From guavaberry at earthlink.net Tue Nov 1 22:21:18 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 17:21:18 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted In-Reply-To: <43639A95.7040602@solution-consulting.com> References: <43639A95.7040602@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20051101165059.01e78a48@mail.earthlink.net> No wonder we have the intelligent design belongs in classroom curriculum battle. Teachers Flunk http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/flunk.html Stats http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/tmatters.html & they can get rid of the kids http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newretention.html but can't seem to get rid of the bad teachers http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/badteachers.html Teachers are idiots http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Underlying.html btw: private schools can hire anyone they want. karen <:-(> At 10:51 AM 10/29/2005, you wrote: >Frank, you know that teachers have the lowest IQs of any college graduate >group. Where will they find a teacher who can respond to Misha's >questions? You would have to sidestep the teacher certification process >and entice a Ph.D. in physics or something similar to come into the >school, wouldn't you? Perhaps the Davidsons will have U Reno faculty come >in to actually teach the classes (can they do that?). > >Anyway, fascinating report. Thanks, Frank. >Lynn > >Premise Checker wrote: >>Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted >>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/education/26gifted.html > ><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >The Educational CyberPlayGround >http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ > >National Children's Folksong Repository >http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/NCFR/ > >Hot List of Schools Online and >Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters >http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/ > >7 Hot Site Awards >New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, >USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty ><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Nov 2 02:00:51 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 19:00:51 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.0.20051101165059.01e78a48@mail.earthlink.net> References: <43639A95.7040602@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20051101165059.01e78a48@mail.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <43681DD3.1000405@solution-consulting.com> Karen's links are fascinating, and disheartening. Karen, the links within the articles don't seem to work for me. Frank, any comments on this? You are the resident expert. Look at this link for more disheartening news. Help us Howard to re-energize the country. You are our only hope. http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007460 best line in the piece: And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . . Lynn K.E. wrote: > No wonder we have the > intelligent design belongs in classroom curriculum battle. > > Teachers Flunk > http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/flunk.html Comment: I don't think there is any evidence that being a certified teacher means anything about whether a teacher can effectively teach / motivate / organize the class, etc. It would be better, IMHO, to (1) raise compensation for teachers; (2) eliminate tenure in all schools [yes, in the university too]; (3) hire anyone who wants to teach and retain those who do a good job; (4) close Departments of Education in every college; (5) Close the federal Department of Education. > > > Stats > http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/tmatters.html Well, there is the problem. Teaching attracts two types, a bimodal distribution. First, dedicated bright people who want to serve and help, and second, dunces who want to get a degree but aren't smart enough to finish anything but a education degree. The low averages make me thing that the second group is by far the largest. > > & they can get rid of the kids > http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newretention.html > > but can't seem to get rid of the bad teachers > http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/badteachers.html > > Teachers are idiots > http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Underlying.html > > btw: private schools can hire anyone they want. > > karen > <:-(> > > At 10:51 AM 10/29/2005, you wrote: > >> Frank, you know that teachers have the lowest IQs of any college >> graduate group. Where will they find a teacher who can respond to >> Misha's questions? You would have to sidestep the teacher >> certification process and entice a Ph.D. in physics or something >> similar to come into the school, wouldn't you? Perhaps the Davidsons >> will have U Reno faculty come in to actually teach the classes (can >> they do that?). >> >> Anyway, fascinating report. Thanks, Frank. >> Lynn >> >> Premise Checker wrote: >> >>> Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted >>> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/education/26gifted.html >> >> >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> The Educational CyberPlayGround >> http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ >> >> National Children's Folksong Repository >> http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/NCFR/ >> >> Hot List of Schools Online and >> Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters >> http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/ >> >> 7 Hot Site Awards >> New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, >> USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Nov 2 01:47:30 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 17:47:30 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bush Family Tradition Message-ID: <20113060.1130896051076.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BushFamilyTradition.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 125510 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Nov 3 01:12:16 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 17:12:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] not smart enough In-Reply-To: <200511021900.jA2J09e01882@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051103011216.4776.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>First, dedicated bright people who want to serve and help, and second, dunces who want to get a degree but aren't smart enough to finish anything but a education degree. The low averages make me thing that the second group is by far the largest.<< --I'm suspicious of claims people "aren't smart enough". More likely they are attempting to work within a system that doesn't match their mode of information processing. Kinesthetic modelers trying to adapt to a lecture format, for example. They may well want to serve, but have a problem adapting to the way information is presented. Or, they may have emotional problems that hold them back and make them more compassionate toward students. There are many possibilities, other than calling them "dunces". One could assume from the above paragraph that the author isn't smart ("a education degree") or one could guess the writer was hurried, or has a processing style that doesn't match the written format. I don't like that we've become so quick to judge as a culture, and so uninterested in why brains do what they do. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com From guavaberry at earthlink.net Thu Nov 3 01:25:31 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:25:31 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted In-Reply-To: <43681DD3.1000405@solution-consulting.com> References: <43639A95.7040602@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20051101165059.01e78a48@mail.earthlink.net> <43681DD3.1000405@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20051102202101.01dd76f8@mail.earthlink.net> hi Lynn sorry that some links don't work, i try but can't keep up with all . . . best, karen At 09:00 PM 11/1/2005, you wrote: >Karen's links are fascinating, and disheartening. Karen, the links within >the articles don't seem to work for me. > >Frank, any comments on this? You are the resident expert. > >Look at this link for more disheartening news. Help us Howard to >re-energize the country. You are our only hope. >http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007460 > >best line in the piece: >And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . . >Lynn > >K.E. wrote: >>No wonder we have the >>intelligent design belongs in classroom curriculum battle. >> >>Teachers Flunk >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/flunk.html >> >Comment: I don't think there is any evidence that being a certified >teacher means anything about whether a teacher can effectively teach / >motivate / organize the class, etc. It would be better, IMHO, to (1) raise >compensation for teachers; (2) eliminate tenure in all schools [yes, in >the university too]; (3) hire anyone who wants to teach and retain those >who do a good job; (4) close Departments of Education in every college; >(5) Close the federal Department of Education. >> >> >>Stats >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/tmatters.html >> >Well, there is the problem. Teaching attracts two types, a bimodal >distribution. First, dedicated bright people who want to serve and help, >and second, dunces who want to get a degree but aren't smart enough to >finish anything but a education degree. The low averages make me thing >that the second group is by far the largest. >> >>& they can get rid of the kids >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newretention.html >> >> >>but can't seem to get rid of the bad teachers >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/badteachers.html >> >> >>Teachers are idiots >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Underlying.html >> >> >>btw: private schools can hire anyone they want. >> >>karen >><:-(> >> >>At 10:51 AM 10/29/2005, you wrote: >>>Frank, you know that teachers have the lowest IQs of any college >>>graduate group. Where will they find a teacher who can respond to >>>Misha's questions? You would have to sidestep the teacher certification >>>process and entice a Ph.D. in physics or something similar to come into >>>the school, wouldn't you? Perhaps the Davidsons will have U Reno >>>faculty come in to actually teach the classes (can they do that?). >>> >>>Anyway, fascinating report. Thanks, Frank. >>>Lynn >>> >>>Premise Checker wrote: >>>>Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted >>>>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/education/26gifted.html >>>> >>> >>><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>>The Educational CyberPlayGround >>>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ >>> >>>National Children's Folksong Repository >>>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/NCFR/ >>> >>>Hot List of Schools Online and >>>Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters >>>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/ >>> >>> >>>7 Hot Site Awards >>>New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, >>>USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty >>><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 Euterpel66 at aol.com Thu Nov 3 01:40:28 2005 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 20:40:28 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] not smart enough Message-ID: <22d.37f9c9.309ac48c@aol.com> In a message dated 11/2/2005 8:13:23 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: >>First, dedicated bright people who want to serve and help, and second, dunces who want to get a degree but aren't smart enough to finish anything but a education degree. The low averages make me thing that the second group is by far the largest.<< --I'm suspicious of claims people "aren't smart enough". More likely they are attempting to work within a system that doesn't match their mode of information processing. Kinesthetic modelers trying to adapt to a lecture format, for example. They may well want to serve, but have a problem adapting to the way information is presented. Or, they may have emotional problems that hold them back and make them more compassionate toward students. There are many possibilities, other than calling them "dunces". One could assume from the above paragraph that the author isn't smart ("a education degree") or one could guess the writer was hurried, or has a processing style that doesn't match the written format. I don't like that we've become so quick to judge as a culture, and so uninterested in why brains do what they do. Michael Michael, When we look in a mirror, we think we see ourselves as we really are, but in reality not only is it backwards, but it is two dimensional. My friend, Mike Waller once wrote a poem about the rose-colored (or he would say rose-coloured) glasses with which we view the world, ourselves included. O May No Some Pow'r the Giftie gie us........... I think old Rabbie got it wrong, Our world would not last very long If we could see with steely eye The self that's seen by passers-by. The human brain's perhaps the best But in one way it fails the test. In planning all our clever acts We need a mind which faces facts. Yet one such fact we deeply fear: There ain't much point in being here. As billions of us come and go, >From whence and whither we don't know, Our egos need stout walls and roof To shield them from this dreadful truth. So, whilst outwardly there's no sign, Inside ourselves we build a shrine. There, raised upon a noble plinth, Which stands within a labyrinth, There dwells the sacred sense of self So crucial to our mental health. These gods, who hold us all in thrall, Demand delusions shared by all, Which serve to fool the human race That everyone's a special case. So when your mind to ego turns Forget about old Rabbie Burns. As of yourself you take a view Wear spectables of rosy hue. Lorraine Rice Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ---Andre Gide http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Nov 3 06:10:32 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 22:10:32 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Cheney Family Tradition Message-ID: <32631960.1130998233002.JavaMail.root@mswamui-thinleaf.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CheneyFamilyTradition.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 99838 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Nov 3 21:30:08 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 13:30:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] views of self In-Reply-To: <200511031900.jA3J0te06691@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051103213008.45659.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Mike Waller says: >>Our world would not last very long If we could see with steely eye The self that's seen by passers-by.<< --We all have an internal narrative in which we convince ourselves we are wise, likeable, funny, powerful, whatever. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of less friendly observers can be a jarring experience. Gregory Bateson noted that schizophrenics tend to act as if they expect their communication to be misread. That would make it pretty difficult to form a stable social self. Perhaps religious crusades and fascism are also allergic reactions to the "cold observer". An attempt to preserve the friendly container in which one's preferred self is reinforced by the gaze of others. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com From thrst4knw at aol.com Thu Nov 3 22:11:24 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 17:11:24 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] not smart enough (active learning) Message-ID: <436A8B0C.4090704@aol.com> The loaded notion of "smart" or "not smart" aside for just a moment, I wanted to address this notion of teaching people according to information processing mode. I've seen it discussed in NLP and other related sources, and always been just a bit skeptical of it. Not that I know for a fact that it is completely wrong, though it seems rather weak to me at this point. More importantly, it does seem somewhat misguded to me in its intentions. It is based on a mechanistic notion of the brain and its learning abilities, as if the human biocomputer were a simplistic multi-channel transducer of some sort, with isolated channels. More current models of brain function seem to acknowledge more active and wholistic human talents and motivations. So personally, I like to envison adult competence as largely a matter of learning your own strengths and weaknesesses and finding strategies for making the best of your own talents. If people prefer information in a particular form, it is far more useful educationally in my opinion to teach them ways to translate between different kinds of information in their own manner, so they do not depend on the rest of the world to be presented in a particular format to them. We know enough about the human brain to know that the brain doesn't store information for recall coded into different sensory channels, it builds knowledge maps that make sense of situations in context. It does not make sense to solely try to present everything someone is learning into some form that they may prefer. That's like encouraging a deaf person to only read signs and not lips. It is hard to find a humane justification for deliberately handicapping a person in that manner in my opinion, unless there is no choice. The old chestnut about teaching a person to fish rather than throwing them a fish (or something like that :-)) comes to mind. I think the model I am fishing for here is called "mastery learning" or sometimes "active learning." I think if someone hasn't the neccessary talent for that form of active learning, and can't aquire the skills, then it makes perfect sense to conclude they have to learn in a less efficient manner such as spoon feeding them in particular ways. I think we should realistically distinguish talent (and lack thereof) where it is truly meaningful to outcomes, such as the capacity for self-directed learning and specific teaching strategies. kind regards, Todd Michael Christopher wrote on 11/2/2005, 8:12 PM: > --I'm suspicious of claims people "aren't smart > enough". More likely they are attempting to work > within a system that doesn't match their mode of > information processing. Kinesthetic modelers trying to > adapt to a lecture format, for example. They may well > want to serve, but have a problem adapting to the way > information is presented. From thrst4knw at aol.com Thu Nov 3 22:24:35 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 17:24:35 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] views of self In-Reply-To: <20051103213008.45659.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20051103213008.45659.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <436A8E23.9060509@aol.com> Interesing point ... we can even be our own enemy in this regard ... one of the core theories of social psychology (Self-Perception Theory, Daryl Bem) says that we evaluate ourselves by observing our own actions as if we were an outside observer. And then we tend to act consistently with what we've inferred about ourselves that way (closely related to and sometimes hard to distinguish from dissonance theory). Michael Christopher wrote on 11/3/2005, 4:30 PM: > Seeing ourselves through the eyes > of less friendly observers can be a jarring > experience. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Nov 4 02:48:39 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:48:39 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] not smart enough (active learning) In-Reply-To: <436A8B0C.4090704@aol.com> References: <436A8B0C.4090704@aol.com> Message-ID: <436ACC07.6080109@solution-consulting.com> If you teach a man to fish, he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day Todd I. Stark wrote: >The loaded notion of "smart" or "not smart" aside for just a moment, I >wanted to address this notion of teaching people according to >information processing mode. > >I've seen it discussed in NLP and other related sources, and always >been just a bit skeptical of it. Not that I know for a fact that it is >completely wrong, though it seems rather weak to me at this point. More >importantly, it does seem somewhat misguded to me in its intentions. It >is based on a mechanistic notion of the brain and its learning >abilities, as if the human biocomputer were a simplistic multi-channel >transducer of some sort, with isolated channels. More current models of >brain function seem to acknowledge more active and wholistic human >talents and motivations. > >So personally, I like to envison adult competence as largely a matter of >learning your own strengths and weaknesesses and finding strategies for >making the best of your own talents. > >If people prefer information in a particular form, it is far more useful >educationally in my opinion to teach them ways to translate between >different kinds of information in their own manner, so they do not >depend on the rest of the world to be presented in a particular format >to them. We know enough about the human brain to know that the brain >doesn't store information for recall coded into different sensory >channels, it builds knowledge maps that make sense of situations in >context. It does not make sense to solely try to present everything >someone is learning into some form that they may prefer. That's like >encouraging a deaf person to only read signs and not lips. It is hard >to find a humane justification for deliberately handicapping a person in >that manner in my opinion, unless there is no choice. > >The old chestnut about teaching a person to fish rather than throwing >them a fish (or something like that :-)) comes to mind. I think the >model I am fishing for here is called "mastery learning" or sometimes >"active learning." > >I think if someone hasn't the neccessary talent for that form of active >learning, and can't aquire the skills, then it makes perfect sense to >conclude they have to learn in a less efficient manner such as spoon >feeding them in particular ways. I think we should realistically >distinguish talent (and lack thereof) where it is truly meaningful to >outcomes, such as the capacity for self-directed learning and specific >teaching strategies. > >kind regards, > >Todd > > > >Michael Christopher wrote on 11/2/2005, 8:12 PM: > > > --I'm suspicious of claims people "aren't smart > > enough". More likely they are attempting to work > > within a system that doesn't match their mode of > > information processing. Kinesthetic modelers trying to > > adapt to a lecture format, for example. They may well > > want to serve, but have a problem adapting to the way > > information is presented. > > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Nov 4 05:22:03 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 21:22:03 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] views of self In-Reply-To: <20051103213008.45659.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: views of self :-) -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael Christopher Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 1:30 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] views of self Mike Waller says: >>Our world would not last very long If we could see with steely eye The self that's seen by passers-by.<< --We all have an internal narrative in which we convince ourselves we are wise, likeable, funny, powerful, whatever. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of less friendly observers can be a jarring experience. Gregory Bateson noted that schizophrenics tend to act as if they expect their communication to be misread. That would make it pretty difficult to form a stable social self. Perhaps religious crusades and fascism are also allergic reactions to the "cold observer". An attempt to preserve the friendly container in which one's preferred self is reinforced by the gaze of others. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 02[1].jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 83045 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: ClintonFamilyTradition.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 139857 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Nov 4 14:26:58 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 06:26:58 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Honor Roll Message-ID: <4541150.1131114418790.JavaMail.root@mswamui-cedar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: HonorRoll.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 124946 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Nov 4 23:33:36 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 15:33:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] processing modes In-Reply-To: <200511041723.jA4HN5e18591@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051104233336.21856.qmail@web30811.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Todd says: >>More importantly, it does seem somewhat misguded to me in its intentions. It is based on a mechanistic notion of the brain and its learning abilities<< --The educational model of using lectures and textbooks is also based on a mechanistic view of learning. Learning is a process, it involves two-way interaction, and whether information is delivered in words, images, or through three-dimensional environments does make a difference. There is nothing wrong with people who can't learn from a textbook or lecture. They learn better in other ways. >>as if the human biocomputer were a simplistic multi-channel transducer of some sort, with isolated channels.<< --I'm not aware that people were teaching processing modes as isolated channels. Of course channels interact. If someone says they don't, they're taking the model way too far. >>More current models of brain function seem to acknowledge more active and wholistic human talents and motivations.<< --Agreed. That doesn't negate the model, if it's used intelligently. >>So personally, I like to envison adult competence as largely a matter of learning your own strengths and weaknesesses and finding strategies for making the best of your own talents.<< --That's the whole reason for recognizing processing modes. If someone is absolutely terrible at learning through a lecture format but excellent at learning through music or some visual medium, we can either declare them "stupid" because the lecture format is preferred in education, or we can say they work better in one mode than another. I think the latter is more productive, and much kinder. >>If people prefer information in a particular form, it is far more useful educationally in my opinion to teach them ways to translate between different kinds of information in their own manner, so they do not depend on the rest of the world to be presented in a particular format to them.<< --Agreed. That can't be done unless we acknowledge that there are different modes and that translation is needed. >>We know enough about the human brain to know that the brain doesn't store information for recall coded into different sensory channels, it builds knowledge maps that make sense of situations in context.<< --Information is coded in different channels, those channels can conflict, there can be crosstalk, and you are right that context matters. >>It does not make sense to solely try to present everything someone is learning into some form that they may prefer.<< --It might make sense, depending on the context. As we know, people learn in different ways (we may have different ideas of why), and the key is for the teacher to be able to notice which teaching methods are working or not working. >>That's like encouraging a deaf person to only read signs and not lips.<< --Or maybe more like encouraging a deaf person to read lips rather than straining to hear what they can't hear. >>It is hard to find a humane justification for deliberately handicapping a person in that manner in my opinion, unless there is no choice.<< --The education system handicaps people already, and always has. But I agree with you. If I saw the idea of processing modes as something that would handicap people, I'd feel the same way. But I think the model would only do that if one took it to a ridiculous extreme. Of course, educators will take EVERY model to a ridiculous extreme at some point. All human beings make ridiculous mistakes when they try to turn human systems into a formula, and the educational system tends to do that as much as any other. >>The old chestnut about teaching a person to fish rather than throwing them a fish (or something like that :-)) comes to mind.<< --But if you teach them to fish, you're handicapping their ability to claw fish from the water, like bears. Has factory schooling *ever* prepared people for the real world? With one teacher for every thirty or so kids, a lot of kids are going to get short-changed, regardless of the teaching formula used. But at least the model of processing modes gives a little extra feedback about why some kids might do better than others in the same format. >>I think if someone hasn't the neccessary talent for that form of active learning, and can't aquire the skills, then it makes perfect sense to conclude they have to learn in a less efficient manner such as spoon feeding them in particular ways.<< --Obviously if someone can't learn in one way, trying another way is a good idea. If the processing modes model offers anything, it's the ability to recognize *why* one isn't learning well in one format, which offers both the possibility of using another learning approach, and the possibility of translating consciously and adapting. For a very visual person, saying, "Listen harder in class" won't work very well. But being able to say, "I get a lot of auditory crosstalk and internal dialogue" might make it easier to listen for key points and repeat them internally. Obviously the success of any model depends on how it's used. >>I think we should realistically distinguish talent (and lack thereof) where it is truly meaningful to outcomes, such as the capacity for self-directed learning and specific teaching strategies.<< --"Talent" is a buzzword. It says nothing about the specific skills, how information is encoded and remembered, how one practices a skill, and so on. Processing modes are much more specific than "talent", but the idea is the same: recognize what you're good at, and use that to approach what you're not as good at. Just labeling some kids "good at math" or "bad at sports" isn't as helpful as recognizing that one kid has trouble forming the kind of visual-kinesthetic models that mathematicians specialize in, and another has internal dialogue that interferes with timing and spacial awareness. Everyone knows what they're bad at, but how many people know precisely *why* they're bad at something, and how much improvement might be possible if more people knew? Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Nov 5 05:51:53 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 22:51:53 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] movie recommendation Message-ID: <436C4879.8030601@solution-consulting.com> Howard, I just got home from a local movie premier: New York Doll http://www.newyorkdollmovie.com/ Given your life at the core of the music scene those years, I think you may enjoy it. Hope you are getting out these days. It is playing in NYC at http://www.angelikafilmcenter.com/newyork/default.asp It is a documentary on Arthur "Killer" Kane, the bassist for New York Dolls. The movie follows Kane from 2003 when the director meets Kane while attending a Mormon church service in Los Angeles, through the invitation to the New York Dolls to do a reunion appearance at Morrisey's 2004 Meltdown Festival in London Arthur rejoins the surviving members of the band and they do play in London. Stranger than fiction. Astonishing ending.Quite moving; the audience tonight gave the movie a standing ovation. Don't leave until after the final credits roll; there is a fascinating surprise. The director was there at the premier, saw the standing ovation and said that had never happened before, even though the movie was a surprise smash hit at the Sundance Film Festival. It has a zero promotion budget. Lynn From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Nov 5 20:31:03 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 13:31:03 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gary North speech Message-ID: <436D1687.2080500@solution-consulting.com> Howard, This is an interesting speech to the Future Business Leaders Association, a high school club. As usual, North has a keen eye. I send it to you because it may enrich your already staggering intellect in regards to Vision Quest. BTW, will you create DVDs of Vision Quest? Here's the link and the talk. Lynn http://www.garynorth.com/public/424.cfm http://www.garynorth.com My Speech on Success in Business and Career to a High School FBLA Chapter Gary North Reality Check (November 25, 2002) MY SPEECH TO A LOCAL FBLA CHAPTER FBLA stands for Future Business Leaders of America. The FBLA is a national organization of high school clubs whose members are planning careers in business. I never belonged to the FBLA in high school, although there was a chapter. I knew of it only by its initials. Back then, I did not intend to go into business. Thinking back, I'm not sure what I planned to do. I think I planned to go into education. I guess I did. I'm in the education business. But I'm not on anyone else's payroll. The FBLA was founded in 1940. The first high school chapter was begun in 1942 in Johnson City, Tennessee. Today, it has 215,000 members. The related college organization, Phi Beta Lambda, has only 10,000 members. http://www.fbla-pbl.org/ Clearly, there is very little carry-over between the high school and college organizations. It is basically a high school organization. With 215,000 members, this is an average club size of almost exactly ten students per American public high school. There are 21,200 public high schools. When you think about it, ten students per high school isn't a large figure. Given the crucial importance of business in creating the wealth of this or any nation, a figure this low testifies to the bureaucratic nature of modern education. Students are not encouraged by the system to go into business. Given the fact of either tax funding or the non-profit status of most education -- rarely paid for by full-cost tuition -- this bureaucratic mind set is not surprising. Educators assume that education must go begging. The old saying, "He never met a payroll," applies to teachers and most school administrators. The idea that education must meet consumer demand -- mainly, parental demand -- is regarded as preposterous by professional educators. Their operating presupposition is this: "The education of children is too important to be left in the hands of parents." The mind set of a classroom teacher is very different from the mind set of a businessman. I say this as someone who has taught at the college level -- briefly. The script writer of "Ghostbusters" had it right. The key scene in this regard was when the three self-appointed experts in paranormal science have just been fired by the university. Dan Ackroyd's character bewails their expulsion from academia. "This means we have to go into the real world. I've been out there. It's a jungle. You have to compete." We must compete in all areas of life, of course, but the nature of the competition is different. In business, consumers set the standards. In academia, the screening system is run by the recipients of the public's money. The system is self-credentialed. Legislatures do not hold the system or its criteria economically accountable. Every failure of the system is dealt with by pouring more money into it -- the standard response of all governments. What saves the West is that business as an occupation still attracts highly creative individuals who have a knack for meeting consumer demand at prices that buyers are willing and able to pay. These entrepreneurs were rarely the top SAT score high school graduates or straight-A students. But without the productivity of these people, today's teachers and administrators would still be in the corn fields somewhere, walking behind a mule. (Actually, they would never have been born, or would have died in infancy. The infancy death rate is high in non-capitalist societies.) Business operates on this principle: "Formal education is so unimportant that you can leave it in the hands of professional educators." The most eloquent testimony in favor of this view comes from John Taylor Gatto, who was "Teacher of the Year" in New York State and three times in New York City. His web site provides the first eight chapters of his book, THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION, plus his essays and other choice materials. Gatto says that he wasted his career as a public school educator, and his site, as well as his books (DUMBING US DOWN, which I read this month, and A DIFFERENT KIND OF TEACHER, which I read last year) serve as a kind of academic penance. