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 Brookhiser: "What has become of eros over the last seven centuries." 85. The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk 86. Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder 87. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson 88. Henry James, Leon Edel King: "All the James you want without having to read him." 89. Essays of E. B. White, E. B. White Gelernter: "White is the apotheosis of the American liberal now spurned and detested by the Left (and the cultural mainstream). His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his affection-his family, the female sex, his farm, the English language, Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom, in descending order-is movingly absolute." 90. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov 3 91. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe x 92. Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning." 93. The Civil War, Shelby Foote 94. The Way the World Works, Jude Wanniski Gilder: "The best book on economics. Shows fatuity of still-dominant demand-side model, with its silly preoccupation with accounting trivia, like the federal budget and trade balance and savings rates, in an economy with $40 trillion or so in assets that rise and fall weekly by trillions." 95. To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson Herman: "The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history." 96. Civilisation, Kenneth Clark 97. The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes 98. The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood 99. The Last Lion, William Manchester Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill: Vol. 1 Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill: Vol. 2 Alone, 1932-1940 100. The Starr Report, Kenneth W. Starr Hart: "A study in human depravity." From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:47:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:47:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Rights are not enough Message-ID: John Gray: Rights are not enough The Times Literary Supplement, 99.1.22 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2098008&window_type=print FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION. Amy Gutmann, editor. 382pp. Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?40 (paperback, ?13.95) - 0 691 05758 3. Liberal democracies pride themselves on the freedom of association enjoyed by their citizens. The absence of that freedom is one of the surest signs of oppression. It is part of being a free person to join together with others of like mind. When people cannot exercise that freedom, their liberty is radically diminished. At the same time, the presence of freedom of association is a marker for a healthy democracy. Since Tocqueville's writings on American democracy, it has been a liberal orthodoxy that flourishing associations and strong democracy go together. Indisputably, freedom of association is a Good Thing. Like every other great political good, however, it is attended by numerous inconveniences, and sometimes it can engender serious evils. Free association for some may mean disrespect and exclusion for others. Schools and clubs which limit admission by ethnic origin or sexual orientation can claim to be exercising their freedom to associate with others of their choice; but the effect of such choices is to express contempt for those who do not meet the required criteria and, arguably, to limit the freedom of association of those thereby shut out. In an admirably lucid and balanced essay introducing an exceptionally valuable collection of essays on the subject, Amy Gutmann discusses the case of Bob Jones University v United States. The case concerned the US Internal Revenue's withholding of tax-exempt charitable status from the Bob Jones University on the ground that, in prohibiting interracial dating among its students, it was practising racial discrimination. The Bob Jones University could claim that it was exercising freedom of association, in that the university was a voluntary religious association based on an interpretation of the Bible in which miscegenation is forbidden. On the other hand, it could be argued that any policy that proscribes interracial couples is a limitation on free association - and a highly discriminatory one at that. At this point, freedom of association may seem a somewhat paradoxical good, inasmuch as it can be intelligibly invoked to justify contradictory policies. Gutmann comments that the Supreme Court was reasonable and right to uphold the Internal Revenue's denial of tax-exempt status to the Bob Jones University. She cites the judgment that a limitation of religious liberty may be justified if it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest - in this case, overcoming racial discrimination in American education. Gutmann is right to endorse the Supreme Court's decision in this case. Yet neither she nor the majority of the other contributors to Freedom of Association have asked themselves whether the theoretical perspective from which they make such judgments - a theory in which free association is one element in a system of fundamental human rights - can do justice to the complex issues surrounding freedom of association in the modern world. Only four or five of the book's thirteen distinguished contributors show clear signs of understanding the severe limitations of a rights-based, juridical approach to the subject. This curious oversight arises partly from the fact that most contributors to Freedom of Association treat the subject primarily, if not solely, as it has arisen in American constitutional history, in which a discourse of fundamental rights has long been hegemonic. It is true that a great deal that is useful and enlightening can be said within this limited context. In a characteristically probing, rigorous and uncompromising paper on "The Value of Association", George Kateb argues that freedom of association is indeed a fundamental right that should not be compromised for the sake of mere gain to society. "The issue", he writes, "is whether a given activity that is alleged to be an exercise of a fundamental right injures the vital claims of others, and hence, is not in fact an exercise of a fundamental right." Deploying this understanding of rights, Kateb reaches the "painful conclusion" that governmental interference in the membership policies of social clubs for the purpose of compelling admission of blacks is inconsistent with freedom of association. So long as one remains within the narrow confines of Kateb's argument, it is hard to fault. But why should anyone feel obliged to accept the rights-based theory which leads him to his painful conclusion? It is, in the first place, only a local truth within American jurisprudence that fundamental rights cannot conflict with one another. Many other constitutional traditions, such as Canada's, recognize that fundamental rights can and do clash. When rights clash, a decision must be reached about which is more important, and one relevant test of importance is the public interest. Most constitutions resolve conflicts of rights in this way. Many are ready to impose restrictions on freedom for the sake of a public interest that the American Constitution does not allow, including some that have a direct bearing on freedom of association; nearly all European states have legislation prohibiting racist speech. Kateb's argument for a fundamental right to free association proceeds in part by analogy with the near-absolute protection conferred on free expression in the American Constitution. But that is an argument which no one who does not already accept American constitutional conventions on free expression (as recently interpreted) will find compelling. For many of us, indeed, Kateb's painful conclusion is a reductio ad absurdum of the peremptory claims about rights that are its point of departure. The limitations of the rights-based approach to freedom of association are recognized by several contributors. In one of the book's subtlest contributions, "Revisiting the Civic Sphere", Yael Tamir contends persuasively that a liberal, rights-based account which focuses on its importance in exemplifying the autonomy of civic associations is in no way inconsistent with a communitarian argument invoking the forms of common life that free association makes possible. Will Kymlicka's essay on "Ethnic Associations and Democratic Citizenship" is a robust argument that many multicultural policies can be defended as promoting associational life and thereby the kind of civic engagement that underpins active democratic citizenship. Alan Ryan's contribution on "The City as a Site for Free Association" is a useful corrective of views which ground association in individual engagements and neglect the role of social institutions such as cities. Stuart White's essay on "Trade Unionism in a Liberal State" has a broad theoretical interest in arguing that liberal states are not bound to adhere strictly to a principle of respecting the organizational autonomy of trade unions and other secondary associations. Michael Walzer's contribution on "Involuntary Association" is a thoughtful exploration of the cultural preconditions of association, voluntary or not. The essays by Tamir, Kymlicka, Ryan, White and Walzer are exemplary in directing attention to the social, cultural and political contexts in which the life of associations arises. In different ways, each can be read as an argument against the strange notion that debate about freedom of association can be confined within the Procrustean framework of rights theory. Perhaps it is beginning to be understood that a parochial legalist discourse of rights may not be the best language in which to frame the central questions of political thought. If this is indeed so, it is not before time. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:47:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:47:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: The light of other minds Message-ID: John Gray: The light of other minds The Times Literary Supplement, 9.2.11 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2101253&window_type=print Giants Refreshed - VI John Stuart Mill's neglected insights: his understanding of human variety and his plea for the wilderness. It is easy to think of John Stuart Mill as merely an eminent Victorian. So much in his thought belongs in an irrecoverable past. The history of the twentieth century stands, impassable, between Mill's hopes and ours. Mill's Enlightenment faith that the growth of knowledge and moral progress move in tandem, his narrowly Eurocentric vision of a universal civilization and his vaporous religion of humanity are far removed from the way we think now. Gladstone called him, not, perhaps, without a hint of malice, "the Saint of Rationalism"; and for all the immense power and restless agility of his intellect, there is something in Mill's turn of mind akin to the simplicity that is sometimes said to go with sanctity. He never doubted that unreason and savagery would be banished from human affairs by the spread of education. He could not have imagined that humanity's worst crimes would be committed in Europe, the most educated and therefore, in his view, the most civilized region of the world. Had he been able to foresee even a fraction of the horror of the twentieth century, we can imagine Mill reacting - as his godson Bertrand Russell did throughout much of his long life - with a furious uncomprehending despair, as his rationalist hopes were again and again confounded. Yet it is quite wrong to think that Mill's thought is just another Enlightenment museum piece. On the contrary, because he sought illumination from sources as disparate as French Positivism and German Romanticism, it is less dated than that of most of his contemporaries. More than any other nineteenth-century thinker, Mill anticipated later concerns with the limits of economic growth, the ambiguities of technological progress and even - much against his official Utilitarian outlook - the intrinsic worth of the natural environment. He was an avowed defender of the Enlightenment project of a universal rational morality. Even so, he injected into liberal thought the insight that humans thrive not in one but in many, widely divergent ways of life - an idea that must qualify, if it does not actually subvert, some core Enlightenment ideals. He insisted that modern societies need the disciplines of market competition; but he viewed the market as a fallible instrument of society, not its master. He was a consistent advocate of individual liberty. Nevertheless, he understood that the liberties that are most worth protecting vary with time, place and circumstance - an insight that has been neglected in recent schemes for the globalization of human rights. Flawed as it is in a great many ways, Mill's liberalism is a better guide to the dilemmas we face today than the rights-based legalism that, by the end of the twentieth century, had led liberal political philosophy into a blind alley. Over the past thirty years, political philosophy has become a self-referential discourse, one of whose defining features is its non-existence as far as the real political world is concerned. This disconnection of political philosophy from political practice has many causes, but some of the most important come from within the subject itself. Under the influence of John Rawls and his many disciples, liberal thought has been captured by the project of removing basic liberties and requirements of social justice from political contention, and entrenching them in law. Political philosophy has come to be seen as a branch of jurisprudence, whose central task is the design of an ideal constitution according to the principles of a "theory of justice". Within this liberal orthodoxy, little of importance is left to political decision. Once the requirements of justice have been determined by philosophical inquiry, they need only be interpreted and enforced. The core institution of recent liberalism is not a parliament, or any other sort of deliberative assembly, but a Supreme Court. Though it describes itself as "political liberalism", Rawls's doctrine is in fact a species of anti-political legalism. The anti-political animus of the prevailing school of liberal political philosophy is compounded by its neglect of recent history. A careful reader of Rawls and most of his disciples could come away from their writings without knowing that social democracy is everywhere in retreat, that Communism has ceased to exist, that in the most important case - Russia - the transition from central planning to a market economy has failed and that, in much of the world, ethnic nationalist and fundamentalist movements are the most powerful political force. He would be unaware that in many countries modern states have collapsed or become so deeply corroded as to be virtually powerless. This comprehensive disregard for the historical circumstances of the late twentieth century is not inadvertent. It flows from a philosophical method in which the values and institutions of modern democratic societies are taken as given. In this view, moral inquiry should aim for an equilibrium between unreflective liberal intuition and a simple ideal of rationality. Law is seen as an institution whose dependency on the power of the State is accidental. Liberal values are elucidated from an "overlapping consensus", presumed to exist in all or most democratic societies. This method is not confined to Rawls and his followers, where it articulates the egalitarian intuitions of sections of the liberal Left. It is found also in thinkers such as F. A. Hayek and (the earlier) Robert Nozick, where it expresses the intuitions of the libertarian Right regarding private property and the free market. These seemingly opposed doctrines have some crucial assumptions in common. They take it for granted that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, and that its requirements are to be removed from political control. They differ chiefly on a question of detail. Their views of a just society are at odds at nearly every point. The contrast with Mill's thought is stark. He could only have found outlandish the notion that we can decide which liberties are most worth having by consulting a "theory of justice" which is based primarily on the intuitions of a few philosophers. His political philosophy was shaped not by any narrow, intra-academic agenda, but by the great social and political transformations of his time - the nascent socialist and feminist movements, trade unions and growing popular demands for democratic representation. For Mill, the central task of political philosophy was not to design an ideal constitution. It was to formulate principles that are practically useful to legislators. He hoped to make political discourse more reasonable. He believed political philosophy should, and could, make a difference in political life. (He was for some years himself a Member of Parliament.) He never sought to replace political argument by judicial interpretation of a theory of justice. In Utilitarianism, Mill presented an account of justice; but it was framed in severely minimalist terms. For Mill, justice was a set of practices protecting the human interest in security, not a theory that prescribed the structure of society. As he put it: The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt another (in which we must never forget to include wrongful interference with each other's freedom) are more vital to human wellbeing than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs. Again, in On Liberty Mill wrote: The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end of which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is harm to others. In this justly famous passage, Mill stated an uncompromising principle of liberty; but he made no attempt to supply a list of freedoms, fixed once and for all by philosophical inquiry, that are to be removed from political decision. On the contrary, Mill believed that we can know which liberties to protect in any given context only by applying a Utilitarian ethical theory with the aid of a great deal of empirical knowledge; he is clear that, when we do so, we will find that different liberties are required in different historical contexts; and he takes for granted that the choice of liberties is best made through representative political institutions. Mill's historical and empirical approach has decisive advantages over the rights-based philosophies that have dominated recent liberal thought. To begin with, it allows for clear thinking about conflicts among liberties. In Rawls's theory, as in most theories of rights, basic liberties are "contoured", so their demands are guaranteed to be compatible. But this is not much more than a sleight of hand. In the real world, vital freedoms are rivals. Freedom of expression and protection from racist abuse; the freedom of investigative journalists and the privacy of the individual; the freedom of schools to hire whom they will and the freedom of citizens from religious and sexual discrimination - these are not dovetailing liberties. They are competing freedoms, protecting human interests that are often in conflict. No doubt there is much that is vague or disputable in Mill's Utilitarianism; but it is better to seek a balance, necessarily imprecise and never wholly fixed, between the claims of liberties whose conflicts we admit, than to pretend that they can be reconciled in the spurious harmonies of theories of justice. Mill's approach to questions of liberty enables us to think more realistically about the globalization of human rights. There can be no doubt that Mill favoured something like a worldwide regime of enforceable human rights. That much is evident in what he says about justice. But Mill's grasp of the economic, social and political conditions that are necessary if vital freedoms are to be secured is such that he could not endorse the project of global regime of rights without entering some serious reservations. He would surely accept that some rights warrant universal enforcement. Rights against genocide and torture plainly belong in that category, since they embody the most rudimentary requirements of individual security. But Mill is not thereby committed to the belief that the same liberties should be enforced everywhere. Unlike latter-day liberal legalists, Mill understood that law is not a free-standing institution than can be taken for granted. Before there can be any talk of protecting rights, there must be a modern State that has the capacity to define and enforce them, together with a decent level of wealth. In most cases, there are conditions that come into being only as the result of long historical development. Even when a stage of economic and political development has been reached when it makes sense to talk of protecting rights, Mill does not suggest they will be the same everywhere. As his Utilitarian moral outlook implies, basic human freedoms are not derived from any a priori idea of what is right; they are conventions, whose justification depends on their consequences. How far a basic freedom can be realized, and how it may clash with other such freedoms, are matters that can be decided only on the basis of a detailed know-ledge of particular circumstances. Mill knew that vital human freedoms cannot be listed as if they are items on a fixed-price menu. They come a la carte, and often we must choose among them. For Mill, such choices cannot be made by reference to any idea of abstract right, but only - as he puts it in On Liberty - by appealing to "utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interest of man as a progressive being". As is well known, Mill's account of utility leaves much to be desired. Isaiah Berlin observed, rightly, that Mill valued individuality, social diversity and free inquiry independently of whether they promoted utility - even "utility in the largest sense". Mill asserted that the justification for a liberal society is that it promotes better than any other the well-being of humankind; but when we ask what that well- being consists in, we are not answered, but instead given examples of the different ways in which humans can thrive. In Utilitarianism, Mill tried to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures. He was evidently swayed by the Victorian notion that intellectual and moral satisfactions are somehow inherently more valuable than aesthetic and sensuous pleasures; but the test he proposed is simply the verdict of experienced judges - as if those judges were not themselves often in conflict. He nowhere gives any means of comparing the value of different kinds of human flourishing. It is as if, despite his avowed Utilitarian belief that different forms of life can always be compared in value, Mill suspected that some among them might be incommensurable - as some of the German Romantic thinkers had obscurely intimated. In any event, he could offer no account of how we are to reconcile the claims of rival freedoms, other than to say that we must do so in awareness of the consequences of our choices for the diverse ways in which human beings can live well. Voltaire - an Enlightenment thinker if ever there was one - never doubted that civilization was animated everywhere by the same values; but he was no less clear that these values could be, and indeed should be, expressed in a variety of political systems. In this earlier Enlightenment view, it was accepted that a universal civilization will be embodied in a variety of regimes. The English classical Utilitarians followed Voltaire in combining ethical universalism with a wise political relativism. So did John Stuart Mill, but with an all-important qualification. He believed that, as the species progressed, it would tend towards a single, liberal-democratic type of political regime. In Considerations on Representative Government, he observed: "To determine the form of government most suited to any particular people, we must be able, among the shortcomings and defects which belong to that people, to distinguish those that are the immediate impediments to progress; to discover what it is which (as it were) stops the way." Here Mill is a political relativist, acknowledging that different political systems are best in different cultures and circumstances. Later in the same book, however, he wrote that the ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general. Here Mill specifies not merely liberal democracy, but a liberal democratic regime with some classical republican characteristics, as being ideally the best mode of government for all of humanity. To be sure, since circumstances vary, there will always be different political systems, some of which might embody different choices among vital freedoms. (That is why Mill's support for recent projects of universal human rights could only have been qualified.) Yet, though they are important, the variations in political systems Mill expected came within a fairly narrow range. The only regimes that could ensure continuing progress in Mill's view were representative governments of a particular kind. Following the French Positivists, Mill believed that, as scientific knowledge advances and becomes a necessary part of life in societies throughout the world, there is bound to be a species-wide convergence in both values and institutions. It is this old Enlightenment faith, and not his quasi-pluralist moral philosophy, that sustains Mill's belief that liberal societies are destined to encompass all humankind. If we are guided by history, it is clear that this faith is groundless. Considered as a predictive theory, the Enlightenment view of history that Mill took over from the French Positivists is practically worthless. Science and new technologies flourish in societies, such as the United States, that are awash with religiosity, some of it fundamentalist; and they can thrive in countries, such as post-Mao China and postcommunist Russia in the aftermath of its ruinous neo-liberal experiment, whose attachment to Enlightenment values is tenuous. Late nineteenth-century Japan modernized by making numerous strategic borrowings from Western societies, but without embracing their Enlightenment values; and twenty-first-century India could conceivably do the same. No systematic, enduring link exists between the development of modern science and technology and the adoption of an Enlightenment world-view. There is a crux here for Mill's thought, and for liberalism. Mill's positivist philosophy of history suggests that the growth of knowledge engenders a universal civilization; but his tacitly expressed value-pluralism implies that the powers that are conferred by science and technology will be used in the service of a variety of ends, between which rational choice is not always possible. In that case, different cultures will deploy science and technology in the service of different ideas and projects, not all of them consistent with Enlightenment ideals. Take away Mill's philosophy of history, and his claims for the universal authority of liberal values are empty. Nothing is more commonplace than the view that liberalism and value-pluralism go together. Yet nothing supports this view other than a discredited philosophy of history. If it is true that ultimate values collide, with reason sometimes leaving us in the lurch, we have to choose between them; there is no reason to expect our choices to converge on a single political ideal. Recent liberal thinkers trade on the belief that the consensus which they imagine exists in some late modern societies will come to prevail wherever modernity has been achieved. Once the positivist interpretation of history is abandoned, however, liberalism and value-pluralism come apart, and Enlightenment values are seen to embody only one way of being modern. To be sure, disciples of Mill can doubtless still be found who affirm that modernity and Enlightenment are bound in the end to be one and the same; but this is a confession of faith, notable chiefly because it shows how little Mill's followers have learnt from the century that has just ended, rather than a conclusion of any sort of rational inquiry. When it is combined with a consistently empirical view of modern history, Mill's value-pluralism points towards a liberalism in which there can be many modernities and the ideal of a universal civilization has no place. In a time in which the hegemony of purely Western values is at an end, this is the only kind of liberalism that has a future. Mill's discussion of economic growth and technological progress shows him more clearly aware of their moral hazards and limits than any of the Marxists, Fabians and free-marketeers who followed him. In the remarkable chapter "Of the Stationary State" in Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848), he argues that the increase of wealth has no value in itself. In his view, no modern society can do without the growing surplus made possible by a competitive market economy; but mere economic growth is as little to be desired as the increase of human population. In a striking anticipation of late twentieth-century anxieties. Mill foresaw that technological innovation can generate new scarcities of time and opportunity. Technological innovation adds little to the sum of human well-being, he observes, if it does not yield an increase in leisure. In that case, it is purposeless. What is the point of an economy founded on perpetual motion, if it has no goal? Far better a stationary state of capital and population, Mill argues, than the pursuit of ever-greater affluence for ever-larger human numbers. In such a stationary-state economy, as Mill conceives of it, technical progress is used to improve the art of living rather than merely to satisfy ever-expanding wants. Mill's refreshingly humane view of the purposes of technology and the role of a market economy contrasts sharply with the dystopian vision that was later propagated by free-market economists such as F. A. Hayek. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek articulated the neo-liberal philosophy of unending growth in the nihilistic dictum, "Progress is movement for movement's sake." The distance between this view and Mill's is a measure of the loss that results when economic theory is divorced from any understanding of society. Mill does more than reject the simplistic equation of economic growth with social welfare. He anticipates late twentieth-century anxiety about the integrity of the natural environment. When he argues that there is nothing inherently desirable in an increase of human population, Mill cites the quality of human life that is achievable in a less crowded world: but he also appeals to the intrinsic worth of other living things. Along with Utilitarians from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer, Mill is clear that it is not membership of the human species that grounds moral concern but rather sentience and the capacity for pleasure and pain. He is therefore committed to including in consideration the well-being not only of humans but also of other animal species. But he seems to want to go further than this. He is not entirely unambiguous here, but he seems tempted to affirm that life-forms and ecosystems can have a value of their own. In "Of the Stationary State", he writes: It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species . . . . Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture plowed up, all quadrupeds, or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed. Mill's conception of a highly progressive, technically innovative society which uses its growing productivity to raise the quality of life, rather than merely to increase production, consumption or population, is perhaps the most attractive social vision to have emerged from liberal thought. Certainly it is the first clear statement of an ideal of ecological modernization. A century and a half later, it is more valuable than ever before as a corrective of the vulgar prejudice that environmental concern is necessarily Luddite or anti-modern. Yet Mill's vision raises some extremely difficult questions. The idea of intrinsic value at which it hints is opaque. Even if it can be stated clearly, there is nothing in it to show us how to balance the claims of human beings against those of other animals - still less against those of insentient living things. Of course, if Mill is at bottom some sort of value-pluralist, this should not be surprising. If some desires and satisfactions are rationally incomparable in value, so perhaps are some intrinsic goods. In environmental ethics as in other contexts, Mill's value-pluralism may leave some vital questions unanswerable. Equally, he says little as to how a "stationary-state" economy is to be achieved. The schemes of worker participation he discusses here and there in his writings were unworkable on any large scale, even in his time, and they are utterly impractical in the globalized markets that exist today. Nor is there anything in Mill which tells us how to control population in a world of massively uneven development. Without a doubt, Mill's stationary state is a utopia. But who among his successors has envisioned anything better? Astonishingly prescient though he was in his anticipation of the limits of growth, Mill had little of the prophetic gift. He could never have guessed - as Nietzsche did - the immensely destructive conflicts that would be waged between secular ideologies. At the same time, like nearly all Enlightenment thinkers, he failed entirely to foresee the return of religion as a deciding force in politics. Again, along with the social democrats he later inspired, he imagined that the anarchic energies of the market could be mastered by humane and reasonable policies. He had nothing of Marx's insight into the revolutionary dynamism of capitalism. Though the logic of his thought was to mark out the limits of rational choice, he placed irrational hopes in reason. Mill's liberalism is incomparably more profound than the callow legalist philosophies that have helped to make liberal thought politically marginal. Yet it is not Mill's liberalism that speaks to us today, but his empirical and historical approach to the problems of government and society, his questing pursuit of light from other minds and his unwilling glimpses of the limits of the Enlightenment ideals to which he was steadfastly committed. John Gray's next book, Two Faces of Liberalism, will be published in May. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:54:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:54:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Fiona Ellis: Lovesick Message-ID: Fiona Ellis: Lovesick The Times Literary Supplement, 4.7.30 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2108346&window_type=print LOVESICK. Love as a mental illness. By Frank Tallis. 240pp. Century. Pounds 12.99. - 0 712629 041 In Lovesick, Frank Tallis believes that we can best define love as a mental illness. He is, however, only concerned with erotic love - the love into which we "fall": and, though he does not make this clear, he merely focuses on the initial stage of this - the stage which has been referred to as passion-love. His claim, then, is that passion-love is the mental illness. Tallis details various psychiatric disorders which capture the lover's inner turmoil. A person in love harbours obsessive thoughts about his or her beloved and spends as much time in the bathroom as patients with contamination fears (obsessive compulsive disorder). He or she is prone to bouts of melancholy (clinical depression) and has no appetite (anorexia), feels nervous before a date (panic disorder), oscillates between mania and despair (bipolar disorder), and is an addict. All of this is rather extreme and leads one to surmise that either the author is unaware of the nature of mental illness, or he has been the victim of pathological love. Certainly, lovers might take more care of personal hygiene, lingering in the bathroom before a date, but it is absurd to suppose that they were engaging in compulsive washing rituals. A lover's bouts of melancholy are not the same as the crippling inertia that grips the clinically depressed and, though one can suffer a loss of appetite (or eat too much for that matter), this affliction is hardly comparable to that of the anorexic. Certainly, lovers are subject to mood swings; but unless they are already victims of bipolar disorder, their "mania" does not escalate to a level at which they are incapable of engaging in coherent thought or action. If it did they would be too busy running on empty to entertain thoughts about their beloveds. Erotic love is neither a cognitive nor an affective disorder, but a passionate response to another person, based on an understanding of who and what they are. The idea that love is an addiction leads Tallis to produce some amusing comparisons, the best of which is that the lover is some kind of alcoholic. Of course, there are lovers who display addictive tendencies - those, for example, who are in love with being in love and who flit from one grand passion to the next rather than taking the effort to truly love another person. What this shows, however, is not that love is an addition but that there are addictions which make it impossible to love. Tallis is so taken up with the idea that love can make us feel drunk, he decides that "being drunk can make us fall in love". Apparently, two and a half glasses of wine does the trick. There are affective disorders arising out of love - the "madness of Tristan", for example, which formed a topos for medieval poetry - and there are cognitive disorders arising out of love - the jealousy of Othello, with his willing belief in the impossible - but these cases are recognized to be abnormal. Falling in love is generally both a falling and a knowing, a surrender and an act of self control, as described by Jane Austen in the love of Emma for Mr Knightley. Tallis is prepared to concede that being in love can be a positive experience, but, given his wish to pursue his preferred "definition", he is compelled to give precedence to the agony it involves. Indeed, his only concession to the opposing viewpoint is to cite those who see mental illness as a "painful but necessary process of self-discovery, which enriches the individual's inner world". That view of mental illness may have been fashionable in the days of R. D. Laing, but it receives no support whatever from subsequent developments in neurophysiology. The final few pages of the book are much better. Tallis begins to question the claim he makes elsewhere that even "normal love" is indistinguishable from mental illness and acknowledges that he has been describing a pathological form of love. His account then tackles erotic love as it is meant to be - the love which really does enrich the individual's inner world and, of course, that of his or her beloved. At this point, Tallis tells us, we have divested ourselves of the "hopeless, confused, deluded and insecure posturing that characterizes 'romance' and replaced it with true love". So love is not a mental illness; and it is both confused and deluded to think otherwise. From isaacsonj at hotmail.com Sun Jun 12 02:59:11 2005 From: isaacsonj at hotmail.com (Joel Isaacson) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 22:59:11 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes Message-ID: >From: HowlBloom at 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? Good question! First, let me say a few words about Nils Basse and his speculation. Basse (meaning 'wild boar' in old Danish) is being a bit wild here in his speculation, IMO. A 31 year old physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, he is now a postdoctoral associate at MIT and will return soon to Denmark. He is an experimentalist, and a good one, studying turbulence in fusion plasmas using optical techniques; primarily reflectometry. His findings are largely experimental, and his mathematics is modest. The math he is using in that paper relates mostly to mundane curve-fitting of experimental data. He observes that exponential fit of certain data is common to both fusion plasmas and expanding galaxies. This is nice, but far from giving any sort of mathematical description of underlying mechanisms. You may read the entire Basse's letter to Physics Letters A via the following link: http://www.npb.dk/pub/basse_pla_2005.pdf That paper has been available online since late April, but will be published formally dated June 13, 2005. >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? I don't know of any such rule. > >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? My CA systems certainly generate a great deal of complexity. It doesn't particularly show in the simplest case of an initial single pixel (as in the Steganogramic paper). There things remain symmetrical and generally regular. But, start instead with a cluster of a few pixel, say a string such as 'BLOOM', and you'll immediately get significant complexity. See the few first steps here: (following may get scrambled in transmission, but you'll get the gist of it -- we are doing "recursive tetracoding" on the initial string 'BLOOM') --> B L O O M O O [ ] O ] [ ] O O O [ ] OOO [ = ] O [ etc. The reason for the above emergent complexity is that each individuall letter (pixel) attempts to expand exactly like the one described in the Steganogramic paper. But there are mutual interferences and the resulting patterns are accommodations (or coordination) of the individual patterns. The complexity is a compound result (and you'd never know it unless you understood the underlying patterns and tendencies). This, btw, suggests that the visible effects of the big bang are compound effects of a cluster of multiple big bangs and NOT a single event. As to Basse's work, he works with fusion plasma systems such as those that are supposed to have occurred some 300000 years into the big bang process (at some 3000 K degrees). He suggests to do similar work on earlier stages where quark-gluon plasmas first develop, but has at present no clue as to how to go about it experimentally. In his own words, from the Discussion section: "The fact that density fluctuations on small (fusion plasmas) and large (galaxies) scales can be described by an exponential function might indicate that plasma turbulence at early times has been expanded to cosmological proportions. A natural consequence of that thought would be to investigate fluctuations in quark-gluon plasmas (QGPs) corresponding to even earlier times. However, experimental techniques to do this are not sufficiently developed at the moment due to the extreme nature of QGPs." And, of course, he has no mathematics to do this either. Note also the quote from the Conclusion section: "The cross-disciplinary work presented here is hopefully just the beginning of an interesting path that can benefit both fields. As a first step, we will expand our studies to encompass a wider range of scales, both for fusion plasmas and galaxy measurements." So, all in all, Basse's conjecture is both encouraging and disappointing. It is encouraging in that it predicts similarity at many scales, from QGPs to galaxies -- something that you have been thinking about for some time now. It is disappointing for lack of mathematical depth and disregard of deep/underlying processes. > >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? Very hard to project... because we don't know that which doesn't yet exists... Historically, we have been able to draw on metaphors (with mixed success) derived from mythology, religious theories and beliefs, philosophies, etc. I suppose that nanotechnologies relating to microbiological systems would be loaded with new metaphors. I also think that deep down therein the metaphor of distinction-making CA-like processes will eventually be found lurking... -- Joel >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 > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >From: HowlBloom at aol.com >Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list >To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes >Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:23:05 EDT > > > >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? Good question! First, let me say a few words about Nils Basse and his speculation. Basse (meaning 'wild boar' in old Danish) is being a bit wild here in his speculation, IMO. A 31 year old physicist from the Nils Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, he is now visiting at MIT and will return soon to Denmark. He is an experimentalist, and a good one, studying turbulence in plasmas using optical techniques; primarily >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 > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >From: HowlBloom at 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? Good question! First, let me say a few words about Nils Basse and his speculation. Basse (meaning 'wild boar' in old Danish) is being a bit wild here in his speculation, IMO. A 31 year old physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, he is now a postdoctoral associate at MIT and will return soon to Denmark. He is an experimentalist, and a good one, studying turbulence in plasmas using optical techniques; primarily reflectometry. His findings are largely experimental, and his mathematics is modest. The math he is using in that paper relates mostly to curve-fitting of experimental data. He observes that..... >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? Very hard to project... because we don't know that which doesn't yet exists... Historically, we have been able to draw on metaphors (with mixed success) derived from mythology, religious theories and beliefs, philosophies, etc. I suppose that nanotechnologies relating to microbiological systems would be loaded with new metaphors. I also think that down deep therein the metaphor of distinction-making CA-like processes will be found lurking... -- Joel >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 > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >From: HowlBloom at aol.com >Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list >To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes >Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:23:05 EDT > > > >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? Good question! First, let me say a few words about Nils Basse and his speculation. Basse (meaning 'wild boar' in old Danish) is being a bit wild here in his speculation, IMO. A 31 year old physicist from the Nils Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, he is now visiting at MIT and will return soon to Denmark. He is an experimentalist, and a good one, studying turbulence in plasmas using optical techniques; primarily >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 > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jun 12 16:26:10 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 09:26:10 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Omega 3 tweak Message-ID: <01C56F30.C6278800.shovland@mindspring.com> It appears that a lot of people are getting the "healthy fats" message these days. Most of them are taking flax seed oil, but it may be better to take an animal based source such as fish oil. My local health food store tells me that fish oils that are independently tested are usually free of mercury. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From kendulf at shaw.ca Sun Jun 12 18:44:36 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 11:44:36 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Omega 3 tweak References: <01C56F30.C6278800.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <002f01c56f7e$cef17420$873e4346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> A nice finding by a study at the U. of Colorado is that the fat of free-living ruminants - pronghorns, mule deer, elk and grass-fed beef - is very high in omega-3 fatty acids. The ratio is one omega-3 to two omega-6 fatty acids (in beef from feed lots the ratio is 1/40). Another find is that monogastrics (pigs, horses, elephants) have higher concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids than do ruminants. The Caveman's diet comes to mind. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail)" Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2005 9:26 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] Omega 3 tweak > It appears that a lot of people are getting > the "healthy fats" message these days. > > Most of them are taking flax seed oil, but > it may be better to take an animal based > source such as fish oil. > > My local health food store tells me that > fish oils that are independently tested > are usually free of mercury. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.6.9 - Release Date: 6/11/2005 > > From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 18:59:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:59:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class 11) Angela Whitiker's Climb Message-ID: Angela Whitiker's Climb http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/class/ANGELA-FINAL.html By ISABEL WILKERSON CHICAGO, June 10 - Angela Whitiker arrived early and rain-soaked at a suburban school building with a carton of sugar water in her purse and a squall in her stomach. It was the small hours of the morning, when the parking lot was empty and the street lights were still on. There she was alone in the darkness for the biggest test of her life. If she passed, she could shed the last layer of her former self - the teenage girl who grew up too fast, dropped out in the 10th grade, and landed aimless and on public assistance with five children by nearly as many men. She would finally be the registered nurse she had been striving toward for years. She could get a car that wouldn't break down in the middle of the Dan Ryan Expressway. She could get an A.T.M. card and balance her checkbook and start paying down her bills and save up for that two-story colonial on Greenwood that was already hers in her dreams. She would never again have to live in that gang-run nightmare of a place, the Robert Taylor housing projects - where she packed a .38 for protection - or in Section 8 housing or in any government-subsidized anything. Her children could be proud of her and go on to make something of themselves too, once she proved it could be done. But if she didn't pass. ... She couldn't think about that. And so, as she would often tell the story later, she got up before dawn and made herself some oatmeal and a hard-boiled egg and toast and got to the testing site for the state licensing boards for registered nurses two hours before the test began. She had never been good at tests. All through nursing school, she agonized the night before an exam, overstudying the charts and graphs, termites dropping from the ceiling onto her physiology books, mice crawling at her feet, and her children tugging her leg to find out what was for dinner. She had only recently become the first woman in her family with a college degree and, if everything went well this day, would be the first nurse anybody in her family knew personally. So, she left long before she needed to that morning to avoid traffic, a missed turn, not enough gas. Once there, she sat parked in the rain trying to compose herself. She pulled out her Bible to read the 91st Psalm, the one about the Lord being her refuge. She broke out the sugar water to get glucose to the brain. In the hallway, she avoided looking anyone in the eye. She spoke to no one. She didn't want to pick up on anyone's anxiety. She had enough of her own. She took a last drag on a Newport. The testing room began to fill. The examiner checked her identification and assigned her computer No. 12. She drew in another deep breath as she walked to her place. She was about to sit down to take a $256 pass-or-fail entrance exam into the American middle class. For most of her 38 years, Angela Whitiker has been on the outside looking in at the seeming perfection of the professional classes, the people who did the college-career-wedding-house-in-the-suburbs-2.5-kids routine. Her life has been so very different from that. She was a child of the working class who, through ill-considered choices and circumstance, slipped into the welfare class and had to fight her way out. While the rest of the country has fitfully cut back welfare and continues to debate class disparities and the barriers to mobility, Ms. Whitiker has quietly traversed several classes in a single lifetime. She has gone from welfare statistic in the early 1990's to credit-card carrying member of the middle class, a woman for whom there are now few statistics, so rare has her experience been. This is the story of her 12-year slog to the middle class and of how hard it is to stay there. The third of five children, she was born to a mother who was a cook and to a laborer father whom, though the parents had married, she didn't meet until she was 10. She said it was a heartbreaking visit in which, smelling of whiskey, he promised to buy her a bicycle and didn't. She hasn't seen him since. Within a few years, she was using men as a substitute for her father and her adolescent longing for him. By 15, she was pregnant with her first child. By 23, she was the mother of five children, had been married and separated, and been a casualty of the crack epidemic of the 1980's. She had lost and would later win back custody of her children, and had worked a variety of odd jobs, from sausage vendor to picking butterbeans. At 26, she gained short-lived celebrity when she and her oldest son, Nicholas, then a 10-year-old fourth-grader with a man's obligations, were [3]the subjects of a profile by this reporter in The New York Times, part of a 1993 series on at-risk urban young people called [4]Children of the Shadows. She, Nicholas and her four other children were living in a second-floor walk-up in Englewood, a crime-burdened neighborhood abandoned first by the white middle class and then by the black middle class that succeeded it. For her, each day meant trying to piece together enough to take care of herself and her kids - one day petitioning the fathers for child support, the next counting what was left of her food stamps; one minute rushing to an administrator's office to get bus vouchers for school, the next bargaining with the electric company to get her lights turned back on. To keep her family out of the projects and on what might be described as the upper rung of poverty, she had taken up with a man who worked handling baggage at O'Hare International Airport. He paid the rent and was the father of her fifth child, Johnathan. His paycheck gave her breathing room to get into a pre-nursing program at Kennedy-King Community College on the South Side. But men never seemed to hang around that long, and it fell to Nicholas to be father to the younger children that the men in their lives seemed unwilling to be. He was the one who washed his and his siblings' school uniforms in the bathtub at night because they each had only one set. He was the one who pulled his brother Willie out of the line of fire by the hood of his jacket when gunshots rang out in the schoolyard. And he was the one who took the blame and the beatings if something wasn't done to his mother's boyfriend's liking. Readers responded with great outpourings of generosity after the article was published, but it was clear from the reporter's continuing contacts with the family over the years that it was not enough to materially change the basic facts of their lives. It was still a household run by a single mother with only a high school equivalency degree, no career skills, no assets and no immediate prospects for independence. In addition, the fraying relationship between Ms. Whitiker and her boyfriend fell apart after publication of the article, and, without him to pay the rent, she fell further behind. She wound up in the only place that a woman with five children, no job and no money could get in Chicago in 1994, a cellblock of an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, an urban no-man's land where you could move about only when the gangs that ran the place let you. The elevators, sticky with urine, didn't work, and gunshots were background music. From the start, Ms. Whitiker felt that it was beneath her. She looked down on the women who had grown accustomed to bullet holes over their dinette tables, who watched "All My Children" and ate Doritos all day and didn't seem to want anything better. She carried the gun to protect herself and had to use it once when, having climbed nine flights of stairs, she found some strangers playing cards at her kitchen table. She fired shots into the ceiling to get them out. It was the lowest rung of the poverty class in America, lower in a way than the worst nights in a crack house in her early 20's, because now she was fully conscious of exactly where she was. She vowed from the very first night to get out. But she knew she couldn't make it out on public assistance. So she figured she'd get whatever job she could. She would have to put off her nursing studies. She worked at a fast food restaurant, rising to assistant manager but never making much more than minimum wage. She worked nights as a security guard in the projects, a job that was dangerous and equally dead-end but paid a bit more. Every day held its own kind of peril or indignity, much of it coming from her 1976 Chevrolet, which she relied on to get to and from work but was well past its natural lifespan. It had a cracked windshield and a hole rusted through the floor. It wasn't big enough for all of her children, but they piled in just the same with no thought of seatbelts, because there weren't enough anyway. When she was coming home in the rain on the expressway one night, the defroster conked out and the windshield fogged up. "I had to stick my head out the window to drive," she said. "God drove that car that night." One time the car caught fire because of a hole in the gasoline line. Flames shot out of the hood and into the air. Ms. Whitiker jumped out and told her sister, Michelle, riding in the passenger seat, to do the same. "Get out of the car!" she screamed. "It's gonna blow!" A fire truck came to put out the fire. The firefighters argued over which one should try to start the engine. None of them wanted to. So she had to try herself. Somehow, it started and got her home, just another day on her long climb out of the hole. The drug economy played out every day on the cracked concrete lawns of Robert Taylor, and her preteen older sons, Nicholas and Willie, could not help breathing it in. The only working men they saw were the drug dealers who were up early to meet their sales quotas, wore the latest gym shoes and got the girls. Their cars were new and didn't catch fire. The family lived at Robert Taylor for nine months. "It was hell," she would say later. "I wouldn't want a dog to stay up in there." She left there a new woman. She knew she had to get back into nursing school if she was ever going to get anywhere. Learning a New Way Then she met a man by the name of Vincent Allen. He wasn't like the other men she had known. He had a college degree. His father had been a military man, his mother a homemaker, solidly middle class. He had a nice apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Michigan. Ms. Whitiker was struck by his manners and how he spoke like the teachers and social workers she had known growing up - enunciating his words, slipping in a few she didn't know. He was a police detective. They met on the job when they were working as private security guards. He took an immediate liking to her, saw that they both wanted the same thing - in his words, a "picket fence kind of a life." He encouraged her to follow her dreams. Soon she and the kids were moving in with him. He took his job as the man of the house seriously and actually liked the father role. Suddenly, there was a man asking about homework and where Nicholas and Willie had been. He noticed if they had slipped on some gang colors or had their caps pushed to the left or the right as gang members did. He took it upon himself to correct the behavior of the younger children and pick them up from school. That had been Nicholas's job for all of his short life, and, as his mother recalled, he did not take displacement well. First, she said, he figured he would scare his rival away. He stole his clothes, talked back, came in late. It would only be a matter of time before this man would go the way of all the other men, Nicholas thought. But Mr. Allen did not leave. And the sweet little boy who had been the father of his family went out and found a new family in the streets. The drug dealers were more than willing to take him and put him to work. Before long, Ms. Whitiker discovered that her 12-year-old Nicholas was a lookout for the dealers. She and Mr. Allen could see the road Nicholas was on, but, streetwise though they were, could do little to stop it. The more vigilant Mr. Allen was, the more resentful and alienated Nicholas became and the worse things got. It was as if he had grown so accustomed to the chaos of his mother's previous lives that he did not know how to function when a family worked as it should. He had made himself into a wind gauge and had no purpose when the air was still. Ms. Whitiker sent Nicholas to live with his father, a laborer who had married, had other children and lived on the other side of town. She hoped that being far from his homies would put Nicholas on a straighter course. Mr. Allen started encouraging her to go back to nursing school. They figured that, with him providing a place for her to live, and with Pell grants and the other financial aid for low-income students, she could make a go of it. She enrolled at Kennedy-King College again, but it was different this time; or, rather, she was different. She was no longer the fun-loving girl looking for something to do. She had seen the bottom of the well and never wanted to go back there again. She had also seen a new way of managing one's life. The professional people she met in college and now Mr. Allen had different ways of thinking about spending and saving money and carrying oneself. They tended to plan and save for things. She had never had enough money or reason to save. They paid attention to things like late fees and interest rates; she mostly ignored them because she couldn't pay the bills anyway. They set long-term goals for themselves; she just tried to get through the day. It all rubbed off on her, and it changed her. On top of that, she had a renewed sense of time pressing against her. How long would Mr. Allen put up with her and the kids while she went to school? What if he got tired of it and left? What if he insisted she quit school and get a job to pay her share of the expenses? She didn't like the idea of owing him and couldn't bear the thought of slipping backward again. So, when it came to her studies, she would have to be more focused and efficient than she had been about anything in her life. 'I Had to Make It' There were certain points in certain years - say from 1996 to 2002 - when Angela Whitiker didn't yet know that Tupac Shakur had been killed or that President Bill Clinton had been impeached. "If it wasn't about nursing or biology or what was on my test Friday, I wasn't interested," she said. "I blocked everything and everybody out. I used to be so particular about cleaning the house. I got to the point where I'd see a shoe, and I'd just kick it over." She felt she had to work extra hard because she felt so outranked in the classroom. She endured the stares of the middle-class teacher's pets who looked down on her for the circuitous route that got her there. "They were snobs whose moms were nurses, and they knew everything," she said. "I had to show them that I was somebody, that because I had five kids, that I made bad decisions, that I didn't have a father - and so what? - I was determined to show them I can do this. I had to make it. I couldn't fail." Whenever test day came, she recalled, she would work herself into such a state of anxiety that sometimes she had to excuse herself to throw up. The professor had to go get her out of the bathroom. "Are you O.K.?" the professor would ask. "You're going to kill yourself." Everybody knew when a test didn't go well. They could see it in her face, the simultaneous pouting and rolling of the eyes, and hear it in her voice, the way she snapped at the lowest registers over the littlest thing. "Mama didn't pass her test today," the first child to notice would say to the others. "Don't say nothing." Because she wasn't from a professional family, she brought a kind of na?vet? to school with her. One day in a clinical class, she recalled, the teacher went around the room asking students how their patients were doing. When the teacher got to her, Ms. Whitiker thought about the colostomy bag attached to her patient, and started crying. "Oh my God," the teacher said. "Did your patient die?" "No," she said, still sobbing. "But she had this hole in her stomach." "Well, go on in there and wash your face," the teacher told her. Soon she was working with cadavers as if they were just another piece of office equipment, but she didn't know anyone who could give her the ins and outs of the field or tell her what to expect. "I didn't have anybody I could go to who had a degree other than Vince," she said. He went over her papers and marked them up - too much for her liking, sometimes - and read her papers aloud so she could hear what was wrong with them. When she made the dean's list, he celebrated. When she failed a test, he consoled her as best he could. "Oh baby, you're going to make it," he'd say. "Oh shut up, you don't understand," she'd shoot back. In May 2001, she finally finished nursing school at Kennedy-King, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. For her class picture, she wore her hair in a flip like Gidget and a nurse's cap that looked like white dove wings. It was a long way from the teenager in a jheri curl and too-tight jeans. Soon she would be driving in the rain to take the nursing boards on computer No. 12. "It was a step to another life," she would say years later. "It was a do-or-die type of thing. I thought I was going to kill myself waiting for the results." The Test Results One morning in late 2001, when Ms. Whitiker was alone and the apartment was uncharacteristically quiet, the mail arrived and, in it, an envelope from the state boards. In that moment, she came closer than at any other time of her life to upper-middle-class young people awaiting word from the Ivy League school of their dreams. The chatter among her fellow nursing students was that a thin envelope meant you passed; a thick one, presumably filled with the things you got wrong, meant you failed. She got a thin envelope. "My heart just dropped to the floor," she said. She took the envelope into the apartment and threw it on the bed, afraid to open it, afraid that, given the disappointments of her life, somehow the grapevine had been wrong and the thin one meant failure. She called her mother to get the courage to open it. Soon she was out in the middle of the hallway. "I passed my boards!" she screamed to neighbors fumbling for their house keys. The family took her out to celebrate. They had dinner at Hooters and bought her a cake. Soon after, she and Mr. Allen agreed it was time they married. "My daughter was getting to an age where I was trying to tell her to do right," Ms. Whitiker said of Ishtar, now 17. "I can't tell her to do right if I'm doing wrong." They married at Faith Temple Coptic Church on June 7, 2003. She wore an ivory shift and a long white veil and carried a bouquet of white carnations. He wore a black tux. It was the groom's first marriage, the bride's second. All the kids were there except Willie, who, still on the path he learned at Robert Taylor, was in jail. The remaining kids were dressed to their mother's specifications, except Nicholas, who, having by now declared that he wanted to be a rapper, showed up in pants hanging off his body and a baseball cap turned backward. For the family wedding picture, Ms. Whitiker told him to stand in the back so nobody could see what he had on. She was already becoming class conscious, aware of appearances and decorum. And so, on this triumphant day in the family's history, all that is visible of Nicholas is his head. High-Stress Work Ms. Whitiker finished nursing school as vice president of her class and with academic awards in biology and pharmacology, but despite her hard work and potential, the reality of her life was that she could not afford to go any further than a two-year associate's degree. That limits her job prospects even in a high-demand field like nursing. She doesn't have the contacts to get a job at the teaching hospitals in Chicago where she would get better training and higher pay. She landed a job at a small inner city hospital on the South Side, known not for its groundbreaking procedures or training opportunities but as the hospital where the eight student nurses killed by Richard Speck in 1966 had worked. It's an unnerving history that is always in the back of her mind, but she needs the job and the pay is more than she could ever have imagined back when she was on food stamps. She has worked high-stress assignments in telemetry - monitoring cardiac patients - and in the intensive care unit. With all the night hours she puts in, she made $83,000 last year, more than 90 percent of all American workers. It is hard work, messy, often thankless. She has found herself in a pecking order that surprises and frustrates her. The doctors seem to expect her to work magic on their orders, she said, and the certified nursing assistants resent her place of privilege. A few years back she might have sympathized with the nursing assistants. They do what no one else wants to do, attending to the unpleasant bodily needs of the very ill. There was a time when that would have been a move up for her. But their envy and resentment only made her feel more distant. And now, she was showing the same disdain for them that the middle class might have felt for her in her other life. "I'm like, don't be mad at me because I'm a nurse," she said. "If you want my job, you need to suffer and cry like I did." She tried to find her bearings in this new class she was in. She resented the old friends who drank muscatel at the taverns late into the night and hit her up for money. And yet her past had a way of catching up with her in unexpected ways. She was out running errands once when a man recognized her from her days on the street. "I know you," he said. "You're the one who stole money from me." She feigned ignorance and walked away, even though, she would later say, she remembered taking his money and his television set, too, back when she was on drugs. She tried hanging out with the nurses from work. But some were bourgeois and uppity, had a sense of comfort and confidence she did not possess. At one party she went to, some of them started smoking marijuana. It was a fun little escape for them, but it took her back to a place she could not afford to revisit. "I reached for my purse," she said. "When I got my first paycheck, that was high enough for me." Her life was complicated as it was. For one thing she was now the mother of six (seven, if you counted Zach, her husband's 13-year-old son, who recently moved in with them). Her youngest, Christopher, had been born shortly after the uncertain time at Robert Taylor and had been with her only off and on because of a custody fight between her and Christopher's father. Both the fight over Christopher and the fact that he came after a lull in childbearing when she was a more mature 28 help explain why she is investing in him in ways she had not had the luxury of doing with her older kids. She now knows how to discipline without using a belt, and the value of grounding and timeouts. She spends her off time shuttling Christopher to and from school or to little league practice in her new Chevrolet sport utility vehicle, an early benefit of her higher paychecks. When he has a science project, she's on the floor helping sculpt the volcano with him. She's quick to hug him and expects a kiss when she drops him off. She says he has become the very embodiment of the fresh start she was seeking for herself, and onto him she has grafted all her middle-class hopes. He reminds her so much of Nicholas -- the same round face and velvet skin, the same precociousness that she saw as impudence in young Nicholas when she was barely out of her teens, but now sees as reflecting her youngest's unlimited potential. While Nicholas went to a strapped public grade school in a perilous neighborhood, Christopher is in the gifted program of a school she handpicked on the middle-class side of town. While Nicholas played a hand-me-down Nintendo on a television with a busted tube, Christopher plays 3-D chess on the family's Dell computer. Christopher is now 10, the same age as Nicholas when he appeared in The Times, but he talks like one of the sweet, smart-alecky kids on a network sitcom rather than a streetwise man-child who's seen too much too soon. Asked what it means to be in the gifted program, he had a ready answer. "It means I'm smarter than the other kids," he said without flinching. At that age, Nicholas's conversations were about running from bullets. Demands and Responsibilities At first, nursing was like hitting the lottery. She was making enough for the family to move into a four-bedroom apartment in a prewar building overlooking Lake Michigan. It has crown molding, a marble fireplace and grander rooms than they have furniture for. She had a contractor paint the rooms the colors of sweet peas and corn on the cob. She bought a mahogany king-size bed, propping it high with pillows for herself and her husband, and bunk beds for the kids. But she has found herself alone. She is making more money than anybody she knows. And come payday, everybody needs something, and not just the kids. Relatives need gas money, friends could use help with the rent. Even her patients, on hard times themselves, have their hands out. "You got some money to lend me?" one of them, an older woman whose telephone had just been cut off, asked her. "You get your check yet?" Suddenly, she is the successful star in her universe who is supposed to cover the cost of the family reunion, give career advice to the nieces and nephews, show up for their basketball games, float a loan to whoever needs it. After all, she's making $83,000 a year. She is making more than her police detective husband and has found herself tiptoeing around his ego and expectations. They have tried different ways of dividing the bills, at one point splitting the $1,475 rent and sharing the utilities, at another point, one paying the rent and the other the utilities. But after Medicare and Social Security deductions and her share of the household obligations, groceries for a family of seven, her $500 monthly car payment, the assorted expenses that come with three teenagers, loans to relatives who think she makes a fortune and the debt left over from her previous life, she finds that there is often little left over at month's end, and most months she's still in the hole. She exists in an in-between place, middle class on paper but squeezed in reality. Take her car, for instance. It's a 2002 two-door Blazer that cost $29,000. She really needed the bigger four-door, just so everybody could easily get in. But that would have cost an extra $5,000, so everybody crams into the two-door. Insufficient though it is, it still comes at a high price. She pays 17 percent interest on the car loan - with $13,000 remaining - because of bad credit from her previous life, when sometimes the choice was whether to eat or pay the light bill. The kids asked her the other day if she was getting a new car. "No," she said, "you can pop the seat and duck your head and get in like everybody else." But she winces every time Christopher and Zach have to fold themselves into the size of a bag of groceries to fit into the rear storage compartment. She says she wants a bigger car like a Lincoln Navigator, but with gas so high she shudders at what it would cost to fill the tank, and she knows she can't afford a new car anyway. So despite her income, Saks and Macy's are somebody else's world. Instead, she frequents the places she did in her previous life. She still shops at the dollar stores in Englewood, her old down-and-out neighborhood. On a recent trip to Louisiana for her family reunion she watched every nickel and checked her balance at the automated teller machine several times a day. She has become keenly aware that what middle-class comforts she does enjoy are built on uncertain scaffolding. First, her status requires two paychecks and the stability and backup she gets from being married. It requires that she work the higher-paying 12-hour night shifts that keep her away from her family for long stretches and leave her tired and irritable when she's with them. It requires that Mr. Allen work extra hours as security at an elementary school, which leaves the two of them with little overlapping time to reinforce the strong marriage they need to stay where they are. Stretching Every Dollar Her job and paycheck say she's middle class, but what does that mean? She said that when she was on the outside looking in, she never imagined it would mean working three and a half years without a vacation or having an empty dining room waiting for a table and chairs. It never would have occurred to her that she would be working this hard and still have to choose between paying the phone bill and paying for her daughter Ishtar's prom. She exhibits a mounting awareness of just how far her money will and will not go, and of how much hard work each dollar represents and how carefully she must protect it because any loss means she has to work that much harder. So she drops what she's doing when she sees a spot on the sofa because it cost four figures and it's not paid for yet. She buys in bulk and has to watch out for relatives wanting to shop in her kitchen. "I caught my aunt going into my pantry getting her some soap," she said. "I told her, 'That's Dove!' " For Ms. Whitiker, being middle class has meant working upside-down hours for so long that she's started to greet people on the street with "Have a good evening!" It means taking on family members as unofficial patients with their edema and diabetes. "When you're the only nurse in the family they think you're a doctor," she says. "Mama calls me. Mama has her friends calling me." She has no choice but to keep up the pace because she wants to get vested in the retirement plan at the hospital. She has 18 months to go. She wants to open up a Roth retirement account, but can't seem to save enough. She wants to go back to school to get a bachelor's degree, but has neither the time nor the money. "I feel like every corner of my body is being stretched," she said the other day. More than anything, Ms. Whitiker wants to buy a house. Sometimes she drives by her dream house on Greenwood in the comfortably middle-class neighborhood of Chatham. It's yellow brick with a spiral staircase and a two-story foyer and vertical blinds. But she's having trouble saving anything toward that house or any other. The bad credit from her previous life still haunts her. Where she wants to live, they can't afford. And where they could afford, she doesn't dare live. "I have to live in a decent neighborhood," she said. "I can't walk around the projects in my nursing uniform. They would try to take everything I got. And my husband - he's arrested half the people in Englewood. We're in danger." Missing Pieces Ms. Whitiker's ideal of middle-class perfection, with well-educated, smartly groomed kids gathered around a big middle-class dining room table, has two missing pieces: Nicholas and Willie. Her success came too late to benefit them. They were already on a road she was unable to steer them from. Nicholas dropped out of school in the 11th grade and has been on and off the streets ever since. Willie, ever the follower looking up to Nicholas, was right behind. At 22, Nicholas is a burdened soul who saw too much too soon. His front tooth is broken from a fight he got into trying to protect Willie on the streets. His car has bullet holes from a drive-by shooting. He knows what it's like to have a pistol jammed into your chin, or to be a 12-year-old making $50 from neighborhood drug dealers for sitting on a hydrant and calling out "Five-O!" - street slang for the police. And worse. "I could be dead right now," said Nicholas, his chiseled features weary, water welling in his eyes. "I should be dead. I hurt so many people. I hurt myself." There were times when Mr. Allen, on patrol and by then Nicholas's putative stepfather, would catch him on the street and write up a summons but then let him go. But Nicholas finally got caught and spent about six weeks in jail in 2002 for stealing two coats from a Marshall's store in the suburbs and for fighting the police when they tried to arrest him, a consequence, his mother believes, of unresolved "anger issues" from the chaos of his childhood. She wishes she could go back and do some things differently. She thinks he needs to get into anger management and get into school to put his quick mind to good use. For now, he lives in a walk-up apartment in the suburbs with the mother of the second of his three children; she's a housekeeper at the local Y.M.C.A. He has worked part-time as a stock clerk, but he is pinning his hopes on his rap music, which his exasperated mother admits is pretty good. He closes his eyes with hands quivering and begins one of his songs: "Going to change my ways," he sings in a near whisper. "Lord have mercy on me." Willie has become a sturdily built young man with a movie star smile and a precisely trimmed goatee. Like Nicholas, he has worked low-paying service jobs when he has worked. He has two children, and a more serious criminal record that includes a felony drug conviction for selling near a schoolyard. "I was doing some things I shouldn't have been doing," Willie said, still sweet-faced at 21. Ms. Whitiker's two older sons are living reminders of the world she wants to put behind her. She lives in constant fear of what may happen to them. "I go to work," she said wearily, "and I don't know when I'm going to get that call, that your son is dead or in jail again." It was soon after she began working as a nurse that she got the call she had been dreading. She was in the intensive care unit bandaging a patient when she was called to the phone. Willie had been shot. It was not clear where he had been shot or how seriously hurt he was, or if he was conscious or would live. She dropped everything. It turned out he had been shot twice in the leg. She found it suspicious that he was shot on a well-known South Side drug corner that had been contested by rival dealers. But she rushed in to save her son. "It almost killed me," she said. "I almost had a nervous breakdown. I'm at work bandaging up patients, and I get the call that he's been shot. He said he was robbed. So I took him in and took care of his wounds." Last summer, she got another call. She was at home in bed this time. "Your son Willie's been shot," said the slurred, panicked voice on the phone. It was a call from one of Willie's acquaintances from the very corner where Willie had been shot the first time. "They were so ghetto," Ms. Whitiker recalled with exasperation. "They were arguing over the phone about what they should do." She thought quickly. The nurse in her kicked into gear. "Where was he shot?" she asked. "In the leg," came the answer. "Is he breathing?" "Yeah." She knew then that he would live. "So I hung up and turned over and went to sleep," she recalled later. "I didn't even tell my family." In the days and weeks that followed Willie's shooting, Ms. Whitiker made perhaps the most painful decision a mother could make in order to keep her family on the straight and narrow. She has performed a kind of emergency triage, banishing the infected to save the well. She didn't visit Willie in the hospital, didn't take him home to tend him as she had the first time. She made it clear that neither he nor Nicholas was welcome until they got themselves together, got their high school equivalency diplomas and started taking care of their kids. She has big plans for the younger ones: graduations, proms, college, professions. She doesn't want them getting shot like Willie. "I told him you can't bring that here," she said. "How are his brothers supposed to feel? They're trying to do right and their brother is in the other room with a gunshot wound. I don't want him bringing that to the house and spreading it to the others. The other boys are on the right path, and I want it to stay that way." Her plan appears to be working. The younger children rarely speak of Nicholas and Willie. When Willie showed up at the apartment one afternoon, Ishtar knew to alert her mother on her cellphone. "Willie's here," Ishtar said. "What you want me to do?" Everyone knows about the quarantine, even if it's breached. When Nicholas's name comes up, there's an awkward silence and a looking away. Pushing Higher Goals Thursday was a big day for the family. It was the day Ishtar walked across the stage and became the first of Ms. Whitiker's children to get a high school diploma. It caused quite a flurry in a family with a history of more births than graduations. After the ceremony, Ms. Whitiker's sister, Michelle, took Ishtar's yellow mortarboard and said, good-naturedly: "Let me try this on. Which way does it go? They don't give you these when you get your G.E.D." Everyone was there, except Willie, who was looking for work in Milwaukee, and Nicholas, who was in the public library reading up on contracts and music royalties to get a record deal. The day put Ms. Whitiker in a class quandary even as she went without a telephone to pay for the commencement and the prom. While proud of Ishtar, who made it to the prom after all, Ms. Whitiker is torn between making a big deal of graduation and keeping it in perspective. "I'm not going to do like these other mothers and brag about, 'My baby graduated from high school!' " she said the other day. "I'm not going to say that's good. No, that's just the beginning. I want her to go to college and have a profession. She asked me, 'What age do you think I should have sex?' I said, 'I think about 30.' " Ms. Whitiker has made no attempt to hide her displeasure over Ishtar's wanting to join the Navy - not only because her daughter could be deployed to the Middle East but also because it does not fit the middle-class ideal Ms. Whitiker now has for her children. She sees Ishtar going into law. She is nudging 14-year-old John, who brings home A's, is a linebacker on the football squad and a squad leader in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, to consider becoming a doctor. John listens and applies himself but says he wants to go into the Army first. Before she became a nurse, the military might have been seen as a step up for her kids. Now she sees it as a detour from what they really should be doing. "I try to talk to my kids to go into a profession," she said. "If you're certified and licensed, nobody can take that away from you." To Nicholas and Willie, her advice is very different. "Can't you see your life is going down the drain, and you're the only one who can save it?" she asks to shrugging shoulders. "You want a quick way out. There is no quick way out. I tried that. It doesn't work." But she still has hope. "I'm a late bloomer," she says, "and I know it's not too late for them." Real Riches What has kept Ms. Whitiker going is the knowledge that there are certain things no one can ever take away, that certain pieces of paper really do matter. That is why the letter she was afraid to open, the one announcing she had passed her nursing boards - it's folded up, crinkled in her wallet beneath a picture of her husband and her A.T.M. card. The college diploma that it took her eight years to earn - her husband keeps that in his bedroom drawer, as if it is as much his as hers. But as their second anniversary approached, the balancing act that plays out every day of their lives came down to the more immediate questions of getting by. Will they have a telephone this week or will Ishtar go to the prom? Will Ms. Whitiker be able to cut back her hours at the hospital and spend more time with her family? Can she work days instead of nights? Will she be able to find a home she can afford instead of spending five figures in rent each year? Recently, she took a second job as a visiting nurse, checking in on elderly patients on the South Side during the day. It allows her to have more control over her schedule and work fewer nights at the hospital. The earnings potential is uncertain, and she has no health benefits under this new part-time arrangement, relying instead on her husband's. But a burden has been lifted for now. So here she is on a late spring afternoon in her S.U.V. running errands in the old neighborhood. She has always felt safest with the familiar. She drops off some clothes at the dry cleaners where her sister's former husband's sister works. She buys a duffle bag at a dollar store that hired her aunt to fill in. She checks in on the niece who just had the Caesarean. "How's the baby?" she asks. "You know I want to come up and give her some sugar." Her cellphone rings. "That's the kids," she said. She answers immediately, confident that, whatever bills are waiting in the mailbox, she's rich in the one thing that matters. "Family is like the most important thing in life," Ms. Whitiker said. "Without family, I don't even see a purpose." References 3. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/19930404children.pdf 4. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nytimes/results.html?st=advanced&QryTxt=%22Children+of+the+Shadows%22&By=&Title=&datetype=6&frommonth=04&fromday=01&fromyear=1993&tomonth=04&today=27&toyear=1993&restrict=articles&sortby=CHRON&x=19&y=4 From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 18:59:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:59:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class 11) A Success Story That's Hard to Duplicate Message-ID: A Success Story That's Hard to Duplicate http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/class/12angelaside-final.html By ISABEL WILKERSON The case of a welfare mother of six pulling herself into the ranks of the middle class is rare enough to compel experts on class and poverty to zero in on a single question: What would it take to create more Angela Whitikers? "It shows the importance of work and marriage," said [3]Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton who specializes in family and poverty. "She found a good man and a good job. The thinking now is, it takes both to move out of poverty." [4]Walter Allen, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose areas of specialization include stratification and inequality, said: "She reflects a Horatio Alger kind of American dream story. The great news is that her efforts and initiative were rewarded. She got herself credentialed. The bad news is how challenging and how difficult it is to replicate her path." The reason is that upward mobility requires what sociologists describe as the twin pillars of success: human capital and social capital. Human capital is a person's education, job credentials and employability. Social capital usually means emotional support and encouragement from a reliable stakeholder in one's life, an asset commonly associated with marriage that is itself a form of wealth. Often, single mothers have neither, as was the case with Ms. Whitiker. In fact, as a mother with six children by five fathers - a situation sociologists call multiple partner fertility - she faced more obstacles than most. "The things going against this woman were phenomenal," Professor McLanahan said. "Women who have children with other men are the least likely to find a mate." In the current political climate, conservatives extol marriage as the solution to many of society's ills, while liberals argue that it alone cannot compensate for the effects of imperiled neighborhoods and failing schools. In fact, the research suggests that marriage may indeed be crucial to mobility out of poverty, but that it is not always enough. Of the small number of poor single mothers who marry, 56 percent are lifted out of poverty, according to a 2002 study conducted by [5]Signe-Mary McKernan and [6]Caroline Ratcliffe for the [7]Urban Institute. Getting a job is more common, and 39 percent of poor people who are hired rise out of poverty, as against 35 percent who get at least a two-year college degree. Because of high rates of joblessness and incarceration among black men, marriage is not a viable option for many poor single mothers. Only 1.4 percent of them marry in any given year, the Urban Institute study found. "Why do we feel that promoting marriage will solve the problem when there are so few marriageable men?" asked [8]William Julius Wilson, professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard. "We need to find ways to duplicate the kinds of support that come from an encouraging partner." Professor Wilson says the government should increase its support for low-income women who want to go to college. "The more education these women receive, the more money they will make," he said. "They will be in different social settings and be exposed to more marriageable men." "The liberals and the conservatives are both right in a sense," Professor McLanahan said. "A good relationship is part of the story. But it can't be any relationship. It can't be any man. This case underscores that it must be a healthy relationship. The liberals are wrong because they're too dismissive of marriage, even though they want it for themselves. Everyone wants a strong helping hand. This woman represents the best of both ideals." Still, the ups and downs of Ms. Whitiker's middle-class existence show that the transition out of poverty is not an easy one. "As well off as her economic situation is, her success is precarious," Professor Allen said. "This is a reminder that you can be middle class but in a very unstable situation." For most of the country's history, race was a fairly clear class marker - black usually meant poor, and white middle class or better. Only in the second half of the 20th century, with the dismantling of legal barriers to opportunity, did the lines begin to blur. Still, race continues to shape the experience of being middle class, sociologists say. First, blacks tend to be first-generation middle class, as in Ms. Whitiker's case, which means they have fewer resources to draw upon as they navigate the middle-class world. Second, there is the issue of wealth. "Not only do blacks earn less on average than whites, but the differences in wealth and race are staggering," Professor Allen said. "Their status depends on current earnings, not accumulated wealth that provides a safety net. They don't come from families that could save and acquire property or teach them how things work in society, the mores and cultural capital. "These things have not been as available to blacks as to whites. It translates into whether your family could buy that $23,000 home decades ago that is now worth $2 million or $3 million. Blacks weren't allowed to buy those $23,000 homes. Blacks fall at least a rung below their white counterparts because of the wealth factor alone." There are other pressures as well, Professor Wilson said. "Whites with the same educational attainment have better schooling and are able to get better jobs," he said. "Blacks are much more likely to live near poor segregated areas. They are much less insulated from crime and other manifestations of social disarray that grow from racial exclusion." In the end, everyone profits when people like Angela Whitiker succeed, the experts said. "She is an object lesson," Professor Allen said. "If you want to see this kind of success, you have to provide opportunity for a highly motivated woman to recover from her past mistakes. Ultimately, society benefits. Her younger children won't be a burden on society. And the next generation will do even better." Visible links 3. http://crcw.princeton.edu/mclanahan/ 4. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/members/allen 5. http://www.urban.org/Template.cfm?Section=Home&NavMenuID=75&template=/TaggedContent/ViewExpert.cfm&ExpertID=5860 6. http://www.urban.org/Template.cfm?Section=Home&NavMenuID=75&template=/TaggedContent/ViewExpert.cfm&ExpertID=5879 7. http://www.urban.org/ 8. http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~WWilson/FullBio.html From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 19:00:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:00:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Edmund Fawcett: Left languishing Message-ID: Edmund Fawcett: Left languishing The Times Literary Supplement, 4.10.1 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2108939&window_type=print WHERE HAVE ALL THE INTELLECTUALS GONE? Frank Furedi. 167pp. Continuum. Pounds 12.99 (US $19.95). 0 8264 6769 5. Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is calling for "a culture war against the philistines". Britain's schools and universities are in calamitous decline, he writes, commitment to high culture is vanishing and the dumbing down of public debate is eroding democracy. These are serious, if scarcely original, claims. Here they stand out for two reasons. One is that sky-is falling talk about intellectual standards is commoner on the political Right, whereas Furedi comes from the radical Left. (His title, though not his biblical tone, is a nod to Pete Seeger's gentle anti-war roundel from the early 1960s, "Where have all the flowers gone?".) The second reason is that Professor Furedi blames his own side for the decline, and particularly its culturally minded intellectuals. Furedi spends little time defending his tale of decay or testing it against contrary evidence. He decries foolish new teaching practices in schools, derides "outreach" campaigns by public libraries and museums, and laments declines in voter turnout. As proof of widespread debility, this is thin. How typical his examples are, how today compares with, say, 1950 and how far he is talking about the spread rather than the depth of culture, Furedi does not really say. But this is not that kind of study. He more or less takes it for granted that his glum picture will be recognized by anyone who is actually reading a work of non-fiction. Furedi's culprits are teachers of cultural studies. This is the subject, the joke goes, invented to give sociologists something to look down on. Many people think cultural studies a spent force or, cue Slavoj Zizek, a form of entertainment. Not Furedi. To him its influence is baleful and lasting, especially for the Left. For he sees the culture studies staples - critical theory and postmodernism - as a betrayal of the "Enlightenment values" that the Left used to stand for: equality, civil rights and social improvement through public policy. Here Furedi, in effect, changes topic. What seemed to be an essay on culture and democracy (in the tradition of Arnold, Eliot and Dwight Macdonald) transposes into reflections on the responsibilities of left-wing intellectuals (a line of thought familiar from Antonio Gramsci and Paul Nizan). Furedi could have made things easier by deciding which model he was following. As it is, he treats the (radical) Left's rejection of old gods as a kind of despair based on three connected mistakes: an exaggerated sense that society is too complex to think of in broad terms, the denial of universal moral values, and a politicized form of extreme anti-realism - the incoherent idea that the authority of fact is just another form of tyranny, to be replaced by the free play of perspectives and opinion. Why intellectual heirs of European socialism and American progressivism took refuge in the postmodern swamp is a good question to which a selfless cultural historian may yet find answers. Several factors suggest themselves. The radical Left had abandoned economics, in 1968 it had made a hash of politics and "contesting" culture looked a good third best (Perry Anderson, the former Editor of New Left Review, inclines to this view in The Origins of Postmodernity, where he writes, elegiacally, that "the long suit" of Western Marxism "was always aesthetic"). Universities surrendered humanities to the new irrationalism so long as law, medicine and business schools were safe. Race, gender and "otherness" had bubbled up as issues for their own good reasons. Furedi's explanation is ingenious: the Right once spoke for "local" values - custom, nation, authority, the Left for "universal" ones - rights, peace, equality. By the 1980s, positions were reversed. Neo-liberalism championed global values (free trade, open societies, individual rights). The radical Left accordingly fell back on local idols of identity politics. The embrace by left-wing educators of "relevance" and "personal knowledge" followed inevitably. This story is dazzling but too abstract to be convincing. Quite who Furedi is writing for is a puzzle. At times he sounds like a weekend-papers critic of modern follies. Previous books of his have mocked undue fear of risk, and over-resort to therapists and tort lawyers. At other times he seems engaged in a micro-debate about the post-Marxist Left. Even here his focus is narrow. Not all ex-1968ers became literature dons. Many joined established parties of the Left. Several became ministers. Others, alternatively their children, swelled the ranks of the anti- globalization movement or became radical Greens - no despair there about not being able to see society in the round or of having to treat climate change as a matter of perspective. Even on Furedi's bleak view of "liberal culture", singling out culture studies villains looks questionable. Arguably they are part of a larger trend towards personalization in Western culture under debate for over half a century. For all that, Frank Furedi points his finger at important issues. It would be wrong to fault him for not writing a different book. A more economic (and more Marxist?) approach to the state of British culture would nevertheless look harder at press and television ownership, at public broadcasting, and at the structure of higher education. It would pay less attention to critical theory and more to the influence of business schools and right-wing think-tanks. It would also look into the decline of book editing. In Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Diane Ravitch's name in the bibliography is misspelled, the title of Bertrand de Jouvenel's essay, "The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals", is incomplete, and the lead book critic of the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, is mistakenly thought to be a man. But perhaps this was a coded joke against identity politics. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 19:00:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:00:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Enough Keyword Searches. Just Answer My Question. Message-ID: Enough Keyword Searches. Just Answer My Question. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/business/yourmoney/12techno.html By JAMES FALLOWS SEARCH engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak. When it comes to digging up a specific name, date, phrase or price, search engines are unstoppable. The same is true for details from the previously concealed past. For better and worse, any information about any of us - true or false, flattering or compromising - that has ever appeared on a publicly available site is likely to be retrievable forever, or until we run out of electricity for the server farms. Carefree use of e-mail was once a sign of sophistication. Now to trust confidential information to e-mail is to be a rube. Despite the sneering term snail mail, plain old letters are the form of long-distance communication least likely to be intercepted, misdirected, forwarded, retrieved or otherwise inspected by someone you didn't have in mind. Yet for anything but simple keyword queries, even the best search engines are surprisingly ineffective. Recently, for example, I was trying to track the changes in California's spending on its schools. In the 1960's, when I was in public school there, the legend was that only Connecticut spent more per student than California did. Now, the legend is that only the likes of Louisiana and Mississippi spend less. Was either belief true? When I finally called an education expert on a Monday morning, she gave me the answer off the top of her head. (Answer: right in spirit, exaggerated in detail.) But that was only after I'd wasted what seemed like hours over the weekend with normal search tools. If it sounds easy, try using keyword searches to find consistent state-by-state data covering the last 40 years. We live with these imperfections by trying to outguess the engines - what if I put "per capita spending by states" in quotation marks? - and by realizing that they're right for some jobs and wrong for others. One branch of the federal government is desperate enough for a better search tool that its efforts could be a stimulus for fundamental long-term improvements. Last week, I spent a day at a workshop near Washington for the Aquaint project, whose work is unclassified but has gone virtually unnoticed in the news media. The name stands for "advanced question answering for intelligence," and it refers to a joint effort by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and other federal intelligence organizations. To computer scientists, "question answering," or Q.A., means a form of search that does not just match keywords but also scans, parses and "understands" vast quantities of information to respond to queries. An ideal Q.A. system would let me ask, "How has California's standing among states in per-student school funds changed since the 1960's?" - and it would draw from all relevant sources to find the right answer. In the real Aquaint program, the questions are more likely to be, "Did any potential terrorist just buy an airplane ticket?" or "How strong is the new evidence of nuclear programs in Country X?" The presentations I saw, by scientists at universities and private companies, reported progress on seven approaches to the problem. (The new [3]I.B.M. search technology discussed here last year is also part of the Aquaint project.) There will be more to say later about this effort. On the bright side, apart from whatever the project does for national security, its innovations could eventually improve civilian search systems, much as the Pentagon's Arpanet eventually became the civilian Internet. Of course, the dark potential in ever more effective search-and-surveillance systems is also obvious. For the moment, consider several here-and-now innovations that can improve on the standard [4]Google-style list of search hits. [5]Ask Jeeves, whose site is [6]Ask.com, recently introduced two features that enhance its long-established question-and-answer format. One tries to recast search terms into a question that can be answered on the Web; the other offers suggestions to broaden or narrow the search. [7]Answers.com, a free version of what was once called [8]GuruNet, combines conventional search results with questions and answers. Two related sites, [9]Clusty.com and its parent, [10]Vivisimo.com, categorize the hits from each search, producing a kind of table of contents of results. Another site, [11]Grokker.com, does something similar in a visual form; it is free online or $49 for a desktop version. And the bizarrely named but extremely useful [12]MrSapo.com has become my favorite search portal, because it allows quick, easy comparisons of the results of the same search on virtually any major engine. FINALLY, some updates. Last month, I complained about those ill-designed Web sites that force users to re-enter information from the start if any error occurs. The real solution to this problem is better design, but of the many work-arounds, the best is the free utility Roboform, from [13]roboform.com. In the same column, I mentioned that Google Maps' satellite view of the vice presidential residence in Washington had been camouflaged with a protective thoroughness not applied to the White House, the Pentagon and other significant structures. It turns out that at least one other center of power has received similar treatment; zoom in on downtown Albany to see what it is. (A Google spokesman says that the company itself has never blurred or altered the photos but that it simply posts what it gets from "third parties.") It also turns out that a crystal-clear aerial view of every bit of the vice presidential compound is readily available - not on Google, but on another free, public, mainstream site. Ever vigilant, I will say no more. But the contrast illustrates the inanity of many "homeland security" measures, which gum up life for the average citizen while offering no genuine protection against real threats. The idea of pointless protective gestures brings us back to the intelligence agencies and Aquaint. As the briefings went on last week, I began to notice that they were not being delivered in American-accented English. The first project was introduced by a man born in Romania. The second, by a native Pole. The third, by a scientist who had emigrated from Russia. The fourth, by one from Greece. The fifth presenter was from New Zealand, the sixth was another Romanian and only the seventh sounded as if he had been reared in the United States. All the rest had come from around the world to study, in several cases to start companies, and now to lend their skills to this national security effort. Several of the foreign-born scientists told me afterward that their counterparts at home would have a much harder time following their example, because of post-9/11 visa restrictions to keep America "safe." James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. E-mail: [14]tfiles at nytimes.com. References 2. http://www.nytimes.com/ 3. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=IBM 4. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GOOG 5. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=ASKJ 6. http://Ask.com/ 7. http://Answers.com/ 8. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GRU 9. http://Clusty.com/ 10. http://Vivisimo.com/ 11. http://Grokker.com/ 12. http://MrSapo.com/ 13. http://roboform.com/ 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/business/yourmoney/tfiles at nytimes.com From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 19:00:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:00:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Who's Mentally Ill? Deciding Is Often All in the Mind Message-ID: Who's Mentally Ill? Deciding Is Often All in the Mind http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/weekinreview/12carey.html By [3]BENEDICT CAREY THE release last week of a government-sponsored survey, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that more than half of Americans will develop a mental disorder in their lives. The study was the third, beginning in 1984, to suggest a significant increase in mental illness since the middle of the 20th century, when estimates of lifetime prevalence ranged closer 20 or 30 percent. But what does it mean when more than half of a society may suffer "mental illness"? Is it an indictment of modern life or a sign of greater willingness to deal openly with a once-taboo subject? Or is it another example of the American mania to give every problem a name, a set of symptoms and a treatment - a trend, medical historians say, accentuated by drug marketing to doctors and patients? Changes in societies over time, and differences across cultures, make it extremely difficult to compare prevalence levels of mental illness, even today. Levels of depression in China were thought to be very low, for example, until the Harvard anthropologist Dr. Arthur Kleinman found in the 1980's that many Chinese did not think or talk about mood disorders the way Westerners do. They came to doctors or healers with physical complaints - dizziness, headaches and other pains that were treated as such, though in many cases they could be diagnosed as depression. A World Health Organization survey published in 2004 found that 2.5 percent of Chinese reported a mood disorder in the last year, compared with a rate of 9.6 percent in the United States. In Japan, too, reported levels of depression tend to be low - just over 3 percent reported a mood disorder in the last year, in the W.H.O. survey - in part because of a culture of stoicism, said Dr. Laurence Kirmayer, director of social and transcultural psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. Depression, after all, is not one symptom but many, and in Japan there is strong cultural taboo against repeated, vague complaints. In addition, said Dr. Margaret Lock, a professor of social studies in medicine at McGill, Japanese doctors tend to be attentive to men's complaints of mood problems, and dismissive of women's. The result: depression rates are higher in men than in women, the reverse of the United States and much of Europe. But more than anything, historians and medical anthropologists said, the rise in the incidence of mental illness in America over recent decades reflects cultural and political shifts. "People have not changed biologically in the past 100 years," Dr. Kirmayer said, "but the culture, our understanding of mental illness" has changed. That evolving understanding can have implications for diagnoses. For example, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders, amid a growing realization that no evidence linked homosexuality to any mental impairment. Overnight, an estimated four to five million "sick" people became well. More common, however, is for psychiatrists to add conditions and syndromes: The association's first diagnostic manual, published in 1952, included some 60 disorders, while the current edition now has about 300, including everything from sexual arousal disorders to kleptomania to hyposomnia (oversleeping) and several shades of bipolar disorder. "The idea has been not to expand the number of people with mental conditions but to develop a more fine-grained understanding of those who do," said Dr. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the latest mental health survey. But if contemporary trends, whether scientific or commercial, can serve to expand the franchise of mental illness, the mores, biases and scientific ignorance of previous centuries did much to hide it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, doctors had far fewer words for mental impairment - madness, hysteria, melancholia - and estimated its incidence at somewhere around 5 percent to 10 percent, as far as historians can determine. In some communities, the mentally ill were tolerated as holy fools or village idiots. The city of Geel, in Belgium, was particularly enlightened. There, in the 18th and 19th centuries, lunatics "could walk the streets, engage in commerce, they would deliver food, carry milk, they were incorporated into the society and respected," said Dr. Theodore Millon, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology in Coral Gables, Fla., and author of a recent history of psychiatry and psychology, "Masters of the Mind." But Geel was exceptional. More typical, Dr. Millon said, was for people considered mad or uncontrollable to be confined, sometimes in homemade chambers called lock boxes. They were captive, uncounted, beyond any hope of treatment, their stories lost to history. The behavior of millions of others who were merely troubled, rebellious or moody was often understood - and veiled - in religious terms, said Dr. Nancy Tomes, a professor of medical history at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. Gamblers and drinkers, the excessively impulsive or rebellious, the sexually promiscuous (especially women) were considered sinners, deviants or possessed. Conversely, those who denied themselves food or comfort, or who prayed or performed ritual cleansing repeatedly, often struck others as especially pious, Dr. Tomes said. As science gradually displaced religion in the industrializing countries through the 19th century, such behavior was increasingly seen in secular, diagnostic terms, historians said. Excessive fasting became anorexia; ritualized behavior was understood as compulsive, or obsessive-compulsive. "In some ways this is the story of the past century, the medicalization of many behaviors that once were seen in an entirely religious context," Dr. Tomes said. Beyond that, some experts are convinced that modern life in the West - especially urban life - is more stressful than in earlier periods, and that the increased numbers of illnesses in the psychiatric association's diagnostic manual is a reflection of that fact. Dr. Millon, who has served on panels to write and revise the manual, tells the story of borderline personality disorder. In the late 1970's, he was among a small group of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who settled on the term "borderline" to mean people who fell somewhere between neurotic and psychotic. Some doctors in the room hated the term; others liked it; several said it was meaningless. But after hours of debate, reversals of opinion and bruised egos, the diagnosis was born: borderline personality disorder, to describe a needy, scattered, uncertain self, or personality. Borderline is now one of the most popular diagnoses in psychiatry, an umbrella term that covers a multitude of symptoms that all seem to point to a similar problem. "This is seems to me a kind of diagnosis for our age, this complex, changing, fluid society in which young people are not allowed to internalize a coherent picture of who they are," Dr. Millon said. "There are too many options, too many choices, and there's a sense of, 'I don't know who I am - am I angry, am I contrite, happy, sad?' It's the scattered confusion of modern society." From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 19:01:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:01:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Does globalization bring liberty? Message-ID: John Gray: Does globalization bring liberty? The Times Literary Supplement, 0.11.17 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2098697&window_type=print A FUTURE PERFECT. The challenge and hidden promise of globalization. By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 386pp. Heinemann. ?20. TLS ?17. 0 434 00751 X THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM. The world economy in the twenty-first century. By Robert Gilpin. 373pp. Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?18.95. TLS ?16.95. 0 691 04935 1 THE GLOBALIZATION SYNDROME. Transformation and resistance. By James H. Mittelman. 286pp. Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?30 (paperback, ?11.50). TLS ?27; ?9.50. 0 691 00988 0 The pitfalls of identifying civil society with the free market When President Suharto of Indonesia resigned in May 1998, the response in the West was quiet satisfaction. A corrupt and murderous tyrant had been toppled - and free markets, with a little help from the International Monetary Fund, could take the credit. Never mind that the West had supported Suharto for decades. That fact belonged in the past, along with Asian "crony capitalism". A new epoch was about to begin, in which globalized free markets would act as pacemakers for democracy throughout the world. As could have been foreseen, things did not turn out quite in that way. Severe recession and the collapse of the currency provided a less than ideal background for democratic transition. The civil disorder that had forced Suharto's resignation continued, with the country's Chinese minority suffering persecution and murderous attacks, and the Indonesian State began a slow and violent unravelling. The new era was postponed. The collapse in Indonesia was a knock-on effect of a currency crisis that had erupted in July 1997, when hedge-fund activity forced the Thai Government to let its currency float, and the contagion spread rapidly to neighbouring countries. In the West, the crisis was routinely described as a sign that Asian capitalism had entered a terminal crisis. This was absurd. Until turmoil in global financial markets hit them, the East Asian countries were lauded by Western opinion. Are we to believe that they underwent a radical metamorphosis in the summer of 1997? No doubt many of their economies contained serious imbalances; but it defies common sense to suppose that long-established and - for the most part - highly successful varieties of capitalism can collapse overnight. The Western response to the East Asian crisis was a callow triumphalism that continues to this day. To be sure, the West's complacency was shaken by the devaluation of the rouble in August 1998. The Russian default triggered the collapse of a colossally leveraged American hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, threatening the stability of the world's financial system. The threat was swiftly neutralized by the American banking authorities, and it was soon business as usual in the global financial markets. As a result, the lesson of the default went barely noticed: in the most important case, the transition from central planning to market institutions had failed. In Russia, as in Indonesia, globalized financial markets have not assisted the transition to democracy and a liberal market economy. They have made the transition more difficult. There is a systematic mismatch between the goal of a worldwide free market and the anarchic workings of globalization in practice. If John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge have written the most intelligent defence of globalization to date, it is because they readily acknowledge this gap between aspiration and reality. A Future Perfect does not shrink from detailing the increases in inequality that have gone with accelerating globalization. Nor does it pass over the ethnic conflict and fundamentalist revulsion that it has generated or aggravated in a number of countries. As a result, unlike a host of quasi-religious tracts that identify deregulated global markets with human progress and anathematize all criticism of them, Micklethwait and Wooldridge present a commendably tough-minded and exceptionally useful account of globalization as an actually existing economic regime. They are able to combine this realistic perception of globalization's flaws and risk with impassioned advocacy of its benefits because their core argument in its defence is not economic at all. For them, the promise held out by globalization is not increased prosperity. It is an increase in individual liberty. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge see it, the case for globalization is that it embodies a classical liberal ideal of personal freedom. In the introduction and the conclusion to A Future Perfect, they cite John Stuart Mill's principle that individuals should be free to act in any way that does not harm others, and contend that globalization is tending to bring about a worldwide open society of the sort that Mill and other liberals are bound to support. But here they deploy a misinterpretation of Mill to bolster a reading of globalization's actual impact that their own account suggests is suspect. Mill could never have defended a universal free market as a direct application of his principles regarding personal liberty. Indeed, he explicitly rejects any such implication. In his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill distinguishes sharply between basic principles of liberty and rules of thumb, such as the laissez-faire maxim enjoining non-interference by governments in the workings of the economy. The latter is a guide to policy which should not be followed slavishly, whereas the former concern core human freedoms. Mill amplified this position in On Liberty (1859). There he went out of his way to note that trade is a social act which may harm the interests of others, and so cannot be protected by his principle of liberty. In Mill's view, free trade may well be a very good thing; but not because restraining trade infringes basic human liberties. Applying Mill's distinction yields a more nuanced assessment in which the contribution made by globalization to personal freedom is patchy. Where they enable individuals to escape from the constraints of oppressive communities, the global flows of information made possible by new communication technologies enhance liberty. But the effects on freedom of a regime of unfettered capital flows are much more problematic. Where it weakens fledgling liberal regimes - as happened when markets moved against the South African currency - or strengthens anti-liberal forces, as it has manifestly done in Russia, its impact has been to create an environment less hospitable to basic liberties. As George Soros has observed, deregulated financial markets often behave more like wrecking balls than pendulums. Contagion spreads indiscriminately. In times of panic, free flows of capital can devastate authoritarian and liberal regimes alike. There is no systematic connection between globalized markets and liberal values. That so many of globalization's boosters have failed to notice this fact says as much about their ignorance of history as it does about their ideological enthusiasm. Throughout much of the Cold War, the defence of individual freedom went hand in hand with a Keynesian regime of managed markets. It was only with the rise of the New Right that the absurd notion that interventionist economic policies lead inexorably to limitations on personal and political freedom came to be a idee recue. One of the many virtues of Robert Gilpin's wide-ranging book is its deep sense of history. The Challenge of Global Capitalism is an exemplary guide to the geo-strategic environment in which world markets operate. More particularly, it is a penetrating examination of the sources of global financial vulnerability. Unlike many political scientists and most economists, Gilpin does not discuss the current regime in global markets as if it had always existed. He is clear that it has a history - if, in some respects, one that is quite brief. The regime of global free markets emerged with the Soviet collapse. It cannot be understood adequately, if its background in the strategic rivalries of the Cold War is not grasped. Equally, its prospects cannot be assessed except in the context of the unchallenged post-Cold War dominance of the United States. What is rather less clear in Gilpin's account is the depth of US commitment to the current global regime. He is emphatic that the future of the current global regime depends on continuing American leadership. On this he is surely right; but perhaps he underestimates the risks of unilateralism and incipient economic nationalism in American policy. US commitment to global free markets is recent, and - except in respect of its dependency on large-scale imports of capital - its economy is not, in fact, very highly globalized. Can we take for granted that, in the event of serious dislocation in world markets, America's commitment to free trade would not be compromised? Might it not tilt towards protectionism? An uncertainty which haunts all discussion of the world economy is the ambiguity of the terms in which it is analysed. The Globalization Syndrome by James H. Mittelman is distinguished from the overwhelming majority of recent writings on the subject by its sensitivity to the conceptual issues the subject raises. In Mittelman's view, globalization encompasses a configuration of trends and forces, not a single process, and political power is as central in this configuration as the growth of worldwide economic networks. One of the most refreshing aspects of Mittelman's thoughtful and subtle discussion is his critique of the discourse of civil society. In a chapter dealing with the underexamined subject of global organized crime, Mittelman notes that "the very idea of civil society is being corrupted . . . . At best, global civil society is a nascent, yet important, normative force for future world order." Here Mittelman registers a scepticism that is pertinent and overdue. In much recent discourse, civil society has acquired the role of a fetish. In the vulgar parodies of neo-liberal discourse, it is conceived as a wholly spontaneous formation, which emerges as soon as the State has retreated from social life, and which for all practical purposes can be identified with the practices of market exchange. As Mittelman points out, thinking of civil society in this way suppresses its true provenance in recent thought, which is in Marxian critical theory. The proper role of the idea of civil society in social and political thought is not to glorify the market. It is to show on what the market stands, and thereby mark its limits. It is worth recalling that when, not much more than a decade ago, central planning was overthrown in the first fully post-totalitarian country, the forces of civil society that accomplished this feat did not identify themselves with the institutions of the market. Indeed, they were as hostile to them as they were to Communism. If talk of the spontaneous forces of civil society means anything, it applies to Poland in the time when Solidarity and the Church were in conflict with the Communist state apparatus. Yet the fact is that achieving a market economy was no part of their aims. Indeed, as later developments demonstrated, they actively opposed it. In Poland, as in other countries, a market economy did not emerge as a side-effect of the reassertion of society; it was an artefact of state power. That is has proved remarkably successful does not invalidate the central point. Civil society and the market are not linked indissolubly together. Quite commonly they embody irreconcilably opposed interests and values. The wild expectations which Western opinion harboured regarding globalization only a few years ago are now muted. There have been too many near-catastrophes. Events in Indonesia and Russia have confounded the hope that free markets will act as pacemakers for democracy. Yet the illusion persists that advancing globalization somehow assures the future of liberal values. The reality - that the vast, chaotic and uncontrollable transformation on which the world is embarked is bound to be deeply mixed in its impact on human freedom and well-being - seems still too forbidding to be much contemplated. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 12 19:01:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:01:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Rising against all reason Message-ID: John Gray: Rising against all reason The Times Literary Supplement, 1.2.9 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2104632&window_type=print THE VOICE OF MODERN HATRED. Encounters with Europe's New Right. By Nicholas Fraser. 327pp. Picador. ?16.99. TLS ?14.99 - 0 330 37212 2. The revival of the far Right in Europe during the past ten years has come as something of a shock to liberal opinion, but two generations ago it was widely feared. A revival of fascism was expected from the beginning by the Allied occupying forces in Germany. In 1947, they commissioned polls in the American Zone, which confirmed their worst fears. The polls revealed that between 47 and 55 per cent of Germans believed that National Socialism, contrary to all evidence, was - as Nicholas Fraser drily puts it in The Voice of Modern Hatred: Encounters with Europe's New Right - "a good idea badly carried out". Partly as a response to such evidence, the authorities of the new Germany passed the Basic Law of 1950, which made it constitutionally possible to ban extremist political parties. Despite these efforts, and the decades of education in democracy that followed them, Germany has not escaped the recrudescence of the radical Right that is under way in many European countries. What frightens and confounds liberals today is that - in Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Denmark and the eastern parts of Germany, for example - far Right movements are gaining influence, and sometimes power, after half a century of stable democratic government, and at a time of unprecedented general prosperity. According to all the models of political development that were developed in post-war democratic theory, this is a near-impossibility.Yet it is happening today in many parts of Europe. Liberal bafflement at this seemingly inexplicable reversion to type in Continental Europe is the animating theme of Nicholas Fraser's arresting and at times wrenchingly honest book, which was written in tandem with a series of television programmes recording Fraser's travels across Europe. Partly for that reason, it is a highly personal narrative, presented almost in the style of a novel. This might seem an unpromising and overambitious format for an inquiry into the European radical Right, but in fact Fraser succeeds brilliantly in interweaving his thoughts on the seeming anomaly of the reappearance of the politics of hatred throughout much of Europe with a succession of repulsive and fascinating vignettes of some of the leading representatives of Europe's New Right. Political leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, Vlaams Blok and Jorg Haider, "revisionist historians" such as Robert Faurisson and David Irving - these and other figures are swept up in a penetrating, digressive monologue in which moods of perplexed sympathy alternate with bouts of fury and despair. Though The Voice of Modern Hatred contains more information and clear-headed thought than many academic texts, it does not pretend to offer anything like a theory of the movements with which it deals. Fraser is too alert to the singularity of the people and circumstances of which he writes to seek to encapsulate them in any neat formulation. Yet the book does suggest an overall interpretation of the European New Right. The overwhelming impression left by Fraser's vignettes is that the attitudes of today's far-rightists are not very different from those of the 1930s. The characters whom Fraser describes are a pretty miscellaneous bunch. They have very varying degrees of influence, ranging from nearly complete political marginality to being serious contenders for key positions in national government. Some are undeniably plebeian, others highly educated, some aspire to be demagogues, while others pose as martyrs. They come from a wide variety of national and regional milieux. But it is striking that denial of the Holocaust is an integral part of the world-view of practically every one of them. Today, as in the 1930s, anti-Semitism is the dark, unbroken thread that runs all the way through the European far Right. This is not the only echo of the inter-war years. The intellectuals described are in many ways strikingly reminiscent of Europe's proto-Nazi bohemian intelligentsia. Only a few anachronistic details divide Fraser's disoriented would-be Brownshirts, reading Celine, Genet and Foucault during brief periods of imprisonment, from their confreres seventy years ago. Then the alienated intellectual's preferred reading was Ernst Junger or Moeller van den Bruck; but the content was the same. The fact is that hostility to liberal society is not an intermittent aberration of the European intelligentsia. On the Left as well as the Right, among believers in Enlightenment as much as the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, political movements that not only criticize, but actually aim to destroy liberal institutions have always had a powerful appeal. In the nineteenth century, it was thinkers such as the authoritarian Auguste Comte, not John Stuart Mill, who commanded a mass intellectual following. In the twentieth century there were normally a dozen Marinettis and Drieu la Rochelles for every Isaiah Berlin or Karl Popper. Nor was the infatuation with anti-liberal regimes limited to Continental thinkers. It was just as strong in G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton and a good many other English writers. The idea that Europe's intellectuals are somehow constitutionally liberal is a mirage generated by the Second World War. To be sure, despite the alarming inroads that are being made by the New Right, we are far from the endemic crises of the inter-war years. Liberal institutions are under threat, but - except maybe in Russia and parts of the Balkans - there is no likelihood of their being overthrown. Instead, Europe seems to be returning to something approaching its condition towards the end of the nineteenth century, when, in many countries, the politics of hate enjoyed the support of large sections of the public, and intellectuals wavered between support for liberal values and the perennial charms of extremism. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jun 13 22:16:07 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:16:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage and poverty In-Reply-To: <200506131800.j5DI0CR19051@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050613221608.56234.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>"Why do we feel that promoting marriage will solve the problem when there are so few marriageable men?" asked [8]William Julius Wilson, professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard. "We need to find ways to duplicate the kinds of support that come from an encouraging partner."<< --I agree. I never understood why some people think the nuclear family is the answer (especially given our tribal evolutionary upbringing, in which the family unit was imbedded in a larger culture), when there are many people who just can't find someone to marry. Will the people advocating marriage for the poor be willing to lend their sons/daughters to the cause? Probably not. They'll teach their kids to marry upward. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Jun 14 00:32:50 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 17:32:50 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage and poverty In-Reply-To: <20050613221608.56234.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050613221608.56234.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42AE25B2.6030602@earthlink.net> Amusing but possibly right on target. If you come across any "left overs" from the advocates of marriage for the poor, you might suggest they resubmit to the marriage pool. I know way too many females post 30 who cannot find any likely prospects. Then again, there are many post 30 males who don't wish to enter the marriage scene. I think the problem is greater than "no one available". Maybe an examination of the "why" might enlighten the question. Gerry Michael Christopher wrote: >--I agree. I never understood why some people think >the nuclear family is the answer (especially given our >tribal evolutionary upbringing, in which the family >unit was imbedded in a larger culture), when there are >many people who just can't find someone to marry. Will >the people advocating marriage for the poor be willing >to lend their sons/daughters to the cause? Probably >not. They'll teach their kids to marry upward. > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jun 14 00:46:22 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 17:46:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage and poverty Message-ID: <01C5703F.D119B2A0.shovland@mindspring.com> For a number of years I hung out in the ballroom dance world. It was filled with people who were unable to have relationships but needed contact with the other sex. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 5:33 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] marriage and poverty Amusing but possibly right on target. If you come across any "left overs" from the advocates of marriage for the poor, you might suggest they resubmit to the marriage pool. I know way too many females post 30 who cannot find any likely prospects. Then again, there are many post 30 males who don't wish to enter the marriage scene. I think the problem is greater than "no one available". Maybe an examination of the "why" might enlighten the question. Gerry Michael Christopher wrote: >--I agree. I never understood why some people think >the nuclear family is the answer (especially given our >tribal evolutionary upbringing, in which the family >unit was imbedded in a larger culture), when there are >many people who just can't find someone to marry. Will >the people advocating marriage for the poor be willing >to lend their sons/daughters to the cause? Probably >not. They'll teach their kids to marry upward. > > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:10:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:10:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Striking Back at the Food Police Message-ID: Striking Back at the Food Police http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/business/yourmoney/12food.html By [3]MELANIE WARNER WHEN it comes to food fights, John Belushi's character in "Animal House" has nothing on Rick Berman. A prominent Washington lobbyist, Mr. Berman runs the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit advocacy group that is financed by the food and restaurant industries. Two months ago, after a report in a leading medical journal cast doubt on several assumptions about obesity, he pounced. His group ran $600,000 worth of full-page ads in a half-dozen newspapers, gloating that the study showed that obesity was not an "epidemic" but rather a lot of hype. "Americans have been force-fed a steady diet of obesity myths by the 'food police,' trial lawyers, and even our own government," the ad said. In recent years, Mr. Berman, who is not a scientist, has emerged as a powerful and controversial voice in the debate over the nation's eating habits. In some ways, he has become the face of the food industry as it tries to beat back regulations and discourage consumer lawsuits. Food and restaurant companies, he says, are being unfairly blamed for making Americans fat and unhealthy; he adds that people are smart enough to make their own well-informed choices. Formed in 1995 with money from [4]Philip Morris, now known as Altria, to fight bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, Consumer Freedom has gained attention for its provocative tactics. Last year, it ran television ads that featured the Soup Nazi of "Seinfeld" fame ordering overweight people to eat salad - a clear jab at what the group considers pushy nutritionists who are trying to suck the joy out of eating. Mr. Berman has declared war on organizations like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the food and nutrition activist group that is run by his nemesis, Michael Jacobson. If the food police had a commissioner, Mr. Berman would cast him in the role. Along the way, Mr. Berman and his group have earned more than a few enemies. Critics say that Consumer Freedom seizes on statistical errors and other nuances to distract from the substance of the obesity debate. "They make a lot of noise, but nobody in academia takes their arguments seriously," said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston and an occasional target of Mr. Berman's group. "They stand for food industry freedom, not consumer freedom." Amid the claims and counterclaims, Mr. Berman and his opponents duke it out, taking sides on major questions about obesity, including these: How did Americans become so fat? Who is to be blamed? And how should the problem be solved? Much is at stake in the answers. In April, a study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sharply lowered the number of annual deaths attributable to obesity, to 112,000 from 400,000. But the report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, said nothing of other problems that can result from obesity. Scientists have linked the condition - defined as having a body mass index of more than 30 - to an increased risk of everything from diabetes and arthritis to hypertension and heart disease. As a result, the C.D.C., the government's primary agency for health information, still calls obesity "a very, very important health problem" and "a serious epidemic." According to the agency, rates of obesity have doubled in the last 25 years among adults and children, and tripled among teenagers. Some scientists and public health officials have suggested that this trend, if left unchecked, could bankrupt the already faltering health care system. A study last year by scientists at the Research Triangle Institute and the C.D.C. found that states' medical expenditures related to obesity were as much as $75 billion a year. FOR the food industry, which has annual revenue of $500 billion, the implications of all this are potentially colossal. Many major food and restaurant companies derive a huge portion of their revenue from products - Cocoa Puffs, Doritos, Hot Pockets, you name it - that most nutritionists frown upon. Only a handful of small lawsuits have been filed against food companies so far concerning diet and obesity, but trial lawyers are circling and are starting to turn food into the new tobacco. Part of Mr. Berman's job is to keep that from happening. To that end, he has taken aim at Center for Science in the Public Interest - which, like Consumer Freedom, is based in Washington - because it has done more than anyone else to say the food industry has had a major role in obesity. Run for 30 years by Mr. Jacobson, a tenacious Ph.D. in microbiology, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has consistently shined a bright light on the nutritional ills of the standard American diet. Last year it raised $16 million, mostly from subscribers to its monthly newsletter. To Mr. Jacobson, food companies have followed the profit motive, making bigger sizes to encourage people to spend more money, and engineering food that is full of sugar, fat and salt - and thus has an irresistible taste. As a result, he says, people have become fat. To illustrate the point, he cites a study showing that many of the foods with the biggest increases in consumption in the last 20 years are among the most fattening and nutritionally unredeeming, such as salty snacks, pizza and soft drinks. Mr. Berman, on the other hand, argues that potato chips and hamburger combo meals have very little to do with America's ballooning waistline. The real culprits, he says, are a lack of exercise and people's unwillingness to take personal responsibility for their own diets. He points to separate studies showing that over the last two decades, the rates of exercise among American adolescents have decreased considerably, while total caloric consumption has risen only slightly. Not surprisingly, Mr. Jacobson cites government data that show just the opposite: that the average American consumed anywhere from 166 to 560 more calories a day in 2000 than in 1980. Run from the well-appointed offices of Mr. Berman's lobbying firm, Berman & Company, the Center for Consumer Freedom employs 25 people. Mr. Berman, trained as a lawyer, built a career working on labor issues - he campaigned against the minimum-wage increase in 1997 and worked as a negotiator for [5]Bethlehem Steel in union contract talks - before turning his attention to obesity. In newspaper advertising, Consumer Freedom describes itself as a "nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting consumer choices and promoting common sense." But Mr. Berman readily acknowledges that he gets the bulk of his funds from food and restaurant companies, some of which are also clients of his lobbying firm. Mr. Jacobson, who employs 60 people at his organization, says that because of the way Mr. Berman's group is financed, Consumer Freedom is little more than a thinly veiled front for the interests of the food industry. "The companies that are working with them want their critics debunked and trashed," Mr. Jacobson said recently from his Washington office. "They can secretly participate in that by funding Berman." Mr. Berman responds that his primary goal is to create an "intellectually honest" debate. "I'm trying to make sure the statistics are not made to seem worse than they are and to educate the public about how some people are being selective in their data," he said last month over a healthy lunch of grilled salmon at a restaurant not far from his 12th-floor offices overlooking the White House. MR. BERMAN has always declined to name the specific companies that support Consumer Freedom. He said in an interview that there were roughly 100 companies, including some that control very large brands, but that identifying them would serve no purpose. "I don't want these companies getting targeted for something controversial that I'm saying," he said. A watchdog group in Washington, the Center for Media and Democracy, has posted data about Consumer Freedom's financing on its Web site. According to documents they say were obtained from a former Consumer Freedom staff member, corporate contributors to the group as of 2002 included [6]Coca-Cola, Wendy's and [7]Tyson Foods, each of which gave $200,000. Cargill gave $100,000, according to the documents, and [8]Outback Steakhouse gave $164,600. Coca-Cola confirms that it is a sponsor of Consumer Freedom and calls the group valuable as "another voice in the debate." But a Coke spokeswoman, Kari Bjorhus, added that her company does "take the obesity issue very seriously." The National Restaurant Association, which represents large chains like [9]McDonald's and Wendy's as well as small, independent businesses, says that it is not a financial contributor to Consumer Freedom, but that the two organizations have similar goals. "We have regular communications with Consumer Freedom," said a spokeswoman, Sue Hensley. "They have an important voice in emphasizing personal responsibility." Not all food companies, however, are aligned in support of Mr. Berman - a situation that highlights a philosophical divide in the industry. Some companies, like [10]PepsiCo and [11]Kraft Foods, say that they have explicitly declined to work with Consumer Freedom and that they do not agree with some of its arguments or its approach. "Our focus is not to engage in all the debate over whose fault it is, but to continue to work on healthier product development," said Brock Leach, a senior vice president at PepsiCo who in 2002 was given the task of helping to develop more nutritious product offerings. A spokesman for Kraft, Mark Berlind, says that the company does not contribute to Consumer Freedom because it doesn't think "finger-pointing" is the "right solution." "We feel we have a responsibility to address consumers' concerns over obesity," he added, "so we're responding by reformulating many of our products, providing more product information, creating smaller sizes and adjusting our marketing practices." To Mr. Berman, that is "appeasement" and will not work. "You can't accommodate these people," he said, referring to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "They're not going away. If you create some healthier products, they'll go after all the unhealthy ones you still make." So in turn, Consumer Freedom goes after that group, as one prong of its strategy. Another is to become an authority on health and obesity information. Consumer Freedom staff members post articles daily on its Web site and publish booklets with titles like "An Epidemic of Obesity Myths," dense with statistics and references to scientific studies. The booklets and articles make for interesting reading, but many scientists question whether much of it really matters. For instance, Mr. Berman says that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and Michael Jordan all have body mass indexes above 30 and thus are classified as "obese." So, too, is Mr. Berman. At 6-foot-3 and 255 pounds, he has a body mass index of 31.87. Despite his "obesity," Mr. Berman says he is "perfectly healthy." These are useful points, but Dr. Ludwig of Children's Hospital said that people like weightlifters and professional athletes who are technically overweight because of muscle constitute a very small percentage of the population. And while it is certainly possible to have an index above 30 and still be healthy, that is not true for a majority of people who are obese. Dr. Glenn A. Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia and a supporter of many of the efforts of Consumer Freedom, says that roughly 30 percent of obese people have none of the classic metabolic problems or other risk factors. The other 70 percent are indeed at risk for a host of troubling and costly obesity-related health problems, he says. ONE scientist who objects to Consumer Freedom's statistical nit-picking is Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the C.D.C.'s National Center for Health Statistics and an author of the study in The Journal of the American Medical Association that found fewer deaths linked to obesity. "I think people have overinterpreted a lot of what we said," Dr. Flegal said in a recent interview. "Just because you don't have a risk of excess death doesn't mean you're healthy." And for Dr. Ludwig, the fact that the study's findings were less dire than previous studies does not shake his belief that there is a looming public health disaster. Dr. Flegal's study, for instance, did not directly address the sharp increase in childhood obesity. "Once obese children enter adulthood," Dr. Ludwig said, "then all of the previous relationships that have been observed may no longer apply because they'll be carrying those extra pounds for so many more years. "In other words, with regard to the childhood obesity epidemic," he added, "we are still in the quiet before the storm." Mr. Jacobson says that it is shortsighted for Consumer Freedom to make such a big deal over the number of obesity deaths. He contends that obesity is just one symptom of the prevalence of horrible diets, and that the same eating habits that cause people to gain weight may also deprive them of essential nutrients, antioxidants and fiber to help keep their bodies healthy and free from chronic disease. "It's all related," he said. MR. BERMAN is undeterred by such criticism. In fact, he thrives on it. He calls Dr. Ludwig a "waistline scaremonger" and says that Mr. Jacobson has a "messiah complex." Instead of easing up on its criticism of the C.D.C. for having to change the figure on obesity deaths, Consumer Freedom is turning up the dial. Using internal C.D.C. documents the agency posted on its Web site, the group recently completed a report that accuses the C.D.C. of deliberately inflating its statistics and covering up that it has done so. The C.D.C. said it did not want to comment on that report. And the group is planning a new television commercial assailing the food police. The ad shows a hand yanking an ice cream cone away from a little boy and grabbing a beer away from a guy at a bar. "Do you ever feel like you're always being told what not to do?" the ad says. "Find out who's driving the food police at [12]consumerfreedom.com." To Mr. Berman, nothing less than the vitality of the food industry and the personal freedom of all Americans are at stake. "There are attempts to create ill-conceived regulations at the state level and there will certainly be rogue lawyers filing obesity lawsuits against companies," he said. "And if Michael Jacobson has his way there will be a tax on every food product that is not a vegetable. We can't let that happen." References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=MELANIE%20WARNER&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=MELANIE%20WARNER&inline=nyt-per 4. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MO 5. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=BHMMQ 6. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=KO 7. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=TSN 8. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=OSI 9. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MCD 10. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=PEP 11. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=KFT 12. http://consumerfreedom.com/ From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:11:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:11:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Book World: (Garreau) Intelligent Design? Message-ID: Intelligent Design? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/09/AR2005060901546_pf.html Reviewed by Joshua Foer Sunday, June 12, 2005; BW05 RADICAL EVOLUTION The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human By Joel Garreau. Doubleday. 384 pp. $26 Far-fetched as it may sound, the first person who will live to be 1,000 may already walk among us. The first computer that will think like a person may be built before today's kindergarteners graduate from college. By the middle of this century, we may be as blas? about genetically engineered humans as we are today about pierced ears. These sorts of predictions have a habit of sounding silly by the time they're supposed to come true, but there's a certain logic to them. Joel Garreau calls that logic "The Curve." The Curve is the untamable force of exponential growth that propels technological progress. It's the compound interest on human ingenuity. The fact that computing power has doubled every 18 months, right on schedule, for the last four decades is a manifestation of The Curve. So is the rapid expansion of the Internet and the recent boom in genetic technologies. According to the inexorable logic of The Curve, if you want to get a sense of how radically our world will be transformed over the next century, the best guide will be looking back at how much things have changed, not over the past century, but over the past millennium. Garreau, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, has sought out the scientists who are driving The Curve's breakneck acceleration and the major thinkers who are contemplating its implications. His breezy, conversational book, full of mini-profiles and chatty asides, is a guide to the big ideas about the future of our species that are circulating at the beginning of the 21st century. As he tramps around the country meeting futurists and technophiles, Garreau becomes acquainted with researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who are trying to abolish sleep and invent cyborg soldiers. He meets "transhumanists" for whom genetic enhancement promises a kind of messianic salvation. He also meets naysayers who fear that all this so-called progress is far more likely to lead to auto-annihilation than to techno-bliss. Garreau lays out three alternative futures for our species: a happy ending that he calls the Heaven Scenario, a tragic ending he calls Hell and a middle scenario he calls Prevail, in which humans somehow manage to muddle through the ethical and technological jungle ahead without creating paradise on Earth or blowing ourselves up. In the Heaven scenario, genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology make us happier, smarter, stronger and better-looking. Man and machine gradually meld as we transcend the physical limitations of our bodies and become immortal. Humans evolve into a new species of post-humans as different from us today as we are from chimps. We become like gods. According to Vernor Vinge, one of several eccentric scientists whom Garreau interviews, The Curve will continue to get steeper and steeper until it eventually goes completely vertical in a rapturous moment he has dubbed "The Singularity." At some point this century, but probably no later than 2030, Vinge believes that humans will build the last machine we'll ever need -- a device so intelligent it will be able to reproduce rapidly and create new machines far smarter than humans could ever imagine. Practically overnight, our social order will rupture, and our world will be transformed. There's no guarantee that will be particularly pleasant. Many of the thinkers Garreau interviews are less than sanguine about humanity's prospects. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, warns that technology is empowering individuals to do evil on a scale never before imagined. A single rogue scientist will soon be able to engineer a plague capable of wiping out humankind. Even well-intentioned scientists could accidentally do something catastrophic, such as releasing a swarm of self-replicating nanobots that would suck the planet dry of energy -- turning the world into the "gray goo" of Michael's Crichton's fanciful novel Prey . In such a one-strike-and-you're-out world, it's hard to imagine we'd last very long. Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben's Hell Scenarios are less apocalyptic. They fear that the coming technologies will upend societies and sap life of its meaning, gradually leading us into the dehumanized hell of a Brave New World. They'd like to manage The Curve through government regulation or by taking the Amish approach of forswearing objectionable technologies. But just as inescapable as The Curve's upward trajectory may be humankind's uncanny knack for rolling with the punches. Garreau's Prevail scenario is "based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve a curve." Even if technology seems to be a force out of control, we'll always find some way to direct it toward our desired ends, Garreau suspects. Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality, envisions a version of the Prevail scenario in which humans use technology to build tighter and tighter interpersonal relations. Our bodies become less important as our social bonds strengthen. The Internet, according to Lanier, is an early step down this path to global interconnectedness. If these scenarios sound outlandish, that is only because it's hard to look so far into the future without getting whiplash. But Garreau argues that the stakes in thinking all this through are enormous. We "face the biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human," he writes. It's an exhilarating adventure our species has embarked upon. It might be a little less terrifying if we knew where we were headed. ? Joshua Foer is a science writer living in Washington, D.C. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:12:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:12:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science: Women's Health Message-ID: Science: Women's Health 5.6.10 (Special section) [I am including only the news articles, not the reports.] Many a song and poem celebrates the splendid differences between men and women. But obvious physical variation aside, in what ways do we differ mentally, physiologically, and socially? This special issue on Women?s Health highlights many points of divergence. However, the title of this issue should not prompt the male reader to put down this copy and wait for a subsequent one. The issue covers many topics that concern men and women equally, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, cardiovascular disease, sexuality, and personalized medicine, as well as matters specific to women. Much of our understanding of sex variation stems from the Women?s Health Initiative, an effort launched in the late 1980s to probe gender questions and to increase the number of women in clinical trials. Without doubt, more women are now included in trials, and more studies focus on diseases that especially afflict women, but much improvement is needed; see the Editorial on p. 1517 and News story on p. 1570. Uterine fibroids, a major indication of hysterectomy, have received less attention. See Walker and Stewart on p. 1589. Likewise, mechanistic insight is needed to define preeclampsia, a circulatory disturbance between mother and fetus (see Redman and Sargent, p. 1592). In contrast, Berkley and colleagues (p. 1587) note that substantial progress has been made in understanding endometriosis, particularly the pain associated with it. The understanding of male/female differences in disease manifestation and drug response has also lagged behind (see News story on p. 1572). For instance, investigators are beginning to probe the differences in brain chemistry and anatomy that contribute to the different patterns of mental illness in men and women (see News story on p. 1574). In a related story (p. 1576), Miller describes how HIV/AIDS and other factors seem to increase risks to mental health for women in developing countries. Greater awareness about gender variation also reveals an increasing ?feminization? of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, due in part to the heightened social and biological vulnerability of women, as Quinn and Overbaugh describe on p. 1582. In dealing with topics that differentiate the sexes, the heart emerges as central. Mendelsohn and Karas (p. 1583) review how the molecular and cellular physiology of the heart and blood vessels differ between males and females during development and in cardiovascular disease. And a News story on p. 1580 reports on gender differences in bone quality and fracture risk, an issue of increasing importance to both sexes in an aging population. Finally, touching on a hot-button topic, Enserink (p. 1578) explores what some call the ?medicalization? of female sexuality and whether, in the age of Viagra, lack of desire is a disease requiring drug therapy. Related materials include Policy Forums in which Greenberger and Vogelstein (p. 1557) and Manasse (p. 1558) debate some pharmacists? refusal to dispense prescriptions for contraception, a Book Review by Aplin on pregnancy loss (p. 1555), and multiple online articles in the Signal Transduction and Science of Aging Knowledge Environments on topics such as cervical cancer and the role of estrogen in diseases of aging. In all, this issue contains ample fodder for the ongoing debate about what men and women share and how they are unique?la diff?rence. BEVERLY PURNELL, LESLIE ROBERTS,ORLA SMITH Vive la Diff?rence T I T L E O F S P E C I A L S E C T I O N INTRODUCTION CONTENTS NEWS 1570 From Dearth to Deluge Clinical Trials:Keeping Score on the Sexes 1572 Gender in the Pharmacy: Does It Matter? 1574 Sex and the Suffering Brain Poor Countries, Added Perils for Women 1578 Let?s Talk About Sex?and Drugs 1580 Bone Quality Fills Holes in Fracture Risk R E V I E W S 1582 HIV/AIDS in Women: An Expanding Epidemic T. C. Quinn and J.Overbaugh 1583 Molecular and Cellular Basis of Cardiovascular Gender Differences M. E. Mendelsohn and R. H. Karas 1587 The Pains of Endometriosis K. J. Berkley,A. J. Rapkin, R. E. Papka 1589 Uterine Fibroids: The Elephant in the Room C. L.Walker and E.A. Stewart 1592 Latest Advances in Understanding Preeclampsia C.W. Redman and I. L. Sargent See also the Editorial on p.1517;the Book Review on p.1555;the Policy Forums on pp.1557 and 1558;SAGE KE material on p.1511;STKE material on p.1511; and www.sciencemag.org/sciext/womenshealth for related online material. ------------------ News From Dearth to Deluge Eliot Marshall The charge that women were being excluded from clinical studies led to the Women's Health Initiative; it produced a flood of data and controversy At a congressional hearing 15 years ago, male leaders of the U.S. biomedical world endured a grilling about sex and science. Specifically, on 18 June 1990, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) asked the heads of the various National Institutes of Health (NIH) what they were doing to enforce a 3-year-old mandate to include women in clinical trials. (The NIH director's job was vacant at the time.) One by one, the witnesses acknowledged that they didn't have much to report. It was a pivotal moment, say advocates for women's health studies. It attracted the media and reduced an arcane debate about disease prevention and sex differences into a simple theme: Women were being excluded. The drama had been carefully choreographed, recalls Phyllis Greenberger, executive director of the Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR) in Washington, D.C. In 1989, its leaders discovered that a government panel co-chaired by NIH official Ruth Kirschstein had found that "there was a dearth of women enrolled in clinical trials," as Kirschstein recalls. The panel had also instructed U.S. health agencies to insist that grantees recruit more women--or explain why they didn't intend to. "That was the hook" on which to hang an indictment, says Greenberger: "Here was a mandate that said they were supposed to be doing something--and they weren't doing it." Meanwhile, SWHR's co-founder, NIH obstetrician-gynecologist Florence Haseltine, says that she used her own money to hire the lobbying team of Marie Bass and Joanne Howes to push the campaign, leading to a congressional audit and the 1990 hearing. Although women were not systematically excluded from trials, later analysts have found (see sidebar ) that they were kept out of some famous studies of heart disease in the 1980s. One of the male-only studies--with the acronym MR FIT--examined the benefits of a careful diet and exercise. Another, the Physicians' Health Study by Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, found that middle-aged doctors who took a small dose of aspirin every other day had a significantly lower risk (44% less) of heart attack. For efficiency, it had enrolled 22,071 men (who were more likely than women to have heart attacks and yield data) but not one woman. Critics said the results were irrelevant for half the population. Because of such criticism, NIH launched a companion aspirin study in the 1990s of 39,876 women. A decade later, in March 2005, this $30 million study reported that women were different after all: Unlike men, the aspirin takers did not have a significantly lower risk of heart attack, but they did have a somewhat lower risk of stroke. The government also made some administrative changes in 1990, creating an NIH Office for Research on Women's Health, headed by Vivian Pinn, to see that sex differences were investigated. And in a move that surprised many, President George H. W. Bush chose Bernadine Healy--a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio--to be the first woman director of NIH. Almost immediately, in 1991, Healy unveiled what she called "a moonwalk for women," the most ambitious trial undertaken by NIH, the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). Some warned that the project, designed to run for 15 years and recruit more than 160,000 women, would cost $1 billion. By official reckoning, however, it will only reach the $725 million mark in 2007. From the start, WHI caught flak, Healy recalls. Critics said it wouldn't work because it was too complex and poorly designed; they also feared that not enough women would enroll. Healy battled "relentlessly" to get money for it, she says, adding that she helped get it entrenched by committing money to 40 study centers before she left NIH. She also says she helped fend off a move to end the trial in the Clinton Administration. [Figure 1] Getting results. The number of clinical studies on women's health has increased dramatically since the 1980s. Now in its 13th year, WHI has been extended to at least until 2010 so that it can continue tracking women in a large observational study. In October, WHI plans to deliver findings from two key diet studies, on the effects of calcium supplements and vitamins. But by far the project's most dramatic moment came in July 2002, when it produced a stunning and unexpected result. Hormone replacement therapy, assumed to help avert heart disease and keep the brain healthy, actually elevated risks in older women. Clinical bombshell There was never any doubt, Kirschstein says: "WHI was Bernadine's baby." To make it work smoothly, Healy summoned the heads of 10 NIH institutes to weekly meetings. At the core of the project were three randomized clinical trials that recruited roughly 68,000 women aged 50 to 79. The studies were linked so that women could contribute data to more than one at once. One examined hormone use, and the other two were designed to test popular ideas: that a low-fat diet could reduce breast cancer, colon cancer, or heart disease; and that taking daily supplements of vitamin D and calcium could prevent osteoporotic bone breaks. WHI also paid for a series of community projects designed to instruct women in healthy living. Funded by NIH, they were carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. WHI's largest component is an observational trial that enrolled 93,000 women and continues to collect blood, urine, and DNA; it will go for another 5 years, says Program Director Jacques Rossouw of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Participants have given consent to future genetic studies, including possible commercial uses of the data. Healy says this part--modeled on a famous 50-year study of doctors in Framingham, Massachusetts--may be WHI's main legacy. The best-known part of WHI, though, is the clinical trial of hormone supplements. It had been planned for years at NHLBI, says Rossouw, because of the booming use of female hormones. In 1990, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals of Collegeville, Pennsylvania, manufacturer of the most popular pill--containing conjugated equine estrogen with progestin--was seeking approval to market the drug as a heart disease preventive. "We would have done the trial anyway," says Rossouw, but "Healy was forceful, and the political climate was favorable; that was why she could get it funded so rapidly." The "medical culture at the time," Healy recalls, was "basically to put every woman over the age of 50 on hormones until she stepped into the grave." She, too, believed hormones were beneficial but felt the evidence "wasn't sufficient." The trial had two arms. One gave placebo or therapy in the form of a pill containing estrogen and progestin--a hormone added to reduce estrogen's known risk of increasing uterine cancer. The other gave estrogen alone to women who had had hysterectomies. The project had "many skeptics," Rossouw recalls. For example, some doubted that women would stay with the low-fat diet long enough to yield results. A review by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1992 suggested that this part of the study should change its primary endpoint to look for heart disease benefits, not cancer reduction. The chance of failure was so high, the IOM group warned, that it would be "wrong" to invest so much money and "find after 14 years that little in the way of useful information had been learned." A member of that panel, epidemiologist Lynn Rosenberg of the Slone Epidemiology Unit at the Boston University School of Medicine, says today: "I will be very surprised if the results [of the diet trial] ... show anything." The vitamin D-calcium trial, she thinks, is more likely to come up with significant results. Data from both are to be published in the fall. One of the critics' biggest worries--as Rossouw recalls with irony--was that giving women a placebo would deprive them of the benefits of hormone therapy, possibly making the trial unethical. Indeed, the IOM panel predicted that WHI was "likely to terminate early because of evidence demonstrating [hormones'] protection against" coronary heart disease. It did end early, but not because hormone therapy was beneficial: WHI officials reported in July 2002 that women who took the combination pill were more likely than those on placebo to develop invasive breast cancer--38 in 10,000 compared to 30 in 10,000. Risks for heart disease, stroke, and blood clotting were also higher, whereas risks for hip fracture or colon cancer were lower. The announcement made front-page news and sent a shock through the more than 6 million U.S. women who were taking hormones. Many quit (Science, 19 July 2002, p. 325 and 1 November 2002, p. 942). Sales of the estrogen-progestin pill plummeted about 40% and never regained the lost ground. Because cancer risks for estrogen alone were deemed much lower, this part of the WHI trial continued. In March 2004, a monitoring panel stopped it, too, because women on this therapy had a higher risk for blood clots and strokes than those on placebo. An analysis showed that estrogen gave no significant protection against heart disease. Later in 2004, an analysis of women over 65 in the estrogen-only group found that they had a somewhat elevated risk for dementia compared to those on placebo. The adverse events were undeniable, but some experts criticized the way WHI officials and authors described and released the findings. Wulf Utian, for example, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Cleveland Clinic and executive director of the North American Menopause Society, charges that the government stressed negative results to "achieve maximal impact." Rossouw acknowledges that the data were released in a dramatic way. He didn't give advance warning to drug companies, doctors, or professional societies, but he mailed the findings directly to study participants--to maintain "confidentiality," he says. And he held a press conference because "the goal was to change medical practice." WHI succeeded, Rossouw thinks: Before WHI, people were trying to "get all older women on hormones," and afterward, the aim was to "minimize exposure." That is a "180-degree turnaround in medicine," Rossouw says--and one "we can feel gratified about." Critics object, however, that WHI's specific results were used to discredit all hormone therapy. Utian suggests that the heart disease findings from women in the WHI group (median age 63) and dementia findings (age 65 and older) might not apply to younger women. For those just approaching menopause around age 50, he says, the benefits of symptom relief from hormones may outweigh other risks. Endocrinologist Judith Turgeon of the University of California, Davis, also points out that alternative formulations may be less risky than the hormone pills used in WHI, which contain equine estrogens that can adversely affect the liver (Science, 28 May 2004, p. 1269). She notes that some researchers are testing lower drug doses or transdermal rather than oral administration. Although WHI is not ready to conduct a big study of younger women--mainly because it would cost too much, says Rossouw--it is looking into a few lingering questions. For example, the WHI program is supporting an imaging study of women in the estrogen-only therapy group to look for reduced calcification of the arteries, a sign that may indicate a lower risk for coronary heart disease. WHI experts are watching the private Kronos Longevity Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, which is enrolling 720 women younger than the WHI profile in a trial that aims to test low-dose estrogen therapy and administration of estradiol by skin patch in combination with oral progesterone. If such studies are encouraging, Rossouw thinks, the government might consider a larger trial. Healy argues that WHI's payoff will be greater than the sum of its findings. It proved that "big, strategic trials" of this kind can work, she claims, and that the government should not shy away from them. Most important, she says, WHI "absolutely blew open" the topic of women's health, which had been "terribly neglected." ----------------- Clinical Trials: Keeping Score on the Sexes Eliot Marshall Biomedicine used to have a bias against including young women in clinical trials, says Ruth Kirschstein, a former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)--partly because of the thalidomide disaster. This drug, given to pregnant women to stop nausea in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused thousands of birth defects. After it was withdrawn, regulatory agencies directed that young women should be kept out of clinical trials to protect fetuses they might be carrying. That attitude lived on into the 1980s--long after new tests and testing methods had made it easy to identify early pregnancy and avoid risks, Kirschstein says. In 1987, a government panel she co-chaired found that U.S. agencies were slighting women's health and ordered that more women be included in research trials (see main text ). Some trials, particularly big ones looking at heart disease, were designed to focus on male patients. Too often, and with too little evidence, results based on males were extrapolated to females, the review found. Some independent analysts argue that, aside from the big heart studies, the imbalance was never that great. But since the initial complaints, both sides agree, NIH has tipped the balance to include more women. NIH's own evaluation of grants found in 1987 that only 13.5% looked at diseases unique to women. But then, only 6.5% were on diseases unique to men (Science, 11 August 1995, p. 766). In 1990, a General Accounting Office (GAO) study ordered by Congress found that NIH was being "very slow" in carrying out its own goals of recruiting more women and investigating physiological differences between the sexes. A sample of 50 grant submissions on diseases that affect both sexes, GAO found, included 20% that didn't mention the subjects' sex, and "some" that excluded women but didn't explain why. In a 2000 audit, GAO found that NIH had made "significant progress." Peer reviewers reported that 94% of grant proposals in 1997 met the standards for including women, and "more than 50% of the participants in clinical research studies that NIH funded" were women. As it became clear that women were not being excluded from the new crop of trials, critics shifted ground. For example, in a paper released on 10 May, the Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR) in Washington, D.C., said that NIH is not doing enough to get researchers to run clinical trials in a way that will bring to light physiological differences between men and women. The report by Viviana Simon, Sherry Marts, and other members of the SWHR staff found that "a very small percentage" of all indexed NIH grants between 2000 and 2003 (about 3%) were awarded to study sex differences. It also found that the richest institutes--such as those dedicated to cancer, heart disease, and infectious diseases--scored low in the study's index of funding research on sex differences. Now that women are being included in trials, SWHR argues, researchers should be doing more to learn how they differ from men. ----------------- Gender in the Pharmacy: Does It Matter? Jocelyn Kaiser Studies of how women's and men's bodies process drugs have turned up mostly minor differences. But some drugs may be less or more effective in women or cause more side effects, and other variations may await discovery In 1989, a 39-year-old woman blacked out while she and her husband were eating dinner. He rushed her to the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where tests showed that her heart had a dangerous irregular rhythm that can lead to cardiac arrest. Doctors were puzzled: The woman was taking a popular antihistamine, Seldane, overdoses of which had caused abnormal heart rhythm, yet she was taking the recommended dose. The doctors consulted Louis Cantilena, a clinical pharmacologist at the hospital, who in turn called a colleague at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Looking through FDA's adverse events database, FDA staffers found two dozen cases of arrhythmias from Seldane, or terfenadine--the majority in women. It was one of the first red flags that researchers might have been missing sex differences in responses to drugs. Combing through data on other medications, FDA and researchers realized that at least nine drugs could cause potentially fatal heart arrhythmias in women, especially when prescribed with certain antibiotics. By 2001, FDA had pulled four of these drugs off the market, including Seldane. "There's no way to know how many, but there were deaths," says Raymond Woosley, then a pharmacologist at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., who began studying the problem. The drug withdrawals fueled an argument made by advocates for women's health: Sex differences in responses to drugs had been missed because women were not always included in clinical trials, or if they were, the data were not broken down by sex. That has changed considerably in the past dozen years, after the National Institutes of Health brought more women into clinical trials and FDA rescinded a 1977 rule that excluded women of childbearing age from early trials (see p. 1570)--with positive results, advocates say. Earlier this year, for example, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that aspirin--which protects men against heart attack but not stroke--has exactly the opposite effect in women. [Figure 1] Yet sex differences in drug responses remain controversial. Concerns center on two aspects: how quickly drugs are metabolized and absorbed, and how they affect the body once they're in the bloodstream. Although studies have found many differences in how women and men process drugs, these changes are less worrisome than expected. Differences in how safe and effective a given blood level of a drug is for a man or woman are probably bigger issues, many experts agree. This is harder to study, however, and so far only a few clear-cut examples have emerged. That leaves some experts skeptical that sex will matter much in the long run; genetic variation among individuals, especially of different ethnicity, may dominate, they say. "Gender is not the major concern that we thought it would be," says Leslie Benet, a pharmacologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). But others counter that drug researchers have barely scratched the surface. Despite prodding, clinicians still don't always analyze data on women separately, and more research--and better research tools--may yet reveal more serious gender differences, they say. Even subtle sex differences may be important in an era of personalized medicine. "When it's all done, we still find sex is a factor that keeps coming out," says clinical pharmacologist and cardiologist Janice Schwartz of UCSF. Less than expected As far back as 1932, researchers noticed that female rats could be knocked out with half the dose of barbiturates needed for male rats of the same size. But such differences were largely ignored until 1993, when FDA reversed course on including women in trials. Until then, trial results were dominated by "the cult of the typical 70-kilogram male," says Sherry Marts, vice president of scientific affairs for the Society for Women's Health Research in Washington, D.C. That began to change, slowly. The 1993 FDA guideline explicitly urged drug companies to look for sex differences in drug processing, or pharmacokinetics. Researchers examined old animal data and new human evidence suggesting that males and females differ in the activity of liver enzymes that metabolize drugs, particularly the cytochrome P450 enzymes, whose ex-pression is mod-ulated by sex hormones. One such enzyme, CYP3A4, is involved in metabolizing more than half of all therapeutic drugs; women clear some CYP3A4 enzyme drugs more quickly than men do and thus may need a higher dose to get the same effect. (The difference probably also involves women's lower liver levels of a protein called P-glycoprotein that shunts the drug out of cells in which CYP3A4 processes it.) Women are also smaller on average than men are, they may absorb drugs more slowly, and their kidneys filter excreted drugs out more slowly. Because women tend to have more body fat, fat-soluble drugs stay in their bodies longer. All this means a woman who swallows the same number of pills as a man may end up with a larger or smaller level in her blood. [Figure 2] In many trials, however, differences in women's responses to a drug disappear if the dose data are simply adjusted for body weight or surface area. The gender differences in processing drugs that remain appear to be relatively minor, says pharmacologist Bernd Meibohm of the University of Tennessee, Memphis. The best evidence is an FDA study of the 300 new drugs reviewed from 1995 to 2000, more than half of which provided sex data. Only for 11 drugs were pharmacokinetic differences greater than 40%, and none resulted in separate dosing instructions for women--indicating the difference wasn't important to the clinical outcome, notes Margaret Miller, science program manager for FDA's Office of Women's Health. Pharmacologist Gail Anderson of the University of Washington, Seattle, is not convinced, pointing out that in negotiating labels with FDA, companies would resist dosing for subpopulations--or even for body weight--because it makes it harder to market the drug. Metabolism differences in women do matter for drugs that must be given in very precise doses, such as the blood thinner warfarin and cancer drugs and immunosuppressive drugs. But doctors already carefully tailor doses of those drugs to the individual, notes Benet. "The bottom line is, [sex differences in pharmacokinetics] doesn't seem to make a major difference," agrees Meibohm. The female heart A potentially much bigger problem is the difference in how men's and women's bodies react to the drug once it's reached the bloodstream. Known as pharmacodynamics, this property of drugs is harder to measure: Gauging improvement in depression, for example, is trickier than detecting the blood level of a chemical. But disparities for some classes of drugs have emerged. Probably best-established are differences in responses to medications that can affect the heart's rhythm, such as terfenadine. These include some antihistamines, antibiotics, antiarrhythmics, and antipsychotics. Woosley and others showed that these drugs share the ability to block potassium channels in the heart, which in turn can affect the heart's rhythm. Two-thirds of reported arrhythmias from these drugs occur in women; they are especially vulnerable because the female heart has a longer "QT interval," the time it takes to recharge between beats. More than 30 marketed drugs are known to cause arrhythmias, notes Woosley, president of the C-Path Institute in Tucson, Arizona. The University of Arizona lists these drugs on a Web site (www.qtdrugs.org). Women also appear to respond differently to drugs for treating or preventing cardiovascular disease. The latest example is the study of aspirin reported in the 31 March issue of NEJM of results from the Women's Health Study, which was launched in 1993 after protests that a previous study had included only men. Whereas men were protected from heart attacks but not stroke, women 45 years or older who took low-dose aspirin for 10 years had no fewer heart attacks but a 17% lower rate of stroke. The results may involve differences in physiology in women, such as smaller coronary arteries than men have and lower lipid levels before menopause. Sex differences also seem to come into play in the reaction to opiates. The strongest evidence comes from a series of studies in the mid-1990s led by Jon Levine's group at UCSF, which looked at how men and women respond to drugs known as kappa-receptor opiates after wisdom tooth surgery. The drugs worked much better on women and caused fewer side effects than opiates such as morphine that have a different target, mu receptors. Male and female rodents also respond differently to opiates. But other groups haven't yet replicated the UCSF results, and in a controlled lab setting--for example, with volunteers subjected to mild heat and muscle pain--the same sex differences aren't always observed, cautions pain researcher Roger Fillingim of the University of Florida, Gainesville. The discordant studies may reflect factors such as the type of pain or opiate drug dose, Fillingim says. "I just don't think we have enough data" to know which conditions result in sex differences, he says. The jury is still out on antidepressants as well. A fairly large study led by psychiatrist Susan Kornstein of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and published in 2000 in the American Journal of Psychiatry reported that women responded better to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs); men got more help from tricyclics, which target receptors for serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Not all subsequent studies have found these differences, however. Under the radar Many agree that important sex differences are yet to be discovered. For example, researchers noticed only in 2002 that an old drug for heart failure, digoxin, raised the death rate in women by 4% in an earlier trial, possibly because they received too high a dose, notes Schwartz. The painkillers known as COX-2 inhibitors, one of which was withdrawn from the market last year because of side effects, are also under the microscope. Concerns were raised after Garrett FitzGerald's group at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia found that blocking the COX-2 enzyme in mice also hinders estrogen's protective effects against cardiovascular disease, suggesting that giving COX-2 drugs to young women could put them at higher risk for heart attacks and stroke (Science, 19 November 2004, p. 1277). Pinning down sex differences should become easier with new biomarkers--such as brain imaging--that enable researchers to measure disease and other endpoints, such as pain, more objectively. "My guess is we're going to find a lot more gender differences," Woosley says. Sex differences are also coming up in the context of pharmacogenomics: genetic differences, often tied to a single polymorphism, or mutation, that affect an individual's disease susceptibility, say, to heart disease or response to a drug. Although these mutations are usually not carried on the X chromosome and so are independent of sex, they can be modulated by sex hormones. For example, researchers recently found a polymorphism that makes redheaded women--but not men--more responsive to opiates, notes Fillingim, a co-author (Science, 16 July 2004, p. 328). Even if most sex differences in drug responses aren't dramatic, they will feed into the cost-benefit tradeoff for a drug--all part of the personalized medicine equation, says Miller of FDA. "The most important message is to look for differences in treatment response by gender," says Kornstein, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Women's Health. She and others say their colleagues in drug research are listening, but not everyone is on the same page yet. ------------------ Sex and the Suffering Brain Constance Holden Researchers are seeking biological reasons for the widespread gender differences in the prevalence and symptomatology of mental disorders It's easy to start a fight about whether there are gender differences when it comes to mental skills, but there's little debate that patterns of mental illness and disorders vary between the sexes. Women, for example, are more likely to get depressed (see table). Men are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia. Females have more anxiety. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male; females have more eating disorders. Even suicide has a gender bias. Females make more attempts; males are more successful. Although culture helps shape how the two sexes express mental problems, some differences persist across cultures and across time, says psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. And that suggests a role for biology. In fact, says Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, "it's pretty difficult to find any single factor that's more predictive for some of these disorders than gender." Talking about sex differences has long been taboo in some quarters--"People hear 'sex differences' and think you're talking about individuals, not populations," says Insel. "It's critical to remember there's a huge amount of variation within a population and overlap between populations." But neuroscience research, especially the explosion in brain imaging, has produced data that are hard to ignore. "Every time you do a functional MRI on any test, different parts of the brain light up in men and women," says Florence Haseltine, a reproductive endocrinologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. "It's clear there are big differences." Understanding them will have "tremendous implications" for treatments of brain diseases and injuries, says Viviana Simon, director of scientific programs for the Society for Women's Health Research in Washington, D.C. [Figure 1] Most mental disorders are complex and resist the hunt for specific genes, yet family and twin studies have demonstrated significant heritability for them. These disorders interact with brain differences between the sexes that arise from genes on the X and Y chromosomes and from the bath of gonadal hormones that soak fetal brains early in gestation. Sex hormones are far-reaching in their powers, notes Insel. "They are sort of master transcription regulators; they affect hundreds of downstream genes. ... There's no question these are big players in mental disorders." Those sex-related changes are sort of early filters, influencing the expression of underlying disorders in different ways, says psychologist Elizabeth Susman of Pennsylvania State University, University Park. No one has managed to draw an unbroken line from prenatal development to adult behavior. But some researchers are now trying to tease apart just what aspects of brain anatomy and chemistry can help account for the gender skewing in mental disorders. "We're just at the beginning of trying to examine these differences," says Cornell University endocrinologist Margaret Altemus. Some studies are contradictory, and there is still more known about animals than about humans. Affective disorders Epidemiologic studies show that women are more vulnerable than are men to most disorders that affect the emotions. These include major depression and a host of anxiety-related conditions, such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and phobias. Anxiety and depression are very closely related: Eye-blink tests reveal that a strong "startle response" is a good predictor for both. Negative experiences can trigger both anxiety and depression in vulnerable people. Those feelings involve the activation of multiple neurotransmitter and hormonal systems, including stress mechanisms that are heavily influenced by sex hormones. The human stress response basically has two components: the autonomic nervous system that causes raised heartbeat, sweaty hands, and gut churning; and the slower-responding hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. The HPA axis involves a cascade of hormonal events that are normally counteracted by release of the stress hormone cortisol. Because female depression rates start to rise during puberty, notes psychologist Laura Stroud of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, researchers posit that hormones play a role in women's vulnerability to affective disorders. Animal and human research has shown that sex hormones affect stress responses in different ways. Just the right amount of estrogen is required for emotional balance, says NICHD endocrinologist George Chrousos. Some women go into "withdrawal" and hence depression when levels drop. But too much estrogen can overactivate the HPA axis, also resulting in depression, he says. Testosterone, on the other hand, may protect against stress and depression through its damping effect on HPA reactivity. This is illustrated by a study appearing last month in Neuropsychopharmacology. Psychiatrist David Rubinow of NIMH and colleagues suppressed sex hormone production in 10 men and stimulated their HPA axes with corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). They found that testosterone replacement "significantly blunted" the cortisol response to CRH. [Figure 2] Other research shows that fear, a powerful stressor, may activate stress responses more in females than in males. Data from rats and mice "overwhelmingly indicate that females show more intense fear responses than males," says Jaak Panksepp of the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. Testosterone appears to reduce males' reactions to pain, he adds. Human evidence is beginning to accumulate. In a study in the journal Emotion in 2001, researchers at the University of Florida (UF) observed the reactions of 50 women and 45 men to pictures of distressing things, such as car crashes and mutilations. They found that women had more extreme autonomic reactions as gauged by heart rate, skin conductance, and the startle response. "Women are more reactive on average in everything involving negative stimuli," says UF psychologist Margaret Bradley. Brain-imaging studies are supplying a wealth of new data. A group at Westmead Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, recently completed a study (in press at Neuroimage) showing that females exhibited more widespread activation of the amygdala, the seat of the fear response--corresponding with rapid heart rate and sweating--than males did in reaction to pictures of people with fearful facial express-ions. In another study, in press at Neuro-report, a team headed by David Silbersweig of Cornell University's Weill Medical College in New York City found that normal females show more reaction to stress--in this case, anticipating a pain on the wrist--in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a key region linked with anxiety and depression. Although the evidence is more ambiguous, gender differences have also been seen in the HPA axis, the other component of the stress machinery. Observing 50 young volunteers, half of them women, Brown's Stroud found that in an "achievement" test, in which subjects must make a speech and perform a subtraction task in front of a panel of judges, men secreted higher levels of cortisol. But in a "social rejection" test, in which trained confederates made the subjects feel excluded in brief interactions, women's cortisol levels were higher, her team reported in the journal Biological Psychiatry in 2002. NICHD's Chrousos contends that the HPA axis is slightly more reactive in females, as shown in a study in which young women responded with significantly higher levels of cortisol to a CRH challenge. Chrousos speculates that a highly tuned HPA axis, clearly evident in rodents and primates, is an evolutionary adaptation to help mothers protect their young. Aggression and impulsivity Sex hormones are also implicated in aggression-related gender differences, notes Kendler. There is abundant evidence, he says, that men are more prone to expressing unhappiness through an "externalizing pathway" of physical behavior that includes drinking, drug abuse, and violence, whereas women are more likely to "internalize," leading to depression and disorders such as anorexia. The pattern of male externalizing, like sex differences in general, becomes more pronounced during puberty, when the hormones are flowing. "We know, from primate studies, that testosterone is directly related to aggression," says Kendler. "If you give females testosterone, they get more aggressive." Addictions follow the pattern of male externalizing. Epidemiological studies have shown, for example, that in families of women with bulimia, the men often have alcoholism and other addictions. Studies have repeatedly shown that even within the alcoholic population, females are more often diagnosed with depression, whereas more males express antisocial behavior. The sex-based tendency to act out versus internalize is evident in the distribution of the personality disorders, which involve maladaptive patterns of thinking and relating to the world. Some of these, such as dependent or histrionic personality disorders, are hotly debated, and critics argue that they only exemplify learned gender-typical behaviors. "Can it be that human beings manifest certain symptoms in ways that are politically and socially acceptable within certain historical times?" asks feminist therapist Arlene Istar Lev of Albany, New York. But psychiatrist Larry Siever of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City says there's more to it. "It used to be a non sequitur to link biology and personality," he says. "Now we see a very real substrate." Take borderline personality disorder (BPD), which features extreme emotional instability, impulsivity, and self-harming behavior and is most often seen in post-adolescent girls. Although people with BPD frequently have a history of childhood abuse, says Siever, brain scans of patients also show abnormalities. In an unusual study now under review at Biological Psychiatry , Siever and psychiatrist Antonia New also found sex differences. They compared the brains of 17 males and 9 females with BPD and a history of impulsive aggression to normal controls matched for sex. They report that the males with BPD showed less neural activity in prefrontal areas involved in inhibition. This "presumably suggests a brain mechanism" for this type of aggression, Siever says. The fact that males with BPD are more prone than women with BPD to impulsivity and aggression could partly explain why more women get the diagnosis, he adds; the men may be seen as having antisocial personality disorder (ASP). Researchers are also looking into the biological dimensions of ASP, in which males outnumber females three to one. People with ASP (formerly known as psychopaths) don't form deep attachments and feel little guilt. Psychologist Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles believes he has hit upon a possible biological marker. He reported in 1997 in the journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, from a longitudinal study of 1800 children in the Republic of Mauritius, a strong correlation between slow heart rate among 3-year-old boys--suspected to reflect reduced autonomic reactivity--and their subsequent antisocial behavior as adolescents. A high threshold for reacting to physical or social threats can make for "fearlessness," which in turn inhibits the learning of normal social inhibitions, says Raine. Susman of Penn State has similar findings. In a 1997 study she reported that adolescents who had low cortisol levels prior to an anticipated physical stressor exhibited raised antisocial behavior 1 year later. She believes these individuals are unable to "anticipate" stresses. "They're not good at planning or regulating," she says, so "they don't anticipate fear." It may be that males are more prone to hypoarousal of the stress response system and females to hyperarousal, speculates Susman. Thought disorder Sex differences also extend to cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and perception. Men's brains are more lateralized, which means that higher cortical functions tend to be centered in the right or left side of the brain, says genetic epidemiologist Kathleen Merikangas of NIMH, whereas in females there's more "crosstalk" between the sides and therefore more redundancy. Evidence for this comes from the fact that women are more likely than men are to recover language from strokes in the left hemisphere, where language is centered. This redundancy may also be protective in girls, who have much lower rates than do boys of childhood developmental and mental disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism, says psychiatrist Raquel Gur of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Estrogen, too, says Gur, appears to have neuroprotective effects according to results of research on brain injury, epilepsy, and cognitive decline in aging. Gur says these differences also seem to work against men afflicted with schizophrenia, the most complex and devastating mental illness of all. More males than females have schizophrenia, and they have earlier, more severe symptoms, says psychiatrist Jill Goldstein of Harvard University. In brain scans comparing men and women with schizophrenia, Goldstein has found that men tend to have greater deficits than women do in attention, language, visual-spatial perception, and other areas ruled by the cortex, such as olfaction and motor skills. These are also areas that she and others have found to be sexually dimorphic in normal subjects. She believes these deficits all begin prenatally during the period of sexual differentiation of the brain. Researchers are still cautious about their conclusions. Despite evidence of a "huge number of ... differences between men and women's brains," says Cornell's Altemus, "it's hard to know which are functionally relevant." Nonetheless, times have changed, observes Goldstein: "For many years we were not even allowed to say there were sex differences in the brain." ---------------------- Poor Countries, Added Perils for Women Greg Miller When the Indian government disbursed the first round of financial aid to families in Tamil Nadu state, hard hit by the 26 December 2004 tsunami, they doled it out to men, the traditional household heads. That didn't work too well, says K. Sekar, a psychiatrist with India's National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, who has coordinated mental health support for the tsunami survivors. Many men have coped with the disaster by drinking, Sekar explains, and much of the money intended for families flowed straight into state-run liquor stores. The second round of aid, delivered to women, seems to be doing more good, he says. Even though women--especially those who lost children in the tsunami--appear to have suffered most in psychological terms, they've handled it differently. Drinking is socially unacceptable for women, Sekar says, and they have largely internalized their distress, showing signs of anxiety and depression. The psychological aftermath of the tsunami in Tamil Nadu reflects two of the most robust trends in psychiatric epidemiology: Across the globe, anxiety disorders and depression are more common in women, and substance abuse is more common in men (see main text ). The situation there also hints at how social factors and women's roles as childbearers influence the mental health of women in developing countries, often for the worse. Although there are no reliable figures on the prevalence of mental disorders for many parts of the world, there are signs that women in poor countries are more vulnerable than women in richer parts of the world, says Ricardo Araya, a Chilean-trained psychiatrist at the University of Bristol, U.K. A recent study by Araya and colleagues is the first to attempt a direct comparison of the gender gap in the prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders between developing and developed countries. The researchers interviewed more than 10,000 men and women in urban areas of Chile and the United Kingdom about their mental health and reported in the April issue of Social Science and Medicine that the gender gap is greater in Chile. For women in sub-Saharan Africa, especially, HIV is a major risk factor for depression, says Sylvia Kaaya, a psychiatrist at Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Although little research has been done to examine HIV's toll on women's mental health in particular, Kaaya suspects that women experience extra stress that ups their risk of depression. Women have little say in negotiating condom use and other protective measures and are generally expected to care for infected relatives, Kaaya says. Much of the research on women's mental health overall in developing countries has investigated its links to reproductive health. Women in poorer countries are more likely to have miscarriages or lose young children, and such events, especially when they occur more than once, take a heavy toll on a woman's psychological well-being, says Veena Das, an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Das has just completed a study in poor communities in Delhi, India, that documents sharply elevated rates of depression in women who have lost multiple pregnancies. [Figure 1] Women who give birth to healthy babies aren't immune either. Rates of postnatal depression run high in some developing countries. In India and Pakistan, for example, a handful of studies in the past few years have found that 20% to 30% of women suffer postnatal depression, about twice the prevalence in wealthy countries. That's not just bad for moms. A study published last September in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that Pakistani infants born to depressed moms were four times more likely to be underweight 6 months after birth. Socioeconomic factors work against women in many societies, says Jill Astbury, a psychologist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Even in developed countries, she says, the most disadvantaged women--for example, single moms with low incomes, insecure work, inadequate housing, and lack of child care--have rates of depression two to three times higher than those of women in more favorable circumstances. Unemployment and low income, aside from being bad for mental health in their own right, have been linked to high rates of another risk factor: domestic violence. "Factors in many developing countries such as low levels of education for women ... [and a] lack of legal redress and property rights in divorce make it more likely that women living with violent partners will be forced to stay with them to survive economically," Astbury says. Such factors might help explain why some of the highest suicide rates in the world are found among women in developing countries. More than half of all female suicides worldwide take place in China, one of the few countries where more women than men die by suicide. A paper published last year in The Lancet reported a startling suicide rate of 148 per 100,000 among young women in Vellore, an inland city in Tamil Nadu, India. In the United States, roughly 4 women per 100,000 commit suicide each year. Rising economies don't necessarily relieve the risk factors for poor mental health, however. A 1999 paper published in Social Science and Medicine suggested that growing income disparities created by rapid economic development in India, Chile, Brazil, and Zimbabwe may have increased the risk of anxiety and depression for women there. Development can add to the stress of everyday life for women, says Araya, one of the study's authors. As jobs become available, women are often expected to work outside the home in addition to their household duties. "They go and work in a sweatshop, and then they have to go home and cook," he says. A more comprehensive view of women's mental health around the world should come from a massive international survey now under way in 28 countries. Ronald Kessler, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston who is directing the project for the World Health Organization, says it will examine a variety of potential influences on women's mental health, such as access to birth control, property rights, education, and reproductive history, including age of puberty. Some researchers have proposed that sex hormones are responsible for the higher incidence of depression and anxiety in women, but the main evidence for that hypothesis is that these disorders appear in midpuberty in the United States, Kessler says. In developing countries, puberty is often delayed by several years as a result of malnutrition, even though girls marry and are thrust into adult roles earlier. Says Kessler: "This creates a natural experiment to tease out the relative effects of biology and social roles on female mental illness." ------------------ Let's Talk About Sex--and Drugs Martin Enserink Seven years after Viagra was launched, many drugs are on the horizon to treat women's sexual problems. But several questions remain: Are they safe? And are they needed? Laura was miserable. She had once enjoyed a healthy sex life, but any desire for sexual activity had vanished after her hysterectomy. Her 9-year marriage was on the rocks, and her husband was becoming emotionally abusive. Her real-life story, told by marriage and sex therapist Jean Koehler to a panel of experts gathered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December, was meant to help persuade the committee to approve the first drug developed to treat women's sexual problems. Koehler had traveled from Louisville, Kentucky, to suburban Maryland to deliver 3 minutes of testimony on behalf of a testosterone patch called Intrinsa. Once her client started taking testosterone, Koehler said, her life changed for the better: She enjoyed sex again, her relationship improved, "and two little children were spared the trauma of impending divorce." Intrinsa, developed by Procter and Gamble (P&G), is part of a wave of new drugs stirring controversy before a single one has hit the market. Advocates for these drugs, including some prominent researchers of women's sexuality, say they have the potential to help tens of millions of suffering women; not just those who have had their ovaries removed, which often happens as part of a hysterectomy, but "naturally menopausal" women as well. Even if the drugs don't promise to save a marriage, market analysts see them as potential blockbusters. But the FDA panel was not convinced. At the end of its daylong session, the group unanimously rejected the drug. Panelists decided that there weren't enough data to show that long-term hormone treatment--patients have to wear the patch continuously--does not cause serious side effects. The decision, decried as overly cautious by proponents of the patch, was a setback not just to P&G but to several other companies whose products contain testosterone. But safety isn't the only issue. Some researchers also worry that the new pills, patches, gels, and nasal sprays will lead women to take drugs for what are really social or psychological problems that can be treated more effectively with education or psychological intervention. "Most of women's sexual complaints have to do with self-respect, self-image, and the quality of the relationship," says clinical psychologist Leonore Tiefer of the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine, a leading critic of what she calls the "medicalization" of female sexuality. "They're things a pill can't treat." [Figure 1] Not tonight. Waning desire is the most important sexual problem in women, clinicians say. "Our turn" It's no surprise that the drug industry has turned its attention to women. Sildenafil, or Viagra--discovered when a candidate angina drug had surprising side effects--has grossed billions of dollars for Pfizer since its launch in 1998; copycats tadalafil (Cialis) and vardenafil (Levitra)--which also block the PD5 receptor, resulting in increased blood flow to the penis--have become successes in their own right. Meanwhile, interest in women's sexuality is growing; to wit, the adventures of four Manhattan women in the HBO smash hit series Sex and the City . "Women started asking: What's there for us?" says Harvard reproductive endocrinologist Jan Shifren, who directs the Vincent Menopause Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. But exactly what sex drugs should do in women is much less obvious than in men. When the FDA put together "draft guidelines" in 2000 for companies interested in producing drugs to treat female sexual dysfunction (FSD), it followed the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM-4 says that FSD has four major components: decreased desire to have sex; decreased arousal (such as blood flow to the genitals and lubrication); pain during intercourse; and difficulty or failure to have orgasms. Companies must choose which component their drug affects and show efficacy in women with that problem. Not everyone subscribes to that delineation, based on the classic model of the "human sexual response cycle" proposed by William Masters and Virginia Johnson in the 1960s. The distinction between desire and arousal, for instance, doesn't make much sense, says Ellen Laan, a sex researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. How to measure a drug's effect on people's sex lives is controversial, too. Because of those debates, the final version of FDA's guidelines has yet to appear. In the meantime, about two dozen companies now have products in development for FSD (see table). Viagra, once considered a candidate to treat arousal problems, is no longer among them; Pfizer gave up last year after disappointing trials. But other companies have products that would do the same: Vivus in Mountain View, California, for instance, is in phase III trials with alprostadil, a vasodilating agent that women apply directly to their genitalia. Most candidate drugs, however, focus on what clinicians say is by far the most common disorder: decreased interest in sex, also known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Some of these compounds act on the central nervous system. One is flibanserin, a pill previously studied and rejected as an antidepressant, from German pharma giant Boehringer Ingelheim. Another, PT 141 from Palatin Technologies in Cranbury, New Jersey, is a nasal spray that stimulates melanocortin receptors in the brain. [Figure 2] Plain old testosterone is the basis for most of the desire-enhancing products. It usually comes in the form of skin gels, sprays, or patches, because the hormone is broken down quickly by the liver when taken orally. Women naturally produce testosterone, although at much lower levels than men, and production declines after menopause. Levels also drop on average by 50% after a woman's ovaries are removed, a condition called "surgical menopause." Several small trials suggested that testosterone enhances sexual desire in women, and U.S. doctors widely prescribe the hormone "off-label"--without being specifically approved--to women with HSDD. (European women are generally more reluctant to take hormones, Laan says.) Because no specific product has been approved for women, doctors prescribe male testosterone drugs at about one-tenth of the dose or order pharmacists to produce special formulations that contain smaller amounts. A product aimed at and approved for women would be more convenient and safer, says Shifren, as well as opening a huge new market. Those hopes were dealt a blow by the FDA panel in December. P&G had asked for approval of Intrinsa in surgically menopausal women first. The panel concluded that the results of two trials in this group were "clinically significant" if not exactly mind-blowing. (Roughly, patients who took placebo went from 3 to 4 "satisfying sexual episodes" per month, whereas those who got testosterone went from 3 to 5-5.5.) Side effects, such as increased facial hair growth and acne, were limited. [Figure 3] But the panel balked at the long-term safety data. The two trials together had enrolled 1095 women for 24 weeks--not nearly enough time to detect subtle risks resulting from long-term use, says panel member Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Fresh on the panel's mind, he says, were the disturbing results of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), a huge study funded by the U.S. government, which discovered in 2002 that long-term use of estrogen, alone or in combination with progestin, can increase women's risk of cardiovascular disease (see p. 1570). "We have a bad history with manipulating hormones in women," says Nissen, and the decision "wasn't even close." Some critics say the vote smacks of a double standard, because drugs like Viagra, or even testosterone treatments in men, were never subjected to the long-term safety trials that the panel wished to see. "Be as conservative for men as you are for women," says Shifren. Clinical psychologist Sheryl Kingsberg of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, calls the panel "very, very overconservative" and says it's "paternalistic" to deny women the choice to use testosterone. The fate of Intrinsa and similar drugs is unclear. P&G withdrew its application after the panel meeting; a spokesperson says the company "is working with the FDA" to design new trials. "The key questions are going to be: How long does a trial have to be, and how many patients?" says Stephen Simes, president of BioSante Pharmaceuticals in Lincolnshire, Illinois, a company developing a testosterone gel. Companies will abandon their efforts if the agency requires studies like the WHI, which enrolled more than 16,000 women for 5 years in its main trial, Simes predicts. But Nissen says a trial of a few thousand women for 2 years, plus thorough postmarketing surveillance, might allay the worries. Defining what's normal But proving the safety of Intrinsa and its slew of competitors won't solve women's sexual problems, says NYU's Tiefer, who also gave a 3-minute presentation at the December meeting. Tiefer worries that women will feel compelled to start taking drugs, even if they're comfortable with their decreasing sex drives, once they become available. "I'm pro-sex," she says. "I'm pro-porn, I'm pro-vibrators. ... But sex is a hobby. It's fine not to do it if you're not interested." (And certainly, an abusive husband like Laura's isn't a reason to put a woman on drugs, she adds.) Tiefer has founded a group, FSD Alert, that takes a feminist view of female sexual problems and puts more emphasis on sociocultural, political, and psychological factors. There are other foes of FSD as a medical problem. In a series of articles over the past few years in the British Medical Journal , Ray Moynihan, a freelance journalist based in Sydney, Australia, called it the "corporate-sponsored creation of a new disease." He implicates the media for what he says are titillating but sloppy stories. Those who favor the new drugs--even while admitting that they receive corporate support--dismiss this idea as absurd and slightly conspirational. Women had sexual problems long before drug companies started paying attention, says Shifren. And counseling or a getaway weekend with their partners, she notes, are some of many other options before medication. For some of her clients, lack of desire really is a source of misery, Shifren says. Irwin Goldstein of Boston University adds that the critics are now telling women what men heard in the pre-Viagra era: that it's all in their heads. "They talk about medicalization. I call what they do psycholization," Goldstein says. But even experts who believe that some women might benefit from medical treatment don't like the idea of large numbers of healthy women, nudged by wall-to-wall advertising on U.S. television, on FSD drugs. Already, the extent of the problem is being blown far out of proportion, says John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, who is now retired in England. For instance, a 1999 study by Edward Laumann and his colleagues at the University of Chicago found that a staggering 43% of women between 18 and 55 suffer from sexual dysfunction--a number often repeated in scientific literature and the press that Bancroft calls "extreme." A recent British study suggests that many problems are transient, he adds: Although 40% of women reported having a problem with sexual function that lasted at least 1 month, the study found, only 10% had complaints that lasted longer than 6 months. Laan, at the University of Amsterdam, also believes that there's nothing medically wrong with most of the women who have arousal or desire problems. Instead, she says they just need more sexual stimulation. A recent German study among college students, for instance, showed that a woman's desire dropped with the duration of the relationship. "It's a huge taboo to say so, but many women who have lost interest in their partner still feel like having sex with the guy next door," Laan says. But desire can be stimulated, she adds, by anything from romantic dinners to fantasizing: "It's just something that takes some work." Ironically, the drug trials themselves suggest that some women may not need desire-boosting drugs. Most show a considerable placebo effect; in the Intrinsa studies, for instance, some 36% of patients on placebo wanted to continue after the study closed. Maybe P&G should just market the placebo, Nissen quipped during the panel meeting. Talking about a sexual problem and deciding to tackle it might have a therapeutic effect by itself, say researchers. Even with all the questions about FSD drugs, Bancroft believes that the increased attention will benefit the field. "We're having a very healthy debate," he says. "The good thing is that we'll come out of this with a much better understanding of women's sexuality." ------------------ Bone Quality Fills Holes in Fracture Risk Erik Stokstad Osteoporosis isn't the only factor behind broken bones. A better understanding of bone quality, coming from biochemical markers and refined imaging techniques, will help predict who is most at risk of debilitating fractures When a woman is tested for osteoporosis, technicians shoot low-dose x-rays through her hip to get a picture of the bone and a measure of its density. The less bone, the higher the overall risk of breaks, including debilitating hip fractures. But over the last decade, researchers have come to a greater awareness that it's not just quantity that matters: Bone quality counts for a lot. The importance of bone quality--a term covering aspects such as the organization of the tiny struts that make up the inner tissue--became obvious during clinical trials of drugs for osteoporosis. These drugs prevent the loss of bone, but it turned out that, statistically, bone mineral density (BMD) couldn't explain all of the reduction in fracture risk. That fit with observations by clinicians: Some women with osteoporotic bones don't suffer breaks, whereas many women with apparently healthy bones still end up with fractures. Identifying women at risk before they fracture is "the most challenging public health question" facing osteoporosis researchers, says Ego Seeman of Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. And it's not just an issue for women. Osteoporosis is becoming more common in men, and more commonly diagnosed, especially as they live longer. Researchers are trying to get a better handle on bone quality in several ways. They're searching for new and better biochemical markers of bone change, to add to the handful already used in the clinic to assess the effects of drugs. Higher resolution imaging with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is beginning to probe the inner architecture of bones without the need for direct sampling. The hope is that these advances may one day better identify patients in need of treatment, as well as provide a way to chart their progress on drugs, but the newer imaging techniques are still being developed and won't be widely available for several years. In the meantime, some researchers are trying to integrate proven risk factors to predict a woman's chance of fracture. Strong bones Osteoporosis is a factor in more than 1.5 million fractures each year in the United States alone. Costs have been estimated at more than $17 billion a year, particularly from hip fractures, more than 75% of them in women. Part of the reason is that women who are not in nursing homes are twice as likely as men to fall, perhaps because they lose muscle strength faster with age. But another major factor is that their bones tend to become much weaker with age than men's do. [Figure 1] Strength comes from two features of bones. The outer shell of dense material, called cortical bone, is like the metal tubing of a bicycle that makes a strong, light frame. Inside this cortex is a porous network of tiny support struts and rods, called trabeculae. Trabecular bone makes up just 20% of bone mass but most of its surface area. Sex differences appear relatively early in life. Growing girls tend to add more mass to the inner side of the bone cortex, beefing up the trabeculae to create a storehouse of calcium for pregnancy and lactation. Boys, in contrast, tend to add more material to the outside of the cortex. The greater the diameter, the stronger the bone. The effect, as seen in cross-sectional studies, is "absolutely huge," says Heather McKay of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In addition, girls tend to be less active than boys, she says, so many don't get the bone-building benefits of exercise. The big kicker comes at menopause. Estrogen is a key regulating signal for the cells that are constantly remodeling bone, thus repairing damage and allowing bones to bulk up to the loads placed on them. When estrogen levels decline during menopause, the bone-building cells known as osteoblasts slacken their activity. But the bone-resorbing osteoclasts continue to remove bone mineral and break down collagen. That means women typically lose 1% to 2% of their bone per year around menopause, more of it from trabecular bone. Several risk factors influence the likelihood that a woman will lose more bone than normal and eventually suffer a fracture. A previous fracture ups the odds substantially, as does a family history of fracture, although genetic factors remain fairly murky. Race matters, too. The incidence of hip fractures is 25% lower in Asian than in white women, for example, even for women with similar bone densities. Behaviors--poor diet and lack of exercise, especially in youth--are also negative influences on bone health, as discussed in a massive report from the Surgeon General last year.* These risk factors are fairly weak predictors of an individual's absolute risk, however. Up until the 1980s, clinicians basically waited until a fracture occurred before treating patients for osteoporosis. Diagnosis--and research--got a considerable boost in the 1990s with the advent of dual x-ray absorptiometry (DXA). "It just revolutionized the field," says B. Lawrence Riggs of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. DXA enabled clinicians and researchers to follow patients over a long time and assess their responses to medications, helping bring the current crop of drugs to market, Riggs says (Science, 3 September 2004, p. 1420 ). In the United States, the National Osteoporosis Foundation recommends that women over the age of 65, or younger women who have one or more risk factors, be tested with DXA for osteoporosis. [Figure 2] Virtual biopsy. An osteoporotic radius (right) and a healthy tibia, seen with MRI. But DXA's usefulness for making predictions is limited. "The number one clinical goal is to be able to sit down with a patient and give a numerical indicator of fracture risk," says Lawrence Raisz of the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. DXA doesn't do that well, although many researchers point out that it's a better predictor than is cholesterol level for heart disease. By factoring in bone quality as well, researchers and doctors eventually hope to do better. Sharpening the picture One of the main approaches to gleaning details about the quality of bones is to measure the activity of osteoclasts and osteoblasts, the cells that remodel bone and thus influence its structural properties. The first cell activity marker approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in 1995, measures the products of bone breakdown and can pick out women with extremely high rates of bone loss. In general, however, markers are not currently useful for diagnosis of osteoporosis, because levels overlap between those who have and don't have the disorder. Researchers are trying to explain the variability and investigating new markers that might be more specific. The main clinical use of markers at the moment is to help chart how patients respond to drugs. That kind of information may also encourage patients to keep taking their medicine, as Pierre Delmas of Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France, explained last month at a meeting on bone quality run by the National Institutes of Health and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research in Bethesda, Maryland. His unpublished data showed that providing patients with progress reports from biomarkers could increase the numbers who stay on their medications by 20%. Biochemical markers may also help refine the assessment of fracture risk, but the results of large studies so far have been inconsistent. Another way of getting new information about bone quality is by looking at bone architecture directly. A time-tested research method is to study actual bone from biopsies, cadavers, or hip replacement operations. CT and electron microscopy can resolve individual rods and struts, the crucial support elements inside trabecular bone. But direct sampling is too invasive and expensive to be used to track individual patients' health. Researchers have been trying to get similar and more clinically useful information using imaging tools. One benchmark in the field is a 2001 paper in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (JBMR ) by Felix Wehrli's group at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The researchers showed in a study of 79 women with various bone densities and vertebral deformities that a souped-up MRI machine can reveal microscopic bone structure noninvasively. In April, a group led by Charles Chesnut of the University of Washington, Seattle, published online in JBMR the first such longitudinal study of bone microarchitecture with MRI. The other main imaging techniques use quantitative CT, mainly to study peripheral bones, such as the forearm. Aspects of bone quality are then extrapolated to hip and spine. Given the small size of studies so far, CT and MRI haven't been used to assess fracture risk. Researchers say those results should come in the next few years: Larger trials are incorporating CT and MRI in subsets of patients. One attempt to get at fracture risk is already under way. Tony Keaveny, a biomechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, is using a technique called finite element analysis. Keaveny and colleagues take CT images of human vertebrae, including information about the trabecular architecture, and model how they respond to stress. In a paper published in Bone in 2003, he and his former student R. Paul Crawford showed that their analysis of CT images of cadaver bones predicted 85% of the variation in bone strength in experiments with actual loadings of the bones--"better than BMD did," he says. Ultimately, Keaveny says, the method should be able to provide a personalized fracture risk assessment for patients, adjusted for their height and weight and other factors. Clinicians say the approach is exciting but might be prohibitively expensive for screening patients. In the meantime, clinicians and researchers say much can be done to get more women checked for osteoporosis and give patients a better idea of their fracture risk. In one high-profile effort, a center at the University of Sheffield, U.K., sponsored by the World Health Organization has been designing a method to express a person's absolute risk of fracture during the next 10 years. "This will allow us to have a standard of care," comments Ethel Siris of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. "It will give us a better threshold for determining treatment." * Bone Health and Osteoporosis: A Report of the Surgeon General (2004), HHS. www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/bonehealth/content.html From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:12:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:12:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Pioneer Fund: Grantees Message-ID: Grantees http://www.pioneerfund.org/Grantees.html Highlights of Pioneer Fund Research and Grantees __________________________________________ Since its inception in 1937, the Pioneer Fund has made grants to 64 different institutions, located in eight different countries, including to some of the most prominent universities in the world. The collected works of the Pioneer Funds distinguished list of grantees now totals over 200 books and 2,000 articles. The Pioneer fund has focused its resources on supporting cutting-edge research in: * Behavioral Genetics * Cognitive Ability * Social Demography * Group Differences Sex, Social Class, and Race Some of the most celebrated work by Pioneer grantees is summarized below. __________________________________________ Behavioral Genetics Hans J. Eysenck From 1986 Pioneer supported the research program of the late Hans Eysenck of the University of London in England. One of the world's leading taxonomists of human personality and its biological basis, Eysenck began to build the British Twin Register early in his career. For over three decades his investigations indicated that genes contribute significantly to measures of extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism, personal adjustment, and social attitudes. One of his longest standing interests was investigating the genetic contribution to the personality factors underlying antisocial behavior. His 1989 book, The Causes and Cures of Criminality, written in collaboration with Gisli Gudjonsson, estimated the heritability of criminality at about 60 percent. Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. Perhaps the best known of the Pioneer-supported studies is the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart, which reunited separated twins from around the world. Professor Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. and his team at the University of Minnesota flew in sixty-two pairs of genetically identical and forty-three pairs of fraternal twins, many of who had not been together since infancy, for a week of testing. The identical twins turned out to have an extraordinary number of common traits including eccentricities while the fraternal twins were not nearly as alike. On quantitative tests of IQ and personality, as well as attitudes such as religiosity and traditionalism, values, vocational aptitudes, and work preferences, identical twins separated at birth grew to be even more similar than did fraternal twins raised together. The results of this research showed that heredity plays a major role in almost every type of human behavior, accounting for 40 to 80% of individual differences. Joseph M. Horn Another major study Pioneer helped support was the Texas Adoption Project. Professor Joseph M. Horn at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues followed 300 Texas families who had adopted one or more children from a home for unwed mothers. The first phase of the study tested the personality and intelligence of adopted children between three and fourteen years-old; then the study re-tested them again as adolescents and young adults ten years later. Not only were the adoptees much more like their biological mothers than their adoptive mothers, but as they grew older, they became increasingly more similar to the biological parents they had not seen since shortly after their birth, and the less like the adopting parents who had raised them. By adolescence, the adoptees showed virtually no similarity to their adopting parents or the adoptive siblings with whom they had been raised. The study concluded that about fifty percent of the individual differences in IQ and personality were due to heredity and the remainder to environmental influences. R. Travis Osborne J. Philippe Rushton Philip A. Vernon Dovetailing with the results from these large scale projects are those from many others also funded by Pioneer. For example, Professor Emeritus R. Travis Osborne of the University of Georgia studied intelligence and personality as well as physical characteristics in several hundred white and black twins in Georgia, Kentucky, and Indiana. Osbornes large twin study showed that the weight of genes and culture are equally as important among Blacks as among Whites. Professor J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, used the University of London Twin Register and found that individual differences in altruism, nurturance, and empathy were between 50 and 60% heritable, as were individual differences in aggression and crime. Professor Philip A. Vernon, also of the University of Western Ontario, has undertaken a longitudinal study of infant twins who are being tested and followed up over a period of years. Measures are made of motor, mental, and temperamental development, with the major goal of identifying cultural, environmental, and genetic factors that contribute to development. Smaller scale grants have gone to support research on such genetic disorders as sickle-cell anemia, eye cancers, hemophilia, Tay-Sachs disease, and schizophrenia. These results show that discovering the genetic bases of various conditions serve to make them more amenable to treatment, rather than less so. Brunetto Chiarelli Still other awards have gone to aid international conferences on anthropology and genetics. One recipient, Professor Brunetto Chiarelli of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florence, recently used a grant to defray expenses for travelers from the developing world so they could attend the XVIth International Congress of Anthropology, which he hosted in Italy. __________________________________________ Cognitive Ability Hans J. Eysenck One of the most cited psychologists of all time, Professor Hans J. Eysenck (1916-1997) of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, England, also made significant contributions to the study of the nature of intelligence. In 1967, Eysenck proposed that faster neural transmission was the basis of higher IQ scores. Eysenck studied the reaction time and EEG (electroencephalogram or brain waves) correlates of intelligence, which are summarized in his posthumously published book Intelligence: A New Look (1998). Arthur R. Jensen Professor Emeritus Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley is todays leading exponent of the position that all mental tasks, even simple reaction time tests, reflect a unitary general factor termed g. In studies conducted over two decades, factor analyzing a great number of data sets, using a variety of procedures, he has shown that this large general factor consistently emerges. Some intelligence tests, however, are better measures of g than others. Problem solving and reasoning are the best, or purest measures, while simpler cognitive processes, such as short-term memory still draw on g, but much less so. Jensen has established that the extent to which a test measures g is directly related to how much it is a product of nature, rather than nurture, and is correlated with anatomical and physiological measures such as brain waves. Philip A. Vernon Professor Philip A. Vernon and his collaborators at the University of Western Ontario used state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques and found that IQ scores are related to brain size. In one study, they reported the results for 40 adult females for whom the correlation between brain size and IQ was 0.40. In a subsequent study, this time of 68 adult males, they again found a 0.40 correlation between brain volume and IQ. They also showed that external head size measures such as head length, head width, and head circumference also correlated with IQ scores, but only about 0.20, and that brain size correlated more highly with the g component of IQ scores. Linda S. Gottfredson Professor Linda S. Gottfredson, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has investigated the role IQ plays in vocational aptitudes, health and longevity, and success. Gottfredson has demonstrated that intelligence is the single most important factor in the world of work. IQ predicts job performance better than any other single trait or circumstance, including education or specific aptitudes. While useful in all jobs, IQ becomes critical in the more complex and highly prestigious occupations. Gottfredson concluded that the occupational-prestige hierarchy is essentially a ranking of relative intellectual difficulty. Robert Gordon Professor Robert Gordon, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, examined the role IQ plays in crime and delinquency. His review of the literature and subsequent mathematical models demonstrate that people with lower levels of intelligence are at much greater risk to fall into a life of delinquency. More recently, he has demonstrated that social outcomes such as single parenthood, HIV infection, poverty, and belief in conspiracy rumors are also predicted by lower IQ. __________________________________________ Social Demography Garrett Hardin Professor Garrett Hardin of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is one of the worlds leading ecologists. He has extended his Tragedy of the Commons and Living on a Lifeboat metaphors to questions of environmental conservation, world population, and immigration, noting that individuals tend to maximize their own advantage even if this entails a net cost to society as a whole. Applying this same analysis to people who have a large number of children and thereby impose a cost on society that they themselves do not have to bear, Hardin has questioned the assumption of many demographers that as people become more affluent they automatically control their fertility. His mathematical models predict that economic and other aid is likely to lead to population increases, not decreases, so that even more aid will be required in the future. Richard Lynn Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster has studied the social ecology of intelligence, and the question of whether the intelligence level of a population helps determine its level of economic and cultural achievement. After calculating average IQs for 13 regions in the UK, which ranged from 102 in London, to 97 in Scotland, to 96 in Ireland, he found that per capita income and the number of Fellows of the Royal Society paralleled the mean IQs. Lynn then replicated these findings in a study of regional IQ differences in France. Most recently, he collaborated with Tatu Vanhannen, a political scientist in Finland, to publish IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002). They examined IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries and demonstrated that national differences in prosperity were best explained in terms of the intelligence levels of their respective populations. National IQ correlated more than 0.70 with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The second determinant of national wealth was whether a country had a market or a socialist economy. The widely credited factor of natural resources (such as oil), was only third. __________________________________________ Group Differences Sex, Social Class, and Race Lloyd Humphreys Sex differences. Professor Lloyd Humphreys of the University of Illinois has long been interested in mathematically gifted youth. In one study of approximately 100,000 tenth graders, he found that at the highly gifted end of the ability range, boys exceeded girls by a ratio of about 10 to 1, which he thought might help to explain the under-representation of women in math and science courses and careers. Philip E. Vernon Socioeconomic status. Professor Philip E. Vernon (1905-1987) of the University of London in England and the University of Calgary in Canada documented the substantial social class differences in IQ scores found in both the U.S. and the U.K. For example, the analysis of the World War I American military conscripts showed that the average IQ of children born in the professional class was 123, whereas those born to unskilled workers averaged 96. Vernon concluded that these social class differences have some genetic basis. He based this assessment on his review of the evidence that the intelligence of adopted children related more to the social class of their biological parents than to that of their adopting parents. Vernon suggested that social mobility allows those with higher intelligence to rise in the social hierarchy, while those with lower intelligence tend to fall. Aurdrey M. Shuey Racial variation. Professor Audrey M. Shuey (1910-1977) of Randolph-Macon Womans College in Virginia published the first comprehensive review of all the studies of average Black-White IQ differences in her book, The Testing of Negro Intelligence (1958, 2nd ed., 1966). The standard sourcebook on the topic, it demonstrated that the 15-point Black-White average IQ difference remained constant from the 1910s to the 1960s, across all regions of the U.S., as well as in Canada and Jamaica. It was also constant across all types of tests (verbal or non-verbal, and whether individual or group administered), age groups (primary school, high school, college, and adult), and specific samples (the gifted, the retarded, the delinquent, the military in World Wars I and II, as well as in the Korean and Viet man Wars). Arthur R. Jensen Richard Lynn Philip E. Vernon Other Pioneer grantees significantly extended the scope of the debate about racial differences. Professor Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley in his book The g Factor (1998) demonstrated that IQ tests mostly measure the general factor (g) of intelligence, are not culturally biased against minorities, and that even the simplest reaction time measures correlate with IQ and show average race differences. In fact, Jensen has shown that Black-White IQ differences are greatest on the most g-loaded, heritable subtests. Professors Richard Lynn and Philip E. Vernon found that, on average, Pacific Rim Asians in Asia and in the United States averaged higher on tests of mental ability than did Whites. In his book The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America (1982), Vernon also showed that East Asians tended to have a quieter temperament, a more stable family structure, and lower rates of violent crime. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:13:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:13:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Galileo's Heirs: The Scientific Defense of Segregation, 1954-1967 Message-ID: Galileo's Heirs: The Scientific Defense of Segregation, 1954-1967 http://comm.colorado.edu/jjackson/research/nyu%20proposal.htm [If you back up the directory tree, you'll see the book is in press. Amazon does not stock it as of right now, though. I wonder how much *positive*, data-driven evidence FOR racial equality the author cites. Thanks to Sarah for finding this.] The Scientific Defense of Segregation, 1954-1967 Book Proposal Accepted by New York University Press John P. Jackson, Jr. I. Book Proposal. A. Introduction. I am a historian interested in the how the cultural authority of science has been used in American history to support various positions on race relations. In my most recently completed project I investigated social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark and his colleagues' involvement in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education which declared segregation unconstitutional. I now propose a historical examination of a group of scientists who used their scientific expertise in an attempt to overturn Brown v. Board of Education. In a series of court cases in the early 1960s these scientists testified that African American children were biologically and psychologically inferior to white children and therefore segregation should continue. I am in a unique position to study these segregationist scientists, since they faced many of the same issues that Clark and his colleagues faced in the Brown case. B. Description of the Study. 1. The Context. Walter Jackson has called the scientific community in the two decades following World War II a "liberal orthodoxy" regarding race relations (Jackson, 1990). The prevailing scientific belief during these two decades was that there were no significant differences in intelligence or character among the various races. Indeed, many anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, and sociologists argued that the entire concept of "race" should be scrapped as scientifically worthless. A small minority of scientists, whom I call the "segregationist scientists", disagreed with the egalitarian view of the majority. Members of this group were bound together by a concern that the scientific truth of racial differences was being smothered by the unscientific propaganda of racial equality. Segregationist scientists argued that the psychological and biological differences between the white and black races had profound implications for social policy, especially regarding school integration. School integration would corrupt white children by forcing them into a degraded environment. Moreover, integration would psychologically hurt African American children by forcing them into day-to-day contact with white children, with whom they could not possibly compete. Segregation, however, protected both white and black children from the malevolent influences of interracial contact. These scientists testified on behalf of segregation in a number of Federal court cases in the early 1960s. In these cases many of the segregationist scientists proclaimed, as anatomist Wesley C. George of the University of North Carolina had soon after the Brown decision "we cannot consider the Negro to be genetically acceptable," therefore, "it is of fundamental importance that we shall maintain racial separateness in the social sphere" (George, 1954, 13). 