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com Gatto came to his senses mainly because he had senses to come to. He had not started out as a teacher. After college, Mr. Gatto worked as a scriptwriter in the film business, was an advertising writer, a taxi driver, a jewelry designer, an ASCAP songwriter, and a hotdog vendor before becoming a schoolteacher. During his schoolteaching years he also entered the caviar trade, conducted an antique business, operated a rare book search service, and founded Lava Mt. Records, a documentary record producer. . . . Gatto and I are both committed to education. The institutional legacies that I plan on leaving behind are all connected to education. But both of us have our sincere doubts about anyone's ability to reform tax-funded classroom education. So, I occasionally give speeches to high school students. I am sure that these students are moved by my speeches, because after every speech, the students stand up and walk out. FOOD FOR THOUGHT My most recent speech was given in a private K-12 school run by a large Baptist church. This lunchtime meeting was catered. For lunch, they had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, huge rolls, and cookies with M&M's. The entire school had this for lunch. (I don't recall a single cafeteria lunch this good in my entire high school experience.) Over 20 students showed up. That's pretty good for a high school of fewer than 300. I spoke on three issues: the future, business, and leadership. That's three-quarters of what the FBLA acronym stands for. I didn't have enough time to deal with point four: America. Had I had more time, I would have contrasted America's future with Mainland China's, which American businessmen had better start thinking about if they want to survive. In 2001, mainland China produced 465,000 college graduates in science and engineering -- as many as the United States has in total. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_43/b3805001.htm Next year, they will do this again. And the year after that. This doesn't count thousands of mainland Chinese students enrolled in U.S. graduate school programs and other foreign universities. It is a well-known secret that the best science and technology students in American graduate schools are foreigners, and the largest single source of these students is Mainland China. The United States, on the other hand, is producing millions of people with B.A.'s in sociology, history, political science, and psychology -- degrees that have hardly any market value without a Ph.D., and not much value even then. All this for only $135,000 after taxes (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford). But I digress. I talked about their futures. These were all bright, enthusiastic students. Well, anyway, they were students. And, of course, they hung on every word of a man who entered high school during Eisenhower's first term as President, a pre-historic world, i.e., pre- "Heartbreak Hotel." I began with one of my favorite themes: goal-setting. I handed out the following outline, since I figured that they would not remember as much as 10% of what I said within 24 hours or less. ************ SETTING GOALS Say that you are 70 years old. Your family has put on your 70th birthday party. All of your children and grandchildren are there. They cry, "Speech! Speech!" What will you tell them about your greatest successes, how you achieved them, and what lessons you have learned -- in five minutes, so that they may actually remember at least half of what you tell them? Start planning now for that birthday party. To make plans, you must answer three questions, the most difficult three questions of your life: What do I want to achieve? How soon do I want to achieve this? How much am I willing to pay to achieve this? Remember these principles: 1. You can change a goal. 2. You can change a plan. 3. A bad plan is better than no plan. The Goals Notebook Buy a three-ring notebook. But a pack of lined paper. Buy some tabbed dividers. Insert the paper into the back of the notebook. Using as your starting point the date on which you begin your notebook, write the following numerical dates on the tabs: 1. Three months out 2. Six months out 3. One year out 4. Age 18 5. Age 31 6. Age 30 7. Age 40 8. Age 50 9. Age 65 (normal retirement these days) 10. Age 70 11. The reading of your last will & testament On a sheet of paper, write down your goals. The further away, the bigger the goals. Aim very high. Use these categories for your goals for dates 1-10: 1. Money 2. Influence 3. Legacy (if you dropped dead the that day) As for category #11, never forget this exchange: "How much did he leave behind?" "All of it!" Every day that a tab's date comes up, go to the notebook and write down on a new sheet if you're on schedule, why you're on schedule, or why you're not on schedule. Then write down your specific plans to meet the next deadline. You are entitled to modify your goals for the next section. Don't throw away the sheet of your original goals. Write down on that page why you have modified your original goals. After year one is over, add new tabs: 1. Three months 2. Six months 3. One year Keep doing this every year. Always have your short- term goals written down in three-month segments. Keep referring to your list every three months. When you start courting seriously, insist that your prospective spouse participate with you in a joint goal- setting session. Here you will find out if this relationship has a future. If you don't have a filled-in notebook to serve as an example, your insistence that the other person create one will not carry weight. From that point on, both of you must keep a notebook. Budgeting You must begin to budget. You have two primary temporal assets: time and money. All of life is a trade-off between time and money. In a world of scarce economic resources, you buy what you want either by paying money (goods/services) or lining up. You must set up a money budget. If you have a computer, use Quicken. If you don't, then do it by hand. But get help in setting up your initial budget from someone who has Quicken. You must budget 10% for the church (pay God first) and 15% for your savings program (pay yourself second), which you will not spend except on capital assets. This is untouchable money for the rest of your life. You must be able to see where your money went. You need a budget. You must set up a time budget. Buy a cheap pocket imitation of a Day-Timer. Start using it for your school work. You must be able to see where your time went. You need a budget. Time management is more important than money management. Work on it. ***************** I also handed out a bibliography on leadership. I told them that if they wanted to become business leaders, they would have to be economically successful. I also told them that they would need two skills: the ability to write and the ability to speak in public. The only other way to become a leader in business is to give away piles of money. It's a lit cheaper to learn how to write and speak. *************** BECOMING A BUSINESS LEADER Extracurricular Activities, Beginning Soon 1. On-campus: debate team, newspaper, annual.br 2. Off-campus: Toastmasters, Junior Achievement (high school). www.ja.org Education 1. Career. Work for a successful small businessman locally for at least 5 years. Master all aspects of the business. 2. College. Major in journalism. Minor in accounting. Learn how to write and calculate revenues/costs. Second-best: major in English, minor in business. Reading 1. Subscribe to THE ECONOMIST. This year. Read as much of it as you can understand. This is the best single source of news on the planet. Subscribe (free) to "GARY NORTH'S REALITY CHECK." Send e-mail to reality at agora-inc.com 2. Books on business success: THE MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR and THE MILLIONAIRE MIND, by Thomas J. Stanley. RICH DAD, POOR DAD, by Robert Kiyosaki. THE E-MYTH, by Michael Gerber. ACRES OF DIAMONDS, by Russell Conwell. This book is free on the Web: http://www.temple.edu/about/temples_founder/acres_text.html 3. Books on leadership: DEDICATION AND LEADERSHIP, by Douglas Hyde. LEADERSHIP IS AN ART, by Max DuPree. STRONGER THAN STEEL, by R. C Sproul. MR. ANONYMOUS: THE LIFE OF WILLIAM VOLKER, by Herbert Cornuelle. Books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs. 4. Books on advertising: HOW TO WRITE A GOOD ADVERTISEMENT, by Victor O. Schwab. MY LIFE IN ADVERTISING and SCIENTIFIC ADVERTISING, by Claude Hopkins. Free: www.geocities.com/MadisonAvenue/Boardroom/4124 Tools 1. Spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel). Master it. 2. Texas Instruments BA-35 financial calculator. Master it. ********************** The reason why I gave the speech is that the son of a friend of mine needed to fill a lunchtime speaker's slot. The father, who runs a successful small business, came along to hear my speech. Afterward, he said, "I wish I had head that speech when I was in high school." I replied: "You wouldn't have paid any attention to it. You would have been too young." They were too young, too. Anyway, most of them were. But if Pareto's 20-80 rule holds good -- and it usually does -- then about four of them will actually put some of my material to good use. That's true of my mailing list, too. It's also true of those forwarded copies of this issue that my subscribers will send out. Who knows? Maybe some outfit will post my two outlines for their members. I hope they do, if they post the entire text. But the fact is, no matter how good my material is, even for free, most people who read it will not put it to productive use. This is why those 20% who do apply it can maintain their advantage. Most of their competitors are too busy, too bored, or too ill-informed to pay any attention. The Rotary Club speaker announces, "This nation is going to the dogs because of two reasons: ignorance and apathy." One member turns to the other and whispers, "Do you think that's true?" His fellow club member replies, "I don't know, and I don't care." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Tue Nov 8 14:46:47 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 09:46:47 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Learning Disabilities in perspective? Message-ID: <4370BA57.1020303@aol.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Nov 7 15:08:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 07:08:07 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] White House Play Date Message-ID: <30099197.1131376088227.JavaMail.root@mswamui-andean.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: WhiteHousePlayDate.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 141808 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Nov 8 14:39:13 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 06:39:13 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Not a Nazi Message-ID: <24475361.1131460753572.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Schwarzenegger.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 31620 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Nov 9 14:24:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 06:24:26 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bush's House of Lies Message-ID: <16108740.1131546266939.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BushHouseOfLies.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 111041 bytes Desc: not available URL: From urbug at webmail.co.za Thu Nov 10 12:11:15 2005 From: urbug at webmail.co.za (maetheng hlalele) Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:11:15 +0200 Subject: [Paleopsych] my email address to get a list Message-ID: urbug at webmail.co.za ___________________________________________________________________ For super low premiums, click here http://www.webmail.co.za/dd.pwm http://www.webmail.co.za the South African FREE email service From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Nov 10 14:52:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 06:52:46 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bush: Kiss of Death Message-ID: <7432459.1131634367286.JavaMail.root@mswamui-andean.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BushKissOfDeath.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 63622 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 15:41:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 10:41:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] RE: Meme 047: Frank's Abandonment of Reality, One Year Later In-Reply-To: <025201c5ddba$13506aa0$8801a8c0@chaosmanor.jerrypournelle.com> References: <025201c5ddba$13506aa0$8801a8c0@chaosmanor.jerrypournelle.com> Message-ID: Thanks for the suggestion, which you made before, Jerry, along with "Oath of Fealty" and one other book. I bought the first two. A friend suggests that the plot of "The Mote in God's Eye" can be hard to follow, and this presents a severe problem, given the way I read. Is there a chapter-by-chapter plot summary anywhere online so I can keep track of it? Frank On 2005-10-30, Jerry Pournelle opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 17:26:09 -0800 > From: Jerry Pournelle > To: 'Premise Checker' , > 'Transhuman Tech' , > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: RE: [h-bd] Meme 047: Frank's Abandonment of Reality, One Year Later > > You might try The Mote In God's Eye but Niven and me, and The Prince by me. > But what the hell] > > > -----Original Message----- > From: h-bd at yahoogroups.com [mailto:h-bd at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of > Premise Checker > Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 6:23 PM > To: Transhuman Tech; paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [h-bd] Meme 047: Frank's Abandonment of Reality, One Year Later > > Meme 047: Frank's Abandonment of Reality, One Year Later > sent 2005.10.28 > > My themes for the next year: "Deep Cultural Change" and "Persistence > of Difference." > > You'll recall that a year ago, on my sixtieth birthday, I decided to > abandon reality for fiction, on the grounds that I think I know, at > least in general outline, what is really known about human nature > from the social and biological sciences. Novelists have a way of > getting at the human condition that eludes scientists, and to novels > I would turn. > > I decided to confine my reading of books to, alternatively, Western > fiction (includes Russian), non-Western fiction (includes Latin > America), science fiction, and religion (both sacred books and books > about them). > > Here's what I have read, since abandoning reality at age 60 on > 2004.10.28: > > WESTERN NOVELS: > > 1. Kerouac, Jack, 1922-69. On the road. 1957. > 2. Wilson, Sloan, 1920-2003. The man in the gray flannel suit. 1955. > 3. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), Elective affinities. 1809. > 4. Andrews, Alice, ca. 1966- . Trine erotic. 2002. > > NON-WESTERN NOVELS: > > 1. Garc?a M?rquez, Gabriel, 1928- . One hundred years of solitude. 1967. > 2. Pamuk, Orhan, 1952- . Snow. 2002. > 3. Truong, Monique, 1968- . The book of salt. 2003. > 4. Mistry, Rohinton, 1952- . A fine balance. 1995. > > SCIENCE FICTION: > > 1. Stephenson, Neal, 1959.10.31- . The diamond age. 1995 > 2. Herbert, Frank, 1920-86. Dune. 1965. > 3. Laxness, Halld?r, 1902-55. Under the glacier. 1968. > > 4-6. Philip Pullman, 1946- . His Dark Materials (trilogy): > 1, The golden compass, 1995. > 2, The subtle knife, 1997. > 3, The amber spyglass, 2000. > > RELIGION: > > 1. Gregg, Steve, 1953- . Revelation: Four views: A parallel > commentary. 1997. > 2. Cleary, Thomas, translator, 1949- . The essential Koran. 1993. > 3. MacDonald, Dennis R., 1946- . Does the New Testament imitate Homer? > Four cases from the Acts of the Apostles. 2003. > 4. C.S. Lewis, 1898-1963. The four loves, 1960. > > > Science Fiction: I got a little ahead in science fiction, since I > read an entire trilogy. I found these science fiction books hard to > follow, except Under the Glacier, a comic Icelandic masterpiece, > which is much else besides science fiction. The books I read are > supposed classics, and I think I see why science fiction is ranked > low down by literary scholars. Actually, I added science fiction > more to catch up on my reading in this area than to gain new > insights into human nature. > > Religion: I'm glad to have read at least an abridged Koran, but the > selector chose mostly the nice verses, which talk more about > praising Allah for his message than lay out what a believer is > supposed to think and how to act. The Psalms do the same thing, but > in a far, far better way. The book about the Book of Revelation got > tedious. MacDonald's findings of parallels is not nearly as good as > his earlier, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, which makes > the case, conclusively I think obvious, that that Gospel is a > literary creation, compiled of sayings of a preacher railing at > hypocrisy, Old Testament prophecies, and parallels with Homer. > Rather than reduplicate his efforts for another NT book, I wish he > has gone on to present a complete theory of the NT, working in esp. > the letters of St. Paul. The C.S. Lewis book was often insightful, > but not the chapter about charity as a kind of love. Unlike the > other chapters, it dealt only with man's relation to god, as though > charity does not happen between people. > > Western novels: I enjoyed all four Western novels, and they were > generally easy to follow. On the Road paints a more devastating > picture of the ma?ana mentality of Mexican immigrants than anything > I have read in the anti-immigration literature. Kerouac, for all his > boozing and whoring, has a more distant time horizon. The Man in the > Gray Flannel Suit book does not turn his hero into a cartoon the way > his critics have. One should always read the originals. Elective > Affinities is a little-known novel of Goethe that portrays well-off > people ensnared in traps of their own making. And Trine Erotic is > the first novel to incorporate evolutionary psychology. It has tales > within tales and deals with introspection and intimate discussions > about sex and evolution, all within a nifty postmodern context. > > Non-Western Novels: It was reading non-Western novels that prompted > my abandoning reality. My overall aim was to find out how > non-Westerners apprehend the world differently from Westerners. I > must report that I failed, at least with the four novels I read. > Garcia M?rquez knows too much Western modernist literature, though > the magical thinking characteristic of Latin American did come > through. One Hundred Years of Solitude may well be the greatest > novel of the last half of the last century. The plot is complicated > and Cliff and Monarch Notes were indispensable. Orhan Pamuk's Snow > is a superb novel of a Turkish exile to Germany who came home. He > was torn between the secularism of Germany and the increasing > fundamentalism of home. But, his photograph reveals him to be very > much a White man, so I don't think I got a non-Western viewpoint. > Monique Truong's The Book of Salt was the one disaster in the pile. > What might have been a lively fictional portrayal of literary Paris > in the 1920s from the standpoint of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. > Toklas's Vietnamese cook was only about the plight of the cook, who > was also a homosexual. All the fashionable leftist noises were made. > Though the book got excellent reviews, the high praise was forced, > as the author apparently has exhausted her fame. On the other hand, > A Fine Balance is another mixture of comedy and tragedy and covers > four characters caught in the midst of the Emergency declared in > India in 1975. The balance is between giving in to despair and > persevering. > > While this project of supposedly abandoning reality did not give me > great insights into non-Western mentalities, it certainly did save > me a lot of money on books! But the problem is that I'm addicted to > the Internet and spent way too much time finding articles and > sending them to my lists. Almost all of these articles don't expand > my thoughts. > > I must focus, a problem I've always had. So for the coming year I > have two themes: "deep cultural change" and "the persistence of > difference." > > No more wasting time over controversies. I hope it has been > instructive to you to have gotten coverage of many sides on various > issues, to get a better feel for how to distinguish good and bad > arguments and, just as important, to consider why certain > controversies never end, why there is no convergence of opinion over > time. As you wade into new controversies and revisit old ones over > the next year, look for all sides and try to discern why convergence > of opinion is so often slow. So, for a while, no more coverage of > Supreme Court fights, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, > liberals, Arab vs. Jew, Intelligent Design, Lincoln, the energy > "crisis," even black holes. And not nearly so much coverage of > religious controversies, so often humorous as they are. > > And I have spent too much time tracking incremental changes. What > has happened during the year since I turned 60? The collapse of the > Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) has been the big event, though > it will be a while before its political repercussions are felt, for > political lag is the severest form of culture lag. Even so, there > has been a decided shift from equality vs. inequality as the > principal left-right political divide to pluralism vs. universalism. > Resistance to U.S. foreign policy has replaced race as the major > U.S. domestic political issue. > > Well, maybe not a complete collapse within one year, but the > speed-up of the shift is the biggest general trend during the last > year. It is hard to think of anything else that comes close. I'd > like to report some deep technological (transhuman) breakthroughs, > but they occur over five to ten years or more. > > Now to my two main themes for at least the next year: > > 1. "Deep cultural change" means the effects of the Internet, the > change from modernism to postmodernism, commodification, > globalization--in short the topics covered in The Hedgehog Review, > http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehog.html. Over the last year, I > have read all but two issues of this journal, published by the > Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of > Virginia. Transhumanistic developments fit here absolutely, though > they seem to be arriving more slowly than anticipated. > Brain-enhancing medicines and hookups strike me as the most likely > new development: embryo selection also, but it takes a generation to > raise the children. > > 2. "Persistence of difference" is the obverse of deep cultural > change. In spite of globalization, Americanization, the use of the > military to spread "democratic capitalism," McDonaldization, many > cross-cultural differences remain the same. There is much > resistence, too. As a 21st century leftist (pluralist), I hope that > different ways of processing the world persist, so that different > approaches to problems will continue and thrive. The difference that > intrigues me most now is that Westerners think more in analytic > (bottom-up) terms, while Easterners (North-East Asians, in > particular) think in synthetic (top-down) and holistic terms. > Psychologically, Westerners are more individualistic, Easterners > more collectivist. Richard Nisbet has been prodigiously active in > exploring these differences, differences that go down to perception > and "folk" physics, most notably in The Geography of Thought. A more > comprehensive book is Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett, > American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (revised > edition. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1991, 192 pp.), which I > intend to read for the third time. > > Nisbet remarks that it took analytic thinking to get science off the > ground. But scientific investigation has been finding ever since > Darwin and the earlier rise of sociology that the whole affects the > parts: the environment selects which organisms survive; society > shapes the self. And so the Eastern mentality may have a jump on > forging a more comprehensive view of the world than an overly > Western mentality. > > This remains to be seen, though it is striking that my > exhaustive--well at least exhausting!--surfing of the Web has not > turned up any Eastern sociology. Books on how the Chinese view the > West are all written by Westerners! I hope I'm wrong. Furnish me Web > pages! Or I'll just have to wait. > > Now Nisbet is a leading antiracist and repeatedly asserts that > geographic differences in thought are wholly cultural, but without > marshaling evidence for his whole-hog cultural view. Yet this would > imply that geographic variations, from the Arctic to the steppes to > the Fertile Crescent to darkest Africa, have had no selective effect > for the last 10,000 or 100,000 years on the distribution of > psychological traits, even as they has manifestly have had for > everything from the neck down. Nisbet does indeed invoke the evolved > Pleistocene character of our minds. He is not upholding the SSSM in > its full glory, but effectively he's an evolutionist up to the Stone > Age, a creationist afterwards. It will be up to others to boldly > conjecture gene-culture co-evolutionary explanations for the > geographical variation in thought. > > As I said, I am a particularist and hope that the Americanization > steamroller won't make everyone think like Americans. I certainly > favor the pragmatic mind set of my culture, but not for every > culture. But I also realize that American culture has changed deeply > over the course of its history (whence my first theme, "deep > cultural change"), and I'm certainly no conservative who thinks the > final method for discovering the world and operating within it has > already been found, much less that we need to go back to previous > models. > > My hope is that there will be genetic as well as cultural resistance > to making the world uniform. Perhaps I should write an essay, "Why I > Want to Become a Racist"! To date the best documented, and saddest, > difference is human populations is in general cognitive abilities, > but it is also the least interesting. I will leave this problem to > future generations of scholars, to quote Thomas Sowell,^ while I > will seek to learn more about other geographical and cultural > differences in thought. I can't become a racist in any comprehensive > sense until others make conjectures about gene-culture co-evolution > since the Stone Age, conduct experiments, and interpret the results. > > ^[On April 25, the entire issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and > Law, 2005 June, Vol. 11(2), a publication of the American > Psychological Association, went online. It featured J. Philippe > Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen, "Thirty Years of Research on Race > Differences in Cognitive Ability," four responses, the best of which > was by Richard Nisbet, and a reply by Rushton and Jensen. I have yet > to read it, as it covers territory utterly familiar to me.] > > Will a consensus emerge? No more than in social science without > gene-culture co-evolution. You see, we all routinely accept social > science explanations, invoking concepts like peer pressure, the > routinization of charisma, die Entzauberung der Welt, without > realizing that these all rest upon very vague and general concepts. > It's like explaining a child's behavior as conforming to his parents > and, a moment later, another child's behavior as rebelling against > his parents! To the trees, then, many social scientistz repair, to > all those Big Mac articles in social science journals and away from > grand theory. The forest, the big concepts in the social science, is > abandoned, even though the routinization of charisma, and so on, are > quite real, even if immune to quantification. > > If not quantified, then the historian can only give his opinion > about the causes of an historical event. Was the American Civil War > caused by disagreements over slavery, by the desire of the South to > remain true to the American Revolution's principle of > non-interference from a centralized power, to the different > economies based on agriculture and manufacturing? How much of each? > Each champion for one factor piles up his evidence. So do his > rivals. No emerging consensus, since none can quantify the > importance of the factors. > > And so it will be when historians add gene-culture co-evolutionary > factors to the mix. (Anglo-Saxon vs. Celt keeps popping up in > reflections on the Civil War, and this may be racial, or rather > sub-racial. It merits yet another unearthing.) American hubris will > be much reduced as racial explanations emerge. As a 21st century > leftist, I approve. > > My focus, then, for at least a year: "deep cultural change" and > "persistence of differences." Help me with my projects by sending me > things, and please excuse the great reduction of forwardings of > articles while I do this. > > Meanwhile, you can use my favorite sources to find more things on your > own: > > The New York Times, http://nytimes.com > Arts & Letters Daily, http://aldaily.com > The Last Ditch: http://thornwalker.com/ditch, the best > paleolibertarian site > > Also various Yahoo! groups, for which to get add to > http://yahoogroups.com/group/ > Evolutionary Psychology: evolutionary-psychology > Rael Science: rael-science-select > Rational Review of the News: rrnd (libertarian newslinks) > Transhuman Tech news: transhumantech > > You may also join various discussion groups of the World > Transhumanist Association, esp. talk and politics (the latter I no > longer take) at http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/lists/ > > I have passwords for these, but there's much public content: > The New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com (www is essential) > The Economist, http://economist.com > Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com > The Times Literary Supplement, http://www.the-tls.co.uk > The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com > > Wikipedia should be regulary consulted: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki > > Laird Wilcox, who founded The Wilcox Collection of Contemporary > Political Movements in 1965 at the University of Kansas, which deals > with extreme groups both left and right, runs a list forwarding > articles like mine. He concentrates more on civil liberties issues > than I do and has a mostly paleo bent. Drop him an e-mail at Laird > Wilcox to subscribe. > > [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly > with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder > them and spread them.] From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 16:08:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:08:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Howard Bloom invites you to a Reinventing Capitalism Event -- Reinventing Capitalism Message-ID: Howard, Stop trying to save the world! Lots and lots of people have been beating a drum for capitalism and free trade, and it's richly unclear what new ideas you are going to add to the stew. Can you just tell us what is different about your approach? Instead of trying to save a world that will largely ignore you, you should confine your efforts to giving us new tools to think with. We, or some of us, will use these tools to save the world. Go back to tool making, please, Howard! We need tool makers far, far more than we need world saviors! Frank ----------- America and the Western world are in trouble. Militant Islam says that our civilization is obsolete and is about to crumble to dust. The Chinese are working to make our obsolescence complete. But American and Western Civilization are not reaching our end. We are standing at the beginning of a future of passion and artistry, a future lifted by technologies beyond our dreams. But we are only standing at the start of this path of wonders if we MAKE IT THAT WAY. During the last four years, I've stepped aside from science to write a book called Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine: A Quick Revision of the Rise and Future of Western Civilization. The book is a total reperception of why you wake up every day, of why you go to work, of what you and I do to save, uplift, console, empower, and delight others, and of what you and I can do to express the you that has always wanted to be freed but has never felt the time was right. Reinventing Capitalism is a reperception of the civilization you and I have inherited, the civilization you and I now must remake. While I was giving a presentation on quantum physics at an International Conference on Quantum Informatics in Moscow (I kid you not), a strange thing happened to Reinventing Capitalism and to the 27 key principles it espouses-principles that show you and me how to be artists in our daily work and why we need to unleash our passions from nine to five. The still-unfinished book was made a key component of an MBA program at The Graduate Institute in Milford, Connecticut. And the founder of the Global Entertainment and Media Summits saw Reinventing Capitalism as a tool with which to change the way we see our world.and with which we can radically reshape our future. Steve Zuckerman, the founder of the Summits, has put together a two-day meeting of some of the brightest business and entertainment minds in North America to present and discuss the quick-and-easy but tap-root-deep ideas about Reinventing Capitalism's Putting Soul In the Machine.in the machine of your company and mine, in the machine of your office, your industry, your culture, your personal life, and of your species---in the machine of the human race. No, this is not EST. It's history, science, and the knowledge of the invisible heart of business that you helped me acquire in 20 years working with Sony, NBC-TV, New Line Cinema, Amnesty International, Farm Aid, CBS, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, EMI, ABC, Gulf and Western, MCA/Universal, Manesmann, Polygram, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Disney, academic institutions, and extraordinarily bright individuals like you. It's the gut-sense you helped me evolve when we worked together to generate $28 billion dollars in revenue for our clients-more than the gross domestic product of Luxembourg and Qatar. And when we worked together to put Amnesty International and Farm Aid on the map. You know as well as I do that when we brought in our greatest revenue streams and made our greatest cultural contributions, we didn't do it out of greed or cold calculation. We did it out of bone-deep belief. That knowledge-in-your-bones is the essence of what we'll discuss for two days, December 2nd and December 3rd at 69 West Fourteenth Street. I very much want you there. The cost is trivial--$129. And I'm asking you to pay your own transportation and hotel costs. But I want to see you. It's been a long time. And I want your mind to contribute to one of the strangest revolutions you will ever be a part of. When someone from Steve Zuckerman's team or mine calls you to give you details, please say yes. With warmth and gusto-Howard Bloom From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 17:01:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:01:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Sizes of Bird Brains Message-ID: Neuroscience: On the Sizes of Bird Brains http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051104-5.htm The following points are made by Fahad Sultan (Current Biology 2005 15:R649): 1) How does brain size and design influence the survival chances of a species? A large brain may contribute to an individual's success irrespective of its detailed composition. The author has studied the size and shape of cerebella in birds and looked for links between the bird's cerebellar design, brain size, and behavior. Results indicate that the cerebellum in large-brained birds does not scale uniformly, but occurs in two designs. Crows, parrots and woodpeckers show an enlargement of the cerebellar trigeminal and visual parts, while owls show an enlargement of vestibular and tail somatosensory cerebellar regions, likely related to their specialization as nocturnal raptors. The enlargement of specific cerebellar regions in crows, parrots and woodpeckers may be related to their repertoire of visually guided goal-directed beak behavior. This specialization may lead to an increased active exploration and perception of the physical world, much as primates use of their hands to explore their environment. The parallel specialization seen in some birds and primates may point to the influence of a similar neuronal machine in shaping selection during phylogeny. 