2. A Scientific Community. Segregationist scientists had their own professional organization, the International Society for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), founded in Washington DC 1959. The expressed function of the IAAEE was to objectively investigate racial differences and publicize their findings. Although it claimed to be primarily a scientific organization, the IAAEE was composed of a group of social conservative thinkers and writers, most of who had scientific training. Within the United States there were three basic groups within the IAAEE. The first group in the IAAEE was composed of an older generation of southern scientists who had grown up under segregation. These men were born in the late nineteenth century or the first two decades of the twentieth century. A good example of this group was psychologist Henry E. Garrett, one of three scientists who testified in favor of segregation during the Brown litigation. Garrett was on the faculty of Columbia University for decades before retiring in 1956 and assuming a position in his home state at the University of Virginia. Also in this group was anatomist Wesley C. George, who had been on the faculty of the University of North Carolina Medical School since 1919. For this group, having grown up in the South during the height of Jim Crow, the dismantling of segregation represented the dismantling of their culture. They were fully prepared to use their scientific expertise to defend the old order. The second group represented in the IAAEE were much younger individuals who were neo-Fascist sympathizers closely associated with neo-Nazi Willis Carto and his organization, the Liberty Lobby. For example, economist Donald Swan, an openly declared Fascist, served as the executive secretary of the IAAEE during the time under study. Biologist Robert E. Kuttner, in addition to publishing extensively in biochemistry journals (Kuttner, Sims, and Gordon, 1961; Kuttner and Wagreich, 1953) also provided scientific proof of white superiority before Congress as a representative of the Liberty Lobby, had published extensively in extremist journals such as The Truth Seeker, Northern World, and Western Destiny (Kuttner, 1956; 1958). In these publications, Kuttner held forth against the Jewish domination of the western world and championed the Nordic as the true representative of the white race. The final group within the IAAEE was a group I have chosen to call the "idiosyncratic conservatives". Ernst van den Haag, psychoanalyst and social philosopher, was one of the earliest critics of the use of social science in Brown. Van den Haag served on the executive committee of the IAAEE for a number of years and testified on behalf of segregation in three different court cases. A. James Gregor, another social philosopher, published widely within the social science literature criticizing Brown, publishing psychological studies with psychologists R. Travis Osborne and Stanley Porteus, and writing highly theoretical articles on racial thought. These writers rejected the notion that African Americans were biologically inferior to white Americans and instead based their arguments for segregation on notions of group identity. These arguments will be explored in more detail below. 3. The Equalitarian Conspiracy. Although members differed on a number of points, a central point of the IAAEE agenda was to debunk the "equalitarian dogma" of modern anthropology. According to the IAAEE line, Franz Boas and his students, the "equalitarians," had substituted their political and religious belief in racial equality for hard scientific evidence when they proclaimed the races equal. The equalitarians had infiltrated the scientific establishment and through political pressure had successfully suppressed the truth about racial differences in a host of disciplines. The equalitarians controlled hiring and tenure decisions of all major universities and the publication boards of major scientific publishers. The equalitarians quickly and severely punished any "objective" scientists who dared reveal that the races were fundamentally unequal. In this way, the equalitarians perpetuated what Henry Garrett described as "the scientific hoax of the century" (1961, 484). According to the IAAEE scientists, in the Brown school desegregation case the equalitarians had actually had their scientific hoax written into constitutional law. In Brown the Supreme Court had found that segregation psychologically damaged school children, citing the work of Kenneth B. Clark and other social scientists who had worked with the NAACP (Jackson, 1997). After Brown, IAAEE scientists took to print arguing that Clark and his colleagues had misled the court about racial differences (Gregor, 1963; van den Haag, 1960). Segregationist scientists' critique of Brown meshed with positions argued by the South's political leadership. Like the members of the IAAEE, Southern leaders had excoriated the substitution of "socialistic" social scientists for case precedent in the Brown decision. For white southern leadership, the citation of social scientific evidence was just one more reason to despise the Brown decision (Bloch, 1958). However, the citation of social scientific evidence in Brown also provided a method for the South to overturn the decision. The South believed that Brown turned on a "finding of fact" rather than a "finding of law". Because Brown relied on the "factual" grounds of racial equality it southern leaders believed they could show Brown's facts to be in error. Charles Bloch, a Georgia attorney and arch critic of Brown wrote that, "It can be shown that in our society of 1959...these findings and factual conclusions [in Brown] are erroneous and have no place" (Bloch, 1959, 138). If the South could demonstrate in court that science actually proved the inequality of the races, then segregation would be justified, by Brown's own logic. Southerners wanting to use scientific facts to overturn Brown and scientists eager to supply those facts were brought together by Carleton Putnam; a retired airline executive turned segregationist pamphleteer. In his writings, Putnam put forth the case against the equalitarian dogma and what he saw as the scientific truth of African American inferiority (1961; 1967). Putnam was a founding member of the IAAEE and had extensive ties to the Citizen Councils and southern political culture. Through his efforts, southern lawyers brought four separate Federal Court cases to overturn Brown on the basis of expert scientific testimony of IAAEE scientists.[1] 4. Scientific Arguments for Segregation. In these cases, segregationists scientists drew upon their writings to argue that there were three main sources of scientific support for segregation. The most fundamental argument was based on the evidence provided by psychological tests of intelligence. a. Group differences in intelligence. One thing that all IAAEE members agreed upon was that psychological tests had proven that African Americans simply were not as innately intelligent as white Americans were. For the most part, this argument was based, not on original research, but on surveys of the results of IQ tests. The "bible" for the IAAEE was The Testing of Negro Intelligence, a massive book of intelligence test results compiled by Audrey Shuey, a doctoral student of Garrett's while he was at Columbia (Shuey, 1958). The sheer mass of studies, IAAEE scientists argued, must prove that the gap in IQ between whites and blacks could not be due to environmental differences. Psychologist Frank C.J. McGurk, who carefully assembled studies in which he claimed environmental backgrounds were equalized and yet whites continually outperformed blacks (McGurk 1959; 1967), advanced a similar argument. In addition to the compilations of other studies, IAAEE members also undertook original research designed to show high heritability for intelligence For example, A. James Gregor, who was a colleague of Stanley Porteus at the University of Hawaii, administered the Porteus Maze Test in Australia to test "native" intelligence of the aboriginal population (Gregor and McPherson, 1963). Gregor also undertook a series of intelligence studies with psychologist R. Travis Osborne of the University or Georgia (Osborne and Gregor, 1966; Osborne and Gregor, 1968; Osborne, Gregor, and Miele, 1967; Osborne, Gregor, and Miele, 1968). The IQ argument served two purposes for the IAAEE in a court of law. First, it was an attempt to establish that race was a "reasonable" classification under the law for the purposes of educational policy. That is to say, given the wide differences in intelligence between the two races, it was a reasonable use of state power to require segregated schooling because the curriculum of each school system could be adjusted to the level needed for each race. A second use of the IQ argument in court was an attempt to show that integration would damage white children. Brown? it could be argued, was based on the "psychological damage" inflicted on minority children. The IQ argument could turn the tables on the integrationists because African American children simply were not as smart as white children hence school integration would lead to a "dumbed down" curriculum denying white children of a proper education (Garrett, 1962; McGurk, 1959; Osborne, 1960). The IQ argument however, was not enough to clinch the cases for the IAAEE. The problem lay within the overlap between white and black tests scores. A large overlap between the two populations, even granting that the mean of the scores of the black population was equivalent to the value of one standard deviation below the mean of the scores of the white population. IAAEE knew the NAACP would argue as it did during the Brown case, that while the differences in IQ scores might justify educational tracking by test scores, they did not justify segregation by race. The NAACP would simply argue that the court should group the smart children, regardless of race, and the slower children, regardless of race. What was needed was some argument to add to the IQ argument that would guarantee that race would be the relevant factor for the courts. Finding the argument that would make race a relevant factor for the court caused widespread disagreement within the segregationist scientific community. In the end, they settled on two approaches: first, a biological argument that relied on essential differences between the races; second, a psychological argument that assumed no essential differences. Each of these will be examined in turn. b. Biological differences between the races. There were two arguments for significant biological differences between the races. First, anatomist Wesley C. George argued that the brain structure of African Americans was significantly different than the brains of white Americans. According to George, not only did whites have, on average, larger brains, but also the fissures in the gray matter of the brain were significantly deeper in the white brain. Moreover, the differences in fissuration were in the frontal lobes of the brain, those areas most responsible for forethought and higher planning.These differences in brain structure were, George argued, immune from environmental influences and were almost wholly genetic in origin. The difference in neuroanatomy between white and black brains allowed George and Carleton Putnam (who was enormously impressed with George's argument) to go beyond mere differences in intelligence and argue that African Americans lacked the "capacity for civilization" found in white Americans. African Americans were physiologically incapable of achieving white standards in behavior and decorum. George and Putnam argued that high rates of disease, crime, and delinquency in African American culture were physiological, not social, in origin. To integrate schools would force white students into a climate of disease and crime. Moreover, school integration would inevitably lead to "race mixing" destroying the genetic basis for American civilization. The fear of miscegenation was a constant theme in the American South, and George and Putnam gave this fear a scientific footing (George, 1961; Putnam, 1967). The second biological argument was the appropriation of the work of anthropologist Carleton Coon. Coon was a world-renowned physical anthropologist and not directly involved with the IAAEE. He was, however, a cousin to Carleton Putnam. In 1962 Coon published The Origin of the Races which offered a multi-regional hypothesis for the origin of humankind. Coon argued that the human race crossed the threshold into homo sapiens not once, but five times, with whites crossing first and black last, 200,000 years later. Putnam quickly seized on Coon's theory as proof of the innate inferiority of African Americans and ample justification for segregation. One of the great benefits of my study has been to fully explore Coon's relationship with Putnam. Privately Coon checked manuscripts and supplied anthropological information for Putnam while publicly maintaining that he had no relationship with the segregationist. (see my paper, "In Ways Unacademical"). c. Psychological argument for segregation. The majority opinion in the Brown case turned on the finding of fact that racial segregation of schools was psychological damaging to minority children. The IAAEE scientists simply reversed the damage argument as found in Brown by claiming that integration would lead to damage and that segregation was a psychologically more healthy social arrangement. A key to this argument was the notion that race prejudice was a natural and healthy psychological phenomenon. IAAEE scientists, Gregor in particular, argued that any member of a given race naturally preferred only to associate with members of the same race. Because of this innate "racial preference" segregation guaranteed a peaceful and psychologically healthy society. By contrast, to force two races into contact would lead to frustration, anxiety, and inter-racial violence. Moreover, regardless of the ultimate cause, white children on intelligence tests consistently outscored African American children. Hence they would experience great frustration surrounded by white children who would outperform them in academic performance (Gregor, 1961, 1962, 1963; van den Haag, 1956, 1963, 1965). In order to support the argument that segregation was psychologically beneficial to African American school children, A. James Gregor went as far as to duplicate Kenneth and Mamie Clark's famous "doll tests' which were projective tests designed to measure group identity and self-esteem in African American children (Gregor and McPherson, 1966a, 1966b). van den Haag was responsible for introducing these tests into evidence through his expert testimony at trial. The biological argument for segregation was from a previous era--recalling the traditional southern fears of misgenenation and southern certainty that there were unbridgeable differences between black and white. The psychological argument, however predicted a line of research that would follow the burgeoning Black Power movements of the 1960s. As African Americans rejected the assimilationist model offered by integrationist social science, racial separation would be seen as a more healthy alternative than it had in the 1950s. Gregor, in particular, was aware of the growing power of Black Nationalism and coopted their call for voluntary racial separation in support of enforced segregation (Gregor, 1963a, also my article, "The Triumph of the Segregationists?"). 5. The Court Decisions. The IAAEE scientists were eager to present their scientific case in court and equally eager to put the NAACP's scientific witnesses to the test of rigorous cross-examination. Carleton Putnam wrote that in court: It would be possible to expose the fallacies and supply the deficiencies in Brown. The proponents of the environmental sociology, the cultural anthropologists, the Montagues, the Klinebergs, and the Clarks could be cross-examined under oath on the witness stand. So could the Garretts and the Georges. Finally, adequate press coverage would permit a beginning in the education of the public about the facts (1967, 74). It was not to be, however. The law was now favorable to the NAACP and they relied on the rule of the law. With each scientific witness, the NAACP moved to strike the testimony as immaterial to the case, relying on the simple constitutional mandate of Brown. The reliance on the rule of law fit perfectly with the strategy of the NAACP. In his masterful analysis of the career of Thurgood Marshall, Mark Tushnet noted that the overarching goal of the NAACP in the desegregation campaign was the transformation of unfavorable case precedent into favorable case precedent, "through a careful litigation strategy pointing out anomalies in doctrine and identifying the inevitable failure of society's efforts to explain why unjust doctrines nonetheless were acceptable." However, once the victories were one, that is once the first Brown decision was one, the situation changed dramatically for the NAACP and they would rely on the legal rule of Brown in subsequent desegregation litigation. Tushnet concluded, "Once law became favorable, the rule of law was an advantage" and the NAACP would argue against introducing social scientific evidence (1994, 314-315). The NAACP's motions to disallow the IAAEE's scientific testimony failed and the evidence was introduced. The district court in the first of these cases, Stell, found segregation constitutional justified on the basis of the inferiority of African Americans. The Stell decision was overruled by the Court of Appeals. The subsequent cases were forced to follow the rule laid down by the Appeal court and the cases were denied a hearing by the US Supreme Court. The court cases died with a whimper after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which permanently ended de jure segregation in the American South. The issues raised by the IAAEE however, proved enduring. Within a few years, Arthur Jensen would put forth the position that there were significant heritable differences in IQ between the races (Jensen, 1969). The idea that racial separation was psychologically healthy would become more and more acceptable within the social science community (Scott, 1997). Of course, given the changes in political climate, no one argued on the basis of these arguments that the country should return to legally enforced segregation which underscores the argument that there is not straightforward connection between a social scientific finding and a particular social policy. C. Contribution and Significance of the Study. The IAAEE is the subject of two books and mentioned briefly in two other books (Chase, 1980; Richards, 1997). The first book is by I.A. Newby (1967), who uses the history of the IAAEE to validate the civil rights movement, the Brown decision, and the equality of the races at a time when these were still very live issues. Indeed, the second edition of his book contains "responses" by several mainstays of the IAAEE indicating that Newby is partaking in these debates rather than offering an historical analysis of them. A similar point could be made about the brief treatment of the IAAEE in Allan Chase's The Legacy of Malthus (1980). A more recent treatment is William H. Tucker's The Science and Politics of Racial Research (1994). Tucker uses the history of racial research as a cautionary tale and his book is a call for the social sciences to abandon racial research altogether. Tucker uncovered some fascinating material, but did not focus on the role of the IAAEE in the battle to maintain segregation. In addition to these works, Andrew Winston (1997, 1998) is examining the IAAEE. Winston is especially interested in uncovering the neo-Fascist links between the IAAEE and far right groups such as Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby. Like Tucker, Winston is writing to an audience of psychologists. The Mankind Quarterly, the journal founded by the IAAEE, is still in business and its affiliated network of scientists still promulgates the inferiority of African Americans. Winston intends his work to make clear the political and social agendas of those still holding to the IAAEE line. In my work, I hope to engage different historical issues than previous writers. The story of the IAAEE and its struggle to preserve racial segregation can shed new light on several issues current in the historical literature. I will briefly describe a number of these issues. 1. Biological Determinism and Racism. My examination of the IAAEE's attempt to maintain segregation with the use of social science will further current historiographic debates on the relationship between "biological determinism" and political ideologies. This debate is a long-standing one that flares up every few decades, usually in response to highly publicized studies that claim to link intelligence and race. Over two decades ago, in response to the work of psychologist Richard Herrnstein, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the study of the relationship between intelligence and race is inherently political. Noting that those, like Herrnstein and Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, who persisted in claiming the relationship between race and intelligence was a matter of scientific import, Chomsky argued that: A possible correlation between mean IQ and skin color is of not greater scientific interest than a correlation between any two other arbitrarily selected traits, say, mean height and color of eyes.... Such questions might be interesting if the results had some bearing, say, on hypotheses about the physiological mechanisms involved, but this is not the case. Therefore the investigation seems of quite limited scientific interest and the zeal and intensity with which some pursue or welcome it cannot reasonable be attributed to a dispassionate desire to advance society. Lest the reader miss his point, Chomsky concluded that, not only was the relationship between race and intelligence of no scientific interest, but was not of "social importance, except under the assumptions of a racist society" (Chomksy, 1976, 296). Chomsky was only one of several researchers in the 1970s who were responding to the furor aroused by Arthur Jensen's 1969 article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Educational Achievement?" Jensen's article had made the question of heritable differences in intelligence between the races a matter of national concern and spawned a literature that Graham Richards properly calls "dauntingly vast" (1997, 262) and we will not be addressing all of the issues generated by Jensen's article. Of particular relevance to the current project is the attempt by scientists to use the history of intelligence testing to undermine Jensen's argument. A common strategy used by Chomsky and others in scientific community attacking "Jensenism" was to claim that the attempt to link race in intelligence was motivated by a political rather than a scientific agenda. One of the weapons used in this struggle was the history of psychological testing. One of the earliest attempts was by Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin in his book, The Science and Politics of IQ (1974). Kamin laid bare the social prejudices of the pioneers of intelligence testing, portraying them as unrepentant bigots. Lewis Terman, Robert Yerkes, and Henry Goddard were portrayed as anti-Semitic, xenophobic white supremacists. A decade later Kamin, geneticist Richard Lewontin and neurobiologist Stephen Rose used historical evidence to reiterate the theme that "biological determinism" was a "political ideology [that claims] to be scientific" (1984, 29). In 1981, Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould used history to launch another attack on biological determinism. Gould explored the 19^th century science of craniology, which attempted to prove racial superiority through measuring skulls and brain weights. He then painstakingly demonstrated the scientific errors imbedded in craniology and what he painted as its rightful successor, intelligence testing. Concluded Gould, "previous claims for a direct biological mapping of human affairs have recorded cultural prejudice and not nature" (1981, 324). Gould's book was so successful that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of the Bell Curve, called it "the capstone of the assault on the integrity of the [psychometric] discipline" (1994, 11) Within the history of science, however, works such as Kamin's and Gould's enjoy an uncertain reputation. On the one hand, many found it refreshing to see history employed so effectively in the cause of social justice. On the other, Gould and Kamin related one-sided histories that smoothed over incredibly complex stories in order to score political points. Benjamin Harris rightly points out that Gould and Kamin were "concentrating on a few leading men in the field, whom they see as ideologically unanimous and critically involved in deciding social policy" (1997, 28). One of the leading historians of intelligence testing, Leila Zenderland, makes a similar point regarding the current controversy surrounding Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve. She notes that the book's popularity will "push the books opponents, historians among them, to emphasize the fact that testing has always been a racist, nativist, and class-biased enterprise, and to cite the quotations that prove so." Unfortunately, notes Zenderland, such a simplistic position will "marginalize all other aspects of the history of psychological testing, and thus disguise once again the more subtle roles that such tests came to play in shaping the science of the mind in the twentieth century" (1997, 138). When historians of science turn to issues of "biological determinism" whether it is the history of the eugenics movement or the history of scientific racism, a more nuanced and complex story emerges (Allen, 1997; Barkan, 1992; Cravens, 1988, 1996, Degler, 1991; Kevles, 1985, Provine 1973, 1986). In her own work on intelligence testing, Zenderland attempts to undermine the assumption that all hereditarians must be social conservatives and all environmentalists must be socially liberal. Zenderland uses the career of Henry Goddard, one of the earliest testing pioneers to explore the futility of this polarization. Concludes Zenderland, for Henry Goddard, "the label `hereditarian' is in one sense perfectly accurate and in another highly inadequate; calling Goddard a `conservative' is more problematic still" (1998, 354). I will explores a further complexity only hinted at by Zenderland. My examination of segregationist scientists will further problematize the link between "hereditarian" and "conservative. There is little doubt that the maintenance of racial segregation was a "conservative" position in the early 1960s and many of segregationist scientists were proud to identify themselves as "conservative". However, not all of them did or could possibly be identified as "hereditarians". "Biological determinism" was not a necessary condition for a scientist to argue for racial segregation. Indeed, to build as strong a case as possible, it was necessary for segregationist scientists to both embrace essential and biological differences between the races and the contrary position, that biological differences were irrelevant to the scientific case for segregation. Part of the complexity of historical story is how segregationist scientists fashioned a case for segregation from both the science of an earlier era, that with assumed that racial differences were real and enduring and the science of the time, which argued that racial differences were not enduring but merely the product of American society. By exploring this complexity I hope to dissolve further the false dichotomy that assumes all hereditarians are racists and all environmentalists are egalitarians. If historians want to use the past as a weapon against racial policies that they view as regressive, it does not help to automatically equate "racism" with "hereditarianism". The further problematizing of biological determinism opens up significant questions for historians of science. Where Kamin and Gould used social construction as a bludgeon against the science of an earlier era, showing how scientist's racist and nativist beliefs interfered with the proper interpretation of scientific data, they seem unaware to the extent that, with a few notable exceptions (Glass, 1986; Richards, 1998), recent work on the history of scientific racism has shown that the scientific "antiracism" no less than "scientific racism" is a social construction (Barkan, 1992; Degler, 1991; Provine 1973, 1986; Samelson, 1978). Sounding much like Carleton Putnam and Henry Garrett, historians of science have argued that the increase in number of Jewish scientists was a significant factor in the abandonment of scientific racism, that the changing political climate of the United States was far more important than scientific data in rejecting white supremacy, and that the revulsion to Nazi excesses was the real reason so many scientists "changed their minds" about the relative value of the races. In making these arguments, have historians of science denied the "objectivity of science" to those working toward a more racially just world? Leila Zenderland asks The central problem can be stated simply: how ought one to challenge some of the errors and oversimplifications evident in popular studies such as Gould's Mismeasure of Man without being driven into the waiting arms of Herrnstein and Murray and The Bell Curve? (1997, 138) One of the problems raised by Zenderland's question is that at least since the 1960s, most historical literature on race was been "based on the objective truth of scientific antiracism" (Novick, 1988, 348). Historians who write on the "social construction of race" in fields outside the history of science often take as their starting point the "objective truth" of the equality of the races. One of the leading figures in the history of the social construction of race in the law, Ian F. Haney Lopez, begins his discussion with the bald statement, that "Biological race is an illusion" and hence race must instead by a "social construction" (1995, 200). In a similar vein, labor historian David Roedinger writes that "race is given meaning through the agency of human beings in concrete historical and social contexts, and is not a biological or natural category (1994, 2). Writers such as Haney Lopez and Roedinger seem unaware that current scholarship in the history of science has shown that their confident assertion that race is not a biological category is itself a social construction. It can no longer be a safe starting point for anti-racist writers to assert that race is not a natural category because we have not yet worked out the implications that antiracism is not founded in "objective science." I hope to begin to work out an answer for this fundamental problem in the history of science. 2. Reconceptualizing Racist Ideology. My study of the IAAEE will show how we need to redefine our understanding of racial ideology. Building on the work of George Frederickson, I hope to offer a fresh understanding of how racist ideology can be reshaped to meet changing social conditions. Fundamental to this new understanding is a rejection of the notion that a necessary condition of racist ideology is the belief in innate racial differences. One of the great strengths of the IAAEE's defense of segregation was that it did not depend on notions of biological superiority of the white race, allowing IAAEE scientists to deny that they were "racists". Race is now an accepted category for historical analysis despite the fact that historians seldom define what it is they mean by the term. Jacqueline Jones admits "In the late twentieth-century, historians tend to use the word `race' in rather imprecise ways" (1998, 221). Part of the problem is, of course, is that we live in a time when "race" is often thought not to exist. A glance at the appended bibliography will reveal that the word "race" is often encapsulated by "scare quotes" by writers in the 1990s, warning the reader that it is not a "real" category.We live in a paradoxical time, then, for many academic writers race is not real but "racism" definitely is. Racism, more than race, is seen as a real, pervading social phenomenon. It is curious then that, much writing on racism is beset with problems of definition (Webster, 1992). Recent writers on the history of racial ideology in Western thought and society attempt offer us more clear definitions of racism. These writers stress that racism is a recent phenomenon, quite different from forms of subjection and oppression that existed before the late 18^th century (Allen, 1994, 1997; Hannaford, 1996; Smedley 1999; contrast with Gossett, 1963; Davis, 1966). Smedley provides a convenient listing of the relevant elements of racial ideology that distinguishes it from "mere" ethnocentrism: first, humans can be classified into discrete biological groups; second, these groups can be arranged hierarchically; third physical characteristics of human beings are indications of their inner mental and spiritual qualities; fourth, these qualities are inherited; fifth and finally, these racial groupings are fixed and cannot be transcended (1999, 28). While valuable, these notions of racial ideology do not seem do be adequate to capture all facets of racist thought. A notable example is the writings of Dinesh D'souza who firmly discounts genetic differences between the races. Hence, D'souza could not be categorized as a racist, since he believes racial differences are cultural and not biological in origin.Indeed, D'souza's argument is much like that of A. James Gregor. Both argue that the cultural differences between African Americans and white Americans justify differential treatment. D'souza believes that racial discrimination against African Americans by white Americans is rational and justified and favors rolling back portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (1995). The question then becomes, despite the fact that D'souza rejects many of the tenants of racist ideology, those about inherited mental and moral differences, can he be branded a racist? Similarly, can those within the IAAEE who rejected innate biological inferiority, such as van den Haag and Gregor, be considered racist? The question is vital, for if segregation could be defended outside a racist ideology our understanding of how Jim Crow functioned as a social system needs to be seriously rethought for segregation would not be a function of white supremacy. One historian who has addressed this dilemma is George Fredrickson. Fredrickson notes the argument of D'souza who rejects biological determinism in favor of a cultural argument mirrors the racism of the South African regime which founded apartheid on the basis of cultural, rather than biological differences. Fredrickson concludes that our conceptualization of the ideology of racism needs to be reformulated. "If the term racism is to apply" Fredrickson argues, " its association with the specific form of biological determinism that justified slavery and segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be regarded as fortuitous rather then essential" (1997, 81-82). Rejecting biological determinism while maintaining that "cultural" determinism can be the basis of a racist ideology allows us to see how segregationist scientists could meld together such a coherent position from seeming contradictory elements. One example is the tension between the notion that people have a natural tendency to associate with members of their own race and the notion that integration would inevitably lead to race mixing. Both the idea that segregation reflects the "natural order" of the world and that the threat of miscegenation is high were long staples of white supremacist discourse (Vander Zanden, 1959; Williamson, 1984). These twin claims were given voice within the community of segregationist scientists by Putnam's continued claims that school integration would "inevitably" lead to miscegenation and Gregor's claims that race prejudice is a naturally occurring phenomenon and the races do not naturally commingle. One of the functions of ideology, especially racial ideology is to smooth over and explain away contradictions in the world (Fields, 1982).I hope to demonstrate how segregationist scientists maintained a united front because they all were operating from an ideology of white supremacy. 3. Racist ideology within the American Ideologies of Freedom and Equality. My history of the IAAEE will add to a growing literature of the flexibility of "The American Creed". By closely examining how segregationist scientists preached inequality in a fashion that they saw as consistent with American ideals of freedom and equality. More than half a century after it was formulated; Gunnar Myrdal's framing of "An American Dilemma" remains a puzzle for American society. The dilemma, as framed by Myrdal, was between American's professed allegiance to the "American Creed" of freedom and equality versus their racist practice with disenfranchised and discriminated against African American citizens (1944). While still respected as a significant work, sociologists of race relations have moved beyond Myrdal's analysis of American race relations and into new lines of research (Clayton, 1996; Jackson, 1990; Steinberg, 1995). Myrdal envisioned a constant psychological struggle within the minds of white Americans between their belief in freedom and equality and their racist beliefs, which denied freedom and equality to racial minorities. Some historians have attempted to use Myrdal's ideas to explore the history of race relations (Koval, 1970). However, one of the chief functions of a racist ideology is to define the world in such a way as to keep social benefits flowing to those in power (Appiah, 1990).Hence, one of the chief functions of a racist ideology would be to define ideas such as "equality" and "freedom" in such a way to insure an inequitable distribution of power and resources.Indeed recent historical works have found that freedom and equality have been defined by white elites to easily exclude African Americans (Condit and Lacaites, 1993; Foner, 1998). Within the context of the present project, I hope to add to this literature on the shifting meanings of "freedom" and "equality". For example, segregationists often argued that "equality" was not a constitutional value and, in fact, was a communistic value that was in direct conflict with "freedom". This was one of the chief arguments advanced by attorney R. Carter Pittman, the chief attorney in the trials I wish to examine. Pittman argued that only in the constitutions of communist countries was "equality" guaranteed. In a free country, however, equality interfered with freedom. Some people were naturally more gifted than other and, in a free society, would naturally achieve more. Hence court decisions based on "equality" were suspect (1954, 1956, 1960). Segregationist scientists were eager to supply scientific proof on the inequality of humankind. Science had proven the inequality of the races, the segregationist scientists declared, and that inequality does not conflict with our basic democratic precepts, which should focus on liberty as a fundamental value. The ideology of scientific racism, which proclaimed the fundamental inequality of the races and the ideology of "the American Creed" could be joined without fear of contradiction. In the proposed study I hope to show in some detail how this maneuver was accomplished. 4. The Science of Race in a Court of Law. Long ago, philosopher Stephen Toulmin claimed that science and the law were two different "fields of argument" each with its own standards for evidence and reasoning. Toulmin argued that what counts as a cogent argument in one field may not count as a cogent argument in another field (1958). More recent work has explored the complex interaction of science in the legal system, often noting that science fits only poorly in the processes of the law (Goldberg, 1994; Jasanoff, 1995). I have made my own contributions to this literature in my work on the Brown case. In that work, I noted how scientists could only function within the legal system by adhering to self-professed standards of scientific objectivity. This adherence resulted in a paradox: by remaining distant from the actual litigation process scientists were able to become more effective advocates within that process (Jackson, 1998). My current project will open up new aspects of the interaction of science and the law. First, it will shed new light on how the science of race has fared in American courts of law. Historians have noted that one of the struggles social science has had in American culture is the difficulty in getting people to replace their "common sense" about the social world with "expert knowledge" as provided by social scientists (Morowski and Hornstein, 1991). This problem was particularly acute in a court of law when scientists would be called as expert witnesses to provide testimony on race relations. Courts consistently refused to substitute scientific understanding of race for "common sense" understandings (Haney Lopez, 1996; Pascoe, 1996). For the cases, scientists were providing scientific evidence that supported common sense notions of race in the American South. "Everybody knew" in the South that African Americans were not as smart, industrious, or trustworthy as white Americans, hence the scientific testimony to that effect would be welcomed by the District Courts. Because the appellate courts were more insulated from the segregationist establishment of the South, the scientific arguments would be much less persuasive there and the rule of law as laid down by Brown much more so. My study will add to the literature of the interaction between science and the law in an additional way. I will show how segregationist scientists took advantage of the two exemplars of objectivity in American society: science and the law. The court system provided the perfect venue for segregationist scientists because it allowed them to take advantage of their minority status within the scientific community. Segregationist scientists knew that their views did not reflect those of the vast majority of their scientific colleagues, indeed several professional scientific associations drew up formal resolutions of condemnation of segregationist science. However, as the segregationist scientists were found of saying, scientific truths were not decided by majority vote but rather by the cogency of scientific arguments. As the anti-majoritarian branch of government, segregationist scientists believed, the court system provided perfect venue for them to put forth their case and let the court decide if the evidence was sound and the conclusions worthy (Armstrong, Crutchfield, Hoy, and Kuttner, 1963). The segregationist scientists felt that judges, as experts in sifting evidence and discovering truth, would prove that segregation was scientifically justified. I hope to explore in some depth how this twin facets of the "objectivity" of the law and the "objectivity" of science were melded in these cases. The objectivity of these institutions was particularly important for upper-class defenders of segregation. In his study of the Citizen's Councils, Neil McMillen noted that many white southerners had an obsession with respectability. Many upper-class southerners wanted to defy integration, but also wanted to distance themselves from the violence and destructiveness of the Ku Klux Klan and other militant branches of the massive resistance movement. (McMillen, 1971). Litigation offered one road to respectability, as violence and threats were put aside in favor of reasoned discourse within an accepted legal forum (Goldfield, 1990). Layered over the respectability offered by the courts was the respect garnered by science. Science, as a value-neutral, apolitical institution had the ability to transform highly emotional issues of human differences into one of objective reality, immune from moral criticism (Rose, 1992). Hence the prospect of embracing both the neutrality of science and the neutrality of law offered segregationists a unique opportunity to claim the mantle of objective truth. C. Current State of the Proposed Study. The materials that will be examined in this study fall into three broad categories: published works of the historical actors, legal materials from the trials and appeals process, and unpublished papers from archival sources. This section outlines what has been accomplished and what remains to be done for each of these categories. Published Works. As the appended bibliography should demonstrate, I have gathered much of the material published by the segregationist scientists and the segregationist attorneys. Legal Materials: The legal materials needed for this study include briefs submitted to the Court for the trials and the testimony offered by the expert witnesses. The Clerks of the District Courts have informed me that briefs submitted at the District level were regularly destroyed. However one of the cases, Stell v. Savannah was appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and I have retrieved the briefs for that case. The testimony by the expert witnesses is available from the Clerks of the Federal District Courts. I have the testimony for the Evers and Stell trial already and will have the testimony for the remaining trials in hand soon. Unpublished Materials: I have collected material from the following archival collections: Duke University Archives, Duke University, Durham NC: Earnest Sevier Cox Papers Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto CA: Nathaniel Weyl Papers H. Keith Thompson Papers Right Wing Collection Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC: Margaret Mead Papers NAACP Papers National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: Carleton S. Coon Papers Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC: Wesley Critz George Papers Stanford University Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto CA: William S. Shockley Papers I would like to visit the following collections as well: 1. Geneticists Papers at the American Philosophical Society. Theodosius Dobzhansky and L.C. Dunn were two scientists who took the threat posed by segregationist scientists seriously. By examining their papers it may be possible to see how "mainstream" scientists worked against segregationists. 2. Papers of Clarence Oliver. University of Texas geneticist Clarence Oliver was on the IAAEE executive board. While he did not publish extensively on segregation, letters I have recovered from the George papers indicate he was quite active behind the scenes. There is a large collection of his papers open for researchers at the University of Texas that could provide important information on the inner workings of the IAAEE. D. Final form of the proposed study. I have attached a proposed table of contents for the book.IAAEE's battle to overturn Brown would be of interest to historians of science, historians of the American South, legal historians and African American historians. 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Savannah, 220 F.Supp. 667 (1963) From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:13:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:13:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: There's no justice Message-ID: John Gray: There's no justice The Times Literary Supplement, 1.4.20 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2103966&window_type=print EQUALITY. By Alex Callinicos. 160pp. Oxford: Polity. ?40 (paperback, ?11.99). TLS ?38; ?11.49. - 0 7456 2324 7 Spectres at the feast: Rawls and Marx are unwelcome in the new Labour Party It is only during the past thirty years that political philosophy has been ruled by the strange idea of a theory of justice. From Aristotle onwards, philosophers have tried to find reasons for our judgments about justice, but most have believed that when we differ about what it demands, it is not a theory that we require. What we need then is politics - a practical activity in which history, sentiment and the sense of belonging in a common enterprise are at least as important as any kind of theoretical reasoning. With the ascendancy of an American orthodoxy in which political philosophy is viewed as a branch of jurisprudence, however, the centre of gravity of the subject has shifted. No longer do philosophers aim to improve the political reasoning of ordinary citizens. Instead, they see their task as providing a body of principles which can be interpreted by a court. In this view, best represented in John Rawls's deeply meditated and intricately reasoned, yet supremely parochial and unhistorical book, A Theory of Justice (1971), politics is redundant. Philosophers supply principles dictating the scope of individual liberty and the distribution of social goods; judges apply them. Little if anything of importance remains for political decision. Rawls calls his theory "political liberalism", but it is more accurately described as a species of anti political legalism. Rawls's work deserves credit for reviving political philosophy after a long period of intellectual neglect, but the effect of the orthodoxy he established has been to render the subject politically irrelevant. As he originally conceived it, his theory was far from being a purely academic exercise. It did not seek merely to demonstrate the cogency of a particular view of justice. Its aim was practical: to secure public agreement on what justice demands. Its actual result has been virtually the opposite. Except in the 1980s, when one or two figures in the ill-starred Social Democratic Party briefly flirted with it, Rawls's conception of justice has never been taken up by practising politicians. On the other hand, it has become the default position of philosophers whose political beliefs have been made redundant by history. Though it is no longer an unchallenged orthodoxy, A Theory of Justice has an iconic status in contemporary political philosophy. It is easily forgotten that, when the book was published, most philosophers viewed the very idea of a theory of justice with suspicion. Under the influence of Isaiah Berlin and others, they believed - rightly, in my view - that the claims of justice are simply too disparate and conflicting to be theorized in any very systematic fashion. Rawls's work captivated philosophers, because, for a time, it seemed to exorcize these sceptical doubts. But its hold over the subject had another, less obvious source. It conferred the imprimatur of reason on egalitarian values. A distinctive feature of Rawls's work is its method of "reflective equilibrium", whereby conceptions of justice are tested against intuitive moral responses. The conception of justice which emerges when Rawls applies his method treats the resources of society, including the individual talents of its members, as collective assets, which may be redistributed according to the dictates of an ideal of equality. But what is the political relevance of this conclusion? True, as with any moral question, one can begin to reason about justice only on the basis of one's own intuitive judgments. But as John Stuart Mill recognized, the danger of intuitionism in philosophy is that it sanctifies conventional opinion. Rawls's method treats the egalitarian prejudices of a group of Anglo-American philosophers as the touchstone of fairness. But why should the intuitions of a few academics have any public legitimacy? A Theory of Justice became an icon in the academy, because it allowed these awkward questions to go unanswered - and indeed unasked. It enabled Rawls and his followers to delude themselves that their work was politically significant, when the best that can be said of his theory is that it has a certain charm when viewed as a transcendental deduction of the Labour Party, circa 1963. Alex Callinicos writes in the afterword of Equality: "Egalitarian liberalism has, since the appearance of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice nearly a generation ago, greatly improved our philosophical understanding of the nature of distributive justice." This resoundingly commonplace statement does less than justice to the exceptional interest of the book. Callinicos distinguishes himself from the majority of recent writers by his highly developed awareness of the historical and political context of philosophical inquiry. This is not surprising, since he takes his intellectual bearings as much from Marx as from Rawls. Marx knew that we must understand the origins and uses that are made of political ideas if we are to evaluate them critically. In accordance with this admirable Marxian precept, Callinicos does a good deal more than consider how the idea of equality has been discussed among philosophers over the past thirty years. He situates that discussion in the history of Europe since the seventeenth century, showing how it arises from the fact that, in modern societies, no form of power can be self-validating. More topically, he considers the uses to which the idea of equality has been put by Labour in the last few years, arguing that the ideal of equal opportunity advocated by Gordon Brown marks a break with an older, more radical and - according to Callinicos -more defensible conception. Equality is a topical and provocative book. It is also a deeply muddled and politically fatuous book. Like others who have abandoned Marxism for the more mundane pieties of Anglo-American liberalism, Callinicos succeeds only in combining their worst elements. Nowhere in Equality is there anything reminiscent of the sharply realistic analysis of social forces prescribed (and intermittently practised) by Marx. Quite to the contrary, Marx's blankly utopian project of "an efficient and democratic nonmarket form of economic co-ordination" is reaffirmed on the book's last page, as if the ruinous history of Marxian socialism in the twentieth century had never occurred, or had all been a ghastly mistake. (Callinicos does not interpret the Soviet collapse as showing the failings of central economic planning. Not a bit of it. If anything, he seems to think, it demostrates the risks of market socialism.) At the same time, precisely because he has relinquished Marx's attempt to link radical ideals of equality with the aspirations of large social groups, Callinicos falls in with the intuitionist method of recent Rawlsian orthodoxy. As in Rawls, so in Callinicos, "principles" are tested for consistency with "our" intuitive judgments, and "concepts" are inspected to see how they square with what "we" are inclined to say. At no point does Callinicos seriously consider how this method connects with the realities and possibilities of the present time. To be sure, as Marxists were fond of saying when they still imagined history was on their side, this is no accident. Callinicos cannot link the radical egalitarian ideals he defends with the aspirations of any social class. It is not only that no actually existing working class anywhere in the world shows the slightest interest in them. Worse -for Callinicos - the party that might once have been regarded as their political vehicle in Britain has rejected them irrevocably. Without a historical agent to which they can be attached, Callinicos is reduced to spinning his egalitarian ideals from thin air. If Equality has an interest lacking in much recent political philosophy, it does not come from Callinicos's analysis of equality, which is pedestrian in the extreme. It comes from his furious animus against Labour, which is angrily castigated as having sold out to the capitalist forces of darkness. Gordon Brown's effort to develop a conception of equality more suited to the present day is given parti-cularly short shrift. Brown - Callinicos fumes - "is a leading member of a government that has dedicated itself to avoiding giving offence to the rich and privileged . . . . If New Labour does obtain a second term, the forces of reaction and privilege will be able to rest easy in the know-ledge that they are the masters." Here Callinicos voices an uncomprehending indignation frequently found among members of an old academic Left who have been left stranded and gawping by the political developments of the past twenty-odd years. It is not only that Thatcher's early governments finished off old-style social democracy in Britain. Worse, the Labour leadership confirmed on its return to power that it had shed any commitment to equality as that was once understood by R. H. Tawney or even Tony Crosland. The party which embodied Rawls's egalitarian intuitions and the remaining hopes of the Old Left has ceased to exist. This is not to say there are not important con-tinuities between that party and the party of Blair and Brown. On the contrary, after nearly four years in power, "New Labour" looks in many ways rather like "Old Labour". Its positive attitude to public spending and its commitment to liberal policies such as legal equality for gays are clear links with earlier Labour administrations. But there are two all-important differences. Labour now has a secure reputation for economic competence, and its re-election depends on retaining the support of Tory voters who switched to them in numbers for the first time in 1997. Changes in Labour thinking reflect these facts. Gordon Brown's defence of maximal, comprehensive, lifelong equality of opportunity marks a shift with the party's past, but it can be defended by reference to parallel shifts in the real world. Plausibly, equal opportunity is the version of equality best suited to a society such as ours. A fixed pattern cannot be imposed on the distribution of goods in society when continuous technological innovation has thrown the economy into flux. Nor - and this is a point of the greatest importance - is egalitarian redistribution demanded by any widespread notion of fairness. The difficulties of Brown's conception come not so much with its positive content as from what it leaves out. Doing well in the labour market can never be the whole of social justice, if only because there will always be many people who find themselves outside it. The sick, the disabled and the old who are poor are owed resources, whether or not they return to the labour market. They are owed help, not in virtue of any principle of distribution, but because their well-being will be damaged if they are not helped - and so will be the cohesion of society. Callinicos's attack on Brown is mere rant. He comes closest to making a valid criticism of Labour's recent thinking when he argues that the government's basic contradiction "lies in its attempt to combine egalitarian aims with a neoliberal economic strategy". But here as elsewhere he fails to make crucial distinctions. The main threat to the government's objectives comes not from its acceptance of the market economy, nor from its rejection of older ideals of equality, but from a major dislocation in world markets. A sharp protectionist recession would blow Labour's strategies badly off course. But this is testimony to the instability of global laissez-faire, not the inherent evils of capitalism. Like the neo-liberals against whom he rails, Callinicos writes as if today's deregulated markets express capitalism's unalterable essence. But throughout practically all of its history, capitalism has gone with extensive government intervention in the economy, and it will surely do so in the future. At the end of the afterword to Equality, Callinicos writes that changing the present state of things will require "a revival in Utopian imagination". It is a refreshingly candid admission, for Rawls's legalism and Marx's project of a planned economy run up against an intractable fact that makes them both unrealizable. Human values have always been dissonant, but rarely more clearly so than they are today. The fundamental error of recent political philosophy is to imagine that conflicts of value can be marginalized by adopting an agreed idea of justice. Curiously, this is the same mistake that Marx made when he prophesied that the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things. In bringing together this pair of Utopians to mount a ranting attack on Labour, Alex Callinicos has forgotten the reality that political philosophy exists to understand. It's the politics, stupid. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 14 01:13:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:13:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: The global mirage Message-ID: John Gray: The global mirage The Times Literary Supplement, 2.6.7 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2077813&window_type=print THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM. Nationalism and economic growth. Liah Greenfeld. 541pp. Harvard University Press. ?30.95. 0 674 00614 3. Marxists and market liberals like to see themselves as deadly adversaries, but they have a remarkably similar view of the world. Both subscribe to a version of determinism in which economic forces are the motor of history, and nationalism and religion are secondary or marginal factors. Both look forward to a universal civilization in which the cultural identities of the past have withered away, or else retreated into private life. If Marxists and neo-liberals differ, it is on a point of detail - the question of which is the more productive system, central planning or the market economy - that history has now settled. In their crudely rationalistic understanding of history, politics and culture, and their quasi-religious faith that a radiant future is near at hand, the two ideologies are at one. As Liah Greenfeld puts it in the opening chapter of The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and economic growth, "Curiously, Marxism, abandoned in the lands traditionally dedicated to its propagation and proved wrong by experience, is remarkably similar to the dominant Anglo-American view of the world." The affinities between the two philosophies are not confined to the textbook and the lecture hall. They are strikingly similar in practice. Both have supported massive programmes of social engineering, while steadfastly denying mounting evidence of their human costs and perverse consequences. Like the Communists in the 1930s who cast a benignly sightless eye on the millions of lives ruined or ended by Stalinism, Western free-marketeers have chosen to ignore the vast social havoc and personal misery that has resulted from neoliberal shock therapy in post-Communist Russia. At the same time, both Marxists and neoliberals have been thoroughly unprepared for the actual course of events. The disintegration of the Soviet state was very largely a result of the power of nationalism - a force that neither ideology has ever managed to encompass. It was not its manifest economic failures or its repression of intellectual dissidents, its endemic corruption or the devastation it wrought on the environment that brought the Soviet Union down. It was nationalist popular resistance in Poland and the Baltic states, together with defeat in Afghanistan and the unintended consequences of Gorbachev's far-fetched schemes of economic reform. The centrality of nationalist movements in the events leading up to the Soviet collapse was not perceived in the West, which - in a fateful coincidence whose damaging consequences we are still suffering - was dominated by a free-market ideology as primitive and reductive in its view of nationalism as Marxism has ever been, if not more so. In neoliberal ideology, modern capitalism embodies the moral culture of individualism. By contrast, Greenfeld maintains that modern capitalism owes its existence to nationalism. In a tour de force of social theory and historical interpretation, she argues that modern economies came about not through the emancipation of the rational, utility-maximizing individual but from the emergence of national consciousness. Contrary to Marxist and neoliberal determinism, there is nothing inevitable about economic growth. Like nationalism itself, it is a historical accident. Taking England, France, Germany, Japan and the United States as case studies, Greenfeld provides historical evidence for the thesis that "the spirit of capitalism", which generates economic growth, is a by-product of the collective rivalry inherent in nationalism. The Spirit of Capitalism echoes Max Weber's celebrated argument that modern capitalism is a product of "the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture". According to Weber, market exchange can be found in all societies, but in capitalism it is organized so that it can be subject to exact calculation, and only in capitalism is economic life oriented towards continuous growth. Famously, Weber suggested that the emergence of growth-oriented economies owed much to Protestantism, which supposedly put a high value on worldly success. Greenfeld believes this was not an unreasonable hypothesis for Weber to have advanced; even so, citing a number of studies showing that early Protestantism did not revalorize economic activity in the ways Weber suggested, she rejects it. The spirit of capitalism flows from the collective sentiment of nationality, she believes, not from religion. Here Greenfeld builds on an earlier work of her own, Nationalism: Five roads to modernity (1992), to argue that nationalism signifies much more than the post-Westphalian sovereign state. It is the basis of modern society. "Nationalism", she writes, "is a form of social consciousness, a way of cognitive and moral organization of reality. As such it represents the foundation of the moral order of modern society, the source of its values, the framework of its characteristic - national - identity, and the basis of social integration in it." The Spirit of Capitalism is an immensely refreshing book, not least in its destructive impact on the determinism that underpins recent neoliberal theories and policies. Three implications of Greenfeld's argument are worth stressing. Firstly, the link between capitalism and individualism, taken for granted by Marxists and neoliberals, is an accident of history, not a universal law. A culture of individualism may have been present in the first exemplar of a modern economy, seventeenth-century England, and successfully transplanted into countries such as the US and Australia. It did not exist in anything like the same form in France or Germany, later converts to capitalism, and it was wholly absent in the most astonishing conversion to capitalism - that of nineteenth-century Japan. By the start of the twentieth century, the chief feature of capitalism - sustained economic growth -was securely established in countries where moral cultures varied enormously, and which have shown no tendency to converge on Anglo-American individualism since that time.) The strength of capitalism is due to its successful reshaping of individual motivation on a new collective model. The vulgar Whig view that the triumph of market capitalism is owed to the superiority of its individualist values, which was so stridently trumpeted in the fast-receding go-go days of the 1990s, is a myth. Secondly, Greenfeld's book deals a death-blow to the legend that there is anything uniquely rational about the type of economic activity that produces economic growth. Quite to the contrary, Greenfeld - following Weber - argues persuasively that utility-maximizing agents would not engage in the pursuit of unending growth. Economic growth is a benefit to nations, not necessarily to individuals. A rational utility-maximizer would find nothing compelling in a life of incessant striving. Indeed, in terms of pure economic self-interest, such a life is plainly irrational. As Greenfeld puts it: A Homo economicus, motivated solely by self-interest and rational in the sense of strictly economic rationality . . . could not be attracted to profit for profit's sake - which, we are reminded by Weber, "from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, must appear entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational" - and thus could not find the idea of economic growth reasonable. The spread of capitalism from England to France and Germany, and beyond Europe to the United States and Japan, cannot be explained by any increase in the economic rationality of individuals. It is as a result of the increasing power of a mode of collective consciousness in which individual economic rationality is subordinated to the power and dignity of the nation. These two points suggest a third regarding the pretensions of economics. At present, the expertise of economists is more widely sought by governments than that of any other social scientists; but the prestige of economics as a discipline derives chiefly from its remoteness from any actual society. Economists have aped natural scientists in their fondness for mathematical modelling, but, unlike those of natural scientists, the models of economists are notably lacking in predictive power. This is only to be expected, since the very respects in which economics as currently practised most resembles the natural sciences are those in which it is most humanly unrealistic. In the real world, human beings do not maximize or optimize the satisfaction of their wants; they stumble along, their actions guided not by any calculation of utility but by their sense of self-identity, the meaning or lack of it they find in their daily activities, and whatever solidarity they can call up with others. Economic life is not a free-standing sphere of activity, but an outgrowth of the religious, political and moral life of those who engage in it. This fact, so strikingly absent from the minds of most economists today, was a truism to Adam Smith. It is hardly accidental that his great inquiry into the nature and causes of economic growth should be entitled The Wealth of Nations. Like other practitioners of political economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in sharp contrast with most economists nowadays, Smith had a highly developed sense of history, and rarely mistook his own theoretical constructions for social facts. Writing of the state of the economics profession in the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century, Greenfeld observes: The idea of science among American intellectuals who professed themselves economists could not reflect the nature of their social subject matter, of which they were ignorant; nor could it reflect a deep understanding of the activity of natural scientists, of which they were ignorant as well. One might add that the conception of the method appropriate to the study of economic activity to which the majority of economists subscribe today does not reflect a familiarity with the history of their own subject - of which they are also ignorant. By returning the study of capitalism to the intellectual disciplines where it belongs - sociology and history - Greenfeld's book deserves to bring about a paradigm shift in the understanding of economic growth. That is not to say her argument must be accepted as it stands. She is right to argue that capitalism is not the product of any one religion, but it seems cavalier to suggest (as she sometimes comes close to doing) that religion has not been a major influence on economic development. There are doubtless many reasons why Russia has not managed to achieve a modern market economy, but the anti-capitalist moral culture of Russian Orthodoxy must surely be important among them. On the other hand, one should not make the mistake of thinking that Russia never experienced a period of rapid economic growth - it did precisely that towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is therefore a reasonable question why this achievement was not sustained. Greenfeld's answer is that the sense of national identity in Russia was not linked with success in economic competition with other countries as it was in England, France and Germany. But one might equally well reply that national consciousness was never as highly developed in Russia as it was in England or France, say. After all, Russia remained a land empire, unlike these other countries, and the Russian State remains to this day an imperial construction. If Russia has not achieved sustained economic growth, one reason may be that it has not become a nation state. A salient fact about our current circumstances is that in much of the world the modern State has collapsed. A monumental project of nation-building is under way in China, which is reflected in the rapid economic growth that has been recorded in some parts of the country. But in much of post-Communist Russia and parts of former Yugoslavia, large areas of Africa, much of the Middle East and parts of Asia such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is nothing resembling an effective modern nation state. In any future that can be realistically foreseen, it is extremely unlikely that there will be nation states in these parts of the world. If economic growth is a by-product of national consciousness, their future is bleak. Greenfeld comments that much of what is seen as globalization "is a reflection of the specific American tradition - its peculiar business ethic, which condones and encourages competition on an individual basis, and which is a product of the nature and development of American national consciousness". Greenfeld is right to note the absurdity of the belief that singularly American practices and values can be made universal. But her argument has wider, and - for some people, at least - more disturbing implications. The popular idea of globalization was based on the belief, propagated by neoliberal ideologues and endorsed by the majority of economists, that economic growth is a result of the adoption of free markets. Today's evangelists for globalization are at one with Marx's disciples in believing that history is a process of convergence on a single economic system. In this view, we are on the brink of a new era, in which the rising prosperity achieved by some capitalist countries over the past few centuries will be replicated worldwide. If Greenfeld is even half right, this is a delusion: global capitalism is a mirage, just like Communism. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jun 14 14:54:20 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:54:20 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Death of Mean Message-ID: <01C570B6.469229B0.shovland@mindspring.com> Starting some years ago, we started to hear a lot about "lean and mean" organizations. As a business person, I understand the value of lean organizations that generate more revenue for less cost. As a human, I have never understood the pairing of lean with "mean." This choice of words bespeaks a dark approach to dealing with the world. At least since Sun Tzu leaders have understood that their ultimate success depends on the willing cooperation of their followers. In the last two decades business has come to think that beating people up is the best way to get them to perform. The result is a corporate world peopled by foot-draggers who hang on because there are no other choices. This has resulted in the shortening of CEO tenures, and a downward spiral of declining profits and endless layoffs. How will we get out of this? Eventually the boards of public companies will see what has been going on and look for leaders with a more humanitarian bent. As to when this will happen, I have no idea. In terms of income and perks, things have never been better for the folks in the corner offices. For 80% of Americans, though, incomes are stagnant or declining. This is resulting in fewer purchases, and this will eventually show up in the P&L's of the meanies. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From isaacsonj at hotmail.com Tue Jun 14 16:11:37 2005 From: isaacsonj at hotmail.com (Joel Isaacson) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:11:37 -0400 Subject: FW: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes -- Basse's Comments Message-ID: I relayed our discussion to Nils Basse and following is his response: >From: "Nils P. Basse" >To: "'Joel Isaacson'" >Subject: RE: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes >Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:01:32 -0400 > >Hi Joel, > >I'm glad some people find my idea interesting - I agree with you, at the >moment this is extremely speculative and my approach is quite primitive, >we'll see if anything more develops, > >cheers Nils > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Joel Isaacson [mailto:isaacsonj at hotmail.com] > > Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:35 AM > > To: basse at psfc.mit.edu > > Subject: FW: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes > > > > > > FYI. Regards, -- jdi From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Jun 14 18:29:44 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:29:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage pool shrinking? In-Reply-To: <200506141800.j5EI0MR14245@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050614182944.85965.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Gerry says: >>I know way too many females post 30 who cannot find any likely prospects. Then again, there are many post 30 males who don't wish to enter the marriage scene. I think the problem is greater than "no one available". Maybe an examination of the "why" might enlighten the question.<< --Possibly because everyone has "issues" that contaminate relationships. Fundamentalists and very sensitive/shy people try to solve that problem by being very selective and not getting heavily involved until they are certain they've found the person they want. Others have sexual relationships that don't involve enough emotion to risk rejection or loss of face. Others get married early, discover that marriage isn't what they expected it to be, and leave when they can no longer handle the obligations and routines. In poor areas, many women find they have better earning potential than the men, and reject marriage because they can afford to. The perception that "all men are dogs" or that "all women are whores who want your money" can make a mess of things as well, with many people exhibiting "borderline" traits in relationships (swinging from "you are my god/goddess" to "you ruined my life", grandiosity and dashed expectations, etc). After a few rounds of that, a lot of people decide it's just safer and less draining to have less complex relationships. There are two ways to address that: either improve communication between the sexes and give them tools for preventing catastrophic rifts in relationships, or create a sense of being a tribe, with romantic relationships on a lower priority level. If a single relationship means everything, it's easier to get disillusioned when minor obstacles accumulate, and it's easier to explode in rage if you feel betrayed. Romantic triangles dramatically affect people's sense of status and belonging, and creating a sense of a tribal safety net might even things out and make relationships less volatile. I'm not sure how fear of nuclear war and terrorism will affect marriage patterns... will people marry as soon as they feel safe (maybe feeling restless later when less afraid) or will they avoid marriage in order to avoid the pain of loss? Michael __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Jun 14 20:24:46 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:24:46 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage pool shrinking? In-Reply-To: <20050614182944.85965.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050614182944.85965.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42AF3D0E.70305@earthlink.net> Michael, Here an alarming statistic: since 1970, the marriage rate is down by 35%. During this period we've viewed the impact of "feminism" on both the workplace and the classroom. We've also watched co-habitation for young people replacing traditional marriage vows and advances in birth control measures preventing the arrival of unplanned/unwanted offspring. Many women delay marriage until they finish their education and those entering a PhD program place their studies far ahead of birthing children. Medical advances allow even post-menopausal women to give birth, something clearly unheard of for past generations. Psychologically a 50% divorce rate has to have an enormous impact on young marriage especially since many divorced women with children fall into poverty. Your evaluation has sparked a discussion but in some circles could be seen as fairly naive. Nevertheless, it offers food for thought. Gerry Michael Christopher wrote: >Gerry says: > > >>>I know way too many females post 30 who cannot find >>> >>> >any likely prospects. Then again, there are many post >30 males who don't wish to enter the marriage >scene. I think the problem is greater than "no one >available". Maybe an examination of the "why" might >enlighten the question.<< > >--Possibly because everyone has "issues" that >contaminate relationships. Fundamentalists and very >sensitive/shy people try to solve that problem by >being very selective and not getting heavily involved >until they are certain they've found the person they >want. Others have sexual relationships that don't >involve enough emotion to risk rejection or loss of >face. Others get married early, discover that marriage >isn't what they expected it to be, and leave when they >can no longer handle the obligations and routines. In >poor areas, many women find they have better earning >potential than the men, and reject marriage because >they can afford to. The perception that "all men are >dogs" or that "all women are whores who want your >money" can make a mess of things as well, with many >people exhibiting "borderline" traits in relationships >(swinging from "you are my god/goddess" to "you ruined >my life", grandiosity and dashed expectations, etc). >After a few rounds of that, a lot of people decide >it's just safer and less draining to have less complex >relationships. > >There are two ways to address that: either improve >communication between the sexes and give them tools >for preventing catastrophic rifts in relationships, or >create a sense of being a tribe, with romantic >relationships on a lower priority level. If a single >relationship means everything, it's easier to get >disillusioned when minor obstacles accumulate, and >it's easier to explode in rage if you feel betrayed. >Romantic triangles dramatically affect people's sense >of status and belonging, and creating a sense of a >tribal safety net might even things out and make >relationships less volatile. > >I'm not sure how fear of nuclear war and terrorism >will affect marriage patterns... will people marry as >soon as they feel safe (maybe feeling restless later >when less afraid) or will they avoid marriage in order >to avoid the pain of loss? > >Michael > > > > > > >__________________________________ >Discover Yahoo! >Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! >http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:16:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:16:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Upstream: The Human Trinity Message-ID: The Human Trinity http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/psychology/trinity.html "....at least one mental character of the highest 'civic worth', namely intelligence, can be reliably measured and appears to be inherited." Reported (as a finding of McDougall, Burt and Flugel, 1907, from a study conducted at the Dragon School, Oxford) by Cyril BURT, 1952, Intelligence and Fertility _________________________________________________________________ "One of the few impressive achievements of the mental tester is to have succeeded in talking the general public into believing that it is possible to "measure intelligence" without being able to define it." P.H.SCHONEMANN, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer. _________________________________________________________________ "I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool." William BLAKE, Jerusalem. "I now think that there is some correlation between the most effective clever people and eventual spirituality.... Both Neumann [(1903-1957) who invented the modern computer and prevented Stalin being succeeded by Beria] and my daughter [by far the cleverest and best person in my immediate circle of family and friends] chuckled in the last stages of their cancer as they surprised their families by turning deeply religious." Norman MACRAE, 1989, Sunday Times, 24 xii The human trinity: The three consciousnesses of man. By Richard Atnally, William Paterson College of New Jersey _________________________________________________________________ Vol. 34, Mankind Quarterly, 01-01-1993, pp 3. _________________________________________________________________ Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience 388 . . . we see in all these instances most undoubted trinities, because they are wrought in ourselves, or are in ourselves, when we remember, look at or desire these things. . . . St. Augustine, On the Trinity 838 A pervasive idea in intellectual history has been the notion of threeness as a framework for understanding the world. Georges Dumezil held that the tripartite division was "an ancient habit of language and thought particular to Indo-European peoples" (Davis 33), and Duby followed in showing that "the tripartite conception" was one of " . . . those structural (or systemic) articulations of human experience, with their continuities and interruptions, which inform a cultural history running, in this case, from Indo-European antiquity to the French Revolution" (Bisson vii). The Indo-European influence no doubt affected Christianity profoundly. Commenting on the major human faculties, Augustine observed: "I would that men would consider these three, that are in themselves" (Confessions 113). The Greeks also felt early the force of threeness in history. "For, as the Pythagoreans say", noted Aristotle with approval, "the world and all that is in it is determined by the number three . . . (359)." Finally, as we shall see, the Renaissance was perhaps even more lavish in finding triplicities in things, and the tripartite concept was very much central to the Enlightenment and the modern period. Whence all this threeness? This essay will attempt a new perspective on this deep-rooted, universal concept, arguing that the multi-faceted implications of these usages reflect, indeed, a master three-fold structuring in the human mind and history, which I call the human trinity. In so doing I will sketch in broad outline a developmental theory of historical knowledge, related and indebted to the psychology of Jean Piaget. I begin at the location of a famous twentieth-century "trinity", the Los Alamos testing site. II On the modern horizon, filling it totally, is an image -- if ever an image dominated an age it is this one, more piercingly than even the cathedrals or the Virgin dominated the Middle Ages -- pressing our eyelids and sinking into our minds and hearts the terror of all the ages: the image of the nuclear cloud. Among the first and most famous responses to this image came from the man who more than anyone else helped to create it, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, on seeing the fireball, was reminded of these lines from the Bhagavad Gita, when Vishnu informs the hero of his power: If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky, That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, The shatterer of worlds. (qtd. in Lamont 3) This emotive response of mythic images from the architect of the atomic age, who in less than twenty-seven months at Los Alamos brought man over the edge of history, seems a startling paradox. The paradox goes deeper than the complexity of a scientist who was also a reader of Sanskrit religious epic. It is clear that Oppenheimer also joined in the general exclamation uttered at the time of the explosion: "It worked, my God, the damn thing worked!" (238). Indeed, Oppenheimer was more responsible than any other man for the identification the Los Alamos scientists made with the technological task of creating the bomb. "We were so intimately bound to it," said one of them, "in a technical sense that we felt it as a special triumph" (296). This pride in scientific achievement was summarized by General Groves, the military leader, who said, " Those of us who saw the dawn of the Atomic Age . . . know that when man is willing to make the effort, he is capable of accomplishing virtually anything" (308). With similar bravado, Oppenheimer noted: "A scientist cannot hold back progress because of fears of what the world will do with his discoveries" (267). But in his last talk before he left Los Alamos he expressed another mood: "Our pride must be tempered with a profound concern" (311). At this point both the mythic and technical attitudes gave way to a kind of third response, what might be called a moral and metaphoric one. "In some crude sense," Oppenheimer insisted, " which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose" (297). Similarly, at a meeting in President Truman's office, Oppenheimer explained, to the President's chagrin, "We have blood on our hands" (qtd. in Joravsky 7). Oppenheimer's multi-levelled reactions--mythic story, technical control, moral-metaphoric drama -- were by no means unique to him, although he voiced them with a striking eloquence. William L. Laurence, the science journalist, described the test in the terms of a "mighty thunder, " and with such Biblical language as "if the first man could have been present at the moment of Creation when God said, 'Let there be light,' he might have seen something very similar to what we have seen" (qtd. in Lifton 66). Indeed in a recent article on the effect of the atom bomb's "imagery of extinction," Robert J. Lifton argues that its association with religious imagery of Armageddon is "a central factor in the growth of fundamentalism" (64) throughout the world today. Truman himself was spellbound by the explosive force of the bomb and boasted technologically, "What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history" (qtd. in Lamont 267). But in announcing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, he cited theological guidance, pledging that the weapon would be used "in His ways and to His purposes" (qtd. in Canby C16). And much later in 1958, he described the bomb in terms of a Biblical drama: "The old Hebrew prophets presented the idea of the destruction of the world by fire after their presentation of a destruction by water. Well, that destruction is at hand unless the great leaders of the world prevent it" (A9). Churchill also received the news of the weapon with multiple levels of reference. "What was gunpowder'?. Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath" (qtd. in Lamont 261). Oppenheimer's ambivalence, however, came to epitomize in a special way the dilemma of modern man. This dilemma, an ageless one, but particularly exacerbated by modern prowess, is that there are within man forces -- emotional and moral -- representing fears of ever-increasing human knowledge while at the same time there are contradictory, technical forces so world-converting that man cannot turn his back on them. Oppenheimer's responses to the dawn of the atomic world mirrors, I think, a trinity of self by which man, individually and historically, constructs his responses to the world. This trinity consists of three layers of consciousness, the major elements of which are expressed through mythic story, metaphoric thinking and lastly, scientific reasoning. The idea of multi-leveled states in man and in history is cogently set forth by the art critic, E. H. Gombrich: No lesson of psychology is perhaps more important for the historian to absorb than this multiplicity of layers, the peaceful coexistence in man of incompatible attitudes. There never was a primitive stage of man when all was magic; there never happened an evolution which wiped out the earlier phase. What happens is rather that different institutions and different situations favor and bring out a different approach to which both the artist and his public learn to respond. But beneath these new attitudes, or mental sets, the old ones survive and come to the surface in play or earnest. (113-4) There is, I will argue, a kind of triple "mental set" socialized within us throughout our evolutionary history on the planet. This results in a trifocal vision -- whether we are conscious of it or not -not only in the signal efforts of human history such as in the great climax of scientific explorations, but also in our everyday dispositions and attitudes. Another critic of social transformations, Alvin Toffler, argues, in his The Third Wave, that every civilization "must explain -- whether through myth, metaphor or scientific theory -- how nature works (118). Essentially we possess three master mental sets, a mythic, metaphoric and measuring one. Since the scientific revolution in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, our "older" mythic and metaphoric minds have been relegated to what are now generally valued as less relevant areas of modern thought, namely religion, myth, and poetry. But, as we have grown to understand more and more in this century, unless we integrate these earlier modes of apprehending the world with our new technological ones, "the center cannot hold" (Yeats 3). In his The Invisible Pyramid Loren Eiseley best expressed this need for the modern mind to return not only to the ethical visions of "axial" thinkers of the first millennium B.C. like Buddha, Christ and Confucius, but to a primal "green world": Today man's mounting numbers and his technological power to pollute his environment reveal a single demanding necessity. . . . He must now incorporate from the wisdom of the axial thinkers an ethic not alone directed towards his fellows, but extended to the living world around him. (63). III If there is a triple sense of reality evolved and operating in man from the beginning to the present, evidence of a tripleness sensibilty should be found deeply and universally in his thoughts and works. Such is the case, as we proceed from the twentieth century scientist, back through the recesses of time and myth. On the cover of Joseph Campbell's magnificent collection of The Mythic Image appears a central representation -- what he calls a "sublime triadic image"-- of the three-headed Hindu god, Shiva (12). Three faces of the god appear on this larger-than-life statue: the profile on the left represents the male principle, on the right the female principle, and in the middle the union of these, and all other opposites of creation. Not only in Hindu statuary does this tripleness appear; in the Bhagavad Gita the face of the god, Vishnu, is presented as a flaming fire before which the "triple world trembles" (Edgerton 111). In Buddhist art, too, at the Horyu-ji temple in Naira, Japan, there is a triple presentation (the "Shaka triad") of deities -- three seated Buddhas dominate the inner, quiet sanctuary of the Kondo (Bunsaku 20-6). Surrounding this central shrine are numerous other triple figures flanked by accompanying standing or sitting Bodhisattvas. According to ancient accounts, similar triadic godships existed in Egypt, where Osiris supposedly had three sons - Anubis, Macedon, Hercules, Aegyptius (qtd. in Wind 250); and in nearby Persia, where Plutarch reported a Chaldean trinity consisting of OhrmazdMithra-Ahriman (250). If tripleness is a major theme in Egypt and the Indo-European East its presence in the Indo-European West is even more profound. The Christian Trinity became the traditional centerpiece of Western religion, but earlier in time, there were, according to Edgar Wind, no less than "120 triadic groups in Greek myth and ritual" (248). Major among these were the Three Fates, the Three Graces, the Three Goddesses (Aphrodite, Hera, Athena) who appealed to Paris's "judgement" and thereby instigated the Trojan War, the triple-faced goddesses Diane and Hecate (249-51), and moving back into archaic times, the threefold Moon Goddess described by Robert Graves in The White Goddess as the source of popular religious ceremonies throughout the prehistoric Mediterranean world (70). Not only is the trinity notion pervasive throughout religious belief systems; it is at the heart of major philosophical, psychological and social structurings. In the Western philosophical tradition we see this in the pivotal figures of Plato, and Aristotle, as well as in the earlier, more Eastern thought of Pythagoras. In Plato's Dialogues the idea of a tripartite division of the soul plays a key role, particularly in the Republic, where the rational principle rules over the passionate, making it its ally, and both principles in turn rule the "concupiscent" (353-4). For Plato, the order of the state and the individual demand these three principles be harmoniously integrated by the just man: . . . he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals- -when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act. (355) This "three-souls" moral doctrine is also essential to Plato's vision of reason's sovereignty and the soul's ascent to the heavens which appears in the Timaeus (476) and the Phaedrus (the "noble rider-chariot" metaphor) (124). The concept of three-souls itself harks back, according to John Burnet, to a "primitive psychology . . . doubtless older than Socrates; for it stands in close relation to the Pythagorean doctrine of the 'Three Lives'" (40). The latter emphasized the soul's progress through "lower, " more sensual states of existence by means of philosophy, and in an influential commentary on this notion, Cicero compared these three stages to three kinds of people who come to a festival. First there are those who come to sell goods (sensual life), then there are those who come to engage in the games (active life), and finally those who come as spectators (philosophical life) (433). The concept of threeness, and its connections of Pythagorean thought, is alluded to by Aristotle in a discussion of three dimensionality in his De Caelo, and then profoundly extended to include the logical temporal triad of "beginning-middle-end": A magnitude if divisible one way is a line, if two ways a surface, and if three a body. Beyond these there is no other magnitude, because the three dimensions are all that there are, and that which is divisible in three directions is divisible in all. For, as the Pythagoreans say, the world and all that is in it is determined by the number three, since beginning and middle and end give the number of an 'all,' and the number they give is the triad. (359) In his rational conceptualization of art, Aristotle also highlighted the idea of a threefold temporal division: the heart of drama (the greatest of all art) is its "plot," which must follow laws of necessity and unity by means of logical sequences of "beginning," "middle," and "end." That Nature itself had a threeness in it discoverable by religious, moral, and logical processes of the mind is basic to Pythagorean- Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and art -- for each, it is not too strong to say, "the world and all that is in it is determined by the number three." IV Triune patterns go deeper, however, than these religious and philosophical perspectives. A tripleness is in fact discernible in the basic structuring of all primitive social action, i.e., in the "rites of passage," which is set forth in a triadic sequence of separation, initiation, and return. This triad, according to Campbell, is at the exact center of myth: "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth" (Hero 30). As a consequence, this triadic myth pattern informs all folk tales, fairy tales, and primitive narratives. Campbell describes this movement thus: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (30) Myth-structuring itself may be seen as an elaboration of primitive puberty rituals, involving a fundamental quest for identity: first, separation from symbiotic union with the family, tribe, society; secondly, initiation into a new state of manhood or womanhood; and thirdly, return or reunion as a fully mature member of the group. The "monomyth" expresses itself thus in a kind of triple "plot" (involving not only art but life), structuring man's journey through three key stages of life: infancy, manhood, maturity. As "the civilization of antiquity emerged out of primitivity" the ritual sequence, as John W. Perry notes, became spiritualized to signify first the soul's separation from a fallen world, secondly its spiritual initiation and rebirth and lastly, its return to God (117-8). Such a triadic pattern is at the core of the mystery cults of the ancient world, particularly Orphism and Eleusianism (117-8). The latter, in turn, were connected with the Pythagorean mystery cults, eventually influencing Plato and later Orphic thinking, such as Virgil's vision of Aeneas's descent into the underworld (paralleled later in Dante' s separation, rebirth and return to godhead in the Divine Comedy) (126). Neo-Platonic and Christian fusions of primitive myths and PythagoreanPlatonic mysticism inevitably stressed the idea of tripleness. Plotinus, for example, pictured the soul's ascent through a trinity of "soul, Nous and the One" (Rist 70). Proclus, in his Elements of Theology, Prop. 35, declared divine order to have a "threefold nature" and, along with other Neo-Platonics, he emphasized a triple-world rhythm of "inherence," "procession" and "reversion" (qtd. in Wind 38). The sense of triple cycles was so widespread among these thinkers that the fifth century philosopher, Fulgentius, in his Mythologiae, II, i, summarized Platonic thinking by saying, "The philosophers have decided that the life of humanity consists of three parts, of which the first is called theoretical, the second practical, the third pleasurable: which in Latin are named contemplativa, activa, voluptaria" (81-2). In the early Renaissance in Florence, Neo-Platonists combined Classical- Orphic mythology with Platonic-Christian dogmas into even more elaborate trinities. Thus Pico della Mirandola, in his Conclusiones . . . de modo intelligendi hymnos Orphei, no. 8, could write: He that understands profoundly and clearly how the unity of Venus is unfolded in the trinity of the Graces, and the unity of Necessity in the trinity of the Fates, and the unity of Saturn in the trinity of Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, knows the proper way of proceeding in Orphic Theology. (qtd. in Wind 36) And Marsilio Ficino, in De Amore, II, I went so far as to argue that the Trinity "was regarded by the Pythagorean philosophers as the measure of all things; the reason being, I surmise, that God governs things by threes, and that the things themselves also are determined by threes" (42). To be sure, the most influential expressions of trinities in Western thought came from St. Augustine -- triplicities of philosophy (natural, supernatural, and moral), of science (physical, logical, ethical), of human nature (being, knowing, loving) and other analogies of the divine trinity are widespread throughout his works. But what became of great significance was Augustine's new linear emphasis on man's religious education in time through analogy to the triple states of infancy, youth and maturity (Letters 37). In so doing, Augustine seized upon the idea explored earlier by St. Paul and succeeding theologians that humankind moved forward towards a more perfect spiritual state just as an individual man grew to maturity. Tertullian, for example, in De virginibus velandis, had argued that righteousness advanced from a rudimentary state of natural fear of God "through the Law and the Prophets to infancy; from that stage it passed, through the Gospel, to the fervour of youth: now, through the Paraclete, it is settling into maturity" (qtd. in Crane 275). After St. Augustine, the Christian drama was increasingly constructed in linear terms of a beginning, middle and final state; and that triple drama was frequently described in such analogous terms as "glory, sin, redemption," or "glory, ruin and restoration" (fundamental patterns appearing in Milton and Christian humanists up through the nineteenth century) (Mack l-li). Such temporal triads, with their parallels to human developmental stages, recall the Aristotelian concept of "plot. " However, these triads also relate to the triadic structuring of primitive myths. For in formulating the mythic "separation-initiation- return" trilogy (and its spiritualized Pythagorean-Platonicversions) Christianity projected it into historical reality, presenting a three- act Providential history drama consisting of a glorious past (Eden), a present ruined (but redeemable) state, and a final, restored state. The universal drama was, like the human drama, of a triple nature. Carl Becker underscores the power of this formula: To be aware of present trials and misfortunes, to look back with fond memories to the happier times (imagined so at least) of youth, to look forward with hope to a more serene and secure old age -what could more adequately sum up the experience of the great majority? And what was the Christian story if not an application of this familiar individual experience to the life of mankind? Mankind had its youth, its happier time in the Garden of Eden, to look back upon, its present middle period of misfortunes to endure, its future security to hope for. (126) A key distinction between earlier mythic sequences and the Christian drama lay, then, in the latter's emphasis on the value of forward movement in time. Of course, the Christian pattern was still (as were all ancient time notions) predominantly cyclical (from Eden to Paradise), and eternalist, but the introduction of linear movement and historical progress was clear. The valorization of time, of course, was implicit in earlier Old Testament narrations of the Jews as the chief actors in a plotted drama culminating in a Messianic realm. But temporal consciousness was reinforced in Christianity by a historically incarnated deity and the promise of a Second Coming which often led to earthly millennial thinking. Tertullian's vision of the Paraclete opened itself to such an interpretation, and a more radically historical picture of the threefold drama was provided by the twelfth-century Calabrian monk, Joachim De Fiore. Joachim argued that the first great stage in human history was under the "ascendency of the flesh," which transformed into a second stage under Christ, in which man was left between "the flesh and the spirit, " until a final, third stage -- that of pure spirit -- would usher in an age of Contemplatives (whose lives would be led entirely through the mind) (qtd. in Nisbet 95). Joachim's triadic division of history, as Robert Nisbet shows, was an effort to "temporalize" the Christian trinity, although its final state was clearly a spiritualized one[96]. The concept of a triple structuring of reality in medieval France has been underscored in recent studies from the French Annales School. Georges Duby, Georges Dumezil and Jacques LeGoff have all highlighted tripleness as a master mentalite. Duby traces it running from ProtoIndo -European triads of social classes and divine beings up through the three orders or "estates" of medieval society (priests, warriors, workers) (Duby 1). In a similar fashion, LeGoff, looking for the "historical and logical conditions" for the origin of the idea of Purgatory, finds it in medieval Christianity's "thinking in threes, " and its growing sense of time as "linear" (Davis 32). In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England the notion of a progressivist three-staged maturation drama by which God educated man in time through infancy, youth and maturity began to be used increasingly by Christian Anglicans as a tool against Deism's claim of an eternalist order (Crane 349-82). Towards the end of the eighteenth century in Germany, Gotthold Lessing, in his The Education of the Human Race offered a closely related triple scheme, arguing for the historic education of the human race in three stages (qtd. in Baumer 200). And one of the "most important formulations" of a "trinitarian structure of history," according to Mark Taylor, "was developed in the systematic philosophy of the nineteenth- century philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. For Hegel, the doctrine of the Trinity revealed not only the structure of history but of all reality" (3). It was Auguste Comte, however, who played a signal role in secularizing the triadic human drama. The founder of positivism, and a preeminent exponent of the idea of progress, Comte envisioned history in terms of a preliminary theological stage, followed by a second metaphysical stage, and a final "mature" stage of scientific reason -- all governed by inevitable laws of secular progress towards an earthly Paradise (Russell 275). Thus the original, essentially cyclical human drama gradually became replaced by straightforward linear advance through sequential stages. Our inventory of triadic interpretations of reality moves in the twentieth century inward from the realm of history to psychology. Freud, for example, projected an internal drama with three protagonists, the primal instinctual "id," the reality-making "ego," and the controlling "super-ego." The concept of an evolved psychological construction is also central to Jean Piaget's genetic psychology. In the latter, the child grows cognitively as the result of a progressive, and essentially triple organization of intelligence. The first stage of sensorimotor coordination is followed by a second stage, involving "concrete operations" (organization according to number, class, and quantity) and a third "formal operations stage" (systematically, abstractly coordinating earlier principles of classification) (Furth 217-8). According to Piaget, every child undergoes a history of these self-regulating operations, resulting in continually more sophisticated logical reasoning. IV These structuring activities can be broken down into the following major modes. The first, linear or analytical mode, involves the logical dividing of the continuum of existence into linear patterns equal to temporal consciousness itself: past, present and future, with its incumbent logical causality -- "then" is followed by (or causes) " now," which is followed by (or causes) "next" (Baker 23). The triad, as Aristotle says, is an expression of temporality. The human development of hindsight and foresight, which provides us with a sense of past (memory), present, and future (anticipation), is essential to this linear logic. Historical consciousness is the hallmark of the analytical; the logical temporal triads of Aristotle, Augustine and especially later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historicists are reflected in this mode. A second, organic or mythic mode, reflects the fundamental act of human identity-making through the self's necessary transactions with "other" (family, society, tribe) to form a third fused entity. Unlike linear logic which cuts up reality, dividing and reintegrating it into causal sequences, this mode gathers opposites together into new wholes. Mythic atemporality is the hallmark of this activity, and instead of linear motion, cyclical movement dominates (as in separation- initiation-return). Mythic unions, such as in Shiva, and the rites of passage pattern, are reflected in this mode. The organic and analytical modes are part, I believe, of a larger, three-staged mental framework. This "evolutionary" one, is rooted in the development of three internal stages within human consciousness itself. We see it reflected in tile primitive "three-souls" concept, in the traditional three-levelled moral Pythagorean/Platonic systems, in the "three estates" concept, in recent psychological and cognitive theories, and, of course in Oppenheimer's mystical-moral-technological projections. In the first myth state of human thought ritualized actions, emotions, dream-like imagining dominate. Myth story ("Vishnu") epitomizes such a state. In the epistemological-social transformations leading to a second, more historical rational state, metaphoric language and moral drama dominate. This cognition operates both organically and analytically, combining mythic thinking with linear processing. Metaphoric drama ("knowing sin") epitomizes this state. A third and final, rational- technical consciousness results in the dominance of abstract numerical- linguistic language, and a scientific ethos. Measurement (A-bomb technology) epitomizes this state. The development of linear thinking in the progression of the three consciousness states is essential. In an article recently published in Mankind Quarterly (1992) I traced how symbolic clues to human culture could be found found in the merger of "line" and "labyrinth" (337- 58). The major story of the Greek world which dramatized the beginnings of this merger was the "thread" or "line" Theseus used to wind his way through the Minoan labyrinth. This line represented "linear logic" (the step-by-step sequential causality developed in Western rationalism and science) interpenetrating previous mythic thoughtways. Linear logic develops through such interpenetration in three stages. First there is "prima-consciousness," an organic mode, made up of concrete, dreamlike, magical thinking in which there is little linear, logically analytical processing. In this myth state, mankind operates in a largely undifferentiated matrix of self and other. Secondly, there is "metaconsciousness, " in which the mythic and rational merge in a way that Werner Jaeger saw happening in Homer: " . . . Yet it is hardly possible to separate 'mythical thinking' in the epic from the rational ideas with which it is interpenetrated" (Jaeger 151). Lastly, there is "techniconsciousness, " in which analytical, differentiating linear logic ushered in our Western scientific lifeways. This third stage not only replaced mythic atemporality (Shiva) but also metaphoric temporality (St. Augustine's drama) with the secular progressivists' belief in the linear march of history through scientific rationalism (Comte). In fact, the three consciousness states are never simply divisible into clear-cut, autonomous entities; rather they tend to be merged in interdependent systems of reactions, with a dominating element. Within the complex evolutionary progressions of states can be found an explanatory pattern of human symbol-making: a) techniconsciousness, dominated by measure, sign and machine, is elaborated out of b) metaconsciousness, and metaphor, symbol and drama, which earlier arose out of c) primaconsciousness, and myth, concrete symbol and magic. A growing differentiation of the self from mediated presentations occurs so that the latter become less engaged by earlier levels of human consciousness, and turn into systems of abstract signs and concepts. In any society or individual the three levels coexist with symbolic mediation systems built up from earlier coordinations. Logical configurations are accordingly mixed, with a particular historical organization of knowledge mentally "set" according to newly developed configurations. V The human trinity concept offers, I would argue, new insight into such fundmental questions as the nature of knowledge, myth and cultural evolution. My basic premise is that consciousness is constructed developmentally, in the individual, and historically -- in a three tiered structuring. In these last sections I will focus on the idea of knowledge as construction, and on the first primaconscious world of myth. Alexander Luria, a Russian psychologist who pioneered studies of cultural differences in consciousness, posited two essential concepts: first, that psychological shifts occured in consciousness as the result of social-historical activities (10), and secondly that: Consciousness -- the highest form of the reflection of reality is not given in advance, unchanging and passive, but shaped by activity and used by human beings to orient themselves to their environment, not only in adapting to cultures but in restructuring them. (qtd. in Restak 239) In The Brain: The Last Frontier, Richard Restak quotes Luria's ideas with approval, and makes a general connection between Luria's historical developmentalism and the Piagetian vision of the child's developmental constructions (238-9). Is it possible that just as the child in Piagetian constructions moves from an undifferentiated matrix through early sensorimotor concrete representations to more formal analytical operations, mankind also developed from an initially less differentiated world of knower and object? I believe this to be the case. The Piagetian notion of individual cognitive evolution contains many sugestive analogies to our idea of the evolving dominance of linear differentiated thinking, and also, I think, clarifies myth's position in the spectrum of human cognition. Myth, in my view, should be seen as the first of three stages of mankind' s constructed cognitive-social transactions with the world of objects. The philospher Suzanne Langer and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz have shown how dream-like imaging and acting out qualities in primitive ceremonies are at the core of myth-making (Dinnage 37). But how cognitively do these elements fit into the cultural evolution of thought? We approach this question first through the representative example of an American Indian tribe's ceremonial transaction with the sun -- the Zuni's famous Shalako initiation rituals which coincide with the winter solstice. Anna Dooling describes how these are designed to entice the sun to return through a set of miming performances, centered on a bird-like figure: Towering over them all is the magnificient figure of the Shalako, a 10-foot-high bird creature incorporating a snapping beak, layers of colorful blankets, a tail of streaming horse hair, dangling rabbit skins and a crest of eagle feathers. . . . At an unseen signal, the Shalako dancer arises, assumes the giant mask, and begins to execute a simple repetitive patter up and down the dirt floor. Two men alternate the task of dancing beneath the mask, clacking with concealed strings the long beak of the birdlike Shalako, and rolling its terrifying eyes. The effect is hypnotic. (51) Things in this graphic world clearly are not presented as objects of observation, but as symbolic models of transaction. The ceremony is meant not for spectatorship but for an active "re-presentation" of the primal forces of nature, which are dramatized in vivid networks of associations and analogies. Just as the child, as we shall see, relies initially on sensorimotor-concrete representations ("symbols" ) to build up a world of knowledge, the primitive mind relies on visualkinesthetic action, and memorable imitative patterns. At the end of the dance, more symbolic impersonating takes place: Dancing continues in the houses until almost dawn, and as daylight breaks over the pueblo, the rain priest of the north climbs to the roof of one of the dwellings and greets the new day with an litany of chants. At noon the Shalako reassemble near the river and run a series of races to plant prayer sticks in the ground -- a symbolic reenactment of their role as couriers of the gods. (51) To know in this world is to recreate ancestral animal-human actions. Impersonation is key, and "katchinas" ("sacred personage") dolls as well as masks are employed to aid the process. Furthermore, the diversity of the story's events are made coherent by the ritualistic use of a script. If the exact actions are not carried out, there is disaster, for such scripts offer, as Daniel O'Keefe explains, "a core of certainty to collective experience" (75). Mythic knowing, then, involves ritualized sensorimotor modelling, i.e., thought is realized by a "re-doing," a play-imitation construction in a web of life-giving communal identity. Major motifs in the Zuni rite are basic to all mythic activity: presentation of the storied actions of supernatural spirits, graphic presentations of sacred objects and events, all embedded in an initiation situation. What are the cognitive-social forces that explain such primitive symbol-making? Why is it always made of the stuff of images, imitative gestures, play-like ritual representations and actions? Why is it grounded in human intention and wishes, and devoted to educating the young mind? Solon Kimball notes how "study of initation ceremonies holds implication for learning theory, that have yet to be explored" (x). Our exploration takes us to the child's world of thinking as set forth by Piaget. VII For Piaget human intelligence evolves by constructing schemas of knowledge derived from adaptive functioning. This involves a complex balancing between play-like "assimilation" and imitation-like "accommodation. " The organism assimilates to its schemas the particular things it encounters and conversely accomodates the schemas to external data. In this process, reality itself is constructed from an undifferentiated organism-in-environment state. It is constructed by the child in its first play-imitation actions, which help distinquish its inner world of self from the external world of objects. The three main stages of intellectual development in Piaget consists of first, the sensorimotor stage, secondly, the concrete operations stage when the child begins to objectify reality, and uses such logical functions as numbering, seriation and classifications, and thirdly, the formal operations stage. In the second stage, operations are still focused on concrete representations ("motivated" signifiers or "symbols") rather than on abstract formal operations (arbitary signifiers or "signs"). One of the hallmarks of childhood is the world of play,which in Piaget becomes not simply the medium of fantasies, but the exercising of inward schemas for "acquiring thereby a feeling of virtuosity or power" (Play, 89).Play progresses in stages to become a "ludic" symbol, thatis, a conscious symbolic activity done for the sake of knowing (93-7). An example is the child's pretending to sleep (putting his head momentarily on a pillow), instead of, as in earlier sensorimotor activities, i.e., actually sleeping. Such "pretending" activity leads to the testing out of schemas, and the ritualized re-enactment of them. A final aspect of the child's symbolic play is the use of "substitutes" that figurally or analogically represent the original model in some way (e.g. cloth for pillow) (97). Equally essential to Piagetian thought is the idea of imitation and its close relation to sensorimotor activity. Here imitation is actually seen as the agency of all image-making: "the mental image or symbolic representation thus comes into being as the product of the function of more or less exact imitation" (84). The image for Piaget is not a continuation of perception but is derived from an internalizing of imitation. Physical reenactment through visible gestures leads to what Piaget calls "interiorized imitation" and to the increasingly internal constructions of images. Thus motorimitative actions, transforming themselves from "representations in action" to deferred, interior images constitute the source of all theoretical knowing, ritual and art. The image only becomes separated from action in later, developed interiorizations; during the latter stages, the child no longer depends on the actual presence of a model, and instead becomes capable of internally reenacting absent models. The tribal actions of the Zuni function, I think, as "representations in action" meant to trigger already internalized schemas. In myth the mental schema are still tied closely to sensorimotor imitation. These schemas are assured of strong internal reenactment and storage by the hypnotic rhythms and riveting masks which provide sensorimotor cues. The masks are not mere wishful magic; they are figurative learning devices (just as dolls, puppets, toys, etc. are to the child), prompting the construction of appropriate maturation strategies (acting as the ancestor successfully did.) Gestures, images and words set up a "script" agreed upon by all participants to recreate these "saving" concrete symbolic messages. Such imaginative projectings, mixing inner psychological needs with the beginnings of objectified representation, become in the course of historical development tested in more abstract linguisticnumerical networks of meaning, as the inner imaginary pole is continually separated from the external objective pole. In time mythic schema are transformed into metaphoric-rational representations where symbols are still tied to the sensory but also partake of the analytical processes of "sign" thinking. This "second act" in the differentiation drama, in which humans construct reality combines symbols and signs, gradually yields to a "third act" in which these combined symbol-sign representations become "reprogrammed" into a numerically-dominated sign world of operations. From Lascaux Cave to modern "Computersville" can be traced a compelling mental voyage from global sensorimotor-symbolic representations to increasingly differentiated signs. It must be pointed out that in Piaget's system of knowing, symbols tend to be necessary only in so far as they lead to logical operations, and thus "mature" knowing by implication requires moving away from symbol-dominated, emotional knowledge. Image and symbol, in other words, comprise a "motivated" cognition which is designed to be transformed into a kind of algebra of knowledge and behavior. Myth, art and all the domains of religious, aesthetic man tend in a real sense to be left behind in Piaget's logicism. While I believe the play-imitation modeling theory of Piaget is a key to understanding mythic thought, the persistence of early symbolic processing seems to me vital to the functioning of human culture. That functioning demands figurative thinking, ritual action and personalist sense of language as much as measurement and logical reasoning. In concluding, we turn to a final and earliest historical example of the first constructed stage of consciousnesses. VIII In The Roots of Civilization, Alexander Marshack parallels the mental development of Upper Paleolithic man to Neolithic Man to the development of the child as envisioned by Piaget: Time and space had begun to be divided and extended in increasingly complex human terms, and interrelations among men were involved with these time-space structures and mythologies. . As we saw in connection with Piaget's research, there are stages in cognitive development and in the development of the capacity for logical and symbolic thinking. The individual gradually enlarged his "rational" capacity to see process within an object or symbol, to process in the end product, to recognize a sequence of steps or transformations, and finally to communicate these through the use of stories and symbols. (374- 5) What happened to create this enlarged "rational capacity" was, I believe, that linear thinking -- "process" . . . sequence of steps"--was called out by new cultural challenges to the primaconscious mental set. In the latter, a type of linear logic assuredly existed, as Marshack shows through innumerable examples of calendric linear notations found on Ice Age bones, but abstract conceptual thought was still largely minor in the "motivated cognition" of cave art symbols. The latter were built around a primaconscious "script", typically embroidered with multisensory images of animals, bird-like masks, fertility goddesses, male and female markings or signals. (Campbell, Atlas 64-5) The cave chambers in which the paintings were found were, as John Pfeiffer points out, "sanctuaries," and the images in them part of a "initiatory trial in the terrifying and remote depths of the underground world, . . " (qtd. in Zweig 18). I believe Ice-Age man, like the Zuni, constructed a first world of knowledge by internalizing powerful images of sensorimotor action. The artists's drawings were "representations in action," fostering "deferred, interior images" of fertility and communal identity. Cognitive "assimilation" through figurative and analogical associations is suggested by Leroi-Gourhan who, in commenting on a barbed stick and falling entrails in the Lascaux "Shaft" iconography, wonders if the female marking may be "a variant of the assimilation of phallus-to-spear and vulva-to wound," and the male marking might "imply an assimilation of phallus-to-spear-thrower" (316). Such primaconscious image-making, as I have argued previously (337-58), became transmitted throughout Old European cult objects directly into Minoan culture, acting as a persistent scenario of memory cues for primaconscious cognitive responses. New "time-space structures and mythologies" arose in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece when primaconsciousness awoke to more linear articulation. A subtle cognitive shift to more formal conceptual sign operations is in evidence in a new time and numbering sensibility in an epic like Gilgamesh. There the hero says to Enkidu: Only the gods d(well) forever with Shamash. But for mankind, their days are numbered" (McNeill 5.4. 141-2). This temporal reflectiveness on man's linear existence mirrors something novel in the atemporal world of myth. With it, self-consciousness, individuation and the beginnings of analytical thought begin to seep into the organic realm of primaconsciousness. The emphasis on ethical choice and rationalism insucceeding cultures, especially in the Greek world accelerated new metaconscious constructions. The metaphor oflife as an onward spiritual drama (fusing concrete representations with linear conceptual ones) epitomized such thinking throughout the early and middle ages of Christianity up through the late Renaissance. But how, then,did the emergence of a new mathematical vision of nature -- epitomized in the image of the clock world -- become so all-encompassing in post-Renaissance Europe? It was the result of new cognitive urges to restructure the world in terms of an abstract linear logic, a logic which had already long been embedded in the three-tiered mind. This was accomplished in large part through an intricate "representation" of time and process, stimulating man to see natureless in terms as a world drama animated by human and divinepurposes (the "motivated cognition" of symbols), and more as linear mathematical chain of causes. Such a shift can be glimpsed in Descartes's "Method:" "Those long chaines of reasoning," Descartes muses, "so simple and easy, which enabled the geometricians to reach the most difficult demonstrations, has made me wonder whether all things knowable to men might not fall into a similar logical sequence" (33). The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought in a radical new activation of techni-conscious capabilities, one which was increasingly favored in political and social transactions. The later tended to extend out into a technological collective brain embodied in twentieth- century multinational communication networks. Modern society has successfully bound man to man in continents of automated information systems not only in the multi-national commercial and political worlds but in the realm of human communication. Mankind, in my view, ideally belongs neither to the techniconscious collective machine world, nor to a mythicethnic-tribal world, but to one where the three consciousnesses can be integrated in a responsible, free, and caring personality. To sum up: mental life is a part of mankind's on-going triple constructing of reality, involving societal and psychological pressures towards more cognitive formalization and in the last three-hundred years towards an inexorable technological vision of reality. The search for a full human response requires that we chart the points at which new mental sets infiltrate the symbolic world of valued perception, for both good and bad. It is our freedom to choose to or not to abide with the techniconscious world, but in any further adaptation we will have to be aware of where we are and how we have moved through these three master cognitive-cultural patterns. REFERENCES Aristotle 1952 De Caelo. Trans. J. L. Stocks. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 8. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 54 vols. Atnally, R. 1992 "The Line and the Labyrinth: Symbolic Keys to Cultural History. " The Mankind Quarterly 32.4 (Summer 1992): 337-358. Augustine, St. 1952 Confessions. XIII, XI, 12. Trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey. Vol. 18. Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutcbins. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 54 vols. 1952 On the Trinity. Basic Writings of St. Augustine. Ed. Whitney J. Oates 1948 New York: Random House, 1948. Baker, Russell 1977 "Stopped Clock." New York Times 28, August, 1982: 3. Baumer, Franklin L. 1977 Modern European Thought. New York: MacMillan, 1977. Becker, Carl L. 1961 The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. 4th Ed. New Haven: Yale U P Bisson, Thomas 1980 Foreword. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined by George Duby. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Bunsaku, Karata 1981 Horyu-ji: Temple of the Exalted Law. Trans. W. Chile Ishibashi. Kyoto, Japan: Japan Society, 1981. Burnet, John 1963 Plato's Phaedo, Oxford: Claredon Press. Campbell, Joseph 1988 Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. I. The Way of the Animal Powers. Part 1. Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers. New York: Harper & Row. 1968 The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, Princeton U P. 1971 The Mythic Image. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1974. Cicero. Tusculan Disputations, V, iv. Trans. J. E. King. Cicero. Vol. 18. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P. Crane, Ronald 1934 "Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress 1699-1745 (Part I)". Modern Philology May: 349-82. Davis, Natalie Zemon 1985 "The Happy Ending." Rev. The Birth of Purgatory, by Jacques Le Goff. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, New York Review of Books 18, July: 31-3. Descartes, Rene 1950 Discourse on Method, Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press. Dinnage, Rosemary 1978 "The Piaget Way." Rev. The Essential Piaget. Eds. Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Voueche. New York Review of Books 21 Dec. 18-25. Dooling, Anna 1982 "The Spirit of the Zuni Pueblo." New York Times, 5, 7 Nov., 51. Duby, Georges 1980 The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago P. Edgerton, Frank 1952 Trans. The Bhagavad Gita, XI, 20. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Eiseley, Loren 1970 The Invisible Pyramid. New York: Scribner's. Furth, Hans G. 1969 Piaget and Knowledge: Theoretical Foundations. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall Inc. Graves, Robert 1966 The White Goddess. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. James, William 1929 The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green and Company. Jaravsky, David 1980 "Sin and the Scientist." Rev. Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections. Eds. Alice Smith and Charles Weiner. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard U P, 1980. New York Review of Books 17 July: 7 Jaeger, Werner 1965 Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume I: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens. Trans. Gilbert Higher. 2nd Ed. New York: Oxford UP. Kimball, Solon 1980 Introduction. The Rites of Passage by Arnold Van Gennep. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. Lamont, Lansing 1965 Day of Trinity, New York: Athenuem. Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 1?? Treasures of Prehistoric Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d. Lifton, Robert Jay 1982 "The Psychic Toll of the Nuclear Age." New York Times Magazine 26 September: 52, 58-66. Luria, A. R. 1976 Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Trans. Martin Lopez-Morillas and Lynn Solotaroff. Ed. Michael Cole. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P. Mack, Maynard 1938 Introduction. An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope. Vol. 3, 1. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope. London, New Haven: Metheun, Yale U P 1938-61. 10 vols. Marshack, Alexander 1972 The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art Symbol and Notation. New York: McGraw Hill. McNeill, William H., and Jean E. Sedlar 1968 The Origins of Civilization. New York: Oxford UP. O'Keefe, Daniel Lawrence 1982 Stolen Lightning:The Social Theory of Magic. New York:Continuum Publisbing Co. Perry, John W. 1953 The Self in Psychotic Process: Its Symbolization in Schizophrenia. Berkeley: U California P. Piaget, Jean 1962 Play, Dreams and Imitation. Trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Plato 1952 Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Vol. 7. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Inc. 54 vols. Restak, Richard M. 1979 The Brain: The Last Frontier. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Rist, John M. 1964 Eros and Psyche. Toronto: Univ. Toronto Press. Russell, Betrand 1969 Wisdom of the West. Ed. Paul Foulkes. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc. Taylor, Mark C. 1987 "Descartes, Nietzsche and the Search for the Unsayable." New York Times Book Review. 1 Feb: 3, 34. Wind, Edgar 1968 Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. Yeats, W. B. 1966 "The Second Coming." Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. New York, Collier. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:17:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:17:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Michael Torigian: The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right Message-ID: Michael Torigian: The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right Telos No. 117 (Fall 1999) http://es.geocities.com/sucellus23/591.htm "The future belongs to those with the longest memory." -- Friedrich Nietzsche The Third Way To understand the French New Right, it is necessary to begin with its identitarian philosophy of history. This philosophy, however, is so entangled in an ideological thicket of critical scorn that it is all but impossible to approach with impartiality. Like revolutionary conservatism, national bolshevism, and various expressions of populism and syndicalism, the French New Right seeks a revolutionary course beyond the Left-Right politics it rejects; and, like these other "Third Way" tendencies, it, too, is routinely compared with the most notorious of the Third Way movements: fascism and National Socialism.(n1) While liberalism, social democracy, and communism, as different expressions of the Left, are not similarly equated (and tainted), there is a certain, if tenuous logic to these comparisons in that all Third Way tendencies oppose the modernist order. Less certain still is the inquisitional intent of these comparisons.(n2) Efforts by Alain de Benoist's GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne),(n3) the principal French proponent of the Third Way, to challenge the liberal paradigm or to evoke the Indo-European heritage as a spur to cultural renewal, have led to numerous McCarthy-style allegations of Nazism and "Aryan supremacy"(n4) -- even though for thirty years Benoist and his Grecistes have denounced Nazism as a "brown Jacobinism" and have characterized racism as an offshoot of the totalizing modernity they oppose. The greatest obstacle to understanding the Third Way may stem, however, from the fact that these comparisons mistakenly assume that ideology, an "outgrowth of modernity" that reduces the world to itself, and philosophy, which is an opening to the world, are analogous, and that, therefore, the philosophical disposition of a school of thought, such as the GRECE's, can be deduced from its politics.(n5) Since all these stigmatizing comparisons endeavor to delegitimate, rather than to explain such non-conformist tendencies, it is hardly surprising that they also have succeeded in marginalizing them.(n6) Europe's Identitarian Crisis An interest in the past generally begins with an interest in the future. As its appellation suggests, the GRECE's interest is European civilization. Unlike globalists and Altanticists, who tout its wealth and economic prominence, Grecistes believe Europe is in decline.(n7) The continent, they argue, is no longer governed by European criteria. Self-serving technocracies, guided by liberal managerial imperatives, now rule its lands with a generic conception of man that disparages its particularistic cultures and historic continuities.(n8) The ensuing weakening of collective identities has been compounded by a stunted system of socialization, educational policies that denigrate traditional standards, a proliferation of social pathologies and cretinizing spectacles, and a vast influx of inassimilable Afro-Asian immigrants.(n9) Buttressed by the liberal "Right" and the Social Democratic Left, as they converge in extolling the virtues of the world market, these technocracies focus almost exclusively on "the battle for exports" and the dictates of globalization, seemingly indifferent to the breakdown of social-cultural solidarities.(n10) Even more deleterious than these technocratic threats to European identity has been the loss of sovereignty that followed in the wake of the "Thirty Years' War" (1914-1945), when Europe was occupied and divided by the two extra-European powers. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War allegedly altered only the character of this heteronomy. Though accepting Heidegger's contention that the techno-economic civilizations of communist Russia and liberal America were "metaphysically the same," with similar materialist philosophies of history, Grecistes believe the American occupation was the more pernicious: where the Soviets crushed any assertion of East European independence, the US not only occupied Western Europe militarily in the name of defending it, but colonized it culturally in ways that decomposed and Americanized European life.(n11) "A people," Raymond Ruyer has written, "more often perishes by losing its soul than its resources."(n12) To Grecistes, this seems to be the case today. In their view, the US represents the purest embodiment of liberal modernity, and thus the chief worldwide force for cultural homogenization. Nowhere, they argue, were the modernist principles born in the 18th-century Enlightenment --the principles of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism -- as thoroughly realized as in the new republic "liberated from the dead hand of the European past."(n13) In this spirit, the US was founded on a concept of its citizenry as autonomous self-interested subjects, homo oeconomicus, oriented to market exchanges and contractual relations, but devoid of high culture or ethnic identification. As such, the denizens of this modernist "enterprise" (constituting a demos, rather than an ethnos) have tended to substitute mercantile conventions for tradition, to define themselves in terms of a materialist way of life, and to elevate "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," i.e., the monadic conception of freedom, to the pinnacle of their concerns. Any notion of a "people" or of particularistic cultural organisms imbued with historically-shaped destinies, has been entirely foreign to their "national" project.(n14) For this reason, the "culturally-primitive upper class" (Oswald Spengler) of this former colony, in its role as modernity's elect, has been occupied almost exclusively with promoting consumer choice in open markets and enhancing the "rationality" of these choices by disembedding individuals from their communities and ascriptive ties. US power was accordingly imposed on Europe as if the entire continent, not just the US, were frozen in an eternal here and now, concerned solely with matters of economic advantage. Aided by marketing and media lures that circumvented elite structures and catered to the libidinous impulses of mass taste, Europe's postwar Americanization displaced, if not discredited much of the continent's millennial heritage. Grecistes thus look on America as a "murderer" of culture and history, a civilizational no-man's-land bent on turning the world into a single global market where everything is exchangeable.(n15) As Benoist writes, the US "is not like other countries. It is a country that seeks to destroy all others."(n16) This Greciste view of the New World as a cultural threat to the Old World's survival is especially relevant, since many Europeans have succumbed to America's hegemonic designs and have abandoned not a few of their defining particularisms. As John Gray writes,(n17) Europe today "confronts the phenomenon of a culture permeated throughout by a hatred of its own identity." The Longest Memory To strip a people of their culture and history, as America's universalist and homogenizing project entails, is tantamount, Grecistes argue, to severing a people's roots, and a people can no more live with severed roots than can a tree. Without a memory of its collective past and the foundational myths that define and distinguish it from others --without, that is, the encompassing forrces that tie a multiple of related individuals to a larger identity -- a people ceases to be a people.(n18) For this reason, Grecistes consider the erosion of Europe's cultural foundations to be the greatest danger facing its civilization. Consequently, the cultural front has become the primary theater of their operations.(n19) In defending Europe's patrimony, their line of march has commenced with a metapolitical assault on the cosmopolitan forces of modernity. Like Antonio Gramsci, they believe that power and politics follow culture, and that Europe continues to betray itself as long as its culture remains infused with anti-European influences. To combat the hegemony of American-style modernity and to instill in their people a will to be themselves, they have taken up a Gramscian metapolitics that treats culture as if it were a strategic high-ground to be contested by "organic intellectuals" beating different views of what it means to be European.(n20) In this spirit, they straggle for a re-Europeanization of the continent. Unlike conservative and traditionalist critics of liberal modernity, Grecistes' metapolitics attacks what many consider the core religious component of European identity.(n21) From their perspective, the Christian religious heritage constitutes not simply the spiritual foundation of modernity, but an ideology inimical to all forms of indigenous culture.(n22) They point out that Christianity arose in a multicultural world filled with anomie and deracination, that it was multi-ethnic in conviction, and that it rejected all communal particularisms, deigning only to be "in the world, not of it."(n23) Beginning with their affiliation to the early Greco-Roman church, Christians identified with a people and a history (those of the Bible) that were not their own, abandoning, in effect, their native identity. In this spirit, the church's "new covenant" was made between God and all humanity, which gave it a universal, rather than a national mission. Accordingly, history, culture, and ethnicity, from which the complexities of earthly identity are fashioned, have been irrelevant to its adherents, who see themselves as God's children, indifferent to the ascriptions obscuring the equality of every soul and obstructing the spread of His word. As Louis Pauwels puts it, Christians have no patrie, only God's promise land.(n24) Relatedly, in focusing on the hereafter, their salvational calculous neglects the holistic communal relations that animated pagan religiosity and nurtures a social ideal radically opposed to the classical idea of tradition, hierarchy, and hearth.(n25) By privileging individual salvation and deprecating attachment to everything unrelated to redemption, Christianity prepared the way for egoistic and, ultimately, anti-identitarian social forms.(n26) Even more consequential in Grecistes' eyes is Christianity's dualistic cosmology. Unlike pagans, Christians see the natural world not as the body of the gods, infused with the sacred, but as a creation called forth out of nothing by a transcendent Creator who stands outside and above it. By sharply differentiating between creation and Creator --making the latter the source, not the result, of the former, as pagans held -- they posit the primacy of the God who created, rules, and eventually will preside over the end of the world. Subordinated to this Supreme Being, man's world becomes comprehensible solely in terms of His logos: i.e., in terms of the divine rationality ordering creation. Accordingly, all world events and all human actions, despite their apparent incoherence and antagonism, partake in the logos' universality. This belief in the raison du monde makes Christianity, like Judaism, an ultra-rationalist religion, with "all aspects of man's life [subject to] a myriad of prescriptions, laws, and interdictions."(n27) Moreover, by replacing the sacred, mythic elements of pre-Christian Europe with the logos' higher rationality, and by conceiving of divinity in otherworldly terms, the cosmos is desacralized, nature objectified, and creation devalued.(n28) Apart, then, from God, the Christian world is drained of significance; what Max Weber refers to as "disenchantment" is, for Grecistes, an innovation not of modern rationalism, but of a cosmology that separates an all-perfect Creator from a creation that imperfectly reflects Him.(n29) From Christian dualism, an entirely new view of time emerges. Because man (in the form of "Adam and Eve") tainted creation by disobeying God, Christians look on history as a tale of his fallen state.(n30) Their "logocentric" intent is hence directed beyond the "vale of tears" to the end of time, when man, or at least the saved among men, are to be returned to His grace.(n31) "Instead of being [a] religion of life, here and now," Christianity, as one of the great modern pagans characterizes it, becomes a "religion of postponed destiny, death and reward afterwards, 'if you are good'."(n32) This finalist (or eschatological) vision of history, whose culmination is to be the Last Judgement, Genesis' antipode, gives rise to Christianity's unilinear conception of time, in which the present issues from a former determination and the future follows the "path of time" to something better. Within the frame of this irreversible progression -- running from the fall to salvation, from the particular to the redeeming universal -- time ceases to function as a recurring cycle of nature and becomes a vector whose continuous temporality ascends from creation (occurring but once), to Moses, to Jesus, to the Resurrection, and, finally, to the world's end. History is thereby homogenized into a sequence of successive now-points, with events seen as different stages in salvation's progression along this ascent, each stage representing a present ("the now") distinct from a past ("the no-longer now") and a future ("the not-yet-now").(n33) With the advent of Christianity, then, the nature of historical enquiry undergoes a radical change, as the mythic adjunct of a specific cultural tradition (history) is transformed into the study of a creation that irreversibly progresses as an essentialist-defined being traverses a fixed course of becoming.(n34) Because it posits a rational necessity underlying history's "progression," Grecistes believe the Christian concept of history has the cultural-ontological effect of denigrating the past and locking man into an abstract temporal continuum whose single possible outcome corrupts "the innocence of becoming" (Nietzsche). Modernity, they add, gives this concept a no less determinist cast, for Christianity's secular progenies, liberalism and Marxism, have allegedly embraced a similar "telos of redemption" -- framed in materialist, rather than spiritual terms, with the GNP replacing Jesus as the chief idol, happiness as salvation, and reason as faith, but, nonetheless, understood as the progressive development of a purposeful teleology that supersedes the past's errant legacy.(n35) In other words, modernists, refuse Christian appeals to transcendent values only to re-establish them in immanent ones.(n36) They might have emptied the heavens of the gods, but their rationalist notion of history is still simply another expression of a supra-historical process governed not by life, but by a metaphysics that seeks light and vision from what lies ahead -- in this case, "the global triumph of economic rationality."(n37) Moreover, in the form of the now discredited, though still implicitly dominant Whig and Marxist interpretations, modernist historiography not only gives new impetus to the teleological impulse of the linear view by dismissing the "no longer present" and by privileging the Great Narrative whose telos is the universal and timeless, it deprecates all particularisms, concerned as it is with the single evolutionary goal to which progress or class struggle (the secularized equivalents of the divine logos) is heading and the universal solution this logos messianically offers for all social, moral, and political problems. The developmental impulse of this historiography assumes, as a consequence, a directional, uniform, and causal form that optimistically anticipates a more rational and perfect future.(n38) Against the Christian/modernist concept of history, which "dialectically" negates an erring past in the name of an expiated future, Grecistes adopt the perspective of the longue duree, evoking from the continent's primordial origins its longest memory, which "rises up in us whenever we become 'serious'."(n39) In privileging the immemorial of Europe's past, this millennial perspective presupposes a tradition of community whose organic, cultural, and mythic references reach back into the far recesses of time and encompass all the European peoples.(n40) From this heritage, Grecistes hope to differentiate between what is properly European and what has been imposed as a foreign, self-denying admixture. The question immediately arises, though, as to how cogent it is to think of Europe as comprising such a community. Scholarly convention long held that the ancient Near East prepared the seed bed of European culture, and that Europe's very existence stemmed not from itself, but from another civilization. Grecistes, however, dismiss this ex oriente lux thesis, claiming it reflects the deracinating impulse of Christian/modernist universalism and a hostility toward native culture.(n41) Therefore, they reject the prevailing accounts that situate Europe's roots in the Euphrates River valley -- "We come from the people of The Iliad and the Edda, not the Bible" -- and argue instead for the integrity of European origins.(n42) In this, their historiographical apostasy, they have been especially fortunate in not having to await the vindication of another Schliemann or Evans, for recent archeological advances, especially the radiocarbon dating of Colin Renfrew and his team at Cambridge, already have uncovered evidence for the autochthonic origins of European civilization. This, in turn, has provoked a major revision in prehistorical studies, reframing them in terms that more closely accord with the GRECE's "Eurocentrism."(n43) And while this revision does not detract from Near Eastern achievements, it should, Grecistes argue, alter the conventional view of the continent's "barbarian" origins and its alleged debt to non-European sources.(n44) Grecistes further contend that the historiographical disparaging of archaic Europe, with its culturally negative implications, pales in comparison to the indifference or hostility shown to its Indo-European founders. Despite their pivotal role in prehistory and the popular interest they continue to generate, their study is largely ignored in current university curriculum. Stigmatized by the Nazis' Aryan cult, the Indo-Europeans are studied today in but a few universities, and there only on the margins of what already are marginalized disciplines. Yet they, especially their Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Latin, and Hellenic families, are the ones, Grecistes claim, out of whom the bedrock of European culture was formed. This emphasis on the "Aryan" core of European sensibilities has, to be sure, armed their critics, adepts at reductio ad Hitlerum, with potentially explosives charges. But this emphasis is cultural, rather then biological, and is made not because Grecistes rate the Indo-Europeans "superior" to other peoples or consider them to be the progenitors of white racial purity, as did Hitler, but because, like Luther, they cannot do otherwise.(n45) For better or worse, Europe's identitarian roots are those of the peoples who conquered its lands in the 2nd millennium BC, establishing the fundament of its languages, culture, and history. As such, the Indo-Europeans testify to Europe's historical specificity and stand as a challenge to the cosmopolitan pretences of modernists and Christians. Yet, in singling out the Indo-Europeans, Grecistes rekindle not only the compromising associations the Nazis brought to them, they commit themselves to an intellectually daunting enterprise. When they began formulating their metapolitical strategy in the late 1960s, Indo-European studies were virtually unknown within the French intelligentsia, even though France was home to one of the great Indo-Europeanists.(n46) Moreover, for the longest time (and still today), Indo-European studies were mainly philological, unamenable to the sort of cultural project they hoped to pursue. Only with Georges Dumezil's work in the late 1930s -- largely neglected until the GRECE popularized it -- did it become possible to infer anything significant about the sociocultural character of Europe's root peoples and challenge the ex oriente lux thesis.(n47) Working with a knowledge of twenty Indo-European languages and employing methods that up to then had been reserved for historical linguistics, Dumezil spent a life time comparing the mythological and literary remains of the different Indo-European peoples. In these comparative studies, embracing sixty books and several hundred articles, he related details gleaned from the Rig Veda, the Homeric epics, the Irish tales of Cuchulainn, the Norse sagas, and other Indo-European literatures to patterns or configurations that seemed to make up shared wholes and to point to a common origin (or to what Claude Levi-Strauss, in his decontextualized and dehistoricized adaptation of Dumezil's approach, called "structures").(n48) The most significant achievement of these studies was the discovery of a "tripartite ideology,"(n49) which, he claimed, shaped the way Indo-Europeans organized their societies, ordered their values and envisaged their religious pantheons. The discovery of tripartition constituted what is arguably the key event in modern Indo-European studies, for the presence of a common world-view "proves," in effect, that these peoples were not merely a language group, but also a culture.(n50) Derived from linguistic and literary sources, Dumezil's discovery rests empirically on the historical existence of three castes of men -- sages, warriors, and producers --representing the three "functions" or orders responsible for regulating Indo-European society. These functions allegedly gave the Indo-Europeans their distinct cultural style, and later influenced the different national families branching off from their trunk.(n51) Although features of this ideology have been found among certain other peoples, Dumezil claimed it was institutionalization, and assumed conscious articulation only among Indo-Europeans, making it the defining element of their culture and the essence of their "living past."(n52) In the Grecistes' reading of Dumezil, the tripartite ideology sanctioned principles that not only accorded with Indo-European sensibilities, but enabled the highest representatives of their people to govern, i.e., the wise men and priests who performed the sacred rituals and remembered the old stories, and the warrior aristocrats upon whose courage and self-sacrifice the community's survival depended. By contrast, farmers, stock-herders, craftsmen, traders -- the producers -- were relegated ideologically to the lowest social order (the third caste) and refused sovereign authority. In thus conditioning the European mentality, tripartition made wisdom and courage more important than economic-reproductive functions. It also gave culture its high symbols and the power of its defining ideals, pride of place above all other pursuits, unlike modernity's inversion of these values.(n53) Yet, however crucial its role in constituting the basis of European civilization, the tripartite ideology represents but a single facet of the Indo-European heritage to serve as a Greciste foil to the liberal order. The "folk-centric, world-accepting" values animating the Vedic, Homeric, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic traditions of pre-Christian paganism, most of whose pantheons reflect the tripartite ideology, play a no less important role. Because these pagan values and the religiosity they inspired implicitly repudiate Christianity's "world-rejecting" monotheism, Grecistes look to them as a way of "returning to ourselves" and of finding there a spirituality appropriate to Europeans disoriented by the disparity between their native identity and the universalist dictates of the Christian/modernist project. This validation of pagan values does not, however, mean that Grecistes have taken to worshipping Zeus and Odin. Instead, their metapolitical activities endeavor to recuperate paganism's nominalist avowal of difference, its theophany of the natural world, its heroic, aristocratic conception of man, its marriage of aesthetics and morality, and, above all, its pluralistic rejection of biblical dualism -- in order to counter the liberal anti-identitarian currents they oppose.(n54) Not unrelatedly, their rejection of the linear conception of history and its unidimensional view of the world follows largely from this adherence to pagan values. The Wellspring of Being The difference between mythos and logos best illustrates the spiritual divide separating Judeo-Christian dualism, with its linear historical vision, from the cyclical, open-ended holism of Indo-European paganism.(n55) In siding with mythos, whose metaphoric images evoke perspectival "truths" unfathomable to analytic method, Grecistes take up what they consider to be the more cogent tradition. Although Christianity initially succeeded in branding pagan myth, in contrast to its own alleged historical foundations, as inherently fictitious, representing the fears and irrationalities of early man, the truth claims of mythos (not to be confused with mythology) are no less compelling than those of logos, whose rationalist procedures of thought (i.e., logic) are "an invention of schoolteachers, not philosophers."(n56) Grecistes further point out that all thinking is mythic in form, since thought is conceptual, based on images signifying objects and processes ultimately incommensurate with their representation, and thus subject to interpretation. They even note that logos itself was originally simply a phase, another of mythos' expressions, for the image of the idea precedes and is frequently more pregnant than its discursive formulation.(n57) This makes mythos not the opponent of reason, but rather its metaphoric expression, which logos later renders into the objectivist terms of a subject whose conception of the world derives from a free-floating intellectualism. Finally, as logical proposition ignoring the perspectival nature of truth, logos differs from mythos in saying nothing about the meaning of the world, and thus of man's historicity. Contrary to Christians and modernists, Grecistes claim that mythos (or myth) has little to do with an irrational rendering of a fantasized past. Instead, its main function is to explain how the chaos inherent in the world becomes the cosmos of specific cultural traditions. In this sense, myth immortalizes those "exemplary precedents," however encrusted with legend and poetry, that once occurred and reoccur whenever a people, in response to what becomes the paradigmatic themes of its heritage, imposes its order upon the world.(n58) Fictitious or not, these primordial acts embody "truths" about the nature of reality that elude formylaic or analytic proposition, based as they are on a culture's interpretative encounter with it. Through the mythic inscription of these truths and the heritage they found, the fundament of a culturally defined existence is perpetuated. As such, myth treats the past as a living trace, and transmits not the ancient, but the permanent in a heritage, establishing a framework of continuity that renders discontinuity and innovation into a coherent history of tradition. As Mircea Eliade explains, myth is "creative and exemplary," revealing how things come to be, defining their underlying structures, and suggesting the multiple modalities of being they imply.(n59) It does not describe reality "objectively," but roots it in a heritage of significance that prescribes and affirms it as a manifestation of original being. Intuitively seized by its believers, mythic truth enables man to engage his world and to participate in its re-creation.(n60) Its teachings are thus existentialist, not essentialist; they can never be refuted, only rejected.(n61) Indeed, myth has little to do with the rationalist notion of truth (verum), for its power resides not in its correspondence to an object's noumena, but in its aesthetic accordance with a state of soul and in its capacity to inspire man's being with certum.(n62) In this vein, it can be argued that the mythic revelations inscribed in the Voluspa or the Tain Bo Cuailnge are as cogent as the scientific verities Of the Origin of Species or the Principia Mathematica. Both as existentialist postulate and "child of the imagination," myth apprehends those certitudes which tradition accepts as true. For Benoist, it is what justifies existence.(n63) Likewise, the paradigmatic principles elaborated in mythic accounts of origins generate the unquestioned presuppositions legitimating a people s historical vocation.(n64) Its certitudes are summoned whenever a people attempts to re-create its world and hence itself. If there is no myth to preserve the particular truth of its original being -- the particular truth (or illusion) that overcomes the world's chaos and creates the values sustaining its will to power -- there can be no re-creation. And if there is no re-creation, there can be no destiny, and no people.(n65) In other words, myth orients a people in the regeneration of its world through an affirmation of its original inception. Without myth, "every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity," for it is the creative and exemplary force of myth that alone prompts a people to forge their common values into a destiny that presses "upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal."(n66) Mythic time is correspondingly reversible, as the origins it recounts are repeated in each act of renewal.(n67) Myth, in sum, knows no immutable truth, yet serves as a source of meaning and certitude in an inherently meaningless and uncertain world.(n68) Not coincidentally, the first major thinker to lend himself to the GRECE's historiological project was Nietzsche, for his rejection of the Western metaphysical tradition and his embrace of the old Greek myths to counter the rationalism of the "dialecticians" (Socratic, Christian, or modernist) anticipates many of the Grecistes' own concerns. More importantly, in its appeal to "we good Europeans,"(n69) his philosophical opus is steeped in historiological issues pertinent to the problems of cultural renewal and historical fatigue. From these have emerged not only the most profound and the least understood of his ideas -- the thought of Eternal Return -- but also the inspiration for the Grecistes' confrontation with the finitudes and determinisms of the Christian/modernist project. Contrary to the usual interpretations, Eternal Return does not imply a literal repetition of the past. It is an axiological, not a cosmological principle, representing the will for metamorphosis in a world that is itself in endless metamorphoses. In fact, it is a principle of becoming that knows neither beginning nor end, but only the process of life returning to itself. As such, Eternal Return affirms "will to power" --characteristic of the mythic spirit off Indo-European paganism -- and not the dialecticians' negation, sublation, and evolution which follow logos in cleaving to an objective and thus otherworldly truth. Against the dialecticians' narrow fixation on reason and self-preservation, Nietzsche exalts life's ascending instincts and the old noble virtues that sought to forge those instincts into a heroically subjective culture. Homer's Greeks, he well knew, were dead and gone. Yet, whenever "the eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down," "opening" the future to the past, he thought the epic spirit, as that which bears returning, might be roused and something analogously creative achieved.(n70) Life, he argued, is not a predetermined and timeless essence with an inscribed telos. As being, it is becoming, and becoming is will to power. Eternal Return represents an affirmation of man's original being, an assertion of his difference with others, and, in its infinite repertoire of exemplary past actions, the anticipation of whatever his future might hold. In this sense, its recurring past functions as a "selective thought," putting memory's endless assortment of experience in service to life. Man has only to envisage a future similar to some select facet of the past to initiate its realization.(n71) The past cannot exist, then, as a momentary point on a line, a duration measurable in mechanical clock time, understandable as an onward succession of consecutive "nows." Rather, it recurs as a "genealogical" differential, whose origin inheres in its wilful assertion and becomes recoverable for futural re-enactments that seek to continue life's adventure.(n72) In a word, the past never ends. It returns in every successive affirmation of will, in every conscious exertion of memory, in every instant when will and memory become interchangeable. This makes it reversible, repeatable, and recoverable. Moreover, the past of Nietzsche's Eternal Return is of a whole with other temporalities. One can never be younger, but as time advances, the future recedes. In the present, these temporalities meet. Consequently, the human sense of time encompasses an infinity of temporalities, as past, present, and future converge in every passing moment. And since this infinity is all of a piece, containing all the dimensions of time, as well as all the acts of man, affirmed in their entirety "whenever we affirm a single moment of it," the present acts as an intersection, not a division, between past and future.(n73) Linked to this polychronous totality, man's will accesses time's infinity, where there is no prescribed end. As to historical teleology or finality, for Nietzsche they are merely a derivative of Christian/modernist nihilism, with its indifference to life's temporal play. In response to the prompting of his will, it is man, as he participates in the eternal recurrence of his original affirmation, who imposes order on the world's underlying chaos, and man alone who shapes the future -- not some external, supra-human force that goes by the name of God, Progress, or the laws of Historical Materialism.(n74) In the spirit of the ancient Hellenes, who treated life's transience as the conjuncture of the actual and the eternal, of men and gods, Nietzsche's Eternal Return testifies to the completeness of the present moment.(n75) In addition to affirming willful action, Nietzsche's breaks with linear temporality infuses man with the idea that he always has the option of living the thought of Eternal Return. Just as every past was once a prefiguration of a sought-after future, every future arises from a past anticipation, that can be anticipated again. "The impossible," as teleologically decreed, "is not possible."(n76) Indeed, in seeking to overcome that which resists, life's will to power is manifested. Only belief in the underlying unity and purpose of "creation," the logos, resigns man to time's alleged eschatological properties. Nietzsche's Ubermensch, the antithesis of modern man, is steeped in the longest memory, not because he bears the accumulated wisdom of the past, but because he rejects the weariness of those governed by an imagined necessity and instead imposes his will, as an assertion of original being, upon the vagaries of time.(n77) This validation of ancient affirmations that identifies being with becoming should not, however, be taken to mean that the genealogical spirit of mythic origins -- the spirit of an eternally open and purposeless world subject solely to the active force of will -- gives man the liberty to do whatever he desires. The limits he faces remain those posed by the conditions of his epoch, as well as by his nature. In the language of social science, Nietzsche fully acknowledges the inescapable constraints of structures, systematic forces, or what Comte called "social statics." Yet, within these limits, all that is possible is possible, for man's activities are always prospectively open to the possibilities inherent in the moment, whenever these possibilities are appropriated according to his own determinations: i.e., whenever man engages the ceaseless struggle that is life. "Necessity," Nietzsche argues, "is not a fact, but an interpretation."(n78) What ultimately conditions historical activity is less what acts on man from the outside ("objectivity") than on what emanates from the inside (will), as he "evaluates" the forces affecting him. Nature, history, and the world may therefore affect the way he lives, but not as a "mechanical necessity." Given this rejection of immanent and transcendental determinisms, Nietzsche's concept of history is far from being a literal recapitulation of the traditional cyclical concept. According to Eliade, the thought of Eternal Return found in archaic societies implies an endless repetition of time, i.e., another sort of "line" (a circle) or necessity refusing history.(n79) By contrast, Nietzsche eschews time's automatic repetition by seeing Eternal Return in non-cyclical, as well as non-linear terms. The eternity of the past and the eternity of the future, he posits, necessitate the eternity of the present, and the eternity of the present cannot but mean that whatever has happened or will happen is always at hand in thought, ready to be repotentiated.(n80) In assuming that being is becoming, chance the verso of necessity, and will the force countering as well as partaking in the forces of chaos, the eternity of the Nietzschean past inevitably reverberates in the eternity of the future, and does so in a life-affirming manner.(n81) The past of Eternal Return is thus nostalgic, not for the past, but for the future. As Grecistes understand it, Nietzsche's concept of historical time is spherical. In time's "eternally recurring noon-tide," the different temporal dimensions of man's mind form a "sphere" in which thoughts of the past, present, and future revolve around one another, taking on new significance as each of their moments becomes a center in relation to the others. Within this polychronous sphere, the past does not occur but once and then freeze behind us, nor does the future follow according to determinants situated along a sequential course of development. Rather, past, present, and future inhere in every moment, never definitively superseded, never left entirely behind.(n82) "O my soul," his Zarathustra exclaims, "I taught you to say 'today' as well as 'one day' and 'formerly' and to dance your dance over every Here and There and Over-There."(n83) Whenever the Janus-headed present alters its view of these temporalities, its vision of past and future simultaneously changes. The way one stands in the present thus determines how everything recurs.(n84) And since every exemplary past was once the prefiguration of a sought-after future, these different temporalities have the potential of coming into new alignment, as they phenomenologically flow into one another. Recollected from memory and anticipated in will, the past, like the future, is always at hand, ready to be re-realized.(n85) As this happens, and a particular past is "redeemed" from the Heraclitean flux to forge a particular future, the "it was" becomes a "thus I willed it."(n86) In this fashion, time functions like a sphere that rolls forward, toward a future anticipated in one's image of the past.(n87) Existence, it follows, "begins in every instant; the ball There rolls around every Here. The middle [i.e., the present] is everywhere. The path of eternity is crooked."(n88) Moreover, this recurrence goes beyond mere repetition, for the re-enactment of an archaic configuration is invariably transfigured by its altered context. Likewise, the conventional opposition between past and future gives way before it, as the past becomes a harbinger of the future and the future a recurrence of the past. When the man of Eternal Return, who rejects the resentment and bad conscience of the teleologists, steps fully into his moment, Nietzsche counsels: Werde das, was Du bist! He does not advocate the Marxist-Hegelian Aufhebung, liberal progress, or Christian salvation, but a heroic assertion that releases him from the nihilistic or deterministic exhaustion of the present and imbues him with the archaic confidence to forge a future true to his higher, life-affirming instincts. Becoming what you are thus entails both a return and an overcoming. Through the longest memory, man ("whose horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future") returns to and thus transvalues the spirit of those foundational acts which marked his ancestors' triumph over the world's chaos; at the same time, this memory shaping his sense of history aids him in overcoming the resentment that dissipates his will and the bad conscience that leaves him adrift in the random stream of becoming. In the process, the will to power implied in Eternal Return compels him to confront what he believes to be the essential and eternal in life, imparting, in turn, something of the essential and eternal to the "marvelous uncertainty" of his own finite existence, as he goes beyond himself in imitating the gods. In this way, wilful becoming defines the character of his being, as the return of the essential and the eternal reaffirms both his origins and the values -- the mode of existence -- he proposes for his future. Since such a disposition is framed in the genealogical context of a primordial origin, Eternal Return does not foster an atomized, discontinuous duration, in which becoming is out of joint with being, but a self-justifying coherence that unites individual fate and collective destiny in a higher creativity--even if this "coherence" is premised on the belief that the world lacks an inherent significance or purpose. Based on a select appropriation of the past that serves as a principle of value, each individual act becomes inseparable from its historical world, just as the historical world, product of multiple individual valuations, comes to pervade every individual act. "Every great human being," Nietzsche writes, "exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again."(n89) Whenever, then, the thought of Eternal Return puts the past and future in the balance, as the present casts its altering light on them, it reestablishes "the innocence of becoming" which allows the active man, the heir to past valuations, to decide his own fate -- in contrast to the life-denigrating man of mechanical or teleological necessity, who fixes his past and awaits his future as if the world's course were already ordained.(n90) The final, and today most important component of the GRECE's historical philosophy comes from Heidegger, whose anti-modernist thought began to influence its metapolitical project, and to supplant that of Nietzsche in the early 1980s.(n91) Like the author of Zarathustra, Heidegger rejects Christian/modernist metaphysics and views man and history, being and becoming, as inseparable and incomplete. The past is gone and will not return, but its significance is neither left behind nor ever permanently cast. Further, when experienced as authentic historicity, it "is anything but what is past. It is something to which I can return again and again."(n92) Thus, while the past belongs "irretrievably to an earlier time," it may still exist in the form of a heritage or an identity that is able to 'determine 'a future' 'in the present."(n93) In this spirit, Heidegger claims "the original essence of being is time."(n94) Unlike other species of sentient life, Heideggerian man has no predetermined or ultimate ontological foundation: he alone is responsible for his being and its potentiality. Indeed, he is that being whose "being is itself an issue," for his existence is never fixed or complete, but open and transient.(n95) He alone leads his life and is, ipso facto, what he becomes. Man is thus compelled to "make something of himself," and this entails that he "care" about his Dasein. As being-in-the-world, i.e., as something specific to and inseparable from a historical-cultural context, human Dasein is experienced as an on-going possibility (inner, rather than contingent) that projects itself toward a future that is "not yet actual." Relatedly, the possibility man seeks in the world into which he is "thrown" is conditioned by temporal conditions, for time is not only the open horizon against which he is thrown, it is the ground on which he realizes himself. Because time "draws everything into its motion," the possibility man seeks in the future (his project) is conditioned by the present situating him and the past affecting his sense of possibility. Dasein's projection cannot, then, but come "toward itself in such a way that it comes back," anticipating its possibility as something that "has been" and is still present at hand.(n96) The three temporal dimensions (ecstases) of man's consciousness are, therefore, elicited whenever some latent potential or possibility is pursued.(n97) Birth and death, along with everything in between, inhere in all his moments, for Dasein equally possesses and equally temporalizes past, present, and future, conceived not as fleeting now-points, but as simultaneous dimensions of mindful existence.(n98) And though it occurs "in time," Dasein's experience of time -- temporality -- is incomparable with ordinary clock or calendar time, which moves progressively from past to present to future, as the flow of "nows" arrive and disappear. Instead, its temporality proceeds from the anticipated future (whose ultimate possibility is death), through the inheritance of the past, to the lived present. Thus, Dasein's time is not durational, in the quantitative, uniform way it is for natural science or "common sense," but existential, i.e., experienced ecstatically as the present thought of an anticipated future is "recollected" and made meaningful in terms of past references. Because the "what has been, what is about to be, and the presence" (the "ecstatical unity of temporality") reach out to one another in every conscious moment and influence the way man lives his life, Dasein is necessarily infused with the historical. "History," however, should not to be confused with the sum of momentary actualities" which historians fabricate into narratives; rather, it is "an acting and being acted upon which pass through the present, which are determined from out of the future, and which take over the past."(n99) When man chooses a possibility, he makes present what he will be through an appropriation of what he has been.(n100) This decision has nothing arbitrary or willful about it, but follows from the process that allows him to open himself to and "belong to the truth of being," as that truth is manifested in its ecstatical unity. For the same reason, this decision does not imply the past's triumph over the present and future, for it is made to free thought -- and life -- from the inertia of what already has been thought and lived. Man's project has little to do with causal factors acting on his existence from "outside" (what in conventional history, which Heidegger calls Historie,(n101) is the purely factual or "scientific" account of past events), and everything to do with the complex ecstatical consciousness shaping his view of possibility (i.e., with the ontological basis of human temporality, Geschichte, which "stretches" Dasein through the past, present, and future, as Dasein is "constituted in advance"). Because this ecstatical consciousness allows man to anticipate and to authenticate his future, Dasein remains constantly in play, never frozen in an external world of essences or bound to the linearity of subject-object relations. Further, the events historically situating it do not happen "just once for all nor are they something universal," but represent past possibilities that are potentially recuperable for futural endeavors. The notion of an irretrievable past simply does not make sense for Heidegger, for the past is always at hand. Its thought and reality are irreparably linked: its meaning is part of man, part of his world, and invariably changes as his project and his perspective changes. The past, then, is not to be seen in the same way as a scientist observes his data. It is not something independent of belief or perspective that can be grasped wie es eigentlich gewesen. Rather, its significance (and even its "factual" depiction) is mediated and undergoes ceaseless revision as man lives and reflects on his lived condition.(n102) This frames historical understanding in existential terms, with the "facts" of past events becoming meaningful to the degree that they belong to his "story," i.e., when what "has been" still "is" and "can be." In Heidegger's language, projection is premised on thrownness. While such an anti-substantialist understanding of history is likely to appear fictitious to those viewing it from the outside, "objectively," without participating in the possibilities undergirding it, Heidegger argues that all history is "experienced" in this way, for what "has been" is meaningful only to the degree that it is recuperable for the future. As long, therefore, as the promise of the past remains something still living, still to come, it is not a disinterested, apriori aspect of something no longer present. Neither is it mere prologue, a stepping stone leading the way to a more rational future, but something with which we have to identify if we are to resolve the challenges posed by our project, for only knowledge of who we have been enables us to be who we are. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger believes that whenever Dasein "runs ahead toward the past," the "not yet actual" opens to the inexhaustible possibilities of what "has been" and what "can be." He also follows Nietzsche in viewing the regenerative impulses of mythic time as inherent to history. In thus emphasizing man's inherent temporality, both Heidegger and Nietzsche reject the abstract universalism of the mechanical and teleological conceptions of becoming (suitable for measuring matter in motion or the Spirit's progression toward the Absolute), just as they both dismiss decontextualized concepts of being (whether in the form of the Christian soul, Descartes' ego cogito, Marx's species man, or Rawls' disembodied individual). Heidegger, however, differs from Nietzsche in making being, not will, the key to temporality. Nietzsche, he claims, neither fully rejected the metaphysical tradition he opposed nor saw beyond beings to being.(n103) While denying modernity's faith in progress and perpetual overcoming (the Aufhebung which implies not only transcendence, but a leaving behind), Nietzsche's "will to power" allegedly perpetuates modernity's transcendental impulse by positing a subjectivity that is not "enowned" by being. As a possible corrective to this assumed failing, Heidegger privileges notions of Andenken (the recollection that recovers and renews tradition) and Verwendung (which is a going beyond that, unlike Aufhebung, is also an acceptance and a deepening) -- notions implying not simply the inseparability of being and becoming, but becoming's role in the unfolding, rather than the transcendence of being.(n104) Despite these differences, the anti-metaphysical, anti-modernist aims Nietzsche and Heidegger share makes them both apposite allies of the GRECE's philosophical project. This is especially evident in the importance they attribute to becoming and to origins. Heidegger, for example, argues that whenever being is separated from becoming and deprived of temporality, as it is in the Christian/modern logos, then being (in this case, abstract being, rather than being-in-the-world) becomes identified with the present, a now-point, subject to the determinisms governing the inorganic objects of Newtonian physics.(n105) This implicit denial of ecstatical temporality allegedly causes the prevailing philosophical tradition to "forget" that being exists in time, as well as space, and is not an essence posited by God or the laws of nature.(n106) By rethinking being in terms of human temporality and restoring it to becoming, Heidegger, like Nietzsche, makes time the horizon of all existence, thereby freeing the existential from the inorganic properties of space and matter. Moreover, since it is inseparable from becoming, and since becoming occurs in a world-with-others, being is necessarily situated in a "context of significance" saturated with history and tradition. As man pursues his project in terms of present worldly concerns, the various existential modes of these concerns, as well as the "world" itself, are informed by interpretations stemming from a history of interpretation. Just as "every age must write its own history afresh" (R. G. Collingwood), every man is compelled to engage his existence in light of what has been handed down to him -- in light, in other words, of the totality of meaning and purpose defining his world.(n107) His future-directed project is indeed only conceivable in terms of the world into which he is thrown. Man therefore makes his history, but does so as a "bearer of meaning," whose convictions, beliefs, and representations have been bestowed by the past.(n108) This meaning-laden matrix constitutes the "t/here" [da] in Dasein, without which being (qua being-in-the-world) is inconceivable.(n109) And because there can be no Sein without a da, no existence without a specific framework of meaning and purpose, man, in his ownmost nature qua being, is inseparable from this matrix that "makes possible what has been projected."(n110) Being is indeed inherent only in "the enowning of the grounding of the t/here."(n111) In contrast to inauthentic Dasein that "temporalizes itself in the mode of a making-present which does not await but forgets," accepting what is usually taken as the imperatives of being (but which, situated as it is in "now time," is usually a corrupted or sclerotic transmission confusing self-absorption in the present with the primordial sources of life), authentic Dasein "dredges" its heritage in order to "remember" or to retrieve the truth of primordial possibility and to "make it productively its own.(n112) The more authentically the potential of this "inexhaustible wellspring" is brought to light, the more profoundly man becomes "what he is."(n113) In this sense, authentic historicity "understands history as the 'recurrence' of the possible."(n114) Here, the "possible" is "what does not pass," what remains, what lasts, what is deeply rooted in oneself, one's people, one's world; it is the heritage of historical meaning that preserves what has been posited in the beginning and what will be true in the future.(n115) "I know," Heidegger said in 1966, "that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man.., was rooted in a tradition.(n116) By contrast, the uprooted, detemporalized man of modern thought is deprived not only of a means of rising above his necessarily impoverished, because isolated self, he lacks access to the creative force of his original being and the "greatness" -- the truth -- it portends. When Heideggerian man is "great" and rises to the possibilities latent in his existence, he invariably returns to his autochthonous source, resuming there a heritage that is not to be confused with the causal properties of his thrown condition, but with a being whose authenticity is manifested in its becoming. "Being proclaims destiny, and hence control of tradition."(n117) Here again, Heidegger concurs with Nietzsche, linking man's existence with the "essential swaying of meaning" that occurred aborigine, when his forefathers created the possibilities that remain open for him to realize. From the presence of this original being, enduring in tradition and constituting its truth, man is existentially sustained and authenticated, just as a tree thrives when rooted in its native soil.(n118) Although a self-conscious appropriation of origins does not resolve the problems posed by the human condition, it does free man from present fixations with the inauthentic, and remind him of the possibilities inherent in his existence. 119 The "first beginning" also brings other beginnings into play, for it is the ground of all subsequent groundings.(n120) Without a "reconquest" of Dasein's original commencement (impossible in the linear conception, with its irreversible and deracinating progressions), there can never be another commencement: only in reappropriating a heritage, whose beginning is already a completion, does man come back to himself, achieve authenticity, and inscribe himself in the world of his own time. Indeed, only from the store of possibility intrinsic to his originary genesis, never from the empty abstractions postulated by the universal reason transcending historicity, does he learn the finite, historically-situated tasks "demanded" of him and open himself to the possibility of his world. Commencement, accordingly, lies in front of, never behind him, for the initial revelation of being is necessarily anticipated in each new beginning, as each new beginning draws on its source, accessing what has been preserved for posterity and rediscovering being's highest possibilities. Because the "truth of being" found in origins informs Dasein's project and causes it to "come back to itself," what is prior invariably prefigures what is posterior. In this sense, the past is future. History functions not as a progression from beginning to end, but, rather, as a return backwards, to foundations, where the possibility of being remains ripest. This makes origins all important. They are never mere antecedent or causa prima, as modernity's inorganic logic holds, but "that from which and by which something is what it is and as it is .... [They are] the source of its essence" [i.e., its ownmost particularly] and the way truth "comes into being... [and] becomes historical.(n121) As Benoist puts it, the "original" (unlike modernity's novum) is not that which comes once and for all, but that which comes and is repeated every time being unfolds in its authenticity.(n122) In this sense, origins represent the primordial unity of existence and essence affirmed in myth. And because origins, as "enowned" being, denote possibility, not the purely "factual" or "momentary" environment affecting its framework, Dasein achieves self-constancy (authenticity) whenever it is projected on the basis of its original inheritance, for Dasein "comes toward itself" only when anticipating its end as an extension of its beginning.(n123) Thus, origins designate identity and destiny, not causation (the "wherein," not the "wherefrom"). Relatedly, the historical-spiritual world in which Dasein originates persists throughout life, preserving what "has been" and providing the basis for what "continues to be," given that origins are not "out there," but part of us and who we are. Because origins constitute the ground of all authentic existence, "gathering into the present what is always essential," what "will be" springs ever anew from what "has been."(n124) This confrontation with "the beginning of our being," as Benoist reiterates, is requisite for "other, more original commencements."(n125) The original repose of being that saves man from the "bustle of mere events and machinations" is not, however, easily accessed. To return Dasein to its ground and to "recapture the beginning of historical-spiritual existence in order to transform it into a new beginning" is possible only through "an anticipatory resoluteness" that turns against the present's mindless routines.(n126) Such an engagement (and here Heidegger's "revolutionary conservative" opposition to the established philosophical tradition is categorical) entails a fundamental questioning of the "rootless and self-seeking freedoms" concealing the truth of being -- a questioning, that draws "its necessity from the deepest history of man."(n127) For this reason, Heidegger (like Grecistes) sees history as a "choice for heros," demanding the firmest resolve and the greatest risk, as man, in anxious confrontation with the heritage given him, because of his origins, seeks to realize an indwelling possibility in the face of an amnesic or obscurant conventionality.(n128) This heroic choice ought not, however, to be confused with the subjectivist propensities of liberal individualism. A heroic conception of history demands action based on what is true and "original" in tradition, not on what is arbitrary or wilful. Similarly, this conception is anything but reactionary, for its appropriation of origins privileges the most radical opening of being. Finally, this heritage that becomes meaningful when choosing a project, this reaching forward that reaches back, validates what Heidegger calls "fate."(n129) In his definition, fate is the "enowning" embrace, not causality's fatalistic acceptance, of the heritage of culture and history into which man is thrown at birth. In embracing this heritage, i.e., in taking over the unchosen circumstances of his community and generation, man necessarily identifies with the collective destiny of his people, as he grounds his Dasein in the truth of his "ownmost particular historical facticity."(n130) This makes individual identity inseparable from communal identity, as being-in-the-world recognizes its being-with-others (Mitsein) and accepts its participation in the larger existence of its people. Against the detemporalized, deracinated individual of liberal thought, "liberated" from organic ties and conceived as a phenomenal "inside" separated from an unknowable "outside," Heideggerian man achieves authenticity through a resolute appropriation of the multi-temporal, interdependent ties he shares with his community. He makes himself out of the immediacy of his world, as well as what has been bequeathed to him by his forefathers and what is to be passed on to his heirs. In so doing, he affirms his mindful involvement in the time and space of his own destined existence, along with the destiny of his people's existence. The community of one's people (Mitsein) becomes, then, "the in which, out of which, and for which history happens."(n131) And because authentic Dasein is unavoidably Mitsein, human existence is quintessentially social. Dasein's social nature has, though, little to do with the thoughtless conventions of everyday life, but rather inheres in the very texture of human Being and in that which is ownmost to a people. For this reason, Dasein's pursuit of possibility, even in opposing the prevailing conventions for the sake of individual authenticity, is necessarily a "cohistorizing" with a community, a co-historizing that converts the legacy of the far-distant past into the basis of a meaningful future.(n132) In fact, history to Heidegger is possible only because Dasein's individual fate--its inner necessity -- connects with a larger social-historical necessity that struggles against the perennial forces of decay and dissolution, as a people seeks "to take history back unto itself." The destiny it shares with its people is, indeed, what grounds Dasein in historicity and links it to the heritage that determines and is determined by it.(n133) The Future of the Past In the present, the past and future co-exist -- as memory or tradition, anticipation or project. It is up to man to determine how to relate to these different temporalities. From pagan myth and the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Grecistes propound a historical philosophy that endeavors to free Europeans from the deculturating determinisms of the Christian/ modernist project. Following Guillaume Faye, this philosophy may be called "archeofuturism," for it posits that there can be no destining future without an original pre-destination.(n134) If Europeans are to regain the creative spirit of their being and to play a historical role again, they have no alternative but to rediscover "the original essence of their identity." This obliges them to reappropriate their longest memories and to face the future with the conviction of their ancestral lineage. Like Plato's anamnesis, this recovery seeks to release them from time's irreversibility, and make possible another beginning. If, on the other hand, Europeans continue to forget their origins and reject the "European idea" as their myth fondateur, archeofuturists fear that they are likely to succumb to the "end of history," where the past ceases to return and the future folds in on an eternal "now."(n135) Archeofuturism's emphasis on origins should not be taken to imply that Europeans are bound to repeat the foundational acts that defined their forbearers, such as occurs in "cold societies"(n136) (i.e., those primitive communities whose synchronic principles play a commanding role in the thought of Levi-Strauss and other anti-historical thinkers). Instead of perpetuating the identitarian vestiges of a former golden age, archeofuturists seek only the original impetus of archaic possibilities so as to create new ones. Indeed, identity for them is real only when under construction, deconstruction, or reconstruction. "We," Benoist writes, "assume a heritage in order to continue it or to re-found it."(n137) It is, he argues, neither rationale for present conditions nor occasion for folkloric revival, but simply requisite for a meaningful future.(n138) Archeofuturism posits, then, neither a return nor a repetition, but only an unfolding of identity on the basis of the history and culture that situate it. Unlike the denizens of Levi-Strauss' cold societies, Europeans attuned to the Faustian possibilities of their world invent, improvise, and make new choices that endeavor to begin the beginning again --"with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a true beginning."(n139) It is, therefore, the regenerative impulse of the Indo-European heritage, not its nostalgic re-generation, that reconciles past and future, origin and project.(n140) Archeofuturists feel Europeans do justice to who they are only when they look forward, providing their heritage another opening to the future. In Heidegger's formulation, "remembrance of [our] inception is not a flight into the past, but readiness for what is to come."(n141) In this spirit, the longest memory of the European past is summons, because there the possibility of the future is disclosed in its primordial fullness, and because there, where causality cedes to destiny, being commences anew. As Grecistes emphasize, every great revolution envisages its project as a return to origins.(n142) References: 1. Zeev Sternhell is typical of those who characterize the rejection of the right-left continuum as inherently fascist. See his Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. D. Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For a Greciste critique, see Gilbert Destrees, Les Non-Conformistes des annees 30: entre doctrine et action (Paris: GRECE Pamphlet, n.d.). For an alternate account, see Marc Crapez, Naissance de la gauche (Paris: Eds. Michalon, 1998). Of the numerous works on the different Third Way tendencies, the most impressive is Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932, 5th ed. (Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1999). On the Third Way per se, see Arnaud Imatz, Par dela droite et gauche. Permanence et ?volution des ideaux et des valeurs non-conformistes (Paris: Godefroy de Bouillon, 1996). 2. David Barney et al., La Nouvelle inquisition. Ses acteurs, ses methodes, ses victimes: Essai sur le terrorisme intellectuel et la police de la pense? (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1993); also De la police de la pense? et la nouvelle inquisition: Actes du XXXLe colloque national du GRECE (Paris: GRECE, 1998). On the censorious nature of the contemporary intelligentsia, see Reagis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, tr. by D. Macey (London: Verso, 1981); Jean Sevilla, Le terrorisme intellectuel de 1945 a nos jours (Paris: L'Aencre, 2000); Klaus J. Groth, Die Diktatur der Guten: Political Correctness (Munich: Herbig, 1999). 3. When discovered by the French media in the late 1970s, the GRECE was labelled "Nouvelle Droite. This term not only lacks substance, it is used in the most contradictory ways. See Jean-Christian Petitfils, Le extreme droite en France (Paris: PUF, 1983), p.119. While it may be inaccurate to translate Nouvelle Droite as New Right, since this term is usually reserved for the union-busting, budget-cutting Anglo-American right of the 1970s and 1980s, as represented by the governments of Thatcher and Reagan and the theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, there is no better term. Programmatically, the American New Right was a neo-liberal tendency that sought to diminish state intervention in the economy, dismantle the Keynesian system, and mobilize popular electoral around populist and Christian-fundamentalist themes. By contrast, the Nouvelle Droite(i.e. the GRECE) is anti-liberal and anti-Christian, hostile to the Anglo-American Right, and more concerned with culture than economics. Typical of the prevailing inability to make these distinctions is Ruth Levitas, ed., The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). For a Greciste's critique of the Anglo-American New Right, see Alain de Benoist, Hayek: A Critique, in Telos 110 (Winter 1998); Alain de Benoist, Le lib?ralisme contre les identit?s, in Aux sources de le erreur liberale, ed. by B. Guillemaind and A. Guyot-Jeannin (Lausanne: Le Age d'Homme, 1999); Guillaume Faye, Le lib?ralisme, j'a ne marche pas," in ?lements pour la civilisation europenne (hereafter Elements) 44 (January 1983). On the GRECE's project, see Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, The French New Right in the Year 2000," in Telos 115 (Spring 1999). See also Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); and Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Fall 1994), devoted to The French New Right: New Right -- New Left -- New Paradigm? 4 .Unlike their liberal critics, Lepenistes and Catholic traditionalists are wont to accuse the Grecistes of pro-communism and crypto-gauchisme. From a different angle, the non conformist Left also rejects the prevailing characterizations. Some members of the PCF and the Left/nationalist wing of the Socialist Party (most notably Reagis Debray and Jean-Pierre Chevennement), along with independent leftists associated with Esprit, Jean-Edern Hallier's Le Idiot internationale, the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (MAUSS) of Serge Latouche and Alain Caill?, and parts of the Italian far Left, dismiss the accusation of fascism and have, at times, collaborated with the GRECE. Certain prominent Franco-Jewish intellectuals, such as the late Raymond Aron and Annie Kriegel, while unsympathetic to the GRECE's project, have similarly repudiated the accusation of "fascism." 5. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. by P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 6 .On several occasions, Pierre-Andr? Taquieff has denounced the extraordinary abasement of the reigning intelligentsia and the terrorist? vigilante tactics it employs to stifle debate. See, e.g., Sur la Nouvelle Droite (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 1994), pp. 314-36. The situation, moreover, is not qualitatively different in the U.S. In assessing the recent literature on the Right, Glen Jeansonne has warned that: We are rapidly approaching the point at which scholarship becomes propaganda, ceases to liberate the spirit of the individual, and simply replaces old dogmas with new ones [i.e. with those of the present left-liberal Establishment]. See Women of the Far Right: The Mothers Movement and World War Two (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 186. 7. Julien Freund, La Decadence (Paris: Sirey, 1984). Cf. Robert M. Adams, Decadent Societies (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), p. 36. 8. Guillaume Faye, Le syst?me a tuer les peuples (Paris: Copernic, 1981), p. 144. 9 .Alain de Benoist, La Europe sous tutelle, in El?ments 59 (Summer 1986); Philippe Malaud, La r?volution lib?rale (Paris: Masson, 1976). 10.Alain de Benoist, Id?ologies: c'est la lutte finale (1984), in La Ligne de mire. Discours aux citoyens europeens 1972-1987 (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1995); Pierre Joannon, Pavane pour une Europe difunte, in El?ments 19 (December 1976); Alain de Benoist, Die Religion der Menschenrechte, in Mut zur Identitat, ed. by Pierre Krebs (Struckum: Verlag f. Ganzheitl. Forschung u. Kultur, 1988). See also Pierre Thuillier, La grande implosion: Rapport sur l? effrondrement de l'Occident 1999-2002 (Paris: Fayard, 1995); Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996). 11 .Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. by R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 37; Alain de Benoist, Orientations pour les ann?es d?cisives (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982), pp. 29-31, and L'ennemi principal, in El?ments (March-April 1982); Guillaume Faye, Pour en finir avec la civilisation occidentale, El?ments 34 (April 1980); Marco Tarchi, La colonisation subtile: American way of life: dynamique sociale, in Le d?fi de Disneyland: Actes du XXe colloque national de la revue El?ments (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1987); Jordis von Lohausen, Main basse sur l'Europe, in El?ments 84 (February 1996). Cf. Julius Evola, Americanisme et Bolchevisme (1929), in Le visionnaire foudroye, ed. by Jean Mabire (Paris: Copernic, 1977); Gerd Lundestad, Empire by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945-1997 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998); Jacques Thibau, La France colonis? (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). 12. Raymond Ruyer, Les cent prochains si?cles: Le destin historique de l'homme selon la Nouvelle Gnose am?ricaine (Paris: Fayard, 1977), p. 320; Alain de Benoist, Vers l'ind?pendence! Pour une Europe souveraine et lib?re des blocs!, in La ligne de mire, op. cit.; Guillaume Faye, Nouveau discours a la nation europ?enne (Paris: Eds. Albatros, 1985) 13. Although the Gr?cistes acknowledge the European roots of modernity, they claim European modernity lacked the truly universal impulse which Americans (former colonials shallowly rooted in the Western tradition and without a homogeneous cultural heritage) have imparted to it -- somewhat in the way socialism was European in origin, but not in the totalizing/universalizing manner of the Soviets. See Guillaume Faye, Les nouveaux enjeux id?ologiques (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), p. 56. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, America,tr. by C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988), p. 73; Eric Werner, L'avant-guerre civile (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1998), pp. 27-29 14. Alain de Benoist points out that the English word -people is not the equivalent of the Freench peuple or the German Volk, but closer in meaning to gens or Leute -- i.e. terms denoting an indeterminate plurality of not necessarily related individuals. There is, moreover, no English equivalent for patrie, and home for the American is where -he hangs his hat. See D?mocraie: Le probl?me (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), pp. 30 and 40; and Robert de Herte(Alain de Benoist) and Hans-J?rgen Nigra (Giorgio Locchi), Il ?tait une fois l'Am?rique, in Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (January 1976). See also Herman Keyserling, America Set Free(New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), and Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Le cancer am?ricain(Paris: Rieder, 1931), two works informing much of the GRECE's anti-Americanism. Cf. Jacob Burkhardt, Reflections on History, tr. by M. D. Hottinger (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics,1979), p. 39; Stendhal et les Etats-Unis de Am?rique, in Etudes et recherches 4-5 (January 1977); J. G. Jatras, Rainbow Fascism at Home and Abroad, in Chronicles(June 1998). 15. The vocation of the human race, they [Americans] believe, is American. See Thomas Molnar, The Emerging Atlantic Culture (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 22. In this vein, Robert Kennedy spoke of America's right to the spiritual direction of the planet; George H. W. Bush, in announcing the New World Order, proclaimed the inexorability of America's global leadership; and William J. Clinton, as the latest exemplar of his nation's moral superiority, designated America as the world's "indispensable nation." See Claude Julien, " America's Empire, tr. by R. Bruce (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 31; Pierre-Marie Gallois, Le soleil d'Allah aveugle l'Occident(Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1995), p. 25; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Great Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives(New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 195. See also Jean Cau, Le triomphe de Mickey, in Etats-Unis: Danger -- Actes du XXVe colloque national du GRECE(Paris: GRECE, 1992); Henri Gobard, La guerre culturelle: logique du d?sastre(Paris: Copernic, 1979), pp. 62-92. As to America's new-found mania for multiculturalism, it has less to do with cultural sensitivity than with globalist and managerial imperatives hostile to all forms of indigenous culture. See Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 103. Not unrelatedly, the GRECE's anti-Americanism is accompanied by a similar coolness to the English. The only Anglophones contributing to its cultural arsenal have been the Irish, whose lovers and dancers long incurred the wrath of what W. B. Yeats called Cromwell's murderous crew -- i.e. the Puritan-mercantile forces of the Anglo-American world. 16. Benoist, Vers l'ind?pendence, op. cit. See also Alain de Benoist, Europe, Tiers monde,m?me combat(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980); Pierre B?rard, Ces cultures queon assassine, La cause des peuples: Actes du XVe collogue national du GRECE(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982)To the degree they resemble Russian, Indian, and Chinese critics of America's universalist pretensions, the Gr?cistes are a good example of what Samuel P. Huntington refers to as "the mainenemy" in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 17. Quoted in The Nature of the Right: American and European Politics and Political Thought since 1789, ed. by Roger Eatwell and No?l Sullivan (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p.181. See also Jean Cau, Discours de la d?cadence(Paris: Copernic, 1978), pp. 176 and 188; Alain de Benoist, Quest-ce que l'identit?: R?flexions sur un concept-clef, in El?ments (n.d. [Spring 1993?]); Pierre Krebs, Das Thule-Seminar: Geistesgegenwart der Zukunft (Horn: Burkhart Weecke Verlag, 1994), pp. 23-24. Cf. Richard Bessel, "European Society in the Twentieth Century," in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, T. C. W. Blanning, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 252 18. Jean Varenne,Le h?ritage indo-europ?en, in El?ments 40 (Winter 1982); Benoist, Orientations pour les ann?es d?cisives, op. cit. pp. 52-53; Pierre Krebs, Im Kampf um das Wesen(Horn: Burkhart Weecke Verlag, 1997), pp. 16-20; Faye, Le syst?me a tuer les peuples, op. cit.,pp. 164-77; Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 63. Cf. Hellmut Diwald, Mut zur Geschichte(Bergisch Gladbach: LoGbbe Verlag, 1983), p. 8. 19. By its very nature, culture aspires toward self-sufficient unity in its representational modes. Because its centripetalism tolerates only limited amounts of the foreign, culture is inherently exclusive.This makes its members part of a living whole, distinct from others. See Alain de Benoist, Culture, in Nouvelle Ecole 25-26 (Winter 1974-75); Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies, 1995), pp. 3-21; Claude L?vi-Strauss, Le regard eloign?e (Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 24-30. Given culture's inherent exclusiveness, the GRECE's critics consider its culturalism a sophisticated form of traditional racism -- in that it allegedly replaces notions of biological inferiority with those of cultural difference -- little concerned that culturalism and racism partake of radically different realms. For a typical example of this confusion, see Alain Bihr, Le Actualit? de un archa?sme: La pens?e de extr?me droite et la crise de la modernit? (Paris: Eds. Page Deux, 1998), pp. 15-40; see also Pierre-Andr? Taguieff, Le n?o-racisme diff?rentialiste. Sur le ambiguit? de une evidence commune et ses effets pervers, in Langage et Soci?t? 34 (December 1985). These critics also dismiss the GRECE's advocacy of le droit a ladiff?rence and la cause des peuples. See Alain de Benoist, Le droit a la diff?rence, and Gilbert Destr?es, Diff?rentialisme contre racisme, in El?ments 77 (n.d. [Spring 1993?]). Ironically, the GRECE's culturalism is profoundly equalitarian and hence modernist, stemming from the Enlightenment's programmatic affirmation of the equality of all peoples and cultures - an affirmation which Gr?cistes philosophically oppose but tend to accept in cultural practice. Relatedly, Paul Piconne links the GRECE's critique of left-liberal anti-racism to the critique of anti-Semitism made by Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972 [1944]). By today's hyper-liberal standards, Horkheimer's and Adorno's defense of Jewish identity, like the culturalism of the French New Right, would be considered racist, because it opposes a homogenizing universalism threatening particularisms with extermination. See Confronting the French New Right, in Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Fall 1999). 20. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci,ed. and tr. by Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 3-13; Pour un Gramscisme de droite: Actes du XVIe colloque national du GRECE (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982); Pierre Vial, Die Weltbewegende Kraft der Ideen, in Elemente f?r de europaische Wiedergeburt 2 (January 1987). 21. For the relationship between conservatism, traditionalism, and Christianity, see Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ed., Antichristliche Konservative: Religionkritik von rechts (Munich: Herderb Gecherei, 1982). 22. Alain de Benoist, La religion de l'Europe,in El?ments 36 (Fall 1980); Louis Rougier, Celse contre les chretiens, with an introduction by Alain de Benoist (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1997). Cf. Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick, History of Pagan Europe (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1999), pp. 59-77. For a critique of the GRECE's anti-Christianism, see Daniel Cologne, Nouvelle droite et subversion (Paris: Collection M?tapolitique et Tradition, 1979); Georges Hourdin, Le nouvelle droite et les chr?tiens (Paris: Eds. du Cerf, 1980). Gr?cistes acknowledge Christianity's syncretistic character: it absorbed many traditional pagan elements and ultimately adapted itself to the Indo-European world view. Yet, they claim it never fully conquered Europe, and that the greatest European achievements, whether in the form of the Gothic Cathedrals or the music of Bach, were essentially pagan in inspiration. See Patrick de Plunkett, Analyses, in Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (January 1976); Pierluigi Locchi, La musique, le mythe, Wagner et moi, in Etudes et recherches 3 (June 1976). Despite their recognition of its syncretistic character, the GRECE's anti-Christianism (or, more accurately, its anti-Catholicism) emphasizes Christianity's Hebraic rather than European roots and underplays the powerful Europeanizing influences exerted by traditional Catholicism, which, unlike its post-Vatican II counterpart or its Protestant offshoots, bore little resemblance to the oriental forms of early Christianity. Cf. James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Given the GRECE's implicit Islamophilism, its strident anti-Catholicism seems curiously inconsistent, if not duplicitous, especially considering Islam's more faithful distillation of Near Eastern monotheism. See Dossier: Les Arabes, in El?ments 53 (Spring 1985); Alexander del Valle, Islamisme et Etats-Unis: Une alliance contre Europe , 2nd ed. (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1999), p. 53; and Guillaume Faye, La colonisation de l'Europe: Discours vrai sur le immigration et l'Islam (Paris: L'Aencre, 2000), pp. 73-85, 329-36. 23. Alain de Benoist, Les id?es a la endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), pp.167-84. Cf. Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 19-31; Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, tr. by W. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 2, p. 413. 24. Louis Pauwels, Comment devient-on ce que le on est? (Paris: Stock, 1978), p. 145. Cf. Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), pp. 30-31; Egon Haffner, Der Humanitaraismus und die Versuch seiner F?berwindung bei Nietzsche, Scheler und Gehlen (Weigrzburg: Konigshausen u. Neumann, 1988), p. 75. 25. Guillaume Faye, La probl?matique moderne de la raison ou la querelle de la rationalit?, in Nouvelle Ecole 41 (November 1984); Louis Rougier, Du paradis a la utopie(Paris: Copernic, 1979), p. 60. Cf. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). 26. Louis Dumont, La gen?se chr?tienne de l'individualisme moderne, in Le D?bate 15(September 1981); Pierre B?rard, Louis Dumont: Anthropologie et modernit?, in Nouvelle Ecole 39 (Fall 1982). Also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Marcel Gauchet, Le d?senchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 77. 27 . Tomislav Sunic, Against Equality and Democracy ,op. cit., p. 74. 28. Thomas Molnar and Alain de Benoist, Le ?clipse du sacr? : discours et r?ponses(Paris: La Table Ronde, 1986), pp. 131-47; Sigrid Hunke, Was Tresgt aber den Untergang des Zeitalters?, in Elemente f?r die europaische Wiedergeburt 1 (July 1986). 29. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 51-52; Alain de Benoist, Le empire int?rieur(Paris: Fata Morgana, 1995), pp. 32-38; Guillaume Faye, Heidegger et la question du depassement du Christianisme, in Nouvelle Ecole 39 (Fall 1982). 30. Sigrid Henke, Europas andere Religion: Die ?eberwindung der religiosen Krise (Dusseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1969), pp. 27-39. 31. Benoist, Le empire int?rieur, op. cit., p. 31. 32. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Viking, 1931), p. 59. (Emphasis in the original, as in all subsequent uses of it). 33. Alain de Benoist, Sacr? pa?en et d?scralisation jud?o-chr?tienne du Monde, in Quelle religion pour le Europe, ed. by D?metre Theraios (Paris: Georg, 1990). In Catholicism, especially among its former peasant adherents, this progressive sense was mitigated by liturgical time, whose sacred calendar annually repeated the historical time of Jesus. Liturgical time has, though, like other pagan encrustations, been largely demoted in the modern church. See Alain de Benoist, Le nouvelle calendrier liturgique, in Nouvelle Ecole 12 (March-April 1970). 34. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, tr. by W. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 134-35. Cf. Karl Lewith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, tr. by F. V. Filson (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). The teleological is by no means foreign to the Ancients; it is, for example, central to Aristotle's thought. But Aristotle, like Plato and Socrates before him, anticipated the Christian/modernist metaphysics opposed by Gr?cistes-- Christianity being, in Nietzsche's phrase, a "Platonism of the masses." The Indo-European world view that is lost and lamented here, to use Greek examples, refers to the age of Homer, the pre-Socratics, and the tragedians. 35. Rougier, Du paradis a la utopie, op. cit.,p. 125; Pierre Chassard, La philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: GRECE, 1975), pp. 26-40. See also Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, tr. by G. Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 36-52; Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by P. Emard and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 36. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 37. The social revolution . . . cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future." Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), vol. 1, p. 400. Like those adhering to the biblical, liberal, and Freudian traditions, Marxists conceive of origins in purely negative terms: the long detour that began with the abandonment of primitive communism (analogous to the expulsion from Eden/the natural state/the patricidal act). Hence the Marxist effort to escape history. 38. Alain de Benoist, "Une br?ve histoire de l'id?e de progr?s," in Nouvelle Ecole 51 (2000). 39. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), Essay I, 3 40. Pierre Vial, Servir la cause des peuples, in La cause des peuples,op. cit.,p. 67; Guillaume Faye, Warum Wir Kampfen, in Elemente f?r die europaische Wiedergeburt 1(July 1986). 41. Pierre Vial, Aux sources de l'Europe, in El?ments 50 (Spring 1984); Christian Lahalle, Le peuplement de la Gr?ce et du basin ?egeen aux hautes ?poques, in Nouvelle Ecole 43 (December 1985). A recent, though dilettantish variation of the "ex oriente lux" thesis appears in Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiactic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987-91). 42. Th?me central, in Nouvelle Ecole 17 (March-April 1972); Krebs, Das Thule-Seminar, op. cit., p. 88. 43. Vial, Aux sources de l'Europe, in op. cit.; Andr? Cherpillod, La ?criture en Europe a la ?poque pr?historique,in Nouvelle Ecole 50 (1998). Also Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500-3500 B.C. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982); Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilization of the Stone Age (New York: The Free Press, 1998); Chris Scarre, Exploring Prehistoric Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Barry Cunliffe, ed., Prehistoric Europe: An Illustrated History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). These recent discoveries had long been suspected; see Geoffrey Bibby, The Testimony of the Spade (New York: Merton, 1957). 44. The evidence should, but does not necessarily discredit the old diffusionist view. For example, J. M. Roberts, in a typical display of the "ex lux oriente" influence among AngloSaxon historians, acknowledges the recent evidence that puts Europe's civilizational origins on a par with Near Eastern ones, yet nonetheless roots Europe's identity in the Holy Lands. See A History of Europe (New York: Allen Lane, 1996), pp. 12-20, 54. 45. Itin?raire, in Nouvelle Ecole 21-22 (Winter 1972-73); Marco Tarchi, Prol?gomones a la unification de l'Europe, in Crepuscule des blocs, aurore des peuples: XXIIIe colloque national du GRECE (Paris: GRECE, 1990); Charles Champetier, Anti-utilitarisme: de nouveau clivages, in El?ments 74 (Spring 1992); Alain de Benoist, Les Indo-Europ?ens: A la recherche du foyer d'origine, in Nouvelle Ecole 49 (1997). Gr?cistes do not view the Indo-Europeans as a racial group, but solely as a linguistic-cultural one. The question of race, contrary to the claims of their critics, is irrelevant here, for all the peoples of archaic Europe, whether Indo-European or non-Indo-European, were Europid ("white"). What is at stake is cultural identity, not biology, though liberal universalists (recognizing "humanity" only as an abstract zoological concept) have had trouble following the logic of this distinction. See Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-on ?tre pa?en? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981) p.174; Claude L?vi Strauss, Race et historie (Paris: Denoe, 1987 [1953]), p. 23. Moreover, given the GRECE's opposition to the former Soviet Union and its on-going opposition to the US, it rejects all notions of racial unity with the so-called "white world." See Guillaume Faye, Il ne a pas de "Monde Blanc", in El?ments 34 (April 1980). This distinction between race and culture would seem, however, to concede too much to the dominant ideology. For a trenchant critique of the implicit equalitarianism undergirding the GRECE's culturalism, see Guillaume Faye, La colonisation de l'Europe, op. cit.,pp. 74-84, a work that not only revises Faye's earlier position, but one that has brought down the state's judicial terror on this most eminent of former Gr?cistes. 46. Benoist, Les Indo-Europ?ens, op. cit. 47. On Georges Dum?zil, see C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dum?zil, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University " of California Press, 1982). See also Jean-Claude Riviere, ed., Georges Dum?zil en la d?couverte des Indo-Europ?ens(Paris: Copernic, 1979); Jean Varenne, Le h?ritage de Georges Dum?zil, in El?ments 62 (Spring 1987). For a critique of his work, see Wouter W. Belier, Decayed Gods: Origin and Development of Georges Dum?zil's id?ologie Tripartite(Leiden: Brill, 1991). 48. C. Scott Littleton, Je ne suis pas . . . structuraliste: Some Fundamental Differences between Dum?zil and L?vi-Strauss, in Journal of Asian Studies 34 (November 1974). 49. On the tripartite ideology, see Georges Dum?zil, La id?ologie tripartite des Indo-Europ?ens (Brussels: Latomus, 1958); Jean Haudry, La religion cosmique des Indo-Europ?ens (Milan: Arch?, 1987); J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), pp. 130-34. 50. Jean-Claude Rivi?re, Pour un lecture de Dum?zil, in Nouvelle Ecole 21-22 (Winter 1972-1973); Jean Maibre, Les dieux mandits: R?cits de mytholgie nordique (Paris: Copernic, 1978), pp. 21-27. 51. J. H. Griswald, Trois perspectives medievales, in Nouvelle Ecole 21-22 (Winter 1972-1973). Cf. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, tr. by A. Goldhammer(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 52. Georges Dum?zil r?pond aux questions de Nouvelle Ecole, in Nouvelle Ecole 10(September 1969); Itin?raire, in Nouvelle Ecole 21-22; Jean Haudry, Die indoeuropaische Tradition als Wurzel unserer Identit?t, in Mut zur Identit?t, op. cit. The non political Dum?zil paid dearly for his discoveries. In the 1980s, a full-scale witchhunt was launched against him, initiated by UCLA historian Carlo Ginsburg, who, in Mythologie germanique et nazisme. Sur un ancien livre de Georges Dum?zil, in Annales ESC (July 1985), accused him, in so many words, of Nazism. The charge was then taken up by Lib?ration and made the rounds of several politically-correct Parisian journals. The falseness of the charge and the readiness of certain intellectuals to use it to smear one of the century's great scholars, because his work happened to lend credence to non-conformist ideas, has been fully documented in Didier Eribon, Faut-il br?ler Dum?zil? Mythologie, science et politique (Paris: Flammarion,1992). On the "fascist" epithet as a political ploy for discrediting new ideas, see Hans Helmuth Knutter, Die Faschismus Keule. Das letzte Aufgebot der deutschen Linken(Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1993). On the living past, see R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 96-98. 53. Alain de Benoist, La ordre,in Etudes et recherches 4-5 (January 1977); Jean Haudry,Linguistique et tradition indo-europ?enne, in Nouvelle Ecole 45 (Winter 1988-89). 54. See Benoist, La religion de l'Europe, op. cit.; Alain de Benoist and La Commission Traditions et Communaut?, Les Traditions d'Europe, 2nd ed. (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1996). More generally, see David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses(New York: Harper and Row, 1974); and R. Faber and R. Schlesier, eds., Die Restauration de ?tter. Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus(W?rzburg: Konigshausen u. Neuman, 1986). 55. Benoist, L'empire int?rieur, op. cit.,p. 9; Jacques Marlaud, Le renouveau pa?en dans la pens?e francaise(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1986), p. 24; Giogio Locchi, Die Zeit der Geschichte, in Elemente f?r die europaische Wiedergeburt 1 (July 1986). 56. So claims not only the numinous school of comparative mythology (Mircea Eliade, Walter F. Otto, Jean-Pierre Vernant et al., to whom the GRECE is close), but also structuralists around Claude L?vi-Strauss and neo-Kantians associated with Ernst Cassirer. See Kurt Hubner, La recherche sur le mythe: une r?volution encore m?connue, in Krisis 6 (October 1990). On logical unphilosophical character and its problematic principle of identity, see Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit.,pp. 21-36, 170-79, and 165-90; Friedrich Nietzsche,The Gay Science, tr. by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 111; and Alain de Benoist,Les fausses alternatives, in La ligne de mire, op. cit. 57. Itin?raire, in Nouvelle Ecole 19 (September 1969); Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, tr. by P. Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 344. Even science, whose knowledge of nature is similarly mediated, is a form, however sophisticated, of mythic thought. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), in which the problem of competing paradigms is posed ultimately as an aesthetic one, based less on the procedures of normal science than on culturally-shaped appeals. Cf. J. McKim Malville, The Fermenting Universe: Myths of Eternal Change (New York: Seabury Press, 1981); Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929), in Basic Writings, tr. by D. F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). At any rate, mythos and logos were originally interchangeable terms. See Benoist, L'empire int?rieur, op. cit. pp. 9, 54. 58. Roger Caillois, Le homme et le sacr?, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp. 132-36. 59. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, tr. by P. Mairet (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 14-15. 60. Kurt H?bner, Die Wahrheit des Mythos (Munich: Beck, 1985), pp. 257-70; Alain de Benoist, Un mot en quatre lettres, in El?ments 95 (June 1999). 61. Alain de Benoist, Les mythes europ?ens (1984), in Le grain de sable: Jalons pour une fin de si?cle (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1994); Benoist, Les id?es a la endroit, op. cit., pp. 115-21. 62. Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginnaire, 10th ed.(Paris: Dunod,1984), pp. 323-24; Julien Freund, Une interpr?tation de Georges Sorel,in Nouvelle Ecole 35 (Winter 1979-1980). 63. Benoist, Le empire int?rieur, op. cit., pp. 14-15. Cf. Jos? Ortega y Gasset, Historical Reason, tr. by P. W. Silver (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 17-21. 64. Alain de Benoist, R?flexion sur l'identit? nationale, in Une certain id?e de la France: Actes du XIXe colloque national du GRECE (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985). 65. Marlaud, Le renouveau pa?en, op. cit., p. 30; Vial, Servir la cause des peuples, op. cit. 66. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 23; Marlaud, Le renouveau pa?en, op. cit., p. 29. 67. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. by W. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1959), p. 68. Also Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. by M. Faber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 96. 68. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, op. cit.,pp. 3, 14-15; Les Grecs croyaient " leurs mythes: entretien avec Jean-Pierre Vernant, in Krisis 6 (October 1990). 69. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 56; The Gay Science, op. cit., 285 and 341; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), The Vision and the Riddle and The Convalescent. And Also Phillippe Granarolo, le individu ?ternal: La exp?rience nietzsch?enne de la ?ternit? (Paris: Vrin, 1993), p. 37. Cf. M. C. Sterling, Recent Discussions of Eternal Recurrence: Some Critical Comments,in Nietzsche Studien 6 (1977). 70. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, op. cit., 24; Benoist, Les id?es a la endroit, op. cit., p. 74; Armin Mohler, Devant l'histoire, in Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (Winter 1974-1975). 71. Paul Chassard, Nietzsche: Finalisme et histoire (Paris: Copernic, 1977), p. 174; Cl?ment Rosset, La force majeure (Paris: Minuit, 1983), pp. 87-89; Jean-Pierre Martin, Myth et cosmologie, in Krisis 6 (October 1990). 72 . Granarolo, L'individu?l ?ternal, op. cit., pp. 34-52. 73. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 1032. 74. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, op. cit., 706; Chassard, La philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, op. cit., pp. 114-18 75. Eugene Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgard: Kohlhammer, 1960), pp. 75-92 76. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, op. cit., 639. 77. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Vision and the Riddle, op. cit. Origins for Nietzsche do not bear the timeless essence of things, but rather the unencumbered expression of their original being, the "Herkunft" that serves as "Erbschaft." See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay II, 12; The Gay Science, op. cit., 83. Cf. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,tr. by D. F. Boucard and S. Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 78. Nietzsche, Will to Power, op. cit., 552; also 70; Giorgio Locchi, Ethologie et sciences sociales, in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (Summer 1979). 79. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, tr. by W. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 36, 85-86, 117; also Eliade,The Sacred and the Profane, op. cit., pp. 108. 80. Chassard, La philosophie de l'histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, op. cit., pp. 121-22. 81. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit. 109. 82. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des id?es contemporaires(Paris: Copernic, 1979), pp. 298-99. 83. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Great Longing, op. cit. [Translation modified.] 84. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 233; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 245; Benoist, Les id?es a la endroit, op. cit.,pp. 38-40. 85. Alain de Benoist, Fondements nominalistes d'une attitude devant la vie, in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (June 1979); Itineraire, in Nouvelle Ecole 24 (Winter 1973-1974). 86. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of Redemption, op. cit. 87. Giorgio Locchi, L'histoire, in Nouvelle Ecole 27-28 (January 1976); and, from the same author, Nietzsche, Wagner e il mito sovrumanista (Rome: Akropolis, 1982). 88. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Convalescent, op. cit. 89. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 34. 90. Granarolo, L'individu ?ternal, op. cit., pp. 133-44; Itin?raire, in Nouvelle Ecole 15 (March-April 1971). C?cile Guignard-Vanuxem probably best captures the civilizational significance of these different concepts of time in Vercingetorix, le d?fi des druides(Paris: Eds. Cheminements, 1997). 91. Lectures de Heidegger, in Nouvelle Ecole 37 (April 1982). For those inclined to follow the fraudulent argumentation of Victor Farias and approach Heidegger as pre-eminently a Nazi thinker, they might consult Silvio Vietta, Heidegger, critique du national-socialisme et du technique, tr. by J. Ollivier (Paris: Pard?s, 1993); Jean-Pierre Blanchard, Martin Heidegger, philosophe incorrect (Paris: L'Aencre, 1997); and Alexander Schwan, Politische Philosophie im Denken Heideggers, 2nd ed. (Opladen, 1989). 92. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, tr. by W. McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 19. 93. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 79. 94. Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, op. cit., 13b. 95. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 79; Benoist, Un mot en quatre lettres, op. cit. 96. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65. 97. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 69 and 72; Benoist, Comment peut-on ?tre pa?en? op. cit., p. 26. 98. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, tr. by J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 11-15; Benoist, La religion de l'Europe, op. cit. 99. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 44. 100. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65. 101. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 72, 76, and 79. The distinction between the selective character of memory, in its function as a people's cult of remembrance, and the scientific impulse of history, as it breaks with moral or ideological judgement, is emphasized in Alain de Benoist's Communisme et nazisme: 25 r?flexions sur le totalitarisme au XXe si?cle(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1998), pp. 9-13. In pointing out that memory demands affiliation and history distance, Benoist sides with history whenever the argument turns on the "facts" -- the objective truth -- of an issue. This, however, is a point whose problematic relation to an identitarian philosophy of history Gr?cistes have failed to clarify. As Heidegger argues, the objective truth" of the professional historian is usually an evasion of historical understanding insofar as this truth based on scientific methods and rules of procedures is mainly an expression of modernity's calculative logic: i. e. the factual explanation of "what is" is not necessarily the same as a knowing understanding -- or, said differently, what is scientifically correct may not be historically/ontologically true. Although Heidegger's distinction between correctness (in the sense of correspondence) and truth (as enowning being) is relatively unambivalent (see Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 76), Benoist often marshalls the "facts" against the selective memory of those with whom he polemicizes, assuming that memory based on distortion, ignorance, or repression is, ipso facto,at odds with history, and that "facts" and "history" ought to be understood in the conventional, i.e., objectivist, sense. While this suggest that the GRECE's historical philosophy is not to be confused with an identitarian solipsism, it still leaves unanswered the question of how "truth" relates to fact. Heidegger and the anti-empiricist tradition holds that truth, expressing being which is neither subjective nor objective but a "happening unfolding" in the world, alone orders "fact." Benoist, though, seems to hedge his argument here, conflating fact and truth in ways that would be unacceptable to Heidegger. This is especially evident in the various articles devoted to "M?moire et histoire" in L'?cume et les galet: 10 ans d'actualit? vue d'ailleurs(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 2000). 102. Robert Steuckers, Conception de l'homme et R?volution conservatrice: Heidegger et son temps,in Nouvelle Ecole 37 (April 1982); Charles Champetier, Homo Consumans: Arch?ologie du don et de la d?pense(Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1994)p. 98. 103. Martin Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. by W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 104. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, tr. by J. R. Synder (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 51-64. 105. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 5; Miller, The New Polytheism, op. cit., p. 48. 106. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, op. cit., pp. 12-13; Guillaume Faye and Patrick Rizzi, Pour en finir avec le nihilisme,in Nouvelle Ecole 37 (Spring 1982). 107. R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of History(1930), in Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. by William Debbins (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 138. Heidegger, though, goes a step farther than Collingwood: each generation must not only confront the heritage of its past, but appropriate what it finds essential in it in order to establish the upon which it projects its being. See Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65. 108. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 5. 109. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 29; Contributions to Philosophy,op. cit., 120 and 255. To see Dasein as pure existence, stripped of all security and standing,causes many commentators to misread Heidegger. For example, Karl L?with, The Political Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism (1946), in New German Critique 45 (Fall 1988). 110. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65 111. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 92. 112. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 6 and 79. 113. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74; Itin?raire, in Nouvelle Ecole 17 (March-April 1972). 114. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 75. 115. What is it is not current events and neither is it what is present right now. What is it is what approaches from what has-been and, as this, is what approaches.The inability to discern this difference between now and what is is linked to the present era's flight from history. See Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason,tr. by R. Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 80-81. The development of modern historical studies and what Nietzsche facetiously terms the historical sense has, relatedly, occurred in a period that has almost entirely divested the past of any real? meaning and made a hedonistic cult out of the moment. 116. Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger(1966), in The Heidegger Controversy,ed. by Richard Wolin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 106; also Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74. 117. Martin Heidegger, The Onto-theo-logical Nature of Metaphysics(1957), in Essays in Metaphysics, tr. by K. F. Leidecker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), p. 44; Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 91. 118. Eliade, Myth and Reality, op. cit., p. 92. 119. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 76. 120. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 3 and 20. 121. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art(1935), in Basic Writings, pp. 149? and 187; Molnar and Benoist, Le ?clipse du sacr?, op. cit.,p. 215. In Diwald's epic history of the German nation, the "narrative" begins with the Yalta Conference of 1945 and "runs" backwards" to the founding of the first Reich, in what is the most extraordinary historiographical illustration of this key Heideggerian idea. See Helmut Diwald, Geschichte der Deutschen (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1978). 122. Benoist, le empire int?rieur, op. cit., p. 18. 123. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 65; Benoist, Le empire int?rieur, op. cit. p. 17. 124. Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment(1946), in Early Greek Thinking, tr. by D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1984), p. 18. 125. Benoist, La religion de l'Europe, op. cit. 126. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 39; Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, op. cit., pp. 31 and 95; Benoist, La religion de lEurope, op. cit. 127. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit.,p. 6; Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 117 and 184. 128. Faye, Les nouveaux enjeax id?ologiques, op. cit.,pp. 68 and 78; Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74. 129. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74 130. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 11. 131. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 152. 132. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74. 133. Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., 74; Benoist, L'empire int?rieur, op. cit., pp. 23-26. This merger of individual fate and collective destiny, it might be noted, intends not the sublation of the individual ego, but rather its enrootment and growth. 134. "Archeofuturism" is a term that Gr?cistes have yet to embrace. See Guillaume Faye, L'Arch?ofuturisme(Paris: L'Aencre, 1998), a landmark work of the new European nationalism. 135. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, op. cit., Prologue, 5; cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, National Interest 16 (Summer 1989). 136. Claude L?vi-Strauss, Anthrologie structurale(Paris: Plon, 1973), ch. 2. Cf. Giorgio Locchi, Histoire et soci?t?: critique de L?vi-Strauss,in Nouvelle Ecole 17 (Match 1972). Benoist has accordingly called America a cold society, frozen in an eternal present, without a past or a future. See Herte and Nigra, Il a ?tait un fois l'Amerique, op. cit.,p. 92 137. Benoist, Les id?es a l'endroit, op. cit., p. 41; Robert de Herte, Le retour des dieux, El?ments 27 (Winter 1978). 138. Alain de Benoist, Recours au paganisme, in Dieu est-il morte en Occident?, ed. by Dani?le Masson (Paris: Eds. Guy Tr?daniel, 1998). In a related vein, Michel Marmin points out that Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and other luminaries of the Celtic Twilight -- arguably the greatest of all identitarian movements -- attempted no return to Eden or recourse to provincialism. Joyce, for example, in replenishing Irish roots . . . sought to nurture such thick and prodigious forests in Ireland that their shadows would be cast upon the whole world. See Les pi?ge des folklore,in La cause des peuples, op. cit. See also Philip O'Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921: Ideology and Innovation University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 139. Alain de Benoist, Horizon 2000: Trois entretiens(Paris: GRECE Pamphlet, 1996), p. 15; Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 39; Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 5. 140.Whoever wants to go very far back . . . into the first beginning -- must think ahead to and carry out a great future. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., 23. 141. Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, tr. by G. E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 17. Cf. also Russell Kirk, The Question of Tradition (1989), The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right, ed. by Joseph Scotchie (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999). 142. Maistra, Renaissance de l'Occident? (Paris: Plon, 1979), p. 295. The GRECE's recent qualified support of multiculturalism (see El?ments 91 [March 1998]) would seem to render this conclusion purely rhetorical. Yet, if Gr?cistes have begun to imbibe the universalism of the dominant ideology and retreat from the political implications of their historical philosophy, opposed in principle to any balkanization of the lands their forefathers settled, archeofuturism has nonetheless become part of the intellectual arsenal of other, more steadfast Europeanists. Guillaume Faye, for one, continues to uphold it and in several recent books has applied it to many of the most grievous European problems, doing so in ways that have renewed and radicalized it. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:17:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:17:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] David Plotz: The Genius Factory: My short, scary career as a sperm donor. Message-ID: David Plotz: The Genius Factory: My short, scary career as a sperm donor. http://slate.msn.com/id/2119998 5.6.7 In February 1980, an eccentric California tycoon named Robert Graham announced the opening of the Repository for Germinal Choice--a sperm bank where Nobel Prize winners were the only donors. Graham intended to reverse what he saw as America's genetic decline by breeding a cadre of brilliant scientists and leaders. Nineteen years and 215 children later, the repository shut down. It left a mystery: Graham was dead, the bank's records were sealed, and no one knew what had become of the kids. Had Graham's dream of breeding outstanding children come true? In 2001, Slate's David Plotz set out to unlock the history of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, inviting readers to contact him if they had been involved in the bank or knew anything about it. Soon he was hearing from donors to the bank, mothers who had used it, former employees, and the children themselves. [24]In 14 articles over two years, Plotz described the remarkable lives of the families and donors, connected kids with their genetic fathers and half-siblings, and explored the strange world of modern eugenics. (If you were involved with the repository and wish to share your story anonymously, or if you are searching for children, siblings, or a donor from the repository, please e-mail David Plotz.) This week marks the publication of Plotz's [25]The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, a book based on the Slate project. In this excerpt, Plotz recounts his own awkward attempt to become a sperm donor: After talking to donors from the Nobel sperm bank, I remained puzzled about why they had bothered with such a peculiar and burdensome enterprise. That's when I realized that I needed to donate sperm, too. Not because I wanted to, quite the contrary. I already had two children, which seemed more than enough on most days. My lack of desire to donate is why I felt obliged to do it. No matter how often donors explained their rationale to me, sperm donation befuddled me. Why had the repository donors subjected themselves to such inconvenience and embarrassment? Why had they been willing to father children--dozens in some cases--that they could never know? What was donating like? I had to find out for myself. I dutifully informed my wife about my plan. "No way," Hanna said. I argued that it was all in the name of research. She was unimpressed. I promised that I would stop the sperm bank before it could sell my sperm. She didn't believe the bank would make such a deal. I swore that there was no chance they would use my sperm. I begged, which was not a pretty sight. She relented. These days, sperm banks recruit customers and donors through the Internet, so I cruised the Web and found an application for Fairfax Cryobank, located in Washington, D.C.'s, Virginia suburbs. Fairfax Cryobank is to sperm banking what Citigroup is to real banking. It has branches in four states and Canada. The sperm bank itself is only one small division of a full-service fertility business, the Genetics & IVF Institute. I completed Fairfax's online application in a couple of minutes--it asked for little more than my name and address. A week later, the mailman delivered a discreet brown envelope with no name on the return address. Sperm banks, like pornographers, keep everything on the down-low. Bank staffers dislike leaving phone messages, but if they must, the message is almost incomprehensibly vague: "This is Mary, from Fairfax. We'd like to talk to you about your recent inquiry. Please call us at ...") The brown package from Fairfax contained an 18-page application. I trudged through the physical data: age, hair color, height, weight, blood type. I dragged my way through the biographical section: educational history, profession, musical talent ("None," I wrote proudly), athletic abilities, hobbies. Then I bored through the medical questionnaire: alcohol use, tobacco use, drug use, tattooing history, how well I sleep, how well I eat, what medicines I take and why, what bones I have broken, whether I exchange sex for money, whether I had used intranasal cocaine in the preceding 12 months. I listed three generations of familial mental illness and felt my own ticker skip a beat when I wrote that all my male ancestors on both sides of the family had died young of heart disease. I declared that I wasn't a carrier of Gaucher disease, Fanconi anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Canavan disease, or thalassemia, although I had not the faintest idea what those illnesses were. I checked off whether I suffered from any of an endless roster of symptoms--hoarseness, warts, blood in stool, goiter, tingling, dizziness, fainting, convulsions, seizures, fits, shaking, tremor, numbness. By the time I was done, I was suffering from several of them. I was asked 16 ways to Sunday if I inject drugs or have sex with other men. I agreed to submit to an HIV test. Finally, I reached Page 18, which was the scariest of all: "I agree that I release all rights, privileges, and disposition of my semen specimens to Fairfax Cryobank." Hanna is going to kill me, I thought, and then I signed it. According to the application, if my written application made the cut, I would be invited for an interview, where I would "produce" a semen sample for analysis. If that were satisfactory, I would return for more semen analyses and a physical. Only if I passed those would I qualify as a donor. I mailed my application to Fairfax and waited. And waited. And waited. After two months, I was miffed. How dare they ignore my semen? That semen had produced two healthy children! That semen had run a marathon! Then my irritation turned to worry: Did Fairfax know something I didn't about my health? Was my future that bleak? Was all that heart disease really so bad? Suddenly I found myself desperate to be chosen. I had just applied to a bank in New York when I received an e-mail from "Amanda," who identified herself as Fairfax's laboratories coordinator. She invited me for an interview. She noted, oh so casually, that I would have to furnish a sample on the premises. The following Monday, I made my way to the Fairfax Cryobank office, situated beyond the Washington Beltway in The Land of Wretched Office Parks, in the dreariest of all office developments. The building's blandness may be intentional: A sperm bank doesn't want to draw attention to itself or its visitors. Inside, I hunted through the first-floor corridors, past the mysterious "microsort" room and "egg donor" facility, searching for the sperm-bank office. I saw an open door, peeked in, and discovered that I had stumbled on the vault--the room that housed Fairfax's liquid-nitrogen storage tanks. I ducked inside and found myself alone with the tanks. There were four of them. They were head-high and looked like fat silver men. Each tank, I knew, held tens of thousands of vials, and each vial was filled with millions of spermatozoa. My skin got clammy: It felt like the scene in the science fiction movie when the hero accidentally discovers the warehouse where the "friendly" aliens are freezing the millions of humans they have secretly kidnapped for their terrible experiments. Finally I located the door marked "Cryobank" and walked into an uncomfortably cramped waiting room. A couple--not a young couple--was sitting there. They looked up, startled, when I entered. We half-smiled at each other. All of us instantly recognized the awkward situation. They were there to buy sperm; I was there to sell it. We had each accidentally looked through a window into a world we did not want to see. I was sure the couple was thinking, "That guy is a donor? The hell with this place, let's go to Sperm World instead." I flagged down the receptionist, who assumed I was a customer, too. When I explained I was there to see Amanda about donating, she was chagrined. I wasn't supposed to be there. I had apparently come in the wrong door. Amanda was summoned from her office and hustled me into the back, out of sight of the couple. Amanda led me to her office, a cozy room lined with wedding pictures and prints of sailing ships. She checked my driver's license then pulled out my application and began reviewing it with me, line by line. In tone, it felt like a job interview with human resources. In subject, it was rather different. "OK, so you live in Washington, great. And your blood is B-positive. You sure of that? No? That's OK, we'll check it. Hmm, so your family is from eastern Europe. Do you know exactly where? Can you check?" She noticed I was married and asked if my wife knew that I was there. I answered, "Of course. Don't all wives know?" Amanda acted as though this was very funny and said, "A lot of donors are married and don't tell their wives." She asked me where I had gone to college. I said "Harvard." She was delighted. She continued, "And have you done some graduate work?" I said no. She looked disappointed. "But surely you are planning to do some graduate work?" Again I said no. She was deflated and told me why. Fairfax has something it calls--I'm not kidding--its "doctorate program." For a premium, mothers can buy sperm from donors who have doctoral degrees or are pursuing them. What counts as a doctor? I asked. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, optometry, law, and chiropractic. Don't say you weren't warned: Your premium "doctorate" sperm may have come from a law student. As we discussed the application, I gazed distractedly at Amanda's screen saver, a soothing blue-and-white pattern. After a few seconds, I noticed that the white pattern was a school of tiny sperm, tails waving jauntily as they motored across the screen. I took a second look at the mouse paperweight on Amanda's desk. It wasn't a mouse. It was a cute little sperm. Such goofiness was, I came to discover, a hallmark of modern sperm banks. Fairfax hands out pens on college campuses that ask, "Why not get paid for it?" When I visited California Cryobank, the director of public relations gave me a T-shirt depicting swimming sperm. Around the sperm ran a circle of text that read "Future People" in a dozen different languages. California Cryobank distributes floaty pens, with a little plastic sperm swimming up and down, up and down. Anyway, back to Amanda. At this point I am obliged to point out that Amanda was cute. In fact, she was distractingly cute. She was thirty, I'd guess, and looked Latina. She smiled all the time, a sexy, gleaming smile, and laughed when I made even the lamest stab at a joke. She leaned across her desk toward me as we talked. Rule number one of sperm banking: The people who recruit donors are invariably women, and they are invariably good-looking. I suspect--no, I am sure--that this is deliberate, to get donors excited to join the Fairfax team. Yet Amanda's sexiness presented a kind of paradox. The chief activity of the sperm bank--its entire purpose--is masturbation. But my interview with Amanda was actually designed to desexualize what I would be doing. It eliminated the embarrassment that men feel about masturbation by replacing it with tedium. After the review of my application, Amanda walked me, step by countless step, through the qualification process--if my sperm count were above such-and-such a number, I would make the next round. There would be blood tests for gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis, and scary diseases I had never heard of. They would give me a renal ultrasound. My sperm would again be counted, frozen, thawed, and recounted. Its motility--how well it swims--would be tested and retested. Only then would I finally be admitted as a donor--and even that was contingent on passing regular blood tests. Amanda listed what I would be required to supply to the bank if I qualified: baby photos, an audio CD about myself, essays on such topics as "What is your most memorable childhood experience?" and "What is the funniest thing that ever happened to you?" Amanda held forth enthusiastically and at great length about money. "You will get paid $50 per usable specimen, for starters. Then you will get $5 for every vial from the specimen. The average is 10 to 14 vials per specimen. When a vial is released from quarantine after six months, you will get another $5. So the average payment is $209 per deposit." She paused. "Now, this is ordinary income, but we don't do withholding. We send checks twice a month, but later we will just give you a check every six months. We will send you a 1099 form at the end of the year." Amanda had managed to take a mysterious and sexual and profound process and make it sound exactly like ... a job. I considered asking her about the 401(k) and dental benefits. Finally, it was time for the money shot. She led me next door to the lab, where three women in lab coats were chatting about their weekends while studying sperm samples under microscopes. They ignored me. When I became a regular donor, Amanda said, I would come straight to the lab to collect a sterile cup and a labeling sticker. She handed me a cup. Amanda pointed to a small incubator--a warm metal box--where I would put the "specimen" when I was done. Next to the incubator was a pile of plastic sachets; they looked like the mustard packets you get with a deli sandwich. "That's KY jelly," she said. "It's nontoxic for sperm. Still, just try not to get it, you know, on the sample." The donor room was really no more than a large closet. Fairfax has two of them--sometimes known in the trade as "blue rooms" or "masturbatoriums." A dingy beige love seat was pushed against the far wall. An erotic print hung above the sofa. It was a painting of a woman from behind; she was wearing some diaphanous lingerie. It was pretty sexy, to be honest. On another wall were a clock, a sink, and a cabinet. Amanda handed me a pen and told me to write the time of ejaculation on the cup when I was done. She turned on the taps and instructed, "Wash your hands now with this antibacterial soap, and dry them well. Water is toxic for semen." "Here's the exhaust fan." She flipped a switch by the door, and a buzzing noise covered the room. She opened the cabinet. "And here are the magazines." She handed me a stack of High Societys, Gallerys, and Playboys, all well-thumbed. "Fairfax Cryobank" was scrawled on the cover of each. Amanda seemed unfazed. I pretended I was unfazed, too. Who's your daddy? She gave me the phone number for the chief lab technician and told me to call the next day to find out whether I had a high enough sperm count and whether my guys had survived freezing and thawing. "Now, of 100 men who apply," she said reassuringly, "we only interview 20 or 30. And the vast majority of those--even men who have their own children already--end up being disqualified by sperm count. So don't feel bad if you don't make it." She thanked me for coming in. She flashed me one more gleaming, sexy smile, closed the door, and locked it from the outside. The next few minutes passed as you would expect and are none of your business. When I was done, I walked my cup down the hall to the incubator. I tried to catch the eye of one of the technicians, to ask if I could take a sperm paperweight as a souvenir. None of them looked at me. The next morning, I called the chief lab technician. "I was about to call you," she said. "I have some good news. You passed the freezing and thawing. We want to make arrangements for your second trial specimen--that is, if you are still interested." I flushed. I couldn't resist asking, "So what were my numbers? What was the count?" "Your count was about 105 million per milliliter. The usual is around 50 to 60 million. So you are well above average." I grinned--105 million! I was "well above average." I started to make an appointment for my second deposit, then thought better of it. Hanna was right: Who knew what they were doing with my sperm? The longer I kept up the charade, the greater the possibility that my sperm would end up in the wrong hands (or wrong uterus). I told the tech I needed to check my schedule and would call back. I didn't call back. I was not much closer to wanting to be a donor than I had been before I started, but I was closer to understanding why someone else might want to do it. In the abstract, donating sperm had seemed fundamentally silly. But actually doing it was seductive. I had been accepted by the ultraexclusive Fairfax Cryobank! My sperm was "well above average"! My count was 105 million! What's yours, George Clooney? Amanda, lovely Amanda, had asked for my help. The women of America demanded my B-positive, brown-eyed, six-foot-one-inch, HIV-negative, drug-free, heart-attack-prone sperm. How could I deny it to them? David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of [29]The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at . References 24. http://slate.msn.com/id/2119808/ 25. http://www.thegeniusfactory.net/ 28. http://slate.msn.com/id/2120406/ 29. http://www.thegeniusfactory.net/ From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:17:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:17:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Playing God With Birth Defects in the Nursery Message-ID: Playing God With Birth Defects in the Nursery http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/health/policy/14essa.html [Clearly, only a proto-Nazi would think a child with grave defects should not be born. In fact, it is proto-Nazi to even speak of defects. If the parents are victims of proto-Nazi attitudes of the surrounding society and thereby cannot earn enough to pay for the child's medical bills, it would be proto-Nazi to want to want to avoid paying just compensation to the child and to the parents.] By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. What is best for babies born with a severe neurological condition? Two doctors thought they knew. At a series of medical meetings in the 1970's, Dr. John Lorber argued that they should be left to die. Dr. John M. Freeman said they should be saved. The neurological defect in question, meningomyelocele, has since declined in incidence. But the issues that the doctors debated remain highly relevant in modern neonatal intensive-care units. Meningomyelocele referred to a protrusion of the spinal cord through the protective vertebrae of the back. Infants with this condition suffered from a series of problems, including permanent paralysis of the legs, swelling of the head, urinary incontinence and meningitis, an infection of the tissues surrounding the spinal cord. Meningomyelocele was the most severe form of spina bifida, a spectrum of conditions in which the vertebrae do not close properly. All doctors agreed that in mild cases, with minimal neurological damage, the defect should be closed. But more advanced cases raised genuine questions about whether severely handicapped infants should be saved. Dr. Lorber was a renowned pediatrician at Sheffield Hospital in England, which had pioneered many of the advances in treating meningomyelocele. These included inserting a shunt to drain fluid from the head into the abdomen, possibly preventing brain damage. But in a 1971 article, Dr. Lorber argued that to spare children and their families prolonged suffering, the most severe cases should not undergo treatment. In a study of 524 patients, he had found that half the children died despite maximum treatment. Most who lived had severe mental or physical defects, or both. Only 7 percent had a life consistent with "self-respect, earning capacity, happiness, and even marriage." In advocating "nontreatment," Dr. Lorber anticipated medicine's future concerns about quality of life: just because surgeons could fix things did not mean they necessarily should. And that was what he told the parents of severely affected children. Dr. Freeman respectfully disagreed. A pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins University, he believed that recent innovations in treatment - the shunt, antibiotics, kidney surgery and better rehabilitation - made treatment almost always mandatory. True, he acknowledged, roughly one-fifth of children wound up with severe mental retardation, but it was difficult to predict which ones. He was also profoundly uncomfortable with the practice of putting children in the corner of the nursery to die. Children with meningomyelocele at Johns Hopkins usually underwent immediate surgical repair of their backs, followed by dozens of subsequent procedures. As time progressed, Dr. Lorber and Dr. Freeman found themselves making fewer independent decisions for their patients. By the late 1970's, the notion of patient autonomy had taken hold. In the case of birth defects, the parents had become the appropriate decision makers. Accompanying this development was the rise of the disability rights movement, which argued that disabled children and adults were not inferior. Whether it was medical treatment or access to buildings, the disabled were entitled to the same opportunities as all others. Parents of children with meningomyelocele - and, as they grew older, those affected themselves - became vocal spokesmen for the value of life. "If a child has a chance to survive," asked one mother on an Internet forum, "who is to play God and say that they will not have a meaningful life?" Dr. Lorber, one of the first physicians to take an interest in the lives of spina bifida patients, was vilified in retrospect. His terminology, suggesting that certain children be "selected" for nontreatment, raised uncomfortable reminders of the Holocaust. More charitably, a man with spina bifida wrote on the Internet that Dr. Lorber was well intentioned but wrong. Dr. Freeman was also not spared the revenge of hindsight. Even though his policy of aggressive surgery had become standard by the 1990's, he received a surprise when he interviewed two of his "favorite" patients, women in their 20's who were college graduates with steady jobs. Reflecting on their lives spent in wheelchairs with limited social contacts and no hope of marriage, they told Dr. Freeman, as he recalled, "We wish we'd never been born." Today, the use of folic acid in pregnancy and the availability of abortions have made meningomyelocele rare, affecting fewer than 1 out of 1,000 live children. But the issues raised in the 1970's persist, with the treatment of other birth defects and infants of very low birth weight. New technologies can ensure the survival of such children, but many will have severe developmental problems, like learning disabilities, behavioral disorders and motor skill deficits. How aggressively should such infants be treated? Studies hope to answer that question, providing parents and doctors with the type of predictive data that Dr. Lorber generated. But as Dr. Freeman learned, each case is different. If we want to know whether saving particular children was the right choice, we may need to wait 20 years and ask them. Barron H. Lerner is a medical historian and an internist at Columbia University. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:18:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:18:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: After 2, 000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts Message-ID: After 2,000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/international/middleeast/12palm.html By [3]STEVEN ERLANGER JERUSALEM, June 11 - Israeli doctors and scientists have succeeded in germinating a date seed nearly 2,000 years old. The seed, nicknamed Methuselah, was taken from an excavation at Masada, the cliff fortress where, in A.D. 73, 960 Jewish zealots died by their own hand, rather than surrender to a Roman assault. The point is to find out what was so exceptional about the original date palm of Judea, much praised in the Bible and the Koran for its shade, food, beauty and medicinal qualities, but long ago destroyed by the crusaders. "The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree," says Psalm 92. "They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. They shall be fat and flourishing." Well, we'll see. Dr. Sarah Sallon, who runs a project on medicinal plants of the Middle East, notes that the date palm in ancient times symbolized the tree of life. But Dr. Elaine Solowey, who germinated the seed and is growing it in quarantine, says plants grown from ancient seeds "usually keel over and die soon," having used most of their nutrients in remaining alive. The plant is now 11.8 inches tall and has produced seven leaves, one of which was removed for DNA testing. Radiocarbon dating in Switzerland on a snip of the seed showed it to be 1,990 years old, plus or minus 50 years. So the date seed dates from 35 B.C. to A.D. 65, just before the famed Roman siege. Three date seeds were taken from Level 34 of the Masada dig. They were found in a storeroom, and are presumably from dates eaten by the defenders, Dr. Sallon says. Mordechai Kislef, director of botanical archeology at Bar-Ilan University, had some date seeds from Ehud Netzer, who excavated Masada in the 1970's. "They were sitting in a drawer, and when I asked for one, he said, 'You're mad,' but finally gave me three," Dr. Sallon said. "Then I gave them to Elaine, who's an expert on arid agriculture and dates." Dr. Solowey said: "Well, I didn't have much hope that any would come up, but you know how Sarah is." Dr. Sallon, who is a pediatric gastroenterologist trained at University College, London, came to Israel 20 years ago. She is the director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah Medical Organization, which she set up 10 years ago to study natural products and therapies, from Tibetan and Chinese medicine to the indigenous medicinal plants of the Middle East. The idea is to preserve these plants and their oral histories in a modernizing region, but also to domesticate them, evaluate them scientifically and then try to integrate them into conventional medicine. Dr. Solowey, who teaches agriculture and sustainable farming at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based at Kibbutz Ketura in the southern Negev, works on finding new crops for arid and saline areas like Jordan, Gaza and Morocco. She also works with Dr. Sallon to domesticate indigenous plants that appear to have medicinal uses. Dr. Solowey grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in California and studied horticulture, then turned away from commercial agriculture in disgust, coming here in 1971. "I don't come to organic agriculture from the hippie side, but as a frustrated agricultural scientist," she said. "We've bred for yield and taste, but not hardiness, so we have a lot of plants as hardy as French poodles, so we have to spray to protect them, and then we pay the price," she said. "There isn't a cubic centimeter of water in the San Joaquin Valley that isn't polluted with something." She planted the date seeds at the end of January after trying to draw them out of their deep dormancy. She first soaked the seeds in hot water to soften the coat, then in an acid rich in hormones, then in an enzymatic fertilizer made of seaweed and other nutrients. "I've done other recalcitrant seeds," she said. "It wasn't a project with a high priority. I had no idea if the food in the seed was still good, but I put them in new pots in new potting soil and plugged them into drip irrigation and kind of forgot about them." About six weeks later, she said, "I saw the earth cracked in a pot and much to my astonishment, one of these came up." The first two leaves looked odd, she said, very flat and pale. "But the third looked like a date leaf with lines, and every one since has looked more and more normal - like it had a hard time getting out of the seed." Lotus seeds of about 1,200 years of age have been sprouted in China, and after the Nazis bombed London's Natural History Museum in World War II and a lot of water was used to put out the fire, seeds of 500 years of age also germinated. "But no one had done it from 2,000 years old," Dr. Sallon said. In the time of Pliny, forests of date palms covered the area from Lake Galilee to the Dead Sea and made Jericho famous; a date palm features on ancient coinage, as it does on the current Israeli 10-shekel coin. The date palm symbolized ancient Israel; the honey of "the land of milk and honey" came from the date. It is praised as a tonic to increase longevity, as a laxative, as a cure for infections and as an aphrodisiac, Dr. Sallon said. But the dates of Judea were destroyed before the Middle Ages, and what dates Israel grows now were imported in the 1950's and 60's from California and originated elsewhere in the Middle East. The Prophet Muhammad considered the date of great importance for medicine, food, construction and income, and it is described in the Koran as a "symbol of goodness" associated with heaven. Dates need to grow 30 years to reach maturity and can live as long as 200 years. But it is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears fruit. "Men are rather superfluous in the date industry," Dr. Sallon said. "O.K, I have a date plant," Dr. Solowey said. "If it lives, it will be years before we eat any dates. And that's if it's female. There's a 50-50 chance. And if it's a male, it will just be a curiosity." From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:18:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:18:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Harlequinade Message-ID: John Gray: Harlequinade The Times Literary Supplement, 3.1.31 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2081292&window_type=print A CARNIVAL OF REVOLUTION. Central Europe, 1989. Padraic Kenney. 341pp. Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?19.95. 0 691 05028 7. Many explanations of the Communist collapse tend to focus on the economic failure of state socialism, but - as anyone who visited Central and Eastern Europe during the Communist period knew - that was hardly novel. Under central planning, shortage and corruption were endemic and chronic; one way or another, people in Soviet bloc countries had learnt to live with them. The economic failings of state socialism played little role in triggering the regime changes of 1989. Nor did the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev. The chief constituency of the reformist Soviet leader was always in the West. In Russia, his policies served only to reveal the Soviet system's lack of legitimacy, even among members of the nomenklatura who benefited most from it, while in Central and Eastern Europe he was widely perceived as trying to rescue a regime that was flawed beyond recovery. Though Gorbachev's unwillingness to sanction the use of repressive force made life easier for dissident movements, it does not explain the sudden political meltdown that began in Central Europe at the end of the 1980s. Part of the problem with conventional academic accounts of Communism is that they have always relied heavily on official sources. Visiting scholars could not be sure of getting another visa if they showed themselves to be too critical of their hosts. As a result, many of the worst features of the Communist regimes failed to register in the standard academic literature. As an example, the degradation of the environment in Russia was rarely mentioned in the voluminous pseudo discipline of Sovietology, and never in ways that reflected the scale of the damage that had been done to the natural world and human health. Yet the Soviet environmental catastrophe was common knowledge among emigres and dissidents, and - in conjunction with the Chernobyl disaster -it contributed to the constellation of forces that toppled Gorbachev and overturned the Soviet regime. An ingrained deference to authority is poor preparation for understanding a time of political upheaval. A corresponding poverty of first-hand experience debars most Western academics from giving any useful account of the events that transformed Central Europe in 1989. Against this background, Padraic Kenney's A Carnival of Revolution is seminal and indispensable. Using his first-hand acquaintance with many of the key participants in the movements of intellectual and popular resistance that developed in the late 1980s, including some who remain little known, Kenney has given us a pioneering oral history of the "revolution from below" that redrew the political map of Central Europe. Strikingly well written, A Carnival of Revolution weaves personal narratives of protest into an illuminating historical analysis of the changing environment in which a new kind of politics developed. In referring to the movements that took shape in countries such as Poland, East Germany, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia and western Ukraine as a "carnival" of actors and issues, Kenney seeks to distinguish them from anything like a conventional political opposition to the Communist apparatus. For one thing, they were far more pluralistic. As he observes: This was not simply a tolerant pluralism of parties and movements, in which one person might be a socialist and another a conservative, or one person focused on environmental problems while another worried about nuclear war. I think of it as internal pluralism: one mixed and matched identities, and issues, as necessary, depending upon what was necessary to defeat the Communists. A nationalist pacifist, or a pro-market green, was not an uncommon species. Not only were the new movements refreshingly hybrid in their intellectual outlooks, they were highly innovative in the techniques of protest they employed. Groups such as the "Orange Alternative" in Poland used "socialist surrealism" - painting their faces and wearing elf-like costumes, for example - in a surprisingly effective campaign of ridicule and derision against the Communist authorities. Elsewhere in Central Europe, a ragtag army of punks, hippies, greens and peace campaigners used techniques of mass protest to set the scene for revolutionary political change. Kenney performs an invaluable service in recovering the inspiring motley of Central European dissidence from the memory hole of history. At the same time, perhaps inevitably given that he is swimming against the current, he tends to overestimate the impact of the protest movement on subsequent political developments in the region. Reading Kenney, one would scarcely suspect that former Communists had returned to power in eastern Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. Nor would one guess that with the passage of time some of the more familiar aspects of Central European nationalism, such as xenophobia and anti-Semitism, have revived as significant forces in politics. Kenney is keen to show that the countries in which oppositional movements were most highly developed are those that have since done well in combining the economic transition from state socialism with democratic governance. There is some truth in this view, but what it misses is the larger contribution made by the differing histories of the countries of Communist Europe. If Poland has done best in handling the problems of transition, one reason is that the Communist regime in that country never succeeded - as it very largely did for a time in Hungary and Czechoslovakia - in destroying civil society. If one looks further back, and considers countries not included in Kenney's survey, we find that those that lacked experience of democratic government in the pre Communist period - such as Romania - are experiencing considerable difficulty in coming to terms with the dilemmas of post-Communist reconstruction. There is a lesson here. By humbling the ruling regimes of Central Europe in 1989, Kenney's carnival of anti-authoritarian movements achieved a peaceful overthrow of tyranny on a scale unprecedented in history; but they could not shift the larger burden of the past. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 01:18:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:18:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: An elusive threat Message-ID: John Gray: An elusive threat The Times Literary Supplement, 3.2.21 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2081074&window_type=print HOMELAND. Into a world of hate. By Nick Ryan. 319pp. Edinburgh: Mainstream. ?15.99. - 1 84018 465 5 If it is dangerous to forget the past, there is also a danger in relying on it to understand the present. The rise of the Far Right in Europe between the two World Wars was a part of a global crisis. Prosperity and democracy came under threat across the European continent chiefly through the impact of the Great Depression. No doubt the reparations exacted from Germany by the Allies played a part too, but it was mass unemployment and monetary collapse that enabled the Far Right to come to power. Against this background of economic crisis, the Nazis were able to challenge the legitimacy of the liberal Weimar regime. Using the resources of a party machine that mobilized millions of people, they overthrew democracy in Germany and established a totalitarian state. In some ways the Nazis were untypical of the Far Right elsewhere in Europe: they were more consistently hostile to Christianity, for example. Even so, the way they used the vast dislocation of the inter-war years to capture and overturn democratic regimes shapes our perception of the Far Right to this day. In shaping our thinking about the radical Right, the Nazis have at the same time clouded our vision. Circumstances are very different today - but so is the threat from the Far Right. The 1930s were years of economic collapse in Europe, while today - for the time being, at any rate - Europe is muddling through. Unemployment is high, but nowhere catastrophically so; though the welfare state has become somewhat frayed, the great majority remains affluent. At the same time, democracy is well entrenched; the revolutionary mass parties of the 1930s are nowhere to be seen. Seen through the lens of inter-war history, Europe looks an inhospitable environment for the politics of hate. In fact, the Far Right has re-emerged as a key player in politics and government right across the European continent. Seeking support among groups whose position in society is threatened by economic change, it does not need mass unemployment to thrive. No longer seeking to overthrow democracy, instead it exploits democracy's weaknesses. Even where they are not in government, far-right parties are shaping the agenda of politics on issues of immigration and crime in nearly every European country. How and why this should have come about is an interesting question, as well as one on which a good deal hangs politically, but few answers are to be found in the standard social science literature, which remains stuck in intra-academic commentary on outdated theories. The literature of first-hand observation is a much better starting point. Homeland is reportage of the most illuminating kind - a vividly atmospheric narrative of Nick Ryan's six years exploring the far-right underworld across Europe and the United States. A television producer and investigative journalist, Ryan records his exposure to a wide spectrum of drifting sociopaths and calculating opportunists, white-power punks and political provocateurs, Satanist rock musicians and Christian fundamentalist conspiracy theorists. Patrick Buchanan and Jorg Haider jostle together along with a host of characters of whom most readers will never have heard. As he recounts his meetings with them, Ryan probes the psychology of people whose sense of their own identities seems to depend on stigmatizing the identities of others. The result is a fascinating and unsettling exploration of the dangerous nether reaches of contemporary culture and politics. Ryan makes few generalizations. The value of his book lies not in any attempt at theorizing but in its taut depiction of a new cultural-political landscape. Yet Homeland adds to our understanding of the new Far Right in several crucial respects. To begin with, it underscores the ways in which the Far Right has not changed. Today, as in the 1920s and 30s, it is driven by hatred of minorities - internal and external. Now, as then, the central place in its demonology is accorded to Jews, with Holocaust revisionism reproducing all the poisonous themes of inter-war anti-Semitic hate literature. As it was in the inter-war era, the Right today is deeply homophobic. These are continuities that recur continuously on the Far Right, expressing a syndrome that shows no signs of fading away. In some contexts it is actually intensifying, as far-right movements deploy the Internet to disseminate their ideas. A figure such as David Copeland, the nail-bomber who attacked the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, killing three people and injuring over fifty, some seriously, was portrayed in the media as a deranged loner. That his mental state was unbalanced is not in doubt; but, as Ryan demonstrates, Copeland was no mere solitary. He had a history of contact with British far-right groups, whose ideas he had absorbed over a long period. Acting alone, he implemented a strategy of terror that had been incubating for many years. A valuable feature of Homeland is its description of the amorphous character of much of the new Far Right. Alongside its entry into the European political mainstream, it has a more shadowy side, in which it practises terrorist strategies of "leaderless resistance". Unlike the anti-liberal movements of the twentieth century, it is not organized in hierarchical structures, but in loose networks. In this regard the new Far Right mirrors other terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda (which it seems to view with both trepidation and admiration). There is a lesson here. In the twentieth century the chief threat to liberal values came from revolutionary mass parties and totalitarian regimes. Today, the danger comes from elusive affinity groups, held together mainly by their shared hatreds, aiming not to capture the State but to disable or destroy it. The hate-filled extremists described by Ryan are often nondescript figures, who make full use of the anonymous freedom afforded by liberal societies. Curbing these networks means strengthening the State, a process in which core liberal freedoms could easily be compromised. Political thought has yet to catch up with this dilemma, but it seems destined to shape some of our most intractable conflicts. From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jun 15 03:52:04 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:52:04 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] THE SYNCHRONIZED UNIVERSE Message-ID: <01C57122.EC0FC390.shovland@mindspring.com> A new scientific revolution is quietly underway. Laboratories around the world have proven that many kinds of paranormal phenomena are real. It represents a new kind of force, one that is able to travel forward and backward in time, a force that does not weaken with distance. It is a force unlike anything conventional science has ever seen. The Synchronized Universe summarizes this evidence for many kinds of paranormal phenomena. In many cases these strange forces have been demonstrated under rigorous scientific statistics, with odds of millions or even billions to one against chance. This evidence is presented in a "user friendly" way, with a minimum of jargon, and with over 140 photographs, figures and sketches. The author, an MIT and Princeton educated physicist, Dr. Claude Swanson, has put together the "best evidence" showing that our present scientific paradigm is broken. He describes scientifically controlled remote viewing and ESP experiments, demonstrations of long-range healing, psychokinesis (mind over matter), scientifically controlled experiments in levitation, teleportation and out of body phenomena (OBE). These are just a few of the areas where new research is defying the old beliefs of conventional science. It points the way to a new, expanded science which, instead of denying the role of consciousness and spirit, begins to integrate these forces into a larger, more highly evolved and integrated world view. The truly "unified field theory" must explain and understand both science and consciousness. In doing so, it begins to heal the ancient rift between science and spirituality. And in the last chapter of the book, he proposes some ways to modify and expand present science to begin to achieve these goals. From HowlBloom at aol.com Wed Jun 15 05:32:25 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 01:32:25 EDT Subject: FW: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes -- Basse's Comments Message-ID: All thanks, Joel. Sometimes primitive can be useful. Howard In a message dated 6/14/2005 12:13:18 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes: I relayed our discussion to Nils Basse and following is his response: >From: "Nils P. Basse" >To: "'Joel Isaacson'" >Subject: RE: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes >Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:01:32 -0400 > >Hi Joel, > >I'm glad some people find my idea interesting - I agree with you, at the >moment this is extremely speculative and my approach is quite primitive, >we'll see if anything more develops, > >cheers Nils ---------- 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 Thrst4knw at aol.com Wed Jun 15 16:44:00 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:44:00 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Book World: (Garreau) Intelligent Design? Message-ID: <68.57c457b1.2fe1b4d0@aol.com> In a message dated 6/13/2005 9:12:14 PM Eastern Daylight Time, checker at panix.com writes: Even if technology seems to be a force out of control, we'll always find some way to direct it toward our desired ends, Garreau suspects. We might be able to direct technology toward desired ends; a more troubling and deeper question is whether pursuing our currently desired ends will lead us someplace that will still be desireable once we get there. That's much harder to calculate, I suspect. Todd -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:31:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:31:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself about my novel, Trine Erotic Message-ID: Our list member has written the very first novel written around evolutionary psychology ideas, and I can recommend it highly. It is composed of stories with stories, and you're never quite sure what the reality is. It's like postmodernism in this way. And you wonder to what extent the novel is autobiographical or about the person the author wished she were or just made up of creatures that exemplify what evolutionary psychology demands that they do. But it's quite clear that the female protagonists very much want men they can bat ideas around with, though there's no place for the love of ideas for their own sake in evolutionary psychology. The narrators seem to know this, though they want to transcend these limits. Gordon Tullock, an economics professor I had, thought that altruism in humans was the result of an evolutionary defect: we had not been humans long enough for altruism to have been weeded out! I'm sure he'd worry that Alice is defective, being much too in love with ideas. One answer, that she apparently doesn't know about, is that evolution takes place on many levels, not just at the level of the gene. This makes group selection possible and makes room for altruism. The book here is Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, _Unto Others_, which is slowly getting accepted in the biology community. (Paradigm shifts do take time, you know.) Another answer is that, however much the overall selfish gene theory is true, our desires are indirect mechanisms to promote the overall goal and that there are many of these desires. Steven Reiss came up with 16 basic desires that are relatively independent of one another. Desiring to raise (one's own) children is largely independent of romance (which includes the neighboring desires of wanting coitus and of wanting aesthetic experiences. Why the latter, I'm not sure, but factor analysis puts the three of them together.). And both are independent of curiosity, which is at the top of my list and my wife's (I am sure) and at least near the top of Alice's. What's also missing from the novel, as it is from evolutionary psychology generally, is the desire for a long-term monogamous commitment, which is a quite different kind of love. Note to myself: you've got to get around to buying and reading C.S. Lewis' _The Four Loves_. You shouldn't let your atheism keep you from the book. After all, Moses and Solomon (less so Jesus) were proto-sociobiologists. --------------------- Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself about my novel, Trine Erotic http://www.entelechyjournal.com/playing_with_myself.htm [This is the first novel written from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. I am finishing it up now and am enjoying its playfulness exceedingly.] Q What are some of the major questions you try to deal with in Trine Erotic? A Well, there are quite a few: Is there free will? What is the will? What is and is there a single Ia self? Are we determined by our genes? Can we (and how and what affect does it have to) go against our nature? What is the unconscious? Is it what evolutionary psychologists refer to as our universal human nature? Or is it something else? And how does it work? And is there a universal human nature? How does culture influence us? What is art? What is love? And is there something beyond our evolutionary, deep reflexessome kind of global brain, as Howard Bloom suggests, that is motivating us? Q You dedicate the book to every womans desire and the art within her and to alpha males everywhere. Does that mean its not for other malessay, Beta? A No, no. Its sort of tongue-in-cheeky. Im playing with the evolutionary theory that art is displayed as a mating signal/strategy. So Im saying: Here is this piece of artand, naturally, I would want to signal the highest type of man. Of course, alpha male is subjective when it comes to humansfor apes it may be just a factor of strength or posing. For me, an alpha male doesnt always look like an alpha; a man could be an alpha and work in a factory but be an original thinker and want to lead or organize people. (David M. Busss work explains this, actually.) But anyway, its not just for alpha males. Its for all males. But its particularly for men who are creative and deep and interested in figuring out the world . . . understanding human nature, and more. And it's for females too! Q Why did you write the book? A Well, for one, I was compelled to write. And there are a lot of other reasons as well. But, I have to say that I found the fiction I was reading leaving me cold. I just found myself not getting turned on by all that good literature. I wanted to be turned on. I saw the appeal; saw the code of it. You know, theres something here in this story but Im not going to let on to what it is because youre supposed to get it because were so smart, and good fiction shows and doesnt tell. And Im not going to even attempt to affect you in any way because that would be pompous and sentimental and ultimately ineffective. And were so sophisticated and subtle. I guess these are some of the rules of fiction. Like how you shouldnt write out ideas. And its related to the seduction/anti-seduction stuff I write about in the book. Most modern fiction is quite seductive, in the Baudrillardian sense, by trying or appearing not to seduce. I think my style is anti-anti-seductionor [2]meta-seduction. I am possibly "seducing" by going against a seductive "hiding" strategy. For example, I can choose to wear revealing clothing (which isnt seductive) or less revealing clothing, which concealswhich is seductive. But I can wear the revealing clothes as a reaction to the seductive strategy, which says, Im not trying to seduce with the not-trying-to-seduce clothes. And this is seductive in its own waya hiding from hiding. Of course, the revealing clothing looks the sameits just a matter of intention. And only a few will be able to read the code or signal. I realize this is made confusing because I am using Baudrillards sense of the word. In fact, what you have are three things working: seduction (in its denotation), anti-seduction, and anti-anti-seduction or meta-seduction. Dont tell me Im confusing YOU!?? Im not terribly affected by most fiction (though I know Im in the minority). And Im not proud of that fact. Its just the way I am. Im not very subtle. I like to read nonfiction. Otherwise I feel like Im wasting my time. Id rather be doing something or writing or learning something. Unfortunately I dont have that feeling (that Im learning something, etc.) when I read most fiction. And perhaps that is a fault of mine. Perhaps Im just not refined enough or my personality doesnt allow me to slow down. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Im right-brain dominant. I really see a difference though, between people who love fiction and me. And, thankfully, Ive stopped worrying that theres something wrong with me in this. For the record, I dont place a value on one or the otherseductive fiction (which is what is accepted and favored) versus meta-seductive fiction (fiction which tells you what its doing, openly wants to affect, deals with ideas, etc.). But to answer your question: I wrote a book that I was wanting to read. Q Is there any fiction you do like? A Oh, of course. I loved Smillas Sense of Snow, liked Jeanette Wintersons Sexing the Cherry, D.H. Lawrenceliked Kundera when I was younger Dostoevsky, John Berger, Hermann Hesse, and [3]there are others Q You mention wanting to affect the reader. What kind of affect are you hoping for? A Any, I suppose. Nietzsche wrote that the effect of works of art is to excite the state that creates art . . . he says its intoxication . . . First and foremost, I want the reader to get some pleasure from it. After that, its mostly a working out of some of the questions which seem to haunt us, stuff about love. And I suppose I want it to be a part of the readers working it out, like a friend. There is also the sort of feministy thing about desire and art in women. I suppose I would like TE to inspire women to let loose their desire and art more. In Sirens Song, the nameless protagonist says her father told her that the point about art was to share itabout an audience. Which reminds me of a scene in Bride of the Wind, a film about Alma Mahler I just saw on video. Alma says to her husband Mahler, I wish youd conduct one of my songs. And he says, One of your songs? . . . Perhaps one day in rehearsal. And she says, Rehearsal? But then there wouldnt be an audience. And he says, Ill be there. Arent I enough? And Im interested in this. Because despite the womens rights movement and so much liberation and so many women artists, I still think there is this thing within us (women) . . . a resistance . . . and I question its etiology. If such a resistance existsor rather, a relative lack of desire to broadcast compared to menis it innate? That is, is it related to biology, to the evolutionary theory that men try to broadcast to as many women as possible, since it is in their genetic interest to do so? (Or since they are the product of millions of years of evolution which ensured such a tendency persisted?) Or is it cultural? Or some admixture? Again, I question my premise as well. Im interested in trying to uncover whether or not such a tendency exists. I certainly have felt my relative lack of desire to broadcast. But of course, that could have everything to do with other things: personality, conditioning, stage of life, etc. About my Sirens Song character: her feeling had always been that it was something that had to do with her (whatever her art was, be it painting or writing); she didnt have an impulse to broadcast it. And so, there is this question about what art is, and its purpose and function. And, in some sense, the book is my grappling with deciding to share whatever it is in meand that in my sharing of it, there is meaning. There is a dialectics of desire, as Barthes saysand I quote him at the beginning of Sirens Song. For me, I couldnt and wouldnt want to put the book out there if I didnt think it would serve some kind of purpose. And of course, art is purposeful. It is motivated by all sorts of deep, powerful urges. The artist experiences it as an outpouring of some kind of force that has to be expelled, a feeling of compulsion. And then theres that choice an artist makesdo you go mad or stay somewhat functionally neurotic, or do you release and create? (The existential problem of whether or not it is a choice, I cant answer. My answer probably changes with my mood.) But also, there is the EP theory of art as signal. And in some ways that is also about survival. So I see art as a saviorfor the artist but also for the audience, of course. Once I decided that Trine Erotic was for an audience, it took on a whole new light. It was outward directed and relating, and it was pleasurable in a way that before it hadnt been (that is, writing for myself). So much goes unsaid in the culture. Most of us (except perhaps for some hard-core feminists) think women are free to do their thing. We have this sense, historically and culturally, that women are now free. Yet I dont really think so. I think its good to show a female character who feels restricted with respect to desire and the art within her. I think some women will identify and it may feel liberating, or help create movement. And of course, thats where the fiction reactionaries come in. I shouldnt be so pompous as to think that something I have created could have some kind of affect. But to me, perhaps because Im a woman and mother (it may be nature or nurture or both), I dont see why you would put something out there if it wasnt for some good, for some use. And that is also tied in to the notion that it could be my compulsion and selfishness (much like an overbearing parent) that made me continue to write new stories, though it felt like love, but that it is finally the selfless love for the reader that allows me to stop creatingto allow the reader to create something of their own from the book or envision the next story or storiesto be individuated and truly the artist, to be free. Q This seems related to the whole reader response issue in the novel . . . A Yes. I say the book is alive. And in a way, the book is like a lover. It is also a meme (or memeplexwhat I call memesome). I, the author, am egoless; the words are not minetheyre this meme. And the words belong to the reader, and the reader is the artistcreating meaning and art through the reading. Q You say feministy, but sometimes you sound downright backwards about women in the novel. The scene with the woman walking behind Caleb, for example, youre not critical of ityou seem to romanticize it. A Well, first of all, the most interesting thing about people is their contradictions. I think thats why Ed and Calebs characters are interesting. I am putting those questions out there, because we have all felt them. I mean, I say something like, it was a walking dance which fulfilled something primal for them and though they both understood the sexist implications, they didnt care . . . Its dealing with the different layers again accepting and integrating them not trying to ban certain impulses or desires because we are told to. Is it bad or is she inferior because she is turned on by walking behind him? I dont know. I dont think so. If she feels free as a woman, then I dont see the problem. But I see the potential danger in this positionjust as there is potential danger in an EP/essentialist position. But Steven Pinker I think does the best job of explaining why it doesnt have to be dangerousand in fact, in the long run might do more good than harm. Q You play with the question of patterns . . . Why? A Well, for one, Gurdjieff, the basis for Rajingiev and Guerttiev, was interested in habits. And I guess I am too. The book is about these women who have recurring patterns in their relationships. And, of course, people do throughout their lifespanoften debilitatingly so. And I suppose a big question in standard social clinical psychology is how do you break these patterns? But Im not only interested in patterns as related to psychological processes/neuroses/habits, but also to questions of time, e.g. eternal recurrence. Would it all really be the same if we played it all back from the beginning? And can we change? And do we really have free will? And can we actually determine reality or has everything been set and were just living it out? The new physics gets at a lot of these issues . . . Q Why didnt you use Gurdjieff s name in the book? You use the real names of others A I didnt because many of the philosophical/spiritual ideas I wrote about in Sirens Song and some in Baby Theory are really not the ideas of Gurdjieff. Rajingiev and Guerttiev are not pseudonyms for Gurdjieff; they are names for a fictional sage. Yet Gurdjieffians will certainly recognize some of Gurdjieff in them, thats true. Q What does the title mean, Trine Erotic? A Well, trine means three . . . and three is important throughout the book. Erotic refers to Eros . . . love (though also it has a sexual component). But the first meaning of the title is three love stories: three loves. (Trine Erotic= Love Stories, Sirens Song, and Baby Theory . . . Also Conscious Shock = soft kill, Red Love, and Sirens Song.) In addition, there are couplet stories that make a final third story: Conscious Shock and Third Force make Trine Erotic; soft kill and Red Love make Love Stories; Love Stories and Sirens Song make Conscious Shock . . .) And there is a feeling that Third Force isnt over and that Trine Erotic itself is part of something . . . Three-love is also for a sort of triune theory of love I have in the book: evolution, experience, culture. The notion that our problems stem from the conflict between our different layers. So, for example, if I were a man, I might feel an attraction for women who are heavier or who have a particular hip-to-waist ratio than what the culture tells me is attractive. This conflict of impulses and desires tends to clog feelings, or at least makes people feel disjointed. It is hard to put it all together. Its hard to know what it is the I really desires; what is more true for the self? Three is everywhere in TE. Its also a Fibonacci number, and Id say just about every number in the book is a Fibonacci number. And trine is also an astrological concept, relating to the relationship of planets. Q Whats a Fibonacci number? A Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician who discovered an interesting series of numbers, which are now called Fibonacci numbers. It begins with 1. You then add one to that to get 2. You then add those two numbers together to get 3. Then 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13; 8+13=21 . . . and so on . . . Whats interesting about these numbers is that the ratio between any of the pairs of numbers is approximately the golden ratio or the golden number, which is around 1.618. And whats interesting about the golden number is that artists throughout history have used it in their art. (The golden mean, the golden section, or golden ratio is most beautiful to our eyes.) In addition, what is interesting about the actual numbers themselves in the series is that they can be found in naturein particular in the spirals of things. So, if you count the spirals in a pine cone or the seeds in a sunflower, or the spirals of a shell, you will find you get a Fibonacci number. . . . 13 rows of spirals, or 21, like that. As well, the human face shows a lot of correspondence to Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio. . . . And this is interesting because there is a lot of work being done in EP and other fields to suggest that there is a correlation between symmetry and what is thought of as beautiful, with developmental health and stability, perhaps, even fertility and fecundity. And perhaps, somehow, there is a relationship between the mathematics of outward beauty and inner. Q Why use Fibonacci numbers? A I think theres a magical quality to the numbers, no question. They seem most natural. Its like choosing between painting your wall a flat yellow or painting it yellow with a mixture of white, with a subtle Lazure technique, to create a feeling of softness and naturalness, what youd find in nature. In addition, mathematics is important throughout much of the book. I talk about there being a math to everything; about the algorithms of our adapted mind; write about how the nameless protagonist adds everything up: Calebs lies, his Heliosen ways, his amorality . . . Q In the book, you sometimes refer to TE as metafiction. Why? A Oh, because its about fictionits a story about a story about a story. And because its concerned with ideas about fiction and writing. Also, because I go outside of the fiction and interject as the author about the work. Its meta in a lot of ways. Im interested in fictionthe craft of writing. I see TE as a triptych. Each section, each story has a different style. Some stories are crafted more than others, but so far, readers have told me they dont see a difference. To me theres a huge difference, as far as craft and complexity between some of the stories . . . Q Which ones? A I dont want to say. I want to get virgin feedback still . . . I do want to say this: I dont think of myself as a writerI think of myself more as a synthesizera synthesizer of memes. If my writing were a singing voice it would be closer to Leonard Cohens than Pavarottisor Joan Osbornes than Kathleen Battles. The tradition in fiction is, of course, pre-film, and has mostly been concerned with painting mental pictures for readers. But Im more interested in representing and transmitting ideas than I am pictures. My emphasis is on conveying meaning up frontthats where I put my energy. I realize meaning is also conveyed subtly, but its just not enough for me. I have more I want to convey. And, of course, I also do it in the traditional wayI dont think it would be a novel otherwise. Also, thats not to say Im not interested in language. I am very much. And I have a pretty good ear, so I care very much about the sounds. Sometimes I would spend half an hour on one sentence. For example, every sentence fragment is there for a reason. I could have chosen instead a semi-colon or a connecting word or an em-dash, etc., but for me it was a question of sound and meaning and even a visual impression. And of course, sometimes, my first writing would be just right and I could leave it alone. That was always nice. _______________________ [4]Alice Andrews has taught both writing and psychology (and sometimes both at the same time) with an evolutionary lens for over a decade. Currently she's teaching "Social Psychology " and "Personality and Psychotherapy" at the [5]State University of New York at New Paltz. Alice is also an editor and writer (books and magazines), and was the associate editor of [6]Chronogram from 2000-2002. She is the author of [7]Trine Erotic, a novel which explores evolutionary psychology. References 1. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/ 2. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/meta-seductionfiction.htm 3. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/books.htm 4. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/andrews 5. http://www.newpaltz.edu/ 6. http://www.chronogram.com/ 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587761211/qid=1029245378/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/trineerotic-20%22%3ETrine%20Erotic%3C/A%3E/102-5304949-9560913 From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Jun 15 19:35:51 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:35:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] feminism, etc In-Reply-To: <200506151800.j5FI0XR06268@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050615193551.98351.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Gerry says: >>Michael, Here an alarming statistic: since 1970, the marriage rate is down by 35%. During this period we've viewed the impact of "feminism" on both the workplace and the classroom.<< --Question: how exactly is the impact of "feminism" being measured? How would one contrast it with the impact of "masculinism", for example? Or disentangle the consequences of feminism from the consequences of, say, greed or video games? >>Psychologically a 50% divorce rate has to have an enormous impact on young marriage especially since many divorced women with children fall into poverty.<< --No doubt, divorce produces a lot of insecurity. Any schism in family or community is going to add stress (and that may also apply if fundamentalism or politics divides people) and a lot of that stress will fall on children. The question is, if people aren't willing to marry or stay married, how can we compensate, by providing children with a sense of security and the knowledge that, even if parents can't stay together, they will still be there for the kids? Church may provide a sense of community as a second family. What else is there, or could be there in the future? I don't think it will work to artifically shore up marriage. Only providing alternate means to self-esteem and security will really help. Ultimately, we lack a sense of community, and that's going to affect both divorce rates and the psychological health of children. Many of those who advocate a religion-centered community do not see why religion can't work for everyone, and secular alternatives may not be as well organized. 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 15 19:46:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:46:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Modelling the brain: Grey matter, blue matter Message-ID: Modelling the brain: Grey matter, blue matter http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4054975 5.6.9 The first serious attempt to build a computer model of the brain has just begun THE most complex object known to humanity is the human brain--and not only is it complex, but it is the seat of one of the few natural phenomena that science has no purchase on at all, namely consciousness. To try to replicate something that is so poorly understood may therefore seem like hubris. But you have to start somewhere, and IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, propose to start by replicating "in silico", as the jargon has it, one of the brain's building blocks. In a partnership announced on June 6th, the two organisations said they would be working together to build a simulation of a structure known as a neocortical column on a type of IBM supercomputer that is currently used to study the molecular functioning of genes. If that works, they plan to use future, more powerful computers to link such simulated columns together into something that mimics a brain. In a real brain, a neocortical column is a cylindrical element about a third of a millimetre in diameter and three millimetres long, containing some 10,000 nerve cells. It is these columns, arranged side by side like the cells of a honeycomb, which make up the famous "grey matter" that has become a shorthand for human intelligence. The Blue Gene/L supercomputer that will be used for the simulation consists of enough independent processors for each to be programmed to emulate an individual nerve cell in a column. The EPFL's contribution to the Blue Brain Project, as it has inevitably been dubbed, will be to create a digital description of how the columns behave. Its Brain Mind Institute has what is generally regarded as the world's most extensive set of data on the machinations of the neocortex--the columns' natural habitat and the part of the brain responsible for learning, memory, language and complex thought. This database will provide the raw material for the simulation. Biologists and computer scientists will then collaborate to connect the artificial nerve cells up in a way that mimics nature. They will do so by assigning electrical properties to them, and telling them how to communicate with each other and how they should modify their connections with one another depending on their activity. That will be no mean feat. Even a single nerve cell is complicated, not least because each one has about 10,000 connections with others. And nerve cells come in great variety--relying, for example, on different chemical transmitters to carry messages across those connections. Eventually, however, a digital representation of an entire column should emerge. This part of the project is expected to take two to three years. From then on, things will go in two directions simultaneously. One will be to "grow" more columns (the human brain contains about 1m of them) and get them to interact with one another. The second will be to work at a more elementary level--that is, to simulate the molecular structure of the brain, and to look at the influence of gene expression on brain function. Assuming that the growth of computing power continues to follow Moore's Law, Charles Peck, the leader of IBM's side of the collaboration, reckons it should be feasible to emulate an entire human brain in silico this way in ten to 15 years. Such an artificial brain would, of course, be a powerful research tool. It would allow neurological experiments that currently take days in a "wet lab" to be conducted in seconds. The researchers hope, for instance, that their simulated brain will reveal the secrets of how certain psychiatric and neurological disorders develop. But that is probably not the real reason for doing it. The most interesting questions, surely, are whether such an artificial brain will be intelligent, or conscious, or both. Rhapsody in blue? Some academics, such as Roger Penrose of Oxford University, argue that brains do not work in a way comparable with a computer, so any kind of simulation that is built on digital architecture and uses traditional programming techniques is doomed to failure. Dr Penrose thinks that exotic quantum processes are involved in the generation of consciousness. The "Blue Brain" project will help to determine whether he is right or wrong. Henry Markram, the boss of the Brain Mind Institute, and the leader of the EPFL's side of the collaboration, stresses that Blue Brain's formal goal is not to build an artificial intelligence system, such as a neural network. Nor is it to create a conscious machine. The goal is merely to build a simulacrum of a biological brain. If the outputs produced by the simulation in response to particular inputs are identical to those in animal experiments, then that goal will have been achieved. On the other hand, he also says, "I believe the intelligence that is going to emerge if we succeed in doing that is going to be far more than we can even imagine." Watch this space. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:46:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:46:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Times: Matthew Syed: A case of mistaken identity crisis Message-ID: Matthew Syed: A case of mistaken identity crisis http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1644788,00.html 5.6.8 Guest contributors People afflicted with multiple personalities reveal that the idea of the self is a fiction THE MOST sinister form of abuse is that meted out to a child by a parent. The young have a biological predisposition to "belong" -- a duckling, for example, will instinctively snuggle up to a human leg if that is the first thing it sees -- so it is particularly traumatic when this need for tenderness is met with systematic physical or sexual violence. Pamela, the subject of a haunting documentary on Channel 4 tonight, developed a novel, if somewhat disquieting, mechanism to cope with her sadistic upbringing: she created new selves. When the pain, squalor and ignominy became too much to endure, Pamela, as it were, "left it all behind": while she was abused, she dissociated and departed to another place -- leaving a new person in her place. R?my Aquarone, an analytical psychotherapist, has dealt with these disturbing cases of what is known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). "Dissociation is a primitive defence mechanism," he said. "When something is unbearable to consciousness and cannot be cognitively processed, it is split off: quite literally dissociated." In many cases the various "alters" have their own memories and personality traits. When a switch is about to occur the patient often undergoes a temporary look of vacancy before the background alter "emerges". One psychoanalyst I spoke to had worked with a patient who had a successful job in the City during the week and then travelled to the South Coast at the weekend to work as a prostitute. One of the most fascinating aspects of witnessing such people is our own knee-jerk scepticism. I watched a tape of the documentary and found it difficult to suppress a growing sense of incredulity, as if I expected Pamela eventually to wink at the camera and say: "Gotcha!" This response is not confined to lay people. Doctors repudiated the condition when it was first diagnosed and it remains hotly contested today, regarded by many as a phenomenon that has been induced under hypnotic suggestion by over-zealous clinicians. But why this reluctance? The problem here is not a lack of evidence -- which is overwhelming -- but a failure of intellectual courage. For DID strikes at the heart of the most basic myth in our intellectual vocabulary: the self. Since we first learnt to use language we have regarded the first-person pronoun as referring to something that existed in childhood, exists today, will continue to exist in the future and -- for those of a religious persuasion -- will survive bodily death. We fondly think of this self as the subject of our experiences, the instigator of our actions and the custodian of our morality. We are lulled into this idea by the seeming unity of our consciousness: our various thoughts and perceptions all knitted into a seamless whole. This cherished conception is, however, a cruel fiction. It has taken extreme cases, such as DID, to ram the truth home. Take brain dissection. In these operations, the corpus callosum -- a large strand of neurons which facilitates communications between the hemispheres -- is cut to stop the spread of epileptic seizures from one half of the brain to the other. Under certain laboratory conditions, two "centres of consciousness" seem to appear in patients who have had this operation. For example, suppose that we flash the word CANNOT on a screen in front of a brain-bisected patient in such a way that the letters CAN hit one side of the retina, the letters NOT the other and we ensure that the information hitting each retina stays in one lobe and is not fed to the other. If such a patient is asked what word is being shown, the mouth will say CAN while the hand controlled by the hemisphere that does not control the mouth will write NOT. So much for the "unity" of consciousness. What about the notion of the self as instigator of action? We na?vely suppose that we consciously decide to move, and then move. When Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment on voluntary action in 1985 he found that the brain activity began about half a second before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action, as though consciousness is a mere afterthought. Many reacted to this with astonishment. Why? Did they really suppose the body was animated by some ghostly mini me lurking behind the brain? A more plausible theory is that which is emerging from both biology and artificial intelligence. As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts it: "Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly `purposeful and integrated' way simply by having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision." The self, then, is not what it seems to be. There is no soul, no spirit, no supervisor. There is just a brain, a dull grey collection of neurons and neural pathways -- going about its business. The illusion of self is merely a by-product of the brain's organisational sophistication. Seen in this light, DID is neither a philosophical absurdity nor a medical fantasy but a vivid demonstration of the infinite adaptability of the human mind in the quest for survival. Those who tune in tonight will feel an overwhelming sense of compassion for the pathetic figure of Pamela. But, for those who take the intellectual plunge, the most acute pity will be directed inwardly. Accepting the death of "self" is both strange and traumatic, bringing with it a profound a sense of bereavement. Except that there is nothing there to bereave. Being Pamela, Channel 4, 9pm From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:47:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:47:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science: How "Competent" Faces Win Elections Message-ID: Science: How "Competent" Faces Win Elections 5.6.10 First, the summary from CHE: Do physically attractive political candidates have an edge? The answer appears to be yes, to judge from a paper by four researchers at Princeton University. In their study, subjects were shown images of Congressional candidates for only one second and were then asked which were more "competent," based solely on their appearance. The subjects picked the actual election winners about 70 percent of the time, report Alexander Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology, and three graduate students in his department. The inferences also were directly proportional to the candidates' margins of victory in races, the authors say. Their findings, they conclude, suggest that rapid, unreflective impressions of candidates contribute to voting choices -- a view that contradicts the common belief that votes are based primarily on rational deliberations. In a related article, Leslie A. Zebrowitz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University, and Joann M. Montepare, an associate professor of psychology at Emerson College, say that voters appear to judge faces as not competent based on whether, for example, candidates looked more "babyfaced" than did their opponents. That trait, characterized by such features as round faces and large eyes, is often interpreted by voters as a sign of being submissive, na?ve, and weak. Mr. Todorov and his colleagues say that their findings suggest that "consequential decisions can be more shallow than we would like to believe," and note that researchers have found "no good evidence that trait inferences from facial appearance are accurate." --------------- Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes Alexander Todorov,1,2* Anesu N. Mandisodza,1 [{dagger}] Amir Goren,1 Crystal C. Hall1 We show that inferences of competence based solely on facial appearance predicted the outcomes of U.S. congressional elections better than chance (e.g., 68.8% of the Senate races in 2004) and also were linearly related to the margin of victory. These inferences were specific to competence and occurred within a 1-second exposure to the faces of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective trait inferences can contribute to voting choices, which are widely assumed to be based primarily on rational and deliberative considerations. 1 Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. 2 Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. [{dagger}] Present address: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: atodorov at princeton.edu Faces are a major source of information about other people. The rapid recognition of familiar individuals and communication cues (such as expressions of emotion) is critical for successful social interaction (1). However, people go beyond the inferences afforded by a person's facial appearance to make inferences about personal dispositions (2, 3). Here, we argue that rapid, unreflective trait inferences from faces influence consequential decisions. Specifically, we show that inferences of competence, based solely on the facial appearance of political candidates and with no prior knowledge about the person, predict the outcomes of elections for the U.S. Congress. In each election cycle, millions of dollars are spent on campaigns to disseminate information about candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and to convince citizens to vote for these candidates. Is it possible that quick, unreflective judgments based solely on facial appearance can predict the outcomes of these elections? There are many reasons why inferences from facial appearance should not play an important role in voting decisions. From a rational perspective, information about the candidates should override any fleeting initial impressions. From an ideological perspective, party affiliation should sway such impressions. Party affiliation is one of the most important predictors of voting decisions in congressional elections (4). From a voter's subjective perspective, voting decisions are justified not in terms of the candidate's looks but in terms of the candidate's position on issues important to the voter. Yet, from a psychological perspective, rapid automatic inferences from the facial appearance of political candidates can influence processing of subsequent information about these candidates. Recent models of social cognition and decision-making (5, 6) posit a qualitative distinction between fast, unreflective, effortless "system 1" processes and slow, deliberate, effortful "system 2" processes. Many inferences about other people, including inferences from facial appearance, can be characterized as system 1 processes (7, 8). The implications of the dual-process perspective are that person impressions can be formed "on-line" in the very first encounter with the person and can have subtle and often subjectively unrecognized effects on subsequent deliberate judgments. Competence emerges as one of the most important trait attributes on which people evaluate politicians (9?11). If voters evaluate political candidates on competence, inferences of competence from facial appearance could influence their voting decisions. To test this hypothesis, we asked na"ve participants to evaluate candidates for the U.S. Senate (2000, 2002, and 2004) and House (2002 and 2004) on competence (12). In all studies, participants were presented with pairs of black-and-white head-shot photographs of the winners and the runners-up (Fig. 1A) from the election races. If participants recognized any of the faces in a race pair, the data for this pair were not used in subsequent analyses. Thus, all findings are based on judgments derived from facial appearance in the absence of prior knowledge about the person. [ ] Fig. 1. (A) An example of a pair of faces used in the experiments: the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin. In all experiments, the positions of the faces were counterbalanced. (B) Scatterplot of differences in proportions of votes between the winner and the runner-up in races for the Senate as a function of inferred competence from facial appearance. The upper right and lower left quadrants indicate the correctly predicted races. Each point represents a Senate race from 2000, 2002, or 2004. The competence score on the x axis ranges from 0 to 1 and represents the proportion of participants judging the candidate on the right to be more competent than the one on the left. The midpoint score of 0.50 indicates that the candidates were judged as equally competent. The difference in votes on the y axis ranges from ?1 to +1 [(votes of candidate on the right ? votes of candidate on the left)/(sum of votes)]. Scores below 0 indicate that the candidate on the left won the election; scores above 0 indicate that the candidate on the right won the election. [Photos in (A): Capitol Advantage] [View Larger Version of this Image (48K GIF file)] As shown in Table 1, the candidate who was perceived as more competent won in 71.6% of the Senate races and in 66.8% of the House races (13). Although the data for the 2004 elections were collected before the actual elections (14), there were no differences between the accuracy of the prospective predictions for these elections and the accuracy of the retrospective predictions for the 2000 and 2002 elections (15). Inferences of competence not only predicted the winner but also were linearly related to the margin of victory. To model the relation between inferred competence and actual votes, we computed for each race the difference in the proportion of votes (16). As shown in Fig. 1B, competence judgments were positively correlated with the differences in votes between the candidates for Senate [r(95) = 0.44, P < 0.001] (17, 18). Similarly, the correlation was 0.37 (P < 0.001) for the 2002 House races and 0.44 (P < 0.001) for the 2004 races. Across 2002 and 2004, the correlation was 0.40 (P < 0.001). Table 1. Percentage of correctly predicted races for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives as a function of the perceived competence of the candidates. The percentages indicate the races in which the candidate who was perceived as more competent won the race. The [{chi}] 2 statistic tests the proportion of correctly predicted races against the chance level of 50%. Election Correctly predicted [{chi}] 2 U.S. Senate 2000 (n = 30) 73.3% 6.53 (P < 0.011) 2002 (n = 33) 72.7% 6.82 (P < 0.009) 2004 (n = 32) 68.8% 4.50 (P < 0.034) Total (n = 95) 71.6% 17.70 (P < 0.001) U.S. House of Representatives 2002 (n = 321) 66.0% 33.05 (P < 0.001) 2004 (n = 279) 67.7% 35.13 (P < 0.001) Total (n = 600) 66.8% 68.01 (P < 0.001) In the previous studies, there were no time constraints on the participants' judgments. However, system 1 processes are fast and efficient. Thus, minimal time exposure to the faces should be sufficient for participants to make inferences of competence. We conducted an experiment in which 40 participants (19) were exposed to the faces of the candidates for 1 s (per pair of faces) and were then asked to make a competence judgment. The average response time for the judgment was about 1 s (mean = 1051.60 ms, SD = 135.59). These rapid judgments based on minimal time exposure to faces predicted 67.6% of the actual Senate races (P < 0.004) (20). The correlation between competence judgments and differences in votes was 0.46 (P < 0.001). The findings show that 1-s judgments of competence suffice to predict the outcomes of actual elections, but perhaps people are making global inferences of likability rather than specific inferences of competence. To address this alternative hypothesis, we asked participants to make judgments on seven different trait dimensions: competence, intelligence, leadership, honesty, trustworthiness, charisma, and likability (21). From a simple halo-effect perspective (22), participants should evaluate the candidates in the same manner across traits. However, the trait judgments were highly differentiated. Factor analysis showed that the judgments clustered in three distinctive factors: competence (competence, intelligence, leadership), trust (honesty, trustworthiness), and likability (charisma, likability), each accounting for more than 30% of the variance in the data (table S1). More important, only the judgments forming the competence factor predicted the outcomes of the elections. The correlation between the mean score across the three judgments (competence, intelligence, leadership) and differences in votes was 0.58 (P < 0.001). In contrast to competence-related inferences, neither the trust-related inferences (r = ?0.09, P = 0.65) nor the likability-related inferences (r = ?0.17, P = 0.38) predicted differences in votes. The correlation between the competence judgment alone and differences in votes was 0.55 (P < 0.002), and this judgment correctly predicted 70% of the Senate races (P < 0.028). These findings show that people make highly differentiated trait inferences from facial appearance and that these inferences have selective effects on decisions. We also ruled out the possibility that the age, attractiveness, and/or familiarity with the faces of the candidates could account for the relation between inferences of competence and election outcomes. For example, older candidates can be judged as more competent (23) and be more likely to win. Similarly, more attractive candidates can be judged more favorably and be more likely to win (24). In the case of face familiarity, though unrecognized by our participants, incumbents might be more familiar than challengers, and participants might have misattributed this familiarity to competence (25). However, a regression analysis controlling for all judgments showed that the only significant predictor of differences in votes was competence (Table 2). Competence alone accounted for 30.2% of the variance for the analyses of all Senate races and 45.0% of the variance for the races in which candidates were of the same sex and ethnicity. Thus, all other judgments combined contributed only 4.7% of the variance in the former analysis and less than 1.0% in the latter analysis. Table 2. Standardized regression coefficients of competence, age, attractiveness, and face familiarity judgments as predictors of differences in proportions of votes between the winner and the runner-up in races for the U.S. Senate in 2000 and 2002. Matched races are those in which both candidates were of the same sex and ethnicity. Predictor Differences in votes between winner and runner-up All races Matched races Competence judgments 0.49 (P < 0.002) 0.58 (P < 0.002) Age judgments 0.26 (P < 0.061) 0.07 (P = 0.62) Attractiveness judgments 0.07 (P = 0.63) 0.08 (P = 0.62) Face familiarity judgments -0.05 (P = 0.76) 0.03 (P = 0.86) Accounted variance (R2) 34.9% 45.8% Number of races 63 47 [ ] Fig. 2. Scatterplot of simulated voting preferences as a function of inferred competence from facial appearance. Each point represents a U.S. Senate race from 2000 or 2002. One group of participants was asked to cast hypothetical votes and another group was asked to judge the competence of candidates. Both the competence score and the voting preference score range from 0 to 1. The competence score represents the proportion of participants judging the candidate on the right to be more competent than the one on the left. The preference score represents the proportion of participants choosing the candidate on the right over the one on the left. The midpoint score of 0.50 on the x axis indicates that the candidates were judged as equally competent. The midpoint score of 0.50 on the y axis indicates lack of preference for either of the candidates. [View Larger Version of this Image (10K GIF file)] Actual voting decisions are certainly based on multiple sources of information other than inferences from facial appearance. Voters can use this additional information to modify initial impressions of political candidates. However, from a dual-system perspective, correction of intuitive system 1 judgments is a prerogative of system 2 processes that are attention-dependent and are often anchored on intuitive system 1 judgments. Thus, correction of initial impressions may be insufficient (26). In the case of voting decisions, these decisions can be anchored on initial inferences of competence from facial appearance. From this perspective, in the absence of any other information, voting preferences should be closely related to such inferences. In real-life voting decisions, additional information may weaken the relation between inferences from faces and decisions but may not change the nature of the relation. To test this hypothesis, we conducted simulated voting studies in which participants were asked to choose the person they would have voted for in a political election (27). If voting preferences based on facial appearance derive from inferences of competence, the revealed preferences should be highly correlated with competence judgments. As shown in Fig. 2, the correlation was 0.83 (P < 0.001) (28). By comparison, the correlation between competence judgments and actual differences in votes was 0.56 (P < 0.001). These findings suggest that the additional information that voters had about the candidates diluted the effect of initial impressions on voting decisions. The simulated votes were also correlated with the actual votes [r(63) = 0.46, P < 0.001] (29, 30). However, when controlling for inferences of competence, this correlation dropped to 0.01 (P = 0.95), which suggests that both simulated and actual voting preferences were anchored on inferences of competence from facial appearance. Our findings have challenging implications for the rationality of voting preferences, adding to other findings that consequential decisions can be more "shallow" than we would like to believe (31, 32). Of course, if trait inferences from facial appearance are correlated with the underlying traits, the effects of facial appearance on voting decisions can be normatively justified. This is certainly an empirical question that needs to be addressed. Although research has shown that inferences from thin slices of nonverbal behaviors can be surprisingly accurate (33), there is no good evidence that trait inferences from facial appearance are accurate (34?39). As Darwin recollected in his autobiography (40), he was almost denied the chance to take the historic Beagle voyage?the one that enabled the main observations of his theory of evolution?on account of his nose. Apparently, the captain did not believe that a person with such a nose would "possess sufficient energy and determination." References and Notes 1. J. V. Haxby, E. A. Hoffman, M. I. Gobbini, Trends Cognit. Sci. 4, 223 (2000).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 2. R. Hassin, Y. Trope, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78, 837 (2000).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 3. L. A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1999). 4. L. M. Bartels, Am. J. Polit. Sci. 44, 35 (2000).[ISI] 5. S. Chaiken, Y. Trope, Eds., Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology (Guilford, New York, 1999). 6. D. Kahneman, Am. Psychol. 58, 697 (2003).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 7. A. Todorov, J. S. Uleman, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 39, 549 (2003).[CrossRef][ISI] 8. J. S. Winston, B. A. Strange, J. O'Doherty, R. J. Dolan, Nat. Neurosci. 5, 277 (2002).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline] 9. D. R. Kinder, M. D. Peters, R. P. Abelson, S. T. Fiske, Polit. Behav. 2, 315 (1980).[CrossRef] 10. In one of our studies, 143 participants were asked to rate the importance of 13 different traits in considering a person for public office. These traits included competence, trustworthiness, likability, and 10 additional traits mapping into five trait dimensions that are generally believed by personality psychologists to explain the structure of personality: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience (11 ). Competence was rated as the most important trait. The mean importance assigned to competence was 6.65 (SD = 0.69) on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all important) to 7 (extremely important). The importance assigned to competence was significantly higher than the importance assigned to any of the other 12 traits (Ps < 0.005). 11. S. D. Gosling, P. J. Rentfrow, W. B. Swan Jr., J. Res. Pers. 37, 504 (2003).[CrossRef][ISI] 12. See supporting data on Science Online. 13. For the House races in 2002, we were able to obtain pictures of both the winner and the runner-up for 321 of the 435 races. For the House races in 2004, we were able to obtain pictures for 279 of the 435 races (12). 14. In the studies involving these races, we used photographs of the Democratic and Republican candidates (12). 15. In addition, the accuracy of the predictions was not affected by the race and sex of the candidates. This is important because participants might have used race and sex stereotypes to make competence judgments for contests in which the candidates were of different sexes and races. For example, in such contests Caucasian male candidates were more likely to win. However, if anything, competence judgments predicted the outcomes of elections in which the candidates were of the same sex and race (73.1% for the Senate and 68.5% for the House) more accurately than elections in which they were of different sexes and races (67.9% and 64.3%, respectively). This difference possibly reflects participants' social desirability concerns when judging people of different race and sex. 16. For races with more than two candidates, we standardized this difference so that it was comparable to the difference in races with two candidates. Specifically, the difference between the votes of the winner and those of the runner-up was divided by the sum of their votes. 17. From the scatterplot showing the relation between competence judgments and votes for Senate (Fig. 1B ), seven races (three in the lower right quadrant and four in the upper left quadrant) could be identified as deviating from the linear trend. It is a well-known fact that incumbents have an advantage in U.S. elections (18 ). In six of the seven races, the incumbent won but was judged as less competent. In the seventh race (Illinois, 2004) there was no incumbent, but the person who won, Barack Obama, was the favorite long before the election. Excluding these seven races, the correlation between competence judgments and differences in votes increased to 0.64 (P < 0.001). Although incumbent status seemed to affect the strength of the linear relation between inferences of competence and the margin of victory, it did not affect the prediction of the outcome. Competence judgments predicted the outcome in 72.9% of the races in which the incumbent won, in 66.7% of the races in which the incumbent lost, and in 68.8% of the cases in which there was no incumbent ( [{chi}] 2 < 1.0 for the difference between these percentages; P = 0.89). 18. A. D. Cover, Am. J. Polit. Sci. 21, 523 (1977).[ISI] 19. A bootstrapping data simulation showed that increasing the sample size to more than 40 participants does not improve the accuracy of prediction substantially (12) (fig. S1). 20. Given the time constraints in this study, to avoid judgments based on salient differences such as race and sex, we used only Senate races (2000, 2002, and 2004) in which the candidates were of the same sex and race. 21. For this study, we used the 2002 Senate races. The judgments in this and the subsequent studies were performed in the absence of time constraints (12). 22. H. H. Kelley, J. Pers. 18, 431 (1950).[ISI][Medline] 23. J. M. Montepare, L. A. Zebrowitz, Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 30, 93 (1998).[ISI] 24. T. L. Budesheim, S. J. DePaola, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 20, 339 (1994).[ISI] 25. C. M. Kelley, L. L. Jacoby, Acta Psychol. (Amsterdam) 98, 127 (1998). 26. D. T. Gilbert, in Unintended Thought, J. S. Uleman, J. A. Bargh, Eds. (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1989), pp. 189?211. 27. For these studies, we used the 2000 and 2002 Senate races (12). 28. An additional analysis from a study in which participants made judgments of the candidates for the Senate (2000 and 2002) on 13 different traits [see (10 ) for the list of traits] provided additional evidence that inferences of competence were the key determinants of voting preferences in this situation. We regressed voting preferences on the 13 trait judgments. The only significant predictor of these preferences was the judgment of competence [ [{bullet}] = 0.67, t(49) = 4.46, P < 0.001]. 29. A similar finding was obtained in an early study conducted in Australia (30 ). Hypothetical votes based on newspaper photographs of 11 politicians were closely related to the actual votes in a local government election. Moreover, both hypothetical and actual votes correlated with inferences of competence. 30. D. S. Martin, Aust. J. Psychol. 30, 255 (1978).[ISI] 31. G. A. Quattrone, A. Tversky, Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 82, 719 (1988).[ISI] 32. J. R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1992). 33. N. Ambady, F. J. Bernieri, J. A. Richeson, Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 32, 201 (2000).[CrossRef][ISI] 34. There is some evidence that judgments of intelligence from facial appearance correlate modestly with IQ scores (35). However, these correlations tend to be small [e.g., <0.18 in (35 )], they seem to be limited to judgments of people from specific age groups (e.g., puberty), and the correlation is accounted for by the judges' reliance on physical attractiveness. That is, attractive people are perceived as more intelligent, and physical attractiveness is modestly correlated with IQ scores. 35. L. A. Zebrowitz, J. A. Hall, N. A. Murphy, G. Rhodes, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 28, 238 (2002).[Abstract/Free Full Text] 36. Mueller and Mazur (37 ) found that judgments of dominance from facial appearance of cadets predicted military rank attainment. However, these judgments did not correlate with a relatively objective measure of performance based on academic grades, peer and instructor ratings of leadership, military aptitude, and physical education grades. 37. U. Mueller, A. Mazur, Soc. Forces 74, 823 (1996).[ISI] 38. There is evidence that trait inferences from facial appearance can be wrong. Collins and Zebrowitz [cited in (23 ), p. 136] showed that baby-faced individuals who are judged as less competent than mature-faced individuals actually tend to be more intelligent. There is also evidence that subtle alterations of facial features can influence the trait impressions of highly familiar presidents such as Reagan and Clinton (39). 39. C. F. Keating, D. Randall, T. Kendrick, Polit. Psychol. 20, 593 (1999).[CrossRef][ISI] 40. F. Darwin, Ed., Charles Darwin's Autobiography (Henry Schuman, New York, 1950), p. 36. 41. Supported by the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. We thank M. Savard, R. Hackell, M. Gerbasi, E. Smith, B. Padilla, M. Pakrashi, J. Wey, and R. G.-L. Tan for their help with this project and E. Shafir, D. Prentice, S. Fiske, A. Conway, L. Bartels, M. Prior, D. Lewis, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. ---------------- Appearance DOES Matter Leslie A. Zebrowitz and Joann M. Montepare* Take a look at these two snapshots (see the figure). Which man is more babyfaced? Most viewers would say it's the person on the right. And that's the person who lost a 2004 U.S. congressional election to his more mature-faced and competent-looking opponent. In fact, about 70% of recent U.S. Senate races were accurately predicted based on which candidates looked more competent from a quick glance at their faces. This remarkable effect, reported by Todorov et al. on page 1623 of this issue, likely reflects differences in "babyfacedness" (1 ). A more babyfaced individual is perceived as less competent than a more mature-faced, but equally attractive, peer of the same age and sex (2, 3 ). Although we like to believe that we "don't judge a book by its cover," superficial appearance qualities such as babyfacedness profoundly affect human behavior in the blink of an eye (4). [Figure 1] Which person is more babyfaced? What facial qualities make someone look more babyfaced and less competent? Facial measurements and computer modeling reveal that babies and babyfaced adults of all ages share such features as a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead, and small chin (2, 3, 5). So a babyish face is not synonymous with age, which Todorov et al. (1 ) eliminated as an explanation for their findings. This general quality also seems to be racially universal and evident in both sexes (2, 3 ). However, a woman's facial anatomy tends to be more neotenous than a man's, which may be a disadvantage for women when vying for leadership positions (6 ). The association between facial maturity and perceived competence is ubiquitous: Babyfaced individuals within various demographic groups are perceived as less competent, whether by their own or another group. Its impact can be seen even for famous politicians: When images of former U.S. presidents Reagan and Kennedy were morphed to increase babyfacedness, their perceived dominance, strength, and cunning decreased significantly (7). Why do we think babyfaced people are less competent, at first glimpse? According to the ecological theory of social perception, our ability to detect the attributes of age, health, identity, and emotion has evolutionary and social value. Thus, we have a strong, built-in, predisposition to respond to facial qualities that reveal these characteristics. Moreover, our responses can be overgeneralized to people who look like individuals who actually have the attributes. In this case, our impressions of babies (submissive, na?ve, and weak) are extended to babyfaced adults who are consequently perceived as less competent than their more mature-faced peers. On the other hand, we get a more warm and honest impression from a babyface (2, 3, 5). So what are the social--even political--consequences of our behavior? One must consider the context. Just as competentlooking, mature-faced individuals are favored as congressional leaders, so are they favored for other occupations requiring leadership and intellectual competence. However, those occupations requiring warmth, such as nursing, are most likely assumed by babyfaced adults (2, 3 ). Contextual effects are also seen in judicial decisions. Judges are more apt to believe denials of negligent acts by mature-faced defendants, whose competent appearance is inconsistent with carelessness. In contrast, they believe denials of intentional transgressions by babyfaced defendants, whose warm and honest appearance is not compatible with such malfeasance (2, 3 ). Shifts in the popularity of American actresses tell a similar tale regarding contextual relevance of perceived competence. Actresses with mature faces are favored during times of social and economic hardship. But in prosperous times, we turn our preference toward those with a baby?s glow (8). When does perceived competence fail to predict election outcomes? Todorov et al. found that more competent-looking candidates were defeated in 30% of races. One possible explanation is that face biases could have favored babyfaced candidates in those particular contests. It would be interesting to determine whether babyfaced candidates have the edge in races where polls show that integrity is a highly relevant trait. Like competence, perceived integrity is an important quality used to judge politicians, and it favors babyfaced individuals (9, 10 ). The more competent-looking candidates also had only a small advantage in contests between candidates of different sexes. This was attributed to people's reluctance to judge the relative competence of male versus female opponents (1 ). Such concerns should be minimal when judging babyfacedness. Thus, we may better predict outcomes in mixed-sex contests if babyfacedness is used as a proxy for perceived competence. Are we far from predicting the winner of an election based on voters' responses to a candidate's appearance? Unfortunately, the Todorov et al. study shows that this reality may be all too near. The study has important implications for political marketing, social decision-making, and the democratic process. It also highlights unanswered questions about appearance biases at both the neuroscience and social science levels. What brain mechanisms underlie automatic reactions to superficial qualities such as facial appearance? How can we inoculate people against biased reactions to such qualities? The latter question is particularly important given that more competent-looking victors in congressional elections are not likely to be smarter or bolder than babyfaced losers. Indeed, Todorov et al. noted that more babyfaced men tend to be slightly more intelligent (1 ). They also tend to be more highly educated, contrary to impressions of their na?vet?, and more assertive and more likely to earn military awards, contrary to impressions of their submissiveness and weakness (2, 3 ). Understanding the nature and origins of appearance biases has real-world value, not the least of which may be identifying electoral reforms that could increase the likelihood of electing the most qualified leaders rather than those who simply look the part. References 1. A. Todorov, A. N. Mandisodza, A. Goren, C. C. Hall, Science 308, [1623] (2005). 2. L.A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1997). [publisher's information] 3. J. M. Montepare, L. A. Zebrowitz, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, M. P. Zanna, Ed. (Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 1998), vol. 30, pp. 93-161. 4. N. Ambady, F. J. Bernieri, J. A. Richeson, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, M. P. Zanna, Ed. (Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 2000), vol. 32, pp. 201-271. [publisher's information] 5. L.A. Zebrowitz, J.M. Fellous,A. Mignault, C.Andreoletti, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 7, 194 (2003). [Abstract] 6. H. Friedman, L. A. Zebrowitz, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 18, 430 (1992). 7. C. F. Keating, D. Randall, T. Kendrick, Polit. Psychol. 20, 593 (1999). [Abstract] 8. T. F. Pettijohn II,A.Tesser, Media Psychol. 1, 229 (1999). 9. D. R. Kinder, in Political Cognition: The 19th Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, R. Lau, D. O. Sears, Eds. (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986), pp. 233-255. 10. S. Brownlow, J. Nonverb. Behav.16, 101 (1992). 10.1126/science.1114170 L. A. Zebrowitz is in the Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA. J. M. Montepare is in the Department of Marketing Communication, Emerson College, Boston, MA 02116, USA. E-mail: zebrowit at brandeis.edu From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:50:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:50:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Studies Rebut Earlier Report on Pledges of Virginity Message-ID: Studies Rebut Earlier Report on Pledges of Virginity http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/health/15pledge.html [My reaction when reading the headline was, "here's another example of why you should be suspicious of studies that get widely cited because those who cite them want to believe the results but which do not get any followups. I mentioned before such studies as Dr. Kenneth B. Clark's ones on black children reacting to black vs. white dolls, a study about the IQs of illegitimate children of American soldiers and German mothers after WW II (the IQs were the same irregardless of whether the father was white or black), and the case of "homophobes" having greater penile erections than other men when shown homoerotic pictures. Where are the followups? [But after reading the article, though I think my advice is sound, I'm distressed that the Heritage Foundation's rebuttal does not give any quantities. Well, yes, pledgers may have lower rates of STDs, but how much? 1%? 25%? 90%? My *suspicion* is that the difference is not great. [But, maybe the Times is biased and would not have reported a big drop. To www.heritage.org , then. I append it below. And in a moment, the entire restudy. [I'm sending all this, not to get at the bottom of this one issue, but to help you think about how to judge controversies. And you'll have to judge whether the reduction in STDs is significant or not.] By [3]LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN Challenging earlier findings, two studies from the Heritage Foundation reported yesterday that young people who took virginity pledges had lower rates of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases and engaged in fewer risky sexual behaviors. The new findings were based on the same national survey used by earlier studies and conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. But the authors of the new study used different methods of statistical analysis from those in an earlier one that was widely publicized, making direct comparisons difficult. Independent experts called the new findings provocative, but criticized the Heritage team's analysis as flawed and lacking the statistical evidence to back its conclusions. The new findings have not been submitted to a journal for publication, an author said. The independent experts who reviewed the study said the findings were unlikely to be published in their present form. The authors of the new studies, Dr. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow in policy studies at the foundation, and Dr. Kirk A. Johnson, a senior policy analyst there, said their findings contradicted those published in March in The Journal of Adolescent Health by Dr. Peter Bearman, the chairman of the sociology department at Columbia University, and Hannah Br?ckner of Yale University. The earlier study found that a majority of teenagers who took the pledge did not live up to their promises and developed sexually transmitted diseases about the same rate as adolescents who had not made such pledges. It also found that the promise did tend to delay the start of intercourse by 18 months. The new study, reported at a meeting in Arlington, Va., sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, found that over all, adolescents who made virginity pledges were less likely to engage in any form of sexual activity. If those who made promises did become sexually active, their array of sexual behaviors was likely to be more restricted than those of adolescents who did not make a pledge, Dr. Rector's team said. Those who made pledges were less likely to engage in vaginal intercourse, oral sex, anal sex and sex with a prostitute, and they were less likely to become prostitutes than were adolescents who did not take such a pledge, the Heritage team said. The team needs to do "a lot of work" on its paper, said David Landry, a senior research associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York. He said in an interview that it was "a glaring error" to use the result of a statistical test at a 0.10 level of significance when journals generally use a lower and more rigorous level of 0.05. Dr. Johnson, a co-author, defended the team's methods and said many journal articles used the higher level and let readers decide the merits of the findings. Mr. Landry also criticized the Heritage team's reliance on self-reports of sexually transmitted diseases among those who took the pledge, saying that group would be less likely to report them. "The underreporting problem is so severe that it makes that data highly questionable," Mr. Landry said. Dr. Bearman said: "Our analyses showed that pledgers are less likely to get tested for S.T.D.'s, be diagnosed as having an S.T.D. and to see a doctor because they are worried about having an S.T.D. Most S.T.D. infections are asymptomatic, and therefore, people don't know that they have an S.T.D. unless they get tested. The use of self-report data for S.T.D.'s is therefore extremely problematic." Mr. Landry and Dr. Freya Sonenstein, who directs the center for adolescent health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, urged the Heritage team to try to publish its findings. "It's healthy to have a good dialogue" on issues like virginity pledges, Mr. Landry said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which helped pay for the study, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the new study. The centers did not analyze the data from the earlier study and did not plan to analyze the new Heritage findings, the spokeswoman said. In an unusual feature of a scientific report, the Heritage team said that Dr. Bearman's team "deliberately misled the press and the public" about some of its findings. "That is an offensive statement," Dr. Bearman said. ---------------- Virginity Pledgers Have Lower STD Rates and Engage in Fewer Risky Sexual Behaviors by Robert Rector and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D. WebMemo #762 http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/wm762.cfm?renderforprint=1 June 14, 2005 For more than a decade, organizations such as True Love Waits have encouraged young people to abstain from sexual activity. As part of these programs, young people are encouraged to take a verbal or written pledge to abstain from sex until marriage. An article by professors Peter Bearman and Hanna Bruckner in the April 2005 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health strongly attacked virginity pledge programs and abstinence education in general. The article stated that youth who took virginity pledges had the same sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates as non-pledgers. It also strongly suggested that virginity pledgers were more likely to engage in unhealthy anal and oral sex. The report garnered widespread media attention across the nation. A reexamination of the data, however, reveals that Bearman and Bruckner?s conclusions were inaccurate. Moreover, in crucial respects they deliberately misled the press and public. Bearman and Bruckner tested the long-term effects of virginity pledge programs, examining the health and risk behaviors of young adults (with an average age 22) who had taken a virginity pledge as adolescents. Their analysis was based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (?Add Health?), a database funded by the federal government. We used this same database to reexamine the issues they raised. Several discrepancies were immediately apparent. For starters, the Add Health data clearly reveal that virginity pledgers are less likely to engage in oral or anal sex when compared to non-pledgers. In addition, virginity pledgers who have become sexually active (engaged in vaginal, oral, or anal sex) are still less likely to engage in oral or anal sex when compared to sexually active non-pledgers. This lower level of risk behavior puts virginity pledgers at lower risk for sexually transmitted diseases relative to non-pledgers. How do Bearman and Bruckner conclude the opposite? In a narrow sense, they do not. Although they strongly suggest that pledgers are more likely to engage in anal and oral sex, they never actually state that. In fact, they very carefully avoid making any clear statements about the sexual risk behaviors of pledgers and non-pledgers as a whole. Instead, they have culled through the Add Health sample looking for tiny sub-groups of pledgers with higher risk behaviors. They then describe the risk behaviors of these tiny groups and let the press infer that they are talking about pledgers in general. The centerpiece of their argument about pledgers and heightened sexual risk activity is a small group of pledgers who engaged in anal sex without vaginal sex. This ?risk group? consists of 21 persons out of a sample of 14,116. Bearman and Bruckner focus on this microscopic group while deliberately failing to inform their audience of the obvious and critical fact that pledgers as a whole are substantially less likely to engage in anal sex when compared to non-pledgers. This tactic is akin to finding a small rocky island in the middle of the ocean, describing the island in detail without describing the surrounding ocean, and then suggesting that the ocean is dry and rocky. It is junk science, a willful deception of the American public. With regard to STDs, Bearman and Bruckner actually found that adolescents who made virginity pledges were less likely to have STDs as young adults than were non-pledgers, but concluded that this difference was not statistically significant. This conclusion was based on limitations in their methodology methodology. In fact, the same methods that they used to demonstrate that virginity pledges do not reduce STDs also demonstrate that condom use does not reduce STDs. One problem is that Bearman and Bruckner examined only one of several STD measures available in the Add Health data file. Analysis of the remaining measures reveals that adolescent virginity pledging is strongly associated with reduced STDs among young adults. These results are statistically significant in four of the five STD measures examined and are very near significance on the fifth measure. With all the STD measures, the allegedly ineffective virginity pledge is actually a better predictor of STD reduction than is condom use. On average, individuals who took virginity pledges as adolescents were 25 percent less likely to have STDs as young adults than non-pledgers from identical socioeconomic backgrounds. Further, Bearman and Bruckner?s suggestion that virginity pledgers are ignorant about contraception is also inaccurate. Although virginity pledgers were less likely to use contraception at the very first occurrence of intercourse, differences in contraceptive use between pledgers and non-pledgers disappear quickly. In young adult years, sexually active pledgers are as likely to use contraception as non-pledgers. Of course, virginity pledge programs are not omnipotent. Many years will pass between the time an adolescent takes a pledge and the time he or she reaches adulthood. These years will be full of events and forces that either reinforce or, more likely, undermine the youth?s commitment to abstinence. Despite these forces, taking a virginity pledge is associated with a broad array of positive outcomes. Although most pledgers fall short of their goal of abstaining until marriage, in general, they still do a lot better in life. Compared to non-pledgers from the same social backgrounds, pledgers have far fewer sex partners. Pledgers are also less likely to engage in sex while in high school, less likely to experience teen pregnancy, less likely to have a child out-of-wedlock, less likely to have children in their teen and young adult years, and less likely to engage in non-marital sex as young adults. Overall, virginity pledge programs have a strong record of success. They are among the few institutions in society teaching self-restraint to youth awash in a culture of narcissism and sexual permissiveness. They have been unfairly maligned by two academics who should know better. Robert Rector is Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies, and Kirk Johnson, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis, at The Heritage Foundation. These findings are based on research presented by Rector and Johnson at the Eighth Annual National Welfare Research and Evaluation Conference in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 2005. The conference was run by the Administration of Children and Families of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This paper is based on research contained in the draft papers "Adolescent Virginity Pledges, Condom Use and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Young Adults" and "Adolescent Virginity Pledges and Risky Sexual Behaviors," both by Robert Rector and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:51:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:51:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Heritage: Adolescent Virginity Pledges, Condom Use, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Young Adults (Draft) Message-ID: Adolescent Virginity Pledges, Condom Use, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Young Adults (Draft) http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/whitepaper06142005-1.cfm [Click the URL to get the graphs, or grab the PDF.] Research - Welfare Adolescent Virginity Pledges, Condom Use, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Young Adults (Draft) by Robert Rector and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D. WebMemo June 14, 2005 | [23]Print PDF Executive Summary For more than a decade, organizations such as True Love Waits have encouraged young people to abstain from sexual activity. As part of these programs, young people are encouraged to take a verbal or written pledge to abstain from sex until marriage. A recent article by professors Peter Bearman and Hanna Bruckner in the Journal of Adolescent Health claimed that, when they reach young adult years, adolescents who made virginity pledges were as likely to have sexually transmitted diseases (STD's), as were those who never made a pledge. Bearman and Bruckner did not measure whether individuals had ever had an STD or had had an STD during adolescence. They only measured whether young adults were currently infected with an STD. Since seven or more years might have elapsed between the time an adolescent made a virginity pledge and the time STD's were measured, their analysis poses a very rigorous test for virginity pledges. It assesses the long-term health consequences of moral commitments made in adolescence. Bearman and Bruckner's analysis showed that, as young adults, virginity pledgers actually had lower STD rates than non-pledgers, but that the differences were not statistically significant. They concluded that the STD rate of pledgers "does not differ from non-pledgers." This assertion garnered very widespread press attention. Bolstered by this finding, Bearman and Bruckner called for the critical re-examination of federal funding for abstinence education. Examination of the Bearman and Bruckner article reveals that the methods employed have serious limitations. For example, the methods used to assess the impact of virginity pledges on STD's also demonstrate that condom use has no effect in reducing STD's. This peculiar result underscores the problematic nature of their analysis. In the present paper, we re-examine the linkage between adolescent virginity pledging and STD rates among young adults using the same data set employed by Bearman and Bruckner, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The current analysis differs in two key respects from Bearman and Bruckner's. While Bearman and Bruckner used only one STD measure (the presence of three STD's in urine samples), the present paper analyzes five STD measures based on urine samples, STD diagnoses, and STD symptoms. Second, the Bearman and Bruckner article was unusual in that it presented only simple descriptive statistics; the present paper employs a wide range of multivariate logistic regressions that simultaneously hold constant relevant background variables such as race, gender and family background. Our analysis shows that with four of the five STD measures examined, virginity pledging predicts lower STD rates among young adults with statistical significance at the 95 percent confidence level or better. With the fifth STD measure, virginity pledging was found to predict lower STD rates at the 90 percent confidence level. (This fifth STD measure was the one employed by Bearman and Bruckner: evidence of any of three STD's in urine samples.) We also analyze the relationship between condom use and STD rates. Three measures of condom use were examined: condom use at last intercourse; condom use at first intercourse and frequency of condom use in the last year. Across the full range of analysis, using all five dependent STD variables, virginity pledging was found to be a better predictor of reduced STD rates when compared to any of the condom use variables. Critically, none of the condom use variables successfully predicts lower STD rates with the STD measure chosen by Bearman and Bruckner (three STD's in urine samples); a fact the emphasizes the problematic nature of that STD variable as a measure of program success. Bearman and Bruckner's conclusion that virginity pledgers have the same STD rates as non-pledgers is clearly the result of serious limitations in their analytic methods. Our current paper shows that taking a virginity pledge in adolescence is associated with a substantial decline in STD rates in young adult years. Across a broad array of analysis, virginity pledging was found to be a better predictor of STD reduction than was condom use. Individuals who took a virginity pledge in adolescence are some 25 percent less likely to have an STD as young adults, when compared with non-pledgers who are identical in race, gender, and family background. The reduction in STD's for virginity pledgers occurs despite the fact that many years may have elapsed between the time the individual took a virginity pledge and the time that the STD rate was measured. Moreover, after initially taking a pledge, relatively few virginity pledgers will have received continuing social support for their commitment to abstinence. Lower STD rates is just one among a broad array of positive outcomes associated with virginity pledging. Previous research has shown that, when compared to non-pledgers of similar backgrounds, individuals who have taken a virginity pledge are: * Less likely to have children out-of-wedlock; * Less likely to experience teen pregnancy; * Less likely to give birth as teens or young adults; * Less likely to have sex before age 18; and, * Less likely to engage in non-marital sex as young adults. In addition, pledgers have far fewer life-time sexual partners than non-pledgers. There are no apparent negatives associated with virginity pledging: while pledgers are less likely to use contraception at initial intercourse, differences in contraceptive use quickly disappear. By young adult years, sexually active pledgers are as likely to use contraception as non-pledgers. Introduction For more than a decade, organizations such as True Love Waits have encouraged young people to abstain from sexual activity. As part of these programs, young people are encouraged to take a verbal or written pledge to abstain from sex until marriage. In recent years, increased public policy attention has been focused on adolescents who take these "virginity pledges," as policy-makers seek to assess the social and behavioral outcomes of such abstinence programs. In the April 2005 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, professors Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner claimed that adolescents who have taken a virginity pledge have the same rate of STD infections as those who have never taken a pledge.[25][1] This finding was surprising since previous research had shown that taking a virginity pledge was clearly associated with reductions in sexual risk behavior, specifically a delay in initiation of sexual intercourse and decrease in the number of lifetime sexual partners. Bearman and Bruckner suggested that while virginity pledging may be related to a reduction in STD's in early adolescence, by young adulthood any positive health effects had disappeared. They stated, "As a social policy, pledging does not appear effective in stemming STD acquisition among young adults."[26][2] The authors called for a re-examination of federal funding for abstinence education. Bearman and Bruckner's claim was immediately seized on by the press and repeated in hundreds of publications nationwide. For example, * The Associated Press wire service reported, "teens who pledged abstinence are just as likely to have STDs as their peers."[27][3] * The San Francisco Chronicle stated "Virginity pledgers are just as likely to contract sexually-transmitted diseases as other teens." [28][4] * The CBS news show Sixty Minutes reported, "kids who take virginity pledges [are] just as likely to have sexually transmitted diseases as kids who don't." Bearman and Bruckner's finding has quickly become a key element in the advocacy of groups hostile to abstinence education. For example, the nation's leading anti-abstinence organization, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) triumphantly proclaims "pledgers have the same rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) as their peers who had not pledged."[29][5] Clearly, virginity pledge programs and abstinence education are of considerable public and political interest. Previous research by the authors of the present paper has shown that adolescents who take virginity pledgers have substantially improved life outcomes; specifically, they are: less likely to engage in sexual activity while in high school; have fewer sexual partners; are less likely to experience teen pregnancy; and are less likely to bear children out-of-wedlock.[30][6] The current paper will examine the link between virginity pledging and sexually transmitted disease with specific reference to the Bearman and Bruckner article. Background Our analysis will utilize the same database employed by Bearman and Bruckner, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (hereafter simply "Add Health"), funded by the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies.[31][7] The Add Health survey is longitudinal which means that it surveys the same group of youth repeatedly over time. Interviews were conducted in three succeeding periods: wave I in 1994, wave II in 1995, and wave III in 2001. When the Add Health survey started with wave interviews in 1994, most of the respondents were junior-high and high-school students nearly all aged 12 to 18. The students were tracked through high school and into early adulthood. By the time of the wave III interviews, the youth in the survey were nearly all young adults between the ages of 19 and 25. Virginity Pledgers and Non-pledgers In each of the three waves of the Add Health survey, youth were asked the question: "Have you ever taken a public or written pledge to remain a virgin until marriage?" In the following analysis, youth who reported, in any of the three waves of the survey, that they have taken a pledge are counted as "pledgers". Youth who did not report taking a virginity pledge in any of the Add Health interview waves are counted as "non-pledgers." Roughly one fifth of the youth in the Add Health survey report having taken a pledge in at least one interview of the survey. The remaining four fifths have never reported taking a pledge. As Table 1 shows, pledgers are similar to non-pledgers in race, family structure, and family income. Pledgers, in the sample, are slightly younger than non-pledgers. Pledgers are more likely to be female: 61.8 percent of pledgers are girls compared to 46.6 percent of non-pledgers. Pledgers are also somewhat more likely to be religious; on a scale of one to four based on frequency of church attendance, frequency of prayer, and importance of religion to the individual, pledgers have a mean score of 3.4 compared to 2.7 for non-pledgers. Virginity Pledging and Sexual Activity Pledging is linked to large reductions in sexual activity during adolescence. For example, 63 percent of non-pledgers had sexual intercourse before age 18 compared to 39 percent of pledgers.[33][8] As noted, by the third wave of the Add Health survey in 2001, the adolescents in the survey had become young adults, with ages ranging between 19 and 25. At this point many years may have elapsed since the youth's promise to remain a virgin until marriage. In the intervening years, relatively few pledging youth will have benefited from social support systems aimed at bolstering their commitment to abstinence. As a consequence, it is not surprising that differences in sexual behavior between pledgers and non-pledgers diminish somewhat over time. Nonetheless, by the third wave of the survey, real differences in sexual behavior remain; roughly a fifth of all pledgers have never engaged in any type of sexual activity (vaginal, oral, or anal) compared to 8 percent among non-pledgers. STDs and the Add Health Survey Virginity pledge and abstinence education programs have a variety of goals. Such programs seek to: improve the mental health of youth; help youth develop true respect for others; prepare young people for healthy marriages as adults; reduce the risk of teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock childbearing; and reduce the threat of sexually transmitted diseases. As noted, virginity pledging has been shown to be linked to a wide range of positive outcomes for youth; however, recently, most attention has focused on the association between virginity pledges and STDs. While the Add Health survey has an abundance of data on STD's, most are imperfect as means of assessing the impact of virginity pledging in reducing STDs. One would expect a virginity pledge program to have its maximum impact in reducing exposure to STDs in the years immediately after the pledge was taken. The peak effectiveness of pledge programs in decreasing STDs probably occurs in late adolescence, the time when the behavioral differences between pledgers and non-pledgers are greatest and the risk of acquiring STDs is highest. To measure the impact of virginity pledges on contraction of STDs, analysts would ideally want to know: whether a youth has ever been infected by a STD; the number of infections and the timing of each; and the date the virginity pledge was taken. Unfortunately, the Add Health survey does not contain this information. Critically, the Add Health survey does not ask respondents whether they have ever had an STD. Instead, most of the STD data in the Add Health survey relate to current or recent STD infections occurring at the third interview wave of the survey. By the third wave interview, as noted, the respondents are no longer adolescents, but are young adults aged 19 to 25. Many years may have passed since an individual made his or her virginity pledge. Thus, the Add Health data provide an imperfect basis for measuring the link between pledging and STDs. While the question of whether virginity pledges, taken mainly in adolescence, are linked to lower STD rates among young adults is a valid research topic, this approach is very likely to underestimate the effectiveness of pledging in reducing STD infections. Bearman and Bruckner partially acknowledge this point, stating that STD data on young adults "cannot tell us whether pledgers had a lower risk of STD infection as young adolescents."[34][9] With this caveat in mind, the present paper will follow the approach taken by Bearman and Bruckner, measuring the relationship between adolescent virginity pledging and subsequent STD rates among young adults. Again, readers should recognize that this methodology, while informative, is very likely to underestimate the health benefits of pledging. Bearman and Bruckner's STD Analysis To analyze the links between virginity pledging and STD's, Bearman and Bruckner used STD data from the third interview wave of the Add Health survey. As part of the third wave interviews, urine samples were taken from some 90 percent of Add Health respondents, a total of around 14,000 individuals. The urine samples were examined for evidence of current bacterial infection by three sexually transmitted diseases: Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, and Trichomoniasis. According to the urine sample data, some 6.8 percent of the sample was found to be currently infected with one or more of these diseases. Bearman and Bruckner then determined the pledge status of each interviewee based on data from all three waves of the Add Health survey. On the basis of this analysis, they concluded that "the STD infection rate [of virginity pledgers] does not differ from nonpledgers"[35][10] This claim has been repeated on television and in hundreds of news stories and has been amplified by other groups. We shall begin our examination of these claims by reporting the actual STD infection rates in the Add Health sample. Chart 1 shows the STD rates for pledgers and non-pledgers; the measure of STD infection is the same one employed by Bearman and Bruckner: evidence of Chlamydia, Gonorrhea or Trichomoniasis in urine samples. (We shall henceforth refer to this variable as the "three STD's in urine sample" measure.) Given the aggressive claims of the press and anti-abstinence groups, many will be surprised to find that the Add Health survey data used by Bearman and Bruckner actually show that pledgers have noticeably lower STD infection rates than do non-pledgers. Male pledgers have an infection rate 30 percent lower than non-pledgers (4.2 pecent to 6.1 percent.) Female pledgers have an infection rate some 15 percent lower than non-pledgers (6.7 percent to 7.8 percent.) These differences are roughly in line with what might be expected given that the behavioral differences between the two groups have attenuated by young adulthood. If the Add Health data show pledgers have lower rates of infection, how can Bearman and Bruckner assert that the STD rate of pledgers "does not differ" from non-pledgers? At the foundation of their argument is the legitimate issue of "statistical significance". Obviously, the Add Health survey does not contain all American youth; it is a representative sample of some 15,000 individuals. In analyzing data from the sample, it is important to estimate whether conditions in the sample: a) reflect real conditions in the U.S. population as a whole; or, b) may be the result of random distortion in the sample itself. (If, for example, we took a sample of 10 persons and found that seven were men, it would not be appropriate to conclude that 70 percent of all persons were male.) Statistical significance measures the degree of confidence that analysts can have that conditions found in the sample mirror conditions in the real world. Bearman and Bruckner found that the differences in STD rates between pledgers and non-pledgers were not statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level, a conventional test of significance used in social science. In other words, while the Add Health survey shows differences in STD rates, we cannot be 95 percent certain that these differences exist in the general youth population rather than just within the confines of the Add Health sample. It is true that, using the urine sample measure of three STDs, the differences in STD rates between pledgers and non-pledgers are not statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. But the differences in STD rates do fall within a hairbreadth of the 95 percent significance threshold. Multivariate regressions (presented later), using the three STD's in urine sample measure as the dependent (predicted) variable reaffirm that pledgers have lower rates of STDs; this finding is significant at the 91 to 94 percent confidence levels.[37][11] While technically accurate, Bearman and Bruckner's claim that "the STD infection rate [of virginity pledgers] does not differ from nonpledgers" represents rather severe example of the "null hypothesis fallacy." In effect, they argue: differences in STD rates between pledgers and non-pledgers appear in the Add Health sample, but these differences are significant at the 90 percent rather than the 95 percent confidence level, therefore we assert categorically that no STD differences exist between the two groups. The fallacy of this logic is obvious. A passionate embrace of the null hypothesis (no differences in outcomes exist between the groups) is likely to be misplaced when the STD differences found in the sample are near the 95 percent confidence level and where other evidence exists indicating that these STD differences are real. As we shall see this is the situation with respect to virginity pledges and STDs. Part of the difficulty of demonstrating statistical significance may lie in the particular STD measure used by Bearman and Bruckner. The three STD in urine sample measure shows a very low rate of current STD infection; only 6.8 percent of young adults have an STD by this measure. In addition, virginity pledgers are a relatively small group, comprising roughly 20 percent of the Add Health sample. Overall, pledgers testing positive for the three STDs in the urine sample were about one percent of the Add Health sample. These factors make it difficult to demonstrate statistically significant effects. Other measures of STD infection in the Add Health data base may more readily yield statistically significant results. Other Measures of STD Infections In addition, to the urine sample test, the third wave of the Add Health survey contains other STD data: respondents are asked if they have been diagnosed as having one of fourteen different STDs in the last twelve months; they are also asked if they have had specific physical symptoms of STD infection in the last year. We have utilized these additional data to construct five different measures of STD infection. A. Three STDs in urine sample. We code respondents as having an STD if their urine sample shows the presence of Gonorrhea, Chlamydia, or Trichomoniasis. This is the same measure used by Bearman and Bruckner. B. Three STDs in urine sample or three STD diagnosis. In addition to testing urine for Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, and Trichomoniasis, Add Health also asks the individual if they have been diagnosed as have any of these three diseases in the last 12 months. For this measure, we code individuals as having an STD if they have a positive urine test or have been diagnosed as having one or more of the three diseases in the last year. Gonorrhea, Chlamydia, and Trichomoniasis are bacterial infections. An individual who is diagnosed with one of these diseases will immediately be given antibiotics. In nearly all cases, the antibiotic will quickly eliminate the disease and remove evidence of the disease from the urine. A urine sample alone will understate the prevalence of these three diseases since many individuals will already have been diagnosed and treated for them. Combining the urine sample data with information on diagnoses during the prior 12 months provides a more robust and useful measure of STD incidence. C. Three STDs in urine sample or physical symptoms. There are many STDs in addition to the three assayed in the urine samples. This measure combines the urine sample data with reported physical symptoms. Under this measure, individuals are coded as having an STD if they have a positive urine test or if they report having experienced any of the following physical symptoms in the last year: "warts on your genitals", "painful sores or blisters on your genitals" or "oozing or dripping from your penis or vagina".[38][12] D. Diagnosis of having any of fourteen STDs. The Add Health survey also asks respondents if, in the last 12 months, they have been told by a doctor or health worker that they have any of the following sexually transmitted diseases: chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis, syphilis, genital herpes, genital warts, human papilloma virus (HPV), bacterial vaginosis, pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), crevicitis or mu copurulent cervicitis (MPC), urethritis (NGU), vaginitis, HIV or AIDS, or other STD. Under this measure, individuals are coded as having an STD if they report being diagnosed with any of the diseases on the preceding list. E. Fourteen Disease Diagnosis, positive urine sample, or physical symptoms. This measure combines the previous four measures. Individuals are coded as having an STD if they: have a positive urine test; have any of the three physical symptoms; or have been diagnosed with any of the fourteen STDs in the last year.[39][13] Chart 2 shows the incidence and 95 percent confidence intervals for each of the five STD measures. (The confidence intervals indicate that we can have 95 percent certainty that the infection rate in the real world falls within the interval range.) The three STD urine sample measured used by Bearman and Bruckner has the lowest point estimate of incidence (at 6.7 percent) and the largest confidence interval relative to the point estimate. This indicates that it will be comparatively more difficult to make statistically significant predictions with this STD measure compared to the others. We hypothesize that virginity pledge status is more likely to be a statistically significant predictor of reduced STD infection for the STD measures with higher incidence. We hypothesize further that the same pattern will hold between condom use variables and STD measures. Confirmation of these hypotheses will provide compelling evidence that Bearman and Bruckner's failure to find significant differences in the STD rates of pledgers and non-pledgers was a result of the operational measure of STD's they employed. The Role of Social Background Variables Teens who make virginity pledges may differ substantially from those who do not in a wide range of important social background factors. If pledgers have better STD outcomes than do non-pledgers, it is possible that the outcome differences are the result of social background factors rather than pledge activity per se. To compensate for this possibility, we analyzed the role of virginity pledges on STD outcomes through a set of multivariate logistic regression analyses which hold relevant social background factors constant. In this statistical procedure, teens who made virginity pledges were compared to non-pledging teens who were otherwise identical in social background characteristics. A number of independent or predictor variables were used in the regression analyses. These were: Pledge status -Individuals were identified as "pledgers" if they responded that they had made a virginity pledge in at least one wave of the survey. Individuals were identified as "non-pledgers" if they answered that they had not taken a virginity pledge in each of the three waves of the survey.[41][14] Gender - whether the individual was male or female Age - whether the individual was white, black, Asian or Hispanic Family background - whether the individual came from an intact married family containing both biological parents, a single parent family, a step parent or cohabiting family or other family. Religiosity - a continuous variable on a scale of 1 to 4 based on the average scores of responses to the questions: how often do you attend religious services, how often do you pray, and how important is religion to you. All Add Health youths for which STD data were available were included in the regressions. The independent or predictor variables were deployed in four models. These were: Model One - pledge status was used as a single predictor variable without controls. Model Two - The independent or predictor variables were: pledge status, age, gender, and race. Model Three - The independent variables were the same as Model Two but family structure variables were added. Model Four - The independent variables were the same as Model Three but religiosity was added. Virginity Pledging as a Predictor of Lower Rates of STD Infection To fully examine the relationship between virginity pledging and the STD rates of young adults, the five dependent STD measures were each analyzed in all four regression models described above, yielding a total of 20 separate regressions. Data on the individual logistic regressions is provided in the appendix. Table 2 summarizes the results of the 20 regressions. Using all five dependent STD variables, virginity pledgers were found to have lower STD rates across all 20 regressions; in each case the odd ratios for pledging were below 1.00 indicating that pledging was linked to lower STD rates. Virginity pledging was found to be a statistically significant predictor of lower STD rates at, at least, the 95 percent confidence level, for four of the STD measures: (B) three STDs in urine or three STD diagnosis; (C) three STD's in urine or physical symptoms; (D) diagnosis of any of 14 STDs; and, (E) diagnosis of 14 STD's positive urine sample or physical symptoms. In many cases, statistical significance reached the 99 percent confidence level. (The sole exception to these results was STD measure (C) in model one, a regression without controls; the results here were not significant.) The regression models using STD measure (A) or three STDs in urine sample, as the dependent variable, differ somewhat from the other regressions. This is the STD measure employed by Bearman and Bruckner. All four models using STD measure (A) show that virginity pledgers have lower STD rates than non-pledgers. The magnitude of STD reduction (odds ratio) is virtually identical to the other sixteen regressions using STD measures (B), (C), (D), and (E) as dependent variables. However, the models using STD measure (A) as a dependent variable fall just short of the 95 percent statistical significance level. With this STD measure, in models 2, 3, and 4, virginity pledge status is shown to be statistically significant as a predictor of reduced STDs at the 92 to 94 confidence level. Unfortunately, STD measure (A) is the only one employed in Bearman and Bruckner's analysis. In summary, in all cases the Add Health data show that virginity pledgers have lower STD rates when compared to non-pledgers. In four of the five STD measures presented, virginity pledging predicts lower STD rates with a statistical significance of 95 percent or greater. With the fifth STD measure, virginity pledging is shown to predict lower STD rates with a 90 percent confidence. No STD measures in the Add Health survey show virginity pledgers to have same or higher STD rates as non-pledgers. In view of this aggregate data, it is implausible to conclude that pledgers and non-pledgers in reality have the same STD rates. Bearman and Bruckner's conclusion that there were no meaningful differences in STD rates between pledgers and non-pledgers is contingent on the single STD measure they employ. Moreover, even with this measure, virginity pledging falls short of statistical significance by a razor thin margin. Condom Use and STD's The next step in our analysis was to examine the relationship between STD's and an array of measures of condom use. This enables us to compare the efficacy of virginity pledges and condom use as predictors of STD's. It also provides an independent method of assessing the utility of various measures of STD infection. We hypothesized that those STD measures that lacked a statistical significant association with the virginity pledge as a predictor would also lack a statistically significant link to condom use as a predictor. If true, this could underscore the problematic nature of those dependent STD variables. Using Add Health interview data, we constructed three independent (predictor) variables for condom use. They were: Condom Use at First Vaginal Intercourse. This measures whether an individual used a condom during the first instance of intercourse in his or her life. The variable is a three part dummy variable: never had vaginal intercourse; had vaginal intercourse and used condom in first intercourse; and had vaginal intercourse and did not use condom in first intercourse. (The last category was the default.) Condom Use in Last Vaginal Intercourse. This variable measures whether a condom was used during last intercourse. It is a three part dummy variable: never had vaginal intercourse; had vaginal intercourse and used a condom during last intercourse; and, had intercourse and did not use a condom during last intercourse. (The last category was treated as the default.) Frequency of Condom Use. For individuals who report they had vaginal intercourse during the last year, the Add Health survey asked how frequently condoms were used during intercourse: never; some of the time; half of the time; most of the time; or, all of the time. A five point continuous independent variable was created with these responses. Regressions using this variable were necessarily limited to those who reported having vaginal intercourse during the last year. We tested each of these condom use variables as predictors of the five dependent STD measures. Socio-economic control variables were used according to the four models specified earlier in the paper. A total of twenty logistic regressions were performed using each of the three independent variables of condom use, for a total of 60 regressions in all. (Information on the individual regressions is presented in the appendix.) The results are summarized in table 3. Each of the condom use independent variables either fails to predict or predicts inadequately with respect to the three STD measures at the top of the table: three STDs in urine sample; three STDs in urine sample or three STD diagnoses; and three STDs in urine sample or physical symptoms. Using these three STD measures as dependent variables, statistical significance is not achieved in 27 of 36 regressions; in 9 regressions, significance reaches the 90 percent confidence level. The two STD measures at the bottom of the table (diagnosis of fourteen STD's, and diagnosis of fourteen STD's combined with positive urine sample or physical symptoms) present a different story. With these STD measures, the three condom use variables are able to predict, in almost all models, a reduction of STD's at 95 or 99 percent confidence levels. These patterns of significance loosely match those found with virginity pledge variable. The data in table 3 underscore the fact that statistical significance of predictor variables is highly contingent on the particular STD measure used. The data suggest that it would be unwise to base conclusions on one measure only. The failure of all three condom use variables to successfully predict reductions in Bearman and Bruckner's chosen STD measure (a positive test for 3 STD's in the urine sample) is important. The condom use variables not only failed to predict a reduction in STD's according to this measure, they failed very badly. (Specific information is provided in regression tables 6, 11, and 16 in the appendix.) While the virginity pledge variable predicted STD reduction at the 90 percent confidence level according to this STD measure, the condom use independent variables achieved, at best, a 35 percent confidence in predicting reductions in this STD variable. One variable actually achieves a statistically significant prediction of increased STD's using this STD measure under model I. This is undoubtedly a fluke, but it calls attention to the problematic nature of the three STDs in urine sample measure as a dependent variable. Comparison of Virginity Pledge and Condom Use as Predictors of STD Reduction Table 4 compares the predictive power of the virginity pledge variable to the predictive power of the condom use variables (condom use at first intercourse, condom use at last intercourse and frequency of condom use in last year). The virginity pledge variable predicts a reduction in STD's with at least a 95 percent confidence with four of the five dependent STD variables. It predicts reduction in the fifth STD variable with 90 percent confidence. By contrast the three condom use variables predict reductions at 95 percent confidence with only two of the five STD measures. The virginity pledge variable predicts reduced STD's at the 99 percent confidence with three STD variables. It predicts at 95 percent confidence with the fourth STD variable and 90 percent with the fifth STD measure (A). By contrast, the most effective condom use variable (condom use at first intercourse) predicts STD reduction at the 99 percent confidence level with one measure and at the 95 percent confidence with another. It achieved 90 percent confidence with two other STD measures and failed to predict with the final dependent measure (A): three STD's in urine sample. Overall, in the analysis 80 regressions were performed: 20 with the virginity pledge variable and 60 with the three condom use variables. In every instance, across all 80 regressions, the virginity pledge variable always achieved higher levels of confidence as a predictor of STD reduction when compared to any of the corresponding condom use variables. In other words, in predicting reduction of each dependent STD variable in each of the four regression models, the virginity pledge variable always outperformed all the condom variables. While it is possible that future research may improve the predictive power of both the pledge variable and the condom use variables, it is very difficult in light of the evidence in table 4 to conclude, as Bearman and Bruckner did, that "the STD infection rate [of pledgers] does not differ from non-pledgers".[45][15] Finally, note that the comparison of virginity pledging against condom use is unfair to virginity pledge programs because it compares pledging, which is merely a promise to behave a certain way in the future, against actual behavior: the use of condoms. A fair comparison would be to contrast the outcomes of virginity pledges against adolescent promises to use condoms in the future. Of course, no "condom promise" programs exist; if they did they would be unlikely to compare well against virginity pledge programs. Methodological Differences with Bearman and Bruckner Analysis While the present analysis and the Bearman-Bruckner article both used the same Add Health database, they reached very different conclusions concerning the relationship between the virginity pledges and STD's. These differences stem from three factors. First, and most obvious, Bearman and Bruckner examined only one measure of STD occurrence whereas the present paper examines five. Second, the Bearman and Bruckner article presented only simple descriptive statistics and confidence intervals. The present paper relies primarily on multivariate logistic regressions. The use of simple descriptive data can cause difficulties when groups compared differ in background characteristics. In this case, the fact that pledgers are more likely to be women and that women are more likely to have STD's is particularly relevant. Third, the Bearman and Bruckner article divided Add Health respondents into three categories: non-pledgers, inconsistent pledgers, and consistent pledgers.[46][16] Structuring the pledge data in this way, Bearman and Bruckner actually found, as expected, that non-pledgers had the highest STD rates, followed by inconsistent pledgers in the middle, while consistent pledgers had the lowest rates; however, the differences were not statistically significant. This three-part division of pledge status is heuristically useful, and the present authors have successfully used it in previous research; however, it does have drawbacks. Dividing the already small population of pledgers into two smaller sub-groups reduces the probability of achieving statistically significant predictions. Consequently, in the present paper, we have followed the Bearman and Bruckner's approach to pledge status closely, but the two categories of inconsistent and consistent pledgers have been combined into the single group called "pledgers." Considerations on Differences in STD Measures If pledgers and non-pledgers truly had identical rates of STD infection, one would expect to see a wider variation in outcomes across various STD measures; some STD measures would probably show the pledgers had higher disease rates; others would show the STD rates of pledgers and non-pledgers to be nearly identical, and other measures would show pledgers to have lower rates. The Add Health data clearly do not show this pattern; all five STD measures show that pledgers have lower STD rates. The only real difference between the five STD measures is that four show the relationship between pledging and reduced STD's is significant at the 95 to 99 percent confidence levels while the fifth measure shows significance at a 90 percent confidence. This seems to build a prima facie case that virginity pledgers do have lower STD rates in their young adult years despite the fact that many years may have elapsed since they took their pledges. Despite the array of different STD data available from the Add Health survey, Bearman and Bruckner analyzed only the urine sample data. They apparently regard the Add Health STD diagnoses data to be biased against non-pledgers, arguing that non-pledgers are more likely to perceive themselves at risk of STD's and more likely to go to a doctor and be diagnosed and treated. Assuming that this idea has some validity, it has interesting implications. Diagnosis and treatment will remove evidence of gonorrhea, Chlamydia and Trichomoniasis from the urine. If it is true that medical diagnoses rates of STD's are biased against non-pledgers because they are differentially more likely to be diagnosed and treated for each STD occurrence, it follows that post-treatment physical evidence (such as the urine sample) would be biased, conversely, against pledgers. For example, if it were true, that, 1) pledgers and non-pledgers have identical rates of pre-treatment STD infections; and, 2) non-pledgers are more likely to go to a doctor and be diagnosed and treated, then it would follow that the post-treatment urine samples should show non-pledgers with lower rates of current infection. Obviously, this is not the case. This provides yet another piece of evidence indicating that pledgers do in fact have lower STD rates than non-pledgers. Table 5 shows the STD rate ratios for the five STD measures. The ratios represent the STD rate of pledgers divided by the STD rate of non-pledgers; they report raw or non-standardized data. The ratios have inconsistencies but they provide some evidence suggesting that non-pledgers may, indeed, be differentially more likely to go to a doctor and be diagnosed per STD occurrence. The ratio for the 14 STD diagnosis measure (which is based on diagnosis only) is lower than the other measures based on physical evidence or physical evidence and diagnosis combined. If it is true that non-pledgers are more likely to seek treatment per STD occurrence, then STD measures using diagnosis would be somewhat biased in favor of pledgers and STD measures based on post-treatment physical evidence (such as urine samples) would be biased against pledgers. The real inter-group difference would lie somewhere between the urine sample STD measure and the STD diagnosis measure. The question of biases in the STD measures would be critical if the different STD measures presented opposite findings: if one measure showed pledgers had better outcomes while another showed non-pledgers had better outcomes. But, of course, all the STD measures show pledgers have better outcomes. Again, if the real pre-treatment STD rates for pledgers and non-pledgers were identical we would expect that the urine measure would show non-pledgers with lower STD rates while the diagnosis measure would show non-pledgers with higher rates. Of course, this is not the case. All the measures show that pledgers have lower STD rates; the only difference is between those that show significance at the 95 or 99 percent confidence level and the one measure with 90 percent confidence. Thus, the potential bias of the individual STD measures for or against pledgers does not disturb the large body of evidence indicating pledgers have lower STD rates. Magnitude of Predicted STD Reduction The power or magnitude of STD reduction predicted by the virginity pledge variable is fairly constant across all the regression models. In general, virginity pledgers were found to have STD rates about 25 percent lower than the STD rates of non-pledgers of the same gender, race and family background. This is illustrated in Chart 3. The chart uses the broadest STD measure: the combined measure of diagnosis of fourteen STD's, three STD's in the urine or physical symptoms. Chart 3 shows the predicted STD rates for an Hispanic male age 22 raised in a step-family. If this individual had never taken a virginity pledge, the predicted probability of STD's would be 19.9 percent. If he had taken a virginity pledge, the predicted probability would be around one fourth lower at 14.6 percent. The chart also shows the predicted STD rates for a white male, also aged 22 and raised in a step family. If this individual had never taken a virginity pledge, the predicted probability of STD's would be 12.5 percent. If he had taken a pledge, the probability of STD's would be around one fourth lower or 9.0 percent. Similar STD reductions would occur for individuals different gender, race or family background. Other Behavioral Outcomes The fact that virginity pledgers are less likely to have STD's is just one among a broad array of positive outcomes associated with virginity pledging.[49][17] Previous research has shown that, when compared to non-pledgers of similar backgrounds, individuals who have taken a virginity pledge are: * Less likely to have children out-of-wedlock; * Less likely to experience teen pregnancy; * Less likely to give birth as teens or young adults; * Less likely to have sex before age 18; and, * Less likely to engage in non-marital sex as young adults. Pledgers will have fewer life-time sexual partners than non-pledgers. Pledgers engaging in sexual activity in young adult years are as likely to use contraceptives as are non-pledgers. Pledgers are also less likely to have abortions although the reported incidence low enough that the difference is not statistically significant. Success or Failure? Virginity pledge programs provide a strong positive social message emphasizing: self-control; future orientation and respect for self and others. Adolescents who make virginity pledges promise to abstain until marriage. Virginity programs are often criticized because a majority of those making pledges fail to meet their goal and do have sex before marriage. However, this criticism seems misplaced. Even if pledgers fail to abstain till marriage, pledging is still associated with positive life decisions. As noted, when compared to non-pledgers, pledgers are more likely to delay substantially the onset of sexual activity and to have fewer sex partners. Pledging is linked to strong positive outcomes for the individual and society. Given such outcomes, it is difficult to imagine how virginity pledge programs could be judged failures. Consider, for example, a hypothetical program in which a group of adolescents all promised to attend Harvard. Two years later, few were attending Harvard, but the overall college attendance rate was up 30 percent compared to adolescents who never made such a promise. Would such a program possibly be deemed a failure? Questions of Causation This paper has presented a strong finding showing that adolescent virginity pledging is associated with lower STD rates. This should not be surprising, because in young adult years virginity pledgers have lower levels of sexual activity and fewer sexual partners when compared to non-pledgers. Overall, the evidence concerning the positive effects of virginity pledges is extremely strong. Still, skeptics might argue that the simple fact that teens who make virginity pledges have substantially improved behaviors does not prove that virginity pledge programs themselves have a positive impact on behavior. It is conceivable that participating in a virginity pledge program and taking a pledge merely ratifies pro-abstinence decisions that the teen would have made without the program or pledge. From this perspective virginity pledge programs may be a redundant fifth wheel with no effect, rather than an operative factor leading to less risk behavior. The fact that research on the outcomes of associated with virginity pledging controls for a wide range of social background variables makes this less likely. Still, given the limitations of the Add Health data, it is impossible to fully disprove this type of skepticism. Nonetheless, such an argument violates common sense. Teens do not make decisions about sexual values in a vacuum. A decision to abstain and delay sex activity does not emerge in a teen's mind, ex nihilo, but will reflect the sexual values and messages that society communicates to the adolescent. Unfortunately, teens today live in a sex saturated popular culture that celebrates casual sex at an early age. To practice abstinence, teens must resist peer and media pressure, as well as control physical desire. It seems implausible to expect teens to abstain in the absence of social institutions (such a virginity pledge programs) that teach strong abstinence values. Similarly, it seems implausible that programs that teach clear abstinence values will have no influence on behavior, even among teens who embrace those values. Since decisions to practice abstinence do not emerge in a vacuum, it seems very likely that the messages in virginity pledge programs contribute to positive behavior among youth. Participation in virginity pledge programs encourages youth to make pro-abstinence choices, and taking a public abstinence pledge reinforces the teen's commitment, helping him to stick with the abstinence life style. Public Policy Issues Today's teens live in a sex-drenched media culture that promotes vulgarity, permissiveness and casual sex. Most parents are eagerly seeking social forces that can counteract this tide of permissiveness and communicate an uplifting message of self restraint to youth. Nearly 90 percent of parents want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they are married or in an adult relationship that is close to marriage.[50][18] This is the predominant message of abstinence education programs. Unfortunately, these parental values are rarely taught in the classroom. The focus of government continues to be on "safe sex," or promoting contraceptive use. Today, government spends, at least, twelve dollars promoting and distributing contraception for every one dollar spent encouraging abstinence.[51][19] If the comparison is limited to funding for teens, government still spends at least four dollars promoting contraceptives for every dollar spent on abstinence. Moreover these figures dramatically undercount the efforts to promote contraception since they do not include most state and local spending of sex education, nearly all of which continues to have a heavy, if not exclusive, emphasis on contraception. Today, nearly all students in the U.S. are taught about contraception[52][20]; however, students rarely receive more than token references to abstinence. Authentic abstinence programs which strongly encourage youth to abstain from sexual activity are rare. The abstinence programs that do exist are limited, generally providing 10 to 15 hours of instruction per year. It is true that, in the limited time available, abstinence programs teach abstinence not contraception; however, this does not mean that youth participating in abstinence programs never receive information about contraception. In schools where abstinence is taught, students will generally receive information about contraception as well, in a separate venue such as a biology or health class. Polling shows that a majority of parents believe that, if contraception is to be taught, it should be taught separately from abstinence.[53][21] Bearman charges that youth who participate in abstinence education are ignorant and afraid of contraception. He states that virginity pledgers "have been taught that condoms don't work; they're fearful of them. They don't know how to use them...They have no experience with them. They don't know how to get them." While it is true that participants in abstinence programs are taught about the limitations of contraception, there is no evidence to substantiate the rest of Bearman's claim. The wave II interviews of the Add Health survey contains a "knowledge quiz" that section that tests individuals' knowledge of contraception and reproduction. The differences between pledgers and non-pledgers in this knowledge are marginal; moreover, the degree of contraceptive knowledge does not predict lower STD rates. As young adults, virginity pledgers are no less likely to use contraception than non-pledgers.[54][22] To recapitulate, the general situation in sex education and sexuality issues in the U.S. is as follows: The vast majority of government funding is focused on the distribution and promotion of contraception. Nearly, all youth receive instruction in contraception. Even where abstinence is taught, students will generally still receive information about contraception in a separate school program. Despite the fact that nearly all parents want youth taught a very strong abstinence message, the real teaching of abstinence is still relatively rare. Few students receive more than token references to abstaining. Remarkably, despite the overwhelming popularity of abstinence education among parents, there is currently a vigorous effort to eliminate abstinence education from the schools, led by groups such as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) and Advocates for Youth. The focal point of this campaign is an effort to eliminate federal funding for abstinence education. The attack of Bearman and Bruckner against virginity pledge programs plays a major role in the advocacy of these groups. Those seeking is to eliminate abstinence education wish to replace it with "comprehensive sex ed" programs, sometimes also called "abstinence plus."[55][23] While proponents of these programs claim they emphasize abstinence, content analyses reveal such curricula contain virtually no abstinence material, in fact, many such materials implicitly undermine and denigrate abstinence.[56][24] Comprehensive sex ed curricula all convey the message that it is okay for teens to have sex as long as they use contraception. Only seven percent of parents agree with that message. Very few parents want youth taught materials that condone and accept casual sex at an early age; unfortunately, that is the message contained in comprehensive sex ed curricula.[57][25] The main issue in sex education today is not, as Bearman and Bruckner apparently believe, whether society should "ban discussion of contraception and STD protection from sex education."[58][26] As noted, nearly all youth are currently taught about contraception. The real question is whether youth will be taught anything besides contraception. Evidence from the virginity pledge programs indicates that youth can respond positively to messages of self-restraint contained in abstinence programs. Other evaluations show that abstinence education is effective in reducing sexual activity. [59][27] Parents want-- and youth need-- more uplifting messages of self-control from abstinence education, not less. Conclusion The analysis of Bearman and Bruckner indicating that virginity pledgers have the same STD rates as non-pledgers has garnered widespread media and political attention. However, the same methods used by Bearman and Bruckner to analyze virginity pledges also show that condom use has no effect in reducing STD's. This clearly illustrates the serious limitations of Bearman and Bruckner's methodology. The paper has shown that taking a virginity pledge in adolescence, in fact, is associated with a substantial decline in STD rates in young adult years. Across a broad array of analysis, virginity pledging was found to be a better predictor of STD reduction than was condom use. Individuals who took a virginity pledge in adolescence are some 25 percent less likely to have an STD as young adults, when compared with non-pledgers who are identical in race, gender, and family background. The reduction in STD's for virginity pledgers occurs despite the fact that many years may have elapsed between the time the individual took a virginity pledge and the time that the STD rate was measured. Moreover, after initially taking a pledge, relatively few virginity pledgers will have received continuing social support for their commitment to abstinence. Other research has shown that, when compared to non-pledgers of similar backgrounds, individuals who have taken a virginity pledge are: * Less likely to have children out-of-wedlock; * Less likely to experience teen pregnancy; * Less likely to give birth as teens or young adults; * Less likely to have sex before age 18; and, * Less likely to engage in non-marital sex as young adults. Pledgers will have fewer lifetime sexual partners than non-pledgers, and pledgers engaging in sexual activity in young adult years are as likely to use contraceptives as are non-pledgers. Virginity pledge and similar abstinence education programs are among the few forces in our society pushing back against a tide of sexual permissiveness. These efforts need to be strengthened and expanded. _______________________ [81][1]Hannah Bruckner and Peter Bearman, "After the Promise: the STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges," Journal of Adolescent Health, April 2005, pp. 271-278. [82][2]Ibid., p. 277 [83][3] Matt Apuzzo, "Study: Many who pledge abstinence substitute risky behavior" AP wire service, March 18, 2005 [84][4]San Francisco Chronicle, "Key to Sex Education: Discipline or Knowledge,"May 22, 2005. [85][5] Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, "Virginity Pledgers More Likely to Engage in Risky Sexual Behavior Including Oral and Anal Sex", press release, March 18, 2005. [86][6]Robert Rector, Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., and Jennifer A. Marshall, "Teens Who Make Virginity Pledges Have Substantially Improved Life Outcomes," The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis Report No. CDA04-07, September 21, 2004. [87][7]This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 ([88]addhealth at unc.edu). [89][8]Rector, Johnson, and Marshall, op. cit [90][9]Bearman and Bruckner, op. cit., p 277. [91][10]Ibid., p. 271 [92][11] See regression table 1 in the Appendix. [93][12] The Add Health survey also asks three other questions about symptoms: "painful or very frequent urination, bleeding after intercourse or between your periods [for females only], and itching in the vagina or the genital area [females only]". We did not include these symptoms in the STD measure because of the high probability that they were caused by non-STD factors. [94][13] In each of the five STD measures, individuals are categorized in a binary fashion: "yes" for having an STD if they report positively on one or more of the relevant conditions (urine sample test, symptoms, or diagnosis) and "no" if they report negatively on all the relevant conditions. The measures, thus, do not reflect the degree of disease; for example, an individual diagnosed with three diseases would be coded the same as an individual diagnosed with one disease. [95][14] In some cases individuals failed to answer the pledge question on one or more waves of the survey; an individual who responded negatively to this question on at least one wave and gave no response on the other waves was categorized as a non-pledger. [96][15] Bruckner and Bearman, p. 271 [97][16]Consistent pledgers are individuals who affirmed in at least one wave of the survey that they had made a pledge and did not provide contradictory information in any subsequent wave. Inconsistent pledgers reported that they had ever taken a pledge in at least one wave of the survey, but then contradicted themselves by reporting they had never taken a pledge in a subsequent wave. In our analysis, we were able to precisely duplicate Bearman and Bruckner's pledge categorization. As noted, for purposes of the present paper, we merged the inconsistent and consistent pledgers into the single category of pledgers. [98][17]Rector, Johnson, and Marshall, op. cit. [99][18]Robert Rector, Melissa Pardue, and Shannan Martin, "What Do Parents Want Taught in Sex Education Programs?," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1722, January 28, 2004. [100][19]Melissa Pardue, Robert Rector, and Shannan Martin, "Government Spends $12 on Safe Sex and Contraceptives for Every $1 Spent on Abstinence," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1718, January 14, 2004. [101][20]Eighty percent of 7-12^th grade students report that their most recent sex education course was considered comprehensive. 82 percent of 7-12^th grade students report receiving information about birth control in their sex education course. See The Kaiser Family Foundation, Sex Education in America: A Series of National Surveys of Students, Parents, Teachers, and Principals, September 2000, pgs. 17-18. [102][21]Rector, Pardue, and Martin, "What Do Parents Want Taught in Sex Education Programs?," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1722, January 28, 2004. [103][22]While it is true, that virginity pledges are less likely to use contraception during their very first experience of intercourse, by young adult years differences in contraceptive use between sexually active pledgers and non-pledgers have completely disappeared. The main importance of contraceptive or condom use at first intercourse as a variable is that it predicts subsequent contraceptive use; lower rates of contraceptive use at first intercourse may indicate lower contraceptive use in later years. However, as noted, sexually active virginity pledgers are not less likely to use contraceptives by Wave III of the Add Health survey. Thus, the fact that pledgers are less likely to contracept at first intercourse seems to have little significance. [104][23]Shannan Martin, Robert Rector, and Melissa Pardue, Comprehensive Sex Education vs. Authentic Abstinence: A Study of Competing Curricula, The Heritage Foundation, 2004. [105][24]Ibid. [106][25]A major reason that law governing the federal funding of abstinence education stipulates that funded abstinence programs should not teach or promote contraceptive use is to prevent the piracy of abstinence funds by pseudo "abstinence plus" programs that pretend to teach abstinence, but, in reality, denigrate it. [107][26]Bruckner and Bearman, op.cit., p. 277. [108][27]See Robert Rector, "The Effectiveness of Abstinence Education Programs in Reducing Sexual Activity Among Youth," The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1533, April 8, 2002 and Melissa Pardue, "More Evidence of the Effectiveness of Abstinence Education Programs," The Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 738, May 5, 2005. About [120]Robert Rector and [121]Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D. References 23. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=79366 120. http://www.heritage.org/About/Staff/RobertRector.cfm 121. http://www.heritage.org/About/Staff/KirkJohnson.cfm From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:51:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:51:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Ever the twain Message-ID: John Gray: Ever the twain The Times Literary Supplement, 4.10.8 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2109010&window_type=print OCCIDENTALISM. A short history of anti-Westernism. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. 149pp. Atlantic Books. ?14.99. - 1 84354 287 0. Looking back, it is surprising that the Cold War should ever have been described as a conflict between East and West. The ideas in terms of which that vast geopolitical conflict was played out were all of them rooted in the central traditions of Western thought. The Soviet Union began as a Westernizing regime and remained so until the end. Equally, Maoist China always followed the Soviet model in seeking to "catch up with and overtake the West". These were regimes dedicated to emulating the West, not repudiating it. Just as much as their opponents in the "free world", the Communist dictatorships took their view of human society and history from the European Enlightenment. In geostrategic terms, Communism and liberal democracy may have been mortal enemies, but from an intellectual standpoint the Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. During the Cold War it was common to describe the Communist states as totalitarian regimes. Today it has become fashionable to attack the concept of totalitarianism on the ground that it fails to capture the differences between Nazism and Communism. A more fundamental flaw lies in the failure to acknowledge their common European origins. Generations of historians have portrayed Soviet and Chinese Communism as vestiges of Oriental despotism, but a truer account would recognize them as embodying a Western revolutionary project. Certainly the ruling elites exploited nativist sentiment whenever it suited them. Even so, Lenin's claim to be the legitimate heir of the Jacobins was not mistaken. The Communist regimes continued a European revolutionary tradition in which terror was used as an instrument for remaking society, and it is not accidental that they were most admired by Western intellectuals during the Stalinist and Maoist eras, when terror was at its height. The idea that totalitarianism is part of a revolt against the West predates the Cold War, and was the central feature in a once influential analysis of Nazi Germany. Aurel Kolnai's War Against the West (1938) is little read nowadays, but this fascinating book by an unjustly neglected thinker illustrates the central weakness of any interpretation of totalitarianism as an anti-Western phenomenon. For Kolnai - a convert to Catholicism - Nazism was a neo- pagan movement that aimed to destroy the Christian West: the Nazis were radical relativists, who sought to replace belief in truth by a cult of power. Kolnai identified an important strand in Nazi ideology, but he passed over the continuities between Nazism and Europe's religious and intellectual traditions. It is true that some Nazis were virulently anti-Christian, but, like the rest of the Nazi movement, they drew heavily on the poisonous inheritance of Christian anti-Semitism. It is also true that some Nazi ideologues flirted with radical relativism, but many more were exponents of an Enlightenment ideology of "scientific racism". Theories of eugenics and racial anthropology were widely accepted in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe - not least by progressive thinkers. The Nazis used them as a rationale for racial slavery and extermination. Recent historical research has tended to focus on the origins of the Final Solution in the highly fluid conditions that existed in Nazi Europe between late 1941 and early 1942, but the ideas behind that incomparable crime had been current in Europe for generations. The view of totalitarianism as an anti-Western project is the reverse of the truth, but it has an enduring appeal and it is not surprising that it should be revived in the moral panic surrounding radical Islam. In Occidentalism: A short history of Anti-Westernism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit seek to explain the enmity to the West expressed in forces such as al-Qaeda as an episode in a longer and more extensive tradition of anti-Western thought. As they see it, the rage against the West that fuelled the attacks of September 11 is not a unique pathology of radical Islam. Inverting Edward Said's account of Orientalism - which oddly is not discussed in the book - Buruma and Margalit interpret radical Islam as a contemporary version of Occidentalism, a world-view in which the West is perceived as unheroic and materialistic and its inhabitants less than fully human. A virtue of their account is that it illuminates some curious intellectual connections. As they show, Occidentalism is itself a Western export. Twentieth-century anti-Western movements were heavily indebted to German thinkers such as Herder and Fichte. In attacking the universalist pretensions of French civilization, these Counter Enlightenment thinkers (as Isaiah Berlin called them) laid the intellectual ground for European radical nationalism. At the same time their critique of European culture helped shape anti-Western movements in pre-war Japan and in India. Today's Islamists deny any debts to the West, but the history of their ideas demonstrates the pervasive influence of European radical ideology. As Buruma and Margalit note, the Iranian revolutionary scholar Ali Shari'at translated the works of Frantz Fanon, while the Ba'athist ideologue Sati Husri was an avid reader of Fichte and Herder and modelled his conception of Arab unity on the interwar pan-German movement. In these and other examples, we can see the influence of the European Counter-Enlightenment on radical Islam, but - though Buruma and Margalit seem less keen to acknowledge this - Enlightenment ideas have also been formative. The Egyptian Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb propagated ideas of a revolutionary vanguard and of a future society without rulers that derive from the Jacobins, Bakunin and Lenin, not from traditional Islamic ideas of governance. Like many others, Buruma and Margalit find aspects of al-Qaeda prefigured in the Assassins, an eleventh-and twelfth-century Shi'ite sect that practised political murder and ritual suicide. There can be no doubt that al-Qaeda makes use of Islamic traditions, but the belief that the world can be remade by violence is a modern Western inheritance. What is striking about the industrial-style mass killing practised in twentieth-century Europe is not just its scale. It is the fact that it was done to transform the human condition. In its strategy of maximizing civilian casualties, al-Qaeda is more ruthless than most other terrorist movements, and because of its uniquely global reach it poses a greater threat. In its belief in the regenerative power of violence it is a privatized spin-off from twentieth-century state terror and has more in common with the Baader-Meinhof Gang than with the Assassins. When it asserts that terror can create a world without conflict or power, al-Qaeda speaks in a European voice. At the beginning of their book, Buruma and Margalit write that its point is "neither to gather ammunition in a global 'war against terrorism' nor to demonize the current enemies of the West", and they have produced an elegant and forceful study in the history of ideas. But Occidentalism is first of all a tract for the times, and towards the end they present a rather different view of its purpose. "The question", they write, "is how to protect the idea of the West - that is to say, the world's liberal democracies - against its enemies . . . . The war of ideas is in some respects the same as the one that was fought several generations ago against various versions of fascism and state socialism." It is a telling formulation. It purges "the idea of the West" of everything that is negative or questionable. The sources of totalitarianism in Western thought are denied. Marxism - the most powerful assault on liberalism produced by a Western thinker - appears to be no longer a part of "the Western idea". Fascism and state socialism - also indisputably Western ideologies - are written out. Even Occidentalism, which the authors themselves acknowledge to be a body of ideas manufactured in the West, is excised from the Western canon. The implication is clear. The West is the embodiment (however imperfect) of freedom and enlightenment, while the world beyond the West is a realm of darkness and despotism. It is an old story, and if it rings rather hollow today one reason is that "the West" is now even more of a makeshift than in the past. The boundaries between East and West have never been fixed. Before the Cold War, Europe was divided between the Catholic and Protestant West and the Orthodox and Muslim East - a boundary that has reappeared in the Balkans and in Europe's relations with Russia. In a longer perspective, Islam is a part of the West. It helped shape European life in medieval Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and along with Judaism and Christianity it belongs in a Western monotheist tradition in which human salvation is worked out in history. During the colonial era European countries believed that Africa and Asia would become part of the West by being Christianized. Insofar as postcolonial African and Asian countries embraced Marxism they did join the West - not the Christian West, but the secular West that defined itself in terms of ideas of universal human emancipation. In Europe today ideological enthusiasm is muted, but radical ideology has found a new home in Washington. Perversely, given their obsessive hostility to all things European, the neoconservatives have imported a defunct European radical tradition into American political culture. Fusing a right-wing version of the Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution with Christian fundamentalism, they have renewed a millenarian style of politics that has died out in Europe. The missionary zeal of the Bush administration evokes fear and loathing among Europeans, who believe - not without reason - that it could turn the crass theory of clashing civilizations into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having not only different interests and policies but different values and world-views, Europe and America are becoming divergent civilizations. By now, "the West" has as much meaning as the Bush administration's celebrated "axis of evil". Buruma and Margalit insist that they do not seek to shield the West from criticism, and clearly they do not belong with the neoconservative ideologues who denounce all dissent from current American policies as tantamount to siding with the terrorists. Yet by defining the West today in terms of a single idea, supposedly wholly benign and universal in its reach, they endorse the neoconservative view that modernity comes in only one variety, in which Western democracy is the sole legitimate form of government. The trouble with this view is not only that it rests on a very simple reading of history. It is that it can easily be used to license the kind of democratic evangelism that has led to catastrophe in Iraq. Political legitimacy is a complicated business. There is no reason to think that modern states which possess it will all be of the same type - still less that they will all be secular liberal democracies. In the Middle East secular regimes are commonly authoritarian and democracy usually means some form of Islamist rule. In toppling Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration destroyed a prototypically Western regime. Like the Soviet Union (on which it was modelled), Ba'athist Iraq was a modern state, which for most of its history was militantly secular. By destroying it America has empowered the political forces of radical Islam. Neoconservative ideologues who demanded regime change in Iraq did so because they wanted a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East. They may be granted their wish, though hardly in the way they dreamt. Democracy may come to Iraq, but if so it will be the Iranian kind, not the Westminster or Capitol Hill variety. The ironies of history continue, and it looks as if we are in for another era of conflict between the West and "anti-Western" forces that the West itself created. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 15 19:51:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:51:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Ethically engineered Message-ID: John Gray: Ethically engineered The Times Literary Supplement, 4.1.16 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2106404&window_type=print THE FUTURE OF HUMAN NATURE. Jurgen Habermas. Translated by Hella Beister. 128pp. Oxford: Polity. ?40 (paperback, ?13.99). - 0 7456 2986 5. ENOUGH. Genetic engineering and the end of human nature. Bill McKibben. 274pp. Bloomsbury. ?17.99. - 0 7475 6536 8. The development of genetic engineering opens up the possibility that humans may be able to design future generations of humans. The Nazis launched a hideous experiment in breeding a new humanity, but the power of creating new humans beings eluded them. Mercifully, the necessary scientific knowledge did not yet exist. It exists now. There is some debate about when it will be practically usable, but the technology itself is no longer the stuff of science fiction. This new human power poses a fundamental difficulty for liberal ethics. Nazi eugenic policies were based on racist pseudoscience; genocide was their logical result. It is easy to see the horror of what the Nazis attempted, but eugenic policies based on good science and serving impeccably liberal ends have moral difficulties of their own. Designing future humans to embody liberal notions of the good life seems to involve treating them as instruments of our ends -something forbidden by liberal notions of personal autonomy. True, in doing this we would not be using them simply as resources to satisfy our wants; we would aim to enhance their freedom and well-being, by reducing their liability to hereditary disability, for example, or increasing their intellectual capacities. But we would still be intervening in their lives in the most radical way imaginable. We would shape them irrevocably. It seems we cannot help violating liberal values, even as we strive to apply them. There may be no such thing as liberal eugenics. The contradictions of liberal values are a central theme of Jurgen Habermas's thoughtful and stimulating new book, The Future of Human Nature. Unlike most philosophers in anglophone countries, Habermas does not take liberal ethics for granted. Even more unusually, he understands that the root of the liberal ideal of autonomy is in a religious conception of the person. He begins his inquiry with Kierkegaard's explicitly theocentric account of an authentically human existence. As a secular humanist, Habermas does not endorse Kierkegaard's claim that authentic human selfhood is achievable only in the presence of God; but he is insistent that the question of what constitutes authentic human existence is central to thinking about the new biotechnologies. The tendency in analytical philosophy is to view such questions as relics of metaphysics or - even worse - religion. A liberal philosophy can be developed, it is believed, which does not depend on controversial answers to murky - perhaps even senseless - questions about the meaning of life. Yet such questions cannot be banished from philosophy. If new biotechnologies make it possible to create new human beings, they also make it impossible to avoid questions about what it means to be human - questions that cannot be answered by science. Many contemporary philosophers want not only to reject religious belief but also to purge philosophy of religious questions and categories of thought. One of the less obvious consequences of biotechnology is that such a purely secular mode of thinking has ceased to be a viable option. Habermas's achievement in this short, dense, suggestive volume is to reconnect contemporary thought in bioethics to the central traditions of Western philosophy and religion. But by situating his inquiry in this way, he does also limit it. Habermas assumes without question that humans belong in a different moral category from all other animals. He is right that profound ethical issues are raised by the power to shape new human beings, but why should that be more problematic than similar technological interventions in the lives of other animals? The answer is that, like almost all contemporary Western philosophers -not least those who claim most stridently to be rigorously secular in their thinking - Habermas takes his conception of the human subject from Christianity. The notion that humans are separated from other animals by an impassable gulf is a Christian inheritance. Pervasive in post-Christian cultures, it is absent in most others. Hindus and Buddhists acknowledge that humans have some distinctive characteristics, but they do not believe that humans possess extraordinary attributes - such as free will and an immortal soul denied to their animal kin. It is scarcely accidental that it was a pious Christian (Immanuel Kant) who first formulated the liberal idea of personal autonomy. More to the point, it may not be fully coherent when wrenched from a Christian view of humans and their place in the world. Contemporary philosophers pride themselves on their sophisticated understanding of moral concepts, but in taking the categories of post-Christian cultures as the unquestioned framework of moral thought they are being naive. After Habermas's new book this innocence will be harder to sustain. Enough: Genetic engineering and the end of human nature makes no pretence to being a work of conventional philosophy, and it is all the better for it. Written in a light, graceful style that does not aim for false clarity or spurious precision, it is a lucid and illuminating critique of the techno-utopian belief that by applying scientific knowledge the human condition can be improved beyond recognition. Bill McKibben does not deny that technology may change human life irreversibly - on the contrary, that is precisely what he dreads. It is not science itself he fears, but scientism: the belief that science can render the pursuit of meaning through myth and religion superfluous and redundant. If such a reductive utopia were achievable, it would be at the cost of an immeasurable human loss. In practice, those who seek to use science to undermine religion end up turning it into a new religion - and one incomparably more primitive than the traditional creeds that they aim to supplant. Older religions help us come to terms with sadness and mortality. The new ideology of salvation through science promises to eradicate unhappiness and even do away with death. Showing an impressive knowledge of the wilder shores of techno-utopian thinking, McKibben quotes extensively from cryogenicists who seek immortality by having their cadavers frozen, post-humanists who look forward to the technological reconstruction of the human organism, and "extropians", for whom having a body at all is an intolerable constraint on freedom. These evangelists for science seem to be an endearingly eccentric bunch, but they do an enormous amount of harm. By representing technological advance as at once inevitable and somehow inherently benign, they obscure the choices that we are actually making. In McKibben's view, the most valuable human characteristic is the ability to call a halt to technology. Given the new powers conferred by biotechnology, we can choose to restrain ourselves, and say, enough. This is an impassioned plea, but it is unlikely that technology can be controlled by moral restraint. If history is any guide, humans will use the new powers given by science to the limit. Whatever else it may produce, the advance of technology will not bring about the world - rational, hygienic and sterile -that McKibben fears. Instead it will magnify the capacity of humans to act as they have always done. The most predictable result of accelerating technological advance is to increase the intensity of war. Human knowledge grows and changes, but human needs - with all their attendant conflicts - stay the same. This may seem a dispiriting prospect, but at least we can forget the nightmare of a post-human world. From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jun 15 20:57:54 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:57:54 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] feminism, etc In-Reply-To: <20050615193551.98351.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050615193551.98351.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42B09652.2060901@earthlink.net> Michael Christopher wrote: --Question: how exactly is the impact of "feminism" being measured? How would one contrast it with the impact of "masculinism", for example? Or disentangle the consequences of feminism from the consequences of, say, greed or video games? For starters, how about Googling for "feminism" and see what turns up. Or better yet, investigate any university course offering and see what turns up for "women's studies". What you'll find is that just about every world country has a listing in conjunction with feminism i.e. Russian feminism, French feminism..... Then take ethnic groups or religions and see what the links are available i.e. Islamic feminism, Jewish feminism..... Once you've done that you might view the relationship between feminism and a list of academic disciplines such as Feminism and Science, Feminism and Religion, Medieval History and Feminism....and so forth. Feminism is akin to minority studies since women are still considered a disadvantaged group needing the same protection given to other disenfranchised groups such as Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and Asian. A tall white male is an anachronism in 2005. I'm not agreeing or condemning what has transpired, only reporting it and will continue doing so as a "masculinism" backlash gains in momentum. --No doubt, divorce produces a lot of insecurity. Any schism in family or community is going to add stress (and that may also apply if fundamentalism or politics divides people) and a lot of that stress will fall on children. Divorce is only one aspect producing insecurity and hesitancy on the part of young people to marry. A breakdown in traditional religious values replaced by rampant fundamentalism is another. Culturally another factor with a huge impact is the Politically Correct Movement whereby everyone needs to always be on guard lest something offensive to some minority group slips out. This gives young people a feeling of "Big Brother" always watching and competes with romanticism. Lastly, and IMO a hugely important factor is the rift that is developing between Darwinism and Creationism. Neither -ism is accurate in its format yet most academics are lining up and grabbing some aspect of one or the other movement, most favoring Science which they see as being synonymous with Darwinism. It's no wonder young people shy away from traditional marriage. Their world is upside down! Gerry From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jun 16 02:34:08 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:34:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Video Going Wild Message-ID: <01C571E1.340FFB10.shovland@mindspring.com> Within a few hours after the conclusion of John Conyers' Downing Street hearings, video of the event will be widely available on the Internet. As more people see the video, a consensus will begin to develop about the meaning of it. The "mainstream" media have put on an amazing display of disregard for this history-quality document. But we know that they have been threatened and bribed. Fortunately, a lot of us get our information from a lot of places outside the controlled channels. As individuals, and more importantly, as an intelligent mass organism, we have been doing our own intelligence gathering and analysis. I think we are converging on a solution very quickly. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Thu Jun 16 12:06:48 2005 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 08:06:48 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself about my novel, Trine Erotic References: Message-ID: <00c501c5726b$dfa3faa0$6401a8c0@callastudios> First of all, I want to thank you, Frank, for appreciating my novel and for writing and posting this...I feel a lot of support from this list, which isn't nothing! Sure it's electronic, but it's still real and I feel real appreciation. So, just to correct a few things: Of course I know about multi-level selectionism--how could I not! And I think it's good stuff and it makes sense to me! I'm a supporter. In fact, I'll be meeting with David Wilson in about 3 weeks (with others) to discuss the possibility of a new Evolutionary Studies program here at New Paltz. Very exciting! You wrote: What's also missing from the novel, as it is from evolutionary psychology generally, is the desire for a long-term monogamous commitment, which is a quite different kind of love. Hmm. Let me say this: The novel deals with some love themes: passionate love v companionate love (what i call 'hot' love and 'warm' love) and selfless love and selfish love, and also romantic soul-mate love, short-term mating and long-term mating, among other love themes. It's true that many of the female characters "desire" romantic love and don't care how they get it or for how long, whether it is for 10 years or a year. I also think some (if not all) the female characters DO desire monogamous enduring relationships...As well, there is plenty of talk about "long-term, monogamous commitment" I think. But anyway, what drives any story is a quest/motivation/striving... The female characters DO want love. In fact, if you think about it, 3 out of the 4 female characters DO end up in long-term, monogamous, committed relationships... Also, what do you mean when you say the "desire for a long-term monogamous commitment" is missing from EP? I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean that evolutionary psychologists talk too much about short-term mating? I think that's the popular culture's EP.... Just as an interesting example: David Buss, in his EP textbook, devotes 58 pages to male and female long-term mating and only 23 pages to male and female short-term mating. Well, again, thank you for supporting me, Frank.... All best!!!! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: Premise Checker To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 3:31 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself about my novel, Trine Erotic Our list member has written the very first novel written around evolutionary psychology ideas, and I can recommend it highly. It is composed of stories with stories, and you're never quite sure what the reality is. It's like postmodernism in this way. And you wonder to what extent the novel is autobiographical or about the person the author wished she were or just made up of creatures that exemplify what evolutionary psychology demands that they do. But it's quite clear that the female protagonists very much want men they can bat ideas around with, though there's no place for the love of ideas for their own sake in evolutionary psychology. The narrators seem to know this, though they want to transcend these limits. Gordon Tullock, an economics professor I had, thought that altruism in humans was the result of an evolutionary defect: we had not been humans long enough for altruism to have been weeded out! I'm sure he'd worry that Alice is defective, being much too in love with ideas. One answer, that she apparently doesn't know about, is that evolution takes place on many levels, not just at the level of the gene. This makes group selection possible and makes room for altruism. The book here is Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, _Unto Others_, which is slowly getting accepted in the biology community. (Paradigm shifts do take time, you know.) Another answer is that, however much the overall selfish gene theory is true, our desires are indirect mechanisms to promote the overall goal and that there are many of these desires. Steven Reiss came up with 16 basic desires that are relatively independent of one another. Desiring to raise (one's own) children is largely independent of romance (which includes the neighboring desires of wanting coitus and of wanting aesthetic experiences. Why the latter, I'm not sure, but factor analysis puts the three of them together.). And both are independent of curiosity, which is at the top of my list and my wife's (I am sure) and at least near the top of Alice's. What's also missing from the novel, as it is from evolutionary psychology generally, is the desire for a long-term monogamous commitment, which is a quite different kind of love. Note to myself: you've got to get around to buying and reading C.S. Lewis' _The Four Loves_. You shouldn't let your atheism keep you from the book. After all, Moses and Solomon (less so Jesus) were proto-sociobiologists. --------------------- Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself about my novel, Trine Erotic http://www.entelechyjournal.com/playing_with_myself.htm [This is the first novel written from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. I am finishing it up now and am enjoying its playfulness exceedingly.] Q What are some of the major questions you try to deal with in Trine Erotic? A Well, there are quite a few: Is there free will? What is the will? What is and is there a single Ia self? Are we determined by our genes? Can we (and how and what affect does it have to) go against our nature? What is the unconscious? Is it what evolutionary psychologists refer to as our universal human nature? Or is it something else? And how does it work? And is there a universal human nature? How does culture influence us? What is art? What is love? And is there something beyond our evolutionary, deep reflexessome kind of global brain, as Howard Bloom suggests, that is motivating us? Q You dedicate the book to every womans desire and the art within her and to alpha males everywhere. Does that mean its not for other malessay, Beta? A No, no. Its sort of tongue-in-cheeky. Im playing with the evolutionary theory that art is displayed as a mating signal/strategy. So Im saying: Here is this piece of artand, naturally, I would want to signal the highest type of man. Of course, alpha male is subjective when it comes to humansfor apes it may be just a factor of strength or posing. For me, an alpha male doesnt always look like an alpha; a man could be an alpha and work in a factory but be an original thinker and want to lead or organize people. (David M. Busss work explains this, actually.) But anyway, its not just for alpha males. Its for all males. But its particularly for men who are creative and deep and interested in figuring out the world . . . understanding human nature, and more. And it's for females too! Q Why did you write the book? A Well, for one, I was compelled to write. And there are a lot of other reasons as well. But, I have to say that I found the fiction I was reading leaving me cold. I just found myself not getting turned on by all that good literature. I wanted to be turned on. I saw the appeal; saw the code of it. You know, theres something here in this story but Im not going to let on to what it is because youre supposed to get it because were so smart, and good fiction shows and doesnt tell. And Im not going to even attempt to affect you in any way because that would be pompous and sentimental and ultimately ineffective. And were so sophisticated and subtle. I guess these are some of the rules of fiction. Like how you shouldnt write out ideas. And its related to the seduction/anti-seduction stuff I write about in the book. Most modern fiction is quite seductive, in the Baudrillardian sense, by trying or appearing not to seduce. I think my style is anti-anti-seductionor [2]meta-seduction. I am possibly "seducing" by going against a seductive "hiding" strategy. For example, I can choose to wear revealing clothing (which isnt seductive) or less revealing clothing, which concealswhich is seductive. But I can wear the revealing clothes as a reaction to the seductive strategy, which says, Im not trying to seduce with the not-trying-to-seduce clothes. And this is seductive in its own waya hiding from hiding. Of course, the revealing clothing looks the sameits just a matter of intention. And only a few will be able to read the code or signal. I realize this is made confusing because I am using Baudrillards sense of the word. In fact, what you have are three things working: seduction (in its denotation), anti-seduction, and anti-anti-seduction or meta-seduction. Dont tell me Im confusing YOU!?? Im not terribly affected by most fiction (though I know Im in the minority). And Im not proud of that fact. Its just the way I am. Im not very subtle. I like to read nonfiction. Otherwise I feel like Im wasting my time. Id rather be doing something or writing or learning something. Unfortunately I dont have that feeling (that Im learning something, etc.) when I read most fiction. And perhaps that is a fault of mine. Perhaps Im just not refined enough or my personality doesnt allow me to slow down. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Im right-brain dominant. I really see a difference though, between people who love fiction and me. And, thankfully, Ive stopped worrying that theres something wrong with me in this. For the record, I dont place a value on one or the otherseductive fiction (which is what is accepted and favored) versus meta-seductive fiction (fiction which tells you what its doing, openly wants to affect, deals with ideas, etc.). But to answer your question: I wrote a book that I was wanting to read. Q Is there any fiction you do like? A Oh, of course. I loved Smillas Sense of Snow, liked Jeanette Wintersons Sexing the Cherry, D.H. Lawrenceliked Kundera when I was younger Dostoevsky, John Berger, Hermann Hesse, and [3]there are others Q You mention wanting to affect the reader. What kind of affect are you hoping for? A Any, I suppose. Nietzsche wrote that the effect of works of art is to excite the state that creates art . . . he says its intoxication . . . First and foremost, I want the reader to get some pleasure from it. After that, its mostly a working out of some of the questions which seem to haunt us, stuff about love. And I suppose I want it to be a part of the readers working it out, like a friend. There is also the sort of feministy thing about desire and art in women. I suppose I would like TE to inspire women to let loose their desire and art more. In Sirens Song, the nameless protagonist says her father told her that the point about art was to share itabout an audience. Which reminds me of a scene in Bride of the Wind, a film about Alma Mahler I just saw on video. Alma says to her husband Mahler, I wish youd conduct one of my songs. And he says, One of your songs? . . . Perhaps one day in rehearsal. And she says, Rehearsal? But then there wouldnt be an audience. And he says, Ill be there. Arent I enough? And Im interested in this. Because despite the womens rights movement and so much liberation and so many women artists, I still think there is this thing within us (women) . . . a resistance . . . and I question its etiology. If such a resistance existsor rather, a relative lack of desire to broadcast compared to menis it innate? That is, is it related to biology, to the evolutionary theory that men try to broadcast to as many women as possible, since it is in their genetic interest to do so? (Or since they are the product of millions of years of evolution which ensured such a tendency persisted?) Or is it cultural? Or some admixture? Again, I question my premise as well. Im interested in trying to uncover whether or not such a tendency exists. I certainly have felt my relative lack of desire to broadcast. But of course, that could have everything to do with other things: personality, conditioning, stage of life, etc. About my Sirens Song character: her feeling had always been that it was something that had to do with her (whatever her art was, be it painting or writing); she didnt have an impulse to broadcast it. And so, there is this question about what art is, and its purpose and function. And, in some sense, the book is my grappling with deciding to share whatever it is in meand that in my sharing of it, there is meaning. There is a dialectics of desire, as Barthes saysand I quote him at the beginning of Sirens Song. For me, I couldnt and wouldnt want to put the book out there if I didnt think it would serve some kind of purpose. And of course, art is purposeful. It is motivated by all sorts of deep, powerful urges. The artist experiences it as an outpouring of some kind of force that has to be expelled, a feeling of compulsion. And then theres that choice an artist makesdo you go mad or stay somewhat functionally neurotic, or do you release and create? (The existential problem of whether or not it is a choice, I cant answer. My answer probably changes with my mood.) But also, there is the EP theory of art as signal. And in some ways that is also about survival. So I see art as a saviorfor the artist but also for the audience, of course. Once I decided that Trine Erotic was for an audience, it took on a whole new light. It was outward directed and relating, and it was pleasurable in a way that before it hadnt been (that is, writing for myself). So much goes unsaid in the culture. Most of us (except perhaps for some hard-core feminists) think women are free to do their thing. We have this sense, historically and culturally, that women are now free. Yet I dont really think so. I think its good to show a female character who feels restricted with respect to desire and the art within her. I think some women will identify and it may feel liberating, or help create movement. And of course, thats where the fiction reactionaries come in. I shouldnt be so pompous as to think that something I have created could have some kind of affect. But to me, perhaps because Im a woman and mother (it may be nature or nurture or both), I dont see why you would put something out there if it wasnt for some good, for some use. And that is also tied in to the notion that it could be my compulsion and selfishness (much like an overbearing parent) that made me continue to write new stories, though it felt like love, but that it is finally the selfless love for the reader that allows me to stop creatingto allow the reader to create something of their own from the book or envision the next story or storiesto be individuated and truly the artist, to be free. Q This seems related to the whole reader response issue in the novel . . . A Yes. I say the book is alive. And in a way, the book is like a lover. It is also a meme (or memeplexwhat I call memesome). I, the author, am egoless; the words are not minetheyre this meme. And the words belong to the reader, and the reader is the artistcreating meaning and art through the reading. Q You say feministy, but sometimes you sound downright backwards about women in the novel. The scene with the woman walking behind Caleb, for example, youre not critical of ityou seem to romanticize it. A Well, first of all, the most interesting thing about people is their contradictions. I think thats why Ed and Calebs characters are interesting. I am putting those questions out there, because we have all felt them. I mean, I say something like, it was a walking dance which fulfilled something primal for them and though they both understood the sexist implications, they didnt care . . . Its dealing with the different layers again accepting and integrating them not trying to ban certain impulses or desires because we are told to. Is it bad or is she inferior because she is turned on by walking behind him? I dont know. I dont think so. If she feels free as a woman, then I dont see the problem. But I see the potential danger in this positionjust as there is potential danger in an EP/essentialist position. But Steven Pinker I think does the best job of explaining why it doesnt have to be dangerousand in fact, in the long run might do more good than harm. Q You play with the question of patterns . . . Why? A Well, for one, Gurdjieff, the basis for Rajingiev and Guerttiev, was interested in habits. And I guess I am too. The book is about these women who have recurring patterns in their relationships. And, of course, people do throughout their lifespanoften debilitatingly so. And I suppose a big question in standard social clinical psychology is how do you break these patterns? But Im not only interested in patterns as related to psychological processes/neuroses/habits, but also to questions of time, e.g. eternal recurrence. Would it all really be the same if we played it all back from the beginning? And can we change? And do we really have free will? And can we actually determine reality or has everything been set and were just living it out? The new physics gets at a lot of these issues . . . Q Why didnt you use Gurdjieff s name in the book? You use the real names of others A I didnt because many of the philosophical/spiritual ideas I wrote about in Sirens Song and some in Baby Theory are really not the ideas of Gurdjieff. Rajingiev and Guerttiev are not pseudonyms for Gurdjieff; they are names for a fictional sage. Yet Gurdjieffians will certainly recognize some of Gurdjieff in them, thats true. Q What does the title mean, Trine Erotic? A Well, trine means three . . . and three is important throughout the book. Erotic refers to Eros . . . love (though also it has a sexual component). But the first meaning of the title is three love stories: three loves. (Trine Erotic= Love Stories, Sirens Song, and Baby Theory . . . Also Conscious Shock = soft kill, Red Love, and Sirens Song.) In addition, there are couplet stories that make a final third story: Conscious Shock and Third Force make Trine Erotic; soft kill and Red Love make Love Stories; Love Stories and Sirens Song make Conscious Shock . . .) And there is a feeling that Third Force isnt over and that Trine Erotic itself is part of something . . . Three-love is also for a sort of triune theory of love I have in the book: evolution, experience, culture. The notion that our problems stem from the conflict between our different layers. So, for example, if I were a man, I might feel an attraction for women who are heavier or who have a particular hip-to-waist ratio than what the culture tells me is attractive. This conflict of impulses and desires tends to clog feelings, or at least makes people feel disjointed. It is hard to put it all together. Its hard to know what it is the I really desires; what is more true for the self? Three is everywhere in TE. Its also a Fibonacci number, and Id say just about every number in the book is a Fibonacci number. And trine is also an astrological concept, relating to the relationship of planets. Q Whats a Fibonacci number? A Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician who discovered an interesting series of numbers, which are now called Fibonacci numbers. It begins with 1. You then add one to that to get 2. You then add those two numbers together to get 3. Then 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13; 8+13=21 . . . and so on . . . Whats interesting about these numbers is that the ratio between any of the pairs of numbers is approximately the golden ratio or the golden number, which is around 1.618. And whats interesting about the golden number is that artists throughout history have used it in their art. (The golden mean, the golden section, or golden ratio is most beautiful to our eyes.) In addition, what is interesting about the actual numbers themselves in the series is that they can be found in naturein particular in the spirals of things. So, if you count the spirals in a pine cone or the seeds in a sunflower, or the spirals of a shell, you will find you get a Fibonacci number. . . . 13 rows of spirals, or 21, like that. As well, the human face shows a lot of correspondence to Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio. . . . And this is interesting because there is a lot of work being done in EP and other fields to suggest that there is a correlation between symmetry and what is thought of as beautiful, with developmental health and stability, perhaps, even fertility and fecundity. And perhaps, somehow, there is a relationship between the mathematics of outward beauty and inner. Q Why use Fibonacci numbers? A I think theres a magical quality to the numbers, no question. They seem most natural. Its like choosing between painting your wall a flat yellow or painting it yellow with a mixture of white, with a subtle Lazure technique, to create a feeling of softness and naturalness, what youd find in nature. In addition, mathematics is important throughout much of the book. I talk about there being a math to everything; about the algorithms of our adapted mind; write about how the nameless protagonist adds everything up: Calebs lies, his Heliosen ways, his amorality . . . Q In the book, you sometimes refer to TE as metafiction. Why? A Oh, because its about fictionits a story about a story about a story. And because its concerned with ideas about fiction and writing. Also, because I go outside of the fiction and interject as the author about the work. Its meta in a lot of ways. Im interested in fictionthe craft of writing. I see TE as a triptych. Each section, each story has a different style. Some stories are crafted more than others, but so far, readers have told me they dont see a difference. To me theres a huge difference, as far as craft and complexity between some of the stories . . . Q Which ones? A I dont want to say. I want to get virgin feedback still . . . I do want to say this: I dont think of myself as a writerI think of myself more as a synthesizera synthesizer of memes. If my writing were a singing voice it would be closer to Leonard Cohens than Pavarottisor Joan Osbornes than Kathleen Battles. The tradition in fiction is, of course, pre-film, and has mostly been concerned with painting mental pictures for readers. But Im more interested in representing and transmitting ideas than I am pictures. My emphasis is on conveying meaning up frontthats where I put my energy. I realize meaning is also conveyed subtly, but its just not enough for me. I have more I want to convey. And, of course, I also do it in the traditional wayI dont think it would be a novel otherwise. Also, thats not to say Im not interested in language. I am very much. And I have a pretty good ear, so I care very much about the sounds. Sometimes I would spend half an hour on one sentence. For example, every sentence fragment is there for a reason. I could have chosen instead a semi-colon or a connecting word or an em-dash, etc., but for me it was a question of sound and meaning and even a visual impression. And of course, sometimes, my first writing would be just right and I could leave it alone. That was always nice. _______________________ [4]Alice Andrews has taught both writing and psychology (and sometimes both at the same time) with an evolutionary lens for over a decade. Currently she's teaching "Social Psychology " and "Personality and Psychotherapy" at the [5]State University of New York at New Paltz. Alice is also an editor and writer (books and magazines), and was the associate editor of [6]Chronogram from 2000-2002. She is the author of [7]Trine Erotic, a novel which explores evolutionary psychology. References 1. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/ 2. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/meta-seductionfiction.htm 3. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/books.htm 4. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/andrews 5. http://www.newpaltz.edu/ 6. http://www.chronogram.com/ 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587761211/qid=1029245378/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/trineerotic-20%22%3ETrine%20Erotic%3C/A%3E/102-5304949-9560913 _______________________________________________ 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 Thu Jun 16 13:51:23 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 06:51:23 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Trunk monkey- pretty funny Message-ID: <01C5723F.D02D1A10.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: video/x-ms-wmv Size: 2236865 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Jun 16 14:27:28 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:27:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] "self" control In-Reply-To: <200506161354.j5GDsoR05288@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050616142728.68173.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>Parents want-- and youth need-- more uplifting messages of self-control from abstinence education, not less.<< --Problem is, "self control" is a bit paradoxical when the self WANTS to "lose control". Kids don't just say "oops, I had sex." They *want* to have sex. Those who avoid sex are generally the ones who have the fewest opportunities, are shy, or have enough attention from the opposite sex not to put as much stress on sex as a sign of approval. Guilt is probably not the highest motivator, and fear of social disapproval is only effective in pushing people to hide their "sins", not prevent them. The kids who are most likely to TAKE a virginity pledge are those who aren't giving up as much, the ones who feel the dating pool is stacked against them. They increase their value on the marriage market by taking the pledge. A common sense move. Those who have more opportunity and don't stand to lose their social status aren't going to take a virginity pledge, and if they do, they won't take it seriously. A parent or peer group saying "Control yourself, don't have sex!" is sending a mixed message. What they're REALLY saying is "don't have sex, because we don't want you to." "Control yourself" implies that your true self, your *valid* self, wants for you what we want for you. It's an odd sort of double bind. Warning kids about disease, pregnancy and dysfunctional relationships is common sense. Sending the message that the group's sexual standards should control the individual while forcing the individual to convince himself or pretend that he's doing it for his own benefit rather than to avoid scandal, is probably not as healthy. Whether virginity pledges work or not, they teach a really bizarre value: that one's sexuality, one's virginity or lack of virginity, is the group's business. A girl on an ex-fundamentalism forum tells me that back when she was in a Christian school, a guy asked her in class if she was a virgin. She felt humiliated, almost raped. I tend to think sexuality should be private, between a person and his doctor, psychiatrist or priest. Or even his own business, period. Even if you're a teenager. Making it everyone's business seems intrusive to me. Then there's the sexual double standard... boys are given signals that say "Sex for you isn't such a big deal. But if a good girl goes wild, it's everyone's problem." It may be no wonder that girls in some subcultures learn to value their virginity as a sign of social approval and respect, rather than as a personal quality meant for someone special. The group uses disapproval, labeling some girls "sluts" while boys gain an aura of dangerousness that elevates their social status rather than punishing them. That's how real-world peer pressure works, and virginity pledges gain a sort of fascist tint when viewed in light of how high school culture (especially in very male-dominated areas) actually functions. The parading of virginity in public is almost indecent, if you think about it, like bragging publicly about one's sex life. But the way social politics is used deliberately by puritannical adults to pressure kids, is downright tragic. Peer pressure is a volatile, cruel thing. It shouldn't be used as an instrument of reward and punishment to keep kids coloring inside the lines of the old book. If someone has a soulmate and wants to wait until marriage, that's a great thing. But it shouldn't be politicized in a way that makes others feel like pariahs. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 16 14:33:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:33:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself about my novel, Trine Erotic In-Reply-To: <00c501c5726b$dfa3faa0$6401a8c0@callastudios> References: <00c501c5726b$dfa3faa0$6401a8c0@callastudios> Message-ID: I'll have to look at Buss's book, Alice, except that I've abandoned reality and am reading only fiction now, at least as far as books go. The impression I get that most of EP talk about love is about short-term mating comes from the lists I take. There is plenty of talk about the need a woman has to turn a cad into a dad, but not much discussion of what long-term marriages are really like. It seems that they settle into what's called a "companionate" marriage and that infatuation has long since gone. But remember that marriages did not last a long time in the EEA, since lives themselves were short. Of course the literature on marriage is huge. There's so much variation that it's not possible to nail down an exact defintion of it, that is, to single out the necessary and sufficient ingredients. Everyone agrees that marriage in the Western world has become more and more based on love (which kind?) than the convenience and desires of family and others. On 2005-06-16, Alice Andrews opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 08:06:48 -0400 > From: Alice Andrews > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: Premise Checker > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for > myself about my novel, Trine Erotic > > First of all, I want to thank you, > Frank, for appreciating my novel and > for writing and posting this...I feel > a lot of support from this list, which > isn't nothing! Sure it's electronic, > but it's still real and I feel real > appreciation. > > So, just to correct a few things: > Of course I know about multi-level > selectionism--how could I not! And I > think it's good stuff and it makes > sense to me! I'm a supporter. > In fact, I'll be meeting with David > Wilson in about 3 weeks (with others) > to discuss the possibility of a new > Evolutionary Studies program here at > New Paltz. Very exciting! > > You wrote: > What's also missing from the novel, as > it is from evolutionary psychology > generally, is the desire for a > long-term monogamous commitment, which > is > a quite different kind of love. > > > Hmm. Let me say this: The novel deals > with some love themes: passionate love > v companionate love (what i call 'hot' > love and 'warm' love) and selfless > love and selfish love, and also > romantic soul-mate love, short-term > mating and long-term mating, among > other love themes. > It's true that many of the female > characters "desire" romantic love and > don't care how they get it or for how > long, whether it is for 10 years or a > year. I also think some (if not all) > the female characters DO desire > monogamous enduring relationships...As > well, there is plenty of talk about > "long-term, monogamous commitment" I > think. > But anyway, what drives any story is a > quest/motivation/striving... The > female characters DO want love. > In fact, if you think about it, 3 out > of the 4 female characters DO end up > in long-term, monogamous, committed > relationships... > > Also, what do you mean when you say > the > "desire for a long-term monogamous > commitment" is missing from EP? I'm > not sure I understand. Do you mean > that evolutionary psychologists talk > too much about short-term mating? I > think that's the popular culture's > EP.... > Just as an interesting example: David > Buss, in his EP textbook, devotes 58 > pages to male and female long-term > mating and only 23 pages to male and > female short-term mating. > > Well, again, thank you for supporting > me, Frank.... > All best!!!! > Alice > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Premise Checker > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 3:31 > PM > Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: > Playing with Myself: Questions for > myself about my novel, Trine Erotic > > > Our list member has written the very > first novel written around > evolutionary psychology ideas, and I > can recommend it highly. It is > composed of stories with stories, > and you're never quite sure what the > reality is. It's like postmodernism > in this way. And you wonder to what > extent the novel is autobiographical > or about the person the author wished > she were or just made up of > creatures that exemplify what > evolutionary > psychology demands that they do. > > But it's quite clear that the female > protagonists very much want men they > can bat ideas around with, though > there's no place for the love of ideas > for their own sake in evolutionary > psychology. The narrators seem to know > this, though they want to transcend > these limits. Gordon Tullock, an > economics professor I had, thought > that altruism in humans was the result > of an evolutionary defect: we had > not been humans long enough for > altruism > to have been weeded out! I'm sure > he'd worry that Alice is defective, > being much too in love with ideas. > > One answer, that she apparently > doesn't know about, is that evolution > takes place on many levels, not just > at the level of the gene. This makes > group selection possible and makes > room for altruism. The book here is > Elliott Sober and David Sloan > Wilson, _Unto Others_, which is slowly > getting accepted in the biology > community. (Paradigm shifts do take > time, > you know.) > > Another answer is that, however much > the overall selfish gene theory is > true, our desires are indirect > mechanisms to promote the overall goal > and > that there are many of these > desires. Steven Reiss came up with 16 > basic > desires that are relatively > independent of one another. Desiring > to raise > (one's own) children is largely > independent of romance (which includes > the neighboring desires of wanting > coitus and of wanting aesthetic > experiences. Why the latter, I'm not > sure, but factor analysis puts the > three of them together.). And both > are independent of curiosity, which is > at the top of my list and my wife's > (I am sure) and at least near the top > of Alice's. > > What's also missing from the novel, > as it is from evolutionary psychology > generally, is the desire for a > long-term monogamous commitment, which > is > a quite different kind of love. > > Note to myself: you've got to get > around to buying and reading C.S. > Lewis' > _The Four Loves_. You shouldn't let > your atheism keep you from the book. > After all, Moses and Solomon (less > so Jesus) were proto-sociobiologists. > > --------------------- > > Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: > Questions for myself about my novel, > Trine > Erotic > http://www.entelechyjournal.com/playing_with_myself.htm > > [This is the first novel written > from the perspective of evolutionary > psychology. I am finishing it up now > and am enjoying its playfulness > exceedingly.] > > Q What are some of the major > questions you try to deal with in > Trine > Erotic? > > A Well, there are quite a few: > Is there free will? What is the will? > What is and is there a single Ia > self? Are we determined by our genes? > Can we (and how and what affect > does it have to) go against our > nature? What is the unconscious? > Is it what evolutionary psychologists > refer to as our universal human > nature? Or is it something else? And > how does it work? And is there a > universal human nature? How does > culture influence us? What is > art? What is love? And is there > something beyond our > evolutionary, deep reflexessome kind > of global > brain, as Howard Bloom suggests, > that is motivating us? > > Q You dedicate the book to every > womans desire and the art within her > and to alpha males everywhere. > Does that mean its not for other > malessay, Beta? > > A No, no. Its sort of > tongue-in-cheeky. Im playing with the > evolutionary theory that art is > displayed as a mating signal/strategy. > So Im saying: Here is this piece > of artand, naturally, I would want to > signal the highest type of man. > Of course, alpha male is subjective > when it comes to humansfor apes > it may be just a factor of strength or > posing. For me, an alpha male > doesnt always look like an alpha; a > man > could be an alpha and work in a > factory but be an original thinker and > want to lead or organize people. > (David M. Busss work explains this, > actually.) But anyway, its not > just for alpha males. Its for all > males. But its particularly for > men who are creative and deep and > interested in figuring out the > world . . . understanding human > nature, > and more. And it's for females > too! > > Q Why did you write the book? > > A Well, for one, I was compelled > to write. And there are a lot of > other reasons as well. But, I > have to say that I found the fiction I > was reading leaving me cold. I > just found myself not getting turned > on > by all that good literature. I > wanted to be turned on. I saw the > appeal; saw the code of it. You > know, theres something here in this > story but Im not going to let on > to what it is because youre supposed > to get it because were so smart, > and good fiction shows and doesnt > tell. And Im not going to even > attempt to affect you in any way > because that would be pompous > and sentimental and ultimately > ineffective. And were so > sophisticated and subtle. I guess > these are > some of the rules of fiction. > Like how you shouldnt write out ideas. > And its related to the > seduction/anti-seduction stuff I write > about in > the book. Most modern fiction is > quite seductive, in the > Baudrillardian sense, by trying > or appearing not to seduce. I think my > style is anti-anti-seductionor > [2]meta-seduction. I am possibly > "seducing" by going against a > seductive "hiding" strategy. For > example, I can choose to wear > revealing clothing (which isnt > seductive) or less revealing > clothing, which concealswhich is > seductive. But I can wear the > revealing clothes as a reaction to the > seductive strategy, which says, > Im not trying to seduce with the > not-trying-to-seduce clothes. > And this is seductive in its own waya > hiding from hiding. Of course, > the revealing clothing looks the > sameits just a matter of > intention. And only a few will be able > to > read the code or signal. I > realize this is made confusing because > I am > using Baudrillards sense of the > word. In fact, what you have are three > things working: seduction (in > its denotation), anti-seduction, and > anti-anti-seduction or > meta-seduction. Dont tell me Im > confusing > YOU!?? > > Im not terribly affected by most > fiction (though I know Im in the > minority). And Im not proud of > that fact. Its just the way I am. Im > not very subtle. I like to read > nonfiction. Otherwise I feel like Im > wasting my time. Id rather be > doing something or writing or learning > something. Unfortunately I dont > have that feeling (that Im learning > something, etc.) when I read > most fiction. And perhaps that is a > fault > of mine. Perhaps Im just not > refined enough or my personality > doesnt > allow me to slow down. Maybe it > has something to do with the fact that > Im right-brain dominant. I > really see a difference though, > between > people who love fiction and me. > And, thankfully, Ive stopped worrying > that theres something wrong with > me in this. > > For the record, I dont place a > value on one or the otherseductive > fiction (which is what is > accepted and favored) versus > meta-seductive > fiction (fiction which tells you > what its doing, openly wants to > affect, deals with ideas, etc.). > > But to answer your question: I > wrote a book that I was wanting to > read. > > Q Is there any fiction you do > like? > > A Oh, of course. I loved Smillas > Sense of Snow, liked Jeanette > Wintersons Sexing the Cherry, > D.H. Lawrenceliked Kundera when I was > younger Dostoevsky, John Berger, > Hermann Hesse, and [3]there are > others > > Q You mention wanting to affect > the reader. What kind of affect are > you hoping for? > > A Any, I suppose. Nietzsche > wrote that the effect of works of art > is > to excite the state that creates > art . . . he says its intoxication . > . . First and foremost, I want > the reader to get some pleasure from > it. After that, its mostly a > working out of some of the questions > which seem to haunt us, stuff > about love. And I suppose I want it to > be a part of the readers working > it out, like a friend. There is also > the sort of feministy thing > about desire and art in women. I > suppose I > would like TE to inspire women > to let loose their desire and art > more. > In Sirens Song, the nameless > protagonist says her father told her > that > the point about art was to share > itabout an audience. Which reminds me > of a scene in Bride of the Wind, > a film about Alma Mahler I just saw > on video. Alma says to her > husband Mahler, I wish youd conduct > one of > my songs. And he says, One of > your songs? . . . Perhaps one day in > rehearsal. And she says, > Rehearsal? But then there wouldnt be > an > audience. And he says, Ill be > there. Arent I enough? And Im > interested > in this. Because despite the > womens rights movement and so much > liberation and so many women > artists, I still think there is this > thing within us (women) . . . a > resistance . . . and I question its > etiology. If such a resistance > existsor rather, a relative lack of > desire to broadcast compared to > menis it innate? That is, is it > related to biology, to the > evolutionary theory that men try to > broadcast to as many women as > possible, since it is in their genetic > interest to do so? (Or since > they are the product of millions of > years > of evolution which ensured such > a tendency persisted?) Or is it > cultural? Or some admixture? > Again, I question my premise as well. > Im > interested in trying to uncover > whether or not such a tendency exists. > I certainly have felt my > relative lack of desire to broadcast. > But of > course, that could have > everything to do with other things: > personality, conditioning, stage > of life, etc. > > About my Sirens Song character: > her feeling had always been that it > was something that had to do > with her (whatever her art was, be it > painting or writing); she didnt > have an impulse to broadcast it. And > so, there is this question about > what art is, and its purpose and > function. And, in some sense, > the book is my grappling with deciding > to share whatever it is in meand > that in my sharing of it, there is > meaning. There is a dialectics > of desire, as Barthes saysand I quote > him at the beginning of Sirens > Song. For me, I couldnt and wouldnt > want to put the book out there > if I didnt think it would serve some > kind of purpose. And of course, > art is purposeful. It is motivated by > all sorts of deep, powerful > urges. The artist experiences it as an > outpouring of some kind of force > that has to be expelled, a feeling of > compulsion. And then theres that > choice an artist makesdo you go mad > or stay somewhat functionally > neurotic, or do you release and > create? > (The existential problem of > whether or not it is a choice, I cant > answer. My answer probably > changes with my mood.) > > But also, there is the EP theory > of art as signal. And in some ways > that is also about survival. So > I see art as a saviorfor the artist > but also for the audience, of > course. Once I decided that Trine > Erotic > was for an audience, it took on > a whole new light. It was outward > directed and relating, and it > was pleasurable in a way that before > it > hadnt been (that is, writing for > myself). So much goes unsaid in the > culture. Most of us (except > perhaps for some hard-core feminists) > think women are free to do their > thing. We have this sense, > historically and culturally, > that women are now free. Yet I dont > really think so. I think its > good to show a female character who > feels > restricted with respect to > desire and the art within her. I think > some > women will identify and it may > feel liberating, or help create > movement. And of course, thats > where the fiction reactionaries come > in. I shouldnt be so pompous as > to think that something I have created > could have some kind of affect. > But to me, perhaps because Im a woman > and mother (it may be nature or > nurture or both), I dont see why you > would put something out there if > it wasnt for some good, for some use. > And that is also tied in to the > notion that it could be my compulsion > and selfishness (much like an > overbearing parent) that made me > continue to write new stories, > though it felt like love, but that it > is finally the selfless love for > the reader that allows me to stop > creatingto allow the reader to > create something of their own from the > book or envision the next story > or storiesto be individuated and truly > the artist, to be free. > > Q This seems related to the > whole reader response issue in the > novel . > . . > > > A Yes. I say the book is alive. > And in a way, the book is like a > lover. It is also a meme (or > memeplexwhat I call memesome). I, the > author, am egoless; the words > are not minetheyre this meme. And the > words belong to the reader, and > the reader is the artistcreating > meaning and art through the > reading. > > Q You say feministy, but > sometimes you sound downright > backwards about > women in the novel. The scene > with the woman walking behind Caleb, > for > example, youre not critical of > ityou seem to romanticize it. > > A Well, first of all, the most > interesting thing about people is > their > contradictions. I think thats > why Ed and Calebs characters are > interesting. I am putting those > questions out there, because we have > all felt them. I mean, I say > something like, it was a walking dance > which fulfilled something primal > for them and though they both > understood the sexist > implications, they didnt care . . . > Its dealing > with the different layers again > accepting and integrating them not > trying to ban certain impulses > or desires because we are told to. Is > it bad or is she inferior > because she is turned on by walking > behind > him? I dont know. I dont think > so. If she feels free as a woman, then > I dont see the problem. But I > see the potential danger in this > positionjust as there is > potential danger in an EP/essentialist > position. But Steven Pinker I > think does the best job of explaining > why it doesnt have to be > dangerousand in fact, in the long run > might > do more good than harm. > > Q You play with the question of > patterns . . . Why? > > A Well, for one, Gurdjieff, the > basis for Rajingiev and Guerttiev, was > interested in habits. And I > guess I am too. The book is about > these > women who have recurring > patterns in their relationships. And, > of > course, people do throughout > their lifespanoften debilitatingly so. > And I suppose a big question in > standard social clinical psychology is > how do you break these patterns? > But Im not only interested in > patterns as related to > psychological > processes/neuroses/habits, but > also to questions of time, e.g. > eternal recurrence. Would it all > really be the same if we played > it all back from the beginning? And > can we change? And do we really > have free will? And can we actually > determine reality or has > everything been set and were just > living it > out? The new physics gets at a > lot of these issues . . . > > Q Why didnt you use Gurdjieff s > name in the book? You use the real > names of others > > A I didnt because many of the > philosophical/spiritual ideas I wrote > about in Sirens Song and some in > Baby Theory are really not the ideas > of Gurdjieff. Rajingiev and > Guerttiev are not pseudonyms for > Gurdjieff; they are names for a > fictional sage. Yet Gurdjieffians will > certainly recognize some of > Gurdjieff in them, thats true. > > Q What does the title mean, > Trine Erotic? > > A Well, trine means three . . . > and three is important throughout the > book. Erotic refers to Eros . . > . love (though also it has a sexual > component). But the first > meaning of the title is three love > stories: > three loves. (Trine Erotic= Love > Stories, Sirens Song, and Baby Theory > . . . Also Conscious Shock = > soft kill, Red Love, and Sirens Song.) > In > addition, there are couplet > stories that make a final third story: > Conscious Shock and Third Force > make Trine Erotic; soft kill and Red > Love make Love Stories; Love > Stories and Sirens Song make Conscious > Shock . . .) > > And there is a feeling that > Third Force isnt over and that Trine > Erotic itself is part of > something . . . > > Three-love is also for a sort of > triune theory of love I have in the > book: evolution, experience, > culture. The notion that our problems > stem from the conflict between > our different layers. So, for example, > if I were a man, I might feel an > attraction for women who are heavier > or who have a particular > hip-to-waist ratio than what the > culture > tells me is attractive. This > conflict of impulses and desires tends > to > clog feelings, or at least makes > people feel disjointed. It is hard to > put it all together. Its hard to > know what it is the I really desires; > what is more true for the self? > > Three is everywhere in TE. Its > also a Fibonacci number, and Id say > just about every number in the > book is a Fibonacci number. And trine > is also an astrological concept, > relating to the relationship of > planets. > > Q Whats a Fibonacci number? > > A Fibonacci was an Italian > mathematician who discovered an > interesting > series of numbers, which are now > called Fibonacci numbers. It begins > with 1. You then add one to that > to get 2. You then add those two > numbers together to get 3. Then > 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13; 8+13=21 . . . > and so on . . . Whats > interesting about these numbers is > that the > ratio between any of the pairs > of numbers is approximately the golden > ratio or the golden number, > which is around 1.618. And whats > interesting about the golden > number is that artists throughout > history > have used it in their art. (The > golden mean, the golden section, or > golden ratio is most beautiful > to our eyes.) In addition, what is > interesting about the actual > numbers themselves in the series is > that > they can be found in naturein > particular in the spirals of things. > So, > if you count the spirals in a > pine cone or the seeds in a sunflower, > or the spirals of a shell, you > will find you get a Fibonacci number. > . > . . 13 rows of spirals, or 21, > like that. As well, the human face > shows a lot of correspondence to > Fibonacci numbers and the golden > ratio. . . . And this is > interesting because there is a lot of > work > being done in EP and other > fields to suggest that there is a > correlation between symmetry and > what is thought of as beautiful, with > developmental health and > stability, perhaps, even fertility and > fecundity. And perhaps, somehow, > there is a relationship between the > mathematics of outward beauty > and inner. > > Q Why use Fibonacci numbers? > > A I think theres a magical > quality to the numbers, no question. > They > seem most natural. Its like > choosing between painting your wall a > flat > yellow or painting it yellow > with a mixture of white, with a subtle > Lazure technique, to create a > feeling of softness and naturalness, > what youd find in nature. In > addition, mathematics is important > throughout much of the book. I > talk about there being a math to > everything; about the algorithms > of our adapted mind; write about how > the nameless protagonist adds > everything up: Calebs lies, his > Heliosen > ways, his amorality . . . > > Q In the book, you sometimes > refer to TE as metafiction. Why? > > A Oh, because its about > fictionits a story about a story about > a > story. And because its concerned > with ideas about fiction and writing. > Also, because I go outside of > the fiction and interject as the > author > about the work. Its meta in a > lot of ways. Im interested in > fictionthe > craft of writing. I see TE as a > triptych. Each section, each story has > a different style. Some stories > are crafted more than others, but so > far, readers have told me they > dont see a difference. To me theres a > huge difference, as far as craft > and complexity between some of the > stories . . . > > Q Which ones? > > A I dont want to say. I want to > get virgin feedback still . . . > > I do want to say this: I dont > think of myself as a writerI think of > myself more as a synthesizera > synthesizer of memes. If my writing > were > a singing voice it would be > closer to Leonard Cohens than > Pavarottisor > Joan Osbornes than Kathleen > Battles. The tradition in fiction is, > of > course, pre-film, and has mostly > been concerned with painting mental > pictures for readers. But Im > more interested in representing and > transmitting ideas than I am > pictures. My emphasis is on conveying > meaning up frontthats where I > put my energy. I realize meaning is > also > conveyed subtly, but its just > not enough for me. I have more I want > to > convey. And, of course, I also > do it in the traditional wayI dont > think it would be a novel > otherwise. Also, thats not to say Im > not > interested in language. I am > very much. And I have a pretty good > ear, > so I care very much about the > sounds. Sometimes I would spend half > an > hour on one sentence. For > example, every sentence fragment is > there > for a reason. I could have > chosen instead a semi-colon or a > connecting > word or an em-dash, etc., but > for me it was a question of sound and > meaning and even a visual > impression. And of course, sometimes, > my > first writing would be just > right and I could leave it alone. That > was > always nice. > _______________________ > > [4]Alice Andrews has taught both > writing and psychology (and sometimes > both at the same time) with an > evolutionary lens for over a decade. > Currently she's teaching "Social > Psychology " and "Personality and > Psychotherapy" at the [5]State > University of New York at New Paltz. > Alice is also an editor and > writer (books and magazines), and was > the > associate editor of > [6]Chronogram from 2000-2002. She is > the author of > [7]Trine Erotic, a novel which > explores evolutionary psychology. > > References > > 1. > http://www.entelechyjournal.com/ > 2. > http://www.entelechyjournal.com/meta-seductionfiction.htm > 3. > http://www.entelechyjournal.com/books.htm > 4. > http://www.entelechyjournal.com/andrews > 5. http://www.newpaltz.edu/ > 6. http://www.chronogram.com/ > 7. > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587761211/qid=1029245378/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/trineerotic-20%22%3ETrine%20Erotic%3C/A%3E/102-5304949-9560913 > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Jun 16 16:19:17 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 12:19:17 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage pool shrinking? In-Reply-To: <42AF3D0E.70305@earthlink.net> References: <20050614182944.85965.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <42AF3D0E.70305@earthlink.net> Message-ID: <42B1A685.8070500@uconn.edu> What about the idea that marriage is now more of an option instead of an obligation and that drives the rates lower by increasing the selective criteria for a lifelong partner including the criteria of love? Christian G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > Michael, Here an alarming statistic: since 1970, the marriage rate is > down by 35%. During this period we've viewed the impact of "feminism" > on both the workplace and the classroom. We've also watched > co-habitation for young people replacing traditional marriage vows and > advances in birth control measures preventing the arrival of > unplanned/unwanted offspring. Many women delay marriage until they > finish their education and those entering a PhD program place their > studies far ahead of birthing children. Medical advances allow even > post-menopausal women to give birth, something clearly unheard of for > past generations. Psychologically a 50% divorce rate has to have an > enormous impact on young marriage especially since many divorced women > with children fall into poverty. Your evaluation has sparked a > discussion but in some circles could be seen as fairly naive. > Nevertheless, it offers food for thought. > > Gerry > > Michael Christopher wrote: > >> Gerry says: >> >> >>>> I know way too many females post 30 who cannot find >>>> >> >> any likely prospects. Then again, there are many post >> 30 males who don't wish to enter the marriage scene. I think the >> problem is greater than "no one >> available". Maybe an examination of the "why" might >> enlighten the question.<< >> >> --Possibly because everyone has "issues" that >> contaminate relationships. Fundamentalists and very >> sensitive/shy people try to solve that problem by >> being very selective and not getting heavily involved >> until they are certain they've found the person they >> want. Others have sexual relationships that don't >> involve enough emotion to risk rejection or loss of >> face. Others get married early, discover that marriage >> isn't what they expected it to be, and leave when they >> can no longer handle the obligations and routines. In >> poor areas, many women find they have better earning >> potential than the men, and reject marriage because >> they can afford to. The perception that "all men are >> dogs" or that "all women are whores who want your >> money" can make a mess of things as well, with many >> people exhibiting "borderline" traits in relationships >> (swinging from "you are my god/goddess" to "you ruined >> my life", grandiosity and dashed expectations, etc). >> After a few rounds of that, a lot of people decide >> it's just safer and less draining to have less complex >> relationships. >> There are two ways to address that: either improve >> communication between the sexes and give them tools >> for preventing catastrophic rifts in relationships, or >> create a sense of being a tribe, with romantic >> relationships on a lower priority level. If a single >> relationship means everything, it's easier to get >> disillusioned when minor obstacles accumulate, and >> it's easier to explode in rage if you feel betrayed. >> Romantic triangles dramatically affect people's sense >> of status and belonging, and creating a sense of a >> tribal safety net might even things out and make >> relationships less volatile. >> I'm not sure how fear of nuclear war and terrorism >> will affect marriage patterns... will people marry as >> soon as they feel safe (maybe feeling restless later >> when less afraid) or will they avoid marriage in order >> to avoid the pain of loss? >> >> Michael >> >> >> >> >> >> >> __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Have fun online >> with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! >> http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ~ I G N O R A N C E ~ The trouble with ignorance is precisely that if a person lacks virtue and knowledge, he's perfectly satisfied with the way he is. If a person isn't aware of a lack, he can not desire the thing which he isn't aware of lacking. Symposium (204a), Plato _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From Thrst4knw at aol.com Thu Jun 16 17:50:39 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 13:50:39 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: Playing with Myself: Questions for myself abo... Message-ID: <8d.292c1d77.2fe315ef@aol.com> I'll add my voice to Frank's in recommending Alice's novel "Trine Erotic." Here's the review I posted to Amazon in 2002 ... Witty, wise, and wonderful: brings biology back to life !, March 20, 2002 Reviewer:Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - This is something brand new to me and which caught me completely by surprise--a biologically informed love story. One of those wonderful books that takes useful, interesting intellectual ideas and makes them real and palpable in people's lives. The book is filled with delightfully primal themes voiced in a very modern idiom. It doesn't just tug at your emotions, it tugs at them through your brain by weaving a nest of stories that interlock and share meanings. This is not biology in the old sense of simple "animal instincts" or even just the recent sense of selfish genes and the mathematics of human relationship games. It is also biology informed by our modern understanding of how we create and transmit meaning through words. The roles of the "meme" or fuzzy unit of culture, feature prominently as conceptual undercurrents here. Then the author takes it way beyond being a unit of culture and illustrates by her own masterful example how it is also an agent of human transformation. Many people talk about how human beings are linked by their stories, but in Trine Erotic, the author demonstrates just how fundamental a mode of communication the story can be. Her characters reveal the deep strategies behind their feelings and behaviors, while trying to sort them out from their excuses for their own behaviors. Through her own storytelling, Alice Andrews seduces the reader into layer after layer of change in their own understanding, all the while explaining what she is doing. This is a relatively new and interesting form of introspective art that both inspires and teaches. Two problems ... we aren't used to art being quite so aware of its own role, especially in scientific terms, and we usually aren't comfortable with women consciously cutting through the haze of erotic games to see their own relentless Darwinian logic. It's exciting and a bit disconcerting as well to see female sexuality both revealed and unleashed in this light. Andrews's female leads have the terrifying but exciting freedom we wish we had, while still being immersed in misgivings of their own making, trying to sort out complex webs of feeling and what it all means. Not only did I find this book a delight, but I've put it on my list of books to read when people want to learn about how themes of evolutionary biology can be applied to real life. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jun 16 19:19:47 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 12:19:47 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage pool shrinking? In-Reply-To: <42B1A685.8070500@uconn.edu> References: <20050614182944.85965.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <42AF3D0E.70305@earthlink.net> <42B1A685.8070500@uconn.edu> Message-ID: <42B1D0D3.8080509@earthlink.net> I believe you could be correct that today young people consider marriage as an option and not an obligation but I think this may be true for women with higher educations and those (of both sexes) who prefer living in a metropolitan area vs the suburbs or rural areas of which there still remains a huge swath in our country. Amongst non-college females or those without professional careers, I still think marriage is considered the only option they have to leave the family nest. For males from certain ethnic groups, especially those that promote the importance of a matchmaker, marriage is considered the only option for success in the business or academic world. Gerry Christian Rauh wrote: > What about the idea that marriage is now more of an option instead of > an obligation and that drives the rates lower by increasing the > selective criteria for a lifelong partner including the criteria of love? > > Christian > > G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >> Michael, Here an alarming statistic: since 1970, the marriage rate >> is down by 35%. During this period we've viewed the impact of >> "feminism" on both the workplace and the classroom. We've also >> watched co-habitation for young people replacing traditional marriage >> vows and advances in birth control measures preventing the arrival of >> unplanned/unwanted offspring. Many women delay marriage until they >> finish their education and those entering a PhD program place their >> studies far ahead of birthing children. Medical advances allow even >> post-menopausal women to give birth, something clearly unheard of for >> past generations. Psychologically a 50% divorce rate has to have an >> enormous impact on young marriage especially since many divorced >> women with children fall into poverty. Your evaluation has sparked a >> discussion but in some circles could be seen as fairly naive. >> Nevertheless, it offers food for thought. >> >> Gerry >> >> Michael Christopher wrote: >> >>> Gerry says: >>> >>> >>>>> I know way too many females post 30 who cannot find >>>>> >>>> >>> >>> any likely prospects. Then again, there are many post >>> 30 males who don't wish to enter the marriage scene. I think the >>> problem is greater than "no one >>> available". Maybe an examination of the "why" might >>> enlighten the question.<< >>> >>> --Possibly because everyone has "issues" that >>> contaminate relationships. Fundamentalists and very >>> sensitive/shy people try to solve that problem by >>> being very selective and not getting heavily involved >>> until they are certain they've found the person they >>> want. Others have sexual relationships that don't >>> involve enough emotion to risk rejection or loss of >>> face. Others get married early, discover that marriage >>> isn't what they expected it to be, and leave when they >>> can no longer handle the obligations and routines. In >>> poor areas, many women find they have better earning >>> potential than the men, and reject marriage because >>> they can afford to. The perception that "all men are >>> dogs" or that "all women are whores who want your >>> money" can make a mess of things as well, with many >>> people exhibiting "borderline" traits in relationships >>> (swinging from "you are my god/goddess" to "you ruined >>> my life", grandiosity and dashed expectations, etc). >>> After a few rounds of that, a lot of people decide >>> it's just safer and less draining to have less complex >>> relationships. >>> There are two ways to address that: either improve >>> communication between the sexes and give them tools >>> for preventing catastrophic rifts in relationships, or >>> create a sense of being a tribe, with romantic >>> relationships on a lower priority level. If a single >>> relationship means everything, it's easier to get >>> disillusioned when minor obstacles accumulate, and >>> it's easier to explode in rage if you feel betrayed. >>> Romantic triangles dramatically affect people's sense >>> of status and belonging, and creating a sense of a >>> tribal safety net might even things out and make >>> relationships less volatile. >>> I'm not sure how fear of nuclear war and terrorism >>> will affect marriage patterns... will people marry as >>> soon as they feel safe (maybe feeling restless later >>> when less afraid) or will they avoid marriage in order >>> to avoid the pain of loss? >>> >>> Michael >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Have fun >>> online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! >>> http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 Fri Jun 17 00:57:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:57:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Meditation 'Brain Training" Clues Message-ID: Meditation 'brain training' clues http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/4613759.stm Published: 2005/06/13 00:15:38 GMT [Thanks to Laird for this.] Meditating monks are giving clues about how the brain's basic responses can be overridden, researchers say. Australian scientists gave Buddhist monks vision tests, where each eye was concurrently shown a different image. Most people's attention would automatically fluctuate - but the monks were able to focus on just one image. Writing in Current Biology, the scientists say their ability to override this basic mental response indicates how the brain can be trained. Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity Dr Toby Collins, Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind Researchers from the University of Queensland and the University of California, Berkley, studied 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks at mountain retreats in India. The monks had undergone between five and 54 years of meditative training. In the tests, they were given special goggles that meant they could see a different image with each eye. Normally, the brain would rapidly alternate between both - termed perceptual or visual rivalry. It had been thought that this was a basic and involuntary response. 'Move on' However, the monks - who carried out "one-point" meditation, where they focus attention on a single object or thought - were able to focus on one image. Monks who had undergone the longest and most intense meditative training were able to focus their attention on just one of the images for up to 12 minutes. Olivia Carter, of the University of Queensland, said: "The monks showed they were able to block out external information. "This is an initial step in understanding how their brains work. "It would now be good to carry out further tests using imaging techniques to see exactly what the differences are in the brains of the monks." She said that could direct researchers to a broader understanding of how meditation influences what happens in the brain when someone is deciding whether to give something their attention, and what happens when they choose not to dwell on bad news, or to calm down. Ms Carter added: "Buddhist monks often report that if something negative happens they are able to digest it and move on. "People who use meditation, including the Dalai Lama have said that the ability to control and direct your thoughts can be very beneficial in terms of mental health." Dr Toby Collins, of the Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind, told the BBC News website: "Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity." He said the idea that meditation trained the brain to attend to just one thing at a time fitted in with previous research. He added: "How that's done, we don't yet know. But studies using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) can show what's happening in the brain." From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 00:58:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:58:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Scientific Misbehavior Is Rampant, Study of 3, 000 Researchers Finds Message-ID: Scientific Misbehavior Is Rampant, Study of 3,000 Researchers Finds The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.17 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i41/41a01103.htm By RICHARD MONASTERSKY A survey of more than 3,000 scientists revealed that a large fraction are acting in ways that could compromise the integrity of research, according to a study published in Nature last week. A third of participants acknowledged that they had engaged in actions such as overlooking others' use of flawed data, failing to present data contradicting one's own work, and circumventing minor aspects of human-subject requirements. While those actions don't rise to the level of fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism -- the three cardinal sins of research -- they nonetheless signal problems in the world of science, says Brian C. Martinson, a research investigator at HealthPartners Research Foundation, a not-for-profit center in Minneapolis. "The larger share of behaviors reported to us are more corrosive than explosive -- more questionable research practices that could undermine the quality of the scientific record," says Mr. Martinson. He conducted the study with Melissa S. Anderson and Raymond de Vries, of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Mr. Martinson and his colleagues used a focus group of scientists to draw up a list of potentially questionable research practices. From that list, research-compliance officers from universities identified 10 behaviors that would "get a scientist into trouble at the institutional or federal level." The Minnesota investigators surveyed 3,247 midcareer scientists and postdoctoral research fellows supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. One in three of those who responded admitted to engaging in at least one of the 10 behaviors identified as potentially sanctionable by the university compliance officers. Of those, 15.5 percent said that they had changed "the design, methodology, or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source." "With as many as 33 percent of our survey respondents admitting to one or more of the top-ten behaviors, the scientific community can no longer remain complacent about such behaviors," conclude the study's authors. Other data collected by Mr. Martinson and his colleagues suggest that many scientists see inequities in science regarding obtaining grants, publishing papers, and earning promotions. The researchers also found a correlation between scientists who perceived injustice in the system and those who admitted misbehaving. Theodore O. Poehler, vice provost for research at the Johns Hopkins University, says that some of the questions in the survey were difficult to interpret, so it is hard to know exactly what survey respondents meant when they answered such questions. But the results overall are troubling, he says. "Those are problematic behaviors and not anything to be happy about." He says universities may need to train faculty better about appropriate research behavior and how to preserve the integrity of science. But he cautions against drawing up new regulations regarding questionable behavior because those categories are hard to define. "If we start getting into gray areas, this is going to be very difficult for universities and the government to regulate," he says. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 00:58:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:58:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Rebel in Japan Eyes Status in America Message-ID: A Rebel in Japan Eyes Status in America http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/books/14mura.html By [3]NORIMITSU ONISHI TOKYO, June 12 - If he has not achieved that status already, Haruki Murakami is on course to becoming the most widely read Japanese writer outside Japan, past or present. His novels (including "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle") have long been popular in China and South Korea, as well as Germany and the Baltic states. "Kafka on the Shore," his most recent novel, published in English by Alfred A. Knopf, made some best-seller lists in the United States earlier this year. That, and a film adaptation of his short story, "Tony Takitani," which is to open on July 29 in the United States, may give him the popular visibility in America he has long coveted. (In Japan, paperback copies of "Kafka" are still prominently displayed in bookstores, next to his more recent novel, "After Dark." ) Still, for all his success, Mr. Murakami, 55, speaks with a bitter edge toward the Japanese literary establishment, which has kept him at bay as much as he has distanced himself from it. "I don't consider myself part of the establishment," he said. "I don't deal with the Japanese literary circle or society at all. I live totally separate from them and still rebel against that world." Indeed in Japan, the traditional literary critics regard his novels as un-Japanese and look askance at their Western influences, ranging from the writing style to the American cultural references. (In the United States his work is taught in colleges and has been reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker.) During a recent interview at his office, a barefoot Mr. Murakami, wearing jeans and an orange shirt, spoke on a variety of subjects, from his place in contemporary literature to his writing habits. He appeared at ease, since he was preparing to take one of his periodic breaks, both from his writing and from Japan. He will spend the next year at Harvard as a writer in residence. "Kafka on the Shore" tells two alternating and ultimately converging stories. Mr. Murakami said he had become bored writing about urban dwellers in their 20's and 30's, and so in "Kafka" he decided to create two different types: a 15-year-old boy named Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to rural western Japan; and a mentally defective man in his 60's, Satoru Nakata, who has the ability to talk to cats. The novel has Mr. Murakami's signature surrealism, as fish rain from the sky, and characters named Johnnie Walker, a cat killer, and Colonel Sanders, a pimp, play critical roles. Like his other novels this one is filled with references to American culture, but Mr. Murakami said he regarded Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders, for instance, as worldwide references. "References such as Colonel Sanders or Johnnie Walker are in a way Western and everybody tends to fix their eyes on that," he said. "But as for the essence of a story, my stories have strong Japanese or Oriental elements. I think the structure of my stories is different from so-called Western stories." His storytelling, he said, "does not develop logically from A to B to C to D, but I don't intentionally break up or reverse episodes the way postmodernists do. For me, it is a natural development, but it is not logical." Mr. Murakami's attachment to American literature is longstanding. As a high school student in Kobe, in western Japan, he read, in the original, Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and Raymond Chandler. Like many Japanese of his generation, he became passionate about jazz and rock. "American culture," he said, "became ingrained in my body." By contrast, he never read Japanese novels until he was an adult. "I didn't read them when I was young because they were boring," he said. In Japanese, Mr. Murakami speaks in declarative, sometimes blunt, sentences that convey exactly what he means. He eschews the expressions that most Japanese use to soften their speech and that tend to make the language vague. His writing is infused with the same directness, which makes it easy to translate into English, but which many critics here say lack the richness of traditional literary Japanese. And there are readers here who say that his writing reads as if it had been translated from English into their own language. Mr. Murakami - who translated English-language novels into Japanese before he wrote them, and two years ago offered a new Japanese translation of "The Catcher in the Rye" - said he has chosen to write in a "neutral" Japanese, explaining: "There was a notion in Japan that novelists write in a certain style. I totally ignored it and created a new style. Therefore, in Japan, there was resistance. I was much criticized." When "Kafka" was published in Japan in 2002, it was popularly acclaimed. But some of this country's top literary critics dismissed it as an example of the impoverishment of Japanese literature, with language devoid of depth and richness. Among readers, however, his novels are wildly successful, allowing him to write fiction full time - something he said he had never imagined possible. He wrote "Kafka" in six months, starting, as he usually does, without a plan. He spent one year revising it. He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English. He said that his wife has told him that his personality changes when he is writing his first draft, and that he becomes difficult, nontalkative, tense and forgetful. "I write the same amount every day without any day off," he said. "I absolutely never look back and go forward. I hear Hemingway was like that." Unlike Hemingway, Mr. Murakami leads a healthy lifestyle. In the afternoons, to build up his stamina to keep writing, he works out for one or two hours. Whenever he is in Tokyo, he also visits old-record stores, especially ones in the youth mecca of Shibuya, which appears to be the unnamed setting of "After Dark," published last fall to relatively little attention here. A short novel, which has yet to be translated into English, "After Dark" centers on the stories of several characters over the course of one night as seen, neutrally and coldly, through a camera eye. The novel could be easily adapted into film, unlike Mr. Murakami's other novels. He has resisted selling his novels to filmmakers, though he said he would hand them over unconditionally to Woody Allen or David Lynch. He may now be enjoying the big break in the United States that he has worked for since spending two years in the country in the early 1990's. "I went to New York myself, found an agent myself, found a publisher myself, found an editor myself," Mr. Murakami said. "No Japanese novelist has ever done such things. But I thought I had to do that." He added: "I wanted to test my ability overseas, not being satisfied with being a famous novelist in Japan." From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jun 17 01:06:30 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:06:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] marriage In-Reply-To: <200506161800.j5GI0MR05234@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050617010630.51075.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Christian says: >>What about the idea that marriage is now more of an option instead of an obligation and that drives the rates lower by increasing the selective criteria for a lifelong partner including the criteria of love?<< --I think that's true. Those who marry young may lack the self-esteem to be more selective, and get divorced later on when they regain their confidence, build a career, etc. If circumstances change to the point where one's self image is changed, previous decisions made in a less confident state of mind are re-evaluated. As long as people marry young due to lack of experience or low self-esteem, of course they're going to get divorced, no matter how much guilt you pile on them for it. Guilt also comes from being married without love, having to fake it, and eventually the guilt of staying overrides the guilt of leaving. On the other hand, people are exposed to a mass media fantasy life that tells them, "you can be anything" and there isn't much preparation for married life when the infatuation phase is over. Nor does anyone seem to know how to become re-infatuated and experience the authenticity of genuine, flowing emotion with someone they know too well. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 01:19:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:19:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Snake Phobias, Moodiness and a Battle in Psychiatry Message-ID: Snake Phobias, Moodiness and a Battle in Psychiatry http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/health/psychology/14ment.html By [3]BENEDICT CAREY A college student becomes so compulsive about cleaning his dorm room that his grades begin to slip. An executive living in New York has a mortal fear of snakes but lives in Manhattan and rarely goes outside the city where he might encounter one. A computer technician, deeply anxious around strangers, avoids social and company gatherings and is passed over for promotion. Are these people mentally ill? In a report released last week, researchers estimated that more than half of Americans would develop mental disorders in their lives, raising questions about where mental health ends and illness begins. In fact, psychiatrists have no good answer, and the boundary between mental illness and normal mental struggle has become a battle line dividing the profession into two viscerally opposed camps. On one side are doctors who say that the definition of mental illness should be broad enough to include mild conditions, which can make people miserable and often lead to more severe problems later. On the other are experts who say that the current definitions should be tightened to ensure that limited resources go to those who need them the most and to preserve the profession's credibility with a public that often scoffs at claims that large numbers of Americans have mental disorders. The question is not just philosophical: where psychiatrists draw the line may determine not only the willingness of insurers to pay for services, but the future of research on moderate and mild mental disorders. Directly and indirectly, it will also shape the decisions of millions of people who agonize over whether they or their loved ones are in need of help, merely eccentric or dealing with ordinary life struggles. "This argument is heating up right now," said Dr. Darrel Regier, director of research at the American Psychiatric Association, "because we're in the process of revising the diagnostic manual," the catalog of mental disorders on which research, treatment and the profession itself are based. The next edition of the manual is expected to appear in 2010 or 2011, "and there's going continued debate in the scientific community about what the cut-points of clinical disease are," Dr. Regier said. Psychiatrists have been searching for more than a century for some biological marker for mental disease, to little avail. Although there is promising work in genetics and brain imaging, researchers are not likely to have anything resembling a blood test for a mental illness soon, leaving them with what they have always had: observations of behavior, and patients' answers to questions about how they feel and how severe their condition is. Severity is at the core of the debate. Are slumps in mood bad enough to make someone miss work? Does anxiety over social situations disrupt friendships and play havoc with romantic relationships? Insurers have long incorporated severity measures in decisions about what to cover. Dr. Alex Rodriguez, chief medical officer for behavioral health at Magellan Health Services, the country's largest managed mental health insurer, said that Magellan used several standardized tests to rate how much a problem is interfering with someone's life. The company is developing its own scale to track how well people function. "This is a tool that would allow the therapist to monitor a patient's progress from session to session," he said. Although the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association's catalog of mental disorders includes severity as a part of diagnosis, some experts say these measures are not tough or specific enough. Dr. Stuart Kirk, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been critical of the manual, gives examples of what could, under the current diagnostic guidelines, qualify as a substance abuse disorder: a college student who every month or so drinks too much beer on Sunday night and misses his chemistry class at 8 a.m. Monday, lowering his grade; or a middle-aged professional who smokes a joint now and then drives to a restaurant, risking arrest. "Although perhaps representing bad judgment," Dr. Kirk wrote in an e-mail message, these cases "would not be seen by most people as valid examples of mental illness, and they shouldn't be because they represent no underlying, internal, pathological mental state." Separating the heavies from the lightweights - by asking, say, "Did you ever go to a doctor for your problem, or talk to anyone about it?" - has a significant effect on who counts as mentally impaired. After researchers reported in a large national survey in 1994 that 30 percent of Americans adults had a mental illness in the past year, Dr. Regier and others reanalyzed the data, taking into account whether people had reported their mental troubles to a therapist or friend, had received treatment or had taken other actions. They found that the number of people who qualified for a diagnosis of mental illness in the previous year plunged to 20 percent over all; rates of some disorders dropped by a third to half. But limiting the count to those who have taken action does not give an accurate picture of the extent of illness, argue other researchers, who have been sharply critical of efforts to drive down prevalence estimates. Dr. Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the principal architect of the third edition of the diagnostic manual, wrote in a letter to The Archives of Psychiatry, "Many physical disorders are often transient and mild and may not require treatment (e.g. acute viral infections or low back syndrome). It would be absurd to recognize such conditions only when treatment was indicated." He added, "Let us not revise diagnostic criteria that help us make clinically valid standard diagnoses in order to make community prevalence data easier to justify to a skeptical public." Dr. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard and the lead author of the 1994 survey and the nationwide survey released last week, said squeezing diagnoses so that many mild cases drop out could blind the profession to a group of people it should be paying more attention to, not less. "We know that there are prodromes, states that put people at higher risk, like hypertension for heart disease, which doctors treat," he said. "You can call these milder mental conditions what you want, and you may decide to treat them or not, but if you don't identify them they fall off the radar, and you don't know much of anything about them." In the survey released last week, Dr. Kessler and his colleagues found that half of disorders started by age 14, and three-quarters by age 24. "These are people who may show up at age 25 or later as depressed alcoholics, maybe they're in trouble with the law, they've lost relationships, and from my perspective we need to go upstream and find out what's happening before they become so desperate," Dr. Kessler said. One condition whose estimated prevalence has bounced around like a Ping-Pong ball in this debate is social phobia, extreme anxiety over social situations. In a 1984 survey, investigators identified social phobia primarily by asking about excessive fear of speaking in public. They found a one-year prevalence rate of 1.7 percent. But psychiatrists soon concluded that other kinds of fears, including a fear of eating in public or using public restrooms, were variations of social phobia. When, in 1994, these and others questions were included, the prevalence rate rose to 7.4 percent. Dr. Regier re-evaluated the data using a different criterion for severity and found a much lower rate: 3.2 percent. Last week, Dr. Kessler reported a rate of 6.8 percent. "You can see why people have a hard time believing these numbers because they change so much depending on how you look at the data," said Dr. David Mechanic, director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. Yet the cutoff points for disease severity have real effects on the lives of people like Paul Pusateri, 48, a Baltimore business analyst. Mr. Pusateri said he was outgoing through college but then had a panic attack in his mid-20's, as he was preparing to give a speech. He managed to build a career and family despite surges of anxiety before speeches and meetings. But finally, more than two decades after the first symptoms, he reached a point where he dreaded even small or one-on-one meetings with familiar co-workers. "It's very bizarre; the only way I can describe the feeling is, Imagine walking down the street at dusk having someone put a gun in your face and threaten to kill you - having that absolute terror before a routine work meeting," he said. Mr. Pusateri said that, perhaps unconsciously, he applied severity criteria to his own growing mental struggles. He may have set the bar too high: only when he began badly mangling presentations at work, and then dreaded going in at all, did he tell his wife that he felt he was in trouble. His wife had watched a therapist talk about social phobia on television, and soon he was getting help. He considers himself lucky to have found a diagnosis at all, not to mention a therapist. "I was desperate by the time I did anything about it, I saw that my livelihood was at stake," he said. Yet by all outside appearances, and by some strict definitions, he might not have qualified as having a disorder until he took some action. In the coming years, Dr. Regier's office will be responsible for clarifying the thresholds of disease for the next diagnostic manual, to somehow identify difficult cases like this one, while remaining credible to insurers and to the public at large. After a prolonged controversy last year over the use of antidepressants in children, most experts say the last thing psychiatry needs now is for this process to turn into a public fight over who is sick and who is not. But this fight may be hard to avoid. The two sides are far apart, debates over the diagnostic manual are traditionally contentious and despite increasing openness about mental illness the public tends to be skeptical of any prevalence numbers over a few percent. "That's the problem," said Dr. Regier, "people hear these higher prevalence rates and they immediately start thinking about severe, disabling schizophrenia. But we know these surveys include a lot of mild cases, and we need to ask, How significant are these?" From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 01:19:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:19:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful) Message-ID: Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/politics/14heritage.html By JASON DePARLE WASHINGTON, June 13 - They are young and bright and ardently right. They tack Ronald Reagan calendars on their cubicle walls and devote brown bag lunches to the free market theories of Friedrich von Hayek. They come from 51 colleges and 28 states, calling for low taxes, strong defense and dorm rooms with a view. And let's get one thing straight: they're not here to run the copying machine. The summer interns of the Heritage Foundation have arrived, forming an elite corps inside the capital's premier conservative research group. The 64 interns are each paid a 10-week stipend of $2,500, and about half are housed in a subsidized dorm at the group's headquarters, complete with a fitness room. Unusual in its size (and in its walk-in closets), the program, on which Heritage spends $570,000 a year, is both a coveted spot on the young conservative circuit and an example of the care the movement takes to cultivate its young. Scott Hurff, a senior at Wake Forest University, wanted the internship so badly that he filed three applications. Rachael Seidenschnur had set her eyes on Heritage since her youth in Little Rock, Ark., where she revived the teenage Republicans club at Central High School. Kenneth Cribb came with family ties and a book by the conservative author Russell Kirk, which he said "sends chills up my spine." Daren Stanaway and Brian Christiansen welcomed Heritage as an escape from the liberal orthodoxies they said they experienced at Harvard and Yale. "In the face of derogation, many intelligent young conservatives have simply responded by hiding their beliefs or going with the crowd," Ms. Stanaway wrote in an application essay. "I refuse to be one of them." Like all Heritage applicants, she also answered a 12-item questionnaire designed to ferret out latent liberalism with questions about guns, abortion, welfare and missile defense. (If you agree with the statement that "tax increases are the most appropriate way to balance the budget," this is probably not the internship for you.) Sitting in his supersized office atop the organization he has spent three decades building, Edwin J. Feulner, the longtime president at Heritage, cited the sign over a Heritage auditorium - "Building for the Next Generation" - as evidence of how central to his mission leadership development is. "If we can get young people involved, they will continue to support Heritage, our idea and our causes," Mr. Feulner said. "We almost think of ourselves as a college." Arguing that liberals dominate most campuses, Mr. Feulner said, "We've had to cultivate our alternative." It is an alternative with few rivals. The Brookings Institution, a centrist group more than 50 years older than Heritage, has no paid interns. Neither does the Progressive Policy Institute, which promotes a centrist version of liberalism. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a premier antipoverty group, has 10 paid interns. People for the American Way, a bulwark of Beltway liberalism, has 40 - but no dorm. "There's no question that the right wing over the last 25 years did a much better job of creating a farm system," said Ralph G. Neas, the president of People for the American Way. Like many other liberal groups, his has recently expanded its campus outreach activities in an effort to keep pace with the right. "They invested in young people," Mr. Neas said. "We're trying to catch up." While the prestige of Heritage is part of the appeal, so is the work, which rarely involves making coffee or copies. Joel Peyton, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is helping to write a paper on privatized services in national parks. That is a task for which he may be especially well suited: after spending three summers working in a Kentucky state park, he published a paper this year denouncing "the inefficiencies of a government-run park system." When Mr. Peyton's application reached the desk of Ronald D. Utt, a Heritage senior fellow, Mr. Utt said, "Get this guy." An expert in privatization, Mr. Utt had been wanting to make the same arguments about the National Park Service, which he called "the world's largest lawn care and janitorial service." Mr. Peyton will spend the summer outside Mr. Utt's office, helping to make the case. Heritage has had interns, in ones and twos, ever since its founding in 1973. But it intensified its effort about 15 years ago, hiring a full-time intern coordinator. Another leap forward occurred in 1999, when a supporter, Tom Johnson, offered to donate an adjacent building. Mr. Feulner embarked on a $12 million fund-raising drive to renovate it and carved out space for 30 dorm rooms. For $10,000, donors could have their names in bronze on a dorm room door. Dr. C. N. Papadopoulos underwrote two rooms, in honor of his mother and his mother-in-law. Dr. Papadopoulos, a Greek immigrant now in Houston, left his work as an anesthesiologist for ventures in banking and real estate, and became a Heritage donor a decade ago after a direct-mail solicitation appealed to his belief in free enterprise. Dr. Papadopoulos said he helped finance the dorms because he wanted "these young folks to go to Washington and find out what this country is all about." "This is the land of opportunity," Dr. Papadopoulos said, "and it always will be as long as the you don't depend on the federal government to do everything." Katherine Rogers, a junior at Georgetown, is spending the summer in the Keith and Lois Mitchell room, on the Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Smyth floor, just upstairs from the Norma Zindahl Intern Lounge, which is adjacent to the William J. Lehrfeld Intern Center. Ms. Rogers's father is a longtime Heritage donor, and she is working in donor relations, which she thinks will be useful in her intended career as a pharmaceutical lobbyist. "It's all about forging one-to-one relationships," Ms. Rogers said. "That's where business starts." Among notable former Heritage interns are Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, and Thad T. Viers, elected at 24 to the South Carolina Legislature. Now a 27-year-old law student as well as a lawmaker, Mr. Viers described Heritage as a prized stop on a journey that stretched from a childhood in a single-wide trailer through college at the Citadel and into political life. "It's always a card I have in my arsenal if anybody wants to challenge my conservative credentials," Mr. Viers said. "It's a trump card, too." Other former interns hold posts on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Mr. Lowry theorizes that young conservatives are especially interested in the ideas undergirding their politics, often having come from liberal campuses where they have had to defend themselves. That theory finds support among the current interns, who often talk of being outnumbered by left-leaning peers. Among the perks of the summer program is a lunch series in which interns make their way through the conservative canon. "Being raised a Christian, with family values, I want to make sure I have a solid philosophical footing," said Mr. Hurff, 21, the Wake Forest senior. Mr. Cribb, whose uncle, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., was a Reagan aide and a Heritage fellow, said that the internship offered a chance "to study the fundamental ideas of conservatism." Last week, speakers at Heritage events included Edwin Meese, the former attorney general, and the historian David McCullough. Ms. Seidenschnur, 21, a senior at Washington and Lee, found herself in a political minority as early as high school as she worked in three Republican clubs. "I was sick of being ridiculed by my teachers for being a Republican: 'Oh, here comes the Republican,' " she said. A veteran intern, she has worked on Capitol Hill (for former Senator Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas), in the White House (for the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) and at a fund-raising organization (the National Republican Congressional Committee). "Most of my internships were more on the campaign and active side of politics," Ms. Seidenschnur said. "I wanted to come to Heritage to see more of the intellectual side of politics and the conservative thought movement. When I analyzed my r?sum?, I realized that was greatly missing." Oh, and the internship held one other appeal. "I have a balcony," she said. "It's just magical." From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 01:21:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:21:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Treaty of Union Message-ID: Treaty of Union The Times Literary Supplement, 95.11.18 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2042565 Sir, In his review of Julia Stapleton's Englishness and the Study of Politics (November 4), John Gray describes the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 as "an act of annexation whose antecedents were in war". The antecedents of Treaty of Union lay indeed in war; in much the same way that the antecedents of the Treaty of Rome lay in war; and "annexation" is laying it on a bit thick. The Scottish Parliament's reasons for voting for Union were fundamentally comparable with the British Parliament's reasons for voting for Maastricht; the debate in both cases was that which Aesop recorded between the dog and the wolf. The value of comparison between the two Unions goes further; that of 1707 at least respected contemporary ideas of representative government, unlike the European Union. Furthermore, 1707's constitutional guarantees of "subsidiarity" have, after three centuries, permitted to Scots and English law more diversity than will be allowed to any of the member-states in the emerging projects of Europe's unelected bien-pensants. It is therefore as intemperate to claim that Scotland was annexed by England, as it would be to claim that Britain has been annexed by Europe. Dr Gray's description of 1707 and his denial that Britishness is anything but a "political artefact" are clearly linked, but both are mistaken. There are in fact many thousands of inhabitants of Scotland and England who are first or second-generation immigrants from the other kingdom for whom there is no other accurate adjective than "British". The prominence of such individuals in public life is notorious in both countries. They cannot be wished away by political, national or racial purists. Moreover, "Britishness" is no more a political artefact than is the idea of being European; both ideas are used for political ends, but only one of them is based on the reality of a common popular culture, common media and a common language. MICHAEL UPTON Department of Law, European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Florence. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 01:21:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:21:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Steven Lukes: Pluralism is not enough Message-ID: Steven Lukes: Pluralism is not enough The Times Literary Supplement, 96.2.10 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2045557&window_type=print John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 224pp. HarperCollins. ?18. - 0 00 255582 4 It has become fashionable in certain quarters to declare the so-called "Enlightenment Project" dead. Countless books and articles that proclaim or are influenced by post-modernist ideas attack the Enlightenment almost as a routine invocation. Other thinkers of widely different dispositions do the same, some praising it only to bury it, others attacking its central tenets and ambitions as misconceived. Among their number is Alasdair MacIntyre, who thinks that the Enlightenment Project "had to fail". Another is John Gray, whose quarters (like MacIntyre's) have been singularly mobile, across successive battlegrounds: once a Millian liberal, then a Hayekian, then a "post-liberal", Gray has most recently been dubbed (by The Economist) "an anti-liberal high-communitarian" with a policy agenda (a standpoint that has infuriated Conservatives of all stripes and seems to be interesting some opinion-formers in Tony Blair's Labour Party). Gray is a forceful writer, an engaged political theorist with a serious interest in philosophical fundamentals. The trouble is that he has written a forceful and serious study of the thought of Sir Isaiah Berlin which seeks to enlist Berlin in the anti-Enlightenment camp. Gray claims to resolve a conflict he sees in Berlin's thought between "his doctrine of value pluralism and the historicist conception of human nature to which he holds on the one hand" and "the universalist claims of any species of traditional liberalism on the other". With characteristic honesty, he concedes that his proposed resolution takes "a step for which there is no clear authority in Berlin's writings, and which he might well be reluctant to follow". Gray's proposed resolution is to reconceive liberalism as "a particular form of life with no universal claim on reason, foundation in human nature or privileged place in history". Liberal institutions have "no universal authority": the commitment to the liberal form of life is "a groundless one which nothing in reason compels us to make". Citing Richard Rorty with approval, Gray insists that liberal values, like all other values, are "embedded in particular forms of life", that "their authority is local, not universal, in that it derives from a specific form of life". One question is whether, in proposing this resolution, Gray has taken a step in a direction towards which Berlin's thought tends. Another is whether the step should, in any case, be taken. If, as he suspects, Berlin "might well be reluctant to follow", may there not be excellent reasons for that presumed reluctance? Gray praises Berlin's liberalism in extravagant terms. It is, he writes, "the most profoundly deliberated, and most powerfully defended, in our time, or, perhaps, in any time", diverging "radically from those that have dominated polit-ical philosophy in the post-war world, and indeed since J. S. Mill, in many respects". What, above all, he values in it is its "acknowledgement of an irreducible diversity of rivalrous goods, including negative and positive liberties", claiming that this "distinguishes it from all those recent liberalisms that engage themselves in 'theories of justice', or of 'fundamental rights'". Those liberalisms, Gray claims, are "destroyed by Berlin's insight that, not only is any sort of liberty only one among many incommensurable values, but the different liberties, are themselves rivalrous and uncombinable and sometimes incommensurable, such that choices must be made among them, without the aid of any overarching standard or synoptic theory". In short, Gray's interest in philosophical fundamentals leads him to see in Berlin's "value pluralism" the supposedly deep truth that, in respect of values, there are none. Value pluralism is "true all the way down". It is, he writes, "the idea of radical choice choice without criteria, grounds or principles that is the heart of Berlin's liberalism". There is, moreover, "in Berlin no account of a common human nature": "the propensity to diversity, to difference, is itself implied by the human capacity for choice". In opposition to the anthropology of the Enlightenment (and following Vico and Herder), Berlin, according to Gray, claims that what is "most essentially human" is "the propensity to cultural difference". From this interpretation, unsurprisingly, we must draw the consequence that liberal society is "only one form of human flourishing, one to which Berlin himself is steadfastly committed". Moreover, "since different forms of life embody values, that are often radically in-commensurable, philosophy will not seek to privilege any one form of life". So much for the Enlightenment. Is this indeed the moral to be drawn from Berlin's writings? One difficulty in answering that question is that those writings are, for the most part, themselves extremely rich interpretations of other thinkers. Berlin is a master of empathy, of what Vico called fantasia: he makes ideas come alive by capturing from within the animating vision of the thinkers he discusses. Often, as you read him, you can be unsure just whose voice you are hearing: that of the thinker in question, those of his contemporaries as they responded to him, or that of Berlin himself as interlocutor and critic, marshalling the interpretation at hand in the service of a larger argument. Furthermore, the thinkers he chooses to treat are those he finds uncomfortable: those who put to the test the beliefs and assumptions he holds dear but does not take for granted. Hence, for example, the magisterial studies of de Maistre, of Hamann, of the German Romantics, of Dostoevsky and of Sorel (why did he never tackle Nietzsche?) His interest in discussing these anti-Enlightenment and anti-liberal thinkers is precisely to see what damage they can do to Western rationalism and liberalism. Sometimes his interpretations are so vivid that you can mistake exegesis for endorsement. To do so would be a serious mistake. It is true that Gray quotes Berlin's statement that the Enlightenment was "one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind" and his claim that he remains himself a rationalist. He also concedes that "of Berlin's endorsement of central aspects of the Enlightenment Project there can be no doubt". These are "the values of toleration, liberty and human emancipation". Yet, according to Gray, it is his "agonistic pluralism" of values, deriving from "the Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment claims as to the incommensurability of cultures and the role of will in individual and collective self-creation" that constitutes "the deepest truth in Berlin's thought". Its consequences are, it appears, devastating. It "undercuts the . . . creed of the Enlightenment" and it "undermines liberalism as a political ideal with a universal claim on reason". Hence the need to reconceive his liberalism as groundless, merely local and having no foundation in a common human nature. What Berlin says, speaking in his own voice, and in his central texts, is the very opposite of this. Take, for example, his celebrated lecture Two Concepts of Liberty. Here the preservation of an area of non-interference is defended, not as compelling only to "us" because internal to "our" local culture, in which the activity of unfettered choice is central. Its authority does not derive from our "specific form of life". Rather, it is defended on the ground that "some portion of human existence must remain independent of the sphere of social control". "We must", he argues, "preserve a minimum core of personal freedom if we are not to 'degrade or deny our nature'", the minimum being that "which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature". Berlin goes on to ask what this essence is and what standards it entails, and he answers that this "has always been, and perhaps always will be, a matter of infinite debate". What is important is that he does not reject the question. Moreover, he remarks, in the introduction to his Four Essays on Liberty, that "to contract the area of human choice is to do harm to men in an intrinsic, Kantian, not merely utilitarian, sense". Elsewhere, Berlin has argued that an unchanging human nature is, indeed, a presupposition of mutual intelligibility across human cultures. "Incompatible their ends may be," he has written, "but their variety cannot be unlimited, for the nature of men, however various and subject to change, must possess some generic character if it is to be called human at all." Such passages (and there are many others) suggest that something far more robust than reluctance would prevent Berlin from following Gray down his Rortian path. Despite Gray's careful attempt to distinguish what he calls "objective pluralism" from relativism, there is no doubt that that path leads to relativism. For if, as Gray argues, "rivalrous" values are often rationally incomparable, and if, as he argues in the latter part of this book, they come "embedded" in distinct cultures, seen as wholes, then considerations that tell in favour of a value choice at home (which are not, it seems, grounds or reasons) will be weightless abroad. Cross-cultural evaluation and criticism become illegitimate, both abroad and presumably at home, in a multicultural society. Such a doctrine, as Berlin himself argues, renders mutual intelligibility both across and within cultures itself unintelligible. It also robs moral and political value conflicts of their reality, since it allots each set of values a cultural home. It also falsely portrays cultures as integrated and cohesive unities rather than heterogeneous and interpenetrating conglomerations. In one of his less well-known essays ("Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought"), Berlin has argued that such relativism was unknown in the eighteenth century; it was invented in the nineteenth and has flourished in the twentieth. It is perhaps best appreciated as the distinctively modern and now postmodern form of scepticism. Of course, the great value of scepticism lies in the deep challenge it poses to what we are inclined to believe. Gray's book illustrates just how corrosive this form of scepticism can be, both to the Enlightenment assumption that public deliberation and debate are not incompatible with polit-ical life and to the ideas of contemporary liberals such as John Rawls, who argue for principles of justice and systems of rights by offering reasons that could be acceptable to those holding different comprehensive conceptions of what is valuable in life, without depending on any one of them. In denouncing the "universalism" of all such arguments, it implies, in the end, that all that is left is to appeal to "our" local traditions, or to resort to force. Those inclined to follow Gray should consider just how much of the so-called "Enlightenment Project" they are prepared to abandon. (The appellation, used mainly by the Enlightenment's enemies, artfully conceals all its multiplicity, tensions and contradictions.) In doing so, they should find reading the writings of Sir Isaiah Berlin of particular help. They will learn much, as Gray shows here, about how assumptions about the uniformity of human nature, the law-governed nature of human history, the appropriate methods for the study of society and the prospects for convergence in a cosmopolitan future came to be questioned, above all by the German critics of French rationalism, about the invention of culture and hermeneutic inquiry by Herder and Vico, about the critique of abstract system-building in Herzen, and much else besides. They will also come to reflect on Berlin's extraordinarily paradoxical argument that the "monism" of the Enlightenment encouraged ways of thinking that led to the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism and that it was the "pluralism" of its Romantic and reactionary critics that fed the streams of modern liberalism. They may also learn something else: that the very best way to defend the ideas of the Enlightenment is to confront them with those of its most forceful and serious critics. Steven Lukes is Professor of Political and Social Theory at the European University Institute, Florence. His books include Marxism and Morality, 1985, and Moral Conflict and Politics, 1991. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:25:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:25:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Geoffrey F. Miller: Political peacocks Message-ID: Geoffrey F. Miller: Political peacocks http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/political_peacocks.htm [Thanks to Alice Andrews for this.] Miller, G. F. (1996). Political peacocks. Demos Quarterly, 10 (Special issue on evolutionary psychology), pp. 9-11. The puzzle Suddenly, in the spring of 1986 in New York, hundreds of Columbia University students took over the campus adminstration building and demanded that the university sell off all of its stocks in companies that do business in South Africa. As a psychology undergraduate at Columbia, I was puzzled by the spontaneity, ardour, and near-unanimity of the student demands for divestment. Why would mostly white, mostly middle-class North Americans miss classes, risk jail, and occupy a drab office building for two weeks, in support of political freedom for poor blacks living in a country six thousand miles away? The campus conservative newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the protest as an annual springtime mating ritual, with Dionysian revels punctuated by political sloganeering about this year's arbitrary cause. At the time, I thought the cartoon tasteless and patronizing. Now, I wonder if it contained a grain of truth. Although the protests achieved their political aims only inefficiently and indirectly, they did function very effectively to bring together young men and women who claimed to share similar political ideologies. Everyone I knew was dating someone they'd met at the sit-in. In many cases, the ideological commitment was paper-thin, and the protest ended just in time to study for semester exams. Yet the sexual relationships facilitated by the protest sometimes lasted for years. The hypothesis that loud public advertisements of one's political ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual mates, analogous to the peacock's tail or the nightingale's song, seems dangerous. It risks trivializing all of political discourse, just as the conservative cartoon lampooned the Columbia anti-apartheid protests. The best way to avoid this pitfall is not to ignore the sexual undertones to human political behavior, but to analyze them seriously and respectfully using the strongest and most relevant theory we have from evolutionary biology: Darwin's theory of sexual selection through mate choice. The history Most people think of Darwinian evolution as a blind, haphazard, unguided process in which physical environments impose capricious selection pressures on species, which must adapt or die. True, for natural selection itself. But Darwin himself seems to have become rather bored with natural selection by the inanimate environment after he published The Origin of Species in 1859. He turned to much more interesting question of how animal and human minds can shape evolution. In his 1862 book On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilized by insects he outlined how the perceptual and behavioral capacities of pollinators shape the evolution of flower color and form. In his massive two-volume work of 1868, The variation of animals and plants under domestication, he detailed how human needs and tastes have shaped the evolution of useful and ornamental features in domesticates. Further works on animal emotions in 1872 and the behavior of climbing plants in 1875 continued the trend towards an evolutionary psychology. Most provocatively, Darwin combined the frisson of sex with the spookiness of mind and the enigma of human evolution in his two-volume masterpiece of 1871, The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex. Darwin observed that many animals, especially females, are rather picky about their sexual partners. But why would it ever pay to reject a suitor? Being choosy requires time, energy, and intelligence - costs that can impair survival. The basic rationale for mate choice is that random mating is stupid mating. It pays to be choosy because in a sexually reproducing species, the genetic quality of your mate will determine half the genetic quality of your offspring. Ugly, unhealthy mates usually lead to ugly, unhealthy offspring. By forming a joint genetic venture with an attractive, high-quality mate, one's genes are much more likely to be passed on. Mate choice is simply the best eugenics and genetic screening that female animals are capable of carrying out under field conditions, with no equipment other than their senses and their brains. Often, sexual selection through mate choice can lead to spectacular results: the bowerbird's elaborate nest, the riflebird's riveting dance, the nightingale's haunting song, and the peacock's iridescent tail, for example. Such features are complex adaptations that evolved through mate choice, to function both as advertisements of the male's health and as aesthetic displays that excite female senses. One can recognize these courtship displays by certain biological criteria: they are expensive to produce and hard to maintain, they have survival costs but reproductive benefits, they are loud, bright, rhythmic, complex, and creative to stimulate the senses, they occur more often after reproductive maturity, more often during the breeding season, more often in males than in females, and more often when potential mates are present than absent. Also, they tend to evolve according to unpredictable fashion cycles that change the detailed structure and content of the displays while maintaining their complexity, extremity, and cost. By these criteria, most human behaviors that we call cultural, ideological, and political would count as courtship displays. Victorian skeptics objected to Darwin's theory of sexual selection by pointing out that in contemporary European society, women tended to display more physical ornamentation than men, contrary to the men-display-more hypothesis. This is true only if courtship display is artificially restricted to physical artefacts worn on the body. Whereas Victorian women ornamented themselves with mere jewelry and clothing, men ornamented themselves with the books they wrote, pictures they painted, symphonies they composed, country estates they bought, honors they won, and vast political and economic empires they built. Although Darwin presented overwhelming evidence for his ingenious sexual selection theory, it fell into disrepute for over a century. Even Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, preferred to view male ornaments as outlets for a surplus of male energy, rather than as adaptations evolved through female choice. Even now, we hear echoes of Wallace's fallacious surplus-of-energy argument in most psychological and anthropological theories about the "self-expressive" functions of human art, music, language, and culture. The Modern Synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinism in the 1930s continued to reject female choice, assuming that sexual ornaments simply intimidate other males or keep animals from mating with the wrong species. Only in the 1980s, with a confluence of support from mathematical models, computer simulations, and experiments in animal and human mate choice, has Darwin's sexual selection theory been re-established as a major part of evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, almost everything written about the evolutionary origins of the human mind, language, culture, ideology, and politics, has ignored the power of sexual selection through mate choice as a force that creates exactly these sorts of elaborate display behaviors. The hypothesis Humans are ideological animals. We show strong motivations and incredible capacities to learn, create, recombine, and disseminate ideas. Despite the evidence that these idea-processing systems are complex biological adaptations that must have evolved through Darwinian selection, even the most ardent modern Darwinians such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richards Dawkins, and Dan Dennett tend to treat culture as an evolutionary arena separate from biology. One reason for this failure of nerve is that it is so difficult to think of any form of natural selection that would favor such extreme, costly, and obsessive ideological behavior. Until the last 40,000 years of human evolution, the pace of technological and social change was so slow that it's hard to believe there was much of a survival payoff to becoming such an ideological animal. My hypothesis, developed in a long Ph.D. dissertation, several recent papers, and a forthcoming book, is that the payoffs to ideological behavior were largely reproductive. The heritable mental capacities that underpin human language, culture, music, art, and myth-making evolved through sexual selection operating on both men and women, through mutual mate choice. Whatever technological benefits those capacities happen to have produced in recent centuries are unanticipated side-effects of adaptations originally designed for courtship. Language, of course, is the key to ideological display. Whereas songbirds can only toy with protean combinations of pitch, rhythm, and timbre, language gives humans the closest thing to telepathy in nature: the ability to transmit complex ideas from one head to another, through the tricks of syntax and semantics. Language opens a window into other minds, expanding the arena of courtship display from the physical to the conceptual. This has enormous implications for the way that sexual selection worked during the last few hundred thousand years of human evolution. As human courtship relied more heavily on language, mate choice focused more on the ideas that language expresses. The selection pressures that shaped the evolution of the human mind came increasingly not from the environment testing whether one's hunting skills were sufficient for survival, but from other minds testing whether one's ideas were interesting enough to provoke some sexual attraction. Every ancestor of every human living today was successful in attracting someone to mate with them. Conversely, the millions of hominids and early humans who were too dull and uninspiring to become our ancestors carried genes for brains that were not as ideologically expressive as ours. A wonderful effect of this runaway sexual selection was that brain size in our lineage has tripled over the last two million years, giving us biologically unprecedented capacities for creative thought, astonishing expressiveness, and intricate culture. A more problematic effect is that our ideological capacities were under selection to be novel, interesting, and entertaining to other idea-infested minds, not to accurately represent the external world or their own transient and tangential place in it. This general argument applies to many domains of human behaviour and culture, but for the remainder of the paper, I will focus on political ideology. The predictions and implications The vast majority of people in modern societies have almost no political power, yet have strong political convictions that they broadcast insistently, frequently, and loudly when social conditions are right. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who see clear time and energy costs to ideological behavior, but little political benefit to the individual. My point is that the individual benefits of expressing political ideology are usually not political at all, but social and sexual. As such, political ideology is under strong social and sexual constraints that make little sense to political theorists and policy experts. This simple idea may solve a number of old puzzles in political psychology. Why do hundreds of questionnaires show that men more conservative, more authoritarian, more rights-oriented, and less empathy-oriented than women? Why do people become more conservative as the move from young adulthood to middle age? Why do more men than women run for political office? Why are most ideological revolutions initiated by young single men? None of these phenomena make sense if political ideology is a rational reflection of political self-interest. In political, economic, and psychological terms, everyone has equally strong self-interests, so everyone should produce equal amounts of ideological behavior, if that behavior functions to advance political self-interest. However, we know from sexual selection theory that not everyone has equally strong reproductive interests. Males have much more to gain from each act of intercourse than females, because, by definition, they invest less in each gamete. Young males should be especially risk-seeking in their reproductive behavior, because they have the most to win and the least to lose from risky courtship behavior (such as becoming a political revolutionary). These predictions are obvious to any sexual selection theorist. Less obvious are the ways in which political ideology is used to advertise different aspects of one's personality across the lifespan. In unpublished studies I ran at Stanford University with Felicia Pratto, we found that university students tend to treat each others' political orientations as proxies for personality traits. Conservatism is simply read off as indicating an ambitious, self-interested personality who will excel at protecting and provisioning his or her mate. Liberalism is read as indicating a caring, empathetic personality who will excel at child care and relationship-building. Given the well-documented, cross-culturally universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men, the expression of more liberal ideologies by women and more conservative ideologies by men is not surprising. Men use political conservatism to (unconsciously) advertise their likely social and economic dominance; women use political liberalism to advertise their nurturing abilities. The shift from liberal youth to conservative middle age reflects a mating-relevant increase in social dominance and earnings power, not just a rational shift in one's self-interest. More subtley, because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests. This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before. The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one's heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid. This is called frequency-dependent selection in biology, and it is a hallmark of sexual selection processes. What can policy analysts do, if most people treat political ideas as courtship displays that reveal the proponent's personality traits, rather than as rational suggestions for improving the world? The pragmatic, not to say cynical, solution is to work with the evolved grain of the human mind by recognizing that people respond to policy ideas first as big-brained, idea-infested, hypersexual primates, and only secondly as concerned citizens in a modern polity. This view will not surprise political pollsters, spin doctors, and speech writers, who make their daily living by exploiting our lust for ideology, but it may surprise social scientists who take a more rationalistic view of human nature. Fortunately, sexual selection was not the only force to shape our minds. Other forms of social selection such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and even group selection seem to have favoured some instincts for political rationality and consensual egalitarianism. Without the sexual selection, we would never have become such colourful ideological animals. But without the other forms of social selection, we would have little hope of bringing our sexily protean ideologies into congruence with reality. Further Readings Andersson, M. (1994). Sexual selection. Princeton U. Press. Betzig, L. (1986). Despotism and differential reproduction: A Darwinian view of history. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine. Buss, D. M. (1994). The evolution of desire: Human mating strategies. New York: Basic Books. Cronin, H. (1991). The ant and the peacock: Altruism and sexual selection from Darwin to today. Cambridge U. Press. Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (2 vols.). London: John Murray. Fisher, H. (1992). Anatomy of love: The natural history of monogamy, adultery, and divorce. New York: Simon & Schuster. Miller, G. F. (1993). Evolution of the human brain through runaway sexual selection: The mind as a protean courtship device. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University Psychology Department. (Available through UMI Microfilms; Book in preparation for MIT Press/Bradford Books). Miller, G. F. (in press). Sexual selection in human evolution: Review and prospects. For C. Crawford & D. Krebs (Eds.), Evolution and Human Behavior: Ideas, Issues, and Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum. Miller, G. F., & Todd, P. M. (1995). The role of mate choice in biocomputation: Sexual selection as a process of search, optimization, and diversification. In W. Banzaf & F. Eeckman (Eds.), Evolution and biocomputation: Computational models of evolution. Lecture notes in computer science 899. (pp. 169-204). Springer-Verlag. Pomiankowski, A., & Moller, A. (1995). A resolution of the lek paradox. Proc. R. Soc. London B, 260(1357), 21-29. Ridley, M. (1993). The red queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature. New York: Viking. Wright, R. (1994). The moral animal: Evolutionary psychology and everyday life. New York: Pantheon Books. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:26:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:26:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Globalization: It's Not Just Wages Message-ID: Globalization: It's Not Just Wages http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/business/worldbusiness/17whirlpool.html [This is quite an important article and should be read carefully.] By LOUIS UCHITELLE BENTON HARBOR, Mich. - Who is the biggest exporter of German-made washing machines to the United States? Not Miele or Bosch-Siemens, or any other German manufacturer. It is the American appliance maker, Whirlpool, the company proudly reports. Never mind the higher labor cost - $32 an hour, including benefits, versus $23 in the United States. The necessary technology existed in Germany when Whirlpool decided to sell front-loading washers to Americans. So did a trained work force and a Whirlpool factory already making a European version of the front loader. "We were able to expand the capacity in Germany at a very incremental investment," said Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool's chairman and chief executive. "It was the fastest way to the American market." Globalization is often viewed as a rootless process of constantly moving jobs to low-wage countries. But the issue is more complex, as illustrated by Whirlpool's worldwide operations. What attracts Mr. Fettig and other chief executives is a relatively new form of globalization that emphasizes first-rate centers of production and design in various countries - including the United States. Whirlpool's global network, a work in progress, includes microwave ovens engineered in Sweden and made in China for American consumers; stoves designed in America and made in Tulsa, Okla., for American consumers; refrigerators assembled in Brazil and exported to Europe; and top-loading washers made at a sprawling factory in Clyde, Ohio, for American consumers, although some are sold in Mexico. "The really sophisticated multinationals," said Diana Farrell, director of the Global Institute at McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, "are taking advantage of the different locations in their global networks without worrying about whether they also sell in the countries where they produce." The advantage of Whirlpool's approach to globalization is that it allows the company to put the earnings of overseas affiliates to their best use anywhere in the world, Ms. Farrell argues. The larger consequence, she adds, is that parent companies "invest in new technologies and business opportunities that will eventually create new jobs at home and abroad." At the moment, the job growth and the expansion are mainly abroad. As its turns out, more than 40 percent of the nation's imports are from the overseas subsidiaries of American companies, contributing to the lopsided trade deficit, but also making companies more competitive. Whirlpool is a typical example: its employment in the United States has not risen in years while it has tripled abroad. The "global production footprints," as Ms. Farrell calls them, draw on a growing network of first-rate suppliers in Mexico, China and elsewhere that allow manufacturers to go beyond mere assembly overseas into complex production. And the investment, once made, becomes an anchor; a sunk cost, as economists put it. Sunk cost figured in Whirlpool's decision to ship front-loader washing machines to the United States from its factory in Schorndorf, Germany, which Whirlpool acquired in 1991 with the purchase of the appliance operations of Philips N.V. for more than $1 billion. Almost two million of the front loaders have been sold in the United States since 2001, at $1,200 apiece, and as demand rises, so do the shipments across the Atlantic. The German-made washers load laundry from a door on the front that opens into a basket that spins at high speeds. Front loaders, long popular in Europe, in part because they use less water and electricity, are gaining ground among American consumers, who have traditionally favored top loaders that circulate the laundry and water using an agitator fitted with fins. The [3]Maytag Corporation got into the front loader market first, in the 1990's, but soon stumbled. Its Neptune model, engineered and made in the United States, suffered from a high repair rate. That gave Whirlpool's Duet front loader an advantage, Mr. Fettig said; his company avoided the pitfalls by adopting the already kink-free German technology. Maytag, in a statement, said that it, too, has now resorted to globalization to get back into the game. The newest model "is made in South Korea through a technology and manufacturing partnership with Samsung," Maytag said. Whirlpool's executives take issue with analysts who declare that low foreign wages, particularly in China and elsewhere in Asia, combined with generous subsidies from those countries, will keep the global production networks mobile. Company executives say the manpower required to make its appliances is declining, diluting the drawing power of lower wages. One hour of labor, for example, goes into each of the 20,000 top-loaders coming off the line daily at Clyde, down from 2.5 hours five years ago. "We may pay $23 an hour in Clyde, including benefits, versus $3 in Mexico versus $1 in China," Mr. Fettig said. "But for one hour of labor, the difference won't begin to cover the shipping costs, let alone the investment it would take to build a new factory in Mexico or a new factory in China." The Clyde factory, which employs 2,000 people, is billed as a jewel in Whirlpool's production network - an efficient, partly automated operation whose experienced workers possess a "tribal knowledge" of their product that pays off in quality and cost saving. But if the Clyde factory did not already exist, Mr. Fettig would not put it there. "I'd probably put it in Mexico," he said. Whirlpool's total of 23,000 employees in this country has not changed in a decade, while the overseas work force has tripled, to 45,000. Yet, American consumers, not foreigners, account for two-thirds of Whirlpool's annual revenue, which was $13.2 billion last year, up from $10.3 billion in 2000. Parts suppliers - the small companies that mold plastic parts or machine metal ones, for example - play a big role in determining where new factories are put, or existing ones are expanded. In the last 15 years, suppliers have set up shop in growing numbers near the new production centers in China, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Without their presence, Whirlpool says, it would not have been able to concentrate the manufacture of microwave ovens in southern China. "It is much more difficult to operate outside of an industrial country without that supplier base," said Mark Brown, senior vice president at Whirlpool for global sourcing. The concentration of suppliers in northern Mexico helps explain why Whirlpool has decided to produce a less-costly front-loading washing machine at its existing manufacturing complex in Monterrey. The high-end, $1,200 model will continue to come from Schorndorf. The smaller Mexican front loaders, on the other hand, will be for the majority of American consumers and will be priced several hundred dollars less, too low to absorb the $50 in freight to cross the Atlantic, the company says. "We looked at making them in the United States," said David L. Swift, Whirlpool's executive vice president for North America, "but since we did not already manufacture any front loaders here, this country did not have an advantaged position. Because of the shipping cost, we knew we had to make them in Mexico or America, and since the suppliers were already in Mexico, we thought we might as well go there." Using Mexican workers, Whirlpool could have matched the efficiency of Schorndorf's labor force, said Roy Armes, Whirlpool's vice president for Mexico. Indeed, Mexican engineers, foremen and supervisors have gone to the German plant for 18 months of training, and line workers are also getting special instruction. But Whirlpool calculated that it could afford more workers at Mexican wages, so it did not purchase the most advanced automated machinery for Monterrey. "When you have lower labor costs, it is hard to justify that higher investment," Mr. Armes said. Companies like Whirlpool differentiate between skills that can be taught in a few weeks or months, and those that take longer to acquire. The harder-to-acquire skills anchor the one last Whirlpool factory in Benton Harbor, where the company got its start in 1911 and still has its headquarters. The company closed a washing machine plant in Benton Harbor in the mid-1980's, consolidating production in Clyde, but kept open a parts factory that makes the steel gears that are the heart of the washing machine's agitation mechanism. The machining to make the gears, and the nickel plating to prevent corrosion require a skill level not easily duplicated. "You can find lots of machine shops and some plating operations, but you rarely find the two together," Jim F. Spicer, the plant manager, said. "And when you do find them together, you almost never find the volumes that we require." The gears are trucked to the Clyde plant, four hours away. The 208 hourly workers (many of them long-termers; there has not been a layoff in more than 15 years) earn $14 to $20 an hour. At the low end of the scale are the 178 operators of the automated machining equipment, a skill that can take up to a year to master. The remaining 30 employees are mechanics and electricians who repair the machinery, having acquired these skills during a four-year apprenticeship that costs $200,000, a sum that Whirlpool pays, Mr. Spicer said, when it cannot find people already trained. One apprentice is in training; three recently graduated. "In my opinion, the reason we are here and not outsourced," Mr. Spicer said, "is that we do excellent quality work. If we don't have that, we don't have anything." From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:27:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:27:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Human Events: Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College Message-ID: Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College http://members.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=743 by Staff, 5.6.1 [Again, I'll mark the books I have actually read entire. Lots of them I feel as if I've read them, for having read so much about them. The editors of HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of [1]28 distinguished scholars and university professors to serve as judges in developing a list of Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College. To derive the list, each scholar first nominated titles. When all the nominations were collectedthey amounted to more than 100 titlesHUMAN EVENTS then sent a ballot to the scholars asking each to list his or her Top Ten selections. A book was awarded ten points for receiving a No. 1 rating, 9 points for receiving a No. 2 rating, and so on. The ten books with the highest aggregate ratings made the list. Interestingly enough, the No. 1 book our judges decided every college student should read is a volume that has been virtually banned in public schools by the United States Supreme Court. x #1 The Bible Score: 116 Written: c. 1446 B.C. to c. A.D. 95 [I'm convinced it was finished by 70 AD by John A.T. Robinson's Redating the New Testament.] The Bible, the central work of Western Civilization, defines the relationship between God and man, and forms the foundation of faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet, today it is virtually banned in America's public primary and secondary schoolsmeaning many American students may not encounter the most important book of all time in a classroom setting until they reach college. x #2 The Federalist Papers Score: 106 Authors: Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison Written: October 1787 to May 1788 Written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, [2]The Federalist Papers first appeared in several New York state newspapers as a series of 85 essays published under the nom de plume "Publius" from the fall of 1787 to the spring of 1788. The purpose of The Federalist Papers was to garner support for the newly created Constitution. At the time the states were bound together under the Articles of Confederation, but the weakness of the Articles necessitated the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Once the Constitution was drafted, nine states were required to ratify it, so Hamilton, Jay, and Madison took up the effort to persuade skeptics. Because Hamilton and Madison were both members of the Constitutional Convention, their writings are instructive in divining the original intent of those who drafted the Constitution. According to the Library of Congress, the first bound edition of The Federalist Papers was published in 1788 with revisions and corrections by Hamilton. A bound edition with revisions and corrections by Madison published in 1818 was the first to identify the authors of each essay. To purchase The Federalist Papers, click [3]here. [I may not have actually finished it, since so many of the arguments are bogus.] x #3 Democracy in America Score: 80 Author: Alexis de Tocqueville Written: 1835 A left-leaning Frenchman who visited America in 1831, de Tocqueville produced an [4]incisive portrait of American political and social life in the early 19th Century. He praised the democratic ideals and private virtues of the American people but warned against what he saw as the tyrannical tendency of public opinion. Visiting during the heyday of slavery, de Tocqueville foresaw the troubles racial questions would pose for the country. He also was early in observing that judicial power had a tendency to usurp the political in the United States. He also wrote of the difficulties inherent in the egalitarian sentiment then gaining strength in America. "However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit," he said. [I read an abridgement.] x #4 The Divine Comedy Score: 57 Author: Dante Alighieri Written: A.D. 1306-1321 One of the most frequently cited poems of all time, this epic allegory is an amalgam of Dante's views of science, theology, astronomy, and philosophy. In it Dante recounts his imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, during which he realizes his hatred for his sin and becomes a changed man by the grace of God. The work contains three sections"Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso." In "Inferno," Dante journeys through Hell, led by the soul of the Roman poet Virgil. He describes Hell as a funnel-shaped pit divided into nine circles, each one a place for those people guilty of a particular sin, with suffering increasing as he descends to the bottom where Satan himself dwells. In "Purgatorio," Dante travels with Virgil up the Mount of Purgatory. Ten terraces make up the Mount and the process of purification for its occupants is arduous as they climb from terrace to terrace. When Dante and Virgil pass the final terrace, they glimpse Paradise where Beatrice, Dante's first love, awaits and Virgil is forced to depart. In "Paradiso," Beatrice guides Dante through the various levels of Paradise. At the highest level, Empyrean, where God, Mary, and many of the angels and saints abide, Dante views the light of God, which leaves him speechless and changed. [I am not clear why Protestants reject Purgatory. Do they accept Limbo? What's the difference.] #5 The Republic Score: 55 Author: Plato Written: c. 360 B.C. The Republic is likely the most important work of the most important and influential philosopher who ever lived. The writings of Plato, a disciple of Socrates in ancient Athens, provide the foundation of abstract thought for all of Western Civilization, and The Republic contains expositions of various theories of justice, the state and society, and the soul. Is justice a matter of being helpful to those who help you and harmful to those who harm you? Or is it simply the "interest of the stronger," defined by those who govern the rest of us, as post-modern leftists would have it? How should society be organized? How is the human soul structured? How may we arrive at truth? The first author in history to deal with such questions in systematic rational argument, Plato contrasts the ideal society with reality in a way later echoed in the City of God (No. 7) by St. Augustinewho explored his own soul in his Confessions (No. 9). Plato describes the first totalitarian utopia as part of his argument, the first of many thinkers to do so. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought." #6 The Politics Score: 54 Author: Aristotle Written: Fourth Century, B.C. Aristotle, the most famous student of Plato, is one of the few men who managed to be highly appreciated both in his own time (he was hired to tutor Alexander the Great) and by posterity. His philosophy continues to form the backbone of Western thought. Much of his writing was lost for centuries, but its recovery helped Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th Century, and later political philosophers, develop the concept of natural law that became central to the Anglo-American understanding of just and limited government. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson cited Aristotle as an inspiration for the Declaration of Independence. In the Politics, Aristotle examines the formation and composition of civil society more simply and effectively than perhaps anyone since. Beginning with a complete accounting of the elements in the basic unit of societythe oikos or family homethe philosopher expands outward to discuss the larger unit of human existence, the city-stateor polisin the same terms. #7 (tie) Nicomachaean Ethics Score: 52 Author: Aristotle Written: Fourth Century, B.C. The Ethics is a collection of notes from Aristotle's lectures, taken by his student Nicomachus. The Ethics' elegant inductive arguments, developed hundreds of years before the Christian era, proved that man can indeed understand the basic concepts of good and evil without the aid of Divine Revelationa fact that many leftists are unwilling to accept in their quest to destroy respect for objective rules of right and wrong. [Why are "leftists" so bent? Is it Satan at work, or is it rent-seeking?] Unlike today's secularists, Aristotle saw clearly that all human beings have a built-in need to pursue happiness through behaving properly. Aristotle analyzes why not all human actions lead to happiness, and reveals how a man's daily choices between good and evil result in the habits of virtue or vice. Virtuous action, he concludes, makes men happy, whereas vice does not. #7 (tie) City of God Score: 52 Author: St. Augustine of Hippo Written: A.D. 413-426 The City of God ranks as history's most influential writing by a theologian. Augustine, the cultured bishop of an ancient Roman city in North Africa, created a philosophy of history that answered the argument of pagans who blamed the decline of Rome on the rise of Christianity. (Rome had first been sacked in 410.) Augustine explained human history in terms of Divine Providence and asserted that the Church would bring human history to its final consummation. At that consummation, the two "cities" that remained intermingled on Earththe pure, virtuous city of God and the sinful, flawed city of manwould be separated into two. Augustine argued that the sinful practices of the pagan Romans helped prompt God to allow the Eternal City's capture by barbarians. Augustine firmly implants teleologythe Aristotelian idea that all things have an ultimate purposeinto history just as previous Christian thinkers had adopted teleology to explain God's plan for individual human beings. For Augustine, all of human history points toward a divine purpose. x #9 Confessions Score: 47 Author: St. Augustine of Hippo Written: c. A.D. 400 The Confessions is Augustine's spiritual autobiography. Addressed to God, the book bares the author's soul. Here Augustine explains the history of his life in terms of Divine Providence, much as in the City of God he explained the history of Rome. He owns up to the sins that pulled him away from faith despite the exertions of his intensely devout mother, St. Monica. In the course of describing both his exterior and interior life, Augustine reiterates the Christian philosophy of the human person expounded by St. Paul in his epistles. He describes the interplay among passion, will, and reason and attempts to explain why men do evil when they know better. #10 Reflections on the Revolution in France Score: 44 Author: Edmund Burke Written: 1790 An Irish-born British politician of the late 18th Century, who was popular in America because of his opposition to taxing the colonies, Burke holds a prominent place in the history of English-speaking conservatives. Indeed, in The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk singled him out as the first modern conservative intellectual. Burke's early and energetic disapproval of the French Revolution proved prophetic in light of the Reign of Terror that followed. A champion of the inherent wisdom of long-settled traditions, Burke argued that by violently ripping up their nation's institutions root and branch, the French had assured themselves years of chaos. If changes had to be made in France, he argued, could not the tried-and-true be kept and only the bad discarded? "Is it, then, true," he asked, "that the French government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform, so that it was of absolute necessity that the whole fabric should be at once pulled down and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place?" Honorable Mention Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss 38 points The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk 36 points A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War by Harry V. Jaffa 33 points x Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis 32 points x The Illiad by Homer 31 points x King Lear by William Shakespeare 29 points x The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis 27 points x Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton 25 points x Aeneid by Virgil 19 points x Hamlet by William Shakespeare 18 points x Modern Times by Paul Johnson 18 points Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles 18 points [I only read the first, in high school.] x Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver 17 points Idea of a University by John Henry Newman 16 points x The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek 16 points x Animal Farm by George Orwell 14 points Gorgias by Plato 14 points A Humane Economy by Wilhelm Roepke 14 points The Public Philosophy by Walter Lippman 14 points The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk 14 points [No books by Mr. Mencken!] From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:27:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:27:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Francis Fukuyama: The sober compromise Message-ID: Francis Fukuyama: The sober compromise The Times Literary Supplement, 96.5.10 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2086513&window_type=print AFTER LIBERALISM. Immanuel Wallerstein. 277pp. New York: New Press. Paperback, $14.95. - 1 56584 304 5. ENLIGHTENMENT'S WAKE. John Gray. Politics and culture at the close of the modern age. 203pp. Routledge. ?19.99.- 0 415 12475 1. LIBERALISM AND COMMUNITY. Steven Kautz. 232pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; distributed in the UK by Plymbridge. ?23.50.- 0 8014 2979 X Seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when serious systematic challenges to liberal democracy are few and far between, there has been a flood of writing on the death of liberalism as a political system. No one, for some reason, feels good about the post-Cold War world, and many are ready to proclaim a transition into something much worse than the world we knew before 1989. That this is the case is puzzling, and why it is so may teach us something about the present-day discontents with liberal societies. Immanuel Wallerstein rose to academic prominence by projecting the dependencia theory of the 1960s back in time to what he called "the long sixteenth century", creating in the process the academic sub-discipline of "world systems theory" that has lived on in academic history departments long after anyone in Latin America took dependencia theory seriously. Unlike most of Wallerstein's previous works, After Liberalism is an exercise in futurology. It is based, none the less, on his broader theories concerning the capitalist "world system" which developed about 400 years ago, a piece of meta-historical theorizing on a very grand scale. Wallerstein pulls off the remarkable feat of arguing that the collapse of Communism in 198991 was actually the collapse of liberalism. He does this by asserting that the three major ideologies of the era following the French Revolution conservatism, liberalism and socialism were in fact not distinct doctrines, but rather variants of the same basic theme. Leninism was not the opposite of Wilsonianism, but its avatar, a form of liberal-socialism that bought off the "dangerous classes" by promising their inclusion at the table of technological modernization. The collapse of existing Communist regimes after 1989 was, in fact, a huge defeat for liberalism, because it ended the illusion that liberalism could exist in anything but a nakedly exploitative form. Wallerstein places the coming decades in the context of several historical cycles which nest inside one another, like a Russian matryoshka doll. The shortest is the Kondratieff cycle, whose "A" phase is characterized by a burst of productivity in the capitalist "core" regions, leading to the hegemony of one or another core capitalist power; the "B" phase, following after a generation or so, is one of hegemonic decline, as the technologies fuelling the "A" phase diffuse to other power centres. These Kondratieff cycles are contained within a larger cycle of liberal ideological hegemony, which according to Wallerstein extended over the two centuries from 1789 to 1989. And the final cycle is that of the capitalist world-system as a whole, which began in the "long sixteenth century" and will end, eventually, some time in the second half of the twenty-first century. Encapsulating futurology in this kind of meta-historical theorizing makes it virtually invulnerable to refutation on the basis of empirical evidence. For example, Wallerstein makes a great deal of the fact that the early post-war period of American hegemony ended in the 1970s, with the catching up of Japan and Germany and the various economic crises of that decade. However, economic growth resumed in the United States and many other parts of the world particularly Asia outside Japan by the late 1980s, and in the 1990s, the United States has steadily increased its lead over Japan and Europe, primarily as a result of its mastery of information-related technologies. This presents no problem to Wallerstein's view we may either be in an extended "B" phase of decline or at the beginning of a new "A" phase powered by new technological innovations that could extend the period of world economic growth well into the middle of the twenty-first century. Wallerstein is sure, however, that the capitalist world-system will collapse from its own internal contradictions when this possible new "A" phase exhausts itself in the second half of the next century long after Wallerstein and anyone who is likely to have read his books will have disappeared from view. In the midst of this grand theorizing, Wallerstein manages to blow up events from his personal life into matters of world-historical importance. He notes, at one point, how bracing it was to have been among the student radicals who took over Columbia University in 1968. Virtually every chapter in this highly repetitive book refers to the "world revolution of 1968", whose significance the author puts on a par with the revolutions of 1848 indeed, they are of greater significance, since they revealed the bankruptcy of "liberal socialism" (ie, Communism) and led directly to the events of 1989. Wallerstein points to several real problems in the contemporary world: the ecological sustainability of economic growth, the severe strains that migration from the Third World will put on industrialized societies, and the threat to stability posed by "antisystematic" states on the periphery like Iran or Iraq, states that may be armed with nuclear weapons. Like many other observers, he worries about the tribalisms of a newly unstable post-Cold War world. But he wraps these real concerns in a neo-Marxist package that suggests that they are only the result of the 500-year-old "capitalist world system", and that there is another system out there that can produce wealth without exploitation, without inequality, without authority, without racial and ethnic animosity, without environmental damage. For him, no wealth can be created in the capitalist world-system without the exploitation of other human beings, as if Asia's phenomenal rise over the past two generations could only have come at the expense of Africa, or as if the $100 billion or so of new value created by the American software industry since 1990 was wrung from the sweat of poor inner-city blacks. John Gray, like Immanuel Wallerstein, declares that liberalism has exhausted itself and that the historical period of liberal hegemony ended with the end of the Cold War. His intellectual journey to this point starts from the Right rather than the Left, and raises much more serious issues than does Wallerstein's. But in the end, it is no more plausible than the various Kondratieff cycles of world-systems theory. Gray's argument is a familiar one, which was made much earlier by conservatives like Burke and de Maistre. The liberal Enlightenment project was based on the hope that religion, traditions, culture all of the organic glue of pre-liberal societies could be replaced by a political order based on universal reason, and that social order could emerge out of the interactions of rational, self-interested individuals. This hasn't worked: Neo-liberalism itself can now be seen as a self-undermining political project. Its political success depended upon cultural traditions, and constellations of interests, that neo-liberal policy was bound to dissipate. In adopting the neo-liberal programme of a permanent institutional revolution as their own, contemporary conservatives not only have abandoned any claim to be guardians of continuity in national life; they have at the same time linked their fortunes to a political project which all the evidence suggests is self-defeating. Gray begins with the reasonable premiss that societies are not simply based on a formal, mechanical social contract, but have cultural underpinnings; both self-government and markets will not work properly if self-interest is not leavened with virtue, or if rights are not balanced by duties. Liberal politics has the tendency, however, to slide ineluctably from tolerant pluralism to a militantly agnostic relativism. The best chapter in Enlightenment's Wake argues that toleration of cultural difference is not the same thing as the assertion of the inherent equality of all cultures. This is, indeed, the downfall of current multiculturalist policies in Britain and the United States, which end up being hostile to the dominant national cultural identity. Instead of learning about George Washington, American children are taught about Indian women peace activists in Guatemala or other such stories intended to advance the ideological agenda of particular groups. And now, according to Gray, Western liberalism is spreading this nihilistic doctrine throughout the globe through its claims to universalism. Gray's real hostility, however, is reserved for the capitalist economy. From being a strong supporter of Thatcherism in the early 1980s, he now argues that the free market is the enemy of any form of settled community and is responsible for the decline of institutions across the board. "Shock therapy" and radical economic liberalization have undone the nations of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which are, as a result, turning towards nationalism rather than democracy. But the consequences of free markets are equally devastating for long-time democracies as well, and nowhere more so than in the United States, where both marketization and social decay are the most advanced of any industrialized nation. Globalization, GATT and the extension of the market to the remotest corners of the world are projects "as radically hubristic" as Soviet Communism, and even more threatening to the authentic cultural life lived by non-Western societies. Gray begins with a series of reasonable premisses, for example, that contracts and rational self-interest cannot fully replace cultural norms and moral reciprocity in liberal societies. But he jumps from criticism of Western rationalism on the grounds that it cannot defend itself from relativism, to a weird Heideggerian embrace of that relativism. The liberal, rationalist tradition springing from the Enlightenment is not a noble experiment that sadly failed, but was wrong from the start. On the book's last page, he wagers that "another mode of thinking found in some varieties of poetry and mysticism, for example, can assert against the domination of the forms of thought [ie, rationalism] privileged by both science and philosophy in Western cultures". What is important is to have a culture any culture, it seems, as long as it is authentic and not tainted by Western rationalism and self-doubt. These cultures are not the "kinder, gentler" voluntary communities posited by communitarians; in many cases, they are the ascriptive national and ethnic identities into which many of the world's peoples divide themselves. In relation to them, the liberal West is deservedly in decline; what Westerners need to recognize is the "need to share the earth with radically different cultures". Like many contemporary critics of liberalism, Gray takes aim not at the actual liberal theory underlying contemporary societies, but a caricature of that theory, based in equal parts on John Rawls and modern neoclassical economics. By his account, liberal societies are built from isolated, atomized individuals who choose to enter civil society out of rational calculation, either to obtain justice or to advance their material well-being. If Gray had looked beyond Rawls and come to terms with the classical liberal philosophical tradition, including Locke, the American Founders, Adam Smith and Tocqueville, he would have had to acknowledge its awareness of modernity's necessary cultural underpinnings. Steven Kautz's Liberalism and Community is a useful antidote to this sterile post-Rawlsian debate. Kautz is fully aware of the "empty hole" at the heart of liberal societies: the fact that they encompass no overarching view of the human good, and therefore will never completely satisfy human ends. Liberalism came into being out of a sober recognition that there could be no ultimate agreement on human ends, and particularly no agreement on the nature of distributive justice. This is the fundamental problem at the heart of Rawls's Theory of Justice, since it assumes an egalitarian vision of distributive justice arising out of the "original position", without recognizing that liberal societies are in fact compromises between the few who are proponents of liberty and the many who are proponents of democracy. Classical liberalism was never about happiness, but rather about lowering the aim of politics to achieve peace and prosperity. The latter were the conditions for the pursuit of happiness, an endeavour that would have to take place outside the realm of politics. It is a fantasy to think that pre-liberal societies with strong cultures were some kind of moral paradise. Liberalism got its start in Wallerstein's "long sixteenth century", after all, because various sects of Protestants and Catholics spent the better part of that period slaughtering each other over questions related to final ends. Today, ethnicity has replaced religion as the chief cement of moral community in many parts of the world. The non-urbanized Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia today constitute a rather authentic cultural community, unparalysed by the atomizing acid of Western rational-self-doubt, and it's not a very pretty picture. There is indeed a great deal to be unhappy about in contemporary liberal societies. As Gray does not tire of reminding us, family life has all but broken down in many parts of America; streets are not safe, and American society keeps 1 per cent of its adult population behind bars. The problem that many recent "communitarian" thinkers, including Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Jean Betthke Elsthain and others, have been struggling with, is how to protect group life and the moral and social capital it entails, in the context of a broadly liberal society. Gray dismisses this school as "barely intelligible in any other context than that of their native America", but he needs to pay more attention. Gray doesn't take voluntary community seriously as an alternative to atomistic individualism. It is true that many of the real-world groups into which societies organize themselves are based on ascriptive factors like race, ethnicity, religious heritage and the like. This does not mean, however, that all forms of group life have to be based on irrational loyalties and non-voluntary attachments. The vast majority of the social groups making up the civil societies of contemporary developed democracies are voluntary, and many indeed find their origins in the capitalist market-place. No one would deny that contemporary globalization poses a threat to the rootedness on which community life depends. But capitalism has been churning social relations for many generations now, and not only has it found a way of co-existing quite happily with community life, but the market was and continues to be responsible for a great deal of the socialization that is required to turn isolated individuals into members of organic communities. It was the capitalist market that disciplined peasants to the rhythms of industrial life, that created demands for universal education, that structured the professions and trade unions, and ultimately turned passive political objects into citizens on a grand scale. Many of today's most effective corporations are not those that dissolve the bonds of moral community, but those that build on man's natural sociability. Recognition that modern societies have necessary cultural underpinnings does not mean that we have to abandon reason or our powers of discrimination between healthy and pathological forms of attachment. Take the example of national identity. Gray argues, quite correctly, that nations are more than the sum of their political institutions; they also have shared cultures: "In the British case, vague but still powerful notions of fair play and give-and-take, of the necessity of compromise and of not imposing private convictions on others, are elements in what is left of the common culture, and they are essential if a liberal civil society is to survive in Britain." Yet one of the appealing features of British culture is that it has been relatively open to outsiders, and not inevitably based on blood or ethnicity. Certainly it is a virtue of French nationality that Leopold Senghor could be admitted to the Academie Francaise, an event scarcely conceivable in a more racialist culture like that of Germany. There is, then, a hierarchy of cultural forms dictated by rules of reason; Gray would presumably not be happy if British culture were replaced by a Pakistani or Jamaican sense of national identity, simply for the sake of having a strong culture. While Kautz's defence of the classical liberal tradition is welcome and refreshing, he needs to think carefully where exactly the boundaries between rational and irrational community are to be drawn in contemporary societies. For while classical liberalism is far more open to cultural considerations than its detractors suggest, there are a whole series of urgent questions where it provides relatively little guidance. How to define citizenship, the concessions that can be made to linguistic minorities in multi-ethnic societies, the elements of national culture that can be properly taught in schools, what forms of family life the law ought to legitimate these are the questions for which classical liberalism either has no answers, or where the answers are unsatisfactory. Take, for example, the family. Classical liberal theorists took family life for granted, because its forms were embedded in the cultures in which they lived; they could scarcely have imagined its breaking down to the extent it has in contemporary America. It is not surprising then that communitarians like Mary Ann Glendon or Jean Elshtain have had to look beyond liberalism in order to justify the family. At one point, John Gray takes a swipe at Leo Strauss, relegating him to one of those strands of thought understandable only in a provincially American context. Leaving aside the fact that Strauss's intellectual roots lay with Continental thinkers like Hermann Cohen and Edmund Husserl, and that his writings were never kindly received in the empiricist, Anglo-Saxon world where he eventually made his physical home, his primary preoccupation should be familiar to Gray. For Strauss, the central issue of our time was the so-called "crisis of modernity", the fact that Nietzsche and Heidegger had knocked the intellectual underpinnings away from Enlightenment rationalism. This concern with liberalism's intellectual nakedness is what drew him to that other great Continental European thinker of the mid-century, Alexandre Koj ve. Allan Bloom, Strauss's student, understood long before Gray the tendency of liberal tolerance to degenerate into relativism. Over the course of their lifetimes, these thinkers brought their considerable talents to bear trying to wrestle with this problem because it seemed to them critical to defend, on a philosophical level, the rational, decent, tolerant way of life created in Western societies. John Gray, dimly perceiving this same problem, has simply surrendered pre-emptively at the first sound of gunfire. Francis Fukuyama's most recent book is Trust, 1995. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:27:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:27:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Oliver Letwin: In defence of the citadel Message-ID: Oliver Letwin: In defence of the citadel The Times Literary Supplement, 97.12.12 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2088432&window_type=print 12 December 1997 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TORIES. The Conservative Party since 1945. By Ian Gilmour and Mark Garnett. 440pp. Fourth Estate. ?25. - 1 85702 475 3. IS CONSERVATISM DEAD? By John Gray and David Willetts. 192pp. Profile, 62 Queen Anne Street, London W1M 9LA. Paperback, ?8.99. - 1 86197 042 0. Free markets and the legacy of the Thatcher years. Ian Gilmour's thesis in Whatever Happened to the Tories is reasonably straightforward. As one might expect of one of the most prominent "wets" in Mrs Thatcher's early Cabinets, Gilmour believes that the Conservative Party has prospered - and has done well by Britain - only when it has espoused "One Nation" policies. He does not reach this conclusion by way of anything remotely resembling an academic history of the Conservative Party. There is no sign, in Whatever Happened to the Tories, of an open inquiry, or of balanced judgment drawn out of dispassionately assembled evidence. The conclusions do not emerge from the study; they are imposed on it with ruthless ferocity. Gilmour's is a book with goodies and baddies. The goodies are Keynesians, who benefit and liberate mankind: Mindful of the great pre-war slump and anxious to provide better conditions for their people, all advanced capitalist countries made a deliberate attempt to influence the level of effective demand. Their . . . rejection of laissez faire produced . . . freedom and growing prosperity . . . . In the thirteen years of Conservative government (1951 to 1964) the living standards of the British people . . . improved more than in the whole of the previous century . . . . The baddies are dogmatic Thatcherites, who tyrannize the nation and waste its precious assets: Lenin's slogan in 1917, "all power to the Soviets", was a precursor of Thatcherite practice: all power to Westminster . . . . Still enslaved to privatisation, in 1993 the Major Government also authorised the sell-off of British Rail. Whatever Happened to the Tories is, in other words, an example of polemic thinly disguised as history. But, even when considered as polemic, the book suffers from a notable disadvantage: its central thesis is vitiated by the vagueness of its central concept. What is "One Nation" Conservatism? Gilmour offers a variety of hints. At times, the tag seems to denote a brand of politics that favours particular aims - the "elimination of poverty" and the avoidance of "a too great disproportion among the citizens". At other times, it appears to mean a dispostition towards corporatism - a consensus omnium between big capital and organized labour - "in the long run and for the common good . . . the umpire is better than the duel". At yet other times, it seems to signify a programme to create a "mixed economy" with public and private ownership in a "pragmatic and sensible compromise between the extremes of collectivism and individualism". We are, however, given no clues about how these three themes are to be made consistent in practice, or which is to be given priority in the event of a clash, or (in sum) whether "One Nation" Conservatism is meant to be a description of an aim, or of a disposition or of a programme. Equally unclear is the evidence for the thesis that "One Nation" Conservatism - however defined - benefited Britain. Taking the period from Churchill's post-war government to the end of Heath's government (with the first quasi-Thatcherite part of Heath's administration duly omitted), we have the entire span of what Gilmour regards as "One Nation" Conservative government. During this period, Britain lost an empire; was overtaken economically by Japan, Germany, France and Italy, all of which had been defeated and invaded at one point or another during the war; ceased to be the scientific powerhouse of the world; exhibited the first signs of a cyclical rise in crime and the first beginnings of a breakdown in family life, and witnessed the nearly wholesale destruction of educational standards, as well as standards in the work-place. How is this to be represented as a success story? There are, however, two great redeeming features of Gilmour's book - first, the stretches (sometimes quite long) in which first-rate historical narrative, as if by mistake, takes over from the polemic and the thesis falls temporarily out of sight - the vivid account of the Suez crisis is a poignant example; and second, the moments when moral discernment triumphs over ideo-logical prejudice - as in the generous and touching accounts of Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph. In the end, the greatest interest of the work derives from the light it casts, not on its subject, but on its author. An educated patrician of Gilmour's taste, talent and refinement, no matter how polemically inclined, no matter how conceptually confused, cannot ultimately resist either the urge to write good history or the chivalry that admits qualities in an opponent. The best (indeed, almost the only) advertisement for the thesis lies in the fact that it is propounded by this author. John Gray's fifty pages can be regarded as the clear-minded, articulate and concise version of Gilmour's 500. Like Gilmour, Gray provides an attack on Thatcherite Conservatism which is based essentially on the proposition that Thatcherism is not conservative. His thesis is that "conservative parties and governments throughout the Western World" were "captured" by "free market ideology" during the 1970s and 80s, and that the resulting globally "unconstrained market institutions are bound to undermine social and political stability" and accordingly lack "political legitimacy" in "an age of low economic growth". Conservative parties thus captured are consequently, in Gray's view, left in the late 1990s with a programme that is neither acceptable to the public nor in any way consistent with the traditional Conservative concerns - inheritance, cultural continuity, social stability and an attachment to the familiar. As befits a philosopher of distinction, Gray puts his case with restrained and elegant vigour. He is making a plea for things that matter - and he makes it well. Who - above all, what Conservative - can deny the value of inheritance, cultural continuity, social stability, or the old and familiar? Who - of any persuasion - can pretend to be wholly untouched by the fear that global market forces may sweep away much that is old and precious? Who can deny that Conservatives in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s talked far more about the free market than about the moral and cultural life of mankind? Gray touches a nerve that, for Conservatives today, is raw. David Willetts's aim is to apply balm to that raw nerve, by arguing that "free markets", so far from "undermining social and political stability", actively promote such stability. He first establishes (what can hardly be denied) that a market does not in the least preclude the participants' being guided by motives such as "benevolence or altruism". Next, he advances the - not much less certain - proposition that, although the free market can break down cosy arrangements, it can also encourage some kinds of co-operative behaviour (as evidenced for example, by the fact that firms will succeed in a free market only if their employees display a high level of co-operation and corporate loyalty). The conclusion that Willetts draws from these propositions is that "the market order is non-moral rather than immoral. It is the background against which individuals and institutions must pursue their own purposes". This conclusion forms the uncontentious base-camp from which Willetts ascends. The ascent itself starts with the observation that the worst social problem of our times is the existence of a large set of young unemployed males who, while making the transition from childhood to adulthood, cause mayhem for the people living around them. But, Willetts argues, the schools which should be the great engines of progress, guiding these young men through adolescence, cannot achieve that purpose if they are reduced to being "outposts of an elaborate public sector bureaucracy". And from this reference to the particular, Willetts generalizes - drawing evidence from patterns of social life in the nineteenth century (as well as from the effect of Social Security in our own age) to back the claim that it is big government, rather than the free market, that has undermined the "civic" institutions which alone can convey from one generation to the next the rich panoply of inheritances and personal standards that a Conservative wishes to see preserved. The importance of the debate between Gray and Willetts is clear. If we are to have a society worth living in, we all need to know whether free markets are an ally or an enemy of civilization. The reasons for thinking of free markets as the enemy are clear. Civilization depends on (to a great degree, consists of) continuities, traditions, inheritances, dependabilities of expectation and of meaning; the free market, by contrast, depends on and encourages flux, dynamism, rapid reversals, ever-changing patterns of life. Civilization arises when men first raise their eyes above the immediate necessities of a merely bestial subsistence; free markets reward those who devote themselves wholeheartedly to the pursuit of wealth. The reasons for thinking of free markets as the friend of civilization are equally clear. Civilization depends to an extent on prosperity and the leisure that prosperity alone permits; free markets (notwithstanding the "work ethic" inculcated in some of their participants) deliver both more prosperity and more leisure than peasant or planned economies. Civilization depends also on vitality, freedom of thought, intellectual and artistic evolution; free markets encourage such vitality and pluralism - both directly, by permitting diverse individuals of differing views to support differing forms of cultural life, and in-directly through the encouragement of a general attitude of enterprise and vitality rather than the attitude of subservience encouraged by peasant and planned economics. Any rational and dispassionate observer must surely conclude that free markets are neither the blood-brothers nor the deadly foes of civilization; markets are in some respects dangerous for civilization, and in other respects advantageous. Accordingly, to resolve the dispute, we have to ask a different set of questions. We have to ask what is the alternative to a free market? What kind of political regime is implied by the application of that alternative? And how will civilization be likely to fare under that regime? The first step towards answering these questions is to recognize (as both Gray and Willetts do) the naturalness of a free market. A free market is not something that has to be created artificially - if a collection of people are left to their own devices, they will soon begin to trade (or, at the most primitive level, barter) with one another. It takes a government to stifle this human propensity to exchange; it takes, in particular, an authoritarian government either of the occult authoritarian variety (as in Marxism) or of the numinous authoritarian variety (as in militant Islam). But such governments stifle more than just the exchange of the market; they stifle also the free exchange of ideas. In so doing, they do inestimable damage to civilization. In short, the compelling argument in favour of Willetts and against Gray is not an argument about the intrinsic effects of differing economic systems. It is, rather, an argument about the kinds of political regimes implied by differing economic systems - and about the effect of those regimes. It is the argument that free societies will inevitably give rise to free markets. This is exactly why the Thatcherite programme that Gray elegantly misrepresents was not a programme intending to revolutionize society by favouring the free market. Rather, it was a programme designed to change the nature of government, drawing the State back from the authoritarian interventions (both in the economic and in the social sphere) that threatened - or seemed at least to its proponents to threaten - the liberty, plurality and vitality properly associated both with an open society and (as a consequence) with a flourishing civilization. In seeking that end, the Thatcherite programme was, of course, thoroughly conservative in character. It was conservative in that it sought to restore and preserve an age-old liberty. It was conservative in that it sought to work "with the grain" of human nature, by acknowledging the tendency of humankind to engage in free exchange. And it was conservative in that (so far from being a species of visionary millenarianism) it was addressing a problem associated with a particular time and place - a problem of over-government in the post-war "western" world. For the very same reason, the reports of the imminent death of Conservative politics brought to us breathlessly by Gray are distinctly pre-mature. Having successfully undertaken a programme to pull the State back from authoritarian intervention, Conservative parties around the "western" world are now turning their attention to other threats and problems. The work of a conservative (precisely because conservatism is not visionary) is never done. As the political equivalent of nature's patient, ceaseless eremite, the conservative (in his ever-vigilant desire to protect the fabric of civilization) turns, often somewhat stiffly and battle-weary, from the successful defence of one redoubt to the defence of the next point at which the barbarian enemy is threatening to enter the citadel. Oliver Letwin is Conservative Member of Parliament for Dorset West. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:27:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:27:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SL4 Wiki: MarcGeddes/UniversalDataTypes Message-ID: MarcGeddes/UniversalDataTypes http://www.sl4.org/wiki/MarcGeddes/UniversalDataTypes The following schematic proposes 28 universal data types for sentient minds. It is proposed that 7 universal knowledge domains (Matter, Mathematics, Mentality, Meaning, Models, Morality and Mind) and 4 universal mental operations (Action plans, Deductions, Inductions and Representations) are sufficient for a true general intelligence (one capable of universal reasoning, or reasoning in all domains in which a sentient mind could logically exist). Note on terms: I have used terms from the cognitive sciences to describe my proposed data types, but please bear in mind that I am not using these terms in the exact same way that other researchers may have defined them. Brief definitions of all my terms are given below. Action plan Deduction Induction Representation Mind Goal Utility Projection Episode Morality Plan Meme Lifestyle Person Models Procedure System Process Information Meaning Strategy Role Relationship Interaction Mentality Script Situation Activity Experience Mathematics Heuristic Theorem Axiom Proposition Matter Schema Object Pattern Gestalt ---Marc Geddes _________________________________________________________________ Definitions: Proposed Universal Mental Operations The x-axis (horizontal axis) lists the proposed 4 universal mental operations. The first two (Action plans, Deductions) loosely equate to active consciousness (which in humans mostly refers to operations in the frontal lobes). The last two (Inductions, Representations) loosely equate to passive consciousness (which in humans often refers to operations in the posterior parts of the brain). Bear in though, that the proposal here is for an ideal architecture, not the architecture of the human brain. Action plans: Linearly ordered concepts combined according to accepted rules providing plans of action for the sentient to manipulate the world in some knowledge domains. In humans often carried by out the ACTION networks in the frontal lobes. Deductions: Formation and combination of concepts in some knowledge domain. Here a 'concept' is defined to be a chucked mental unit that can be *uniquely* classified in some knowledge domain (so by this definition a 'fish' is not a concept because it's a folk term which can't be uniquely classified under a scientific Taxonomy of evolutiuonary biology). Inductions: Pattern recognition. Data compression arising from chunking. Here 'Induction' is being used in the most general sense to simply mean probabilistic generalizations from data in some domain. Representations: Data structures for various modalities. Perceptions. _________________________________________________________________ Definitions: Proposed Universal Knowledge domains The y-axis (vertical axis) lists the proposed 7 universal knowledge domains. It is proposed that there are 7 knowledge domains which are 'Universal' (applicable everywhere in reality where sentient minds can exist). These 7 knowledge domains are supposed to 'over-lap' or supervene on each other. It is suggested that all other knowledge domains are sub-domains which could be classified under one of the 7 core domains. The suggestion is that the 7 proposed universal knowledge domains are exhaustive. i.e sufficient to fully encompass all parts of reality in which sentient minds could exist. Mind Involving general abstract properties of sentient minds Morality Involving sentients in terms of their motivations Models Involving Information theory, system theory and computation Meaning Involving interactions between sentients and the role that sentients play in terms of things they do Mentality Involving actions and activities by sentients in terms of action tasks and experiences Mathematics Involving low-medium level logic and maths Matter Involving material properties of physical objects Remember the 7 M's - Mind, Morality, Models, Meaning, Mentality, Mathematics and Matter! _________________________________________________________________ Definitions: Proposed Universal data types Representations: Gestalt Modal representation of a material property of a physical object Proposition Modal representation of a basic relational (mathematical) property Experience Modal representation of the action properties of something as regards their effect on a sentient Interaction Modal representation of the effect of an action taken by a sentient on the world (espeically other sentients) Information Modal representaton of the functional properties of a system Person Modal representation of the identity of a sentient in motivational terms Episode Modal representation of a generic event Inductions: Pattern Recognition of a pattern in a physical modality Axioms Recognition of a consistent set of propositions Activity Recognition of a coherent short-term action task Relationship Recognition of a coherent interaction between a sentient and something in the world (espeically another sentient) Process Recognition of a goal-oriented change in state of a system Lifestyle Recognition of a way of life for a sentient in moral terms Projection Recognition of a possible 'outcome' in terms of it's utility (i.e predicted outcome) Deductions: Object Concept formation and combination of physical units Theorem Concept formation and combination of logical units (theorems). Deductions from axioms Situation Concept formation and combination of 'activity units' as regards effect of the world on a sentient (a 'situation') Role Concept formation and combination of 'social units' as regards the effect of the sentient on the world (a 'role') System Concept formation and combination of computational units as regards function (a 'system') Meme Concept formation and combination of 'cultural units'. Being used here in a more specific sense than the common definition of the term. Here it means a unit referring to the coherent lifestyle preference of a sentient as regards the sentients effects on others. Utility Concept formation and combination of 'event units'. Again, is here being defined in a more specific sense than it's general usage. Here it means projected outcomes of generic events classified according to their general value to sentients). Action plans: Schema A series of short-term physical actions to manipulate physical objects. Heuristic A series of logical strategies used to attack a problem in logic/maths Script A series of general physical/logical actions taken by a sentient in a general situation Strategy A series of social strategy used in a situation to help a sentient carry out its chosen role Procedure A series of functional steps used to manipulate a system Plan A series of social steps used by a sentient to carry out memes Goals A series of of abstract plans by a sentient to achieve projected outcomes. _________________________________________________________________ End of brief definitions. All comments or suggested elaborations of my proposed universal data types welcome ---Marc Geddes _________________________________________________________________ "This doesn't belong on the SL4 wiki. It's pure pseudoscience. Hint: any time you think you've discovered the "7 universal knowledge domains" and all of them happen to begin with the letter M, consider that your definitions may be wishful thinking designed to match your (preconceived) conclusions instead of the other way round." --Jack Say what? Clearly there are at least 3 universal knowledge domains: for instance the physical world, the computational world and the mathematical world. And clearly these domains at least supervene on each other. This much at least is accepted by many scientists and philosophers the world over. The schematic simply suggests proposed data types for dealing with various aspects of knowledge. What is pseudo-science about that? ---Marc Geddes You haven't proposed any 'data types'. That would require some description of how things work, or at the very least a specification of internal structure and state. You've given a very wolly verbal specification of a classification scheme for cognitive complexity, which is parameterised along two discrete axis. I'm not sure what the purpose of this is; are you saying that some kind of implementation of every one of these categories is both necessary and sufficient for an AGI to work (i.e. a design functionality checklist)? Why not add a third axis of parameterisation, so that you can have a true 'Mind Cube' design? -- [6]Starglider It is meant to be a design functionality checklist yes - I've been gradually homing in on what I hope is a 'periodic table' of a truly general sentient mind. Implementation of all these categories may not be neccessery for an AGI, but I think it's neccessery for a truly *general* intelligence (one capable of intelligent reasoning in any domain (i.e a AGI capable of reasoning anywhere in the multiverse where it is logically possible for a sentient mind exist). I may try to clarify definitions later to properly define the data types. As far as I can tell no third axis is required - these 28 categories appear to be both neccessery and sufficient for a true general intelligence. -- Marc Geddes You haven't defined "universal knowledge domain" or "data type". And it's not clear at all that the computational world is distinct from the mathematical world. As for the physical world being distinct... maybe that is an SL4 topic. But I don't know where to begin with a general critique of this essay; I don't think it's even in principle possible to "debunk" it as written. You seem to be suffering from what I believe crank.net calls classificationitis - a desire to cut up the universe into tidy (and in many cases, alliterative) chunks and proclaim the Universal Truth of this classification. See "There are two kinds of people..." type classifications. Also see Aristotle's "everything is either Earth, Air, Fire or Water". They are all more or less garbage because there is no reason at all that the universe should be organised according to such simplistic schemes. --Jack I can see it was poorly written again *sigh* It seems I have trouble being clear even when I'm actually *intentionally* trying to be clear. LOL Next draft should make more sense. According to science, the physical, mathematical and computational worlds are certainly *not* distinct from each other - they are in some sense equivalent. That was my whole point. These are categories for cognition, not categories for objective reality. By 'universal knowledge domain' I mean a domain for reasoning which is required everywhere in the multiverse... for instance everywhere in the universe you go, you will find physical things. Everywhere in the universe you go, you will find computation. And everywhere in the universe you go, you will find mathematical categories (at least according to what science currently tells us (for instance the principle of Universal Computation). --Marc Geddes _________________________________________________________________ This page was moved from [7]UniversalDataTypes by [8]observer on May 21, 2005. Reason: This is a [9]PersonalWikiPage, and therefore should be stored as a SubPage[10]? of the author's [11]NamePage. (see [12]WikiEtiquette) References 6. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/Starglider 7. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/UniversalDataTypes 8. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/Observer 9. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/PersonalWikiPage 10. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/action=edit&id=SubPage 11. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/NamePage 12. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/WikiEtiquette 13. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/SL4Wiki 14. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/MarcGeddes 15. http://www.sl4.org/wiki/RecentChanges From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 17 19:26:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:26:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Philapa Business J.: Robots putting their heads together Message-ID: Robots putting their heads together Philadelphia Business Journal http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2005/06/13/story1.html?t=printable > From the June 10, 2005 print edition [3]Peter Key Staff Writer The key to getting robots to perform complex tasks may not be in making them smarter. Instead, it may be in getting a lot of dumb robots to act together. That's the idea behind a project being led by the University of Pennsylvania that recently received a five-year, $5 million grant from the Department of Defense. The purpose of the [4]Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project is to create software and tools that enable a person to direct a swarm or swarms of small robots. If it succeeds, the project would enable the creation of large groups of robots that can act intelligently, even though the robots making up the groups aren't too bright. The groups would be similar to insects such as ants, which together can perform quite complex tasks, even though individually they are pretty simple. "At some level, robots are like lower order social animals, and the question is, 'Can we do with robots what animals do so naturally?'" said Vijay Kumar, who is heading the project. If the answer is "yes," swarms of robots could be used to do such things as spotting the locations of terrorists, which is why the Defense Department is interested in them. The Defense Department provided a $2 million grant to fund a predecessor project, in which researchers demonstrated at Fort Benning, Ga., that they could manage the movement and behavior of about a dozen autonomously acting robots. That also was led by Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory, or GRASP, which Kumar has directed since 1998. The GRASP lab, which is about 25 years old, has a wide variety of robots, ranging from the miniature, tractor-like clodbusters that performed at Fort Benning to dogs marketed by Sony Corp. that Penn students have programmed to play soccer. The lab is in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, which typically is Penn's largest recipient of Defense grants. Penn gets about $10 million to $14 million in Defense grants most years, making them a small percentage of its roughly $750 million in annual grant awards. In addition to robotics experts, the Swarms project will involve researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence, control theory, systems engineering and biology. Besides Penn, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Army Research Office and the Army Institute of Collaborative Behavior are participating in the project. Funding for Swarms comes from the Defense Department's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program. The project doesn't involve any classified information; Penn doesn't do projects of that type. "We don't do research where there are restrictions on publication," said Perry Molinoff, Penn's vice provost for research. The predecessor to the Swarms project was called the Multiple Autonomous Robotics, or MARS, project. It was meant to get robots to interact, see their world and react to obstacles around them. The Swarms project will attempt to get the robots to do all that, plus communicate with each other about what they are encountering. More about the Swarms project can be found at [5]www.grasp.upenn.edu/swarms/index.html. pkey at bizjournals.com | 215-238-5141 References 1. http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2005/06/13/story1.html 2. http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/ 3. http://www.bizjournals.com/search/bin/search?t=philadelphia&am=philadelphia&q=%22Peter%20Key%22&f=byline&am=120_days&r=20 4. http://www.bizjournals.com/search/bin/search?q=%22Scalable%20Swarms%20of%20Autonomous%20Robots%20and%20Sensors%22&t=philadelphia 5. http://www.grasp.upenn.edu/swarms/index.html From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Jun 18 19:34:33 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:34:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] politics and identity In-Reply-To: <200506181800.j5II0XR13148@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050618193433.90752.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>The hypothesis that loud public advertisements of one's political ideology function as some sort of courtship display designed to attract sexual mates, analogous to the peacock's tail or the nightingale's song, seems dangerous.<< --There may be a risk that all political positions will be "deconstructed" and viewed as courtship displays. But it's difficult to dismiss the psychological overtones in politics, especially when political language often contains blatant references to sexuality and family dynamics. It's easy to find instances where a political declaration happens to work very well as a statement about what kind of family a person wants to have, what one values in a mate, and so on. The psychological aspects of politics do not, of course, override any objective value in one's worldview. Liberals and conservatives are both right some of the time. What's interesting is how reluctant they are to admit it, almost as if one is "tainted" by agreement with the other party. It reminds me of heterosexual males who "overact" in order to avoid being associated too closely with gay acquaintances. The fear is not that one's position will be misread, but that one's identity will be. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:25:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:25:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews reviews The Paradoxical Primate by Colin Talbot Message-ID: Alice Andrews reviews The Paradoxical Primate by Colin Talbot http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=2693 Imprint Academic, 2004 Review by Alice Andrews, M.A. on Jun 13th 2005 At first it was hard for me not to be gleeful reading Colin Talbot's The Paradoxical Primate: here was Talbot, an ex-Trotskyist (I grew up the daughter of Trotskyists) with an evolutionary psychological view of human nature (a perspective he and I share) writing in a light and personal style (my favorite); telling me I was about to read a "creative synthesis" of many disciplines: management and organizational theory and research (his current field), public administration, economics, evolutionary psychology, chaos and complexity theory; about a topic that fascinates me--our paradoxical nature. Talbot, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Nottingham and director of the Nottingham Policy Centre calls his 'synthesis' "human paradox theory;" which basically propounds the notion that we have evolved paradoxical instincts (or traits) which generate paradoxical systems (or organizations). Talbot sees our paradoxical human nature as universal, "ineradicable," and adaptive (not only for our ancestors, but for us today--though he admits it does pose risks and can be maladaptive), and he believes that seeing humans through this particular paradoxical lens will be better for public-policy makers and probably for us all. These paradoxical instincts come in pairs; the major ones for him being: aggression versus peace-making; competition versus cooperation; altruism versus selfishness; conformity versus autonomy. One of our problems as social animals and indeed as agents of social change, etc. (as I think he-- rightly--sees it), is that, paradoxically! we tend to think in rather black-and-white terms, in 'either/or' ways. Talbot writes: "Humans, we usually assume, are either one thing or another. Creative or pedestrian, aggressive or pacific, competitive or cooperative, rational or emotional, and so on endlessly. ....Most social science has traditionally been constructed around the notion that if you are more of one, you must be less of the other. If you are more competitive, you must be less cooperative. (6)" The aim of human paradox theory is to go beyond such false dichotomies. One of his arguments is that in some sense this either/or mentality parallels the political left and right, as well as the war between blank slatists and innatists. (Talbot does a pretty good job of defending why one can be on the left and also subscribe to an innatist view.) Though Talbot and I arrive at the same conclusion and draw on some of the same literature and theories, and though he does make clear that his is not a grand theory of everything but rather an opening to the possible beginning of cross-disciplinary synthetic research in paradoxical studies, my glee did turn to a bit of disappointment, as ultimately, I wasn't convinced about his argument and how he arrived at the conclusion, and I wonder if, indeed, The Paradoxical Primate is a synthesis. Human paradox theory feels more like random ideas and examples and gedanken experiments (quite a few of those) than a cohesive theory or synthesis about our paradoxical nature. The fields Talbot uses for his theory are fine and most are good, but I would rather see more emphasis on behavioral genetics, neuroethology, evolutionary psychology, plain old reductive genetics and neuroscience, and a smattering of Jung and Freud and maybe even fuzzy logic--less so on management and organizational theory and research, less talk about Boston Boxes--but this is clearly my bias and there must be plenty of readers for whom the application of management and organizational theory to our paradoxical nature would be useful and a good starting ground. Here's an example of how more ethology would have been useful. Talbot writes: "What evolves is what might be called a sort of 'behavioural jukebox' [I got the idea of a behavioral jukebox from the excellent book by Bateson and Martin...] a set of behavioral patterns--often contradictory--from which the jukebox operator can select in response to their environment and preferences..." But does he need a neologism for this? Doesn't ethology already have a vocabulary for such a thing? What about 'innate releasing mechanism' or the newer 'releasing mechanism' which admits the continuum of an open to closed developmental system? Or a discussion of epigenetic rules? Talbot is often paradoxical his own self and sometimes seems to confuse or at least muddy his terms here and there. And though Talbot writes an awful lot about the group versus the individual, he doesn't use that dichotomy to make his paradoxical model more clear. Talbot's sense of our paradoxicalness appears to have two components: in one sense we are individually paradoxical--we are deceptive, covetous, hypocritical, wear masks, are well-mannered, civilized; our actions and behaviors and not always in line with our beliefs and values and thoughts. (He never mentions cognitive dissonance but some discussion of it as a social psychological principle might have been warranted. Likewise no mention of Freud and the still very cogent theory that the conflict between the Superego and the Id results in neurosis, stress, etc.) The other way we are paradoxical is as a group, a species. Our very nature is paradoxical in that it seems to have a limited but plastic and ever-adaptive and flexible program which tends to be what he refers to as 'bipolar.' Talbot, I think, is right in supposing that one of our problems comes from not recognizing our paradoxical nature and setting up dichotomies. But I yearned for a deeper understanding of these paradoxes. Can such things be located in parts of the triune brain (reptilian, limbic, neocortex) or bifurcated brain (left/right hemispheres)? Are there perhaps differences in the very brains and genes of people who tend to see our nature as either 'either/or' or as paradoxical? I think Talbot is right that we might need a new model of human nature. I'm going to assume that anyone interested in reading his book doesn't need an exploration of the problems with the blank-slate model. But the evolutionary model (and EP in particular) is worth looking at. The Cosmides/Tooby evolutionary model states that there is one universal human nature but that within that nature there is an epigenetic process with much variability--things can be turned up/on, down/off, or modified depending on the environment, etc. One of the drawbacks to the universal human nature argument seems semantic: If we see such a huge range of behaviors and individual differences, what does it mean to say we have a universal human nature that is say, hierarchical, yet have the capacity to be nonhierarchical? It seems nonsensical (and yes, paradoxical). This is often the argument against evolutionary psychologists, in fact. [See my essay "An Evolutionary Mind" [26]www.metanexus.net).] MacClean's triune brain model (or Jim Henry's four-brain system) might provide clues to this puzzle, though, and although Talbot does make mention of Gerald A. Cory's CSN (conflict systems neurobehavioral) model (a brilliant model--see Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach, eds. Somit and Peterson) which is based on MacClean's triune brain model, he doesn't exactly incorporate it into his theory. Talbot talks about paradoxical behavior and paradoxical instincts, but what of the mind?; the conscious executive function--the ego? He does say: "We humans are essentially conflicted between our individual and social selves and a great deal of our behaviour derives from this basic paradox." (71) But he doesn't develop or expand on the discussion of the executive program that decides on which dimension to lean toward (he uses Cory's terms: ego versus empathy), and it's an exploration of this that seems worth pursuing. The mind (or Ego) in Freudian terms, is that which is constantly trying to balance the instincts (Id) and the Superego (culture's rules, morals, norms, etc.) Through this lens (mechanistic as it is), we are paradoxical because we are constantly being torn and pulled every which way by one side (Id's lusty, demanding, individualistic, sexual and aggressive needs (the midbrain)), or the other--Superego's fair-minded, other- and outward-directed, prosocial needs (the cerebral cortex). It is the executive function (Ego) that tries to balance these. Because Talbot doesn't really deal with the mind (or the executive function much), when he writes about hypocrisy, there is only a fuzzy sense about it. However, seen through the Freudian (or EP or MacLean) triadic model, hypocrisy becomes clearer: A person's need for a job is critical for survival. A person may have an Id-y, reptilian impulse to strike out at a boss or colleague but instead might repress such feelings because of a need to remain in the group, because the group affords survival. A person may even act hypocritically; using the defense mechanism of reaction formation, to brown nose a boss and 'act' in affiliative ways toward colleagues, while behind their back saying all sorts of nasty things about them. If one didn't need to go in to work--if one could be a recluse, a hermit, a self-employed artist--one wouldn't have to deal with the issue of hypocrisy or being two-faced very much. It is one's ability to live with these contradictions and masks, which to me, distinguishes different types. Are there those who are more sensitive to living with such contradictions? Are there different thresholds? I would argue yes--that there are those who are wired to have a large capacity to distance their thoughts and feelings from their behavior and words--to be more compartmental--thus not experiencing as much cognitive dissonance; these are the cool, "cut-off," types, what I call "Apollinian." While there are others who have a harder time with the mismatch (the dissonance) in the form of guilt--who have a naturally lower threshold to carry the inconsistency of mind and behavior. We often refer to these people as "sensitive" artists--what I call "Dionysian." And I think there are fundamental differences between these types--at the level of alleles even. For example, there is much speculation that men's brains are wired more compartmentally and that parts of their corpus callosums--the nerve fibers that bridge the two hemispheres together--are smaller than in women's brains, which could account for some typically male 'compartmental' traits. And though Talbot briefly mentions other cultures such as Japan, he doesn't go near such a genetic or neurological argument, which I think is the more interesting. An exploration of the possible genetic differences regarding collectivist cultures/peoples and individualist cultures/peoples would have been fascinating. Despite my minor disappointment and misgivings, Talbot's project in The Paradoxical Primate is admirable and worthy of attention; there is definitely much food for thought here as he does bring in a lot of material (good references) and that alone is valuable. Certainly a paradoxical view of human nature helps to explain the seeming contradictions regarding our dual nature: How do we answer the question: are we peace-loving or violent? And is it a valid question in the first place? It is in the working out of these questions that evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics will probably have to duel and at some point make peace with, in the form of some paradoxical synthesis. [27]Alice Andrews, M.A., Department of Psychology, State University of New York at New Paltz References 26. http://www.metanexus.net/ 27. http://bhs.sunydutchess.edu/andrews/ From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:25:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:25:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Spectator: Another Perspective: The Liberty Reader Message-ID: Another Perspective: The Liberty Reader http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8314 By [19]Ralph R. Reiland Published 6/16/2005 12:08:53 AM The idea of liberty never seemed especially scary to me. That was what we were all about as Americans -- people fleeing despotism. "Where liberty dwells, there is my country," declared Benjamin Franklin. I write for Liberty magazine. The Statue of Liberty is the American symbol, a salute to freedom, not to caution or obedience. I was surprised, consequently, to see John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, a classic defense of freedom and individual sovereignty, getting an honorable mention on a list published by Human Events of the [20]"Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Human [21][Ad2_255x66.gif] Events, "The National Conservative Weekly," asked a panel of 15 top conservatives to compile a list of books that have done the most damage to the human condition over the past 200 years. There was no surprise about the books that placed first, second, third and sixth -- The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Quotations from Chairman Mao and Das Kapital. All four inspired purification drives that resulted in the mass murder of millions of people by the state. The other six spots on the Top 10 list are more contentious. In the fourth slot, outranking Marx's Das Kapital in its hazard to humanity, is a 1948 study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as "The Kinsey Report." Human Events claims that this report by Indiana University zoologist Alfred Kinsey was "designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy." Kinsey's report, said the conservative Washington Times last year, "stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95 percent of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws." One could argue that it's the state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population is classified as sexual outlaws. It was 13 years after the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that Estelle Griswold, the wife of an Episcopal minister, and Dr. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School, were dragged into court and convicted of providing medical information on contraception to married couples. It wasn't until four years later -- on June 7, 1965 -- that the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, maintaining that the outlawing of counseling about or the use of contraception was a violation of the constitutional right to privacy. Next on the list of dangerous ideas, coming in at No. 5, is John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Mr. Dewey "signed the 'Humanist Manifesto,'" says Human Events, and encouraged the teaching of "thinking skills" instead of "traditional character development," and thereby "helped nurture the Clinton generation." The seventh most harmful book is The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1963. Traditional stay-at-home motherhood was like "a comfortable concentration camp," wrote Friedan. Human Events reports that this founding president of the National Organization for Women was a longtime "Stalinst Marxist" who was "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." We're lucky these well-connected hot bodies didn't nuke the Republican National Committee. Dangerous book No. 8 is The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte. He's the one who coined the term "sociology" and said man could figure out things better through science than theology. Book No. 9 is Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. He argued, correctly I think, that the world isn't run by moral rules; instead, "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." And finally, the danger of bad economics comes in at No. 10, with the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes, published during the depths of the Great Depression. "The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government," says Human Events, referring to the Keynesian idea that governments could reverse downward economic cycles by means of deficits, borrowing and higher levels of state spending. There's cause for disagreement about the animus against Keynes, Nietzsche, Comte, Friedan, Dewey and Kinsey. But when it comes to the defense of liberty and individual freedom, it seems that conservatives should see that John Stuart Mill provided a wise caution. "Whatever crushes individuality is despotism," he wrote in "On Liberty," "whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men." For the next Top 10 contest, some good conservative editor should ask for a list of the most damage done when conservatives abandoned their principles and pushed for a bigger and more intrusive state. Ralph R. Reiland (rrreiland at aol.com) is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:26:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:26:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: EMP: Americas Achilles Heel Message-ID: Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: EMP: Americas Achilles Heel http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:uggRwWDu3YoJ:www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/default.htm+imprimus+emp&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 [This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/default.htm as retrieved on Jun 17, 2005 04:04:16 GMT. I do not know why I had to retrieve this from Google's cache. I get Hillsdale College's Imprimus and thought to look it up online. Lucky I used Google first. [Okay, I've wondered about whether the threat from an Electromagnetic Pulse is actually serious and not just something used for dramatic effect in the teevee series, "Dark Angel," which was pitched for an audience of above average intelligence and was pulled because of abysmal ratings. [I cannot contest Gaffney that the threat is serious, provided the nuclear material can be found. I'm not worried about North Korea but about religious fanatics, who, happily enough, come from countries where the average IQ is 90 or lower, and so may not be able to pull such an attack off. [But--I fear the consequences to our liberties of cranking up the National Security State to the level Gaffney wants. I just can't trust our government.] Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a B.S. from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He acted in the Reagan administration as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, following four years of service as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy. Prior to that he was a professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by the late Senator John Tower (R-Texas) and an aide to the late Senator Henry M. Scoop Jackson (D-Washington). He is a columnist for the Washington Times, Jewish World Review and TownHall.com, a contributing editor to National Review Online and a featured weekly contributor to Hugh Hewitts nationally syndicated radio program. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Mr. Gaffney resides in Washington, D.C. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 24, 2005, in Dallas, Texas, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, Americas War Against Islamic Terrorism. If Osama bin Ladenor the dictators of North Korea or Irancould destroy America as a twenty-first century society and superpower, would they be tempted to try? Given their track records and stated hostility to the United States, we have to operate on the assumption that they would. That assumption would be especially frightening if this destruction could be accomplished with a single attack involving just one relatively small-yield nuclear weaponand if the nature of the attack would mean that its perpetrator might not be immediately or easily identified. Unfortunately, such a scenario is not far-fetched. According to a report issued last summer by a blue-ribbon, Congressionally-mandated commission, a single specialized nuclear weapon delivered to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States by a ballistic missile would be capable of causing catastrophe for the nation. The source of such a cataclysm might be considered the ultimate weapon of mass destruction (WMD)yet it is hardly ever mentioned in the litany of dangerous WMDs we face today. It is known as electromagnetic pulse (EMP). How EMP Works A nuclear weapon produces several different effects. The best known, of course, are the intense heat and overpressures associated with the fireball and accompanying blast. But a nuclear explosion also generates intense outputs of energy in the form of x- and gamma-rays. If the latter are unleashed outside the Earths atmosphere, some portion of them will interact with the upper atmospheres air molecules. This in turn will generate an enormous pulsed current of high-energy electrons that will interact with the Earths magnetic field. The result is the instantaneous creation of an invisible radio-frequency wave of uniquely great intensity roughly a million-fold greater than that of the most powerful radio station. The energy of this pulse would reach everything in line-of-sight of the explosions center point at the speed of light. The higher the altitude of the weapons detonation, the larger the affected terrestrial area would be. For example, at a height of 300 miles, the entire continental United States, some of its offshore areas and parts of Canada and Mexico would be affected. What is more, as the nuclear explosions fireball expands in space, it would generate additional electrical currents in the Earth below and in extended electrical conductors, such as electricity transmission lines. If the electrical wiring of things like computers, microchips and power grids is exposed to these effects, they may be temporarily or permanently disabled. Estimates of the combined direct and indirect effects of an EMP attack prompted the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack to state the following in its report to Congress1: The electromagnetic fields produced by weapons designed and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation. If it seems incredible that a single weapon could have such an extraordinarily destructive effect, consider the nature and repercussions of the three distinct components of an electromagnetic pulse: fast, medium and slow. The fast component is essentially an electromagnetic shock-wave that can temporarily or permanently disrupt the functioning of electronic devices. In twenty-first century America, such devices are virtually everywhere, including in controls, sensors, communications equipment, protective systems, computers, cell phones, cars and airplanes. The extent of the damage induced by this component of EMP, which occurs virtually simultaneously over a very large area, is determined by the altitude of the explosion. The medium-speed component of EMP covers roughly the same geographic area as the fast one, although the peak power level of its electrical shock would be far lower. Since it follows the fast component by a small fraction of a second, however, the medium-speed component has the potential to do extensive damage to systems whose protective and control features have been impaired or destroyed by the first onslaught. If the first two EMP components were not bad enough, there is a third onea slow component resulting from the expansion of the explosions fireball in the Earths magnetic field. It is this slow componenta pulse that lasts tens of seconds to minuteswhich creates disruptive currents in electricity transmission lines, resulting in damage to electrical supply and distribution systems connected to such lines. Just as the second component compounds the destructive impact of the first, the fact that the third follows on the first two ensures significantly greater damage to power grids and related infrastructure. The EMP Threat Commission estimates that, all other things being equal, it may take months to years to bring such systems fully back online. Here is how it depicts the horrifying ripple effect of the sustained loss of electricity on contemporary American society: Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result. In that event, a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our nation. The primary avenues for catastrophic damage to the nation are through our electric power infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications, energy, and other infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact other important aspects of our nations life, including the financial system; means of getting food, water, and medical care to the citizenry; trade; and production of goods and services. The recovery of any one of the key national infrastructures is dependent on the recovery of others. The longer the outage, the more problematic and uncertain the recovery will be. It is possible for the functional outages to become mutually reinforcing until at some point the degradation of infrastructure could have irreversible effects on the countrys ability to support its population. The EMP Threat Today The destructive power of electromagnetic pulses has been recognized by the United States national security community for some time. The EMP Threat Commission noted that EMP effects from nuclear bursts are not new threats to our nation. Historically, [however,] this application of nuclear weaponry was mixed with a much larger population of nuclear devices that were the primary source of destruction, and thus EMP as a weapons effect was not the primary focus. As long as the Cold War threat arose principally from the prospect of tens, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons detonating on American soil, such attention as was given to protecting against EMP effects was confined to shielding critical components of our strategic forces. The militarys conventional forces were generally not systematically hardened against such effects. And little, if any, effort was made even to assesslet alone to mitigatethe vulnerabilities of our civilian infrastructure. As the theory went, as long as our nuclear deterrent worked, there was no need to worry about everything else. If, on the other hand, deterrence failed, the disruptions caused by EMP would be pretty far down the list of things about which we would have to worry. Unfortunately, todays strategic environment has changed dramatically from that of the Cold War, when only the Soviet Union and Communist China could realistically threaten an EMP attack on the United States. In particular, as the EMP Threat Commission put it: The emerging threat environment, characterized by a wide spectrum of actors that include near-peers, established nuclear powers, rogue nations, sub-national groups, and terrorist organizations that either now have access to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles or may have such access over the next 15 years, have combined to raise the risk of EMP attack and adverse consequences on the U.S. to a level that is not acceptable. Worse yet, the Commission observed that some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter. This is particularly true of terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety. The same might be said of rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran. They may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States, and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter. Indeed, professionals associated with the former Soviet nuclear weapons complex are said to have told the Commission that some of their ex-colleagues who worked on advanced nuclear weaponry programs for the USSR are now working in North Korea. Even more troubling, the Iranian military has reportedly tested its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile in a manner consistent with an EMP attack scenario. The launches are said to have taken place from aboard a shipan approach that would enable even short-range missiles to be employed in a strike against the Great Satan. Ship-launched ballistic missiles have another advantage: The return address of the attacker may not be confidently fixed, especially if the missile is a generic Scud-type weapon available in many arsenals around the world. As just one example, in December 2002, North Korea got away with delivering twelve such missiles to Osama bin Ladens native Yemen. And Al Qaeda is estimated to have a score or more of sea-going vessels, any of which could readily be fitted with a Scud launcher and could try to steam undetected within range of our shores. The EMP Threat Commission found that even nations with whom the United States is supposed to have friendly relations, China and Russia, are said to have considered limited nuclear attack options that, unlike their Cold War plans, employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack. Indeed, as recently as May 1999, during the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, high-ranking members of the Russian Duma, meeting with a U.S. congressional delegation to discuss the Balkans conflict, raised the specter of a Russian EMP attack that would paralyze the United States. America the Vulnerable What makes the growing EMP attack capabilities of hostile (and potentially hostile) nations a particular problem for America is that, in the words of the EMP Threat Commission, the U.S. has developed more than most other nations as a modern society heavily dependent on electronics, telecommunications, energy, information networks, and a rich set of financial and transportation systems that leverage modern technology. Given our acute national dependence on such technologies, it is astonishingand alarmingto realize that: ? Very little redundancy has been built into Americas critical infrastructure. There is, for example, no parallel national security power grid built to enjoy greater resiliency than the civilian grid. ? Americas critical infrastructure has scarcely any capacity to spare in the event of disruptioneven in one part of the country (recall the electrical blackout that crippled the northeastern U.S. for just a few days in 2003), let alone nationwide. ? America is generally ill-prepared to reconstitute damaged or destroyed electrical and electricity-dependent systems upon which we rely so heavily. These conditions are not entirely surprising. America in peacetime has not traditionally given thought to military preparedness, given our highly efficient economy and its ability to respond quickly when a threat or attack arises. But EMP threatens to strip our economy of that ability, by rendering the infrastructure on which it relies impotent. In short, the attributes that make us a military and economic superpower without peer are also our potential Achilles heel. In todays world, wracked by terrorists and their state sponsors, it must be asked: Might not the opportunity to exploit the essence of Americas strengththe managed flow of electrons and all they make possiblein order to undo that strength prove irresistible to our foes? This line of thinking seems especially likely among our Islamofascist enemies, who disdain such man-made sources of power and the sorts of democratic, humane and secular societies which they help make possible. These enemies believe it to be their God-given responsibility to wage jihad against Western societies in general and the United States in particular. Calculations that might lead some to contemplate an EMP attack on the United States can only be further encouraged by the fact that our ability to retaliate could be severely degraded by such a strike. In all likelihood, so would our ability to assess against whom to retaliate. Even if forward-deployed U.S. forces were unaffected by the devastation wrought on the homeland by such an attack, many of the systems that transmit their orders and the industrial base necessary to sustain their operations would almost certainly be seriously disrupted. The impact on the American militarys offensive operations would be even further diminished should units based outside the continental United States also be subjected to EMP. Particularly with the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has been reluctant to pay the costs associated with shielding much of its equipment from electromagnetic pulses. Even if it had been more willing to do so, the end of underground nuclear testing in 1992 denied our armed forces their most reliable means of assessing and correcting the EMP vulnerabilities of weapon systems, sensors, telecommunications gear and satellites. The military should also be concerned that although the sorts of shielding it has done in the past may be sufficient to protect against the EMP effects of traditional nuclear weapons designs, weapons optimized for such effects may well be able to defeat those measures. Without a robust program for assessing and testing advanced designs, we are unlikely to be able to quantify such threatslet alone protect our military hardware and capabilities against them. What is to be Done? If the EMP Threat Commission is correct about the phenomenon of electromagnetic pulse attacks, the capabilities of our enemies to engage in these attacks and the effects of such attacks on our national security, cosmopolitan society and democratic way of life, we have no choice but to take urgent action to mitigate this danger. To do so, we must immediately engage in three focused efforts: First, we must do everything possible to deter EMP attacks against the United States. The EMP Threat Commission described a comprehensive approach: We must make it difficult and dangerous to acquire the materials to make a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver them. We must hold at risk of capture or destruction anyone who has such weaponry, wherever they are in the world. Those who engage in or support these activities must be made to understand that they do so at the risk of everything they value. Those who harbor or help those who conspire to create these weapons must suffer serious consequences as well. To be effective, these measures will require vastly improved intelligence, the capacity to perform clandestine operations the world over, and the assured means of retaliating with devastating effect. The latter, in turn, will require not only forces capable of carrying out such retaliation in the aftermath of an EMP attack, but also the certain ability to command and control those forces. It may also require the communication, at least through private if not public channels, of the targets that will be subjected to retaliationirrespective of whether a definitive determination can be made of culpability. Second, we must protect to the best of our ability our critical military capabilities and civilian infrastructure from the effects of EMP attacks. This will require a comprehensive assessment of our vulnerabilities and proof of the effectiveness of corrective measures. Both of these may require, among other things, periodic underground nuclear testing. The EMP Threat Commission judged that, given the sorry state of EMP-preparedness on the part of the tactical forces of the United States and its coalition partners, It is not possible to protect [all of them] from EMP in a regional conflict. But it recommended that priority be given to protecting satellite navigation systems, satellite and airborne intelligence and targeting systems [and] an adequate communications infrastructure. Particularly noteworthy was the Commissions recommendation that America build a ballistic missile defense system. Given that a catastrophic EMP attack can be mounted only by putting a nuclear weapon into space over the United States and that, as a practical matter, this can only be done via a ballistic missile, it is imperative that the United States deploy as quickly as possible a comprehensive defense against such delivery systems. In particular, every effort should be made to give the Navys existing fleet of some 65 AEGIS air defense ships the capability to shoot down short- to medium-range missiles of the kind that might well be used to carry out ship-launched EMP strikes. Third, an aggressive and sustained effort must be made to plan and otherwise prepare for the consequences of an EMP attack in the event all else fails. This will require close collaboration between government at all levels and the private sector, which owns, designs, builds, and operates most of the nations critical infrastructure. Among other things, we will need to do a far better job of monitoring that infrastructure and remediating events that could ensue if EMP attacks are made on it. We must also ensure that we have on hand, and properly protected, the equipment and partsespecially those that are difficult or time-consuming to produceneeded to repair EMP-damaged systems. The EMP Threat Commission identified the latter as including large turbines, generators, and high-voltage transformers in electrical power systems, and electronic switching systems in telecommunications systems. Conclusion We have been warned. The members of the EMP Threat Commissionwho are among the nations most eminent experts with respect to nuclear weapons designs and effectshave rendered a real and timely public service. In the aftermath of their report and in the face of the dire warnings they have issued, there is no excuse for our continued inaction. Yet this report and these warnings continue to receive inadequate attention from the executive branch, Congress and the media. If Americans remain ignorant of the EMP danger and the need for urgent and sustained effort to address it, the United States will continue to remain woefully unprepared for one of the most serious dangers we have ever faced. And by remaining unprepared for such an attack, we will invite it. The good news is that steps can be taken to mitigate this dangerand perhaps to prevent an EMP attack altogether. The bad news is that there will be significant costs associated with those steps, in terms of controversial policy changes and considerable expenditures. We have no choice but to bear such costs, however. The price of continued inaction could be a disaster of infinitely greater cost and unimaginable hardship for our generation and generations of Americans to come. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:27:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:27:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'The Ethical Brain': Mind Over Gray Matter Message-ID: 'The Ethical Brain': Mind Over Gray Matter New York Times Book Review, 5.6.19 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/books/review/19SATELL.html [First chapter appended.] THE ETHICAL BRAIN By Michael S. Gazzaniga. 201 pp. Dana Press. $25. By SALLY SATEL TOM WOLFE was so taken with Michael S. Gazzaniga's ''Social Brain'' that not only did he send Gazzaniga a note calling it the best book on the brain ever written, he had Charlotte Simmons's Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience professor recommend it in class. In ''The Ethical Brain,'' Gazzaniga tries to make the leap from neuroscience to neuroethics and address moral predicaments raised by developments in brain science. The result is stimulating, very readable and at its most edifying when it sticks to science. As director of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College and indefatigable author of five previous books on the brain for the general reader alone, Gazzaniga is less interested in delivering verdicts on bioethical quandries -- should we clone? tinker with our babies' I.Q.? -- than in untangling how we arrive at moral and ethical judgments in the first place. Take the issue of raising intelligence by manipulating genes in test-tube embryos. Gazzaniga asks three questions. Is it technically possible to pick out ''intelligence genes''? If so, do those genes alone determine intelligence? And finally, is this kind of manipulation ethical? ''Most people jump to debate the final question,'' he rightly laments, ''without considering the implications of the answers to the first two.'' Gazzaniga's view is that someday it will be possible to tweak personality and intelligence through genetic manipulation. But because personhood is so significantly affected by factors like peer influence and chance, which scientists can't control, we won't be able to make ''designer babies,'' nor, he believes, will we want to. Or consider what a ''smart pill'' might do to old-fashioned sweat and toil. Gazzaniga isn't especially worried. Neither a smart pill nor genetic manipulation will get you off the hook: enhancement might enable you to grasp connections more easily; still, the fact remains that ''becoming an expert athlete or musician takes hours of practice no matter what else you bring to the task.'' But there are ''public, social'' implications. Imagine basketball stars whose shoes bear the logo not of Nike or Adidas but of Wyeth or Hoffman-La Roche, ''touting the benefits of their neuroenhancing drugs.'' ''If we allow physical enhancements,'' Gazzaniga argues, ''some kind of pharmaceutical arms race would ensue and the whole logic of competition would be neutralized.'' Gazzinga has no doubt that ''neuroscience will figure out how to tamper'' with neurochemical and genetic processes. But, he says, ''I remain convinced that enhancers that improve motor skills are cheating, while those that help you remember where you put your car keys are fine.'' So where, as Gazzaniga asks, ''do the hard-and-fast facts of neuroscience end, and where does ethics begin?'' In a chapter aptly called ''My Brain Made Me Do It,'' Gazzaniga puts the reader in the jury box in the case of a hypothetical Harry and ''a horrible event.'' This reader confesses impatience with illuminated brain scans routinely used to show that people ''addicted'' to drugs -- or food, sex, the Internet, gambling -- have no control over their behavior. Refreshingly, Gazzaniga declares ''the view of human behavior offered by neuroscience is simply at odds with this idea.'' ''Just as optometrists can tell us how much vision a person has (20/20 or 20/40 or 20/200) but cannot tell us when someone is legally blind,'' he continues, ''brain scientists might be able to tell us what someone's mental state or brain condition is but cannot tell us (without being arbitrary) when someone has too little control to be held responsible.'' Last year, when the United States Supreme Court heard arguments against the death penalty for juveniles, the American Medical Association and other health groups, including psychiatrists and psychologists, filed briefs arguing that children should not be treated as adults under the law because in normal brain development the frontal lobe -- the region of the brain that helps curb impulses and conduct moral reasoning -- of an adolescent is still immature. ''Neuroscientists should stay in the lab and let lawyers stay in the courtroom,'' Gazzangia writes. Moving on to the provocative concept of ''brain privacy,'' Gazzaniga describes brain fingerprinting -- identifying brain patterns associated with lying -- and cautions that just like conventional polygraph tests, these ''much more complex tests . . . are fraught with uncertainties.'' He also provides perspective on the so-called bias tests increasingly used in social science and the law, like one recently described in a Washington Post Magazine article. Subjects were asked to pair images of black faces with positive or negative words (''wonderful,'' ''nasty''); if they pressed a computer key to pair the black face with a positive word several milliseconds more slowly than they paired it with a negative word, bias was supposed. The unfortunate headline: ''See No Bias: Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are. Assuming we accept the results, what can we do about it?'' Nonsense, Gazzaniga would say. Human brains make categories based on prior experience or cultural assumptions. This is not sinister, it is normal brain function -- and when experience or assumptions change, response patterns change. ''It appears that a process in the brain makes it likely that people will categorize others on the basis of race,'' he writes. ''Yet this is not the same thing as being racist.'' Nor have split-second reactions like these been convincingly linked to discrimination in the real world. ''Brains are automatic, rule-governed, determined devices, while people are personally responsible agents,'' Gazzaniga says. ''Just as traffic is what happens when physically determined cars interact, responsibility is what happens when people interact.'' Clearly, Gazzaniga is not a member of the handwringer school, like some of his fellow members of the President's Council on Bioethics. At the same time, his faith in our ability to regulate ourselves is touching. He notes that sex selection appears to be producing alarmingly unbalanced ratios of men to women in many countries. ''Tampering with the evolved human fabric is playing with fire,'' he writes. ''Yet I also firmly believe we can handle it. . . . We humans are good at adapting to what works, what is good and beneficial, and, in the end, jettisoning the unwise.'' Gazzaniga looks to the day when neuroethics can derive ''a brain-based philosophy of life.'' But ''The Ethical Brain'' does not always make clear how understanding brain mechanisms can help us deal with hard questions like the status of the embryo or the virtues of prolonging life well over 100 years. And occasionally the book reads as if technical detail has been sacrificed for brevity. A final, speculative section, ''The Nature of Moral Beliefs and the Concept of Universal Ethics,'' explores whether there is ''an innate human moral sense.'' The theories of evolutionary psychology point out, Gazzaniga notes, that ''moral reasoning is good for human survival,'' and social science has concluded that human societies almost universally share rules against incest and murder while valuing family loyalty and truth telling. ''We must commit ourselves to the view that a universal ethics is possible,'' he concludes. But is such a commitment important if, as his discussion suggests, we are guided by a universal moral compass? Still, ''The Ethical Brain'' provides us with cautions -- prominent among them that ''neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility, because that is something we ascribe to humans -- to people -- not to brains. It is a moral value we demand of our fellow, rule-following human beings.'' This statement -- coming as it does from so eminent a neuroscientist -- is a cultural contribution in itself. Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of ''One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance.'' --------------- First chapter of 'The Ethical Brain' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/books/chapters/0619-1st-gazza.html By MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA Conferring Moral Status on an Embryo Central to many of the bioethical issues of our time is the question, When should society confer moral status on an embryo? When should we call an embryo or a fetus one of us? The fertilized egg represents the starting point for the soon-to-be dividing entity that will grow into a fetus and finally into a baby. It is a given that a fertilized egg is the beginning of the life of an individual. It is also a given that it is not the beginning of life, since both the egg and the sperm, prior to uniting, represent life just as any living plant or creature represents life. Yet is it right to attribute the same moral status to that human embryo that one attributes to a newborn baby or, for that matter, to any living human? Bioethicists continue to wrestle with the question. The implications of determining the beginning of moral status are far-reaching, affecting abortion, in vitro fertilization, biomedical cloning, and stem cell research. The rational world is waiting for resolution of this debate. This issue shows us how the field of neuroethics goes beyond that of classic bioethics. When ethical dilemmas involve the nervous system, either directly or indirectly, those trained in the field of neuroscience have something to say. They can peek under the lid, as it were, and help all of us to understand what the actual biological state is and is not. Is a brain present? Is it functioning in any meaningful way? Neuroscientists study the organ that makes us uniquely human-the brain, that which enables a conscious life. They are constantly seeking knowledge about what areas of the brain sustain mental thought, parts of mental thought, or no thought. So at first glance, it might seem that neuroethicists could determine the moral status of an embryo or fetus based on the presence of the sort of biological material that can support mental life and the sort that cannot-in other words, whether the embryo has a brain that functions at a level that supports mental activity. Modern brain science is prepared to answer this question, but while the neurobiology may be clear, neuroethics runs into problems when it tries to impose rational, scientific facts on moral and ethical issues. The Path to Conscious Life As soon as sperm meets egg, the embryo begins its mission: divide and differentiate, divide and differentiate, divide and differentiate. The embryo starts out as the melding of these two cells and must eventually become the approximately 50 trillion cells that make up the human organism. There is no time to lose-after only a few hours, three distinct areas of the embryo are apparent. These areas become the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm, the initial three layers of cells that will differentiate to become all the organs and components of the human body. The layer of the ectoderm gives rise to the nervous system. As the embryo continues to grow in the coming weeks, the base of the portion of the embryo called the neural tube eventually gives rise to neurons and other cells of the central nervous system, while an adjacent portion of the embryo called the neural crest eventually becomes cells of the peripheral nervous system (the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord). The cavity of the neural tube gives rise to the ventricles of the brain and the central canal of the spinal cord, and in week 4 the neural tube develops three distinct bulges that correspond to the areas that will become the three major divisions of the brain: forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. The early signs of a brain have begun to form. Even though the fetus is now developing areas that will become specific sections of the brain, not until the end of week 5 and into week 6 (usually around forty to forty-three days) does the first electrical brain activity begin to occur. This activity, however, is not coherent activity of the kind that underlies human consciousness, or even the coherent activity seen in a shrimp's nervous system. Just as neural activity is present in clinically brain-dead patients, early neural activity consists of unorganized neuron firing of a primitive kind. Neuronal activity by itself does not represent integrated behavior. During weeks 8 to 10, the cerebrum begins its development in earnest. Neurons proliferate and begin their migration throughout the brain. The anterior commissure, which is the first interhemispheric connection (a small one), also develops. Reflexes appear for the first time during this period. The frontal and temporal poles of the brain are apparent during weeks 12 to 16, and the frontal pole (which becomes the neocortex) grows disproportionately fast when compared with the rest of the cortex. The surface of the cortex appears flat through the third month, but by the end of the fourth month indentations, or sulci, appear. (These develop into the familiar folds of the cerebrum.) The different lobes of the brain also become apparent, and neurons continue to proliferate and migrate throughout the cortex. By week 13 the fetus has begun to move. Around this time the corpus callosum, the massive collection of fibers (the axons of neurons) that allow for communication between the hemispheres, begins to develop, forming the infrastructure for the major part of the cross talk between the two sides of the brain. Yet the fetus is not a sentient, self-aware organism at this point; it is more like a sea slug, a writhing, reflex-bound hunk of sensory-motor processes that does not respond to anything in a directed, purposeful way. Laying down the infrastructure for a mature brain and possessing a mature brain are two very different states of being. Synapses-the points where two neurons, the basic building blocks of the nervous system, come together to interact-form in large numbers during the seventeenth and following weeks, allowing for communication between individual neurons. Synaptic activity underlies all brain functions. Synaptic growth does not skyrocket until around postconception day 200 (week 28). Nonetheless, at around week 23 the fetus can survive outside the womb, with medical support; also around this time the fetus can respond to aversive stimuli. Major synaptic growth continues until the third or fourth postnatal month. Sulci continue to develop as the cortex starts folding to create a larger surface area and to accommodate the growing neurons and their supporting glial cells. During this period, neurons begin to myelinate (a process of insulation that speeds their electrical communication). By the thirty-second week, the fetal brain is in control of breathing and body temperature. By the time a child is born, the brain largely resembles that of an adult but is far from finished with development. The cortex will continue to increase in complexity for years, and synapse formation will continue for a lifetime. The Arguments That is the quick and easy neurobiology of fetal brain development. The embryonic stage reveals that the fertilized egg is a clump of cells with no brain; the processes that begin to generate a nervous system do not begin until after the fourteenth day. No sustainable or complex nervous system is in place until approximately six months of gestation. The fact that it is clear that a human brain isn't viable until week 23, and only then with the aid of modern medical support, seems to have no impact on the debate. This is where neuro "logic" loses out. Moral arguments get mixed in with biology, and the result is a stew of passions, beliefs, and stubborn, illogical opinion. Based on the specific question being asked, I myself have different answers about when moral status should be conferred on a fetus. For instance, regarding the use of embryos for biomedical research, I find the fourteen-day cutoff employed by researchers to be a completely acceptable practice. However, in judging a fetus "one of us," and granting it the moral and legal rights of a human being, I put the age much later, at twenty-three weeks, when life is sustainable and that fetus could, with a little help from a neonatal unit, survive and develop into a thinking human being with a normal brain. This is the same age at which the Supreme Court has ruled that the fetus becomes protected from abortion. As a father, I have a perceptual reaction to the Carnegie developmental stages of a fetus: the image of Stage 23, when the fetus is approximately eight weeks old, suggests a small human being. Until that stage, it is difficult to tell the difference between a pig embryo and a human embryo. But then-bingo-up pops the beginning shape of the human head, and it looks unmistakably like one of us. Again, this is around eight weeks, more than two thirds into the first trimester. I am reacting to a sentiment that wells up in me, a perceptual moment that is stark, defining, and real. And yet, at the level of neuroscientific knowledge, it could easily be argued that my view is nonsensical. The brain at Carnegie Stage 23, which has slowly been developing from roughly the fifteenth day, is hardly a brain that could sustain any serious mental life. If a grown adult had suffered massive brain damage, reducing the brain to this level of development, the patient would be considered brain dead and a candidate for organ donation. Society has defined the point at which an inadequately functioning brain no longer deserves moral status. If we look at the requirements for brain death, and examine how they compare with the developmental sequence, we see that the brain of a third-trimester baby, or perhaps even a second-trimester baby, could be so analyzed. So why would I draw a line at Carnegie Stage 23 when the neuroscientific knowledge makes it clear that the brain at this stage is not ready for prime-time life? I am trying to make a neuroethical argument here, and I cannot avoid a "gut reaction." Of course, it is my gut reaction, and others may not have it at all. In recognizing it within me, however, I am able to appreciate how difficult these decisions are for many people. Even though I can't imagine, and do not have, a gut reaction to seeing a fourteen-day-old blastocyst, an entity the size of the dot of an i on this page, that dot may serve as a stimulus to the belief system of those who hold that all fertilized eggs are worthy of our respect. Still, I would argue that assigning equivalent moral status to a fourteen-day-old ball of cells and to a premature baby is conceptually forced. Holding them to be the same is a sheer act of personal belief. The Continuity and Potentiality Arguments There is, they argue, no clear place to draw a line after the earliest formation of the organism, and so there can be no stark division between the moral standing of nascent human life and that of more mature individuals. -From Monitoring Stem Cell Research, the President's Council on Bioethics, 2004 Obviously there is a point of view that life begins at conception. The continuity argument is that a fertilized egg will go on to become a person and therefore deserves the rights of an individual, because it is unquestionably where a particular individual's life begins. If one is not willing to parse the subsequent events of development, then this becomes one of those arguments you can't argue with. Either you believe it or you don't. While those who argue this point try to suggest that anyone who values the sanctity of human life must see things this way, the fact is that this just isn't so. This view comes, to a large extent, from the Catholic Church, the American religious right, and even many atheists and agnostics. On the other side, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, many Christians, and other atheists and agnostics do not believe it. Certain Jews and Muslims believe that the embryo deserves to be assigned the moral status of a "human" after forty days of development. Many Catholics believe the same, and many have written to me expressing those views based on their own reading of church history. When we examine the issue of brain death, that is when life ends, it also begins to become clear that something else is at work here: our own brain's need to form beliefs. If we examine how a common set of accepted rational, scientific facts can lead to different moral judgments, we see the need to consider what influences these varying conclusions, and we can begin to extricate certain neuroethical issues from the arbitrary contexts in which they may initially have been considered. Different cultures view brain death differently. Brain death is declared medically when a patient is in an irreversible coma due to brain injury-from a stroke, for example-and has no brain stem response, leading to a flat EEG (that is, no sign of brain activity on an electroencephalography recording), or ability to breathe independently. A survey published in the journal Neurology in 2000 compared worldwide standards and regulations for declaring brain death. The concept of brain death is accepted worldwide: even in the most religious societies no one argues that human life continues to exist when the brain is irreversibly unable to function. What differs is the procedure for determining brain death. And these societal differences reveal how bioethical practices and laws can vary so wildly, for reasons that have nothing to do with science but instead are based on politics, religion, or, in most cases, the differing personal beliefs of a task force. For instance, China has no standards, while Hong Kong has well-defined criteria-left over, no doubt, from its having been under the rule of the United Kingdom. The Republic of Georgia requires that a doctor with five years of neuroscience practice determine brain death; this is not so in Russia. Iran requires the greatest number of observations-at twelve, twenty-four, and thirty-six hours-with three physicians; and in the United States, several states have adapted the Uniform Definition of Death Act, including New York and New Jersey, both of which have a religious-objections loophole. The example of brain death illustrates how rules and regulations on bioethical issues can be formed and influenced by beliefs that have nothing to do with the accepted scientific facts. No one debates that a line has been crossed when the loss of brain function is such that life ceases. What we differ on isn't even when that line should be drawn-most countries have similar definitions of brain death. What differs is largely who makes the call and what tests are used-differences, basically, in how you know when you get there, not where "there" is. So, too, we all seem to be in agreement that there must be a point at which moral status should be conferred on an embryo or fetus. However, we seem to have a harder time defining that point, regardless of the facts. . . . From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:29:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:29:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'A Different Universe': You Are More Important Than a Quark Message-ID: 'A Different Universe': You Are More Important Than a Quark New York Times Book Review, 5.6.19 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/books/review/19DAVIDSO.html [First chapter appended.] By KEAY DAVIDSON EVERY child knows how to learn what makes a toy work: bust it open. In that sense, we're all born reductionists, whose philosophy holds that anything can be explained by breaking it into its component parts. By analyzing them, one discovers how the parts act together to produce larger phenomena. If you crack open a windup clock, you can examine its gears to see what makes it tick. Some people resent reductionism because it sweeps away many mysteries. Behind spooky phenomena, reductionists have shown, are the ordinary ticktocks of nature's machinery, the concealed ropes and pulleys of cosmic-scale Penn and Teller tricks. Indeed, reductionism has reinforced the old philosophical suspicion that there is something vaguely unreal about ''reality'': as the Greek philosopher Democritus said, it's all just atoms and the void. To a hyper-reductionist, the invisibly small microworld is more ''real'' than everything else. Bigger objects -- cats, toasters, people, the sun, galactic superclusters -- are just second-order consequences. The atoms or quarks or leptons (or ''strings,'' if you follow the latest trendy theories) are what count, while you and I are just ephemera. It's a disillusioning view, but so far it has yielded undeniable benefits. By breaking matter into atoms, subatomic particles and subatomic forces, and by disassembling living organisms into such discrete elements as cells, genes, enzymes and so forth, scientists have learned much about how nature works, and how we can make it do our bidding. Inevitably, reductionism has been overused. Not everything can be reduced to cosmic nuts and bolts. In the emerging sciences of the 21st century, many researchers are dusting off an old saying: ''The whole is more than the sum of its parts.'' A recent example: many molecular biologists once thought the chemical information stored on DNA coded for the full complexity of living organisms. But a few years ago, the Human Genome Project revealed people have far too few genes (not many more than a roundworm) to account for the kaleidoscopic complexity of the human body. By itself, it appears, DNA cannot explain it any more than you can infer the United States Constitution from the traffic laws of Topeka. Somehow, biologists propose, higher-level ''organizational'' or ''emergent'' principles switch on at larger sizes, such as on the scale of proteins. Even physicists, wizards of the nonliving realm, are talking about emergent properties. Their change of heart is not easy, though, as Robert B. Laughlin, who received a Nobel Prize in Physics, shows us in his important, brain-tickling new book, ''A Different Universe.'' Like the blacksmith to whom everything resembles a nail, some physicists spent decades trying to explain everything in terms of particles; thus, gravity was attributed to a hypothetical ''graviton.'' In recent decades, though, a few physicists have won acclaim for experiments with antireductionist implications. One example is a bizarre laboratory phenomenon called superfluidity, in which liquefied helium crawls vertically out of its beaker like the gelatinous monster in ''The Blob.'' Laughlin, who teaches at Stanford University, illuminates emergent principles through a charming analogy: the paintings of Renoir and Monet. Up close the paintings look like ''daubs of paint,'' nothing more. Yet when we step back from the canvases, we see fields of flowers. ''The imperfection of the individual brush strokes tells us that the essence of the painting is its organization. Similarly'' -- Laughlin adds in a most unexpected segue -- ''the ability of certain metals to expel magnetic fields exactly when they are refrigerated to ultralow temperatures strikes us as interesting because the individual atoms out of which the metal is made cannot do this.'' A major step toward recognition of emergent phenomena was a discovery about electrical conductivity in 1980 by the German physicist Klaus von Klitzing. To understand its significance, be aware of its historical context: in the 19th century Edwin Hall had discovered principles of electrical conductivity usually called the Hall effect, and for a century afterward electrical conduction had been understood as simple Newtonian motion of electrons in a metal. Von Klitzing found a totally unexpected phenomenon -- that Hall conductivity in strong magnetic fields and ultralow temperatures changes in a precise, stepwise fashion as the field strength is varied. What identifies the effect as emergent is its precision and the fact that it disappears in small samples. The Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to him in 1985 specifically cites this work. Laughlin and two colleagues shared the 1998 prize for their studies of a similar phenomenon, one even more bizarre than von Klitzing's, ''unanticipated by any theory and not analogous to anything previously known in nature,'' as Laughlin writes. Talk of emergence makes many scientists nervous. The word, after all, has been co-opted by all kinds of people who have bowdlerized it, along with once precise terms like ''holistic'' and ''paradigm,'' for trivial purposes. More pertinent, emergence seems to defy common sense, just as the notion of the sphericity of the earth once did. There are no emergent principles in money, for example: 100 million pennies equals $1 million, not an emergent $2 million. To our primate brains, the whole is the sum of its parts. But when I once griped about the counterintuitiveness of quantum physics, a scientist at the University of Illinois replied dryly, ''Common sense is a poor guide to the nature of reality.'' Laughlin's thesis is intriguing, if not completely persuasive. I can't help wondering if hard-core reductionists will eventually explain emergent phenomena in reductionist terms; they've pulled rabbits out of hats before. Still, his thesis reminds us of the great value of something most physicists assume they can live without: philosophy. Behind the seemingly concrete principles, practices and instruments of any laboratory, there are certain philosophical assumptions, often unexamined. In the 19th century physicists were hypnotized by the myth of the cosmic ether, an invisible medium through which light rippled, as waves ripple across a pond. In 1905, Albert Einstein, then a young patent clerk, awakened them. Likewise, Laughlin says, physicists face a philosophical ''crisis'' over emergence, ''a confrontation between reductionist and emergent principles that continues today.'' In the history of science, philosophical crises often precede scientific revolutions. This year is the 100th anniversary of Einstein's revolution. In Laughlin's view, another physics revolution is coming. He mocks speculations in the 1990's about an imminent end of science: ''We live not at the end of discovery but at the end of Reductionism, a time in which the false ideology of human mastery of all things through microscopics is being swept away by events and reason.'' To invoke a familiar metaphor, physicists have fruitfully spent the last century trying to map every twig, acorn and bird's nest in the trees. Now it's time to step back and see the forest. Keay Davidson, a science writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, is the author of ''Carl Sagan: A Life.'' -------------- First chapter of 'A Different Universe' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/books/chapters/0619-1st-laugh.html By ROBERT B. LAUGHLIN Frontier Law Nature is a collective idea, and though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never its perfection inhabit a single object. Henri Fuseli Many years ago, when I was living near New York, I attended a retrospective of Ansel Adams, the great nature photographer, at the Museum of Modern Art. Like many people born in the American West, I had always liked Mr. Adams's work and felt I appreciated it better than New Yorkers ever could, so I jumped at the chance to see it firsthand. It was well worth the effort. Anyone seeing these images close up realizes at once that they are not simply sterile pictures of rocks and trees but thoughtful comments on the meaning of things, the immense age of the earth, and the impermanence of human concerns. This exhibition made a much stronger impression on me than I had expected, and it flashes into my mind even now when I am wrestling with a tough problem or having difficulty separating what is important from what is not. Public television viewers were reminded recently by Ric Burns's excellent American Experience documentary that Mr. Adams's work, like any other art, was as much a creation of a specific time and place as of the artist himself. In the early part of the twentieth century, when Adams was a boy and the frontier had been declared closed, Americans debated vigorously over what its loss implied for their future. In the end, they decided that they did not want to be like Europe, that part of their identity, and of meaningful life generally, was in close proximity to wildness. Thus was born the metaphorical frontier-the myth of the cowboy, the vast landscape of the possible, the ideal of the rugged individual-that defines American culture to this day. Adams's work grew to maturity alongside this metaphor and derives its power by eliciting the nostalgia for untamed wilderness at its core. The idea of the frontier is not just quaint provincialism. It is often spoken of as such, especially in Europe, where the mythological nature of the American West has always been easier to discern than it is here and is often viewed with suspicion. I first saw this idea expressed in a lengthy article on America in the magazine Stern when I was a soldier stationed in Germany in the early 1970s. Such articles are appearing with increasing frequency nowadays as the cold war recedes into history. But the perception is incorrect. While the confluence of cultural forces that generated Adams's images is uniquely American, the images themselves are not. The longing for a frontier seems to lie deep in the human soul, and people from different parts of the world and with different cultural backgrounds understand it quickly and intuitively. In no country does one have to dig very deep to find an appreciation of, and identification with, wildness. Adams's work travels well for this reason and has universal appeal. The idea of science as a great frontier is similarly timeless. While there are clearly many nonscientific sources of adventure left, science is the unique place where genuine wildness may still be found. The wildness in question is not the lurid technological opportunism to which modern societies seem so hopelessly addicted, but rather the pristine natural world that existed before humans arrived-the vast openness of the lone rider splashing across the stream with three pack animals under the gaze of mighty peaks. It is the choreography of ecologies, the stately evolution of minerals in the earth, the motion of the heavens, and the birth and death of stars. Rumors of its death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are greatly exaggerated. My particular branch of science, theoretical physics, is concerned with the ultimate causes of things. Physicists have no monopoly on ultimate causes, of course, for everyone is concerned with them to some extent. I suspect it is an atavistic trait acquired long ago in Africa for surviving in a physical world in which there actually are causes and effects-for example between proximity to lions and being eaten. We are built to look for causal relations between things and to be deeply satisfied when we discover a rule with cascading implications. We are also built to be impatient with the opposite-forests of facts from which we cannot extract any meaning. All of us secretly wish for an ultimate theory, a master set of rules from which all truth would flow and that could forever free us from the frustration of dealing with facts. Its concern for ultimate causes gives theoretical physics a special appeal even to nonscientists, even though it is by most standards technical and abstruse. It is also a mixture of good news and bad news. First you find that your wish for an ultimate theory at the level of human-scale phenomena has been fulfilled. We are the proud owners of a set of mathematical relationships that, as far as we know, account for everything in the natural world bigger than an atomic nucleus. They are very simple and beautiful and can be written in two or three lines. But then you find that this simplicity is highly misleading-rather like those inexpensive digital wristwatches with only one or two buttons. The equations are devilishly difficult to manipulate and impossible to solve in all but a small handful of instances. Demonstrating that they are correct requires arguments that are lengthy, subtle, and quantitative. It also requires familiarity with a huge body of work done after the Second World War. While the basic ideas were invented by Schr?dinger, Bohr, and Heisenberg in the 1920s, it was not until powerful electronic computers were developed and armies of technically competent people were generated by governments that these ideas could be tested quantitatively against experiment over a wide range of conditions. Key technical developments, such as the purification of silicon and the perfection of atomic beam machines, were also important. Indeed, we might never have known for certain that the whole thing was correct had it not been for the cold war and the economic importance of electronics, radar, and accurate timekeeping, which made financing easy on various ostensibly practical grounds. Thus eighty years after the discovery of the ultimate theory we find ourselves in difficulty. The repeated, detailed experimental confirmation of these relationships has now officially closed the frontier of reductionism at the level of everyday things. Like the closing of the American frontier, this is a significant cultural event, causing thoughtful people everywhere to debate what it means for the future of knowledge. There is even a best-selling book exploring the premise that science is at an end and that meaningful fundamental discovery is no longer possible. At the same time, the list of even very simple things found "too difficult" to describe with these equations continues to lengthen alarmingly. Those of us out on the real frontier listening to the coyotes howl at night find ourselves chuckling over all this. There are few things a real frontiersman finds more entertaining than insights about wilderness from people back in civilization who can barely find the supermarket. I find this moment in history charmingly similar to Lewis and Clark's wintering on the Columbia estuary. Through grit and determination their party had pushed its way across a continent, only to discover that the value had not been in reaching the sea but in the journey itself. The official frontier at that time was a legal fiction having more to do with property rights and homesteading policy than a confrontation with nature. The same is true today. The real frontier, inherently wild, may be found right outside the door, if one only cares to look. Despite being a wild place, the frontier is regulated by laws. In the mythical old West the law meant the force of civilization in a land where there was none, and it was often enforced by some heroic figure holding back the wildness of human nature through strength of will. A man had a choice of whether to obey this law or not, but he stood a good chance of getting gunned down if he did not. But there are natural laws as well, relationships among things that are always true regardless of whether people are present to observe them. The sun rises every morning. Heat flows from hot things to cold ones. Herds of deer spotting cougars always dash away. These are the exact opposite of laws of myth, in that they flow out of wildness and constitute its essence rather than being a means for its containment. Indeed, describing these things as laws is somewhat misleading, for it implies a kind of statute that otherwise willful natural things choose to obey. This is not correct. It is a codification of the way natural things are. The important laws we know about are, without exception, serendipitous discoveries rather than deductions. This is fully compatible with one's everyday experience. The world is filled with sophisticated regularities and causal relationships that can be quantified, for this is how we are able to make sense of things and exploit nature to our own ends. But the discovery of these relationships is annoyingly unpredictable and certainly not anticipated by scientific experts. This commonsense view continues to hold when the matter is examined more carefully and quantitatively. It turns out that our mastery of the universe is largely a bluff-all hat and no cattle. The argument that all the important laws of nature are known is simply part of this bluff. The frontier is still with us and still wild. The logical conflict between an open frontier on the one hand and a set of master rules on the other is resolved by the phenomenon of emergence. The term emergence has unfortunately grown to mean a number of different things, including supernatural phenomena not regulated by physical law. I do not mean this. I mean a physical principle of organization. Human societies obviously have rules of organization that transcend the individual. An automobile company, for example, does not cease to exist if one of its engineers gets run over by a truck. The government of Japan does not change very much after an election. But the inanimate world also has rules of organization, and they similarly account for many things that matter to us, including most of the higher-level physical laws we use in our daily lives. Such commonplace things as the cohesiveness of water or the rigidity of steel are simple cases in point, but there are countless others. Nature is full of highly reliable things that are primitive versions of impressionist paintings. A field of flowers rendered by Renoir or Monet strikes us as interesting because it is a perfect whole, while the daubs of paint from which it is constructed are randomly shaped and imperfect. The imperfection of the individual brush strokes tells us that the essence of the painting is its organization. Similarly, the ability of certain metals to expel magnetic fields exactly when they are refrigerated to ultralow temperatures strikes us as interesting because the individual atoms out of which the metal is made cannot do this. Since principles of organization-or, more precisely, their consequences -can be laws, these can themselves organize into new laws, and these into still newer laws, and so on. The laws of electron motion beget the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry, which beget the laws of crystallization, which beget the laws of rigidity and plasticity, which beget the laws of engineering. The natural world is thus an interdependent hierarchy of descent not unlike Jonathan Swift's society of fleas: So, naturalists observe, the flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em And so proceed ad infinitum. This organizational tendency is so powerful that it can be difficult to distinguish a fundamental law from one of its progeny. The only way we know that the behavior of cats is not fundamental, for example, is because cats fail to work when pushed beyond their proper operating limits, so to speak. Similarly, the only way we know atoms are not fundamental is that they come apart when caused to collide at great speed. This principle continues down to smaller and smaller scales: the nuclei from which atoms are made come apart when caused to collide at greater speed, the parts liberated from the nucleus come apart at even greater speeds, and so forth. Thus the tendency of nature to form a hierarchical society of physical laws is much more than an academic debating point. It is why the world is knowable. It renders the most fundamental laws, whatever they are, irrelevant and protects us from being tyrannized by them. It is the reason we can live without understanding the ultimate secrets of the universe. Thus the end of knowledge and the closing of the frontier it symbolizes is not a looming crisis at all, but merely one of many embarrassing fits of hubris in civilization's long history. In the end it will pass away and be forgotten. Ours is not the first generation to struggle to understand the organizational laws of the frontier, deceive itself that it has succeeded, and go to its grave having failed. One would be wise to be humble, like the Irish fisherman observing quietly that the sea is so wide and his boat so small. The wildness we all need to live, grow, and define ourselves is alive and well, and its glorious laws are all around. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:29:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:29:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Robert Skidelsky: What's wrong with global capitalism? Message-ID: Robert Skidelsky: What's wrong with global capitalism? The Times Literary Supplement, 98.3.27 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093931&window_type=print FALSE DAWN. Delusions of global capitalism. John Gray. 240pp. Granta Books. ?17.99. - 1 86207 023 7 While reading John Gray's False Dawn, a diatribe against global capitalism, I had to keep reminding myself that I was reviewing a book, not a person. Gray's intellectual gyrations have become legendary. I am told he was a socialist in the 1970s. He was a Thatcherite in the 1980s. (The Iron Lady once said to me: "What ever happened to John Gray? He used to be one of us.") Then he adopted the fashionable communitarianism. Judging from his latest book, he is what Marx would have called a "Reactionist" - with hope extinguished, but with a lively apprehension of disaster. He plays each role with passion and panache. But with so much here today, gone tomorrow, it is hard to know how seriously to take his arguments. These are very much hit-and-miss. Half-way through reading False Dawn, an economist friend of mine exclaimed in exasperation "This is the worst book I have ever read. In almost every sentence there is a mistake, every statement is questionable." I would put it more generously. For one thing, Gray can write. His prose crackles with analytic energy. There are intermittent flashes of good sense. He says things about the varieties of capitalist forms, and the requirements for a civilized life, which are wise and true. He understands perfectly well that our future may be neither paradisaical nor hellish, but something in between. Then all of a sudden he goes off the rails, leaving the reader with a violent feeling of resistance to his exaggerations, distortions, and his whole intellectual personality. This is a great pity, because Gray is writing about a centrally important subject. It has become almost a cliche to say that globalization is reconnecting the last decade of the twentieth century to the first decade, putting paid to the pathological and even benign forms of statism which dominated the intervening years. As The Economist quipped: "Communism was a long detour from capitalism to capitalism." The question is whether the new globalism, based on markets, will auto-destruct like the old globalism did. A brief summary of Gray's thesis would go like this. Since the 1980s, there has been a determined attempt by something called the "Washington consensus" to impose free-market liberalism on the world. The collapse of Communism created the illusion that America had "won" the ideological war. It was an illusion, according to Gray, because laissez-faire economics can no more be realized than can Communism. They are twin stems of what he calls the "Western Enlightenment project" - the belief that the world can be reshaped according to the dictates of reason. Both are failed or failing utopias. Just as Communism failed to realize the brotherhood of man, global capitalism will fail to bring about universal harmony. It does not spawn a "single" global economy but a congeries of rival, resentful, rancorous national capitalisms which will become locked in a life-and-death struggle. Today's regime of global markets, Gray tells us, will be briefer than even the belle epoque of 1870 to 1914, since a regulatory framework for the world's diverse economies "figures on no historical or political agenda". He writes, "We stand on the brink of a tragic epoch, in which anarchic market forces and shrinking natural resources drag sovereign states into ever more dangerous rivalries. A deepening international anarchy is the human prospect." One cannot get much gloomier than that. In the attempt to interpret the post-Communist world, Gray plays Jeremiah to Fukuyama's Pangloss. Before discussing the nature and substance of Dr Gray's argument, let me say a word about its auspices. Gray stands in a long line of critics of capitalism. He does not add anything to Karl Marx's superb passages on capitalism in the Communist Manifesto, published 150 years ago. "The bourgeoisie", Marx wrote, cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois era from all other 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 . . . . This powerful caricature captures a likeness which we can all recognize, namely the insatiable restlessness of capitalist civilization. And Marx was equally prescient about its globalizing propensities: "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe." A more direct borrowing is from The Great Transformation (1944) by Karl Polanyi. Gray follows Polanyi in distinguishing between markets "embedded" in social relations, which Polanyi saw as "natural" to human society, and the attempt to create a "free" market system which pulverizes all social relations. It is the latter which is utopian and has to be "created by state coercion". Curiously, Gray omits the essence of Polanyi's distinction between "social" and "free" markets. "Social" markets are confined to goods, whereas the free-market system incorporates the factors of production. It was the attempt to subject land, labour and capital to the logic of buying and selling which, for Polanyi, constituted the core of the nineteenth-century liberal project; and the resistance to this attempt which eventually produced the social-democratic welfare state. As John Gray tells it, dismantling society's defences against free markets is at the heart of the contemporary "neo-liberal" project. Both Marx and Polanyi were optimists. But the consolation of optimism is no longer possible for Gray. Capitalism does not pauperize the worker as Marx thought it would, but constantly enlarges the numbers of the affluent; more and more people and countries move up the income ladder. So Marx's own terminus, the revolution, is cut off. Gray reworks the Marxist categories in describing the delayering, down-sizing effects of the new information technology: "The result is a re-proletarianization of much of the industrial working class and the de-bourgeoisification of what remains of the former middle classes." But his is not a revolutionary scenario. It is capitalism, not Communism, which abolishes classes. Since all global markets make social democracy unviable, we are left with a world of disoriented masses, ready to be mobilized under the banner of xenophobic nationalism. The historical model for this sort of relapse is fascism. The most obvious thing about this kind of argument is its excessively abstract character. I once chaired a debate between Gray and the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, at which Gray accused Sachs (and his kind) of ignoring the historical particularities of different societies. But what struck me (and others) was that Gray was right up in the air, whereas Sachs actually knew a great deal about the different societies whose governments he had been advising. Like many whose reverence for history and culture is essentially Olympian, Gray's knowledge of the historical and cultural terrain is very sketchy. For example, he implies that it was the stresses and strains of capitalist civilization which brought about the destruction of the first globalist "project" in 1914, without bothering to consider whether autocratic rule in Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia might have had something to do with it. Those who argued that trade would have a pacifying effect never neglected the importance of responsible government. Today's world is much more democratic than that of 1914, and I know of no case of democracies going to war with each other. Gray's account of the dislocating effects of capitalist civilization is also highly overwrought. The market system brings great benefits to most of its participants, but it is an inherently difficult discipline, which goes against deep-seated tribal instincts. The possibility of anti-market movements is therefore always there. But Gray fails to make a distinction, crucial to any sensible discussion of this matter, between stress and instability. Indeed, he conflates the two all the way through. Most people are fairly adaptable, and a sizeable minority welcome challenges. They are also very adept in preserving old forms of life in new conditions. What is lethal for a market-based order is violent instability, because this severs the connection between effort and reward. Keynes understood this better than anyone, and it is an insight we need to regain - for example, in our international monetary arrangements. The fluctuations of the dollar, the yen and the yuan certainly contributed to East Asia's financial crises. But a general rant does nothing for clear thinking. Gray discusses the impact of free-market economics in various parts of the world. His general conclusion is that they have produced, or contributed to, social breakdown and rising inequality wherever they have been tried. It is far from clear whether he attributes these consequences to globalization per se, to new technologies, or to the "intellectual fashion" for free markets, and what the relationship between these three things might be. On the one hand, we are told that globalization has created competing capitalisms subject to a kind of Gresham's Law, with the bad driving out the good. The paradigmatic "bad" economy is the United States. Gray's hatred of American capitalism is visceral; free markets there are apparently responsible for the policy of "mass incarceration" - a phrase repeated many times with evident relish. At any rate, having reproletarianized its own people through down-sizing, delayering and other heinous practices, "American free markets work to undercut both European and Asian social market economies", which are burdened with social costs. What is it about America that drives everyone else down? Gray argues that, "in the contest between free market economies and social market systems, free markets are often superior in productivity". He talks about American productivity "steadily rising". Yet on the previous page he writes, "US employment has grown as fast as it has partly because US productivity (he means "growth of productivity") has been low - around half that of most European countries". Elsewhere Gray claims that "the root cause of falling wages and rising unemployment is the worldwide spread of the new technology". He then states correctly that "wage rates in any economy are determined by its domestic labour market, not by wage rates in other countries". It is not possible to reconcile these various assertions. If Gray were thinking clearly or honestly about these things, he would be forced to admit that globalization has not had much effect on patterns of domestic income distribution. Nor has it been "global markets . . . which make social democracy unviable". Globalization has nothing whatsoever to do with the crisis of the welfare state. Rather, this crisis reflects "tax resistance", an increased unwillingness to pay for social programmes by the average taxpayer. Nowhere in this book is the important phenomenon of "tax resistance" treated properly. Gray's most serious mistake is to attribute to free-market policies the pains and dislocations involved in admittedly often botched attempts to escape from previously controlled economies experiencing crisis or breakdown. This vitiates a large part of his discussion of the effects of free-market capitalism in Russia, New Zealand and Mexico. His account of post-Communist Russia, while factually accurate, is almost worthless as interpretation, because he makes no allowances for the extent to which the system had ceased to function under Gorbachev. He states that a major shift in New Zealand's policy "may have been unavoidable", but makes no mention of the stagnant and debt-ridden state of the New Zealand economy when the reforms began fourteen years earlier. The adjustment costs - worsened by poor sequencing of reforms - were a by-product of liberalizing an economy which had become one of the most over-regulated and inefficient in the Western world. Contrary to Gray's assertion that "income inequalities increased in New Zealand more than in any other western countries", the increase in income inequality which occurred with rising unemployment has, in fact, been arrested since the labour market was freed up in 1991 and unemployment started falling. Similarly, the calamities which have befallen Mexican society are not the consequence of the so-called "neo-liberal" project, but the product of many years of state intervention in, and massive regulation of, the Mexican economy, a "project" that was no longer sustainable by 1982. In particular, the number and type of state-owned industries reached ridiculous proportions by the end of Lopez Portillo's regime. Gray attributes the revolt of Chiapas to neo-liberalism. In fact, the misery of this region was a direct consequence of decades, if not centuries, of arbitrary government intervention. It is not the individual mistakes or questionable interpretations which are depressing but the cumulative effect of the whole. Hayek was once asked why he didn't review Keynes's General Theory. There was no point, he replied. "By the time I would have finished my review, he would have changed his mind." In fact, Keynes did not change his mind. But I hope John Gray will change his. He has a great contribution to make - if only he can steer a steadier course. Lord Skidelsky is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and the author of The World After Communism: A polemic for our times, 1995. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 18 23:30:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:30:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Soviet economic planning Message-ID: Soviet economic planning The Times Literary Supplement, 98.5.22 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093487&window_type=print Sir, - John Gray has given us an intriguing appre-ciation (May 8) of Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and its destructive impact on the social fabric. He aptly spears the neo-liberals who close their eyes to the reality, evident even to Marx, of capitalist concentration. Yet Professor Gray offers little guidance towards the damage control that he rightly assigns to representative democracy. There is no institution but the State to maintain free markets in the face of corporate concentration, or failing that, to assure by other means that economic giants serve the public interest. Such tasks, of course, come perilously close to the central economic planning that Gray and others rule out because of its association with the "Marxist utopia" and Communist tyranny. This hobbling assumption about planning results from taking Soviet ideological claims at their face value. In reality, Soviet economic centralism was neither Marxist nor planned. Lenin's original model for planning was not Marx but the German Kriegssozialismus of the First World War. Serious planning, of the indirect, indicative type, was the work of Menshevik economists in the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) in the 1920s, when the State had retreated to the "commanding heights". But Stalin repudiated all this, purged Gosplan and substituted a regime of military commands and allocations. This, not the oft-cited "utopian experiment", was the system that finally came to grief amid Gorbachev's efforts to reform it. Soviet tyranny was not the consequence of planning; it was the worst enemy of planning. Rejection of the Stalinist-style economy does not preclude consideration of alternatives to the global corporatism that John Gray has so effectively criticized. Rather, it should clear the air for fresh ideas about our economic destiny. ROBERT V. DANIELS Department of History, University of Vermont, 442 Main Street, Burlington, Vermont 05405. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:31:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:31:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: (Pipe Smoking) Bowled Over No Longer Message-ID: Bowled Over No Longer http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801145_pf.html [Happy Father's Day, everyone. I'm one of the dimishing tribe myself and enjoy two bowls a day. The brand I once smoked, Fryer's Special Smokynge Mixture, truly stated, "This Master blend is made food for the spirit and a subtle stimulus for contemplative minds." Some statistics say pipe smokers live longer than non-smokers, while one study said that pipe smoking cuts down life expectancy by six to eight weeks. Either way, it's worth it.] The Once-Ubiquitous Aroma of Fatherhood Is Fading Away By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, June 19, 2005; D01 It smelled like cherry or chocolate or chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Or leaves burning in the back yard in those long-ago autumns when you were still allowed to burn leaves in the back yard. In those days, pipe smoke was a man's signature scent. It was the incense in the Church of Dad, a burnt offering to the god of domesticated masculinity, a symbol of benevolent paternalism. A passing whiff of your father's or grandfather's brand -- Erinmore Flake, say, or Royal Yacht Mixture -- can summon vivid memories even decades after his death. Smell is a key that unlocks the vault of memory, and the rich aroma of pipe smoke conjures up a lost world of armchairs and ashtrays, humidors and dark-wood racks holding pipes with WASPy names like Dunhill and Ferndown and Hardcastle. It was a world of wise, contemplative men who sat and smoked and read serious, leather-bound literature, as well as a world of rugged outdoorsmen, canoeists and fly fishermen and clipper ship captains who puffed their pipes as they pored over nautical charts before sailing 'round the Horn. It was a magical world, part reality and part myth, and now it has all but disappeared, fading like smoke. "A lot of pipe smokers have died and new ones aren't coming along," says David Berkebile, owner of Georgetown Tobacco. "The decline has been persistent and unrelenting," says Norman Sharp, head of the Pipe Tobacco Council. Sharp rattles off the statistics: In 1970, Americans bought 52 million pounds of pipe tobacco. In 2004, they bought less than 5 million pounds. "That's a decline of 91 percent," he says. In a 2003 survey, the Department of Health and Human Services calculated that there are 1.6 million pipe smokers in America. The same survey revealed that there are 14.6 million pot smokers and 600,000 crack smokers, which means that if an American is smoking something in a pipe these days, it's more likely to be dope than Dunhill's Mixture 965. But the evidence of the pipe's decline goes beyond statistics. Fifty years ago, nearly every male movie star who wanted to be taken seriously posed for PR photos smoking a pipe and looking contemplative. These days, about the only pipe smokers found in the movies are the hobbits in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Pipe smoking is going the way of the shaving brush, the straight razor, the fedora, the Freemasons, the liberal Republican. Maybe that's good, considering the risks of mouth cancers. But there's something charming about pipe smoking -- an appealingly retro air of reflection and relaxation, a uniquely masculine mystique that's somehow large enough to include tweedy professors and Maine hunting guides, detectives and novelists, Santa Claus and Gen. MacArthur, Albert Einstein and Popeye the Sailor Man. And, of course, the kind of father who always knew best. Puff of Wisdom "I think the appeal of the pipe came from images in movies and pop culture," says Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine. "It was an image of intelligence and sophistication, like a martini." Hefner, 79, is one of America's most famous pipe smokers, although he doesn't smoke anymore. He started in 1959, when he began hosting a TV show called "Playboy's Penthouse" -- "it was something to do with my hands" -- and he quit in 1985 after a stroke. "I was very influenced by pop culture, which had certain symbolic images of smoking," Hefner says. "Cigars had the symbolic implication of a businessman or a politician. Cigarettes could be romantic or related to crime in a film noir, but the pipe had a different quality: It was both thoughtful and adventurous. I was a fan of the comic strip 'Terry and the Pirates,' which had a character named Pat Ryan who smoked a pipe. He was Terry's mentor and he was kind of a dashing hero. One of my influences was Sherlock Holmes. He smoked a pipe and he wore pajamas and a smoking jacket, which sounds kind of familiar." Hefner laughs at his own famous fondness for wearing pajamas in public. "And then," he adds, "there's the pop cultural image of a pipe and slippers in front of the fire with a good book and your dog at your feet." A pipe projects a calm, peaceful image -- except when it's clenched in the fiercely resolute jaw of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the only man in history who could make an oversize corncob pipe look like a weapon of mass destruction. Many of the great thinkers of the 20th century puffed on their pipes while they pondered deep thoughts: Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, George Bernard Shaw and, of course, Einstein, who once said, "I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs." For generations, young men entering college began smoking pipes as a signal that they were joining the high priesthood of knowledge. A.A. Milne, the pipe smoker who created Winnie the Pooh, wrote this about his college days: "At eighteen I went to Cambridge and bought two pipes in a case. In those days, Greek was compulsory, but not more so than two pipes in a case." Even Sammy Davis Jr. took up the pipe when he lived in London, keeping a corncob in the breast pocket of his natty tweed suit, a look he found classy. On both sides of the Atlantic, the pipe became a pop symbol of contemplation and relaxation. Detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret were towering intellects who smoked pipes and solved crimes through rational deduction. Bing Crosby exhibited his ease, his cool , by holding a pipe while he crooned. And in the early days of television, sitcom dads like Robert Young in "Father Knows Best" and Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons" were wise paternal figures who effortlessly solved all family problems while puffing calmly. Now, however, contemplation and relaxation are pretty much passe in a pop culture that has come to prefer the quick and the dumb to the slow and the wise. Today, detectives solve crimes with guns. Pop singers are more likely to bite the head off a bat than puff on a meerschaum. And Homer Simpson, the sitcom dad of our day, doesn't inhale a pipe and exhale wisdom. He sucks up vast quantities of Duff beer and belches out "D'oh!" The pipe is a relic of those bygone days when dads wanted to look -- and act -- like grown-ups. These days, dads hope to remain young and hip, and they're likely to appear in public wearing sneakers, shorts, a replica of their favorite quarterback's jersey and a backward baseball cap. You can't smoke a pipe wearing a backward baseball cap. It just wouldn't work. It would be like presiding over the U.S. Supreme Court while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Fiddle vs. Burn "I started smoking a pipe in the Navy," says Berkebile of Georgetown Tobacco. "My father never smoked one, but my brother did. I used to smell the inside of it. He smoked a cherry blend and it smelled good. There was a lot of nostalgia with that odor." Berkebile, 65, is sitting in his office in the attic above his store. He flicks a lighter and fires up a cigar. He stopped smoking a pipe years ago. "I don't have the patience for it anymore," he says. When Berkebile founded the store, back in the mid-'60s, well over half his business was pipes and pipe tobacco. "In those days," he says, "college kids came into the store in groups and started smoking pipes." Now pipes account for only about 10 percent of his sales. "The pace of life today is much faster, and people don't have the time to smoke a pipe," he says. "They don't make the time." Pipe smoking takes a lot of time and a lot of bother -- tamping and tapping and scraping and cleaning and lighting and relighting and re-relighting. It's fiddling-intensive activity. And maybe people just don't like fiddling anymore. Or maybe they'd rather be fiddling with their computer. Or they just don't have the patience anymore. Berkebile doesn't. "Pipe smoking isn't convenient," Berkebile says. "You have to have tools. You have to have pipe cleaners. If you're on the go, you have to take all that stuff with you." Walter Gorski, vice president of Georgetown Tobacco, wanders in. He sits down, takes out a pipe, fills it with tobacco and lights it up. Now 37, he started smoking a pipe back in college. "It was one of the only things that kept my dorm room from smelling like a sewer," he says, laughing. Inspired, Berkebile snuffs out his cigar, rummages around the office and returns with a pipe. He fills it with a pinch of Gorski's tobacco, tamps it down and lights it up. Aromatic smoke curls toward the ceiling while the two men discuss the differences between pipe smokers and cigar smokers. "Pipe smokers are hobby people," Berkebile says. "They like to collect things, esoteric stuff." "Touchy-feely stuff," Gorski says. "Contemplative stuff. Antiques," Berkebile says. "They're fly fishermen -- and fly tie-ers. And chess players." Cigar smokers are too cranked up for contemplation, Berkebile says. "They're faster paced. Hard chargers. Type A's. They're more interested in better cars and better clothing. They're entrepreneurs, CEO types." Berkebile's wife, Sandy Brudin, walks into the room. He gets up to greet her, then he announces that she married her first husband because he smoked a pipe. She smiles sheepishly and acknowledges that there's a germ of truth to that story. "He smelled nice," she says. Pop's Culture There's something about the smell of pipe tobacco that brings back memories of fathers and grandfathers and, yes, even ex-husbands. "I remember my father smoking a pipe," Brudin says. "I remember liking the smell. It was a sweet smell, a comfortable smell. . . . My father smelled horsy. He rode horses and he smelled horsy, leathery and pipey. He was charming. He was handsome. Movie stars smoked pipes, and he smoked a pipe. It was dashing, and I thought he was dashing." Allen Haddox, 55, a librarian at the American Insurance Association, still recalls the smell of his father's favorite pipe tobacco -- Dunhill No. 21. "It had a very strong, spicy aroma, kind of on the acrid side," he recalls. "Sort of like that smoky scent of the fall but sweeter." His father worked at the State Department, and Haddox remembers the smell of his office. "I would visit him as a kid in the '60s and early '70s," he says. "That was the heyday of pipe smoking. My father worked in a room with at least 40 people and nearly everyone smoked a pipe. It was like going to the bazaar in Istanbul -- you get all kinds of different aromas. It was very exotic." In America, we've pretty much obliterated aromas from our public places -- supermarkets smell about the same as airports these days -- but you can't deodorize the human memory. Sara Newcombe, 25, a recent graduate of New York Law School, recalls the unmistakable smell of her father's pipe. "It was a really good smell -- vanilla and cherry and chocolate," she says. "I just remember it smelling really, really good." Like a dad in some ancient New Yorker cartoon, her father would smoke his pipe after dinner, sitting in the den with the family dog curled up at his feet. "It was just a very relaxed time," she says. "He'd be sitting in his den, in his study, and he would give us wise advice. My dad is very wise." A passing whiff of pipe smoke on the street can bring back the memory of that scene, she says. But these days, she adds a little wistfully, "it doesn't happen very often." From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:31:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:31:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WkStd: Of Genes and Genomes Message-ID: Of Genes and Genomes http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5693&R=C5AF39231 Of Genes and Genomes Where is the science of life taking us? by Christine Rosen 06/13/2005, Volume 010, Issue 37 An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics by Adrian Woolfson Overlook, 224 pp., $21.95 ONE OF THE CONCEITS OF our times is that we live in such a complicated world that we require expert guidance to complete even the simplest of tasks. This sensibility is perhaps best exemplified by the small industry of guidebooks and how-to manuals that ironically flatter our incompetence by offering us the Complete Idiot's Guide to This, or the Dummies' Guide to That. The British publisher Overlook has launched a slightly different kind of series, called the "Intelligent Person's Guides," and the most recent addition to the series is An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics by Adrian Woolfson, who teaches medicine at Clare College, Cambridge, and is a contributor to the London Review of Books. Dummies and Idiots are not the intended audience for Woolfson's elegant summary, with its impressive bibliography and often sophisticated discussions of genetic science. Woolfson's book tackles the history and current state of genetic science, in the process offering definitions and explanations of the basic features of the science, descriptions of important discoveries, and discussion of the attendant forces that influence and interact with DNA. He describes succinctly the much-publicized race between the privately funded scientist J. Craig Venter and researchers at the National Institutes of Health to sequence the human genome, avoiding both the breathlessness and hyperbole that so often infect descriptions of the project. Woolfson's achievement is his ability to explain complicated scientific processes in lucid prose, marshaling metaphors that clarify rather than obscure the material. Of the nucleosome, for example, the group of proteins that packages DNA, Woolfson writes, "It functions much like the chaperones who used to accompany Victorian ladies on their excursions, determining whether the DNA is allowed to have access to visiting proteins or not." To read someone of clinical experience and scientific expertise who is also such a deft writer is a rare treat. Despite his enthusiasm for Victorian cultural examples such as P.T. Barnum's Tom Thumb and the illusionist John Henry Pepper, Woolfson unfortunately offers little grounding in the culture of geneticists, past and present. Thomas Hunt Morgan, the American scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his experiments on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, was one of the few geneticists to distance himself from eugenics, the movement that served as a precursor to genetics in the early 20th century. Many other geneticists, such as H.S. Jennings, were members of eugenics organizations until the 1920s. In other words, geneticists pursued their science not merely for the sake of science; they pursued it because it was a means to an end--improving the human race--even when that end required coercive means such as compulsory sterilization. It is difficult to consider thorough a guide to genetics that includes nary a mention of genetics's wicked stepsister, eugenics. The best sections of Woolfson's narrative are his descriptions of important moments of scientific discovery in the field of genetics, which often include quirky details, like the story of scientists in the 1950s who, in the course of studying DNA in E. coli bacteria, "whirred in a kitchen blender" the cultures they'd created. Information about contemporary research initiatives, such as the Model Cell Consortium, which has embarked on a project far more ambitious than the Human Genome Project but has received much less attention, are also given their due. The Consortium is an effort to "model the logic and behavior of 'intelligent' cellular systems" using the E. coli bacteria. From this effort to describe and replicate the structure of simple bacteria, Woolfson writes, will flow attempts to mimic more complex human cells, and to model their development--paving the way for what he calls a new, "bottom-up" approach to genetics, or, as one of his chapters is titled, "Making Creatures from Scratch." Woolfson discusses dispassionately the creation of animal chimeras (two dissimilar animals bred to create a new creature) and the revival of lost species like the dodo. He suggests that, eventually, "it might be possible to re-create the elusive ancestor of all human life on Earth, a hypothetical organism known as LUCA, or the 'least universal common ancestor'" since "the remnants of LUCA should be scattered across the genomes of all living things." We could, he claims, bring LUCA "back to life." About these Lazarus-like future possibilities Woolfson is wildly enthusiastic. Using man-made genomes, Woolfson speculates, "the circuitry of existing species can be mixed and matched to produce completely new biological structures and behaviors." We are on "the cusp of a new Enlightenment," he argues, "defined by the accumulated genetic knowledge that enables us to entertain the possibility of modifying our own nature and creating artificial life." Of the odder creatures we might have the power to create--the flamingosceros or the kangapelican, for example--Woolfson reassures, "A great many of these potential creatures will be logically flawed and unrealizable." But why should we assume that we will keep Dr. Moreau confined to his island? Woolfson, who earlier in his book notes the great success of P.T. Barnum, should not be so cavalier about the public's appetite for the biologically bizarre. A modern Barnum might televise, for a far larger audience of viewers than Barnum himself ever commanded, the creation and activities of such chimeras. More worrisome, the logical conclusion of such experiments would be the creation of synthetic human life--Frankensteins, if you're a pessimist, or new Adams, if you're an optimist. This future of "synthetic genomics," which would finally allow man to move from merely controlling nature (through the imposition of environmental controls such as plant breeding, or genetic controls such as selecting embryos with certain traits) to becoming nature's creator, requires few constraints in Woolfson's view. This new world need not maintain the boundary between human and animal: "Once the genes and programs that make us human have been identified," Woolfson writes, "we might choose to transfer them into other species in order to humanize them." Spiritual constraints would not factor in, either, since Woolfson's is an entirely secular worldview. He is, in fact, surprisingly unreflective about this dramatic shift, from Nature to Man, of the power to create new forms of life. "For over three billion years," he writes matter-of-factly, "life has made do with 20, and in a very small number of cases, 21 different amino acids; but in the future such constraints will not be necessary." He seems unwilling to apply Dollo's law--"once a species loses a particular characteristic, the character elimination tends to be irreversible," which he cites to describe evolution to the actions of humans creating new species. This lack of concern for the long-term consequences of creating synthetic life stems from Woolfson's sense that these things are inevitable. In the preface to his book, he warns us that his work "should not be read as advocating a particular course of action. My view is slightly different: the creation of synthetic life is an inevitability." This, of course, is advocating a particular course of action--letting science continue on, uninterrupted and unburdened by ethical limits--until such nonintervention yields a world where man is no longer merely capable of controlling Nature, but of creating it from whole cloth. But foregone conclusions can yield their own kind of trouble, and unalloyed enthusiasm is its own worldview. It is here where the clinician would have done better to yield to history and experience. Woolfson never entertains any possibility but the inevitability of these transformations. "In the long term," he writes, "the question of whether or not we should profoundly modify our nature, and that of other creatures, is, like Turing's question, absurd. . . . Synthetic life is inevitable because we are intrinsically curious, because we have utopian desires: these are inalienably human characteristics." Yes, men have always had utopian desires; and history, mythology, and religion are filled with warnings to man about indulging in utopian schemes. But the more malignant of them (such as those of a Hitler or a Stalin, for example) were never inevitable once they faced concerted opposition. Woolfson's optimism about our synthetic future stems, in part, from his particular understanding of the human person. He returns over and over again to the metaphor of the machine: "It seems inevitable that we will have to resign ourselves to the unpalatable fact that we are nothing more than machines," he writes. "That this troubles us is itself a construction of our brains; one day such irrational tendencies might be removed by adjusting the relevant brain circuitry." He adds, "It may be that one of the things that makes us different from other primates is our possession of genes that make us believe in concepts like the soul." Or, as Tom Wolfe put it more bluntly in an essay on neuroscience a decade ago: Sorry, but your soul just died. Woolfson is not alone in this effort to recast human beings as soulless biological machinery. Neuroscientists are exploring the brains of Buddhist monks and atheists, seeking clues to the biological basis for faith. "All our characteristics," writes Woolfson, "including consciousness, are generated by the agency of genetic microcomputers inside our cells." But if man is a machine, he will, in this new world of synthetically constructed beings and carefully mapped brains, be one with a different kind of soul; he might also be one with different passions and pursuits. "What is it that makes us human?" Woolfson asks, towards the end of his book. His answer is a biological form of navel-gazing: "The emergence of all human characteristics--from cellular structure to consciousness and the capacity for extended culture--has a rational basis in the hardware and software modifications to our genomes," he concludes. This is a bit deflating, like asking to speak to a philosopher and instead finding yourself lectured by a computer salesman. And those little genetic differences that separate us from other animals have great consequences: They are the impulses that lead us to name our offspring rather than devour them, for example. Woolfson might be correct that we will appear as strange and gullible to future generations as the Victorians, who believed in fairies, do to us. But he would have done well to consider an observation made by Jorge Luis Borges, whose Book of Imaginary Beings he cites. "The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur," Borges wrote in Other Inquisitions. "God lurks in the gaps." So, too, might resistance to the more extreme forms of human control and alteration of the natural world, and to attempts to reconfigure human nature itself. Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:31:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:31:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Psst! This Stuff Keeps You Young, but It's Illegal Message-ID: Psst! This Stuff Keeps You Young, but It's Illegal http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/fashion/thursdaystyles/09skin.html By LAUREL NAVERSEN GERAGHTY MEXORYL is not the most notorious drug on the black market. Only a few insiders, most of them women, even know its worth, let alone where to buy it. But it is one of the most ordinary substances ever to be bootlegged. Mexoryl SX, made by the Paris-based skin-care giant L'Or?al, is an illegal sunscreen in this country, one that is thought to be particularly useful in preventing wrinkles. Called by dermatologists one of the most effective filters of all wavelengths of ultraviolet light, Mexoryl has been used in sunscreen lotions sold in Canada and Europe for more than a decade. But the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved it. The reason for the delay is difficult to discern, because the F.D.A. does not comment on drugs going through its sometimes lengthy approval process. Dr. Darrell S. Rigel, a dermatologist at New York University, however, said safety is not an issue. "It's just bureaucracy," he said. And so the cognoscenti ask for Ombrelle Extreme ($11), Garnier's Ambre Solaire ($24) or the particularly coveted Anth?lios XL by La Roche-Posay ($40 and more for a relatively small tube) at certain drug stores - like Zitomer and Cambridge Chemists on Manhattan's Upper East Side - or order it online from Canadian or French pharmacies or even on eBay. Though the F.D.A. does not track down and prosecute those consumers, the purchases are technically illegal. When asked about the decision to sell the unapproved sunscreens, representatives of both Zitomer and Cambridge Chemists declined to comment. "I started buying it from Canada," one 46-year-old New Yorker said about Anth?lios, which she has used for three years. (She insisted that her name not be published because she did not want it publicly connected with illegal purchases.) The Canadian pharmacy Web site [3]feelbest.com sells a three-ounce tube for a little over $20, which is less than half the cost at Cambridge Chemists. The woman said she finds Anth?lios lighter than titanium dioxide sunblocks and less likely to stain her clothes. "I buy it by the case," she said. "It's pretty good stuff." The demand for Mexoryl is partly driven by one of the strongest motives: vanity. People are getting wise to the idea that UVA rays, less known than sunburn-causing UVB rays, cause classic signs of aging, not only wrinkles but also sagging skin, brown spots and yellow discoloration. And finding a legal sunscreen in the United States that effectively blocks UVA light, which Mexoryl-enhanced products do, is not as easy as it might seem. Sunscreen labels often advertise "full spectrum" or "broad spectrum" properties, meaning that they block both UVA and UVB rays. But products can make this claim without specifying how well they protect against UVA rays. And because the familiar sun protection factor (SPF) measurements apply only to UVB blockage, consumers have no handy way to gauge the effectiveness of UVA filters. A 2004 Procter & Gamble study that looked at 188 United States sunscreens found that only 56 percent offered significant UVA protection, though 82 percent claimed to do so. Part of the problem is that only within the last 10 years have scientists come to understand the biomechanics of UVA damage. "Up until 1995 the thinking was that UVA was not as important as we now know," Dr. Rigel said. So far the Food and Drug Administration has approved only three ingredients protective against UVA: zinc oxide, titanium dioxide and avobenzone (trade name Parsol 1789). But Mexoryl seems more effective than any of these at protecting against UVA light. In 2000, Canadian and French researchers slathered six brands of sunscreen and sunblock on the backs of volunteers and exposed their skin to a UV sunlamp for 15 minutes. The product containing Mexoryl (along with avobenzone, titanium dioxide and other ingredients) was more than twice as effective in protecting against UVA light as any of the others. The study was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Mexoryl's secret is its chemical structure, Dr. Rigel said. "You can achieve much more efficient and powerful and effective protection with this one ingredient, or you can add it to another ingredient and get an incredibly high SPF protection level, all the way up to SPF 90," as well as UVA protection, he said. The difference between UVA and UVB light is a matter of wavelength. UVA rays come in longer wavelengths (320 to 400 nanometers), so they pass through the outer layer of skin, rather than burning it as do the shorter UVB rays (290 to 320 nanometers). UVA rays penetrate deep into the dermis, or lower layer of skin, where they can break down collagen and other proteins that keep the skin plump and firm. "That deeper penetration and deeper damage is what we think is really associated with premature aging in the skin," said Dr. Clay J. Cockerell, a Dallas dermatologist, who is president of the American Academy of Dermatology. The UVA rays can also damage cells and DNA in the dermis, decrease the skin's immunity and generate harmful free radicals. Though the exact mechanisms remain unclear, doctors assume these actions explain why UVA exposure is also associated with skin cancer. Unlike UVB light, prevalent only when the sun is high in the sky - between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. during summer - UVA light is virtually inescapable. "It's present in the same amount from sunup to sundown, 365 days a year, totally independent of climate conditions," said Dr. Katie Rodan, an associate clinical dermatologist at Stanford University. That means it not only penetrates car windows and T-shirts, but it also reaches the skin during fog, rain and even blizzards. Mexoryl is also very sturdy compared with other UVA filters, which tend to decompose when exposed to sunlight. That may account for Mexoryl's slightly gummy texture, which can be noticeable on the skin long after it has been applied. It is hard to tell whether Mexoryl will make it to the United States market anytime soon. A L'Or?al spokeswoman would say only that the company has "initiated a process of discussion with the F.D.A. regarding Mexoryl and is continuing to work closely with the F.D.A." Doctors say UVA protection in this country has been slow to improve because consumers are not yet aware of the damage UVA light can do and of how inadequately many "broad spectrum" sunscreens protect against it. "I take care of some very well-educated people," Dr. Rodan of Stanford said. "Half of them are Berkeley professors. But beyond the SPF number, they don't know anything about sunscreen or what UVA light does. It's like 'in SPF I trust,' but that's so misleading when you consider the whole picture." From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:31:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:31:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Great Chain of Being Message-ID: Evolution: On the Great Chain of Being Subject: EVOLUTION: ON THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050624-3.htm The following points are made by Sean Nee (Nature 2005 435:429): 1) For centuries the "great chain of being" held a central place in Western thought. This view saw the Universe as ordered in a linear sequence starting from the inanimate world of rocks. Plants came next, then animals, men, angels and, finally, God. It was very detailed with, for example, a ranking of human races; humans themselves ranked above apes above reptiles above amphibians above fish. This view even predicted a world of invisible life in between the inanimate and the visible, living world, long before Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries. Although advocates of evolution may have stripped it of its supernatural summit, this view is with us still. 2) Common presentations of evolution mirror the great chain by viewing the process as progressive. For example, in their book THE MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN EVOLUTION, John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathm?ry take us from the origin of life, through to the origin of eukaryotic cells, multicellularity, human societies and, finally, of language. They explicitly point out that evolution does not necessarily lead to progress, and even refer to the great chain by its Latin name, scala naturae. But it is impossible to overlook the fact that the "major" evolutionary transitions lead inexorably, step by step, to us. Similarly, in their recent essay in Nature, "Climbing the co-evolution ladder" (Nature 431, 913:2004), Lenton and colleagues illustrate their summary of life-environment interactions through the ages with a ladder whose rungs progress through microbes, plants, and, at the top, large animals. 3) In his recent book THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, Richard Dawkins reverses the usual temporal perspective and looks progressively further back in time to find our ancestors. Like Maynard Smith and Szathm?ry, he cautions us against thinking that evolution is progressive, culminating with us. He emphasizes that with whatever organism we begin the pilgrimage back through time, we all are reunited at the origin of life. But by beginning the journey with us and looking backwards along our ancestry, Dawkins generates a sequence of chapter titles that would read like a typical chain to a medieval theologian, albeit with some novelties and the startling omission of God. 4) By starting with us, Dawkins regenerates the chain because species that are more closely related to us are more similar as well, and such similarity was an important criterion in determining the rankings in the classical chain. But there is nothing about the world that compels us to think about it in this way, suggesting, instead, that we have some deep psychological need to see ourselves as the culmination of creation. Illustrating this, when we represent the relationships between species, including ourselves, in a family tree, we automatically construct it so that the column of species' names forms a chain with us as the top, as in the first of the trees pictured. But the other construction is equally valid. References: 1. Lovejoy, A. O. The Great Chain of Being (Harper and Row, New York, 1965) 2. Gee, H. Nature 420, 611 (2002) 3. Maynard Smith, J. & Szathm?ry, E. The Major Transitions of Evolution (W. H. Freeman & Co., Oxford, 1995) 4. Dawkins, R. The Ancestor's Tale (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 2004) 5. Nee, S. Nature 429, 804-805 (2004). Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY: ON THE SCHEME OF ANIMAL PHYLA The following points are made by M. Jones and M. Blaxter (Nature 2005 434:1076): 1) Despite the comforting certainty of textbooks and 150 years of argument, the true relationships of the major groups (phyla) of animals remain contentious. In the late 1990s, a series of controversial papers used molecular evidence to propose a radical rearrangement of animal phyla [1-3]. Subsequently, analyses of whole-genome sequences from a few species showed strong, apparently conclusive, support for an older view[4-6]. New work [7] now provides evidence from expanded data sets that supports the newer evolutionary tree, and also shows why whole-genome data sets can lead phylogeneticists seriously astray. 2) Traditional trees group together phyla of bilaterally symmetrical animals that possess a body cavity lined with mesodermal tissue, the "coelom" (for example, the human pleural cavity), as Coelomata. Those without a true coelom are classified as Acoelomata (no coelom) and Pseudocoelomata (a body cavity not lined by mesoderm). We call this tree the A-P-C hypothesis. Under A-P-C, humans are more closely related to the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster than either is to the nematode roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans[5,6]. 3) In contrast, the new trees [1-3,7] suggest that the basic division in animals is between the Protostomia and Deuterostomia (a distinction based on the origin of the mouth during embryo formation). Humans are deuterostomes, but because flies and nematodes are both protostomes they are more closely related to each other than either is to humans. The Protostomia can be divided into two "superphyla": Ecdysozoa (animals that undergo ecdysis or moulting, including flies and nematodes) and Lophotrochozoa (animals with a feeding structure called the lophophore, including snails and earthworms). We call this tree the L-E-D hypothesis. In this new tree, the coelom must have arisen more than once, or have been lost from some phyla. 4) Molecular analyses have been divided in their support for these competing hypotheses. Trees built using single genes from many species tend to support L-E-D, but analyses using many genes from a few complete genomes support A-P-C [5,6]. The number of species represented in a phylogenetic study can have two effects on tree reconstruction. First, without genomes to represent most animal phyla, genome-based trees provide no information on the placement of the missing taxonomic groups. Current genome studies do not include any members of the Lophotrochozoa. More notably, if a species' genome is evolving rapidly, tree reconstruction programs can be misled by a phenomenon known as long-branch attraction. 5) In long-branch attraction, independent but convergent changes (homoplasies) on long branches are misconstrued as "shared derived" changes, causing artefactual clustering of species with long branches. Because these artefacts are systematic, confidence in them grows as more data are included, and thus genome-scale analyses are especially sensitive to long-branch attraction. Long branches can arise in two ways. One is when a distantly related organism is used as an "outgroup" to root the tree of the organisms of interest. The other is when one organism of interest has a very different, accelerated pattern of evolution compared with the rest. References (abridged): 1. Aguinaldo, A. M. A. et al. Nature 387, 489-493 (1997) 2. Winnepenninckx, B. et al. Mol. Biol. Evol. 12, 1132-1137 (1995) 3. Adoutte, A., Balavoine, G., Lartillot, N. & de Rosa, R. Trends Genet. 15, 104-108 (1999) 4. Mushegian, A. R., Garey, J. R., Martin, J. & Liu, L. X. Genome Res. 8, 590-598 (1998) 5. Blair, J. E., Ikeo, K., Gojobori, T. & Hedges, S. B. BMC Evol. Biol. 2, 7 (2002) 6. Wolf, Y. I., Rogozin, I. B. & Koonin, E. V. Genome Res. 14, 29-36 (2004) 7. Philippe, H., Lartillot, N. & Brinkmann, H. Mol. Biol. Evol. 22, 1246-1253 (2005) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: EVOLUTION: GENOMES AND THE TREE OF LIFE The following points are made by K.A. Crandall and J.E. Buhay (Science 2004 306:1144): 1) Although we have not yet counted the total number of species on our planet, biologists in the field of systematics are assembling the "Tree of Life" (1,2). The Tree of Life aims to define the phylogenetic relationships of all organisms on Earth. Driskell et al (3) recently proposed a computational method for assembling this phylogenetic tree. These investigators probed the phylogenetic potential of ~300,000 protein sequences sampled from the GenBank and Swiss-Prot genetic databases. From these data, they generated "supermatrices" and then super-trees. 2) Supermatrices are extremely large data sets of amino acid or nucleotide sequences (columns in the matrix) for many different taxa (rows in the matrix). Driskell et al (3) constructed a supermatrix of 185,000 protein sequences for more than 16,000 green plant taxa and one of 120,000 sequences for nearly 7500 metazoan taxa. This compares with a typical systematics study of, on a good day, four to six partial gene sequences for 100 or so taxa. Thus, the potential data enrichment that comes with carefully mining genetic databases is large. However, this enrichment comes at a cost. Traditional phylogenetic studies sequence the same gene regions for all the taxa of interest while minimizing the overall amount of missing data. With the database supermatrix method, the data overlap is sparse, resulting in many empty cells in the supermatrix, but the total data set is massive. 3) To solve the problem of sparseness, the authors built a "super-tree" (4). The supertree approach estimates phylogenies for subsets of data with good overlap, then combines these subtree estimates into a supertree. Driskell et al (3) took individual gene clusters and assembled them into subtrees, and then looked for sufficient taxonomic overlap to allow construction of a supertree. For example, using 254 genes (2777 sequences and 96,584 sites), the authors reduced the green plant supermatrix to 69 taxa from 16,000 taxa, with an average of 40 genes per taxon and 84% missing sequences! This represents one of the largest data sets for phylogeny estimation in terms of total nucleotide information; but it is the sparsest in terms of the percentage of overlapping data. 4) Yet even with such sparseness, the authors are still able to estimate robust phylogenetic relationships that are congruent with those reported using more traditional methods. Computer simulation studies (5) recently showed that, contrary to the prevailing view, phylogenetic accuracy depends more on having sufficient characters (such as amino acids) than on whether data are missing. Clearly, building a super-tree allows for an abundance of characters even though there are many missing entries in the resulting matrix. References (abridged): 1. M. Pagel, Nature 401, 877 (1999) 2. A new NSF program funds computational approaches for "assembling the Tree of Life" (AToL). Total AToL program funding is $13 million for fiscal year 2004. NSF, Assembling the Tree of Life: Program Solicitation NSF 04-526 (www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04526/nsf04526.pdf) 3. A. C. Driskell et al., Science 306, 1172 (2004) 4. M. J. Sanderson et al., Trends Ecol. Evol. 13, 105 (1998) 5. J. Wiens, Syst. Biol. 52, 528 (2003) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:32:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:32:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: China Is Said to Consider $15 Billion Bailout of Stock Market Message-ID: China Is Said to Consider $15 Billion Bailout of Stock Market http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/business/worldbusiness/15yuan.html [This is a quite significant article, at least to me, since I did not know that only state-run enterprises in Red China could sell stocks. All this so-called privatization is not really taking place. It's as though I could buy stock only in the United States Postal "Service"! [Also, although I knew it already, Red China is practicing Keynesian macro-economic management. [I shall not make the case for genuine free enterprise here, merely predict that Red China is not going to do nearly as well economically as most people hope.] By DAVID BARBOZA SHANGHAI, June 14 - The Chinese government is considering creating a $15 billion fund to help bail out the nation's ailing stock market, according to a senior government official and people told of the proposal. The creation of a huge fund to invest in mainland stocks would be the government's most striking effort yet to prop up share prices and try to restore confidence in a market that has fallen to its lowest level in about eight years. The proposal comes at a time when China's economy is sizzling hot, but the nation's Communist Party leadership is struggling to fix a stock market that has been broken for several years. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, where about 1,400 state-owned companies are listed, are each down 40 to 50 percent from the highs they reached in 2001. In recent months, struggling brokerage houses and large investors have been aggressively lobbying for a government bailout fund. Government bailouts have a weak track record, however, and the proposed support is unlikely to nurse the growth of the capital markets here. When authorities in Hong Kong and Tokyo stepped in to aid their local stock markets, the moves only provided a short psychological lift and failed to produce a sustained turnaround. Analysts say the government is considering the huge bailout proposal because the market has fallen so sharply in the last year that some government officials fear a bigger drop could seriously impede the long term development of China's financial markets. Indeed, China's weak system for raising money and putting it to profitable use is not just hurting investors and state-owned companies, experts say. At the heart of the problem is that private companies, which have a much better track record, are not allowed to list on the Chinese stock exchanges. "China needs a healthy capital market," said Zhou Chunsheng, a professor of finance at Guanghua School of Management at Beijing University. "Traditionally state-owned companies found it easy to get financing from state-owned banks. But now we have more small businesses and private businesses. And they have to find ways to get financing." Some Chinese officials say they are motivated in part from fears that huge and mounting investor losses could also create social discontent among the millions of people who began buying shares in the early to mid-1990's, when stock prices were climbing. While it is not clear whether China's leadership will ultimately approve the bailout proposal, expectations that the government is about to act helped lift share prices last week in one of the biggest one-day rallies in three years. If the $15 billion investment fund were created, the size of the fund would represent about one-tenth of the current value of the stock market's floating, tradeable shares. But some analysts say that turning to a bailout fund could make the situation worse by encouraging investors to sell more of their stocks, saddling the government with huge additional losses. "If the government really wants to do something they should try some other measures instead of simply pouring more capital into the market," said Qian Qimin, a senior analyst at Shenyin & Wanguo, a brokerage house based in Shanghai. The government has turned increasingly aggressive in its efforts to restore investor faith in the market. Nearly every week, regulators announce a new initiative aimed at shoring up the slumping market. On Monday, for instance, the government said that it would offer loans to two major brokerage houses. Regulators have also said they plan to reduce taxes on stock sales and give listed companies the right to engage in stock buybacks. The government has also reduced transaction costs and allowed insurance companies and the government pension fund to invest. Even more, foreign investors who need special approval to buy shares inside China have been given greater access to the domestic stock market. Regulators have also introduced new corporate governance rules, cracked down on accounting fraud and closed some corrupt and insolvent brokerage houses. Despite such efforts, stock prices have continued to slide. Last week, the Shanghai exchange index dipped below 1,000 points for the first time since 1997, crossing what many investors considered a crucial technical and psychological trading level. Then, last Wednesday, the stock exchange suddenly jumped 8.2 percent on rumors that the government might bail out state-owned brokerage houses or create the bailout fund big investors have been advocating in recent months. Trading has been flat to down slightly since then. "It's very hard to estimate the future of the stock market because the market is often interfered with by the government," said Mr. Qian at Shenyin & Wanguo Securities. "How often the government will take administrative measures and how effective these measures are will decide whether the stock index will rise or fall in the future." China opened its two stock exchanges in 1990 and 1991 as a way to help state-owned companies raise money and to create a foundation for a thriving capital market system. For several years, prices rose steadily as millions of investors bid up the shares of state-owned enterprises, raising billions of dollars for those companies and helping alleviate pressure on the already struggling state-owned banking sector. But since late 2001, the stock market has been tumbling amid allegations of accounting fraud, poor corporate governance and continued government interference in business operations. On top of that are fears that regulators might allow some of the state's huge holdings in legal, nontradeable shares (which represent more than two-thirds of the market's value) to be released into the market, further depressing prices. The market has also soured on initial public offerings. In 2002, the Shanghai Stock Exchange raised about $6 billion through such offerings, slightly more than the longer-established Hong Kong Stock Exchange. But in the two years since then, Hong Kong has raised close to $20 billion through initial public offerings compared with just $9 billion in Shanghai. And this year is expected to be no different, with all the big Chinese companies deciding to raise the bulk of their money in Hong Kong, not Shanghai. Few are optimistic about the stock markets' prospects over the next year. "In my view the stock market is still overvalued, even after falling 50 percent," said Joe Zhang, an analyst at UBS. "We were paying way too much for stocks back then. And we are now beginning to realize that what we bought was not BMW, it was Xiali Automobile." From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:32:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:32:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Soviet economic planning Message-ID: Soviet economic planning The Times Literary Supplement, 98.5.22 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093487&window_type=print Sir, - John Gray has given us an intriguing appre-ciation (May 8) of Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and its destructive impact on the social fabric. He aptly spears the neo-liberals who close their eyes to the reality, evident even to Marx, of capitalist concentration. Yet Professor Gray offers little guidance towards the damage control that he rightly assigns to representative democracy. There is no institution but the State to maintain free markets in the face of corporate concentration, or failing that, to assure by other means that economic giants serve the public interest. Such tasks, of course, come perilously close to the central economic planning that Gray and others rule out because of its association with the "Marxist utopia" and Communist tyranny. This hobbling assumption about planning results from taking Soviet ideological claims at their face value. In reality, Soviet economic centralism was neither Marxist nor planned. Lenin's original model for planning was not Marx but the German Kriegssozialismus of the First World War. Serious planning, of the indirect, indicative type, was the work of Menshevik economists in the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) in the 1920s, when the State had retreated to the "commanding heights". But Stalin repudiated all this, purged Gosplan and substituted a regime of military commands and allocations. This, not the oft-cited "utopian experiment", was the system that finally came to grief amid Gorbachev's efforts to reform it. Soviet tyranny was not the consequence of planning; it was the worst enemy of planning. Rejection of the Stalinist-style economy does not preclude consideration of alternatives to the global corporatism that John Gray has so effectively criticized. Rather, it should clear the air for fresh ideas about our economic destiny. ROBERT V. DANIELS Department of History, University of Vermont, 442 Main Street, Burlington, Vermont 05405. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 00:32:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:32:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) New Labour and global laissez-faire Message-ID: New Labour and global laissez-faire The Times Literary Supplement, 1.4.27 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2103894&window_type=print Sir, - Let me first of all reassure anyone who might care that I have not, as John Gray asserts when reviewing my book Equality (April 20), "abandoned Marxism for the more mundane pieties of Anglo-American liberalism". I lack the suppleness that has allowed Gray to spring so rapidly from one intellectual and political position to another. I remain an unrepentant Marxist, but this does not prevent me from appreciating other traditions. The egalitarian liberalism that takes as its starting point A Theory of Justice by John Rawls has developed a rich and sophisticated understanding of distributive justice from which those able to listen can learn much. Gray doesn't think much of egalitarian liberalism, or indeed of my own discussion of equality, which he dismisses as "pedestrian in the extreme". I would be more crushed by this judgment, had he shown much understanding of the philosophical issues involved. Among other egregious errors, he attributes to me a method of testing egalitarian conceptions against common-sense intuitions that I specifically criticize in Equality. In standard New Labour fashion, he counterposes Gordon Brown's version of equality of opportunity to the ideal of achieving a "fixed pattern" of distribution, ignoring my careful effort to demonstrate that no serious egalitarian supports the latter ideal. The unifying idea of contemporary egalitarianism is that everyone should be provided with the resources required for an equal chance to pursue the good life in her own way. Gray accuses me of having written a "ranting attack on Labour". Ranting is one of his special subjects, so I bow to his authority. All the same, it is interesting that he helps himself to some of my criticisms of Brown's strategy for re- ducing inequality by pushing the poor on to the labour market - namely that providing employment isn't the right way of meeting many people's needs, and is vulnerable to capitalist economic fluctuations. But, faithful to Treasury doctrine, Gray denies that the cycle of boom and bust is among "the inherent evils of capitalism", thereby revealing a utopianism at least as ambitious as any he claims to have discovered in my book. In his preferred guise as a realist, Gray declares that radical egalitarianism has no political purchase today. But one of the main motivating forces behind the international protest movement that most recently swept through Quebec City is revulsion at the obscene and growing gap between rich and poor that capitalist globalization is producing. In some moods Gray shows himself aware of these concerns. Perhaps the vulgarity of his attack on my book is a sign of the strains felt by a thinker who somehow manages both to criticize "global laissez-faire" and to support a New Labour government that relentlessly seeks to impose neo-liberal policies in Britain, within the European Union, and on an international scale. ALEX CALLINICOS Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, York. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jun 20 18:11:47 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 11:11:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] pipe smoking In-Reply-To: <200506201800.j5KI0aR05754@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050620181147.99854.qmail@web30802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>But there's something charming about pipe smoking -- an appealingly retro air of reflection and relaxation, a uniquely masculine mystique that's somehow large enough to include tweedy professors and Maine hunting guides, detectives and novelists, Santa Claus and Gen. MacArthur, Albert Einstein and Popeye the Sailor Man.<< --I feel similarly about pot smoking. I miss Cheech and Chong. Not that anyone would be "politically incorrect" enough to rhapsodize about it. It's odd how marketing and role modeling influences how people think about different drugs. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail Mobile Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/learn/mail From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:41:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:41:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: On the Job, Till Death Do Us Part? (9 Letters) Message-ID: On the Job, Till Death Do Us Part? (9 Letters) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/opinion/l16tierney.html To the Editor: In "The Old and the Rested" (column, June 14), John Tierney mentions the unmentionable: he suggests that healthy seniors consider going back to work. But here's something even more unmentionable: many seniors would love to do just that - or keep the jobs they already have - but employers don't want them. Why? The feeling is that seniors are not as mentally acute as younger employees. That they can't or won't work as hard. That training them is a waste because they don't have another 20 years of work left in them. And most unmentionable of all, they make younger decision makers uncomfortable. How many 35-year-old managers (beyond those at McDonald's or Wal-Mart) are eager to hire employees who could be their parents? The problem is less that many seniors who could return to work won't; it is that many who would love to can't, because only minimum-wage jobs that do not make use of their knowledge and experience are open to them. Neil Chesanow Montvale, N.J., June 14, 2005 To the Editor: Most people who have done manual labor their entire working lives are ready to retire by age 60 and should be able to do it. Back, hip and joint problems aside, their lungs and other organs have been assaulted for decades by things like paint, welding fumes and solvents, and it's quite likely that they don't have a whole lot of time left. People who have been writers, editors, accountants and stockbrokers probably have plenty of work left in them at age 60 or 65, and it isn't unreasonable to suggest that they stay on the job. Our economic system is replete with disparities like this, and any Social Security "fix" that doesn't address them should be rejected. David Rubenstein Minneapolis, June 14, 2005 To the Editor: How can John Tierney write so disparagingly of those of us who are far along in our aging species, even to the point of asking, "Why is loafing an inalienable right?" He cites 68- and 69-year-old athletes participating in the National Senior Games and asks if they're not "capable of putting in a full day's work at the office." Maybe they are, but not for 50 weeks a year. How many hours did Mr. Tierney put in interviewing 80- or 85-year-olds or those in their young 90's who would welcome part-time work assignments, who never expected to stay this long and now "scrape by"? Hear us, journalists. We're the ones on your "front line," not only those facing retirement. With eight decades or more (I'm 82), we have the perspective you can't know. Have the guts to look at the hard wisdom we can give you, not to self-serving sarcasm. Pardon our anger, but perhaps you need to hear it. Bob VanWagoner Morehead City, N.C., June 14, 2005 The writer wrote a column about senior issues for The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 1998-2001. To the Editor: Having been let go from my job in March at the age of 61, I have been trying unsuccessfully to find another position (as have many other people in my situation). Also, I need the health benefits offered by full employment. I don't want to apply for Social Security at 62, but it seems that I may have no choice. So please ask John Tierney for a list of companies that are hiring people who are over 60 and that offer benefits. I have a feeling there aren't very many of them. Carol Robinson New York, June 14, 2005 To the Editor: John Tierney's idea of what retirees do with the largess of Social Security (golf?) is laughable. Today's retirees have a new job, women's work. Now that women either need or choose to support their families, grandparents have stepped in to help with child care. They have also taken the place of housewives in volunteer work. In doing so, they apparently give in to what Mr. Tierney calls "greed and sloth." Although unpaid work receives little public acknowledgment, it is needed, and so (desperately) are retirees. Sarah Denes Stony Creek, Conn., June 14, 2005 To the Editor: John Tierney's column resonates with many citizens, senior and otherwise. Norwegians, with perhaps the best quality of life of any country, have a retirement age of 67 for their version of Social Security. We can easily raise the retirement age and work longer. That will help take Social Security out of a financial bind and keep seniors active. But until we stop laying off or sidelining older workers and slow our rush to outsource meaningful jobs to other countries where labor is cheaper, Mr. Tierney is pipe-dreaming at best. Michael A. Keane South Orange, N.J., June 14, 2005 To the Editor: John Tierney's indictment of the "Old and the Rested" graciously doesn't blame Americans for becoming lazier but places the onus on "the system." What he doesn't mention is that "the system" includes corporations that offered early retirement because it was economically expedient; private pension plans (corporate promises to workers) that were underfinanced or raided during mergers; and a culture that is youth-oriented and vilifies the aged. The AARP did not invent early retirement; M.B.A.'s in the boardroom did. Most elderly people are willing to work longer at the jobs they are qualified for, but they work as department-store greeters because they are too experienced and overqualified for the jobs they can do. Brent J. Eelman Willow Grove, Pa., June 14, 2005 To the Editor: Re "The Old and the Rested" (column, June 14): If the Republican tax cuts to the wealthy were reversed and the money appropriately applied, this wouldn't be an issue. This is just more of the same-old, same-old in the continuing saga to shift wealth upward. If seniors want to work, fine; but if not, aren't they entitled to retire, or is that only for the wealthy elderly? Michelle Cacho-Negrete Wells, Me., June 14, 2005 To the Editor: Contrary to John Tierney's column, the problem for my generation is not that we are lazy. It's the job market. I'm 68 and happy to work. Now all I need is for people and businesses to hire me. Danny Kleinman Los Angeles, June 14, 2005 From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:42:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:42:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Entelechy: John A. Johnson: Why Do We Admire Effort and Derogate Beauty Message-ID: John A. Johnson: Why Do We Admire Effort and Derogate Beauty Entelechy: Mind & Culture http://www.entelechyjournal.com/why_do_we_admire_effort_and_dero.htm [Thanks to Alice Andrews for bringing this to my attention. My understanding is that it was not until Jesus spoke about committing lust in one's heart that interior states were a major factor in making moral judgments. I do not know the history of the requirement of "mens rea" (usually rendered as criminal intent) as being necessary to establish in to prove guilt in certain crimes. Has murder always been distinguished from manslaughter? In the same way? Across nations? [Until these questions have been answered, the reader should be careful in extrapolating Johnson's notions beyond those of his circle all the way back to the EEA. [Howard Bloom has pointed out that non-human primates are very good at bullying the handicapped. I suppose that others whose "moral intuitions" tell them not to do so that, well maybe this is true, but "we" are civilized. [Further thought: even if conscientiousness had a hereditability of 0.4, it still needs to be exercised. What is the optimal reward level for its exercise, optimal from the standpoint of someone unborn, not of me, who may be set in my ways? How hard, in other words, should I discipline my children? I'm not sure I'd want to be stricter than my wife or my neighbors, if I want to get along with them. Maybe I should think about what kind of neighborhood I'd like to live in. [The only really strict neighborhoods now are those of Christian Evangelicals. (The Jewish mother is long gone.) But I don't want my children coming away as Christians, until I see far better evidence for the truth of their doctrines. A healthy disrespect for authority is among the virtues I would cultivate. In fact, Creationists very much DO have this healthy disrespect, since Darwinism leads to "relativism." [For whose sake do I want to raise my children to exercise their conscientiousness? For them? For my glory? (In my case, this is a small factor.) For the community as a whole? [And what do I am for in moral education? Happiness, presumably, certainly not the glorification of God, which is un-Christian: And hee [Jesus] said vnto them, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. --Mark 2:27 (original spelling). Now happiness consists of pleasure, engagement, and meaning. [Think in terms of a "psychological contract," that will deal with the general level of moral education across a community, which corresponds to a "social contract," which is really a political contract. What should be the mix of pleasure, engagement, and meaning moral education should aim for. How can it be tailored to individuals? WHy do I care about the state of the culture, as long as others leave me alone? Is tolerance the biggest virtue to cultivate? Why so now? It certainly hasn't been in less "enlightened" ages. Does capitalism and now the Internet mean much less social glue is needed than before? [A string of questions, many I've have been entertaining for quite a while, but stirred up again by the essay you are about to read.] Rudy is a film, based upon a true story, of an untalented, five-foot runt with a burning desire to play football for Notre Dame. This obsession causes him to ignore ridicule and discouragement from those around him. After his applications to transfer from Holy Cross Junior College to Notre Dame are rejected repeatedly, he finally gains admission to the university and earns a spot on the football team. He works harder than all of his athletically gifted teammates, persisting through pain and lack of opportunity to play in a real game. The story has a happy ending: Rudy's teammates cajole the coach into allowing Rudy to play in the closing moments of the last home game, and Rudy tackles the opposing quarterback. His jubilant teammates carry him off the field on their shoulders. Reactions to Rudy's story inevitably include admiration and inspiration. We praise his tenacity, his persistent drive to achieve his goal, despite the odds. Now, let's contrast how we feel about Rudy with how we feel about a woman who, by conventional standards, is a natural beauty. Someone with gorgeous hair, a pretty face, clear, smooth skin, and a perfectly proportioned body regardless of what she eats or how much she exercises. Her natural beauty gives her all sorts of advantages over more ordinary women. She has her choice of men. Even men with no chance of romance with her treat her with deference and do special favors for her. Other women want to be her best friend. We hold beauty pageants that recognize women primarily for being beautiful. But, although we may admire a woman's beauty and want to be close to her, do we admire her as a person in the same way that we admire someone like Rudy? Obviously not. There's a big difference between admiring an attractive individual as we would a beautiful landscape and admiring someone as a human being. In fact, the feeling is quite often the opposite of admiration for many individuals who cannot have the friendship or love of the beautiful woman: We hate her. Women are jealous of her natural endowments. Non-alpha males, tortured by unfulfilled longing, resent her inaccessibility. Both sexes scowl about how unfair it is that some people are lucky enough to be born beautiful and never have to work hard to achieve anything. We question the intelligence of beautiful women. We scoff at the superficiality of beauty pageants or even claim that they are demeaning to women. If a beautiful woman achieves status in an organization we whisper that she must have slept her way to the top. We coin phrases such as "Beauty is only skin deep" to derogate beautiful women. The derogation of attractive individuals is readily explained by evolutionary psychology as a strategy for competing with rivals. By pointing out flaws in our rivals, we improve our own chances of being recognized for whatever we have to offer. But is it logical, fair, and rational to consider the life of Rudy (or a female equivalent) to be more worthy of praise than the life of a man or woman who is born beautiful? Let's put aside the pettiness and jealousy we might hold toward beautiful people. Is there something objectively more admirable about Rudy with his relentless drive, his strong will to achieve, than someone who is a natural beauty? Let's take a closer look at Rudy's life. First, one could question why he invested so much time on an activity for which he was so ill suited. How smart was that? Would not his time have been better spent doing something at which he could excel? Next, one could point out that Rudy's goal (playing football) has superficial social value at best. All of those hours spent on the practice field might have been spent on applying what he was learning in the classroom (he was a sociology major) toward solving social problems weightier than how to beat Georgia Tech. Finally, even if we grant importance to one football team beating another team, what did Rudy really contribute? Perhaps his efforts inspired his teammates. Whether the talented Notre Dame team actually needed this inspiration to win is another question. Okay, someone will say. Maybe the Rudy story is not the best case study in the virtue of persistence, hard work, and sacrifice because it is only a football story. Let's take a different case, the case of a shy young man who suffers from stuttering and exotropia (a visual defect in which one of his eyes turns outward). The young man's traits make speaking in front of groups of people extremely difficult. Nonetheless, he pursues a career in academics, which requires a significant amount of speaking in front of students and colleagues. He struggles early on and is almost denied tenure. Despite his handicaps, he eventually establishes himself as one of the most important personality psychologists in the history of the discipline. The discipline's respect and admiration for Henry A. Murray is evident in the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe and in numerous awards that bear his name. This special admiration is certainly based in part on Murray's drive and determination to succeed even though he was not well-suited for public speaking. Ah, but Murray was also intelligent and creative, you might say. We are primarily recognizing his creative contributions to the field. Yes, his contributions are all the more laudable because he had to work hard to compensate for his weaknesses. But we would not recognize him as we have if he merely tried hard and failed to produce anything of value. Similarly, it would be wrong to create awards honoring someone who was physically attractive but had not accomplished anything. Academics admire and recognize only substantial intellectual and creative contributions. We do not create awards to honor psychologists who are merely good looking. But now we run into a little puzzle. Where did Murray get his intelligence and creativity? The heritability of intelligence is estimated to be about .75, and creativity, about .50. Differences in intelligence and creativity that cannot be accounted for by genes are due to unique life experiences and random factors. In other words, if you are smart and creative, you were lucky to be born to parents with good genes and lucky to have experiences that helped you realize your intellectual and creative potential. These are well-established findings from behavior genetics. So what is the puzzle? There are two puzzles, actually. First, why do we admire, honor, and reward people who were lucky enough to be born with a favorable configuration of genes and life experiences? That makes about as much sense as admiring someone who is lucky enough to pick a winning number in the lottery. Second, why admire someone with genes for high intelligence, but not admire someone with genes for physical attractiveness? Is this logical or fair? At this point, Murray fans might backtrack to emphasize his dogged determination to succeed despite his handicaps. It is not just his intelligence and creativity that we admire. Without his indomitable will, his tenacity, his refusal to give up, no matter what the odds, he would never have achieved what he did. It is the combination of his intelligence, creativity, and strong will that we admire. He was lucky to get good genes from his parents. He was lucky to grow up in a wealthy family who sent him to Harvard. He was fortunate to spend a vacation with Carl Jung and to meet Christiana Morgan, both of whom took a liking to him. He was lucky that Gordon Allport supported him during his struggle for tenure. We do not credit him for these lucky events that he did not control, but we will give him credit for his tenacity, his persistence, his character. This case differs radically from someone who is born with genes for physical attractiveness and therefore does not have to work to gain favorable attention. Only people who show determination and work hard deserve special recognition. Our desire to applaud determination is so strong that we institutionally recognize the efforts of disadvantaged individuals whose physical performances are often less than mediocre. Events such as the Special Olympics and Paralympics provide an opportunity for people to cheer for the disabled just for doing the best they can. It is a pity that we can't have similar events for the thousands of less disabled but still unfortunate people who will never be applauded for anything. For each Henry Murray or Rudy Ruettiger who achieves recognition for some measure of success in life, there are dozens of unaccomplished stutterers and runts who endure endless teasing, bullying, and derogation--far more derogation than what is usually experienced by unaccomplished but physically attractive people. Unlike Special Olympians, they live a miserable life and die without receiving a medal for anything. Sadly, it is true that some people derogate unfortunates--the stutterers, the overweight, the blemished, the mentally retarded--more than they derogate the beautiful. Overall, unfortunates may suffer more than beautiful people. But on the issue of derogation, we need to keep in mind that only some people are so malevolent as to pick on the disadvantaged, and that this kind of derogation is universally recognized as cruel or even evil. We can nod approvingly when someone criticizes the superficiality of beauty pageants, but we would consider it extremely poor taste to put down the Special Olympics or Paralympics. Let us now return to the notion that determination, tenacity and dogged persistence deserves special admiration and recognition because willful striving is something that we control rather than a lucky gift like good genes or fortunate life experiences. (And let us leave aside the question of whether physically attractive people must possess determination to maintain their beauty. Surely many do follow rigid diets, engage in strenuous exercise routines, and deny themselves unhealthy pleasures that might put their beauty at risk.) The question is whether willful striving really is something that we create rather than something that is handed to us like genes for high intelligence or a Harvard education. Why is it that some people have "strong wills" and others, "weak wills?" Why do some people will themselves to overcome disadvantages and accomplish extraordinary things, while others only manage to will themselves to indulge in physical pleasures and still others will themselves to commit antisocial, destructive acts? Do people choose how much will they possess for various pursuits? Of course not. People certainly do make choices, and these choices are based on the amount of will they possess for various activities. "Will" is simply the capacity to follow through on choices. But will itself is not something freely chosen; we simply have the will to do something or we do not. You cannot tell yourself at a particular point in time to have the willpower to persist at a task or to avoid eating that calorie-laden piece of cheesecake. The will is simply there or it is not. And what determines what we call "strength of will?" The same thing as all other human traits: genes and experiences. The domain of personality containing traits such as will, persistence, tenacity, determination, and so forth is Factor III of the Five-Factor Model (FFM), often labeled Conscientiousness. John Digman, a pioneer of the FFM, referred to Factor III as Will to Achieve. One's level on Factor III, like the level of the other four major factors, remains virtually constant over the adult lifespan. Factor III, which shows a heritability of about .4, predicts school grades and performance in a wide range of adult occupations as well as scores on IQ tests. People who are lucky enough to inherit genes for high intelligence and high Conscientiousness and to experience life events that help them realize their potential are indeed fortunate. Not only are they fated to achieve great success by conventional standards, they will also be admired and recognized by others. If they possess physical shortcomings, their achievements may even be recognized by special awards or Hollywood movies. Nobody chooses his or her level or direction of willpower. The strength and direction of your will is something given to you, and not all people are given the same amount. Addicts suffer from low willpower to refrain from their addictions. Children with ADHD lack the will to concentrate on tasks. They did not choose to be this way. They do not want to be this way. This essay could be just as much about the derogation of "weak-willed" people as the derogation of beautiful people. Derogating weak will is the other side of the coin of celebrating effort and strong will. This is unfair and cruel. The hidden (and incorrect) assumption for most people is that beauty, as a fixed, physical trait that we passively receive, is unworthy of genuine admiration, while will is some nonphysical energy that any person can conjure up flexibly at any time, in any quantity necessary. In reality, willpower is not equally available to all of us. We do not all have the same amount of willpower to overcome obstacles. Like most personality traits, willpower is normally distributed: Most of us have an average amount and fewer people have either a lot or a little. Since we are not free to choose our level and direction of willpower, those who possess a strong will are, objectively, no more admirable than those who lack will. Moreover, admiring someone with a will to engage in activities that you personally value is just a form of self-adulation. Yes, people who possess natural beauty are just plain lucky, but so are people who possess a strong will to engage in socially valued activities. Hard-working people are no more deserving of special admiration and recognition than people who are born with a predisposition toward physical attractiveness. It isn't fair to admire effort and derogate beauty, because people can't help what they are. However, pointing this out will not change our attitudes toward effort and beauty, because attitudes have nothing to do with abstract fairness and logic. Our attitudes are based on our evolved nature to look at other people as potential resources. Stupid, dull, lazy people are usually not very useful to us. Smart, creative, overachievers might be. Our positive feelings toward hard-working people are intensified when we perceive them to be underdogs who are overcoming impossible odds, because these stories fuel our own dreams of transcending our limitations. Unattractive people have little use for beautiful people beyond the aesthetic and imaginary pleasures to be gained by gazing at them and fantasizing about them, because these people will never be our friends or lovers and we can never be as beautiful as they are. But the story of Rudy appeals to every scrawny boy who wants to be an athlete. We love the idea that we are free to do anything we desire if we work hard enough at it. Unfortunately for the effort-worshippers, their dreams are usually dashed when they eventually discover that will can not be conjured up any more than beauty. That people suffer for valuing effort over beauty is cosmic justice. [2]John A. Johnson received B.S. degrees in psychology and in biology from the Pennsylvania State University 1976. He received his MA in psychology in 1979 and his PhD in psychology in 1981 from the Johns Hopkins University. In the fall of 1981 he joined Penn State's psychology faculty as an assistant professor at the DuBois Campus. Dr. Johnson joined the graduate faculty in 1984, was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 1988, and promoted to professor in 1995. He spent the 1990-91 year as visiting professor and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Research Fellow at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. John has published over 30 scholarly journal articles and book chapters and has presented over two dozen scholarly papers at regional, national, and international conferences. He has also published a number of book reviews and has served as a reviewer for all of the major personality psychology journals. John's research has been aimed at improving the validity of self-report personality tests, particularly in the context of personnel selection. He has also studied methods for improving the validity and pragmatic utility of computer-generated, narrative personality reports for single individuals. Over 300,000 persons have completed his on-line personality test, which received an award from MSNBC. References 1. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/ 2. http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:42:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:42:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bruce Sterling: Can Technology Save the Planet? Message-ID: Bruce Sterling: Can Technology Save the Planet? Can Technology Save the Planet? Our opposable thumbs got us into this mess, and they can help get us out, says futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Massive technological change is coming. Are we ready? Given the pace of technological innovation we have experienced in the past 50 years, by mid-century we will have an infrastructure as radically different from today's as industry in 1900 was from that of 1700. If we handle the huge transition correctly, it will be worth cheering. In 50 years, nature will be less oppressed, culture will be wiser, government will take new and improved forms, industrial systems will be more efficient and capable, and business will be less like a rigged casino. Purveyors of art, fashion, and design will see what went on nowadays and bust a gut laughing in derision. Our children and grandchildren will get up in the morning, look at the news, and instead of flinching in terror, they will see the edifying spectacle of the world's brightest people transparently solving the world's worst problems. This sounds utopian, but it could soon be everyday life. To achieve this victory, we need to understand technology with a depth of maturity that humans have never shown before. We tend to obsess over newfangled discoveries: the radio age, the space age, the atomic age, the computer age. We need to stop fussing over these tiny decades-long "ages" and think historically and comprehensively, employing technology as a means to preserve the web of life rather than for its own sake. The Iroquois considered the impacts of their decisions on seven generations, and so can we. Thanks to information technology, we can already track what previous generations have sown. According to the United Nations' Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year research effort by more than 1,300 scientists, nearly two-thirds of the world's ecosystems are being degraded because the human race is living beyond its means. Without substantial changes in policies and practices, they contend, Earth faces an environmental disaster that will threaten all people in the 21st century. Understand this timeline, and there are only three basic kinds of technology that are truly worth our attention. None of them is entirely possible now. It is our task to invent them. The first and most sensible technology is one that does its work and then eventually rots and goes away by itself. Its core materials and processes are biodegradable, so it's self-recycling. Writer Janine Benyus talks about "biomimetic" technologies; architect William McDonough describes "cradle to cradle" production systems. This means harnessing the same biochemical means of production that built the natural world and using them to create industries, cities, products, everything. It means the industrial use of new materials with the sturdy, no-nonsense qualities of spider silk, mussel glue, coral, seashell, horn, bone, and timber. It means room-temperature industrial assembly without toxics: no foundries, no pesticides, no mercury. When an object made by these processes is abandoned or worn out, it becomes part of the biosphere. This is already happening, but too often in uncontrolled ways. The shell of my desktop computer is made of aging plastic; its chips and wiring overheat and off-gas. It's becoming part of the biosphere as I type and blast electricity through it. And I'm busily inhaling those tiny bits of computer debris. I have to pray that they're not slowly accumulating somewhere deep in my tender anatomy. The designer of Apple's Macintosh died this year of pancreatic cancer. I don't blame his Mac; Silicon Valley is notorious for its Superfund sites. The leaders of America's computer revolution have been living in a stew of toxic debris. That's no way to build an industry. The second kind of technology is monumental. These are artifacts built to outlast the ages - artifacts with the honest, solid design demanded by, say, craftsman William Morris and art critic John Ruskin. In theory, monuments reduce the human load on the environment because they are "consumed" only over many generations. With no planned obsolescence, they're very thrifty, and they never go away. Compare the quality and livability (and asking price!) of a New York City "Classic Eight" apartment built at the turn of the last century to a postwar pop-up in the suburbs. Look at Union Station in Washington, D.C., still a public-transit hub nearly a century after being built - or the Louvre and Notre-Dame, still in use some 500 and 800 years, respectively, after construction. As much as I like antiquity, monuments are very hard to design and build. (And in some cases, permanence is undesirable. People sometimes want a chance to change their minds, their locales, and their circumstances.) While many designers have sought lasting solutions for technological problems, the fact is that most technology isn't as durable as a great building. You can use a century-old hand tool or wheelbarrow that performs as beautifully as it did the day it was made, but the hope for a perfect and lasting solution also led Dieter Rams of the German firm Braun to design a permanent player for vinyl records. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven left monumental achievements. But a record player? Mere hardware should be a servant to humanity, not a cenotaph. Then there's the third kind of decent technology, a cybernetic industrial base. Imagine a fully documented, trackable, searchable system in which the computer revolution has permeated manufacturing, inventorying, and transporting. Every manufactured object is bar-coded, scanned, and tracked throughout its lifetime. Consider a Dell computer: It doesn't even exist until you place your order, setting in motion a tightly controlled manufacturing and delivery process. (On a smaller scale, I can keep track of my writing?material stored on my hard disk - using a Google search. Eventually I hope to be able to Google my misplaced car keys.) While this sounds like Big Brother, when it comes to managing the resources that go into industrial processes, such hyper-control creates great economic and environmental efficiency. Imagine a whirring technology that would keep full track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably came, recycle itself. The main advantage of this "Internet of Things" would be the ways in which it would transform our relationships to our possessions. Emerson mourned that "things are in the saddle and ride mankind." But in an Internet of Things, objects are not burdensome; they are incidental. An Internet of Things would be as different from today's industrial status quo as Google is from the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica. It would mean a truly dizzying world that would stun us the way a Victorian would be blown away by television. I have few illusions about the ways people interact with technology. So let me be clear: Society's problems do not get solved by merely inventing new stuff. Breakthroughs are easy to publicize, but genuine environmental victory means annihilating some major evils perpetrated by our great-grandparents. The bad old stuff has to be torn up and junked. That requires changing the way we understand technology. Right now the term technology simply means "things invented since I was born." These can be itchy and frightening things, freighted with unknown implications for good or ill. They're things of shock, awe, wonder, and suspicion. They're headline makers. Technologies invented before I was born are basically invisible to me. It scarcely matters how powerful and dangerous they are. Since I'm used to them, I'm blind to them. I regard them as normality, the fabric of the universe. Today nobody calls railroads technology. They are thought of as old-fashioned, cuddly objects with praiseworthy public-transit applications. But when railroads were young, they did most every fearsome thing we dread from new technologies. They exploded and derailed with horrific regularity. They turned cities inside out. They caused financial booms and panics, massive government corruption, vast migrations, wildfires, pollution, and the comprehensive slaughter of the American bison. Railroads were hell on wheels. Yet railroads are still powerfully transformative, just as they were when every red-blooded boy wanted to be Casey Jones, the insanely daring train engineer. We still think in that flawed way, only with newer toys. (For us moderns, technology is a synonym for computers.) In the case of electricity and running water, these technologies are visible only by their absence. When people nowadays lack electricity and plumbing, we don't think of it as a normal way of living. We call it camping out, or poverty. But electricity and plumbing are at the root of the most profound threats to the continuity of our civilization - climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion and salinization, water-table depletion and water shortages, exhaustion of fossil fuels, and the bio-accumulation of various toxics in water, food, soil, and the bloodstreams of all living creatures. Electricity and plumbing aren't evil and wrong. But we've trained ourselves to take their presence too much for granted. We don't yet see technology as an ancient, comprehensive, continually unfolding set of artificial processes, spread through every level of society. Once we fully deal with the darker consequences wreaked on our world by our desire for pretty table lamps and nice hot baths, we'll become far more civilized. And the technologies that can dig us out of, rather than deeper into, the abyss will make more sense. Fortunately, environmental calamity captures our attention better than other political and social concerns: It's based in tangible and physical reality. Acid rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Even our civilization's death grip on creaky old fossil fuels is loosening. Already, major European oil companies are perfectly capable of talking sense: BP sincerely hungers to be "Beyond Petroleum," while the honcho at Shell, an outfit chastened by fraud allegations, rides a folding bike to work and uses fluorescent bulbs at home. ExxonMobil posts the biggest profits in the world, but that's not a sign of health and good management; it's a sign of reckless mania. A clever environmental campaign would explain to the rich how much they are suffering at the hands of old tech. A wealthy American with an environmentally caused cancer has the same bio-accumulative toxic burden as the rest of us; the ultimate environmental reality show would be something like Wrecked Florida Beach Homes of the Rich and Famous. Extend that metaphor to other groups that don't easily embrace environmental messages and you can show fundamentalist churches ripped to shreds by F4 tornadoes, or Sagebrush Rebellion ranchers who haven't seen a drop of rain in months. People understand suffering once it's divorced from the abstract and imposed on them. We need to grasp the artificial environment from a full, long-term, holistic perspective. We can see just by looking at our own hands that we are uniquely suited to manipulating artificial objects. Humans are especially good with fire and edged weapons because they were discovered and invented not by us, but by our prehistoric ancestors. Furthermore, stone tools and fire are potent and dangerous technologies. By the standards of all other living creatures, they are fantastic, unimaginable, and horribly deadly. Today climate change is happening because of fire. Stone tools and fire have also caused massive losses in biodiversity. If mega-creatures were still wandering Yosemite and Yellowstone, they would be a boon to ecotourism. But they're not around, mostly because Stone Age humans ate them all. That particular mass extinction has humanity's opposable thumbprints all over it. The ancient peoples who killed large Pleistocene animals had no way of measuring what their technology was doing to the natural world. It's hard for anyone to think 50 generations ahead. But we're gaining the ability to do so. In the era of global warming, catastrophic change caused by humans is no longer limited to one region or even one continent. The atmosphere is tainted with emissions from pole to pole. Grass is growing in Antarctica. Nobody can "conserve" a landscape from planetary changes in rain, heat, and wind. The job at hand is aggressive restoration: We need to use technology to tear into the artificial environment the way our ancestors tore into the natural one. That means intervening against ongoing damage, as well as ripping into the previous technological base and rethinking, reinventing, and rebuilding it on every level of society. We need to imagine the unimaginable to avoid having to live with the unthinkable. The consequences of bygone technologies are with us now; they've merely been rendered invisible by yesterday's habits of thought. When we see our historical predicament in its full, majestic scope, we will stir ourselves to great and direly necessary actions. It's not beyond us to think and act in a better way. Yesterday's short-sighted habits are leaving us, the way gloom lifts with the dawn. Bruce Sterling has written several novels, including Zeitgeist (2000) and The Zenith Angle (2004). His nonfiction includes The Hacker Crackdown (1992) and Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002). He is "Visionary-in-Residence" at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. The Viridian Design Movement is Sterling's effort to promote high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design. World Changing provides "models, tools, and ideas for building a bright green future" and offers a wealth of Web links to green-technology news, discussions, and resources. The Dead Media Project is a collection of "research notes" on obsolete media technologies, from Incan quipus and Victorian phenakistoscopes to the video games and home computers of the 1980s. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:42:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:42:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: What's the Lure of the Edge? Message-ID: What's the Lure of the Edge? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/health/menshealth/20friedma.html By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. DURING a vacation last winter, I took a zip-line canopy tour of the Costa Rican rain forest. Strapped into a harness 100 feet above the jungle floor, I was flying through the air, with the toucans and parrots, attached to a steel cable strung between two platforms. I was having far too much fun to think that this could be dangerous. At first it was pretty thrilling, but by the 10th zip line I felt it was losing its charge. On the last and highest platform, a guy just in front of me began to hyperventilate. Being a psychiatrist, I realized he was having a panic attack. I got him to relax with some deep breathing and then asked him whether he had had this problem before. "Oh, yes," he said. "I thought this would be a way to conquer my fear of heights." Why was he terrified by what was beginning to bore me? We were both members of the sex that studies and more informal surveys indicate is more drawn to thrill seeking (for better or worse - more men than women have orbited the earth, while men are two to three more times likely to be pathological gamblers). But this man and I seemed to be on opposite ends of the thrill-seeking spectrum. On an individual level, the difference seems to be hard-wired in our brains, scientists have begun to discover. What is more surprising is that thrill seeking appears to be enjoyed not just by an elite - or, as some think, aberrant - bunch of people who put their lives at peril for a jolt of excitement. The focus of research on a relatively small, though dramatic, group of unsavory characters like psychopaths and drug addicts can give the impression that thrill is only for the mentally unbalanced. Far from it. Thrill seeking in one form or another is so widespread that it has practically become institutionalized in the culture. From reality TV shows like "Fear Factor," shot through with danger and risk, to the growing popularity of extreme sports, there is something to suit everyone's taste. The root of the thrill-seeking experience lies in an ancient neural circuit buried deep inside the brain that is intimately involved in pleasure, reward and novelty seeking. This system, which connects our thinking cortex with our more primitive limbic emotional center, runs on dopamine, a neurotransmitter. Many of life's greatest pleasures feel good because, in the end, they cause the release of dopamine from the brain's reward pathway. Sex, food and recreational drugs all flood the brain with dopamine - and so does thrill seeking. Like just about every other human attribute, there is great variation in individual taste for novelty and thrill seeking, much of it rooted in the brain. For example, Dr. Nora Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse has shown that response to euphoria-producing drugs is related to the levels of brain dopamine receptors. In one experiment, she gave normal male controls intravenous Ritalin, which releases dopamine, and found that those who experienced the drug as pleasant had significantly fewer dopamine receptors than participants who reported unpleasant effects. Those with more dopamine receptors at baseline are probably less likely to abuse drugs or seek any thrill because their brains already have more dopamine activity to start with. In fact, these guys are likely to be thrill-averse, like that fellow I met on the zip line. For the chronically underaroused, a simple bike ride or jog in the park doesn't do the trick; it would take something more intense like diving 50 feet into a gorge or snorting cocaine to provide them with enough dopamine for them to feel excited. An entire industry has emerged in the last decade to satisfy such voracious appetites for thrills. Rich Hopkins, an inveterate surfer, stuntman and extreme sportsman, is president of ThrillSeekers Unlimited, a company he founded in 1992. Clients try anything from skydiving, bungee jumping and paragliding to zip-line or stunt driving. They will even give you the "fire burn," where you are set safely on fire, like a real stuntman. "When we started, we had around 50 to 75 customers that first year," Mr. Hopkins said. "Now, we routinely take out several hundred people in just one adventure." Who are these thrill seekers? About 80 percent are men, Mr. Hopkins said. But the big surprise is that some of the largest clients are corporations and that many participants are men well into their 50's and 60's. "Instead of a golf holiday, they are sending their employees for an extreme sports adventure and they love it," Mr. Hopkins said. Charles Edwards has been chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma ever since he studied meteorology in college. "I've been obsessed with tornadoes for the last 15 years," he said. "Every storm is completely different, and you just get this adrenaline rush and try to get as close as possible to them. I've seen houses getting blown apart and cows tossed aside. Just awesome." Mr. Edwards was so hooked by the thrill of chasing storms that he created his own company, Cloud 9 Tours, to support his habit, as he called it. "We take people out during the tornado season here in Oklahoma, from April through August. These guys come back again and again." But what about thrill-averse guys? Can they learn to enjoy a little more excitement? If so, would thrilling activity itself change their neural circuitry to make them more like thrill lovers? Probably not, judging from studies of Dr. Jerome Kagan at Harvard, who has shown that certain temperamental traits you are born with are pretty stable. Using M.R.I. brain scanning, Dr. Carl Schwartz at Harvard recently found that these anxious adults showed greater responses in the amygdala, a brain region that processes fearful and threatening stimuli, to faces of strangers than to familiar faces. In other words, people who like novelty have biologically different brains than cautious folks, and no one knows if experience changes this. Of course, the surge of dopamine that thrill seekers search out can literally be addicting. The reason is that anything that activates our reward system, whether it's a natural reinforcer like sex, food or a thrilling act, is seen by the brain as something that should be repeated - over and over. And despite how smart we think we are, our brain can't really distinguish among the activating effects of drugs, thrill or useful behaviors. Even worse, for some people, drugs and thrill are more powerfully self-reinforcing than even food and sex. So the very design of our brain that promotes survival also makes us vulnerable. Alain Robert, a k a Spiderman, is known for climbing skyscrapers without special equipment or a safety net. He recently climbed the Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan, which, standing at 1,670 feet, is the world's tallest building. "The euphoria when I reach the summit maybe lasts a few hours or days at the most, and then I have to have it again," he said. "I enjoy the risk and to be in control of my fear and have to do it again and again. I cannot stop climbing." Not all men get their thrills in such physically spectacular ways as Mr. Robert; some get it from their work. James Cramer, a founder of TheStreet .com and a financial commentator, used to manage a hedge fund. "I craved the risk," he said. "I would come to work and if by midday I hadn't made a serious bet, I'd be miserable. The bigger the bet, the better." "I got such energy and felt so alive," he added, "I was ecstatic on a daily basis." For some, though, there may be more to thrill than only a dopamine rush. "Guys like extreme sports not just because it's exciting, but because it makes them feel accomplished and more self-confident," Mr. Hopkins said. John Bardes, a freshman at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., who enjoys scaling 50-foot walls, echoed this. "The wall is a genuine test of your ability and if your muscles can't make it, you fall. It's a way of finding your limits and seeing how far you can push yourself." Mr. Bardes, however, is not fearless. "At first I was nervous, and the higher I went the more anxious I became," he said. "But I got over that. Up there, I feel like I'm alone in my own world and it clears my head." Thrill has a dark side, too. In the sexual arena, it can literally be fatal. Men with a strong taste for sexual novelty in the form of multiple partners are at high risk of both getting and spreading H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases as they move from one encounter to the next. But few forms of thrill are as insidiously destructive as gambling. Recently, scientists have peered into the brain while people are playing a game that simulates gambling. Dr. Hans Breiter at Harvard had subjects play a computer game of chance in which they either won or lost money, and monitored their brain activity. He found that the prospect of winning money activates the same dopamine reward pathway in the brain as recreational drugs like cocaine do. No wonder gambling is so compelling. This also helps explain why gamblers, like drug addicts, often seem helpless to resist an impulse that brings intense pleasure but can ruin their lives. Curiously, winning the prize is not what seems to make gambling so thrilling and addictive. Dr. David Zald at Vanderbilt University measured dopamine release in a group of subjects who played a computer game in two different conditions. In the first, subjects selected one of four cards and knew they might win a $1 reward, but didn't know when it might occur. In the second, subjects knew ahead that they were guaranteed to win $1 with every fourth card. Dr. Zald found a large increase in dopamine activity when winning was unpredictable, but not when the subjects knew what was coming. The implication is that gambling is powerfully addictive precisely because the outcome is uncertain. Believe it or not, thrill seeking is pretty much a modern phenomenon. Our hominid ancestors did not bungee jump or do any of the silly things that we do these days for thrill. Life back on the savannah was exciting enough on its own, with ferocious predators and an overall lack of amenities. Nowadays, where the basics like food or a sexual partner are a mouse click away, we don't really need our reward circuit for survival; we are free to use it just for pleasure. (To determine your risk comfort level, you can try a test adapted from the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire at [3]nytimes.com/menshealth.) With few exceptions, like 9/11, modern life has become so safe and controlled that you have to work at finding a little excitement. In fact, one might predict that as life becomes more predictable, riskier forms of excitement will emerge. Hang gliding off Mount Everest? Antarctic triathlon? There's no telling what's next. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:43:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:43:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Calif. Political Review: Gifted Student Deficit Disorder Message-ID: Gifted Student Deficit Disorder Xiaochin Claire Yan, California Political Review, June 14 [Thanks to Laird for this.] Gifted individuals, those with an IQ of 125 or higher, appear in only about five percent of the population, according to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. In nearby Davis, school officials are attempting to boost that percentage by dubious means. Two years ago, the Davis school board, concerned that not enough black and Hispanic children were testing into the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program, lowered the score for GATE identification. That led to 35 percent of third graders in Davis being identified as gifted. Trying to correct the absurd result, the board again tinkered with the identification procedures. This still yielded 26 percent of its students as gifted this year. The board is due to take up the issue of identifying gifted students again this week. They do so not because 26 percent is still more than three times the state average, but because three of the five board members are concerned that those identified as gifted are predominantly white and Asian. This is an example of a misguided and feel-good insistence that all children are gifted somehow, in their own way. It fails the needs of those brightest young minds that the GATE program is designed to foster. Laura Vanderkam, co-author of Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds, says, ???If only the top one percent of students are in the ??? gifted??? group, then it actually means something. If the top 25 percent are in it, then you???ve made it so broad as to be meaningless, and not helpful to the highly gifted in the group.??? That seems to be exactly what several of the Davis trustees have in mind. Trustee Jim Provenza wants classes offered to GATE-identified students also made available to any student whose parents request them. His colleague, Martha West, would prefer to see the GATE program dismantled altogether and the money spent elsewhere. The brightest minds could go eat cake or, as James Delisle, a Kent State University professor of education and part-time teacher of gifted children in Ohio public schools, more delicately states the obvious: a ???schoolwide enrichment plan generally fails to provide the sustenance necessary to fulfill the complex lives of gifted children.??? Equally misguided is the attempt to engineer racial parity in the GATE program. The Davis board may succeed in manipulating the racial breakdowns to look more politically correct, but no amount of engineering or quotas will lead to real gains for students. Real gains come only with true education reform. Where that exists, minorities succeed, often in high numbers. From the rough inner city of Oakland, each year students from the American Indian Charter School qualify for the nationally noted talent search program conducted by Johns Hopkins University. This is because principal Ben Chavis maintains a tough curriculum with high expectations for his all-minority student body. Lowered standards and racial quotas cannot create gifted children. In fact, these policies are a recipe for mediocrity. To boost minority achievement and meet the needs of gifted children, school boards statewide would do better to follow the example of Mr. Chavis. (Posted on June 15, 2005) From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:43:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:43:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) David Marquand: Not for posterity Message-ID: David Marquand: Not for posterity The Times Literary Supplement, 2.11.22 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2076416&window_type=print STRAW DOGS. Thoughts on humans and other animals. John Gray. 246pp. Granta Books. ?12.99. 1 86207 512 3. John Gray is the Prince Rupert of British political theory. Not for him the cautious qualifications, nice distinctions and pedestrian prose of his professional peers. He writes as he talks, with the exhilarating, high-risk urgency of a cavalry charge: he is apt to gallop so fast and so far that his followers can't keep up, but that is a small price to pay for his unquenchable intellectual vitality. His thinking has followed a remarkable trajectory, full of dazzling jumps and unexpected changes of direction. In the 1980s he was an ornament of the Thatcherite New Right, not, I suspect, because he agreed with its politics or economics, but because he shared its contempt for the old elites of Tory tradition. By the early 1990s, he was shifting towards a characteristically lonely and unclassifiable version of the social liberalism that Tony Blair tried and failed to incorporate in the New Labour big tent. At the end of the decade he published a biting, prophetic critique of the simplistic market fundamentalism which then seemed to be carrying all before it. Gray has now made a more dramatic turn. His most recent book has nothing to do with politics in any normal sense of the word. It is an anguished meditation on human nature, humanity's place in the natural world, the looming ecological crisis, the emptiness of the Western philosophical tradition and the hollowness of what our culture sees as progress. It mingles brilliance, perversity and throbbing pain. It puts forward no thesis, and makes no attempt to develop a case or to answer possible objections. It is a collection of terse, aphoristic observations, varying in length from a few sentences to a few pages, loosely arranged under six rather arbitrary headings. The mood and tone - the harsh, almost self-flagellatory language and occasional flashes of savage irony - are more revealing than the content. Despite the absence of formal structure, however, it is not difficult to disentangle three overarching themes. The first and most obvious is a mixture of revulsion and contempt for what Gray calls humanism - the belief, inherited from Christianity, that human beings differ qualitatively and radically from all other animals. From that comes the associated belief that we belong to the only species that can master its destiny: that scientific and technological progress will enable us to escape from the limits that constrain our animal kin and "to control our environment and flourish as never before". This, says Gray, is faith, not science. It is a distinctly moth-eaten faith. The truth, irrefutably demonstrated by Darwin, is that we are part of the animal kingdom -like other species, the adventitious result of "blind evolutionary drift", no more capable of mastering our destiny than whales or gorillas. In Darwin's time, religious fundamentalists made desperate attempts to deny that truth. Today's humanists do the same. Their faith in progress is simply the old Christian faith in salvation dressed up in superficially modern clothes. It is another way of denying our animal status and our evolutionary contingency. The same is true of the Green vision of an enlightened humanity living in harmony with nature and acting as the stewards of the earth's resources. That too is another, and equally deceptive, version of Christian millenarianism. It presupposes a qualitative gulf between ourselves, the prospective stewards, and other animals, the prospective stewarded. No such gulf exists. Much of this seems to me well said, but it is not as novel as Gray seems to think. Simplistic faith in technological progress may still flourish on the wilder shores of popular science, but it no longer runs with the grain of the times. As for our animal status, and our inability to step outside the limits of our genetic inheritance, these Darwinian legacies are rapidly becoming part of the conventional wisdom of the age. Gray's second theme is another matter. Straw Dogs is saturated with a Swiftian loathing for our species. Not only are human beings part of the animal kingdom, they have always been an exceptionally cruel, destructive and rapacious part of it: not Homo sapiens, but "homo rapiens". The human taste for genocide and love of cruelty go back to ancient times; pace humanist progressivism, technological advances have given them more scope. Ruthless slaughter of the defeated was a feature of the ancient world, but "without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust". More striking than our merciless cruelty to each other is our murderous rapacity towards other species and the planet as a whole. Since the first humans arrived on the American continent 12,000 years ago, Gray tell us, 70 per cent of the large mammals in North America and 80 per cent of those in South America have been hunted to extinction. This is not the result of such familiar scapegoats as capitalism, industrialization or Western civilization; throughout history "human advance has coincided with ecological devastation". It is the result of our evolutionary success, above all of the remorseless growth in the human population. We are, in fact, a plague upon the earth. The only hope is a drastic culling of our species. Earth-lovers should not dream of a miraculous change in our habits but of "a time when human beings have ceased to matter". This is where the third theme comes into the story. Having mocked humanist progressivism as a gimcrack secular version of the Christian faith in salvation, Gray offers a bleak salvation of his own. Human beings will cease to matter. The planet will be saved after all - not because there is the remotest chance that Homo rapiens will change his ways, but because Gaia is too strong for him. Her self-regulatory mechanisms - plagues, pollution, global warming and wars of a far more destructive kind than any we have known in the past - will cut our numbers down to a level that Gaia can tolerate, perhaps to zero. Since there is no obvious reason for wishing to preserve our species, the prospect of our extinction should give us no qualms. "The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on." This is not the Christian heaven, but it is a kind of heaven all the same. Though Gray would find this conclusion hateful, I think he has shown that the primordial Judaeo-Christian drama - Original Sin and ultimate redemption - has a stronger hold on our imaginations than he would like to believe. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 20 18:43:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:43:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Civil society in Romania Message-ID: Civil society in Romania The Times Literary Supplement, 3.2.28 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2081019&window_type=print Sir, - John Gray's straightforward review (January 31) of Padraic Kenney's A Carnival of Revolution contains a small imprecision. After stating that the reason for Poland's success in solving the problems of transition is that the Polish Communist regime "never succeeded as it very largely did for a time in Hungary and Czechoslovakia - in destroying civil society", he then presents Romania as a country which is experiencing considerable pains during the same post-Communist reconstruction because it "lacks the experience of democratic government in the pre-Communist period". Romania was, between 1866 and 1938, a constitutional monarchy, with a bicameral parliament, free press, free elections and a healthy middle class. On August 23, 1944, after breaking the alliance with Hitler's Reich, Romania prepared for free elections and democracy's reign rose again, but only for a short time because the Communist Party, with the aid of the Red Army, falsified the elections in 1945; and then, in 1947, it forced King Michael I to abdicate and proclaimed the Popular Republic. Romania's current difficulties are due precisely to the fact that the Communist regime succeeded in destroying the civil society, political parties and "bourgeois" intellectuals that fully existed in the "pre-Communist period". And the proof that Romania didn't lack these is that, for twenty years (1945-64), there was a huge number of political trials, crimes, persecutions, imprisonments and deportations. MIRCEA PLATON French Department, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jun 21 06:37:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 23:37:26 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Great flash piece: Store Wars Message-ID: <01C575F1.048BDC10.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 16:59:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:59:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes Message-ID: Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/science/21gene.html [The article will follow in a moment.] By [3]BENEDICT CAREY Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right. But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes. Environmental influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation with a sports team. The report, which appears in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premier journal, uses genetics to help answer several open questions in political science. They include why some people defect from the party in which they were raised and why some political campaigns, like the 2004 presidential election, turn into verbal blood sport, though polls find little disparity in most Americans' views on specific issues like gun control and affirmative action. The study is the first on genetics to appear in the journal. "I thought here's something new and different by respected political scholars that many political scientists never saw before in their lives," said Dr. Lee Sigelman, editor of the journal and a professor of political science at George Washington University. Dr. Sigelman said that in many fields the findings "would create nothing more than a large yawn," but that "in ours, maybe people will storm the barricades." Geneticists who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their social temperament. It is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA. Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group. Only recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political behavior. Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the new research did not add much to this. Dr. Eaves was not involved in the study but allowed the researchers to analyze data from a study of twins that he is leading. Still, he said the findings were plausible, "and the real significance here is that this paper brings genetics to the attention to a whole new field and gives it a new way of thinking about social, cultural and political questions." In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins. From an extensive battery of surveys on personality traits, religious beliefs and other psychological factors, the researchers selected 28 questions most relevant to political behavior. The questions asked people "to please indicate whether or not you agree with each topic," or are uncertain on issues like property taxes, capitalism, unions and X-rated movies. Most of the twins had a mixture of conservative and progressive views. But over all, they leaned slightly one way or the other. The researchers then compared dizygotic or fraternal twins, who, like any biological siblings, share 50 percent of their genes, with monozygotic, or identical, twins, who share 100 percent of their genes. Calculating how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes' influence on that attitude. A shared family environment for twins reared together is assumed. On school prayer, for example, the identical twins' opinions correlated at a rate of 0.66, a measure of how often they agreed. The correlation rate for fraternal twins was 0.46. This translated into a 41 percent contribution from inheritance. As found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent of the differences. But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins' self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14 percent of the difference in party, the researchers found. "We are measuring two separate things here, ideology and party affiliation," Dr. Hibbing, the senior author, said. He added that his research team found the large difference in heritability between the two "very hard to believe," but that it held up. The implications of this difference may be far-reaching, the authors argue. For years, political scientists tried in vain to learn how family dynamics like closeness between parents and children or the importance of politics in a household influenced political ideology. But the study suggests that an inherited social orientation may overwhelm the more subtle effects of family dynamics. A mismatch between an inherited social orientation and a given party may also explain why some people defect from a party. Many people who are genetically conservative may be brought up as Democrats, and some who are genetically more progressive may be raised as Republicans, the researchers say. In tracking attitudes over the years, geneticists have found that social attitudes tend to stabilize in the late teens and early 20's, when young people begin to fend for themselves. Some "mismatched" people remain loyal to their family's political party. But circumstances can override inherited bent. The draft may look like a good idea until your number is up. The death penalty may seem barbaric until a loved one is murdered. Other people whose social orientations are out of line with their given parties may feel a discomfort that can turn them into opponents of their former party, Dr. Alford said. "Zell Miller would be a good example of this," Dr. Alford said, referring to the former Democratic governor and senator from Georgia who gave an impassioned speech at the Republican National Convention last year against the Democrats' nominee, John Kerry. Support for Democrats among white men has been eroding for years in the South, Dr. Alford said, and Mr. Miller is remarkable for remaining nominally a Democrat despite his divergence from the party line on many issues. Reached by telephone, Mr. Miller said he did not see it quite that way. He said that his views had not changed much since his days as a marine, but that the Democratic Party had moved. "And I'm not talking about inch by inch, like a glacier," said Mr. Miller, who makes the case in a new book, "A Deficit of Decency." "I'm saying the thing got up and flew away." The idea that certain social issues produce immediate unthinking reactions comes through in other political research as well. In several recent studies, Dr. Milton Lodge of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown that certain names and political concepts - "taxes" or "Clinton," for example - produce almost instantaneous positive or negative reactions. These intensely charged political reflexes are shaped partly by inheritance, Dr. Lodge said. It may be the clash of visceral, genetically primed social orientations that gives political debate its current malice and fire, the study suggests. Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new research suggests. "When people talk about the political debate becoming increasingly ugly, they often blame talk radio or the people doing the debating, but they've got it backward," Dr. Alford said. "These genetically predisposed ideologies are polarized, and that's what makes the debate so nasty. "You see it in people's eyes when they talk politics. You can hear it their voices. After about the third response, we all start sounding like talk radio on some issues." The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 17:00:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:00:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alford et alia: Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? Message-ID: Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? American Political Science Review (2005), 99:2:153-167 JOHN R. ALFORD a1c1, CAROLYN L. FUNK a2c2 and JOHN R. HIBBING a3c3 a1 Rice University a2 Virginia Commonwealth University a3 University of Nebraska Abstract We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics?specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins?we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation. Correspondence: c1 John R. Alford is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Rice University, Houston, TX 77251 (jra at rice.edu). c2 Carolyn L. Funk is Associate Professor, L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23298 (clfunk at vcu.edu). c3 John R. Hibbing is Foundation Regents Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska?Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588 (jhibbing at unl.edu). List of Figures and Tables Table 1 - Genetic and Environmental Influences on Political Attitudes: The 28 Individual Wilson?Patterson Items Table 2 - Genetic and Environmental Influences on Political Attitudes: Summary Index and Additional Non?Wilson?Patterson Items Table 3 - Comparison of Australian and U.S. Estimates of Genetic and Environmental Influences on Political Attitudes Why do people think and act politically in the manner they do? Despite the foundational nature of this question, answers are unfortunately incomplete and unnecessarily tentative, largely because political scientists do not take seriously the possibility of nonenvironmental influences. The suggestion that people could be born with political predispositions strikes many as far-fetched, odd, even perverse. However, researchers in other disciplines? notably behavioral genetics?have uncovered a substantial heritable component for many social attitudes and behaviors and it seems unlikely that political attitudes and behaviors are completely immune from such forces. In this article, we combine relevant findings in behavioral genetics with our own analysis of data on a large sample of twins to test the hypothesis that, contrary to the assumptions embedded in political science research, political attitudes have genetic as well as environmental causes. 1 Testing this hypothesis is important for two reasons. First and most broadly, as behavioral scientists we need to analyze all possible shapers of behavior, not just a select few. Second, a more complete understanding of the sources of attitudes and behaviors will help us to sort through existing puzzles of considerable interest to political scientists. One example is political ideology. Why is a reasonably standard left?right spectrum so widely applicable cross-culturally and over time? The universal left?right elements of belief systems around the world and over the decades is difficult for behavioralists to explain. But if there is a genetic component to political ideologies, if the constraints on belief systems come not just from intellectualization or indoctrination but from something deeper, the concept of ideology takes on greater meaning and the commonality of ideology becomes easier to understand. ATTITUDE FORMATION Debates concerning the source of political attitudes revolve primarily around the question of whether early childhood factors have lasting relevance or whether these factors tend to be overwhelmed by more proximate events. Survey responses to political items presumably reflect attitudes and are thought to be a combination of longstanding ?predispositions? and more recent ?off-the-top-of-the-head? considerations (Zaller 1992, chaps 1?3; also see Converse 1964 ). Alternatively, an ?on-line? pattern of processing could allow new incidents to ratchet affect one way or another from previously existing summary locations (see Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh 1989 ). Regardless, proximate forces include recent conversations and experiences, question-wording, priming from previous questions, and a variety of similar factors. Predispositions, on the other hand, are thought to be a ?distillation of a person's lifetime experiences, including childhood socialization and direct involvement with the raw ingredients of policy issues? (Zaller 1992, 23). 2 Great interest exists in determining the relative clout of the early as opposed to the late environment but no interest has been displayed in determining the relative clout of environmental as opposed to genetic variables. A parallel conclusion applies to research on individual attitudes rather than survey responses generally. For example, the consensus among those who study tolerance is that the extent to which individuals are tolerant hinges on a combination of ?antecedent conditions and contemporary information? (Marcus et al. 1995 ). Antecedent conditions, in turn, are believed to be shaped by ?personal circumstances? such as ?family, neighborhood, region and early group experiences? (Marcus et al. 1995, 5; for more on the importance of long established proclivities, or antecedent conditions, see Stouffer 1955). Typically, no role for genetically-induced tendencies is considered (for an exception, see Monroe 2004, chap 6). More broadly, the literature on political socialization has long revolved around the question of the effects of early as opposed to late environmental forces. Early political socialization researchers (e.g., Easton and Dennis 1969, Greenstein 1960, Jennings and Niemi 1968, and Searing, Schwartz, and Lind 1973) and the authors of The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960 ) presented arguments and evidence supporting the primacy of early events. Later researchers, however, questioned the value of early childhood socialization and provided evidence that judgments about more recent conditions and occurrences can dramatically alter preferences we might have held as children and adolescents (see, e.g., Fiorina 1980; for good summaries of the debate over the relative importance of early and late environmental events, see Cook 1985; Merelman 1986, and Sears 1989). In the last 50?60 years, the emphasis in the literature has gone from personality studies (Adorno et al. 1950; Eysenck 1954; Laswell 1930 ), to ideological and childhood socialization studies, to the effects of media frames, perceptions of current conditions, and other types of contemporary information. In fact, for the past couple of decades research on political socialization has been suffering through a ?bear market? (Cook 1985 ), and studies of personality, while experiencing a remarkable comeback in psychology (for an introduction, see Wiggins and Trapnell 1997 ), have been largely absent from political science since McCloskey's (1958) work in the 1950s on the conservative personality. Thus, political science debates concerning the source of political attitudes and behaviors have been over timing, over whether attitudes and behaviors are primarily shaped early in life or by more proximate occurrences. Conspicuously absent is consideration of the possibility that certain attitudes and behaviors may be at least partially attributable to genetic factors. MODERN BEHAVIORAL GENETICS But what is the physical process by which a genetic allele could shape a political attitude? If there is any connection at all, is it not that the effect is so small that it can be safely ignored? And even if this is not the case, in light of potentially troubling normative implications such as biological determinism, is it not best to ignore relationships between genes and social behavior? It is difficult for many outside the biological sciences to understand how it is even possible for genes to influence behavior, so a brief discussion is in order. Genes provide instructions for the production of proteins, which are built and identified by a specific combination of amino acids (which in turn are constructed from complex organic molecules). As such, each protein has a chemical sequence that then interacts with other chemicals in the body, sometimes reacting directly with these other chemicals but often serving as enzymes that facilitate but are not themselves altered by chemical reactions. If a gene coding for a particular enzyme is absent, the chemical reaction it is meant to enhance will occur with much less efficiency. For example, a gene for the enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase-2 (Tph2) facilitates production of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, but a certain form of this gene (which varies from the standard form by a single amino acid) produces about 80% less serotonin and people with this mutant allele appear to be significantly more likely to suffer from unipolar depression (Zhang et al. 2005). Still, the connection is rarely so simple that a given genetic allele can be seen as causing a certain behavior. More typically, findings in modern behavioral genetics reveal the effect of genes to be interactive rather than direct, let alone determinative. To provide one illustration, in humans there is a gene on chromosome 17 involved with serotonin reuptake (5-HTT). As is often the case with genes, 5-HTT has a long allele and a short allele. Mice have a parallel gene, and in that species the short form had previously been connected to listless, depressive behavior. Scientists were eager to determine if such a correlation between the short form of 5-HTT and depression was present in humans. In a long-term study of the health records of nearly 1,000 New Zealanders whose 5-HTT alleles were known, it was found that major episodes of depressive behavior were not much more prevalent among those with the short form. But then the researchers combined genetics and the environment; specifically, they interacted each subject's 5-HTT allele with the number of high-stress events (romantic calamities, bankruptcies, deaths of loved ones, etc.) experienced in that individual's life. They found that those who had a high number of such events and who had the short form of 5-HTT were significantly more likely to display behaviors associated with depression compared to either those experiencing few high stress events or those with the long form who suffered through a comparably large number of high-stress events (see Caspi et al. 2003). In this particular case, genotype did not make people behave a certain way; rather, it influenced the extent to which their behavior was contingent on the environment?and this pattern likely will apply to all sorts of other human activities. Whether the behavior of interest is depression, cooperation, fear response, or susceptibility to drug addiction, some people are more sensitive than others to particular features of their environment, and genetics, far from determining behavior, influences its sensitivity. Genetics makes the mood of some people far more dependent on the extent to which their lives have been beset with difficulties and it likely makes some people's political attitudes far more contextually dependent than others. In other words, the connection between genes and attitudes may not involve specific attitudes as much as the flexibility of those attitudes (Is abortion always wrong, or does it depend?). The issue is not nature versus nurture but the manner in which nature interacts with nurture (see Marcus 2004 and Ridley 2003). MONOZYGOTIC AND DIZYGOTIC TWINS The process of identifying in the laboratory the precise genes responsible for given human behaviors (especially those behaviors that do not have corollaries in lab-friendly animals such as mice) is extremely challenging. Fortunately, even without identifying the genes responsible, it is possible to compile information on the matter of most concern to social scientists: the extent to which attitudes and behaviors have a genetic component. The relevant procedures center on comparisons of monozygotic (MZ; frequently but erroneously called identical) twins and dizygotic (DZ; fraternal) twins. MZ twins develop from a single egg, fertilized by a single sperm, and share an identical genetic inheritance. DZ twins develop from two separate eggs, fertilized by two separate sperm, and are in effect simply two siblings that happen to be born simultaneously. As such, DZ twins share the same average of 50% of genetic material as do any two biological siblings. It is this fixed ratio (two to one) of genetic similarity between MZ and DZ twins, and the contrasting average equivalence of environment influence, that provides most of the power of twin designs. It is important to appreciate that the assumption of environmental equivalence is one of equivalence across types of twins, not across pairs of twins or across twins within a given pair. For example, there is undoubtedly at least some variability in parental socialization across siblings, even those of identical age, but across multiple twin pairs the assumption is that this variability is essentially equal for the MZ and the DZ pairs. This assertion that the effect of genetics is measurably distinct for MZ and DZ twins, while the effect of the environment is either equivalent or at least randomly distributed around equivalence, is crucial to everything that follows from twin research. It is important therefore to raise and consider the criticisms of this fundamental assumption. The arguments come in two essential varieties. The first is that MZ twins, genetics aside, experience a more similar environment because they are treated more similarly than are DZ twins. This would seem particularly telling for childhood socialization, where, for example, parents might show less of a tendency to treat MZ twins as individuals compared to DZ twins. The second is that MZ twins, genetics aside, interact with each other more throughout life than do DZ twins. This would seem to be of particular importance for adult socialization, where closer adult contact between MZ twins might lead us to expect a greater degree of environmentally induced similarity than we would see for the more distant DZ twins. Both caveats have been subject to sustained and varied investigation and neither has been found to hold up under empirical scrutiny. The argument of more similar treatment fails on several fronts. Parents frequently miscategorize their twins (DZ twins are often believed by their parents to be MZ twins) and the differential correlation persists in these instances of miscategorization. In other words, the degree of correspondence between MZ twins surpasses that of DZ twins even in the large subpopulation of twins thought by their parents to be MZ twins (Bouchard and McGue 2003; Bouchard et al. 1990; Plomin 1990 ). The contention that MZ twins have closer or more frequent contact than DZ twins turns out to be at best irrelevant. The correlation between the frequency of contact between twins and the similarity between twins on all attitudinal and behavioral variables tested, including conservatism, is slight and actually negative (Martin et al. 1986 ). In other words, twins in greater contact with their cotwins are not more likely to share the same attitudes and behaviors, so even if MZ twins have more contact than DZ twins, this contact is not the cause of any elevated correlations. But the most powerful refutation of both of these criticisms comes in recent studies utilizing MZ and DZ twins raised apart. These studies uniformly validate MZ and DZ differences found in earlier studies of twins raised together. Arguments about the relative degree of shared environmental effects between MZ and DZ twins simply offer no credible explanation if the twins in question have been raised apart (Bouchard 1998; Bouchard et al. 1990 ). In effect, this naturally occurring, if uncommon, condition provides precisely the sort of laboratory control that we would want in an experimental setting. 3 Other evidence against the exclusive environmental argument is that the empirical results suggest MZ twins reared together are often less likely to share behavioral traits with their twins than are MZ twins reared apart, presumably because of extra efforts to establish distinct identities when the twins live together. In addition, as adult MZ twins living apart age, they tend to become more, not less, similar (Bouchard and McGue 2003 ), a finding that is difficult to reconcile with the belief that only the environment matters. Interestingly, this precise effect is predicted in an early landmark criticism of behaviorism and the conditioned response research on animal behavior that formed its empirical core. Over time, substantial anomalies began to accumulate in this research pointing toward a primacy for some nonenvironmental behaviors. Breland and Breland (1961) summarized this tendency with the phrase ?learned behavior drifts toward instinctive behavior? (684). Given the genetic differences and environmental similarities of the two types of twins, for any trait that is partly heritable the tendency for MZ twins to share that characteristic should be stronger than the tendency for DZ twins to share that characteristic. In contrast, characteristics that arise purely from the environment, whether shared by the twins, as would typically be the case for parental socialization, or not shared by the twins, as would be the case for many adult experiences, should not generate any significantly different patterns when we contrast MZ and DZ twins (see Eaves, Eysenck, and Martin 1989 and Plomin et al. 2001 for a thorough discussion of the relevant statistical techniques). The procedures involved with the twin methodology are standard fare in behavioral genetics but are not familiar to most political scientists, so it is appropriate that we explain the basic terminology, theory, and technique in some detail. Influences on an individual trait, whether it is a political attitude or a physical characteristic, are typically divided into two broad groups?heredity (H) and environment (E). The total variation in a trait can thus be represented as the sum H + E. Heredity is the impact of genetic inheritance on trait variation. In the case of a physical characteristic such as adult height, this would be the proportion of the total variation in height across individuals due to the variation across individuals in the multiple genes that control ultimate physical height. For any one individual, the source of this genetic influence is relatively well defined, as on average 50% of our genes come from our mother and 50% come from our father. This leads to the fact that biological children of tall parents are more likely to be tall than are the biological children of short parents, though even for a relatively straightforward additive physical trait like height, the relationship is far from determinative. ?Environment? is all of the nongenetic external factors that influence trait variation across a population. These influences range broadly from the earliest biological environment of the womb, to the physical environment of a childhood house, to the social environment of the adult workplace. In the case of adult height, some of the obvious environmental factors are prenatal nutrition, the adequacy of childhood and adolescent diet, and exposure to chemical agents that can inhibit growth. Environmental influences can be further divided into two subcategories: the shared environment and the unshared, or unique, environment. The shared environment is all of the shared external influences that we would typically think of as leading to trait similarity between individuals. Siblings, for example, might share similar childhood environments, including similar parental interactions, a similar physical environment, and similar nutrition. If the siblings happen to be twins, they would also share a more similar prenatal environment. 4 In the case of adult height, a shared environmental factor, such as a regional diet limited in protein and specific nutrients, could lead to similarity in height across the entire population of a region. The unshared environment is all of the distinctive external influences that we would typically think of as leading to trait dissimilarity across individuals. While much of the early childhood environment, for example, is similar across siblings, much is nonetheless variable. Siblings differ in diet, disease exposure, peer influences, and a host of other unique experiences. Even twins, whose childhood environment is made increasingly similar by virtue of their identical age, are exposed to substantial unique external influences. With the shift to adult life, the share of unique influences on siblings increases sharply, as peer, workplace, family, and physical settings typically diverge. In the classic political science studies of socialization (see, especially, Jennings and Niemi 1968, 1991 and Tedin 1974 ), the focus has been on the correlation between the attitudes of parents and their children. In terms of the three sources of trait variability outlined above, as informative as it is, this design does not allow for an unambiguous estimation of any of the three categories. The correlation between a parent and a child arises from a combination of shared genes, shared environment, and parental socialization (an indirect form of shared environment in which the parent's attitudes provide a path from the parent's environment to the child's environment), all of which are pressures toward similarity in parent?child attitudes. The failure of this parent?child correspondence to reach +1.0 presumably reflects the pressure toward dissimilarity coming from the unshared environment, but since the genetic similarity of a parent?offspring pair is only .5, there is as much genetic dissimilarity as there is similarity. Thus, trait dissimilarity, like trait similarity, is an undetermined mixture of genetic and environmental influences. Our inability to tease apart genetic heritability and environment, whether shared or unshared, in these parent?child studies is a direct result of the fact that there is no measured variation in genetic similarity across the data set of parent?child pairs (i.e., all biological offspring share the same average of 50% of the variable genetic code with each parent). This inability of standard parent?child observations to distinguish genetic heritability from parental socialization (or other features of the shared environment) is something that has long been understood, but largely ignored in modern social science. Fortunately, twins provide a powerful ?natural experiment? by introducing known genetic variation into analyses of the sources of trait variability. By shifting the focus from the similarity between parents and offspring to the similarity between two siblings, we can take advantage of the fact that some siblings vary in well-known ways in the degree of their genetic correlation. POLITICS AND GENETICS: PREVIOUS FINDINGS AND OUR EXPECTATIONS Comparisons of the correlations of MZ and DZ twins on a wide variety of variables have been conducted, with intriguing results. Using appropriate modeling techniques including controls for parental traits and assortative mating, it is possible to partition the explanatory powers of heredity, shared environment, and nonshared environment on any given variable. These techniques have been valuable for epidemiological traits, intelligence, personality, social attitudes such as those connected to religion, psychological interests, and behaviors such as risk-taking propensities (for a thorough review, see Bouchard and McGue 2003 ). Of most interest to us are the findings pertaining to social attitudes and behaviors. At first, researchers were so confident that social attitudes were not heritable that they employed such items as controls. Quickly they discovered that other controls would have to be found because most social attitudes consistently displayed a surprising measure of heritability (see, e.g., Crelia and Tesser 1996, Scarr and Weinberg 1981, and Tesser 1993). Political attitudes were never a central focus in this research stream but many of the patterns found in other social attitudes should be present for political attitudes as well, and this assumption guided the formulation of our expectations. Since the social attitudes tested to date have demonstrated a strong heritable component, frequently stronger than attitude covariance attributable to shared environment, we predict that political attitudes will also be heavily heritable. Heritability estimates calculated by previous researchers for attitudes associated with psychological conservatism are quite high, while the relevant models typically show little or no effect for shared environment (the remainder is likely the result of nonshared environmental factors). Notably, these findings come from studies of twins in settings as disparate as Australia, Virginia, and Minnesota, and the findings of the Minnesota study, utilizing twins reared apart, conform well to the other studies of twins raised together (for a summary, see Bouchard and McGue 2003). 5 Careful studies of adopted children confirm the finding that genetics matter more than parentally created environment in influencing social attitudes and behaviors, personality traits, and intelligence. 6 We further predict that attitudes on political issues tracking most closely to central personality traits should be the most heritable since personality traits are generally heritable and since the heritability of social attitudes is likely derivative of the heritability of various personality traits (see Bouchard and Loehlin 2001 and Eaves, Eysenck, and Martin 1989 ). For example, one of psychology's ?Big 5? personality traits is general ?openness? and it seems likely degree of openness is relevant to the political arena as well. Liberals and conservatives, on average, differ in their openness to atheism, homosexuality, communism, immigration, and countercultural activities. These differences may be entirely due to enculturation, but then again, they may not be, and we will never know without testing for the effects of genetics. Based on behavioral geneticists' study of religion, it seems that group identification is something that is heavily influenced by the environment, especially shared environment, and is mostly unconnected to genetics. Children of Methodists are likely to be Methodists not because there is a gene for Methodism or even a personality particularly oriented toward Methodism, but because of parental socialization. Thus, even as attitudes connected to religiosity and religious beliefs and activities (e.g., Sabbath observance, church authority, belief in heaven, religious fundamentalism, frequency of attendance) were found to be shaped more by genetic inheritance than by parental views on those issues (for details, see Bouchard et al. 1999, Eaves, Martin, and Heath 1990, Maes et al. 1999, and Martin et al. 1999 ), identification with a particular religious group was shaped more by socialization and almost not at all by genetics. We expect to find a similar pattern with political party identification. Children are eager to belong to the groups their parents belong to and parents are frequently eager to encourage children in this regard. Assuming these identifications have some stickiness into early adulthood, our core expectation is that party identification will be influenced more by parental socialization (shared environment) than by genetic inheritance but that this pattern will be reversed for political attitudes with inheritance playing a role at least as large as the shared environment. By predicting a large influence for genetic inheritance, we depart from typical behavioralist expectations anticipating that political attitudes will be predominantly influenced by environmental factors, rendering genetic inheritance largely, if not completely, inconsequential. DATA AND METHODS Since twin studies have not been conducted by political scientists, political attitudes have been at best a sidelight, and properly refined measures of political variables have not been constructed and employed (the heritability of political behavior has not been analyzed at all). Nonetheless, some previously employed variables in twin studies have political relevance. For example, the heritability of conservatism is frequently assessed (see, e.g., Bouchard et al. 1990, Eaves, Eysenck, and Martin, 1989, and Martin et al. 1986 ), and even though conservatism is viewed by the scholars who do twin studies more as a psychological trait than a political ideology, measures of it include political items. Of most relevance here is the Wilson?Patterson (W?P) Attitude Inventory. This inventory is administered by presenting subjects with a short stimulus phrase such as death penalty or royalty and eliciting a simple agree, disagree, or uncertain response. The broadest version of the W?P inventory includes 50 items, 25 of which contribute positively to the conservatism score and 25 of which contribute negatively to the conservatism score. While some of the items relate to a heavily social conception of conservatism?for example, pajama parties, nudist camps, computer music, and horoscopes?others have a much more direct political content?for example, disarmament, socialism, patriotism, and death penalty. Studies typically utilize reduced sets of W?P items or modify individual items to better suit the country in which the items are being administered. For political science this presents two frustrations. The list of politically relevant items is tantalizing but limited and unfocused, and the results are often presented only for the entire combined scale, making it difficult to assess the contribution of the directly political items to the overall index of heritability. We were granted access to the data for the W?P items in the United States and were able to conduct comparable, though more limited, twin correlation analyses from published results of an Australian study. 7 The U.S. study included information on thousands of twin pairs in Virginia, supplemented with twin pairs recruited through the cooperation of AARP. A subset of these twins and their relatives has been asked questions regarding their social attitudes, including numerous items from the W?P inventory. A brief explication of twin methodology should help readers make independent sense of the tables. The standard techniques in behavioral genetics are based on correlation analysis (in the case of limited response items like the W?P inventory, the actual measure is the polychoric correlation coefficient, a technique that is appropriate when individual subjects are using a limited set of categories to express location on what is in fact a continuous trait). The correlations are computed separately for male/male and female/female twin pairs to provide an appropriate comparison, since all MZ twins are same-sex pairs, while DZ twins are a mix of same-sex and opposite-sex pairs (in other words, female/male DZ twin pairs are excluded from the analysis). Without this control, the presence of any male/female differences would spuriously deflate the correlations for DZ pairs relative to the same-sex MZ pairs. Heritability is typically estimated by subtracting the correlation for DZ pairs from the correlation for MZ pairs and then doubling the resulting difference. At one extreme, if the correlations are the same for MZ and DZ pairs, suggesting that genetic similarity plays no role in similarity for that particular trait, then the result will be an estimate of heritability of zero. At the other extreme, a purely genetic additive trait should produce a correlation of .5 for DZ pairs and 1.0 for MZ pairs, resulting in an estimate of heritability of 1.0 (1.0 - .5 = .5, and 2 * .5 = 1.0). In a similar way, we can estimate the influence of shared environment, as opposed to shared genetic material, by doubling the correlation for DZ pairs and then subtracting the correlation for MZ pairs. Again, a purely genetic additive trait should produce a correlation of .5 for DZ pairs and 1.0 for MZ pairs, resulting in an estimate of the impact of shared environment of zero (2 * .5 = 1.0, and 1.0 - 1.0 = 0). At the other extreme, if the correlations are the same for MZ and DZ pairs, suggesting that genetic similarity plays no role in similarity for that particular trait, then the result will be an estimate of the impact of shared environment that is equal to the MZ or DZ correlation (e.g., if MZ = DZ = .4, then 2 * .4 = .8, and .8 - .4 = .4). Whatever is left over is taken to be attributable to the unshared environment. THE HERITABILITY OF POLITICAL ATTITUDES Table 1 contains the results of a standard polychoric correlation analysis for the 28 W?P items available in the Virginia 30K data set and for a select set of additional items to provide some sense of perspective for the level of these correlations. Even the quickest glance at the results in Table 1 is enough to set aside the traditional view that genes do not play any role in explaining political attitudes. All 28 of the MZ correlations are larger than their corresponding DZ correlations, and in every case the difference is statistically significant at the .01 level. Far from typically being at or near zero, none of the 28 heritability estimates falls in the single digit range, and more than half of the 28 items have heritability estimates of .3 or more. Heritability ranges from a high of .41 to a low of .18, all suggesting that the influence of heredity on political attitudes is very real, and given the diverse range of items included here, this genetic influence is also pervasive. So the view that heritability of social and political attitudes will be nonzero but small relative to shared environment is also called into question. We see from Table 1 that the impact of shared environment exceeds that of heredity for only four of the 28 items, and the mean estimate of heritability for the 28 W?P items is .32, compared to a mean estimate of shared environmental influence of .16. - Genetic and Environmental Influences on Political Attitudes: The 28 Individual Wilson?Patterson Items The second-to-last column in Table 1 reports the estimates for the proportion of the variation in an attitude that is attributable to the unshared environment. As described above this is essentially a residual variance category, reflecting such factors as random choice as well as external influences such as the unique experience of each individual, including those from childhood, and later influences in life that have been termed ?adult socialization? in the political science literature. Across the 28 W?P items the estimate of the impact of unshared environment varies from about one-third (for School Prayer) up to about two-thirds (for Pacifism) of the overall variation. The average impact of the unshared environment for these items is .53, or roughly half of the overall variation. The summary picture for this set of political attitudes, then, is that shared influences (genetic and environmental) account for about half of the variation in these political reactions, with unique individual and environmental factors accounting for the remainder. Within the half that is accounted for by shared influences, genetic influences, in contradiction to behavioralist expectations, are roughly twice as influential as environmental influences. While the individual items provide interesting variation, the purpose of the W?P inventory is to provide an overall index of conservatism. We compute a simple index by assigning a value of +1 to any ?conservative? response (i.e., a ?yes? to an item like Death Penalty or a ?no? to an item like Women's Liberation) and [minus sign]1 to any ?liberal? response (i.e., a ?no? to an item like Death Penalty or a ?yes? to an item like Women's Liberation). Items where the respondent chose a non-commital (?) response are coded as zero. When these individual scores are summed across the 28 items they yield an index that varies from a potential low of [minus sign]28 (indicating a set of uniformly ?liberal? responses) to a high of +28 (indicating a set of uniformly ?conservative? responses). The actual index scores for the twins in the study range from [minus sign]26 to +26, with the median response falling between +2 and +3. Given the far more continuous nature of this overall index, we can now utilize the more traditional Pearson's correlation coefficient. The results for the overall index are presented in Table 2 and clearly support a powerful role for heredity in influencing conservatism, at least as measured by the W?P inventory. The estimate for heritability is .43, higher than for any of the individual items. The estimate for shared environment is .22, falling within the upper range of the individual items, while the estimate for unshared environment is only .35, falling very near the bottom of the range for individual items. The overall picture is again a very strong role for heredity and a less powerful, but clear role for shared environment. What is different for the overall index is that the role of shared influences (genetic and environmental) account for almost two-thirds of the variation in the index (compared to about one-half for the individual items), with unique individual and environmental factors accounting for only about one-third of the variation. This decline in the role of unique individual and environmental factors seems sensible, as we are moving from individual and highly specific items that could involve a host of unique experiential, associational, and informational perturbations to an index where those idiosyncratic features of individual items have the opportunity to cancel each other out. - Genetic and Environmental Influences on Political Attitudes: Summary Index and Additional Non?Wilson?Patterson Items The W?P items can also be used to construct a rough index of political opinionation by taking advantage of the frequency of ? responses. The number of times that a respondent chose a yes or no response over a neutral ? response was summed to produce an index that varies from zero to 28, with a 28 indicating that the respondent was willing to express a directional opinion on all 28 items and a score of zero indicating that the respondent was unwilling to offer a directional opinion on any of the 28 items. The median for this index is 21 yes or no response choices of 28 possible. The results for the overall index clearly support a powerful role for heredity in influencing political opinionation, at least as it is captured by the admitted rough gauge of the frequency of nonneutral responses to the W?P inventory items. The estimate for heritability is .36 and the estimate for shared environment is only .02. The estimate for unshared environment is high, at .61, falling near the top of the range for individual items. To the extent that there is a family effect on political opinionation, it would appear to be entirely a genetic one, with the remaining roughly two-thirds of the variation being due to nonshared factors. Two items from the survey that are not a part of the W?P inventory are included in Table 2 . Party affiliation is the most clearly political of the items in the broader questionnaire, and it is useful here on its own, as well as in contrast to the attitudinal items. Party identification is distinct among U.S. political attitudes both in our conception of it as an identification, and hence as something at least potentially distinct from simple item evaluation, and in its established tendency to correlate well between parent and child (see Jennings and Niemi 1968). This distinctiveness is apparent in Table 2 . As we expected, the pattern for party identification is nearly the exact reverse of that for the average attitude item. Heritability for party affiliation is relatively low (r = .14), while shared environment is much stronger (r = .41). Note also that not one of the 28 W?P items has an average heritability that is as low as that for party affiliation, and likewise, not one of the 28 items has an average coefficient for the impact of shared environment that is as high as that for party affiliation. Clearly, party identification is, at least for the United States, a different sort of beast than reactions to issue items. In this regard it is particularly interesting that the two major parties also appear in the W?P battery, but here they are objects of affect rather than labels of possible identification, and the ?pro? or ?con? reactions to the parties that these items pick up do not exhibit the same patterns of genetic and environmental influence that we see for party affiliation. In fact, if we average the polychoric correlation for the ?Democrats? item with the correlations for the ?Republicans? item and compute the resulting estimates we get a heritability estimate of .31 and a shared environment estimate of .17, almost exactly the same as the mean results for all 28 attitude items. It would appear that affect toward the major parties is largely a matter of genetic predisposition but that, just as the political socialization literature has concluded all along, party identification itself is primarily the result of parental socialization. This pattern is intriguing in and of itself but it also should give pause to those who would dismiss the findings on attitude items as the product of some methodological quirk of twin studies. If estimates of heritability are somehow artificially inflated, why does this alleged contamination not occur for party identification? Table 2 also reports the results for a summary indicator of educational attainment from the survey. We include it here partly because it reflects an actual behavior, if only a self-reported one, and partly because it carries the role of genetics more directly into the world of actual and meaningful social variation. Educational attainment is also useful as an example of a behavior that is traditionally thought to be heavily influenced by shared environment, particularly by parental example, expectations, and resources. This traditional view is supported by the shared environment estimate of .46, a figure higher than any of the estimates for the 28 attitude items and even somewhat higher than the estimate for party ID. What may surprise readers is that as important as shared environment is to educational attainment, heredity, at .40, is almost as important. Taken together, family effects are almost the entire story for variation in education attainment. The estimate for the impact of the unshared environment is only .14, a value markedly lower than any other in the table. ASSORTATIVE MATING Assortative mating is a particular concern here. As detailed above, the assumption that DZ twins, like any other pair of biological siblings, share on average 50% of the variable genetic code is crucial to the estimation of heritability. This contrasts with MZ twins, where the shared proportion is 100%, and the DZ level forms the baseline for separating genetics from the shared environment. What may not be immediately apparent is that the assumption that purely genetic traits in DZ twins will on average correlate at .50 is itself built on the assumption that their biological parents will on average correlate at .00 for the same traits. In other words, the assumption is that the parents are not related to each other in any close degree, and this is typically true, as close relatives generally do not mate, and the amount of average shared genetic code drops geometrically as we move away in relatedness and quickly approaches zero. This assumption that mates are genetically uncorrelated on the trait of interest is, however, violated if mate choice is itself based on the trait of interest. If, for example, parents have identical genetic codes for a trait of interest, then the shuffling of that genetic code produced by sexual reproduction will not result in any variation among DZ twins, or any other siblings, with regard to their genotype for that trait. In other words, DZ twins of these parents will be as genetically alike on this one trait as MZ twins are on this trait. Across a study population, the higher the proportion of spouses that share identical genetics for a trait, the closer the DZ correlation will be to the MZ correlation. Since heritability of a trait is estimated as 2 * (MZ - DZ), the increased similarity of DZ and MZ pairs will lead to an underestimation of heritability for this genetic trait. This is important for our assessment of the heritability of political attitudes. If there is a tendency for people to choose mates with similar positions on political issues, then the estimates of heritability in Tables 1 and 2 are biased. Fortunately for us, the direction of the bias is uniform and conservative. Any measurable tendency toward assortative mating on political orientation will push up the DZ twin correlation while leaving the MZ correlation unaffected, and this reduction in the MZ?DZ gap will have the related effect of lowering estimates of heritability. Note also that any increase in similarity of DZ twins will inflate the estimate of the importance of shared environment, as the estimation formula of (2 * DZ) [minus sign] MZ makes clear. The immediate empirical question is how much of a role assortative mating plays in political issue positions. A quick answer can be found by looking at the interspouse polychoric correlations for the individuals included in the Virginia 30K study. The average inter-spouse polychoric correlation for the 28 items is .41 and the individual correlations range from a low of .26 for Censorship to a high of .64 for School Prayer. While some of this interspouse similarity could plausibly be attributed to persuasion effects taking place after mate choice rather than to assortative mating, the levels of similarity are probably too high to dismiss assortative mating entirely. This is confirmed by a preliminary look at the impact of controlling for assortative mating on these 28 attitude items. The Virginia 30K study includes data for parents of twins in the study, including parents' individual responses to the same W?P items that the twins responded to. The usable sample size does drop substantially when we restrict our analysis to only twin pairs with completed W?P results for both parents (there are a total of 304 pairs of male/male or female/female twins with complete twin and parent W?P data, compared to approximately 4,400 pairs in the twin only analysis in Table 1 ). This effectively limits us to an assortative mating analysis that focuses on the overall index score, rather than looking at each item in the inventory individually. The approach we used is to compute the partial correlation for twin similarity in the overall index for the 28 W?P items, controlling for (partialing out) the influence of the degree of parental similarity on the overall index. The implication for relative twin agreement is simple; if parental agreement results from assortative mating, then the resulting increase in genetic similarity will increase DZ twin correlations (the more alike genetically the parents are on a trait, the more alike siblings will be on a trait). Controlling for parental similarity will therefore reduce the size of the DZ twin correlations. However, parental agreement resulting from assortative mating and the resulting increase in genetic similarity will not increase MZ twin correlations (MZ twins are already genetically identical, regardless of parental similarity or dissimilarity). Therefore, controlling for parental similarity should have no effect on the size of the MZ twin correlations. In contrast, if parental agreement results from persuasion or from a shared environment for the couple, then the impact of parental agreement has no genetic implications and operates on their offspring solely through its influence on the offsprings' shared environment. This should produce relatively higher correlations of equal magnitude for both MZ and DZ twins and, therefore, lead to roughly comparable reductions in both the MZ and the DZ correlations when we partial out the effect of parental agreement. The results for a partial correlation analysis controlling for parental agreement are reported in Table 2 , on the row just below the results for the overall index. For MZ twins the issue of whether their parents agree or disagree on a particular item makes little difference (.65 without control versus .64 after partialing out the effect of parental agreement). In contrast, the correlation between DZ twins decreases modestly when the impact of parental agreement is removed (.43 without control versus .37 after partialing out the effect of parental agreement). Further, the tendency of assortative mating to deflate estimates of heritability while inflating estimates of the impact of shared environment is clear. Without controls, the estimate of heritability for the overall index is .43 and the average estimate of the impact of shared environment is .22. When the impact of parental agreement is partialed out, the average estimate of heritability rises to .53, and the average estimate of the impact of shared environment drops to .11. Note that the traditional socialization account of attitude formation is not at odds with this last finding. If the issue positions of parents are in conflict, then we would hardly expect this shared conflicted setting to yield sibling agreement. 8 COMPARATIVE POLITICAL GENETICS: EVIDENCE FROM AUSTRALIA Even with a data set as large as the Virginia 30K, questions may arise over the extent to which conclusions are bound by time and geography. As a result, it is helpful to note results from a quite different context and a slightly different time period. Table 3 presents a comparison of the key summary results in Table 1 from the Virginia 30K study to comparable results in the Australian data described before (Truett et al. 1994; see also Lake et al. 2000 ). While the Australian study utilized a larger set of W?P items (50 in all, compared to 28 in the U.S. study), the items were a mix of political and social items, and only six items appeared in exactly the same form in both studies. An additional six items were similar enough, in our judgment, to merit comparison, and they are included in Table 2 with the Australian wording italicized. - Comparison of Australian and U.S. Estimates of Genetic and Environmental Influences on Political Attitudes The broad picture from Table 3, and its comparison to Tables 1 and 2 , is one of remarkable similarity. The mean heritability for the 12 item subset of the Virginia 30K data is .32 for the full 28 items in Table 1 and .31 for the 12-item subset of the Australian data. The mean estimate for the effect of shared environment for the 12 item subset of the Virginia 30K data is .12 compared to .16 for the full 28 items in Table 1 and .16 for the 12-item subset of the Australian data. Thus the general pattern of a relatively greater role for heredity compared to shared environment detailed above in the discussion of the U.S. data in Tables 1 and 2 also applies to the Australian data in Table 3 . While most of the individual items also have broadly comparable results in the two countries, a few, specifically ?socialism? and ?immigration? (?nonwhite immigration? in the Australian study), are noticeably different. In both cases the U.S. pattern of substantially higher relative heritability is reversed in the Australian data, where we see evidence of relatively higher shared environmental effects. Whether these are meaningful reflections of differences in how these items relate to deeper political orientations is not clear, but they are in any case the exceptions rather than the rule. 9 THE GENETICS OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGY The possibility that attitudes and behaviors are influenced by genetic variables is an emotionally charged topic so it is important that readers understand the claims being made. Partitioning the origins of human traits, whether they be physiological or behavioral, into the discrete, quantifiable components of genetic inheritance, shared environment, and unshared environment should not be taken to imply that these components work separately. Rather these numbers only provide a rough indication of the influence of three categories of independent variables that are intimately intertwined. (Moreover, they are estimates of the ability of independent variables to account for variance in the dependent variables not for the variables themselves.) As mentioned earlier, gene?culture interaction is the key to understanding the source of political attitudes and behaviors, just as it is the key to understanding most physical and behavioral aspects of the human condition. Genes do not work in isolation and instead generally influence the extent to which organisms are responsive to particular environmental conditions (see Boyd and Richerson 1985 and Masters 1993). And this conditioning influence of genetics on complex social behaviors is not the product of a single gene but rather numerous genes that, to make matters more complicated, appear to combine in configural as opposed to additive ways. The same set of multiple genes may influence behavior in different ways depending on the order in which they express themselves and the manner in which they interact with other genes. Recent discoveries also suggest that biological markers of phenotypic manifestations include the manner in which DNA is packed in the nucleus, particularly the physical location of genes relative to other genes and to the histones that help to give DNA its structure. An accurate understanding of gene expression appears to require knowledge not just of the sequence of nucleotides (e.g., ATCAGG) that constitutes the gene itself but also of the context in which each gene resides, thus forming an interesting parallel to the way we must try to understand the organisms (e.g., human beings) genes help to construct (for a good summary, see Kosack and Groudine 2004; also see Lykken 1999). Individual genes for behaviors do not exist and no one denies that humans have the capacity to act against genetic predispositions. But predictably dissimilar correlations of social and political attitudes among people with greater and lesser shared genotypes suggest that behaviors are often shaped by forces of which the actors themselves are not consciously aware, a point that is made with some force by Bargh and Chartrand (1999), Marcus (2002), Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen (2000), McDermott (2004), and Wegner (2002 ). It is not biological determinism to posit the existence of complex collections of genes that increase the probability that certain people will display heightened or deadened response patterns to given environmental cues. And it is not antibehavioralism to suggest that true explanations of the source of political attitudes and behaviors will be found when we combine our currently detailed understanding of environmental forces with a recognition that genetic variables subtly but importantly condition human responses to environmental stimuli. IMPLICATIONS FOR POLITICS It is important to note that none of the data or arguments presented in this paper indicates that extant empirical knowledge about political socialization is useless. In fact, it strongly reinforces many of the most salient findings in that research stream. We know from that research, for example, that if both parents share a political identification, there is a high degree of likelihood that their offspring will have that same political identification (Jennings and Niemi 1968; Tedin 1974 ). Our ?twin study? results confirm this finding. One of the peculiar findings in the political socialization literature even makes more sense when a role for genetic inheritance in conceded. Scholars have occasionally puzzled over the fact that family arrangements and styles of operation have little if any impact on the extent to which there is a match between parental and offspring political attitudes on a wide variety of items (see Jennings and Niemi 1968 , 180?83). Fathers do not have more influence over sons, and mothers do not have more influence over daughters; fathers are not generally more influential; the distribution of power within the family is irrelevant to parent?child correlations (i.e., neither highly autocratic, highly permissive, nor middling arrangements affect the extent to which attitudes are correlated); the degree to which children and parents feel close to each other does not matter; the frequency with which the family discusses politics does not much affect correspondence between offspring and parent views (though, as we would have predicted since it is based on active socialization, party identification is more sensitive to family arrangements); and the extent to which politics is important to the parents is also irrelevant. Scholars grounded in traditional behavioralism have difficulty accounting for these ?perplexing configurations? (Jennings and Niemi 1968 , 183), but recognizing that the correlations between the views of parents and children derive more from genetics than familial socialization makes it much less surprising that the strength of these correlations is not reliant on family arrangements (for an example of political science work that does posit a role for genetics, see Peterson 1983). Still, the substantive findings we present here offer a direct challenge to common assumptions and interpretations that political attitudes and behavioral tendencies are shaped primarily or even exclusively by environmental, especially familial, factors. Setting aside the important special case of party identification, we find that political attitudes are influenced much more heavily by genetics than by parental socialization. For the overall index of political conservatism, genetics accounts for approximately half of the variance in ideology, while shared environment including parental influence accounts for only 11%. And in the case of the variance in people's tendencies to possess political opinions at all, regardless of their ideological direction, genetics explains one-third of the variance, and shared environment is completely inconsequential. What are the implications of these findings for political science? Acknowledging a role for heritability in politics affects our understanding of, first, political issues, second, political learning, and, third, political cleavages. Inherited attitudes seem to be demonstrably different than acquired attitudes. Tesser (1993 ) provides evidence that attitudes higher in heritability are manifested more quickly, are more resistant to change, and increase the likelihood that people will be attracted to those who share those particular attitudes. It has long been known that certain political issues seem ?hard? to people, and others seem ?easy,? presumably because some issues trigger ?gut responses? while others do not (Carmines and Stimson 1980 , 79), but no explanation has yet been offered for why given issues do or do not elicit gut responses. Why do social, more than economic, issues tend to hit people in the gut, even though both constitute ongoing and equally complex societal concerns? In light of the new findings, one distinct possibility is that easy ?gut? issues tend to be those that are more heritable. To the extent that political ideologies are inherited and not learned, they become more difficult to manipulate. Conservative parents who try to make their children conservative by carefully controlling their children's environments are probably overestimating the importance of those environments. Offspring of such parents are likely to end up being conservative but less because of the environment created by the parents than the genes passed along by the parents. A political match between parents and children should not be taken to be the result of a socialization process?that is, the active postnatal transmission of views?just as political mismatches between parent and child should not be taken as evidence against a role for genetics. Parent?child mismatches are distinctly possible given the uncertainties of meiosis (the random selection of just 50% of each parent's DNA) and the possibility for occasional errors in the transcription and translation of genes (mutations). These mismatches are likely to be the primary cause of the fact that some children rebel against the views of their parents but most do not?a pattern that environmental factors have never explained satisfactorily. Finally, we go into somewhat greater detail to illustrate the manner in which results such as ours can be of use in understanding the divisions characterizing virtually all polities and, certainly, the United States in the early twenty-first century. Remember, genes influence people's outlooks and personalities, and it is these broad features that then predispose individuals toward suites of specific attitudes. This interpretation likely explains the otherwise puzzling consistency in ideological divisions that is present across space and time. The package of attitudes held, for example, by conservatives in the modern United States is remarkably similar to that held by conservatives in other cultures and at earlier times in American history (on the durability of the liberal?conservative spectrum in the United States, see Poole and Rosenthal 1997). Environmental determinists have no convincing explanation for the pervasiveness of this division but genetics does. If, as our results suggest, there is a genetic basis for the varying political views people hold, and if, as seems probable, genetic transmission frequently affects clusters of political attitudes, we are likely to observe broad but distinct political phenotypes. The number of these phenotypes may vary, but for purposes of illustration we discuss two probable orientations. One is characterized by a relatively strong suspicion of out-groups (e.g., immigrants), a yearning for in-group unity and strong leadership, especially if there is an out-group threat (?Do not question the President while we are at war with terrorists?), a desire for clear, unbending moral and behavioral codes (strict constructionists), a fondness for swift and severe punishment for violations of this code (the death penalty), a fondness for systematization (procedural due process), a willingness to tolerate inequality (opposition to redistributive policies), and an inherently pessimistic view of human nature (life is ?nasty, brutish, and short?). The other phenotype is characterized by relatively tolerant attitudes toward out-groups, a desire to take a more context-dependent rather than rule-based approach to proper behavior (substantive due process), an inherently optimistic view of human nature (people should be given the benefit of the doubt), a distaste for preset punishments (mitigating circumstances), a preference for group togetherness but not necessarily unity (?We can all get along even though we are quite different?), suspicion of hierarchy, certainty, and strong leadership (flip-flopping is not a character flaw), an aversion to inequality (e.g., support for a graduated income tax), and greater general empathic tendencies (rehabilitate, don't punish). Common political usage would call the first phenotype conservative and the second liberal, but we seek phrases that are less connected to political ideologies and that indicate that these two phenotypes run to the very orientation of people to society, leadership, knowledge, group life, and the human condition. Thus, we label the first ?absolutist? and the second ?contextualist.? This fundamental dimension offers a credible precursor to basic cleavages manifested in a broad range of human social activity: politics (conservatives/liberals), religion (fundamentalists/secular humanists), law (procedural/substantive due process), education (phonics/whole language), art (traditional form-based realism/modern free-form impressionism), sports (football/frisbee), medicine (traditional AMA/wholistic), morality (enduring standards/situational ethics), and scientific inquiry (formal/empirical). In our view, all of these vexing perennial dichotomies are related cultural expressions of a deep-seated genetic divide in human behavioral predispositions and capabilities. We certainly are not asserting that everyone holds one of these two orientations. Even if the individual genes involved with absolutism or contextualism tend to move together, this does not mean they always do. Some individuals may carry, say, an absolutist's aversion to out-groups but a contextualist's rejection of a universalistic behavioral code. Moreover, genes not included in these central packages, perhaps those related to extroversion, ambition, and intelligence, often muddy the waters. More importantly, let us not forget that a heritable component of 50% for political ideology and probably somewhat higher for the absolutist-contextualist dimension still leaves plenty of opportunity for the environment to alter attitudes and behaviors?and even orientation. An individual with a contextualist genotype who has been repeatedly victimized by out-group members, or who has simply spent a great deal of time listening to persuasive absolutists, may adopt attitudes that run against type. Thus, even if a political system started with two pure genotypes, it would soon display a fascinating array of expressed orientations and beliefs, intensity levels, and degrees of involvement even as the system would continue to revolve around the central division between absolutists and contextualists. Such an account is speculative at this point but is fully consistent with the findings presented here, with previous research on the durability of political ideologies, and with recent events in the United States. Accounts of the 2004 election, for example, that do not invoke this fundamental difference in orientation have fallen flat. Issues did not determine vote choice for the many citizens who expressed disagreement with existing economic policies and/or the war in Iraq yet still voted for the incumbent president, George W. Bush. Indeed, if the focus remains on issues, the resultant description of the American public is grossly at odds with reality. Morris Fiorina's (2005 ) creative analysis of survey responses indicates that Americans can be placed in the middle on many important issues, but if this is true, then what explains the vitriol and intensity of feeling displayed by so many ordinary Americans in 2004? Issues do not explain Americans' politics. Many Americans admit that they do not follow or understand the issues (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002), and to the extent they do, they support whatever their preferred politician and party seems to support (Page and Jones 1979 ). In the 1990s, a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) transformed welfare to workfare; then in the 2000s, his Republican successor (George W. Bush) greatly expanded federal involvement in both education and the provision of prescription drugs for senior citizens. If the enactors of these policies were reversed, the groups of citizens displaying support for the policies also would have reversed. Similarly, if a Republican president had committed adultery with a young intern or if a Democratic president had dramatically worsened the deficit and taken the country to war in a far-off land on the basis of undeniably incorrect beliefs about the opponents' nuclear and chemical weapons capabilities, the positions of most voters on the acceptability of these conditions would be completely reversed. Issue positions generally reflect divisions; they do not create them. Instead, the most accurate account of voting behavior in 2004 moves beyond issues to the basic, partially genotypic orientations described above. This sort of broad orientation is not far removed from what most commentators are trying to capture by reference to a ?moral? division in the electorate, but without tying it to specific moral issues such as gay rights. The chasm inspiring so much hostility between citizens of the United States in the early twenty-first century did not divide supporters and opponents of privatizing Social Security; it did not even divide supporters and opponents of gun control. Rather, as has typically been the case, it divided absolutists and contextualists. And the prospects for eliminating this divide are not promising. Since mate choice appears to be heavily tilted toward those with similar social and political attitudes, no genetic melting pot exists for these traits. Thus, the evidence presented here on assortative mating should be quite sobering to those in search of unity and togetherness. If anything, the heritability of orientation in combination with assortative mating may exacerbate the current divide. But admitting that genetics influences political attitudes could actually help to mute societal divisions. Currently, absolutists and contextualists simply do not connect, and the result is frustration. To contextualists, absolutists appear simplistic and selfish; to absolutists, contextualists appear naive and indecisive. Each side talks past, and is authentically miffed by, the other. Recognizing that our political antagonists probably have a different genetic predisposition to people, life, human nature, and politics may serve to ease frustrations and, eventually, to improve communications across the chasm. If absolutists spent more time trying to think like contextualists and contextualists trying to think like absolutists, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive. As frustrating as it may be to debate with someone who holds such different orientations, value exists in recognizing that intransigence is not the result of willful bullheadedness but, rather, genetically driven differences in orientation. The exciting next step is to understand the reason such distinct orientations have evolved and lasted. Evolutionary psychologists tend to assume that all enduring traits are adaptive (for a dissenting view, see Gould 2000 ) since natural selection drives out variation and makes adaptive traits ever more common. In this organism-based interpretation, whichever orientation?absolutism or contextualism?is evolutionarily superior should soon come to numerically dominate the other. This is possible but unlikely. An alternative group-based interpretation sees variation itself as adaptive (see Alford and Hibbing 2004 and Sober and Wilson 1998 ). The benefits of genetic variation are most easily observed in the ability of differential immune systems to prevent a group of organisms from being completely wiped out by a single pathogen, but it is easy to imagine how sociopolitical variation could also create more viable groups. In fact, computer simulations give support to the hypothesis that divergent individual-level social behaviors, such as cooperation and defection, are beneficial at the group level (Hammond 2000 ). As loathe as contextualists and absolutists are to admit it, the presence of the other orientation may make a society stronger. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Professor Lindon Eaves and colleagues, particularly for granting us access to data from the sample of twins known as Virginia 30K. 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[OpenURL Query Data] [CrossRef] Footnotes 1Evidence consistent with an evolutionary theory of political behavior is found in Brewer 2000, Hibbing and Alford 2004, and Orbell et al. 2004. 2To his credit, Zaller (1992) goes on to acknowledge a possible role for ?inherited? traits in shaping predispositions (23). 3To explain this finding, opponents would need to argue that adoption agencies are more likely to place MZ twins in similar homes than they are to place DZ twins in similar homes. In fact, information on twin zygosity is typically unavailable to those making placement decisions, and even if it were available, it seems highly unlikely that it would factor into their decisions. 4However, recent research suggests that the prenatal environment is so important that it can cause variation even in fetuses inhabiting the uterus at the same time. Prescott, Johnson, and McArdle (1999 ) present evidence that MZ twins sharing the same chorion, the outermost extraembryonic membrane, are more similar in terms of personality and cognitive abilities that MZ twins in separate chorions. 5Conservatism is not unusual in this regard. Rushton, Littlefield, and Lumsden (1986 , 7340) find that approximately 50% of the variance in altruism is the result of ?direct genetic inheritance,? with family environment responsible for 0%. 6Adoption studies measure the correlation of biological parents and adopted children where the biological parents have had no contribution to the rearing (environment) of the child. The most recent adoption study, utilizing surveys of Korean-American adoptees randomly assigned to families in the United States, concludes that roughly 75% of variance in children's educational attainment is attributable to the educational attainment of their biological parents, and only 25% is attributable to the adoptive parents, thus dramatically confirming the earlier findings of a substantial correlation between biological parents and adopted children and a surprisingly paltry correlation between adoptive parents and children (Sacerdote 2004). This parallels, with an entirely distinct methodology, the basic finding of the twin studies (see Plomin et al. 1997, 1998 and Rhee and Waldman 2002). 7Our thanks go to Professor Lindon Eaves at Virginia Commonwealth University for making the VA30K data available to us. The data collection methods for both studies are summarized in Lake et al. 2000 as follows: ?The Australian sample was ascertained through two cohorts of twins. The first cohort was recruited in 1980?1982 from a sampling frame which comprised 5967 twin pairs aged 18 years or older (born 1893 to 1964) then enrolled on the Australian NHMRC Twin Registry (ATR). Responses were obtained from 3808 complete pairs and these were followed up with a second mailed questionnaire in 1988?1990 with responses from 2708 complete pairs . The second cohort of twins, born 1964?1971, was recruited from the ATR in 1989 and was mailed similar questionnaires in 1989?1991, with responses from 3,769 individuals of 4269 eligible pairs . In total there were 21,222 respondents in the Australian sample, of whom 20,945 had valid scores for EPQ Neuroticism. The United States twins were ascertained from a population-based birth registry for the Commonwealth of Virginia and from a volunteer sample through the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), described in detail by Truett et al. (1994 ). Their first-degree relatives and spouses were recruited in a similar fashion to the Australian sample, and in total there were 24,905 respondents (of 29,080) with valid scores for Neuroticism and for whom the zygosity of the proband twins could be determined. The response rates were 70% for twins and 45% for relatives? (224?25). The original U.S. twin data collection was funded in part by NIH grants GM30250 and AG04954, by ADAMHA grants AA06781, AA07728, AA07535, and MH40828, and by a gift from R. J. R. Nabisco. 8The same sort of control for parental agreement that was applied to the W?P inventory was applied to the party affiliation analysis. Because this is only a single item, the results are much less reliable than those averaged across the 28 items. However, despite the fact that assortative mating clearly takes place with regard to party ID (only 24 of the 543 parent pairs had opposite party affiliations), the general pattern of party ID being due more to shared environment than to heredity holds up. Using a very broad definition of disagreement (i.e., anything short of exact agreement on a five-point scale), the shared environment estimate weakens modestly but remains high, at almost twice the heritability estimate in the subset of twin pairs with parents in some degree of disagreement on party affiliation. 9In this case, the different results with regard to socialism could reflect different meanings of the phrase in the two countries. In Australia, the term socialism is closer to a party identification label, whereas in the United States it has more loaded ideological connotations. Likewise, the addition of the qualifier ?nonwhite? to immigration raises questions of what the key stimulus is. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 17:00:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:00:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sunday Times: Paul Kennedy on The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul Message-ID: Paul Kennedy on The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368,00.html May 22, 2005 Current affairs: The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul REVIEWED BY PAUL KENNEDY THE COLLAPSE OF GLOBALISM: And the Reinvention of the World by John Ralston Saul Atlantic ?16.99 pp309 Most readers will know the apocryphal Indian story about a group of blind sages being brought to feel the various parts of an elephant and then to describe what it is they are feeling. One savant strokes the elephant's rough leg and declares it must be a tree, another feels the tail and insists it is a snake, and so on. None of them can comprehend the totality of the beast. Most scholars examining today's volatile political and economic circumstances resemble those India sages in that they -- and I plead guilty here -- focus upon one particular part of the story and tend to ignore (or at least downplay) the others. Some assemble facts to prove that China is an enormous investment opportunity; others contend that it is a vast and growing military threat. Certain scientists warn us that we are on the brink of ecological collapse, but their conservative critics declare the evidence to be too murky to tell. What is the poor layman to do? Nowhere does our present intellectual Tower of Babel appear more in contention and confusion than in regard to the matter of globalisation. This is no mere academic dogfight, because entire political parties, indeed whole countries, have seized upon the question of whether the completely free exchange of goods, capital, ideas and people is a benefit -- or a deadly threat. There are few middle-of-the-road voices to be heard here. Egged on, one suspects, by their publishers, authors participating in this debate tend to advance a more extreme -- or, shall we say, more dramatic -- picture of events. Just recently, the foreign-affairs correspondent of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, published his new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century. Deeply impressed by the communications revolution and the free flow of capital, and reinforced by interviews with high-tech entrepreneurs from Boston to Bangladesh, Friedman argued that globalisation is intensifying, making societies ever more "flat" -- that is, conforming more and more to free-market western practices. This debate is now joined by the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, with The Collapse of Globalism. Saul has written various books of fiction as well as non-fiction, and he brings a great breadth of literary and cultural knowledge to his task. But he has his own axe to grind in this debate over globalism, and his own arguments to advance. The reader would be wise to ignore the dust-jacket blurb: "Globalisation, like many great geopolitical ideologies before it, is now dead." The author is not that crude. He recognises some of the trends that Friedman celebrates, that is, that software engineers in Bangalore and female assembly-workers in a Motorola plant in Thailand are earning 10 times more than their parents could ever hope to bring home. Saul knows that there are significant winners in this tale. But his story is about the losers or, better put, about the backlash against globalism and globalisation. And he is striving, yearning, faltering and then rising to find what Hans Kung, the great German theologian, described as a "global ethic" to help us pick our way through the debris of the 21st century. The Collapse of Globalism is an angry and, I think, an unbalanced book, for the same yet opposite reasons as Friedman's. Each is groping a particular part of our elephant of globalism. For his part, Saul sees, not the "flattening" of our world, but the increasing storms and dislocations, and the increasingly powerful movements and protests against unbridled capitalism, especially in the developing world. And he means to frighten the reader, not only to his point of view, but to take action. This is a sort of manifesto, rather like Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring, or Donella and Dennis Meadows's Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth. There is much that I like about this indignant approach, and there is much evidence to support Saul's contention that things are going badly wrong with our planet, its economic and social systems and its environment. Should the reader peruse a book such as Dominique Reperant's wonderful photographic work, The Most Beautiful Villages of France, he or she would find breathtaking images, but one thing comes to mind: there are few people, except for the ancient women and bent-over veterans. The modern world has sucked the populations out of such rural, pre-industrial and pre-high-tech communes. The same is true in the broad plains of Nebraska, where only the two cities of Omaha and Lincoln survive, and where rural folk are resigned to driving 75 miles to a supermarket. If they can pay for the petrol. These are not pleasant sights and, so far, only a few regions have found a way to cope with this implosion. And the Wal-Mart revolution marches on. Meanwhile, far from "old" Europe, the backlash against globalism has intensified. This is not just in depressed, poverty-stricken countries in the developing world. One of Saul's more interesting discussions, in chapter 22, is how New Zealand flipped from being the "model" of Cobdenite free-market success to a nation riven by economic crisis -- and how it has now begun to recover from that crisis with a return to a mixed economy, recognising where the state has a role to play in providing for the basic needs of its citizens. The Adam Smith societies of the world will go nuts at this. And it is unlikely that Klaus Schwab and the governors of the World Economic Forum at Davos will welcome Saul's description of their orchestration of enthusiastic globalism each year. But the author's chief indignation is arrayed at what is happening in the poorer parts of the world today -- malnutrition, Aids, abuse of human rights, gross distortions of income, dreadful examples of child labour, widespread ecocide, corrupt governments in cahoots with fantastically rich multi-national corporations whose fat-cat executives earn ever-higher bonuses even as they shift their production facilities to cheap-labour countries and fire their own workers. It is a sort of old Socialist Workers' guide to the planet. Anecdote is piled upon anecdote, and statistic upon statistic. It is like being raked by a full broadside from HMS Victory. Saul's counterblast to globalisation's cheerleaders is a healthy one. On the whole, I incline to his worries rather than to "the world is flat" optimism. There is a lot of evidence that societies old and new, north and south, are responding with anger to the acquisitiveness of Wall Street and the cheerful forecasts of the Chicago School of Economics. But the tone of this book is a little too breathless, it rushes from one fact to another, and awards itself (especially in the conclusion) too much importance. This is not the modern-day equivalent of Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace; would that it were. And it will not sell well in Bangalore. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_2,00.html [The continuation of the article. It was three printed pages in Lynx, but only one paragraph of text!] Saul is certainly no fan of the World Economic Forum at Davos, which this year featured Bono, discussing Africa with Tony Blair and Bill Gates. "Just as classic plays with kings, virgins, love and betrayal must have their fool," he sniffs, "so globalisation has Davos." Paul Kennedy is professor of history at Yale University and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and Preparing for the 21st Century. The Collapse of Globalism is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of ?13.59 plus ?2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 READ ON... websites: [75]www.gg.ca/john-ralston-saul/index_e.asp Ralston Saul's official page as Canada's governor general [76]Page 1 || Page 2 [77]Print this article [78]Send to a friend [79]Back to top of page [0,,30572,00.gif] TOOLS & SERVICES [0,,30572,00.gif] [0,,30572,00.gif] [80]Find a holiday Search our database of deals on city breaks, flights and late offers ......................................... [81]Weekly Travel Bulletin Register for our pick of the late travel deals and special offers delivered to your inbox every Thursday ......................................... 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References 1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_2,00.html#startcontent 2. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ 3. http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/ 4. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,197,00.html 5. http://shopping.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,12409,00.html 6. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,521,00.html 7. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,202,00.html 8. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,594,00.html 9. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,5544,00.html 10. http://info.newsgroupdigital.com/cgi-bin/links.pl?l=2003120101 11. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_2,00.html 12. javascript:setbookmark() 13. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,2086,00.html 14. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,1,00.html 15. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,2,00.html 16. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,3,00.html 17. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8209,00.html 18. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8214,00.html 19. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,4,00.html 20. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,6,00.html 21. http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,10209,00.html 22. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,14929,00.html 23. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,19509,00.html 24. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,200,00.html 25. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,252,00.html 26. http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,12389,00.html 27. http://property.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,14029,00.html 28. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,17909,00.html 29. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,589,00.html 30. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8159,00.html 31. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,632,00.html 32. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,923,00.html 33. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,591,00.html 34. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,3223,00.html 35. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,2086,00.html 36. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,9122,00.html 37. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,22449,00.html 38. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,20749,00.html 39. http://property.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,20730,00.html 40. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,20572,00.html 41. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,12190,00.html 42. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,19050,00.html 43. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,17809,00.html 44. http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,11250,00.html 45. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/new.htm 46. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/new.htm 47. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/new.htm 48. http://www.timesonline.otc-uk.com/holidays/home.asp 49. http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,18629,00.html 50. http://www.moneysupermarket.com/link.asp?Section=travel&Source=TIM 51. http://e-paper.timesonline.co.uk/check-in/ 52. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,1661,00.html 53. http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,17590,00.html 54. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,11752,00.html 55. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=502 56. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=473 57. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=471 58. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=510 59. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=484 60. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=491 61. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/class/motorSrchRes.php?make1=513 62. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8171,00.html 63. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8543,00.html 64. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8163,00.html 65. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8247,00.html 66. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8164,00.html 67. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8164,00.html 68. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8171,00.html 69. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,21669,00.html 70. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,169,00.html 71. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,176,00.html 72. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,6969,00.html 73. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,6969,00.html 74. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_1,00.html 75. http://www.gg.ca/john-ralston-saul/index_e.asp 76. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_1,00.html 77. javascript: var printFriendlyWin=window.open('/printFriendly/0,,1-534-1616368-534,00.html','','dependent=yes,resizable=no,scrollbars=yes,height=700,width=625,innerHeight=630,innerWidth=590'); 78. javascript: var emailWin=window.open('http://www.timesonline.co.uk/_nipd/emailAFriend.php?id=2102-1616368','emailFriend1616368','dependent=yes,resizable=no,scrollbars=no,height=400,width=520'); 79. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1616368_2,00.html 80. http://info.newsgroupdigital.com/cgi-bin/links.pl?l=2002041804 81. http://info.newsgroupdigital.com/cgi-bin/links.pl?l=2002081201 82. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/section/0,,153,00.html 83. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/Class/Motoring/home/0,,,00.html 84. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,459,00.html 85. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,549,00.html 86. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,497,00.html 87. http://www.nidp.com/ 88. http://www.nisyndication.com/ From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 17:00:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:00:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Phylogeography Message-ID: Evolution: On Phylogeography http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050624-4.htm The following points are made by B.C. Emerson and G.M. Hewitt (Current Biology 2005 15:R367): 1) Phylogeography [1] is a young and fast-growing field that analyses the geographical distribution of genealogical lineages. It grew out of the new techniques of the 1980s that made it possible to determine DNA sequence variation from individuals across a species range, and hence to reconstruct gene genealogies. The spatial relationships of such genealogies may be displayed geographically and analyzed to deduce the evolutionary history of populations, subspecies and species. In particular, the technical accessibility of mitochondrial (mt)DNA sequences in animal species kindled and fueled this new field. Today, a range of DNA techniques, combined with new analytical methods and recent palaeoclimatic and geological studies are providing important insight into the distribution of genetic diversity around the globe, and how it evolved. 2) Animal phylogeography is dominated by mtDNA, while plant phylogeography is dominated by chloroplast (cp)DNA. For both plants and animals, however, other DNA sequences and marker systems are available, and there is an increasing awareness of the rewards offered by these. Sex-specific markers within both plants and animals can help to shed light on any historical differences in demography between the sexes, and this has been a particularly informative approach for studies of human phylogeography. For deeper phylogenetic history, more slowly evolving sequences are needed, while for recent events, perhaps measured only in tens of thousands of years, more variable or more quickly evolving markers are required. 3) To this end, the use of both microsatellites and amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs) can be extended beyond studies of population differentiation, and it may sometimes be possible to develop genealogies from these. Recent work [2] has complemented mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences with AFLPs to resolve the phylogeography of Lapaula crickets in the Hawaiian Islands, revealing the highest rate of speciation so far recorded for arthropods. 4) Each DNA sequence has its own genealogy, and the evolutionary history of the organism is the sum of many different gene genealogies. The use of both mitochondrial and nuclear markers has demonstrated the potentially misleading conclusions that can be developed from a single marker if there has been historical hybridisation. Furthermore, the various methods of analysis probe different aspects of the molecular and spatial history. Consequently, to reconstruct a species phylogeographic history, one would ideally like to use a range of sequences, including nuclear, cytoplasmic, sex-linked, autosomal, conserved and neutral sequences, including examples with high and low mutation rates. Phylogeographic studies using genealogical data from several independent loci will help to provide a fuller and more reliable species history.[3-5] References (abridged): 1. Avise, J.C. Phylogeography. (2000). Harvard University Press 2. Mendelson, T.C. and Shaw, K.L. Sexual behavior: Rapid speciation in an arthropod. (2005). Nature 433, 375-376 3. Posada, D. and Crandall, K.C. Intraspecific gene genealogies: trees grafting into networks. (2001). Trends Ecol. Evol. 16, 37-45 4. Hewitt, G.M. Genetic consequences of climatic oscillations in the Quaternary. (2004). Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 359, 183-195 5. Gillespie, R.G. Community assembly through adaptive radiation in Hawaiian spiders. (2004). Science 303, 356-359 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: ECOLOGY: ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF EXTINCTION Notes by ScienceWeek: In this context, the term "food web" refers in general to a description of who eats whom in an ecosystem. The following points are made by Peter Kareiva (Current Biology 2004 14:R627): 1) The "global extinction crisis" has become a focus of concern and activism for conservationists [1]. We are currently in the middle of the sixth major extinction event in geologic history --this one almost entirely human induced. Current extinction rates are estimated to be 100 to 1000 times higher than pre-human extinction rates [2]. This rapid loss of species has spurred researchers to examine what might be the consequences of losing such a large proportion of our biodiversity. 2) Although ecosystems clearly would not function if all species went extinct, no one can really say what might be the impact of losing 80% of the species as opposed to only 20% of the species. In fact, even though we have seen many conspicuous species go extinct before our eyes, we know precious little about the consequences of those extinctions [3]. Recently, community ecologists have manipulated experimental communities by either removing one or two species or assembling communities of differing species richness [4]. These experiments teach us about the role of biodiversity and predation or competition, but have not provided a compelling picture of the consequences of extinction. The limitation of these targeted removals is their small scale and short duration. 3) The weakness of our empirical insight regarding extinction has caused ecologists to rely heavily on metaphors and models. The purpose of these models is to anticipate what might happen if the predictions of massive species loss hold true [5]. Models that consider the consequences of extinction have tended to focus on either the reliability or the stability of ecosystems. Reliability models emphasize that the loss of species eliminates redundancy, so that at some point ecosystems may end up with only one or two species filling some critical function -- such as nitrogen sequestration or primary production -- leaving the ecosystems vulnerable to any catastrophe or stress that harms these now irreplaceable species. Stability models adopt a more traditional population dynamics framework, and ask how the loss of species alters either the ability to recover from disturbances, or the tendency towards fluctuations in the face of randomly varying environments. The general message of these many theoretical explorations of extinction is that species loss impairs both stability and reliability. But the theory is in no way complete: in particular, very few models consider food webs and highly structured trophic communities. References (abridged): 1. Gibbs, W.W. (2001). On the termination of species. Sci. Am. 285, 40-49 2. Pimm, S.L., Russell, G.J., Gittleman, J.L. and Brooks, T.M. (1995). The future of biodiversity. Science 269, 347-350 3. Simberloff, D. (2003). Community and ecosystem impacts of single-species extinctions. In The Importance of Species. Kareiva, P. and Levin, S. eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 221-234 4. Wootton, J.T. and Downing, A.L. (2003). Understanding the effects of reduced biodiversity: a comparison of two approaches. In The Importance of Species. Kareiva, P. and Levin, S. eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 85-103 5. Pounds, J.A. and Puschendorf, R. (2004). Clouded futures. Nature 427, 107-108 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: PALEONTOLOGY: ON ICE-AGE EXTINCTIONS The following points are made by J. Pastor and R.A. Moen (Nature 2004 431:639): 1) Sabre-toothed tigers, mastodons, woolly mammoths -- these and many other spectacular large mammals are generally thought to have become extinct about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, otherwise known as the last ice age. But it's becoming clear that some of these species clung on close to the present day. Thomas Jefferson's instruction to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to search for live woolly mammoths in the American West in 1804 was perhaps a little optimistic. But the species survived on Wrangel Island in the northeastern Siberian Arctic until some 4000 years ago(1), making it contemporaneous with the Bronze Age Xia Dynasty in China. Stuart et al(2) have reported that another charismatic ice-age mammal that was thought to have become extinct 10,000 years ago -- the giant deer or Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) -- survived in western Siberia to the dawn of historic times. The finding lends weight to the idea that there is no one explanation for the so-called Pleistocene extinctions. 2) The Irish elk must have cut an impressive figure, standing more than two meters high at the shoulder -- about the same as a bull moose, the largest living member of the deer family. But when and why did it become extinct? In their investigation, Stuart et al(2) began by carrying out radiocarbon dating of five skeletal specimens, including a complete skeleton of an antler-bearing male. By combining this information with maps of the specimens' locations, they demonstrated that Irish elk were widespread in Europe -- from Ireland to Russia, and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean -- before 20,000 years ago. But by the last glacial maximum 15,000 years ago, they may have been restricted to refuges in the shrub steppes of central Asia. From there, Irish elk apparently recolonized northwestern Europe following the retreat of the Alpine and Scandinavian ice sheets during a period of climatic warming. The European population made a last stand in the British Isles before dying out 10,500 years ago, but the Siberian population persisted for another 3000 years. 3) What caused the extinction of so many large mammals 10,000 or so years ago? Human hunting(3), changes in climate or vegetation, or both(4), are often proposed to be causal factors. But the "ragged" nature of these Late Pleistocene extinctions, with isolated pockets of populations surviving for longer, suggests that the extinctions have a complex ecology, with no single mechanism responsible for the demise of every species in every location. 4) Theories for both the expansion and the extinction of Irish elk populations, for instance, often focus on the animals' huge antlers, which weighed 40 kilograms and spanned 3.5 meters, making them 30% larger than those of modern moose. It has been suggested(5) that female Irish elk selected males with large antlers, as this might have signified an ability to find sufficient food to support building and shedding a rack each year. This ability would then be passed on to their male progeny. But the large antlers, which contained as much as 8 kilograms of calcium and 4 kilograms of phosphate, would have posed a large annual nutritional burden on bulls. The antlers would also be physically unwieldy in dense forests. So both physical and nutritional constraints probably restricted the Irish elk to productive open environments, with relatively tall willow and birch shrubs that could be navigated but still supply sufficient calcium and phosphate for antler growth. An inability to balance sexual selection for large antlers with nutritional selection pressures for smaller antlers may have led to the Irish elk's demise in the British Isles, particularly as the climate cooled rapidly and caused the vegetation to change to short-statured and unproductive tundra. References (abridged): 1. Vartanyan, S. L., Garrut, V. E. & Sher, A. V. Nature 362, 337-340 (1993) 2. Stuart, A. J., Kosintsev, P. A., Higham, T. F. G. & Lister, A. M. Nature 431, 684-689 (2004) 3. Martin, P. S. in Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution (eds Martin, P. S. & Klein, R. G.) 364-403 (Univ. Arizona Press, Tucson, 1984) 4. Stuart, A. J. Biol. Rev. 66, 453-562 (1991) 5. Geist, V. Nat. Hist. 95, 54-65 (1986) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 17:01:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:01:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Romp Through Theories More Fanciful Than Freaky Message-ID: A Romp Through Theories More Fanciful Than Freaky http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/business/yourmoney/19shelf.html By ROGER LOWENSTEIN THIS book has no unifying theme." Thus do Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, authors of "Freakonomics," the talk-show host's dream best seller, appear to damn their own creation. Their modesty may be a trifle disingenuous. It would be more accurate to say that the book has no unifying subject. Indeed, their clever juxtapositions, the way they consistently mine illuminating truths by contrasting seemingly unrelated topics, is what makes "Freakonomics" (William Morrow) a romp of a read. The authors show the dangers in the crack trade by pointing out that the fatality rate for street dealers is greater than that of inmates on death row in Texas; they demonstrate the power of information, and the way the Internet has eroded the pricing power of automobile dealers, by recounting how a quite unrelated network (the Ku Klux Klan) was done in by an infiltrator who broadcast the group's secrets. The book is only barely about economics, freakish or otherwise, and even when the authors venture into a standard tutorial, such as one about how supply and demand influence wages, they do so with delightful and unexpected curveballs. Thus, they observe, "The typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect." This is less surprising than it might appear. Working conditions limit the supply of prostitutes and, as for demand, the authors mischievously observe that "an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa." Their protestation notwithstanding, "Freakonomics" does have a unifying theme, which is the power of incentives to explain, and perhaps to predict, behavior. The authors clearly tilt against the one-dimensional theory, so dear to orthodox economists, that people are always motivated solely by maximizing their wealth. Rather, they side with the up-and-coming behavioralist school, which sees people's motivations as more nuanced and polydimensional. But you won't find any academic-sounding discourses here. Thus, the authors relate the experience of day-care centers in Haifa, Israel, that tried to discourage parents from picking up their children late by charging offenders the equivalent of a $3 penalty. The response was prompt: lateness increased! Apparently, parents felt less guilty if they were paying for their tardiness. Similarly, the example of a bagel distributor who tried to do business on the honor system shows that while greed surely motivates most people, it is by no means the only motivator. The book has an even more powerful leitmotif: to understand how incentives work, one has to distinguish between cause and effect. This requires more than the economics profession's favorite props - spreadsheets, computers and data. It requires someone to think, intelligently, about what the data are saying. The authors note, for instance, that the fact that cities with high murder rates have more police officers does not mean that the officers are causing murders. This prepares us for other, less intuitive examples. For instance, the presence of books in a household seems to be an effect of educated and motivated parents, and thus a good predictor of how their children will perform in school. The presence of books is not, however, a cause; therefore (alas), requiring children to read will not necessarily enhance their test scores. The authors are hard on experts in virtually every field - sociology, criminology, political analysis - for misreading data. They are equally tough on news-media aye-sayers for parroting the conventional wisdom so glibly. While all the world was congratulating Rudolph W. Giuliani for reducing violent crime, in particular by cracking down on turnstile jumpers, the authors demonstrate that Hizzoner probably had little to do with it. (Crime rates in New York and other cities had begun falling before he was elected mayor.) The experts simply missed a deeper, longer-running cause: the legalization of abortion in 1973, which led to fewer unwanted babies and, by the early 1990's, to fewer career criminals. The authors' diverse opinions are, in general, well founded, but when they write, "The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself," they run the risk of sounding, well, exceedingly sure of themselves. They also tilt the scales by paying more attention to those who err than to those who get it right. (They emphasize the many wrongheaded explanations for the drop in crime but play down the fact that newspaper articles correctly cited the rise in incarceration rates as a major factor.) Moreover, one should not forget that many if not most pieces of conventional wisdom are apt to be true. Mr. Levitt and Mr. Dubner try to demolish the common perception that money leads to success in politics by arguing that, in fact, success attracts money, not vice versa. Their evidence is that when big-spending politicians run for re-election against repeat opponents, the results usually mirror those of the previous election, even when the winning candidate spends less or when the losing candidate spends more. This is cute to a fault. It overlooks the power of money to introduce a new politician (say, Jon Corzine) to the public in the first place - money that is no longer necessary when he runs for re-election. The authors' conclusion, that "the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all," violates the expert wisdom, but it also violates common sense. ONE other criticism relates to the awkward co-authorship of this book, which is subtitled "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." As the subtitle suggests, the material for the book is largely the fruit of the "rogue economist" (Mr. Levitt). Mr. Dubner, who had written two previous best sellers, entered the picture when he profiled Mr. Levitt in The [3]New York Times Magazine. So far, so good. However, each chapter begins with an italicized excerpt from the article, so "Freakonomics" periodically switches from the first-person plural to a third-person description, in general quite laudatory, of Mr. Levitt. Given that Mr. Levitt is a co-author, it is rather jarring to read, "Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science." These quibbles aside, "Freakonomics" is a splendid book, full of unlikely but arresting historical details that distinguish the authors from the run of pop social scientists. Readers may even find themselves developing a dose of skepticism about the world - no bad thing. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 17:01:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:01:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) Robert Grant: Politics Message-ID: Robert Grant: Politics The Times Literary Supplement, 5.3.11 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2110521&window_type=print HERESIES. Against progress and other illusions. John Gray. 216pp. Granta. Paperback, ?8.99. - 1 86207 718 5. A former Oxford Philosophy, Politics and Economics don, Thatcher supporter and expositor of Friedrich Hayek and Isaiah Berlin, John Gray is now a prominent controversialist and Professor of European Thought at LSE, whose bookshop devotes an entire shelf to his works. Heresies collects twenty-four of his New Statesman columns since 1999. Gray is often accused of being a turncoat. But he has always been a ferocious sceptic, so no past, present or future changes of mind on his part should surprise us. He has never believed in progress, a notion for which he here reserves particular scorn, since it is permanently negated by the core conviction of Heresies, that is, the reality of original sin. He has, however, championed neo-liberalism and free markets, things now long consigned to the flames along with every other kind of Enlightenment universalism (including Marxism and socialism). The current US-led crusade for global democracy and human rights he sees sometimes as hopelessly naive, sometimes as a cover for the Iraq invasion, which he reads as being driven neither by capitalist greed nor by (initially reasonable) fears concerning WMD, but as a geopolitical stratagem for securing the energy supplies essential to First World survival. But survival is not Gray's thing. In his gloomy, dark-Green way, he is as deterministic as Francis Fukuyama and the other optimists, utopians and technophiles whom he ridicules. He foresees ever-increasing wars over resources, ethno-religious strife and environmental devastation, culminating in the extinction of homo rapiens (as he calls us) and the planet's return to its mute, pre-human equilibrium. Whether Gray's scenario is more plausible than its sunnier rivals, or than sheer agnosticism, is hard to judge solely from the evidence and arguments presented, since his enforced aphoristic brevity necessarily restricts their scope. Nevertheless, Heresies makes for exhilarating and unsettling reading, which we should definitely take seriously. Reviewing him in the TLS eleven years ago, I called John Gray "a restless, powerful and scrupulous mind". He still is, even if we must here take the scruples largely on trust. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 21 17:01:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:01:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (John Gray) The Sinatra doctrine Message-ID: The Sinatra doctrine The Times Literary Supplement, 3.3.7 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2080979&window_type=print Sir, - John Gray, in his review of Padraic Kenney's A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989 (January 31), appears to support the view that "a ragtag army of punks, hippies, greens and peace campaigners" brought about the downfall of the Communist regimes of East Central Europe in 1989, and that "Gorbachev's unwillingness to sanction the use of repressive force" was not an important factor. Well, a pretty varied group of people tried to overthrow the Communist regime of their country in 1956 (Hungary), 1968 (Czechoslovakia), and 1981 (Poland). In each case, the use or threat of Soviet tanks swiftly put paid to these efforts. All the dissidents in the 1980s feared a repetition of these events. That is why most of them counselled avoiding a direct confrontation with the Communist State, advocating instead the cultivation of the resources of what some of them called "the parallel society", in other words, the informal, unofficial society. Gorbachev's publicly announced repudiation of the Brezhnev doctrine of "proletarian internationalism", and its replacement by what his spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov called "the Sinatra doctrine" - let every nation do it in its own way - were the indispensable conditions for the success of the 1989 revolutions. That does not mean they were the only conditions, any more than aristocratic opposition to the Crown in 1789 was the sole cause of the French Revolution (though it was undoubtedly a necessary condition). KRISHAN KUMAR Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Jun 21 18:23:28 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:23:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] absolutists, contextualists In-Reply-To: <200506211800.j5LI0UR29693@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050621182328.59070.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>If absolutists spent more time trying to think like contextualists and contextualists trying to think like absolutists, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive.<< --That's a great statement. I've never heard it put so simply. Michael __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Use Yahoo! to plan a weekend, have fun online and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/ From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Jun 21 21:00:34 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:00:34 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] absolutists, contextualists In-Reply-To: <20050621182328.59070.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050621182328.59070.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42B87FF2.2030405@earthlink.net> Even better is: If Republicans spent more time trying to think like Democrats and Democrats trying to think like Republicans, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive. Gerry Michael Christopher wrote: >>>If absolutists spent more time trying to think like >>> >>> >contextualists and contextualists trying to think like >absolutists, understanding would be increased and >debates could become more constructive.<< > >--That's a great statement. I've never heard it put so >simply. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Discover Yahoo! >Use Yahoo! to plan a weekend, have fun online and more. Check it out! >http://discover.yahoo.com/ >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:38:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:38:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: (Jewish IQ) Richard Cohen: Aptitude Adjustment Message-ID: Richard Cohen: Aptitude Adjustment http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061502159_pf.html Thursday, June 16, 2005; A29 Back before I became the legendary Cohen of Claims for a major insurance company, I was the lowly mail boy. Part of my job was to pick up mail from the corner office of the branch manager, an avuncular chap with a tirelessly inoffensive manner that, in his day, had made him a legendary salesman. One day he told me that he knew I would succeed splendidly in the insurance biz -- not because I was industrious or smart or had a bent for property damage claims but because, as he put it, Jews did well in business. As if in response, I showed him how wrong he was. I got fired two years later. Now comes an article in the New York Times to suggest that the branch manager was on to something. It said that scientists at the University of Utah had linked certain genetic diseases found only among European Jews with "natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability." In other words, Jews are smarter because over about a thousand years they adapted to discriminatory practices that limited their livelihood to a restricted range of commercial occupations. Those who succeeded tended to have more children and so, over time, European Jews in general improved their intelligence. Some scientists find the theory credible; some do not. As for myself, I am immeasurably comforted by it. Jews are smart. This does not mean that all Jews are smart and that no Jews are dumb. It only means that, in general, the proposition holds. Among other things, American Jews -- about 2 percent of the population -- make up 27 percent of this country's Nobel laureates. Something's going on here. I cannot be certain that Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, has read the article. But if he did, I bet he wondered why it is possible to suggest that certain Jews are smarter than other people but not remotely possible to suggest that women might not be as brilliant in science and engineering as men. When Summers did precisely that back in January -- when he wondered out loud about such matters as "intrinsic aptitude" -- he got his head handed to him. He was not, mind you, stating this as a fact -- just throwing it out along with other factors that might account for why men outnumber women on the science, engineering and math faculties of first-rate universities. What he did not do -- and this was his mistake -- was limit the possibilities to the only politically correct one: sexual discrimination of one sort or another. But if Jews could adapt to their environment in a certain way, why couldn't women or men? After all, to the eye, there is no distinction between a Jew of European origin and a non-Jew of European origin -- or even a Jew of non-European origin. Yet to that same eye, there is plenty to distinguish a man from a woman. They have bodies designed for different things. If, as the Utah scientists propose, Jews adapted to their environment to produce better businessmen (and not better farmers or soldiers), then why couldn't men or women have adapted to their particular environments in a similar way? Maybe -- just maybe -- there's a link between not being able to express your feelings and solving Fermat's Last Theorem? (Notice the question mark.) I understand full well that beliefs in racial or ethnic superiority or inferiority have accounted for tragedies beyond comprehension -- everything from the Holocaust in Europe to slavery in America. But at root, these were ideologies in which facts either did not matter or were concocted to serve a predetermined end. This is what happened with Summers. He was shouted down not because he was wrong, but because he ought to be wrong; not because he might not be right, but because he should not be right. It did not matter to many of his critics that at least since the 1980s, researchers have found boys doing better at math than girls -- not all boy and all girls, mind you, just those at the highest ranges of achievement. Among the very best, boys are the very bestest. The reason the Utah study of Jews produced no outcry is that it suggested Jews were, like the children of Lake Wobegon, above average. The reason Summers got into trouble is that he wondered if, so to speak, women were below average. But if one is possible, why not the other? The answer escapes me -- and it cannot be, as we all know from the Utah study, because I'm dumb. [2]cohenr at washpost.com From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:38:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:38:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Editorial: The First Race-Based Medicine Message-ID: The First Race-Based Medicine http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/opinion/19sun2.html With the unanimous endorsement of an expert advisory committee last week, a heart-failure drug aimed specifically at African-Americans moved a big step closer to regulatory approval. If the Food and Drug Administration gives a favorable nod, the drug, known as BiDil, will become the first medicine ever approved for a single racial group. Its arrival could be a boon to black patients, who die at disproportionate rates from congestive heart failure. But the history of this first racial medicine raises troubling questions about the impact of patent considerations on how drugs are tested. The new treatment, a combination of two generic drugs, was first tested years ago in a broad sampling of patients. The results were deemed inconclusive by the F.D.A., and the drug was rejected for use in the general population. Subsequently, seizing on data indicating that blacks in those early studies had been helped by the treatment, proponents conducted further tests exclusively in self-described African-Americans. The results were so striking - a 43 percent reduction in mortality when the pill was added to standard therapies - that the clinical trial was halted early to allow those on a placebo to benefit. The drug has been enthusiastically endorsed by black medical groups as a tool to help lessen disparities in health care between blacks and whites. The chief caveat is that race is a very crude category upon which to base medical treatments. Two experts on the panel that recommended approval resisted the notion that the drug should be labeled specifically for African-Americans. The panel's chairman justified race as a rough surrogate for underlying genetic factors that might make some people responsive to the drug and others less so. What makes the history of this drug troubling is the role played by economic considerations in shaping its conversion to a racial medicine. Some experts believe that even after the first failures in clinical trials, it would have been possible to devise a better study to test the drug in a broad population, not just a single racial group. But the drug's maker, NitroMed, a small Massachusetts company, flinched from that arduous and costly process and opted instead to pursue a narrower market. The patent issue was especially potent. If BiDil were approved for the general public, its patent would expire as scheduled in 2007. Approval as a racially targeted drug would extend patent protection until 2020. The danger here is that as other drugs emerge with better results in one racial group or another, some manufacturers may be tempted to qualify them as racial medicines rather than broader-based therapies. Once a drug has been approved for marketing, even based on narrow studies, doctors are free to prescribe it as they see fit. But they could be prescribing in the dark if no one has tested safety and effectiveness in the general population. Regulators need to find some way to ensure that drugs of potential value to everyone are tested broadly. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:38:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:38:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Study: Women's Orgasms Relieve Stress, Anxiety Message-ID: Study: Women's Orgasms Relieve Stress, Anxiety Researchers Couldn't Get Reliable Results From Men POSTED: 5:52 pm EDT June 20, 2005 http://www.local6.com/news/2455821/detail.html [Thanks to Jim for this.] COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- New research indicates parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm but remain active if she is faking. In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain governing emotional control is largely deactivated. "The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain," said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday to the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men, 13 women and their partners. The volunteers were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For men, the scanner tracked activity at rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and during ejaculation brought on by the partner's hand. For women, the scanner measured brain activity at rest, while they faked an orgasm, while their partners stimulated their clitoris and while they experienced orgasm. Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men's climaxes didn't last that long. However, the scans did show activation of reward centers in the brain for men, but not for women. Holstege said his results on women were more clear. When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during a genuine orgasm. Even the body movements made during a real orgasm were unconscious, Holstege said. The most striking results were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated. Deactivation was visible in the amygdala, a part of the brain thought to be involved in the neurobiology of fear and anxiety. "During orgasm, there was strong, enormous deactivation in the brain. During fake orgasm, there was no deactivation of the brain at all. None," Holstege said. Shutting down the brain during orgasm may ensure that obstacles such as fear and stress did not get in the way, Holstege proposed. "Deactivation of these very important parts of the brain might be the most important necessity for having an orgasm," he said. Donald Pfaff, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Rockefeller University in New York, said the interpretations were reasonable. "It makes poetic sense," said Pfaff, who was not connected with the research. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:42:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:42:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Migration is 'good for everybody' Message-ID: Migration is 'good for everybody' http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/4117300.stm Published: 2005/06/22 04:23:33 GMT Thanks to Sarah for this. [The amazing news is that Russia is second in the world, behind the US, in the number of immigrants, but maybe not so amazing if one considers the countries next to Russia. One rarely thinks about these countries, though. [The bad news is that the net (economic) contribution of immigrants to the UK (and the calculations are likely overestimates) is $4 billion, which is 0.2% of its $1.6 trillion GDP, which is also $0.18 per day per Britisher. The negative effects on culture and the gene pool are far, far greater than that. [I haven't seen comparable calculations for the winners and losers for the free movement of goods, as opposed to the free movement of people. I'm waiting for Guillermo de la Dehesha, _Winners and Losers in Globalization_, which was scheduled for issue on June 15 but hasn't appeared. This looks like it's going to be a solid book. [I don't know what the effects on culture is that comes with imported goods. The effects on the gene pool are presumably zero.] Migrants can bring many benefits to both the countries they move to and the ones they leave behind, according to a major new study. The International Organization for Migration looked at the costs, benefits and disadvantages of global migration. It found that common concerns about the negative effects of migration on jobs and welfare costs are often unfounded. The IOM says there are up to 192 million migrants and many bring a wide range of economic and other benefits. Reciprocity "We are living in an increasingly globalised world that can no longer depend on domestic labour markets alone. This is a reality that has to be managed," said Brunson McKinley, head of the IOM. "If managed properly, migration can bring more benefits than costs." The IOM cites a British report showing that, between 1999 and 2000, migrants in the UK contributed $4bn (?2.1bn) more in taxes than they received in benefits. Migrants also make a significant contribution to the economies of their home states, the report says, with returning cash flows sometimes exceeding official development aid. Filling spaces Rather from taking jobs from local workers, the report says that migrants tend to fill spaces at the poles of the labour market - working both in low-skilled, high-risk jobs and highly skilled, well-paid employment. MIGRATION FACTS Migrants represent 2.9% of the world population Almost half of them (48.6%) are women The number of international migrants more than doubled 1970-1990 Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. "There's very little evidence in many of the Western countries that are receiving migrants that migrants are substituting the local workforce," the report's editor, Irena Omelaniuk, added. And migrant workers sent back more than $100bn (?55bn) to their countries of origin in 2004. In fact, the report estimates that more than double this figure may also be sent through informal channels. Morocco, the report says, received $2.87bn (?1.57bn), or 8% of its GDP, from money sent home by migrant workers in 2002 and remittances sent to the Philippines accounted for almost 10% of its GDP. The report says that, although many skilled workers abandon their home countries seeking higher pay abroad, many can be encouraged to return home bringing acquired skills and experience - a process of "brain gain". "Trends suggest a greater movement towards circular migration, with substantial benefits to both home and host societies," the report says. The IOM says that migrants make up less than 3% of the global population and that almost half of all migrants are women. It says that although the number of migrants has risen, from 82m in 1970 to around 190m people today, some countries - including Asia and Africa - have seen their proportional share of migrants decline. The most popular destination countries for migrants include the US - which alone is home to more than 20% of the world's migrants - and Russia, home to almost 8% of global migrants. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:42:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:42:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CNET: Your ISP as Net watchdog Message-ID: Your ISP as Net watchdog http://news.com.com/2102-1028_3-5748649.html?tag=st.util.print Your ISP as Net watchdog By Declan McCullagh Story last modified Thu Jun 16 04:00:00 PDT 2005 The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities. Data retention [5]rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs--that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept. In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically. What's new: The U.S. Department of Justice is mulling data retention rules that could permit police to obtain records of e-mail, browsing or chat-room activity months after ISPs ordinarily would have deleted the logs--if they were ever kept in the first place. Bottom line: Data retention could aid criminal and terrorism prosecutions, but privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior could engender stiff opposition to the proposal. [6]More stories on this topic In Europe, the Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers say logs must be kept for between one and three years. One U.S. industry representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Justice Department is interested in at least a two-month requirement. Justice Department officials endorsed the concept at a private meeting with Internet service providers and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to interviews with multiple people who were present. The meeting took place on April 27 at the Holiday Inn Select in Alexandria, Va. "It was raised not once but several times in the meeting, very emphatically," said Dave McClure, president of the [7]U.S. Internet Industry Association, which represents small to midsize companies. "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'" McClure said that while the Justice Department representatives argued that Internet service providers should cooperate voluntarily, they also raised the "possibility that we should create by law a standard period of data retention." McClure added that "my sense was that this is something that they've been working on for a long time." This represents an abrupt shift in the Justice Department's long-held position that data retention is unnecessary and imposes an unacceptable burden on Internet providers. In 2001, the Bush administration [8]expressed "serious reservations about broad mandatory data retention regimes." The current proposal appears to originate with the Justice Department's [9]Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, which enforces federal child pornography laws. But once mandated by law, the logs likely would be mined during terrorism, copyright infringement and even routine criminal investigations. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.) "Preservation" vs. "Retention" At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation. A 1996 [10]federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It [11]requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity." "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'" --Dave McClure, president, U.S. Internet Industry Association Child protection advocates say that this process can lead police to dead ends if they don't move quickly enough and log files are discarded automatically. Also, many Internet service providers don't record information about instant-messaging conversations or Web sites visited--data that would prove vital to an investigation. "Law enforcement agencies are often having 20 reports referred to them a week by the National Center," said Michelle Collins, director of the exploited child unit for the [12]National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "By the time legal process is drafted, it could be 10, 15, 20 days. They're completely dependent on information from the ISPs to trace back an individual offender." Collins, who participated in the April meeting, said that she had not reached a conclusion about how long log files should be retained. "There are so many various business models...I don't know that there's going to be a clear-cut answer to what would be the optimum amount of time for a company to maintain information," she said. McClure, from the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said he counter-proposed the idea of police agencies establishing their own guidelines that would require them to seek logs soon after receiving tips. Marc Rotenberg, director of the [13]Electronic Privacy Information Center, compared the Justice Department's idea to the since-abandoned [14]Clipper Chip, a brainchild of the Clinton and first Bush White House. Initially the Clipper Chip--an encryption system with a backdoor for the federal government--was supposed to be voluntary, but declassified documents show that backdoors were supposed to become mandatory. "Even if your concern is chasing after child pornographers, the packets don't come pre-labeled that way," Rotenberg said. "What effectively happens is that all ISP customers, when that data is presented to the government, become potential targets of subsequent investigations." A divided Europe The Justice Department's proposal could import a debate that's been simmering in Europe for years. In Europe, a data retention proposal prepared by four nations said that all telecommunications providers must retain generalized logs of phone calls, SMS messages, e-mail communications and other "Internet protocols" for at least one year. Logs would include the addresses of Internet sites and identities of the correspondents but not necessarily the full content of the communication. Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration criticized that approach. In November 2001, Mark Richard from the Justice Department's criminal division [23]said in a speech in Brussels, Belgium, that the U.S. method offers Internet providers the flexibility "to retain or destroy the records they generate based upon individual assessments of resources, architectural limitations, security and other business needs." France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden jointly submitted their data retention proposal to the European Parliament in April 2004. Such mandatory logging was necessary, they argued, "for the purpose of prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of crime or criminal offenses including terrorism." But a [24]report prepared this year by Alexander Alvaro on behalf of the Parliament's civil liberties and home affairs committee slammed the idea, saying it may violate the European Convention on Human Rights. Also, Alvaro wrote: "Given the volume of data to be retained, particularly Internet data, it is unlikely that an appropriate analysis of the data will be at all possible. Individuals involved in organized crime and terrorism will easily find a way to prevent their data from being traced." He calculated that if an Internet provider were to retain all traffic data, the database would swell to a size of 20,000 to 40,000 terabytes--too large to search using existing technology. On June 7, the European Parliament [25]voted by a show of hands to adopt Alvaro's report and effectively snub the mandatory data retention plan. But the vote may turn out to have been largely symbolic: The Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers have vowed to press ahead with their [26]data retention requirement. References 5. http://news.com.com/U.K.s+data-retention+proposal+dealt+blow/2110-1017_3-958132.html?tag=nl 6. http://news.search.com/search?q=ISPs+logs 7. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usiia.org%2F&siteId=3&oId=/U.K.s+data-retention+proposal+dealt+blow/2110-1017_3-958132.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 8. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usdoj.gov%2Fcriminal%2Fcybercrime%2Fintl%2FUSComments_CyberCom_final.pdf&siteId=3&oId=/U.K.s+data-retention+proposal+dealt+blow/2110-1017_3-958132.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 9. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usdoj.gov%2Fcriminal%2Fceos%2F&siteId=3&oId=/U.K.s+data-retention+proposal+dealt+blow/2110-1017_3-958132.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 10. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usdoj.gov%2Fcriminal%2Fcybercrime%2F2703_CSEA.htm&siteId=3&oId=/U.K.s+data-retention+proposal+dealt+blow/2110-1017_3-958132.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 11. http://news.com.com/My+brief+career+as+an+ISP/2010-7355_3-5089267.html?tag=nl 12. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.missingkids.com%2F&siteId=3&oId=/My+brief+career+as+an+ISP/2010-7355_3-5089267.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 13. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epic.org%2F&siteId=3&oId=/My+brief+career+as+an+ISP/2010-7355_3-5089267.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 14. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epic.org%2Fcrypto%2Fclipper%2F&siteId=3&oId=/My+brief+career+as+an+ISP/2010-7355_3-5089267.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 15. http://news.com.com/Video+content+set+free+on+Web/2100-1025_3-5746034.html?tag=nl.caro 16. http://news.com.com/Microsoft+looks+to+extinguish+LAMP/2100-1012_3-5746549.html?tag=nl.caro 17. http://news.com.com/Microsoft+meets+the+hackers/2009-1002_3-5747813.html?tag=nl.caro 18. http://news.com.com/Your+ISP+as+Net+watchdog/2100-1028_3-5748649.html?tag=nl.caro 19. http://news.com.com/Open-source+maneuvers+for+Sun%2C+Microsoft/2009-7344_3-5748223.html?tag=nl.caro 20. http://news.com.com/Will+computing+flow+like+electricity/2100-1011_3-5749968.html?tag=nl.caro 23. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usdoj.gov%2Fcriminal%2Fcybercrime%2Fintl%2FMMR_Nov01_Forum.doc&siteId=3&oId=/My+brief+career+as+an+ISP/2010-7355_3-5089267.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 24. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.statewatch.org%2Fnews%2F2005%2Fmay%2Fep-data-ret-alvaro-report.pdf&siteId=3&oId=/My+brief+career+as+an+ISP/2010-7355_3-5089267.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 25. http://news.com.com/Europe+to+push+ahead+with+ISP+snooping+law/2100-1028_3-5739292.html?tag=nl 26. http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eu2005.lu%2Fen%2Factualites%2Fcommuniques%2F2005%2F06%2F02jai-comm%2Findex.html&siteId=3&oId=/Europe+to+push+ahead+with+ISP+snooping+law/2100-1028_3-5739292.html&ontId=1023&lop=nl.ex 27. http://www.cnet.com/aboutcnet/0-13611-7-811029.html?tag=ft From Thrst4knw at aol.com Wed Jun 22 19:43:16 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:43:16 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] absolutists, contextualists; (step into my world) Message-ID: <12d.5ef6a4af.2feb1954@aol.com> Two thoughts: 1. I can't help noticing that there's some degree of asymmetry to this suggestion. People who agree with this notion of thinking more like other people are probably generally speaking more contextualist than not. The very idea that you can meaningfully and usefully think more like someone else and less like yourself seems to me to require at least some small acknowledgement that human thinking is fundamentally contextual in some way? 2. I'd be very surprised if you could get any agreement that Republicans and Democrats think in characteristic ways that are different from each other unless you froze each party at a particular moment in time and did a fairly sophisticated analysis of the common patterns in their reasoning. Party identification certainly seems to draw on ideological committments, I would agree, and to an increasing degree in recent years. Yet it is much less straightforward as to what "think like a party member" means because parties are not simply traditions of reasoning or ideologies. The dramatic recent shift of the Republican party in the U.S. to some sort of odd alliance between almost statist neo-conservatism and religious conservatism, and the shift of the Democratic Party in the U.S. to a relatively amorphous collection of principles seems like a good case in point. Some strategies for trying to think like someone else when their ideas initially appear strange are linked informally to what is known as "Miller's Law" after cognitive psychologist George Miller, who put it in this awkward but oddly elegant way: "In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of." (Interview with Elizabeth Hall, Psychology Today, January 1980, pp.38-50 and 97-98) In practice, figuring out what someone else's odd belief might be true of can be extremely challenging, when you try to apply this to things like different ideological or metaphysical committments, but I think the principle applies very generally if you are willing to be very flexible in interpreting "what it could be true of." That is, in what world and after making what assumptions and accepting what background conceptual models and making what definitions would this person's belief make perfect sense. This is part of the concept behind neurolinguistic programming and (Milton) Ericksonian therapy methods, and they take it so far sometimes as to try to step into the world of the psychotic, with varying degrees of success. kind regards, Todd In a message dated 6/21/2005 5:02:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, waluk at earthlink.net writes: Even better is: If Republicans spent more time trying to think like Democrats and Democrats trying to think like Republicans, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive. Gerry Michael Christopher wrote: If absolutists spent more time trying to think like contextualists and contextualists trying to think like absolutists, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive.<< --That's a great statement. I've never heard it put so simply. Michael -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:43:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:43:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: New model 'permits time travel' Message-ID: New model 'permits time travel' http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4097258.stm Published: 2005/06/17 10:03:47 GMT By Julianna Kettlewell BBC News science reporter If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated. Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind. The new model, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics, gets rid of the famous paradox surrounding time travel. Paradox explained Although the laws of physics seem to permit temporal gymnastics, the concept is laden with uncomfortable contradictions. The main headache stems from the idea that if you went back in time you could, theoretically, do something to change the present; and that possibility messes up the whole theory of time travel. Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don't suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births - that much is obvious. You go back to kill your father, but you'd arrive after he'd left the room, you wouldn't find him, or you'd change your mind Professor Dan Greenberger, City University, New York So either time travel is not possible, or something is actually acting to prevent any backward movement from changing the present. For most of us, the former option might seem most likely, but Einstein's general theory of relativity leads some physicists to suspect the latter. According to Einstein, space-time can curve back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to double back and meet younger versions of themselves. And now a team of physicists from the US and Austria says this situation can only be the case if there are physical constraints acting to protect the present from changes in the past. Weird laws The researchers say these constraints exist because of the weird laws of quantum mechanics even though, traditionally, they don't account for a backwards movement in time. Quantum behaviour is governed by probabilities. Before something has actually been observed, there are a number of possibilities regarding its state. But once its state has been measured those possibilities shrink to one - uncertainty is eliminated. So, if you know the present, you cannot change it. If, for example, you know your father is alive today, the laws of the quantum universe state that there is no possibility of him being killed in the past. It is as if, in some strange way, the present takes account of all the possible routes back into the past and, because your father is certainly alive, none of the routes back can possibly lead to his death. "Quantum mechanics distinguishes between something that might happen and something that did happen," Professor Dan Greenberger, of the City University of New York, US, told the BBC News website. "If we don't know your father is alive right now - if there is only a 90% chance that he is alive right now, then there is a chance that you can go back and kill him. "But if you know he is alive, there is no chance you can kill him." In other words, even if you take a trip back in time with the specific intention of killing your father, so long as you know he is happily sitting in his chair when you leave him in the present, you can be sure that something will prevent you from murdering him in the past. It is as if it has already happened. "You go back to kill your father, but you'd arrive after he'd left the room, you wouldn't find him, or you'd change your mind," said Professor Greenberger. "You wouldn't be able to kill him because the very fact that he is alive today is going to conspire against you so that you'll never end up taking that path leads you to killing him." Greenberger and colleague Karl Svozil introduce their quantum mechanical model of time travel on the ArXiv e-print service. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 22 19:43:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:43:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: (A third John Gray) Justin Warshaw: Law Message-ID: That's the end of all the TLS's articles by or about John Gray. He's the most important political philosopher living and or because he's the hardest to predict. Justin Warshaw: Law The Times Literary Supplement, 3.2.14 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2081186&window_type=print LAWYERS' LATIN. A vade-mecum. By John Gray. 143pp. Hale. ?9.99. - 0 7090 7066 7 Little has rattled the Bar of England and Wales more than Lord Woolf's attack on legal Latin, save perhaps recent fears that the wearing of wigs may be abolished. The introduction of new civil procedure rules in 1999 heralded the beginning of the end, not only of ancient (but familiar) English words such as "writ" and "plaintiff", but the wholesale butchery of courthouse Latin. John Gray, who should not be confused with either the libertarian philosopher or the author of the bestselling self-help book for couples, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, is a former barrister and recorder who hails, or so it appears from his choice of topic and of foreword writer (Lord Deedes), from a very old school. His asserted aim, however, is to preserve legal Latin for young law students and lawyers, the very group who he fears may welcome its demise. The product of his attempt at conservation is a remarkably readable, erudite and at times witty collection of words, tags and maxims. He illustrates entries with a series of examples ranging over legal authorities, forensic fables, the canon of English poetry, classical and even biblical references. In explaining the concept of aequitas sequitur legem, he weaves in the story of Everet v Williams - a partnership action in which the parties were two eighteenth-century highwaymen, one suing the other for an account of some of their jointly stolen goods (their solicitors were thrown in the Fleet prison for contempt). Pervading the book is Gray's amused contempt for the political correctness which has led to the banishment of Latin. Is Magna Carta to be translated? What value changing certiorari to a "quashing order"? He points out that in Europe our legal masters continue to use Latin with relish in their judgments. Attacks on Latin are not new. Even the Duke of Wellington is said to have reminded new Members of Parliament "don't quote Latin; say what you have to say, and then sit down". Gray's fear is perhaps a little misplaced, and would be alleviated by a day down at the law courts. Already this year a High Court Judge in the Family Division has quoted Virgil extensively in the original. The only criticism that can be levelled at this very full little reference book is its failure to give any guidance on pronunciation. It seems remarkable that Gray missed the opportunity to join the debate which has raged at the Bar for years over whether schoolboy Latin pronunciation should be used, or the apparently more correct, anglicized version favoured by the Americans. But Lawyers' Latin is a useful guide, and entertaining enough to be read cover to cover. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Jun 23 02:30:39 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 19:30:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] absolutists/contextualists In-Reply-To: <200506221800.j5MI0IR20484@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050623023039.56796.qmail@web30811.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Gerry says: >>If Republicans spent more time trying to think like Democrats and Democrats trying to think like Republicans, understanding would be increased and debates could become more constructive.<< --I think it works better as "contextualists and absolutists". If Democrats think like Republicans they just might end up using niche marketing, smear tactics and deceptive language to create a false consensus. And if Republicans think like Democrats, they'll end up losing badly. I think both should think more like Greens. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:26:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:26:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alice Andrews: An Evolutionary Mind Message-ID: Alice Andrews: An Evolutionary Mind http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/printer_friendly.asp?9209 Metanexus Anthropos. 2005.01.13. 12, 300 words. [This is an absolute delight and an effective way of carrying evolutionary psychology to its right-brained (?), politically left-wing (?) enemies. I am the one who abandoned reality for fiction, as you'll read below, though I only meant that I'm turning to fiction to supplement my understanding of human nature, since I've gone down the scientific path about as far as the state of the art can take me. [Alice's novel, Trine Erotic, has been among those I have read since the abandonment. It may mark the beginnings of a new kind of literature, meta-fiction, and I think novels in the future will have to incorporate evolutionary psychology themes, at least implicitly. Innocence has been lost (again). I'd like another novel about life-long loves and the evolutionary psychology behind them. What does it take to keep the spark of infatuation alive? How does it matter that, as the years go on, the couple become more and more intertwined and co-evolved? Monogamy means having one mirror in which to reflect one's self, but only one. This preserves the unity of self and adds to the many reasons why divorce should be difficult.] ---------------------- Alice Andrews, in a wonderfully playful and deeply critical essay, explores evolutionary psychology, human nature, and evolutionary storytelling. In her words: "Evolutionary psychology's view that there is a universal human nature is explored, as well as the idea that there are two kinds of minds (Apollinian and Dionysian) whose etiology may be genetically based. Dionysian minds, it is argued, may be more comfortable with innatist views of human nature because such minds are 'less defended' and less compartmentalized. A defense of evolutionary psychology is elaborated and concludes that we should aim to use our knowledge of our human nature to make the external world fit our evolved natures, while at the same time aim to be transcendent via various practices and practice, i.e., to go against certain hardwired programs. In addition, evolutionary fiction (meta-seductive fiction) is discussed and connected to the Dionysian mind. The idea that this particular kind of storywriting could be a genetic indicator is explored and offers an explanation for the sometimes serious and passionate business of critical theory and aesthetic judgments generally." Alice Andrews (with degrees in philosophy and developmental psychology from Columbia University; [1]http://bhs.sunydutchess.edu/andrews) has taught both writing and psychology (and sometimes both at the same time) with an evolutionary lens for over a decade; and currently teaches psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Alice is also an editor and writer (books and magazines); was the associate editor of Chronogram from 2000-2002; and now publishes and edits Entelechy: Mind and Culture ([2]http://www.entelechyjournal.com), an online journal/'zine devoted to philosophical, psychological, spiritual, revolutionary, and evolutionary ideas expressed artfully and creatively. She is also the author of Trine Erotic, a novel which explores evolutionary psychology. --Editor An Evolutionary Mind by Alice Andrews Close your Deleuze; open your Darwin. -Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal Of Two Minds Not that long ago, for about a year, I dated a cute, left-wing economist off-and-on (though mostly off). We found each other attractive and exotic and perhaps even fascinating, but we didn't get along or get each other one bit. It was a frustrating and futile experiment in the chemistry and mathematics of pairing with someone so different in every way-even our horoscopes said we were disastrous for each other. (That a pretty smart girl like me would even mention the word horoscope in a piece for public consumption would probably make him cringe and clear his throat a few times.) But in the process of going toward something so foreign and at once attractive and repellant, I solidified my worldview that there really are two different kinds of minds. Recently, the New York Times ran an article titled "The Political Brain." The piece suggested that the liberal mind and the conservative mind are quite different and that this difference is related to the differences in the way their limbic systems (in particular, the amygdala) respond to particular stimuli-particularly suffering and violence. The author made clear to point out that it was difficult to parse if liberals were born with more sensitive/reactive amygdalae or if their experiences, etc., shaped the patterns of response; and that indeed it was probably a little of both, as these things often are. Of course, in the game 'the nature/nurture debate,' where anyone over the age of 13 knows the answer is: "it's both," you are really being asked: To which side do you lean or, perhaps, which side do you defend? And in this game my answer is nature; though I consider myself an interactionist; and am informed by an epigenetic, adaptionist model. (The adaptionist model as it relates to human minds and behavior is most often referred to as evolutionary psychology (EP)-and sometimes Darwinian psychology. I will henceforth refer to the adaptionist model as it relates to the human psyche and human behavior as EP (evolutionary psychology), since "EP" is the most popular term for this approach, and seems to be a more rigorous and coherent meta-theory than some other closely related fields, such as: human ethology, evolutionary anthropology, and human behavioral biology) (1). So I will defend an innatist position (while maintaining that the environment has shaped adaptations and hardwiring and that we're influenced by the environment). Why? Because I feel it is true-that much is innate in us-and because others feel it is true, and because there is some scientific evidence that it is true (e.g., behavioral genetics). Perhaps I'm an innate underdoggist with a sensitive amygdala! Because, although being on the nature side these days may seem fashionable to some, in fact, it hasn't been fashionable for most of my reading, thinking, and writing years. The economist on the other hand (or brain) is a social constructionist/environmentalist-big on Freud (and Marx) and early childhood experiences as forming personality traits and very big on the narrative. ('Environmentalist' is a confusing term because of its other, more common meaning related to efforts to preserve and care for the natural environment. But in this context, of course, it means nurture proponent.) He attributed my sympathy with innatist/essentialist models to a rebellion against my parents! Yet, I'm an older sibling, and there's empirical evidence to suggest that older siblings tend to conform, somewhat, to their parents' beliefs. That was the case with me. It felt awful to feel 'the truth' and to go 'against' their social constructionist view of things. It took a very long time to individuate. A much better explanation (to me) is that I have a kind of brain that pushes me in that direction. There's no question to me that the male/female; left-brain/right- brain; western/eastern dichotomy is a valuable one for trying to understand our differences. It may even be better than scanning amygdalae. Here's the thing: It's a phenomenological certainty that the economist and I can't see any other way but the way we do; and indeed, our explanations for things have everything to do with our cognitive style. You see, I can't help think the way I do because of something deep and essential and real-my brain. And this thought in itself I believe comes from my essential nature/brain. I literally cannot get out of it. And he cannot get out of the way he sees the way he does, due to his brain/nature. I am right-brain dominant, female and lean toward an Eastern/collectivist worldview. (I'll call it a Dionysian mind, after Nietzsche's distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollinian in The Birth of Tragedy.) I think I'm also old-brainy and he's new-brainy. This all seems obvious to me. But he'd probably call it a story, a tall-tale or fiction. He'd say, nice narrative, Alice! when perhaps this difference lies in our blood and brains. Or genes. Or souls. Or maybe I just have access to something that he doesn't always have; or doesn't want to have. It's hard to know. Indeed, the brain's organization may well be what accounts for the difference between my Dionysian mind and the economist's Apollinian mind. Chris McManus, in his awards-winning book Right Hand, Left Hand (2002), explains that although there's oddly little research done on the genetics of handedness, and 'brainedness', there is good reason to believe there are genes responsible for hemispheric dominance, lateralization and organization. According to McManus, there is a left-handed gene and it is known as the C gene; the right-handed gene is known as the D gene. Three manifestations of the alleles are possible: CC, DC and DD. Most CC individuals will be left-handed but also may be susceptible to such things as dyslexia, stuttering, autism, and schizophrenia. These individuals make up about 4% of the population. Most DD individuals will be right-handed and make up 64% of the population. And finally the DC individuals (32% of the population), will be right-handed and left-handed. McManus writes: "In looking for an advantage for the C gene-and specifically for the DC genotype-a good starting place is the most striking feature of the C gene: its ability to confer randomness on the organization of the brain, not only for manual dexterity and language...but almost certainly for a host of other cerebral symmetries, such as those for reading, writing, visual-spatial processing and emotion. Although it might seem paradoxical, randomness, at least in small amounts, can benefit complex systems." His theory of random cerebral variation "provides an explanation," he explains, "for the lay belief that some people literally 'think differently' or have their brain 'wired differently.' In a nutshell, McManus characterizes the DD brain/mind as "the standard textbook description" and having the "cold certainty of an ice crystal." For McManus, every DD brain is effectively built the same way and that about 2/3 of the population have such brains/mind. The DCers, in contrast, have modules all over the place, their brains neither lateralized nor compartmentalized the way DD-brainers' are. What this randomness means is that there's a good chance you get a kind of creativity you might not have gotten otherwise. Why? Here are a couple of his examples, but there are many: Say a DC individual has "a module specialised for understanding emotions located in the left hemisphere rather than the right, so that it now sits alongside left-hemisphere modules involved in the production of spoken or written language, that might be beneficial for writing poetry or being an actor....Or "imagine that that a module for understanding three-dimensional space is in the left hemisphere rather than the right, so that it is now located alongside modules involved in fast, accurate, precise control of the hand; that might well benefit drawing or the visual arts, or perhaps ball control in sport." (p.231) It's somehow reassuring to me that I may be the way I am because of an old C gene. And it is old. The C gene, according to McManus is more primitive than the R gene. Indeed, this fits in with my sense of the economist, who I think of as a neo-culturalphile. His mind is attracted to new things-even shiny things-from his need to see the latest hippest film, to his postmodern apartment and trendy metrosexual style. I, on the other hand, am attracted to old things. My house is old and so are the things I put in it. I liked vintage clothes 20 years ago and I still wear retro-clothes, though new-since such clothes exist now, I'm a grown-up, and they fit better. Mr. economist hardly ever goes back in time to understand the world and humans, but when he does, he goes back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years and studies men and systems; whereas when I search for answers I go back 30, 000 to 300 million years, and study our distant primate relatives and even microbes. (I should add that I am also fairly neophilic, but in the way Geoffrey Miller (2000) discusses neophilia in The Mating Mind.) How does a new, Apollinian mind-or DD (left-brain dominant) mind work? The culture at this very moment in time says that (for a female) having a bit of a tummy (as opposed to very flat or muscley) is nice, and so this is what he likes now. But when it didn't-just a few summers ago-he didn't. (This 'bit-o-tummy' meme may change by the summer, though!) There are some men who have a hair-trigger sensitivity to culture's ebbs and flows and laws and fashions-while some men listen to something much more deep and primal; who listen to the 'nature' within. (Again, I'm not sure if it's a question of listening to the depth within, or a question of having it there to listen to or not.) In social psychology there is something called attribution theory-dispositional attribution versus situational attribution. A dispositional attribution (inference) is when a person identifies or attributes someone's behavior to the person's disposition, nature, and personality. A situational attribution (inference) is when a person identifies or attributes someone's behavior to the person's situation/environment. The tendency for people to attribute a particular behavior or trait to one's essential nature and not to the situation, more often, and therefore, more often erroneously, is what is known as "correspondence bias" and more specifically "the fundamental attribution error" (Ross, 1977). Most thinking people are aware of the fundamental attribution error. The right-wing typically is identified with this kind of less reasoned, more automatic attribution; the left typically with more reasoned and fairer situational attributions. There is no social psychological term (as of yet, and probably there never will be) for the tendency for folks who are hyper-sensitive to the fundamental attribution error or who have a tendency to make situational attributions more often than dispositional ones; their number are so few. (One again wonders if this dichotomy, this difference in attribution style can be located somewhere...in the brain or genes...Actually, I wonder. My economist wouldn't.) As essentially more Dionysian, my mind is oodles and oodles more fluid and boundary-less, and uncontrolling and feminine and eastern, and artistic and nonjudgmental and non-labely, and okay, a little bit more nutty than Mr. economist's Apollinian mind. When I think of the people I know who are social constructionists, these are people who are very masculine, logical, judgmental, critical, controlling, rigid, etc. Why is this so? It doesn't make sense! Especially since the EP (evolutionary psychology) model is innatist and positivist and male, whereas the social-constructionist model is relational and female. Maybe there is something to his thing about rebellion! Maybe we adopt these views as reaction formations? A "reaction formation" is a kind of defense mechanism which protects one's self-concept. The classic example is of the homophobe who is, in fact, a latent homosexual. Although Tom feels Id-y homosexual longing and desire (having something to do with nature and nurture, no doubt, though probably more to do with nature), he also feels a strong Super-ego-y injunction against homosexual behavior (having something to do with nature and nurture, no doubt, though probably more to do with nurture). So how does Tom, with his strong moral judge/Super-ego defend himself from acting on these Id-y impulses that do not jibe with his self-concept? He reacts against them most fiercely. And he does so because he knows about the foot-in-the-door phenomenon. He knows that once you open the door a little to something, you are just a few more steps from acting on something. So the door must be completely shut; the smallest opening, the barest light shining through, and it's all over. He would love and get in a bed with a man; Tom would be a gay man. I suggest the same thing happens with fierce social constructionists. So, the question is, does the economist cling to his social constructionist view because his real view frightens him? He is very decent and has a highly developed moral sense and conscience. Perhaps he doesn't like what or the way he thinks naturally, and so he pushes it away and goes in the complete opposite direction because he doesn't feel comfortable with himself and he doesn't like the real, implicit, deep-down views he holds because they flow from the way his male, left-brain works: judging, labeling, boxing in, always truly committing the fundamental attribution error at an automatic, unconscious level. (See later discussion on genetic determinism and free-will. My economist is perhaps doing the best thing he can, given his nature!) I, on the other hand, don't do this by nature. I feel open to stuff, and don't generally feel the need to cover up how I feel about people, things, etc. I feel fairly comfortable with myself and my true feelings and views about people, etc. And so I feel free and easy to be open to all kinds of information. Information that suggests things are innate or hardwired is very threatening to people whose minds naturally have heuristics and algorithms which are male and compartmentalized. My openness to knowledge-and often what is considered 'dangerous knowledge' is treated by aggressive male social constructionists as, indeed, dangerous. But it's as if the ideas really don't matter that much, but that what matters is their (the social constructionists') domination in the ideology war. (Here, maybe some memes- contra memetic-theory-are in service of some genes (DD).) As J. Phillippe Rushton, an evolutionary theorist points out: "It would appear that people are able to detect genetic similarity in others and act accordingly. Religious, political, and other ideological battles may become as heated as they do because they have implications for genetic fitness; genotypes will thrive more in some cultures than others. From this perspective, Karl Marx did not take the argument far enough in the distal direction: ideology serves more than economic interest; it also serves genetic purpose." Truth versus Fiction There appear to be several critiques of EP from the social structuralists/social constructionists/poststructuralists/environmentalists. Environmental Superficial straw-man argument The argument that EP doesn't consider the environment an influence or even a cause of human behavior and psyche, that it's solely about genes and therefore erroneous because the Standard Social Science Model has proven time and time again that the environment plays a large role in influencing human behavior and psyche, fails because it doesn't take into account that "evolutionary theory [psychology] represents a truly interactionist framework. Human behavior cannot occur without two ingredients: 1. evolved adaptations and 2. environmental input that triggers the development and activation of these adaptations" (Buss, 1999). Social Structural/Social Role Theory Deeper, well-informed etiology argument Arguments that recognize that evolutionary psychologists are not committing a fallacy of false dichotomy about nature and nurture, go back farther in time and argue about origins. Here is Alice Eagley (1999), a proponent of the social structural/role theory: "One important feature is shared by these two origin theories: Both offer a functional analysis of behavior that emphasizes adjustment to environmental conditions. However, the two schools of thought differ radically in their analysis of the timing of the adjustments that are most important to sex-differentiated behavior.. . .in the origin theory proposed by evolutionary psychologists, the critical causal arrow points from evolutionary adaptations to psychological sex differences. Because women and men possess sex-specific evolved mechanisms, they differ psychologically and tend to occupy different social roles. In contrast, in the social structural origin theory, the critical causal arrow points from social structure to psychological sex differences. Because men and women tend to occupy different social roles, they become psychologically different in ways that adjust them to these roles." We will probably never be able to answer with authority who is right here. I think we can, however, say that EP has more explanatory power than social structural/role theory. It attempts to answer why "men and women tend to occupy different social roles" not just describe it. Evolutionary psychologists do study innate, evolved psychological mechanisms, but the model admits that those mechanisms have been selected for and have been shaped by the environment through natural and sexual selection, and also, that those mechanisms are subject to huge variability within environments-that we are quite adaptable and plastic. Social Structuralist/Social Constructionist/Environmentalist EP = genetic determinism/immutability begs-the-question argument Certainly the desire to dispute EP comes from an understandable fear (historically) that nativist arguments are akin to genetic determinism and immutability, which they are not. The feminist psychologist Hilary M. Lips (2005) writes: "The [sociobiological] theory implies that such human social behaviors as war, rape, and racism have been 'built in' through our evolution and that it is impossible to make fundamental changes in the relations between the sexes." (p.77) Yikes. The theory neither implies this, nor do evolutionary psychologists (or sociobiologists) say this. In fact, they say quite the opposite. I'll return to this question later, but here's evolutionary psychologist, David M. Buss (1996, p. 306 "Contrary to common misconceptions about evolutionary psychology, documenting that sex differences originated through a causal process of sexual selection does not imply that the differences are unchangeable or intractable." Social Constructionist/Poststructuralist Knowledge is socially constructed; there is no Truth; EP-is-a- narrative argument. It seems pretty safe and reasonable to say that ideology and subjectivity can shape our epistemological framework; ideology and subjectivity color our assumptions and premises, our research methodology, and the way we interpret evidence and data. However, even social constructionists admit: "We need not turn away from scientific research. Rather, we must remain conscious of the ways in which the research process and its results are shaped and limited by social context." (Lips, 2004, p.126) Admitting knowledge is socially constructed is not tantamount to throwing away the epistemic baby with the bath water. That is, the truth of social constructionism does not in-and-of-itself necessarily negate epistemological advances or make knowledge gathered from the sciences inert. Karl Popper, who along with Thomas Kuhn forever changed the way we see 'truth' writes: "Here then is the similarity between my own view (the 'third view') and essentialism; although I do not think we can ever describe, by our universal laws, an ultimate essence of the world, I do not doubt that we may seek to probe deeper and deeper into the structure of the world or, as we might say, into properties of the world that are more and more essential, or of greater and greater depth. (1957, p.166-7) Some things are fiction and some things are true, and some things are closer to truth than fiction. That's what EP is, closer to truth. When it comes to 'knowledge' gained from the social sciences (and perhaps, all sciences) it is virtually impossible to say it is 'true'. The 'soft' science of psychology can never be a pure, objective hard science, by dint of what it is. But even in the hard sciences there is recapitulation and 'truth' changes. (E.g., Kuhnian paradigm shifts, such as Ptomelaic to Copernican to Keplerian model (planets), or Newton to Einstein (general relativity).) Talking about narratives, then, becomes a semantics game. I would be willing to see the differences as different narratives, if I knew exactly what my friend the economist really meant by narrative. But if he means that EP is a narrative because everything is a narrative-even our hardest sciences are narratives and metaphors-then, sure, okay, EP is a narrative. But it belongs in a particular spot on the narrative spectrum, in terms of its explanatory power. Of course, this is a subjective spectrum-he might see it quite differently (i.e., he might not see it as a spectrum at all, or he might order it in a different way). But as far as disciplines advancing our knowledge and getting a better understanding of human nature, I'd order the 'narrative spectrum' something like this: Literature/Religion (Literature and Religion can be interchanged in terms of order, depending on the specific literature or religion. Indeed, some Eastern religions also have explanatory power that would have them in the next levels, possibly.) -> Philosophy [examples: moral, philosophy of mind, existential, Eastern, metaphysics, etc.] -> SSSM (Standard Social Science Model) [examples: sociology, social psychology, cognitive/behavioral psychology, psychoanalytic/Jungian] -> Evolutionary Psychology [a synthesis of: evolutionary biology, primatology, anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, ethology, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, archeology, social psychology, Jungian/Freudian psychology] (EP also flirts with literature -Adaptionist Literary Studies, Darwinian Literary Criticism, Darwinian Literary Science, Evolutionary Fiction- and much from the disciplines in the social sciences, philosophy, and religion.) *Note that 'science' figures ever more prominently as you move 'down' the spectrum. So, the big-picture critique from the social constructionists/structuralists/ environmentalists goes something like this: Since there is no truth, and since we construct our truth/narratives, and since we are not genetically determined, and since the genetic-determinist narrative is dangerous as it suggests that we cannot change, or that the environment can't ameliorate certain social problems, etc., we should reject its use-value as a narrative. This critique doesn't stand up because: * the premise that there is no truth is specious; * the premise that EP is genetically determinist is false; and * the premise that EP is patently false because the social environment plays a more central role, is questionable. Again, EP is the closest to truth that we can get to an understanding of human nature. But just as it's not nature or nurture but an interaction, it's also not a question of positivism versus social constructionism, or science versus just-so-stories. It's not the absolute truth; but it most certainly is not a just-so story, either. As narratives go, we might argue it is a truer one-richer and deeper in explanation, than others. Why EP is Where It's At (on the Narrative Spectrum) Evolutionary psychology is a synthesis of many sciences-some fairly hard ones, as shown in the 'narrative spectrum' above: cognitive science, evolutionary biology, anthropology, behavioral genetics, primatology, neuroscience, archaeology, ethology, to name just a few. It is an integrative and synthetic social science, which stands on the shoulders of various sciences and accumulated 'knowledge' and uses its own relatively young parent, psychology, to make predictions and to generate hypotheses. In essence, it weaves a synthetic interpretation from all these sciences to understand our nature, offering us the best model (story) we've ever had for understanding human nature. It is far beyond a Just-so story. It is a very good and compelling story, in the same way Darwin's 'story' is 'better' and more 'true' than the Bible's. (But, of course, there is much disagreement about that, too.) In fact, I don't see EP as a sub-discipline of psychology at all, the way it is now taught in introductory psychology courses. As a powerful meta-theory, I see it as Psychology-as a consilient, synthetic, interdisciplinary social science, which not only uses other disciplines and sub-disciplines to understand the human mind and human behavior, it also sometimes helps to explain certain phenomena in sub-disciplines. As an example, take evolutionary psychology and social psychology. While social psychology sometimes explains and predicts behavior, it also does a fair amount of just describing it. Evolutionary psychology, however, explains further and deeper. > From David Meyers's widely used Social Psychology textbook: "Men are more likely than women to attribute a woman's friendliness to mild sexual interest. This misreading of warmth as a sexual come-on (called misattribution) can contribute to behavior that women (especially American women) regard as sexual harassment or rape...Men more often than women think about sex. Men also tend to assume that others, including women, share their feelings. Thus, men can easily overestimate the sexual significance of a woman's courtesy smile. What Jane intends as 'just a smile' may give John the wrong idea." (p. 85) Compare that, which is fundamentally descriptive, to David Buss's treatment of the courtesy smile, which has a little more explanatory power. Evolutionary psychology doesn't disagree with social psychology, it just explains why such a misattribution might exist. "When in doubt men infer sexual interest according to studies (Abbey, 1982; Saal, Johnson, & Werber, 1989) (DeSouza, Pierce, Zanelli, & Hutz, 1992)]. Men act on their inferences, occasionally opening up sexual opportunities. If over evolutionary history even a tiny fraction of these led to sex, men would have evolved lower thresholds for inferring women's sexual interest. (p. 315-6) One can think of other ways to look at this, using evolutionary psychology, social psychology, learning theory, and feminist models: The smile as a universally submissive sign. Or, the smile as a secondary reinforcer; and as such, it probably lights up reward centers in the brain of the observer. The simple heuristic/algorithm might then be: "When she smiles, that means I am valued; when I'm valued, I am 'wanted. In addition, some evolutionary psychologists not only describe and explain; they also discuss ways in which their theories might be helpful in reducing human behavior that may be painful or harmful to others. Here's David Buss's prescriptive 'take' on the smile: "Evolutionary psychology provides a heuristic to identify the contexts more likely to trigger conflict between the sexes. In my own research, for example, I have examined the cues that cause men to infer greater sexual interest on the part of a woman than may be the case...a woman smiling at a man, being friendly to a man, and going to a bar alone....[and] have identified signals that do not appear to cause misunderstanding such as dancing closely and prolonged eye contact. This work thus reveals the contexts in which intervention would be most likely to succeed at reducing conflict between men and women. For example, men as a group could be apprised of the finding that, as a group, they tend to overestimate the sexual intentions of a woman who smile at them and thus may want to be more cautious before acting on the basis of a mere smile. After all, a woman might simply be trying to be friendly (Abby, 1992)." (Buss, 1996, p. 315) Choosey Minds, Whorish Modules, and the Politics of Darwin We can empirically prove that hydrogen has one proton with one electron orbiting it. But wait, apparently, we shouldn't say 'orbiting' anymore, because that would be seeing things from the outdated and discredited Rutherford model, and we would be closer to the 'truth' if we said "more or less hovering around it in a fuzzy sort of way." But still, we can feel wonderful epistemic certainty (see below about 'epistemic anxiety') that Hydrogen has one proton and one electron more or less hovering around it in a fuzzy sort of way. Quantity and numbers we can have certainty about, description and movement is another thing. We cannot empirically prove that men tend to have an evolved psychological mechanism that prefers youth and beauty because youth and beauty conferred particular reproductive payoffs over millions of years of natural and sexual selection; and that those characteristics (youth and beauty) were (and still are) a signal of fecundity, reproductive value, developmental stability, health, etc. But EP's theoretical and scientific explanation is pretty close to empirical-as empirical as you're likely to get studying the human mind and behavior. The EP-model explains this particular male propensity deeply and more scientifically, going back further in time and using many more disciplines than the SSSM (standard social science model)-which in this case would be the feminist view. Feminism argues that this male propensity has been learned and is the result of men's historical and current domination over women; that the culture reflects that misogyny and that men react and learn from it. EP theory doesn't necessarily argue against that view, but rather views such an assertion as limited in scope. Here's an example of how an understanding of our human nature through an evolutionary lens, with an historical and environmental/cultural approach, can be the most powerful, and why I am, frankly, irked by knee-jerk feminists who know little about what EP is about, yet make claims against it. We can actually take an EP approach to the question of men and their evolved preferences for youth and beauty and admit feminist ideology. How so? First we must look at what it means when we say youth and beauty. What is generally considered beautiful and attractive in females tends toward the neotenous and gracile spectrum; that is, youthful and 'feminine' features. Of course, what is thought of as feminine in this culture is, to some degree, in flux. But let us for a moment think of it in absolutist terms, more like yin, at least so there can be a discussion. One can imagine, from an EP view, that our male ancestors had (as males have today) a strong desire not to be cuckolded. There is a good deal of evidence in the literature to defend this assertion, having to do with "paternity uncertainty," hidden ovulation, and the male desire to not invest resources to mother and offspring, if the offspring's genes are someone else's. From this position of epistemic anxiety (see beginning of essay about male/female dichotomy), which all men have (and women necessarily don't have-we know when our kid is our kid), one could imagine that men might select as sexual partners women who were relatively submissive and docile. As it happens, there is probably a correlation between one's disposition (aggressive/passive) and one's endocrine system, as well as a connection between one's hormones and one's fitness indicators. That is, large eyes, full lips, small nose, small chin, low face and large forehead may indicate and signal various hormones (e.g., estrogen, oxytocin) which may signal high fecundity and high maternal behavior. These features may also signal low testosterone, which might signal a relatively lower sex drive which would be desirable in a female mate, as it could result in her not seeking out other sexual partners-and receptivity/passivity generally. The idea is, that these features would be selected for (unconsciously, of course, having to do with a female's behavior and personality) so that men could dominate physically and perhaps even in some other domains. So it should be apparent how one could adopt an evolutionary lens to understand why men prefer young and beautiful women, while at the same time holding a feminist perspective. Unfortunately, the popular culture has generated some shallow and spurious EP sound bites which have had an influence even on social scientists. Here's what a feminist academic psychologist just asked me the other day: "But isn't it dangerous to teach that women's sexual strategies are monogamous and men's are not?" Ah! But this is not at all what I teach, nor is it what evolutionary psychologists teach. Evolutionary psychologists devote much theorizing as to why, in fact, women are often not monogamous. In David M. Buss's Evolutionary Psychology (1999, p.176-7) textbook, under the heading: "Hypotheses about the Adaptive Benefits to Women of Short-term Mating," he lists five classes of benefits which have been proposed, and goes on to describe them in detail: resources, genes, mate switching, mate skill acquisition, and mate manipulation. EP teaches that both men and women employ both long-term and short-term mating strategies, including non-monogamous strategies. Evolutionary psychologists, I don't think, ever say that women are more monogamous than men, only that, from an adaptionist perspective of men's biology (from a gene's-eye view), it might have been more adaptive and fitness-maximizing (replicating more genes) for men to have evolved a strong propensity (a psychological mechanism) for wanting sex with lots of women, and women to have evolved a psychological mechanism for being choosier. This says nothing about what women in fact do, or what they ought to do. And evolutionary psychologists certainly never make the claim that it's woman's essential nature to be monogamous. Buss writes: The great initial parental investment of females makes them a valuable reproductive resource (Trivers, 1972). Gestating, bearing, lactating, nurturing, protecting, and feeding a child are exceptionally valuable reproductive resources that are not allocated indiscriminately. Economics 101 tells us that those who hold valuable resources do not give them away haphazardly. Because women in our evolutionary past risked investing enormously as a consequence of having sex, evolution favored women who were highly selective about their mates. Ancestral women suffered severe costs if they were indiscriminating-they experienced lower reproductive success, and fewer of their children survived to reproductive age." But he also says this, which should be interesting to my feminist colleague: "When it comes to long-term mating or marriage, however, it is equally clear that both men and women invest heavily in children, and so the theory of parental investment predicts that both sexes should be very choosy and discriminating." (p. 102-3) The bottom line is this: men and women both engage in short- and long-term mating strategies, but when it comes down to it, it is probably not just enculturation that makes a woman much less likely to say 'yes' to a stranger's sexual advances than a man's to a strange woman's. In fact one study had 50% of both men and women saying yes to a date with a stranger, but when asked for sex, 75% of males and 0% of females agreed (Clarke and Hatfield, 1989). The feminist academic psychologist also asked me if it was not dangerous to our students to teach that "motherhood is innate and that the only way to be happy is to be a mother." My goodness! What does she think I'm teaching, Spencerian anti-feminist, fundamentalist essentialism? That most women are equipped to be mothers is a biological truth. That we have a particular evolved psychological mechanism for attachment and nurturing is also a truism I think anyone would be hard-pressed to deny. But so what? We have many 'developmental programs' within us that don't get activated by the environment and don't 'need' to be. A woman can be just as happy without children as she can be miserable with them! One thing evolutionary psychologists and EP supporters must continue to explain to people is that they're not in the business of committing the naturalistic fallacy! Here's another example of how the social structural/role perspective can be misleading, from Questions of Gender (1998), a textbook that is generally a little more balanced than some of the other Gender/Psychology of Women textbooks: "In traditional heterosexual dating relationships, there are roles assigned to male and females. Typically men initiate the date, make the plans, and pay for both his and her expenses. Women respond to male initiatives. Of course, not everyone follows these social roles. When these roles are violated, however, people are often acutely aware that their behavior or the behavior of others is in violation of a social expectation. Clearly, these social roles have no biological mandate-we are not hardwired to either pay or not pay for a movie or dinner, to respond 'yes' or 'no' to an invitation to a party, or to open doors or smile at bad jokes." (Anselmi & Law p. 2) Though we are not hardwired to pay or not pay for a date, there is some reason to suspect that we may have algorithms or decision rules to prefer paying or being paid for; and that, statistically-speaking, what one's sex is (not just gender) has something to do with such preferences. If learning and the environment are more powerful than biology, as the above quote very clearly expresses, and in fact, hardwiring has nothing to do with my behavior or psyche on a date, why would I, having grown up on a solid diet of postmodern feminism and Marxism from the moment I could babble and somewhat understand all the grown-ups around me, and with all the people around me supporting "equality of the sexes" in such things as paying for dates, etc., still have this general, unamorous feeling deep inside when a man on a first date (it hasn't happened often-okay, it happened once!) doesn't offer to pay, but then wants a goodnight kiss. This dark and not-so-nice response I experienced goes against what I believe in and everything my subculture believes in. I refuse to believe that it's because the dominant culture has so deeply embedded these feelings of value and meaning into my psyche. I am not that weak. The voice I hear is not the voice of Madison Avenue. It is the voice of my ancestral mothers; all those women before me who were clever and resourceful and sexy enough to extract some form of payment (meat, care for young, etc.) in exchange for sexual favors/access. Such an understanding of woman's nature is actually liberating to me...it helps to understand the cognitive dissonance I have so often felt. And with time, it could help me to work against such hardwiring, if I so desired. Which brings up, again, the notion of genetic determinism and free-will. Steven Pinker, in the Blank Slate, writes eloquently in defending the position that it is logical to say that we can have both innate propensities (evolved psychological mechanisms) and free-will. David Berlinski, of the Discovery Institute (an anti-Darwinian "Intelligent Design" think-tank), thinks otherwise: "Thus, when Steven Pinker writes that 'nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives,' he is expressing a hope entirely at odds with his professional commitments. If ordinary men and women are, like the professor himself, perfectly free to tell their genes 'to go jump in the lake,' why then pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology-why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?" (Commentary, 2004) I will turn to this existential, transcendental question again, but one point should be made here. Cognitive psychology and social psychology have 'discovered' some interesting things about our brains and minds. One such interesting thing is our dual attitude system. "We can have differing explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) attitudes toward the same target." (Meyers, 2004, p. 337) I would argue that these implicit automatic attitudes, preferences, or responses are very deep and reflect millions of years of adaptations to the environment via natural and sexual selection. But part of the automatic system is also laid down during one's early years. Here's where there is hope, though, even for automatic thinking: "Although explicit attitudes may change dramatically with education, implicit attitudes may linger, changing only as we form new habits through practice." (Meyers, 2004, p. 337) So, an 'implicit' racist can change. But it takes work, at the individual level and at the societal level. But first we must be honest about our hardwiring, our 'program'. Social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive psychology have shown us that we are wired to be prejudiced; that thinking in such ways is a simple heuristic device that was actually helpful to our ancestors. But we all have the ability to think 'out of the simple box.' We're not fated to our automatic impulses and instincts. Even if we could determine with certitude (an unlikely possibility) that we have particular archetypal, modular, algorithmic, 'structures,' say, a mother-infant system, or a heterosexual-system (father-mother archetypes), we would be very mistaken to extract any ethical, moral values from such, and certainly to go further toward social policy would be disastrous. Social constructionists/environmentalists are often alarmed at particular research or even speculation on such hard-wired systems/algorithms. They write things like: "...Sociobiologists in general reach the conclusion that women should do the childcare (p. 24)....The use of sociobiology to 'justify' a role for mothers as exclusive child caretakers is unjustified. (p. 42)" (Sternglanz, Nash, 1988). I agree it is unjustified and would like to know who these sociobiologists are who say this. Here's why social constructionists and environmentalists shouldn't fear research or speculation on hard-wired systems: 1. Evolutionary psychology simply is not genetic determinism, as was discussed earlier. 2. An epistemically open society is better than an epistemically repressed society. With research and speculation comes opposing assertions and models. If people are driven to hide their speculations, it only festers and gains momentum and power in a kind of underground, communal memetic sphere. But if research is out in the open, it provides open-dialogue with an opposition, which is good. (Recall reaction formation from an earlier discussion and why it is valuable for the individual and society for an individual to be open and unrepressed. For example, some hate crimes are the result of repressed, reaction formations.) And, if researchers somehow 'discovered' a heterosexual-system, say, it could perhaps invoke a response to dispute it, or to perhaps search for a hardwired homosexual-system, or some other kind of archetypal system. Here's Helena Cronin, a feminist EPer (Interview/The Philosopher's Magazine "Certainly, human nature is fixed. But the behaviour that it generates is richly varied. Our evolved minds are designed to help us to react appropriately to the different environments that we find ourselves in. It is thanks to our genetic endowment, not in spite of it, that we can generate our rich behavioural repertoire. Change the environment and you change the behaviour. So an understanding of the evolved psychology of our species - of our motivations and desires - is vital for political action; we need to know which aspects of our environment have to be altered in order to achieve the desired ends. The task, then, is to understand human nature, not to change it." Of One Mind? In terms of evolved psychological mechanisms/innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) and manifest behavior or traits, I would like to be able to argue for a universal human nature, even in the face of huge individual differences. However, say I wanted to argue that, along with our hierarchical nature, we also have the capacity to be nonhierarchical. Now, right there it almost sounds nonsensical to say it is our human nature to be hierarchical but that we have the capacity not to be that way. (This was Berlinski's point against Pinker.) But I do understand Cosmides (1992), I think, and I'm willing to view it as an epigenetic structure that can be turned up/on, or not, which has great variability, etc. However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about multi-phylogenetic modes along the lines of Paul MacLean's triune brain model (1976) or Jim Henry's four-brain system (1977) instead of a universal human nature. Homo Sapiens's hierarchical mode (Apollinian) is probably a lot newer than Homo Sapiens's spiritual/connected-to-everything-feeling/nonhierarchical mode (Dionysian)-which must represent, phylogenetically, something older- even though we think of the hierarchical mode as being more primitive and the connected/spiritual as being more 'evolved'. In terms of a time-line it might go something like this: Pre-reptiles (beginning of reptiles)-nonhierarchical Reptiles and hominids-hierarchical EEA cousins-nonhierarchical and hierarchical Modern homo sapiens sapiens-hierarchical and nonhierarchical EP and behavioral genetics are at odds sometimes, but they needn't be. And now it looks like that they've found the genes controlling spiritual 'feeling'. And my suspicion that some people have it and some don't, appears to be true. > From my novel, Trine Erotic (2002 "She suspected these romantic, fate thoughts they both had were 'designed' for a reason. That there had to be some kind of belief-in-fate module, a mental organ in the brain, just as there is a belief-in-God module. Some people's are 'set' very high. Others don't even have them. Perhaps this fate module was even close to the God module, some kind of Belief area, maybe near the amygdala or hypothalamus. 'Caleb, I think this fate idea, or feeling that we have is some kind of mechanical, deep evolutionary thing. You can see the value as far as reproduction, right?...Our ancestors who had thoughts like this were probably tenacious...and could beat out their rivals for their desired mate...and would care for their loved offspring in a passionate way. The survival of the belief-in-fate gene.'" (p.136) Now, that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have all the genes that might make someone feel spiritual naturally, can't get to that place. But it would probably take concerted effort-lots and lots of meditation and will, and indoctrination, and mushrooms, etc. And then still, it may not be the same thing as the natural Dionysian man-not even close. How would the universal human nature argument proceed, then? We all have psychological evolved mechanisms/structures to feel connected/spiritual, Dionysian, etc.? But, again, what about people who don't feel this way and don't have these genes? Do they have this potential/structure? What does that look like? If nonspirituals (Apollinian types) don't have genes that seem to carry such a disposition and their brains don't appear to reflect it either, how can we say it is there for everyone? Especially when, despite powerful forces like models (parents), school, peers, society, some people have no spiritual feeling or religiosity, etc. And the reverse is also true. Is it that the 'spiritual' program isn't universal, because even the environment doesn't seem to be able to kick it in? Or that it is a part of universal human nature, because if it's not there innately, it is possible for people to feel such feelings given the right set of circumstances? Is it semantic and political? If we say there's no universal human nature, but then make nativist claims here and there, do we get closer to right-wing ideology and behavior genetics? I think we have two choices-but we can choose both if we want. 1. We can say here is human nature warts and all and it's taken millions of years of mother nature's 'fine-tuning' to get it where it is and it's not likely to change in any dramatic way anytime soon, so let's, with our knowledge and understanding of who we are and where we came from, try to change (as Cronin and others suggest), our environment, to make it more compatible with our hunter-gatherer minds. (An example would be to focus on creating more cohesive communities and less fractured alienated ones, since we know that 99% of our "brain-time" as a species evolved in small hunter-gatherer tribes.) This is the practical, pragmatic, active approach. The idea would be to try to create a world that by and large helps to activate certain modules/bioprograms. However, this could sound, to some, like on the path to right-wing ideology or whacky Luddite utopia. But it doesn't have to be either. We needn't not be realistic nor give up freedoms and individual rights and choice. Freedom and individual rights trump the notion that there may be an inherent, archetypal, mother-father system, say. If we maintain as the ultimate goal, though, the pursuit and experience of happiness and democracy, then other ways will not only be tolerated, but embraced and supported. What the project in this case would do would be to try to support people's innate archetypal goals and programs. (My own opinion regarding an archetypal mother-father system is that if there is such an archetypal module (Price/Stevens), it is not so much a question of sex (i.e., man and woman), but of an inherent need of a developing person (i.e., child) to have the two modes of masculine and feminine principles exhibited. In homes with two moms and two dads, there is usually one parent who plays the role of nurturer and merger of boundaries (more passive) and one who plays the role of fixed boundaries and the law (more active). Aside from all the obvious reasons why being a single parent is so tough (I am one), it may in part have to do with the dual roles one has to play more often than not. A better understanding of such an innate system could yield ways in which to support the developmental needs of children- and to support single parents and parents in same-sex relationships, etc. (But this is very speculative.) 2. And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, dualistic route, not terribly postmodern position and say, one of human nature's features is that it is binary: Reason and passion, Id and Superego, reptilian brain and neocortex, feeling and thought, left-brain and right-brain, head and heart, Dionysian and Appolinian, agonic and hedonic (Chance, 1970), hierarchical versus affiliative, instinct and rationality, animalness and godliness, nature and culture, individualistic/separate-feeling vs communitarian/connected-feeling-I could go on. We are every bit of one as we are the other. And we can choose to act on instinct or not. When we are hit, we can choose, through thinking first, whether we wish to do what feels good (limbically and reptiliany) and "right"-which is, generally, to hit back. Our prefrontal lobes give us the gift of not hitting back, running away, or freezing. We can reason, we can ask why, we can negotiate, we can forgive. The mass-proliferation of Eastern traditions, philosophies, and spiritualities (by way of prayer, meditation, yoga, belief, etc.) in the West over the past three decades attests to our yearning for this way of being. The 'science of spirituality' is hot right now: "The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing is the fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important region-the parietal lobe at the back of the brain-goes dim. It's this lobe that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the boundaries of the self fall away, creating the feeling of being at one with the universe. Combine that with what's going on in the other two lobes, and you can put together a profound religious experience." (Time, 2004) The capacity to feel spiritual or feel connected, self-transcendent, is probably a part of human nature. But, as with many things that evolutionary psychologists call a part of our universal human nature, in every individual there is variance, due to nature and nurture. Writes John Steadman Rice in his article "Romantic Modernism and the Self "The Transcendentalists, for example, maintained that humans possess, by nature, a divine inner being, an innate and benevolent spirituality. As such, individuals must be free to develop these innate capacities through 'a process of growth, unfolding and ripening, a gradual realization of inherent qualities latent in the organism from its very birth'-a process, again, believed to be 'thwarted in its development by a...conformist society. As I suggested, the above two choices, though quite philosophically dissimilar (the first one practical, with an emphasis on environmental factors-a materialist, empirical, almost revolutionary view; and the second one, transcendental, rational, with an emphasis on internal, subjective existential factors, need not be mutually exclusive. It is interesting to note that these two positions closely resemble a division in the adaptionist field, which Robert Storey describes in Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation: "It is between theorists who regard the human being as a 'hodgepodge' (to use E.O. Wilson's word) of various psychological adaptations to an ancient environment that no longer exists, and those who look upon the human being as a 'fitness-maximizing' organism, each of whose capacities may be assumed to have evolved to turn social environments to its genetic advantage." (Storey, 1996, p. xix) If one leans toward a hodgepodgist 'ultimate' view, one might lean toward choice number one (the materialist, practical, environmental program). Whereas, if one leans toward a more fitness-maximizing 'proximate' view, one might lean toward choice two, with its emphasis on rational, subjective choices. (One could almost apply a nature-nurture dichotomy/continuum here; where hodgepodgists are more nativist and 'fitness-maximizists' are less so.) I believe (as does Storey) that the answer lies on both sides of the division, and therefore, I see no reason to choose between programs, and so ultimately think choosing both is best. Interestingly, E.O. Wilson (who holds a hodgepodge view), argues against the transcendental position in an Atlantic Monthly article "The Biological Basis of Morality." In it he argues that the "naturalistic fallacy" is not a fallacy but a problem; that the Kantian formulation that there's a separate domain for making reasoned moral decisions, those which transcend instinct and reptilian Id-y desire, is wrong. "For if ought is not is, what is?" he asks. Wilson's point that much of what are moral codes and laws can be found hardwired into our biology because that's the way evolution works, is important and I think true. He writes: "From the consilient perspective of the natural sciences, they are no more principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates-the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are themselves willing to accept for the common good." One can be, like Wilson, an empiricist and recognize that our morality has been hardwired, while at the same time a transcendentalist, recognizing that our free will and bifurcated/triune brains enable us to go against what is, whatever the is is. We don't need to choose between these two options of pragmatism and transcendentalism. We can have an understanding of our transcendental nature, and every day put it into practice. (This is often the domain of faith and religion, but it doesn't have to be, it can be very practical. Recall an earlier discussion about the 'dual attitude system' and implicit and explicit/automatic and conscious attitudes; recall, too, Mr. left-wing economist-we can, albeit slowly, change our ancient habits of mind through practice.) And on the other side, empirically and pragmatically, we can view our bifurcated nature as somewhat fixed and that rather than relying on religion, the law and hope, we can actually change our social structure in some radical way to fit our human nature, rather than the other way around. Wilson might argue we have the systems we have because of our nature, which may be true, but they are only some of the possible ones to have come out of our hierarchal nature. And that's where the two kinds of minds come in again. We are hierarchal. And that kind of way of categorizing the world seems to be especially a left-brain (DD-mind), Western, male, individualist, language-dependent thing. Whereas the non-hierarchal mode seems to be more a feature of a right-brain (DC-mind), Eastern, female, collectivist, emotion-dependent way. Some evolutionary psychologists would have us believe that it is our nature to be hierarchal, but that's only one side/part of us. It's there to be sure, but we have the capacity for getting out of it. So the program might be: Let's have people do more of what they can do to activate the underdog side, since we all can clearly see where the uber-dogs are taking us. And, let us bravely engage in the best science we can to understand our human nature, especially the part that makes life so interesting and difficult. Because it is from our sound understanding of ourselves that we will be better equipped to make better decisions about social policy, and which may even help inform us on how to design better worlds and communities to live in. As one leading evolutionary psychologist wrote to me in a personal correspondence: "A social agenda that isn't grounded in an accurate understanding of human nature has always been worse than useless." Of course, any attentive social constructionist would get up in arms about such a statement-an accurate understanding of human nature. Talk about positivist! Though I'm very sympathetic with such a statement, I would probably say a 'more accurate understanding.' He and I-unlike my ex, the economist-share a similar worldview. But I suspect that that tiny distinction regarding certitude, once again, could have something to do with the essential differences of our nature and minds. A Mind for Evolutionary Fiction Man must be a liar by nature, he must be above all an artist. And he is one. Metaphysics, religion, morality, science-all of them only products of his will to art, to lie, to flight from 'truth,' to negation of truth....Art is worth more than truth... Art as the real task of life. - Nietzsche, The Will to Power The continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and Dionysian duality....The balance of these ideas, and thus the balance of the individual and the whole, leads to the development of higher forms of art, specifically an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art-Attic tragedy. - Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Critical theory and aesthetics are kind of dry, namby-pamby sub-disciplines relative to other forceful and real-world sub-disciplines such as political theory, say, or evolutionary theory, aren't they? And yet, who hasn't gotten excited and furious at least a couple of times in life over defending a film, painting, or book? What is the reason for this 'aesthetics passion'? The reason we so often come alive when interpreting, defending, judging, and assigning (or not assigning) value or merit to (aesthetic) cultural products, I would argue-and will, is that these judgments are really, in the end, battles; and not just battles of wit and ego, but blood and gene battles-for what and who survives. Not so namby-pamby. (The battles of wits and egos are also, ultimately, about what and who survives.) In Michelle Scalise Sugiyama's abstract, from her article, "The Origins of Narrative: Storyteller Bias as a Fitness-Enhancing Strategy" she writes: "Stories consist largely of representations of the human social environment. These representations can be used to influence the behavior of others (consider, e.g., rumor, propaganda, public relations, advertising). Storytelling can thus be seen as a transaction in which the benefit to the listener is information about his or her environment, and the benefit to the storyteller is the elicitation of behavior from the listener that serves the former's interests. However, because no two individuals have exactly the same fitness interests, we would expect different storytellers to have different narrative perspectives and priorities due to differences in sex, age, health, social status, marital status, number of offspring, and so on." (p.403) I think this is true not only of the storyteller, but of the transmitter and promoter and detractor of the story (its content and form/style). So critic, editor, publisher, mother, all have much more at stake (in terms of fitness-enhancing, i.e., in terms of their genes) than we usually imagine. Someone on an e-listserv I belong to wrote: "I am abandoning reality for fiction and will stop reading non-fiction books. I think I know pretty much, at least in outline form, what is actually known about human nature from the biological and social sciences. Novelists have a way of getting at the complexities of the human condition that scientists have not." This is the romantic, seductive view, and pretty much any lover of fiction subscribes to this. 'You can learn more or get more from a novel' so goes the fictphilia meme, 'than say, a psychology textbook.' And there's much truth to this. Cognitive psychologists and evolutionary psychologists tell us that stories are an ancient heuristic-they're how we learn best. Our brains actually have story algorithms (or modules, if you will) because the narrative format probably helped our ancestors to remember invaluable information-information that was necessary for our survival. But the traditional fictiphiles are purists who seem to believe that once we become aware of a lesson or of information in the story, once the author starts 'telling us' instead of 'showing us'-it's all over: The pleasure is gone, its power is gone, and subsequently, the story's merit and value are gone. The romantic fictiphiles believe the only good fiction is fiction shrouded in a kind of Dionysian mystery. It's hard not to be sympathetic to this literary, artistic, romantic view. The character, Hermione, in D. H. Lawrence's, Women in Love characterizes the view quite well: "When we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but knowledge?" she asked pathetically. "If I know about the flower, don't I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren't we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren't we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing." (p. 34-5) At one point does art become science? At one point do we lose the Dionysian mystery? How much telling and how much science before a story, a novel, becomes less pleasurable, less powerful and less valuable? Hero, in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing says: "Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps." Traditional fictiphiles believe fiction gets its power from traps-from hiding and mystery. Just as the lover who is never quite in reach seduces and compels, good narrative, the argument goes, seduces by hiding, by appearing not to seduce. Of course, it's human nature to be drawn in and affected by what is elusive and not transparent; to want to search beyond what's offered and available; to always want a little more. Distant, enigmatic, and maybe even a little commitment-phobic, traditional fiction evokes desire and passion by 'exploiting' our evolved psychological mechanisms and preferences. We are cerebrally bifurcated and lateralized creatures. So, unlike music and visual art which are limbic and right hemispheric ("emotional"), and Dionysian -language is not. One way to make language a little more artistic and Dionysian (without music) is to write poetry, another is through story. And we know from Gazzaniga's studies with split-brain patients how the left brain has an endless capacity to make stuff up. What lies between truth and lies? What lies between science and art? What lies between the-thing-in-itself and mystery? Between knowing and being? Between reason and feeling? I think there's even more pleasure to be had than with the traditional pleasure of seductive fiction. And that pleasure, I think, can be found in the arrows of what I call 'meta-seductive fiction' -traditional fiction's sexy contender. Meta-seductive fiction seduces (if it's successful) by countering the seductive "hiding" strategy, with its openness-with hiding from hiding. Meta-seductive fiction flirts with truth and intimacy by telling the reader what it's doing and by expressing ideas openly, unafraid of logic's potential to prevent feeling. It isn't afraid of wanting to affect (and having a relationship with) the reader. It is male and positivist (in terms of content and epistemic project), while at the same time female and relational (in terms of form and affective project). But meta-seductive fiction doesn't say: "Tell, don't show." But rather: "tell and show; reveal and conceal." So how can you 'have the flower' in fiction - or in any language art? You can't. It's as simple as that. Again, that's the nature of language and of knowledge. Once you give up trying to make language something it's not, you are free to do something much more worthwhile and rather Dionysian: Meta-seductive fiction-a synthetic literary Attic art that is informed by science and 'truth'; that fuses the Apollinian (science and ideas, rationality) with the relatively Dionysian art of storymaking and lovely, euphonious, musical words. I am not afraid to push literature over to the edge of Apollo to burn. In fact, I believe the more we let in the light from certain Appolinian universals or 'truths', it becomes more Dionysian, or at the least, an Attic balancing of these principles. My novel, Trine Erotic, I believe comes close to marrying these two cultures of the humanities and the sciences (C.P. Snow)-what some refer to as third-culture art (Brockman; www.edge.org). Critical theorist Barry Laga writes: Deconstruction "wants to reveal the ideology of the binaries that govern a text (Who benefits from keeping these terms separate? Who benefits from the present polarity?) and open up new paths, reveal opportunities and possibilities, and offer a new way of perceiving the world." I want to do this, too! Who benefits from keeping art separate from science? From judging one kind of art as better than another art? Meta-seductive 'evolutionary fiction'-fiction which is informed by evolutionary theory, EP, ethology, Jung, neuroscience, etc., (but also 'evolutionary' in a transcendent sense), is to me "better" than most stories which are just straight narratives, uninformed by a "science of the mind." Now, 'better' for me only means that it gives me pleasure. It gives me pleasure because it lights up parts of my brain that have come to understand the world and human nature the way such writers of this infant genre have. Why such writers and I have this similar way of viewing the world, etc., is of course as complicated as all of these questions are; having to do with our essential nature, where our nature takes us, and also our 'nurture'. There is a mathematics to the pleasure I get from reading evolutionary fiction; as if my algorithms are working in synch with the writers', as if all the choices I have made to take in or discard information, add up (neuronally), and I am left with the same lens and language-and that sameness lights up the reward system in my brain. Because, after all, we have an ancient heuristics for digging things that are similar and the same. It makes things simpler and easier. I think there is a little battle just beginning between people who are social scientists and passionate about understanding the mind, yet who are creative and write stories, versus 'writers' without such a knowledge or drive to understand our human nature in such a particular way. I would not go so far as to say that evolutionary fiction-fiction that is informed and written through the lens of an evolutionary understanding of human nature-is better. But I can say that I enjoy immensely reading a story that is infused with the ideas of evolutionary theory/psychology, because that is how I understand the world. In terms of aesthetic merit and valuation, I believe it's phenomenological-that there is only one's subjective valuation. I see the labeling of what is good art versus what is not as a 'male', left-brain, Western, controlling activity; one that is meant to shape and control reproductive strategies, etc. "This is beautiful and should be hung up on a wall, or put in a magazine for all to see." The masses see it, imbibe it, and process what is beautiful and make reproductive choices (which is favoring some genes and brains over others). This idea is cogently expressed in George Heresy's The Evolution of Allure. In rephrasing a quote by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing he writes: "Beautiful statues reacted upon their creators, and beautiful men and women selected each other when they looked like those statues. Because of this, beautiful children were born." Heresy's thesis is about visual art and how the artist, influenced by already-created art and his or her experience of people (bodies/faces), creates art. The Platonic 'lovers of life'-people who view this art-are then influenced by it, shaping sexual selection and reproductive choices based on the art. I think we can look at all art in this way. As everyone knows, in literature, film, etc., the artist/writer can venerate a certain 'type' by all sorts of methods (some subtle, some not so subtle). I can only imagine, for example, that the selection for nebbishy, neurotic Jewish men has risen since Woody Allen's films. As a character (a Darwinian socialist) in Trine Erotic writes (p.68 "Because that's one of art's missions. It pushes us. It reveals. It pries us open little by little, exposing us, in a comfort zone. It's about normative values. And power, of course. If you rule art, you rule the world. Forget about the means of production. Art changes the strategy of reproduction. We are the product of art. Our minds, our bodies. What cultural products are valued? Rejected? What survives? Who survives I do believe there is a difference between saying: 'This story gives me more pleasure than that one because that is my worldview and closer to my sensibility and corresponds to my synaptic connections,' or what-have you, as opposed to a more positivist, authoritative/authoritarian approach which proclaims: 'This story is better.' 'This story is good art and that one isn't. This story is valuable. This story is. . . .' without qualification or a relativist/subjective position. Even with qualification, it is just a form of domination and exaltation of one's own particular aesthetic preference. Ironically, I am distinctly aware that by creating an attractive forum (my online journal Entelechy) for the kind of art that I value-I am participating in the battle. So be it. The kind of writing I value has sometimes been undervalued, depreciated and unrecognized-and after all, we're talking about a kind of complex meme (third-culture, meta-seductive, evolutionary fiction meme) which is somehow related to a certain set of genes (in me!); and of course these genes help maintain and support this meme (and vice-versa, ad infinutum). Perhaps this all sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but I feel there's a difference between being the underdog and saying, "We're okay, too" versus being the dominant aesthetic and saying "We are the only good and true art." In the end, it probably is a battle for what and who survives; though I kind of wish it weren't. I think it's all valuable. I want it all to survive. Notes 1. EP is a young science, not much more than 15-years-old, begat by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at UCSB. Other fields that share this approach are human ethology, evolutionary anthropology, and human behavioral biology. All these fields are the descendants of the 30-year-old discipline sociobiology, (E.O Wilson is the founding father); which, according to David Buss (1999, p. 17) is "a synthesis of cellular biology, integrative ethology, comparative psychology, population biology and behavioral ecology" and is basically the study of the genetic and evolutionary basis of animal and human behavior. References Anselmi, D. & Law, A. (1998). Questions of gender: Perspectives and paradoxes. Boston: McGraw Hill. Andrews, A. (2002). Trine erotic. New York: Vivisphere Publishing. Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds.). (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berlinski, D. (2004). On the origins of the mind. Commentary. November, 26-35. Buss, D.M. (1999). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Buss, D.M. (1996). Sexual conflict: evolutionary insights into feminism and the "battle of the sexes." In D.M. Buss & N. Malamuth (Eds.), Sex, power, conflict: Evolutionary and feminist perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. Chance, M.R.A. & Jolly, C.J. (1970). Social groups of monkeys and men. London: Jonathan Cape. Cronin, H., (2000). Interview with helena cronin. The Philosophers' Magazine, 11, 46-48. Eagley, A. & Wood, W. (1999). The origins of sex differences in human behavior: Evolved dispositions versus social roles. American Psychologist, 408-423. Gazzaniga, M.S. (1998). The split brain revisited. Scientific American, 279, 1, 35-39. Henry, J.P. & Stephens, P.M. (1977). Stress, health and the social environment: A sociobiological approach to medicine. New York: Springer. Hutcheon, P.D. (1995). Popper and Kuhn on the evolution of science. Brock Review, 4, 1/2, 28-37. Hochfield, G. (1982). New england transcendentalism. In F.Gura & J. Myerson (Eds.), Critical essays on american transcendentalism. Boston: G.K. Hall. 461. Heresy, G. (1996). The evolution of allure. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Johnson, S. (2004). The political brain. The New York Times, 8/22; Sec 6; 16. Laga, B. (2004). Reading with an eye on the structurality of structure: An introduction to structuralists and poststructuralists. [3]http://mesastate.edu/~blaga/deconstruction/deconstructiox.html Lawrence, D. H. (1920). Women in love. New York: Penguin Books. Lips, H.M. (2005). Sex and gender: An introduction; 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. McManus, C. (2002). Right hand, left hand: The origins of asymmetry in brains, bodies, atoms and cultures. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Meyers, D. (2005). Social psychology; 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Miller, G. F. (1996). Political peacocks. Demos Quarterly, 10 (Special issue on evolutionary psychology), 9-11. Miller, G. F. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. New York: Doubleday. Nietzsche, F. (1967/1885). The will to power. New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1967/1872). The birth of tragedy. New York: Random House. Pinker, S. (2002).The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking. Popper, K. (1957). The aim of science. In D Miller, (Ed.) (1985), Popper selections. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Rice, J. S., (1999). Romantic modernism and the self. The Hedgehog Review. Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (10). New York: Academic Press. Rushton, J.P. (1987). Evolution, altruism and genetic similarity theory. Mankind Quarterly, 27, 379-395. Sternglanz, S.H. & Nash, A. (1988). Ethological contributions to the study of motherhood. In. B.Birns & D. F. Hay, (Eds.), The different faces of motherhood. 15-46. New York: Plenum. Stevens, A. & Price, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychiatry: A new beginning (2nd edn). London: Routledge. Storey, R. (1996). Mimesis and the human animal: on the biogenetic foundations of literary representation. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Sugiyama, M.S. (1996). The origin of narrative: Storyteller bias as a fitness-enhancing strategy. Human Nature, 7, 4, 403-25. Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O. (1998). The biological basis of morality. The Atlantic Monthly, 281, 4. This discussion list, ANTHROPOS, is hosted by Metanexus Online . The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors. 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Metanexus hosts an online magazine and discussion forum with over 40,000 monthly page views and 7000 regular subscribers in 57 different countries. www.metanexus.net References 1. http://bhs.sunydutchess.edu/andrews 2. http://www.entelechyjournal.com/ 3. http://mesastate.edu/ 4. mailto:editor at metanexus.net 5. mailto:LISTSERV at LISTSERV.METANEXUS.NET From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:28:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:28:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: (Sperm Banks) Family Vacation Message-ID: Family Vacation http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061501885_pf.html Why would Raechel McGhee fly her two beloved children across the country to stay with a man they had never met? Because he is their father By Michael Leahy Sunday, June 19, 2005; W12 (the weekly magazine) His name is Mike Rubino, but until recently none of the women who bought his sperm to get pregnant had ever seen him or known him as anything other than Donor 929. Rubino left the sperm business for good a few years ago, thinking it would be another decade at least before any children found him. Now he is standing inside the Los Angeles International Airport, staring at an arrivals gate, awaiting the appearance of two children he has fathered but never met, along with their single mother, a Massachusetts psychotherapist named Raechel McGhee. At that moment, 44-year-old McGhee and her children are descending toward him in blackness and rain. "It is kind of unbelievable that this is about to happen, but I'm relaxed," Rubino says, not looking so relaxed, fidgeting with his brown hair, anxiously surveying an airport monitor until he's found a status report on the McGhees' flight. "On approach," he reads, craning his head toward the arrivals door. "I think their mother said she'd have the kids in slickers," he says, "and she said that she would be in a raspberry slicker." He falls silent. "Maybe this is going to take a while," he says, but then he glimpses a sliver of a raspberry-colored garment moving amid a horde of travelers, spotting a tall woman. He mutters, "There she is -- there they are." He hurries forward, calling out to the woman, "Hi, hi." The woman changes direction, veering toward him, smiling. McGhee looks Rubino up and down as he gets close, hugging him casually. She turns to her kids, gesturing at Rubino, and says, "Look who's here." The children -- a brown-haired boy one month shy of 7 named Aaron, and a 3 1/2-year-old blond girl named Leah -- stare up at him, mouths agape. Rubino turns to the boy, crouches, and hugs him gently. The boy's arms hang stiffly at his side. He tentatively wraps a thin arm around this man's neck, glancing up at his mother for some sign of approval. But she hasn't noticed his glance, open-mouthed herself, drinking in the 45-year-old Rubino, this slender, fair-skinned artist in jeans and a gray T-shirt. Rubino comes out of his crouch, simultaneously lifting the boy a few inches off the floor, then putting him down the way he would a fragile package. Everyone is smiling, the boy broadest of all. "Do it again," he mumbles. Rubino reaches out for little Leah, who jumps back as if his arms might swallow her up. "What do you say to this guy?" McGhee asks her daughter. "Who is this man?" "This is California," the little girl says, dancing away from him toward baggage claim. Rubino watches her, thinking, This is my daughter -- the moment so extraordinary for him as to be slightly surreal. This all began for him a decade ago in a small locked room of the California Cryobank, where, amid soft-porn tapes and magazines, he produced semen that was sold around the world. Only in the late 1990s, about five years after he had made his first deposit, did he acquire any sense of his sperm's appeal, when he was lured out of donor retirement by the flattering news that at least two unidentified women had contacted the cryobank and requested that Donor 929 provide additional semen so that they could have more children by him. This was done successfully -- his final specimens enabling McGhee to bear her second child. "She's cute," Rubino says, pointing at Leah. "Well, thanks," McGhee responds brightly, "but those aren't my blue eyes she has." There is silence for a few seconds before Rubino fills it, glancing sideways at her, looking at her hair, which is the color of wheat. "You're very pretty," he says. He turns back, looking at the children. McGhee can't get out the words she wants to say, which are Thank you. She has self-esteem issues when it comes to her appearance, having been obese once -- and her hair is a dye job, and she can't remember whether she's mentioned that to Rubino. By contrast, she tells herself, he is beautiful. She unabashedly checks him out in profile, though she already knows his physical features without having to look -- 5-foot-11, 145 pounds, blue eyes with long lashes, a cleft in his chin that she likes, strong cheek and jawbone. "You're a good-looking guy," she says, and this hangs there. Her next words come in a rush: "And why should anybody be surprised. Look at the kids. They're gorgeous." She has committed to spending a week at his home, which some of the single donor-inseminated mothers she knows have had no problem telling her is nuts, nuts. They hit her with questions: What if this guy is a jerk? What if he wants custody rights? Are you crazy -- staying alone in his house? Rubino grabs the heaviest of their luggage, simultaneously reaching for Aaron's hand, carefully guiding him through the rain. Pleased, McGhee walks alongside her daughter, who then skips ahead of everyone, turning around every few seconds to stare hard at this man, scrunching up her nose and giving him funny looks. It is a short ride to the Rubino Gallery, where Rubino's living quarters -- one long room alongside a bathroom -- rest on the other side of a wall from his small gallery, separated by an opaque, sea-green glass door. Once inside, Rubino surprises the kids with gifts -- pillowcases with their favorite cartoon characters, special bathroom lights adorned with more cartoon characters and, a reflection of Rubino's hope that they might take an interest in one of his passions, two bags of fossils. "Some of these fossils came from 100 to 600 million years ago," he tells them. "There were no people on the planet then." The boy yelps then, having just seen frogs moving near a wall, inside Rubino's glass terrarium. He runs over, rapping on the glass to get the frogs' attention. On the other side of the sea-green door, there are Mike's paintings. Aaron is an aspiring artist himself, having sent Rubino, before he left home, one of his crayoned drawings -- a serpent with a human head. Rubino telephoned to say it was good. Immediately, Aaron sent him another drawing, inscribed with a note: "You are cool." McGhee calls out to everyone: "We have a present for Mike, don't we? Come here, Mike." Leah hands him his gift -- a T-shirt inscribed "BEST BUDDIES." Beneath these words is a drawing of three stick-figures, accompanied by names: Aaron, Dad, Leah. "Hold it up," McGhee tells him. "You can wear that when we go to Disneyland. The kids have shirts just like it." "That's sweet of you," Rubino says, looking at all of them. Aaron is screaming from the other side of the room. "Mommmm, can we watch TV?" "You have to ask your Daddy." "Is it all right, Mike?" Aaron asks Rubino. Rubino looks at McGhee, who nods. Rubino sits on a tan sofa, Aaron plopping alongside him. They watch a cartoon, and immediately Aaron gets sleepy. He rests his head on Rubino's shoulder, sidling closer, so that most of him lies splayed on Rubino's lap and chest. Enough for one night, decides McGhee, who calls out to the kids to get ready for bed. Aaron is whispering to his mother, asking whether he can sleep between her and Mike. She tells him that Mike will be sleeping in his own bed across the room, with his dog and cat. She points. Mike's bed is about 25 feet away. In a few minutes, McGhee steps into the bathroom, where she changes into her sleeping garb, a pair of gym shorts and a black sleeveless T-shirt from Gold's Gym. She has spent only three hours with Rubino. But when he flicks off the lights, she is ecstatic: They are spending their first night together as a family. Mike Rubino was married in 1985, and by the early '90s, he and his wife were frustrated over their inability to have a child, as he tells the story. "We'd been experiencing fertility problems," he says, "and she had had surgery, but nothing had changed." A hard truth took hold. "We finally realized we wouldn't be able to have children of our own," he recalls. "It was hard, though probably not as hard on me." He tried to console his wife, who bore most of their sorrow, he remembers. Rubino was disappointed but not heartbroken. For starters, he'd wanted only one child, and besides, he'd never been excited by the prospect of diapers, late-night feedings and crying jags. Still, he felt something missing over the next year. He and his wife were watching the news one night when a story appeared about sperm banks and their use of paid donors, who bore no financial or any other legal responsibilities, it was said, to the women who used their purchased sperm or to any children born as a result. The absence of obligation, however, was accompanied by a caveat: The donors enjoyed no rights to see any of the children conceived with their sperm. "We listened to the report, and I said, 'What the hell?'" Rubino remembers. "It was a chance, if nothing else, to be part of the gene pool. And we thought we could help some people. My wife was very encouraging." He liked imagining himself as a 55-year-old man answering his doorbell someday to discover a charming, good-looking 18-year-old on his doorstep, a young adult whose long quest to find his biological father had brought him to Rubino. "I could imagine all of the advantages and see no burdens," he says. In 1994, after tests and assessments, Rubino became a sperm donor at California Cryobank, regarded by many as the largest sperm bank in the country. It opened in 1977, an era when gynecologists generally contacted the cryobank on behalf of their patients, who typically had no idea of their anonymous donors' physical and academic characteristics. The cryobank relied then on a small siring stable, which included several medical students from nearby UCLA. Much had changed by the time Rubino arrived. The small stable had given way to donors -- from 150 to 200 at various times -- who had walked into the cryobank to apply for donation work. The proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases had long since made the testing and screening of sperm routine. The "Cryo" in the company's name -- from the Greek kryo for "cold" or "frost" -- was suggestive of an industry built around freezing the donor sperm so that clients could become pregnant when they wished. It was a new world, and perhaps the most important advance was the advent of a computer-friendly, online culture in which California Cryo-bank's clients could learn about both the donor screening process and the intimate details of the donors themselves. The cryobank purports to select only 3 to 5 percent of its applicants, based on sperm potency and an assessment of intellectual, physical and emotional characteristics. Each applicant must be from 19 to 39 years old and a college graduate or an enrolled student at a four-year university. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Rubino filled out a questionnaire detailing his educational background and appearance. His attributes meant that his semen would be regarded as prized sperm -- his 3.75 grade-point average as an art major and his blue eyes, slenderness and the cleft on his chin were all traits the cryobank's informal surveys indicated were attractive to would-be mothers. Add to this his cryobank-produced audiotape -- on which he etched his artistic ambitions, mentioned his fluency in French, soulfully offered his hope of helping the infertile, and rhapsodized about his love of travel and Puccini -- and what the cryobank had in Rubino was an alluring bon vivant. Welcomed into the program, Rubino fell into the donor's standard routine. Receiving a plastic cup from a technician, he would enter one of the five small locked rooms that the cryobank's co-founder, Cappy Rothman, jokingly dubbed the "masturbatoriums." There Rubino became Donor 929. He generally produced semen twice a week for about a year at the cryobank's offices, where each acceptable specimen (anything that would yield a minimum of one vial of sperm for shipment) brought him $50 -- which translated to about $400 or so a month. Abiding by instructions, he always walked into the cryobank the same way, off an alley and up a rear flight of stairs, so as to avoid crossing paths with the sperm-buyers. From the beginning, cryobank officials told Rubino and other sperm donors in the program that none of them would receive information about births attributable to their sperm. But, increasingly curious, Rubino tried coaxing them to hint how many children he may have fathered: 10? 20? They'd smile but never answer. He was retired from the program at 35, after the cryo-bank said he had provided all the sperm it needed from him. But he took the unusual step of giving cryobank officials a letter in which he expressed interest in meeting any of his children. The letter obligated the cryobank to do nothing, he knew. The cryobank refused to contact donors on behalf of any biological children not yet 18. But back in Massachusetts, Raechel McGhee was pondering ways to circumvent the cryobank's policy and, for the sake of her children, track down Donor 929. McGhee didn't match Rubino's image of the donor-inseminated mother. She was neither married nor involved with a man experiencing a fertility problem, but rather was a 300-pound single woman who had decided in 1997, at age 36, to have a family on her own, finding a sperm donor through the cryobank. The cryobank's clientele had undergone a dramatic change since the early 1980s, when the vast majority of clients had been married women and their infertile husbands. McGhee was representative of a new wave -- a highly educated, unmarried professional able to afford donor sperm and related insemination costs that would ultimately cost her about $6,000 for her two children. Single women and lesbian couples, most of whom bought the sperm online and had it shipped to them or to their doctors' offices, were on their way to becoming 60 percent of California Cryobank's sperm-buying clients. Having been disappointed for years that no slim, attractive men wanted to date her, McGhee could, for the first time in her life, she says, choose from an abundance of fit, intelligent men. "Selecting a donor was empowering," she remembers. "Suddenly I had my pick of these incredible male specimens. I was the one with the power to accept or reject. I loved looking at those donor profiles; I mean, I could have any of these guys." Eventually, she received the audiotape of Donor 929, whose written profile interested her. She scoured the personal details on his pages: Artist. Blood-type: O-positive. Heavy eyelids. A fondness for classical music, but eclectic enough to enjoy Billie Holiday and Roy Orbison. No interest in sports. McGhee listened to his tape. Donor 929 referred to the fertility problems that he and his wife had experienced and the disappointment they had weathered together, noting that the accomplishment he was proudest of was his marriage. He sounded so kind and giving. "I'll probably never have a child of my own," McGhee heard him saying. "I feel privileged to help someone do that." "That was when I began crying," McGhee remembers. "I told myself, 'He's the one.'" On March 1, 1998, she gave birth to Aaron in New York, where she was a social worker counseling at a group home for children. "Some women in my position wanted nothing to do with a man," McGhee remembers. "That was never me. After I had Aaron, I thought it would be important for a child to develop an important relationship with a male. More than ever, I wanted to meet [the donor]. I just didn't know how I was going to do it, and I had other things on my mind." Her weight had become a serious medical problem, soaring to 330 pounds during her pregnancy with Leah. Sometimes she had difficulty breathing, leaving her to wonder how she'd possibly be able to handle two young children. In 2002, a year after Leah was born, McGhee underwent a gastric-bypass operation that would help cut her heft roughly in half. She turned into a workout junkie whose entire life had undergone a makeover. Before the operation, she had become a licensed psychotherapist in Somerset, Mass., building up a practice successful enough for her to buy a house and pay for day care. "I'd become so grateful for everything I had, particularly my family, and I wanted to express my gratitude to the man who'd helped me to do it," she remembers. McGhee regularly reminded her children about their donor-father, recalling personal characteristics of Donor 929 as if he were an absent loved one. "Do you know your donor lives in California?" she would ask them when a television program mentioned something about the state. She would hold up a drawing and say brightly, "Hey, this is one of your donor's favorite colors: red." On Father's Day, she made it a habit to gather her children and say: "Let's send lots of hugs and kisses to your donor. Let's think of your donor. Let's send our love." Her children, as she recounts, happily chimed in: "Thank you, donor. We love you." She began to correspond over the Internet with an organization called Single Mothers by Choice. There she found another buyer of 929's sperm, a Southern California woman who exchanged photos with McGhee of their children. But all of McGhee's networking and new friends had brought her no closer to 929. Then, in 2003, while watching an episode of "Oprah" devoted to donor-conceived families, she heard of a Web site that invited donor-inseminated women to log on and send out messages in an effort to locate their children's donors and half siblings. Called the Donor Sibling Registry, the site also invited donors to search for mothers and children. Within a month of the show's airing, on June 1, 2003, McGhee posted a note on the Donor Sibling Registry site, alongside a reference to California Cryobank Donor 929: "Message to donor: THANK YOU! These children are the greatest gift of my life. They are beautiful, brilliant, talented, kind, absolutely delightful." She added, "We are very open to contact with the donor and/or siblings . . ." Three thousand miles away, Rubino heard about the "Oprah" episode, too. He logged on, he recalls, to the donor sibling site, but he logged off before coming upon the message to 929. Early last year, McGhee asked the cryo-bank to forward a letter to 929, in which she asked for his baby photograph. The cryobank declined her request, insisting that it had already sent such a letter to all donors, and that 929 had not responded (Rubino says he never received the letter). "I said to myself, 'Forget it, he doesn't want to meet these kids, and he never will,'" McGhee remembers. "I thought, 'Get ready to tell the kids they will never know this person.'" Shortly before last Thanksgiving, a still curious Rubino logged on to the donor sibling site again, this time noticing partial lists of donors, who were grouped according to their sperm banks and identified by their donor numbers. Then Rubino discovered McGhee's message for 929. Teary-eyed, he couldn't stop looking at two lines in particular: "THANK YOU! These children are the greatest gift of my life." Having no name or address for his messenger, he left a note on the site: "Hi. I'm Donor 929. I'm Mike and I live in L.A." That same day, McGhee received an e-mail from a woman who ran the donor sibling site: "Check the site now." McGhee logged on and saw 929's message. "My heart pounded when I read it," McGhee says. "I cried. I sent him a message, and we exchanged numbers. We were on the phone together in an hour." In their first conversation, she learned that he had divorced since Aaron was born. She told him a bit about her work as a psychotherapist. The talk turned to the future. As McGhee remembers, Rubino told her: "I don't want to be intrusive. I don't want anything from you." She assured him she wanted nothing from him either; she was simply grateful, she added, to have made contact and to have the chance perhaps of someday introducing him to her children. Within a few minutes, each was extending the other an invitation to visit. Their first conversation could not have been more auspicious, McGhee thought, though she remembered then that Rubino was not hers alone. She knew that, in Southern California, another woman would be thrilled to learn Donor 929's name, the first step to introducing him to her own son. "I have to admit that I had thoughts of keeping the information from her since she didn't know about the [Donor Sibling Registry] Web site," McGhee recalls. "I thought, do I want to share Mike? But, I thought, there's no way I could do that to a kid." Soon McGhee was seriously contemplating a trip with Aaron and Leah to see Rubino, buoyed by what she had learned about him through a series of phone conversations and e-mails. He was easygoing and respectful of her feelings, she told friends. Aaron and Leah mailed him holiday cards that addressed him as Daddy and sent along drawings bearing inscriptions of their love for him. Rubino sent presents of fossils and minerals to the children and, on Christmas Day, called the McGhee family to say hi to everyone. McGhee described at length their holiday plans before saying that she should let him go so he could get on with his own day. As McGhee remembers, Rubino answered, "I have no plans." She was surprised. "I thought it wasn't right that he didn't have someone to celebrate with," she says. "But it made me feel that talking to us was very important to him." The day after Christmas, she turned on a television to learn of the tsunami that had killed hundreds of thousands in Asia, sweeping whole families to their deaths in the Indian Ocean. "I thought that you just don't know when the next disaster could strike or where," she recalls. "There are earthquakes in L.A.; there are disasters all over. I thought: What am I waiting for? . . . I bought the plane tickets for L.A. the next week." Not wanting the emotional stakes of the visit to become too high for her children, she subtly downplayed their get-together with Rubino. She told the kids that their trip would be "a wonderful California vacation," careful to make Rubino sound like just one more part of the itinerary. They'd spend a day at Disneyland, she told Aaron and Leah. They'd see the Pacific Ocean. This had the calculated effect. In the last couple of weeks before leaving for Los Angeles, the kids sounded more excited about seeing Mickey Mouse than meeting Rubino, thought McGhee; thanks to television and videos, Disneyland and Mickey were more real to them. She took one final precaution: finding a list of L.A. hotels near Rubino's home, in case staying with him proved to be troubling or awkward. She already knew how she would say goodbye to Rubino if he turned out to be a disappointment. Still, McGhee was excited, especially about the possibilities for her son, who had not had a chance to bond closely with a man. Her own father had died many years earlier, and she had no brother or brother-in-law. A T-ball coach had been kind to Aaron, as well as a hockey coach and a playmate's father, but none of the men could possibly be more than a pale substitute for a committed and unencumbered man, thought McGhee. Early this year, as the days ticked down toward their flight to Los Angeles, McGhee was reading Aaron a bedtime story, she recalls, when she noticed his eyes growing heavy, the boy falling into that state between dreams and consciousness, where people are at their most truthful, thought the psychotherapist, who sought an answer to a question nagging at her. "Aaron, have you ever wished you had a dad?" she remembers asking him. "I wish I had a dad to play with me," he murmured drowsily. "How come you've never told me that?" "I don't know," the boy said softly, his eyes closing. The moment affirmed her conviction that she was doing the right thing in bringing her children to see Rubino. And, deep down, she did not rule out the possibility that maybe something miraculous would happen and she and Rubino would become a couple. "I'd be lying if I said that my mind didn't go to that fairy-tale ending, and that it ended with all of us living happily ever after," she says. "But, at the same time, as a responsible adult, you realize that such a [scenario] is a fairy tale, and unlikely." One night, as McGhee and Rubino remember, Rubino called to say that he had placed photos of Aaron and Leah in his home, asking whether she minded that he had referred to them as his "children" around a few of his friends. She was pleased, and then asked what he would like the children to call him when they arrived in L.A. "If I could choose, I'd love it if the kids called me 'Dad,'" he said. Despite the good feelings all around, Rubino couldn't be sure what he was getting into with McGhee and her children. He had his own secret plan if the visit became uncomfortable, knowing of a hotel where he could take refuge while politely urging his guests to stay in his home. And, as much as Rubino looked forward to seeing Aaron and Leah, he did not want McGhee to misunderstand the future he envisioned for himself. "I'm comfortable with my current situation," he told her, shortly before she and the children flew to see him. "I don't see myself as a family man ever staying home raising kids 24/7. I don't ever see myself having a family in the conventional sense." Yet now, after just one full day together, Rubino is having a very conventional moment with his new family. Aaron again rests his head on Rubino's shoulder, watching another cartoon. "Aaron, do you want something to eat?" his mother asks him. The boy doesn't seem to hear. "You're happy right there with your Daddy?" The boy nods, burrowing into Rubino's shoulder. Rubino puts an arm around him, drops his chin on the top of the boy's head. For an hour, they don't move. Aaron McGhee has inherited, it seems, his father's ability to shut out the rest of the world in favor of his passions. He sits on the hardwood floor across the room from everyone else, head buried in his artwork, studying his drawings. His mother, his sister and Rubino sometimes call out to him, but he doesn't answer. "He's concentrating," says Rubino, who understands the feeling. Since spending the first few hours of her visit so raptly watching Rubino, McGhee has turned her attention to her children's activities, trying to monitor their moods. Leah is prancing and dancing like Tinkerbell, still avoiding Rubino's efforts to pick her up. Aaron is working on a drawing of a smiley face. He says he wants to do a smiley face drawing for each day he's in Los Angeles, happily showing the latest face to Rubino. It is surrounded by swirling patches of red, orange and violet that Rubino interprets as reflections of Aaron's bliss. Rubino has told McGhee that he sees much of himself in the boy, particularly a need for time alone. McGhee has wondered about some of her son's inclinations, since he is not nearly as outgoing or comfortable around groups of people as is his sister, she thinks. Now, listening to the man who accounts for one-half of her son's genetic makeup, she believes she is hearing the reasons for Aaron's personality. "I was a lot like that as a kid," McGhee remembers Rubino telling her. "I wanted to be off by myself. I was pretty quiet . . . I just didn't need a lot of people around." That explanation alone is worth the price of a plane ticket, thinks McGhee. On a Saturday morning, they all drive in Rubino's old blue Buick LeSabre to Long Beach and one of his favorite places, the Aquarium of the Pacific. Rubino takes the children's hands and leads them toward a family of sea turtles swimming behind glass. "This one here can hold its breath underwater for more than an hour," he says. He reads a placard: "On extra-long dives, the sea green turtle is able to absorb oxygen through its anus. Now that's weird!" Aaron cackles. He thinks he has figured out what this word anus means. He makes a face at the sea turtle and turns to his mother. "Did you hear that, Mom? Anus." For a while, the day only gets better for Aaron. Rubino brings him to the petting tank, where the boy touches stingrays and small brown-banded bamboo sharks the size of trout. "Don't hold their tails," Rubino says, watching Aaron grab. "Just pet the tops with your fingers." Aaron is stroking everything that swims by. "I am petting sharks, I am petting sharks." "Yes, you sure are," Rubino says, laughing. "You pet them, too, Mike. Pet them." "Okay." Rubino's hand reaches into the water. "You notice how they feel a little rough, like sandpaper?" The boy isn't really listening. "Can I come back here with you again?" he asks. "Sure you can." "Soon?" "We'll do it again, sure." The idea of "again" is still on the boy's mind as they grab lunch in the aquarium restaurant. They're sitting at a table, eating sandwiches, when Aaron blurts to his mother: "Can we just stay here? With Mike? We could live here." She smiles at her son, pondering how to make him happy without misleading him. In the back of her mind is the conversation she had with an old friend, the actress Ellen Burstyn, whom she met in the '90s while Burstyn was researching a role and McGhee was counseling at a New York group home for children. Burstyn is now considering making a film about the McGhees' experience with Rubino, McGhee believes. "Sweetheart, if Mommy sells the screen rights," she says, "maybe we can buy a second house here someday, and you can come here a lot to see Daddy." This isn't nearly good enough for the boy. "I want to stay here," Aaron says. McGhee rubs his arm. "This is a fun time, a vacation time, a fantasizing time. But, day to day, we would have work to do, and it wouldn't be as fun, wouldn't be the same. And you have school." The boy looks down at his sandwich. "I could skip a day of school," he says firmly. "I could." "You can't, sweetheart." "That's life," Rubino interjects, rubbing Aaron's head to soften this. "Right," McGhee says, "that's life." On their way back to the gallery, Leah asks her mother, "Do we really have a Daddy?" McGhee understands the challenge posed by Rubino's presence. It is early in their stay, but even when Rubino has invited Leah to sit on the couch next to him, the little girl usually dashes into Mommy's arms. It's the consequence of never having had a close relationship with a man before, McGhee thinks. Her instinct and her work as a psychotherapist tell her that Leah may see any Daddy as threatening. "Maybe Leah thinks if it happens, I get squeezed out and there's no more Mommy," McGhee tells Rubino later. Nonetheless, she is delighted when later in the day, back at the gallery, she sees Leah resting on Rubino's lap. "Who are you sitting with there?" she asks Leah. "Mike." "And who is Mike to you?" Leah beams, delivering her answer, "the donor." As the children tire and rest late in the day, the attentions of McGhee and Rubino turn to each other. They sit on opposite wings of the sofa, sharing a little wine, talking about their tastes and interests, and usually, in the end, finding something to rib each other about. "Turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon," McGhee says, fingering a plastic octopus that Rubino bought for Aaron at the aquarium. "I promised California sun for Leah, and it finally came," Rubino says, "after you Easterners had your great Eastern blizzard of 2005 -- all that snow falling." "Rubbing my nose in it again." "Falling all over that bunch of tiny states you have out there," he adds. "Which we call New England." "We usually leave our windows open out here -- fresh air," he says, smiling. Aaron grins, enjoying this banter between his mother and father. He plops on Rubino's lap, nuzzling there. Leah is resting alongside Rubino's dog and cat. Rubino refills McGhee's wineglass. At night, after the kids have gone to sleep, each of the adults has a martini. They watch a retrospective of one of their favorite television comedies, "Saturday Night Live," howling at the "land shark" skit from the '70s, in which a talking shark knocks on an apartment door and tries to entice an unsuspecting woman to open it up. "Candygram," the shark says, and Rubino and McGhee laugh like kids when recalling how cast regular Laraine Newman excitedly answers, "Oh, candy," and then opens her door to be ravaged. "We've discovered that we grew up liking much the same things," McGhee says later, "and that we came of age at the same time, being attracted to the same cultural and political ideas." Watching television, they talk and laugh, but they don't sit near each other, remaining on separate wings of the sofa. McGhee doesn't think it would be appropriate for her to sit next to him, believing this might suggest an uncomfortable intimacy. "We don't want to give even the impression of lines being crossed," she says later. "And I'd never screw up something for my kids because of some romantic fantasy." Their emphasis has been in slowly forging a comfortable connection so as to make Rubino a member of the family. "Part of what's wonderful right now with Mike," she says, "is that we have no negative baggage between us -- no marriage, no divorce, no custody fight, no emotional vendetta." She spends much time looking around his gallery. One night he points out perhaps his most arresting painting, a work called "Photo-Op," in which a nude couple lords over a virginal jungle filled with exotic birds and, bizarrely, human fetuses. The woman is pregnant, and her own fetus visible, while a roughhousing baby at her feet dumbly chokes a native bird to death. Rubino tells her that the birds depicted in the painting are extinct, and that the work serves as his personal statement about the evils of overpopulation. "I know that's kind of ironic," he says, "because I'm probably responsible right now for a lot of kids in the world." Rubino takes the McGhees to California Cryobank, where they receive a tour. For Rubino, the visit is a sentimental, even triumphal return. He strolls around the lab and tells McGhee and the children: "This is where they drew my blood for testing. That is where they put the donors' sperm under the microscope." He pauses at the five masturbatoriums and grins. "I remember some of these rooms," he says, chuckling. Surrounded by Cryobank administrators, he gestures at the fruits of his seed. "These are my children, Aaron and Leah," he says, rubbing Aaron's neck. "My ready-made family." The administrators are beaming, too. It is the first time in the cryobank's 28-year history that any of them can remember a mother, her children and their sperm donor gathering together in this office. Someone takes photos, and McGhee asks Aaron if he wants to see where the sperm is kept; Aaron has grown up hearing about sperm. Everyone is led into a chilly room, where vapors are rising from six liquid nitrogen tanks that store the semen of hundreds of donors. "We expect a lot of beautiful children will be born from what you see in the tanks," says the cryo-bank's Cappy Rothman. He points at a small portion of the semen vials being readied that day for a FedEx shipment -- headed to Nacogdoches, Tex., Chesterfield, Mo., Panama City, Fla., Sacramento and Boston, in addition to shipments going overseas. "You have wonderful-looking children," he says to McGhee. "I have to go to the bathroom," Aaron announces. "Daddy will bring you," McGhee says. Rothman nods, looking impressed. "Daddy will bring him, huh?" Looking to entertain the kids, Rothman asks his lieutenants to find souvenirs for everybody. An assistant chimes in: "May I answer any questions for anybody? About anything?" This sounds like a formality, but Rubino takes advantage of the offer. "I've asked this question before," he says. "But I'm going to try again now, though I know you probably won't answer. Could you tell me, roughly, how many kids of mine are out there?" Silence in the room. The assistant sweetly smiles, saying nothing. Rubino smiles wanly. "You can't tell me?" Nothing. Rubino shrugs. "Okay, I understand." The souvenirs have arrived -- silver sperm pins. "Oh, cool," Aaron says. "I got a sperm, I got a sperm." "Sperm for everyone," Rubino says. He drapes his arms around Aaron and Leah. "It is amazing how good it feels to be with them," he says to Rothman, bidding the doctor goodbye. Rothman shakes his hand and tells him that the cryobank is moving to larger quarters and that maybe Rubino could paint a mural for the new building. McGhee clasps his elbow on their way out, whispering as they step into the rain, "Wow, you might even get some work out of this." In Colorado, the woman whose Donor Sibling Registry Web site enabled McGhee and Rubino to find each other keeps a curious eye on their developing relationship, hoping it might serve as a model. Wendy Kramer has made a cause of helping women search for donors, but few women, says Kramer, have been as lucky in their searches as McGhee. Kramer herself is still trying to connect with her donor, thinking how much that meeting the stranger would enhance her 15-year-old son's knowledge of himself and his background. Kramer didn't choose her child's donor. In the late 1980s, she and her then-husband delegated the task to her gynecologist. Then, as now, there were about 20 sperm banks in the country, and Kramer had had no idea where to go. "I just said to my doctor, 'Here is what my husband looks like; please find a sperm donor who matches him,'" Kramer recalls. "People ask me now, 'Didn't you think your child would be curious to know about his donor?' I was only thinking in that moment about how lucky I was going to be to have a child . . . It wasn't until later, after my husband and I divorced and my son started asking me about his donor, that these questions started occurring to me . . . Then when I started asking, a lot of cryobank people didn't want to have anything to do with me." No one on any side of the discussion about the rights of American donors, mothers and their donor-conceived children, has any doubt over who shapes the rules of the industry. The sperm business in the United States has always hinged on the wishes of the adults paying for the semen and the desires of the adults providing it. If any party wants anonymity in a transaction, then anonymity reigns. The child created by the process has no voice, particularly over when or whether that child will ever be able to meet the donor. "Looking historically at it, kids have been the ones left out . . ." says Ryan Kramer, Wendy's precocious teenager, who co-founded the Donor Sibling Registry site with his mother and who is a freshman engineering major at the University of Colorado. "[Sperm banks] and parents are happy to produce children through the use of sperm donors, but then a lot of children's interests are ignored." The Donor Sibling Registry has brought him no closer to any contact with his biological relatives. Ryan knows that his donor is an engineer, but it is what he doesn't know about the man that preoccupies him. He feels stymied over having to wait until he turns 18 before California Cryo-bank will formally contact his donor and ask whether the man wishes to speak with him. "If I had the chance," Ryan says, "I'd tell him, 'I want to meet you now because there's a half of me -- mental, emotional and physical -- that I'm not sure about, and also because we have a common interest -- engineering.' To see him would complete me." Nobody knows for sure how many donor-conceived children are out there. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's estimate that 80,000 to 100,000 inseminations with donor sperm are performed annually suggests there may be a large group of kids like Ryan seeking to meet a biological father. Complicating their challenge, says Wendy Kramer, is that California Cryo-bank and other U.S. sperm banks do not have records of where all their donors live. Nor for that matter, the sperm banks acknowledge, do they have complete records of how many sperm-purchasing women have given birth, or where their children live. One school of international medical ethicists, pointing to legal reforms in several foreign countries, argues that the only realistic means for guaranteeing that children be able to contact their donors is to prohibit anonymity in the donor process. In Britain, where a national registry keeps track of sperm donors, a new law gives every child conceived with the aid of donated sperm the right to learn the donor's identity upon turning 18. Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and New Zealand have similar laws requiring varying degrees of donor identification. A rival of California Cryobank, the Virginia-based Fairfax Cryobank, has announced its hope to institute a voluntary donor identity release program next fall, though a Fairfax spokeswoman reported that so far only about 10 percent of active donors indicate they are interested, about the same level of interest as among California Cryobank's donors. Rothman knows that such numbers will not please critics of the sperm banks. But he says that the openness activists among donor-inseminated mothers have forgotten about the goal that had once been their priority: giving birth. "I know Wendy Kramer would like Ryan to be able to meet his donor by the time he turns 18, and preferably before," Rothman says. "I know she thinks she didn't get the right deal. But she signed a paper [before purchasing sperm]. She knew what [donor] anonymity was. And she knew that our donors wanted anonymity and trusted they would receive anonymity. Here's a question: Ask Wendy Kramer and Ryan if they would take their kind of 'openness' if it meant Ryan would never have been born?" On their last full day together, Rubino takes Leah, Aaron and Raechel McGhee to Disneyland. Leah is wearing her sperm pin, and Aaron his Best Buddies T-shirt. By 1 p.m., they've already been on several rides and had their pictures taken with Mickey Mouse; Leah is humming "It's a Small World." Now they're in Mickey's Toontown, and a beaming McGhee, noticing everybody relaxing on a bench, says she'll use the moment to visit the restroom. "Stay with Daddy," she orders the kids. "We'll all sit together," Rubino says, asking Aaron to stay put, please. Just to test the situation, Aaron walks off a few steps. Rubino retrieves him, tickles him, and the kid laughs. "Where's Leah?" Rubino asks. Leah's not around. "Where's Leah?" With Aaron staying close, he checks the nearest attraction, the S.S. Miss Daisy boat, scouring both the top and lower deck. Nothing. "Leah? Leah?" She's been missing two minutes, maybe. Now he's running, headed toward the next attraction, Goofy's Bounce House. "Leah?" He steps over a barrier, ignores a Disneyland employee, cuts through a line, and there she is, her blond hair making her stand out among a pack of kids. He swoops her up, calls for Aaron, and they trudge back to the bench. McGhee reappears. "Hi, everybody." She turns to Leah. "Where's your jacket?" Rubino scurries back to find the jacket. McGhee watches him, smiling. "A little parental mishap, I see." Aaron says grimly, "We have one more day, and then we gotta go." "We'll be coming back, sweetheart." After Rubino returns with the jacket, McGhee says, "We're all going to work hard and maybe make lots of money, and maybe Daddy will make the big mural for the sperm bank." By 5 o'clock, Rubino looks a little tired. With the kids trolling for souvenirs, he sits, chewing on a big piece of red licorice, watching Leah trying on princess crowns, wondering how much of this day she'll be able to recall in a few years. A determined McGhee, trying to bolster the chance that Leah will remember this week with him, has had the girl sitting with Rubino on all two-person rides today. "Leah, take your Daddy's hand, and let's go," McGhee says, and they bound down Disneyland's Main Street, looking for a spot from which to watch the afternoon's last parade. The little bit of sun that is left falls out of the sky, and the temperature plummets. Rubino and Aaron sit on a curb, and the boy looks up at him with a serious expression. "I want to stay here late," Aaron says. "Sure, sure," Rubino says. "We don't have to go anywhere for a long time." The next morning, Aaron lies on the tan sofa, not moving. His mother has changed out of a long T-shirt from California Cryobank that she has been wearing on these last nights as a nightgown, the front of which has an illustration of swimming sperm headed into eggs, and the back of which offers a slogan: "All Of The Tomorrows Are In The Seeds Of Today." She is scurrying around, calling out over her shoulder: "What are you doing, sweetheart? We have to get ready to leave for the airport." Aaron just stares at her. Zero more days. He has packed away his art supplies, finished with the last of his smiley face drawings. As his departure day has approached, he has colored steadily less around the smiley faces. Today's smiley face has no colors around it. They eat muffins out on the backyard patio. McGhee turns to Rubino and taps his shoulder. "I want you to get yourself a cell phone," she says. "You need one, because you don't have the best car in the world. You're a father now . . . And you need to get a vent in this place so that when you paint you won't breathe the fumes . . . And you're going to stop eating all that crap you like, right -- all that food with the MSG in it? And you'll get to a gym?" Rubino chuckles and nods compliantly. Aaron walks over to Rubino, holding a milk-rimmed, disposable plastic cup that he has wrapped a rubber band around and turned into a present. "I made this for you," he says. "So you'll remember me." Rubino bends and tousles the boy's hair. "Hey," he says, trying to summon his happiest voice. "I have so many memories of you that I'll remember you all the time. Oh, my gosh -- I'll be sending you tons of e-mails and calling you." The boy just looks up at him. "I better grab your things," Rubino says to McGhee, his eyes welling. He hauls their luggage to the car. Then he walks inside to join the boy on the sofa, lifting him and depositing him on his lap, tickling him as Aaron watches a cartoon. "Don't do that, Dad," Aaron says. "What did you call me?" He's seen the name in notes and holiday cards from the children, but he's not sure he has ever heard Aaron call him that. "I just want to sit here. No tickling, Dad." "Okay." But, finally, it's time. Aaron pets Rubino's dog and says goodbye to the frogs. Then everybody gets into the car. The sky could not be brighter. "Wouldn't you know the weather is finally perfect on the day we're leaving and headed back to a snowstorm," McGhee says. Once at the airport, everything moves so quickly. Lines are short today. McGhee gets their boarding passes, and they're walking to the security line, Leah skipping in front of her mother, Rubino holding Aaron's hand. "Hey, stop," Rubino says to him. They've reached the security line. "I have to say goodbye here. Give me a hug." He bends and hugs the boy. "'Bye," Aaron says, hugging back, staring at him. "See you next time," Rubino whispers to him. "Okay." He looks up. "Bye, Raech." He embraces her, kissing her on the cheek. He turns and hugs Leah. Then the three are walking through the security scanner, looking back at him, waving. In the days ahead, he will remember keenly what this parting felt like, the swift desolation of it. By the time he will leaves the airport parking lot, however, he will already be thinking about other things, pondering his work, refocusing his attentions, vowing to spend long days with his canvases. He will realize over the next month that some things about him have not changed. "I guess the future is wide open, but I still can't get my mind around the idea of a traditional family," he will say. "I've told Raechel . . . that I'll be there for [her] and the kids. At the same time, as an artist, I seem to do better and be more creative alone. I need solitude often. I can't ignore that fact. On the other hand, every moment I spend with these children I cherish." By then, Raechel McGhee will be taking early steps to uproot her psychotherapy practice and move with her children to Los Angeles, talking about it from Massachusetts to Rubino. With his support, she will have begun the process of redoing her will to give custody of her children to him should she die, and of changing her children's names to Aaron Rubino McGhee and Leah Rubino McGhee. She will say that she still sees, in her mind's eye, her children's expressions as they are hugging Rubino goodbye. "They couldn't stand letting him go," she will say. "I can see the looks on all of our faces during that week -- the happiness. I know this: Those looks are on Mike's mind, too." Back at the airport, those looks during the last moments in Los Angeles freeze Mike Rubino. Leah turns and blows him a kiss from the top of a stairway beyond the security scanner. McGhee smiles at him and mouths slowly: Love you, love you. It is only Aaron who hasn't looked back, already well beyond the stairway and gone, it seems. But then he's back, standing on the top step and looking down at his father, his small hands jutting out, waving slowly. He has waited his whole life to wave at the former 929. Michael Leahy is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this story Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline. From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:28:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:28:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: International Adoptees and Mental Health Message-ID: Public Health: International Adoptees and Mental Health http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050617-6.htm The following points are made by F. Juffer and M.H. van IJzendoorn (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 2005 293:2501): 1) International adoption is an increasing phenomenon involving more than 40,000 children a year moving between more than 100 countries.[1,2] By setting uniform norms and standards, the 1993 Hague Convention[3] endorsed and facilitated international adoption. International adoption may offer the advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a family cannot be found in the country of origin. In 2004, most international adoptions in the United States (22,884) were from China, Russia, Guatemala, South Korea, and Kazakhstan,[4] whereas most international adoptions in Europe (15,847 in 2003) were from China, Russia, Colombia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria.[2] Since the 1970s, domestic adoptions in North America and Europe drastically decreased, whereas at the same time the number of international adoptions increased.[1] 2) International adoptees often experience inadequate prenatal and perinatal medical care, maternal separation, psychological deprivation, insufficient health services, neglect, abuse, and malnutrition in orphanages or poor families before adoptive placement.[5] Animal models have shown that early maternal separation and deprivation can seriously harm infant functioning and later development. Psychological deprivation in orphanages can result in maladjustment in children. In addition, after adoptive placement, adoptees have to cope with integrating the loss of their culture and birth family into their lives. In contrast to domestic adoptees who are adopted within the same country, international adoptees may face problems regarding their divergent identity, as most international adoptees are raised by parents who do not share their racial and cultural background. 3) Adoption usually offers improved medical, physical, educational, and psychological opportunities for institutionalized children, and research has documented children's substantial recovery from deprivation after adoption, which may partly be due to the possibility that some adopted children were selected for adoption because they seemed brighter or had better social skills. Nevertheless, several studies found that adopted children were overrepresented in mental health populations and showed more externalizing disorders. Some studies found more mental health problems in international adoptees compared with nonadopted controls, in particular in male adoptees, in adolescence, and in children placed beyond infancy. However, the majority of adoptees were functioning well. In a large national cohort study in Sweden involving more than 11,000 international adoptees, a significantly higher risk of suicide, psychiatric illness, and social maladjustment was found compared with nonadopted controls, although most adoptees were doing well. 4) The authors report the first meta-analyses on behavior problems and mental health referrals of international adoptees comparing them to nonadopted controls and domestic adoptees. The authors hypothesized that international adoptees present more behavior problems and are referred to mental health services more often than nonadopted controls16 or domestic adoptees.[5] The authors hypothesized that those with preadoption adversity, older ages at international adoptive placement (greater than 12 months), and males would have an increased risk for behavior problems and mental health referrals. International adoptees were also expected to show more behavior problems in adolescence compared with the years before adolescence. The authors studied domestic adoptions in Western countries only because the increasing domestic adoptions in developing countries, eg, India, have not been systematically studied yet. 5) From their results, the authors conclude: Most international adoptees are well-adjusted, although they are referred to mental health services more often than nonadopted controls. However, international adoptees present fewer behavior problems and are less often referred to mental health services than domestic adoptees. References (abridged): 1. Selman P. Intercountry adoption in the new millennium; the "quiet migration" revisited. Popul Res Policy Rev. 2002;21:205-225 2. Selman P. The demographic history of intercountry adoption. In: Selman P, ed. Intercountry Adoption: Developments, Trends and Perspectives. London, England: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering; 2000 3. Duncan W. The Hague Convention on protection of children and co-operation in respect of intercountry adoption. In: Selman P, ed. Intercountry Adoption: Developments, Trends and Perspectives. London, England: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering; 2000 4. Immigrant visas issued to orphans coming to the U.S. US State Department Web site. Available at: http://www.travel.state.gov/family/adoption/stats/stats_451.html. Accessed April 3, 2005. 5. Gunnar MR, Bruce J, Grotevant HD. International adoption of institutionally reared children: research and policy. Dev Psychopathol. 2000;12:677-693 J. Am. Med. Assoc. http://www.jama.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:28:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:28:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Plain, Simple, Primitive? Not the Jellyfish Message-ID: Plain, Simple, Primitive? Not the Jellyfish http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/science/21jell.html By [3]CARL ZIMMER Jellyfish have traditionally been considered simple and primitive. When you gaze at one in an aquarium tank, it is not hard to see why. Like its relatives the sea anemone and coral, the jellyfish looks like a no-frills animal. It has no head, no back or front, no left or right sides, no legs or fins. It has no heart. Its gut is a blind pouch rather than a tube, so its mouth must serve as its anus. Instead of a brain, it has a diffuse net of nerves. A fish or a shrimp may move quickly in a determined swim; a jellyfish pulses lazily along. But new research has made scientists realize that they have underestimated the jellyfish and its relatives - known collectively as cnidarians (pronounced nih-DEHR-ee-uns). Beneath their seemingly simple exterior lies a remarkably sophisticated collection of genes, including many that give rise to humans' complex anatomy. These discoveries have inspired new theories about how animals evolved 600 million years ago. The findings have also attracted scientists to cnidarians as a model to understand the human body. "The big surprise is that cnidarians are much more complex genetically than anyone would have guessed," said Dr. Kevin J. Peterson, a biologist at Dartmouth. "This data have made a lot of people step back and realize that a lot of what they had thought about cnidarians was all wrong." Renaissance scholars considered them plants. Eighteenth-century naturalists grudgingly granted them admittance into the animal kingdom, but only just. They classified cnidarians as "zoophytes," somewhere between animal and plant. It was not until the 19th century that naturalists began to understand how cnidarians developed from fertilized eggs, their body parts growing from two primordial layers of tissue, the endoderm and ectoderm. Other animals, including humans and insects, have a third layer of embryonic tissue, the mesoderm, wedged between the ectoderm and the endoderm. It gives rise to muscles, the heart and other organs not found in cnidarians. Cnidarians also have a simpler overall body plan. Fish, fruit flies and earthworms all have heads and tails, backs and fronts, and left and right sides. Scientists refer to animals, including humans, with this two-sided symmetry as bilaterians. In contrast, cnidarians seem to lack such symmetry completely. A jellyfish, for example, has the symmetry of a bicycle wheel, radiating from a central axis. Evolutionary biologists came to view cnidarians as relics from the early days of animal evolution. The first animals were probably spongelike, little more than clumps of cooperative cells. Cnidarians seemed to represent the next stage, having acquired traits like simple tissues and nerves. The fossil records of animals seemed to back up that hypothesis. Many of the earliest animal fossils resembled jellyfish or other cnidarians. The oldest known bilaterian fossils were younger, appearing in the so-called Cambrian explosion, 540 million years ago. Some researchers suggested that the bilaterian body plan helped set off the Cambrian explosion. Unlike their ancestors, bilaterians had heads, allowing them to sense their surroundings and control a swimming, or crawling, body. Recent research undermines that theory. The oldest fossils that can be confidently called cnidarians are just 540 million years old. And Dr. Peterson and his colleagues have made new estimates of the age of cnidarians by studying their DNA. The DNA mutates at a roughly regular rate over millions of years, a so-called molecular clock. Dr. Peterson estimates that the common ancestor of living cnidarians lived 543 million years ago. In other words, cnidarians did not appear tens of millions of years before bilaterians. Genetic studies have also challenged conventional theories about cnidarians. Beginning in the 1980's, scientists studying bilaterians uncovered a set of genes that laid out their body plan. Some of the genes established the head-to-tail axis, others distinguished the front from the back. Humans and insects may look very different, but they share almost identical versions of this genetic tool kit. And the findings suggested that the tool kit had already evolved in the common ancestor of bilaterians. Dr. Mark E. Martindale of the University of Hawaii and his colleagues decided to look for the genes that build jellyfish and other cnidarians. It took a long time to begin generating results. The team had to find a species that could not only survive life in the laboratory but could produce enough embryos for research. Dr. Martindale's group chose the starlet sea anemone, a species found along the New England coast. Figuring out how to culture the anemone and investigate its genes demanded great patience. "It's taken 9 or 10 years," Dr. Martindale said, "but it's turned into a gold mine." Much to their surprise, the scientists found that some genes switched on in embryos were nearly identical to the genes that determined the head-to-tail axis of bilaterians, including humans. More surprisingly, the genes switched on in the same head-to-tail pattern as in bilaterians. Further studies showed that cnidarians used other genes from the bilaterian tool kit. The same genes that patterned the front and back of the bilaterian embryo, for example, were produced on opposite sides of the anemone embryo. The findings have these scientists wondering why cnidarians use such a complex set of body-building genes when their bodies end up looking so simple. They have concluded that cnidarians may be more complicated than they appear, particularly in their nervous systems. "At the molecular level, they have a lot of body regions that aren't recognizable," said Dr. John R. Finnerty, a biologist at Boston University who is collaborating with Dr. Martindale. Dr. Finnerty expects that the nervous system of cnidarians will turn out to be particularly complex. "The nervous system of a cnidarian is described as a nerve net, but that's a textbook simplification," he said. He predicts that research will show that this net is divided into specialized regions like the human brain. These discoveries have prompted Dr. Peterson to reconsider cnidarians' place in the history of life. "It's changed my thinking about early animal evolution," he said. He now theorizes that cnidarians were not the simple forerunners of the Cambrian explosion, but very much part of it, their evolution driven by the rise of animal food webs. In a paper to be published in the journal Paleobiology, Dr. Peterson and his colleagues propose that the common ancestor of bilaterians and cnidarians is a crawling worm. This ancient worm, which Dr. Peterson estimates lived 600 million years ago, represented a major advance in animal evolution. Instead of passively filtering tiny bits of food, it was able to graze on larger prey. "Once they're able to start grazing through those microbial mats, there's nothing to stop them," Dr. Peterson said. Some of these animals eventually began to eat one another. Animals that could defend themselves were more likely to survive. One way to avoid being eaten was to become bigger. Another way was to loft eggs into the water column rather than leave them to be eaten on the sea floor. Some animals even began to swim as adults in the open water. Once the water began to fill with animals, cnidarians took on their current form. The earliest cnidarians anchored themselves to the sea floor and grew upward, as sea anemones and corals do today. In the process, they abandoned the bilaterian body plan of their ancestors. It was also at that time that cnidarians evolved their distinctive weaponry: a cell containing a miniature harpoon called a nematocyte, for paralyzing prey with toxins. As new lineages of animals moved even higher into the water column, some cnidarians evolved to hunt them as well. Jellyfish are the product of this final stage of evolution, Dr. Peterson argues. These new insights into cnidarians have prompted major initiatives to understand them better. The starlet sea anemone genome is being sequenced by the Energy Department's Joint Genome Institute, and is expected to be complete this year. Scientists expect a number of surprises from the genome project. They have already discovered that a number of genes once thought to be unique to vertebrates have turned up in the genomes of cnidarians. It is now clear that these genes did not, in fact, arise in early vertebrates. They are much older, having evolved in the common ancestor of cnidarians and bilaterians 600 million years ago. Later, they disappeared in branches of bilaterians like insects and nematodes that have been the focus of extensive genome research. In some ways, cnidarians are a better model for human biology than fruit flies. As strange as it may seem, gazing at a jellyfish in an aquarium is a lot like looking in the mirror. From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:31:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:31:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Intelligence: Michael A. McDaniel: Big-brained people are smarter: A meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence Message-ID: Michael A. McDaniel: Big-brained people are smarter: A meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence Intelligence Volume 33, Issue 4 , July-August 2005, Pages 337-346 Michael A. McDaniel Department of Management, Virginia Commonwealth University, PO Box 84400, Richmond, VA 23284-4000, USA Received 30 December 2003; revised 7 September 2004; accepted 11 November 2004. Available online 12 February 2005. Abstract The relationship between brain volume and intelligence has been a topic of a scientific debate since at least the 1830s. To address the debate, a meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence was conducted. Based on 37 samples across 1530 people, the population correlation was estimated at 0.33. The correlation is higher for females than males. It is also higher for adults than children. For all age and sex groups, it is clear that brain volume is positively correlated with intelligence. Keywords: Brain; Intelligence; MRI scan IQ Article Outline 1. Introduction 2. Methods 2.1. Literature review 2.2. Decision rules 2.3. Analysis approach 3. Results 4. Discussion 4.1. Data reporting and availability issues 4.2. Additional research 5. Conclusion References 1. Introduction In 1836, Frederick Tiedmann wrote that there exists ?an indisputable connection between the size of the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man? (as cited in Hamilton, 1935). Since that time, the quest for the biological basis of intelligence has been pursued by many. Various narrative reviews (Rushton & Ankney, 1996, Rushton & Ankney, 2000 and Vernon et al., 2000) and a meta-analysis (Nguyen & McDaniel, 2000 ) have documented a non-trivial positive relationship between brain volume and intelligence in non-clinical samples. In the brain volume literature, there are two general categories of brain volume measures. The first category consists of measures of the external size of the head, such as the circumference of the head. The second category consists of measures of the in vivo brain volume, typically assessed through an MRI scan. For external head measures, Vernon et al. (2000) reported the population correlation between head size and intelligence to be 0.19. Nguyen and McDaniel (2000) reported population correlations from 0.17 to 0.26 for three different sub-categories of external head size measures. Studies assessing the correlation between in vivo brain volume and intelligence are more rare. Vernon et al. (2000) reported data on 15 such correlations and obtained a population correlation of 0.33. Nguyen and McDaniel (2000) reported the same population correlation based on 14 correlations. Gignac, Vernon, and Wickett (2003) reported data published in 2000 or earlier with a mean correlation of 0.37. Since 2000, much more data relating brain volume and intelligence have become available due to the increased use of MRI-based brain assessments. The purpose of this meta-analysis is to cumulate our knowledge concerning the magnitude of the correlation between in vivo brain volume and intelligence in order to answer the long-standing question on this topic. In addition, potential sex and age moderators of the relationship are evaluated. 2. Methods 2.1. Literature review A review of all known past literature was conducted using PsychInfo and Medline as well as citation index searches of popular past reviews. Studies containing relevant data were reviewed to identify citations to other relevant research. Often, studies were found in which the authors collected MRI-assessed brain volume and intelligence data but did not report the correlation between these measures because the correlation between brain volume and intelligence was not the focus of the study, and/or because the publication standards for the journal did not require a correlation matrix among all variables. For such studies, the correlations were requested from the authors. After preliminary findings were obtained, over 50 authors were contacted who: (1) had published in the area of brain volume and intelligence, (2) had provided commentaries on such literature, or (3) were known to have an interest in the relation between brain volume and intelligence. These researchers were provided with the preliminary findings and were asked to scan the references to determine if any relevant research had been omitted. These researchers were also asked if they knew of any data sets containing both MRI-assessed brain volume and intelligence that might be relevant to the study. 2.2. Decision rules The analysis included all correlations between in vivo measures of full brain volume and intelligence that met the decision rules. It did not include studies if they only measured partial brain volume, for example only frontal gray matter volume (Thompson et al., 2001 ). All intelligence measures were standardized tests of general cognitive ability and primarily were full-scale IQ measures or the Ravens Progressive Matrices Test . We did not include data from studies that estimated full-scale IQ from other measures such as the New Adult Reading Test. Some studies reported data on more than one sample. Only one correlation between brain volume and intelligence for a given sample was reported, but whenever possible, data were coded separately by age (children vs. adults) and by sex. Thus, if a sample recorded a correlation for all members of the sample and correlations separately by sex, the correlation for each sex group was included, but the correlation for all members in the sample was not included. Thus, all correlations contributing to the meta-analysis are from independent samples. All sample members were non-clinical. Often the sample was the non-clinical control group in a clinical study. Whereas the Gignac et al. (2003) paper is the most recently published review on this topic, it is useful to compare that data set with the data set used in the this study. This paper incorporates 23 additional samples raising the total number of coefficients available for analysis from 14 to 37. Some of the 23 sample difference is due to differing decision rules. For this paper, correlations are reported separately by sex for six studies (Andreasen et al., 1993, Gur et al., 1999, Ivanovic et al., 2004, Reiss et al., 1996, Tan et al., 1999 and Willerman, 1991 ) while Gignac et al. reported a single correlation for males and females combined for five of the studies and did not include data from Ivanovic et al. (2004). This reduced the number of different samples to 18. Gignac et al. included data from 96 individuals (Pennington et al., 2000 ) of whom at least half had reading disabilities. This sample was excluded from the present study because it did not meet this paper's decision rule for clinically normal subjects. Also, Gignac et al. had included a study by Tramo (1998). That study was excluded from the present analysis because it lacked a measure of full brain volume. This increased the number of unique samples in this study to 20. These 20 coefficients from independent samples were drawn from 11 sources (Aylward et al., 2002, Castellanos et al., 1994, Frangou et al., 2004, Garde et al., 2000, Giedd, 2003, Ivanovic et al., 2004, Kareken et al., 1995, MacLullich et al., 2002, Nosarti et al., 2002, Shapleske et al., 2002 and Staff, 2002 ) not included in the Gignac et al. review. The increased number of samples over the Gignac et al. review and the decision rule to record data separately by age and sex, permitted the evaluation of both age and sex moderators. 2.3. Analysis approach The psychometric meta-analysis approach (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990 and Hunter & Schmidt, 2004 ) was used. This approach estimates the population correlation by correcting the observed correlations for downward bias due to various artifacts including measurement error and range restriction. Whereas both intelligence measures and MRI-based measures of in vivo brain volume have reliabilities in the 0.90s, correlations were not corrected for measurement error in either variable. However, 16 of the 37 samples reported standard deviation for the intelligence measure. Of these 16 samples, 13 reported the standard deviation of the intelligence measures to be below the population standard deviation of 15. The average (median) of the standard deviations was 12.9 indicating that the observed correlations were, on average, underestimates of the population correlation due to restriction of range on the intelligence measures. The analyses are presented in two ways. First, the observed correlations were cumulated without any corrections for range restriction/enhancement. The resulting mean correlation would likely be an underestimate of the population parameter due to range restriction. Next, the observed correlations were corrected individually for range restriction (three correlations were corrected for range enhancement because the standard deviation of the intelligence measure was larger than the population standard deviation of 15). For those coefficients where the degree of range restriction was not known, the value of 12.9 (the median of the known values) was used. The resulting mean correlation corrected for range restriction is offered as the best estimate of the population parameter. Those who are not comfortable with the interpolation of the range restriction data and/or the range restriction corrections may interpret the mean observed correlation with knowledge that it is likely an underestimate of the population parameter. Those who are comfortable with the range restriction corrections may interpret the mean of the corrected correlations as a reasonable estimate of the population parameter. The pattern of the reported moderators is evident in both the observed and corrected means. 3. Results The results of the analysis based on 37 correlations that met the decision criteria (Andreasen et al., 1993, Aylward et al., 2002, Castellanos et al., 1994, Egan et al., 1995, Flashman et al., 1998, Frangou et al., 2004, Garde et al., 2000, Giedd, 2003, Gur et al., 1999, Ivanovic et al., 2004, Kareken et al., 1995, MacLullich et al., 2002, Nosarti et al., 2002, Pennington et al., 2000, Raz et al., 1993, Reiss et al., 1996, Schoenemann et al., 2000, Shapleske et al., 2002, Staff, 2002, Tan et al., 1999, Wickett et al., 1994 and Willerman et al., 1991) are reported in Table 1 . The results for the correlations corrected for the downward bias of range restriction will be discussed in this paper, although results for uncorrected correlations are also shown in the table. The best unbiased estimate of the population correlation between brain volume and intelligence is 0.33 (Table 2). Table 1. Comparison of the data reported by Gignac et al. (2003) and the current study Included in Gignac et al. (2003) Included in current study N r Sex/race/age information Aylward et al. (2002) No Yesa 46 ?0.13 Male, white, children Aylward et al. (2002) No Yesa 30 0.08 Mixed sex, white, adults Andreasen et al. (1993) Yes, data based on sample containing both males and females Yes, data reported separately by sex 37 0.40 Male, unknown race, adults 30 0.44 Female, unknown race, adults Castellanos et al. (1994) No Yes 46 0.33 Male, unknown race, children Egan et al., 1994 and Egan et al., 1995 Yes, used 1994 datab Yes, used 1995 datab 40 0.31 Mostly maleb, unknown race, adults Flashman et al. (1998) Yes Yes 90 0.25 Mixed sex, unknown race, adults Frangou et al. (2004) No Yes 40 0.41 Mixed sex, unknown race, mostly childrenc Garde et al. (2000) No Yesa 46 0.07 Male, white, adults 22 0.22 Female, white, adults Giedd (2003) No Yes 7 ?0.67 Female, not white and not black, children 8 0.46 Female, black, children 39 0.34 Female, white, children 7 0.17 Male, black, children 63 0.27 Male, white, children 7 0.67 Male, not white and not black, children Gur et al. (1999) Yes, data based on sample containing both males and females Yes, data reported separately by sex 40 0.39 Male, unknown race, adults 40 0.40 Female, unknown race, adults Ivanovic et al. (2004) No Yes 47 0.55 Male, unknown race, adults 49 0.37 Female, unknown race, adults Kareken et al. (1995) No Yesa 68 0.30 Mixed sex, unknown race, adults MacLullich et al. (2002) No Yes 97 0.39 Male, white, adults Nosarti et al. (2002) No Yesa 42 0.37 Mixed sex, white, children Pennington et al. (2000) Yesd Yes 36 0.31 Mixed sex, mixed race, children Raz et al. (1993) Yes Yes 29 0.43 Mixed sex, unknown race, adults Reiss et al. (1996) Yes, data based on sample containing both males and females Yes,a data reported separately by sex 12 0.52 Male, whitee, children 57 0.37 Female, white,e children Schoenemann et al. (2000) Yesf Yesf 72 0.21 Female, unknown race, adults Shapleske et al. (2002) No Yesa 23 0.13 Male, white, adults 3 ?0.86 Male, black, adults Staff (2002) No Yes 106 ?0.08 Mixed sex, white, adults Tan et al. (1999) Yes, data based on sample containing both males and females Yes, data reported separately by sex 49 0.28 Male, white, adults 54 0.62 Female, white, adults Tramo et al. (1998) Yes, the authors used a forebrain volume measure No, There is no full brain volume measure in this study ? ? ? Wickett et al. (1994) Yes Yes 40 0.40 Female, unknown race, adults Wickett et al. (2000) Yes Yes 68 0.35 Male, unknown race, adults Willerman et al. (1991) Yes, data based on sample containing both males and females Yes, data reported separately by sex 20 0.51 Male, unknown race, adults 20 0.33 Female unknown race adults Note: Correlation coefficients in this table were rounded to two decimal places. The statistical analysis did not use rounded correlation coefficients. a Data from this study were supplemented by communication with the author(s). This communication resulted in correlations that were not reported in the original study. b In Egan et al. (1994), the sample was described as 48 males and two females. Egan et al. (1995) reported corrected analyses using a sample of 40. This sample of 40, being a subset of the 48 could have had no more than 2 females and was classified as a male sample in the analysis. c The sample used by Frangou et al. (2004) had an age range of 12 to 21. Based on the mean and standard deviation of age, it appeared that most of the sample was under 18. We classified the sample as ?children.? d Gignac et al. (2003) also included a correlation from a sample of twins where at least one of each twin pair had a learning disability. The current study excluded the sample because it was not considered clinically normal. e In personal communication to the author (10/17/2002), Dr. Reiss described the race of the sample as being ?great majority white.? f Gignac et al. (2003) reported a correlation of 0.45 which was the partial correlation between the first principal component of a battery of test and brain volume controlling for age and simple reaction time. The author used the correlation between brain volume and the Ravens which was provided to us by Dr. Schoenemann on November 14, 2002. Table 2. Meta-analytic results for in vivo brain volume and intelligence Distribution Number of studies Sample size Observed mean correlation Mean correlation corrected for range restriction All correlations 37 1530 0.29 0.33 Analyses by whether the degree of range restriction was interpolated Interpolation 21 963 0.29 0.32 No interpolation 16 567 0.30 0.34 Analyses by sex Females 12 438 0.36 0.40 Males 17 651 0.30 0.34 Mixed sex 8 441 0.21 0.25 Analyses by age Adults 24 1120 0.30 0.33 Children 13 410 0.28 0.33 Analyses by age and sex Female adults 8 327 0.38 0.41 Female children 4 111 0.30 0.37 Male adults 11 470 0.34 0.38 Male children 6 181 0.21 0.22 It is possible that the correlation between brain volume and intelligence in studies that provided standard deviations of intelligence is systematically higher or lower than the studies that did not report standard deviations of intelligence. If this were the case, the interpolation of the standard deviations for those studies that did not report standard deviations might lead to biased estimates of the unattenuated correlation between brain volume and intelligence. To assess this potential problem, the author analyzed the data partitioned by whether the standard deviation was reported in the study or whether it was interpolated. The similarity of the observed correlations (0.29 and 0.30) suggested that the studies that reported standard deviations for intelligence were not systematically different in their average observed correlation. Thus, it is reasonable to interpolate the missing standard deviations from the known standard deviations. When the data were subdivided by sex, one obtains three sub-distributions: samples of males, samples of females, and samples that contained both males and females. The relationship between brain volume and intelligence shows a clear sex moderator with the correlation being larger for females than males (0.40 vs. 0.34). For studies in which both males and females were combined in the same sample, the correlation is 0.25. Assuming this correlation is not an anomaly due to sampling error, it argues for separate reporting of results by sex. The data were then subdivided by age into adult and child samples. The analyses restricted to age alone showed no evidence of a moderating effect; however, the mixed sex samples and the uneven distribution of age across sex clouded an effect that is evident when the data were divided hierarchically by sex and then by age. Female adult samples showed a somewhat larger population correlation than female children samples (0.41 vs. 0.37). Male adult samples showed a larger population correlation than male children samples (0.38 vs. 0.22). The hierarchical sex/age results also confirm the sex moderator. Female adult samples showed a higher population correlation than male adult samples (0.41 vs. 0.38). Female children samples showed a higher population correlation than male children samples (0.37 vs. 0.22). An anonymous reviewer requested a significance test on the sex difference. Most applications of psychometric meta-analysis (Hunter & Schmidt, 2004 ) do not incorporate statistical significance tests. This is in part because the meta-analysis seeks to estimate population parameters and statistical tests are designed for sample data. This is also in part due to the fact that statistical tests do not answer the questions that most users think they answer (Cohen, 1994 and Hunter & Schmidt, 2004 ). However, in deference to the reviewer, statistical significance tests are reported here. Statistical tests in meta-analysis focus on whether the observed variance in the distribution of effect sizes is different from the variance one would expect from sampling error alone. A chi-square significance test on the distribution of 37 effect sizes was statistically significant (p<0.0003) indicating that some of the variance in the distribution is not due to sampling error and thus might be due to moderators. Thus, on the basis of the statistical significance test, the moderator analyses for interpolation, age, and sex were warranted. With respect to the sex moderator analysis, the significance test was not statistically significant for females (p<0.065) but was significant for males (p<0.014) and for the mixed sex samples (p <0.017). One interpretation of these significance tests is that there are no moderators within the effect size distribution for females but there are moderators with the distribution of males and within the distribution of mixed-sex samples. Based on this interpretation, the age within sex analyses for females was not warranted while the age within sex analysis was warranted for the males and the mixed-sex samples. However, the significance of the chi-square analyses is a function of the sample size. At least by meta-analysis standards, all these sample sizes are small. Thus, a second interpretation, and the one favored by the author, is that the distribution of effect sizes from female samples needs more data to reach significance. Based on this interpretation, the search for age within sex analyses for females is reasonable and should be replicated as more data cumulate. 4. Discussion This study's best estimate of the correlation between brain volume and intelligence is 0.33. The correlation is higher for females than males. It is higher for adults than children. Regardless of the subgroups examined, the correlation between brain volume and intelligence is always positive. It is very clear that brain volume and intelligence are related. 4.1. Data reporting and availability issues There is much cause for concern regarding the reporting practices of research in this area. Few studies reported means and standard deviations and a zero-order correlation matrix among the variables. The lack of reported standard deviations makes it impossible to estimate precisely the effect of range restriction in these data. The lack of a correlation matrix results in excluding data from this analysis and thus increases publication bias concerns. Publication bias analyses for these data were not conducted because some procedures assume that the results are homogeneous (i.e., lacking moderators) (Terrin, Schmid, Lau, & Olkin, 2003 ). These data clearly show evidence of both sex and age moderators. The data distributions subdivided by both sex and age may be homogeneous but the number of correlations in these distributions was judged too few to conduct meaningful publication bias analyses. As future data accumulate, these analyses should be re-conducted and publication bias analyses should be pursued. Given the evidence of age and sex moderators in these data, more research reporting results separately by age and sex is warranted. Potential race moderators were not examined due to the relative lack of non-Caucasians in the samples and the failure to report correlations separately by race. 4.2. Additional research In addition to more research with better reporting, two additional areas deserve greater research attention. The first area is an examination of the brain volume and intelligence relationship at a more refined level of analysis than total brain volume. For example, although Staff's (2002) results indicated a small negative correlation between brain volume and intelligence, the fraction of brain volume that was gray matter was correlated 0.35 with intelligence. Likewise MacLullich et al. (2002) examined the relationship between regional brain volumes (e.g., left and right hippocampus, left and right frontal lobe, left and right temporal lobe) with intelligence. The author had considered including in this meta-analysis an analysis of regional brain volumes with intelligence but there were too few studies to analyze. The second area worthy of increased attention is the genetic contribution to the brain volume and intelligence relationship. The research in this area is both recent and rapidly growing (Molloy et al., 2002, Pennington et al., 2000, Posthuma et al., 2002, Posthuma et al., 2003, Schoenemann et al., 2000 and Thompson et al., 2001). These two research areas will help us to better understand the causal relationship between brain volume and intelligence. 5. Conclusion This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, the study more than doubles the number of unique samples that address the in vivo brain volume and intelligence relationship. Second, it also contributes by testing age and sex moderators of the relationship. The relationship is stronger for females than males and is stronger for adults than children. 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Abstract | Abstract + References | PDF (318 K) | Full Text via CrossRef From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:31:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:31:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Winners and Losers in Globalization Message-ID: This is from http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=1405133821&site=1 The book's publication date has been pushed back from June 15 to October 7, except the US, where it's being held till November 25. I very much look forward to getting the book. Winners and Losers in Globalization By: Guillermo de la Dehesa, Centre for Economic Policy Research Seeking reason in the impassioned globalization debate, de la Dehesa examines who stands to win and who stands to lose from the process of globalization, in a style accessible to readers unfamiliar with economic theory. Objectively and dispassionately illuminates the emotionally charged globalization debate; Acknowledges that the costs and benefits of globalization will not be distributed evenly; Details the economic effects of globalization on individuals, governments, nation-states and business; Assesses the impact of globalization on both labor markets and financial markets, on global economic growth and on income distribution and real convergence between different national economies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents Foreword (by Paul Krugman) Introduction 1. What is globalization? 2. Globalization and economic growth 3. Globalization, real convergence and income distribution 4. Globalization, employment and labour markets 5. Globalization and the size of firms 6. Globalization, state and government 7. Globalization and economic policy 8. Globalization and exchange rates 9. Globalization and financial crises 10.Globalization and culture 11.Who wins and who loses with globalization? Bibliography Guillermo de la Dehesa is the Chairman of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. He spent twenty years in various Spanish governmental positions from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Since leaving the public sector he has held a number of Chairman and Chief Executive positions in the private sector; he is currently Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs Europe, Independent Director of the Santander Banking Group, and Chairman of the Aviva Corporation, among others. He is a member of the "Group of Thirty", a nonprofit, independent consultative group which counts luminaries such as Mervyn King (Governor at the Bank of England), Lawrence Summers (President of Harvard), and Paul Krugman among its ranks. -------------- "I don?t expect this book to settle the debates over globalization: there is too much real uncertainty about the issue, and anyway there are too many people firmly committed to their views to be shaken by any argument or evidence. But perhaps Mr. De la Dehesa?s excellent book can lower the temperature and give us all a better sense of what this new global economy is really all about." -Paul Krugman, from the Foreword to Winners and Losers in Globalization. ?Globalization is a subject that stirs uncommonly strong emotions [and] those who try to make sense of it are often challenged on their credentials. But once in a while you get someone like Guillermo de la Dehesa ? that is, someone whose knowledge and experience crosses the usual boundaries, who cannot be impeached on the usual grounds. In other words, he is someone whose motives you can trust, and whose breadth of knowledge and experience are rare in this or any other area.? -Paul Krugman, from the Foreword to Winners and Losers in Globalization *Forthcoming Hardback 1405133821 Order Selection: ? $24.95 Americas/Canada ? ?19.99 Rest of World ? A$76.95 incl. GST Australia/New Zealand Publication Dates: USA: Nov 2005 ROW: Oct 2005 Format: 216 x 138mm, 5.5 x 8.5in Pages: 232 From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 23 14:31:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:31:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Why your brain has a Jennifer Aniston cell Message-ID: Why your brain has a Jennifer Aniston cell http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7567&print=true [The articles from Nature are appended. I can supply the PDFs.] * 19:00 22 June 2005 * Anna Gosline Obsessed with reruns of the TV sitcom Friends? Well then you probably have at least one Jennifer Aniston cell in your brain, suggests research on the activity patterns of single neurons in memory-linked areas of the brain. The results point to a decades-old and dismissed theory tying single neurons to individual concepts and could help neuroscientists understand the elusive human memory. For things that you see over and over again, your family, your boyfriend, or celebrities, your brain wires up and fires very specifically to them. These neurons are very, very specific, much more than people think, says Christof Koch at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, one of the researchers. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin suggested that people have neurons that respond to a single concept such as, for example, their grandmother. The notion of these hyper-specific neurons, coined grandmother cells was quickly rejected by psychologists as laughably simplistic. But Rodrigo Quiroga, at the University of Leicester, UK, who led the new study, and his colleagues have found some very grandmother-like cells. Previous unpublished findings from the team showed tantalising results: a neuron that fired only in response to pictures of former US president Bill Clinton, or another to images of the Beatles. But for such grandmother cells to exist, they must invariably respond to the concept of Bill Clinton, not just similar pictures. Wired up, fired up To investigate further, the team turned to eight patients currently undergoing treatment for epilepsy. In an attempt to locate the brain areas responsible for their seizures, each patient had around 100 tiny electrodes implanted in their brain. Many of the wires were placed in the hippocampus - an area of the brain vital to long-term memory formation. They first gave each subject a screening test, showing them between 71 and 114 images of famous people, places, and even food items. For each subject, the researchers measured the electrical activity or firing of the neurons connected to the electrodes. Of the 993 neurons sampled, 132 fired to at least one image. The team then went back for a testing phase, this time showing participants three to seven different pictures of the initial 132 photo subjects that hit. For example, one woman saw seven different photos of the Jennifer Aniston alongside 80 other photos of animals, buildings or additional famous people such as Julia Roberts. The neuron almost ignored all other photos, but fired steadily each time Aniston appeared on screen. Conceptual connections The team found similar results with another woman who had a neuron for pictures of Halle Berry, including a drawing of her face and an image of just the words of her name. This neuron is responding to the concept, the abstract entity, of Halle Berry, says Quiroga. If you show a line drawing or a profile, its the same response. We also showed pictures of her as Catwoman, and you can hardly see her because of the mask. But if you know it is Halle Berry then the neurons still fire. Given more time and an exhaustive list of images, the team may well have landed upon other images that spiked the activity of the Halle Berry neuron. In one participant, the Jen neuron also fired in response to a picture of her former Friends cast-mate, Lisa Kudrow. The pattern suggests that the actresses are tied together in the memory associations of this particular woman, says Charles Connor, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US. These object-specific neurons may be at the core of how we make memories, say Connor. I think thats the excitement to these results, he says. You are looking at the far end of the transformation from metric, visual shapes to conceptual memory-related information. It is that transformation that underlies our ability to understand the world. Its not enough to see something familiar and match it. Its the fact that you plug visual information into the rich tapestry of memory that brings it to life. Journal reference: Nature (vol 435 p 1102) Weblinks Rodrigo Quiroga, University of Leicester http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/ Christof Kochs Lab, California Institute of Technology http://www.klab.caltech.edu/ Charles E Connors Lab, Johns Hopkins University http://www.mb.jhu.edu/connor.asp Nature http://www.nature.com -------- News and Views Nature 435, 1036-1037 (23 June 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4351036a Neuroscience: Friends and grandmothers Charles E. Connor1 Abstract How do neurons in the brain represent movie stars, famous buildings and other familiar objects? Rare recordings from single neurons in the human brain provide a fresh perspective on the question. 'Grandmother cell' is a term coined by J. Y. Lettvin to parody the simplistic notion that the brain has a separate neuron to detect and represent every object (including one's grandmother)1 . The phrase has become a shorthand for invoking all of the overwhelming practical arguments against a one-to-one object coding scheme2. No one wants to be accused of believing in grandmother cells. But on page 1102 of this issue, Quiroga et al.3 describe a neuron in the human brain that looks for all the world like a 'Jennifer Aniston' cell. Ms Aniston could well become a grandmother herself someday. Are vision scientists now forced to drop their dismissive tone when discussing the neural representation of matriarchs? A more technical term for the grandmother issue is 'sparseness' (Fig. 1 ). At earlier stages in the brain's object-representation pathway, the neural code for an object is a broad activity pattern distributed across a population of neurons, each responsive to some discrete visual feature4. At later processing stages, neurons become increasingly selective for combinations of features5 , and the code becomes increasingly sparse ? that is, fewer neurons are activated by a given stimulus, although the code is still population-based6 . Sparseness has its advantages, especially for memory, because compact coding maximizes total storage capacity, and some evidence suggests that 'sparsification' is a defining goal of visual information processing7, 8 . Grandmother cells are the theoretical limit of sparseness, where the representation of an object is reduced to a single neuron. Figure 1: Sparseness and invariance in neural coding of visual stimuli. [Figure 1 : Sparseness and invariance in neural coding of visual stimuli. Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg at nature.com] The blue and yellow pixel plots represent a hypothetical neural population. Each pixel represents a neuron with low (blue) or high (yellow) activity. In distributed coding schemes (left column), many neurons are active in response to each stimulus. In sparse coding schemes (right column), few neurons are active. If the neural representation is invariant (top row), different views of the same person or object evoke identical activity patterns. If the neural representation is not invariant (bottom row), different views evoke different activity patterns. The implication of Quiroga and colleagues' results3, at least as far as vision is concerned, is that neural representation is extremely sparse and invariant. High resolution image and legend (107K) Quiroga and colleagues3 report what seems to be the closest approach yet to that limit. They recorded neural activity from structures in the human medial temporal lobe that are associated with late-stage visual processing and long-term memory. The structures concerned were the entorhinal cortex, the parahippocampal gyrus, the amygdala and the hippocampus, and the recordings were made in the course of clinical procedures to treat epilepsy. The first example cell responded significantly to seven different images of Jennifer Aniston but not to 80 other stimuli, including pictures of Julia Roberts and even pictures of Jennifer Aniston with Brad Pitt. The second example cell preferred Halle Berry in the same way. Altogether, 44 units (out of 137 with significant visual responses) were selective in this way for a single object out of those tested. The striking aspect of these results is the consistency of responses across different images of the same person or object. This relates to another major issue in visual coding, 'invariance' (Fig. 1 ). One of the most difficult aspects of vision is that any given object must be recognizable from the front or side, in light or shadow, and so on. Somehow, given those very different retinal images, the brain consistently invokes the same set of memory associations that give the object meaning. According to 'view-invariant' theories, this is achieved in the visual cortex by some kind of neural calculation that transforms the visual structure in different images into a common format9, 10, 11 . According to 'view-dependent' theories, it is achieved by learning temporal associations between different views and storing those associations in the memory12, 13, 14. Quiroga and colleagues' results3 set a new benchmark for both sparseness and invariance, at least from a visual perspective. Most of the invariant structural characteristics in images of Jennifer Aniston (such as relative positions of eyes, nose and mouth) would be present in images of Julia Roberts as well. Thus, any distributed visual coding scheme would predict substantial overlap in the neural groups representing Aniston and Roberts; cells responding to one and not the other would be rare. The clean, visually invariant selectivity of the neurons described by Quiroga et al. implies a sparseness bordering on grandmotherliness. However, as the authors discuss, these results may be best understood in a somewhat non-visual context. The brain structures that they studied stand at the far end of the object-representation pathway or beyond, and their responses may be more memory-related than strictly visual. In fact, several example cells responded not only to pictures but also to the printed name of a particular person or object. Clearly, this is a kind of invariance based on learned associations, not geometric transformation of visual structure, and these cells encode memory-based concepts rather than visual appearance. How do you measure sparseness in conceptual space? It's a difficult proposition, requiring knowledge of how the subject associates different concepts in memory. The authors did their best (within the constraints of limited recording time) to test images that might be conceptually related. In one tantalizing example, a neuron responded to both Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow, her co-star on the television show Friends. What seems to be a sparse representation in visual space may be a distributed representation in sitcom space! In another example, a neuron responded to two unrelated stimuli commonly used by Quiroga et al. ? pictures of Jennifer Aniston with Brad Pitt and pictures of the Sydney Opera House. This could reflect a new memory association produced by the close temporal proximity of these stimuli during the recording sessions, consistent with similar phenomena observed in monkey temporal cortex15. Thus, Quiroga and colleagues' findings may say less about visual representation as such than they do about memory representation and how it relates to visual inputs. Quiroga et al. have shown that, at or near the end of the transformation from visual information about object structure to memory-related conceptual information about object identity, the neural representation seems extremely sparse and invariant in the visual domain. As the authors note, these are predictable characteristics of an abstract, memory-based representation. But I doubt that anyone would have predicted such striking confirmation at the level of individual neurons. References 1. Rose, D. Perception 25, 881?886 (1996). | PubMed | ChemPort | 2. Barlow, H. B. Perception 1, 371?394 (1972). | PubMed | ChemPort | 3. Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C. & Fried, I. Nature 435, 1102?1107 (2005). | Article | 4. Pasupathy, A. & Connor, C. E. Nature Neurosci. 5, 1332?1338 (2002). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 5. Brincat, S. L. & Connor, C. E. Nature Neurosci. 7, 880?886 (2004). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort | 6. Young, M. P. & Yamane, S. Science 256, 1327?1331 (1992). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 7. Olshausen, B. A. & Field, D. J. Nature 381, 607?609 (1996). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 8. Vinje, W. E. & Gallant, J. L. Science 287, 1273?1276 (2000). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 9. Biederman, I. Psychol. Rev. 94, 115?147 (1987). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 10. Marr, D. & Nishihara, H. K. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 200, 269?294 (1978). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 11. Booth, M. C. & Rolls, E. T. Cereb. Cortex 8, 510?523 (1998). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 12. Bulthoff, H. H., Edelman, S. Y. & Tarr, M. J. Cereb. Cortex 5, 247?260 (1995). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 13. Vetter, T., Hurlbert, A. & Poggio, T. Cereb. Cortex 5, 261?269 (1995). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 14. Logothetis, N. K. & Pauls, J. Cereb. Cortex 5, 270?288 (1995). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 15. Sakai, K. & Miyashita, Y. Nature 354, 152?155 (1991). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 1. Charles E. Connor is in the Department of Neuroscience and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. Email: connor at jhu.edu --------------- Letter Nature 435, 1102-1107 (23 June 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03687 Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain R. Quian Quiroga1,2,5, L. Reddy1, G. Kreiman3, C. Koch1 and I. Fried2,4 Abstract It takes a fraction of a second to recognize a person or an object even when seen under strikingly different conditions. How such a robust, high-level representation is achieved by neurons in the human brain is still unclear1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages of the ventral visual pathway respond to complex images such as faces and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties such as the stimulus size, position and viewing angle2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 . We have previously shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) fire selectively to images of faces, animals, objects or scenes13, 14 . Here we report on a remarkable subset of MTL neurons that are selectively activated by strikingly different pictures of given individuals, landmarks or objects and in some cases even by letter strings with their names. These results suggest an invariant, sparse and explicit code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual percepts into long-term and more abstract memories. The subjects were eight patients with pharmacologically intractable epilepsy who had been implanted with depth electrodes to localize the focus of seizure onset. For each patient, the placement of the depth electrodes, in combination with micro-wires, was determined exclusively by clinical criteria13 . We analysed responses of neurons from the hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus to images shown on a laptop computer in 21 recording sessions. Stimuli were different pictures of individuals, animals, objects and landmark buildings presented for 1 s in pseudo-random order, six times each. An unpublished observation in our previous recordings was the sometimes surprising degree of invariance inherent in the neuron's (that is, unit's) firing behaviour. For example, in one case, a unit responded only to three completely different images of the ex-president Bill Clinton. Another unit (from a different patient) responded only to images of The Beatles, another one to cartoons from The Simpson's television series and another one to pictures of the basketball player Michael Jordan. This suggested that neurons might encode an abstract representation of an individual. We here ask whether MTL neurons can represent high-level information in an abstract manner characterized by invariance to the metric characteristics of the images. By invariance we mean that a given unit is activated mainly, albeit not necessarily uniquely, by different pictures of a given individual, landmark or object. To investigate further this abstract representation, we introduced several modifications to optimize our recording and data processing conditions (see Supplementary Information ) and we designed a paradigm to systematically search for and characterize such invariant neurons. In a first recording session, usually done early in the morning (screening session), a large number of images of famous persons, landmark buildings, animals and objects were shown. This set was complemented by images chosen after an interview with the patient. The mean number of images in the screening session was 93.9 (range 71?114). The data were quickly analysed offline to determine the stimuli that elicited responses in at least one unit (see definition of response below). Subsequently, in later sessions (testing sessions) between three and eight variants of all the stimuli that had previously elicited a response were shown. If not enough stimuli elicited significant responses in the screening session, we chose those stimuli with the strongest responses. On average, 88.6 (range 70?110) different images showing distinct views of 14 individuals or objects (range 7?23) were used in the testing sessions. Single views of random stimuli (for example, famous and non-famous faces, houses, animals, etc) were also included. The total number of stimuli was determined by the time available with the patient (about 30 min on average). Because in our clinical set-up the recording conditions can sometimes change within a few hours, we always tried to perform the testing sessions shortly after the screening sessions in order to maximize the probability of recording from the same units. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all the data reported in this study are from the testing sessions. To hold their attention, patients had to perform a simple task during all sessions (indicating with a key press whether a human face was present in the image). Performance was close to 100%. We recorded from a total of 993 units (343 single units and 650 multi-units), with an average of 47.3 units per session (16.3 single units and 31.0 multi-units). Of these, 132 (14%; 64 single units and 68 multi-units) showed a statistically significant response to at least one picture. A response was considered significant if it was larger than the mean plus 5 standard deviations (s.d.) of the baseline and had at least two spikes in the post-stimulus time interval considered (300?1,000 ms). All these responses were highly selective: for the responsive units, an average of only 2.8% of the presented pictures (range: 0.9?22.8%) showed significant activations according to this criterion. This high selectivity was also present in the screening sessions, where only 3.1% of the pictures shown elicited responses (range: 0.9?18.0%). There was no significant difference between the relative number of responsive pictures obtained in the screening and testing sessions (t-test, P = 0.40). Responses started around 300 ms after stimulus onset and had mainly three non-exclusive patterns of activation (with about one-third of the cells having each type of response): the response disappeared with stimulus offset, 1 s after stimulus onset; it consisted of a rapid sequence of about 6 spikes (s.d. = 5) between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus onset; or it was prolonged and continued up to 1 s after stimulus offset. For this study, we calculated the responses in a time window between 300 and 1,000 ms after stimulus onset. In a few cases we also observed cells that responded selectively only after the image was removed from view (that is, after 1 s). These are not further analysed here. Figure 1a shows the responses of a single unit in the left posterior hippocampus to a selection of 30 out of the 87 pictures presented to the patient. None of the other pictures elicited a statistically significant response. This unit fired to all pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston alone, but not (or only very weakly) to other famous and non-famous faces, landmarks, animals or objects. Interestingly, the unit did not respond to pictures of Jennifer Aniston together with the actor Brad Pitt (but see Supplementary Fig. 2 ). Pictures of Jennifer Aniston elicited an average of 4.85 spikes (s.d. = 3.59) between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus onset. Notably, this unit was nearly silent during baseline (average of 0.02 spikes in a 700-ms pre-stimulus time window) and during the presentation of most other pictures (Fig. 1b). Figure 1b plots the median number of spikes (across trials) in the 300?1,000-ms post-stimulus interval for all 87 pictures shown to the patient. The histogram shows a marked differential response to pictures of Jennifer Aniston (red bars). Figure 1: A single unit in the left posterior hippocampus activated exclusively by different views of the actress Jennifer Aniston. [Figure 1 : A single unit in the left posterior hippocampus activated exclusively by different views of the actress Jennifer Aniston. Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg at nature.com] a , Responses to 30 of the 87 images are shown. There were no statistically significant responses to the other 57 pictures. For each picture, the corresponding raster plots (the order of trial number is from top to bottom) and post-stimulus time histograms are given. Vertical dashed lines indicate image onset and offset (1 s apart). Note that owing to insurmountable copyright problems, all original images were replaced in this and all subsequent figures by very similar ones (same subject, animal or building, similar pose, similar colour, line drawing, and so on). b, The median responses to all pictures. The image numbers correspond to those in a . The two horizontal lines show the mean baseline activity (0.02 spikes) and the mean plus 5 s.d. (0.82 spikes). Pictures of Jennifer Aniston are denoted by red bars. c, The associated ROC curve (red trace) testing the hypothesis that the cell responded in an invariant manner to all seven photographs of Jennifer Aniston (hits) but not to other images (including photographs of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt together; false positives). The grey lines correspond to the same ROC analysis for 99 surrogate sets of 7 randomly chosen pictures (P < 0.01). The area under the red curve is 1.00. High resolution image and legend (87K) Next, we quantified the degree of invariance using a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) framework15. We considered as the hit rate (y axis) the relative number of responses to pictures of a specific individual, object, animal or landmark building, and as the false positive rate (x axis) the relative number of responses to other pictures. The ROC curve corresponds to the performance of a linear binary classifier for different values of a response threshold. Decreasing the threshold increases the probability of hits but also of false alarms. A cell responding to a large set of pictures of different individuals will have a ROC curve close to the diagonal (with an area under the curve of 0.5), whereas a cell that responds to all pictures of an individual but not to others will have a convex ROC curve far from the diagonal, with an area close to 1. In Fig. 1c we show the ROC curve for all seven pictures of Jennifer Aniston (red trace, with an area equal to 1). The grey lines show 99 ROC surrogate curves, testing invariance to randomly selected groups of pictures (see Methods). As expected, these curves are close to the diagonal, having an area of about 0.5. None of the 99 surrogate curves had an area equal or larger than the original ROC curve, implying that it is unlikely (P < 0.01) that the responses to Jennifer Aniston were obtained by chance. A responsive unit was defined to have an invariant representation if the area under the ROC curve was larger than the area of the 99 surrogate curves. Figure 2 shows another single unit located in the right anterior hippocampus of a different patient. This unit was selectively activated by pictures of the actress Halle Berry as well as by a drawing of her (but not by other drawings; for example, picture no. 87). This unit was also activated by several pictures of Halle Berry dressed as Catwoman, her character in a recent film, but not by other images of Catwoman that were not her (data not shown). Notably, the unit was selectively activated by the letter string 'Halle Berry'. Such an invariant pattern of activation goes beyond common visual features of the different stimuli. As with the previous unit, the responses were mainly localized between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus onset. Figure 2c shows the ROC curve for the pictures of Halle Berry (red trace) and for 99 surrogates (grey lines). The area under the ROC curve was 0.99, larger than that of the surrogates. Figure 2: A single unit in the right anterior hippocampus that responds to pictures of the actress Halle Berry (conventions as in Fig. 1). [Figure 2 : A single unit in the right anterior hippocampus that responds to pictures of the actress Halle Berry (conventions as in Fig. 1). Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg at nature.com] a?c , Strikingly, this cell also responds to a drawing of her, to herself dressed as Catwoman (a recent movie in which she played the lead role) and to the letter string 'Halle Berry' (picture no. 96). Such an invariant response cannot be attributed to common visual features of the stimuli. This unit also had a very low baseline firing rate (0.06 spikes). The area under the red curve in c is 0.99. High resolution image and legend (88K) Figure 3 illustrates a multi-unit in the left anterior hippocampus responding to pictures of the Sydney Opera House and the Baha'i Temple. Because the patient identified both landmark buildings as the Sydney Opera House, all these pictures were considered as a single landmark building for the ROC analysis. This unit also responded to the letter string 'Sydney Opera' (pictures no. 2 and 8) but not to other letter strings, such as 'Eiffel Tower' (picture no. 1). More examples of invariant responses are shown in the Supplementary Figs 2?11. Figure 3: A multi-unit in the left anterior hippocampus that responds to photographs of the Sydney Opera House and the Baha'i Temple (conventions as in Fig. 1). [Figure 3 : A multi-unit in the left anterior hippocampus that responds to photographs of the Sydney Opera House and the Baha'i Temple (conventions as in Fig. 1). Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg at nature.com] a?c , The patient identified all pictures of both of these buildings as the Sydney Opera, and we therefore considered them as a single landmark. This unit also responded to the presentation of the letter string 'Sydney Opera' (pictures no. 2 and 8), but not to other strings, such as 'Eiffel Tower' (picture no. 1). In contrast to the previous two figures, this unit had a higher baseline firing rate (2.64 spikes). The area under the red curve in c is 0.97. High resolution image and legend (118K) Out of the 132 responsive units, 51 (38.6%; 30 single units and 21 multi-units) showed invariance to a particular individual (38 units responding to Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, Kobe Bryant, and so on), landmark building (6 units responding to the Tower of Pisa, the Baha'i Temple and the Sydney Opera House), animal (5 units responding to spiders, seals and horses) or object (2 units responding to specific food items), with P < 0.01 as defined above by means of the surrogate tests. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) yielded similar results (see Methods). Eight of these units (two single units and six multi-units) responded to two different individuals (or to an individual and an object). Figure 4 presents the distribution of the areas under the ROC curves for all 51 units that showed an invariant representation to individuals or objects. The areas ranged from 0.76 to 1.00, with a median of 0.94. These units were located in the hippocampus (27 out of 60 responsive units; 45%), parahippocampal gyrus (11 out of 20 responsive units; 55%), amygdala (8 out of 30 responsive units; 27%) and entorhinal cortex (5 out of 22 responsive units; 23%). There were no clear differences in the latencies and firing patterns among the different areas. However, more data are needed before making a conclusive claim about systematic differences between the various structures of the MTL. Figure 4: Distribution of the area under the ROC curves for the 51 units (out of 132 responsive units) showing an invariant representation. [Figure 4 : Distribution of the area under the ROC curves for the 51 units (out of 132 responsive units) showing an invariant representation. Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, or to obtain a text description, please contact npg at nature.com] Of these, 43 responded to a single individual or object and 8 to two individuals or objects. The dashed vertical line marks the median of the distribution (0.94). High resolution image and legend (38K) As shown in Figs 2 and 3 , one of the most extreme cases of an abstract representation is the one given by responses to pictures of a particular individual (or object) and to the presentation of the corresponding letter string with its name. In 18 of the 21 testing sessions we also tested responses to letter strings with the names of the individuals and objects. Eight of the 132 responsive units (6.1%) showed a selective response to an individual and its name (with no response to other names). Six of these were in the hippocampus, one was in the entorhinal cortex and one was in the amygdala. These neuronal responses cannot be attributed to any particular movement artefact, because selective responses started around 300 ms after image onset, whereas key presses occurred at 1 s or later, and neuronal responses were very selective. About one-third of the responsive units had a response localized between 300 and 600 ms. This interval corresponds to the latency of event-related responses correlated with the recognition of 'oddball' stimuli in scalp electroencephalogram, namely, the P300 (ref. 16). Some studies argue for a generation of the P300 in the hippocampal formation and amygdala17, 18, consistent with our findings. What are the common features that activate these neurons? Given the great diversity of distinct images of a single individual (pencil sketches, caricatures, letter strings, coloured photographs with different backgrounds) that these cells can selectively respond to, it is unlikely that this degree of invariance can be explained by a simple set of metric features common to these images. Indeed, our data are compatible with an abstract representation of the identity of the individual or object shown. The existence of such high-level visual responses in medial temporal lobe structures, usually considered to be involved in long-term memory formation and consolidation, should not be surprising given the following: (1) the known anatomical connections between the higher stages of the visual hierarchy in the ventral pathway and the MTL19, 20 ; (2) the well-characterized reactivity of the cortical stages feeding into the MTL to the sight of faces, objects, or spatial scenes (as ascertained using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans21, 22 and electrophysiology in monkeys2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 ); and (3) the observation that any visual percept that will be consciously remembered later on will have to be represented in the hippocampal system23, 24, 25 . This is true even though patients with bilateral loss of parts of the MTL do not, in general, have a deficit in the perception of images25. Neurons in the MTL might have a fundamental role in learning associations between abstract representations26 . Thus, our observed invariant responses probably arise from experiencing very different pictures, words or other visual stimuli in association with a given individual or object. How neurons encode different percepts is one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience. Two extreme hypotheses are schemes based on the explicit representations by highly selective (cardinal, gnostic or grandmother) neurons and schemes that rely on an implicit representation over a very broad and distributed population of neurons1, 2, 3, 4, 6 . In the latter case, recognition would require the simultaneous activation of a large number of cells and therefore we would expect each cell to respond to many pictures with similar basic features. This is in contrast to the sparse firing we observe, because most MTL cells do not respond to the great majority of images seen by the patient. Furthermore, cells signal a particular individual or object in an explicit manner27 , in the sense that the presence of the individual can, in principle, be reliably decoded from a very small number of neurons. We do not mean to imply the existence of single neurons coding uniquely for discrete percepts for several reasons: first, some of these units responded to pictures of more than one individual or object; second, given the limited duration of our recording sessions, we can only explore a tiny portion of stimulus space; and third, the fact that we can discover in this short time some images?such as photographs of Jennifer Aniston?that drive the cells suggests that each cell might represent more than one class of images. Yet, this subset of MTL cells is selectively activated by different views of individuals, landmarks, animals or objects. This is quite distinct from a completely distributed population code and suggests a sparse, explicit and invariant encoding of visual percepts in MTL. Such an abstract representation, in contrast to the metric representation in the early stages of the visual pathway, might be important in the storage of long-term memories. Other factors, including emotional responses towards some images, could conceivably influence the neuronal activity as well. The responses of these neurons are reminiscent of the behaviour of hippocampal place cells in rodents28 that only fire if the animal moves through a particular spatial location, with the actual place field defined independently of sensory cues. Notably, place cells have been found recently in the human hippocampus as well29 . Both classes of neurons?place cells and the cells in the present study?have a very low baseline activity and respond in a highly selective manner. Future research might show that this similarity has functional implications, enabling mammals to encode behaviourally important features of the environment and to transition between them, either in physical space or in a more conceptual space13. Methods The data in the present study come from 21 sessions in 8 patients with pharmacologically intractable epilepsy (eight right handed; 3 male; 17?47 years old). Extensive non-invasive monitoring did not yield concordant data corresponding to a single resectable epileptogenic focus. Therefore, the patients were implanted with chronic depth electrodes for 7?10 days to determine the seizure focus for possible surgical resection13 . Here we report data from sites in the hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus. All studies conformed to the guidelines of the Medical Institutional Review Board at UCLA. The electrode locations were based exclusively on clinical criteria and were verified by MRI or by computer tomography co-registered to preoperative MRI. Each electrode probe had a total of nine micro-wires at its end13 , eight active recording channels and one reference. The differential signal from the micro-wires was amplified using a 64-channel Neuralynx system, filtered between 1 and 9,000 Hz. We computed the power spectrum for every unit after spike sorting. Units that showed evidence of line noise were excluded from subsequent analysis14. Signals were sampled at 28 kHz. Each recording session lasted about 30 min. Subjects lay in bed, facing a laptop computer. Each image covered about 1.5? and was presented at the centre of the screen six times for 1 s. The order of the pictures was randomized. Subjects had to respond, after image offset, according to whether the picture contained a human face or something else by pressing the 'Y' and 'N' keys, respectively. This simple task, on which performance was virtually flawless, required them to attend to the pictures. After the experiments, patients gave feedback on whether they recognized the images or not. Pictures included famous and unknown individuals, animals, landmarks and objects. We tried to maximize the differences between pictures of the individuals (for example, different clothing, size, point of view, and so on). In 18 of the 21 sessions, we also presented letter strings with names of individuals or objects. The data from the screening sessions were rapidly processed to identify responsive units and images. All pictures that elicited a response in the screening session were included in the later testing sessions. Three to eight different views of seven to twenty-three different individuals or objects were used in the testing sessions with a mean of 88.6 images per session (range 70?110). Spike detection and sorting was applied to the continuous recordings using a novel clustering algorithm30 (see Supplementary Information ). The response to a picture was defined as the median number of spikes across trials between 300 and 1,000 ms after stimulus onset. Baseline activity was the average spike count for all pictures between 1,000 and 300 ms before stimulus onset. A unit was considered responsive if the activity to at least one picture fulfilled two criteria: (1) the median number of spikes was larger than the average number of spikes for the baseline plus 5 s.d.; and (2) the median number of spikes was at least two. The classification between single unit and multi-unit was done visually based on the following: (1) the spike shape and its variance; (2) the ratio between the spike peak value and the noise level; (3) the inter-spike interval distribution of each cluster; and (4) the presence of a refractory period for the single units (that is, less than 1% of spikes within less than 3 ms inter-spike interval). Whenever a unit had a response to a given stimulus, we further analysed the responses to other pictures of the same individual or object by a ROC analysis. This tested whether cells responded selectively to pictures of a given individual. The hit rate (y axis) was defined as the number of responses to the individual divided by the total number of pictures of this individual. The false positive rate (x axis) was defined as the number of responses to the other pictures divided by the total number of other pictures. The ROC curve was obtained by gradually lowering the threshold of the responses (the median number of spikes in Figs 1b, 2b and 3b ). Starting with a very high threshold (no hits, no false positives, lower left-hand corner in the ROC diagram), if a unit responds exclusively to an image of a particular individual or object, the ROC curve will show a steep increase when lowering the threshold (a hit rate of 1 and no false positives). If a unit responds to a random selection of pictures, it will have a similar relative number of hits and false positives and the ROC curve will fall along the diagonal. In the first case, for a highly invariant unit, the area under the ROC curve will be close to 1, whereas in the latter case it will be about 0.5. To evaluate the statistical significance, we created 99 surrogate curves for each responsive unit, testing the null hypothesis that the unit responded preferentially to n randomly chosen pictures (with n being the number of pictures of the individual for which invariance was tested). A unit was considered invariant to a certain individual or object if the area under the ROC curve was larger than the area of all of the 99 surrogates (that is, with a confidence of P < 0.01). Alternatively, the ROC analysis can be done with the single trial responses instead of the median responses across trials. Here, responses to the trials corresponding to any picture of the individual tested are considered as hits and responses to trials to other pictures as false positives. This trial-by-trial analysis led to very similar results, with 55 units of all 132 responsive units showing an invariant representation. A one-way ANOVA also yielded similar results. In particular, we tested whether the distribution of median firing rates for all responsive units showed a dependence on the factor identity (that is, the individual, landmark or object shown). The different views of each individual were the repeated measures. As with the ROC analysis, an ANOVA test was performed on all responsive units. Overall, the results were very similar to those obtained with the ROC analysis: of 132 responsive units, 49 had a significant effect for factor identity with P < 0.01, compared to 51 units showing an invariant representation with the ROC analysis. The ANOVA analysis, however, does not demonstrate that the invariant responses were very selective, whereas the ROC analysis explicitly tests the presence of an invariant as well as sparse representation. Images were obtained from Corbis and Photorazzi, with licensed rights to reproduce them in this paper and in the Supplementary Information. Acknowledgments We thank all patients for their participation; P. Sinha for drawing some faces; colleagues for providing pictures; I. Wainwright for administrative assistance; and E. Behnke, T. Fields, E. Ho, E. Isham, A. Kraskov, P. Steinmetz, I. Viskontas and C. Wilson for technical assistance. This work was supported by grants from the NINDS, NIMH, NSF, DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, the W.M. Keck Foundation Fund for Discovery in Basic Medical Research, a Whiteman fellowship (to G.K.), the Gordon Moore Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Swartz Foundation for Computational Neuroscience. Competing interests statement: The authors declared no competing interests. Supplementary information accompanies this paper. References 1. Barlow, H. Single units and sensation: a neuron doctrine for perception. Perception 1, 371?394 (1972) | PubMed | ChemPort | 2. Gross, C. G., Bender, D. B. & Rocha-Miranda, C. E. Visual receptive fields of neurons in inferotemporal cortex of the monkey. Science 166, 1303?1306 (1969) | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 3. 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A. & Creelman, C. D. Detection Theory: A User's Guide (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1991) 16. Picton, T. The P300 wave of the human event-related potential. J. Clin. Neurophysiol. 9, 456?479 (1992) | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 17. Halgren, E., Marinkovic, K. & Chauvel, P. Generators of the late cognitive potentials in auditory and visual oddball tasks. Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol. 106, 156?164 (1998) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 18. McCarthy, G., Wood, C. C., Williamson, P. D. & Spencer, D. D. Task-dependent field potentials in human hippocampal formation. J. Neurosci. 9, 4253?4268 (1989) | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 19. Saleem, K. S. & Tanaka, K. Divergent projections from the anterior inferotemporal area TE to the perirhinal and entorhinal cortices in the macaque monkey. J. Neurosci. 16, 4757?4775 (1996) | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 20. Suzuki, W. A. Neuroanatomy of the monkey entorhinal, perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices: Organization of cortical inputs and interconnections with amygdale and striatum. Seminar Neurosci. 8, 3?12 (1996) 21. Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J. & Chun, M. M. The fusiform face area: A module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. J. Neurosci. 17, 4302?4311 (1997) | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 22. Haxby, J. V. et al. Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex. Science 293, 2425?2430 (2001) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 23. Eichenbaum, H. A cortical-hippocampal system for declarative memory. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 1, 41?50 (2000) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 24. Hampson, R. E., Pons, P. P., Stanford, T. R. & Deadwyler, S. A. Categorization in the monkey hippocampus: A possible mechanism for encoding information into memory. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 3184?3189 (2004) | Article | PubMed | ChemPort | 25. Squire, L. R., Stark, C. E. L. & Clark, R. E. The medial temporal lobe. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 27, 279?306 (2004) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 26. Mishashita, Y. Neuronal correlate of visual associative long-term memory in the primate temporal cortex. Nature 335, 817?820 (1988) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 27. Koch, C. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Roberts, Englewood, Colorado, 2004) 28. Wilson, M. A. & McNaughton, B. L. Dynamics of the hippocampal ensemble code for space. Science 261, 1055?1058 (1993) | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 29. Ekstrom, A. D. et al. Cellular networks underlying human spatial navigation. Nature 425, 184?187 (2003) | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort | 30. Quian Quiroga, R., Nadasdy, Z. & Ben-Shaul, Y. Unsupervised spike detection and sorting with wavelets and super-paramagnetic clustering. Neural Comput. 16, 1661?1687 (2004) | PubMed | 1. Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA 2. Division of Neurosurgery and Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), California 90095, USA 3. Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA 4. Functional Neurosurgery Unit, Tel-Aviv Medical Center and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel 5. ?Present address: Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK Correspondence to: R. Quian Quiroga1,2,5 Correspondence and request for materials should be addressed to R.Q.Q. (Email: rodri at vis.caltech.edu). Received 1 December 2004; Accepted 3 February 2005 From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Jun 23 16:49:14 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 09:49:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] absolutists/contextualists In-Reply-To: <20050623023039.56796.qmail@web30811.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050623023039.56796.qmail@web30811.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42BAE80A.4070203@earthlink.net> Michael says: > I think both should think more like >Greens. > > -- That's a nifty idea since our environment determines our future and established all life on earth. Major problem with the Greens is their militant stance and over reactions on all issues environmental. Maybe after all these years, the Greens have become more moderate in their focus and are working to support what they believe in rather than destroy in order to approve a particular position. Gerry From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jun 24 02:40:25 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 19:40:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] misperceiving cues In-Reply-To: <200506231800.j5NI0VR15440@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050624024025.3154.qmail@web30813.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>"Men are more likely than women to attribute a woman's friendliness to mild sexual interest. This misreading of warmth as a sexual come-on (called misattribution) can contribute to behavior that women (especially American women) regard as sexual harassment or rape...Men more often than women think about sex.<< --There really ought to be more focus on how people misperceive cues by others. In addition to ubiquitous misreading of signals across gender lines, there is a lot of misreading of signals in arguments and conflicts. People who interpret criticism as an attack are more likely to fall into the shame-rage spiral and become violent. It might be a lot easier to teach criminals to interrupt the steps of the spiral than to expect them to learn from punishment weeks or months after an assault has been committed. It would also be helpful in negotiations between highly emotional parties in politics. Michael ____________________________________________________ Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com From Thrst4knw at aol.com Fri Jun 24 13:24:01 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:24:01 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] misperceiving cues Message-ID: <88.295c82f6.2fed6371@aol.com> I agree. On the one hand, these considerations are a big part of cognitive psychology (and cognitive therapy on an individual basis), for example see Ted Beck's "Prisoner's of Hate" for an interesting analysis of reactions patterns that lead to hostility. They are also a big part of the study of unconscious social perception (i.e. attribution theory, dissonance, stereotypes, social schemata, nonverbal communication, marginal perception). Yet even though there's a fair amount of good empirical research in this area already, it has traditionally been very disjoint: a pile of promising data with a few scattered attempts at unifying themes. The result is that the research is still very easy to extrapolate into political arguments by taking advantage of the lack of conceptual unification. I still hold out some hope that evolutionary models will help unify the data and provide a general model of how we build and respond to our inner representations of each other. Todd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------ --There really ought to be more focus on how people misperceive cues by others. In addition to ubiquitous misreading of signals across gender lines, there is a lot of misreading of signals in arguments and conflicts. People who interpret criticism as an attack are more likely to fall into the shame-rage spiral and become violent. It might be a lot easier to teach criminals to interrupt the steps of the spiral than to expect them to learn from punishment weeks or months after an assault has been committed. It would also be helpful in negotiations between highly emotional parties in politics. Michael -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Jun 24 18:29:38 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:29:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] violence In-Reply-To: <200506241800.j5OI0QR07476@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050624182938.10658.qmail@web30802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Todd says: >>I still hold out some hope that evolutionary models will help unify the data and provide a general model of how we build and respond to our inner representations of each other.<< --Another issue is how to conceptualize complex feedback in human systems in a way that appeals to the way most people learn. Most people think of "chemistry" or some other scientific field and all they remember is the textbook diagrams or the periodic table, with no unifying and three-dimensional understanding, let alone any feeling of sincere interest or curiosity. And, since our political and social system is often based on cliches, habit and entrenched family dynamics, it's hard to get any new model into the foreground where it can actually be used to accomplish things. Much easier for a politician to press people's fear buttons, call for tougher penalties and more "discipline" and so on. But that's not going to help someone who falls into a violence spiral and doesn't know where the "hooks" are to stop himself. Just as a violent criminal responds automatically and trance-like to his misperceptions of other people's motives, so the voting public responds automatically and trance-like to authoritarian leaders who appeal to emotional habits developed early in life. michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 24 19:56:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:56:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Erections) With New Lease on Life, Don't Miss the Fine Print Message-ID: With New Lease on Life, Don't Miss the Fine Print http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/health/21brody.html?pagewanted=print By JANE BRODY Only if you never watch television, read a newspaper or magazine or listen to comedians can you have escaped the revolution that has occurred in the treatment of erectile dysfunction. Three drugs - Viagra (sildenafil), Levitra (vardenafil) and Cialis (tadalafil) - have in recent years joined several older and more invasive or involved treatments for this common condition. Estimates of the prevalence vary, ranging from about 5 percent of men in their 40's to over 50 percent in their 70's, depending in part on how the disorder is defined. An estimated 15 million to 30 million Americans have erectile problems. But despite the unavoidable exposure to the drugs through advertising and comedy routines, a majority of these men have never received a medical diagnosis of erectile dysfunction, and only a small fraction are being treated, experts report. Many men are too embarrassed to mention the problem to their doctors, and many doctors are equally reluctant to ask patients about it. On the other hand, some men taking the new drugs have not been adequately screened for possible correctable underlying causes or medical problems that could render the drug treatment unsafe. Problem With Many Causes A man's ability to perform sexually can be impaired by a host of factors, including disorders that affect nerves, blood vessels or hormonal output; certain medications (both prescription and over the counter); diseases like diabetes, stroke, multiple sclerosis or epilepsy; aging; psychological problems like depression and performance anxiety; pelvic trauma, radiation or certain operations; and, of course, a loss of interest in one's sexual partner. In many men with erectile dysfunction, a combination of factors are involved. Risk factors for cardiovascular disease - hypertension, abnormal blood lipids, smoking and diabetes - are associated with an increased prevalence of erectile dysfunction, strongly suggesting that men seeking treatment first be evaluated for heart and blood vessel disease. This is best done with a full medical history, measurement of blood pressure, blood sugar and blood lipids, and possibly a treadmill test. A cardiovascular assessment is especially important for men of middle age and older, since resumption of sexual activity after treatment can result in a heart attack in those unaccustomed to the exertion. Men at high risk for cardiovascular disease - those with uncontrolled hypertension, unstable angina, severe heart failure, valve disease or who suffered a recent heart attack or stroke - should not engage in sexual activity and should not be treated for erectile dysfunction until their medical problems are resolved. Insufficient testosterone is an uncommon cause of erectile dysfunction, affecting about 6 percent of men with this problem. Although giving testosterone to someone with a deficiency may not in itself correct the erectile problem, testosterone is the libido hormone for both men and women and is an important stimulant of sexual desire. Various Treatments The new drugs are revolutionary because earlier treatments were more complicated. One very effective agent, alprostadil, must be administered directly into the urethra or injected into the penis. The injections, which are more effective, can help men with a variety of underlying causes, both psychological and physical. In one study, more than 80 percent of men and their partners reported satisfactory results. Another treatment, vacuum constrictor devices, use vacuum pressure to promote blood flow into the penis and a constricting ring to keep the blood from escaping. Though it works in about two-thirds of cases, it does prevent ejaculation. A third approach involves an implanted prosthesis. One kind is a semirigid rod that, in effect, creates a permanent erection, and the other is an inflatable device that can readily pump up the penis when sexual activity is desired. To appreciate the value of the new drugs, it helps to understand how a normal erection occurs. With sexual arousal, the penis must fill with blood, causing it to enlarge and become rigid. For as long as arousal persists, fibrous tissue in the penis preserves the erection by creating a cinch to prevent blood from leaving. In addition to a receptive state of mind, adequate levels of testosterone and healthy blood vessels and nerves, an erection requires the chemical messenger nitric oxide. It plays two critical roles, transmitting arousal impulses between nerves, and relaxing the smooth muscles in arteries, allowing them to expand and fill with blood. Nitric oxide signals production within artery cells of a chemical called cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), which increases blood flow to the penis. This chemical is broken down by another, phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5), to end the erection. The new drugs all work by inhibiting PDE-5, allowing cGMP to produce and sustain an erection. The three drugs are about equally effective, but there are differences in their actions. In general, the drugs should be taken about an hour before expected sexual activity, and none should be used more than once a day. Viagra is best taken on an empty stomach (dietary fat delays its effect by about an hour). Levitra and Cialis are not affected by food, but the blood level of Levitra is reduced by high-fat meals. None of the drugs should be taken with alcohol, though only Cialis is said to cause dizziness when combined with normal amounts of alcohol. Viagra and Levitra are effective for about four hours; Cialis, for up to 36 hours. Viagra is most effective after an hour. Levitra may work within 20 minutes and Cialis within 45. It is important for men and their partners to understand that these drugs by themselves do not cause an erection or affect libido. They work only as a result of sexual stimulation. Are the Drugs Safe? For men who are otherwise healthy, all three drugs are considered very safe. But there can be side effects: headache in 10 to 30 percent of patients; flushing in 10 to 20 percent; heartburn in 3 to 16 percent; runny nose in 1 to 11 percent; changes in color perception in 2 to 10 percent; muscle aches and back pain in up to 10 percent; and dizziness in up to 5 percent. There have also been more than three dozen cases of blindness reported in men taking Viagra and four cases in men taking Cialis. The vision problem may stem from the same health problem that caused erectile dysfunction. Likewise, deaths and nonfatal heart attacks have been reported in users, but no cause-and-effect evidence has been shown. There are also possible serious interactions with other medications, like nitrates (including nitroglycerin pills, patches and pastes); alpha blockers for hypertension; protease inhibitors used in AIDS treatment; the antifungals ketoconazole and itraconazole; and the acid reducer cimetidine. Several other drugs, including rifampin, carbamazepine and phenytoin, may decrease the effectiveness of the erectile drugs. In addition, patients should not take Levitra if they have a heart problem called prolonged QT syndrome. The erectile drugs come in various dosages, and if a low dose is not effective, a higher can often be tried. In men over 65, however, only the lowest dosages are recommended. Jane E. Brody can be reached at [3]personalhealth at nytimes.com. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 24 19:56:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:56:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] MIT: MIT physicists create new form of matter Message-ID: MIT physicists create new form of matter http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/matter.html June 22, 2005 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity. Their work, to be reported in the June 23 issue of Nature, is closely related to the superconductivity of electrons in metals. Observations of superfluids may help solve lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and energy-efficient transport of electricity, said Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate who heads the MIT group and who is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics as well as a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. Seeing the superfluid gas so clearly is such a dramatic step that Dan Kleppner, director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, said, "This is not a smoking gun for superfluidity. This is a cannon." For several years, research groups around the world have been studying cold gases of so-called fermionic atoms with the ultimate goal of finding new forms of superfluidity. A superfluid gas can flow without resistance. It can be clearly distinguished from a normal gas when it is rotated. A normal gas rotates like an ordinary object, but a superfluid can only rotate when it forms vortices similar to mini-tornadoes. This gives a rotating superfluid the appearance of Swiss cheese, where the holes are the cores of the mini-tornadoes. "When we saw the first picture of the vortices appear on the computer screen, it was simply breathtaking," said graduate student Martin Zwierlein in recalling the evening of April 13, when the team first saw the superfluid gas. For almost a year, the team had been working on making magnetic fields and laser beams very round so the gas could be set in rotation. "It was like sanding the bumps off of a wheel to make it perfectly round," Zwierlein explained. "In superfluids, as well as in superconductors, particles move in lockstep. They form one big quantum-mechanical wave," explained Ketterle. Such a movement allows superconductors to carry electrical currents without resistance. The MIT team was able to view these superfluid vortices at extremely cold temperatures, when the fermionic gas was cooled to about 50 billionths of a degree Kelvin, very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). "It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever." Scaled up to the density of electrons in a metal, the superfluid transition temperature in atomic gases would be higher than room temperature. Ketterle's team members were MIT graduate students Zwierlein, Andre Schirotzek, and Christian Schunck, all of whom are members of the Center for Ultracold Atoms, as well as former graduate student Jamil Abo-Shaeer. The team observed fermionic superfluidity in the lithium-6 isotope comprising three protons, three neutrons and three electrons. Since the total number of constituents is odd, lithium-6 is a fermion. Using laser and evaporative cooling techniques, they cooled the gas close to absolute zero. They then trapped the gas in the focus of an infrared laser beam; the electric and magnetic fields of the infrared light held the atoms in place. The last step was to spin a green laser beam around the gas to set it into rotation. A shadow picture of the cloud showed its superfluid behavior: The cloud was pierced by a regular array of vortices, each about the same size. The work is based on the MIT group's earlier creation of Bose-Einstein condensates, a form of matter in which particles condense and act as one big wave. Albert Einstein predicted this phenomenon in 1925. Scientists later realized that Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity are intimately related. Bose-Einstein condensation of pairs of fermions that were bound together loosely as molecules was observed in November 2003 by independent teams at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Innsbruck in Austria and at MIT. However, observing Bose-Einstein condensation is not the same as observing superfluidity. Further studies were done by these groups and at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, Duke University and Rice University, but evidence for superfluidity was ambiguous or indirect. The superfluid Fermi gas created at MIT can also serve as an easily controllable model system to study properties of much denser forms of fermionic matter such as solid superconductors, neutron stars or the quark-gluon plasma that existed in the early universe. The MIT research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, NASA and the Army Research Office. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 24 19:56:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:56:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Music to Your Eyes Message-ID: Music to Your Eyes http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202394_pf.html [I went to the opening yesterday, at which at least 150 people showed up, the largest gathering in the Hirshhorn's history, I thought, and the director of exhibits agreed. The guided tour, done by joint curators of the exhibits (Hirshhorn and Los Angeles) took an hour and a half and was the best tour I can recall. The only thing missing was a representation of Glenn Gould's "contrapuntal radio." I did ask about this, and the curators were certainly familiar with Gould's work. Perhaps another time. I also asked if Paul Hindemith had gotten involved in this co-mingled art form. The answer was yes. I enthusiastically recommend the exhibit.] Music to Your Eyes At Hirshhorn, Multimedia Excursion Doesn't Go Far By Blake Gopnik Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, June 23, 2005; C01 Try playing some music on your computer. Chances are, when you stick in that CD or access those MP3s, a swirl of color will appear on-screen, throbbing and pulsing in time to your tunes. These sound-and-light displays, churned out by "visualization" programs built into most of today's media players, don't serve any practical purpose. They're about simple sensory enjoyment and about giving us a glimpse of a bold future when our separate senses will collapse into a single pleasure -- a time when categories such as "music" and "video" and "art" and "graphics" are supposed to dissolve, leaving us bathing in a brave new world of multimedia sensations. The funny thing is, that future has been here for almost 100 years, hidden away in obscure corners of avant-garde art and music and filmmaking. The big summer show opening today at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum tracks how radical artists have been crossing over between sight and sound for ages, even though most experts and museums have rarely taken note of this important trend. The Hirshhorn exhibition, titled "Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900," includes works that few of us have ever seen before, by artists we've barely heard of, using media and techniques whose names don't even ring a bell. It gives us a chance to explore life on the artistic fringes and take in some of the mind-bending sights and sounds that have come out of them. The show includes some paintings, sure, by artists as well known as Man Ray, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. But there's also a room devoted to Thomas Wilfred's "lumia," an art form the American inventor first developed in the 1920s. It sets nebulas of color swirling across translucent screens. Over the first half of the 20th century, artists turned out "color organs" with names such as the Synchrome Kineidoscope, the Clavilux, the Lumigraph or the Optophonic Piano. Some of these Rube Goldberg contraptions, salvaged from dark corners and displayed in working order in this show, demand a couple of operators to make them go. They produce elaborate displays of light and color that either accompany music, or that are meant as silent "visual symphonies." These instruments mostly gave way to abstract films, at first made using standard animation skills and then, in the 1950s, by way of more advanced technologies that opened new frontiers in animation. (Computers were adopted early on for the special effects of abstract film. George Lucas owes a debt to a number of "visual musicians" who simply wanted to make swarms of colored dots go dancing across space.) In the psychedelic 1960s, certain experimental artists and collectives (with names like the Single Wing Turquoise Bird and the Joshua Light Show) emerged from the artistic margins to design the elaborate projections that ran at concerts by Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and the Who. This exhibition includes archival footage from some of these shows, but the art form will come fully to life only this weekend, with the Hirshhorn's one-time "Cosmic Drift" event. On Saturday night, the museum will be staying open from 9:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. The show itself will act as a kind of art-historical backdrop for a program of live light-and-sound performances that will take place in the Hirshhorn's circular courtyard. It'll be a groovy trip, man. Hirshhorn curator Kerry Brougher -- who conceived the exhibition with his colleague Judith Zilczer and Jeremy Strick, director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, where "Visual Music" premiered in February -- argues in his catalogue essay that the rock-concert spectacles of the 1960s give a rare example of vanguard art infiltrating the mainstream. The infiltration was so thorough, in fact, that few of us are likely to realize that those light shows had their roots in esoteric art ideas born 60 years before. Those took off from a simple notion and had a simple aim. The notion was to take the novelty of abstract art, so radical before World War I that it could hardly be imagined, and justify it by comparison to music. If a Beethoven string quartet could be understood and admired on its own terms, without imagining that it painted a sonic picture of the world, visual art should have the same freedom to escape from rendering reality. The notes and timbres and structures of music could be compared to the colors and textures and forms of a painting; a talented artist could assemble them into a visual "composition" every bit as affecting, meaningful and praiseworthy as anything that goes on in a fancy concert hall. There were even shreds of scientific evidence in support of such crossing over between the visual and musical arts. In a rare neurological condition known as "synaesthesia," the sensory systems in certain people's brains are cross-wired. When a given sound enters their ears, they "see" -- in their mind's eye, at least -- a color. Another synaesthete might take in a color or shape, and find that the optical signal has been carried to the brain's auditory system, producing a sonic experience at the same time as the visual one. The modern French composer Olivier Messiaen was said to "see" flashes of color that corresponded to chords in the music he played. Such stories provided a kind of real-life analogy to, and justification for, the "visual music" proposed by early abstractionists. Kandinsky is generally credited as the first artist to produce purely abstract works of art. He, however, took the pairing of pictorial abstraction with musical abstraction, understood by some of his peers as nothing more than a useful analogy, and made it literal. He said that his paintings were meant to translate the specific qualities of music into visual terms. His "Impression III (Concert)" was made in response to a famous performance of Arnold Schoenberg's radically modern music held in Munich in early 1911. "The independent life of the individual voices in your composition is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings," the artist wrote to the composer. In 1916, under the influence of Kandinsky, the American Man Ray, based in Paris, painted his colorful "Symphony Orchestra," whose only recognizable feature is the keyboard of a piano. Two other Americans, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, tried to build an entire artistic movement, dubbed "Synchromism," around musical ideas. In their Synchromist manifesto, they insisted that "mankind has until now always tried to satisfy its need for the highest spiritual exaltation only in music. Only [musical] tones have been able to . . . transport us to the highest realms. . . . Yet color is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights." Both tried to take the musical analogy as far as it could go, designing light-projecting machines that would make patterns of color and form play out in space over time, as the notes of music do. Long after abstract painting had found its footing, and stopped needing the crutch of a musical analogy, notions of visual music continued to attract followers working in media that took place over time. There were those color organs, first, which eventually gave way to experimental film, capable of combining sound and abstract image without clumsy apparatuses. The 1930s bred various pioneers in abstract animation. Figures such as Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger (who at first worked on the popularization of visual music in Disney's "Fantasia," then fled the project) made geometric and biomorphic shapes go dancing across the movie screen, sometimes truly rivaling what leading abstract painters were doing on their static canvases. Which leads -- by way of this show's psychedelic spectacles, zooming computer graphics and recent kinetic light sculptures -- to your computer's media player. Which, if you think about it, isn't such a grand place for an art form to end up. Many of the works in "Visual Music" suffer from the same problem as your computer's own "visual music" display: They provide wow-cool flashes of attractive light and shape that don't take long to lose their interest. There's something about trying to find visual equivalents for the sonic energy and verve of music that seems to push artists toward superficiality. Despite this exhibition's subtitle, none of its artworks actually manages full-blown synaesthesia, truly crossing over between sound and vision. You'll not once feel you're hearing something just by looking at a piece in this show. And short of fulfilling that grand aim, its visuals tend to become illustrations of how we imagine music operates, rather than real rivals to the musical experience, or champions of a fully visual one. In 1923, American painter Arthur Dove went to a Chinese restaurant, and, according to this exhibition's catalogue, he came away inspired. He went off and made an abstract picture that seems full of earthy, soy-sauce browns; of spikes that make me think of ginger's bite; of garlicky edges and angles. The only problem is, the mouthwatering sensations that I read out of Dove's artwork are not the ones he meant to put into it. Rather than "Wonton Visions," his painting is titled "Chinese Music." Which goes to show that synaesthesia is always in the mind of the beholder, and that relying on such sensory crossovers doesn't get you all that far in art. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 is at the Hirshhorn Museum, on Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW, through Sept. 11. Call 202-633-1000 or visit [2]http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/ . From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 24 19:56:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:56:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Do games prime brain for violence? Message-ID: Do games prime brain for violence? http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625053.200&print=true * 23 June 2005 * Alison Motluk YOU know that just round the corner is a man who wants to kill you. Your heart is pounding and your hands are sweating - even though this is only a video game. But what is happening in your brain? A small study of brain activity in video-game veterans suggests that their brains react as if they are treating the violence as real. More than 90 per cent of American children play video games every day, and half of the top sellers contain extreme violence. There is now strong evidence that people who play violent games tend to be more aggressive. For example, in 2000, Craig Anderson and Karen Dill at Iowa State University in Ames reported data showing that violent-game players were more likely to report high levels of aggression and to have committed assaults or robberies. But finding out whether it is the games that make them violent or the violence that attracts them to the games has proved much harder. Klaus Mathiak at the University of Aachen in Germany set out to discover what is happening in gamers' brains as they encounter violent situations. He recruited 13 men aged 18 to 26, who played video games for 2 hours every day on average, and asked them to play a violent game while having their brains scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By the time of the experiment, the volunteers were proficient at the game, which required them to navigate a complicated bunker, find and kill terrorists and try to rescue hostages. Mathiak analysed the game scene by scene and studied how brain activity changed during violent interactions. This meant that he could compare patterns of brain activity immediately before and during fights with activity at less aggressive points in the game. He found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became more active. And during a fight, emotional parts of the brain, such as the amygdala and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, were shut down. This pattern is the same as that seen in subjects who have had brain scans during other simulated violent situations such as imagining an aggressive encounter. It is impossible to scan people's brains during acts of real aggression so Mathiak argues that this is as close as you can get to the real thing. It suggests that video games are a "training for the brain to react with this pattern," he says. Niels Birbaumer of the University of T?bingen in Germany speculates that playing violent video games regularly would strengthen these circuits in the brain. A regular player confronted with a similar real-life situation, might be more primed for aggression, Birbaumer says. But Jeffrey Fagan, violence expert at Colombia University in New York says the link between brain activity and violence is complex:"The frontal lobe functions associated with violence have more to do with restraint than the arousal to action." Weblinks Organisation for Human Brain Mapping http://www.humanbrainmapping.org/ Niels Birmbauer, University of Tubingen http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/medizinischepsychologie/personal/n sbirbau.htm Institute of Neurology, University College London http://www.ion.ucl.ac.uk/ Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia University Law School http://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/full_time_fac?&main.find=F From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 25 14:41:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:41:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Bill Gates as Anthropologist Message-ID: Bill Gates as Anthropologist http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/business/media/25offline.ready.htm By PAUL B. BROWN MARGARET MEAD. Louis Leakey. Bill Gates? Grouping the founder of [3]Microsoft among great anthropologists is not as strange as it first sounds, according to the current issue of Fortune Small Business. In an effort to grow ever closer to its customers, Microsoft has hired numerous social scientists, including anthropologists, to help it understand the natives, who in this case are the small-business owners who use its software. The research is part of Microsoft's effort to produce its Office Small Business Accounting software, although this approach to understanding customers would seem applicable not only for other Microsoft products, but also for just about every other company that sells a product. Microsoft's idea behind going into the field to study customers is simple, as Richard McGill Murphy writes in the article "Getting to Know You": the better you understand how your customers work, the easier it becomes to design products and services to meet their needs. And the more you understand where the market is heading, the easier it is to get there first. Once upon a time, all Microsoft would have needed to do to understand the small-business market would be to look inside its own offices in Redmond, Wash. No more. Microsoft is now a company with $37 billion in annual sales and 57,000 employees, and so the need to hire anthropologists. Maybe Harrison Ford can play Mr. Gates in the movie. LATER-LIFE PLANNING It isn't news that people are living longer in retirement. But what is different is how they spend their money once they stop working, according to this month's Financial Planning, a magazine geared to financial advisers, which contends that there's a need to rethink how retirements are financed. Traditionally, financial planners have worried about making sure a retiree's money lasts, assuming expenses will be uniform throughout retirement. But that doesn't reflect reality writes Len Reinhart, a financial planner, who says in his column "Managed Money" that people who retire seem to go through three distinct stages and that expenses vary during each one. "As your clients enter the first phase of later life, they do all the things that you planned for - they travel, make the gifts they want to make, and try the new hobbies and activities they never had time for when they were working," he writes. When they fulfill, or get tired of their dreams, "most settle back into the way of life that made them comfortable in their preretirement years," Mr. Reinhart adds. And in the final phase, health problems tend to limit activities - and increase expenses. The moral is that investments need to be timed to make sure that people can do what they want during each phase. AMERICA FOR SALE "The same Chinese firms that have been crippling American manufacturers with cut-rate goods could soon be viewed in an entirely different light: As sugar daddies," Business 2.0 reports this month. It turns out that Americans are directly responsible for a possible Chinese buying spree on our shores. "Because Americans have spent $390 billion more on Chinese goods during the past three years than China has spent on U.S. imports, China is flush with cash," Paul Kaihla writes. This year, China could spend as much as $15 billion on overseas acquisitions, says Don Straszheim, the former chief economist for Merrill Lynch. That is triple what it spent from 1979 to 2002. The article could not have been more timely; this week alone, there were two big deals. First, the Haier Group, a Chinese manufacturer, moved to acquire [4]Maytag for $1.3 billion, surpassing a bid from a group of American investors. Then the China National Offshore Oil Corporation made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid for [5]Unocal. The bid comes two months after Unocal agreed to be sold to Chevron for $16.4 billion. The [6]Lenovo Group's $1.75 billion purchase of [7]I.B.M.'s personal computer division closed last month. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 25 14:41:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:41:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'How to Be Idle': Being and Do-Nothingness Message-ID: 'How to Be Idle': Being and Do-Nothingness New York Times Book Review, 5.6.26 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/review/26STEINGA.html [First chapter appended.] HOW TO BE IDLE By Tom Hodgkinson. Illustrated. 286 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $18.95. By JEFFREY STEINGARTEN FOR every hour of the day and night there is a different way of being idle, which is why Tom Hodgkinson has written his book in 24 chapters. At 8 a.m. (''Waking Up Is Hard to Do''), true idlers turn off their alarms, flop over in bed and go back to sleep. Hodgkinson is amazed that we voluntarily buy alarm clocks, which serve nobody but our employers. Nine a.m. is ''the time when someone, somewhere, decided that work should start.'' And at 10 a.m. the idler is still sleeping in, living out Dr. Johnson's incontestable dictum that ''the happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.'' The chief problem with modern life is not work in itself. It is jobs. In 1993 Hodgkinson founded the British magazine The Idler, on whose [3]Web site he succinctly sums up the horrors of having a job: ''With a very few exceptions the world of jobs is characterized by stifling boredom, grinding tedium, poverty, petty jealousies, sexual harassment, loneliness, deranged co-workers, bullying bosses, seething resentment, illness, exploitation, stress, helplessness, hellish commutes, humiliation, depression, appalling ethics, physical fatigue and mental exhaustion.'' Yes, that pretty much sums it up. On this we can all agree. And the solution? Become an idler. These chapters brim with supporting quotations from successful literary idlers. G. K. Chesterton, in his essay ''On Lying in Bed,'' argues that the hour at which we rise should be a matter of personal choice. And there's Jesus himself, urging his listeners on the Mount to ''consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.'' Not to mention the fowls of the air who neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns. Keats takes the lilies of the field as his epigraph for ''Ode on Indolence,'' in which he yearns for ''drowsy noons, / And evenings steep'd in honied indolence.'' What do idlers do while they idle? A provisional list can be found in these pages. Idlers contemplate, meditate, appreciate, imagine, feel a sense of peace and calm, follow their dreams, go fishing (Izaak Walton is the star of the 7 p.m. chapter), smoke tobacco, stare at the ceiling and gaze at the stars. Maybe they also read voraciously or lose themselves in feasting, two of my favorites, but I don't recall that Hodgkinson mentions either of these. What do idlers not do? Jobs, of course. They may work for themselves or engage in meditative tasks like chopping vegetables for dinner -- but they do not work at jobs. Jobs are a relatively recent invention, a creation of the Industrial Revolution, Hodgkinson writes, relying on E. P. Thompson's pioneering work, ''The Making of the English Working Class'' (1963), and Bertrand Russell's essay ''In Praise of Idleness'' (1932). (If you check it out in the O.E.D., you'll find that things are somewhat more ambiguous. Before the 1920's, the word ''job'' generally meant a small, discrete piece of work, what jazz musicians would call a gig, never regular employment at set times and wages. But the words ''salary'' and ''wages'' are quite a bit more ancient.) In the old days, artisans worked for themselves, earning enough to support their families and little more. They managed their own time, in what Thompson describes as alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness. On rainy days they would work like the dickens; come a sweet spring day, they might go fishing. Why have we have given up this freedom? Because the ruling classes (Hodgkinson's favorite target) have spent centuries persuading the rest of us to believe in the dignity of work even as they undignifiedly avoid it. The words above the gates of Auschwitz, as Hodgkinson reminds us, are ''Arbeit Macht Frei'' -- ''Work Makes You Free.'' Freedom is Slavery. This is the heart of Hodgkinson's (and Russell's) critique of liberal consumer capitalism. It's no surprise that the successful idlers Hodgkinson quotes are all writers -- and writers will enjoy this book, at least the first half of it. But when we get to the chapter entitled ''The Hangover,'' which happens at noon, Hodgkinson suddenly lurches into the twilight zone. With no warning, he reveals that his goal -- the ultimate purpose of his idling -- is to attain a visionary state. That's just fine, at least with this reader. But then he tries to persuade us that the exaggerated sensitivity to light and sounds that hangovers inflict on us ''may be the model for Hinduism's 'third eye' of enlightenment.'' (He's quoting from an article in The Idler by Josh Glenn.) I'll have to ask my Hindu friends about that. At 1 p.m., we're back on Earth, in time to lament ''the death of lunch,'' which ''has been stolen from us by our rulers.'' Right on! McDonald's and Pret a Manger ''fulfill the fascist definition of the function of food, 'to give the worker's body an injection of energy.' '' Hodgkinson praises the Slow Food movement, but feasting does not appear to be his path to bliss. When he reminds us that London's celebrated 18th-century coffeehouses supplied their customers with ''vast bowls of alcoholic punch,'' we understand that Hodgkinson wants to take back lunch for the conviviality and conversation but especially, it appears, for the punch. Two p.m. is about being ill, which allows you to stay at home and ''pad around the house in your dressing gown like Sherlock Holmes, Noel Coward or our friend, that hero of laziness, Oblomov.'' Doesn't Hodgkinson realize that some of us do not need illness to justify padding around the house? Jacques Derrida stayed in his pajamas all day unless he had an appointment. Loosen up, Hodgkinson! Three p.m. is the hour for napping. Many, many famous and successful people past and present have napped. I've always kept a list. But our rulers are trying to appropriate the afternoon snooze with the repulsive expression ''power nap,'' turning it into just another way of recharging our batteries before we plunge back into work. The first drink of the day comes at 6 p.m. and ''brings us into the present moment: we become Buddhists.'' Aren't we still Hindus? At least Hodgkinson includes a very beautiful passage from Hemingway about getting drunk on absinthe. At 10 p.m. we go to the pub and recall Dr. Johnson's famous encomium upon the tavern, which I believe is still posted on the wall at Elaine's: ''As soon as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude. . . . There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.'' At this point in ''How to Be Idle,'' we have turned just over half of Hodgkinson's 286 pages and mastered most of his arguments, frequently with great enjoyment, and although there are further insights to come and some excellent jokes, a sense of repetition inevitably sets in -- until 3 a.m. It's time to party! ''Bring together good drugs, good people and good music and you have a magical combination. . . . We go beyond words.'' We also go back to the future. The author discovers parallels between his own experiences on ecstasy and Thomas De Quincey's description of opium-eating. It all sounds like a conversation from more than a generation ago. Some of us still alive today grew up in a time when psychedelic substances were legal, when experimentation was widespread, when people were deliberate and thoughtful about what they ingested, and when Timothy Leary was a member of the Harvard faculty. But now we are plunged into a dark and desperate age. Eating a chocolate eclair is considered substance abuse. Abstinence passes for religious experience. You won't persuade people these days to become idlers, to throw off the shackles of wage slavery, by feeding them ecstasy. For the next year or two, let's concentrate on eradicating employment as we know it. Jeffrey Steingarten is the food critic at Vogue and the author of ''It Must've Been Something I Ate.'' ------------- First chapter of 'How to Be Idle' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/chapters/0626-1st-hodg.html By TOM HODGKINSON 8 a.m. Waking Up Is Hard to Do Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) I wonder if that hard-working American rationalist and agent of industry Benjamin Franklin knew how much misery he would cause in the world when, back in 1757, high on puritanical zeal, he popularized and promoted the trite and patently untrue aphorism "early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"? It is a sad fact that from early childhood we are tyrannized by the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible. In my own case, it was my mother whom I remember very clearly screaming at me to get out of bed every morning. As I lay there in blissful comfort, eyes closed, trying to hang on to a fading dream, doing my utmost to ignore her shouting, I would start to calculate the shortest time it would take me to get up, have breakfast and go to school and still arrive with seconds to spare before assembly started. All this mental ingenuity and effort I expended in order to enjoy a few more moments of slumber. Thus the idler begins to learn his craft. Parents begin the brainwashing process and then school works yet harder to indoctrinate its charges with the necessity of early rising. My own personal guilt about feeling actually physically incapable of rising early in the morning continued well into my twenties. For years I fought with the feelings of self-hatred that accompanied my morning listlessness. I would make resolutions to rise at eight. As a student, I developed complex alarm systems. I bought a timer plug, and set it to turn on my coffee maker and also the record player, on which I had placed my loudest record, It's Alive by The Ramones. 7:50 a.m. was the allotted time. I had set the record to come on at an ear-splitting volume. Being a live recording, the first track was prefaced by crowd noise. The cheering and whooping would wake me, and I'd know I had only a few seconds to leap out of bed and turn the volume down before Dee Dee Ramone would grunt: "one-two-three-four" and my housemates and I would be assaulted by the opening chords of "Rockaway Beach," turned up to 11. The idea was that I would then drink the coffee and jolt my body into wakefulness. It half worked. When I heard the crowd noise, I would leap out of bed and totter for a moment. But what happened then, of course, was that I would turn the volume right down, ignore the coffee and climb back to the snuggly warm embrace of my duvet. Then I'd slowly come to my senses at around 10:30 a.m., doze until twelve, and finally stagger to my feet in a fit of self-loathing. I was a real moralist back then: I even made a poster for my wall which read: "Edification first, then have some fun." It was hip in that it was a lyric from hardcore punk band Bad Brains, but the message, I think you'll agree, is a dreary one. Nowadays I do it the other way around. It wasn't until many years later that I learned that I was not alone in my sluggishness and in experiencing the conflicting emotions of pleasure and guilt which surrounded it. There is wealth of literature on the subject. And it is generally written by the best, funniest, most joy-giving writers. In 1889, the Victorian humorist Jerome K. Jerome published an essay called "On Being Idle." Imagine how much better I felt when I read the following passage, in which Jerome reflects on the pleasure of snoozing: Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again: "just for five minutes." Is there any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of a Sunday-school "tale for boys," who ever gets up willingly? There are some men to whom getting up at the proper time is an utter impossibility. If eight o'clock happens to be the time that they should turn out, then they lie till halfpast. If circumstances change and half-past eight becomes early enough for them, then it is nine before they can rise. They are like the statesman of whom it was said that he was always punctually half an hour late. They try all manner of schemes. They buy alarm clocks (artful contrivances that go off at the wrong time and alarm the wrong people) ... (Continues...) From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 25 14:41:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:41:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Broadband Beat-Down Message-ID: A Broadband Beat-Down http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/technology/25online.ready.html [The Foreign Affairs article coming in a moment.] By DAN MITCHELL IT looked for a while as if the United States was firmly entrenched as the world's leader in Internet innovation. President Bill Clinton and Al Gore, his vice president, did much to encourage development of the country's technology infrastructure, writes Thomas Bleha in an article accessible on the Foreign Affairs magazine Web site ([3]www.foreignaffairs.org). From the 1960's until the day President Bush took office, he writes, "The United States led the world in Internet development." No longer. The Bush administration's policies, or lack thereof, have since allowed Asia - Japan in particular - to not only catch up in the development and expansion of broadband and mobile phone technology, but to roundly pound us into the dirt. "The lag," he diplomatically asserts, "is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks." Japan instituted what used to be called an industrial policy, which provided incentives for expanding broadband and wireless technology to the masses. The United States, meanwhile, has done essentially nothing. Japan is now well ahead of us in the percentage of homes with broadband. And their broadband on average is about half the price and 16 times the speed of ours. Japan is even further ahead in mobile telephony. "U.S. mobile phone service remains awful by European, let alone Japanese, standards," writes Mr. Bleha, who served as a Foreign Service officer in Japan for eight years and has a forthcoming book on the subject. Meanwhile, Japan, South Korea and other Asian countries are poised to leap ahead of the United States in any number of areas: teleconferencing, telecommuting, remote medical services, distance education, multimedia entertainment. The economy as a whole is at risk because of broadband shortcomings, says Charles H. Ferguson of the Brookings Institution ([4]brookings.edu). Last year, he asserted in a book, "The Broadband Problem," that the United States might lose up to $1 trillion because of constraints on broadband deployment. SWEET JUSTICE Clicking into Business Week's Brand New Day blog brings up the striking photographic visage of a blogger, David Kiley. He looks so curmudgeonly that you immediately assume he takes on branding and marketing with a healthy dose of skepticism. He does not disappoint. On cereal packages, [5]General Mills features its cartoon icons for Trix, Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs extolling the "health benefits" of its products. Kraft is using the Nickelodeon characters SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer in much the same way. "Let's cut to the chase," he writes. "This is all about creating cover in the debate over childhood obesity and whether or not sugary, fatty and otherwise heavily processed foods should be freely advertised directly to kids under 12." "Brand management should have credibility management at its center," he says. "That's where marketing, smart public relations and reputation management converge when companies do it right." PRIVATE WAR [6]Frontline makes its documentaries available on its [7]World Wide Web site ([8]frontline.org), usually adding complete versions of interviews, source materials, transcripts and other goodies. The Frontline people know the power of the medium, and the site is far and away the best in all of public broadcasting. The latest show, "Private Warriors," profiles the work of private contractors in Iraq, and the Web treatment is up to the show's usual standards. STOP BUGGING ME If newspaper marketers think they are receiving reliable user information via those annoying site registrations, they should run their Web addresses through [9]bugmenot.com, which offers quick user names and passwords to people who click on a link only to be confronted by a mandatory registration page. Some examples of usernames: thisisannoying; iwantnews; thisisjustsilly; whydoyoudothis. E-mail: whatsonline at nytimes.com. References 3. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/ 4. http://brookings.edu/ 5. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GIS 6. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=FRO 7. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=WWWB 8. http://frontline.org/ 9. http://bugmenot.com/ From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 25 14:43:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:43:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Foreign Affairs: Thomas Bleha: Down to the Wire Message-ID: Thomas Bleha: Down to the Wire http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050501faessay84311/thomas-bleha/down-to-the-wire.html?mode=print From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005 _________________________________________________________________ Summary: Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly. By outdoing the United States, Japan and its neighbors are positioning themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, and a better quality of life. Thomas Bleha, the recipient of an Abe Fellowship, is completing a book on the race for Internet leadership. Previously, he was a Foreign Service officer in Japan for eight years. BROADBAND NATION? In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only "basic" broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband. It did not have to be this way. Until recently, the United States led the world in Internet development. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency conceived of and then funded the Internet. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation partially underwrote the university and college networks -- and the high-speed lines supporting them -- that extended the Internet across the nation. After the World Wide Web and mouse-driven browsers were developed in the early 1990s, the Internet was ready to take off. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore showed the way by promoting the Internet's commercialization, the National Infrastructure Initiative, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and remarkable e-commerce, e-government, and e-education programs. The private sector did the work, but the government offered a clear vision and strong leadership that created a competitive playing field for early broadband providers. Even though these policies had their share of detractors -- who claimed that excessive hype was used to sell wasteful projects and even blamed the Clinton administration for the dot-com bust -- they kept the United States in the forefront of Internet innovation and deployment through the 1990s. Things changed when the Bush administration took over in 2001 and set new priorities for the country: tax cuts, missile defense, and, months later, the war on terrorism. In the administration's first three years, President George W. Bush mentioned broadband just twice and only in passing. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) showed little interest in opening home telephone lines to outside competitors to drive down broadband prices and increase demand. When the United States dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead. By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than in the United States had broadband, and Japan had moved well beyond the basic connections still in use in the United States. Today, nearly all Japanese have access to "high-speed" broadband, with an average connection speed 16 times faster than in the United States -- for only about $22 a month. Even faster "ultra-high-speed" broadband, which runs through fiber-optic cable, is scheduled to be available throughout the country for $30 to $40 a month by the end of 2005. And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years. South Korea already has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and last year the absolute number of broadband users in urban China surpassed that in the United States. These countries' progress will have serious economic implications. By dislodging the United States from the lead it commanded not so long ago, Japan and its neighbors have positioned themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation, and an improved quality of life. JAPAN'S HIGH-WIRE ACT In the late 1990s, after a decade in the economic doldrums, Japan lagged well behind the United States in Internet access and broadband usage. But in mid-2000, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori appointed the Information Technology Strategy Council, headed by Sony Chairman Nobuyuki Idei, which put together a bold plan to make Japan the "world's leading IT [Information Technology] nation" by 2005. Just as President Bush was taking office, a new Japanese "IT strategic headquarters," headed by the prime minister and including the entire cabinet, launched an "e-Japan strategy." A central goal of that strategy was to bring better-than-basic broadband to 40 million of Japan's 46 million households within five years. The government hoped to make high-speed broadband available to 30 million households (through cable or digital subscriber lines [DSL], which use phone wires) and ultra-high-speed broadband connections to another 10 million (through fiber-optic cable). But even Japanese officials were skeptical about reaching such ambitious goals. And they understood that if they wanted even to come close, they would have to enlist the private sector and create the proper conditions. The government quickly removed many regulatory obstacles. But because cable providers were mostly mom-and-pop operations in rural areas, officials realized that they would also have to create a highly competitive private-sector environment. So the telecommunications ministry came up with one of the most competitive regimes in the world: it compelled regional telephone companies to grant outside competitors access to all their residential telephone lines in exchange for a modest fee (about $2 per line a month). The antitrust authorities also ensured that these companies did not create obstacles for their competitors, helping provide a level playing field. The results were extraordinary. Yahoo! BB, created by Masayoshi Son's venture-capital firm Softbank, and several other companies soon entered the DSL market. Yahoo! BB began offering high-speed service five times faster than current U.S. broadband for $22 a month. After aggressive marketing forced its competitors to meet Yahoo! BB's price, high-speed DSL subscriptions skyrocketed. By the end of 2002, such access was available to many more than the 30 million Japanese households the government had targeted. Within another five months, a greater percentage of homes in Japan than in the United States had access to broadband. Thanks to the government's competitive framework, the speed of the DSL service offered also rose dramatically, from 8 megabits per second in 2001 to 12, 26, and 40 megabits today. (The typical U.S. broadband connection, whether DSL or cable, is still only 1.5 megabits per second or slower.) Meanwhile, the price of monthly subscriptions remained stable, even for 26-megabit access speeds, at about $22 per month -- by far the lowest price in the world. By September 2004, 15.3 million Japanese subscribed to high-speed broadband. Moreover, for an additional $5 per month, users of Yahoo! BB can also have Internet telephone service. One in every 25 telephone calls in Japan is now made over the Internet, and the number keeps growing. Meeting the e-Japan strategy's second goal -- making ultra-high-speed access (up to 100 megabits per second) available to ten million Japanese households -- proved more difficult. Such connections permit real-time video telephoning and video conferencing, telecommuting, and rich multimedia options such as digital high-definition television, interactive games, and five-minute movie downloads (instead of the short, jerky video streaming that Americans are used to). But data cannot be transmitted at such speeds through existing phone lines, and new fiber-optic cable had to be laid throughout Japan. Having decided that those lines, too, should be open to competition, the Japanese authorities set out to devise significant incentives to persuade Japanese companies to invest in new ultra-high-speed cable, especially in rural areas. The government used tax breaks, debt guaranties, and partial subsidies. It allowed companies willing to lay fiber to depreciate about one-third of the cost on first-year taxes, and it guaranteed their debt liabilities. These measures were sufficient to ensure that new fiber was laid in cities and large towns, but in rural areas, municipal subsidies were also needed. Towns and villages willing to set up their own ultra-high-speed fiber networks received a government subsidy covering approximately one-third of their costs, so long as those networks, too, were open to outside access. These incentives created the right environment for the rapid deployment of fiber networks. Again, other companies decided to compete with regional telephone companies. The first, Usen, a nationwide distributor of background music with its own fiber network, was later joined by electric power companies. The resulting competition quickly drove the price of an ultrafast fiber connection down to $30 to $45 per month. By the end of 2002, ultrafast fiber connections were available to more than ten million households in Tokyo and Osaka; a primary goal of the e-Japan strategy had been met. But the program -- and the government's tax incentives - had also called for fiber lines to run directly to homes and offices, and those connections proved economic only in densely populated cities. In less settled areas, the government agreed to provide tax incentives for fiber taken only as far as neighborhoods, leaving it to individual users to decide how to connect. Some have chosen -- and paid for -- a direct fiber connection; others have opted for a cheaper but slower wireless connection. By mid-2004, ultra-high-speed broadband was available to more than 80 percent of Japan's citizens. With more than two million subscribers, it can be said to have gone mainstream. Fiber deployment is still moving quickly, and by the end of the year, ultra-high-speed access will be available to virtually all Japanese either directly or in their neighborhood. The program has been so successful that the Japanese government has already set its sights higher: in mid-2003, it decided to move beyond promoting access to ultra-high-speed broadband to encouraging its use. ON THE FRITZ So far, no one in the Bush administration has offered a vision nearly as compelling as Japan's. Although Michael Powell, the former chairman of the FCC, spoke eloquently about the benefits of the coming "digital broadband migration," he suggested no date for arrival in the promised land. Moreover, he measured U.S. broadband progress by the exceptionally slow 200-kilobit-per-second standard -- about one-hundredth of the speed of typical broadband in Japan today. According to that minimal standard, the United States has made some progress: by mid-2004, more than 30 million American homes and offices had signed up for basic broadband. But the service is expensive, very slow, and rather unreliable. And despite these limitations, the Bush administration has made little effort to encourage cheaper and more robust high-speed broadband or to promote what many agree should be the model for the future: a vast network of ultrafast fiber connecting homes, offices, and neighborhoods. Without vision or leadership, U.S. broadband policy drifted during the Bush administration's first two years. The FCC tended to other matters. The Department of Commerce insisted that the market, not the government, should drive the rollout of broadband. Meanwhile, regional telephone companies relentlessly tried to reverse some of the promising measures that had been taken under President Clinton. Continuing efforts they had launched after the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed, they lobbied legislators and sought court decisions to overturn regulations that had forced them to open their residential telephone lines to competitors. Powell seemed not to mind this challenge; he preferred a somewhat different approach anyway. He backed promising new technologies and appeared less interested in the idea of promoting DSL competition for residential telephone lines, even though the strategy had quickly boosted access speeds and lowered prices in Japan and elsewhere. Instead, he favored pitting the cable television industry against the regional telephone industry. Although in theory the strategy was viable -- telephone and cable lines run in front of more than 75 percent of U.S. homes, and with some technical upgrading, both can provide basic or high-speed broadband -- many opposed it. Among the critics of the multiplatform approach were Powell's predecessors at the FCC, who had done their utmost to open residential telephone lines; many economists, who were distrustful of duopoly competition; and consumer groups. Firms that were already competing or that wanted to compete with regional telephone companies in providing DSL service disagreed, too, as did those that coveted access to cable television lines. Some even claimed that this approach violated the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which, they argued, required the sharing of residential telephone wires. Still, when the FCC got around to reviewing broadband policy in February 2003, it made convoluted decisions that left only the multiplatform approach. Firms that were competing with regional telephone companies to offer high-speed DSL service over telephone lines would have only three more years of access. More significant for the long run, the regional telephone companies would not have to share with outside competitors the ultra-high-speed fiber lines they laid. The following year, moreover, at the urging of regional telephone companies, a court reaffirmed an earlier ruling that these companies need not share their residential lines with DSL competitors. Although many expected an appeal, higher levels of the administration chose not to challenge the decision. Thus, broadband competition over residential telephone lines was effectively killed. A proven strategy had been lost. Unfortunately, vigorous multiplatform competition is unlikely to emerge soon. True, there are signs of competition between the cable-modem broadband offered by cable television companies and the DSL service offered by telephone companies. Comcast plans to provide reliable Internet-based telephone service by doubling the speed of its broadband offerings from 1.5 megabits to 3 megabits per second over the next three years. Verizon and SBC Communications have dropped the cost of their broadband service to about $30 a month. And to compete directly with cable, some phone companies have begun to talk of developing their own Internet telephone service and providing higher broadband speeds to deliver video. But these new services will probably appear only slowly, and competition between the telephone and cable companies will remain limited. The reasons are simple: cheap, high-speed broadband would lead to widespread use of Internet telephones and thus threaten the phone companies' lucrative voice-telephone business, and more inexpensive broadband would multiply outside video and movie offerings and endanger the cable companies' profitability. So, although both the telephone and cable companies could provide cheap, high-speed broadband if they chose to, they are not rushing to develop it. The lack of strong incentives to encourage competition has, in other words, doomed broadband in the United States to remain much slower and more expensive than in Japan. Over the next five years, service is likely to get only marginally faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, at current transmission speeds, the next "killer" application -- Internet telephone service -- will remain shaky and unreliable. The development of ultra-high-speed fiber broadband service, which is just beginning to appear in the United States, will also lag. Barely more than 600,000 U.S. offices and homes had fiber connections at the end of 2003. Verizon plans to bring fiber to 3 million of the United States' 115 million households by the end of this year, with speeds ranging from 5 to 30 megabits per second. SBC Communications, which dominates the Midwest and Southwest markets, and BellSouth, the leader in the Southeast, are also laying fiber, although at a much slower rate. But they plan to stop the work after spending about $10 billion (the estimated cost of bringing fiber close to about 10 million U.S. homes and offices) and then examine whether further investment is justified. As a result, the pace of rollout will be slow. And the emergence of the substantial market needed to inspire innovative new products and services for those with fiber Internet access remains years away. PLAYING PHONE LAG The United States is even further behind Japan in wireless, mobile-phone-based Internet access, even though that platform is increasingly versatile and valuable. More and more, mobile phones can be used for tasks traditionally performed on computers. Except for the most office-oriented applications, such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software, mobile phones will soon be used for nearly everything. In fact, many, including the Japanese, are already planning for a convergence of wireline and wireless technologies. By 2010, it is expected that such "ubiquitous networks" will permit Japanese to access the Internet at high speeds from a desktop, a laptop, a hand-held personal digital assistant, or a mobile phone. Japan now has a commanding lead in mobile-phone Internet technologies and usage. With a nationwide cell-phone infrastructure in place by the mid-1990s, Japan began the shift away from voice services to Internet data services in early 1999. Then NTT DoCoMo introduced the "i-mode" service, providing e-mail and customer access to over 60 Web sites especially created for mobile-phone use. These sites offer news, financial services, weather, personal ads, games, and much more. (This service was recently introduced as "m-mode" in the United States.) Competitors soon emerged, and customer response was stunning. By December 2004, total mobile-phone subscriptions had reached 83.5 million in Japan (representing more than 60 percent of the population), of which more than 72 million included Internet services. The lesson the NTT DoCoMo leadership took from this experience was that if you develop a new technology and market it, consumers will buy it. Following this philosophy, in October 2001, NTT DoCoMo launched a third-generation videophone service. By December 2004, thanks to thriving competition, Japanese videophone subscriptions had reached nearly 26 million and were growing by nearly 190 percent a year. As expected, this new market prompted notable mobile-phone innovation such as global-positioning-linked advertising, television reception, and music videos. Now Japan is testing fourth-generation, high-speed broadband phones that can support high-definition-television reception, movie downloads, more sophisticated games, and other multimedia applications. The Japanese government played a critical part in these developments. It made well-considered and timely decisions to allot cost-free spectrum for each new mobile-phone generation. In so doing, it gave up badly needed revenue, but it retained full control over the terms of licensing and the flexibility to reassign spectrum according to future technological developments. In 2007, the government is expected to announce new spectrum allocations for the fourth-generation broadband mobile phones planned for 2010. Meanwhile, to protect consumers, the government has set important conditions before granting a service license, insisting that a carrier's network cover a certain area of the country and guarantee a certain level of service (with minimal dropped calls or interference, for example). By contrast, U.S. mobile-phone policy was born of a colossal blunder from which the industry has yet to recover fully. In the early 1980s, after the management consultancy McKinsey estimated that there would be little demand for mobile phones and a small prospect of profitability, the FCC carved the United States into 734 tiny mobile-phone districts. It handed out two provider licenses in each district: one automatically went to the regional telephone company, and the other was drawn by lottery. The resulting infrastructure was cripplingly fragmented. It could not support nationwide calls, and inefficiencies and expensive connection rates translated into sky-high charges for customers. Twenty years later, the Clinton administration made a belated effort to encourage nationwide cellular networks. The government opened up enough spectrum for six nationwide networks and invited bids. Thanks to an imaginative on-line auction, it had sold off the spectrum for $7.7 billion by early 1995. Although the networks that entered the market still struggle to offer consistent quality, competition among them sharply reduced the price of mobile-phone service and spawned millions of new customers. Since the Bush administration took office, however, the FCC has only tinkered with spectrum policy around the edges. It has allowed companies to trade bits of spectrum to round out their infrastructure and opened modest amounts of spectrum to new wireless technologies such as WiFi and WiMax. Meanwhile, although the number of would-be national carriers dwindled from six to four and they expanded their infrastructure, U.S. mobile-phone service remains awful by European, let alone Japanese, standards. U.S. mobile phones can take digital pictures and connect to the Internet, but the cellular infrastructure is so spotty that even in large cities calls from an ordinary wireless phone may not go through. Sadly, U.S. mobile-phone competition is still based on price and the extent of a company's coverage rather than the kind of advanced data services available in Japan and elsewhere. In 2004, third-generation mobile service came on the market in selected U.S. cities. As in Japan, two somewhat different technologies are being used, both of which require upgrading the existing infrastructure. For the time being, third-generation mobile-phone service is available in only eight cities. (The much slower, older service can be had in several others.) Although the FCC has provided some additional badly needed spectrum, the third-generation cellular infrastructure remains painfully inadequate: most of the country has no service at all. Meanwhile, the FCC has announced that it will auction third-generation spectrum "as early as June 2006." Plans for fourth-generation mobile service in the United States are well beyond the horizon. GETTING BACK ON-LINE The United States is losing considerable ground to Japan and its neighbors, and they will be the first to reap the economic benefits of these technologies. It is these countries, rather than the United States, that will benefit from the enhanced productivity, economic growth, and new jobs that high-speed broadband will bring. In 2001, Robert Crandall, an economist at the Brookings Institution, and Charles Jackson, a telecommunications consultant, estimated that "widespread" adoption of basic broadband in the United States could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and produce 1.2 million new jobs. But Washington never promoted such a policy. Last year, another Brookings economist, Charles Ferguson, argued that perhaps as much as $1 trillion might be lost over the next decade due to present constraints on broadband development. These losses, moreover, are only the economic costs of the United States' indirection. They do not take into account the work that could have been done through telecommuting, the medical care or interactive long-distance education that might have been provided in remote areas, and unexploited entertainment possibilities. The large broadband-user markets of Northeast Asia will attract the innovation the United States once enjoyed. Asians will have the first crack at developing the new commercial applications, products, services, and content of the high-speed-broadband era. Although many large U.S. firms, such as Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft, are closely following developments overseas and are unlikely to be left behind, the United States' medium-sized and smaller firms, which tend to foster the most innovation, may well be. The Japanese and the South Koreans will also be the first to enjoy the quality-of-life benefits that the high-speed-broadband era will bring. These will include not only Internet telephones and videophones, but also easy teleconferencing, practical telecommuting, remote diagnosis and medical services, interactive distance education, rich multimedia entertainment, digitally controlled home appliances, and much more. Given these costs and losses, it is clear that broadband is critically important to the U.S. economy and the United States' international competitiveness and that it must become a national priority. In the run-up to the election in November, President Bush finally addressed the issue, promising the electorate "universal, affordable access" to broadband technology by 2007 and "plenty" of carriers to choose from "as soon as possible thereafter." To reach these goals, he expressed confidence in new broadband service over power lines, promising wireless technologies, such as WiFi hotspots and longer-distance WiMax, and unspecified tax credits. But real progress will require more than these measures. To move forward, the administration should quickly take two steps. First, it should explain clearly the profound ways in which broadband will change work, learning, and leisure in the United States. Identifying such substantial benefits would energize providers and encourage potential users to get the most from the Internet. It would also give the private sector confidence in the nation's direction and a degree of business certainty. Second, the administration should push the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), a group of private-sector IT leaders and academics, to play a key leadership role in advancing broadband deployment. Involving the private sector and prominent academics in broadband leadership is essential given the pace of technological advance and today's dynamic business environment. One of the PITAC's first tasks should be to set out bold long-term goals for the deployment of broadband in the United States, carefully distinguishing three different levels of service: basic broadband (at 1.5 to 3 megabits per second), for slow downloads from and uploads to the Internet and Internet telephones; high-speed broadband (at 10 to 30 megabits per second), for Internet reception of digital high-definition television and other video uses; and ultra-high-speed fiber broadband (at 100 megabits per second), for the highest-end applications. The PITAC should consider how to redeem President Bush's pledge to provide, by 2007 (or 2010, at the latest), basic broadband access to all Americans at an affordable price ($20 to $25 per month should be the goal). To reach everyone, the effort would require developing a combination of technologies: wireline, wireless, and satellite. The United States' vastness no doubt complicates the task, but it is no excuse for not undertaking the job. (Canada, the world's second-largest state, also ranks second in global broadband connectivity.) If necessary, tax credits should be granted to companies that help reach rural and underserved areas. By 2010, the PITAC should also aim to make available high-speed broadband access to two-thirds of all U.S. households for $30 to $35 per month. The key to reaching this goal is the government's taking the lead in creating a strongly competitive environment for DSL, cable, power line, and newer wireless broadband technologies. The more these technologies compete among themselves, the sooner Americans will have access to faster, cheaper broadband service. And with enough competition, there should be no need for government financial incentives. The PITAC should also do its best to promote ultra-high-speed fiber access for one-third of all U.S. households at $40 to $45 per month by 2010. It should use its convening power to bring to the table all the stakeholders in the millions of miles of unused fiber that run below U.S. city streets. The purpose of such discussions would be to encourage the widespread use of existing fiber by analyzing the reasons for its current disuse and seeking ways to make it viable. The PITAC might also recommend legislation to permit the National Science Foundation to provide matching grants to bring fiber to the campuses of colleges and universities across the country. This program could be modeled on the highly successful National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) project that brought the Internet to campuses in the 1980s. Finally, by 2010, the PITAC should suggest ways to create a comprehensive, nationwide, third-generation cellular infrastructure. With such mobile phones Americans would, at long last, be able to talk with one another regardless of where they are. A first step might be for the PITAC to bring stakeholders together to sift through the many economic, legal, regulatory, community, and environmental issues that currently stand in the way. Another would be for the government to begin considering now the requirements of fourth-generation wireless technologies. The new policy would also anticipate the likely convergence of wireline and wireless that will provide the anytime, anywhere, any-device connections to the Internet that have long been predicted. For starters, however, the government should take steps to ensure that by 2007 the hundred largest cities in the United States will no longer be riddled with dead spots and that third-generation mobile phones will be available in select rural areas as well. Reaching these goals will require top political leadership and consistent, purposeful government policies, as well as private-sector action. It will be the Bush administration's task to tell Americans how broadband could change their lives, provide the leadership needed to set out and reach specific goals, and fashion the competitive market framework that will foster fast progress. Another four years of drifting would likely leave less than one-half of the nation with somewhat cheaper but slow broadband service, a substantial portion preferring to stick with dial-up, and a significant share with no affordable access to broadband at all. Unfortunately, it could take half a dozen years (or more) to reach these goals, and meeting even that timetable would take commitment, resourcefulness -- and luck. In the meantime, the world leaders in broadband and mobile-phone service will continue to move ahead: Japan is already expected to have a comprehensive nationwide ultra-high-speed fiber infrastructure, as well as an entirely new third-generation mobile-phone infrastructure, in place by the end of the year. As usage grows, Japan and its neighbors will be the first to reap the substantial economic, innovative, and quality-of-life benefits of their enlightened leadership. It is now time for the United States to summon the will to catch up with them, so that Americans, too, can look forward to the rewards of the broadband economy. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 25 14:43:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:43:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Sands of Empire': Civilizations and Their Discontents Message-ID: 'Sands of Empire': Civilizations and Their Discontents New York Times Book Review, 5.6.26 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/review/26SECORL.html [First chapter appended.] SOUTH PARK CONSERVATIVES The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. By Brian C. Anderson. 191 pp. Regnery Publishing. $24.95. By LAURA SECOR Robert W. Merry fingers what he calls the ''idea of progress'' as the dangerous delusion that has given us neoconservatism. Its European forefathers include Rousseau, who believed in the perfectibility of human society through its political institutions, and Hegel, who foresaw an end to history. In America, the ''idea of progress'' has captured the imaginations of optimists from Woodrow Wilson to Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman and William Kristol -- leading them, in Merry's view, to dangerous flights of fancy. Merry, the president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly, argues in ''Sands of Empire'' that history does not follow a linear course with the West out in front, so much as a cyclical one in which civilizations rise and fall. There will always be multiple power centers, multiple cultures and fundamentally incompatible systems of value. Following Samuel Huntington's famous thesis about clashing civilizations, Merry divides the globe into broad categories, each defined by an unchanging cultural essence. To interpret world events -- say, the 1992-95 war in Bosnia or the current war on terrorism -- in moral terms, as humanitarian interventionists and neoconservatives do, is to obscure the real story of intractable conflict among, for instance, Islam, Western Christianity and Orthodox Christianity. In such a Hobbesian world, grand idealistic designs will avail the United States nothing. Nor will a quest for American dominance in the name of the good. Merry calls instead for a foreign policy that seeks, without swagger or sanctimony, to protect American lives, parry threats and foster a global balance of power. In the Middle East, that means unashamedly supporting dictatorships so long as they thwart Islamic fundamentalist ambitions. Since the United States is leading a civilizational war against the forces of Islamism, why behave as if we had the time or resources to re-engineer alien societies? In a foreign policy debate increasingly clouded by illusions of American omnipotence, Merry often strikes a welcome note of humility. He rightly cautions that cold war analogies cannot fruitfully be extended to the Islamic world, where religious politics claim deeper roots than Communism ever did in Eastern Europe. But the intellectual framework into which he squeezes America's foreign policy options seems barren, and his alternative vision for the post-cold-war era is fundamentally tendentious. To begin with, the idea of progress, which Merry scorns, and the clash of civilizations position, which he champions, are more similar than he indicates. Merry argues that through the idea of progress Westerners project their own values onto the world. But the clash of civilizations perspective also projects values onto the world -- the benighted, alien values Westerners imagine others possess, and will possess for all eternity. Islamic civilization, in Merry's description, has always held religion to be inseparable from politics, and will always view women as inferior to men. These and other precepts are ''etched in the cultural consciousness'' of the world's Muslims. But what about the centuries of Muslim quietude under the premodern Islamic empires, let alone the emerging Islamic feminist movement? With a sweep of his hand Merry has flattened huge swaths of the globe into ahistorical, monolithic stasis. What's more, Merry holds that the boundaries between civilizations are impermeable, but then expends enormous energy in arguing that they should be made and kept so. The world, in actual fact, is untidy, and so categories must be imposed and policed. Turkey's bid for European Union membership, for example, should be rejected on the ground that the inclusion of so many Muslims would dilute Europe's so-called cultural identity. Although a great many Turks themselves identify as much with Europe as with the Middle East, Merry advocates that the West push Turkey away and urge it to become a leader of Islamic civilization instead. Similarly, cultural heterogeneity within the United States threatens the Western order. The American government should ''seek to hold down . . . Muslim population growth.'' Merry dresses these notions up as cold-eyed realism, but they smack of old-fashioned racism. Indeed, Merry expresses sympathy for the Serbian argument in favor of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia -- namely, that the Bosnian Muslims were seeking to establish a fundamentalist state. The only evidence Merry produces is an academic book written 35 years ago by the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija (not Aliza, as Merry has it) Izetbegovic before a Bosnian state was forced into existence by the Yugoslav disintegration. Never mind the cynical power politics of Yugoslavia's post-Tito politicians; never mind the centuries of peaceful coexistence up to the emergence of Western-style nationalism in the late 18th century. As Merry describes them, the Yugoslav wars were rooted in ancient ethnic hatreds that are ''part of the essence of Yugoslavia and its peoples,'' at least since ''cultural venom'' was ''injected into the hearts of the peoples there through half a millennium of Turkish rule.'' Merry suggests that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990's rested on the same American hubris that considers the United States' hegemony to be desirable, as well as sustainable in perpetuity. But it hardly seems necessary to adhere to an idea of American exceptionalism to press the country to act when it can to stop mass slaughter. Merry contends, moreover, that our interventions in the Balkans have been disastrous. Unfortunately for him (if not for the Bosnians and Kosovars), they haven't been. And while he repeatedly declares that Bosnia has become a ''geopolitical monster,'' a ''Muslim staging area and recruitment ground for actions aimed at killing Americans in Iraq,'' he doesn't provide anything like the evidence that would support such catastrophic and sweeping claims. What Merry's analysis reveals, in spite of itself, is the bankruptcy of the dichotomies into which foreign policy thinking is too often forced. Why must we choose between American exceptionalism and xenophobic relativism? Both views are arrogant. Neither deals with the world as it actually is -- complex, crosscut by strains of similarity and difference, shaped by politics and moral striving as well as by history and culture. The difference between the two worldviews Merry describes is not so much the difference between the real and the imaginary as between the utopian and the dystopian. Merry rightly notes that the dangers of the utopian imagination are -- have always been -- blindness, arrogance and overreach. Yet Merry's vision of eternal civilizational strife prescribes its own fulfillment. It is hard to imagine a worse outcome than that. Laura Secor is a staff editor for The Times's Op-Ed page. --------------- First chapter of 'Sands of Empire' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/chapters/0626-1st-merry.html By ROBERT W. MERRY Globalization and the End of History In 1910, a starry-eyed British economist named Norman Angell published a book called The Great Illusion, positing the notion that war among the industrial nations had become essentially obsolete. "How," he asked, "can modern life, with its overpowering proportion of industrial activities and its infinitesimal proportion of military, keep alive the instincts associated with war as against those developed by peace?" The book was an instant smash, translated into eleven languages and stirring something of a cult following throughout Europe. "By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument," wrote Barbara Tuchman in her narrative history The Guns of August, "Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one." At major universities throughout Britain, study groups of Angell acolytes sprang up. Viscount Esher, friend and confidant of the king, traveled widely to spread the gospel that "new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars." Such wars, he suggested, would spread "commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering" on such a scale that the very thought of them would unleash powerful "restraining influences." Thus, as he told one military audience, the interlacing of nations had rendered war "every day more difficult and improbable." In recounting all this, Tuchman barely conceals her contempt for Angell and Esher, which seems understandable given the carnage unleashed upon the European continent just four years after Angell's volume began its massive flow through bookstores. And yet there's something remarkably durable about the Angell thesis. In 1930, a year when the memory of World War I's rivers of blood must have been vivid in European minds, the king of England gave him a knighthood. Three years later he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his earnest agitations for world tranquillity. And in 1999, nearly ninety years after The Great Illusion appeared, a prominent New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, pronounced Angell's thesis to be "actually right," although he leavened his endorsement with a bow to Thucydides' observations about the causes of war. All this poses a question: to what can we attribute the durability of Angell's discredited thesis and its reemergence after nearly a century filled with global conflict? The answer lies in the convergence of two developments of significance to Western thought - one distant and occurring over centuries, the other recent and bursting forth with stunning rapidity. The recent development was the West's Cold War victory over the Soviet Union in 1989 after nearly a half century of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. The distant development was the emergence of that seminal Western concept, the Idea of Progress. This convergence is reflected in two publishing events of deep significance in America's recent intellectual life. One was the 1989 publication, in an obscure scholarly journal called The National Interest, of that essay by Francis Fukuyama entitled "The End of History?" Fukuyama, then a functionary on the State Department's planning staff but now a prominent academic, posited the notion that the West's coming Cold War victory represented "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Borrowing from Hegel, he said this represented "the end of history" in that the ideological struggles of the ages had reached absolute finality, with profound benefit to the cause of world peace. It was a bombshell article, stirring debates that still reverberate among academics and intellectuals. The other publishing event was the 1999 publication of Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, an analysis and celebration of what he called "the new era of globalization," characterized by the triumph of Western-style democratic capitalism and by greater prospects for global tranquillity than ever before in history. Friedman's book was widely reviewed, generated abundant favorable comment, and spent several months on the New York Times bestseller list. One reviewer called it "[perhaps] the first indispensable book of the new millennium." These two efforts to explain the post-Cold War world reflect a fundamental reality of current Western thinking - namely, that the Idea of Progress remains for many the central underlying philosophical precept and the wellspring for much of what we see today in the way of perceptions, outlooks, predictions, and convictions. Both "The End of History?" and The Lexus and the Olive Tree are distillations of the Idea of Progress, applied to the post-Cold War world. And both embrace the mischievous corollary and the two great contradictions of the Progress concept. The mischievous corollary suggests that progress can alter fundamental human nature. The contradictions are, first, the notion that this inexorable progress can actually stop at a perceived end point of history; and, second, the persistent underlying idea of Eurocentrism, the perceived superiority and universality of Western ideas and ideals. Francis Fukuyama, the son of a Congregational minister and religion professor, grew up in a middle-class housing development on Manhattan's Lower East Side. At Cornell, he majored in classics and lived at a residence called Telluride House, a haven for philosophy students who enjoyed sitting around and discussing the great thinkers. After Cornell it was on to Yale, where he did graduate work in comparative literature, and then to Paris to further his literary studies. But he became alienated from what he considered the postmodern nihilism of the prominent scholars there, and he redirected his focus toward the tangible world of geopolitics. Three years later he had a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science, with a specialty in Middle Eastern and Soviet politics. Upon getting the doctorate he joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where he spent several years writing papers of informed speculation on the fine points and likely implications of Soviet foreign and military policy. Then in early 1989, just before he was to join the State Department's planning staff, he delivered a lecture at the University of Chicago that sought to place the day's geopolitical events in a broad perspective. Owen Harries, editor of The National Interest (just four years old at the time, with a circulation of 5,600), read the speech and considered it precisely the kind of attention-grabbing analysis he wanted. Running to ten thousand words and appearing in the summer issue, it instantly thrust Fukuyama into the role of intellectual celebrity. Fukuyama's embrace of the Idea of Progress is manifest in his provocative title, in his declaration that Western democratic capitalism represents the final destination point of human civic development, and in his belief in the universality of Western political ideals. But more fundamental is his reliance on the philosophy and dialectic of Hegel, the great nineteenth-century German philosopher. Penetrating Hegel and his thinking is not an easy task. Irving Kristol, the neoconservative intellectual, calls Hegel "the most unreadable of our great philosophers." But more than anyone else Hegel established the history of philosophy as an important area of study. Robert Nisbet calls him "without question the preeminent philosopher of the nineteenth century." Kristol calls him "along with Kant the greatest philosopher of modernity." Aiming to develop a field of philosophy that would integrate the thinking of all his great philosophic predecessors, he posited the notion that these predecessors represented so many states of mind, each signifying a particular stage in the development of the human spirit toward ever greater levels of maturity. Thus he was crucial to the development of the Idea of Progress. "In no philosopher or scientist of the nineteenth century," writes Nisbet, "did the idea of progress ... have greater weight than in Hegel's thought. There is scarcely a work in Hegel's voluminous writings that is not in some fashion or degree built around the idea of becoming, of growth and progress." In his essay replying to the Fukuyama article, Kristol offers a penetrating analysis of Hegel and his significance to Fukuyama's End of History thesis. On one level, he writes, Hegel's outlook was rather conventional in that he viewed history as an evolution from the more simple to the more complex and from the more naive to the more sophisticated. "All this," he writes, "was familiar to the eighteenth century under the rubric of Progress." But Hegel went further, suggesting that this evolution represented a destiny determined by an inner logic - "an inner dialectic, to be more precise" - of which the historical actors were themselves ignorant. Thus, it was left to Hegel to reveal this whole inner dialectic and this destiny. "From a metaphysical point of view," writes Kristol, "this accession of self-consciousness by a German professor represented an achievement of the universe itself, of which humanity is the thinking self-conscious vehicle." In other words, before Hegel came upon the scene the various philosophers hammered away at their various bits of thinking, not knowing how they all fit together. But now they had the benefit of Hegel's dialectic showing how these fragments fit together and showing further how they would continue to develop into the future. Thus the history of philosophy now could be regarded as a kind of cultural evolution "whose inner dialectic," writes Kristol, "aimed always at increments of enlightenment - an evolution which we, from the privileged heights of modernity, can comprehend as never before." This was breathtaking. And soon it wasn't just the history of philosophy that came under the spell of the Hegelian dialectic, but history itself. As Kristol points out, the idea that history is a human autobiography in which events gradually and inexorably mature into modernity serves as the underpinning for nearly all of today's historical inquiry, which assumes, he writes, "that we have the intellectual authority to understand the past as the past failed to understand itself." And this heady, self-congratulatory thinking inevitably captured Western politics as well. "After Hegel," writes Kristol, "all politics too becomes neo-Hegelian." Hegel saw the modern constitutional state and its liberal social order as the end point and the final purpose of history. But he realized that this end point resided largely in the realm of theory and that, in the practical world, the evolution was ongoing. "Now," writes Kristol, "Mr. Fukuyama arrives to tell us that, after almost two centuries, the job has been done and that the United States of America is the incarnation we have all been waiting for." Viewing the Fukuyama thesis through such a prism, it is easy to see why he stirred such interest and controversy. In his essay, Fukuyama identifies Hegel as "the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science." That's because he pioneered the idea of man as the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists had suggested, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes. This is precisely where Hegel embraced the concept of the malleability of human nature. And this is where Fukuyama did likewise. As Fukuyama sees it, this perception of human nature is fundamental to the inescapable modern view of mankind. He writes: "The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive states of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization ... [culminating in] democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man." In other words, we're all Hegelians now. Fukuyama moves from his Hegelian analysis to the question of whether the modern world harbors any fundamental "contradictions" that cannot be resolved in the context of what he calls the "universal homogenous state" of liberal democracy. The End of History, after all, represents a state of human development in which no such contradictions can emerge because we have reached "the common ideological heritage of mankind." But to make his point he runs through the possibilities. First, communism. Fukuyama wrote prior to the profound events of 1989 that marked the end of the Cold War - the massive exodus of East bloc citizens through Hungary and into Austria in late summer; the Soviet loss of nerve in the face of this display of defiance; the consequent disintegration of the Soviets' Eastern European empire; and the dramatic demolition of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Thus he was prescient in seeing that Soviet communism was disintegrating and that it posed no serious alternative to Western democracy. "The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country," writes Fukuyama. "But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society." Next he looked at the "Asian alternatives," with similar results. The Fascism of Imperial Japan had been smashed, and postwar Japan had created a consumer culture "that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state." In other Asian societies economic liberalism was ushering in varying degrees of political liberalism. And even China had abandoned the strictures of Marxism-Leninism in an effort to foster growing prosperity. China was a long way from accepting the Hegelian formula, Fukuyama suggested. "Yet the pull of the liberal idea continues to be very strong as economic power devolves and the economy becomes more open to the outside world." Fukuyama notes the speculation of some that the Soviet disintegration could usher in a threatening wave of Russian nationalism. He dismisses this as "curious" on the ground that it assumes unrealistically that the evolution of the Russian consciousness had "stood still" during the Soviet interregnum. Similarly, he dismisses the idea that nationalism or ethnic zeal could emerge from any quarter to pose a serious threat to the universal homogenous state. As for Islamic fundamentalism, he concedes that Islam has indeed offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to Western liberalism. . . . From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 25 14:43:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:43:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Conservative: Paul Craig Roberts: Who Owns the Dollar?: Our currency and our economy are held hostage by Asia. Message-ID: Who Owns the Dollar?: Our currency and our economy are held hostage by Asia. http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_04/print/articleprint1.html July 4, 2005 Issue China is the leading scapegoat for America's economic ills. On May 20, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman blamed China for the U.S. housing bubble. If only China were not lending us so much money, mortgage rates would be higher, forestalling a housing bubble. Krugman says China is a poor country and should be investing its capital at home, not lending it to the U.S. Krugman could just as well have said, "If only U.S. manufacturers produced in America instead of outsourcing to China, the Chinese would not have any money to lend us. Thus, no housing bubble." Krugman is correct that if foreign lending to the U.S. slows, interest rates will rise, putting a speculative housing market in trouble. But the interest of the U.S.-China relationship goes far beyond the effect on the U.S. housing market. Economists set in traditional ways of thinking miss the really important aspects of the relationship. For example, Krugman notes that China is a poor country and is slowing its own development by lending to the U.S. We do think of China as a Third World country with large supplies of underemployed labor. China's trade relationship with the U.S., however, suggests the opposite. The U.S. trade deficit with China is larger than with any other country, including highly industrialized ones such as Japan and Germany. Think of all those Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans, office machines, and video games that Americans buy from Japan. Yet in the first quarter of this year, the U.S. trade deficit with China is running 50 percent larger than the deficit with Japan. Indeed, the U.S. trade deficit with China is larger than the deficit with all of Europe. It is larger than with Canada and Mexico combined, two countries in which U.S. corporations manufacture cars, appliances, and a variety of big-ticket items for American markets. What are Americans buying from China? With China a poor country and the U.S. a First World superpower, you would think China would have a trade deficit as a result of selling us cheap goods and importing high value-added manufactured goods. Instead, it is the other way around. The U.S. is dependent on China for manufactured goods, including advanced technology products. In the first quarter of 2005, U.S. imports from China are 5.7 times higher than U.S. exports to China. Last year, U.S. exports to China were $34.7 billion. Imports were $196.7 billion for a U.S. trade deficit with China of $162 billion. It was not always this way. In 1985, U.S. trade with China was in balance at $3.8 billion. Ten years later, U.S. imports from China were four times U.S. exports to China. The U.S.-China economic relationship is a highly unusual one between a First World and a Third World country. Moreover, the U.S. trade deficit with China in manufactured goods and advanced technology products is growing rapidly. What explains the U.S. dependence on a poor country for First World products? The answer, and the key to China's rapid development, is that corporations in First World countries--American businesses chief among them--use China as an offshore location where they produce for their home markets. More than half of U.S. imports from China, and as much as 70 percent from some of China's coastal regions, represent offshore production by American firms for U.S. markets. What economists overlook is that when we speak of the Chinese economy, we are speaking in large part of the relocation of American manufacturing to China. Those millions of lost domestic manufacturing jobs were not lost. They were moved. The jobs still exist, only they are not filled by Americans. In a world where capital and technology are highly mobile internationally, these critical factors of production flow to countries with the lowest cost of labor. China has attracted manufacturing, and India has attracted professional services. This has left the American work force with job growth only in lower-paid domestic services, which provide no export earnings. The rapid transformations that have occurred in some Indian cities, which have become high-tech centers, and along the coast of China are unprecedented in economic history. The changes are so rapid because they are driven by the relocation of First World businesses seeking the lowest labor cost. Economics relies on automatic adjustments to rectify trade imbalances. The trade deficit with China should cause the Chinese currency to appreciate relative to the dollar, raising the dollar cost of Chinese labor. In the long run--in which, J.M. Keynes said, "we are all dead"--adjustments would occur until U.S. and Chinese wage rates and living standards equalized. Considering the disparity between American and Chinese wage rates and living standards, the adjustment would be extremely painful for Americans. But the adjustment is forestalled by two factors. China keeps its currency pegged to the dollar, so when the dollar falls, the Chinese currency falls with it and there is no adjustment. China does not permit its currency to be traded, and there is not enough of it in international markets for currency speculators to be able to force the Chinese off the peg. The other factor is the dollar's role as world reserve currency. The reserve-currency role means that every country has a demand for dollars in order to pay its oil bills and settle its international accounts. The world demand means that the U.S. can run large deficits for many years before the chickens come home to roost. In the meantime, Asian countries are accumulating hundreds of billions in dollar assets, making them America's bankers. Industrially developed countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have little need to use the dollars that they earn from their trade surpluses with the U.S. to import American capital goods to fuel their further development. They use the dollars that we pay them for their goods to purchase U.S. government bonds and American companies, real estate, and corporate bonds. China, which has been growing at about 10 percent annually for a number of years, could conceivably use its export surplus with the U.S. to expand its infrastructure more rapidly in order to develop even more quickly. But a 10 percent annual growth rate is probably the highest rate of change with which China wants to contend. As First World firms are flooding China with their capital and technology, China doesn't need to use its trade surplus with the U.S. to purchase capital goods. As a result of many years of persistent trade surpluses with the United States, the Japanese government holds dollar reserves of approximately $1 trillion. China's accumulation of dollars is approximately $600 billion. South Korea holds about $200 billion. These sums give these countries enormous leverage over the United States. By dumping some portion of their reserves, these countries could put the dollar under intense pressure and send U.S. interest rates skyrocketing. Washington would really have to anger Japan and Korea to provoke such action, but in a showdown with China--over Taiwan, for example--China holds the cards. China and Japan, and the world at large, have more dollar reserves than they require. They would have no problem teaching a hegemonic superpower a lesson if the need arose. Last year the U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world was $617 billion. In the first quarter of this year, our trade deficit is $174 billion--$35 billion higher than in the first quarter of last year. If this figure holds for the remaining three quarters and does not increase, the U.S. trade deficit in 2005 will be $700 billion. Offshore outsourcing makes it impossible for the U.S. to rectify its trade imbalance through exports. As more and more of the production of goods and services for U.S. markets moves offshore, we have less capability to boost our exports, and the trade deficit automatically widens. Economic catastrophe at some point in the future seems assured. In the meantime, even a small country could pop the U.S. housing bubble by dumping dollar reserves--which is some fix for a superpower to be in, especially one that is disdainful of the opinion of the rest of the world. Comeuppance can't be far away. The hardest blow on Americans will fall when China does revalue its currency. When China's currency ceases to be undervalued, American shoppers in Wal-Mart, where 70 percent of the goods on the shelves are made in China, will think they are in Neiman Marcus. Price increases will cause a dramatic reduction in American real incomes. If this coincides with rising interest rates and a setback in the housing market, American consumers will experience the hardest times since the Great Depression. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:31:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:31:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Social Hierarchy and Primate Health Message-ID: Sociobiology: Social Hierarchy and Primate Health http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050701-5.htm The following points are made by Robert M. Sapolsky (Science 2005 308:648): 1) One of the greatest challenges in public health is to understand the "socioeconomic gradient." This refers to the fact that in numerous Westernized societies, stepwise descent in socioeconomic status (SES) predicts increased risks of cardiovascular, respiratory, rheumatoid, and psychiatric diseases; low birth weight; infant mortality; and mortality from all causes [1-4]. This relation is predominately due to the influence of SES on health, rather than the converse, and the disease incidences can be several times greater at the lower extreme of the SES spectrum. 2) One set of questions raised by the gradient concern its external causes. Despite human aversion to inequity in some settings [5], many Westernized societies tolerate marked SES gradients in health care access. Is this the predominant cause of the health gradient, or is it more a function of differences in lifestyle risk factors or of the psychosocial milieu in which poverty occurs? 3) Another set of questions concern the physiological mediators of the SES-health relationship -- how, in a frequently used phrase in the field, does poverty get under the skin? These physiological questions are difficult to study in humans, and an extensive literature has focused instead on nonhuman animals. Despite the demonstration that some nonhuman species can also be averse to inequity, groups of social animals often form dominance hierarchies, producing marked inequalities in access to resources. In such cases, an animal's dominance rank can dramatically influence the quality of its life. Does rank also influence the health of an animal? 4) The study of rank-health relations in animals has often been framed in the context of stress and the idea that animals of different ranks experience different patterns of stress. A physical stressor is an external challenge to homeostasis. A psychosocial stressor is the anticipation, justified or not, that a challenge to homeostasis looms. Psychosocial stressors typically engender feelings of lack of control and predictability and a sense of lacking outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor. Both types of stressor activate an array of endocrine and neural adaptations. When mobilized in response to an acute physical challenge to homeostasis (such as fleeing a predator), the stress response is adaptive, mobilizing energy to exercising muscle, increasing cardiovascular tone to facilitate the delivery of such energy, and inhibiting unessential anabolism, such as growth, repair, digestion, and reproduction. Chronic activation of the stress response by chronic psychosocial stressors (such as constant close proximity to an anxiety-provoking member of one's own species) can increase the risk of numerous diseases or exacerbate such preexisting diseases as hypertension, atherosclerosis, insulin-resistant diabetes, immune suppression, reproductive impairments, and affective disorders. 5) In summary: Dominance hierarchies occur in numerous social species, and rank within them can greatly influence the quality of life of an animal. The author considers how rank can also influence physiology and health. The author first considers whether it is high- or low-ranking animals that are most stressed in a dominance hierarchy; this turns out to vary as a function of the social organization in different species and populations. The author then reviews how the stressful characteristics of social rank have adverse adrenocortical, cardiovascular, reproductive, immunological, and neurobiological consequences. Finally, the author considers how these findings apply to the human realm of health, disease, and socioeconomic status. References (abridged): 1. N. Adler et al., Health Psychol. 19, 586 (2000) 2. I. Kawachi, B. Kennedy, The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health (New Press, New York, 2002) 3. J. Siegrist, M. Marmot, Soc. Sci. Med. 58, 1463 (2004) 4. R. Wilkinson, Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health, and Human Evolution (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2000) 5. E. Fehr, B. Rockenbach, Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 14, 784 (2004) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: PUBLIC HEALTH: CLASS AND NATIONAL HEALTH The following points are made by S.L. Isaacs and S.A. Schroeder (New Engl. J. Med. 2004 351:1137): 1) The health of the American public has never been better. Infectious diseases that caused terror in families less than 100 years ago are now largely under control. With the important exception of AIDS and occasional outbreaks of new diseases such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or of old ones such as tuberculosis, infectious diseases no longer constitute much of a public health threat. Mortality rates from heart disease and stroke -- two of the nation's three major killers --have plummeted.(1) 2) But any celebration of these victories must be tempered by the realization that these gains are not shared fairly by all members of our society. People in upper classes -- those who have a good education, hold high-paying jobs, and live in comfortable neighborhoods -- live longer and healthier lives than do people in lower classes, many of whom are black or members of ethnic minorities. And the gap is widening. 3) A great deal of attention is being given to racial and ethnic disparities in health care.(2-5) At the same time, the wide differences in health between the haves and the have-nots are largely ignored. Race and class are both independently associated with health status, although it is often difficult to disentangle the individual effects of the two factors. 4) The authors contend that increased attention should be given to the reality of class and its effect on the nation's health. Clearly, to bring about a fair and just society, every effort should be made to eliminate prejudice, racism, and discrimination. In terms of health, however, differences in rates of premature death, illness, and disability are closely tied to socioeconomic status. Concentrating mainly on race as a way of eliminating these problems downplays the importance of socioeconomic status on health. 5) The focus on reducing racial inequality is understandable since this disparity, the result of a long history of racism and discrimination, is patently unfair. Because of the nation's history and heritage, Americans are acutely conscious of race. In contrast, class disparities draw little attention, perhaps because they are seen as an inevitable consequence of market forces or the fact that life is unfair. As a nation, we are uncomfortable with the concept of class. Americans like to believe that they live in a society with such potential for upward mobility that every citizen's socioeconomic status is fluid. The concept of class smacks of Marxism and economic warfare. Moreover, class is difficult to define. There are many ways of measuring it, the most widely accepted being in terms of income, wealth, education, and employment. 6) Although there are far fewer data on class than on race, what data exist show a consistent inverse and stepwise relationship between class and premature death. On the whole, people in lower classes die earlier than do people at higher socioeconomic levels, a pattern that holds true in a progressive fashion from the poorest to the richest. At the extremes, people who were earning $15,000 or less per year from 1972 to 1989 (in 1993 dollars) were three times as likely to die prematurely as were people earning more than $70,000 per year. The same pattern exists whether one looks at education or occupation. With few exceptions, health status is also associated with class. References (abridged): 1. Institute of Medicine. The future of the public's health in the 21st century. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003:20. 2. Smedley BD, Stith AY, Nelson AR, eds. Unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2003 3. Steinbrook R. Disparities in health care -- from politics to policy. N Engl J Med 2004;350:1486-1488 4. Burchard EG, Ziv E, Coyle N, et al. The importance of race and ethnic background in biomedical research and clinical practice. N Engl J Med 2003;348:1170-1175 5. Winslow R. Aetna is collecting racial data to monitor medical disparities. Wall Street Journal. March 5, 2003:A1 New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:31:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:31:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread? Message-ID: Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread? New York Times Magazine, 5.6.26 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/magazine/26EXCEPTION.html By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF I. As Thomas Jefferson lay dying at his hilltop estate, Monticello, in late June 1826, he wrote a letter telling the citizens of the city of Washington that he was too ill to join them for the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. Wanting his letter to inspire the gathering, he told them that one day the experiment he and the founders started would spread to the whole world. ''To some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,'' he wrote, the American form of republican self-government would become every nation's birthright. Democracy's worldwide triumph was assured, he went on to say, because ''the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion'' would soon convince all men that they were born not to be ruled but to rule themselves in freedom. It was the last letter he ever wrote. The slave-owning apostle of liberty, that incomparable genius and moral scandal, died 10 days later on July 4, 1826, on the same day as his old friend and fellow founder, John Adams. It's impossible to untangle the contradictions of American freedom without thinking about Jefferson and the spiritual abyss that separates his pronouncement that ''all men are created equal'' from the reality of the human beings he owned, slept with and never imagined as fellow citizens. American freedom aspires to be universal, but it has always been exceptional because America is the only modern democratic experiment that began in slavery. From the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it took a century for the promise of American freedom to even begin to be kept. Despite the exceptional character of American liberty, every American president has proclaimed America's duty to defend it abroad as the universal birthright of mankind. John F. Kennedy echoed Jefferson when, in a speech in 1961, he said that the spread of freedom abroad was powered by ''the force of right and reason''; but, he went on, in a sober and pragmatic vein, ''reason does not always appeal to unreasonable men.'' The contrast between Kennedy and the current incumbent of the White House is striking. Until George W. Bush, no American president -- not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' ''excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability'' in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11. If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary. If Iraq fails, it will be his Vietnam, and nothing else will matter much about his time in office. For any president, it must be daunting to know already that his reputation depends on what Jefferson once called ''so inscrutable [an] arrangement of causes and consequences in this world.'' The consequences are more likely to be positive if the president begins to show some concern about the gap between his words and his administration's performance. For he runs an administration with the least care for consistency between what it says and does of any administration in modern times. The real money committed to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East is trifling. The president may have doubled the National Endowment for Democracy's budget, but it is still only $80 million a year. But even if there were more money, there is such doubt in the Middle East that the president actually means what he says -- in the wake of 60 years of American presidents cozying up to tyrants in the region -- that every dollar spent on democracy in the Middle East runs the risk of undermining the cause it supports. Actual Arab democrats recoil from the embrace of American good intentions. Just ask a community-affairs officer trying to give American dollars away for the promotion of democracy in Mosul, in northern Iraq, how easy it is to get anyone to even take the money, let alone spend it honestly. And then there are the prisoners, the hooded man with the wires hanging from his body, the universal icon of the gap between the ideals of American freedom and the sordid -- and criminal -- realities of American detention and interrogation practice. The fetid example of these abuses makes American talk of democracy sound hollow. It will not be possible to encourage the rule of law in Egypt if America is sending Hosni Mubarak shackled prisoners to torture. It will be impossible to secure democratic change in Morocco or Afghanistan or anywhere else if Muslims believe that American guards desecrated the Koran. The failure to convict anybody higher than a sergeant for these crimes leaves many Americans and a lot of the world wondering whether Jefferson's vision of America hasn't degenerated into an ideology of self-congratulation, whose function is no longer to inspire but to lie. II. And yet . . . and yet. . . . If Jefferson's vision were only an ideology of self-congratulation, it would never have inspired Americans to do the hard work of reducing the gap between dream and reality. Think about the explosive force of Jefferson's self-evident truth. First white working men, then women, then blacks, then the disabled, then gay Americans -- all have used his words to demand that the withheld promise be delivered to them. Without Jefferson, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation. Without the slave-owning Jefferson, no Martin Luther King Jr. and the dream of white and black citizens together reaching the Promised Land. Jefferson's words have had the same explosive force abroad. American men and women in two world wars died believing that they had fought to save the freedom of strangers. And they were not deceived. Bill Clinton saluted the men who died at Omaha Beach with the words, ''They gave us our world.'' That seems literally true: a democratic Germany, an unimaginably prosperous Europe at peace with itself. The men who died at Iwo Jima bequeathed their children a democratic Japan and 60 years of stability throughout Asia. These achievements have left Americans claiming credit for everything good that has happened since, especially the fact that there are more democracies in the world than at any time in history. Jefferson's vaunting language makes appropriate historical modesty particularly hard, yet modesty is called for. Freedom's global dispersion owes less to America and more to a contagion of local civic courage, beginning with the people of Portugal and Spain who threw off dictatorship in the 1970's, the Eastern Europeans who threw off Communism in the 90's and the Georgians, Serbs, Kyrgyz and Ukrainians who have thrown off post-Soviet autocratic governments since. The direct American role in these revolutions was often slight, but American officials, spies and activists were there, too, giving a benign green light to regime change from the streets. This democratic turn in American foreign policy has been recent. Latin Americans remember when the American presence meant backing death squads and military juntas. Now in the Middle East and elsewhere, when the crowds wave Lebanese flags in Beirut and clamor for the Syrians to go, when Iraqi housewives proudly hold up their purple fingers on exiting the polling stations, when Afghans quietly line up to vote in their villages, when Egyptians chant ''Enough!'' and demand that Mubarak leave power, few Islamic democrats believe they owe their free voice to America. But many know that they have not been silenced, at least not yet, because the United States actually seems, for the first time, to be betting on them and not on the autocrats. In the cold war, most presidents opted for stability at the price of liberty when they had to choose. This president, as his second Inaugural Address made clear, has soldered stability and liberty together: ''America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.'' As he has said, ''Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.'' It is terrorism that has joined together the freedom of strangers and the national interest of the United States. But not everyone believes that democracy in the Middle East will actually make America safer, even in the medium term. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for one, has questioned the ''facile assumption that a straight line exists between progress on democratization and the elimination of the roots of Islamic terrorism.'' In the short term, democratization in Egypt, for example, might only bring the radical Muslim Brotherhood to power. Even in the medium term, becoming a democracy does not immunize a society from terrorism. Just look at democratic Spain, menaced by Basque terrorism. Moreover, proclaiming freedom to be God's plan for mankind, as the president has done, does not make it so. There is, as yet, no evidence of a sweeping tide of freedom and democracy through the Middle East. Lebanon could pitch from Syrian occupation into civil strife; Egypt might well re-elect Mubarak after a fraudulent exercise in pseudodemocracy; little Jordan hopes nobody will notice that government remains the family monopoly of the Hashemite dynasty; Tunisia remains a good place for tourists but a lousy place for democrats; democratic hopes are most alive in Palestine, but here the bullet is still competing with the ballot box. Over it all hangs Iraq, poised between democratic transition and anarchy. And yet . . . and yet. . . . More than one world leader has been heard to ask his advisers recently, ''What if Bush is right?'' III. Other democratic leaders may suspect Bush is right, but that doesn't mean they are joining his crusade. Never have there been more democracies. Never has America been more alone in spreading democracy's promise. The reticence extends even to those nations that owe their democracy to American force of arms. Freedom in Germany was an American imperial imposition, from the cashiering of ex-Nazi officials and the expunging of anti-Semitic nonsense from school textbooks to the drafting of a new federal constitution. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroder can still intone that democracy cannot be ''forced upon these societies from the outside.'' This is not the only oddity. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German weekly Die Zeit points out, the '68-ers now in power in Germany all spent their radical youth denouncing American support for tyrannies around the world: ''Across the Atlantic they shouted: Pinochet! Somoza! Mubarak! Shah Pahlevi! King Faisal! Now it seems as though an American president has finally heard their complaints. . . . But what is coming out of Germany? . . . Nothing but deafening silence!'' The deafening silence extends beyond Germany. Like Germany, Canada sat out the war in Iraq. Ask the Canadians why they aren't joining the American crusade to spread democracy, and you get this from their government's recent foreign-policy review: ''Canadians hold their values dear, but are not keen to see them imposed on others. This is not the Canadian way.'' One reason it is not the Canadian way is that when American presidents speak of liberty as God's plan for mankind, even God-fearing Canadians wonder when God began disclosing his plan to presidents. The same discomfort with the American project extends to the nation that, in the splendid form of the Marquis de Lafayette, once joined the American fight for freedom. The French used to talk about exporting Libert?, Egalit? et Fraternit?, but nowadays they don't seem to mind standing by and watching Iraqi democrats struggling to keep chaos and anarchy at bay. Even America's best friend, Tony Blair, is circumspect about defining the Iraq project as anything more than managing the chaos. The strategy unit at 10 Downing Street recently conducted a study on how to prevent future international crises: debt relief, overseas aid and humanitarian intervention were all featured, but the promotion of democracy and freedom barely got a mention. European political foundations and overseas development organizations do promote free elections and rule of law, but they bundle up these good works in the parlance of ''governance'' rather than in the language of spreading freedom and democracy. So America presides over a loose alliance of democracies, most of whose leaders think that promoting freedom and democracy is better left to the zealous imperialists in Washington. The charge that promoting democracy is imperialism by another name is baffling to many Americans. How can it be imperialist to help people throw off the shackles of tyranny? It may be that other nations just have longer memories of their own failed imperial projects. From Napoleon onward, France sought to export French political virtues, though not freedom itself, to its colonies. The British Empire was sustained by the conceit that the British had a special talent for government that entitled them to spread the rule of law to Kipling's ''lesser breeds.'' In the 20th century, the Soviet Union advanced missionary claims about the superiority of Soviet rule, backed by Marxist pseudoscience. What is exceptional about the Jefferson dream is that it is the last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of national claims to universal significance. All the others -- the Soviet, the French and the British -- have been consigned to the ash heap of history. This may explain why what so many Americans regard as simply an exercise in good intentions strikes even their allies as a delusive piece of hubris. The problem here is that while no one wants imperialism to win, no one in his right mind can want liberty to fail either. If the American project of encouraging freedom fails, there may be no one else available with the resourcefulness and energy, even the self-deception, necessary for the task. Very few countries can achieve and maintain freedom without outside help. Big imperial allies are often necessary to the establishment of liberty. As the Harvard ethicist Arthur Applbaum likes to put it, ''All foundings are forced.'' Just remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the British. Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly the Europeans themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home. During the cold war, while most Western Europeans tacitly accepted the division of their continent, American presidents stood up and called for the walls to come tumbling down. When an anonymous graffiti artist in Berlin sprayed the wall with a message -- ''This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality'' -- it was President Reagan, not a European politician, who seized on those words and declared that the wall ''cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.'' This is why much of the European support for Bush in Iraq came from the people who had grown up behind that wall. It wasn't just the promise of bases and money and strategic partnerships that tipped Poles, Romanians, Czechs and Hungarians into sending troops; it was the memory that when the chips were down, in the dying years of Soviet tyranny, American presidents were there, and Western European politicians looked the other way. It is true that Western Europe has had a democracy-promotion project of its own since the wall came down: bringing the fledgling regimes of Eastern Europe into the brave new world of the European Union. This very real achievement has now been delayed by the ''no'' votes in France and the Netherlands. Sponsoring the promotion of democracy in the East and preparing an Islamic giant, Turkey, for a later entry is precisely what the referendum votes want to stop. So who will be there to prevent Islamic fundamentalism or military authoritarianism breaking through in Turkey now that the Europeans have told the Turks to remain in the waiting room forever? If democracy within requires patrons without, the only patron left is the United States. IV. While Americans characteristically oversell and exaggerate the world's desire to live as they do, it is actually reasonable to suppose, as Americans believe, that most human beings, if given the chance, would like to rule themselves. It is not imperialistic to believe this. It might even be condescending to believe anything else. If Europeans are embarrassed to admit this universal yearning or to assist it, Americans have difficulty understanding that there are many different forms that this yearning can take, Islamic democracy among them. Democracy may be a universal value, but democracies differ -- mightily -- on ultimate questions. One reason the American promotion of democracy conjures up so little support from other democrats is that American democracy, once a model to emulate, has become an exception to avoid. Consider America's neighbor to the north. Canadians look south and ask themselves why access to health care remains a privilege of income in the United States and not a right of citizenship. They like hunting and shooting, but can't understand why anyone would regard a right to bear arms as a constitutional right. They can't understand why the American love of limited government does not extend to a ban on the government's ultimate power -- capital punishment. The Canadian government seems poised to extend full marriage rights to gays. Some American liberals wistfully wish their own country were more like Canada, while for American conservatives, ''Soviet Canuckistan'' -- as Pat Buchanan calls it -- is the liberal hell they are seeking to avoid. But if American liberals can't persuade their own society to be more like other democracies and American conservatives don't want to, both of them are acknowledging, the first with sorrow, the other with joy, that America is an exception. This is not how it used to be. From the era of F.D.R. to the era of John Kennedy, liberal and progressive foreigners used to look to America for inspiration. For conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan was a lodestar. The grand boulevards in foreign capitals were once named after these large figures of American legend. For a complex set of reasons, American democracy has ceased to be the inspiration it was. This is partly because of the religious turn in American conservatism, which awakens incomprehension in the largely secular politics of America's democratic allies. It is partly because of the chaos of the contested presidential election in 2000, which left the impression, worldwide, that closure had been achieved at the expense of justice. And partly because of the phenomenal influence of money on American elections. But the differences between America and its democratic allies run deeper than that. When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ''community of democracies'' to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson's dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream. In the cold war, America was accepted as the leader of ''the free world.'' The free world -- the West -- has fractured, leaving a fierce and growing argument about democracy in its place. V. The fact that many foreigners do not happen to buy into the American version of promoting democracy may not be much of a surprise. What is significant is how many American liberals don't share the vision, either. On this issue, there has been a huge reversal of roles in American politics. Once upon a time, liberal Democrats were the custodians of the Jeffersonian message that American democracy should be exported to the world, and conservative Republicans were its realist opponents. Beginning in the late 1940's, as the political commentator Peter Beinart has rediscovered, liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Adlai Stevenson realized that liberals would have to reinvent themselves. This was partly a matter of principle -- they detested Soviet tyranny -- and partly a matter of pragmatism. They wanted to avoid being tarred as fellow travelers, the fate that had met Franklin Roosevelt's former running mate, the radical reformer Henry Wallace. The liberals who founded Americans for Democratic Action refounded liberalism as an anti-Communist internationalism, dedicated to defending freedom and democracy abroad from Communist threat. The missionary Jeffersonianism in this reinvention worried many people -- for example, George Kennan, the diplomat and foreign-policy analyst who argued that containment of the Communist menace was all that prudent politics could accomplish. The leading Republicans of the 1950's -- Robert Taft, for example -- were isolationist realists, doubtful that America should impose its way on the world. Eisenhower, that wise old veteran of European carnage, was in that vein, too: prudent, risk-avoiding, letting the Soviets walk into Hungary because he thought war was simply out of the question, too horrible to contemplate. In the 1960's and 70's, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger remained in the realist mode. Since stability mattered more to them than freedom, they propped up the shah of Iran, despite his odious secret police, and helped to depose Salvador Allende in Chile. Kissinger's guiding star was not Jefferson but Bismarck. Kissinger contended that people who wanted freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe were lamentable sentimentalists, unable to look at the map and accommodate themselves to the eternal reality of Soviet power. It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy. At the time, many conservative realists argued for detente, risk avoidance and placation of the Soviet bear. Faced with the Republican embrace of Jeffersonian ambitions for America abroad, liberals chose retreat or scorn. Bill Clinton -- who took reluctant risks to defend freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo -- partly arrested this retreat, yet since his administration, the withdrawal of American liberalism from the defense and promotion of freedom overseas has been startling. The Michael Moore-style left conquered the Democratic Party's heart; now the view was that America's only guiding interest overseas was furthering the interests of Halliburton and Exxon. The relentless emphasis on the hidden role of oil makes the promotion of democracy seem like a devious cover or lame excuse. The unseen cost of this pseudo-Marxist realism is that it disconnected the Democratic Party from the patriotic idealism of the very electorate it sought to persuade. John Kerry's presidential campaign could not overcome liberal America's fatal incapacity to connect to the common faith of the American electorate in the Jeffersonian ideal. Instead he ran as the prudent, risk-avoiding realist in 2004 -- despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he had fought in Vietnam. Kerry's caution was bred in the Mekong. The danger and death he encountered gave him some good reasons to prefer realism to idealism, and risk avoidance to hubris. Faced with a rival who proclaimed that freedom was not just America's gift to mankind but God's gift to the world, it was understandable that Kerry would seek to emphasize how complex reality was, how resistant to American purposes it might be and how high the price of American dreams could prove. As it turned out, the American electorate seemed to know only too well how high the price was in Iraq, and it still chose the gambler over the realist. In 2004, the Jefferson dream won decisively over American prudence. But this is more than just a difference between risk taking and prudence. It is also a disagreement about whether American values properly deserve to be called universal at all. The contemporary liberal attitude toward the promotion of democratic freedom -- we like what we have, but we have no right to promote it to others -- sounds to many conservative Americans like complacent and timorous relativism, timorous because it won't lift a finger to help those who want an escape from tyranny, relativist because it seems to have abandoned the idea that all people do want to be free. Judging from the results of the election in 2004, a majority of Americans do not want to be told that Jefferson was wrong. VI. A relativist America is properly inconceivable. Leave relativism, complexity and realism to other nations. America is the last nation left whose citizens don't laugh out loud when their leader asks God to bless the country and further its mighty work of freedom. It is the last country with a mission, a mandate and a dream, as old as its founders. All of this may be dangerous, even delusional, but it is also unavoidable. It is impossible to think of America without these properties of self-belief. Of course, American self-belief is not an eternal quantity. Jefferson airily assumed that democracy would be carried on the wings of enlightenment, reason and science. No one argues that now. Not even Bush. He does speak of liberty as ''the plan of heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress here on Earth,'' but in more sober moments, he will concede that the promotion of freedom is hard work, stretching out for generations and with no certain end in sight. The activists, experts and bureaucrats who do the work of promoting democracy talk sometimes as if democracy were just a piece of technology, like a water pump, that needs only the right installation to work in foreign climes. Others suggest that the promotion of democracy requires anthropological sensitivity, a deep understanding of the infinitely complex board game of foreign (in this case Iraqi) politics. But Iraqi freedom also depends on something whose measurement is equally complex: what price, in soldiers' bodies and lives, the American people are prepared to pay. The members of the American public are ceaselessly told that stabilizing Iraq will make them more secure. They are told that fighting the terrorists there is better than fighting them at home. They are told that victory in Iraq will spread democracy and stability in the arc from Algeria to Afghanistan. They are told that when this happens, ''they'' won't hate Americans, or hate them as much as they do now. It's hard to know what the American people believe about these claims, but one vital test of whether the claims are believed is the number of adolescent men and women prepared to show up at the recruiting posts in the suburban shopping malls and how many already in the service or Guard choose to re-enlist and sign up for another tour in Ramadi or Falluja. The current word is that recruitment is down, and this is a serious sign that someone at least thinks America is paying too high a price for its ideals. Of all human activities, fighting for your country is the one that requires most elaborate justification. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that ''to fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might.'' He had survived Antietam and the annihilating horror of the Battle of the Wilderness, so he knew of what he spoke. The test that Jefferson's dream has to pass is whether it gives members of a new generation something they want to fight for with all their might. Two years from now is the earliest any senior United States commander says that Americans can begin to come home from Iraq in any significant numbers. Already the steady drip of casualties is the faintly heard, offstage noise of contemporary American politics. As this noise grows louder, it may soon drown out everything else. Flag-draped caskets are slid down the ramps of cargo planes at Dover Air Force Base and readied for their last ride home to the graveyards of America. In some region of every American's mind, those caskets raise a simple question: Is Iraqi freedom worth this? It would be a noble thing if one day 26 million Iraqis could live their lives without fear in a country of their own. But it would also have been a noble dream if the South Vietnamese had been able to resist the armored divisions of North Vietnam and to maintain such freedom as they had. Lyndon Johnson said the reason Americans were there was the ''principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania,'' the right of people to choose their own path to change. Noble dream or not, the price turned out to be just too high. There is nothing worse than believing your son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother died in vain. Even those who have opposed the Iraq war all along, who believe that the hope of planting democracy has lured America into a criminal folly, do not want to tell those who have died that they have given their lives for nothing. This is where Jefferson's dream must work. Its ultimate task in American life is to redeem loss, to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shining purpose. The real truth about Iraq is that we just don't know -- yet -- whether the dream will do its work this time. This is the somber question that hangs unanswered as Americans approach this Fourth of July. Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer, is the Carr professor of human rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the editor of the forthcoming book ''American Exceptionalism and Human Rights.'' From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:32:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:32:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Steve Sailer: If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"? Message-ID: If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"? http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050501_genetic.htm 5.5.1 [14]Steve Sailer Archive By [17]Steve Sailer Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse. Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming. The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity. The bad news: we won't fund research into [18]existing human biodiversity - because it's [19]politically incorrect. Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books. Microsoft programmer [20]Ramez Naam, author of [21]More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability. In contrast, Washington Post reporter [22]Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative [23]The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming [24]Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human. Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor [25]Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of [26]nutritional supplements daily as part of his [27]plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like [28]Sun Microsystems co-founder [29]Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity. (The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like [30]Noah's family to repopulate the planet.) What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here [31]Real Soon Now. I'm not so certain. [32]Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not. The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was [33]far from true. For example, in the overall [34]2004 exit poll, the un-massaged Hispanic share of the respondents turned out to be only 5.9 percent, far below the 8 or 9 percent forecast by [35]Michael Barone. Similarly, when it comes to human bioengineering, the future hasn't yet gone through the [36]formality of taking place. We still have time to figure out what we want to do and what we don't. But how? Answer: By [37]studying honestly the human genetic diversity we see all around us - and learning how it [38]already affects society. Unfortunately, [39]political taboos against the study of human biodiversity retard this crucial work. Occasionally, I get emails telling me I'm foolish to worry about the long term effects of immigration because genetic engineering will soon give us all IQs of 1,000 ... or we'll live forever ... or robots will take over and enslave us ... or [40]nanotechnology will make us all richer than Croesus ... or nanotechnology will run amok and suck all the life out of everything on Earth ... or ... But technological trees don't always grow to the sky. Consider the rise and fall of the Transportation Revolution. From the development of the steamship to the moon landing took less than 170 years. Smart science fiction writers like [41]Robert A. Heinlein assumed that this [42]progress would continue. Yet, in the last quarter of a century, the greatest breakthrough in transportation technology has been, what, the minivan? The Concorde is dead, the Space Shuttle is teetering ... Nor do technical revolutions always arrive on time. Medical gene engineering of humans has been much slower to become usable than many assumed a decade ago. One problem: getting the effectiveness to risk level high enough. Operating on humans isn't like engineering corn or mice, where you can throw away your mistakes. Another difficulty: although there was a vast amount of publicity back in 2000 about how the genome had been "mapped," we still don't know what most genes actually do. Moreover, while a few diseases, such as sickle cell anemia and Huntington's, are the result of a single bad gene, the big bad illnesses seem to have other causes. Indeed, Darwinian logic, as first enunciated by [43]Gregory Cochran, suggests we might have been focusing too hard on finding heritable genetic causes for diseases. In the words of top British genetic journalist Matt Ridley, "Your genes don't exist to kill you." A new report called "[44]Microbial Triggers of Common Human Illness" from the American Academy of Microbiology supports Cochran's insight that many diseases that are assumed genetic may more likely be triggered by germs. That's because natural selection would tend to eliminate harmful genes in us, but pathogens evolve at least as fast as our defenses against them. Your genes haven't evolved to make you sick, but to give you capabilities to survive and reproduce. So genetic technologies might be more suited to enhance skills than to cure illnesses. Yet some capacities are likely to require many genes working together in complex ways, so the payoff from altering a single gene would be small. [45]Superstar cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has [46]said, "I think an Achilles heel of genetic enhancement will be the rarity of single genes with consistent beneficial psychological effects." Considering the intricacy of the human brain, this is particularly likely to be true of intelligence, which would make engineering higher IQs difficult. Conversely, single genes often have multiple uses, which means that genetic engineering could often have unfortunate side effects. For example, back in 1999, Time Magazine ran a cover story called "[47]The I.Q. Gene?" about how Dr. Joe Tsien had genetically engineered "Doogie" mice to have [48]superior memories. But subsequent studies showed the Doogie mice (named after the supersmart TV character[49] Doogie Howser, M.D.) are also more sensitive to [50]chronic inflammatory pain, which isn't a trait you'd want your children to possess. Farmers have been modifying their barnyard animals' genetic frequencies for thousands of years through selective breeding. One of the many interesting aspects of the new book [51]Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by animal sciences professor [52]Temple Grandin, who is America's best known [53]autistic, is how she documents some of the weird things that go wrong when breeders emphasize a single genetic trait. For example, don't expect [54]Lassie to figure out anymore that the way to rescue little [55]Timmy from the quicksand is by extending a long branch to him. Since WWII, collie breeders have been trying to give collies narrower and narrower snouts because they look so darn elegant that way. Unfortunately, they made their skulls so narrow there is no room left for brains. Collies are now dumb as a box of rocks. Side effects can be more unpredictable and even nastier. In recent years, as chicken ranchers have bred for more meat on their birds, they've had to [56]deal with an unprecedented rash of rooster sex murderers who kill hens. In humans, [57]Cochran has pointed out that [58]torsion dystonia, a hereditary illness which puts about 10 percent of its sufferers in wheelchairs at an early age, may be a side effect of intense selection pressure for higher IQ. In one study, the average IQ of patients was 122. So parents may not rush into genetic engineering their children quite as fast as the futurists expect. Futurists--being smart, nerdy guys--generally assume that the most desirable human trait is IQ. But we can look right now at racial groups with higher average IQs, such as [59]Northeast Asians and [60]Ashkenazis, to get some idea of the social impact of high IQ. Higher IQ groups tend to exhibit positive social patterns such as low crime rates and high wealth creation rates. Unfortunately, what Amy Chua calls "[61]market dominant minorities" haven't always been looked upon favorably by the masses. Top IQ researcher Linda Gottfredson points out in her important article "[62]What If the Hereditarian Hypothesis Is True?" that "Virtually all the victim groups of genocide in the 20th century had relatively high average levels of achievement (e.g., German Jews, educated Cambodians, Russian Kulaks, Armenians in Turkey, Ibos in Nigeria)." Among average people, it is not at all clear that intelligence is considered as desirable as desirability. I suspect that most parents would choose attractiveness over intelligence for their children, because being able to outcompete your peers for the best spouse is so important, especially in making grandchildren, that looks matter greatly. Heinlein might have been the first thinker to explore some of the consequences. In his prescient 1942 novel about a genetically engineered future, [63]Beyond This Horizon, the world is populated by fairly intelligent but extremely sexy people straight out of a Hollywood casting call. The men are manly and the ladies lovely. The men are so macho, in fact, that no gentleman would be seen without his gun, and dueling has made a major comeback. The strict code of etiquette that limits when these square-jawed bravos are allowed to blast away at each other inspired Heinlein's famous remark, [64]"An armed society is a polite society." As insightful as the best science fiction writers are, we can learn the pros and cons of a higher testosterone future society right now by examining the social behavior of current racial groups with higher levels of [65]male hormones and [66]stronger male hormone receptors, such as [67]African-Americans. But, that kind of research on naturally occurring genetic diversity is [68]largely taboo. Instead, we will probably walk blindly into the era of genetic engineering. Good luck to us all. We're going to need it. [Steve Sailer [[69]email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and [70]movie critic for [71]The American Conservative. His website [72]www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.] References 14. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 17. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 18. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/human_history.htm 19. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pioneer.htm 20. http://www.morethanhuman.org/ 21. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0767918436/vdare 22. http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/frame.html?main=/bios/bio0157.html? 23. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395291240/vdare 24. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385509650/vdare 25. http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html 26. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11564-2004Oct6.html 27. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579549543/vdare 28. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=site:vdare.com+Sun+Microsystems+&btnG=Search 29. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy.html 30. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&chapter=9&version=9 31. http://www.isteve.com/Future-of-Human-Nature.htm 32. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/wide_eyed.htm 33. http://www.vdare.com/francis/hispanic_vote.htm 34. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050125_stomping.htm 35. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/barone_bet.htm 36. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/hispanic_vote.htm 37. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/bell_curve_10yr.htm 38. http://www.vdare.com/pb/bell_curve_10yrs.htm 39. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/medicine_and_race.htm 40. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb102704.shtml 41. http://www.heinleinsociety.org/ 42. http://baslag.proboards22.com/index.cgi?board=Authors&action=display&num=1067013957 43. http://www.quantumbalancing.com/news/new_germ_theory.htm 44. http://www.asm.org/ASM/files/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/000000001497/ASM-MicroTriggers.pdf 45. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pinker_progress.htm 46. http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/march03/session3.html 47. http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,991939,00.html 48. http://cseserv.engr.scu.edu/NQuinn/ENGR019_301Winter2002/090299sci-ge-mice.html 49. http://www.kfcplainfield.com/tv/doogie.html 50. http://nootropics.com/smartmice/smartpain.html 51. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743247698/vdare 52. http://www.grandin.com/ 53. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0446671827/002-4477764-5880855/vdare 54. http://www.lassie.net/ 55. http://communitylink.reviewjournal.com/lvrj/680/FSLO-1051557614-710680.JPG 56. http://familycow.proboards32.com/index.cgi?board=cow&action=display&num=1112917453 57. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/cochran/overclocking.html 58. http://www.emedicine.com/neuro/topic165.htm 59. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/lynn_and_flynn.htm 60. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/dialogue.htm 61. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/market_dominant.htm 62. http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/journals/pppl/200504/content.apa.org/journals/law/11/2/311-2.html 63. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0451166760/vdare 64. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertahe100989.html 65. http://cancer.med.unc.edu/news/externalnews-archives/research_10061999.htm 66. http://www.phoenix5.org/articles/LATimesBlacks0212.html 67. http://www.isteve.com/mjelegy.htm 68. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/jonah_whales.htm 69. mailto:steveslr at aol.com 70. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iSteve-movies/ 71. http://www.amconmag.com/ 72. http://www.isteve.com/ From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:32:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:32:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: Escalator Ride Message-ID: Escalator Ride http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111595026421432611,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls Those in Bottom Rung Enjoy Better Odds in Europe; How Parents Confer an Edge Immigrants See Fast Advance By DAVID WESSEL Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL May 13, 2005; Page A1 The notion that the U.S is a special place where any child can grow up to be president, a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class, dates to Benjamin Franklin. The 15th child of a candle-and-soap maker, Franklin started out as a penniless printer's apprentice and rose to wealth so great that he retired to a life of politics and diplomacy at age 42. The promise that a child born in poverty isn't trapped there remains a staple of America's self-portrait. President Bush, though a riches-to-riches story himself, revels in the humble origins of some in his cabinet. He says his attorney general "grew up in a two-bedroom house," the son of "migrant workers who never finished elementary school." He notes that his Cuban-born commerce secretary's first job for Kellogg Corp. was driving a truck; his last was chief executive. But the reality of mobility in America is more complicated than the myth. As the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth -- or a rich child will fall into the middle class -- remain stuck. Despite the spread of affirmative action, the expansion of community colleges and the other social change designed to give people of all classes a shot at success, Americans are no more or less likely to rise above, or fall below, their parents' economic class than they were 35 years ago. Although Americans still think of their land as a place of exceptional opportunity -- in contrast to class-bound Europe -- the evidence suggests otherwise. And scholars have, over the past decade, come to see America as a less mobile society than they once believed. As recently as the late 1980s, economists argued that not much advantage passed from parent to child, perhaps as little as 20%. By that measure, a rich man's grandchild would have barely any edge over a poor man's grandchild. "Almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations," wrote Gary Becker, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate, in 1986. "Poverty would not seem to be a 'culture' that persists for several generations." But over the last 10 years, better data and more number-crunching have led economists and sociologists to a new consensus: The escalators of mobility move much more slowly. A substantial body of research finds that at least 45% of parents' advantage in income is passed along to their children, and perhaps as much as 60%. With the higher estimate, it's not only how much money your parents have that matters -- even your great-great grandfather's wealth might give you a noticeable edge today. Many Americans believe their country remains a land of unbounded opportunity. That perception explains why Americans, much more than Europeans, have tolerated the widening inequality in recent years. It is OK to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor, they seem to believe, as long as their children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring. This continuing belief shapes American politics and economic policy. Technology, globalization and unfettered markets tend to erode wages at the bottom and lift wages at the top. But Americans have elected politicians who oppose using the muscle of government to restrain the forces of widening inequality. These politicians argue that lifting the minimum wage or requiring employers to offer health insurance would do unacceptably large damage to economic growth. Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity. Miles Corak, an economist for Canada's national statistical agency who edited a recent Cambridge University Press book on mobility in Europe and North America, tweaked dozens of studies of the U.S., Canada and European countries to make them comparable. "The U.S. and Britain appear to stand out as the least mobile societies among the rich countries studied," he finds. France and Germany are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so. Even the University of Chicago's Prof. Becker is changing his mind, reluctantly. "I do believe that it's still true if you come from a modest background it's easier to move ahead in the U.S. than elsewhere," he says, "but the more data we get that doesn't show that, the more we have to accept the conclusions." Still, the escalators of social mobility continue to move. Nearly a third of the freshmen at four-year colleges last fall said their parents hadn't gone beyond high school. And thanks to a growing economy that lifts everyone's living standards, the typical American is living with more than his or her parents did. People today enjoy services -- cellphones, cancer treatment, the Internet -- that their parents and grandparents never had. Measuring precisely how much the prosperity of Americans depends on advantages conferred by their parents is difficult, since it requires linking income data across many decades. U.S. research relies almost entirely on a couple of long-running surveys. One began in 1968 at the University of Michigan and now tracks more than 7,000 families with more than 65,000 individuals; the other was started by the Labor Department in 1966. One drawback of the surveys is that they don't capture the experiences of recent immigrants or their children, many of whom have seen extraordinary upward mobility. The University of California at Berkeley, for instance, says 52% of last year's undergraduates had two parents who weren't born in the U.S., and that's not counting the relatively few students whose families live abroad. Nonetheless, those two surveys offer the best way to measure the degree to which Americans' economic success or failure depends on their parents. University of Michigan economist Gary Solon, an authority in the field, says one conclusion is clear: "Intergenerational mobility in the U.S. has not changed dramatically over the last two decades." Bhashkar Mazumder, a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist, recently combined the government survey with Social Security records for thousands of men born between 1963 and 1968 to see what they were earning when they reached their late 20s or 30s. Only 14% of the men born to fathers on the bottom 10% of the wage ladder made it to the top 30%. Only 17% of the men born to fathers on the top 10% fell to the bottom 30%. Land of the Self-Made Man Benjamin Franklin best exemplified and first publicized America as the land of the mobile society. "He is the prototype of the self-made man, and his life is the classic American success story -- the story of a man rising from the most obscure of origins to wealth and international preeminence," one of his many biographers, Gordon S. Wood, wrote in 2004. In 1828, a 14-year-old Irish immigrant named Thomas Mellon read Franklin's popular "Autobiography" and later described it as a turning point in his life. "Here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame," Mellon wrote in a memoir. The young Mellon left the family farm, became a successful lawyer and judge and later founded what became Pittsburgh's Mellon Bank. In front, he erected a statute of Franklin. Even Karl Marx accepted the image of America as a land of boundless opportunity, citing this as an explanation for the lack of class consciousness in the U.S. "The position of wage laborer," he wrote in 1865, "is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term." Self-made industrialist Andrew Carnegie, writing in the New York Tribune in 1890, catalogued the "captains of industry" who started as clerks and apprentices and were "trained in that sternest but most efficient of all schools -- poverty." The historical record suggests this widely shared belief about 19th-century America was more than myth. "You didn't need to be told. You lived it. And if you didn't, your neighbors did," says Joseph Ferrie, an economic historian at Northwestern University, who has combed through the U.S. and British census records that give the occupations of thousands of native-born father-and-son pairs who lived between 1850 and 1920. In all, more than 80% of the sons of unskilled men moved to higher-paying, higher-status occupations in the late 1800s in the U.S., but less than 60% in Britain did so. The biggest factor, Mr. Ferrie says, is that young Americans could do something most British couldn't: climb the economic ladder quickly by moving from farm towns to thriving metropolises. In 1850, for instance, James Roberts was a 14-year-old son of a day laborer living in the western New York hamlet of Catharine. Handwritten census records reveal that 30 years later, Mr. Roberts was a bookkeeper -- a much higher rung -- and living in New York City at 2257 Third Ave. with his wife and four children. As education became more important in the 20th century -- first high school, later college -- leaping up the ladder began to require something that only better-off parents could afford: allowing their children to stay in school instead of working. "Something quite fundamental changed in the U.S. economy in the years after 1910 and before the Great Depression," says Prof. Ferrie. One reason that the once-sharp differences between social mobility in the U.S. and Britain narrowed in the 20th century, he argues, is that the regional economies of the U.S. grew more and more similar. It became much harder to leap several rungs of the economic ladder simply by moving. The paucity of data makes it hard to say how mobility changed for much of the 20th century. Individual census records -- the kind that Prof. Ferrie examines -- are still under seal for most of the 20th century. Data from the two national surveys didn't start rolling in until the 1970s. Whatever the facts, the Franklin-inspired notion of America as an exceptionally mobile society persisted through most of the 20th century, as living standards improved after World War II and the children and grandchildren of immigrants prospered. Jeremiads in the 1960s and 1970s warned of an intractable culture of poverty that trapped people at the bottom for generations, and African-Americans didn't enjoy the same progress as whites. But among large numbers of Americans, there was little doubt that their children would ride the escalator. Old Wisdom Shatters In 1992, though, Mr. Solon, the Michigan economist, shattered the conventional academic wisdom, arguing in the American Economic Review that earlier studies relied on "error-ridden data, unrepresentative samples, or both" and misleadingly compared snapshots of a single year in the life of parent and child rather than looking over longer periods. There is "dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research," he said. Subsequent research work confirmed that. As Mr. Mazumder, the Chicago Fed economist, put it in the title of a recent book chapter: "The apple falls even closer to the tree than we thought." Why aren't the escalators working better? Figuring out how parents pass along economic status, apart from the obvious but limited factor of financial bequests, is tough. But education appears to play an important role. In contrast to the 1970s, a college diploma is increasingly valuable in today's job market. The tendency of college grads to marry other college grads and send their children to better elementary and high schools and on to college gives their children a lasting edge. The notion that the offspring of smart, successful people are also smart and successful is appealing, and there is a link between parent and child IQ scores. But most research finds IQ isn't a very big factor in predicting economic success. In the U.S., race appears to be a significant reason that children's economic success resembles their parents'. From 32 years of data on 6,273 families recorded by the University of Michigan's long-running survey, American University economist Tom Hertz calculates that 17% of whites born to the bottom 10% of families ranked by income remained there as adults, but 42% of the blacks did. Perhaps as a consequence, public-opinion surveys find African-Americans more likely to favor government redistribution programs than whites. The tendency of well-off parents to have healthier children, or children more likely to get treated for health problems, may also play a role. "There is very powerful evidence that low-income kids suffer from more health problems, and childhood health does predict adult health and adult health does predict performance," observes Christopher Jencks, a noted Harvard sociologist. Passing along personality traits to one's children may be a factor, too. Economist Melissa Osborne Groves of Maryland's Towson University looked at results of a psychological test for 195 father-son pairs in the government's long-running National Longitudinal Survey. She found similarities in attitudes about life accounted for 11% of the link between the income of a father and his son. Nonetheless, Americans continue to cherish their self-image as a unique land where past and parentage puts no limits on opportunity, as they have for centuries. In his "Autobiography," Franklin wrote simply that he had "emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence." But in a version that became the standard 19th-century text, his grandson, Temple, altered the words to underscore the enduring message: "I have raised myself to a state of affluence..." Write to David Wessel at david.wessel at wsj.com From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:34:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:34:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Tyler Cowen: Why don't people have more sex? Message-ID: Tyler Cowen: Why don't people have more sex? http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/05/why_dont_people.html Loyal *MR* reader Michael Vassar writes: ...all forms of consequentialism have a great deal of difficulty interpreting sexual behavior. To put things short, there is an inexplicable shortage of sex. Given that studies show that women and men enjoy it more than most other activities (on average, not on the margin I'll grant), and given its intrinsically low cost, it appears that even a crude approximation of a utility maximizing person would probably spend much more time having sex than most do. Do you know of any economic discussion of this? We need not just reasons, but rather gains-from-trade-defying reasons. I can think of a few: 1. The long-run lifestyle costs of being "more open to sex" involve a loss of integrity and control. (OK, but I know many married couples, not all of whom hate each other, who don't seem to have much sex.) 2. The average utility of sex is high but the marginal utilities are falling off a cliff. You just don't want any more. But how many people are at this margin? 3. Freud was right and we are all repressed. The will is not unitary and the utility-maximizing part is not always in control. 4. There has been a market failure, but the Internet is remedying it. People are having more sex and this will only go up. 5. Sex stops being fun when you do it to close a gap between your marginal utilities. It requires spontaneity or some other quality inconsistent with the classical model of the consumer and the equation of marginal rates of substitution. 6. Sex isn't as much fun as the studies indicate. Perhaps people lie about their quality of their sex or remember only the better experiences. 7. People want their sex to consist of peaks, rather than seeking to maximize lifetime utility. Tom Schelling once told me this is why he did not listen to Bach more. 8. The market-clearing price for more sex is positive, and people feel shame about paying too explicitly; see also #5. 9. We are biologically programmed to "stick to our guns," rather than just kiss and make up; read more here . Or perhaps your wife has read my earlier post on why it is hard to avoid torture. 10. People are having sex in other ways . Maybe that is really good too. 11. Everyone else *is* having sex *all the time -- *Michael Vassar simply doesn't know about it. 12. You're all addicted to reading blogs. *My wife's question*: "Should you be flattered or insulted that you are considered an expert on this?" Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 9, 2005 at 07:08 AM in Economics From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:34:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:34:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In Overhaul of Social Security, Age Is the Elephant in the Room Message-ID: I'm not sending this so much to discuss the politics of Social Security but to inform you of the increase in longevity at the end of life, rather than at the beginning. It's in the first paragraph. Does anyone predict, out of each year of increased life expectancy, what fraction of a year will there be of increased employment? We can expect a continued increasing premium on raw intelligence (the driving force behind increased wage inequality in the U.S. and, I presume, other countries). The problem is that raw intelligence peaks about age 20 or even earlier (what's the data on this). If earnings = intelligence + experience, then the peak earning year will decline, though not by as much as one might think. The idea that with age comes wisdom was true in paleolithic days but not so much anymore. Our minds a geared to that era, and so oldsters get more than they deserve. The relentless grindings of capitalism will put an end to that, provided output can be better measured, which is hard to do in a service economy. The authors of the article did not mention another way the Social Security deficit will be narrowed: a spreading acceptance of euthanasia. ------------------ In Overhaul of Social Security, Age Is the Elephant in the Room http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/politics/12age.html By [3]ROBIN TONER and [4]DAVID E. ROSENBAUM WASHINGTON, June 11 - Americans turning 65 this year can expect to live, on average, until they are 83, four and a half years longer than the typical 65-year-old could expect in 1940. And government actuaries predict that American life spans will just keep growing. This demographic trend - by 2040, the average 65-year-old will live to about 85 - has major financial implications for Social Security and major political implications for the lawmakers now trying to overhaul the system. Policy experts across the political spectrum, who agree on little else, have told Congress in recent weeks that any effort to improve Social Security's long-term finances should somehow deal with this jump in life expectancy - by adjusting benefits, raising the retirement age, increasing taxes or creating new incentives to work longer. Not only are Americans living longer, these experts say, but most are also retiring earlier, and these demographic pressures will be heightened by the sheer size of the baby boom generation - 78 million strong - which will begin to retire in the next five years. Major committees in the House and Senate, struggling to produce Social Security legislation this summer, are beginning to confront the longevity issue. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee, says the retirement age will be addressed in the solvency plan he hopes to develop with his fellow party members in the coming week, and his Republican counterparts in the House are holding hearings on the issue on Tuesday. "We've got to deal with reality," said Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. But the politics are treacherous, all the more so because Republicans are dealing with it alone. Democrats have refused to engage in discussions over Social Security's finances until President Bush withdraws his proposal to create private investment accounts in the program. The most direct way to deal with the financial strain of greater longevity is simply to raise the retirement age, which now stands at 65 years and 6 months and will gradually rise under current law to 67 for people born in 1960 and later. But of all the options to shore up Social Security's finances, that ranks as one of the most unpopular, pollsters say. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll earlier this year, nearly 8 out of 10 respondents said they would oppose raising the age when people are eligible for Social Security benefits. Political strategists say this issue is viewed very differently by policy experts, who may see nothing wrong with working longer, and average Americans, with jobs that may be uninteresting, stressful or physically demanding, who are often eager to retire and doubtful of their employment prospects in their mid-to-late 60's. "In Washington, the focus is on the demographic reality that people live longer, and most of the people who are having this conversation wouldn't mind working well into their 70's and 80's," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. "But out in the country, most working people don't look forward to working forever." Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, agreed: "Forty might be the new 30, but they don't necessarily believe that 70 is the new 65." Lawmakers in both parties have acknowledged that many people not only want to but also need to retire at 62 or 65. Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, recently reflected, "I know my father, in terms of his plumbing activities, was pretty - the phrase, I guess, would be pretty used up by the time he was 65." Representative Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota, a committee member, said, "I represent a lot of people doing some pretty hard labor out there on those farms." As a result, many analysts say any proposal to deal with increased life expectancy would probably include some protections for low-income workers in physically taxing fields. There are other potential inequities associated with raising the retirement age: on average, women live longer than men; whites live longer than blacks; the rich live longer than the poor. Another political hurdle is AARP, the lobby for older Americans, which notes that a major increase in the retirement age is already under way as a result of the last significant overhaul of Social Security, in 1983. The normal retirement age, as the Social Security Administration calls it, is to rise by about two months a year until it reaches 67 in 2027. (One proposal occasionally discussed is simply speeding up the increase to 67.) Workers can take earlier retirement at 62, as most do, but their benefit checks are reduced as a result - 20 percent or more every month for the rest of their lives, depending on how early they retire. David Certner, director of federal affairs for AARP, said, "Just because you raise the age, doesn't mean there will be jobs out there so you can continue working, even if you want to." Moreover, he added: "you've got a whole group of people who are just not physically or mentally able to continue. I think a lot of people recognize that if you change the age, you just push those people onto the disability rolls," which are financed by the same Social Security taxes as retirement benefits. Still, experts say that the system as a whole needs to reflect the new demographic realities. C. Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former official in the Reagan administration, notes that Americans already retire, on average, for close to one-third of their adult lives, and argues that Social Security "has morphed into a middle-age retirement system." The change in the last 60 years is striking: The average retirement age in 1940 was 68. As recently as 1965, about two-thirds of workers did not begin drawing Social Security benefits until they were 65 or older. Now, more than half retire at 62 or younger, and three-quarters receive their first benefit checks before they are 65. Edward M. Gramlich, a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and an authority on Social Security, says that if the architects of Social Security "had known about the explosion in life expectancy, they would have put in some adjustment in the retirement age." One way to address the problem - and the direction some lawmakers seem to be heading in - is an automatic adjustment in the retirement age or the benefits received at each age to reflect increases in life expectancy. That way, retirees' total lifetime benefits would remain more or less constant even as they lived longer. Automatic changes are already made for average wage increases and price inflation. For individuals, such a change, called indexing for longevity, would be little different from a direct increase in the retirement age or a specified reduction in benefits, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office. But for the system, Mr. Holtz-Eakin said, it would make a big difference because the changes would be automatic and would not require new laws. It might also be politically attractive because politicians would be relieved of the responsibility of periodically voting to raise the retirement age or to cut benefits. Adjusting the system for longevity would not contribute much to solving Social Security's solvency problem over the next 30 years or so, Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. But over 75 years and longer, he said, it would have an important effect. Still, pollsters question whether even a gradual adjustment based on life expectancy will sell. "You can call it indexing for longevity in Washington, but in America it's raising the retirement age," said Mr. Garin, the Democratic pollster. Mr. Bolger, his Republican counterpart, said, "There's no appetite for anything related to age among the public." From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 26 18:34:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:34:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] G&M: Controversial Genetic Technology Helps Find Suspects Message-ID: Controversial Genetic Technology Helps Find Suspects By Carolyn Abraham http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050625.wxdna25/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/ The Globe and Mail 5.6.25 Canadian police have been quietly using a controversial new genetic technology to reveal the racial background and physical appearance of criminals they are hunting, according to the Florida company that sells the test. Officials with DNAPrint Genomics, a biotech firm in Sarasota that has offered the test since 2002, say four separate forces in Canada -- including the RCMP -- have used the technology to narrow their search for suspects. This spring, two Canadian investigators made the unusual move of hand-delivering a crime-scene DNA sample to the Florida lab. Unlike the more familiar forensic test that tries to match DNA found at a crime scene with samples from known suspects, this test is based on a single recovered sample and has the potential to tell police if the offender they are looking for is white, black, Asian, native, or of mixed race. The company then supplies photos of people with similar genetic profiles to help complete the portrait. The company says the so-called DNAWitness test has been used in 80 criminal investigations by law-enforcement organizations worldwide, including the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army and Scotland Yard. Advertisements Click Heread1 Register "This could be helpful in solving crimes, more helpful than human eyewitnesses," said Anthony Frudakis, the company's chief scientific officer. "Our technology serves as a potential molecular eyewitness. It's objective." It's also advancing at a dizzying pace. This spring, the company launched a new DNA test that can discern a person's eye colour with 92-per-cent accuracy. Meanwhile, the prospect of learning other physical -- even psychological -- traits could soon follow. But while law enforcers seem to be embracing the new science, it has received a chilly reception from others who compare the technology -- a similar version of which has been developed in Britain -- to racial profiling in the genomics age. "You still have to make a leap that what you're getting from the DNA correlates to visual characteristics," said Mildred Cho, associate director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics in California. "Then in order to round those people up, you have to say to the police department, or the force, 'Go find people who look like this, someone who looks black, or someone who looks half black and half Asian. "This technology really overstates the ability to classify people by race and ethnicity." For this reason, as well as the risk of tipping off criminals who could try to alter their appearance, Dr. Frudakis said police are loath to discuss their use of the technology -- which appears to be the case in Canada. Officials at DNAPrint, who sign confidentiality agreements with police, say they cannot reveal details of the Canadian cases and investigators they contacted on behalf of The Globe and Mail have not responded to requests to discuss the test. But as far as the company knows (and police do not generally keep them updated), Dr. Frudakis said, the test has contributed to six arrests internationally. The most prominent example comes from Louisiana where detectives used it to catch a serial killer. Eyewitness accounts of a white man driving a white pickup truck, as well as an FBI psychological profile, had suggested it was a Caucasian man who was raping and killing women in the Baton Rouge area in 2002. But crime-scene DNA the Florida company tested indicated the offender was 85 per cent sub-Saharan African and 15 per cent Native American. In short, the test told police they should not be looking for a white man. Two months after the shift in focus, Baton Rouge police arrested Derek Todd Lee, a black man now on death row for the slaying of six women. Asked whether RCMP hunting a possible serial killer in Edmonton might consider using the technology, spokesman Corporal Wayne Oakes would say only that investigators on the case are "aware of this technology, but it's not one they have had occasion to use." Sergeant Don Kelly of the Baton Rouge police force said in an interview that one of the detectives involved in their serial killer case has made a presentation to police in Edmonton. But he could not say if the technology was discussed. In some cases, the test has been helpful in identifying victims of a crime. Police in Southern California, for example, had been targeting Asian gangs after discovering skeletal remains at Mammoth Lakes Park that bone-structure experts felt belonged to an Asian woman. But the Florida test found the woman was largely Native American, prompting park rangers to recall that a woman who fit that description had complained about her husband's abusive behaviour. The test, which costs $1,000 (U.S.), scans 176 particular genetic mutations that each offer information about a person's continent of origin. The results then break DNA inheritance down into percentages of four geographic groups: sub-Saharan African, East Asian, European and Native American. The company refers to the process as an estimate of "biogeographical ancestry" and from this, investigators can indirectly infer key physical traits -- in particular skin, eye and hair colour. Of the 8,000 DNA samples they have tested by this method in the course of their research and work, 95 per cent of people turn out to be of significant mixed heritage, said Zach Gaskin, a technical co-ordinator of forensics at the company. Still, Mr. Gaskin said, once a DNA sample suggests that at least 30 per cent of a person's heritage belongs to a particular racial group, a person starts "to exhibit features consistent with that population." But in a paper published in American Psychologist, U.S. sociologist Troy Duster and ethicist Pilar Ossorio caution that the test has risks: "Some percentage of people who look white will possess genetic markers indicating that a significant majority of their recent ancestors were African. Some percentage of people who look black will possess genetic markers indicating the majority of their recent ancestors were European. "Inferring race from genetic ancestry may mislead police rather than illuminating their search for a suspect." For these reasons, company officials in Florida do not actually interpret test results by trying to describe shades of skin or hair colour. Instead, they provide photographs taken from their sample database of 2,500 people who match the genetic mix of suspects. Stanford's Prof. Cho criticized this technique, however, arguing that even children from the same family can look very different from one another. Toronto police Detective David Needham of the major sex crimes unit applauded the technology and said it is scheduled to be presented at a conference the force is holding in October. "If the science is reliable and it can be accepted and established in the courts, it's going to be great," he said. But he knows firsthand about the controversy it attracts. A year ago, Det. Needham was hunting two men who had abducted and raped a woman who had seen only one of her attackers. To narrow his search for suspects, Det. Needham asked experts at Ontario's Centre for Forensic Sciences to try to give him a sense of racial background based on semen samples. "They said, 'We can't do that, that's racial profiling,' " Det. Needham said. "If someone said they had seen a white man or a black man leaving the scene of the crime, we would use that information. So what's the difference?" Bruce O'Neill, spokesman for the Ministry of Community and Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees the CFS, said the technology at hand has nothing to do with racial profiling. Tim Caulfield, director of the Health Law and Policy Institute at the University of Alberta, noted that if the technology is indeed a sound tool for determining a suspect's physical appearance, it could turn out to be more reliable than eyewitness accounts. "With a witness, there may be a whole set of social stereotypes that come out," he said. "If this technology is providing information that is factual, and people don't use it to make unwarranted presumptions, then it could be worthwhile. We need to be careful about how we let politically correct concerns colour our views." Yet such concerns are bound to grow right along with the power of genetics. The Florida firm, for example, is now developing 3-D technology to read gene types to infer physical traits such as hair texture, skull shapes or the distance between the eyes. Dr. Frudakis predicted that such technology might allow them within the decade to generate a crude sketch of a suspect from a DNA sample. If all this sounds more like an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the popular television program that plays up the power of forensics, it is just a brief trailer for the plot lines to come. Profs. Duster and Ossorio note police will eventually be able to discern psychological characteristics from DNA samples and generate behavioural profiles of subjects. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Jun 27 19:04:39 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:04:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] democracy in the middle east In-Reply-To: <200506271800.j5RI0OR02748@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050627190439.13787.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary.<< --Question: why is it assumed that democracy would not enable extremist Muslims rather than moderates to be elected? It would be nice if, say, Pakistan were democratic, but what if a pragmatic dictator like Musharraf were replaced by an ideologue like Bin Laden through free elections? The argument that free trade prevents war has some merit... but there is no guarantee that democracy would be enough to prevent the rise of ideological extremists to positions of nuclear power. Michael ____________________________________________________ Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 27 19:25:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:25:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Association of Politics and the Life Sciences: Preliminary Program for the 2005 Annual Meeting Message-ID: Association of Politics and the Life Sciences: Preliminary Program for the 2005 Annual Meeting http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/prelimprog.htm et seq. Available in one piece: http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/PrelimProg.pdf [This goes out to most of my address book, to let those who know me mostly from classical music, for example, of my other interests. We attended the annual meeting here in 2000 and will be back. I know or have been in e-contact with or have read books by Arnhart, Gross, Hughes, Masters, Roberts, and Rothman. [What's completely new is two sessions on transhumanism. The sparks flew most wildly at the 2000 conference over innate racial differences in psychology. My impression is that the passion has gone out of defenders of physiology-only differences, and so transhumanism is well-poised to take its place at the scene of most contest. We shall see.] Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting The Mayflower Hotel - Washington, DC August 31 - September 4, 2005 Preliminary Program SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS Program Chairs: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Keynote Speaker Napoleon Chagnon, University of California - Santa Barbara "Warfare Among the Yanomano" Fri., 8:00 pm Plenary Speakers Gregory Conko, Competitive Enterprise Institute "The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution" Wed., 12:30 pm Lois Gibbs, Center for Health, the Environment and Justice, Love Canal "The Effect of Toxins on Children" Thurs., 2:00 pm Barry Levy, Tufts University School of Medicine "Social Injustice and Public Health" Fri., 2:00 pm Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland "Assessing Biological Weapons and the Bioterrorism Threat" Sat., 2:00 pm A WORKSHOPS: Kristen Alley Swain A-1 Training Workshop on Planetary Protection Wed., 9:00-10:30 am A-2 Intelligent Design Theory: Teaching Alternatives to Evolution in Public School Science Classes Wed., 10:45-12:15 pm A-3 Simulating Dynamic Systems Wed., 10:45-12:15 pm A-4 Artificial Intelligence and Species Dominance Wed., 2:00-3:30 pm A-5 The Precautionary Principle Wed., 2:00-3:30 pm A-6 Worlds Apart: Bridging the Journalist-Scientist Gap Wed.,3:45-5:00 pm B BIOBEHAVIOR: Steven A. Peterson and Albert Somit B-1 Explorations in Biobehavioral Politics: I Thur., 8:30-10:15 am B-2 Democracy and Nation-Building Thur., 8:30-10:15 am B-3 Explorations in Biobehavioral Politics: II Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm B-4 Evolutionary Psychology Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm B-5 Evolution and Politics Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm B-6 Why People Become Suicide Terrorists? Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm B-7 Traditional and Biopolitical Reflections on Terrorism Sat., 10:45-12:30 pm B-8 Biology and Group Cooperation & Conflict Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm B-9 Darwinian Anthropology: Human Social Organization Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm B-10 Neurosciences, Physiology, and Politics Sun., 8:30-10:15 am C BIOTECHNOLOGY: Patrick A. Stewart & Richard Sherlock C-1 Agricultural and Animal Genetic Engineering and Politics Thur., 8:30-10:15 am C-2 Transhumanism I Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm C-3 Transhumanism II Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm C-4 Human Genetic Engineering and Politics Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm C-5 Genetic Engineering and Concepts of Human Nature Sat., 8:30-10:15 am D HEALTH POLICY AND BIOETHICS: Roberta Herzberg D-1 Health Care Reform Thur., 8:30-10:15 am D-2 Stem Cell Research: Politics and Ethics I Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm D-3 Public Health and Privacy Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm D-4 Medical Ethics Fri., 8:30-10:15 am D-5 Stem Cell Research: Politics and Ethics II Fri., 8:30-10:15 am D-6 Social Injustice and Public Health Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm D-7 The Continuing Ethical and Political Relevance of the Belmont Report Sat., 8:30-10:15 am D-8 Controversies in Life and Death Sat., 10:45-12:30 pm D-9 Current Controversies in Death and Dying Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm D-10 Emerging Global Diseases Sun., 8:30-10:15 E ENVIRONMENT: Odelia Funke E-1 Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Science, and Environmental Policy-making Thur., 8:30-10:15 am E-2 Women in the Health Environment Movement Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm E-3 Science Strategies in Arctic Environmental Politics Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm E-4 Global Warming and the Kyoto Protocol Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm E-5 All of the Planets, All of the Time: Planetary Protection in Space Exploration Fri., 8:30-10:15 am E-6 Effects of Toxins on Neurotransmitters: Violent Crime & Poor Educational Performance Fri., 8:30-10:15 am E-7 Criteria, Measurements, and Political Implications of Ecological Science Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm E-8 Roundtable on Science and Risk Communication Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm E-9 Deforestation and Pollution in the Amazon and Mata Atlantica Sat., 8:30-10:15 am E-10 Weaknesses in Existing Regulatory Approaches to Human Health and the Environment Sat., 10:45-12:30 pm E-11 Making Environmental Information Available to the Public Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm F BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY: Laurette Liesen F-1 Intelligent Design Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm F-2 Darwinism, Creationism, and Intelligent Design Sat., 8:30-10:15 am F-3 Biopolitics and Political Theory Sun., 8:30-10:15 am G BIOSECURITY: Aleksandr Rabodzey G-1 Bioterrorism Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm G-2 Biosecurity I Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm G-3 Biosecurity IISat., 10:45-12:30 pm H OTHER H-1 Interdisciplinary Publishing for APLS Graduate Students Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm H-2 Posters Thur., 6:00-8:00 pm Social Events and Meetings Student Reception Thur., 5:00 pm Welcoming Reception and Poster Session Thur., 6:00 pm APLS Executive Council MeetingFri., 7:00 am Cocktail ReceptionFri., 6:15 pm Banquet Dinner (followed by Keynote Speaker) Fri., 7:00 pm APLS Business Meeting (open to all members) Sat., 5:15 pm ---------- APLS 2005 (Wednesday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progwed.htm WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Wednesday, 8:00 - 8:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Wednesday, 9:00 - 10:30 am - Plenary Roundtable A-1 TRAINING WORKSHOP ON PLANETARY PROTECTION Chair: Linda Billings, SETI Institute Presenters: Overview, Science John Rummel, NASA Techniques Perry Stabekis, NASA Amy Baker, Technical Administrative Services Legal and Ethical Considerations, Communication Margaret Race, SETI Institute Wednesday, 10:45 - 12:15 pm - Breakout Sessions A-2 INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY: TEACHING ALTERNATIVES TO EVOLUTION IN PUBLIC SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASSES Chair: Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi Presenters: Barbara Forrest, Southeastern Louisiana University Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Chris Mooney, Author of `The Republican War on Science' Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi A-3 SIMULATING DYNAMIC SYSTEMS Chair: Dario Nardi, University of California - Los Angeles Presenters: Dario Nardi, University of California - Los Angeles Why did human brains suddenly triple in size 2.5 million years ago? Laura Power, Biotype Research Corporation Is Evolution an Optimizing Process? James H. Fetzer, University of Minnesota, Duluth Wednesday, 12:30 - 1:45 pm - Luncheon (Box Lunch) and Plenary Speech The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution Gregory Conko, Senior Fellow and Director of Food Safety Policy , Competitive Enterprise Institute Wednesday, 2:00 - 3:30 pm - Breakout Sessions A-4 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND SPECIES DOMINANCE Chair: Hugo Degaris, Utah State University Presenters: Hugo Degaris, Utah State University Richard Sherlock, Utah State University A-5 THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE Chair: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri Presenters: Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi Wil Burns, Monterey Institute of International Studies Gregory Conko, Senior Fellow and Director of Food Safety Policy Wednesday, 3:30 - 3:45 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Wednesday, 3:45 - 5:00 pm - Closing Roundtable A-6 WORLDS APART: BRIDGING THE JOURNALIST-SCIENTIST GAP Chair: Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Presenters: Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Linda Billings, SETI Institute Brian Vastag, DC science journalist Rick Borchelt, Berman Institute for Bioethics, Johns Hopkins Chris Mooney, Author of `The Republican War on Science" Katherine Arnold Travis, Journal of the National Cancer Institute APLS 2005 (Thursday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progthurs.htm THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Exhibits 8:00 am - 5:30 pm Thursday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables B-1 EXPLORATIONS IN BIOBEHAVIORAL POLITICS: I Chair: Phil Roberts, Jr. Presenters: Political Edge of Chaos: Constitutional Liberalism and Political Evolution Lauren Hall, Northern Illinois University Burned into the Brain: a Redefinition of Political Culture Ivelin Sardamov, American University, Bulgaria Rehabilitating Introspection Phil Roberts, Jr. Bioethics and Biomorality, Practical Consequences for a Hegelian Distinction Alin Fumurescu, University of Indiana-Bloomington B-2 DEMOCRACY AND NATION-BUILDING Chair: Liliana Anaya, American University Presenters: Individual Demobilization and Reintegration Process in Colombia: a Nation Building Policy from a National Security Perspective Liliana Anaya, American University Social Dominance-Enhancing Myths: The Case of Democratization Rachel Kirkland-Gaymer, Wayne State University It's Our Responsibility: Family, Violence, and Korean Civil Society Sungmoon Kim, University of Maryland C-1 AGRICULTURAL AND ANIMAL GENETIC ENGINEERING AND POLITICS Chair: Patrick A. Stewart, Arkansas State University Presenters: A Study on Genetic Modification Policy Change In U.K. in terms of Iron-Triangle Model Myong Hwa Lee, Northern Illinois University The Case of Antibiotic Growth Promoters in Livestock Production Dustin Tingley, Princeton University Public participation in biotechnology policies in developing countries: What role can agricultural extension play? William M. Rivera, University of Maryland Three Generations of Agricultural Biotechnology and Willingness to Pay For Food Labeling Patrick A. Stewart, Arkansas State University William P. McLean, Arkansas State University D-1 HEALTH CARE REFORM Chair: Miriam Levitt, Elisabeth Bruyere Research Institute Presenters: Health Care Reform in Canada Miriam Levitt, Elisabeth Bruyere Research Institute Rural Health Care Reform in the West Roberta Herzberg, Utah State University Converting Social Insurance into Means-Tested Welfare: The Surreptitious 'Modernization' of Medicare William P. Brandon, University of North Carolina - Charlotte Politics and Policy of Prison Health Care for Aging Inmates Cynthia Mara, Penn State University E-1 TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY-MAKING Chair: Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Presenters: Hunting Caribou on "The Road to Resources:" The interaction of co-management, traditional knowledge, and local self regulation Gary Kofinas, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Marine Mammal Policy Science: The Political Influence of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Co-Management Regimes Chanda Meek The Power of Story: Comparing public discourse on genetically modified crops of Europe and India Anjali Bhat, International Food Policy Research Institute Regina Birner, International Food Policy Research Institute Thursday, 10:15-10:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Thursday, 10:45 - 12:30 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-3 EXPLORATIONS IN BIOBEHAVIORAL POLITICS: II Chair: Kilian Garvey, University of New England Presenters: Anxiety, Fear, and Political Cognition Kilian Garvey, University of New England Biology and the `F' Word: Why Neuroscience and Psychological Essentialism Can Revive Third Wave Feminism Jennifer Guon, Northern Illinois University C-2 TRANSHUMANISM I Chair: Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Presenters: Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Roger Barrus, Hampton-Sydney College Ron Bailey, Reason Magazine D-2 STEM CELL RESEARCH: POLITICS AND ETHICS I Chair: Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Presenters: Debra Aranson, Biotechnology Industry Organization Bruce Artim, Senate Judiciary Committee Peter Lawler, President's Commission on Bioethics E-2 WOMEN IN THE HEALTH ENVIRONMENT MOVEMENT Chair: Charlotte Cotrill, US EPA Presenters: Case Studies Lois Gibbs, Center for Health, the Environment and Justice, Love Canal Sharon Terry, Genetic Alliance E-3 SCIENCE STRATEGIES IN ARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Chair: Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Presenters: Science and Political Strategy: Analyzing the Role of Science in Interest Group Claims on Government Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks The Science of Tourism: History and Politics of the Travel Lobby in Alaska's Environmental Debates Tim Pursell, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Northern Peoples, Northern Pipelines: the Science and Politics of Exploiting Canada's Arctic Gas Ian Urguhart Thursday, 12:30 - 2:00 pm - Lunch Thursday, 2:00 - 3:00 pm - Plenary Lecture Lois Gibbs, Center for Health, the Environment and Justice, Love Canal "The Effect of Toxins on Children" Thursday, 3:00-3:15 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Thursday, 3:15 - 5:00 pm - Panels and Roundtables D-3PUBLIC HEALTH AND PRIVACY Chair:Odelia Funke, EPA Presenters: Government's Role in Patient Identity Management John Chelen, Esq., Special Counsel/Senior Information Architect, Government of the District of Columbia Should Insurance Companies Know Your Genetic Information? Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi Balancing Health Privacy and Progress Patrick Daly, US Navy Medical Corps E-4GLOBAL WARMING AND THE KYOTO PROTOCOL Chair:Glen Sussman, Old Dominion University Presenter: Greenless Diplomacy: Kyoto without the US Glen Sussman, Old Dominion University Discovery of Global Warming Spencer Wearst, American Institute of Physics G-1BIOTERRORISM Chair:Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Presenters: Credibility in a Crisis: News Sourcing in the Anthrax Attacks Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Homeland Security for Hospitals: Front-Line Reimbursement for Bioterrorism and Public Health Emergencies Elizabeth Weeks, University of Kansas School of Law Detection of Weapons of Mass Destruction Using New Technologies Matthew D. Horton, Arkansas State University H-1INTERDISCIPLINARY PUBLISHING FOR APLS GRADUATE STUDENTS Chair:Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Presenters: Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Peter A. Corning, Institute for Complex Systems John Orbell, University of Oregon Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Thursday, 5:00-5:30 pm - Student Reception Thursday, 6:00-8:00 pm - Welcoming Reception and Poster Session H-2POSTERS An overview of xenotransplantation: Implications for Aging and Public Policy Richard Haubner, College of St. Joseph Handedness, Fear Perception, and Political Affiliation Kilian Garvey, University of New England APLS 2005 (Friday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progfri.htm FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Exhibits 8:00 am - 5:30 pm Friday, 7:00 - 8:30 am - APLS Executive Council Meeting Friday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables D-4 MEDICAL ETHICS Chair: Ronald F. White, College of Mount St. Joseph Presenters: The Political Implications of Contemporary Biomedicine in Germany Anja Karnein, Brandeis University Medical Ethics vs. Business Ethics: The Case of DTC Pharmaceutical Advertising Ronald F. White, College of Mount St. Joseph The 108th Congress and Legislative Action on Financial Incentives for Organ Donation Brian Frederick, Northern Illinois University D-5 STEM CELL RESEARCH: POLITICS AND ETHICS II Chair: Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Presenters: Political framing in news coverage of the stem cell debate Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Political Ethics and Stem Cell Research Edward Sankowski, University of Oklahoma The Garden of Eden: Perfect Equilibrium or the Original Frankenstein Myth Lene Johansen, University of Missouri - Columbia The global politics of human embryonic stem cell science Amanda Dickens, University of East Anglia, UK E-5 ALL OF THE PLANETS, ALL OF THE TIME: PLANETARY PROTECTION IN SPACE EXPLORATION Chair: Linda Billings, SETI institute Presenters: John Rummel, NASA Michael A. Meyer, NASA Norine Noonan, College of Charleston E-6 EFFECTS OF TOXINS ON NEUROTRANSMITTERS: VIOLENT CRIME & POOR EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE Chair: Laurel Sharmer, SUNY Potsdam Presenters: Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Ellen Silbergeld, The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Dan Gallo, EPA Region 3 Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Herbert Needleman Neurology and Toxins Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Friday, 10:15-10:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Friday, 10:45-12:30 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-4 EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Chair: Roberts, Phil Jr. Presenters: Feelings of Worthlessness Roberts, Phil Jr. An Evolutionary Perspective of Solitude Cristian Cantir, Northern Illinois University Facial Hair, Hair Color, and Political Impression Formation: The Influence of Visual Cues on Perceived Qualification for Office Erik Bucy, Indiana University B-5 EVOLUTION AND POLITICS Chair: Albert Somit, Southern Illinois University Presenters: Evolution, Virtue, and Politics William Dibrell, Alfred University Testing Ethnic Nepotism Theory Michael Tweed, Northern Illinois University Evolution and Nation-Building: Human Nature Meets Ideology Albert Somit, Southern Illinois University Steven A. Peterson, Pennsylvania State - Harrisburg C-3 TRANSHUMANISM II Chair: Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Presenters: Transhumanism, Biopolitics and the New Rights Paradigm James Hughes, Trinity College Extra Life a Community of the Future Peter Houghton, The Heart Failure Foundation D-6 SOCIAL INJUSTICE AND PUBLIC HEALTH Chair: Victor W. Sidel, MD., Albert Einstein College of Medicine Presenters: Victor W. Sidel, MD., Albert Einstein College of Medicine Barry Levy, MD., Tufts University School of Medicine News framing of the environmental justice movement Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas E-7 CRITERIA, MEASUREMENTS, AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ECOLOGICAL SCIENCE Chair: Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Presenters: Regulators vs. Interest Groups: The Science and Politics of Standard Setting for Arsenic and Radon David Shafie The Normative Implications of Ecological Footprinting Steve Vanderheiden Virtu-based Politics and the Politicization of Ecological Science: Political Thought confronts Stability, Place, and Invasive Species Peter Cannavo Friday, 12:30-2:00 pm - Lunch Friday, 2:00-3:00 pm - Plenary Lecture Barry Levy, Tufts University School of Medicine "Social Injustice and Public Health" Friday, 3:00-3:15 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Friday, 3:15-5:00 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-6 WHY PEOPLE BECOME SUICIDE TERRORISTS Chair: Bradley Thayer, Missouri State University Presenters: What Do We Know About Suicide Bombing? Where Do We Go From Here? Veronica Ward, Utah State University Connecting the Dots Between Sociality and Suicide Terrorism Nancy E. Aiken, Independent C-4 HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING AND POLITICS Chair: Sonia E. Miller, S.E. Miller Law Firm & Converging Technologies Bar Association Presenters: The POP in Striving for Perfection: Politics, Optics, and Perceptions Sonia E. Miller, S.E. Miller Law Firm & Converging Technologies Bar Association Conserving Genes: The Biopolitics of Cloning in Species Recovery Amy Lynn Fletcher, University of Canterbury The Political Implications of Human Genetic Engineering Anja Karnein, Brandeis University Issue-network Analysis of Korean Therapeutic Cloning Policy Making Process Myong Hwa Lee, Northern Illinois University E-8 ROUNDTABLE ON SCIENCE AND RISK COMMUNICATION Chair: Linda Billings, SETI Institute Presenters: Linda Billings, SETI Institute Rick Borcheldt, John Hopkins University Susanna Priest, University of South Carolina Charlotte Schell, Portland State University F-1 INTELLIGENT DESIGN Chair: Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Presenters: Intelligent Design: A Middle Ground Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Intelligent Design and the Politics of the Life Sciences: Leibniz in the 21st Century Francis Moran, New Jersey City University John J. Porcaro Chris Mooney, Author of `The Republican War on Science' Angus Menugue, Condordia University, Wisconsin G-2 BIOSECURITY I Chair: Aleksandr Rabodzey, MIT Presenters: Russia's Role in Building International Biosecurity? Aleksandr Rabodzey, MIT Biosecurity: Bridging the Gap Between the Life Sciences and National Security Gregory D. Koblentz, MIT Deconstructing the Threat of Bioterrorism: New Insights from the Field of Science and Technology Studies Kathleen M. Vogel, Cornell University The Problem of Biological Weapons Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland Renolds M. Salerno, Sandia National Labs Friday, 6:15 - 9:15 pm - Reception, Banquet, and Keynote Address Pre-Banquet Reception (cash bar)6:15 pm Banquet (by ticket)7:00 pm Keynote Address8:00 pm Keynote Address - Napoleon Chagnon University of Santa Barbara "Warfare Among the Yanomamo" 8:00 pm APLS 2005 (Saturday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progsat.htm SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Exhibits 8:00 am - 5:30 pm Saturday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables C-5 GENETIC ENGINEERING AND CONCEPTS OF HUMAN NATURE Chair: Robert Wachbroit, University of Maryland Presenters: Genetic Engineering and Three Concepts of Human Nature Robert Wachbroit, University of Maryland Genetic Engineering and the Human Place in Nature Mark Sagoff, University of Maryland Genetic Enhancement of Core Characteristics David Degrazia, George Washington University Genetic Engineering and Emotional Capacity David Wasserman, University of Maryland Genetic Engineering and the Distinctively Human Samual Kerstein, University of Maryland D-7 THE CONTINUING ETHICAL AND POLITICAL RELEVANCE OF THE ELMONT REPORT Chair: Stanley Rothman, Smith College Organizer: Edward Sankowski, University of Oklahoma Presenters: The Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects: Implications for Academic Institutions Richard Haubner, College of Mount St. Joseph The Continuing Ethical and Political Relevance of the Belmont Report Edward Sankowski, University of Oklahoma IRB Mission Drift: The "Common Rule," Social Science Education, and the "Nanny State" Ronald F. White, College of Mount St. Joseph E-9 DEFORESTATION AND POLLUTION IN THE AMAZON AND MATA ATLANTICA Chair: Eduardo Lustoza, Prof Meio Ambiente Universidade Santa Cecilia, Brasil Presenters: Mata Atlantica - Deforestation , Pollution, and Afforestation Eduardo Lustoza, Prof Meio Ambiente, Universidade Santa Cecilia, Brasil Pollution , deforestation and Human uses of the Amazon Leonardo Sampaio, Prof Meio Ambiente, Universidade Santa Cecilia, Brasil Costa Rica's Biodiversity: Conservation or Destruction William Furlong, Utah State University Discussant: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri F-2 DARWINISM, CREATIONISM, AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN Chair: Donald Tannenbaum, Gettysburg College Presenters: Believers and Disbelievers in Evolution Science Allan Mazur, Syracuse University Individual Differences and Belief in Evolution Chris Niebauer, Slippery Rock University Learning about Evolution E. Margaret Evans, University of Michigan Intelligent Design and other glad tidings for K-12 Paul Gross, University of Virginia Saturday, 10:15-10:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Saturday, 10:45-12:30 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-7 TRADITIONAL AND BIOPOLITICAL REFLECTIONS ON TERRORISM Chair: Bradley Thayer, Missouri State University Presenters: Force Protection and Terrorism Nicholas Drummond, Missouri State University Hezbollah's Terrorism in Lebanon Nicholas Gicinto, Missouri State University Talking to Terrorists: The Role of Negotiation in the War on Terror Alan Steinberg, Missouri State University D-8 CONTROVERSIES IN LIFE AND DEATH Chair: Roberta Herzberg, Utah State University Presenters: Changes in Translation: Hospice from the UK to the US and to Russia Susan Behuniak, LeMoyne College Debating Death in a World of Limited Resources Roberta Herzberg, Utah State University Medical Marijuana and PAS in Federal Courts: How Raich v. Ashcroft Could End an End of Life Option Arthur Svenson, University of Redlands Pigs Don't Have Passports: Explaining Policy Design for Cross-Species Transplants in the United States and New Zealand Amy Lynn Fletcher, University of Canterbury E-10 WEAKNESSES IN EXISTING REGULATORY APPROACHES TO HUMAN HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT Chair: Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Presenters: Toxins and Behavior: Why Academic Refusal to Study Biopolitics Harms Public Policy Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Environmental Health Regulatory Process: The Need for a New Approach Stan Caress, University of West Georgia Innovative Strategies for Pollution Control Dan Fiorina, EPA Mercury Rising: Fetal Health and Toxic Politics Deirdre Condit, Virginia Commonwealth University L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia Commonwealth University J. Clifford Fox, Virginia Commonwealth University G-3 BIOSECURITY II Chair: Aleksandr Rabodzey, MIT Presenters: Universities and Academic Research in the Era of High Security Nancy D. Connell, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Brendan S. McCluskey, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey An Integrated Biodetection System Approach to Counter Biological Attack David Siegrist, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Impact of Infectious Diseases on National Security Decisionmaking Bridget Lange, University of Canterbury Saturday, 12:30 - 2:00 pm - Lunch Saturday, 2:00 - 3:00 pm - Plenary Lecture Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland "Assessing Biological Weapons and the Bioterrorism Threat" Saturday, 3:00-3:15 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Saturday, 3:15-5:00 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-8 BIOLOGY AND GROUP COOPERATION & CONFLICT Chair: Rob Sprinkle, University of Maryland Presenters: A Century Against The Cults Rob Sprinkle, University of Maryland Testing Alternative Explanations for Enduring Rivalries William Long, Georgia Institute of Technology Evolution of Altruism/group Solidarity through Warfare John Orbell, University of Oregon Oleg Smirnov, University of Oregon Douglas Kennett, University of Oregon Holly Arrow, University of Oregon The benefits of reciprocity in a sequential public goods game: Field evidence and a new model Tim Johnson, Max Planck Institute, Berlin B-9 DARWINIAN ANTHROPOLOGY: HUMAN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Chair: Wayne E. Allen, Minnesota State University Presenters: Involution: A new theory of social change for the biological, behavioral, and social sciences Wayne E. Allen, Minnesota State University Darwinian evolutionary theory and social behavior: Analysis of cooperative networks among indigenous Siberian minorities in the Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, Russia John P. Ziker, Max Planek Institute for Social Anthropology A New State System Paradigm Luai Bashir, Minnesota State University Oil and Involution Louis Schwartzkopf, Minnesota State University Discussant: Napoleon Chagnon, University of California - Santa Barbara D-9 CURRENT CONTROVERSIES IN DEATH AND DYING Chair: John Strate, Indiana University, Fort Wayne Presenters: Challenging the Consensus of PVS: The Schiavo Case and Posturing to Public Attention John Strate, Indiana University, Fort Wayne David Prentice, Family Research Council Andrew Imparato Assocation of People with Disabilities In the Aftermath: Burdens of Proof in the Right to Die Fred Frohock, University of Miami E-11 MAKING ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC Chair: Sean Moulton, OMB Watch Informed Communities: Collaborative Training Programs to Advance Health and Environmental Justice Terry Greene, JSI Information and Involvement in Decisions Concerning Contaminated Sites Judith Bradbury, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Occupational Health and Access to Chemical Testing Information Brent Gibson, Dr., USHUS Providing Time-relevant, Local Environmental Monitoring Information Denice Shaw, EPA Discussant: Sean Moulton, OMB Watch Saturday, 5:15-6:00 pm - APLS Business Meeting APLS Business Meeting (for all members) APLS 2005 (Sunday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progsun.htm SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2005 Registration8:00 am - 10:30 am Sunday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables B-10 NEUROSCIENCES, PHYSIOLOGY, AND POLITICS Chair: Steven A. Peterson, Pennsylvania State, Harrisburg Presenter: Decision- Making, the Brain, and Evolution Steven A. Peterson, Pennsylvania State, Harrisburg Politicians under the Microscope: Microanalysis of the First Bush-Kerry Debate Patrick A. Stewart, Arkansas State University Jonathan "Chad" Moseley, Arkansas State University Communicational States Approached via Across-Species Comparisons Russell Gardner Adult Neuroplasticity and Social Science Theory William Long, Georgia Institute of Technology D-10 EMERGING GLOBAL DISEASES TBA F-3 BIOPOLITICS AND POLITICAL THEORY Chair: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri Holistic Darwinism: The New Evolutionary Paradigm Peter Corning, Institute for the Study of Complex Systems Natural Right and Evolution: Reclaiming the Natural Right of Reproduction Lauren Hall, Northern Illinois University Moral and Political Philosophy James Rutherford Animal Personhood: Some Lockean Considerations Edward Fried, Rice University -------------- Directory of Participants http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/particdir.htm Aiken, Nancy E. 14 Allen, Wayne E. 19 Anaya, Liliana B-2 Aranson, Debra D-2 Arnhart, Larry A-2 , C-2 Arrow, Holly 19 Artim, Bruce D-2 Bailey, Ron C-2 Baker, Amy A-1 Barrus, Roger C-2 Bashir, Luai 20 Behuniak, Susan 18 Bhat, Anjali E-1 Billings, Linda 15 A-1 , A-6 , E-5 Birner, Regina E-1 Borcheldt, Rick 5, 15 A-6 Bradbury, Judith 20 Brandon, William P. D-1 Bucy, Erik B-4 Burns, Wil A-5 Cannavo, Peter E-7 Cantir, Cristian B-4 Cress, Stan 18 Chagnon, Napoleon 1, 15, 20 Keynote, Chelen, John D-3 Condit, Deirdre 18 Conko, Gregory A-5 Connell, Nancy D. 18 Corning, Peter A. 21 H-1 Cotrill, Charlotte E-2 Daly, Patrick D-3 Degaris, Hugo 5 A-4 Degrazia, David 16 Dibrell, William B-5 Dickens, Amanda D-5 Drummond, Nicholas 17 Evans, E. Margaret 17 Fetzer, James H. A-3 Fiorina, Dan 18 Fletcher, Amy Lynn 18, 19 D-5 Forrest, Barbara 4 A-2 Fox, J. Clifford 18 Frederick, Brian D-4 Fried, Edward 21 Frohock, Fred 20 Fumuresu, Alin B-1 Funke, Odelia D-3 Furlong, William 17 Gallo, Dan E-6 Gardner, Russell 21 Garvey, Kilian B-3 , H-2 Gibbs, Lois E-2 Gibson, Brent 20 Gicinto, Nicholas 17 Greene, Terry 20 Gross, Paul 17 Guon, Jennifer B-3 Hall, Lauren 21 B-1 Haubner, Richard 16 H-2 Herzberg, Roberta 18 D-1 Horton, Matthew D. G-1 Houghton, Peter C-3 Hughes, James C-3 Imparato, Andrew 20 Johansen, Lene D-5 Johnson, Tim 19 Karnein, Anja D-4 Kennett, Douglas 19 Kerstein, Samual 16 Kim, Sungmoon B-2 Kirkland-Gaymer, Rachel B-2 Koblentz, Gregory D. 15 Kofinas, Gary 7 Lange, Bridget 19 Lawler, Peter D-2 Lee, Myong Hwa 14 C-1 Leitenberg, Milton 1, 15, 19 Levitt, Miriam 7 D-1 Levy, Barry 1, D-6 Liesen, Laurette 3 Long, William 19, 21 Lovecraft, Amy E-1 , E-3 , E-7 Lustoza, Eduardo 17 Manson, Neil A. A-2 , A-5 , D-3 Mara, Cynthia D-1 Masters, Roger H-1 , E-6 Mazur, Allan 17 McCluskey, Brendan S. 18 McLean, William P. C-1 Meek, Chanda E-1 Menugue, Angus 15 Meyer, Michael A. E-5 Miller, Sonia E. 14 Mooney, Chris 15 A-2 , A-6 , Moran, Francis 15 Moseley, Jonathan "Chad" 21 Moulton, Sean 20 Nardi, Dario A-3 Needleman, Herbert E-6 Niebauer, Chris 17 Noonan, Norine E-5 Orbell, John 19 H-1 Peritore, Patrick 17, 21 A-5 Peterson, Steven A. 21 B-5 Porcaro, John J. 15 Power, Laura A-3 Prentice, David 20 Priest, Susanna 15 Pursell, Tim E-3 Rabodzey, Aleksandr 3, 15 Race, Margaret A-1 Rivera, William M. C-1 Roberts, Phil Jr. 6, B-1 , B-4 Rothman, Stanley 16 Rummel, John A-1 , E-5 Rutherford, James 21 Sagoff, Mark 16 Salerno, Renolds M 15 Sampaio, Leonardo 17 Sankowski, Edward 16 D-5 Sardamov, Ivelin B-1 Schell, Charlotte 15 Schwartzkopf, Louis 20 Shafie, David E-7 Sharmer, Laurel E-6 Shaw, Denice 20 Sherlock, Richard 15, 20 A-4 , H-1 , C-3 , Sidel, Victor D-6 Siegrist, David 19 Silbergeld, Ellen E-6 Smirnov, Olg 19 Somit, Albert B-5 Sprinkle, Rob 19 Stabekis, Perry 4 Steinberg, Alan 18 Stewart, Patrick A. 7, 21 C-1 Strate, John 20 Sussman, Glen E-4 Svenson, Arthur 18 Swain, Kristen Alley A-6 , G-1 , D-5 , D-6 Tannenbaum, Donald 17 Terry, Sharon E-2 Thayer, Bradley 14, 17 Tingley, Dustin C-1 Tweed, Michael B-5 Urguhart, Ian E-3 Vanderheiden, Steve E-7 Vastag, Brian A-6 Vogel, Kathleen M. 15 Wachbroit, Robert 16 Ward, Veronica 14 Wasserman, David 16 Wearst, Spencer E-4 Weeks, Elizabeth G-1 White, Ronald F. 16 D-4 Wilder, L. Douglas 18 Ziker, John P. 20 From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 27 23:56:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:56:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Krugman: The Chinese Challenge Message-ID: The Chinese Challenge Opinion column by Paul Krugman, New York Times, 5.6.27 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/opinion/27krugman.html Fifteen years ago, when Japanese companies were busily buying up chunks of corporate America, I was one of those urging Americans not to panic. You might therefore expect me to offer similar soothing words now that the Chinese are doing the same thing. But the Chinese challenge - highlighted by the bids for Maytag and Unocal - looks a lot more serious than the Japanese challenge ever did. There's nothing shocking per se about the fact that Chinese buyers are now seeking control over some American companies. After all, there's no natural law that says Americans will always be in charge. Power usually ends up in the hands of those who hold the purse strings. America, which imports far more than it exports, has been living for years on borrowed funds, and lately China has been buying many of our I.O.U.'s. Until now, the Chinese have mainly invested in U.S. government bonds. But bonds yield neither a high rate of return nor control over how the money is spent. The only reason for China to acquire lots of U.S. bonds is for protection against currency speculators - and at this point China's reserves of dollars are so large that a speculative attack on the dollar looks far more likely than a speculative attack on the yuan. So it was predictable that, sooner or later, the Chinese would stop buying so many dollar bonds. Either they would stop buying American I.O.U.'s altogether, causing a plunge in the dollar, or they would stop being satisfied with the role of passive financiers, and demand the power that comes with ownership. And we should be relieved that at least for now the Chinese aren't dumping their dollars; they're using them to buy American companies. Yet there are two reasons that Chinese investment in America seems different from Japanese investment 15 years ago. One difference is that, judging from early indications, the Chinese won't squander their money as badly as the Japanese did. The Japanese, back in the day, tended to go for prestige investments - Rockefeller Center, movie studios - that transferred lots of money to the American sellers, but never generated much return for the buyers. The result was, in effect, a subsidy to the United States. The Chinese seem shrewder than that. Although Maytag is a piece of American business history, it isn't a prestige buy for Haier, the Chinese appliance manufacturer. Instead, it's a reasonable way to acquire a brand name and a distribution network to serve Haier's growing manufacturing capability. That doesn't mean that America will lose from the deal. Maytag's stockholders will gain, and the company will probably shed fewer American workers under Chinese ownership than it would have otherwise. Still, the deal won't be as one-sided as the deals with the Japanese often were. The more important difference from Japan's investment is that China, unlike Japan, really does seem to be emerging as America's strategic rival and a competitor for scarce resources - which makes last week's other big Chinese offer more than just a business proposition. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a company that is 70 percent owned by the Chinese government, is seeking to acquire control of Unocal, an energy company with global reach. In particular, Unocal has a history - oddly ignored in much reporting on the Chinese offer - of doing business with problematic regimes in difficult places, including the Burmese junta and the Taliban. One indication of Unocal's reach: Zalmay Khalilzad, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan for 18 months and was just confirmed as ambassador to Iraq, was a Unocal consultant. Unocal sounds, in other words, like exactly the kind of company the Chinese government might want to control if it envisions a sort of "great game" in which major economic powers scramble for access to far-flung oil and natural gas reserves. (Buying a company is a lot cheaper, in lives and money, than invading an oil-producing country.) So the Unocal story gains extra resonance from the latest surge in oil prices. If it were up to me, I'd block the Chinese bid for Unocal. But it would be a lot easier to take that position if the United States weren't so dependent on China right now, not just to buy our I.O.U.'s, but to help us deal with North Korea now that our military is bogged down in Iraq. E-mail: krugman at nytimes.com From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 27 23:56:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:56:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Claremont: (Depopulation) No Child Left Behind Message-ID: No Child Left Behind http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/spring2005/krikorian.html. By Mark Krikorian Posted June 14, 2005 A review of [1]The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It by Phillip Longman [2]Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future by Ben J. Wattenberg Goodbye, population explosion. Hello, population implosion. Well, not quite yet, but soon. Birthrates are falling in almost every country, changing the way the public and policymakers think about a wide range of issues. To mention only the most obvious, Social Security reform, once a taboo topic in American politics, is now up for debate as lower birthrates lead to an unsustainable ratio of workers to retirees. Two new books explore these changes and their implications. Each presents a wide variety of information that will be news to most readers; each offers policy prescriptions; and each, in its own way, falls short. Wattenberg's Fewer has the more extensive description of the new demographic realities faced by humanity, while Longman's The Empty Cradle offers a more detailed look at the likely causes for the fertility decline as well as ways to address it in the United States. Although the birthrate decline has begun to have significant effects in the U.S., it is in Europe and East Asia that the consequences will be most dramatic. In demographic terms, a "total fertility rate" (TFR) of 2.1 is necessary to keep a population from declining--the average woman needs to have two children (plus the 0.1 for girls who die before reaching reproductive age) to replace herself and the father. The TFR in the U.S. is just a hair below that benchmark, having bounced back from its nadir in the 1970s. But in every other developed nation it is lower, and falling: Ireland, 1.9; Australia, 1.7; Canada, 1.5; Germany, 1.35; Japan, 1.32; Italy, 1.23; Spain, 1.15. Birthrates this low are unprecedented in peacetime societies. As Wattenberg writes, "never have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places, so surprisingly." Not only is this causing an increase in the median age of these populations, as in the U.S., but many of these countries will soon see declines in total population. By the middle of this century, we could find a Europe home to 100 million fewer people than today, and a Japan shrinking by one-fourth. Despite their huge and growing populations, the most rapid birthrate declines (and thus the most rapid rates of population aging) are taking place in the Third World. The total fertility rate in less-developed countries as a whole, as defined by the U.N., has fallen by half since the 1960s, to 2.9 children per woman, a much faster drop than anything experienced in the developed world. This is happening almost everywhere: China and India, Mexico and South Africa, Iran and Egypt. Population "momentum" will cause continued increases in these countries for a time, as large numbers of girls have babies, albeit fewer than their mothers, and the Third World will potentially add another 2.5 billion people before population growth stops. This is still a very large increase, but it will come to an end in the foreseeable future (in some countries surprisingly soon). After that, their populations will also start to fall. "[O]ne broad social trend," Longman writes, "holds constant at the beginning of the twenty-first century: As more and more of the world's population moves to overcrowded urban areas, and as women gain in education and economic opportunity, people are producing fewer and fewer children." Both authors acknowledge that the U.S. is exceptional. Our birthrates have fallen, and thus the average age of our people has increased, but it has happened more gradually than elsewhere. What's more, our population is projected to keep growing. This is not only because of immigration, as Wattenberg suggests, but because of higher fertility among native-born women; even college-educated, non-Hispanic white women have a total fertility rate of 1.7 children, higher than the overall rates of Canada, Britain, or Australia, not to mention the even lower rates of Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain. * * * Within the context of falling birthrates worldwide caused by urbanization, education, and the rest, Americans, as both a more religious and more optimistic people, simply choose to have more children. In fact, the only Census Bureau scenario that foresees a declining U.S. population in this century is based on the highly unlikely assumptions that, first, the fertility of American women will fall to European levels, and second, immigration will be reduced to levels below even what most restrictionist organizations call for. Barring catastrophe, then, the population of the U.S. will not decline during the lifetime of anyone reading this article. Nonetheless, we as a people are getting older, and this is creating important challenges in fields ranging from medicine and pensions to employment. The fundamental question for our society is: Should our emphasis be on adjusting to new circumstances, or should the state second-guess the American people and take an active role in shaping the size and composition of the nation? Both authors favor the second approach, fearing that what they value about America could be lost if population aging and slowing growth continue. Longman, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, sees America's purpose as providing a home for secular liberalism, and fears that if secular liberals like him don't start having more children, the only people having them will be "fundamentalists." He writes: On our current course, more and more of the world's population will be produced by people who believe they are (or who in fact are) commanded by a higher power to procreate, or who just lack the foresight to avoid the social and economic cost of creating large families. [S]uch a trend, if sustained, would drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, and gradually create an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalist values. Wattenberg also fears that the New Demography could impair America's mission, which he defines somewhat differently. Other than defending itself, our country's " job" is "to vigorously promote social, economic, and individual liberty in America and around the world." Declares Wattenberg, It's hard for me to imagine that the advance of individual and economic liberties in the world would continue without an exemplar nation that is prospering and growing. In the modern world America is that nation. Were America on the European/Japanese track of population decline, the case for democracy would be much harder to make. When it comes to policies, Longman's recommendations are clearly intended to engineer for America his desired political culture. But he works from the common-sense proposition, often articulated by Jack Kemp, that if you tax something, you get less of it. Longman maintains that there is an effective tax on child-bearing and rearing; he spells out ways of lightening the load on parents, including exempting them from Social Security payments until their children turn 18 (the theory being that parents are already contributing to the future of society by raising children). To ensure healthier and more productive old age, he wants to hector Americans to eat less and exercise more. He also wants government to help the family reclaim its role as the center of economic activity, thus again making children economic assets rather than liabilities. Wattenberg's solution, by contrast, is unambiguously undemocratic and coercive. He argues that pro-natalist policies like Longman's have always proven ineffective, and that the magic solution is mass immigration. Unfortunately, his data refute his argument. The Census Bureau projects an increase in our population of about 140 million, including new immigrants, over the first half of this century, but "only" a 50 million increase if there were no immigration at all. How is it plausible to claim that America will be derailed, and the worldwide spread of human liberty jeopardized, if our population grows by an average of one million a year instead of three million? Basically, Wattenberg is saying that since Americans have freely chosen to have smaller families, the state must import people to supply the bodies needed to fuel the global democratic revolution. As others have noted, this mass-immigration worldview echoes Bertolt Brecht's suggestion that the East German government dissolve the people and elect a new one. Wattenberg never offers any specifics about how to "elect" this new people. What kind of actual immigration policy should we have? How many immigrants? What kind? How do we select and screen them? He offers nothing beyond the most vaporous generalities. * * * In the end, neither author has sufficient faith in the American people. Wattenberg sees his countrymen as not up to the task History has set before them, and so they must be supplemented by a huge, unending flow of outsiders. Longman, on the other hand, harbors the blue-state fear that those who feel commanded by nature and nature's God to procreate are itching secretly to establish a theocracy. Some of Longman's suggestions about easing the burden of parents' excess taxation may well be advisable on equity grounds, and a certain low level of immigration by, say, foreign-born spouses, is desirable. But the social engineering that both authors call for is incompatible with republicanism, and in any case, unnecessary. The American people, through what one might call a reproductive free market, are collectively making sensible decisions about how many Americans there should be. We need sober and reasoned discussion about how best to adjust to changing demographics, and these books do a good job of alerting us to the challenges. But when it comes to having babies, our government should leave it to the citizenry to decide how best to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Mark Krikorian is Executive Director of the [3]Center for Immigration Studies. References 1. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465050506/theclaremontinst 2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156663606X/theclaremontinst From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 27 23:56:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:56:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Criterion: Paul R. Gross: Exorcising sociobiology Message-ID: Paul R. Gross: Exorcising sociobiology http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/feb01/pgross.htm From The New Criterion Vol. 19, No. 6, February 2001 Innocents imagine that universities, the names of many of whose departments include "science" (as in social science), do not perform exorcisms. That is a mistake. Today, universities are among the busiest sites for the practice of intellectual exorcism. Ask any current student to define "investigate": you will get the definition for "indict." The latest outbreak of academic exorcism comes to us from anthropology. At issue are the Yanomam?, a stone-age, indigenous people of the Amazon rain forest. The current repellent effort rests on postmodern scripture: the idea that science is just window-dressing for Western hubris and colonialism. Thirty years ago the distinction between technical disagreements and moral-political warfare began to dissolve. A whole generation of students and teachers became convinced that everything, including scientific inquiry, is inextricably political because knowledge itself was inextricably a social --i.e., a political--phenomenon. Politics, meanwhile, is a matter too important for niceties. The Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes exemplified these enthusiasms when she demanded from her colleagues, in 1995, a "militant anthropology," the education of a new cadre of "barefoot anthropologists" that I envision must become alarmists and shock troopers--the producers of politically complicated and morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking through the layers of acceptance, complicity, and bad faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue. The excuses for such self-righteousness are manifold: a concern for virtue, the environment, racism, sexism, imperialism . . . the list is endless. The capo-exorcists are professors; the soldiers are students, junior faculty, and journalists. Self-criticism is a rarity. "Critical theory," Marxist or postmodern, is about bad people--i.e., other people--never about oneself. The assassins believe themselves just, in public and in their hearts. This makes them political ruffians and intellectual terrorists, and academic terrorism is what we will see in the Yanomam? affair. But the thing is not new: there have been precedent demon-hunts in the last few decades. It is important first to recall their origins. In the summer of 1975, E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard zoologist, published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. This was a work of exemplary scientific scholarship, a weaving together of threads from many biological subdisciplines. In some of those Wilson was himself already a leader: population biology, ecology, evolution, animal behavior. He was the authority on an enormous group of social animals: the ants. His purpose was to show that results and methods were already sufficient for a systematic account of animal social behavior and for expanded new research on the hard science of it. Scores of qualified readers quickly gave praise and had no qualms about the closing chapter, in which Wilson extrapolated from his findings to speculate about human social behavior. He was laying out a program for future research, as well as recording achievements. No serious scientist denies that humans are at least animals. This part of Sociobiology was clearly more sowing than reaping, defining what should be meant henceforth by that word. Then, suddenly, came an earthquake of highly public denunciation, spreading from the Harvard epicenter, which only now has been properly chronicled. Ullica Segerstr?le's impressive new book, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociology Debate and Beyond, [3][1] gives an excellent account of what has come to be called the "sociobiology controversy." Although Segerstr?le is a sociologist, she has taken the trouble to comprehend fully the science she writes about. It is worth noting, however, that the "battle" she writes about is really a case of academic assassination, not an argument over philosophy of science. Segerstr?le has attempted to provide "a view through the keyhole" to the inner workings of science and the means by which it changes. This scants the blatant politics of the attack she chronicles, emphasizing instead intellectual conflicts and alliances, opposed epistemologies, and different cognitive styles. But the real battle over sociobiology today is not an intellectual battle. It is a political battle, a moral--or rather a moralistic--crusade. Among the newest victims of this crusade are the late "father of human genetics," James V. Neel, and the renowned anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon. But to understand the attacks against them, we must return to E. O. Wilson and the charges made against him in 1975. Wilson seems to have been unaware of the full political implications of his final chapter. A respected member of the Cambridge (Massachusetts) community of able, ambitious, mostly leftish academics, he considered himself a good liberal on social issues. But he was and is, as Segerstr?le notes, an energetic scientific planter as well as a weeder. He saw no more harm in deploying biology in the study of human behavior than in the study of ants or chimpanzees. Insistence upon absolute animal-human discontinuity is, after all, reversion at least to eighteenth-century pop-theology. In The Hub? In 1975? Never! But Wilson had not been paying attention to the ideological storm clouds that had been gathering. Biology-phobia in the social sciences is a very old story, but from the end of World War II there was renewed fury on the academic left to expunge all vestiges of the idea that human behavior and sociality are, even in small part, products of our evolution (and hence of our genes). The reasons for this are easy to see. There was, first of all, a justified fear and hatred of Nazi eugenics. But there were also the increasingly vociferous demands for preferences and quotas for "minorities"-- including women (an honorary minority who form a majority of the population)-- because of prior racism or sexism. There was also the insistence on the West's moral inferiority to the Soviet "experiment" and to the Third World, a fixation upon capitalist-colonial wrongdoing, and the cultural excellences of the wronged "Other." The belief that "everything is political" implies that every problem can be fixed by political action. Biology introduces a few doubts to these believers and is therefore at best a diversion and at worst an enemy. The attack on so-called "biological determinism" that is part and parcel of the regnant social-science mentality today really involves a blanket rejection of any significant biological contribution to human performance or behavior. (Note, too, that the term "biological determinism" is a calumny: no serious scientist believes that biology-- heredity?--"determines," that is fixes, human behavior.) Instead of human nature, the champions of everything-is-political present us with the spectacle of an infinitely malleable potentiality. This idea is, of course, hardly new. It has been an important component of utopian thought for centuries. It figures prominently in the ideas of Karl Marx, for example, who insisted that it is not man's consciousness that makes social life, but society that makes consciousness. Thus, according to Marxists, social thought is the "Master Science." Hence, there is not only Marxist economics but also Marxist everything, including correct (Marxist) science. To have been an academic in the 1970s and to have been unaware of this was na?ve; to have called upon biology, even if only as an aid to understanding culture, was a crime. It was this crime with which Wilson was charged. Segerstr?le reports that In November 1975, a group called the Sociobiology Study Group, composed of professors, students, researchers, and others from the Boston area, launched an attack on Wilson's Sociobiology. . . . The first public statement by this group was a letter in The New York Review of Books. . . . The dramatic nature of this letter lay not only in its strong language, but also in the fact that among the co-signers could be found the names of some of Wilson's colleagues, working in the same department at Harvard, particularly Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould. And of what was E. O. Wilson accused? Well, of bad science, of course, but also of being a friend of racism, sexism, and even genocide. Segerstr?le notes that Wilson was presented as an ideologue supporting the status quo as an inevitable consequence of human nature, because of his interest in establishing the central traits of a genetically controlled human nature. The Sociobiology Study Group merged with the New Left's Science For The People and attracted and recruited support from other radical-left fraternities such as the Committee Against Racism (CAR). In due course CAR members attacked Wilson-- once physically--hounding and shouting him down in public. Although the shouting has abated, the slurs have never really ended. Meanwhile, Wilson has gone on to win every honor and international prize available to a scientist of his interests, and steadily to publish important new work far outside the field of sociobiology. But the artillery still growls by night. There are now a few real scientific issues. The descendant of sociobiology flourishes --an interdisciplinary field for anthropologists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, geneticists, even economists--but it no longer calls itself "sociobiology." In an attempt to purchase immunity from stink-bombs, it calls itself "evolutionary psychology." Segerstr?le's attempt to make an epistemology of the continuing debate fails: In any case, the lack of . . . [a genuine] . . . scientific critique was only temporary: soon Gould and Lewontin changed their strategy and went full steam ahead with various scientific attacks on sociobiology. Arguably, though, Gould and Lewontin's new focus on the field's scientific shortcomings was not a real substitute for the continuing lack of genuinely scientific critique. In their writings, these two Harvard critics never quite abandoned their original moral/political condemnation of sociobiology. Nor have they and their followers abandoned it yet. There are new assassins and targets. The "scientific" objections take this form: sociobiology cannot be good science because data-gathering or theorizing insensitive to the harm it might do victim-groups is ipso facto bad science. This impresses the young, the aged New Left, and other philosophical na?fs. But it is tautologic nonsense. There is no connection between quality of inquiry and decorousness of result. More: a possible role for biology in human behavior implies that political action alone might not change everything for the better. For the political engag?, that is absolute heresy. Terence S. Turner is a professor of anthropology at Cornell. He has studied Amazonian indigenes. So has Chagnon, though he has been immensely more successful (by the standard measures of recognition). A self-identified political anthropologist and defender of human rights, Turner abhors "sociobiology" and has for years denounced it and Chagnon. For him it is vicious, rightist, reductionist. He is a vocal enemy of Chagnon, who thinks (and writes) that human evolution can help explain some of our doings, including--horror of horrors--our aggression. Leslie E. Sponsel, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, also specializing in "peace studies," shares Turner's hostility to sociobiology, indeed toward science in anthropology generally. These two represent the "cultural" ("social" in the U.K.) branch of the subject, which has in many places divorced itself from physical anthropology. Stanford University, for example, has separate departments. In September 2000, Turner and Sponsel wrote a five-page e-mail to the president and president-elect of the American Anthropological Association. Somehow, this epistle was immediately sent on to many others in the field; overnight it was made public on the internet. No word describes it better than "hysterical." "We write to inform you," it begins, of an impending scandal that will affect the American anthropological profession. . . . In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of anthropology. . . . This nightmarish story-- a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining even of a Joseph Conrad (although not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)-- will be seen (rightly in our view) . . . as putting the whole discipline on trial. Turner and Sponsel had just seen proofs, they averred, of a book by Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, called Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. This book contains horrifying revelations about which they, ostensibly fearing for their colleagues, are sounding the alarm. There is something wrong with these claims. Turner and Sponsel seem to have known Tierney and about this book for a long time before they saw proofs. Tierney thanks Turner in the book for his help. They are both also on record citing prior versions of Tierney's claims. But never mind that. Their tocsin: publication is imminent; Darkness was about to be excerpted in The New Yorker. (It was also in fact a candidate for the National Book Award.) [4][2] What does Tierney charge? Well, I proceed from the ridiculous to the defamatory: Chagnon was a draft-dodger; he exploits ethnographic studies among the Yanomam? for his, but not their, profit; he is careless of human rights; he is a right-wing ideologue, out to make sociobiological points; he faked the Yanomam? fierceness made famous in his ethnography; thirty years ago, he joined the American medical geneticist (and physician and co-investigator, with Japanese colleagues, of the genetic consequences of the atomic bomb) James V. Neel in inoculating the Yanomam? with a "virulent" vaccine in order to induce a measles epidemic, thereby testing sociobiological and "eugenic" theories; and, finally, that Neel was a right-wing eugenicist, who performed illegal radiation experiments on the Yanomam? for the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy). Most of this was supposed to have taken place in 1968. And it is only a partial list of the charges. The media jumped. Before anybody had seen even The New Yorker piece, let alone the book, a full-blown character assassination was underway, with no epistemological quibbling to confuse the audience. In England, The Guardian's headline read "Scientist `Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory'" The publisher had obviously never allowed the manuscript to be read by reviewers competent to evaluate the evidence--not even those from the institutions where all the facts lay open for examination: the Universities of Michigan and California at Santa Barbara; the National Academy of Sciences (Dr. Neel was a member); the Department of Energy; and the federal vaccine safety and distribution agencies. Turner and Sponsel also arranged a suitable denouement: the national meeting of their association was scheduled for mid-November, 2000, in San Francisco. The writers, both emeritus members of the Committee for Human Rights, have arranged . . . that the Open Forum put on by the Committee this year be devoted to the Yanomami case. This seemed the best way to provide a public venue for a public airing of the scandal, given that the program is of course already closed. . . . [W]e have invited Patrick Tierney to come to the Meetings and to be present at the Forum. [emphasis added] Things did not turn out as expected. Serious scholars, of whom some remain even in cultural anthropology (with more in adjacent fields), read The New Yorker piece. They got hold, with difficulty, of original proof-copies of the book. And then all hell broke loose. Tierney's "investigative reporting"--he claims to have given it ten years, some in the Amazon--is a tissue of misrepresentation, scientific ignorance, and groundless insinuation. The book is densely "documented," but, among the five-thousand notes, many refer to informants who can't be checked, most others to known enemies of Chagnon or to locals in Brazil and Venezuela who are in fact exploiters. Citations of documents or conversations say the opposite of what is in the documents, or of what the interviewees report independently. The entire "induced" epidemic story, central to Tierney's bill of indictment, is part innuendo and part gross incomprehension of the science. Turner was forced to withdraw publicly his endorsement of that part of Darkness in El Dorado. There were also no "illegal radiation experiments." What of Dr. Neel's racist "eugenics?" It is clear from their comments that none of the three--Messrs. Tierney, Turner, Sponsel-- knows what "eugenics" means. It looks as though Mr. Tierney was unaware that Dr. Neel, a physician as well as a scientist, had advice and assistance, in his effort to abort an existing measles epidemic among the Yanomam?, from the world's best sources. Neel's lifelong commitment--and great success--was in fact to defeating "eugenics"! All this is recorded--even, thanks to the aroused institutions, on the internet. The "draft-dodger" charge against Chagnon is simple slander. By the time The New Yorker extract appeared, Tierney had muffled some of its most outrageous claims--in language but not intent. Old proof copies of the book were out, and it was clear whence the backing-down was being done. The book, as published, uses still weaker language, reduced in many places to mere innuendo. But the tendentiousness is unremitting. No longer, for example, does Tierney invoke crazy sociobiological experiments and an induced epidemic. Instead, he is content with statements like this: The Venezuelan Yanomami experienced the greatest disease pressure in their history during a 1968 measles epidemic. The epidemic started from the same village where the geneticist James Neel had scientists inoculate the Yanomami with a live virus that had proven safe for healthy American children but was known to be dangerous for immune-compromised people. The epidemic seemed to track the movements of the investigators. The virus was not "live" in the trivial sense. The vaccine used by Neel was the standard attenuated (a process first systematized by Louis Pasteur) virus preparation, multiple millions of doses of which had and have been given around the world, not just to "healthy American children." Among the millions of vaccinations, known serious consequences number three, all in children with prior severe immunodeficiency disease. The vaccine Neel and Chagnon obtained was the best available at the time; no vaccine was available for measles before 1963. The creation of effective antiviral vaccines was one of the great biomedical achievements of the twentieth century. The measles vaccine was developed by Dr. Samuel L. Katz (a distinguished Duke pediatrician) and Nobelist John Enders, inter alii. Dr. Katz has quietly shown since the scandal broke that the Tierney charges are nonsense. There is no case on record of such a vaccine ever having transmitted measles. Better vaccines are available today, but this was thirty years ago. That so delicious a story could be a complete fiction may seem unlikely, but then, many otherwise normal people think that Hollywood's version of the Kennedy assassination was a courageous expos?. Believers in vast right-wing conspiracies can get, however, a proper account of the measles epidemic from a long letter by William J. Oliver, M.D. (retired Chairman of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan), which dissects the Tierney/Turner/Sponsel account point by point. It is available online, in company with much related material, from the University of Michigan ([5]www.umich. edu/~urel/Darkness/oliver.html). This, with the dozens of other contributions from competent physicians and scientists, pushed Turner to recant his passionate endorsement of both Tierney's early and then-weakened stories of the Yanomam? measles epidemic. In an e-mail response to Katz on September 28, 2000, Turner excuses himself and Sponsel, and at the same time abandons Tierney, as follows: [W]e did set about doing our best to check on its more shocking allegations. . . . One of the authorities we consulted was Dr. Peter Aaby, a well-known medical anthropologist and member of the Scandinavian medical team that has been working on measles in West Africa for some twenty years. He has gone over the cliams about the vaccine made by Tierney and refuted them point by point, in very much the same terms that you [Katz] have used. We are in the process of preparing a memo that will state our understanding of this matter, to help correct the confusion that the unauthorized circulation of our earlier memo [sic]. No matter: the activist Tierney still gets his word in: "I sensed that the injustice done to the Yanomami was matched by the distortion done to science and the history of evolution. Yet the incredible faith the sociobiologists had in their theories was admirable." It looks as though the exorcism of "sociobiology" has, for the moment, failed again. But decent scholars have been hounded and besmirched. Perhaps they, too, will recover in strength, as E. O. Wilson has done. But Dr. Neel is dead, and the energetic Chagnon has retired from the field in which he is both an eminence and the target of bitter obloquy. (Some of his detractors say that he is not a nice man.) At the AAA meetings in November, 2000, most speakers exposed the conceits and deceits of Darkness in El Dorado. And thus far there have been no serious rebuttals from the book's promoters. Patrick Tierney's feeble and largely irrelevant written responses to the critical revelations can be found, along with links to many other important documents, online at [6]http://www.anth.uconn.edu/gradstudents/dhume/darkness_in_el_dorado/ index.htm. Yet the dirty work is done. However far the exorcists retreat, they have damaged indigenous peoples, who are already afraid of outsiders (and should be, of some) and of medicine and who see only conspiracy--of both men and of gods--against them. Science and preventive medicine suffer already; stung by the worldwide attention to the horror story, the Venezualan government is moving to stop all future scientific contacts with such peoples as the Yanomam?. At the AAA meetings, however, Tierney received enthusiastic applause, presumably for caring. Those who applauded, the barefoot anthropologists and activists, will be teaching your children. Notes 1. Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociology Debate and Beyond, by Ullica Segerstr?le; Oxford University Press, 464 pages, $30. 2. Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, by Patrick Tierney; W. W. Norton & Co., 417 pages, $27.95. References 1. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198505051/thenewcriterio 2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198505051/thenewcriterio 5. http://www.umich.edu/~urel/Darkness/oliver.html 6. http://www.anth.uconn.edu/gradstudents/dhume/darkness_in_el_dorado/index.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 27 23:56:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:56:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: (Fallaci) Citizen of the World Message-ID: Citizen of the World http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/tvaradarajan/?id=110006858 Prophet of Decline An interview with Oriana Fallaci. BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state." In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment. It is a shame, in so many ways, that "vilipend," the latinate word that is the pinpoint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A "vilification," by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid--hardly fitting for a grande dame. "When I was given the news," Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch. The complainant, one Adel Smith--who, despite his name, is Muslim, and an incendiary public provocateur to boot--has a history of anti-Fallaci crankiness, and is widely believed to be behind the publication of a pamphlet, "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," which exhorts Muslims to "eliminate" her. (Ironically, Mr. Smith, too, faces the peculiar charge of vilipendio against religion--Roman Catholicism in his case--after he described the Catholic Church as "a criminal organization" on television. Two years ago, he made news in Italy by filing suit for the removal of crucifixes from the walls of all public-school classrooms, and also, allegedly, for flinging a crucifix out of the window of a hospital room where his mother was being treated. "My mother will not die in a room where there is a crucifix," he said, according to hospital officials.) Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites). "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: "The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" She then says "Phwah, phwah," and gestures at slashing her wrists. "He committed suicide!" Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. "What could Seneca do?" she asks, with a discernible shudder. "He knew it would end that way--with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing." [062305fallaci.jpg] The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!"--a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. "In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour--Europe needs a Cavour." Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent." She professes to "cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow." Here she pauses to light a slim black cigarillo, and then to take a sip of champagne. Its chill makes her grimace, but fortified, she returns to vehement speech, more clearly evocative of Oswald Spengler than at any time in our interview. "You cannot survive if you do not know the past. We know why all the other civilizations have collapsed--from an excess of welfare, of richness, and from lack of morality, of spirituality." (She uses "welfare" here in the sense of well-being, so she is talking, really, of decadence.) "The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." The force with which she utters the word "dead" here is startling. I reach for my flute of champagne, as if for a crutch. "I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion." Ms. Fallaci, who made her name by interviewing numerous statesmen (and not a few tyrants), believes that ours is "an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century." Of George Bush, she will concede only that he has "vigor," and that he is "obstinate" (in her book a compliment) and "gutsy. . . . Nobody obliged him to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did." But it is "Ratzinger" (as she insists on calling the pope) who is her soulmate. John Paul II--"Wojtyla"--was a "warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America," but she will not forgive him for his "weakness toward the Islamic world. Why, why was he so weak?" The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself," from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: "The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure." "Ecco!" she says. A man after her own heart. "Ecco!" But I cannot be certain whether I see triumph in her eyes, or pain. As for the vilipendio against Islam, she refuses to attend the trial in Bergamo, set for June 2006. "I don't even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty." At this point she laughs. Bitterly, of course, but she laughs. Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 01:08:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:08:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Call the geeks when computer rage boils over Message-ID: Call the geeks when computer rage boils over http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=t&refer=http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/221072_callthegeeks21ww.html Thursday, April 21, 2005 By KATHERINE SELIGMAN SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE It was early evening by the time the rental geek headed to his last job at the end of a rough day. He was behind schedule and, worse, he'd lost his cell phone, the lifeline that connected him to his stable of clueless clients. "It's been a damage-control week," he said, the closest he gets to complaining. His motto, after all, is, "We've wasted countless hours learning this stuff so you won't have to." This "we" is Alec Bennett, proprietor of Rent a Geek, the business he founded four years ago after his dot-com employer succumbed to the dot-com crash. It didn't take long after losing that job for him to realize his plight wasn't so bad. There were lots of digitally challenged people out there who needed him. They had computers suffering from viruses, e-mail problems and inexplicable crashes that eradicated their tax records, calendars or address books. In fact, there was too much business. Computer frustration has become a modern plague, aggravated by a proliferation of computer-chip-driven gadgets, all with disparate multipage directions, cords, vocabularies and manufacturers, some with 24-hour help lines that require that much time to reach. Together, they've fueled a cottage industry of home geeks, computer technicians who will make house calls. About two-thirds of Americans used the Internet in 2003 -- 87 percent of them through connections at home -- according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Though there is no estimate of the number who couldn't master their computers, academic and anecdotal evidence abounds. Anger and frustration with computers can even escalate into what one psychologist calls "computer rage." "Computer rage is becoming a big problem in our world today," University of Maryland professor Kent Norman says on a section of [1]his Web site devoted to the subject. "Men and women are taking out their frustrations on the computer; and unfortunately, sometimes misdirecting it to other people." Norman, who directs the Laboratory of Automation Psychology and Decision Processes at the university, conducted an online survey last year in which nearly 20 percent of respondents admitted they'd dropped a computer on the floor out of anger. They described smashing, microwaving and cursing at their computers. One confessed to urinating on his. Another said he had thrown his laptop in a fryer. At least three claimed to have shot at hardware. None of this was shocking to a man who studies computer-human interactions. So Norman developed some techniques for handling the rage, which, bottled up, can lead to "techno-frustration denial" and inappropriate behavior, like taking anger out on a spouse. He advocates some healthy "vicarious venting," which he demonstrates in video clips in which he bashes, burns and barbecues old computer parts. "You really have to be careful with this stuff," Norman said in an interview. But he understands what drives these cathartic acts. Computer programs being used at home were generally designed for business use, he said. Only a geek would have the knowledge and patience to fix programs, eradicate viruses and rescue data after a crash. "It's this incredible amount of frustration trying to deal with something that's not designed well and is in fact incredibly unreliable," Norman said. Robert Stephens, who believes he was the original home geek, began tapping into the cauldron of frustration 11 years ago as a student at the University of Minnesota when he founded the Geek Squad. By the end of the 1990s, his clients included the Rolling Stones, U2 and Madonna tours. Best Buy, figuring he'd come up with a good idea, bought the business and in 2004 installed rentable geeks in all its 668 stores in the United States. Called Double Agents, they follow a geek dress code, accented with clip-on ties and white tube socks and drive VW Bugs emblazoned with the company logo. "Not all geeks are created equal," Stephens said. "We like to think we attract the best ones." Bennett sees the proliferation of geek services as "a good thing. There is enough work out there for everybody. It's just that it's like the Wild West. You never know what you're going to get." COMPUTER RAGE CHRONICLES Respondents to [2]the computer rage survey conducted by Kent Norman, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, had these comments: * "I often show my PC the middle finger!" * "I'll admit it, I'm always swearing at my computer." * "I once shot a computer with a .50-cal BMG sniper rifle." * "I took great pleasure throwing an old monitor into a dumpster hard enough to smash it completely." * "I often just squeeze my mouse real hard when I'm angry at something on the computer. Then when I'm more angry, I start smashing it on the table. And when I'm even more angry, computer gets a kick on the side." * "I once was so frustrated that my laptop was going so slow, I threw it into a fryer when I was a manager of a restaurant. It melted all the parts, and we had to replace the fryer." * "Taking a hockey stick to an old monitor is VERY SATISFYING." * "Poured gasoline on a computer and set fire to it." * "Throwing keyboards into the swimming pool (kinda nice watching it sink, and the joy is after it dries out and it carries on working.)" * "Struck mid-size tower with car going 25 mph, propelling it 15-20 feet forward: Note this causes damage to car but troublesome DVD drive finally ejected jammed disc upon contact with pavement. Afterlife: yes, but HDD (hard disk drive) reported errors and case wasn't attractive. Sold on eBay ..." ___________________________________ Katherine Seligman can be reached at at [3]kseligman at sfchronicle.com. References 1. http://www.lap.umd.edu/computer_rage/ 2. http://lap.umd.edu/surveys/computer_rage/index.html 3. mailto:kseligman at sfchronicle.com From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 01:09:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:09:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Clay Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags Message-ID: Clay Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html [1]Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet Economics & Culture, Media & Community [2]clay at shirky.com Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization. What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets. PART I: Classification and Its Discontents [3]# Q: What is Ontology? A: It Depends on What the Meaning of "Is" Is. [4]# I need to provide some quick definitions, starting with ontology. It is a rich irony that the word "ontology", which has to do with making clear and explicit statements about entities in a particular domain, has so many conflicting definitions. I'll offer two general ones. The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations. The question ontology asks is: What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? Ontology is less concerned with what is than with what is possible. The knowledge management and AI communities have a related definition -- they've taken the word "ontology" and applied it more directly to their problem. The sense of ontology there is something like "an explicit specification of a conceptualization." The common thread between the two definitions is essence, "Is-ness." In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other? The other pair of terms I need to define are categorization and classification. These are the act of organizing a collection of entities, whether things or concepts, into related groups. Though there are some field-by-field distinctions, the terms are in the main used interchangeably. And then there's ontological classification or categorization, which is organizing a set of entities into groups, based on their essences and possible relations. A library catalog, for example, assumes that for any new book, its logical place already exists within the system, even before the book was published. That strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance is what I'm primarily concerned with, because it is both widely used and badly overrated in terms of its value in the digital world. Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will tell you they can never get a perfect system. In working classification systems, success is not "Did we get the ideal arrangement?" but rather "How close did we come, and on what measures?" The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, I want to argue that even the ontological ideal is a mistake. Even using theoretical perfection as a measure of practical success leads to misapplication of resources. Now, to the problems of classification. Cleaving Nature at the Joints [5]# [periodic.jpg] [ The Periodic Table of the Elements ] The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar." It turns out that by organizing elements by the number of protons in the nucleus, you get all of this fantastic value, both descriptive and predictive value. And because what you're doing is organizing things, the periodic table is as close to making assertions about essence as it is physically possible to get. This is a really powerful scheme, almost perfect. Almost. All the way over in the right-hand column, the pink column, are noble gases. Now noble gas is an odd category, because helium is no more a gas than mercury is a liquid. Helium is not fundamentally a gas, it's just a gas at most temperatures, but the people studying it at the time didn't know that, because they weren't able to make it cold enough to see that helium, like everything else, has different states of matter. Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect -- literally, part of the essence -- of those elements. Even in a nearly perfect categorization scheme, there are these kinds of context errors, where people are placing something that is merely true at room temperature, and is absolutely unrelated to essence, right in the center of the categorization. And the category 'Noble Gas' has stayed there from the day they added it, because we've all just gotten used to that anomaly as a frozen accident. If it's impossible to create a completely coherent categorization, even when you're doing something as physically related to essence as chemistry, imagine the problems faced by anyone who's dealing with a domain where essence is even less obvious. Which brings me to the subject of libraries. Of Cards and Catalogs [6]# The periodic table gets my vote for the best categorization scheme ever, but libraries have the best-known categorization schemes. The experience of the library catalog is probably what people know best as a high-order categorized view of the world, and those cataloging systems contain all kinds of odd mappings between the categories and the world they describe. Here's the first top-level category in the Soviet library system: A: Marxism-Leninism A1: Classic works of Marxism-Leninism A3: Life and work of C.Marx, F.Engels, V.I.Lenin A5: Marxism-Leninism Philosophy A6: Marxist-Leninist Political Economics A7/8: Scientific Communism Some of those categories are starting to look a little bit dated. Or, my favorite -- this is the Dewey Decimal System's categorization for religions of the world, which is the 200 category. Dewey, 200: Religion 210 Natural theology 220 Bible 230 Christian theology 240 Christian moral & devotional theology 250 Christian orders & local church 260 Christian social theology 270 Christian church history 280 Christian sects & denominations 290 Other religions How much is this not the categorization you want in the 21st century? This kind of bias is rife in categorization systems. Here's the Library of Congress' categorization of History. These are all the top-level categories -- all of these things are presented as being co-equal. D: History (general) DA: Great Britain DB: Austria DC: France DD: Germany DE: Mediterranean DF: Greece DG: Italy DH: Low Countries DJ: Netherlands DK: Former Soviet Union DL: Scandinavia DP: Iberian Peninsula DQ: Switzerland DR: Balkan Peninsula DS: Asia DT: Africa DU: Oceania DX: Gypsies I'd like to call your attention to the ones in bold: The Balkan Peninsula. Asia. Africa. And just, you know, to review the geography: [map.jpg] [ Spot the difference? ] Yet, for all the oddity of placing the Balkan Peninsula and Asia in the same level, this is harder to laugh off than the Dewey example, because it's so puzzling. The Library of Congress -- no slouches in the thinking department, founded by Thomas Jefferson -- has a staff of people who do nothing but think about categorization all day long. So what's being optimized here? It's not geography. It's not population. It's not regional GDP. What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf. That's what the categorization scheme is categorizing. It's tempting to think that the classification schemes that libraries have optimized for in the past can be extended in an uncomplicated way into the digital world. This badly underestimates, in my view, the degree to which what libraries have historically been managing an entirely different problem. The musculature of the Library of Congress categorization scheme looks like it's about concepts. It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels -- any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories. But every now and again, the skeleton pokes through, and the skeleton, the supporting structure around which the system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves. The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained. The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage, and to people's inability to keep the location of more than a few hundred things in their mind at once. Once you own more than a few hundred books, you have to organize them somehow. (My mother, who was a reference librarian, said she wanted to reshelve the entire University library by color, because students would come in and say "I'm looking for a sociology book. It's green...") But however you do it, the frailty of human memory and the physical fact of books make some sort of organizational scheme a requirement, and hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects. The "Balkans/Asia" kind of imbalance is simply a byproduct of physical constraints. It isn't the ideas in a book that have to be in one place -- a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents. People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now. And yet. The Parable of the Ontologist, or, "There Is No Shelf" [7]# A little over ten years ago, a couple of guys out of Stanford launched a service called Yahoo that offered a list of things available on the Web. It was the first really significant attempt to bring order to the Web. As the Web expanded, the Yahoo list grew into a hierarchy with categories. As the Web expanded more they realized that, to maintain the value in the directory, they were going to have to systematize, so they hired a professional ontologist, and they developed their now-familiar top-level categories, which go to subcategories, each subcategory contains links to still other subcategories, and so on. Now we have this ontologically managed list of what's out there. Here we are in one of Yahoo's top-level categories, Entertainment. [entertainment.jpg] [ Yahoo's Entertainment Category ] You can see what the sub-categories of Entertainment are, whether or not there are new additions, and how many links roll up under those sub-categories. Except, in the case of Books and Literature, that sub-category doesn't tell you how many links roll up under it. Books and Literature doesn't end with a number of links, but with an "@" sign. That "@" sign is telling you that the category of Books and Literature isn't 'really' in the category Entertainment. Yahoo is saying "We've put this link here for your convenience, but that's only to take you to where Books and Literature 'really' are." To which one can only respond -- "What's real?" Yahoo is saying "We understand better than you how the world is organized, because we are trained professionals. So if you mistakenly think that Books and Literature are entertainment, we'll put a little flag up so we can set you right, but to see those links, you have to 'go' to where they 'are'." (My fingers are going to fall off from all the air quotes.) When you go to Literature -- which is part of Humanities, not Entertainment -- you are told, similarly, that booksellers are not 'really' there. Because they are a commercial service, booksellers are 'really' in Business. [books.jpg] [ 'Literature' on Yahoo ] Look what's happened here. Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back. They couldn't imagine organization without the constraints of the shelf, so they added it back. It is perfectly possible for any number of links to be in any number of places in a hierarchy, or in many hierarchies, or in no hierarchy at all. But Yahoo decided to privilege one way of organizing links over all others, because they wanted to make assertions about what is "real." The charitable explanation for this is that they thought of this kind of a priori organization as their job, and as something their users would value. The uncharitable explanation is that they thought there was business value in determining the view the user would have to adopt to use the system. Both of those explanations may have been true at different times and in different measures, but the effect was to override the users' sense of where things ought to be, and to insist on the Yahoo view instead. File Systems and Hierarchy [8]# It's easy to see how the Yahoo hierarchy maps to technological constraints as well as physical ones. The constraints in the Yahoo directory describes both a library categorization scheme and, obviously, a file system -- the file system is both a powerful tool and a powerful metaphor, and we're all so used to it, it seems natural. [hierarchy.jpg] [ Hierarchy ] There's a top level, and subdirectories roll up under that. Subdirectories contain files or further subdirectories and so on, all the way down. Both librarians and computer scientists hit the same next idea, which is "You know, it wouldn't hurt to add a few secondary links in here" -- symbolic links, aliases, shortcuts, whatever you want to call them. [hierarchy_links.jpg] [ Plus Links ] The Library of Congress has something similar in its second-order categorization -- "This book is mainly about the Balkans, but it's also about art, or it's mainly about art, but it's also about the Balkans." Most hierarchical attempts to subdivide the world use some system like this. Then, in the early 90s, one of the things that Berners-Lee showed us is that you could have a lot of links. You don't have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links. [hierarchy_lots_links.jpg] [ Plus Lots of Links ] This is where Yahoo got off the boat. They said, "Get out of here with that crazy talk. A URL can only appear in three places. That's the Yahoo rule." They did that in part because they didn't want to get spammed, since they were doing a commercial directory, so they put an upper limit on the number of symbolic links that could go into their view of the world. They missed the end of this progression, which is that, if you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough. [just_links.jpg] [ Just Links (There Is No Filesystem) ] One reason Google was adopted so quickly when it came along is that Google understood there is no shelf, and that there is no file system. Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know. Let's say I need every Web page with the word "obstreperous" and "Minnesota" in it. You can't ask a cataloguer in advance to say "Well, that's going to be a useful category, we should encode that in advance." Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say is, "Obstreperous plus Minnesota! Forget it, we're not going to optimize for one-offs like that." Google, on the other hand, says, "Who cares? We're not going to tell the user what to do, because the link structure is more complex than we can read, except in response to a user query." Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck. The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure. A lot of the conversation that's going on now about categorization starts at a second step -- "Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should..." But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of not categorizing. Even Google adopted DMOZ, the open source version of the Yahoo directory, and later they downgraded its presence on the site, because almost no one was using it. When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things. When Does Ontological Classification Work Well? [9]# Ontological classification works well in some places, of course. You need a card catalog if you are managing a physical library. You need a hierarchy to manage a file system. So what you want to know, when thinking about how to organize anything, is whether that kind of classification is a good strategy. Here is a partial list of characteristics that help make it work: Domain to be Organized * Small corpus * Formal categories * Stable entities * Restricted entities * Clear edges This is all the domain-specific stuff that you would like to be true if you're trying to classify cleanly. The periodic table of the elements has all of these things -- there are only a hundred or so elements; the categories are simple and derivable; protons don't change because of political circumstances; only elements can be classified, not molecules; there are no blended elements; and so on. The more of those characteristics that are true, the better a fit ontology is likely to be. The other key question, besides the characteristics of the domain itself, is "What are the participants like?" Here are some things that, if true, help make ontology a workable classification strategy: Participants * Expert catalogers * Authoritative source of judgment * Coordinated users * Expert users DSM-IV, the 4th version of the psychiatrists' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is a classic example of an classification scheme that works because of these characteristics. DSM IV allows psychiatrists all over the US, in theory, to make the same judgment about a mental illness, when presented with the same list of symptoms. There is an authoritative source for DSM-IV, the American Psychiatric Association. The APA gets to say what symptoms add up to psychosis. They have both expert cataloguers and expert users. The amount of 'people infrastructure' that's hidden in a working system like DSM IV is a big part of what makes this sort of categorization work. This 'people infrastructure' is very expensive, though. One of the problem users have with categories is that when we do head-to-head tests -- we describe something and then we ask users to guess how we described it -- there's a very poor match. Users have a terrifically hard time guessing how something they want will have been categorized in advance, unless they have been educated about those categories in advance as well, and the bigger the user base, the more work that user education is. You can also turn that list around. You can say "Here are some characteristics where ontological classification doesn't work well": Domain * Large corpus * No formal categories * Unstable entities * Unrestricted entities * No clear edges Participants * Uncoordinated users * Amateur users * Naive catalogers * No Authority If you've got a large, ill-defined corpus, if you've got naive users, if your cataloguers aren't expert, if there's no one to say authoritatively what's going on, then ontology is going to be a bad strategy. The list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an almost perfect description of the Web -- largest corpus, most naive users, no global authority, and so on. The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining it, to say nothing of the amount of force you have to get to exert over users to get them to drop their own world view in favor of yours. The reason we know SUVs are a light truck instead of a car is that the Government says they're a light truck. This is voodoo categorization, where acting on the model changes the world -- when the Government says an SUV is a truck, it is a truck, by definition. Much of the appeal of categorization comes from this sort of voodoo, where the people doing the categorizing believe, even if only unconciously, that naming the world changes it. Unfortunately, most of the world is not actually amenable to voodoo categorization. The reason we don't know whether or not Buffy, The Vampire Slayer is science fiction, for example, is because there's no one who can say definitively yes or no. In environments where there's no authority and no force that can be applied to the user, it's very difficult to support the voodoo style of organization. Merely naming the world creates no actual change, either in the world, or in the minds of potential users who don't understand the system. Mind Reading [10]# One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future. The mind-reading aspect shows up in conversations about controlled vocabularies. Whenever users are allowed to label or tag things, someone always says "Hey, I know! Let's make a thesaurus, so that if you tag something 'Mac' and I tag it 'Apple' and somebody else tags it 'OSX', we all end up looking at the same thing!" They point to the signal loss from the fact that users, although they use these three different labels, are talking about the same thing. The assumption is that we both can and should read people's minds, that we can understand what they meant when they used a particular label, and, understanding that, we can start to restrict those labels, or at least map them easily onto one another. This looks relatively simple with the Apple/Mac/OSX example, but when we start to expand to other groups of related words, like movies, film, and cinema, the case for the thesaurus becomes much less clear. I learned this from Brad Fitzgerald's design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema. The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches. When we get to really contested terms like queer/gay/homosexual, by this point, all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion. "Oh, the people talking about 'queer politics' and the people talking about 'the homosexual agenda', they're really talking about the same thing." Oh no they're not. If you think the movies and cinema people were going to have a fight, wait til you get the queer politics and homosexual agenda people in the same room. You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus. Fortune Telling [11]# The other big problem is that predicting the future turns out to be hard, and yet any classification system meant to be stable over time puts the categorizer in the position of fortune teller. Alert readers will be able to spot the difference between Sentence A and Sentence B. A: "I love you." B: "I will always love you." Woe betide the person who utters Sentence B when what they mean is Sentence A. Sentence A is a statement. Sentence B is a prediction. But this is the ontological dilemma. Consider the following statements: A: "This is a book about Dresden." B: "This is a book about Dresden, and it goes in the category 'East Germany'." That second sentence seems so obvious, but East Germany actually turned out to be an unstable category. Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities. We pretend that 'country' refers to a physical area the same way 'city' does, but it's not true, as we know from places like the former Yugoslavia. There is a top-level category, you may have seen it earlier in the Library of Congress scheme, called Former Soviet Union. The best they were able to do was just tack "former" onto that entire zone that they'd previously categorized as the Soviet Union. Not because that's what they thought was true about the world, but because they don't have the staff to reshelve all the books. That's the constraint. Part II: The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody [12]# "My God. It's full of links!" [13]# When we reexamine categorization without assuming the physical constraint either of hierarchy on disk or of hierarchy in the physical world, we get very different answers. Let's say you wanted to merge two libraries -- mine and the Library of Congress's. (You can tell it's the Library of Congress on the right, because they have a few more books than I do.) [book_clouds.jpg] [ Two Categorized Collections of Books ] So, how do we do this? Do I have to sit down with the Librarian of Congress and say, "Well, in my world, Python In A Nutshell is a reference work, and I keep all of my books on creativity together." Do we have to hash out the difference between my categorization scheme and theirs before the Library of Congress is able to take my books? No, of course we don't have to do anything of the sort. They're able to take my books in while ignoring my categories, because all my books have ISBN numbers, International Standard Book Numbers. They're not merging at the category level. They're merging at the globally unique item level. My entities, my uniquely labeled books, go into Library of Congress scheme trivially. The presence of unique labels means that merging libraries doesn't require merging categorization schemes. [book_isbn_merged.jpg] [ Merge ISBNs ] Now imagine a world where everything can have a unique identifier. This should be easy, since that's the world we currently live in -- the URL gives us a way to create a globally unique ID for anything we need to point to. Sometimes the pointers are direct, as when a URL points to the contents of a Web page. Sometimes they are indirect, as when you use an Amazon link to point to a book. Sometimes there are layers of indirection, as when you use a URI, a uniform resource identifier, to name something whose location is indeterminate. But the basic scheme gives us ways to create a globally unique identifier for anything. And once you can do that, anyone can label those pointers, can tag those URLs, in ways that make them more valuable, and all without requiring top-down organization schemes. And this -- an explosion in free-form labeling of links, followed by all sorts of ways of grabbing value from those labels -- is what I think is happening now. Great Minds Don't Think Alike [14]# Here is del.icio.us, Joshua Shachter's social bookmarking service. It's for people who are keeping track of their URLs for themselves, but who are willing to share globally a view of what they're doing, creating an aggregate view of all users' bookmarks, as well as a personal view for each user. [del.jpg] [ Front Page of del.icio.us ] As you can see here, the characteristics of a del.icio.us entry are a link, an optional extended description, and a set of tags, which are words or phrases users attach to a link. Each user who adds a link to the system can give it a set of tags -- some do, some don't. Attached to each link on the home page are the tags, the username of the person who added it, the number of other people who have added that same link, and the time. Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements. The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost. There's a useful comparison here between gopher and the Web, where gopher was better organized, better mapped to existing institutional practices, and utterly unfit to work at internet scale. The Web, by contrast, was and is a complete mess, with only one brand of pointer, the URL, and no mechanism for global organization or resources. The Web is mainly notable for two things -- the way it ignored most of the theories of hypertext and rich metadata, and how much better it works than any of the proposed alternatives. (The Yahoo/Google strategies I mentioned earlier also split along those lines.) With those changes afoot, here are some of the things that I think are coming, as advantages of tagging systems: * Market Logic - As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value. As Schachter says of del.icio.us, "Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them." If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation. The other essential value of market logic is that individual differences don't have to be homogenized. Look for the word 'queer' in almost any top-level categorization. You will not find it, even though, as an organizing principle for a large group of people, that word matters enormously. Users don't get to participate those kind of discussions around traditional categorization schemes, but with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something "should" be tagged. Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view, even in the face of general disagreement. * User and Time are Core Attributes - This is absolutely essential. The attitude of the Yahoo ontologist and her staff was -- "We are Yahoo We do not have biases. This is just how the world is. The world is organized into a dozen categories." You don't know who those people were, where they came from, what their background was, what their political biases might be. Here, because you can derive 'this is who this link is was tagged by' and 'this is when it was tagged, you can start to do inclusion and exclusion around people and time, not just tags. You can start to do grouping. You can start to do decay. "Roll up tags from just this group of users, I'd like to see what they are talking about" or "Give me all tags with this signature, but anything that's more than a week old or a year old." This is group tagging -- not the entire population, and not just me. It's like Unix permissions -- right now we've got tags for user and world, and this is the base on which we will be inventing group tags. We're going to start to be able to subset our categorization schemes. Instead of having massive categorizations and then specialty categorization, we're going to have a spectrum between them, based on the size and make-up of various tagging groups. * Signal Loss from Expression - The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories. With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things. The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view. The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't "Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'", but rather "Is anyone tagging it the way I do?" As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it -- using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error. * The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists. Similarly, the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers. Much of the expense of existing catalogue systems is in trying to prevent one-off categories. With tagging, what you say is "As long as a lot of people are tagging any given link, the rare tags can be used or ignored, as the user likes. We won't even have to expend the cost to prevent people from using them. We'll just help other users ignore them if they want to." Again, scale comes to the rescue of the system in a way that would simply break traditional cataloging schemes. The existence of an odd or unusual tag is a problem if it's the only way a given link has been tagged, or if there is no way for a user to avoid that tag. Once a link has been tagged more than once, though, users can view or ignore the odd tags as it suits them, and the decision about which tags to use comes after the links have been tagged, not before. * Merged from URLs, Not Categories - You don't merge tagging schemes at the category level and then see what the contents are. As with the 'merging ISBNs' idea, you merge individual contents, because we now have URLs as unique handles. You merge from the URLs, and then try and derive something about the categorization from there. This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes. * Merges are Probabilistic, not Binary - Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag "is" or "is not" the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying "A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'." We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change. Tag Distributions on del.icio.us [15]# Here's something showing what I mean about the breakdown of binary categorization. [del_users.jpg] [ Tags per user ] This is a chart based on a small sample of links from the del.icio.us front page, taken during a 2-hour window. The X axis is the 64 users who posted links during that period. The Y axis is the total number of discrete kinds of tags that those users have ever used in their history on del.icio.us. The chart shows a great variability in tagging strategies among the various users. The user all the way to the left has an enormous number of unique tags, almost 600 of them. Then there's this group of people who are not quite power taggers but who tag quite a bit, and of course to the right of them there's the characteristic long tail of people who use many fewer tags than the power taggers. (Because this is a two-hour snapshot, it has a natural bias towards frequent del.icio.us users. I'm trying to get a larger data set. My guess is the tail goes out quite a bit further than this.) But this is what organization looks like when you turn it over to the users -- many different strategies, each of which works in its own context, but which can also be merged. [del_user.jpg] [ A single user's tags ] This is a single user's tags. From here, you can tell something about this person -- he or she is obviously a Flash programmer -- the commonest tag here is Flash, followed by a number of other frequently used tags mainly related to programming. Like the front page, this distribution has the organic signature. Experts don't catalog this way; experts who learn how to catalogue produce much more consistent labeling. Here, it's whatever the user thought would help them remember the link later. You can see there's a tag "to_read". A professional cataloguer would look at this tag in horror -- "This is context-dependent and temporary." Well, so was the category "East Germany." Once you expand your time scale to include the actual life of the categorization scheme itself, you recognize that the distinction between temporary and permanent is awfully vague. There isn't in fact a binary condition of a tag that can or cannot survive any kind of long-term examination. [del_urls.jpg] [ Different tag 'signatures' for different URLs ] Then there's this set of graphs. This is to me in a way the most interesting and least well understood part of the del.icio.us right now -- these are two different URLs and the tags that a whole group of users applied to them. The graph at the bottom left refers to a site for downloading old versions of programs that are no longer supported. You can see here that there is broad communal consensus. 140 people tagged this Software. Then, the next commonest tag, with only 20 occurrences, is Windows, then Old, then Download, and so forth. For this URL, there's a core consensus -- this link is about software -- and after that one bit of commonality, there is a really sharp, clear fall off in tags. The graph at the upper right, by contrast, shows the tags for a page detailing how to embed standing searches in Gmail. You can see the tags -- Gmail, Firefox, Search, Javascript, GreaseMonkey -- this is a much smearier distribution, with a much less sharp fall-off. The consensus view is that this link is about more kinds of things than the software download link is, or, rather, occupies more contexts for del.icio.us users than the software download link does. Looking at this sort of data, we can start to say, of particular URLs, that the users tagging this URL either did or did not center around a certain core tags, with this degree of certainty, and, thanks to the time stamps, we can even start to understand how the distribution of a URLs tags changes over time. It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value. We're early in the use of tags, so we don't yet have large, long-lived data sets to look at, but they are being built up quickly, and we're just figuring out how to extract novel value from whole collections of tags. Organization Goes Organic [16]# We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world, where N% of users think books are entertainment. It may well be that within Yahoo, there was a big debate about whether or not books are entertainment. But they either had no way of reflecting that debate or they decided not to expose it to the users. What instead happened was it became an all-or-nothing categorization, "This is entertainment, this is not entertainment." We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice. It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world. If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world. Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. When del.icio.us is recommending tags to me, the system is not saying, "I know that OSX is an operating system. Therefore, I can use predicate logic to come up with recommendations -- users run software, software runs on operating systems, OSX is a type of operating system -- and then say 'Here Mr. User, you may like these links.'" What it's doing instead is a lot simpler: "A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related." It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful -- del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine. It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it. Thank you very much. Thanks to Alicia Cervini for invaluable editorial help. [17]Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source [18]clay at shirky.com References 1. http://www.shirky.com/ 2. mailto:clay at shirky.com 3. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#classification_and_its_discontents 4. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#what_is_ontology 5. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#cleaving_nature_at_the_joints 6. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#of_cards_and_catalogs 7. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#parable_of_the_ontologist 8. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#file_systems_and_hierarchy 9. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#when_does_ontological_classification_work 10. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#mind_reading 11. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#fortune_telling 12. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#the_only_group 13. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html 14. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#great_minds_dont_think_alike 15. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#tag_distributions_on_del.icio.us 16. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#organization_goes_organic 17. http://www.shirky.com/ 18. mailto:clay at shirky.com From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 01:09:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:09:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Association of Politics and the Life Sciences: Preliminary Program for the 2005 Annual Meeting Message-ID: Association of Politics and the Life Sciences: Preliminary Program for the 2005 Annual Meeting http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/prelimprog.htm et seq. Available in one piece: http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/PrelimProg.pdf [This goes out to most of my address book, to let those who know me mostly from classical music, for example, of my other interests. We attended the annual meeting here in 2000 and will be back. I know or have been in e-contact with or have read books by Arnhart, Gross, Hughes, Masters, Roberts, and Rothman. [What's completely new is two sessions on transhumanism. The sparks flew most wildly at the 2000 conference over innate racial differences in psychology. My impression is that the passion has gone out of defenders of physiology-only differences, and so transhumanism is well-poised to take its place at the scene of most contest. We shall see.] Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting The Mayflower Hotel - Washington, DC August 31 - September 4, 2005 Preliminary Program SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS Program Chairs: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Keynote Speaker Napoleon Chagnon, University of California - Santa Barbara "Warfare Among the Yanomano" Fri., 8:00 pm Plenary Speakers Gregory Conko, Competitive Enterprise Institute "The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution" Wed., 12:30 pm Lois Gibbs, Center for Health, the Environment and Justice, Love Canal "The Effect of Toxins on Children" Thurs., 2:00 pm Barry Levy, Tufts University School of Medicine "Social Injustice and Public Health" Fri., 2:00 pm Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland "Assessing Biological Weapons and the Bioterrorism Threat" Sat., 2:00 pm A WORKSHOPS: Kristen Alley Swain A-1 Training Workshop on Planetary Protection Wed., 9:00-10:30 am A-2 Intelligent Design Theory: Teaching Alternatives to Evolution in Public School Science Classes Wed., 10:45-12:15 pm A-3 Simulating Dynamic Systems Wed., 10:45-12:15 pm A-4 Artificial Intelligence and Species Dominance Wed., 2:00-3:30 pm A-5 The Precautionary Principle Wed., 2:00-3:30 pm A-6 Worlds Apart: Bridging the Journalist-Scientist Gap Wed.,3:45-5:00 pm B BIOBEHAVIOR: Steven A. Peterson and Albert Somit B-1 Explorations in Biobehavioral Politics: I Thur., 8:30-10:15 am B-2 Democracy and Nation-Building Thur., 8:30-10:15 am B-3 Explorations in Biobehavioral Politics: II Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm B-4 Evolutionary Psychology Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm B-5 Evolution and Politics Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm B-6 Why People Become Suicide Terrorists? Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm B-7 Traditional and Biopolitical Reflections on Terrorism Sat., 10:45-12:30 pm B-8 Biology and Group Cooperation & Conflict Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm B-9 Darwinian Anthropology: Human Social Organization Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm B-10 Neurosciences, Physiology, and Politics Sun., 8:30-10:15 am C BIOTECHNOLOGY: Patrick A. Stewart & Richard Sherlock C-1 Agricultural and Animal Genetic Engineering and Politics Thur., 8:30-10:15 am C-2 Transhumanism I Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm C-3 Transhumanism II Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm C-4 Human Genetic Engineering and Politics Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm C-5 Genetic Engineering and Concepts of Human Nature Sat., 8:30-10:15 am D HEALTH POLICY AND BIOETHICS: Roberta Herzberg D-1 Health Care Reform Thur., 8:30-10:15 am D-2 Stem Cell Research: Politics and Ethics I Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm D-3 Public Health and Privacy Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm D-4 Medical Ethics Fri., 8:30-10:15 am D-5 Stem Cell Research: Politics and Ethics II Fri., 8:30-10:15 am D-6 Social Injustice and Public Health Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm D-7 The Continuing Ethical and Political Relevance of the Belmont Report Sat., 8:30-10:15 am D-8 Controversies in Life and Death Sat., 10:45-12:30 pm D-9 Current Controversies in Death and Dying Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm D-10 Emerging Global Diseases Sun., 8:30-10:15 E ENVIRONMENT: Odelia Funke E-1 Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Science, and Environmental Policy-making Thur., 8:30-10:15 am E-2 Women in the Health Environment Movement Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm E-3 Science Strategies in Arctic Environmental Politics Thur., 10:45-12:30 pm E-4 Global Warming and the Kyoto Protocol Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm E-5 All of the Planets, All of the Time: Planetary Protection in Space Exploration Fri., 8:30-10:15 am E-6 Effects of Toxins on Neurotransmitters: Violent Crime & Poor Educational Performance Fri., 8:30-10:15 am E-7 Criteria, Measurements, and Political Implications of Ecological Science Fri., 10:45-12:30 pm E-8 Roundtable on Science and Risk Communication Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm E-9 Deforestation and Pollution in the Amazon and Mata Atlantica Sat., 8:30-10:15 am E-10 Weaknesses in Existing Regulatory Approaches to Human Health and the Environment Sat., 10:45-12:30 pm E-11 Making Environmental Information Available to the Public Sat., 3:15-5:00 pm F BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY: Laurette Liesen F-1 Intelligent Design Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm F-2 Darwinism, Creationism, and Intelligent Design Sat., 8:30-10:15 am F-3 Biopolitics and Political Theory Sun., 8:30-10:15 am G BIOSECURITY: Aleksandr Rabodzey G-1 Bioterrorism Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm G-2 Biosecurity I Fri., 3:15-5:00 pm G-3 Biosecurity IISat., 10:45-12:30 pm H OTHER H-1 Interdisciplinary Publishing for APLS Graduate Students Thur., 3:15-5:00 pm H-2 Posters Thur., 6:00-8:00 pm Social Events and Meetings Student Reception Thur., 5:00 pm Welcoming Reception and Poster Session Thur., 6:00 pm APLS Executive Council MeetingFri., 7:00 am Cocktail ReceptionFri., 6:15 pm Banquet Dinner (followed by Keynote Speaker) Fri., 7:00 pm APLS Business Meeting (open to all members) Sat., 5:15 pm ---------- APLS 2005 (Wednesday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progwed.htm WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Wednesday, 8:00 - 8:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Wednesday, 9:00 - 10:30 am - Plenary Roundtable A-1 TRAINING WORKSHOP ON PLANETARY PROTECTION Chair: Linda Billings, SETI Institute Presenters: Overview, Science John Rummel, NASA Techniques Perry Stabekis, NASA Amy Baker, Technical Administrative Services Legal and Ethical Considerations, Communication Margaret Race, SETI Institute Wednesday, 10:45 - 12:15 pm - Breakout Sessions A-2 INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY: TEACHING ALTERNATIVES TO EVOLUTION IN PUBLIC SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASSES Chair: Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi Presenters: Barbara Forrest, Southeastern Louisiana University Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Chris Mooney, Author of `The Republican War on Science' Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi A-3 SIMULATING DYNAMIC SYSTEMS Chair: Dario Nardi, University of California - Los Angeles Presenters: Dario Nardi, University of California - Los Angeles Why did human brains suddenly triple in size 2.5 million years ago? Laura Power, Biotype Research Corporation Is Evolution an Optimizing Process? James H. Fetzer, University of Minnesota, Duluth Wednesday, 12:30 - 1:45 pm - Luncheon (Box Lunch) and Plenary Speech The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution Gregory Conko, Senior Fellow and Director of Food Safety Policy , Competitive Enterprise Institute Wednesday, 2:00 - 3:30 pm - Breakout Sessions A-4 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND SPECIES DOMINANCE Chair: Hugo Degaris, Utah State University Presenters: Hugo Degaris, Utah State University Richard Sherlock, Utah State University A-5 THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE Chair: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri Presenters: Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi Wil Burns, Monterey Institute of International Studies Gregory Conko, Senior Fellow and Director of Food Safety Policy Wednesday, 3:30 - 3:45 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Wednesday, 3:45 - 5:00 pm - Closing Roundtable A-6 WORLDS APART: BRIDGING THE JOURNALIST-SCIENTIST GAP Chair: Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Presenters: Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Linda Billings, SETI Institute Brian Vastag, DC science journalist Rick Borchelt, Berman Institute for Bioethics, Johns Hopkins Chris Mooney, Author of `The Republican War on Science" Katherine Arnold Travis, Journal of the National Cancer Institute APLS 2005 (Thursday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progthurs.htm THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Exhibits 8:00 am - 5:30 pm Thursday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables B-1 EXPLORATIONS IN BIOBEHAVIORAL POLITICS: I Chair: Phil Roberts, Jr. Presenters: Political Edge of Chaos: Constitutional Liberalism and Political Evolution Lauren Hall, Northern Illinois University Burned into the Brain: a Redefinition of Political Culture Ivelin Sardamov, American University, Bulgaria Rehabilitating Introspection Phil Roberts, Jr. Bioethics and Biomorality, Practical Consequences for a Hegelian Distinction Alin Fumurescu, University of Indiana-Bloomington B-2 DEMOCRACY AND NATION-BUILDING Chair: Liliana Anaya, American University Presenters: Individual Demobilization and Reintegration Process in Colombia: a Nation Building Policy from a National Security Perspective Liliana Anaya, American University Social Dominance-Enhancing Myths: The Case of Democratization Rachel Kirkland-Gaymer, Wayne State University It's Our Responsibility: Family, Violence, and Korean Civil Society Sungmoon Kim, University of Maryland C-1 AGRICULTURAL AND ANIMAL GENETIC ENGINEERING AND POLITICS Chair: Patrick A. Stewart, Arkansas State University Presenters: A Study on Genetic Modification Policy Change In U.K. in terms of Iron-Triangle Model Myong Hwa Lee, Northern Illinois University The Case of Antibiotic Growth Promoters in Livestock Production Dustin Tingley, Princeton University Public participation in biotechnology policies in developing countries: What role can agricultural extension play? William M. Rivera, University of Maryland Three Generations of Agricultural Biotechnology and Willingness to Pay For Food Labeling Patrick A. Stewart, Arkansas State University William P. McLean, Arkansas State University D-1 HEALTH CARE REFORM Chair: Miriam Levitt, Elisabeth Bruyere Research Institute Presenters: Health Care Reform in Canada Miriam Levitt, Elisabeth Bruyere Research Institute Rural Health Care Reform in the West Roberta Herzberg, Utah State University Converting Social Insurance into Means-Tested Welfare: The Surreptitious 'Modernization' of Medicare William P. Brandon, University of North Carolina - Charlotte Politics and Policy of Prison Health Care for Aging Inmates Cynthia Mara, Penn State University E-1 TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY-MAKING Chair: Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Presenters: Hunting Caribou on "The Road to Resources:" The interaction of co-management, traditional knowledge, and local self regulation Gary Kofinas, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Marine Mammal Policy Science: The Political Influence of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Co-Management Regimes Chanda Meek The Power of Story: Comparing public discourse on genetically modified crops of Europe and India Anjali Bhat, International Food Policy Research Institute Regina Birner, International Food Policy Research Institute Thursday, 10:15-10:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Thursday, 10:45 - 12:30 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-3 EXPLORATIONS IN BIOBEHAVIORAL POLITICS: II Chair: Kilian Garvey, University of New England Presenters: Anxiety, Fear, and Political Cognition Kilian Garvey, University of New England Biology and the `F' Word: Why Neuroscience and Psychological Essentialism Can Revive Third Wave Feminism Jennifer Guon, Northern Illinois University C-2 TRANSHUMANISM I Chair: Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Presenters: Larry Arnhart, Northern Illinois University Roger Barrus, Hampton-Sydney College Ron Bailey, Reason Magazine D-2 STEM CELL RESEARCH: POLITICS AND ETHICS I Chair: Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Presenters: Debra Aranson, Biotechnology Industry Organization Bruce Artim, Senate Judiciary Committee Peter Lawler, President's Commission on Bioethics E-2 WOMEN IN THE HEALTH ENVIRONMENT MOVEMENT Chair: Charlotte Cotrill, US EPA Presenters: Case Studies Lois Gibbs, Center for Health, the Environment and Justice, Love Canal Sharon Terry, Genetic Alliance E-3 SCIENCE STRATEGIES IN ARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Chair: Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Presenters: Science and Political Strategy: Analyzing the Role of Science in Interest Group Claims on Government Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks The Science of Tourism: History and Politics of the Travel Lobby in Alaska's Environmental Debates Tim Pursell, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Northern Peoples, Northern Pipelines: the Science and Politics of Exploiting Canada's Arctic Gas Ian Urguhart Thursday, 12:30 - 2:00 pm - Lunch Thursday, 2:00 - 3:00 pm - Plenary Lecture Lois Gibbs, Center for Health, the Environment and Justice, Love Canal "The Effect of Toxins on Children" Thursday, 3:00-3:15 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Thursday, 3:15 - 5:00 pm - Panels and Roundtables D-3PUBLIC HEALTH AND PRIVACY Chair:Odelia Funke, EPA Presenters: Government's Role in Patient Identity Management John Chelen, Esq., Special Counsel/Senior Information Architect, Government of the District of Columbia Should Insurance Companies Know Your Genetic Information? Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi Balancing Health Privacy and Progress Patrick Daly, US Navy Medical Corps E-4GLOBAL WARMING AND THE KYOTO PROTOCOL Chair:Glen Sussman, Old Dominion University Presenter: Greenless Diplomacy: Kyoto without the US Glen Sussman, Old Dominion University Discovery of Global Warming Spencer Wearst, American Institute of Physics G-1BIOTERRORISM Chair:Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Presenters: Credibility in a Crisis: News Sourcing in the Anthrax Attacks Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Homeland Security for Hospitals: Front-Line Reimbursement for Bioterrorism and Public Health Emergencies Elizabeth Weeks, University of Kansas School of Law Detection of Weapons of Mass Destruction Using New Technologies Matthew D. Horton, Arkansas State University H-1INTERDISCIPLINARY PUBLISHING FOR APLS GRADUATE STUDENTS Chair:Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Presenters: Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Peter A. Corning, Institute for Complex Systems John Orbell, University of Oregon Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Thursday, 5:00-5:30 pm - Student Reception Thursday, 6:00-8:00 pm - Welcoming Reception and Poster Session H-2POSTERS An overview of xenotransplantation: Implications for Aging and Public Policy Richard Haubner, College of St. Joseph Handedness, Fear Perception, and Political Affiliation Kilian Garvey, University of New England APLS 2005 (Friday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progfri.htm FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Exhibits 8:00 am - 5:30 pm Friday, 7:00 - 8:30 am - APLS Executive Council Meeting Friday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables D-4 MEDICAL ETHICS Chair: Ronald F. White, College of Mount St. Joseph Presenters: The Political Implications of Contemporary Biomedicine in Germany Anja Karnein, Brandeis University Medical Ethics vs. Business Ethics: The Case of DTC Pharmaceutical Advertising Ronald F. White, College of Mount St. Joseph The 108th Congress and Legislative Action on Financial Incentives for Organ Donation Brian Frederick, Northern Illinois University D-5 STEM CELL RESEARCH: POLITICS AND ETHICS II Chair: Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Presenters: Political framing in news coverage of the stem cell debate Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas Political Ethics and Stem Cell Research Edward Sankowski, University of Oklahoma The Garden of Eden: Perfect Equilibrium or the Original Frankenstein Myth Lene Johansen, University of Missouri - Columbia The global politics of human embryonic stem cell science Amanda Dickens, University of East Anglia, UK E-5 ALL OF THE PLANETS, ALL OF THE TIME: PLANETARY PROTECTION IN SPACE EXPLORATION Chair: Linda Billings, SETI institute Presenters: John Rummel, NASA Michael A. Meyer, NASA Norine Noonan, College of Charleston E-6 EFFECTS OF TOXINS ON NEUROTRANSMITTERS: VIOLENT CRIME & POOR EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE Chair: Laurel Sharmer, SUNY Potsdam Presenters: Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Ellen Silbergeld, The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Dan Gallo, EPA Region 3 Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Herbert Needleman Neurology and Toxins Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Friday, 10:15-10:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Friday, 10:45-12:30 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-4 EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Chair: Roberts, Phil Jr. Presenters: Feelings of Worthlessness Roberts, Phil Jr. An Evolutionary Perspective of Solitude Cristian Cantir, Northern Illinois University Facial Hair, Hair Color, and Political Impression Formation: The Influence of Visual Cues on Perceived Qualification for Office Erik Bucy, Indiana University B-5 EVOLUTION AND POLITICS Chair: Albert Somit, Southern Illinois University Presenters: Evolution, Virtue, and Politics William Dibrell, Alfred University Testing Ethnic Nepotism Theory Michael Tweed, Northern Illinois University Evolution and Nation-Building: Human Nature Meets Ideology Albert Somit, Southern Illinois University Steven A. Peterson, Pennsylvania State - Harrisburg C-3 TRANSHUMANISM II Chair: Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Presenters: Transhumanism, Biopolitics and the New Rights Paradigm James Hughes, Trinity College Extra Life a Community of the Future Peter Houghton, The Heart Failure Foundation D-6 SOCIAL INJUSTICE AND PUBLIC HEALTH Chair: Victor W. Sidel, MD., Albert Einstein College of Medicine Presenters: Victor W. Sidel, MD., Albert Einstein College of Medicine Barry Levy, MD., Tufts University School of Medicine News framing of the environmental justice movement Kristen Alley Swain, University of Kansas E-7 CRITERIA, MEASUREMENTS, AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ECOLOGICAL SCIENCE Chair: Amy Lovecraft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks Presenters: Regulators vs. Interest Groups: The Science and Politics of Standard Setting for Arsenic and Radon David Shafie The Normative Implications of Ecological Footprinting Steve Vanderheiden Virtu-based Politics and the Politicization of Ecological Science: Political Thought confronts Stability, Place, and Invasive Species Peter Cannavo Friday, 12:30-2:00 pm - Lunch Friday, 2:00-3:00 pm - Plenary Lecture Barry Levy, Tufts University School of Medicine "Social Injustice and Public Health" Friday, 3:00-3:15 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Friday, 3:15-5:00 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-6 WHY PEOPLE BECOME SUICIDE TERRORISTS Chair: Bradley Thayer, Missouri State University Presenters: What Do We Know About Suicide Bombing? Where Do We Go From Here? Veronica Ward, Utah State University Connecting the Dots Between Sociality and Suicide Terrorism Nancy E. Aiken, Independent C-4 HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING AND POLITICS Chair: Sonia E. Miller, S.E. Miller Law Firm & Converging Technologies Bar Association Presenters: The POP in Striving for Perfection: Politics, Optics, and Perceptions Sonia E. Miller, S.E. Miller Law Firm & Converging Technologies Bar Association Conserving Genes: The Biopolitics of Cloning in Species Recovery Amy Lynn Fletcher, University of Canterbury The Political Implications of Human Genetic Engineering Anja Karnein, Brandeis University Issue-network Analysis of Korean Therapeutic Cloning Policy Making Process Myong Hwa Lee, Northern Illinois University E-8 ROUNDTABLE ON SCIENCE AND RISK COMMUNICATION Chair: Linda Billings, SETI Institute Presenters: Linda Billings, SETI Institute Rick Borcheldt, John Hopkins University Susanna Priest, University of South Carolina Charlotte Schell, Portland State University F-1 INTELLIGENT DESIGN Chair: Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Presenters: Intelligent Design: A Middle Ground Richard Sherlock, Utah State University Intelligent Design and the Politics of the Life Sciences: Leibniz in the 21st Century Francis Moran, New Jersey City University John J. Porcaro Chris Mooney, Author of `The Republican War on Science' Angus Menugue, Condordia University, Wisconsin G-2 BIOSECURITY I Chair: Aleksandr Rabodzey, MIT Presenters: Russia's Role in Building International Biosecurity? Aleksandr Rabodzey, MIT Biosecurity: Bridging the Gap Between the Life Sciences and National Security Gregory D. Koblentz, MIT Deconstructing the Threat of Bioterrorism: New Insights from the Field of Science and Technology Studies Kathleen M. Vogel, Cornell University The Problem of Biological Weapons Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland Renolds M. Salerno, Sandia National Labs Friday, 6:15 - 9:15 pm - Reception, Banquet, and Keynote Address Pre-Banquet Reception (cash bar)6:15 pm Banquet (by ticket)7:00 pm Keynote Address8:00 pm Keynote Address - Napoleon Chagnon University of Santa Barbara "Warfare Among the Yanomamo" 8:00 pm APLS 2005 (Saturday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progsat.htm SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2005 Registration 8:00 am - 8:00 pm Exhibits 8:00 am - 5:30 pm Saturday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables C-5 GENETIC ENGINEERING AND CONCEPTS OF HUMAN NATURE Chair: Robert Wachbroit, University of Maryland Presenters: Genetic Engineering and Three Concepts of Human Nature Robert Wachbroit, University of Maryland Genetic Engineering and the Human Place in Nature Mark Sagoff, University of Maryland Genetic Enhancement of Core Characteristics David Degrazia, George Washington University Genetic Engineering and Emotional Capacity David Wasserman, University of Maryland Genetic Engineering and the Distinctively Human Samual Kerstein, University of Maryland D-7 THE CONTINUING ETHICAL AND POLITICAL RELEVANCE OF THE ELMONT REPORT Chair: Stanley Rothman, Smith College Organizer: Edward Sankowski, University of Oklahoma Presenters: The Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects: Implications for Academic Institutions Richard Haubner, College of Mount St. Joseph The Continuing Ethical and Political Relevance of the Belmont Report Edward Sankowski, University of Oklahoma IRB Mission Drift: The "Common Rule," Social Science Education, and the "Nanny State" Ronald F. White, College of Mount St. Joseph E-9 DEFORESTATION AND POLLUTION IN THE AMAZON AND MATA ATLANTICA Chair: Eduardo Lustoza, Prof Meio Ambiente Universidade Santa Cecilia, Brasil Presenters: Mata Atlantica - Deforestation , Pollution, and Afforestation Eduardo Lustoza, Prof Meio Ambiente, Universidade Santa Cecilia, Brasil Pollution , deforestation and Human uses of the Amazon Leonardo Sampaio, Prof Meio Ambiente, Universidade Santa Cecilia, Brasil Costa Rica's Biodiversity: Conservation or Destruction William Furlong, Utah State University Discussant: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri F-2 DARWINISM, CREATIONISM, AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN Chair: Donald Tannenbaum, Gettysburg College Presenters: Believers and Disbelievers in Evolution Science Allan Mazur, Syracuse University Individual Differences and Belief in Evolution Chris Niebauer, Slippery Rock University Learning about Evolution E. Margaret Evans, University of Michigan Intelligent Design and other glad tidings for K-12 Paul Gross, University of Virginia Saturday, 10:15-10:45 am - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Saturday, 10:45-12:30 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-7 TRADITIONAL AND BIOPOLITICAL REFLECTIONS ON TERRORISM Chair: Bradley Thayer, Missouri State University Presenters: Force Protection and Terrorism Nicholas Drummond, Missouri State University Hezbollah's Terrorism in Lebanon Nicholas Gicinto, Missouri State University Talking to Terrorists: The Role of Negotiation in the War on Terror Alan Steinberg, Missouri State University D-8 CONTROVERSIES IN LIFE AND DEATH Chair: Roberta Herzberg, Utah State University Presenters: Changes in Translation: Hospice from the UK to the US and to Russia Susan Behuniak, LeMoyne College Debating Death in a World of Limited Resources Roberta Herzberg, Utah State University Medical Marijuana and PAS in Federal Courts: How Raich v. Ashcroft Could End an End of Life Option Arthur Svenson, University of Redlands Pigs Don't Have Passports: Explaining Policy Design for Cross-Species Transplants in the United States and New Zealand Amy Lynn Fletcher, University of Canterbury E-10 WEAKNESSES IN EXISTING REGULATORY APPROACHES TO HUMAN HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT Chair: Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Presenters: Toxins and Behavior: Why Academic Refusal to Study Biopolitics Harms Public Policy Roger Masters, Dartmouth College Environmental Health Regulatory Process: The Need for a New Approach Stan Caress, University of West Georgia Innovative Strategies for Pollution Control Dan Fiorina, EPA Mercury Rising: Fetal Health and Toxic Politics Deirdre Condit, Virginia Commonwealth University L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia Commonwealth University J. Clifford Fox, Virginia Commonwealth University G-3 BIOSECURITY II Chair: Aleksandr Rabodzey, MIT Presenters: Universities and Academic Research in the Era of High Security Nancy D. Connell, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Brendan S. McCluskey, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey An Integrated Biodetection System Approach to Counter Biological Attack David Siegrist, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Impact of Infectious Diseases on National Security Decisionmaking Bridget Lange, University of Canterbury Saturday, 12:30 - 2:00 pm - Lunch Saturday, 2:00 - 3:00 pm - Plenary Lecture Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland "Assessing Biological Weapons and the Bioterrorism Threat" Saturday, 3:00-3:15 pm - Coffee Break Complimentary coffee, tea, and soft drinks Saturday, 3:15-5:00 pm - Panels and Roundtables B-8 BIOLOGY AND GROUP COOPERATION & CONFLICT Chair: Rob Sprinkle, University of Maryland Presenters: A Century Against The Cults Rob Sprinkle, University of Maryland Testing Alternative Explanations for Enduring Rivalries William Long, Georgia Institute of Technology Evolution of Altruism/group Solidarity through Warfare John Orbell, University of Oregon Oleg Smirnov, University of Oregon Douglas Kennett, University of Oregon Holly Arrow, University of Oregon The benefits of reciprocity in a sequential public goods game: Field evidence and a new model Tim Johnson, Max Planck Institute, Berlin B-9 DARWINIAN ANTHROPOLOGY: HUMAN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION Chair: Wayne E. Allen, Minnesota State University Presenters: Involution: A new theory of social change for the biological, behavioral, and social sciences Wayne E. Allen, Minnesota State University Darwinian evolutionary theory and social behavior: Analysis of cooperative networks among indigenous Siberian minorities in the Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, Russia John P. Ziker, Max Planek Institute for Social Anthropology A New State System Paradigm Luai Bashir, Minnesota State University Oil and Involution Louis Schwartzkopf, Minnesota State University Discussant: Napoleon Chagnon, University of California - Santa Barbara D-9 CURRENT CONTROVERSIES IN DEATH AND DYING Chair: John Strate, Indiana University, Fort Wayne Presenters: Challenging the Consensus of PVS: The Schiavo Case and Posturing to Public Attention John Strate, Indiana University, Fort Wayne David Prentice, Family Research Council Andrew Imparato Assocation of People with Disabilities In the Aftermath: Burdens of Proof in the Right to Die Fred Frohock, University of Miami E-11 MAKING ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC Chair: Sean Moulton, OMB Watch Informed Communities: Collaborative Training Programs to Advance Health and Environmental Justice Terry Greene, JSI Information and Involvement in Decisions Concerning Contaminated Sites Judith Bradbury, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Occupational Health and Access to Chemical Testing Information Brent Gibson, Dr., USHUS Providing Time-relevant, Local Environmental Monitoring Information Denice Shaw, EPA Discussant: Sean Moulton, OMB Watch Saturday, 5:15-6:00 pm - APLS Business Meeting APLS Business Meeting (for all members) APLS 2005 (Sunday) http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/progsun.htm SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2005 Registration8:00 am - 10:30 am Sunday, 8:30 - 10:15 am - Panels and Roundtables B-10 NEUROSCIENCES, PHYSIOLOGY, AND POLITICS Chair: Steven A. Peterson, Pennsylvania State, Harrisburg Presenter: Decision- Making, the Brain, and Evolution Steven A. Peterson, Pennsylvania State, Harrisburg Politicians under the Microscope: Microanalysis of the First Bush-Kerry Debate Patrick A. Stewart, Arkansas State University Jonathan "Chad" Moseley, Arkansas State University Communicational States Approached via Across-Species Comparisons Russell Gardner Adult Neuroplasticity and Social Science Theory William Long, Georgia Institute of Technology D-10 EMERGING GLOBAL DISEASES TBA F-3 BIOPOLITICS AND POLITICAL THEORY Chair: Patrick Peritore, University of Missouri Holistic Darwinism: The New Evolutionary Paradigm Peter Corning, Institute for the Study of Complex Systems Natural Right and Evolution: Reclaiming the Natural Right of Reproduction Lauren Hall, Northern Illinois University Moral and Political Philosophy James Rutherford Animal Personhood: Some Lockean Considerations Edward Fried, Rice University -------------- Directory of Participants http://www.hass.usu.edu/~apls/2005conference/particdir.htm Aiken, Nancy E. 14 Allen, Wayne E. 19 Anaya, Liliana B-2 Aranson, Debra D-2 Arnhart, Larry A-2 , C-2 Arrow, Holly 19 Artim, Bruce D-2 Bailey, Ron C-2 Baker, Amy A-1 Barrus, Roger C-2 Bashir, Luai 20 Behuniak, Susan 18 Bhat, Anjali E-1 Billings, Linda 15 A-1 , A-6 , E-5 Birner, Regina E-1 Borcheldt, Rick 5, 15 A-6 Bradbury, Judith 20 Brandon, William P. D-1 Bucy, Erik B-4 Burns, Wil A-5 Cannavo, Peter E-7 Cantir, Cristian B-4 Cress, Stan 18 Chagnon, Napoleon 1, 15, 20 Keynote, Chelen, John D-3 Condit, Deirdre 18 Conko, Gregory A-5 Connell, Nancy D. 18 Corning, Peter A. 21 H-1 Cotrill, Charlotte E-2 Daly, Patrick D-3 Degaris, Hugo 5 A-4 Degrazia, David 16 Dibrell, William B-5 Dickens, Amanda D-5 Drummond, Nicholas 17 Evans, E. Margaret 17 Fetzer, James H. A-3 Fiorina, Dan 18 Fletcher, Amy Lynn 18, 19 D-5 Forrest, Barbara 4 A-2 Fox, J. Clifford 18 Frederick, Brian D-4 Fried, Edward 21 Frohock, Fred 20 Fumuresu, Alin B-1 Funke, Odelia D-3 Furlong, William 17 Gallo, Dan E-6 Gardner, Russell 21 Garvey, Kilian B-3 , H-2 Gibbs, Lois E-2 Gibson, Brent 20 Gicinto, Nicholas 17 Greene, Terry 20 Gross, Paul 17 Guon, Jennifer B-3 Hall, Lauren 21 B-1 Haubner, Richard 16 H-2 Herzberg, Roberta 18 D-1 Horton, Matthew D. G-1 Houghton, Peter C-3 Hughes, James C-3 Imparato, Andrew 20 Johansen, Lene D-5 Johnson, Tim 19 Karnein, Anja D-4 Kennett, Douglas 19 Kerstein, Samual 16 Kim, Sungmoon B-2 Kirkland-Gaymer, Rachel B-2 Koblentz, Gregory D. 15 Kofinas, Gary 7 Lange, Bridget 19 Lawler, Peter D-2 Lee, Myong Hwa 14 C-1 Leitenberg, Milton 1, 15, 19 Levitt, Miriam 7 D-1 Levy, Barry 1, D-6 Liesen, Laurette 3 Long, William 19, 21 Lovecraft, Amy E-1 , E-3 , E-7 Lustoza, Eduardo 17 Manson, Neil A. A-2 , A-5 , D-3 Mara, Cynthia D-1 Masters, Roger H-1 , E-6 Mazur, Allan 17 McCluskey, Brendan S. 18 McLean, William P. C-1 Meek, Chanda E-1 Menugue, Angus 15 Meyer, Michael A. E-5 Miller, Sonia E. 14 Mooney, Chris 15 A-2 , A-6 , Moran, Francis 15 Moseley, Jonathan "Chad" 21 Moulton, Sean 20 Nardi, Dario A-3 Needleman, Herbert E-6 Niebauer, Chris 17 Noonan, Norine E-5 Orbell, John 19 H-1 Peritore, Patrick 17, 21 A-5 Peterson, Steven A. 21 B-5 Porcaro, John J. 15 Power, Laura A-3 Prentice, David 20 Priest, Susanna 15 Pursell, Tim E-3 Rabodzey, Aleksandr 3, 15 Race, Margaret A-1 Rivera, William M. C-1 Roberts, Phil Jr. 6, B-1 , B-4 Rothman, Stanley 16 Rummel, John A-1 , E-5 Rutherford, James 21 Sagoff, Mark 16 Salerno, Renolds M 15 Sampaio, Leonardo 17 Sankowski, Edward 16 D-5 Sardamov, Ivelin B-1 Schell, Charlotte 15 Schwartzkopf, Louis 20 Shafie, David E-7 Sharmer, Laurel E-6 Shaw, Denice 20 Sherlock, Richard 15, 20 A-4 , H-1 , C-3 , Sidel, Victor D-6 Siegrist, David 19 Silbergeld, Ellen E-6 Smirnov, Olg 19 Somit, Albert B-5 Sprinkle, Rob 19 Stabekis, Perry 4 Steinberg, Alan 18 Stewart, Patrick A. 7, 21 C-1 Strate, John 20 Sussman, Glen E-4 Svenson, Arthur 18 Swain, Kristen Alley A-6 , G-1 , D-5 , D-6 Tannenbaum, Donald 17 Terry, Sharon E-2 Thayer, Bradley 14, 17 Tingley, Dustin C-1 Tweed, Michael B-5 Urguhart, Ian E-3 Vanderheiden, Steve E-7 Vastag, Brian A-6 Vogel, Kathleen M. 15 Wachbroit, Robert 16 Ward, Veronica 14 Wasserman, David 16 Wearst, Spencer E-4 Weeks, Elizabeth G-1 White, Ronald F. 16 D-4 Wilder, L. Douglas 18 Ziker, John P. 20 From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jun 28 03:24:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:24:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Link to a real time monitor of global brain Message-ID: <01C57B56.303A53E0.shovland@mindspring.com> The "eggs" at Princeton (Dean Radin) http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:41:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:41:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time Message-ID: Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/science/28time.html ["A Trip Forward in Time. Your Travel Agent: Einstein." appended.] By DENNIS OVERBYE There was a conference for time travelers at M.I.T. earlier this spring. I'm still hoping to attend, and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists who would like to eliminate the possibility of your creating a paradox by going back in time and killing your grandfather. "No law of physics that we know of prohibits time travel," said Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist. Dr. Gott, author of the 2001 book "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time," is one of a small breed of physicists who spend part of their time (and their research grants) thinking about wormholes in space, warp drives and other cosmic constructions, that "absurdly advanced civilizations" might use to travel through time. It's not that physicists expect to be able to go back and attend Woodstock, drop by the Bern patent office to take Einstein to lunch, see the dinosaurs or investigate John F. Kennedy's assassination. In fact, they're pretty sure those are absurd dreams and are all bemused by the fact that they can't say why. They hope such extreme theorizing could reveal new features, gaps or perhaps paradoxes or contradictions in the foundations of Physics As We Know It and point the way to new ideas. "Traversable wormholes are primarily useful as a 'gedanken experiment' to explore the limitations of general relativity," said Dr. Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon. If general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity and space-time, allows for the ability to go back in time and kill your grandfather, asks Dr. David Z. Albert, a physicist and philosopher at Columbia University, "how can it be a logically consistent theory?" In his recent book "The Universe in a Nutshell," Dr. Stephen W. Hawking wrote, "Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible." When it comes to the nature of time, physicists are pretty much at as much of a loss as the rest of us who seem hopelessly swept along in its current. The mystery of time is connected with some of the thorniest questions in physics, as well as in philosophy, like why we remember the past but not the future, how causality works, why you can't stir cream out of your coffee or put perfume back in a bottle. But some theorists think that has to change. Just as Einstein needed to come up with a new concept of time in order to invent relativity 100 years ago this year, so physicists say that a new insight into time - or beyond it - may be required to crack profound problems like how the universe began, what happens at the center of black hole or how to marry relativity and quantum theory into a unified theory of nature. Space and time, some quantum gravity theorists say, are most likely a sort of illusion - or less sensationally, an "approximation" - doomed to be replaced by some more fundamental idea. If only they could think of what that idea is. "By convention there is space, by convention time," Dr. David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and a winner of last year's Nobel Prize, said recently, paraphrasing the Greek philosopher Democritus, "in reality there is. ... ?" his voice trailing off. The issues raised by time travel are connected to these questions, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and author of the book "The Physics of Star Trek," said. "The minute you have time travel you have paradoxes," Dr. Krauss said, explaining that if you can go backward in time you confront fundamental issues like cause and effect or the meaning of your own identity if there can be two of you at once. A refined theory of time would have to explain "how a sensible world could result from something so nonsensical." "That's why time travel is philosophically important and has captivated the public, who care about these paradoxes," he said. At stake, said Dr. Albert, the philosopher and author of his own time book, "Time and Chance," is "what kind of view science presents us of the world." "Physics gets time wrong, and time is the most familiar thing there is," Dr. Albert said. We all feel time passing in our bones, but ever since Galileo and Newton in the 17th century began using time as a coordinate to help chart the motion of cannonballs, time - for physicists - has simply been an "addendum in the address of an event," Dr. Albert said. "There is a feeling in philosophy," he said, "that this picture leaves no room for locutions about flow and the passage of time we experience." Then there is what physicists call "the arrow of time" problem. The fundamental laws of physics don't care what direction time goes, he pointed out. Run a movie of billiard balls colliding or planets swirling around in their orbits in reverse and nothing will look weird, but if you run a movie of a baseball game in reverse people will laugh. Einstein once termed the distinction between past, present and future "a stubborn illusion," but as Dr. Albert said, "It's hard to imagine something more basic than the distinction between the future and the past." The Birth of an Illusion Space and time, the philosopher Augustine famously argued 1,700 years ago, are creatures of existence and the universe, born with it, not separately standing features of eternity. That is the same answer that Einstein came up with in 1915 when he finished his general theory of relativity. That theory explains how matter and energy warp the geometry of space and time to produce the effect we call gravity. It also predicted, somewhat to Einstein's dismay, the expansion of the universe, which forms the basis of modern cosmology. But Einstein's theory is incompatible, mathematically and philosophically, with the quirky rules known as quantum mechanics that describe the microscopic randomness that fills this elegantly curved expanding space-time. According to relativity, nature is continuous, smooth and orderly, in quantum theory the world is jumpy and discontinuous. The sacred laws of physics are correct only on average. Until the pair are married in a theory of so-called quantum gravity, physics has no way to investigate what happens in the Big Bang, when the entire universe is so small that quantum rules apply. Looked at closely enough, with an imaginary microscope that could see lengths down to 10^-33 centimeters, quantum gravity theorists say, even ordinary space and time dissolve into a boiling mess that Dr. John Wheeler, the Princeton physicist and phrasemaker, called "space-time foam." At that level of reality, which exists underneath all our fingernails, clocks and rulers as we know them cease to exist. "Everything we know about stops at the Big Bang, the Big Crunch," said Dr. Raphael Bousso, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. What happens to time at this level of reality is anybody's guess. Dr. Lee Smolin, of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, said, "There are several different, very different, ideas about time in quantum gravity." One view, he explained, is that space and time "emerge" from this foamy substrate when it is viewed at larger scales. Another is that space emerges but that time or some deeper relations of cause and effect are fundamental. Dr. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara of the Perimeter Institute described time as, if not an illusion, an approximation, "a bit like the way you can see the river flow in a smooth way even though the individual water molecules follow much more complicated patterns." She added in an e-mail message: "I have always thought that there has to be some basic fundamental notion of causality, even if it doesn't look at all like the one of the space-time we live in. I can't see how to get causality from something that has none; neither have I ever seen anyone succeed in doing so." Physicists say they have a sense of how space can emerge, because of recent advances in string theory, the putative theory of everything, which posits that nature is composed of wriggling little strings. Calculations by Dr. Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and by others have shown how an extra dimension of space can pop mathematically into being almost like magic, the way the illusion of three dimensions can appear in the holograms on bank cards. But string theorists admit they don't know how to do the same thing for time yet. "Time is really difficult," said Dr. Cumrun Vafa, a Harvard string theorist. "We have not made much progress on the emergence of time. Once we make progress we will make progress on the early universe, on high energy physics and black holes. "We are out on a limb trying to understand what's going on here." Dr. Bousso, an expert on holographic theories of space-time, said that in general relativity time gets no special treatment. He said he expected both time and space to break down, adding, "We really just don't know what's going to go." "There is a lot of mysticism about time," Dr. Bousso said. "Time is what a clock measures. What a clock measures is more interesting than you thought." A Brief History of Time Travel "If we could go faster than light, we could telegraph into the past," Einstein once said. According to the theory of special relativity - which he proposed in 1905 and which ushered E=mc? into the world and set the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit - such telegraphy is not possible, and there is no way of getting back to the past. But, somewhat to Einstein's surprise, in general relativity it is possible to beat a light beam across space. That theory, which Einstein finished in 1916, said that gravity resulted from the warping of space-time geometry by matter and energy, the way a bowling ball sags a trampoline. And all this warping and sagging can create shortcuts through space-time. In 1949, Kurt G?del, the Austrian logician and mathematician then at the Institute for Advanced Study, showed that in a rotating universe, according to general relativity, there were paths, technically called "closed timelike curves," you could follow to get back to the past. But it has turned out that the universe does not rotate very much, if at all. Most scientists, including Einstein, resisted the idea of time travel until 1988 when Dr. Kip Thorne, a gravitational theorist at the California Institute of Technology, and two of his graduate students, Dr. Mike Morris and Dr. Ulvi Yurtsever, published a pair of papers concluding that the laws of physics may allow you to use wormholes, which are like tunnels through space connecting distant points, to travel in time. These holes, technically called Einstein-Rosen bridges, have long been predicted as a solution of Einstein's equations. But physicists dismissed them because calculations predicted that gravity would slam them shut. Dr. Thorne was inspired by his friend, the late Cornell scientist and author Carl Sagan, who was writing the science fiction novel "Contact," later made into a Jodie Foster movie, and was looking for a way to send his heroine, Eleanor Arroway, across the galaxy. Dr. Thorne and his colleagues imagined that such holes could be kept from collapsing and thus maintained to be used as a galactic subway, at least in principle, by threading them with something called Casimir energy, (after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir) which is a sort of quantum suction produced when two parallel metal plates are placed very close together. According to Einstein's equations, this suction, or negative pressure, would have an antigravitational effect, keeping the walls of the wormhole apart. If one mouth of a wormhole was then grabbed by a spaceship and taken on a high-speed trip, according to relativity, its clock would run slow compared with the other end of the wormhole. So the wormhole would become a portal between two different times as well as places. Dr. Thorne later said he had been afraid that the words "time travel" in the second paper's title would create a sensation and tarnish his students' careers, and he had forbidden Caltech to publicize it. In fact, their paper made time travel safe for serious scientists, and other theorists, including Dr. Frank Tipler of Tulane University and Dr. Hawking, jumped in. In 1991, for example, Dr. Gott of Princeton showed how another shortcut through space-time could be manufactured using pairs cosmic strings - dense tubes of primordial energy not to be confused with the strings of string theory, left over by the Big Bang in some theories of cosmic evolution - rushing past each other and warping space around them. Harnessing the Dark Side These speculations have been bolstered (not that time machine architects lack imagination) with the unsettling discovery that the universe may be full of exactly the kind of antigravity stuff needed to grow and prop open a wormhole. Some mysterious "dark energy," astronomers say, is pushing space apart and accelerating the expansion of the universe. The race is on to measure this energy precisely and find out what it is. Among the weirder and more disturbing explanations for this cosmic riddle is something called phantom energy, which is so virulently antigravitational that it would eventually rip planets, people and even atoms apart, ending everything. As it happens this bizarre stuff would also be perfect for propping open a wormhole, Dr. Lobo of Lisbon recently pointed out. "This certainly is an interesting prospect for an absurdly advanced civilization, as phantom energy probably comprises of 70 percent of the universe," Dr. Lobo wrote in an e-mail message. Dr. Sergey Sushkov of Kazan State Pedagogical University in Russia has made the same suggestion. In a paper posted on the physics Web site [3]arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0502099, Dr. Lobo suggested that as the universe was stretched and stretched under phantom energy, microscopic holes in the quantum "space-time foam" might grow to macroscopic usable size. "One could also imagine an advanced civilization mining the cosmic fluid for phantom energy necessary to construct and sustain a traversable wormhole," he wrote. Such a wormhole he even speculated, could be used to escape the "big rip" in which a phantom energy universe will eventually end. But nobody knows if phantom, or exotic, energy is really allowed in nature and most physicists would be happy if it is not. Its existence would lead to paradoxes, like negative kinetic energy, where something could lose energy by speeding up, violating what is left of common sense in modern physics. Dr. Krauss said, "From the point of view of realistic theories, phantom energy just doesn't exist." But such exotic stuff is not required for all time machines, Dr. Gott's cosmic strings for example. In another recent paper, Dr. Amos Ori of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa describes a time machine that he claims can be built by moving around colossal masses to warp the space inside a doughnut of regular empty space into a particular configuration, something an advanced civilization may be able to do in 100 or 200 years. The space inside the doughnut, he said, will then naturally evolve according to Einstein's laws into a time machine. Dr. Ori admits that he doesn't know if his machine would be stable. Time machines could blow up as soon as you turned them on, say some physicists, including Dr. Hawking, who has proposed what he calls the "chronology protection" conjecture to keep the past safe for historians. Random microscopic fluctuations in matter and energy and space itself, they argue, would be amplified by going around and around boundaries of the machine or the wormhole, and finally blow it up. Dr. Gott and his colleague Dr. Li-Xin Li have shown that there are at least some cases where the time machine does not blow up. But until gravity marries quantum theory, they admit, nobody knows how to predict exactly what the fluctuations would be. "That's why we really need to know about quantum gravity," Dr. Gott said. "That's one reason people are interested in time travel." Saving Grandpa But what about killing your grandfather? In a well-ordered universe, that would be a paradox and shouldn't be able to happen, everybody agrees. That was the challenge that Dr. Joe Polchinski, now at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., issued to Dr. Thorne and his colleagues after their paper was published. Being a good physicist, Dr. Polchinski phrased the problem in terms of billiard balls. A billiard ball, he suggested, could roll into one end of a time machine, come back out the other end a little earlier and collide with its earlier self, thereby preventing itself from entering the time machine to begin with. Dr. Thorne and two students, Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer, concluded after months of mathematical struggle that there was a logically consistent solution to the billiard matricide that Dr. Polchinski had set up. The ball would come back out of the time machine and deliver only a glancing blow to itself, altering its path just enough so that it would still hit the time machine. When it came back out, it would be aimed just so as to deflect itself rather than hitting full on. And so it would go like a movie with a circular plot. In other words, it's not a paradox if you go back in time and save your grandfather. And, added Dr. Polchinski, "It's not a paradox if you try to shoot your grandfather and miss." "The conclusion is somewhat satisfying," Dr. Thorne wrote in his book "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy." "It suggests that the laws of physics might accommodate themselves to time machines fairly nicely." Dr. Polchinski agreed. "I was making the point that the grandfather paradox had nothing to do with free will, and they found a nifty resolution," he said in an e-mail message, adding, nevertheless, that his intuition still tells him time machines would lead to paradoxes. Dr. Bousso said, "Most of us would consider it quite satisfactory if the laws of quantum gravity forbid time travel." References 3. http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0502099 ----------- A Trip Forward in Time. Your Travel Agent: Einstein. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/science/28cheap.html By DENNIS OVERBYE When H. G. Wells published his epochal novel "The Time Machine" in 1895, time travel was outlawed by the laws of physics. But that was Newtonian physics, and everything changed 10 years later with Einstein's theory of relativity. That theory - which ushered in the age of E=mc? and set the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, as the cosmic speed limit - allows for time travel to the future, physicists say. Here's how: One consequence of Einstein's theory is that a clock in motion will always appear to run slowly compared with one at rest (and since all motion is relative the clock at rest will appear to go slowly from the vantage of the one moving). This leads to the famous "twin paradox" in which one twin is rocketed at high speed across the galaxy and back home. Even at a velocity close to the speed of light, the journey would take tens of thousands of years from the vantage point of Earth, but because of his high relative motion the astronaut would age more slowly than he or she would than on Earth, and would return home only a few years older. His twin would be long dead. In effect the astronaut would have traveled into the future, said Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist. The slowing clock prediction has been confirmed by flying atomic clocks around Earth on jets. "If you take a plane east around the world you will come back 59 nanoseconds younger than if you had stayed home," Dr. Gott said. The record holder for this type of travel, he said, is the Russian astronaut Sergei Krikalev, who came back from 748 days orbiting in the Mir space station a full one-fiftieth of a second younger than he would have if he had stayed on the ground. In his 1905 paper Einstein predicted that because of the rotation speed of Earth, clocks would also run slower at the Equator than the poles, but that turned out to be wrong. In a recent article in Physics Today, Dr. Alex Harvey of Queens College in New York and Dr. Engelbert Schucking of New York University pointed out that Einstein had not taken account of an effect of general relativity, then 10 years in the future, which says that clocks run slower the more deeply in a gravitational field they sit. The rotation of Earth causes it to bulge at the Equator, lifting clocks there and making them run slightly faster relative to those at the poles by just enough to compensate for the extra speed. So the two effects just cancel out, and clocks at the Equator and poles run at the same speed. "It's a deep coincidence," Dr. Gott said. The two effects could be combined for an even deeper trip into the future by going to Mercury, which is both deep in the gravitational field of the Sun and also zooming around it at high speed. A 30-year stay there, Dr. Gott said, would save 22 seconds of an astronaut's life. A few seconds might not sound like much of a trip in time, but Dr. Gott points out that astronauts haven't been that far into space, either. The Moon, humanity's most distant destination so far, is only about 1.3 light-seconds away, about like hopping over the Atlantic, he said. "The astronauts are the Lindberghs of time travel," Dr. Gott said. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:41:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:41:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Andy Lock: Is Evolution Progressive? Message-ID: Andy Lock: Is Evolution Progressive? From: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com On Behalf Of Andy Lock Sent: 2005 June 24, Friday 23:05 To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com Put all those Victorian lunacies about 'progress' aside: of course evolution is progressive! The first self-replicating 'organisms' all used non-organic energy sources to maintain their organisational properties. Having thus constructed a conserved site of energy, that energy becomes a possible source for other possible organisms to maintain their organisation with. To do that requires the construction of a means of locomotion. Locomotory organisms, once evolved, constitute inherently new sources of organisition-sustaining energy, but to capture it requires something beyond trial-and-error guided locomotion: it requires perception as a vicarious at-a-distance system to guide locomotion to a moving target (which is not done well by trial-and-error, tactilely-controlled, locomotion). Perceptually-guided locomotion can be further improved if learning mechanisms are added by evolution to an individual's repertoire of skills. And so on: as evolution throws up new organisms to take account of the situation existing at one point in time, it creates new possibilities that can be exploited. Exploitation is obviously not guaranteed, but implied as more-or-less possible. Take the last stage in this process. In my view, non-human higher primates have some inner mental life that can be described as their having intentional states. But non-human higher primates appear, as individuals, to be almost totally oblivious to this property of their conspecifics, and consequently cannot take it into account as a fact of the world they live in so as to control their own actions. Humans have evolved so as to take this fact of life into account: and people wouldn't have 'mindreading skills' if their environment only consisted of evolved organisms that didn't have 'minds'. And that is evolutionary progress: adapting to a world in which that world's contents have been painstakingly constructed to take account of an ever-so-slightly more complex collection of abilities that were evolved to cope with the slightly simpler set of facts those solutions were adaptations to. The first predators didn't require 'mindreading abilities', just perceptually-guided locomotory abilities. Not surprisingly, it took all of evolutionary time to make 'mindreading' a) worth having; b) likely; but c) not inevitable. I, for one, am glad it happened :-) Andy From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:41:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:41:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: What Other People Say May Change What You See Message-ID: What Other People Say May Change What You See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/science/28brai.html?pagewanted=print By [3]SANDRA BLAKESLEE A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity. The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch. In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card. Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly. But Dr. Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes these confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer. Dr. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time. Dr. Asch, who died in 1996, always wondered about the findings. Did the people who gave in to group do so knowing that their answers was wrong? Or did the social pressure actually change their perceptions? The new study tried to find an answer by using functional M.R.I. scanners that can peer into the working brain, a technology not available to Dr. Asch. The researchers found that social conformity showed up in the brain as activity in regions that are entirely devoted to perception. But independence of judgment - standing up for one's beliefs - showed up as activity in brain areas involved in emotion, the study found, suggesting that there is a cost for going against the group. "We like to think that seeing is believing," said Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta who led the study. But the study's findings, he said, show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe. The research was published June 22 in the online edition of Biological Psychiatry. "It's a very important piece of work," said Dr. Dan Ariely, a professor of management and decision making at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "It suggests that information from other people may color our perception at a very deep level." Dr. Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford and an expert on perception, called the study "extremely clever." "It had all the right controls and is a new contribution, the first to look at social conformity inside a brain magnet," he said. Functional M.R.I. scanners detect which brain regions are active when people carry out various mental tasks. The new study involved 32 volunteers who agreed to participate in a study on perception. "We told them others will be doing the same task, but you're the only one who will be in the scanner," Dr. Berns said. The subjects were asked to mentally rotate images of three-dimensional objects to determine if the objects were the same or different. In the waiting room, the subjects met four people who they thought were other volunteers, but who in fact were actors, ready to fake their responses. To encourage cohesiveness in the group, the participant and the four actors played practice rounds on laptop computers, took pictures of one another and chatted. Then the participant went into the M.R.I. machine. The participant was told that the others would look at the objects first as a group and then decide if they were same or different. As planned, the actors gave unanimously wrong answers in some instances and unanimously correct answers in others. Mixed answers were sometimes thrown in to make the test more believable but they were not included in the analysis. Next, the participant was shown the answer given by the others and asked to judge the objects. Were they the same or different? The brain scanner captured a picture of the judgment process. In some trials, instead of being told that the other volunteers had given an answer, they were told that a computer had made the decision. Dr. Berns said this was done to make sure it was social pressure that was having an effect. As in Dr. Asch's experiments, many of the subjects caved in to group pressure. On average, Dr. Berns said, they went along with the group on wrong answers 41 percent of the time. The researchers had two hypotheses about what was happening. If social conformity was a result of conscious decision making, they reasoned, they should see changes in areas of the forebrain that deal with monitoring conflicts, planning and other higher-order mental activities. But if the subjects' social conformity stemmed from changes in perception, there should be changes in posterior brain areas dedicated to vision and spatial perception. In fact, the researchers found that when people went along with the group on wrong answers, activity increased in the right intraparietal sulcus, an area devoted to spatial awareness, Dr. Berns said. There was no activity in brain areas that make conscious decisions, the researchers found. But the people who made independent judgments that went against the group showed activation in the right amygdala and right caudate nucleus - regions associated with emotional salience. The implications of the study's findings are huge, Dr. Berns said. In many areas of society - elections, for example, or jury trials - the accepted way to resolve conflicts between an individual and a group is to invoke the "rule of the majority." There is a sound reason for this: A majority represents the collective wisdom of many people, rather than the judgment of a single person. But the superiority of the group can disappear when the group exerts pressure on individuals, Dr. Berns said. The unpleasantness of standing alone can make a majority opinion seem more appealing than sticking to one's own beliefs. If other people's views can actually affect how someone perceives the external world, then truth itself is called into question. There is no way out of this problem, Dr. Ariely said. But if people are made aware of their vulnerability, they may be able to avoid conforming to social pressure when it is not in their self-interest. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:42:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:42:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Anthropologists Rescind Report That Examined Allegations of Misconduct by Researchers in the Amazon Message-ID: Anthropologists Rescind Report That Examined Allegations of Misconduct by Researchers in the Amazon News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.28 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/06/2005062801n.htm By DAVID GLENN The American Anthropological Association has voted to rescind its acceptance of a 2002 committee report that reviewed allegations that two prominent American anthropologists had committed serious misconduct in Brazil and Venezuela between 1967 and 1990. The reversal is the latest twist in a complex dispute that had been simmering for decades but exploded into prominence in 2000, with the publication of Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (W.W. Norton), by the freelance reporter Patrick Tierney ([68]The Chronicle, September 29, 2000). In his book, Mr. Tierney charged that Napoleon A. Chagnon, who is now a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the late James V. Neel, a longtime professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, had badly mistreated an indigenous group, known as the Yanomami, in the upper Amazon. Among other things, Mr. Tierney asserted that during a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami, Mr. Neel's research was driven by scientific curiosity rather than sound medical practice and that dozens of indigenous people had needlessly died. (In prepublication galleys, Mr. Tierney even suggested that Mr. Neel had spread measles himself by administering a certain vaccine.) Mr. Tierney also charged that Mr. Chagnon had tacitly encouraged violence among the Yanomami and that he had staged violent scenes in several famous ethnographic films. Mr. Tierney's book received a huge amount of publicity, and leaders of the anthropology association felt a need to respond. In 2001 they appointed a small committee, known as the El Dorado Task Force, that was instructed to assess the issues raised by the controversy and to recommend ways to improve anthropologists' practices in the field. The task force was dogged by its own controversies. Critics complained that two of its members had prejudged the case by publicly criticizing Mr. Chagnon's conduct. Another member, Raymond Hames, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, resigned from the committee because he believed that his past professional association with Mr. Chagnon raised the appearance of a conflict of interest. The low point may have come in November 2001, when the anthropology association released a preliminary report by the committee. Two of its six members promptly objected, saying that the report contained material that they had neither read nor approved ([69]The Chronicle, December 3, 2001). At the association's annual meeting that month, several scholars complained that the report appeared to ignore certain serious allegations in Mr. Tierney's book. The committee's [70]final report was completed in May 2002 and released to the public two months later. Like other investigative bodies, the committee found that Mr. Tierney's most sensational allegation -- that Mr. Neel had acted negligently during the measles epidemic -- was false. The report found merit in several of Mr. Tierney's other charges, however. The committee encouraged the association to take steps to improve scholars' ethics in the field and the discipline's relationship with indigenous people ([71]The Chronicle, July 2, 2002). The final report came under immediate and heavy criticism from several scholars. Chief among them were Thomas A. Gregor, a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and Daniel R. Gross, a staff researcher at the World Bank. Mr. Gregor and Mr. Gross charged that the committee's report amounted to a formal inquiry into Mr. Chagnon's and Mr. Neel's behavior, and that, as such, it violated a 1998 resolution in which the association vowed that it would not adjudicate charges of misconduct against its members. The critics also said that the panel's composition was biased, that Mr. Chagnon had not been afforded due process, and that the association's Web site had propagated (in "comments" pages associated with the task-force report) a new stream of lurid and unsubstantiated allegations against Mr. Chagnon. Last fall, Mr. Gregor and Mr. Gross offered a resolution to rescind the association's acceptance of the report. The association's members voted on the resolution by mail in April and May, and the results were announced late last week. The resolution passed, 846 to 338. The resolution requires the association to widely publicize the decision to rescind the report, and to explain the reasons for doing so. It also affirms that "the association will follow its own policies prohibiting ethics adjudications." Reached by telephone in Uruguay on Monday, Mr. Gross said that he was very pleased by the vote. "The association wasn't equipped to carry out adjudications," he said. "It didn't have the machinery, it didn't have the procedures in place. In any of these cases where grave accusations are made against a colleague, we need to have fair procedures in place." Mr. Gross suggested that the institutional review boards at Mr. Chagnon's and Mr. Neel's universities were better placed to assess Mr. Tierney's allegations. Mr. Gross said that he would have no objection if the association continued to post the report on its Web site. He simply wanted it to be made clear, he said, that the report is "the opinion of a group of people, and not the association's official position." Jane H. Hill, a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Arizona, who was the chair of the task force, said on Monday that she was very disappointed in the referendum's outcome. "We should have done more work to educate people about the meaning of this," she said. Ms. Hill said that she could have accepted a narrower resolution that affirmed the association's prohibition on adjudicating ethical allegations against its members. But she believes that Mr. Gregor and Mr. Gross's resolution, which rescinds the task force report in its entirety, goes much too far. The committee's recommendations for ethical reforms in anthropological fieldwork have now been struck from the record, she said. "I think this sends an appalling message," she said. "I'm afraid that the resolution will be read in Latin America by our anthropological colleagues and by politically aware indigenous people as a direct slap at the kinds of agency that they're trying to achieve with international science." Another scholar said the saga had much to teach the field. "I hope we can move on now to really get a good sense of where ethics lie in the discipline, and how we can evaluate anthropologists fairly and honorably," said Robert Borofsky, a professor of anthropology at Hawaii Pacific University and the author of Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It (University of California Press, 2005). Mr. Borofsky, who was not a member of the El Dorado Task Force, said he agreed with Mr. Gross that the committee's due-process procedures were inadequate. But he strongly disputed the notion that the association should not adjudicate cases of alleged misconduct among its members. He said that he and a colleague would like to revisit some of the material in the report. "We would like to find exact data -- criteria that everyone can agree on -- that we can use for evaluating the accusations against Chagnon," he said, "and decide what might be a fair and honorable way of evaluating Chagnon's actions." "We need to have procedures in place before the next storm, before the next time the media hounds us with another crisis," Mr. Borofsky said. "We cannot take an ostrich-like view of ethics." Mr. Borofsky also said that he was startled by how few people voted in the referendum. The association has more than 10,000 members. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [72]Anthropological Association's Report Criticizes Yanomami Researchers and Their Accuser (7/2/2002) * [73]Anthropologists Dealing With Yanomami Report Take Steps to Improve Work With Indigenous Groups (5/23/2002) * [74]Anthropologists Criticize Release of Preliminary Report on Controversy Over Research on the Yanomami (12/3/2001) * [75]Anthropology Panel Accepts Some Findings, Rejects Others in Controversial Book on Study of the Yanomami (11/27/2001) * [76]Academic Scandal in the Internet Age (1/12/2001) * [77]Allegations of Misconduct Roil Anthropologists (9/29/2000) Opinion: * [78]Charges of Wrongdoing by Anthropologists (8/9/2002) * [79]Anthropology and the Search for the Enemy Within (7/26/2002) References 68. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i05/05a01601.htm 69. http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/12/2001120303n.htm 70. http://www.aaanet.org/edtf/index.htm 71. http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/07/2002070202n.htm 72. http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/07/2002070202n.htm 73. http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/05/2002052302n.htm 74. http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/12/2001120303n.htm 75. http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/11/2001112701n.htm 76. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i18/18a01401.htm 77. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i05/05a01601.htm 78. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i48/48b01301.htm 79. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i46/46b01101.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:45:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:45:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] JEL: Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics Message-ID: Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics Authors: Camerer, Colin; Loewenstein, George; Prelec, Drazen Journal of Economic Literature, March 2005, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 9-64(56) [I can supply the PDF.] Abstract: Neuroeconomics uses knowledge about brain mechanisms to inform economic analysis, and roots economics in biology. It opens up the "black box" of the brain, much as organizational economics adds detail to the theory of the firm. Neuroscientists use many tools? including brain imaging, behavior of patients with localized brain lesions, animal behavior, and recording single neuron activity. The key insight for economics is that the brain is composed of multiple systems which interact. Controlled systems ("executive function") interrupt automatic ones. Emotions and cognition both guide decisions. Just as prices and allocations emerge from the interaction of two processes?supply and demand? individual decisions can be modeled as the result of two (or more) processes interacting. Indeed, "dual-process" models of this sort are better rooted in neuroscientific fact, and more empirically accurate, than single-process models (such as utility-maximization). We discuss how brain evidence complicates standard assumptions about basic preference, to include homeostasis and other kinds of state-dependence. We also discuss applications to intertemporal choice, risk and decision making, and game theory. Intertemporal choice appears to be domain-specific and heavily influenced by emotion. The simplified ?-d of quasi-hyperbolic discounting is supported by activation in distinct regions of limbic and cortical systems. In risky decision, imaging data tentatively support the idea that gains and losses are coded separately, and that ambiguity is distinct from risk, because it activates fear and discomfort regions. (Ironically, lesion patients who do not receive fear signals in prefrontal cortex are "rationally" neutral toward ambiguity.) Game theory studies show the effect of brain regions implicated in "theory of mind", correlates of strategic skill, and effects of hormones and other biological variables. Finally, economics can contribute to neuroscience because simple rational-choice models are useful for understanding highly-evolved behavior like motor actions that earn rewards, and Bayesian integration of sensorimotor information. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:45:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:45:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Courant (Hartford): (James Hughes) Better Than Human Message-ID: Better Than Human http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-transhuman.artjun26,0,5799885.story?page=2&coll=hc-headlines-life In The Future, We May Be Able To Artificially Improve On What God Gave Us By WILLIAM WEIR Courant Staff Writer June 26 2005 Sitting in his office at Trinity College, James Hughes explains his vision of a family gathering a couple of hundred years from now: One family member is a cyborg, another is outfitted with gills for living underwater. Yet another has been modified to live in a vacuum. "But they will all consider themselves as descendants of humanity," he says. At no point in the interview does Hughes peel off his face to reveal a set of wires and blinking lights. Nor does he roll up his sleeves to expose super-strong mechanical limbs. Bearded and bespectacled, he looks pretty much the way you might expect a professor of health policy to look. But as executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, he's one of the leaders in a movement that sees, in the next 50 years, a world where flesh fuses with mechanics and brains with circuitry. He recently published "Citizen Cyborg" (Westview Press, $26.95), a book that has made waves in academic circles and urges the need to prepare for this future. Transhumanism, a theory that has been kicking around for a few decades, envisions a "post-human" phase where technology will bring us beyond human capabilities. Intelligence-boosting brain chips, extended life spans and even immortality are all part of this vision. The movement has split into a number of factions, some of which take on a quasi-religious tone. The World Transhumanist Association, based in Willington, is one of the largest organizations and offers what Hughes calls a "more mature and academically respectable" take on the philosophy. According to its Transhumanist Declaration, the organization seeks "personal growth beyond our current biological limitations." It's an idea that covers a lot of ground. Walking canes and eyeglasses are a basic form of transhumanism. And then there's uploading one's mind and living as sheer consciousness on a computer. The organization was founded in 1997 by Nick Bostrom while he was a philosophy professor at Yale. Hughes says it now has more than 30 chapters worldwide, including recent additions in Somalia and Uganda. While transhumanism was long relegated to the scientific fringe, it has edged closer to the mainstream in the past few years. "I believe part of it is that these technological possibilities, five or 10 years ago, seemed like science fiction," says Bostrom, now director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. "Just the general progress that we've made makes it easier for people to see it happening." It's gained enough prominence to get the attention of some well-known critics. One of them, political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently nominated transhumanism as the "world's most dangerous idea" in Foreign Policy magazine. His fear is that enhanced versions of the human being will threaten the sense of equality that societies have been working toward for centuries. A lot of what the transhumanists talk about is timely, like genetic engineering, cloning and the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing technologies in sports. But they also talk about things like civil rights for artificially intelligent beings and animals whose learning and speaking abilities have been artificially enhanced. Much of which informs one of the main questions transhumanism tries to answer: What makes a person? Hughes says "human" no longer works as a definition. A person, as Hughes sees it, would be any being with a certain level of self-awareness and intelligence, including robots and talking animals. Then, we would need to determine what rights these enhanced creatures have in our society. "What are we going to say `I'm sorry, you're not human - you shouldn't have the right to go to school and get an advanced degree'?" he says. The image of gorillas sitting in a college classroom discussing the Bronte sisters might cause some to dismiss transhumanists as sci-fi fanatics whose imaginations have gotten the best of them. But take a look at what's happening now, Hughes says. He cites a slew of recent news articles: Scientists at IBM plan to build a computer model of a human brain; chips are being implanted in the brains of paralyzed people; MRI can be used to read thoughts. How many people 50 years ago, Hughes says, thought any of this was possible? "I don't know how anyone who pays attention can't see how quickly things change," he says. As an example of how quickly things change, Hughes points to a recent road race where runners objected to competing against an amputee with a mechanical leg. The prosthetic leg, they said, gave him an unfair advantage. "When the cyborg athlete can out-perform the non-disabled athletes, that's transhumanism," he says. Hughes describes himself as a "techno-optimist" and believes that human enhancements can lead to better lives. Others aren't so sure. Objections range from overpopulation to the possibility of hacking into people's brains. Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a think tank in Seattle best known for advocating "intelligent design" as the basis of evolution, worries about what a transhumanist future would mean for humanity. If you listen to Hughes and other transhumanists, he says, we are nothing but "so much meat on the hoof." "They're saying that being human does not have intrinsic value, that we have to earn our moral value by having requisite capacities, generally cognitive capacities," he says. And if merely being human loses its value, he says, legal distinctions will be made as to who and who doesn't deserve certain rights. Hughes calls Smith, Fukuyama and other critics "bioLuddites" - people who expect only the worst from science. You can't stop scientific advancement, he says. But you can make sure it is pursued responsibly. There have always been crime and suffering, he says, but as societies advance, the better they become at protecting their citizenry. He says a post-human future will follow this pattern and most likely increase personal freedom. "The tendency in our world is for an increased respect for personal rights," he says. "We will increasingly become masters of our own fate. We will be making decisions on what kind of person we want to be." Contact Bill Weir at bweir at courant.com. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 28 18:45:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:45:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired News: Laptops for Kids With No Power Message-ID: Wired News: Laptops for Kids With No Power http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67667,00.html [I've appended another story from the Discovery channel below. A minute of cranking can power a laptop for ten minutes and a minute of bicycling for 100 minutes. I recall that Ted Turner was planning to put satellites up that would cover all but Antarctica, also to get everyone access to educational materials. I presume this meant that anyone with an antenna could get on the World-Wide Web without further expenditures. There's plenty of free education content up there now, including what will eventually be all courses at MIT. [Will egalitarian visions come about at last, now that all have access to education?] By [21]Stephen Leahy 02:00 AM Jun. 06, 2005 PT Giving laptops to school kids has been a big hit in the United States, but an ambitious plan to sell millions of cheap notebooks to children in developing countries may be more challenging, experts warn. Many need electricity more than laptops. Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of [23]MIT's Media Lab, is planning to provide several hundred million kids in developing countries their own rugged, internet- and multimedia-capable [24]$100 laptops. But while Negroponte sees the notebooks as an educational tool that can help alleviate world poverty, others say it will take a lot more than a cheap computer. "It's not as simple as 'if you build it, they will use it,'" said [29]Andy Carvin, director of the [30]Digital Divide Network, a community of educators and activists working to include more people in the digital age. For the program to work, training and technical support has to exist -- as well as basic literacy and local content to meet local needs, he said. "Some kids could probably do well on their own, but the majority will need long-term support of some kind," he said. For the past three years, every seventh- and eighth-grader in Maine has been given a laptop. The [31]project has reportedly turned slackers into busy bees and now ninth-grade students will also get laptops this fall. States such as Michigan and New Mexico have similar programs, as do a number of school boards across the United States. But a big part of the success is properly trained teachers, technical support and specially designed educational content, said Carvin. Though the first $100 laptop has yet to be built -- work is scheduled to begin in September -- the project's three corporate partners, [32]Advanced Micro Devices, [33]Google and [34]News Corporation, have each pledged $2 million apiece and tech expertise. The first 6 million laptops are to be manufactured in China starting in 2006, project representatives claim, and orders from the Chinese, Brazilian and other education departments are expected shortly. The machines are intended for governments or large institutions and will not be available commercially. To reduce the need for technical support, Negroponte promises the laptops will be extra tough, simple and easily fixed. However, power is a major problem when more then 2 billion people do not have access to electricity. While solar and windup mechanisms are being explored, the MIT team is hoping to develop what it calls "parasitic power" -- powering a laptop just by typing on the keys. [35]Seymour Papert, a mathematician and child learning expert who is one of Negroponte's key collaborators, said when children have their own laptop, it enables them learn on their own, at their own pace and to work on projects that interest them. "It liberates the learning from the limitations of the teacher who probably doesn't know much about math, science or computers," said Papert, who was also a key player in the Maine laptop project. "Laptops mean you can access an enormous library of information that's up-to-date whether the child is in school or at home." Negroponte said he has seen the power of laptops firsthand at a rural village school in Cambodia. Each child has a Panasonic Toughbook and the school is equipped with Wi-Fi and a satellite link. "A village that has no books, suddenly has access to Google," said Negroponte, who established the school with his wife Elaine. "It changes their lives in several ways, ranging from self-esteem to empowerment, to fulfilling the passion for learning." But internet access and electricity, not cheap computers, are the real challenges in developing countries, said Wayan Vota, a program manager at [36]Geekcorps, a volunteer organization that teaches communities how to use affordable information and communication technologies. Geekcorps has helped build BottleNets in Africa: wi-Fi relay stations built using wire mesh, discarded plastic bottles and bamboo poles. "The $100 laptop is a really cool idea. But the real technology bottleneck is getting an affordable internet connection to the outside world," said Vota. In most countries, telecommunications are controlled by monopolies that think internet access is only for the rich and so charge accordingly, Vota said. And even at high prices, very little bandwidth is made available. Out of the box, the $100 laptops will be Wi-Fi and cell-network enabled, Papert said. They will also be able to make their own ad-hoc mesh networks, peer to peer. It should be possible to set up a central server in town, and the kids could get content updates as they walk by. Even without internet access, high-quality content can be provided cheaply on a CD, Papert added. "There's plenty of creative ways to create networks and share costs," he said. References 23. http://www.media.mit.edu/ 24. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ 27. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67667,00.html 28. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67667,00.html 29. http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/acarvin 30. http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/ 31. http://ali.apple.com/ali_sites/glefli/exhibits/1001165/A_Computer_for_Every_Lap.html 32. http://www.amd.com/us-en/ 33. http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html 34. http://www.newscorp.com/index2.html 35. http://web.media.mit.edu/~papert/ 36. http://www.geekcorps.org/ ------------ MIT Plans $100 Laptop By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News May 25, 2005- Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, recently unveiled his plan to provide affordable laptop computers for developing communities - and do it at a cost of $100 each. Such an inexpensive device could throw laptop manufacturers into a panic, but it also could improve education in remote areas. "This is not an effort to save the third world; it's an effort to get some of the tools for change in place," said Alan Kay, an early pioneer of personal computing, who is currently at Hewlett Packard Labs developing some of the educational software for the laptop. The prototype is still in development, but the lightweight machine, measuring no bigger than 10 inches by 8 inches, will come with 1 gigabyte of flash memory and at least two USB port for plugging in external devices, such as printers. At least one manufacturer plans to build a printer for Negroponte's machine that will sell for $35. Negroponte also hopes to manufacture the display - the most expensive part of any computer - for under $30. The laptop will have wireless capabilities and a Linux operating system, which looks a lot like Microsoft Windows but has the advantage of costing nothing. Since batteries are few and far between in developing countries, Negroponte plans on technologically simple and cheap power methods, such as turning a hand crank. One minute of cranking would bring 10 minutes of operating time. Using a bike to power the machine would bring 100 minutes of power per minute of pedaling, Negroponte said. Negroponte's goal is ambitious. He wants third world governments to provide one laptop per child in entire regions. Several governments have shown interest. Brazil is expected to purchase 1 million machines, and China has discussed ordering 3 million. Additional funding may come from the World Bank and private foundations, Negroponte said. Sri Lankan native Bernardine Dias, a research scientist who heads the TechBridgeWorld initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, has some reservations about Negroponte's plan. "I don't know that it is the most useful thing," she said. "You have to think of the bigger picture of who is going to maintain those computers." From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:40:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:40:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PNAS: Analyzing bioterror attack on the food supply: The case of botulinum toxin in milk Message-ID: Analyzing bioterror attack on the food supply: The case of botulinum toxin in milk Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 9984-9989 PNAS July 12, 2005 vol. 102 no. 28 Lawrence M. Wein* and Yifan Liu [First the summary from CHE. Reading the article, I don't see what the fuss from the feds was about. The article did not tell anyone how to pull off the botulinum attack, only about how the poision would spread and what should be done to prevent such attacks. Sorry about the bad formatting, but that's the best Adobe Professional can do, and I spent a lot of time cleaning even that up.] In Defiance of Federal Agency, Scientific Journal Describes How to Poison Milk Supply News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.29 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/06/2005062901n.htm [54]By RICHARD MONASTERSKY Disregarding a request from the federal government, the National Academy of Sciences published a paper on Tuesday that describes how terrorists could kill tens of thousands of people by dropping a few grams of botulinum toxin into a milk truck or storage silo. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had planned on publishing the paper, by two Stanford University researchers, a month ago, but the academy balked when it received a letter from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The letter described the paper as "a road map for terrorists" and said that "publication is not in the interests of the United States" ([69]The Chronicle, June 17). But after meeting with government representatives, the academy's leaders decided that the benefits of publishing the paper outweighed any threats it posed. In an editorial accompanying the paper, Bruce Alberts, the academy's president, said that "we are convinced that the guidance offered in this article on how to anticipate, model, and minimize a botulinum-toxin attack can be valuable for biodefense." The paper, "Analyzing a Bioterror Attack on the Food Supply: The Case of Botulinum Toxin in Milk," was written by Lawrence M. Wein, a professor of management science at Stanford's business school, and Yifan Liu, a graduate student in computational and mathematical engineering. Bill Hall, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, said the agency does not agree with the academy's decision. "Our concern is that if the academy is wrong on this," he said, "the consequences could be severe and could be dire, and it will be HHS and not the academy that will end up having to deal with it." In their paper, Mr. Wein and Mr. Liu describe how the milk industry is vulnerable because individual farmers send their product to central processing facilities, thereby allowing milk from many locations to mix. Terrorists could poison the supply by putting botulinum toxin into one of the 5,500-gallon trucks that picks up milk daily at farms or by dropping the toxin into raw-milk silos, which hold roughly 50,000 gallons each. Pasteurization would destroy some but not all of the toxin, and a millionth of a gram of toxin may be enough to kill a person. The standard tests to detect botulinum toxin take too long to be useful, Mr. Wein said in an interview, although he recently learned of a new test that takes only 15 minutes to perform. Such assays could mitigate, or even thwart, an attack, he said. To alleviate the risk of such an attack, the Food and Drug Administration has issued guidelines for the dairy industry, such as making sure that milk trucks and tanks are locked. But Mr. Wein argues that those voluntary measures should be required by law. "If a dairy industry in the hands of a terrorist is as dangerous as a nuclear facility or a chemical facility," he said, "then voluntary is not commensurate with the threat." James S. Cullor, associate dean and director of a teaching and research center on veterinary medicine at the University of California at Davis, said Mr. Wein should not have submitted his paper for publication. "He put millions of children at risk, not only in this country, but around the world," he said. "And for what? It's an issue that the industry is already working on. In fact, these are issues that the industry taught him about. We all knew this was sensitive information, and we should handle it with care." But Mr. Wein said he did not provide any information that was not already available. "Anyone who could seriously pull off this kind of attack," he said, "is sophisticated enough to track what was going on in the bioterror world." Using Google, he said, "it would take you all of 30 seconds to pull up these things." The paper is available on the journal's[70] Web site. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [71]Federal Officials Ask Journal Not to Publish Bioterrorism Paper (6/17/2005) * [72]Final Rules Issued on Microbes (4/1/2005) * [73]Journal Editors and Scientists Call for More Caution in Publishing Potentially Dangerous Research (2/17/2003) * [74]Publish and Perish? As the Nation Fights Terrorists, Scientists Weigh the Risks of Releasing Sensitive Information (10/11/2002) * [75]One More Frightening Possibility: Terrorism in the Croplands (10/26/2001) References 54. mailto:rich.monastersky at chronicle.com 70. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0408526102v1 71. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i41/41a01102.htm 72. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i30/30a03802.htm 73. http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/02/2003021704n.htm 74. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i07/07a01601.htm 75. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i09/09a02001.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. ---------------------------- *Graduate School of Business and Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 Edited by Barry R. Bloom, Harvard University, Boston, MA, and approved April 20, 2005 (received for review November 16, 2004) To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: lwein at stanford.edu. Summary We developed a mathematical model of a cows-to-consumers supply chain associated with a single milk-processing facility that is the victim of a deliberate release of botulinum toxin. Because centralized storage and processing lead to substantial dilution of the toxin, a minimum amount of toxin is required for the release to do damage. Irreducible uncertainties regarding the dose?response curve prevent us from quantifying the minimum effective release. However, if terrorists can obtain enough toxin, and this may well be possible, then rapid distribution and consumption result in several hundred thousand poisoned individuals if detection from early symptomatics is not timely. Timely and specific in-process testing has the potential to eliminate the threat of this scenario at a cost of <1 cent per gallon and should be pursued aggressively. Investigation of improving the toxin inactivation rate of heat pasteurization without sacrificing taste or nutrition is warranted. Keywords: bioterrorism, mathematical modeling Among bioterror attacks not involving genetic engineering, the three scenarios that arguably pose the greatest threats tohumansareasmallpoxattack,anairborneanthraxattack,and release of botulinum toxin in cold drinks (1) The methods of dissemination in these three scenarios are, respectively, the person-to-person spread of contagious disease, the outdoor dispersalofahighlydurableandlethalagent,andthelarge-scale storage and production and rapid widespread distribution and consumption of beverages containing the most poisonous substance known. The first two scenarios have been the subject of recent systems modeling studies (2?5) and here we present detailedsystemsanalysisofthethirdscenario.Forconcreteness, we consider release in the milk supply, which, in addition to its symbolic value as target, is characterized by the rapid distribution of 20 billion gallons per year in the U.S. indeed, two natural Salmonella outbreaks in the dairy industry each infected 200,000people(6).Nonetheless,ourmethodsareapplicableto similar food products, such as fruit and vegetable juices, canned foods (e.g. processed tomato products) and perhaps grain- based and other foods possessing the bow-tie-shaped supply chain pictured in Fig. 1. The Model The mathematical model considers the flow of milk through nine-stage cows-to-consumers supply chain associated with single milk-processing facility (Fig. 1) Supporting Appendix, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site, contains detailed mathematical formulation of the model, discussion of the modeling assumptions, and the specification of parameter values, some of which are listed in Table 1. The supply-chain parameter values are representative of the California dairy industry, which produces20% of the nation? milk (California dairy facts, www.dairyforum.orcdf.html, accessed onMay18,2004).Inourmodel,cowsaremilkedtwicedaily,and the milk from each farm is picked up once per day by 5,500-gallon truck, which makes two round trips daily between various farms and the processing plant. Upon truck?s arrival at the processing plant, the milk is piped into one of several raw milk silos, each capable of holding 50,000 gallons. Raw milk is piped into the processing facility, goes through sequence of processes (e.g. separation, pasteurization, homogenization, and vitamin fortification) where each processing line may simultaneously receive milk from several silos, and is held in 10,000gallonpostpasteurizationtanksbeforebeingbottled. Inourbase case, we assume that milk from different silos does not mix during downstream processing and relax this assumption later; although downstream mixing is physically possible at many facilities, it is not always done. Bottled milk is stored as finished- goods inventory before traveling through the downstream distribution channel, eventually being purchased and consumed. We assume that botulinum toxin is deliberately released in eitheraholdingtankatadairyfarm,atankertrucktransporting milkfromafarmtotheprocessingplant,orarawmilksiloatthe processing facility. Each of these release locations leads to identical consequences, because the toxin is eventually well mixed throughout the contents of a raw milk silo. The crux of our analysis is to calculate the amount and toxin concentration of contaminated milk (see Fig. 4, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site) By California state law, raw milk silo must be cleaned after 72 of operation. During these 72 h, the silo is initially filled up, then replenished (i.e. simultaneously filled and drained) for most of the 72- period, and finally drained empty by 72 h. Because the toxin concentration in the silo drops exponentially during the replenishment interval, each postpasteurization holding tank has different concentration level. Moreover, the amount of contaminated milk and the concentration distribution are themselves random quantities,dependinguponwheninthe72-hsilooperationcycle the deliberate release occurs. Because of the difficulty of terrorist in scheduling the release for maximum impact, we assume the release occurs randomly throughout the filling and replenishment intervals and report the mean number of poisoned people averaged over the random release time within the cycle.Usingheat-inactivationdataforfoodswithsimilarpH(7) we estimate that the heat-pasteurization process [170? (77?C) for 15 min] inactivates 68.4% of the toxin. Each gallon of purchased milk is continuously consumed by four people (one child and three adults) over 3.5-day period. Children aged 2?11 and adults have differential milk consumption rates and dose?response curves in our model. probit dose?response model dictates the precise timing of each poisoning. Ourdose?responserelationshipisbasedonscanthuman data for adults, ID50 0.43 for children) (8, 9) The attack can be detected via either early symptomatics or in-process testing results, whichever occurs first. We assume the outbreak is detected when the 100th person develops symptoms [the incubation period, which is the interval between the time of poisoning and the onset of symptoms, is log normal with median of 48 and dispersal factor of 1.5 (10)] and an Fig. 1. The milk supply chain. additional 24 are required to identify the attack as being milkborne, at which time all consumption is halted. As with current antibiotic residue testing, we assume in-process botulinumtestingisperformedonmilkfromeachtruckjustbeforethe milk is piped into raw milk silo at the processing facility. We have two tests at our disposal: the Food and Drug Administration- approved mouse assay with detection limit of 16 pml (11) and testing delay of 48 h, and an ELISA test with detection limit of 80 pml (12) and testing delay of h. Because the mouse assay is not practical for widespread use (assays are processed at only several U.S. laboratories, and the mousesupplyislimited),weassesstwostrategies:theELISAtest used in isolation (i.e. consumption is stopped after positive ELISAresult)andasequentialstrategyinwhichthemouseassay is used as confirmatory test after positive ELISA result (i.e. consumption is halted after positive mouse result) The latter strategy has detection limit of 80 pml and testing delay of 51 h. The ELISA test in isolation is practical only if the test has an extremely small false-positive rate (no data have been published on ELISA test specificity in milk) otherwise, the sequential strategy is the only viable alternative. Results In the absence of any detection (i.e. every gallon of contaminated milk is consumed) the mean number of people who consume contaminated milk is 568,000 (Fig. 2) Less than1gof toxinisrequiredtocause100,000meancasualties(i.e.,poisoned individuals) and 10 poison the great majority of the 568,000 consumers (Fig. 2) Most of the casualties occur on days 3?6, although they happen somewhat faster for larger releases, because less consumption is required for poisoning. Due to children?s higher consumption rate and greater toxin sensitivity, the percentage of casualties who are children in Fig. decreases from99.97%fora0.1-grelease,to61%fora1-grelease,to28% for 10- release. Early symptomatic detection avoids of the casualties in Fig. (see Fig. 3) but still allows100,000 mean casualties for release of 10 g. Relative to no testing, the sequential testing strategy cuts the number poisoned approximately in half, resulting in tens of thousands of cases. The ELISA testing strategy used in isolation prevents nearly all cases, e.g. if kg is released then the mean number poisoned is 2.82, and six people are poisonedeveniftheterroristchoosestheworst-casereleasetime within the silo cleaning cycle. Table 2 contains the results of sensitivity analysis of isolated changesin10keyparametersintheno-testingcase.Fiveofthese 10 changes impact the number of casualties in the no-detection case (Table 3) Graphs corresponding to Tables and appear in Supporting Appendix. The first of these 10 changes involve milk storage and processing. Reducing the time between silo cleanings from 72 to 48 lowers the number poisoned by 30% in large attack with no detection but otherwise has modest impact. Increasing the silo size from 50,000 to 100,000 gallons (several raw milk silos in California hold up to 200,000 gallons) while varying the number of silos so that the total silo capacity is fixed at 400,000 gallons, and maintaining dedicated processing line for each silo leads to slightly fewer casualties for small releases but up to twice as many poisoned for large releases and no detection. Similarly, allowing milk from four silos to mix during downstream processing can quadruple the number of casualties in large attack with no detection. Because the toxin inactivation rate may be very sensitive to the pasteurization temperature and time in the neighborhood of the current pasteurization formula (7) we consider pasteurization process that causes 2-log reduction in active toxin. This leads to huge reduction in casualties if the release size is 10 or less but has no impact for 1-kg release. The remaining six changes are from the downstream portion ofthesupplychain.Wecouldnotfindreliabledataonthespeed of the distribution channel. More rapid distribution leads to Table 1. Base-case values for model parameters Parameter description Value Production rate 10 gallons per cow per day Silo size 50,000 gallons Silos per processing line 1 Time between silo cleanings 72 hr Speed of distribution channel 80% of milk purchased within 48 hr Consumers per gallon of milk 4 Time to consume 1 gallon of milk 84 hr Dose-response probit slope 4.34 Median incubation (adult and child) 48 hr Dispersal factor of incubation 1.5 Number of symptomatics until detection 100 Time to detect attack is milkborne 24 hr Testing-detection limit (mouse, ELISA) 60.6 ngallon, 303 ngallon Testing-time delay (mouse, ELISA) 48 hr, 3 hr Fraction of toxin not inactivated by pasteurization 0.316 Fraction of milk consumers who are children 0.25 Fraction of milk consumed by children 0.4 earlier consumption and faster diagnosis, and the former effect appears to dominate, leading to larger attack sizes. Our base- case value for the time to drink gallon of milk is based on the conservative assumption that everyone has the same consumption rate. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in consumption rates across the population, which causes heavier consumers to buy milk more frequently. Hence, we assume it takes 24 rather than 84 for gallon to be consumed. As in the case of rapid distribution, higher consumption rate leads to more casualties. The dose?response data in Tables and are based on monkey data, which are more plentiful than human data. As in the pasteurization case, the monkey data lead to drastic reduction in casualties for small release but have little effect in large release. Because children rarely eat in restaurants or eat home-canned food, nearly all of the historical incubationdataarebasedonadults.Weassumethatthemedian Fig. 2. The mean cumulative number of people poisoned over time for various release sizes in the absence of any detection. Fig. 3. The mean total number of people poisoned vs. release size for various detection scenarios. incubation time for children is reduced from 48 to 12 because of their smaller mass and larger consumption of tainted milk, which lead to earlier detection and many fewer casualties. Our last two changes relate to detection time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains well established national surveillance system for botulism (14) that has been enhanced in the last several years. Botulism in virtually all jurisdictions is an immediately reportable disease, and the characteristic clinical features of botulism suggest that the outbreakmightberecognizedpromptly(e.g.,bythepresentation of the 10th case) Moreover, because most metropolitan areas haveonlyoneortwochildren?shospitals,andbecausemilkisone of the few staples in children?s diets, the time to detect the outbreak as milkborne might be rather quick (e.g. 12 h) Not surprisingly, both changes lead to reduction in the number of people poisoned. Discussion Combating bioterrorism requires an appropriate mix of prevention, mitigation, detection, and response. Our observation that, due to the successive mixing operations in the upstream portion of the supply chain, the impact of deliberate release upstream oftheprocessingplantisindependentofthepreciselocationmay aid in prioritizing resources for prevention. foodborne attack is much more preventable than an airborne or mailborne attack, due to the restricted number of release locations. Requiring all tanks, trucks, and silos to be locked when not being drained or filledwouldbeanobviousstepforward,aswouldsecuritychecks forpersonnelwhohaveaccesstoprebottledmilk(farmlaborers, truck drivers, receiving labor at the processing facility, and plant engineers) and requiring one person from each stage of the supply chain to be present while milk is transferred from one stage to the next (15) Although these and other measures are included in proposed Food and Drug Administration guidelines (16) they are currently voluntary. Homeland security officials need to engage industry leaders to establish the most appropriate way to guarantee these guidelines are enforced. Although enforcement options range from voluntary guidelines to new laws, the most promising approach may be to develop International Organization for Standardization (ISO) security standards that are analogous to the ISO 9000 standards for quality management and the ISO 14000 standards for environmental ---------------- Table 2. Sensitivity analysis for 10 parameters in the no-testing case Release size Case description 0.1 g 1 g 10 g 100 g 1 kg Base case 1.7 103 3.2 104 1.2 105 1.6 105 1.7 105 Time between silo cleanings 48 hr 2.0 103 3.5 104 1.2 105 1.5 105 1.5 105 Silo size 100,000 gallons 2.1 102 3.2 104 1.6 105 2.7 105 3.0 105 Silos per processing line 4 4.4 101 2.7 104 1.9 105 4.5 105 5.3 105 Inactivation by pasteurization 0.99 6.6 103iigggChild ID50 0.43 11 5.0 1.3 104 7.3 104 1.5 105 Distribution: 90% purchased 24 hr 2.0 103 4.5 104 1.8 105 2.4 105 2.6 105 Time to consume a gallon 24 hr 1.9 103 6.2 104 1.5 105 1.7 105 1.7 105 ID50 (adult, child) g 1.8 10g, 30 70 16 6.7 103 4.3 103 4.2 104 1.3 105 Median child incubation 12 hr 6.4 102 7.5 103 3.4 104 5.6 104 6.0 104 Symptomatics until detection 10 1.1 103 2.0 104 8.4 104 1.2 105 1.2 105 Milkborne detection time 12 hr 1.5 103 2.0 104 6.9 104 9.3 104 9.6 104 Each change from the base-case value in Table 1 was made in isolation and shown are the mean number of poisoned people computed for five different release sizes. -------------- management (www.iso.ciseiso9000?1400index.html, accessed on November 12, 2004) Turning to mitigation, botulinum toxin cannot be completely inactivated by radiation (17) or any heat treatment that does not adversely affect the milk?s taste. Ultrahigh-temperature (UHT) pasteurization (performed to provide extended shelf life) appearscapableofcompletelyinactivatingbotulinumtoxininmilk, but UHT milk has not been embraced by U.S. consumers. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to perform pasteurization studies to determine whether more potent inactivation process can be used without compromising nutrition or taste, particularly because the inactivation rate appears to be quite sensitive to the pasteurization temperature and time in the neighborhood of the current pasteurization formula (7) Reducing the time between silo cleanings decreases the number of people poisoned in, at most, linear manner, but more frequent cleanings would not onlyincreasevariablematerialandlaborcostsbutwouldpossibly require fixed investments in additional silos. Before discussing detection, we note that, on the response side, 60% of poisoned individuals would require mechanical ventilation(6).Giventhesmallnumberofventilatorsandlimited amountofantitoxininthenationalstockpile,thedeathratefrom large attack would likely be closer to the pre-1950s 60% rate (18) or the 25% rate incurred in the 1950s than to the 6% death rate experienced in the 1990s (19) Moreover, the current treatment, passive immunization with equine antitoxin, does notreverseexistentparalysis,andpostexposureprophylaxiswith antitoxin has adverse side effects (19) Although an economic impact assessment of this scenario is beyond the scope of our study, the economic cost (including direct medical costs and lost productivity due to illness and death) from hypothetical botulism outbreak that poisons 50,000 people was estimated to be 8.6 billion (20) using direct medical cost (assuming ample ventilators and antitoxin) per hospitalized patient of $55,000 (based on Canadian dollars in 1993?1994) In contrast, two recent U.S. victims receiving injections of ??fake Botox? each incurred $350,000 medical bill in the first weeks of illness [S. Z. Grossman (lawyer of Botox victims) personal communication] If this latter amount was spent on each survivor in an attack that poisoned several hundred thousand people, then the total medical costs would be tens of billions of dollars. Our study highlights the value of rapid in-process testing for detecting an attack, and because stockpiling sufficient ventilators and antitoxin in the event of large-scale attack would be exorbitantly expensive, it seems wise to aggressively invest in rapid, sensitive, and specific in-process testing. variety of different botulinumtestingtechnologiesarebeinginvestigatedasalternatives to the mouse assay [summary of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) expert panel on botulinum diagnostics, May 23, 2003, www2.niaid.nih.goNrdonlyres BB1DDC43-1906-4450-8983-DB0BE374474bottoxinsmtg. pdf,accessedonNovember15,2004],althoughpublisheddataexist onlyfortheELISAassay.ThecurrentELISAtestappearstobe orders of magnitude more sensitive than needed: if milk in truck contains 300 ng per gallon, which is the detection limit of the assay (12),themilkgetsdilutedbyafactorof 20duringprocessing,and hence each person consumes ng in their quart of milk, which is logs less than the estimated ID50 for children, using the human data. Therefore, the current test can afford to lose some of this sensitivityifitleadstoincreasedspecificityorspeed.Analternative less-sensitive ELISA assay based on the catalytic activity of the toxin is also available for botulinum toxin (21) [List Biological Laboratories(Campbell,CA),www.listlabs.com,accessedonJuly1, 2004] and may be more specific in foods (unlike milk) where the toxin is unstable. Current antibiotic residue testing takes 45 min, during which timethetruckwaitsbeforehavingitscontentsdrainedintoasilo. ----------- Table 3. Sensitivity analysis for five parameters in the no-detection case Release size Case description 0.1 g 1 g 10 g 100 g 1 kg SOCIAL SCIENCES Base case 2.3 103 1.5 105 5.0 105 5.7 105 5.7 105 Time between silo cleanings 48 hr 2.8 103 1.6 105 3.8 105 3.9 105 3.9 105 Silo size 100,000 gallons 2.1 102 1.4 105 8.4 105 1.1 106 1.1 106 Silos per processing line 4 4.4 101 1.1 105 1.2 106 2.2 106 2.2 106 Inactivation by pasteurization 0.99 6.6 1006Rv0noh11 5.0 3.8 104 3.6 105 5.7 105 ID50 (adult, child) g 1.8 10g, 30 70 16 6.7 103 7.5 103 2.1 105 5.3 105 Each change from the base-case value in Table 1 was made in isolation, and the mean number of poisoned people was computed for four different release sizes. ------------ test that takes45 min is impractical because it either would increase the waiting time for each truck (if milk is not released to the silo until the test results are received) or would need to have near-perfect specificity (if milk is released before the test results are received) In contrast, three possible approaches can be used to deal with positive result from sub-45-min test: the truckcanbehelduntilaconfirmatorymouseassayisperformed, the milk can be discarded, or the milk can be routed to processing line for ultra-high-temperature pasteurization, which kills all of the botulinum toxin. The likelihood that positively testedmilkcontainstoxinmaybeextremelysmall,e.g.,byBayes? rule, if there is 10% probability of an attack occurring in the U.S.overthenext5years,andthefalse-positiverateis104,then the probability that positively tested milk contains toxin is only 105. Regardless of which of the three options is used, it seems clear that sub-45-min test is necessary from practical perspective. Even if such test is not perfectly specific, it could still be an immensely useful tool that could essentially eliminate thethreatofthisscenario.Evenifthetotalcostofatestwas$50, testingeach5,500-gallontruckwouldincreasethecostofmilkby only cent per gallon. In addition, because thousands of people would be poisoned per hour in this scenario, it is imperative to perfect the design and implementation of near-instantaneous product recall and disposal strategy. To understand the impact of changing these processing parameters and to assess the danger of bioterror threats to various food industries, we need some understanding of the terrorists? capabilities. To put the release sizes in Figs. and into perspective, we note that the maximum concentration of botulinumtoxinincultureis2? 106mouseunitsperml(22),where mouse unit is the mouse intraperitoneal LD50 in micrograms. Inthe1980s,theIraqibioweaponsprogramapparentlyincreased this concentration 5-to 10-fold with the use of sulfuric acid (23) If so, it would appear that terrorists should be capable of concentration of at least 107 mouse units per ml per gallon. That is, terrorist with this technology could easily deliver 10 of toxin without any special gear. Referring to Fig. 2, in the absence of detection, this amount would poison 400,000 people. Delivering 100 or more with this technology would be more cumbersome and would greatly increase the likelihood of intercepting the attack. Amplification technologies have advanced significantly in recent years (24) and hence terrorists may be capable of concentrations considerably higher than per gallon. Section of Supporting Appendix analyzes three additional interrelated issues: secondary cases due to crosscontaminated milk, product tracing, and product recall. Two locations in the supplychain,trucksthatarecleaneddailybutthatmaketwotrips daily and processing lines that are cleaned daily, offer the opportunity for uncontaminated milk to become tainted by uncleaned residue from the primary release. The secondary effect from release in truck has an 50% chance of causing damage equivalent to release that is later and 0.5% as large as the primary release. According to Figs. and 3, secondary casualties would be significant only in cases when the primary release poisons nearly all of its consumers (in the absence of detection) The secondary impact due to tainted processing lines is likely to be much smaller, but the resulting milk concentrations are more difficult to estimate. Thispotentialforcrosscontamination,coupledwithconsumer anxiety, would probably cause the supply chain?s entire milk supply to be recalled and discarded at the time of detection. For the values in Tables and 5, which are published as supporting information on the PNAS web site, this amounts to 4.83 million gallons, which includes 2.24-million-gallon containers of partially consumed milk that need to be recalled from consumers (Eq. 29 in SupportingAppendix) In addition, 640,000 gallons per dayoffreshlyproducedmilkwouldneedtobediscardeduntilthe attack is effectively investigated, the supply chain is turned back on, and consumer confidence returns. This delay could be hastenedbyeffectiveproducttracing,decontamination,andrisk communication.TheU.S.dairyindustrytraceseverymilkcarton back to its processing facility, which, at least in theory, prevents 300milliongallons)frombeing discardedandrecalled.Inotherfoodscenarioswherethereisno risk of crosscontamination (e.g. fresh produce packaged in the field) the ability to trace product back through the particular path it takes in Fig. could lead to significant reduction in the amount of product recalled and discarded. As an illustration, we compute (Eq. 30 in Supporting Appendix and Table 6, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site) the amount of milk that needs to be discarded as function of the release location (farm, truck, or silo) and the stage (cow, farm, truck,silo,orprocessingfacility)towhichthemilkcanbetraced, hypothetically assuming no crosscontamination. Our sensitivity analysis suggests there are three types of variables.Variablesofthefirsttype(timebetweensilocleanings, silosize,andnumberofsilosperprocessingline)causeavertical shift in the number poisoned vs. release size graphs (Fig. a?c, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site) and underscore the subtle relationship between high production efficiency and the consequences of bioterror attack. Economies of scale can represent double-edged sword: increasing the time between silo cleanings, silo size, or number of silos per processing line increases the amount of contaminated milk but reduces the toxin concentration of this milk, thereby mitigating the impact of small release and exacerbating the effect of large release. However, for the parameter regimes considered here, the reduction in casualties in small release is very modest, whereas the increase in casualties in large release with no testing and poor detection is in the hundreds of thousands. Variables of the second type (ID50, pasteurization inactivation) result in horizontal shift in the number poisoned vs. release size graphs (Fig. and g) More precisely, to cause equivalent damage, the release size for the monkey ID50s needs to be 70 times larger than the release size for the human ID50s. Similarly, to generate an equivalent casualty level, the release sizeinthe99%inactivationscenarioneedstobe1?0.681?0.99 31.6timeslargerthanthereleasesizeinthe68.4%inactivation scenario. Variables of the third type (distribution speed, consumption rate, children?s incubation, number of symptomatics until detection, and milkborne detection time) all relate to the speed of various events and have no impact on the casualty level if the attack is not detected. In the no-testing case, the resulting graphs (Fig. e? and h?j) are very similar to one another and, for the parameter values considered here, the change in the children?s incubation has the biggest impact, and the consumption rate has the smallest impact. Conclusion In closing, it is important to stress that several elements of the model contain enough irreducible uncertainty to preclude estimating the impact of an attack to within several orders of magnitude. First and foremost is the dose?response curve. The paucity of human data makes an estimate of the ID50 difficult task,andareliableestimateoftheprobitslopeisimpossible.The ID50 values used here are not close to the worst-case estimate, due to the possibility that several sublethal (injected or oral) doses collectively containing 1?10% of the LD50 may be lethal, as in guinea pigs, rabbits, and mice (25) There are also three aspects of the model that have not been discussed in the open literature, although presumably studies can and perhaps have beenperformed:theinactivationrateattainedbypasteurization, the specificity of an ELISA test in milk, and the release size that terrorist organization is capable of. Such studies would allow our results to be sharpened considerably. The dose?response curve, pasteurization inactivation rate, and terrorists? release- size capabilities each contain several orders of magnitude of uncertainty, and together they essentially determine the release threshold required to achieve sufficiently high milk concentration. There is much less uncertainty about how many people would drink this contaminated milk. There is irreducible uncertainty due to the timing of the release within the silo operation cycle,whichcausesthenumberpoisonedtoberoughlyuniformly distributed between half and twice the mean values (with an additional point mass at the latter value with probability 0.26) reported in Figs. and 3. Takentogether,wehaveareasonablyaccurateestimateofthe number of people who could be poisoned but very poor estimateofhowmuchtoxinisrequiredtocausealargeoutbreak. The main uncertainties related to the number of people who could be poisoned are how quickly the attack would be detected via early symptomatics and how quickly and completely consumption would be halted: we optimistically assumed that consumption is halted instantaneously and completely within 24 after the early symptomatics are detected, even though it took several weeks to identify the source of the two large but more subtle Salmonella outbreaks in the dairy industry (26, 27) Even if the reducible uncertainty resolves itself favorably (e.g. heat pasteurization inactivates 99% of toxin rather than 68.4%) catastrophiceventisnotimplausible,andthewayforwardseems clear:investinprevention,investigateinactivationprocessesthat do not affect nutrition or taste and, most importantly, develop and deploy sub-45-min highly specific in-process test. Although the U.S. government appears to be working diligently on the latter two issues, it is not clear how quickly and thoroughly the dairy supply chain is being secured. The use of voluntary Food and Drug Administration guidelines is not commensurate with the severity of this threat, and the government needs to act much more decisively to safeguard its citizens fromsuchanattack.Moreover,althoughthedairyindustryisan obvious target, the government needs to force other food processing industries to quickly assess the impact of deliberate botulinum release in their supply chains and to do what is necessary to prevent and mitigate such an event. --------------------- L.M.W. thanks Stephen Arnon, Larry Barrett, Seth Carus, Richard Danzig, Clay Detlefson, Leland Ellis, Jerry Gillespie, Steve Jerkins, Eric Johnson, Laura Kelley, David Montague, Keith Ward, and Dennis Wilson for helpful conversations. This research was partially supported by the Center for Social Innovation, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. 16. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2003) Dairy Farms, Bulk Milk Transporters, Bulk Milk Transfer Stations and Fluid Milk Processors: Food Security PreventiveMeasuresGuidance (U.S.FoodandDrugAdmin.,Washington,DC) 1. Danzig, R. (2003) Catastrophic Bioterrorism?What is to be Done? (Center for TechnologyandNationalSecurityPolicy,NationalDefenseUniversity,Washington, DC) 2. Kaplan, E. H. Craft, D. L. Wein, L. M. (2002) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 10934?10940. 3. Halloran, M. Longini, I. M. Jr. Nizam, A. Yang, Y. (2002) Science 298, 1428?1433. 4. Eubank, S. Guclu, H. Kumar, V. S. A. Marathe, M. V. Srinivasan, A. Toroczkai, Z. Wang, N. (2004) Nature 429, 180?184. 5. Wein, L. M. Craft, D. L. Kaplan, E. H. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100, 4346?4351. 6. Sobel, J. Khan, A. S. Swerdlow, D. L. (2002) Lancet 359, 874?880. 7. Woodburn, M. J. Somers, E. Rodriguez, J. Schantz, E. J. (1979) J.FoodSci. 44, 1658?1661. 8. Meyer, K. F. Eddie, B. (1951) Zeitschr. Hyg. 133, 255?263. 9. Morton, H. E. (1961) The Toxicity of Clostridium botulinum Type Toxin for Various Species of Animals (Institute of Cooperative Research, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) 10. Terranova, W. Breman, J. G. Locey, R. P. Speck, S. (1978) Am.J.Epidemiol. 108, 150?156. 11. Schantz, E. J. Sugiyama, H. (1974) J. Agr. Food Chem. 22, 26?30. 12. Ferreira, J. L. Maslanka, S. Johnson, E. Goodnough, M. (2003) J. AOAC Int. 86, 314?331. 13. Herrero, B. A. Ecklund, A. E. Streett, C. S. Ford, D. F. King, J. K. (1967) Exp. Mol. Pathol. 6, 84?95. 14. Shapiro, R. L. Hatheway, C. Becher, J. Swerdlow, D. L. (1997) J. Am. Med. Assoc. 278, 433?435. 15. Reed, B. A. Grivetti, L. E. (2000) J. Dairy Sci. 83, 2988?2991. 17. Siegel, L. S. (1993) in Clostridium botulinum: Ecology and Control in Foods, eds. Hauschild, A. H. W. Dodds, K. L. (Dekker, New York) pp. 323?341. 18. U.S. Department of Defense (1996) Army Field Manual 8-9, Navy Medical Publication 5059 and Air Force Joint Manual 44-151 (U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, DC) 19. Arnon, S. S. Schechter, R. Inglesby, T. V. Henderson, D. A. Bartlett, J. G. Ascher,M.S.,Eitzen,E.,Fine,A.D.,Hauer,J.,Layton,M. etal. (2001) J.Am. Med. Assoc. 285, 1059?1070. 20. St. John, R. Finlay, B. Blair, C. (2001) Can. J. Infect. Dis. 12, 275?284. 21. Wictome, M. Newton, K. A. Jameson, K. Dunnigan, P. Clarke, S. Gaze, J. Tauk,A.,Foster,K.A.&Shone,C.C.(1999) FEMSImmunol.Med.Microbiol. 24, 319?323. 22. Dasgupta, B. R. (1971) J. Bacteriol. 108, 1051?1057. 23. Miller, J. (April 27, 2003) N.Y. Times,p.22. 24. Danzig, R. (2005) in The Challenge of Proliferation: Report of the Aspen Strategy Group, ed. Campbell, K. (The Aspen Institute, Washington, DC) in press. 25. Matveev, K. I. (1959) J. Microbiol. Epidemiol. Immunobiol. 30, 71?78. 26. Ryan, C. A. Nickels, M. K. Hargrett-Bean, N. T. Potter, M. E. Endo, T. Mayer, L. Langkop, C. W. Gibson, C. MacDonald, R. C. Kenney, R. T. et al. (1987) J. Am. Med. Assoc. 258, 3269?3274. 27. Hennessy, T. W. Hedberg, C. W. Slutsker, L. White, K. E. Besser-Wiek, J. M. Moen, M. E. Feldman, J. Coleman, W. W. Edmonson, L. M. MacDonald, K. L. et al. (1996) New Engl. J. Med. 334, 1281?1286. 4theentirenation?smilksupply(3iig Adult ID50 1 2ggg3iig(ID50 g From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:40:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:40:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Foreign Affairs: Michael T. Osterholm: Preparing for the Next Pandemic Message-ID: Michael T. Osterholm: Preparing for the Next Pandemic http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84402/michael-t-osterholm/preparing-for-the-next-pandemic.html?mode=print First, the summary from CHE: The Chronicle of Higher Education: Magazine & journal reader http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/06/2005062901j.htm Wednesday, June 29, 2005 A glance at the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs: Coping with the coming pandemic An influenza pandemic is coming, writes Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. "The signs are alarming," he says, as the number of human and animal infections caused by a virulent strain of bird flu known as H5N1 "has been increasing; small clusters of cases have been documented, suggesting that the virus may have come close to sustained human-to-human transmission; and H5N1 continues to evolve in the virtual genetic-reassortment laboratory provided by the unprecedented number of people, pigs, and poultry in Asia." If a pandemic struck today, it would probably kill hundreds of millions of people and ravage the world economy. International borders would close, and there would be severe worldwide shortages of influenza vaccine, other medicines, and a wide range of commodities, "including food, soap, paper, light bulbs, gasoline," Mr. Osterholm argues. In short, he says, panic would ensue. It's urgent that world leaders develop an "initiative to provide vaccine for the entire world," stockpile "critical health-care and consumer products and commodities," and assess "the vulnerability of the global economy to ensure that surges in demand can be met," he writes. "Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic," Mr. Osterholm warns . We can't stop it from hitting, he says, but if we act now, we may be able to reduce its impact. The article, "Preparing for the Next Pandemic," is online at [54]http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84402/michael-t-oster holm/preparing-for-the-next-pandemic.html --Gabriela Montell _________________________________________________________________ Background article from The Chronicle: * [55]Taking Aim at Bird Flu (3/18/2005) References 55. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i28/28a01401.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced article. --------------------------------- From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005 _________________________________________________________________ Summary: If an influenza pandemic struck today, borders would close, the global economy would shut down, international vaccine supplies and health-care systems would be overwhelmed, and panic would reign. To limit the fallout, the industrialized world must create a detailed response strategy involving the public and private sectors. Michael T. Osterholm is Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, Associate Director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense, and Professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health. FEAR ITSELF Dating back to antiquity, influenza pandemics have posed the greatest threat of a worldwide calamity caused by infectious disease. Over the past 300 years, ten influenza pandemics have occurred among humans. The most recent came in 1957-58 and 1968-69, and although several tens of thousands of Americans died in each one, these were considered mild compared to others. The 1918-19 pandemic was not. According to recent analysis, it killed 50 to 100 million people globally. Today, with a population of 6.5 billion, more than three times that of 1918, even a "mild" pandemic could kill many millions of people. A number of recent events and factors have significantly heightened concern that a specific near-term pandemic may be imminent. It could be caused by H5N1, the avian influenza strain currently circulating in Asia. At this juncture scientists cannot be certain. Nor can they know exactly when a pandemic will hit, or whether it will rival the experience of 1918-19 or be more muted like 1957-58 and 1968-69. The reality of a coming pandemic, however, cannot be avoided. Only its impact can be lessened. Some important preparatory efforts are under way, but much more needs to be done by institutions at many levels of society. THE BACKDROP Of the three types of influenza virus, influenza type A infects and kills the greatest number of people each year and is the only type that causes pandemics. It originates in wild aquatic birds. The virus does not cause illness in these birds, and although it is widely transmitted among them, it does not undergo any significant genetic change. Direct transmission from the birds to humans has not been demonstrated, but when a virus is transmitted from wild birds to domesticated birds such as chickens, it undergoes changes that allow it to infect humans, pigs, and potentially other mammals. Once in the lung cells of a mammalian host, the virus can "reassort," or mix genes, with human influenza viruses that are also present. This process can lead to an entirely new viral strain, capable of sustained human-to-human transmission. If such a virus has not circulated in humans before, the entire population will be susceptible. If the virus has not circulated in the human population for a number of years, most people will lack residual immunity from previous infection. Once the novel strain better adapts to humans and is easily transmitted from person to person, it is capable of causing a new pandemic. As the virus passes repeatedly from one human to the next, it eventually becomes less virulent and joins the other influenza viruses that circulate the globe each year. This cycle continues until another new influenza virus emerges from wild birds and the process begins again. Some pandemics result in much higher rates of infection and death than others. Scientists now understand that this variation is a result of the genetic makeup of each specific virus and the presence of certain virulence factors. That is why the 1918-19 pandemic killed many more people than either the 1957-58 or the 1968-69 pandemic. A CRITICAL DIFFERENCE Infectious diseases remain the number one killer of humans worldwide. Currently, more than 39 million people live with HIV, and last year about 2.9 million people died of AIDS, bringing the cumulative total of deaths from AIDS to approximately 25 million. Tuberculosis (TB) and malaria also remain major causes of death. In 2003, about 8.8 million people became infected with TB, and the disease killed more than 2 million. Each year, malaria causes more than 1 million deaths and close to 5 billion episodes of clinical illness. In addition, newly emerging infections, diarrheal and other vector-borne diseases, and agents resistant to antibiotics pose a serious and growing public health concern. Given so many other significant infectious diseases, why does another influenza pandemic merit unique and urgent attention? First, of the more than 1,500 microbes known to cause disease in humans, influenza continues to be the king in terms of overall mortality. Even in a year when only the garden-variety strains circulate, an estimated 1-1.5 million people worldwide die from influenza infections or related complications. In a pandemic lasting 12 to 36 months, the number of cases and deaths would rise dramatically. Recent clinical, epidemiological, and laboratory evidence suggests that the impact of a pandemic caused by the current H5N1 strain would be similar to that of the 1918-19 pandemic. More than half of the people killed in that pandemic were 18 to 40 years old and largely healthy. If 1918-19 mortality data are extrapolated to the current U.S. population, 1.7 million people could die, half of them between the ages of 18 and 40. Globally, those same estimates yield 180-360 million deaths, more than five times the cumulative number of documented AIDS deaths. In 1918-19, most deaths were caused by a virus-induced response of the victim's immune system -- a cytokine storm -- which led to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In other words, in the process of fighting the disease, a person's immune system severely damaged the lungs, resulting in death. Victims of H5N1 have also suffered from cytokine storms, and the world is not much better prepared to treat millions of cases of ARDS today than it was 85 years ago. In the 1957-58 and 1968-69 pandemics, the primary cause of death was secondary bacterial pneumonias that infected lungs weakened by influenza. Although such bacterial infections can often be treated by antibiotics, these drugs would be either unavailable or in short supply for much of the global population during a pandemic. The arrival of a pandemic influenza would trigger a reaction that would change the world overnight. A vaccine would not be available for a number of months after the pandemic started, and there are very limited stockpiles of antiviral drugs. Plus, only a few privileged areas of the world have access to vaccine-production facilities. Foreign trade and travel would be reduced or even ended in an attempt to stop the virus from entering new countries -- even though such efforts would probably fail given the infectiousness of influenza and the volume of illegal crossings that occur at most borders. It is likely that transportation would also be significantly curtailed domestically, as smaller communities sought to keep the disease contained. The world relies on the speedy distribution of products such as food and replacement parts for equipment. Global, regional, and national economies would come to an abrupt halt -- something that has never happened due to HIV, malaria, or TB despite their dramatic impact on the developing world. The closest the world has come to this scenario in modern times was the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) crisis of 2003. Over a period of five months, about 8,000 people were infected by a novel human coronavirus. About ten percent of them died. The virus apparently spread to humans when infected animals were sold and slaughtered in unsanitary and crowded markets in China's Guangdong Province. Although the transmission rate of SARS paled in comparison to that of influenza, it demonstrated how quickly such an infectious agent can circle the globe, given the ease and frequency of international travel. Once SARS emerged in rural China, it spread to five countries within 24 hours and to 30 countries on six continents within several months. The SARS experience teaches a critical lesson about the potential global response to a pandemic influenza. Even with the relatively low number of deaths it caused compared to other infectious diseases, SARS had a powerful negative psychological impact on the populations of many countries. In a recent analysis of the epidemic, the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine concluded: "The relatively high case-fatality rate, the identification of super-spreaders, the newness of the disease, the speed of its global spread, and public uncertainty about the ability to control its spread may have contributed to the public's alarm. This alarm, in turn, may have led to the behavior that exacerbated the economic blows to the travel and tourism industries of the countries with the highest number of cases." SARS provided a taste of the impact a killer influenza pandemic would have on the global economy. Jong-Wha Lee, of Korea University, and Warwick McKibbin, of the Australian National University, estimated the economic impact of the six-month SARS epidemic on the Asia-Pacific region at about $40 billion. In Canada, 438 people were infected and 43 died after an infected person traveled from Hong Kong to Toronto, and the Canadian Tourism Commission estimated that the epidemic cost the nation's economy $419 million. The Ontario health minister estimated that SARS cost the province's health-care system about $763 million, money that was spent, in part, on special SARS clinics and supplies to protect health-care workers. The SARS outbreak also had a substantial impact on the global airline industry. After the disease hit in 2003, flights in the Asia-Pacific area decreased by 45 percent from the year before. During the outbreak, the number of flights between Hong Kong and the United States fell 69 percent. And this impact would pale in comparison to that of a 12- to 36-month worldwide influenza pandemic. The SARS epidemic also raises questions about how prepared governments are to address a prolonged infectious-disease crisis -- particularly governments that are already unstable. Seton Hall University's Yanzhong Huang concluded that the SARS epidemic created the most severe social or political crisis encountered by China's leadership since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. China's problems probably resulted less from SARS' public health impact than from the government's failed effort to allay panic by withholding information about the disease from the Chinese people. The effort backfired. During the crisis, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pointed out in a cabinet meeting on the epidemic that "the health and security of the people, overall state of reform, development, and stability, and China's national interest and image are at stake." But Huang believes that "a fatal period of hesitation regarding information-sharing and action spawned anxiety, panic, and rumor-mongering across the country and undermined the government's efforts to create a milder image of itself in the international arena." Widespread infection and economic collapse can destabilize a government; blame for failing to deal effectively with a pandemic can cripple a government. This holds even more for an influenza pandemic. In the event of a pandemic influenza, the level of panic witnessed during the SARS crisis could spiral out of control as illnesses and deaths continued to mount over months and months. Unfortunately, the public is often indifferent to initial warnings about impending infectious-disease crises -- as with HIV, for example. Indifference becomes fear only after the catastrophe hits, when it is already too late to implement preventive or control measures. READY FOR THE WORST What should the industrialized world be doing to prepare for the next pandemic? The simple answer: far more. So far, the World Health Organization and several countries have finalized or drafted useful but overly general plans. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has increased research on influenza-vaccine production and availability. These efforts are commendable, but what is needed is a detailed operational blueprint for how to get a population through one to three years of a pandemic. Such a plan must involve all the key components of society. In the private sector, the plan must coordinate the responses of the medical community, medical suppliers, food providers, and the transportation system. In the government sector, the plan should take into account officials from public health, law enforcement, and emergency management at the international, federal, state, and local levels. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that such master blueprints may have their drawbacks, too. Berkeley's Aaron Wildavsky persuasively argued that resilience is the real key to crisis management -- overly rigid plans can do more harm than good. Still, planning is enormously useful. It gives government officials, private-sector partners, and the community the opportunity to meet, think through potential dilemmas, purchase necessary equipment, and set up organizational structures for a 12- to 36-month response. A blueprint forces leaders to rehearse their response to a crisis, preparing emotionally and intellectually so that when disaster strikes the community can face it. Influenza-vaccine production deserves special attention. An initiative to provide vaccine for the entire world must be developed, with a well-defined schedule to ensure progress. It is laudable that countries such as the United States and Vietnam are pursuing programs with long-term goals to develop and produce H5N1 vaccine for their respective populations. But if the rest of the world lacks supplies, even the vaccinated will be devastated when the global economy comes to an abrupt halt. Pandemic-influenza preparedness is by nature an international issue. No one can truly be isolated from a pandemic. The pandemic-related collapse of worldwide trade and its ripple effect throughout industrialized and developing countries would represent the first real test of the resiliency of the modern global delivery system. Given the extent to which modern commerce relies on the precise and readily available international trade of goods and services, a shutdown of the global economic system would dramatically harm the world's ability to meet the surging demand for essential commodities such as food and medicine during a crisis. The business community can no longer afford to play a minor role in planning the response to a pandemic. For the world to have critical goods and services during a pandemic, industry heads must stockpile raw materials for production and preplan distribution and transportation support. Every company's senior managers need to be ready to respond rapidly to changes in the availability, production, distribution, and inventory management of their products. There is no model for how to revive the current global economy were it to be devastated. To truly be complete, all planning on international, regional, national, and local levels must consider three different scenarios: What if the pandemic begins tonight? What if it starts one year from now? What if the world is so fortunate as to have an entire decade to prepare? All are possible, but none is certain. STARTING TONIGHT What would happen today in the office of every nation's leader if several cities in Vietnam suffered from major outbreaks of H5N1 infection, with a five percent mortality rate? First, there would be an immediate effort to try to sort out disparate disease-surveillance data from a variety of government and public health sources to determine which countries might have pandemic-related cases. Then, the decision would likely be made to close most international and even some state or provincial borders -- without any predetermined criteria for how or when those borders might be reopened. Border security would be made a priority, especially to protect potential supplies of pandemic-specific vaccines from nearby desperate countries. Military leaders would have to develop strategies to defend the country and also protect against domestic insurgency with armed forces that would likely be compromised by the disease. Even in unaffected countries, fear, panic, and chaos would spread as international media reported the daily advance of the disease around the world. In short order, the global economy would shut down. The commodities and services countries would need to "survive" the next 12 to 36 months would have to be identified. Currently, most businesses' continuity plans account for only a localized disruption -- a single plant closure, for instance -- and have not planned for extensive, long-term outages. The private and public sectors would have to develop emergency plans to sustain critical domestic supply chains and manufacturing and agricultural production and distribution. The labor force would be severely affected when it was most needed. Over the course of the year, up to 50 percent of affected populations could become ill; as many as five percent could die. The disease would hit senior management as hard as the rest of the work force. There would be major shortages in all countries of a wide range of commodities, including food, soap, paper, light bulbs, gasoline, parts for repairing military equipment and municipal water pumps, and medicines, including vaccines unrelated to the pandemic. Many industries not critical to survival -- electronics, automobile, and clothing, for example -- would suffer or even close. Activities that require close human contact -- school, seeing movies in theaters, or eating at restaurants -- would be avoided, maybe even banned. Vaccine would have no impact on the course of the virus in the first months and would likely play an extremely limited role worldwide during the following 12 to 18 months of the pandemic. Despite major innovations in the production of most other vaccines, international production of influenza vaccine is based on a fragile and limited system that utilizes technology from the 1950s. Currently, annual production of influenza vaccine is limited to about 300 million trivalent doses -- which protect against three different influenza strains in one dose -- or less than one billion monovalent doses. To counter a new strain of pandemic influenza that has never circulated throughout the population, each person would likely need two doses for adequate protection. With today's limited production capacity, that means that less than 500 million people -- about 14 percent of the world's population -- would be vaccinated within a year of the pandemic. In addition, because the structure of the virus changes so rapidly, vaccine development could only start once the pandemic began, as manufacturers would have to obtain the new pandemic strain. It would then be at least another six months before mass production of the vaccine. Even if the system functions to the best of its ability, influenza vaccine is produced commercially in just nine countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries contain only 12 percent of the world's population. In the event of an influenza pandemic, they would probably nationalize their domestic production facilities, as occurred in 1976, when the United States, anticipating a pandemic of swine influenza (H1N1), refused to share its vaccine. If a pandemic struck the world today, there would be another possible weapon against influenza: antiviral medicine. When taken daily during the time of exposure to influenza, antivirals have prevented individuals from becoming ill. They have also reduced the severity of illness and subsequent complications when taken within 48 hours of onset. Although there is no data for H5N1, it is assumed antivirals would also prevent H5N1 infection if taken before exposure. There is no evidence, however, that current antiviral influenza drugs would help if the patient developed the kind of cytokine storm that has characterized recent H5N1 infections. But barring this complication, H5N1 should be treatable with Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate), which is manufactured by the Roche pharmaceuticals company in a single plant in Switzerland. In responding to a pandemic, Tamiflu could have a measurable impact in the limited number of countries with sizable stockpiles, but for most of the world it would not be available. Although the company plans on opening another facility in the United States this year, annual production would still cover only a small percentage of the world's population. To date, at least 14 countries have ordered Tamiflu, but the amount of these orders is enough to treat only 40 million people. The orders take considerable time to be processed and delivered -- manufacturing can take up to a year -- and in an emergency the company's ability to produce more would be limited. As with vaccines, countries would probably nationalize their antiviral supplies during a pandemic. Even if the medicine were available, most countries could not afford to buy it. Critical antibiotics, for treatment of secondary bacterial infections, would also be in short supply during a pandemic. Even now, supplies of eight different anti-infective agents are limited in the United States due to manufacturing problems. Aside from medication, many countries would not have the ability to meet the surge in the demand for health-care supplies and services that are normally taken for granted. In the United States, for example, there are 105,000 mechanical ventilators, 75,000 to 80,000 of which are in use at any given time for everyday medical care. During a routine influenza season, the number of ventilators being used shoots up to 100,000. In an influenza pandemic, the United States may need as many as several hundred thousand additional ventilators. A similar situation exists in all developed countries. Virtually every piece of medical equipment or protective gear would be in short supply within days of the recognition of a pandemic. Throughout the crisis, many of these necessities would simply be unavailable for most health-care institutions. Currently, two U.S.-based companies supply most of the respiratory protection masks for health-care workers around the world. Neither company would be able to meet the jump in demand, in part because the component parts for the masks come from multiple suppliers in multiple countries. With travel and transportation restricted, masks may not even be produced at all. Health-care providers and managed-care organizations are also unprepared for an outbreak of pandemic influenza today. There would be a tremendous demand for skilled health professionals. New "hospitals" in high school gymnasiums and community centers would have to be staffed for one to three years. Health-care workers would probably get sick and die at the same rate as the general public -- perhaps at an even higher rate, particularly if they lack access to protective equipment. If they lack such fundamental supplies, it is unclear how many professionals would continue to place themselves in high-risk situations by caring for the infected. Volunteers who are naturally immune as a result of having survived influenza infection would thus have to be found and employed. That means that the medical community's strong resistance to using lay volunteers, which is grounded in both liability concerns and professional hubris, would need to be addressed. Other unpleasant issues would also need to be tackled. Who would have priority access to the extremely limited antiviral supplies? The public would consider any ad hoc prioritization unfair, creating further dissent and disruption during a pandemic. In addition, there would not even be detailed plans for handling the massive number of dead bodies that would soon outstrip the ability to process them. Clearly, an influenza pandemic that struck today would demand an unprecedented medical and nonmedical response. This requires planning well beyond anything devised thus far by any of the world's countries and organizations. A YEAR FROM NOW Even if an H5N1 pandemic is a year away, the world must plan for the same problems with the same fervor. Major campaigns must be initiated to prepare the nonmedical and medical sectors. Pandemic planning must be on the agenda of every school board, manufacturing plant, investment firm, mortuary, state legislature, and food distributor in the United States and beyond. There is an urgent need to reassess the vulnerability of the global economy to ensure that surges in demand can be met. Critical heath-care and consumer products and commodities must be stockpiled. Health professionals must learn how to better communicate risk and must be able to both provide the facts and acknowledge the unknowns to a frightened or panicked population. If there is a year of lead-time before an H5N1 pandemic, vaccine could play a more central role in the global response. Although the world would still have a limited capacity to manufacture influenza vaccine, techniques that could allow scientists to get multiple doses from a current single dose may increase the supply. In addition to further research on this issue, efforts are needed to ensure the availability of syringes and equipment for delivering vaccine. There must also be an international plan for how the vaccine would be allocated. It is far better to struggle with the ethical issues involved in determining such priorities now, in a public forum, rather than to wait until the crisis occurs. Prevention must also be improved. Priority should be placed on early intervention and risk assessment. And an aggressive and comprehensive research agenda must be launched immediately to study the ecology and biology of the influenza virus and the epidemiologic role of various animal and bird species. TEN YEARS LATER If developed countries begin to transform radically the current system of influenza-vaccine production, an influenza pandemic ten years from now could have a much less devastating outcome. The industrialized world must initiate an international project to develop the ability to produce a vaccine for the entire global population within several months of the start of a pandemic. The initiative must be a top priority of the group of seven industrialized nations plus Russia (G-8), because almost nothing could inflict more death and disruption than a pandemic influenza. The current BioShield law and additional legislation recently submitted to Congress will act to enhance the availability of vaccines in the United States. This aim is laudable, but it does little to address international needs. The ultimate goal must be to develop a new cell-culture vaccine or comparable vaccine technology that works on all influenza subtypes and that can be made available on short notice to all the people of the world. WHAT COURSE TO TAKE? The world must form a better understanding of the potential for the emergence of a pandemic influenza strain. A pandemic is coming. It could be caused by H5N1 or by another novel strain. It could happen tonight, next year, or even ten years from now. The signs are alarming: the number of human and animal H5N1 infections has been increasing; small clusters of cases have been documented, suggesting that the virus may have come close to sustained human-to-human transmission; and H5N1 continues to evolve in the virtual genetic reassortment laboratory provided by the unprecedented number of people, pigs, and poultry in Asia. The population explosion in China and other Asian countries has created an incredible mixing vessel for the virus. Consider this sobering information: the most recent influenza pandemic, of 1968-69, emerged in China, when its population was 790 million; today it is 1.3 billion. In 1968, the number of pigs in China was 5.2 million; today it is 508 million. The number of poultry in China in 1968 was 12.3 million; today it is 13 billion. Changes in other Asian countries are similar. Given these developments, as well as the exponential growth in foreign travel over the past 50 years, an influenza pandemic could be more devastating than ever before. Can disaster be avoided? The answer is a qualified yes. Although a coming pandemic cannot be avoided, its impact can be considerably lessened. It depends on how the leaders of the world -- from the heads of the G-8 to local officials -- decide to respond. They must recognize the economic, security, and health threat that the next influenza pandemic poses and invest accordingly. Each leader must realize that even if a country has enough vaccine to protect its citizens, the economic impact of a worldwide pandemic will inflict substantial pain on everyone. The resources required to prepare adequately will be extensive. But they must be considered in light of the cost of failing to invest: a global world economy that remains in a shambles for several years. This is a critical point in history. Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose. Someday, after the next pandemic has come and gone, a commission much like the 9/11 Commission will be charged with determining how well government, business, and public health leaders prepared the world for the catastrophe when they had clear warning. What will be the verdict? From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:41:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:41:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] List of Carnivore & Eschelon Keywords: Bugs Bunny? (Source Uncertain) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:04:36 -0400 (EDT) From: Premise Checker To: Transhuman Tech Subject: List of Carnivore & Eschelon Keywords: Bugs Bunny? (Source Uncertain) The List Of Carnivore And Eschelon Keywords 5.6.28 [Thanks to Laird for this, but he was unable to provide a source, so I'm dubious myself. If garbage, market, and beef are keywords, then there are just too many messages to go through. Maybe there's a formula that assigns weights to each of these words and that messages that score higher than a certain number get flagged. Come to think of it, how would *you* go about searching through e-messages?] The list below contains many of the keywords the Government Spooks search YOUR email and chat for: Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charges, ambush, sniping, motorcade, IRS, BATF, jtf-6, mjtf, hrt, srt, hostages, munitions, weapons, TNT, rdx, amfo, hmtd, picric acid, silver nitrite, mercury fulminate, presidential motorcade, salt peter, charcoal, sulfur, c4, composition b, amatol, petn, lead azide, lead styphante, ddnp, tetryl, nitrocellulose, nitrostarch, mines, grenades, rockets, fuses, delay mechanism, mortars, rpg7, propellants, incendiaries, incendiary device, thermite, security forces, intelligence, agencies, hrt, resistance, psyops, infiltration, assault team, defensive elements, evasion, detection, mission, communications, the football, platter charge, shaped charges, m118, claymore, body armor, charges, shrapnel, timers, timing devices, boobytraps, detcord, pmk 40, silencers, Uzi, HK-MP5, AK-47, FAL, Jatti, Skorpion MP, teflon bullets, cordite, napalm, law, Stingers, RPK, SOCIMI 821 SMG, STEN, BAR, MP40, HK-G3,FN-MAG, RPD,PzB39, Air Force One, M60, RPK74, SG530, SG540, Galil arm, Walther WA2000, HK33KE, Parker-Hale MOD. 82, AKR, Ingram MAC10, M3, L34A1, Walther MPL, AKS-74, HK-GR6, subsonic rounds, ballistic media, special forces, JFKSWC, SFOD-D! , SRT, Rewson, SAFE, Waihopai, INFOSEC, ASPIC, Information Security, SAI, Information Warfare, IW, IS, Privacy, Information Terrorism, Kenya, Terrorism Defensive Information, Defense Information Warfare, Offensive Information, Offensive Information Warfare, NAIA, SAPM, ASU, ECHELON ASTS, National Information Infrastructure, InfoSec, SAO, Reno, Compsec, JICS, Computer Terrorism, Firewalls, Secure Internet Connections, RSP, ISS, JDF, Passwords, NAAP, DefCon V, RSO, Hackers, Encryption, ASWS, Espionage, USDOJ, NSA, CIA, S/Key, SSL, FBI, Secret Service, USSS, Defcon, Military, White House, Undercover, NCCS, Mayfly, PGP, SALDV, PEM, resta, RSA, Perl-RSA, MSNBC, bet, AOL, AOL TOS, CIS, CBOT, AIMSX, STARLAN, 3B2, BITNET, Tanzania, SAMU, COSMOS, DATTA, E911, FCIC, HTCIA, IACIS, UT/RUS, JANET, ram, JICC, ReMOB, LEETAC, UTU, VNET, BRLO, SADCC, NSLEP, SACLANTCEN, FALN, 877, NAVELEXSYSSECENGCEN, BZ, CANSLO, CBNRC, CIDA, JAVA, rsta, Awarehouse, Active X, Compsec 97, RENS, LLC, DERA, JIC, ri! p, rb, Wu, RDI, Mavricks, BIOL, Meta-hackers, ^?, SADT, Steve Case, Tools, RECCEX, Telex, OTAN, monarchist, NMIC, NIOG, IDB, MID/KL, NADIS, NMI, SEIDM, BNC, CNCIS, STEEPLEBUSH, RG, BSS, DDIS, mixmaster, BCCI, BRGE, SARL, Military Intelligence, JICA, Scully, recondo, Flame, Infowar, Bubba, Freeh, Donaldson, Archives, ISADC, CISSP, Sundevil, jack, Investigation, JOTS, ISACA, NCSA, ASVC, spook words, RRF, 1071, Bugs Bunny, Verisign, Secure, ASIO, Lebed, ICE, NRO, Lexis-Nexis, NSCT, SCIF, FLiR, JIC, bce, Lacrosse, Bunker, Flashbangs, HRT, IRA, EODG, DIA, USCOI, CID, BOP, FINCEN, FLETC, NIJ, ACC, AFSPC, BMDO, site, SASSTIXS, NAVWAN, NRL, RL, NAVWCWPNS, NSWC, USAFA, AHPCRC, ARPA, SARD, LABLINK, USACIL, SAPT, USCG, NRC, ~, O, NSA/CSS, CDC, DOE, SAAM, FMS, HPCC, NTIS, SEL, USCODE, CISE, SIRC, CIM, ISN, DJC, bemd, SGC, UNCPCJ, CFC, SABENA, DREO, CDA, SADRS, DRA, SHAPE, bird dog, SACLANT, BECCA, DCJFTF, HALO, SC, TA SAS, Lander, GSM, T Branch, AST, SAMCOMM, HAHO, FKS, 868, GCHQ, DITSA, S! ORT, AMEMB, NSG, HIC, EDI, benelux, SAS, SBS, SAW, UDT, EODC, GOE, DOE, SAMF, GEO, JRB, 3P-HV, Masuda, Forte, AT, GIGN, Exon Shell, radint, MB, CQB, CONUS, CTU, RCMP, GRU, SASR, GSG-9, 22nd SAS, GEOS, EADA, SART, BBE, STEP, Echelon, Dictionary, MD2, MD4, MDA, diwn, 747, ASIC, 777, RDI, 767, MI5, 737, MI6, 757, Kh-11, EODN, SHS, ^X, Shayet-13, SADMS, Spetznaz, Recce, 707, CIO, NOCS, Halcon, NSS, Duress, RAID, Uziel, wojo, Psyops, SASCOM, grom, NSIRL, D-11, SERT, VIP, ARC, S.E.T. Team, NSWG, MP5k, SATKA, DREC, DEVGRP, DF, DSD, FDM, GRU, LRTS, SIGDEV, NACSI, MEU/SOC,PSAC, PTT, RFI, ZL31, SIGDASYS, TDM, SUKLO, SUSLO, TELINT, fake, TEXTA, ELF, LF, MF, SIGS, VHF, Recon, peapod, PA598D28, Spall, dort, 50MZ, 11Emc Choe, SATCOMA, UHF, SHF, ASIO, SASP, WANK, Colonel, domestic disruption, 5ESS, smuggle, Z- 200, 15kg, UVDEVAN, RFX, nitrate, OIR, Pretoria, M-14, enigma, Bletchley Park, Clandestine, NSO, nkvd, argus, afsatcom, CQB, NVD, Counter Terrorism Security, SARA, Rapid Reaction, JSOF! C3IP, Corporate Security, Police, sniper, PPS, ASIS, ASLET, TSCM, Security Consulting, M-x spook, Z-150T, High Security, Security Evaluation, Electronic Surveillance, MI-17, ISR, NSAS, Counterterrorism, real, spies, IWO, eavesdropping, debugging, CCSS, interception, COCOT, NACSI, rhost, rhosts, ASO, SETA, Amherst, Broadside, Capricorn, NAVCM, Gamma, Gorizont, Guppy, NSS, rita, ISSO, submiss, ASDIC, .tc, 2EME REP, FID, 7NL SBS, tekka, captain, 226, .45, nonac, .li, Ionosphere, Mole, Keyhole, NABS, Kilderkin, Artichoke, Badger, Emerson, Tzvrif, SDIS, T2S2, STTC, DNR, NADDIS, NFLIS, CFD, quarter, Cornflower, Daisy, Egret, Iris, JSOTF, Hollyhock, Jasmine, Juile, Vinnell, B.D.M., Sphinx, Stephanie, Reflection, Spoke, Talent, Trump, FX, FXR, IMF, POCSAG, rusers, Covert Video, Intiso, r00t, lock picking, Beyond Hope, LASINT, csystems, .tm, passwd, 2600 Magazine, JUWTF, Competitor, EO, Chan, Pathfinders, SEAL Team 3, JTF, Nash, ISSAA, B61-11, Alouette, executive, Event Security,! Mace, Cap-Stun, stakeout, ninja, ASIS, ISA, EOD, Oscor, Merlin, NTT, SL-1, Rolm, TIE, Tie-fighter, PBX, SLI, NTT, MSCJ, MIT, 69, RIT, Time, MSEE, Cable & Wireless, CSE, SUW, J2, Embassy, ETA, Fax, finks, Fax encryption, white noise, Fernspah, MYK, GAFE, forcast, import, rain, tiger, buzzer, N9, pink noise, CRA, M.P.R.I., top secret, Mossberg, 50BMG, Macintosh Security, Macintosh Internet Security, OC3, Macintosh Firewalls, Unix Security, VIP Protection, SIG, sweep, Medco, TRD, TDR, Z, sweeping, SURSAT, 5926, TELINT, Audiotel, Harvard, 1080H, SWS, Asset, Satellite imagery, force, NAIAG, Cypherpunks, NARF, 127, Coderpunks, TRW, remailers, replay, redheads, RX-7, explicit, FLAME, JTF-6, AVN, ISSSP, Anonymous, W, Sex, chaining, codes, Nuclear, 20, subversives, SLIP, toad, fish, data havens, unix, c, a, b, d, SUBACS, the, Elvis, quiche, DES, 1*, NATIA, NATOA, sneakers, UXO, (), OC-12, counterintelligence, Shaldag, sport, NASA, TWA, DT, gtegsc, owhere, .ch, hope, emc, industr! ial espionage, SUPIR, PI, TSCI, spookwords, industrial intelligence, H.N.P., SUAEWICS, Juiliett Class Submarine, Locks, qrss, loch, 64 Vauxhall Cross, Ingram Mac-10, wwics, sigvoice, ssa, E.O.D., SEMTEX, penrep, racal, OTP, OSS, Siemens, RPC, Met, CIA-DST, INI, watchers, keebler, contacts, Blowpipe, BTM, CCS, GSA, Kilo Class, squib, primacord, RSP, Z7, Becker, Nerd, fangs, Austin, no|d, Comirex, GPMG, Speakeasy, humint, GEODSS, SORO, M5, BROMURE, ANC, zone, SBI, DSS, S.A.I.C., Minox, Keyhole, SAR, Rand Corporation, Starr, Wackenhutt, EO, burhop, Wackendude, mol, Shelton, 2E781, F-22, 2010, JCET, cocaine, Vale, IG, Kosovo, Dake, 36,800, Hillal, Pesec, Hindawi, GGL, NAICC, CTU, botux, Virii, CCC, ISPE, CCSC, Scud, SecDef, Magdeyev, VOA, Kosiura, Small Pox, Tajik, +=, Blacklisted 411, TRDL, Internet Underground, BX, XS4ALL, wetsu, muezzin, Retinal Fetish, WIR, Fetish, FCA, Yobie, forschung, emm, ANZUS, Reprieve, NZC-332, edition, cards, mania, 701, CTP, CATO, Phon- e, Chicago! Posse, NSDM, l0ck, spook, keywords, QRR, PLA, TDYC, W3, CUD, CdC, Weekly World News, Zen, World Domination, Dead, GRU, M72750, Salsa, 7, Blowfish, Gorelick, Glock, Ft. Meade, NSWT, press- release, WISDIM, burned, Indigo, wire transfer, e-cash, Bubba the Love Sponge, Enforcers, Digicash, zip, SWAT, Ortega, PPP, NACSE, crypto-anarchy, AT&T, SGI, SUN, MCI, Blacknet, SM, JCE, Middleman, KLM, Blackbird, NSV, GQ360, X400, Texas, jihad, SDI, BRIGAND, Uzi, Fort Meade, *&, gchq.gov.uk, supercomputer, bullion, 3, NTTC, Blackmednet, :, Propaganda, ABC, Satellite phones, IWIS, Planet-1, ISTA, rs9512c, South Africa, Sergeyev, Montenegro, Toeffler, Rebollo, sorot, cryptanalysis, nuclear, 52 52 N - 03 03 W, Morgan, Canine, GEBA, INSCOM, MEMEX, Stanley, FBI, Panama, fissio nable, Sears Tower, NORAD, Delta Force, SEAL, virtual, WASS, WID, Dolch, secure shell, screws, Black-Ops, O/S, Area51, SABC, basement, ISWG, $ @, data-haven, NSDD, black-bag, rack, TEMPEST, Goodwin, rebels, ID, MD5, ID! EA, garbage, market, beef, Stego, ISAF, unclassified, Sayeret Tzanhanim, PARASAR, Gripan, pirg, curly, Taiwan, guest, utopia, NSG, orthodox, CCSQ, Alica, SHA, Global, gorilla, Bob, UNSCOM, Fukuyama, Manfurov, Kvashnin, Marx, Abdurahmon, snullen, Pseudonyms, MITM, NARF, Gray Data, VLSI, mega, Leitrim, Yakima, NSES, Sugar Grove, WAS, Cowboy, Gist, 8182, Gatt, Platform, 1911, Geraldton, UKUSA, veggie, XM, Parvus, NAVSVS, 3848, Morwenstow, Consul, Oratory, Pine Gap, Menwith, Mantis, DSD, BVD, 1984, blow out, BUDS, WQC, Flintlock, PABX, Electron, Chicago Crust, e95, DDR&E, 3M, KEDO, iButton, R1, erco, Toffler, FAS, RHL, K3, Visa/BCC, SNT, Ceridian, STE, condor, CipherTAC-2000, Etacs, Shipiro, ssor, piz, fritz, KY, 32, Edens, Kiwis, Kamumaruha, DODIG, Firefly, HRM, Albright, Bellcore, rail, csim, NMS, 2c, FIPS140-1, CAVE, E-Bomb, CDMA, Fortezza, 355ml, ISSC, cybercash, NAWAS, government, NSY, hate, speedbump, joe, illuminati, BOSS, Kourou, Misawa, Morse, HF, P415, ladylove, fi! lofax, Gulf, lamma, Unit 5707, Sayeret Mat'Kal, Unit 669, Sayeret Golani, Lanceros, Summercon, NSADS, president, ISFR, freedom, ISSO, walburn, Defcon VI, DC6, Larson, P99, HERF pipe-bomb, 2.3 Oz., cocaine, $, impact, Roswell, ESN, COS, E.T., credit card, b9, fraud, ST1, assassinate, virus, ISCS, ISPR, anarchy, rogue, mailbomb, 888, Chelsea, 1997, Whitewater, MOD, York, plutonium, William Gates, clone, BATF, SGDN, Nike, WWSV, Atlas, IWWSVCS, Delta, TWA, Kiwi, PGP 2.6.2., PGP 5.0i, PGP 5.1, siliconpimp, SASSTIXS, IWG, Lynch, 414, Face, Pixar, IRIDF, NSRB, eternity server, Skytel, Yukon, Templeton, Johohonbu, LUK, Cohiba, Soros, Standford, niche, ISEP, ISEC, 51, H&K, USP, ^, sardine, bank, EUB, USP, PCS, NRO, Red Cell, NSOF, Glock 26, snuffle, Patel, package, ISI, INR, INS, IRS, GRU, RUOP, GSS, NSP, SRI, Ronco, Armani, BOSS, Chobetsu, FBIS, BND, SISDE, FSB, BfV, IB, froglegs, JITEM, SADF, advise, TUSA, LITE, PKK, HoHoCon, SISMI, ISG, FIS, MSW, Spyderco, UOP, SSCI, NIMA, HAMASMOIS, SVR, SIN, advisors, SAP, Monica, OAU, PFS, Aladdin, AG, chameleon man, Hutsul, CESID, Bess, rail gun, .375, Peering, CSC, Tangimoana Beach, Commecen, Vanuatu, Kwajalein, LHI, DRM, GSGI, DST, MITI, JERTO, SDF, Koancho, Blenheim, Rivera, Kyudanki, varon, 310, 17, 312, NB, CBM, CTP, Sardine, SBIRS, jaws, SGDN, ADIU, DEADBEEF, IDP, IDF, Halibut, SONANGOL, Flu, &, Loin, PGP 5.53, meta, Faber, SFPD, EG&G, ISEP, blackjack, Fox, Aum, AIEWS, AMW, RHL, Baranyi, WORM, MP5K-SD, 1071, WINGS, cdi, VIA, DynCorp, UXO, Ti, WWSP, WID, osco, Mary, honor, Templar, THAAD, package, CISD, ISG, BIOLWPN, JRA, ISB, ISDS, chosen, LBSD, van, schloss, secops, DCSS, DPSD, LIF, PRIME, SURVIAC, telex, SP4, Analyzer, embassy, Golf, B61-7, Maple, Tokyo, ERR, SBU, Threat, JPL, Tess, SE, EPL, SPINTCOM, ISS-ADP, Merv, Mexico, SUR, SO13, Rojdykarna, airframe, 510, EuroFed, Avi, shelter, Crypto AG. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:43:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:43:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CS Mon: How the Web changes your reading habits Message-ID: How the Web changes your reading habits http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0623/p13s02-stin.htm 5.6.23 By [2]Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor PALO ALTO, CALIF. - When Ed Chi wants to read, he turns to two of the six computer screens that surround his desk. One is devoted exclusively to e-mail; the other, to the rest of his reading material. The senior researcher is testing a theory: What if your "virtual desk" was as just big as your real desk? How would that change your behavior? Dr. Chi, of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, has found out one thing already. Almost all his reading - text messages, e-mails, journal articles, even books - is done on-screen. Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store. Take "Hamlet." A decade ago, a student of the Shakespeare play would read the play, probably all the way through, and then search out separate commentaries and analyses. Enter hamletworks.org. When completed, the site will help visitors comb through several editions of the play, along with 300 years of commentaries by a slew of scholars. Readers can click to commentaries linked to each line of text in the nearly 3,500-line play. The idea is that some day, anyone wanting to study "Hamlet" will find nearly all the known scholarship brought together in a cohesive way that printed books cannot. Even that effort only scratches the surface of what's possible, some researchers say. Since people are still largely reading the way they always have, they ask, why not use technology to make reading itself more efficient? The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says. While readers might not feel a need to use ScentHighlights with the next Harry Potter novel, the software could help students, academics, and business people quickly extract specific information from other written material. ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild. "Certain plants emit a scent in order to attract birds and bees to come to them," Chi says. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of information give off and attract readers to it. If the reader types in "Wimbledon tennis," for example, ScentHighlights would highlight each word in its own color in the text, as search programs do. But ScentHighlights adds additional keywords in gray that the system has inferred that the reader would be interested in (perhaps "US Open" or "Andy Roddick"). It would also highlight in yellow entire sentences that it deems likely to be especially relevant. To do this, ScentHighlights combines two approaches, noticing how often words are near each other in text and using a technique called "spreading activation." Chi says: "It basically mimics how humans retrieve information." ScentHighlights actually knows nothing about tennis, he says. "It's a purely statistically based technique." Not far away, in a tiny office in a red-tile-roofed building on the edge of the Stanford University campus, another research group is taking a different approach in hopes of making reading on mobile phones faster and easier. Analysts expect mobile phones to evolve into a multipurpose "third screen," along with televisions and computers displaying both pictures and text. But the small screen size has made reading cumbersome, as users scroll through tiny screen after screen. To solve that, BuddyBuzz, a project of a small group within the Stanford Persuasive Technology Laboratory, flashes text to the viewer a word at a time. BuddyBuzz is based on a reading technique called RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) that's been around since the 1970s, says Matt Markovich, editor in chief of BuddyBuzz ([3]www.BuddyBuzz.org). Using it, people can learn to read with good comprehension up to 1,000 words per minute, Mr. Markovich says. "Initially, it seems kind of awkward, but people warm up to it rather quickly," he says. "It does tend to take all of your attention. But I've found my reading speed has increased dramatically." Users who sign up can download news from Reuters and CNET, a technology news website, and postings from several popular Internet bloggers. More content is on the way, Markovich says. Users can also feed their own texts into the website and have them sent to their mobile phone, or offer their content to other BuddyBuzz users. His team, which includes two volunteer programmers and a handful of Stanford undergrads, continues to add more features. Users can set BuddyBuzz to present the text at whatever speed is comfortable for them. The system knows to pause at commas or the end of sentences, just as most readers do. If readers miss something, they can skip back to the beginning of the sentence. Eventually, the group would like to refine the program so that it can recognize when readers are having trouble with a text and automatically slow down, perhaps when they hit a less-familiar word like "Uzbekistan." The system does have shortcomings, says B.J. Fogg, the head of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, who had known about RSVP and encouraged the group to apply it to mobile phones. It doesn't work well with numbers, such as sports scores and stock quotes, though it's great for news, or other general reading, he says. "BuddyBuzz is a new type of reading," he adds. "It doesn't destroy any of the previous forms of reading." Neither ScentHighlights nor BuddyBuzz is commercially available, though a free test version of the latter is available at the BuddyBuzz website. Literacy score card Compared with a generation ago, the world is better able to read. The top 35 nations have 99 percent or better literacy. But others lag far behind, especially in Africa. Among the less literate: o Niger 16.5 percent o Burkina Faso 24.8 o Vanuatu 34.0 o Bangladesh 40.6 o Nepal 42.9 o Pakistan 44.0 o Yemen 47.7 o Morocco 49.8 o Haiti 50.8 Source: United Nations Development Program From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:45:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:45:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Half human, half beast? Message-ID: Half human, half beast? http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7560&print=true * 15:50 21 June 2005 * Jamie Shreeve ON THE surface, it looked like a dry and somewhat technical report on stem cells. But inside there was something extraordinary. The guidelines for research on embryonic stem cells issued by the US National Academy of Sciences in April took meticulous care to address a kind of experimentation that sounds more like science fiction than science. In a section titled "Interspecies Mixing", the authors concluded that there were "valid scientific reasons" for creating chimeras - living entities composed of both human and animal cells. You may have seen mention of chimeras in the press recently. As stem cell technology pushes forward, expect to hear a lot more. In Greek mythology, the chimera was a monstrous creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. The most famous chimeras scuffling about in our collective consciousness are probably the tortured demi-beasts concocted by the megalomaniacal scientist in H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau. In real-life laboratories, mildly chimeric creatures have long been commonplace - mice and other animals with human immune systems, kidneys, skin, and muscle tissue, all created for the purpose of better understanding human diseases. Scientists have also been adding parts of animals to human beings for decades, usually to rescue some faulty original part. In the 1920s, Russian-born French scientist Serge Voronoff made a fortune purporting to treat flagging virility by grafting strips of monkey testicle onto the scrotums of wealthy gentlemen - chimeras all, at least for the brief time before their immune systems spat back the grafts. Today, pig heart valves are routinely transplanted into heart patients with far greater success. None of this research has caused any public outcry, perhaps because the amount of mixing is so small, or the borrowed part is not visible - one can imagine a different reaction to, say, pig nose transplants. But stem cell technology has made the creation of more potent human-animal mixtures both easier and more urgent. Already, researchers have created monkeys with brains that are partially human, mice with functioning human photoreceptor cells in their retinas and sheep with organs that are up to 40 per cent human. And there's a lot more to come, not least a plan to create a mouse with a brain made entirely of human neurons. There is no sinister intent behind these experiments: chimeras would be hugely useful in biomedical research. But there's no denying that organisms assembled by mixing humans and animals are troubling on many levels. A mouse that's 1 per cent human might be OK. But what about 10 per cent? Or 50 per cent? What if such a creature turned out to have human attributes? And what new responsibilities would such an ambiguous being pose to a society accustomed to a clean moral and legal distinction between human beings and the rest of the animal world? "We don't treat all humans that well and we certainly don't treat animals well," says Francoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who helped draft Canada's guidelines on chimeras. "So how do we treat these new beings?" A chimera's worth The reason for all this sudden interest in chimeras is the immense medical potential of stem cells. Isolated from the inner cell mass of a very early embryo called a blastocyst, human embryonic stem cells have the ability to morph into any other kind of cell in the body. They might one day be transplanted into patients with heart disease, diabetes and a host of other ailments to regenerate damaged tissue. Stem cell research is progressing rapidly (New Scientist, 28 May, p 8), but as yet no one knows how the cells would behave once transplanted into the human body - how they might differentiate, migrate and form new tissues. Testing this in people would clearly be unethical, which means studying them in animals first. And implanting human stem cells in animals inevitably entails creating chimeras. Hence all the recent institutional angst, not just from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), but also in a report on human reproductive technologies delivered by the UK's parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology in March, and in recent deliberations of the Medical Research Council of Canada. One problem the policy-makers have to grapple with is that scientists do not yet know how much transplanted human cells will contribute to a developing animal's body or organ functions, including its brain. It is clear, though, that the answer might be "a lot". A few years ago, Esmail Zanjani at the University of Nevada, Reno, injected human stem cells into sheep embryos around halfway through gestation. The resulting sheep had human cells in almost all their tissues, including blood, bone, liver, heart and nervous system. Some organs were up to 40 per cent human. That in itself seems unproblematic, as Zanjani's sheep show no human tendencies whatsoever. But it does raise two serious questions. The first concerns the gonads, and presents a particularly unsettling scenario. If embryonic human stem cells were injected into an animal fetus, especially at a very early stage, it is quite possible that they would migrate into the developing organism's germ line to produce human sperm or eggs. If two such chimeras were to mate, it's possible that a human sperm would fertilise a human egg, resulting in a human embryo growing inside the uterus of an animal. It is highly implausible that such an unsuitably accommodated fetus would come to term. But to eliminate the prospect, the NAS committee dealt with the issue with a swift hand: under no circumstances, it recommended, should any two chimeras be allowed to breed. The second problem concerns the brain, and finding the right regulatory solution is more difficult. Trying to prevent contentious experiments from happening will not suffice - they already have. Eugene Redmond of Yale University and his colleagues have injected human neural progenitor cells - stem cells that have already taken the first developmental step towards becoming a brain cell - into the brains of vervet monkeys with the intention of exploring them as a treatment for Parkinson's disease. And a team at Harvard University transplanted neuronal progenitor cells into fetal monkeys to see if they would grow, migrate and differentiate along with their monkey counterparts (they did), while still others have treated mouse brains to a similar human neural dusting. The problem is how to reap the knowledge gained from such experiments while ensuring that the subjects do not become disturbingly knowledgeable themselves. Is it possible that you could end up with a creature possessing a human-like brain - and human-like cognitive abilities, such as intelligence and self-awareness - trapped in the skull of an animal? The answer to that question seems to depend on three factors: the stage in development at which the cells are introduced, the amount of human material added, and how closely related the animal is to us. While it is highly unlikely that human stem cells transplanted into an adult animal will have any effect on its cognitive abilities or body plan, a fetus would stand a much higher chance of being "humanised". And the earlier in gestation you introduce the stem cells, the more humanised it is likely to become. Very early embryos would be most receptive of all, which is why most scientists shy away from such an experiment. Though no formal regulations address the issue in the UK, British stem cell researchers have an informal agreement among themselves not to pursue it. "People have sensitivities about this," says Stephen Minger, a stem cell biologist at King's College London. Canadian guidelines prohibit funding for experiments that introduce human stem cells into an unborn animal at any stage, a policy that led Derek van der Kooy, a stem cell researcher at the University of Toronto, to wait until his mouse subjects were 1 day old before transplanting human retinal stem cells into their eyes to see if they would develop into photoreceptors. The experiment worked, but according to van der Kooy, would have been much more informative if it had been carried out at an earlier stage of development. In the US, transfer of human stem cells into mammalian blastocysts is prohibited in federally-funded research. But under the NAS guidelines, anyone with private or state funding, including biotech companies, could conduct such an experiment, provided that they gain approval from the appropriate review boards and "no other experiment can provide the information needed". The latter requirement shouldn't be a block: many researchers say this would be the best way to observe the "pluripotency" of human embryonic stem cells - their capacity to differentiate into all kinds of tissue. But so far, only one American scientist, Ari Brivanlou of The Rockefeller University in New York, seems eager to go down that road. "It's a little uncomfortable that I understand my chicken, frog and mouse cells better than my human cells," says Brivanlou, who plans to inject human embryonic stem cells into 3 to 5-day-old mouse blastocysts, then implant the embryo in a mouse uterus. "We have to know how many cell lines contribute to the pancreas, how many to the nervous system, and so on. If we don't know answers to these basic questions, we will never go to the next step of using stem cells clinically." Perhaps even more provocative than the question of when human stem cells are inserted into an animal is the matter of where. No experiment has drawn more attention to this issue than the one proposed by Irving Weissman and his colleagues at Stanford University, California, and StemCells Inc., a private company he co-founded. Two years ago, Weissman came up with an ingenious idea to create an experimental model to study human brain cancers and drug therapies. He imagined transplanting human neuronal stem cells into the brains of a strain of mouse that loses its own neurons just before birth. The result would be a mouse with a brain composed almost entirely of human neurons. Well aware of the ethical pitfalls involved in such research, Weissman sought the advice of Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford's law school, before proceeding. Greely organised a committee to review the experiment. Its recommendation was that the project be allowed to proceed, but with built-in "stopping points" to examine whether the mouse's brain was developing any unusual structures or, after its birth, exhibiting any odd or human-like behaviour. If so, the work should be halted pending further review (see Graphic, page 40). Perhaps the committee should also have advised hiring a good PR agent. Weissman is still months or even years away from attempting his experiment - he is reportedly having trouble breeding the neuronally deficient mice - but it has already drawn "this shall not stand" rhetoric from the conservative talk-show host Bill O'Reilly, the anti-biotech activist Jeremy Rifkin, and numerous religious commentators and bloggers. Some scientists are uncomfortable too. "Eight years ago, people said it was slander that we would suggest that scientists would even attempt anything like this," says Stuart Newman, a developmental biologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. In 1997, Newman teamed up with Rifkin in a failed attempt to patent a method for creating a human-animal chimera - not so they could conduct the experiment, but to block others from doing so and to raise public awareness of the inherent dangers. "Now Irving Weissman is saying he'll have a mouse with a human brain. I don't come at this from any moral or religious perspective. I'm concerned about the social uses of science and the possibility of technology coming back and biting us. In this case, maybe literally." Weissman has little time for such arguments. "You will find bioethicists, religious people and politicians who will try to stop this research," he says. "They must be reminded that if they succeed, and it's the kind of research that could result in real and new therapies, then I personally hold them morally responsible for the suffering and death of those patients." In any case, the chances of one of Weissman's mice standing up and saying "Hi, I'm Mickey!", as Greely puts it, are vanishingly small. Wherever consciousness resides in our minds, it is almost certainly not on the cellular level, but rather in the vastly complex interactions that take place in the unique architecture of the human brain. Mouse brains are less than one-thousandth the size of human brains in volume, and are far simpler in their organisation. To create an animal with a brain possessing any human attributes you would probably have to use an animal much closer to us in evolution, and early in its development. A chimpanzee, for instance. While still unlikely, the mere chance that such an experiment might produce a "humanzee" has not gone unnoticed by ethicists and policy-makers. A working group at The Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is already wrestling with the problem of human-primate chimeras. And the NAS report recommends that the transfer of human stem cells into the early embryos of apes or other primates "should not be permitted at this time". The yuck factor Those last three words have been a red rag to some, who see in them the top of a slippery slope towards the acceptance of an abomination. But there may be legitimate reasons not to fence off that slope too securely without considering areas that might be useful to explore. Consider a disease such as severe autism, which diminishes or even erases cognitive capacities that are considered uniquely human: language, social and moral judgement, and the ability to read the intentions of others or understand that they have intentions in the first place. Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Johns Hopkins working group, says that if embryonic stem cells could be cloned from an autistic individual and transplanted into a monkey brain early in its development, perhaps the mechanisms of the disease could be illuminated by observing differences in brain structure and social behaviour between the autistic monkeys and controls who received normal human stem cells. "This is science fiction," says Deacon. "But the point is, if I can imagine how it might help this disorder, there are probably dozens of cases that I can't imagine. We need to create a system of rules that is both sensitive to the problem and capable of discerning applications." For a lot of people, perhaps most, the creation of an animal even slightly "humanised" in its thoughts or feelings is morally wrong, no matter what the potential biomedical pay-off. But it is not easy to pinpoint why. The most often heard reason is some variation on "the yuck factor", or what Leon Kass, head of The President's Council on Bioethics in the US, calls "the wisdom of repugnance": if you have a gut feeling that something is wrong, it probably is, whether or not you can articulate the rational basis for the feeling. Perhaps it is the inherent "unnaturalness" of the chimera that makes people bristle at it; perhaps mixing animals and humans violates some fundamental moral taboo. On the other hand, our species has performed unnatural acts upon nature for centuries - hybridising farm animals such as mules, grafting plants onto each other, let alone performing heart transplants and in vitro fertilisation. And while some moral taboos, such as cannibalism and incest, appear to be universal, others, such as homosexuality and interracial marriage, have lost their authority. "In the 1800s, it was considered morally unacceptable to give blood transfusions," says Cynthia Cohen, a bioethicist at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington DC. "When there is reason to change the taboos, we change them." Cohen argues that the real problem is that chimeras denigrate what it means to be human. Writing in a forthcoming issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, she, van der Kooy and his colleague at the University of Toronto, Phillip Karpowicz, argue that what is at risk is human dignity: a being with only some degree of humanness imprisoned in an animal body is not free to experience all the cognitive endowments, emotions and moral rights our species uniquely enjoys. The "human dignity" argument underscores a devilish catch-22: the better a chimera serves as a research model for actual human biology, the more risk there is that it will acquire human attributes that would preclude or even criminalise its use in research. This is an amplified version of the dilemma that society already has to confront over the use of chimpanzees and other higher primates in research. But what if one were to look at a highly humanised chimera from the other direction, seeing it not as a denigration of the human, but an elevation of the animal? "I don't think that taking an individual with a lower moral status and conferring a higher moral status on it is wrong for the animal," says Robert Streiffer, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It could even be beneficial, if it reminded us in a useful way that the categorical difference between a human being and the rest of nature is really not so categorical." Another highly speculative benefit of a true human-animal chimera might be its role as a sort of privileged go-between. With a hand in one world and a paw in the other, perhaps it could provide unimagined insights into the lives and minds of non-human primates, and in so doing advance our understanding of all animals. But what if it were trapped between those two worlds, able neither to realise its humanity, nor to live in peace with its animal self? Such a creature would be as wretched as the ones crafted by the hand of Doctor Moreau, "thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer". Perhaps the best argument against too potent a mix of human and animal would be the emotional torment suffered by a being so unspeakably alone in the world. But such thoughts are still safely in the realm of science fiction. Jamie Shreeve is a science writer based in New Jersey. His latest book, The Genome War (Knopf, 2004), was one of The Economist's Books of the Year From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:45:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:45:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Women's orgasms are a turn-off for the brain Message-ID: Women's orgasms are a turn-off for the brain http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625053.600&print=true * 25 June 2005 * Michael Le Page FOR women, it seems, sex is a big turn-off. A scanning study has revealed that many areas of the brain switch off during orgasm - including those involved in emotion. "At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings," says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity decreased in many more areas of the brain, Holstege told a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Copenhagen this week. Only one part of the brain, in the cerebellum, was more active in women during orgasm. The cerebellum is generally associated with coordinating movement. The findings appear to confirm what we already know: that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. Looked at from an evolutionary point of view, it could be that the brain switches off the emotions during sex because at such times reproduction and survival of the species become more important than survival of the individual. The team has already done a similar study with 11 men, which revealed far less deactivation during orgasm than in women. However, Holstege says the results are probably unreliable because PET scanners measure activity over 2 minutes - and in men it's all over in a few seconds. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 29 20:45:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:45:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Editorial: The trouble with human-animal chimeras Message-ID: Editorial: The trouble with human-animal chimeras http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625052.200&print=true * 25 June 2005 LEON KASS, chairman of President Bush's bioethics council, calls it "the wisdom of repugnance". Others know it simply as the "yuck factor" - that visceral feeling that there is something wrong, even if you cannot say what. That gut feeling, Kass argues, is telling you that a moral boundary has been crossed and it is time to turn back. The yuck factor has made more frequent appearances in recent years as biotechnology has advanced. Most recently it has emerged in discussions of human-animal chimeras - living entities that have both human and animal cells. One researcher, for example, wants to create a mouse with a brain composed entirely of human neurons. That might sound like science fiction, and for now it is. But scientists have already created similar human-animal amalgamations, and there are many more on the drawing board. Researchers' attraction to human-animal chimeras goes hand in hand with the evolving field of stem cell therapies. They want to uncover the potential of stem cells for both restoring health and destroying it - which tissues stem cells can differentiate into, and whether they will develop into tumours. This can only be tested by injecting human stem cells into animals, which inevitably means creating chimeras. Chimeras could also give us revolutionary new models of human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's. Animal rights campaigners are bound to see chimeras as yet another example of unwarranted exploitation. While most people may not share this view, and even though stem cells have extraordinary promise, there is still something deeply unsettling about the prospect of creating animals that are partly human. Explaining why, however, is tricky. It cannot be just their "unnaturalness" - that they never existed before humans decided to create them. After all, we have been tinkering with the living world since prehistory, from hybrids to recombinant DNA technology. Such creations are often controversial, but they do not send us into a moral quandary. There is no doubt that involving humans in experiments raises the stakes: organ transplants and IVF certainly triggered deep moral objections when they were introduced. Yet until recently, human-animal chimeras have not done the same. Few are repulsed by the idea of having a pig valve transplanted into their heart, or an injection of pig neurons into their brain to treat Parkinson's disease, even though both turn the recipients into chimeras. But imagine if that injection of pig cells made its recipient less human - if it made their thoughts and feelings a little bit pig-like. That is an unsettling thought, and it reveals what is really troubling about human-animal chimeras: the prospect of creating something that is somehow sub-human, a person who is not quite human or one trapped inside an animal's body. Where would such a creature belong in a world used to clear distinctions - social, moral and legal - between humans and other animals? On present evidence, the chances of a mouse becoming conscious or feeling human emotions are very slim. When human neural stem cells were injected into a mouse brain they followed the rules for mouse neural stem cells. It is likely that "humanness" resides not in individual brain cells but in the organisation of those cells. One curious consequence of these experiments is that they expose how little we know about what it means to be human: they may even provide some answers. The US National Academy of Sciences issued sensible guidelines earlier this year to minimise the potential for "humanising" animals and vice versa. That guidance calls for scientists to take extra precautions when altering an animal's brain or germ line (lest future generations grow ever more human). And it warns of the need to be alert to the emergence of any human characteristics in animals - whether in behaviour or appearance. To reassure the public and ensure that animal experiments remain acceptable, work on chimeras must be carefully monitored and limited to tests that are essential to tackling human disease. Scientists should also be specific about their purpose: if trials are basic research, relevant only in the long-run, they should say so. There is no room here for the "what would happen if I did this?" type of experiment. The risk of creating a monster, provoking public anger and destroying a field with huge potential benefit is just too great. From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jun 30 02:49:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 19:49:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Right or wrong, not winning or losing Message-ID: <01C57CE3.A98FC840.shovland@mindspring.com> Those who counsel patience and persistence in Iraq never suggest that succeeding in Iraq would be morally right. Even they know that it would not be. And that is the real problem with persisting. If we "won" it would be at the cost of the complete destruction of our moral soul, which is already seriously damaged. "Winning" will require nothing less than the genocide of the Iraqi people- destroying them to "save" them from the "terrorists." Baghdad, Falluja, and Basra have become the death camps of the "New American Century." Even the goal of achieving "stability" seems suspect, because that is often used as a code word for "under our control." It will be years before we can calculate the total cost of this disaster, but we know that it will be high. It will include a generous measure of self-loathing, a crushing debt load, and the loss of access to the vital resources we were trying to conquer. We will have to struggle on, humbled but wiser, to rebuild a nation that is part of the community of nations, and not a would-be global tyrant. Steve Hovland