2) The cerebellum is a highly conserved part of the brain present in most vertebrates[1], well suited for a comparative study of size and design. The cerebellum in birds, as in mammals, consists of a strongly folded thin sheet of gray matter located dorsally to the brainstem. In birds, it largely consists of a single narrow strip that varies in different species in the antero-posterior extension, which corresponds to the cerebellar length. The cerebellum of birds is commonly subdivided into ten groups of folds termed lobuli[2]. Both variability and regularity are evident in the lobular pattern of the bird cerebella. To quantify these structural varieties and relate them to functional or phylogenetic differences, a principal component analysis was performed on the residuals of the lobuli length, obtained from a double-logarithmic regression of lobuli length against body size. 3) What could be the behavioral denominator common to crows, parrots and woodpeckers that is not developed in owls? All of these birds also have large brains; however, their cerebellar designs differ arguing against a simple co-enlargement model. The enlargement of specific visual and beak-related cerebellar parts in crows, parrots and woodpeckers fits well with their marked adeptness in using their beaks and/or tongues to manipulate and explore external objects. Their skills are even comparable to those of primates in using their hands. The tight temporal coupling between motor command, expected sensory consequences and resulting afferents during visually guided hand and beak usage may be the reason why these animals need large cerebella. The comparative analysis of the birds cerebella reveals that some brains may have enlarged to solve similar problems by similar means during phylogeny. Furthermore it shows that large brains have a specific architecture with dedicated building blocks.[3-5] References (abridged): 1. Braitenberg, V., Heck, D., and Sultan, F. (1997). The detection and generation of sequences as a key to cerebellar function: experiments and theory. Behav. Brain Sci. 20, 229-245 2. Larsell, O. (1948). The development and subdivisions of the cerebellum of birds. J. Comp. Neurol. 89, 123-189 3. Whitlock, D.G. (1952). A neurohistological and neurophysiological study of afferent fiber tracts and receptive areas of the avian cerebellum. J. Comp. Neurol. 97, 567-635 4. Arends, J.J. and Zeigler, H.P. (1989). Cerebellar connections of the trigeminal system in the pigeon (Columba livia). Brain Res. 487, 69-78 5. Clarke, P.G. (1974). The organization of visual processing in the pigeon cerebellum. J. Physiol. 243, 267-285 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: SYNAPSE FORMATION IS ASSOCIATED WITH MEMORY STORAGE IN THE CEREBELLUM The following points are made by J.A. Kleim et al (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 2002 99:13228): 1) "For every act of memory, every exercise of bodily aptitude, every habit, recollection, train of ideas, there is a specific neural grouping, or co-ordination, of sensations and movement, by virtue of specific growths in cell junctions." (1)[Bain, A. (1873) Mind and Body: The Theories of Their Relation (Henry King, London). 2) The neural circuits critical for the acquisition and performance of the conditioned eyeblink response are localized to the cerebellum (2). Information regarding the unconditioned stimulus (US) and conditioned stimulus (CS) converge within both the cerebellar cortex and the interpositus nucleus. CS information is relayed via ponto-cerebellar projections, whereas US information is relayed via the olivo-cerebellar pathway (2,3). Although the cerebellar cortex is involved in modulating some aspects of the conditioned response (CR) (4,5), the interpositus nucleus is the critical brain structure supporting long-term retention of the CR (2). Neuronal activity within the interpositus nucleus is highly correlated with development of the CR (5), and inactivation of the interpositus prevents both CR acquisition and performance. 3) Although the locus of the memory trace is clear, the cellular mechanisms underlying the formation of the CS/US association are poorly understood. Several mechanisms have been proposed, including increases in the intrinsic excitability of interpositus neurons and reduced inhibition via depression of Purkinje cell activity. The fact that inhibition of specific synaptic enzymes and neurotransmitter receptors within the interpositus nucleus impair learning suggests that changes in synaptic function are involved. Transient changes in enzyme or receptor activity, however, would seem incapable of supporting the long-term encoding of the CS/US association. Recent work has shown that microinjections of a protein synthesis inhibitor into the interpositus nucleus impairs the acquisition but not the expression of the CR. This finding suggests that strengthening of the CS pathway may involve more permanent changes in cell structure. 4) In summary: The idea that memory is encoded by means of synaptic growth is not new. However, this idea has been difficult to demonstrate in the mammalian brain because of both the complexity of mammalian behavior and the neural circuitry by which it is supported. The authors examine how eyeblink classical conditioning affects synapse number within the cerebellum; the brain region essential for long-term retention of the conditioned response. Results show eyeblink-conditioned rats to have significantly more synapses per neuron within the cerebellar interpositus nucleus than both explicitly unpaired and untrained controls. Further analysis demonstrates that the increase was caused by the addition of excitatory rather than inhibitory synapses. Thus, development of the conditioned eyeblink response is associated with a strengthening of inputs from precerebellar nuclei rather than from cerebellar cortex. The authors suggest these results demonstrate that the modifications of specific neural pathways by means of synaptogenesis contributes to formation of a specific memory within the mammalian brain. References (abridged): 1. Bain, A. (1873) Mind and Body: The Theories of Their Relation (Henry King, London). 2. Thompson, R. F. (1986) Science 223, 941-947. 3. Steinmetz, J. E. (2000) Behav. Brain Res. 110, 13-24. 4. Lavond, D. G. & Steinmetz, J. E. (1989) Behav. Brain Res. 33, 113-164. 5. Perrett, S. P. , Ruiz, B. P. & Mauk, M. D. (1993) J. Neurosci. 13, 1708-1718. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. http://www.pnas.org -------------------------------- Related Material: MOTOR LEARNING AND THE CEREBELLUM The following points are made by R.D. Seidler et al (Science 2002 296:2043): 1) Despite extensive research, the role of the cerebellum in learning motor skills remains controversial (1,2). The concept of the cerebellum as a learning machine comes from the theoretical work of Marr (3) and Albus (4) and has been supported by data showing that it is essential for adaptive modification of reflex behavior (5) and is activated during motor learning. However, learning invariably leads to changes in motor performance, which in itself can activate the cerebellum. Efforts to deal with the issue of learning versus performance have required complex behavioral manipulations, such as subtracting an estimate of the performance effect. 2) The authors present a learning paradigm in which learning and performance change are effectively dissociated, using a modification of the serial reaction time task. Typically, participants learn the sequence embedded in the serial reaction time task within a few hundred trials. However, when asked to perform the task concomitantly with certain distractor tasks, they show no evidence of sequence learning. When retested upon removal of this distractor, it is evident that participants did actually learn the sequence during the initial training. Therefore, the distractor task served only to suppress performance change but did not prevent learning, allowing the determination of the underlying neural substrates for sequence learning separately from performance. 3) The authors report they performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation during an implicit, motor sequence-learning task that was designed to separate the two processes, the effects of motor learning and changes in performance. During the sequence-encoding phase, human participants performed a concurrent distractor task that served to suppress the performance changes associated with learning. Upon removal of the distractor, participants showed evidence of having learned. No cerebellar activation was associated with the learning phase, despite extensive involvement of other cortical and subcortical regions. There was, however, significant cerebellar activation during the expression of learning. The authors conclude that the cerebellum does not contribute to learning of the motor skill itself but is engaged primarily in the modification of performance. References (abridged): 1. J. R. Bloedel and V. Bracha, Behav. Brain Res. 68, 1 (1995) 2. J. P. Welsh and J. A. Harvey, J. Neurosci. 9, 299 (1989) 3. D. A. Marr, J. Physiol. 202, 437 (1969) 4. J. S. Albus, Math. Biosci. 10, 25 (1971) 5. M. Ito, Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 5, 275 (1982) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 17:02:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:02:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Ten top tips (left out of creativity special) Message-ID: Creativity special: Ten top tips - Creative Minds http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.300&print=true [Thanks to W. David for catching this.] * 29 October 2005 Tom Ward senior research fellow in the Center for Creative Media at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and editor of the Journal of Creative Behavior "Merge two previously separate concepts that are in conflict with one another. For example, combinations such as 'friendly enemy' and 'healthful illness'. The more discrepant the concepts, the more likely they are to result in novel properties." Margaret Atwood novelist, Toronto "I have a great big cupboard stuffed with ideas and when I want one I open the door and take the first one that falls out. Alternatively, if you want an idea, do the following. Close your eyes, put your left hand on the ground, raise your right hand into the air. You are now a conductor. The ideas will pass through you. Sooner or later one will pass through your brain. It never fails, though the waiting times vary and sometimes lunch intervenes." Lee Smolin theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario "The main ingredients in science are intensive immersion in a problem, fanatical desire to solve it (big problems are rarely solved by accident), familiarity with previous attempts leading to an original critique of where they went wrong, reckless disregard for what other experts think, and the courage to overcome your own doubts and hesitations, which are much scarier than anything anyone else can say because you know best how vulnerable your new idea is." Tracey Emin artist, London "Get a really good part-time job, preferably to do with something you like. For example, if you like reading, work in a book shop and do lots of evening classes." Lisa Randall professor of physics at Harvard University "Think about the big problems while working on the small ones and vice versa. A larger perspective can be the best guide when approaching a detailed problem. On the other hand, details can reveal profound insights about larger questions. Listen carefully and pay close attention. You might learn more than people, or the objects you're studying, superficially reveal." Dean Simonton professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis "Know your stuff: creativity requires expertise; but don't know it too well: overspecialisation puts blinders on. Imagine the impossible: many breakthrough ideas at first seem outright crazy; but you have to be able to impose your idea: crazy ideas remain crazy if they cannot survive critical evaluation. Finally, be persistent: big problems are seldom solved on the first try, or the second, or the third; but remember to take a break: you may be barking up the wrong tree, so incubate a bit to get a fresh start." Allan Snyder director of Centre for the Mind, Australian National University, Canberra, and University of Sydney "Creativity demands that you leave your comfort zone, that you continually challenge yourself and be prepared to confront conventional wisdom. When you become an expert, move on. Especially, engage in that for which you have not been schooled." Robert Stickgold associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School "Creativity is fostered by a particular, if poorly understood, brain state. It often seems to be induced when you feel under pressure to perform and at the same time free to let your mind wander. Some authors go to the mountains or the seashore, others take a walk in a park. But this might be easiest to do by simply going to bed. As our brain cycles through REM and non-REM sleep, it appears to go in and out of this state." F. David Peat author and physicist, director of the Pari Centre for New Learning near Siena, Italy "Hold the intention or the question. Trust it and it will it happen. Leave a space - daydream, relax, doze...you'll be amazed because you are not doing it." Alan Lightman novelist and physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Creativity is enhanced by having a prepared mind, and then being stuck on a problem. I also need a space of silence and calm, where I am free from distractions." From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 17:02:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:02:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything Message-ID: On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/science/01prof.html [I wonder if there are theories that make time multi-dimensional.] By DENNIS OVERBYE The portal to the fifth dimension, sadly, is closed. There used to be an ice cream parlor in the student center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And it was there, in the summer of 1998, that Lisa Randall, now a professor of physics at Harvard and a bit of a chocoholic, and Raman Sundrum, a professor at Johns Hopkins, took an imaginary trip right out of this earthly plane into a science fiction realm of parallel universes, warped space and otherworldly laws of physics. They came back with a possible answer to a question that has tormented scientists for decades, namely why gravity is so weak compared with the other forces of nature: in effect, we are borrowing it from another universe. In so doing, Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum helped foment a revolution in the way scientists think about string theory - the vaunted "theory of everything" - raising a glimmer of hope that coming experiments may actually test some of its ineffable sounding concepts. Their work undermined well-worn concepts like the idea that we can even know how many dimensions of space we live in, or the reality of gravity, space and time. The work has also made a star and an icon of Dr. Randall. The attention has been increased by the recent publication to laudatory reviews of her new book, "Warped Passages, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions," A debate broke out on the physics blog Cosmic Variance a few weeks ago about whether it was appropriate, as a commentator on NPR had said, to say she looked like Jodi Foster. "How do we know we live in a four-dimensional universe?" she asked a crowd who filled the Hayden Planetarium on a stormy night last week. "You think gravity is what you see. We're always just looking at the tail of things." Although it is the unanswerable questions that most appeal to her now, it was the answerable ones that drew her to science, especially math, as a child, the middle of three daughters of a salesman for an engineering firm, and a teacher, in Fresh Meadows, Queens. "I really liked the fact that it had definite answers," Dr. Randall said. At Stuyvesant High School, where she was in the same class as Brian Greene, the future Columbia string theorist and best-selling author, she was the first girl to serve as captain of the school's math team, and she won the famous Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition with a project about complex numbers. She went on to Harvard where she stayed until 1987 when she emerged with a Ph.D. in physics. Those were heady times in physics. Fired by the dream of a unified theory of everything, theorists flocked to string theory, which envisioned the fundamental elements of nature as tiny wriggling strings. Dr. Randall, however, resisted this siren call, at least for a while. For one thing, physicists thought it would take a particle accelerator 10 million billion times as powerful as anything on earth to produce an actual string and test the theory. String theory also stubbornly requires space-time to have 10 dimensions, not the 4 (3 of space and 1 of time) that we experience. Preferring to stay closer to testable reality, Dr. Randall was drawn to a bottom-up approach to theoretical physics, trying to build models that explain observed phenomena and hoping to discover principles with wider application. But Dr. Randall and string theory had their own kismet. In the mid-90's, theorists discovered that the theory was even richer than its founders had thought, describing not just strings but so-called branes, as in membranes, of all dimensions. Our own universe could be such a brane, an island of three dimensions floating in a sea of higher dimension, like a bubble in the sea. But there could be membranes with five, six, seven or more dimensions coexisting and mingling like weird cosmic soap bubbles in what theorists sometimes call the multiverse. "The stuff we're really famous for was really lucky in a way," Dr. Randall said. In the summer of 1998, after postdoctoral stints at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, she was a tenured M.I.T. professor ready to move to Princeton. She wondered then whether parallel universes could help solve a vexing problem with a favorite theories of particle physicists. That theory, known as supersymmetry, was invented in turn to solve another problem - the enormous gulf known as the hierarchy problem between gravity and the other forces. Na?ve calculations from first principles suggest, Dr. Randall said, that gravity should be 10 million billion times as strong as it is. You might find it hard to imagine gravity as a weak force, but consider, says Dr. Randall, that a small magnet can hold up a paper clip, even though the entire earth is pulling down on it. But there was a hitch with the way the theory worked out in our universe. It predicted reactions that are not observed. Dr. Randall wondered if the missing reactions could be explained by positing that some aspects of the theory were quarantined in a separate universe. She called up Dr. Sundrum, who was then a fellow at Boston University and happy to collaborate, having worked with her before. A lot of physics is taste, he explained, discerning, for example, what is an important and a potentially soluble problem. Dr. Randall's biggest strength, he said, is a kind of "unworldly" instinct. "She has a great nose," Dr. Sundrum said. "It's a mystery to those of us - hard to understand, almost to the point of amusement - how she does it without any clear sign of what led her to that path," he continued. "She gives no sign of why she thinks what she thinks." They began by drawing pictures and making crude estimates over ice cream and coffee in that ice cream parlor, which is now a taqueria. What they drew pictures of was a kind of Oreo cookie multiverse, an architecture similar to one first discovered as a solution of the string equations by Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study and Petr Horava, now at Berkeley. Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum's model consisted of a pair of universes, four-dimensional branes, thinly separated by a five-dimensional space poetically called the bulk. When they solved the equations for this setup, they discovered that the space between the branes would be warped. Objects, for example, would appear to grow larger or smaller and get less massive or more massive as they moved back and forth between the branes. Such a situation, they realized to their surprise, could provide a natural explanation for the hierarchy problem without invoking supersymmetry. Suppose, they said, that gravity is actually inherently as strong as the other forces, but because of the warping gravity is much much stronger on one of the branes than on the other one, where we happen to live. So we experience gravity as extremely weak. "You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane," Dr. Randall said, "and gravity will be incredibly weak." A result was a natural explanation for why atomic forces outgun gravity by 10 million billion to 1. Could this miracle be true? Crazy as it sounded, they soon discovered an even more bizarre possibility. The fifth dimension could actually be infinite and we would not have noticed it. In this case, there would be only one brane, ours, containing both gravity as we know it and the rest of nature. But it would warp space in the same way as in the first model, trapping gravity nearby so that we would experience space-time as four-dimensional. This new single brane model did not solve the weak gravity problem, Dr. Randall admitted, but it was a revelation, that an infinite ocean of space could be sitting next to us undetected. "So when we wrote this paper, what we were concentrating on was this amazing fact that really had been overlooked for 100 years - well, years, whatever - that you can have this infinite extra dimension," she said. "I mean it was quite wild." This was not the first time that theorists had tinkered with the extra dimensions of string theory, dimensions that had been presumed to be coiled out of sight of experiment, into tight loops so small that not even an electron could enter. In 1998, three theorists - Nima Arkani-Hamed of Harvard, Gia Divali of New York University and Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford (a group known in physics as A.D.D.) - had surprised everybody by suggesting that if one or two of the curled-up extra dimensions had sizes as big as a tenth of millimeter or so (gigantic on particle physics scales), gravity would be similarly diluted and weakened. When Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum published their first paper, describing the two-brane scheme, in 1999, she said that many physicists did not recognize it as a new idea and not just an elaboration on the large extra dimensions of the A.D.D. group. In fact, she said, the extra dimensions don't have to be very large in the two-brane theory, less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of an inch. When they published their second paper, about the infinite dimension, she said, even some of their best friends, reserved judgment. But by the time a long-planned workshop on strings and particle physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara rolled around that fall, string theorists were excited about the Randall-Sundrum work and the earlier A.D.D. proposal. The reason was simple: If they were very lucky and one of these versions of string theory was the one that nature had adopted, it could actually be tested in the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator due to go into operation at CERN near Geneva in 2007. Colliding beams of protons with a combined energy of 14 trillion electron volts, the collider could produce particles like gravitons going off into the fifth dimension like billiard balls hopping off the table, black holes or even the illusive strings themselves. "If this is the way gravity works in high-energy physics, we'll know about it," Dr. Randall said. Although physicists agree that these theories are a long shot, the new work has captured their imaginations and encouraged them to take a fresh look at the possibilities for the universe and their new accelerator. Dr. Greene of Columbia said, "Sometimes it takes an outsider to come into a field and see what is being missed, or taken for granted." At first the idea that extra dimensions could be bigger than any of us had thought was shocking, he said. Andrew Strominger, a Harvard string theorist, said: "Before A.D.D. we believed there was no hope of finding evidence for string theory at the Large Hadron Collider, an assumption that was wrong. It shows how unimaginative and narrow-minded we are. I see that as cause for optimism. Science and nature are full of surprises, we never see what's going to happen next." It was shortly before a conference that Dr. Randall had organized during the Kavli workshop that she had her own experience with gravity: she fell while rock climbing in Yosemite, breaking several bones. Only a day before, she said, she had completed a climb of Half Dome and was feeling cocky. Another symptom of gravity's weakness is that a rope is sufficient to hold a human body up against earth's pull, but Dr. Randall was still on the first leg of her climb and hadn't yet attached it to the rock.. She woke up in a helicopter. For a long time, she said, new parts kept hurting as old ones healed. "I was very much not myself. I didn't even like chocolate and coffee." Since she was the conference organizer, her ordeal was more public than she would have liked. "In some ways you sort of want to do this in private," Dr. Randall said. "On the other hand people were really nice." After two years at Princeton, Dr. Randall returned to M.I.T. in 2000, but then a year later moved to Harvard, by then a powerhouse in string theory. She was the third woman to get tenure in physics there. Dr. Randall, 43 and single, prefers not to talk about "the women in science thing," as she calls it. That subject that gained notoriety earlier this year when Harvard's President Larry Summers famously ventured that a relative lack of women in the upper ranks of science might reflect innate deficiencies, but Dr. Randall said it had been beaten to death. Asked if she would rather be a woman in science than talk about women in science, Dr. Randall said, "I'd rather be a scientist." She did say that part of the reason she had written her book was to demonstrate that that there were women out there doing this kind of science. "I did feel extra pressure to write a good book," she said, adding that the response in reviews and emails from readers had been much greater than she had expected. She was particularly pleased that some of her readers were attentive and studious enough to catch on to various puns and games she had inserted in the book, like the frequent references to Alice in Wonderland, which, she said, is a pun on "one-d-land." Dr. Randall is intrigued by that fact that her results, as well as other results from string theory seem to paint a picture of the universe in which theories with different numbers of dimensions in them all give the same physics? She and Andreas Karch of the University of Washington have found, for example, that the fifth dimension could be so warped that the number of dimensions you see would depend on where you were. Our own universe might just be a three-dimensional "sinkhole," she says. "It's not completely obvious what gravity is, fundamentally, or what dimensions are, fundamentally," she said over lunch. "One of these days we'll understand better what we mean, what is the fundamental thing that's given us space in the first place and dimensions of space in particular." She held out less hope for time, saying, "I just don't understand it. "Space we can make progress with." Is time an illusion? "I wish time were an illusion," she said as she carved up the last of her chocolate bread pudding, "but unfortunately it seems all too real." From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 17:02:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:02:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Scientists Link a Prolific Gene Tree to the Manchu Conquerors of China Message-ID: Scientists Link a Prolific Gene Tree to the Manchu Conquerors of China http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/science/01manc.html By NICHOLAS WADE Geneticists have identified a major lineage of Y chromosomes in populations of northern China that they believe may mark the bearers as descendants of one of the Manchu conquerors who founded the Qing dynasty and ruled China from 1644 to 1911. Because the founder of the lineage lived some 500 years ago, according to calculations based on the rate of genetic change, he may have been Giocangga, who died in 1582, the grandfather of the Manchu leader Nurhaci. At least 1.6 million men now carry this Manchu Y chromosome, says Chris Tyler-Smith, the leader of a team of English and Chinese geneticists. Several historians, however, expressed reservations and said they would like to see more evidence, including testing of present-day descendants of the Qing nobility. This is not the first instance of extraordinary male procreation that Dr. Tyler-Smith has brought to light. Two years ago, after a survey of Y chromosomes across East Asia, he identified a lineage that he was able to associate with the Mongol royal house and Genghis Khan. Some 16 million men who live within the boundaries of the former Mongol empire now carry Genghis's Y chromosome, according to Dr. Tyler-Smith's calculations. The Mongol Y chromosome presumably spread so widely because of the large number of concubines amassed by Genghis and his relatives. The Manchu rulers, though not in Genghis's league, also were able to spread their lineage so far, Dr. Tyler-Smith and his colleagues suggest, because of being able to keep many concubines. Even a ninth-rank nobleman in the dynasty (whose name is pronounced ching) was entitled to receive 11 kilograms of silver and 22,000 liters of rice as his annual stipend. With colleagues in England and Beijing, Dr. Tyler-Smith identified a Y chromosome lineage that was surprisingly common among seven populations scattered across northern China, but was absent from the Han, to which most Chinese belong. Since the only other Y chromosome lineage in the region anywhere near as common was that of Genghis Khan, the founder of the new lineage seemed likely to have left his mark in the historical record, as well, Dr. Tyler-Smith says in an article to appear in the December issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics. The Manchus of the Qing dynasty seem the best candidates because there were more than 80,000 official members of the Qing dynasty by 1911, according to a history of the Manchus by Prof. Mark C. Elliott of Harvard. By counting the number of mutations in the lineage's Y chromosome, Dr. Tyler-Smith estimated that the common ancestor of all branches of the lineage lived about 500 years ago and was therefore probably the Manchu patriarch Giocangga. A puzzling feature of the geneticists' finding is that the Manchu Y chromosome they identified is quite rare in Liaoning, the original home province. Dr. Elliott said that was not necessarily surprising, because many Manchus left their homeland and relocated to Beijing after the founding of the Qing dynasty. Also, the Communist government allowed many Han who worked for the Manchu in Liaoning to claim Manchu ethnicity. Dr. James Lee, a historical demographer at the University of Michigan, said in an e-mail message from Beijing that the claim to have found a genetic link to the Qing imperial nobility in northern ethnic groups "seems quite forced," because most of the nobility lived in Beijing and Liaoning. Dr. Tyler-Smith responded that his colleagues in Beijing had approached several documented descendants of the nobility and invited them to participate but none accepted. After the Cultural Revolution, descent from the nobility was generally hidden, and many documents were destroyed, Dr. Tyler-Smith and colleagues write in their article. Because they could not find living Qing noblemen to test, they write, "Our hypothetical explanation remains unproven," despite "strong circumstantial support." Dr, Elliott said that he knew several people who were well-attested descendants of the Qing royal family and that an ad in a Beijing newspaper should recruit a few hundred people, if not a few thousand. Dr. Elliott said the Qing often contracted marriages with the Mongols as a means of securing political alliances, which would explain the presence of the Manchu chromosome in Mongolia. This could have also occurred with other northern ethnic groups where the Manchu chromosome is common, like the Oroqen, Hezhe and Ewenki, although those forest peoples "did not intermarry with the Qing imperial lineage, at least not in any appreciable numbers," he said. The fathering of many children by a single man is an instance of what biologists call male intrasexual selection. Dr. Tyler-Smith said the Manchu and Mongol chromosomes were the only genetic imprints of this size that he can see in the populations of East Asia, but that there are likely to be other instances elsewhere. From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 12 17:03:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:03:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Brain structure link to anxiety Message-ID: Brain structure link to anxiety http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/4671483.stm Published: 2005/10/31 00:17:25 GMT [Thanks to Laird for this.] Vulnerability to anxiety may be down to the size of a brain structure involved in fearful memories, say US scientists. People with a thicker ventromedial prefrontal cortex were better able to cope with stressful experiences. The findings may help explain why some people develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while others bounce back after adversity, say the authors. The Massachusetts General Hospital study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Fear factor While it is normal to experience physical and psychological symptoms after an extremely stressful event, such as the recent London terrorist attacks, some people will continue to be consumed by overwhelming fear and may develop PTSD. "Certainly, that part of the brain is associated with a whole manner of psychiatric vulnerabilities," Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, consultant psychiatrist in London A person with PTSD may experience unwanted flashbacks, poor sleep and depression, and avoidance certain situations that could trigger memories of the event. Studies in animals suggest that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is involved with helping the brain forget fearful events. Also, studies of have shown that people with PTSD have unusually inactive vmPFCs, again suggesting that this brain region is important in anxiety. In the current study, Dr Mohammed Milad and colleagues scanned the brains of 14 volunteers. Sweaty palms The volunteers were also exposed to a series of experiments, involving harmless but uncomfortable electric shocks, which were designed to cause anxiety. The volunteers who had the least anxiety responses, gauged by how sweaty their palms were during the tests, tended to have thicker vmPFCs and vice versa. Dr Milad said: "These results suggest that a bigger vmPFC may be protective against anxiety disorders or that a smaller one may be a predisposing factor." However, he said they did not yet know who that might work. His colleague Dr Scott Rauch said the next step was to look at genetic and factors in the environment that might explain the brain differences. In the future, it might be possible to measure a person's vmPFC to predict whether they are more prone to anxiety disorders such as PTSD. Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, consultant psychiatrist in London, said: "We know that some people are more vulnerable to stress and anxiety and it is nice to have a biological correlate of that. "Certainly, that part of the brain is associated with a whole manner of psychiatric vulnerabilities. "It is not surprising that anxiety disorders may also have part of their underlying vulnerability in that area." He said important thing was to recognise was that PTSD is treatable and should be managed as early as possible. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Nov 12 18:33:04 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:33:04 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Brain structure link to anxiety In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43763560.4030009@solution-consulting.com> Comment: We know now that activity changes the structure of the brain. Violinists, for example, have a larger motor strip; London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus. So what this news doesn't say is the cause/effect relationship. Why wouldn't enough trauma overwhelm and ventromedial prefrontal cortex? Hum??? Why wouldn't children taught hardiness cognitive strategies then develop a more robust frontal lobe? We have seen a number of these studies, and all are vulnerable to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Another factor they seem to overlook is habitual level of happiness. People who are more happy are less intimidated by pain (like the small shocks) and actually rate the same cold-pressor pain stimulus as less painful than less happy people. Thanks for the provocative article, Frank. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Brain structure link to anxiety > http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/4671483.stm Published: > 2005/10/31 00:17:25 GMT [Thanks to Laird for this.] > > Vulnerability to anxiety may be down to the size of a brain structure > involved in fearful memories, say US scientists. > > People with a thicker ventromedial prefrontal cortex were better able > to cope with stressful experiences. > > The findings may help explain why some people develop post-traumatic > stress disorder (PTSD) while others bounce back after adversity, say > the authors. > > The Massachusetts General Hospital study appears in Proceedings of the > National Academy of Science. > > Fear factor > > While it is normal to experience physical and psychological symptoms > after an extremely stressful event, such as the recent London > terrorist attacks, some people will continue to be consumed by > overwhelming fear and may develop PTSD. > > "Certainly, that part of the brain is associated with a whole manner > of psychiatric vulnerabilities," Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, consultant > psychiatrist in London > > A person with PTSD may experience unwanted flashbacks, poor sleep and > depression, and avoidance certain situations that could trigger > memories of the event. > > Studies in animals suggest that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex > (vmPFC) is involved with helping the brain forget fearful events. > > Also, studies of have shown that people with PTSD have unusually > inactive vmPFCs, again suggesting that this brain region is important > in anxiety. > > In the current study, Dr Mohammed Milad and colleagues scanned the > brains of 14 volunteers. > > Sweaty palms > > The volunteers were also exposed to a series of experiments, involving > harmless but uncomfortable electric shocks, which were designed to > cause anxiety. > > The volunteers who had the least anxiety responses, gauged by how > sweaty their palms were during the tests, tended to have thicker > vmPFCs and vice versa. > > Dr Milad said: "These results suggest that a bigger vmPFC may be > protective against anxiety disorders or that a smaller one may be a > predisposing factor." > > However, he said they did not yet know who that might work. > > His colleague Dr Scott Rauch said the next step was to look at genetic > and factors in the environment that might explain the brain differences. > > In the future, it might be possible to measure a person's vmPFC to > predict whether they are more prone to anxiety disorders such as PTSD. > > Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, consultant psychiatrist in London, said: "We know > that some people are more vulnerable to stress and anxiety and it is > nice to have a biological correlate of that. > > "Certainly, that part of the brain is associated with a whole manner > of psychiatric vulnerabilities. > > "It is not surprising that anxiety disorders may also have part of > their underlying vulnerability in that area." > > He said important thing was to recognise was that PTSD is treatable > and should be managed as early as possible. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Nov 12 18:43:54 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:43:54 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Howard Bloom invites you etc. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <437637EA.9010401@solution-consulting.com> Frank, I differ with your view of this. I teach a class for the university MBA program, and in my humble (ha!) opinion, my MBA students do need this. What I think Howard is going to offer is a key tool. A public seminar is one way of sharing that tool with people who might not otherwise learn about it. Howard's unique view is capitalism as entertainment, and (down one level) entertainment as being secular salvation, lifting people from their ordinary lives. Thus, the successful capitalist increases the total amount of happiness in the world. When I saw the movie, New York Doll, I learned that Arthur "Killer" Kane (bass player for New York Dolls) had a very similar concept about the purpose of his music; last night ABC had a piece on happiness and a successful businessman was telling his class that complaints are gold, they are what you use to improve your customer's lives. It is a significant reframe away from the P/L statements that dominate and stultify business. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Howard, > > Stop trying to save the world! Lots and lots of people have been > beating a drum for capitalism and free trade, and it's richly unclear > what new ideas you are going to add to the stew. Can you just tell us > what is different about your approach? > > Instead of trying to save a world that will largely ignore you, you > should confine your efforts to giving us new tools to think with. We, > or some of us, will use these tools to save the world. > > Go back to tool making, please, Howard! We need tool makers far, far > more than we need world saviors! > > Frank > ----------- > America and the Western world are in trouble. Militant Islam says > that our civilization is obsolete and is about to crumble to dust. The > Chinese are working to make our obsolescence complete. > > But American and Western Civilization are not reaching our end. We > are standing at the beginning of a future of passion and artistry, a > future lifted by technologies beyond our dreams. But we are only > standing at the start of this path of wonders if we MAKE IT THAT WAY. > > During the last four years, I've stepped aside from science to write a > book called Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine: A > Quick Revision of the Rise and Future of Western Civilization. The > book is a total reperception of why you wake up every day, of why you > go to work, of what you and I do to save, uplift, console, empower, > and delight others, and of what you and I can do to express the you > that has always wanted to be freed but has never felt the time was > right. Reinventing Capitalism is a reperception of the civilization > you and I have inherited, the civilization you and I now must remake. > > While I was giving a presentation on quantum physics at an > International Conference on Quantum Informatics in Moscow (I kid you > not), a strange thing happened to Reinventing Capitalism and to the 27 > key principles it espouses-principles that show you and me how to be > artists in our daily work and why we need to unleash our passions from > nine to five. The still-unfinished book was made a key component of > an MBA program at The Graduate Institute in Milford, Connecticut. > > And the founder of the Global Entertainment and Media Summits saw > Reinventing Capitalism as a tool with which to change the way we see > our world.and with which we can radically reshape our future. Steve > Zuckerman, the founder of the Summits, has put together a two-day > meeting of some of the brightest business and entertainment minds in > North America to present and discuss the quick-and-easy but > tap-root-deep ideas about Reinventing Capitalism's Putting Soul In the > Machine.in the machine of your company and mine, in the machine of > your office, your industry, your culture, your personal life, and of > your species---in the machine of the human race. > > No, this is not EST. It's history, science, and the knowledge of the > invisible heart of business that you helped me acquire in 20 years > working with Sony, NBC-TV, New Line Cinema, Amnesty International, > Farm Aid, CBS, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, EMI, ABC, Gulf and > Western, MCA/Universal, Manesmann, Polygram, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, > Disney, academic institutions, and extraordinarily bright individuals > like you. It's the gut-sense you helped me evolve when we worked > together to generate $28 billion dollars in revenue for our > clients-more than the gross domestic product of Luxembourg and Qatar. > And when we worked together to put Amnesty International and Farm Aid > on the map. > > You know as well as I do that when we brought in our greatest revenue > streams and made our greatest cultural contributions, we didn't do it > out of greed or cold calculation. We did it out of bone-deep belief. > > That knowledge-in-your-bones is the essence of what we'll discuss for > two days, December 2nd and December 3rd at 69 West Fourteenth Street. > > I very much want you there. The cost is trivial--$129. And I'm > asking you to pay your own transportation and hotel costs. But I want > to see you. It's been a long time. And I want your mind to > contribute to one of the strangest revolutions you will ever be a part > of. > > When someone from Steve Zuckerman's team or mine calls you to give you > details, please say yes. > > With warmth and gusto-Howard Bloom > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Nov 12 18:56:22 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:56:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France Message-ID: <43763AD6.10004@solution-consulting.com> [an interesting and likely correct view of the riots from the Wall Street Journal] http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007529 French Lessons How to create a Muslim underclass. Friday, November 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns seems to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law enforcement, which is certainly welcome news. The riots have shaken France, however, and the unrest was of such magnitude that it has become a moment of illumination, for French and Americans equally. In particular, some longstanding conceits about the superiority of the French social model have gone up in flames. This model emphasizes "solidarity" through high taxes, cossetted labor markets, subsidies to industry and farming, a "Ministry for Social Cohesion," powerful public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare state, and, inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of the Anglo-Saxon "market" model. So by all means, let's do some comparing. The first thing that needs illuminating is that, while the overwhelming majority of rioters are Muslim, it is premature at best to describe the rioting as an "intifada" or some other term denoting religiously or culturally inspired violence. And it is flat-out wrong to claim that the rioting is a consequence of liberal immigration policies. Consider the contrast with the U.S. Between 1978 and 2002, the percentage of foreign-born Americans nearly doubled, to 12% from 6.2%. At the same time, the five-year average unemployment rate declined to 5.1% from 7.3%. Among immigrants, median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained in the country. These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups. It's true that France's Muslim population--some five million out of a total of 60 million--is much larger than America's. They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of the traditionally adaptive, supple American one. In France, the opposite applies. Mass Muslim migration to France began in the 1960s, a period of very low unemployment and industrial labor shortages. Today, French unemployment is close to 10%, or double the U.S. rate. Unlike in the U.S., French culture eschews multiculturalism and puts a heavy premium on the concept of "Frenchness." Yet that hasn't provided much cushion for increasingly impoverished and thus estranged Muslim communities, which tend to be segregated into isolated and generally unpoliced suburban cities called banlieues. There, youth unemployment runs to 40%, and crime, drug addiction and hooliganism are endemic. This is not to say that Muslim cultural practices are irrelevant. For Muslim women especially, the misery of the banlieues is compounded by a culture of female submission, often violently enforced. Nor should anyone rule out the possibility that Islamic radicals will exploit the mayhem for their own ends. But whatever else might be said about the Muslim attributes of the French rioters, the fact is that the pathologies of the banlieues are similar to those of inner cities everywhere. What France suffers from, fundamentally, is neither a "Muslim problem" nor an "immigration problem." It is an underclass problem. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin almost put his finger on the problem when he promised to introduce legislation to ease the economic plight of the banlieues. But aside from the useful suggestion of "enterprise zones," most of the legislation smacked of big-government solutions: community centers, training programs and so on. The larger problem for the prime minister is that France's underclass is a consequence of the structure of the French economy, in which the state accounts for nearly half of gross domestic product and roughly a quarter of employment. French workers, both in the public and private sectors, enjoy GM-like benefits in pensions, early retirement, working hours and vacations, sick- and maternity leave, and job security--all of which is militantly enforced by strike-happy labor unions. The predictable result is that there is little job turnover and little net new job creation. Leave aside the debilitating effects of unemployment insurance and welfare on the underclass: Who would employ them if they actually sought work? For France, the good news is that these problems can be solved, principally be deregulating labor markets, reducing taxes, reforming the pension system and breaking the stranglehold of unions on economic life. The bad news is the entrenched cultural resistance to those solutions--not on the part of angry Muslim youth, but from the employed half of French society that refuses to relinquish their subsidized existences for the sake of the "solidarity" they profess to hold dear. So far, most attempts at reform have failed, mainly due to a combination of union militancy and political timidity. There are lessons in France for the U.S., too. Advocates of multiculturalism might take note of what happens when ethnic communities are excluded (or exclude themselves) from the broad currents of national life. Opponents of immigration might take note of the contrast between France's impoverished Muslims and America's flourishing immigrant communities. Above all, those who want America to emulate the French social model by mandating health and other benefits, raising tax burdens and entrenching union power might take note of just how sour its promises have become, especially its promises to the poor. In the matter of "solidarity," economic growth counts more than rhetoric. -------------- 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 Sat Nov 12 19:15:25 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:15:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France In-Reply-To: <43763AD6.10004@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: I think it's a good summary of the right-wing view, but this is not the place to have a serious argument about it. If anyone is hankering for a knock-down drag-out approach to political debate they are welcome to join us in thepoliticalspinroom on yahoo groups. Not a tea party, bit it is definitely one place where the interface between left and right is hyperactive. I go there to sharpen my teeth :-) Steve HOvland -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 10:56 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France [an interesting and likely correct view of the riots from the Wall Street Journal] http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007529 French Lessons How to create a Muslim underclass. Friday, November 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns seems to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law enforcement, which is certainly welcome news. The riots have shaken France, however, and the unrest was of such magnitude that it has become a moment of illumination, for French and Americans equally. In particular, some longstanding conceits about the superiority of the French social model have gone up in flames. This model emphasizes "solidarity" through high taxes, cossetted labor markets, subsidies to industry and farming, a "Ministry for Social Cohesion," powerful public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare state, and, inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of the Anglo-Saxon "market" model. So by all means, let's do some comparing. The first thing that needs illuminating is that, while the overwhelming majority of rioters are Muslim, it is premature at best to describe the rioting as an "intifada" or some other term denoting religiously or culturally inspired violence. And it is flat-out wrong to claim that the rioting is a consequence of liberal immigration policies. Consider the contrast with the U.S. Between 1978 and 2002, the percentage of foreign-born Americans nearly doubled, to 12% from 6.2%. At the same time, the five-year average unemployment rate declined to 5.1% from 7.3%. Among immigrants, median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained in the country. These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups. It's true that France's Muslim population--some five million out of a total of 60 million--is much larger than America's. They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of the traditionally adaptive, supple American one. In France, the opposite applies. Mass Muslim migration to France began in the 1960s, a period of very low unemployment and industrial labor shortages. Today, French unemployment is close to 10%, or double the U.S. rate. Unlike in the U.S., French culture eschews multiculturalism and puts a heavy premium on the concept of "Frenchness." Yet that hasn't provided much cushion for increasingly impoverished and thus estranged Muslim communities, which tend to be segregated into isolated and generally unpoliced suburban cities called banlieues. There, youth unemployment runs to 40%, and crime, drug addiction and hooliganism are endemic. This is not to say that Muslim cultural practices are irrelevant. For Muslim women especially, the misery of the banlieues is compounded by a culture of female submission, often violently enforced. Nor should anyone rule out the possibility that Islamic radicals will exploit the mayhem for their own ends. But whatever else might be said about the Muslim attributes of the French rioters, the fact is that the pathologies of the banlieues are similar to those of inner cities everywhere. What France suffers from, fundamentally, is neither a "Muslim problem" nor an "immigration problem." It is an underclass problem. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin almost put his finger on the problem when he promised to introduce legislation to ease the economic plight of the banlieues. But aside from the useful suggestion of "enterprise zones," most of the legislation smacked of big-government solutions: community centers, training programs and so on. The larger problem for the prime minister is that France's underclass is a consequence of the structure of the French economy, in which the state accounts for nearly half of gross domestic product and roughly a quarter of employment. French workers, both in the public and private sectors, enjoy GM-like benefits in pensions, early retirement, working hours and vacations, sick- and maternity leave, and job security--all of which is militantly enforced by strike-happy labor unions. The predictable result is that there is little job turnover and little net new job creation. Leave aside the debilitating effects of unemployment insurance and welfare on the underclass: Who would employ them if they actually sought work? For France, the good news is that these problems can be solved, principally be deregulating labor markets, reducing taxes, reforming the pension system and breaking the stranglehold of unions on economic life. The bad news is the entrenched cultural resistance to those solutions--not on the part of angry Muslim youth, but from the employed half of French society that refuses to relinquish their subsidized existences for the sake of the "solidarity" they profess to hold dear. So far, most attempts at reform have failed, mainly due to a combination of union militancy and political timidity. There are lessons in France for the U.S., too. Advocates of multiculturalism might take note of what happens when ethnic communities are excluded (or exclude themselves) from the broad currents of national life. Opponents of immigration might take note of the contrast between France's impoverished Muslims and America's flourishing immigrant communities. Above all, those who want America to emulate the French social model by mandating health and other benefits, raising tax burdens and entrenching union power might take note of just how sour its promises have become, especially its promises to the poor. In the matter of "solidarity," economic growth counts more than rhetoric. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 155 bytes Desc: not available URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Nov 13 00:16:23 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 16:16:23 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <437685D7.3060501@earthlink.net> I've been looking for thepoliticalspinroom but all I could find was: http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=thepoliticalspinroom&ss=1 (the politicalspinroom2). Please advise. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Steve Hovland wrote: > I think it's a good summary of the right-wing view, > but this is not the place to have a serious argument > about it. > > If anyone is hankering for a knock-down > drag-out approach to political debate they are > welcome to join us in thepoliticalspinroom on > yahoo groups. > > Not a tea party, bit it is definitely one place > where the interface between left and right is > hyperactive. I go there to sharpen my teeth :-) > > Steve HOvland > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]*On Behalf Of *Lynn D. > Johnson, Ph.D. > *Sent:* Saturday, November 12, 2005 10:56 AM > *To:* The new improved paleopsych list > *Subject:* [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France > > [an interesting and likely correct view of the riots from the Wall > Street Journal] > > http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007529 > *French Lessons* > How to create a Muslim underclass. > > /Friday, November 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST/ > > Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns seems > to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law enforcement, which > is certainly welcome news. The riots have shaken France, however, > and the unrest was of such magnitude that it has become a moment > of illumination, for French and Americans equally. > > In particular, some longstanding conceits about the superiority of > the French social model have gone up in flames. This model > emphasizes "solidarity" through high taxes, cossetted labor > markets, subsidies to industry and farming, a "Ministry for Social > Cohesion," powerful public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare > state, and, inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of > the Anglo-Saxon "market" model. So by all means, let's do some > comparing. > > The first thing that needs illuminating is that, while the > overwhelming majority of rioters are Muslim, it is premature at > best to describe the rioting as an "intifada" or some other term > denoting religiously or culturally inspired violence. And it is > flat-out wrong to claim that the rioting is a consequence of > liberal immigration policies. > > Consider the contrast with the U.S. Between 1978 and 2002, the > percentage of foreign-born Americans nearly doubled, to 12% from > 6.2%. At the same time, the five-year average unemployment rate > declined to 5.1% from 7.3%. Among immigrants, median family > incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained > in the country. > > These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that > U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take Muslims, some > two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by > Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college > education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one > in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their > intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other > religious groups. > > It's true that France's Muslim population--some five million out > of a total of 60 million--is much larger than America's. They also > generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant > difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former > inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, > which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the > mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the > best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol > fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of > the traditionally adaptive, supple American one. > > In France, the opposite applies. Mass Muslim migration to France > began in the 1960s, a period of very low unemployment and > industrial labor shortages. Today, French unemployment is close to > 10%, or double the U.S. rate. Unlike in the U.S., French culture > eschews multiculturalism and puts a heavy premium on the concept > of "Frenchness." Yet that hasn't provided much cushion for > increasingly impoverished and thus estranged Muslim communities, > which tend to be segregated into isolated and generally unpoliced > suburban cities called /banlieues/. There, youth unemployment runs > to 40%, and crime, drug addiction and hooliganism are endemic. > > This is not to say that Muslim cultural practices are irrelevant. > For Muslim women especially, the misery of the /banlieues/ is > compounded by a culture of female submission, often violently > enforced. Nor should anyone rule out the possibility that Islamic > radicals will exploit the mayhem for their own ends. But whatever > else might be said about the Muslim attributes of the French > rioters, the fact is that the pathologies of the /banlieues/ are > similar to those of inner cities everywhere. What France suffers > from, fundamentally, is neither a "Muslim problem" nor an > "immigration problem." It is an underclass problem. > > French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin almost put his finger > on the problem when he promised to introduce legislation to ease > the economic plight of the /banlieues./ But aside from the useful > suggestion of "enterprise zones," most of the legislation smacked > of big-government solutions: community centers, training programs > and so on. > > The larger problem for the prime minister is that France's > underclass is a consequence of the structure of the French > economy, in which the state accounts for nearly half of gross > domestic product and roughly a quarter of employment. French > workers, both in the public and private sectors, enjoy GM-like > benefits in pensions, early retirement, working hours and > vacations, sick- and maternity leave, and job security--all of > which is militantly enforced by strike-happy labor unions. The > predictable result is that there is little job turnover and little > net new job creation. Leave aside the debilitating effects of > unemployment insurance and welfare on the underclass: Who would > employ them if they actually sought work? > > For France, the good news is that these problems can be solved, > principally be deregulating labor markets, reducing taxes, > reforming the pension system and breaking the stranglehold of > unions on economic life. The bad news is the entrenched cultural > resistance to those solutions--not on the part of angry Muslim > youth, but from the employed half of French society that refuses > to relinquish their subsidized existences for the sake of the > "solidarity" they profess to hold dear. So far, most attempts at > reform have failed, mainly due to a combination of union militancy > and political timidity. > > There are lessons in France for the U.S., too. Advocates of > multiculturalism might take note of what happens when ethnic > communities are excluded (or exclude themselves) from the broad > currents of national life. Opponents of immigration might take > note of the contrast between France's impoverished Muslims and > America's flourishing immigrant communities. > > Above all, those who want America to emulate the French social > model by mandating health and other benefits, raising tax burdens > and entrenching union power might take note of just how sour its > promises have become, especially its promises to the poor. In the > matter of "solidarity," economic growth counts more than rhetoric. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 155 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Nov 13 01:20:05 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 17:20:05 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France In-Reply-To: <437685D7.3060501@earthlink.net> Message-ID: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThePoliticalSpinroom/ -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Gerry Reinhart-Waller Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 4:16 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France I've been looking for thepoliticalspinroom but all I could find was: http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=thepoliticalspinroom&ss=1 (the politicalspinroom2). Please advise. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Steve Hovland wrote: I think it's a good summary of the right-wing view, but this is not the place to have a serious argument about it. If anyone is hankering for a knock-down drag-out approach to political debate they are welcome to join us in thepoliticalspinroom on yahoo groups. Not a tea party, bit it is definitely one place where the interface between left and right is hyperactive. I go there to sharpen my teeth :-) Steve HOvland -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 10:56 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France [an interesting and likely correct view of the riots from the Wall Street Journal] http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007529 French Lessons How to create a Muslim underclass. Friday, November 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns seems to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law enforcement, which is certainly welcome news. The riots have shaken France, however, and the unrest was of such magnitude that it has become a moment of illumination, for French and Americans equally. In particular, some longstanding conceits about the superiority of the French social model have gone up in flames. This model emphasizes "solidarity" through high taxes, cossetted labor markets, subsidies to industry and farming, a "Ministry for Social Cohesion," powerful public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare state, and, inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of the Anglo-Saxon "market" model. So by all means, let's do some comparing. The first thing that needs illuminating is that, while the overwhelming majority of rioters are Muslim, it is premature at best to describe the rioting as an "intifada" or some other term denoting religiously or culturally inspired violence. And it is flat-out wrong to claim that the rioting is a consequence of liberal immigration policies. Consider the contrast with the U.S. Between 1978 and 2002, the percentage of foreign-born Americans nearly doubled, to 12% from 6.2%. At the same time, the five-year average unemployment rate declined to 5.1% from 7.3%. Among immigrants, median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained in the country. These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups. It's true that France's Muslim population--some five million out of a total of 60 million--is much larger than America's. They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of the traditionally adaptive, supple American one. In France, the opposite applies. Mass Muslim migration to France began in the 1960s, a period of very low unemployment and industrial labor shortages. Today, French unemployment is close to 10%, or double the U.S. rate. Unlike in the U.S., French culture eschews multiculturalism and puts a heavy premium on the concept of "Frenchness." Yet that hasn't provided much cushion for increasingly impoverished and thus estranged Muslim communities, which tend to be segregated into isolated and generally unpoliced suburban cities called banlieues. There, youth unemployment runs to 40%, and crime, drug addiction and hooliganism are endemic. This is not to say that Muslim cultural practices are irrelevant. For Muslim women especially, the misery of the banlieues is compounded by a culture of female submission, often violently enforced. Nor should anyone rule out the possibility that Islamic radicals will exploit the mayhem for their own ends. But whatever else might be said about the Muslim attributes of the French rioters, the fact is that the pathologies of the banlieues are similar to those of inner cities everywhere. What France suffers from, fundamentally, is neither a "Muslim problem" nor an "immigration problem." It is an underclass problem. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin almost put his finger on the problem when he promised to introduce legislation to ease the economic plight of the banlieues. But aside from the useful suggestion of "enterprise zones," most of the legislation smacked of big-government solutions: community centers, training programs and so on. The larger problem for the prime minister is that France's underclass is a consequence of the structure of the French economy, in which the state accounts for nearly half of gross domestic product and roughly a quarter of employment. French workers, both in the public and private sectors, enjoy GM-like benefits in pensions, early retirement, working hours and vacations, sick- and maternity leave, and job security--all of which is militantly enforced by strike-happy labor unions. The predictable result is that there is little job turnover and little net new job creation. Leave aside the debilitating effects of unemployment insurance and welfare on the underclass: Who would employ them if they actually sought work? For France, the good news is that these problems can be solved, principally be deregulating labor markets, reducing taxes, reforming the pension system and breaking the stranglehold of unions on economic life. The bad news is the entrenched cultural resistance to those solutions--not on the part of angry Muslim youth, but from the employed half of French society that refuses to relinquish their subsidized existences for the sake of the "solidarity" they profess to hold dear. So far, most attempts at reform have failed, mainly due to a combination of union militancy and political timidity. There are lessons in France for the U.S., too. Advocates of multiculturalism might take note of what happens when ethnic communities are excluded (or exclude themselves) from the broad currents of national life. Opponents of immigration might take note of the contrast between France's impoverished Muslims and America's flourishing immigrant communities. Above all, those who want America to emulate the French social model by mandating health and other benefits, raising tax burdens and entrenching union power might take note of just how sour its promises have become, especially its promises to the poor. In the matter of "solidarity," economic growth counts more than rhetoric. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 155 bytes Desc: not available URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Sun Nov 13 02:31:37 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:31:37 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] Frank Message-ID: <24b.fec4cb.30a7ff89@aol.com> I respect your opinion, as you know. I also value our friendship. I'm enclosing a copy of the draft of Reinventing Capitalism--which is NOT about free market stuff. See if you think there are new tools of understanding in it. And let me know what you think. Howard Frank, I differ with your view of this. I teach a class for the university MBA program, and in my humble (ha!) opinion, my MBA students do need this. What I think Howard is going to offer is a key tool. A public seminar is one way of sharing that tool with people who might not otherwise learn about it. Howard's unique view is capitalism as entertainment, and (down one level) entertainment as being secular salvation, lifting people from their ordinary lives. Thus, the successful capitalist increases the total amount of happiness in the world. When I saw the movie, New York Doll, I learned that Arthur "Killer" Kane (bass player for New York Dolls) had a very similar concept about the purpose of his music; last night ABC had a piece on happiness and a successful businessman was telling his class that complaints are gold, they are what you use to improve your customer's lives. It is a significant reframe away from the P/L statements that dominate and stultify business. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Howard, > > Stop trying to save the world! Lots and lots of people have been > beating a drum for capitalism and free trade, and it's richly unclear > what new ideas you are going to add to the stew. Can you just tell us > what is different about your approach? > > Instead of trying to save a world that will largely ignore you, you > should confine your efforts to giving us new tools to think with. We, > or some of us, will use these tools to save the world. > > Go back to tool making, please, Howard! We need tool makers far, far > more than we need world saviors! > > Frank > ----------- > America and the Western world are in trouble. Militant Islam says > that our civilization is obsolete and is about to crumble to dust. The > Chinese are working to make our obsolescence complete. > > But American and Western Civilization are not reaching our end. We > are standing at the beginning of a future of passion and artistry, a > future lifted by technologies beyond our dreams. But we are only > standing at the start of this path of wonders if we MAKE IT THAT WAY. > > During the last four years, I've stepped aside from science to write a > book called Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine: A > Quick Revision of the Rise and Future of Western Civilization. The > book is a total reperception of why you wake up every day, of why you > go to work, of what you and I do to save, uplift, console, empower, > and delight others, and of what you and I can do to express the you > that has always wanted to be freed but has never felt the time was > right. Reinventing Capitalism is a reperception of the civilization > you and I have inherited, the civilization you and I now must remake. > > While I was giving a presentation on quantum physics at an > International Conference on Quantum Informatics in Moscow (I kid you > not), a strange thing happened to Reinventing Capitalism and to the 27 > key principles it espouses-principles that show you and me how to be > artists in our daily work and why we need to unleash our passions from > nine to five. The still-unfinished book was made a key component of > an MBA program at The Graduate Institute in Milford, Connecticut. > > And the founder of the Global Entertainment and Media Summits saw > Reinventing Capitalism as a tool with which to change the way we see > our world.and with which we can radically reshape our future. Steve > Zuckerman, the founder of the Summits, has put together a two-day > meeting of some of the brightest business and entertainment minds in > North America to present and discuss the quick-and-easy but > tap-root-deep ideas about Reinventing Capitalism's Putting Soul In the > Machine.in the machine of your company and mine, in the machine of > your office, your industry, your culture, your personal life, and of > your species---in the machine of the human race. > > No, this is not EST. It's history, science, and the knowledge of the > invisible heart of business that you helped me acquire in 20 years > working with Sony, NBC-TV, New Line Cinema, Amnesty International, > Farm Aid, CBS, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, EMI, ABC, Gulf and > Western, MCA/Universal, Manesmann, Polygram, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, > Disney, academic institutions, and extraordinarily bright individuals > like you. It's the gut-sense you helped me evolve when we worked > together to generate $28 billion dollars in revenue for our > clients-more than the gross domestic product of Luxembourg and Qatar. > And when we worked together to put Amnesty International and Farm Aid > on the map. > > You know as well as I do that when we brought in our greatest revenue > streams and made our greatest cultural contributions, we didn't do it > out of greed or cold calculation. We did it out of bone-deep belief. > > That knowledge-in-your-bones is the essence of what we'll discuss for > two days, December 2nd and December 3rd at 69 West Fourteenth Street. > > I very much want you there. The cost is trivial--$129. And I'm > asking you to pay your own transportation and hotel costs. But I want > to see you. It's been a long time. And I want your mind to > contribute to one of the strangest revolutions you will ever be a part > of. > > When someone from Steve Zuckerman's team or mine calls you to give you > details, please say yes. > > With warmth and gusto-Howard Bloom > _______________________________________________ > 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 Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: REAE06~1.DOC Type: application/octet-stream Size: 1704448 bytes Desc: not available URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Nov 13 04:27:36 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 20:27:36 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4376C0B8.2000307@earthlink.net> Thanks Steve. It works. Steve Hovland wrote: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThePoliticalSpinroom/ > > > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]*On Behalf Of *Gerry > Reinhart-Waller > *Sent:* Saturday, November 12, 2005 4:16 PM > *To:* The new improved paleopsych list > *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France > > I've been looking for thepoliticalspinroom but all I could find was: > http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=thepoliticalspinroom&ss=1 > (the politicalspinroom2). > > Please advise. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > > Steve Hovland wrote: > >> I think it's a good summary of the right-wing view, >> but this is not the place to have a serious argument >> about it. >> >> If anyone is hankering for a knock-down >> drag-out approach to political debate they are >> welcome to join us in thepoliticalspinroom on >> yahoo groups. >> >> Not a tea party, bit it is definitely one place >> where the interface between left and right is >> hyperactive. I go there to sharpen my teeth :-) >> >> Steve HOvland >> >> -----Original Message----- >> *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]*On Behalf Of *Lynn >> D. Johnson, Ph.D. >> *Sent:* Saturday, November 12, 2005 10:56 AM >> *To:* The new improved paleopsych list >> *Subject:* [Paleopsych] Muslim riots in France >> >> [an interesting and likely correct view of the riots from the >> Wall Street Journal] >> >> http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007529 >> *French Lessons* >> How to create a Muslim underclass. >> >> /Friday, November 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST/ >> >> Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns >> seems to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law >> enforcement, which is certainly welcome news. The riots have >> shaken France, however, and the unrest was of such magnitude >> that it has become a moment of illumination, for French and >> Americans equally. >> >> In particular, some longstanding conceits about the >> superiority of the French social model have gone up in >> flames. This model emphasizes "solidarity" through high >> taxes, cossetted labor markets, subsidies to industry and >> farming, a "Ministry for Social Cohesion," powerful >> public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare state, and, >> inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of the >> Anglo-Saxon "market" model. So by all means, let's do some >> comparing. >> >> The first thing that needs illuminating is that, while the >> overwhelming majority of rioters are Muslim, it is premature >> at best to describe the rioting as an "intifada" or some >> other term denoting religiously or culturally inspired >> violence. And it is flat-out wrong to claim that the rioting >> is a consequence of liberal immigration policies. >> >> Consider the contrast with the U.S. Between 1978 and 2002, >> the percentage of foreign-born Americans nearly doubled, to >> 12% from 6.2%. At the same time, the five-year average >> unemployment rate declined to 5.1% from 7.3%. Among >> immigrants, median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for >> every 10 years they remained in the country. >> >> These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones >> that U.S. nativist groups claim are "unassimilable." Take >> Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According >> to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are >> immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming >> majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual >> incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is >> 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups. >> >> It's true that France's Muslim population--some five million >> out of a total of 60 million--is much larger than America's. >> They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the >> significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is >> that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and >> social mobility, which generally has led to their successful >> assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has >> been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists >> on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and >> religious identities at the expense of the traditionally >> adaptive, supple American one. >> >> In France, the opposite applies. Mass Muslim migration to >> France began in the 1960s, a period of very low unemployment >> and industrial labor shortages. Today, French unemployment is >> close to 10%, or double the U.S. rate. Unlike in the U.S., >> French culture eschews multiculturalism and puts a heavy >> premium on the concept of "Frenchness." Yet that hasn't >> provided much cushion for increasingly impoverished and thus >> estranged Muslim communities, which tend to be segregated >> into isolated and generally unpoliced suburban cities called >> /banlieues/. There, youth unemployment runs to 40%, and >> crime, drug addiction and hooliganism are endemic. >> >> This is not to say that Muslim cultural practices are >> irrelevant. For Muslim women especially, the misery of the >> /banlieues/ is compounded by a culture of female submission, >> often violently enforced. Nor should anyone rule out the >> possibility that Islamic radicals will exploit the mayhem for >> their own ends. But whatever else might be said about the >> Muslim attributes of the French rioters, the fact is that the >> pathologies of the /banlieues/ are similar to those of inner >> cities everywhere. What France suffers from, fundamentally, >> is neither a "Muslim problem" nor an "immigration problem." >> It is an underclass problem. >> >> French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin almost put his >> finger on the problem when he promised to introduce >> legislation to ease the economic plight of the /banlieues./ >> But aside from the useful suggestion of "enterprise zones," >> most of the legislation smacked of big-government solutions: >> community centers, training programs and so on. >> >> The larger problem for the prime minister is that France's >> underclass is a consequence of the structure of the French >> economy, in which the state accounts for nearly half of gross >> domestic product and roughly a quarter of employment. French >> workers, both in the public and private sectors, enjoy >> GM-like benefits in pensions, early retirement, working hours >> and vacations, sick- and maternity leave, and job >> security--all of which is militantly enforced by strike-happy >> labor unions. The predictable result is that there is little >> job turnover and little net new job creation. Leave aside the >> debilitating effects of unemployment insurance and welfare on >> the underclass: Who would employ them if they actually sought >> work? >> >> For France, the good news is that these problems can be >> solved, principally be deregulating labor markets, reducing >> taxes, reforming the pension system and breaking the >> stranglehold of unions on economic life. The bad news is the >> entrenched cultural resistance to those solutions--not on the >> part of angry Muslim youth, but from the employed half of >> French society that refuses to relinquish their subsidized >> existences for the sake of the "solidarity" they profess to >> hold dear. So far, most attempts at reform have failed, >> mainly due to a combination of union militancy and political >> timidity. >> >> There are lessons in France for the U.S., too. Advocates of >> multiculturalism might take note of what happens when ethnic >> communities are excluded (or exclude themselves) from the >> broad currents of national life. Opponents of immigration >> might take note of the contrast between France's impoverished >> Muslims and America's flourishing immigrant communities. >> >> Above all, those who want America to emulate the French >> social model by mandating health and other benefits, raising >> tax burdens and entrenching union power might take note of >> just how sour its promises have become, especially its >> promises to the poor. In the matter of "solidarity," economic >> growth counts more than rhetoric. >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Nov 13 04:32:50 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 20:32:50 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] saving the world In-Reply-To: <200511121900.jACJ0He30264@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051113043250.92175.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Frank says to Howard: >>Stop trying to save the world!<< --When I was in my idealistic early 20's, a lot of people told me not to try to save the world. So I didn't try. Look what happened! ;) I'm pretty sure a lot of young idealists were told the same thing all through the 80's and 90's. Perhaps instead of telling people not to try to save the world, we should be having a discussion about what tools might help the world save itself? I think that's what you were telling Howard, in a way, but whenever someone tells someone else not to try to save the world, it makes me wonder if that meme is a healthy one that encourages people to focus locally where they can do more good, or a toxic one that discourages people from doing what small part they could to make the world better. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com From HowlBloom at aol.com Sun Nov 13 06:01:58 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 01:01:58 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael Message-ID: <1c8.35e170ab.30a830d6@aol.com> This is wonderful. Truths and paradoxes are partners. Howard In a message dated 11/12/2005 11:33:39 PM Eastern Standard Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: Frank says to Howard: >>Stop trying to save the world!<< --When I was in my idealistic early 20's, a lot of people told me not to try to save the world. So I didn't try. Look what happened! ;) I'm pretty sure a lot of young idealists were told the same thing all through the 80's and 90's. Perhaps instead of telling people not to try to save the world, we should be having a discussion about what tools might help the world save itself? I think that's what you were telling Howard, in a way, but whenever someone tells someone else not to try to save the world, it makes me wonder if that meme is a healthy one that encourages people to focus locally where they can do more good, or a toxic one that discourages people from doing what small part they could to make the world better. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ 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: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Nov 11 15:42:04 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 07:42:04 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Draft Dodgers Message-ID: <2230956.1131723724924.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: DraftDodgers.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 90545 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Nov 13 16:39:39 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 08:39:39 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael In-Reply-To: <1c8.35e170ab.30a830d6@aol.com> Message-ID: Big ideas can help make better local/personal choices :-) Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world. Steve Hovland -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 10:02 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael This is wonderful. Truths and paradoxes are partners. Howard In a message dated 11/12/2005 11:33:39 PM Eastern Standard Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: Frank says to Howard: >>Stop trying to save the world!<< --When I was in my idealistic early 20's, a lot of people told me not to try to save the world. So I didn't try. Look what happened! ;) I'm pretty sure a lot of young idealists were told the same thing all through the 80's and 90's. Perhaps instead of telling people not to try to save the world, we should be having a discussion about what tools might help the world save itself? I think that's what you were telling Howard, in a way, but whenever someone tells someone else not to try to save the world, it makes me wonder if that meme is a healthy one that encourages people to focus locally where they can do more good, or a toxic one that discourages people from doing what small part they could to make the world better. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ 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: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Nov 13 19:27:05 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:27:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopathy in business In-Reply-To: <200511131900.jADJ0Oe25029@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051113192705.27252.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Steve says: >>Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world.<< --Not being involved in the corporate world, it's hard for me to be sure, but I've met a lot of people who say business culture has been rewarding Machiavellian sociopaths rather than people with genuine talent and/or integrity (a bit like Survivor-type reality shows that promote people who play other people over those who are good at competing honestly). If that's true, at some point the system will hit a bump, all the short term compromises and cracks in the foundation will sync up and bring down groups that promote the wrong people or wrong strategies (corporate or otherwise... perhaps it's a cultural problem, not a problem with capitalism as a system). At that point, there should be an opening for groups which recognize and promote real talent and integrity to market themselves, and the pendulum will swing the other way. Either that, or other nations will get the right idea and overrule US dominance in the global market. One way or another, a democratic and consumer-driven culture will learn its lesson. Hopefully in a way that good people can benefit from. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 19:28:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 14:28:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Frank In-Reply-To: <24b.fec4cb.30a7ff89@aol.com> References: <24b.fec4cb.30a7ff89@aol.com> Message-ID: Thanks, Howard. I've download the book and hope to read it soon. I've got several other books I've promised to read first, though. My issue remains whether you should best be doing this sort of thing. Frank On 2005-11-12, HowlBloom at aol.com opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:31:37 EST > From: HowlBloom at aol.com > To: checker at panix.com > Cc: ldj at sisna.com, paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: Frank > > I respect your opinion, as you know. I also value our friendship. > > I'm enclosing a copy of the draft of Reinventing Capitalism--which is NOT > about free market stuff. > > See if you think there are new tools of understanding in it. And let me > know what you think. > > Howard > > Frank, I differ with your view of this. I teach a class for the > university MBA program, and in my humble (ha!) opinion, my MBA students > do need this. What I think Howard is going to offer is a key tool. A > public seminar is one way of sharing that tool with people who might not > otherwise learn about it. > > Howard's unique view is capitalism as entertainment, and (down one > level) entertainment as being secular salvation, lifting people from > their ordinary lives. Thus, the successful capitalist increases the > total amount of happiness in the world. > > When I saw the movie, New York Doll, I learned that Arthur "Killer" Kane > (bass player for New York Dolls) had a very similar concept about the > purpose of his music; last night ABC had a piece on happiness and a > successful businessman was telling his class that complaints are gold, > they are what you use to improve your customer's lives. It is a > significant reframe away from the P/L statements that dominate and > stultify business. > > Lynn > > Premise Checker wrote: > >> Howard, >> >> Stop trying to save the world! Lots and lots of people have been >> beating a drum for capitalism and free trade, and it's richly unclear >> what new ideas you are going to add to the stew. Can you just tell us >> what is different about your approach? >> >> Instead of trying to save a world that will largely ignore you, you >> should confine your efforts to giving us new tools to think with. We, >> or some of us, will use these tools to save the world. >> >> Go back to tool making, please, Howard! We need tool makers far, far >> more than we need world saviors! >> >> Frank From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Nov 13 22:01:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 14:01:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopathy in business In-Reply-To: <20051113192705.27252.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The whole process of deregulation has turned the economy into a playground for white collar criminals. The decent people are still out there, but corporations overall have become a parasite on our society. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael Christopher Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2005 11:27 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopathy in business Steve says: >>Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world.<< --Not being involved in the corporate world, it's hard for me to be sure, but I've met a lot of people who say business culture has been rewarding Machiavellian sociopaths rather than people with genuine talent and/or integrity (a bit like Survivor-type reality shows that promote people who play other people over those who are good at competing honestly). If that's true, at some point the system will hit a bump, all the short term compromises and cracks in the foundation will sync up and bring down groups that promote the wrong people or wrong strategies (corporate or otherwise... perhaps it's a cultural problem, not a problem with capitalism as a system). At that point, there should be an opening for groups which recognize and promote real talent and integrity to market themselves, and the pendulum will swing the other way. Either that, or other nations will get the right idea and overrule US dominance in the global market. One way or another, a democratic and consumer-driven culture will learn its lesson. Hopefully in a way that good people can benefit from. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 23:22:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:22:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Reality in Political Science Message-ID: Reality in Political Science The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.4 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i11/11b01901.htm [Alert me if this is worth my reading.] By ALAN WOLFE If you were not one of them, you might think that political scientists follow political events, propose hypotheses designed to explain them, and collect data to test those hypotheses. Alas, or so argues Yale University's Ian Shapiro in his new book, The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton University Press, 2005), that is not always, not even often, the case. In most of the social sciences and humanities, but especially in political science, Shapiro writes, subject matter does not drive methodology; in all too many cases, method comes first, and subject matter is chosen to conform to it. Shapiro is not alone in his critique of the discipline. Another new book -- Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (Yale University Press, 2005), edited by the University of California at Irvine's Kristen Renwick Monroe -- discusses the spontaneous effort that, in 2000, began to criticize the discipline for its unreadable and irrelevant journals, closed leadership structure, and, as the anonymous e-mail message that launched the movement put it, domination by "poor game theorists." If Shapiro and adherents of Perestroika are right, something is seriously amiss in the academic study of politics. How can a discipline presumably interested in understanding human behavior offer much insight if the real world of politics is treated as an afterthought? It was not always thus. Leading political scientists of the post-World War II period typically anchored their research in political reality. V.O. Key Jr.'s Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knopf, 1949) was a classic in that regard; Key not only brought to life the sights and sounds of Alabama courthouses, he tied the South's peculiar political style to its preoccupation with race and dealt masterfully with the implications of one-party government for democratic rule. Equally magisterial was Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (Yale University Press, 1961). In a case study of politics in New Haven, Conn., Dahl provided both a "thick description" of urban renewal and a major challenge to those who insisted that democracy was a sham because a "ruling class" made the major decisions. The American South no longer bears any resemblance to the one described by Key, yet his book remains in print and is widely used in college courses. Similarly the pluralism Dahl discovered in New Haven may no longer exist; even Dahl himself came to feel that American democracy was not as open to all as he had suggested. His book, however, is also still assigned across the country. The discipline of political science today contains more than its fair share of scholars who, like Key and Dahl, put reality first; my personal short list would include, among others, John J. DiIulio, Jacob S. Hacker, Jennifer L. Hochschild, Jane J. Mansbridge, Robert D. Putnam, James C. Scott, Theda Skocpol, and James Q. Wilson. Yet as well known as those scholars may be outside the discipline, they tend not to publish their work in academic journals, which are more devoted to hypothesis testing and model building than to analyzing real-world political institutions; a search through JSTOR, an online archive, reveals that only one of them, Skocpol, published a substantive article -- beyond reviews or, in Wilson's case, a presidential address to the association -- in The American Political Science Review, the discipline's flagship journal, between 1990 and 2001. Less well known to the public are political scientists like Bernard Grofman, Keith Krehbiel, and Peter C. Ordeshook. Between them, they published eight articles in the political-science journal between 1990 and 2001. They are proponents of rational-choice theory, an approach that owes much to economics. Assuming that human beings are purposeful creatures who try to maximize their utility in any given situation, rational-choice theorists show, for example, how congressmen behave to improve their chances for re-election, or how voters sort through the messages sent their way. To its adherents, the theory offers political science the opportunity to become a true science based on a universal understanding of human behavior and girded by the rigor that accompanies deductive reasoning and mathematical formalism. Sanford F. Schram disagrees. In his essay in Monroe's book, he argues that rational-choice theory misuses the idea of science for which it presumably speaks. Human beings, in his view, adapt to the local circumstances around them. Any science of behavior must avoid universal laws and paradigms borrowed from the natural sciences and emphasize the role of contingency and context in human affairs. Shapiro is vehement on this point: "The scientific outlook requires a commitment to discovering what is actually going on in a given situation without prejudging what that is," he writes. Rational-choice theory already knows what it wants to prove. It is therefore "little more than thinly disguised curve-fitting"; the purpose of a typical rational-choice article is not to explain reality, but to find often-ingenious ways to twist reality to fit its predetermined assumptions. A typical example of curve-fitting cited by Shapiro involves voting behavior. Given how little chance one voter has of influencing an election's outcome, it is irrational to vote. Yet many people vote anyway. The fact that they do suggests that rational calculation plays little role. Yet rational-choice theorists constantly look for calculable explanations of why people show up at the polls. Ordeshook, for example, along with William Riker, has argued that citizens feel a duty to vote, which they factor into their calculus. Shapiro sees little value in such speculation. A reality-driven science, in his view, would try to discover why some people vote and others do not. Only a methods-driven approach would instead debate what kinds of acts are rational and what kind are not. But if rational-choice theory rarely makes good science, it has spread to many of the discipline's most prestigious doctoral programs. For the critics in the Perestroika movement, method-driven research is only part of the problem facing the discipline. The American Political Science Review is biased in favor of mathematically based scholarship, claim David S. Pion-Berlin and Dan Cleary in the Monroe volume. Graduate education too often insists on the superiority of the same techniques, other contributors say. Many charge that rigorous debate within the profession about what kind of research is most appropriate has been hindered by the fact that the political-science association suffers from a lack of internal democracy. Both the association and its journal have been changing, critics concede. The association now sponsors a new journal, Perspectives on Politics, that tries to deal with current issues in the real world, and some of the methodological bias in the Review has abated in recent years. Still, one comes away from Monroe's book with a lingering feeling that the success of rational-choice theory may have more to do with how rewards are offered and careers shaped than with philosophies of science and the validity of methodologies. Although Shapiro's book deals primarily with debates over scientific method, it also focuses from time to time on mundane matters like careers. In a chapter called "Gross Concepts in Political Argument," Shapiro notes that political theorists of many persuasions, in ways not dissimilar from rational-choice adherents, try to fit all reality into one huge explanatory concept. Such efforts are open to criticism because reality is complicated and rarely can be so reduced. Yet political scientists thrive on the resulting disputes. "The endless opposition of gross concepts might not be designed to serve academic careers," Shapiro writes, "but we may say without overstatement that it is in our collective professional interest that there be the relatively autonomous discourse of political theory which endures mainly by feeding off its own controversies because we depend on it for our livelihood." Putting reality first would not only make political science more interesting, it would also make it more scientific. There is, in Shapiro's view, nothing wrong with the ambition to predict (although, he quickly adds, one should not make a fetish out of it). Suppose, for example, we want to predict whether negotiations between historically hostile parties will produce an accord, or fail and result in war. Rather than search for universal laws, we are better off examining a concrete case -- for example, the negotiations that brought Nelson Mandela to power in South Africa -- and then seeing whether the conditions there are similar or different from those in, say, Northern Ireland or the Middle East. The real world contains a great deal of uncertainty, which makes perfect prediction impossible. But it also offers enough regularity to permit modest generalization, especially if we are willing to acknowledge the possibility of error and to revise our expectations accordingly. Political scientists are not that different from politicians, Shapiro concludes. Taking one grand idea and trying to stuff as much into it as you can -- the reigning way of doing political science -- bears an uncomfortable resemblance to developing a political ideology and interpreting everything in the world through it -- the dominant way of doing politics. Perhaps both political scientists and politicians can learn something from Shapiro's thoughtful reflections on the state of his discipline. Reality, in a word, is something of a tonic, as both Shapiro's and Monroe's books remind us; it tempers perfectionism, broadens understanding, and appreciates nuance. Someday politicians may decide that ideological warfare is not the best way to do politics, and may return to more traditional methods involving bipartisanship and compromise. If that happens, one can only hope that political scientists will decide to join them and go back to an era in which understanding reality was more important than advancing one's pet methodology. Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and a professor of political science at Boston College. He is writing a book on whether democracy in America still works. From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 23:22:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:22:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Yale Global: China, India Superpower? Not so Fast! Message-ID: China, India Superpower? Not so Fast! http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6407 Every day, countless commentators prophesize the ascendance of the world's next superpowers, China and India, the two "Asian giants" shaking off their ancient slumber and rising to the call of the 21st century. According to popular punditry, their place in the firmament of globalization's success stories is already guaranteed. Yet economist Pranab Bardhan argues that a much more complicated picture belies the rosy visions of optimists. In China, rural and urban inequality grows at alarming rates, stirring unrest amongst those hundreds of millions who remain impoverished. In fact, China, responsible for only 6 percent of world trade, has actually lost manufacturing jobs in the past ten years. Meanwhile, India's much-vaunted hi-tech sector accounts for less than one quarter of one percent of the country's labor force. The nation still boasts the world's highest illiteracy rate, while poverty reduction continues to slow. In short, Bardhan suggests, only patience and struggle - not destiny - can guide India and China to the level of superpowers. - YaleGlobal China, India Superpower? Not so Fast! Despite impressive growth, the rising Asian giants have feet of clay Pranab Bardhan YaleGlobal, 25 October 2005 [clearPoint.gif] China and India, still desperately poor. Chinese children in a village pick garbage (above); An Indian child in a slum (below). BERKELEY: The media, particularly the financial press, are all agog over the rise of China and India in the international economy. After a long period of relative stagnation, these two countries, nearly two-fifths of the world population, have seen their incomes grow at remarkably high rates over the last two decades. Journalists have referred to their economic reforms and integration into the world economy in all kinds of colorful metaphors: giants shaking off their "socialist slumber," "caged tigers" unshackled, and so on. Columnists have sent breathless reports from Beijing and Bangalore about the inexorable competition from these two new whiz kids in our complacent neighborhood in a "flattened," globalized, playing field. Others have warned about the momentous implications of "three billion new capitalists," largely from China and India, redefining the next phase of globalization. While there is no doubt about the great potential of these two economies in the rest of this century, severe structural and institutional problems will hobble them for years to come. At this point, the hype about the Indian economy seems patently premature, and the risks on the horizon for the Chinese polity - and hence for economic stability - highly underestimated. [clearPoint.gif] Both China and India are still desperately poor countries. Of the total of 2.3 billion people in these two countries, nearly 1.5 billion earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations. Of course, the lifting of hundreds of millions of people above poverty in China has been historic. Thanks to repeated assertions in the international financial press, conventional wisdom now suggests that globalization is responsible for this feat. Yet a substantial part of China's decline in poverty since 1980 already happened by mid-1980s (largely as a result of agricultural growth), before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in the 1990s. Assertions about Indian poverty reduction primarily through trade liberalization are even shakier. In the nineties, the decade of major trade liberalization, the rate of decline in poverty by some aggregative estimates has, if anything, slowed down. In any case, India is as yet a minor player in world trade, contributing less than one percent of world exports. (China's share is about 6 percent.) What about the hordes of Indian software engineers, call-center operators, and back-room programmers supposedly hollowing out white-collar jobs in rich countries? The total number of workers in all possible forms of IT-related jobs in India comes to less than a million workers - one-quarter of one percent of the Indian labor force. For all its Nobel Prizes and brilliant scholars and professionals, India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world. Lifting them out of poverty and dead-end menial jobs will remain a Herculean task for decades to come. [clearPoint.gif] Even in China, now considered the manufacturing workshop of the world (though China's share in the worldwide manufacturing value-added is below 9 percent, less than half that of Japan or the United States), less than one-fifth of its labor force is employed in manufacturing, mining, and construction combined. In fact, China has lost tens of millions of manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s. Nearly half of the country's labor force remains in agriculture (about 60 percent in India). As per acre productivity growth has stagnated, reabsorbing the hundreds of millions of peasants will remain a challenge in the foreseeable future for both countries. Domestic private enterprise in China, while active and growing, is relatively weak, and Chinese banks are burdened with "bad" loans. By most aggregative measures, capital is used much less efficiently in China than in India, even though in terms of physical infrastructure and progress in education and health, China is better poised for further economic growth. Commercial regulatory structures in both countries are still slow and heavy-handed. According to the World Bank, to start a business requires in India 71 days, in China 48 days (compared to 6 days in Singapore); enforcing debt contracts requires 425 days in India, 241 days in China (69 days in Singapore). [clearPoint.gif] China's authoritarian system of government will likely be a major economic liability in the long run, regardless of its immediate implications for short-run policy decisions. In the economic reform process, the Chinese leadership has often made bold decisions and implemented them relatively quickly and decisively, whereas in India, reform has been halting and hesitant. This is usually attributed to the inevitably slow processes of democracy in India. And though this may be the case, other factors are involved. For example, the major disruptions and hardships of restructuring in the Chinese economy were rendered somewhat tolerable by a minimum rural safety net - made possible to a large extent by land reforms in 1978. In most parts of India, no similar rural safety net exists for the poor; and the more severe educational inequality in India makes the absorption of shocks in the industrial labor market more difficult. So the resistance to the competitive process of market reform is that much stiffer. But inequalities (particularly rural-urban) have been increasing in China, and those left behind are getting restive. With massive layoffs in the rust-belt provinces, arbitrary local levies on farmers, pervasive official corruption, and toxic industrial dumping, many in the countryside are highly agitated. Chinese police records indicate a sevenfold increase in the number of incidents of social unrest in the last decade. [clearPoint.gif] China is far behind India in the ability to politically manage conflicts, and this may prove to be China's Achilles' Heel. Over the last fifty years, India's extremely heterogeneous society has been riddled with various kinds of conflicts, but the system has by and large managed these conflicts and kept them within moderate bounds. For many centuries, the homogenizing tradition of Chinese high culture, language, and bureaucracy has not given much scope to pluralism and diversity, and a centralizing, authoritarian Communist Party has carried on with this tradition. There is a certain pre-occupation with order and stability in China (not just in the Party), a tendency to over-react to difficult situations, and a quickness to brand dissenting movements and local autonomy efforts as seditious, and it is in this context that one sees dark clouds on the horizon for China's polity and therefore the economy. We should not lose our sense of proportion in thinking about the rise of China and India. While adjusting its economies to the new reality and utilizing the new opportunities, the West should not overlook the enormity of the economic gap that exists between it and those two countries (particularly India). There are many severe pitfalls and roadblocks which they have to overcome in the near future, before they can become significant players in the international economic scene on a sustained basis. Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance. He is Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 23:23:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:23:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Astronomers Edging Closer to Gaining Black Hole Image Message-ID: Astronomers Edging Closer to Gaining Black Hole Image http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/science/space/03hole.html By DENNIS OVERBYE Astronomers are reporting today that they have moved a notch closer to seeing the unseeable. Using a worldwide array of radio telescopes to obtain the most detailed look yet at the center of the Milky Way, they said they had determined that the diameter of a mysterious fountain of energy there was less than half that of Earth's orbit about the Sun. The result strengthens the case that the energy is generated by a black hole that is gobbling stars and gas, they said. It also leaves astronomers on the verge of seeing the black hole itself as a small dark shadow ringed with light, in the blaze of radiation that marks the galaxy's center. Until now, the existence of black holes - objects so dense that not even light can escape them- has been surmised by indirect measurements, say of stars or gas swirling in their grip. Seeing the black hole's shadow would require the ability to see about twice as much detail as can now be discerned. Such an observation could provide an important test of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicts that black holes can exist. "We're getting tantalizingly close to being able to see an unmistakable signature that would provide the first concrete proof of a supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center," Shen Zhiqiang of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, a leader of an international team of radio astronomers, said in a news release. Their report appears today in the journal Nature. Another member of the team, Fred K. Y. Lo, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., said that achieving the extra resolution could take several years and would probably require new radio telescopes. "We're not there yet," he said, "but in time, no question, we will get there." He added that seeing the shadow would be "proof of the pudding" that Einstein was right. In an accompanying commentary, Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland wrote that such observations would "herald a new era in probing the structure and properties of some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe." But other experts said it might be difficult, even if the extra resolution could be achieved, to untangle the detailed properties of the black hole from its blazing surroundings. Astronomers have identified thousands of probable black holes. The candidates include objects billions of times as massive as the Sun at the centers of galaxies, where, it is theorized, gas and dust swirling toward their doom are heated and erupt with jets of X-rays and radio energy. But the putative holes are too far away for astronomers to discern what would be their signature feature: a point of no return called the event horizon, in effect an edge of the observable universe, from which nothing can return. Instead, the evidence for black holes rests mainly on the inference that too much invisible mass resides in too small a space to be anything else. The center of the Milky Way is about 26,000 light-years away, in the direction of Sagittarius. The new observations conclude that at the center of the galaxy an amount of invisible matter equal to the mass of four million Suns is crammed into a region no more than 90 million miles across. That small size, the radio astronomers said, eliminates the most likely alternative explanation of the fireworks at the galaxy's center: a cluster of stars. Such a dense cluster would collapse in 100 years. Even more conclusive proof would come from the observation of the black hole's shadow, which would be about five times the size of the event horizon and appear about as big as a tennis ball on the Moon as seen from Earth, according to calculations by Eric Agol of the University of Washington, Heino Falcke of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and Fulvio Melia of the University of Arizona. "For most people, seeing is believing," said Dr. Agol, who added that observations of the shadow could in principle be used to test whether general relativity is correct in such strange conditions and to measure how fast the black hole is spinning. Martin Rees of Cambridge University in England, who with Donald Lynden-Bell in 1971 first proposed a black hole as the energy source at the Milky Way's center, said he was encouraged by this progress. But he cited studies suggesting that the shadow could be washed out by radiation or particles in front of the black hole, making definitive measurements hard. As all the astronomers pointed out, getting to the next level of detail will require building new radio telescopes that operate at shorter wavelengths - and higher frequencies - than the Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes that were used to carry out the present observations. "It's something I've been working on for 30 years," said Dr. Lo of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. "It's been a long saga." For a long time, he said, astronomers were peering through a haze. "Now we're seeing the thing in itself." From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 23:23:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:23:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TIME Asia Magazine: Merchants of Mayhem Message-ID: Merchants of Mayhem -- Nov. 07, 2005 http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501051107-1124360,00.html [Thanks to Laird for this.] Why the biggest beneficiaries of globalization may be pimps, drug runners and other crooks BY [42]ILYA GARGER Sunday, Oct. 30, 2005 Consider these disparate and disturbing facts from Illicit, a new book by Mois?s Na?m. There are 300 tons of unsecured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, international terrorists itching to get their hands on it, and smugglers who may be able to help close the deal. Trafficking in women is facilitated by websites where merchants advertise and sell their wares with impunity. The global trade in stolen art has led to the disappearance of 43 Van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts and 551 Picassos. In Central Asia, children are believed to have been stolen from orphanages and killed for their organs. And money laundering accounts for up to 10% of the world's GDP, or as much $5 trillion. Shocking? Maybe not. Globalization's dark side is remarkably well illuminated, at least in fragments, and anyone who reads the news is somewhat inured to facts such as these. But just because we read about them on a daily basis doesn't mean that we understand the larger context. Indeed, it's not obvious what all of the above phenomena have in common. Sure, they all involve illegal activities that cross national borders. But is there an underlying trend that explains why organ smuggling, money laundering and weapons trafficking have all grown dramatically in the last decade? That's the question Na?m, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, takes up in this valiant attempt to organize into a coherent picture the kaleidoscopic shards of information on underground trading, from music piracy to nuclear smuggling. The result is like a photo negative of Thomas Friedman's books (most recently, this year's The Earth is Flat) focusing on the happier aspects of globalization. The usual suspects are back in the spotlight: expanding free markets, the Internet, and the geopolitical fragmentation that followed the end of the Cold War. But in Na?m's version of the story, these changeswhich in Friedman's telling are supposed to usher in a new, more enlightened global orderhave become accessories to vice. In the 1990s, "Not only did the hold of governments on borders weaken," writes Na?m, "but [economic] reforms amplified the rewards awaiting those who were prepared to break the rules." And it turned out that everyone from gangsters to generals to regular businesspeople could hardly wait to grab the spoils. LATEST COVER STORY [44]Global Health [arrow2.gif ] [45]Saving One Life at a Time [arrow2.gif ] [46]18 Health Heroes [Past Covers.......] [line.gif] ASIA [arrow2.gif] [47]Pakistan: After the Earthquake [line.gif] ARTS [arrow2.gif] [48]Books: Merchants of Mayhem [line.gif] NOTEBOOK [arrow2.gif] [49]Iran: Outburst in Tehran [arrow2.gif] [50]India: Dark Days of Diwali [arrow2.gif] [51]Bali: Investigation Bogs Down [arrow2.gif] [52]Milestones [arrow2.gif] [53]Verbatim [arrow2.gif] [54]Letters [line.gif] GLOBAL ADVISER [arrow2.gif] [55]Style: Pimp My Sneakers! [arrow2.gif] [56]Africa: Game Show [arrow2.gif] [57]Diversions: A la Cart [arrow2.gif] [58]Travel: Room to Fly [arrow2.gif] [59]Stockholm: Material Whirl [arrow2.gif] [60]Jakarta: The Cool Room [line.gif] CNN.com: [61]Top Headlines [transparent.gif] [bottom_dots.gif] [transparent.gif] They did so on such a scale that it changed the world. "Global criminal activities are transforming the international system, upending the rules, creating new players, and reconfiguring power in international politics and economics," writes Na?m. These new players are counterfeiters, shady financiers, snakeheads, terrorists, corrupt officials and other fast-adapters now flourishing beyond the reach of authorities. They have even redefined geography: as governments' control over the flow of people, goods and information weakens, opportunists have turned places like Cambodia, Liberia and parts of Russia into "geopolitical black holes" where illicit networks can operate unchecked. Even outside such areas, transnational crime has a way of slipping through cracks, not least because of inadequate and inconsistent laws. Turkey didn't prohibit human smuggling until recently, writes Na?m, while in the U.S. people-smugglers face a lighter penalty than those who carry marijuana across borders. International organizations often do no better: a U.N. convention on migrants' rights was drafted in 1978, signed in 1990 and went into effect in 2003only to end up largely unenforced. Given inadequate laws and resources, governments will need to choose their battles wisely. Legalizing marijuana, for example, would free up authorities to crack down on hard drugs, and money spent hunting down pirated CDs might be better applied to fighting more insidious forms of trafficking. But Na?m points out that the line between various crimes is often hazy. In many parts of the world, counterfeiting is controlled by gangs that traffic in drugs and people. For all its erudition and scope, Illicit has one vexing flaw: its lack of substantial original research. Na?m is an armchair tour guide, relying mostly on well-worn news stories and official reports. For a book on the underground trade in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, Illicit is disappointingly dry. The climax is not a memorable glimpse inside a smuggling ring, but a raft of policy suggestions such as better coordination among government agencies and improved international cooperationhardly page-turning stuff. Still, Na?m succeeds in presenting a clear account of how illicit commerce works and what its consequences are. In doing so, he sheds light on one of the most powerful forces shaping today's world. From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 23:23:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:23:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Harvard Researcher Probes the Minds of Alien Abductees Message-ID: Harvard Researcher Probes the Minds of Alien Abductees The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.4 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i11/11a01601.htm By JENNIFER HOWARD CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: Susan A. Clancy doesn't think her subjects are any weirder than the rest of us -- certainly not weirder than various relatives or the people she's met at Ivy League universities who delude themselves into believing "that a city dweller needs an all-terrain vehicle" and that "they understand how wireless technology works." "I myself believe that strenuous exercise is a form of self-loathing," she writes, "and that buying shoes is an effective treatment for depression." As that excerpt demonstrates, Ms. Clancy's new book, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Harvard University Press), is galaxies away from standard university-press fare. It is about extraterrestrials and the humans who encounter them. It is "Bridget Jones goes to Harvard and meets the aliens," says Elizabeth Knoll, a senior editor at Harvard University Press. "We don't very often publish books where a one-sentence description of the topic makes people laugh." Most earthlings do not believe that we're being snatched from our beds by little green men (or, in a more common scenario, big gray beings of indeterminate gender) and subjected to hideous probings. But Ms. Clancy, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at Harvard, felt that scientists had been too quick to dismiss abduction stories as crazy talk from crackpots who have seen too many episodes of The X-Files. If this stuff isn't happening, she wondered, why does it seem so real to those who believe that it is? In Abducted, Ms. Clancy synthesizes abductees' accounts, the results of psychological experiments, and the stories we all know from books, movies, and television to arrive at an explanation: "Alien-abduction memories are best understood as resulting from a blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy, aided and abetted by the suggestions of hypnotherapy," she writes. And the experience fills a void in abductees' lives, she believes. "Not only does it furnish an explanation for psychological distress and unsettling experiences; it provides meaning for one's entire life." For believers, in other words, aliens may be the cure for alienation. To "de-pathologize" the abduction phenomenon, Ms. Clancy drew on her graduate work with women who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Alien abductees seemed to offer an excellent and less-politicized way of exploring the creation and manipulation of memories. Her research team ran ads in the Boston papers and, after screening out the pranksters and those who wanted to know whether Harvard didn't have better ways to spend its money, conducted extensive interviews with about 50 people. Fifteen of those interviewed agreed to take part in lab experiments such as the Deese/Roediger-McDermott, or DRM, paradigm, in which they studied lists of words (e.g., "sugar," "candy," etc.) all related to another word (e.g., "sweet") that did not actually appear on the list. They were then asked to recall which words they'd really seen. The abductees were statistically more likely than other groups to believe they had seen the absent words, according to Ms. Clancy. "I didn't try to change the world with one experiment. ... All I concluded from the study was the alien abductees were more prone in the lab to create a certain type of false memory." She also found that in tests that measured physical reactions such as heart rate and sweating, the abductees "reacted similarly to real trauma victims" when reliving their experiences. Abductees and their champions are not amused by Ms. Clancy's work. David M. Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University and president of the International Center for Abduction Research, wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that Ms. Clancy "sets up an unfalsifiable system of explanation whereby the abductee can never have had the experiences that they say they have." Using hypnotic regression, Mr. Jacobs has worked with some 140 alien abductees in the last 20 years. "The abduction phenomenon is not something one can re-create in a laboratory situation," he says. Fifteen subjects does sound like a slim sample. But Ms. Clancy calls it "quite appropriate for the analysis." And the DRM paradigm is widely used in memory research, she says, which allowed her to compare her data with existing norms. Some of her conclusions have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Psychological Science and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Ms. Knoll calls Ms. Clancy's approach "an incredibly ingenious way" of exploring "the very large and almost universal phenomenon of false memory and false belief." The press subjected the manuscript to twice the standard number of reviews; Ms. Knoll solicited all four of them "from top people in memory, cognitive neuroscience, and hypnosis" to be sure that "the science was absolutely solid," she says. Author and editor say that the burden of proof rests with the believers anyway. Anecdotes and recovered memories don't count as evidence -- but that's what believers have to go on. "We do not have an alien ashtray that says 'Made on Mars' on the back of it," says Mr. Jacobs, "but we do have a tremendous amount of anecdotal testimony that is ... exceptionally precise in its detail." Are aliens just a science fiction, the hybrid offspring of modern technology and humanity's age-old need to believe in something greater than ourselves? "Whether extraterrestrial life exists," Ms. Clancy says, "is totally separate from whether it has been coming down to earth and abducting us to have babies with us." From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 13 23:23:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:23:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] UCSD Study Shows 'Junk' DNA Has Evolutionary Importance Message-ID: UCSD Study Shows 'Junk' DNA Has Evolutionary Importance http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcjunk.asp October 19, 2005 By Kim McDonald Genetic material derisively called "junk" DNA because it does not contain the instructions for protein-coding genes and appears to have little or no function is actually critically important to an organism's evolutionary survival, according to a study conducted by a biologist at UCSD. In the October 20 issue of Nature, Peter Andolfatto, an assistant professor of biology at UCSD, shows that these non-coding regions play an important role in maintaining an organism's genetic integrity. In his study of the genes from the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, he discovered that these regions are strongly affected by natural selection, the evolutionary process that preferentially leads to the survival of organisms and genes best adapted to the environment. Andolfatto's findings are important because the similarity of genome sequences in fruit flies, worms and humans suggest that similar processes are probably responsible for the differences between humans and their close evolutionary relatives. "Sequencing of the complete genome in humans, fruit flies, nematodes and plants has revealed that the number of protein-coding genes is much more similar among these species than expected," he says. "Curiously, the largest differences between major species groups appear to be the amount of `junk' DNA rather than the number of genes." Using a recently developed population genetic approach, Andolfatto showed in his study that these expansive regions of "junk" DNA--which in Drosophila accounts for about 80 percent of the fly's total genome--are evolving more slowly than expected due to natural selection pressures on the non-protein-coding DNA to remain the same over time. "This pattern most likely reflects resistance to the incorporation of new mutations," he says. "In fact, 40 to 70 percent of new mutations that arise in non-coding DNA fail to be incorporated by this species, which suggests that these non-protein-coding regions are not `junk,' but are somehow functionally important to the organism." Andolfatto also found that "junk" regions exhibit an unusually large amount of functional genetic divergence between different species of Drosophila, further evidence that these regions are evolutionarily important to organisms. This implies that, like evolutionary changes to proteins, changes to these "junk" parts of the genome also play an important role in the evolution of new species. "Protein evolution has traditionally been emphasized as a key facet of genome evolution and the evolution of new species," says Andolfatto. "The degree of protein sequence similarity between humans and chimpanzees, and other closely-related but morphologically distinct taxa, has prompted several researchers to speculate that most adaptive differences between taxa are due to changes in gene regulation and not protein evolution. My results lend support to this view by demonstrating that regulatory changes have been of great importance in the evolution of new Drosophila species." Comment: [6]Peter Andolfatto (858) 334-8039 Media Contact: [7]Kim McDonald (858) 534-7572 References 2. http://www-er.ucsd.edu/ 3. http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/ 4. http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/releases 5. http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/graphics/images/2004/fruitfly_lg.jpg 6. mailto:pandolfatto at ucsd.edu 7. mailto:kmcdonald at ucsd.edu From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Nov 14 07:04:47 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 02:04:47 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] pavel--cosmic quorum sensing Message-ID: <78.7ee01ebb.30a9910f@aol.com> Pavel?Here?s an article with very little content that I can see. But it does have a statement that relates to the work we?re doing together?"There's a real conflict between the way that we're thinking about the world right now, which is a very local way where everything happens independently in different regions of space and the way that we're going to have to think about it," said UC Berkeley physics professor, Raphael Bousso. You and I are inching our way toward an explanation of the way a single particle?or a hoard of particles?converse with and consult the cosmos before deciding on their next move. We?re working on how the cosmos evolves via sophisticated quorum sensing. The rest of the following article is undermined by the usual epistemological problem in physics. It says that the universe must be a certain way because this is the best way our math can describe it. When will the community of physicists and mathematicians finally understand what you do, that our math is a stone tool. It?s extremely primitive. But that doesn?t mean the cosmos is primitive. Howard The Universe is Only Pretending, Physicist Says Like a Hologram, the Universe Merely Appears to Have Three Spatial Dimensions, Scientists Infer By ALEXANDRA L. WOODRUFF Contributing Writer Wednesday, November 9, 2005 In quantum physics, nothing is as it seems. As physicists continue to study the universe they continually run into new questions that shake how humans understand the universe's intricate mechanics. UC Berkeley physics professor, Raphael Bousso, is trying to break down the mysteries of the universe with a concept called the holographic principle. Physicists stumbled on the idea while studying black holes. It is a concept, which ultimately questions whether the third dimension exists. "There's a real conflict between the way that we're thinking about the world right now, which is a very local way where everything happens independently in different regions of space and the way that we're going to have to think about it," said Bousso in an interview. Bousso presented the ideas at a seminar last weekend called "Latest Theories About the Universe and Its Governing Laws: Theoretical Physics Made Easy for the Public" at the Lawrence Hall of Science to an audience of about 100. The holographic principle uses the optical concept of holograms to try to visually explain the complex idea. Holograms are most often used on credit cards and are images that look three dimensional, but they exist on a two dimensional surface. "You have to keep in mind that we're just using that name as a sort of metaphor for something that we're specifying quite precisely when we're talking about how much information there is relative to certain areas," he said. A computer chip is a good way to visualize the principle. The chip has information stored on it in the form of data, but this isn't the information Bousso is talking about. Information in the holographic principle means the entire collection of matter the chip is made of. "One way of quantifying the complexity of matter is to ask how many different states can it be in? How many things can you wiggle in? How many different ways?" Bousso said. It would seem logical that if you doubled the size of the chip, then you could store twice as much information on the chip. "What we've found is that it appears that gravity conspires against that when you really try to store a lot of information in a special region, then once you double that region you can't store twice as much anymore," Bousso said. In other words, if you have a bunch of grapes in the fridge and have all the information including water content, temperature and anything else, you should be able to create an exact replica of the grapes. Physicists have found the information content doesn't hinge on volume, but rather on surface area. An information increase can only happen on a two-dimensional surface and information density cannot increase by volume, a three-dimensional measurement. "The total amount of information that you can store in the world grows only like the surface area of the region that you're considering," he said. The discovery ultimately says the concept shows the third dimension could be an illusion because complex calculations can't prove it exists. The recognition is a step of progress, but Bousso doesn't know where it will ultimately lead. "It may be a major step, it may just be one piece in a very big puzzle, but I think it's definitely progress towards that goal," he said. Although there is practical way to use these principles right now, Bousso said he and fellow physicists are driven to understand nature at the most fundamental level. Albert Einstein didn't have any practical applications for his theory of relativity when he first discovered it, but now the concept is woven into today's technology with things like global positioning systems, he said. "It happens to be true that sooner or later these types of progress have not just had practical applications, but they really underlie almost everything that we can do technologically today," Bousso said. Ultimately, the physicist wants to find the origins and the implications of the holographic principle. He said the principle has given insight into physics concepts that scientists have understood for years. "It gives us a preview of some of the unifications and the explanatory power that the quantum gravity we're seeking is going to have," Bousso said. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Nov 14 07:31:17 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 02:31:17 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael Message-ID: <25e.fef967.30a99745@aol.com> In a message dated 11/13/2005 11:41:01 AM Eastern Standard Time, shovland at mindspring.com writes: Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world. heartily agreed 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 Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Nov 14 14:27:47 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 06:27:47 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael In-Reply-To: <25e.fef967.30a99745@aol.com> Message-ID: And those "people" have driven the passion out of corporations. The extra effort that makes companies really perform comes from the passion that people invest in them. Many years of downsizing, oursourcing, and pay squeezes have killed the passion in most companies. I think most corporate employees these days have an arms-length relationship with their companies. If nothing else, this is because the employee manual of almost every major corporation has an "employment at will" clause. Why should anyone love an organization that will discard them at any moment for no reason at all? This will not be fixed easily. It may be the work of a generation because the people who are now working in corporations have all been damaged by this. The "leadership" groups will have to pass through the needle's eye to get to a better place with the other 98% of corporates. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2005 11:31 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael In a message dated 11/13/2005 11:41:01 AM Eastern Standard Time, shovland at mindspring.com writes: Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world. heartily agreed 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 Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Nov 14 15:17:32 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:17:32 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Creativity Special (thoughts on group thinking) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4378AA8C.6000008@aol.com> One of the most interesting points I took away from this issue of NS was the finding they reported regarding "brainstorming." This is usually proposed in business as a group dynamic, where people's ideas are assumed to trigger other ideas from other people. From experience, I've found this to be largely untrue. Whenever the issue is one that is important to people, they can't seem to avoid censoring themselves and each other rather than triggering creative new combinations. The theory that people can "think together" just doesn't seem to pan out under most conditions, except where the "thinking" is a very primitive form of mob coordination. But that is just my limited experience. One of the articles mentioned that brainstorming has also been found experimentally to work better when people come up with ideas individually first and then get together to evaluate them. Other research shows that groups tend to make slightly better decisions than the average decision maker in the group, but worse than the best decision maker in the group. So working closely with other people in making decisions seems to bring us down roughly to the group average. Not exactly the ideal of "synergy" that we would like to strive for. I suspect this is right, because the creative process occurs more within individual minds than within the communication media we use. A similar misconception occurs in business in "knowledge management." In our zeal to represent knowledge by using external networks we lose track of how sophisticated and different the network of knowledge *within* the human mind really is. Groups can certainly share _information_, but knowledge is really still within individuals rather than being anything stored externally at this point. Network properties are interesting but networks in an animal brain are of a qualitatively different sort than those that we use to connect ourselves together. It's hard enough to get people to talk to each other openly, much less "collaborate" more efficiently through the use of information technology. The better we connect ourselves, the less we seem to think as individuals, so we often and perhaps often rightly resist group processes that supposedly improve on individual thinking. kind regards, Todd From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Nov 14 14:37:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 06:37:46 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] War Criminal Message-ID: <17198954.1131979066836.JavaMail.root@mswamui-billy.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Bush War Criminal.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 63359 bytes Desc: not available URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Nov 14 16:41:41 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:41:41 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] pain perception In-Reply-To: <43763560.4030009@solution-consulting.com> References: <43763560.4030009@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <4378BE44.4080200@aol.com> I think this is a very rich and productive topic. Since pain perception would presumably be among the most primitive and basic of perceptual experiences biologically and is of particular medical significance, it has been of great interest in research and there is a fair amount of data on it so far. It appears that perception of pain is a very complex combination of physical stimuli, signal transmission, neural regulation at various levels, and social and psychological factors that alter expectancy, mood, and attention. This combines with individual genetic differences to produce what is usually envisioned as a matrix of different factors affecting the perception of pain in different people. One important point is that we are talking about at least two different levels: (1) acute perception and (2) long term coping. Acute perception varies more dramatically between individuals due to talents. There seems to be a more readily identifiable genetic basis for dramatic differences in acute pain perception than differences in chronic pain coping. About 15% of the population have a radically different experience of acute pain simply because their expectations about it are different. This can mean _either_ experiencing MORE pain or LESS pain. Those are the people with whom suggestion can dramatically alleviate (or exacerbate!) acute pain. In a different 15%, their expectations affect the experience of acute pain little or not at all. In almost everyone, our expectations influence our perception of chronic pain and how well we cope with it. In the remaining 70% of the population, expectancy seems to modulate acute pain slightly to moderately well. It also turns out that, perhaps not unexpectedly, women modulate pain in a much more complex way than men related to hormonal mechanisms. [ http://www.the-scientist.com/2005/03/28/S27/1 ] kind regards, Todd Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote on 11/12/2005, 1:33 PM: > Comment: We know now that activity changes the structure of the brain. > Violinists, for example, have a larger motor strip; London taxi drivers > have a larger hippocampus. So what this news doesn't say is the > cause/effect relationship. Why wouldn't enough trauma overwhelm and > ventromedial prefrontal cortex? Hum??? Why wouldn't children taught > hardiness cognitive strategies then develop a more robust frontal lobe? > We have seen a number of these studies, and all are vulnerable to the > post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Another factor they seem to overlook > is habitual level of happiness. People who are more happy are less > intimidated by pain (like the small shocks) and actually rate the same > cold-pressor pain stimulus as less painful than less happy people. > > Thanks for the provocative article, Frank. > Lynn > From btillier at shaw.ca Mon Nov 14 17:37:51 2005 From: btillier at shaw.ca (Bill Tillier) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:37:51 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopathy in business Message-ID: Steve says: >>Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world.<< Of course you mean psychopaths, not psychotics (psychotics get a bad enough rap as it is). Here are three recent books of interest, the Psychopath's Bible is an especially perverted one. Bill Tillier The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout Hardcover - 256 pages 1 edition (February 8, 2005) Language: English Broadway ; ISBN: 076791581X [Dr.] Stout says that as many as 4% of the population are conscienceless sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate feelings for humans or animals. As Stout (The Myth of Sanity) explains, a sociopath is defined as someone who displays at least three of seven distinguishing characteristics, such as deceitfulness, impulsivity and a lack of remorse. Such people often have a superficial charm, which they exercise ruthlessly in order to get what they want. Stout argues that the development of sociopathy is due half to genetics and half to nongenetic influences that have not been clearly identified. The author offers three examples of such people, including Skip, the handsome, brilliant, superrich boy who enjoyed stabbing bullfrogs near his family's summer home, and Doreen, who lied about her credentials to get work at a psychiatric institute, manipulated her colleagues and, most cruelly, a patient. Dramatic as these tales are, they are composites, and while Stout is a good writer and her exploration of sociopaths can be arresting, this book occasionally appeals to readers' paranoia, as the book's title and its guidelines for dealing with sociopaths indicate. Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain Author: James Blair Format: Trade Paperback ? Published: June 2005 ISBN: 0631233369 ? Published by Blackwell Publishing >From the Publisher This new book presents scientific facts of psychopathy and antisocial behavior, addressing critical issues such as the definitions of psychopathy, the number of psychopaths in society, whether psychopaths can be treated, and whether psychopathy is due to nurture or nature. The Psychopath's Bible: For the Extreme Individual (Expanded and Revised Edition) Author: Christopher S Hyatt Format: Trade Paperback ? Published: June 2004 ISBN: 1561841749 ? Published by New Falcon [the psychopath as gifted individual, hero standing up to social injustice] FROM THE PUBLISHER "A Practical Guide for the Gifted" Throughout history, throughout most of the world, psychopaths have gotten a bad rap. That is quite understandable since almost all of the world's religious and social philosophies have little use for the individual except as a tool to be placed in service to their notion of something else: "God," or the "collective," or the "higher good" or some other equally undefinable term. Only rarely, such as in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and some schools of Existentialism, is the individual considered primal. Here, finally, is a book which celebrates, encourages and educates the best part of ourselves -- the Psychopath. -- From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Nov 14 20:09:02 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 12:09:02 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] deregulation and culture rot In-Reply-To: <200511141900.jAEJ0Me22735@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051114200902.62248.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Steve says: >>The whole process of deregulation has turned the economy into a playground for white collar criminals. The decent people are still out there, but corporations overall have become a parasite on our society.<< --I'm not sure if that's a product of deregulation, rather I'm wondering if our entire culture, corporate and non-corporate, has eroded to the point where guilt is dismissed automatically and where criticism is habitually deflected. I've seen that tendency in people at various levels of the social hierarchy, and it's by no means confined to corporate culture. Deregulation may be a symptom, but I'm not sure it's the cause. When responsibility is denied at all levels, it will inevitably be more noticeable in groups that have a great deal of power and influence, but it might be a mistake to blame the powerful alone. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 21:01:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:01:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael In-Reply-To: <25e.fef967.30a99745@aol.com> References: <25e.fef967.30a99745@aol.com> Message-ID: But how did it come to pass that "greedy psychotics" took over the business world? It is not very helpful to fervently hope that somehow artists and magicians will take over. Have they ever run businesses in any quantity? More seriously, what is there about the *current* rules of business that result in "greedy psychotics" taking over? Have the rules changed? Has the supply of "greedy psychotics" increased? If so, why? I urge you to always think about processes and the rules governing those processes. But I'll wait to read what you say about them in your book. Frank On 2005-11-14, HowlBloom at aol.com opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 02:31:17 EST > From: HowlBloom at aol.com > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] saving the world--Michael > > > > In a message dated 11/13/2005 11:41:01 AM Eastern Standard Time, > shovland at mindspring.com writes: > > Capitalism is clearly at a turning point, having been largely > taken over by greedy psychotics. It's time to give more > status to the artists and magicians in the corporate world. > > > heartily agreed > > howard From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:20:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:20:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] ScienceWeek Editorials Message-ID: ScienceWeek Editorials http://scienceweek.com/editorials.htm (content changes) [11]Brain Size and the National Review - October 30, 2005 [12]Creationism vs. Sanity - January 23, 2005 [13]Harvard, Women, and Science - January 19, 2005 October 30, 2005 Brain Size and the National Review When politics makes an incursion into science, a common result is distortion and a misinformed and ill-served public. Of course, some people don't care much about the public. In the November 7, 2005 issue of the National Review magazine, a frequent repository of right-wing slop and spittle, an article touts two papers that recently appeared in a scientific journal (Science September 9, 2005 309:1717,1720). The major point of the National Review article is that the two scientific papers present evidence that different human groups may have different gene frequencies influencing brain development, one consequence of which is that "our cherished national dream of a well-mixed and harmonious meritocracy with all groups equally represented in all niches, at all levels, may be unattainable." The title of the National Review article is "The Spectre of Difference". The interest of a self-proclaimed arch-conservative magazine like the National Review in this idea needs no explication. The two scientific papers concern two genes, one called "microcephalin", and the other gene called ASPM (abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated). Both genes may contribute to the regulation of brain size, since mutations of either gene cause pathological microcephaly. Both papers are from the research group of Bruce T. Lahn, a human geneticist at the University of Chicago. The first paper purports to present evidence that a genetic variant of microcephalin in modern humans that arose 37,000 years ago increased in frequency too rapidly to be compatible with neutral genetic drift, and thus must have spread under strong positive natural selection, which in turn suggests the ongoing evolutionary plasticity of the human brain. The second paper, concerns the gene ASPM , and here also the authors interpret their analysis as suggesting that the human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution. All of which is politically neutral, except that the authors also present arguments that the frequencies of these two genes are undergoing adaptive evolution that varies with different geographical populations. In plain words, the data are presented as suggesting that the brain size of different ethnic groups and races (and dependent cultural outputs of such brains) are evolving (and have evolved) at measurably different rates. Unequivocal in the two scientific papers is the idea that brain size is related to culture Such is the gist of what the National Review picks up for its readers, the article proposing that "results like these out of the human sciences should prompt us to begin some hard thinking about our society, and about what we can reasonably expect social policies to accomplish." But maybe before we get to hard thinking about social policies we need some hard thinking about evidence and conclusions. Let's consider the two scientific papers. In the first paper, the demonstration of evolutionary selection is inferential and not definitive. The authors state, "Our data on haplotype 49 are consistent with these signatures of selection." Yes, consistent only: no anthropological conclusions are justified, and the so-called "signatures" of selection are provisional. In the first paper, the anthropological statements are essentially speculations, to wit: "Such population differentiation may reflect a Eurasian origin of haplogroup D, local adaptation, and/or demographic factors such as a bottleneck associated with human migration 50,000 to 100,000 years ago." Again, speculation: "may reflect". In translation: "We think this work may be related to demographic anthropology, but we don't know." In the second paper, concerning the proposed adaptive evolution of the gene ASPM, the authors conclude: "Although the age of haplogroup D and its geographic distribution across Eurasia roughly coincide with two important events in the cultural evolution of Eurasia -- namely, the emergence and spread of domestication from the Middle East ~10,000 years ago and the rapid increase in population associated with the development of cities and written language 5000 to 6000 years ago around the Middle East -- the significance of this correlation is not yet clear." Exactly so. The coincidence is rough, the significance unclear, and the authors nowhere discuss the important fact that within and across present human populations, studies of brains without pathology show no evidence of correlation of brain size with brain function or cultural "achievement". Certainly, if the authors are working on genes apparently associated with brain size, and the authors are also interested in relating their work to current anthropology, one would expect some discussion of their problem, to wit: If greater human brain size is still undergoing evolutionary selection, how come we have no strong correlations between brain size and important functional attributes of the human nervous system? If the brain is still evolving in size, what are the conceivable selection pressures, given no apparent correlation between non-pathological brain size and function? We're unhappy that the authors were not urged by the referees to make some statements about these questions. We're also fascinated by the opening sentence of the first paper: "The most distinct trait of Homo sapiens is the exceptional size and complexity of the brain (1,2). That's good, but the problem is the two references are 46 years old and 32 years old, respectively, and we're trying to imagine why anyone would choose these particular references for a report of such research. If we're to choose old references, why not choose von Bonin? But maybe that would be against the approach of these authors. Consider, for example, the following quotation from von Bonin: "The results of our inquiries into the brains of fossil men are somewhat meager: we cannot deduce any details about their mental life, whether they believed in God, whether they could speak or not, or how they felt about the world around them... That the brain increases in size as we go from the Australopithecinae to modern man -- or to the Upper Paleolithics, for that matter --is quite obvious and, of course, gratifying. But the meaning of the increase is again not quite clear because, as we all know, brain size as such is a very poor indicator of mental ability. This has been shown best perhaps by Pearson (1925) some years ago. In his series, very gifted persons, such as Leon Gambetta, Anatole France, or Franz Joseph Gall, had very small brains, of about 1100 grams. Other equally gifted persons had very large brains; thus Byron and Dr. Johnson had brains of about 2000 grams. And, of course, some very ordinary persons had equally large brains. So brain size was certainly not very important, and the correlation between brain size and mental capacity was insignificant. But whether this argument can be extended to an evolutionary series is again another matter. For one thing, we know far too little about the bodily proportions of fossil forms. Obviously, the brain stands in a certain relation to the rest of the body, and this rest is still largely hidden from us. Brain size as such is none too meaningful. Moreover, mere size completely leaves out of account the inner structure of the brain, which may be different in different forms and which may determine to a great extent what the brain can do." Gerhardt von Bonin: THE EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN University of Chicago Press, 1963, p.76 So why cite Spuhler (1959) and Jerison (1973) rather than von Bonin (1963)? Our final comment is that human brain size, as a phenotype, has important determinants arising from epigenetics, fetal environment, and postnatal environment, in addition to the probable involvement of many gene networks, and at the present level of our ignorance, any attempt to lock in brain size to the activity of a few genes is most likely an exaggeration. We would especially emphasize that whatever genes or gene complexes may have been involved with the marked increase in brain size apparently associated with our split from the great ape line, the same genes or gene complexes may not at all be involved with any apparent changes in brain size during the Holocene. There is certainly no reason to believe that the human brain has stopped evolving, and certainly brain size is a biological parameter that may indeed be changing, but we don't think this work is of much particular anthropological significance. We would say the work needs to be done (and supported), but we are not at the point yet of making important conclusions from such studies. And finally there is this: Is it total brain size that's important or the surface area and depth of neocortex? With an increase in total brain size may come an increase in subcortical structures and not necessarily a concomitant increase in neocortex at all, given the existing foldings of neocortex. In plain words: Could evolution be dumbing down the brain? (What an idea!) In general, if there are any anthropologists and psychologists listening, we would urge them not to jump to any conclusions on the basis of this work alone or on the basis of any work like it. We certainly need to identify the critical neurobiological variables that may be associated with individual psychological performance and with cultural change, but our view is that we're not there yet, not even close. As for the National Review, we suggest they do more homework. The author of the article (John Derbyshire) calls himself "a simple Darwinian rightist". Indeed. The Editors ScienceWeek _________________________________________________________________ January 23, 2005 Creationism vs. Sanity One grows tired of the recurring efforts of inadequately educated religionists to base the teaching of science in schools on biblical passages written during a time when civilization and understanding of the natural world were both primitive. In a country of nearly 300 million people, there will always be some people who, because of "religious" conviction, believe the Earth is as flat as a pancake, a few thousand years old, and resting on the backs of four giant elephants. Their belief is unfortunate. What is even more unfortunate is teaching our children that such beliefs, because they are "religious", deserve respect. Creationism and its latest effluvium, intelligent design, are not science, not evidentiary, not even close to science, and do not deserve respect as material to be taught to children in public schools. The idea of imposing one's religious views on others via public education is totally un-American, and the people who promulgate that idea need to be called that -- un-American. Religionists who accept the work of their God as revealed by science, and who understand that creationism is blasphemy, need to come out into the arena and be heard. Scientists who devote their lives to science and scientific attitudes and scientific truths also need to come out into the arena and be heard with their strongest voices. Science teachers who find these creationist crusades obnoxious and potentially damaging to the children they teach also need to come out into the arena in droves and wage the battle of their intellectual lives. It is time. We are nearly 150 years after Darwin's Origin of Species, and it is time for the United States, the foremost scientific enterprise on the planet, to deal firmly with this issue. People are free in the US to practice any particular religion. They are not free to impose that religion on others, and they are certainly not free to force the teaching of their religious beliefs in the public schools. We call for an end to stickers on textbooks telling children that evolution is only a "theory". We call for an end to mandated teaching of creationism or intelligent design or any other attempt to subvert the public school teaching of science as it is currently understood by the scientific community. We call for all scientists, educators, and thinking Americans to raise their voices in a decisive confrontation against insidious and un-American anti-scientific dogma. The US Supreme Court owes the American people a unanimous and unambiguous rejection of religionist attacks on science education. The Editors ScienceWeek _________________________________________________________________ January 19, 2005 Harvard, Women, and Science The recent comments by Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggesting that biological differences between the sexes may be one explanation why fewer women succeed in mathematics and science careers, is evidence of at best a sophomoric understanding of the professions of science and mathematics, and at worst possible evidence of brain damage. Dr. Summers is an economist, not a scientist and not a mathematician. At the present time, approximately half the graduating PhDs in chemistry and MDs in medicine are women, and more than a third in the biological sciences, particularly in molecular biology. One can assume that any of these new women graduates knows more science and mathematics than Dr. Summers, and in addition one suspects that any of these new women graduates knows more about the problems of women in science and mathematics than Dr. Summers does. If Dr. Summers is really interested in understanding the present situation of women in science and mathematics, he ought to have a serious look at the history of his own university. In general, Harvard University has never been known as a leader in the intellectual emancipation of women, and throughout most of its existence, Harvard was an all-male college that frowned on the idea of women in intellectual pursuits. In the early years of stellar spectroscopy at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory, for example, nearly all the data were catalogued and analyzed by female astronomers, called "computers", who were trained professional astronomers but forbidden because of their sex to use the telescopes. Women astronomers at Harvard were not allowed routine access to the telescopes until the 1950s. It is an irony of the social history of science that the work of such female astronomers as Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1928) and Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) came to be of greater significance than the work of many of the male astronomers who considered these female astronomers to be no more than menial assistants. If understanding of women in science is the objective, after an examination of the history of women at Harvard, we suggest to Dr. Summers that he start thinking about attitudes rather than biological differences, attitudes of men in science toward women in science, and attitudes of university presidents who are supposed to lead forward rather than backward. In truth, this problem of attitudes toward women of accomplishment is so old it feels trite. Plato, after all, that old Greek so clever with his words, already pointed out in his time that wasting women, wasting the intellectual capabilities of half the population, was a stupid strategy for any society. As always, in science or anywhere else, "old-boy" attitudes are the attitudes of old boys. The Editors References 11. http://scienceweek.com/editorials.htm#051030 12. http://scienceweek.com/editorials.htm#050123 13. http://scienceweek.com/editorials.htm#050119 From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:20:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:20:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: The Literary Darwinists Message-ID: The Literary Darwinists http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/magazine/06darwin.html By D. T. MAX Jane Austen first published "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813. She had misgivings about the book, complaining in a letter to her sister that it was "rather too light, and bright, and sparkling." But these qualities may be what make it the most popular of her novels. It tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, a young woman from a shabby genteel family, who meets Mr. Darcy, an aristocrat. At first, the two dislike each other. Mr. Darcy is arrogant; Elizabeth, clever and cutting. But through a series of encounters that show one to the other in a more appealing light - as well as Mr. Darcy's intervention when an officer named Wickham runs away with Elizabeth's younger sister Lydia (Darcy bribes the cad to marry Lydia) - Elizabeth and Darcy come to love each other, to marry and, it is strongly suggested at book's end, to live happily ever after. For the common reader, "Pride and Prejudice" is a romantic comedy. His or her pleasure comes from the vividness of Austen's characters and how familiar they still seem: it's as if we know Elizabeth and Darcy. On a more literary level, we enjoy Austen's pointed dialogue and admire her expert way with humor. For similar reasons, critics have long called "Pride and Prejudic" a classic - their ultimate (if not well defined) expression of approval. But for an emerging school of literary criticism known as Literary Darwinism, the novel is significant for different reasons. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts. From the first words of the first chapter ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife") to the first words of the last ("Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters"), the novel is stocked with the sort of life's-passage moments that resonate with meaning for Literary Darwinists. (One calls the novel their "fruit fly.") The women in the book mostly compete to marry high-status men, consistent with the Darwinian idea that females try to find mates whose status will assure the success of their offspring. At the same time, the men are typically competing to marry the most attractive women, consistent with the Darwinian idea that males look for youth and beauty in females as signs of reproductive fitness. Darcy and Elizabeth's flips and flops illustrate the effort mammals put into distinguishing between short-term appeal (a pert step, a handsome coxcomb) and long-term appropriateness (stability, commitment, wealth, underlying good health). Meanwhile, Wickham - the penniless officer who tries to make off first with Darcy's sister and then carries off Lydia - serves as an example of the mating behavior evolutionary biologists call (I'm using a milder euphemism than they do) "the sneaky fornicator theory." Humans beyond reproductive age also have a part to play in the Literary Darwinist paradigm. Consider Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth's mother. Jane Austen calls her "invariably silly," and most critics over nearly two centuries have agreed. But for Literary Darwinists, her marriage obsession makes sense, because she also has a stake in what is going on. If one of her daughters has a child, Mrs. Bennet will have further passed on her genetic material, fulfilling the ultimate aim of living things according to some evolutionary theorists: the replication of one's genes. (J.B.S. Haldane, a British biologist, was once asked if he would trade his life for his brother's and replied no, but that he would trade it for two brothers or eight cousins.) It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature. "The Literary Animal," the first scholarly anthology dedicated to Literary Darwinism, is to be published next month. It draws from the various fields that figure in Darwinian evolutionary studies, including contributions from evolutionary psychologists and biologists as well as literature professors. The essays consider the importance of the male-male bond in epics and romances, the battle of the sexes in Shakespeare and the motif in both Japanese and Western literature of men rejecting children whom their wives have conceived in adultery. "The Literary Animal" spans centuries and individual cultures with bravura, if not bravado. "There is no work of literature written anywhere in the world, at any time, by any author, that is outside the scope of Darwinian analysis," Joseph Carroll, a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, writes in an essay in "The Literary Animal." Why bring literature into what is essentially a social science? Jonathan Gotschall, an editor of "The Literary Animal," offers an answer: "One thing literature offers is data. Fast, inexhaustible, cross-cultural and cheap." There is a circularity to an argument that uses texts about people to prove that people behave in human ways. (I'm reminded of the Robert Frost line: "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better.") But Literary Darwinism has a second focus too. It also investigates why we read and write fiction. At the core of Literary Darwinism is the idea that we inherit many of the predispositions we deem to be cultural through our genes. How we behave has been subjected to the same fitness test as our bodies: if a bit of behavior has no purpose, then evolution - given enough time - may well dispense with it. So why, Literary Darwinists ask, do we make room for this strange exercise of the imagination? What are reading and writing fiction good for? In her essay "Reverse-Engineering Narrative," Michelle Scalise Sugiyama tries to simplify the question by picking stories apart, breaking them down into characters, settings, causalities and time frames ("the cognitive widgets and sprockets of storytelling") and asking what purpose each serves: how do they make us more adaptive, more capable of passing on our genes? F or the moment, Literary Darwinism is a club that may grow into a crowd; there are only about 30 or so declared adherents in all of academia. (The wider field of biopoetics - which relates music and the visual arts to Darwin as well - can claim another handful.) But it has captured the imagination of a number of academics who grew up with other literary critical techniques and became dissatisfied. Brian Boyd, for instance, a well-known scholar of Vladimir Nabokov and professor at the University of New Zealand in Auckland, changed his focus in his 40's to Literary Darwinism, gripped by what he calls its "one very simple and powerful idea." It may seem strange that English professors in search of inspiration would turn to evolutionary biology, but you should never underestimate the appeal of the worldview Darwin formulated. It has a way of capturing people's attention. While not everyone enjoys being reminded that humans descend from monkeys (or even worse, from prokaryotic bacteria), many of us like the subtle reassurance that Darwinism offers. Despite its theory that unceasing change is the essence of life, it can be perceived as a reassuring philosophy, one that believes there are answers. And a philosophy that implies "survival of the fittest" pays a great compliment to all of us who are here to read about it. So it is little surprise that evolutionary biology has come to be invoked not merely as a theory about changes in the physical makeups of living beings but also as an explanatory tool that appeals to both academics and to everyone's inner pop psychologist. (Jack Nicholson explaining his bad-boy behavior to an interviewer for The New York Times in 2002: "I have a sweet spot for what's attractive to me. It's not just psychological. It's also glandular and has to do with mindlessly continuing the species.") Literary Darwinism - like many offshoots of Darwinism - tends to find favor with those looking for universal explanations. Like Freudianism and Marxism, it has large-scale ambitions: to explain not just the workings of a particular text or author but of texts and authors over time and across cultures as well. It may also allow English professors to grab back some of the influence - and money - that the sciences, in the Darwinian fight for university resources, have taken from the humanities for the past century. But for now, to march under the Literary Darwinist banner you had better be independent and unafraid. "The most effective and easiest form of repudiation is to ignore us," Carroll says. Literary Darwinists give off a cultlike vibe. When they talk about like-minded academics who won't acknowledge their beliefs in public, they sometimes call them "closeted." The 56-year-old Carroll's own conversion to the discipline took place when, as a young, tenured but disgruntled professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis in the early 90's, he picked up "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" and had an "intuitive conviction" that he had found the master keys to literature. Carroll had always liked big ideas; he'd had a "big Hegel phase" when he was 21. "The basic conception crystallized for me in a matter of weeks," he remembers, and the notes he began taking "at high intensity" formed themselves into the founding text in the field, "Evolution and Literary Theory," published in 1995. Jonathan Gottschall, a 33-year-old editor of "The Literary Animal," began his graduate studies in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1994 and was surprised at how little his professors cared about linking literature with "the big, Delphic project of seeking the nature of human nature. They didn't believe in knowledge. In fact they could only render the word in quotes." When he found a copy of the zoologist Desmond Morris's 1967 book, "The Naked Ape," in a used bookstore, Morris's observations on the overlap between primate and human behavior spoke to him. (Animals often play a role in these conversion narratives: Ellen Dissanayake, the author of "What Is Art For?" and a biopoeticist at the University of Washington, was primed for her conversion in part by watching the behavior of wild animals - her husband at the time was a director at the National Zoo in Washington - and comparing them to her young children.) Soon after reading "The Naked Ape," Gottschall reread the "Iliad," one of his favorite books: "As always," he writes in the introduction to "The Literary Animal," "Homer made my bones flex and ache under the weight of all the terror and beauty of the human condition. But this time around I also experienced the 'Iliad' as a drama of naked apes - strutting, preening, fighting, tattooing their chests and bellowing their power in fierce competition for social dominance, desirable mates and material resources." He brought his ideas to class. "When I would say things like 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary biology' in class," Gottschall remembers, "my classmates would hear things like 'eugenics' and 'Hitler.' It was a measure of how toxic the material was." His interest in Literary Darwinism does not seem to have helped Gottschall's career - "The Literary Animal" was rejected by more than a dozen publishers before Northwestern University Press agreed to take it on. And Gottschall himself remains unemployed (though that is a condition familiar to many English Ph.D.'s). Literary Darwinists claim that no acknowledged member of their troupe has ever received tenure in this country. "Most of my closest friends ended up at the Ivies or their equivalents," Joseph Carroll says, while he is at "a branch campus in a state university system." The alpha male of Literary Darwinism is the 76-year-old Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. "There's no one we owe so much," Gottschall says. Wilson contributed a foreword to "The Literary Animal" in which he writes that if Literary Darwinism succeeds and "not only human nature but its outermost literary productions can be solidly connected to biological roots, it will be one of the great events of intellectual history. Science and the humanities united!" Wilson has been working for 30 years to prepare the way for such a moment. In 1975, he began the expansion of modern evolutionary biology to human behavior in his book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis." In the last chapter, he tried to show that evolutionary pressures play a big role not just in animal societies but also in human culture. "Many scientists and others believed it would have been better if I had stopped at chimpanzees," Wilson would remember later, "but the challenge and the excitement I felt were too much to resist." In "On Human Nature," published three years later, Wilson revisited the question with new energy. The field that emerged in part out of his work, evolutionary psychology, asserts that many of our mental activities and the behaviors that come from them - language, altruism, promiscuity - can be traced to preferences that were encoded in us in prehistoric times when they helped us to survive. According to evolutionary psychologists, everything from seasonal affective disorder to singing to lifesaving is - or at least might be - hard-wired. Evolutionary psychologists also try to demystify the nature of consciousness itself, positing, for example, that the brain is a collection of separate modules evolved to serve mental operations, more like a Swiss Army knife than a soul. A controversial implication of their theories is that evolution may be responsible for some inequalities among groups. One has only to recall the trouble that Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, brought on himself earlier this year when he speculated that evolution might have left women less capable than men of outstanding performance in engineering and science to see how the notion continues to roil us. All the same, today we speak casually of innate preferences, adaptive behavior and fitness strategies. Consider how evolutionary psychology has displaced Freud. Who, upon discovering that a remote tribe had an incest taboo, would ascribe it to unconscious repression on the part of the sons of their sexual attraction to their mothers? Instead, we would likely cite an evolutionary biology principle that states that we have evolved an innate repulsion to inbreeding because it creates birth defects and birth defects are a barrier to survival. In a recent telephone conversation, I asked Wilson to assess the state of the revolution he helped touch off. How far had sociologists and psychologists gone in folding evolutionary principles into their work? Wilson laughed and said silkily, "Not far enough, in my opinion." Nonetheless, he looks forward to seeing sociobiology dust the wings of the arts - especially literature - with its magic. "Confusion is what we have now in the realm of literary criticism," Wilson writes in his foreword to "The Literary Animal." He amplified the point on the phone: "They just go on presenting it, teaching it, explaining it as best they can." He saw in literary criticism, especially the school led by Derrida, a "form of unrooted free association and an attempt to build rules of analysis on just idiosyncratic perceptions of how the world works, how the mind works. I could not see anything that was truly coherent." Predicting my objection, he went on: "We're not talking about reducing, corroding, dehumanizing. We're talking about adding deep history, deep genetic history, to art criticism." Literary Darwinists use this "deep history" to explain the power of books and poems that might otherwise confuse us, thus hoping to add satisfaction to our reading of them. Take for instance "Hamlet." Through the Literary Darwinist lens, Shakespeare's play becomes the story of a young man's dilemma choosing between his personal self-interest (taking over the kingdom by killing his uncle, his mother's new husband) and his genetic self-interest (if his mother has children with his uncle, he may get new siblings who carry three-eighths of his genes). No wonder the prince of Denmark cannot make up his mind. Or look at Jonathan Gottschall's study of the "Iliad," which emphasizes how the fighting over women in the epic is not the substitute for the fight over territory, as commentators usually assume, but the central subject of the poem, occasioned by an ancient sex-ratio imbalance, a fact he unearthed in part from studies of the archaeological records of contemporary grave sites. One of the central beliefs of evolutionary psychology is that pleasure is adaptive, so it is meaningful that Literary Darwinism is enjoyable to practice. But while its observations on individual books can be fun and memorable, they also feel flimsy. As David Sloan Wilson, an editor of "The Literary Animal" and a professor of biology and anthropology at SUNY-Binghamton, puts it, "Tasty slice, but where's the rest of the pie?" And Literary Darwinism is not equally good at explaining everything. It is best on big social novels, on people behaving in groups. As the British novelist Ian McEwan notes in his contribution to "The Literary Animal," "If one reads accounts of . . . troops of bonobo . . . one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel." But I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke "The Waste Land" or "Finnegans Wake." Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator - these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists, an interpretive limitation that can be traced to Darwin himself; his son once complained that "it often astonished us what trash he would tolerate in the way of novels. The chief requisites were a pretty girl and a good ending." Darwin was drawn to books that were Darwinian. Similarly, Literary Darwinists are better on ?mile Zola and John Steinbeck than, say, Henry James or Gustave Flaubert. I would read their take on Shakespeare's histories before the tragedies and the tragedies before the comedies, and in "The Tempest" I'd be curious about their observations on the Prospero, Miranda and Fernando triad but not on Caliban or Ariel. I don't care if there are selection pressures on mooncalfs and sprites. Ultimately, Literary Darwinism may teach us less about individual books than about the point of literature. But what can the purpose of literature be, assuming it is not just a harmless oddity? At first glance, reading is a waste of time, turning us all into versions of Don Quixote, too befuddled by our imaginations to tell windmills from giants. We would be better off spending the time mating or farming. Darwinists have an answer - or more accurately, many possible answers. (Literary Darwinists like multiple answers, convinced the best idea will win out.) One idea is that literature is a defense reaction to the expansion of our mental life that took place as we began to acquire the basics of higher intelligence around 40,000 years ago. At that time, the world suddenly appeared to homo sapiens in all its frightening complexity. But by taking imaginative but orderly voyages within our minds, we gained the confidence to interpret this new vastly denser reality. Another theory is that reading literature is a form of fitness training, an exercise in "what if" thinking. If you could imagine the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, then if you ever found yourself in a street fight, you would have a better chance of winning. A third theory sees writing as a sex-display trait. Certainly writers often seem to be preening when they write, with an eye toward attracting a desirable mate. In "The Ghost Writer," Philip Roth's narrator informs another writer that "no one with seven books in New York City settles for" just one woman. "That's what you get for a couplet." Yet another theory is that the main function of literature is to integrate us all into one culture; evolutionary psychologists believe shared imaginings or myths produce social cohesion, which in turn confers a survival advantage. And a fifth idea is that literature began as religion or wish fulfillment: we ensure our success in the next hunt by recounting the triumph of the last one. Finally, it may be precisely writing's uselessness that makes it attractive to the opposite sex; it could be that, like the male peacock's exuberant tail, literature's very unnecessariness speaks to the underlying good health of its practitioner. He or she has resources to burn. Generally, Literary Darwinism positions literature not as a luxury or as an add-on but as connected with our deepest selves. There is a grandeur to this view, and also a good deal of conjecture. That is because evolutionary biology is unusual among the sciences in asking not just "how" things work but also "why" - and not the why of local explanations (Why does water freeze at 32 degrees?) but the why of deeper ones, why something exists (Why did we evolve lungs? Why do we feel love?). There is no lab protocol to solve these sorts of mysteries, which the inductive techniques of science are poorly designed to answer, and so in the end, evolutionary biologists' conclusions can far outrun their research. Take, for example, the human fear of snakes. According to Edward Wilson, this fear had its beginning in prehistoric times, when many of our ancestors were killed by snake bites. Those who feared snakes survived in greater numbers than those who didn't. This was the period when the human brain was becoming hard-wired, so our fear, rooted now in our genetic makeup, outlived its usefulness. Even after snakes stopped killing us very often, we remembered how we felt when they did. Over time, because they had traumatized us when we were most impressionable, snakes took a central role in our imaginative lives, becoming a center of our religion and art - whence the protection of the kings of ancient Egypt by the cobra goddess Wadjet; Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec serpent god of death and resurrection; and the fascination D.H. Lawrence felt when an uninvited guest slithered "his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied" down to his water trough. It is a nice story backed by some evidence. Children have a readiness to fear snakes that needs only an encounter or two to set it off. Their fear remains even after they outgrow ordinary childhood fears. And many primates, our nearest relatives, also have a readiness - an easily evoked potential - to be afraid of snakes. But we need to know a great deal before asserting that our snake obsession is an example of the sort of "gene-culture co-evolution," in Wilson's words, that evolutionary psychology - and literary Darwinism - depend on. For one thing, if there is a module in the brain that contains the predisposition to fear snakes, it has not yet been found. Nor do we really know how many snake deaths there were in prehistoric times. Nor whether that number was sufficient to create a phobia, which, moreover, for some reason would have had to remain fixed until the present day in the human mind instead of dropping out through further evolutionary selection, as you might expect a useless phobia to do. Today it might be people who love snakes who outreproduce the ophidophobes, since some snakes make good eating and their skins can be sold for money, yet we have no evidence of this pattern. At the same time, we must ask why there are equivalent or greater dangers our ancestors withstood that do not seem to have led to phobias - for instance, fire. When you try to evaluate the importance of snakes to myths and the arts, you have to make several more assumptions. First, are snakes any more prominent in our imaginations than, say, eagles, which have never preyed on us? And if they are, does it not seem as likely that our fascination with them comes from there being something special (module-activating, if you like) about the snake's motion or its shape - its resemblance to a stick, or pace Freud, to the penis? Or about the fact that it kills with poison rather than through lethal wounding, as most wild animals do? Why trace our fear of them only back to their supposed role as a prehistoric killer of our ancestors? S ometimes evolutionary psychological theory feels like a start toward a science rather than a science itself. Consider, for instance, the larger question of the human imagination's role in evolution. Let's assume the capacity for imagination is inherited. Then most evolutionary psychologists would assume that human imagination was favored by natural selection and that it helps us to survive. But imagination could just as well not be an adaptation to (imagined) survival pressures but an accidental byproduct of such an adaptation. Maybe evolutionary pressures favored a related mental process like, say, curiosity, and because the higher brain, where such mental activities reside, is a sort of huge pool of neurons, it also produced the capacity for imagination. And, as Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard psychology professor, notes, "Whether any of this was itself the target of natural selection is anybody's guess." To be fair, evolutionary psychologists deserve credit for asking whether complex human behavior can be transmitted through a genetic-cultural link even if they cannot yet show that it is. Theirs remains an alluring approach. What they need in order to overcome their problems is the equivalent of the early-20th-century elaboration of the function of genes - or at least more and better hard science to support their conclusions. A similar focus would help Literary Darwinists. They would benefit from studying writers and readers in the laboratory to see what parts of the brain our taste for literature comes out of and what the implications are. Such experiments could reveal quite remarkable things. For instance, we know that a structure in the brain called the hippocampus has a key role in long-term memory formulation. Scanning readers using functional M.R.I.'s - M.R.I.'s set to track blood flow to different areas of the brain - we can also see how different works activate their readers' hippocampuses. Those words that light up the hippocampus the most are the ones people wind up remembering best. So functional M.R.I.'s of the hippocampus could provide the beginning of a biological basis for the hoary assumption that "Pride and Prejudice" is a classic and maybe even a justification for the rest of the literary canon. Even more interesting, brain scanning might one day help to explain the act of reading itself. "Reading is a funny kind of brain state," says Norman Holland, a professor who teaches a course on brain science and literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "If you're engrossed in a story, you're no longer aware of your body; you're no longer aware of your environment. You feel real emotions toward the characters." What is going on in our heads? Are we in a dream? A heightened reality? A trance? Edward Wilson told me that he is confident neurobiology can help confirm many of evolutionary psychology's insights about the humanities, commending the work to "any ambitious young neurobiologist, psychologist or scholar in the humanities." They could be the "Columbus of neurobiology," he said, adding that if "you gave me a million dollars to do it, I would get immediately into brain imaging." In fact, you won't always need a million dollars for the work, as the cost of M.R.I. technology goes down. "Five years from now, every psychology department will have a scanner in the basement," says Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist. With the help of those scanners, Wilson says that science and the study of literature will join in "a mutualistic symbiosis," with science providing literary criticism with the "foundational principles" for analysis it lacks. David Sloan Wilson, the co-editor of "The Literary Animal" (and the son of the novelist Sloan Wilson), sees the potential of that embrace differently. "Literature," he says, "is the natural history of our species," and its diversity proves us diverse. No one in "Pride and Prejudice" takes exception when, at the book's opening, Elizabeth Bennet's father's cousin comes to propose to her. In Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders," the title character can, at the same time, consider her incest with her brother "the most nauseous thing to me in the world" and say she "had not great concern about it in point of conscience" because she had not known they were related. Humans are complex, and the best books about them are too. So rather than narrowing literature, David Wilson says that Literary Darwinism may broaden evolutionary psychology. It may, in fact, have already done so. Think about evolutionary psychology. It is seductive and metaphoric, alluring and imagistic. It is fun to riff on. It takes bits of information and from them builds a worldview. It convinces us that we understand why things happen the way they happen. When it succeeds, evolutionary psychology impresses us with the elegance and economy of that vision and, when it fails, gives us a sense of waste and unthriftiness on the author's part. It may be true or it may just have some truth in it, and once you have encountered it, you can never see things quite the same way again: it works a kind of conversion in you. Isn't it, then, already a lot like literature? D.T. Max, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is working on "The Dark Eye," a cultural and scientific history of mad cow and other prion diseases. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:20:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:20:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] kragen@pobox.com: the energy cost to evacuate Earth's human population Message-ID: The energy cost to evacuate Earth's human population From: kragen at pobox.com Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:37:02 -0500 (EST) To: kragen-tol at canonical.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity says: On the surface of the Earth the escape velocity is about 11.2 kilometres per second. You have: 100 kg * (11.2 km/sec) * (11.2 km/sec) / 2 You want: kilowatt hours * 1742.2222 / 0.00057397959 So 1700 kWh per (large) person, to lift them out of Earth's gravity well (assuming perfect efficiency, as with a space elevator.) http://www.ecoworld.org/energy/EcoWorld_Energy_Resid_KWH_Prices.cfm lists average US residential electricity prices from 6.5 to 14.8 cents per kWh, with an outlier at 33.3 in San Francisco during the California energy crisis. It also claims that the cost of the fuel alone amounts to about 0.5 to 1 cent per kWh. So if we have to pay 10 cents per kWh, lifting a person into space should cost around $170 --- an energy cost that could in theory be recovered if they came back down. (At present this energy is mostly dissipated thermally.) Evacuating the entire human race to an extraterrestrial habitat prepared to handle them should then have an energy cost around $1 trillion. This is roughly 2% of annual world GDP ($55.9 trillion) at PPP. (See http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GDP_PPP.pdf for details.) Current world energy usage is around 354 exajoules (http://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/Papers/WMC/17/) or 400 exajoules (http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/agra/agra_reports_wg4.htm) or 375 exajoules (http://www.globalfuture.com/0002.htm) or thereabouts. 1700 kWh per person is You have: 1742 kilowatt hours * 6 billion You want: joules * 3.76272e+19 / 2.6576519e-20 38 exajoules, a significant fraction of world yearly energy usage, but far from unimaginable. It would probably be enough to raise the unit price of energy. I conclude that, while technical obstacles currently make evacuation of Earth's population to extraterrestrial colonies impossible, the energy cost of the evacuation itself is within reason. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:20:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:20:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Observer: Who has the bigger brain? Message-ID: Who has the bigger brain? Sunday, November 6, 2005 The Observer As one respected journal claims that men are smarter than women, another leaps in to rubbish the research. Robin McKie reports on science's gloves-off squabble It was one of the summer's top stories. In August, two British academics announced that men are significantly cleverer than women and that male university students outstrip females by almost five IQ points. 'Girls need manpower' and 'IQ tests: women just don't get it' claimed the headlines. The announcement was the latest round in a battle that has come to dominate psychology in recent years and has triggered countless workplace arguments and marital rows over the years. In this case, the formidable nature of the statistics used by the study's authors - Dr Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn - seemed to land a fairly hefty blow for the men-are-cleverer camp. 'It confirms what we've long suspected,' said a (male) writer in the Sun. 'The male of the species is cleverer than the female. It's a no-brainer.' But not any more. Last week the work of the two academics was denounced in startlingly fierce terms in the journal Nature just as a paper officially outlining their work was published in the British Journal of Psychology The attack - which claims that Irwing and Lynn's work is 'deeply flawed' - is unusual. Science journals rarely attack studies at the same time as they are being published by a rival. Neither do they often use strong or intemperate terms. A delayed and measured approach is the norm in scientific circles. Nevertheless, Nature insisted that its confrontational approach was justified. Supposed sex differences in IQ attract wide attention and are likely to be widely cited, it pointed out. 'We were made aware that Irwing and Lynn's results were based on a seriously flawed methodology, and had the opportunity to provide timely expert opinion when their paper became publicly available,' said Tim Lincoln of Nature's News & Views section. The author of the Nature article was even more critical. 'Their study - which claims to show major sex differences in IQ - is simple, utter hogwash,' said Dr Steve Blinkhorn, an expert on intelligence testing. The study by Irwing, of Manchester University, and Lynn, an Ulster academic who has previously claimed that white people are cleverer than black people, was based on a technique known as meta-analysis. The pair examined dozens of previous studies of men's and women's IQs, research that had been carried out in different countries - including Egypt, Belgium, Australia and the United States - between 1964 and 2004 and published in a variety of different journals. Then they subjected these studies to an intense statistical analysis. >From this, the pair decided that their work showed men outnumber women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. According to Irwing and Lynn, there are twice as many men with IQ scores of 125 - a level typical for people with first-class degrees - than women, while at the level of 155, an IQ associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. The announcement was startling because it had been previously accepted that there were few differences between male and female IQs. Most research on the subject of the intellectual differences between the sexes had concentrated on other aspects of brain activity. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, has recently argued that levels of testosterone in the womb will determine how much eye contact a child will make or how quickly his or her language will develop. Hence more newborn boys look longer at objects, and more newborn girls look at faces. By contrast, Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, and the author of Y: The Descent of Men, says there is absolutely no consensus at all about the science. 'That doesn't mean there are no differences between the brains of the sexes, but we should take care not to exaggerate them.' However, it was not just the nature of their findings that was unexpected; the two psychologists' approach to publishing their work was unusual. They did not release their paper to fellow academics immediately. Instead, they gave it out to journalists two months before it was scheduled to be published in the British Journal of Psychology this month. 'In retrospect, that may have seemed a peculiar thing to do,' Irwing told The Observer. Last week was therefore fellow academics' first chance to to make an assessment of their work and respond. After reports of their study were published in newspapers, Irwing and Lynn appeared on various radio and TV shows. In general, they received responses that were fairly uncritical and were only occasionally pushed to defend their claims. At one point, Lynn alleged that men were smarter simply because they have bigger brains and said that girls now outperform boys at school because of the inclusion of coursework, to which more conscientious females were better suited. However, last week's publication of Blinkhorn's critique in Nature represents a major change in attitudes to their claims. He points to a number of 'serious flaws' in the approach taken by Lynn and Irwing. For a start, he accuses them of carefully selecting those IQ studies that they allowed in their meta-analysis. In particular, he says they chose to ignore a massive study, carried out in Mexico, which showed there was very little difference in the IQs of men and women. 'They say it is "an outlier" in data terms --in other words, it was a statistical freak,' Blinkhorn said. 'It was nothing of the kind. It was just plain inconvenient. Had it been included, as it should have been, it would have removed a huge chunk of the differences they claim to have observed.' In addition, Blinkhorn said the pair were ignoring a vast body of work that had found no differences. 'Psychologists often carry out studies that find no differences between men's and women's IQs but don't publish them for the simple reason that finding nothing seems uninteresting. But you have to take these studies into account as well as those studies that do find differences. But Lynn and Irwing did not. That also skewed their results.' Blinkhorn also accuses the pair of adopting a variety of statistical manoeuvres that he describes, in his paper, as being 'flawed and suspect'. Last week Irwing defended the study and accused Blinkhorn of 'attacking the men, not the science'. The study they had done 'also has to be seen in context of our other work which has shown significant sex differences in IQ. Nor is it true that we played about with our data.' For his part, Blinkhorn is unrepentant. 'Sex differences in average IQ, if they exist at all, are too small to be interesting,' he states in Nature It is a stark, unequivocal statement - although it will certainly not be the last word in a debate that seems likely to dog psychology for years to come. Scuffles in science The Nature attack is the latest of several recent rows that have erupted over papers in leading journals. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield caused a furore when he wrote an article in the Lancet claiming a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. The paper led to a boycott of the vaccine by many parents, although scientists have been unable to establish any of his claims. Critics attacked the Lancet for publishing the paper. The journal was also criticised by Nobel laureate Aaron Klug for printing a paper claiming the immune systems of rats were damaged after they were fed genetically modified potatoes. The claims have never been substantiated. In contrast, last year's Nature paper, in which scientists revealed they had found remains of a race of tiny apemen, Homo floresiensis, pictured left, has survived scrutiny despite claims that the fossils really belonged to deformed Homo sapiens. Research has since confirmed the original paper's results. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:20:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:20:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTDBR: Society Rudely Sinks Into a Cesspool of Boorishness Message-ID: Society Rudely Sinks Into a Cesspool of Boorishness New York Times Daily Book Review, 5.11.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/books/07masl.html [A good trashing. Conservatives have been moaning about the decline of manners for centuries now and never distinguish decline from change. This is not an example of deep cultural change.] Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door By Lynne Truss 206 pages. Gotham Books. $20. Books of the Times | 'Talk to the Hand' By JANET MASLIN With "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," Lynne Truss tapped into a mother lode of irritation about bad grammar. Her new target is bad behavior. Ms. Truss goes on the rampage against rudeness with "Talk to the Hand," a promising-looking volume that turns out to be a thin and crabby diatribe. The author may have been good for only one book-length conniption. Ms. Truss remains cartoonishly indignant, ever ready to swat the new breed of lout with her old-fashioned bumbershoot. Evidence of this lout is not difficult for her to find. The author is so mad, in both the daft and angry senses of the word, that she can be enraged by a "Pick Your Own Strawberries" sign. "No, I won't bloody pick my own bloody strawberries!" she wants to shout. "You bloody pick them for me!" Why the outrage? Because of the creeping transfer of work from businesses to their customers and the breakdown of many other heretofore-accepted boundaries. When dividing lines disappear, confusion ensues, and in this Ms. Truss finds the roots of rudeness. Her idea of a civilized society is one in which corporations don't use voicemail, telephone sales pitches don't intrude on dinnertime and the boundary-wrecking influence of television is kept to a minimum. "One hesitates to blame television for all this because that's such an obvious thing to do," she writes. "But, come on. Just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's not true." And just because it's true doesn't mean it hasn't been said before. Frequently. This slender book draws on more authoritative treatises, from Robert Hughes's "Culture of Complaint" to Robert D. Putnam's "Bowling Alone," to validate its ideas of crumbling social standards. It also uses first-hand evidence that is conspicuously slight, like Ms. Truss's own anecdotes from the badminton court (where she finds herself apologizing too much). Ms. Truss takes much more wisdom from her own cute-curmudgeonly example than most readers will. "Talk to the Hand" dwells on one overarching point: that new technology has mangled etiquette in much the same way that verbal logorrhea on the Internet damaged syntax and punctuation. As cell phones and e-mail blur the lines between public and private discourse ("the subject of annoying mobile phone users comes up more quickly than you can say 'I'm on the train,' " she writes), people develop a strange sense of isolation. They wear pajamas on airplanes. They air private thoughts in public places. They sustain the feeling that they are alone and at home, even when, demonstrably, they are not. This has led to an "age of social autism, in which people just can't see the value of imagining their impact on others, and in which responsibility is always conveniently laid at other people's doors." So away go good manners, which are fundamentally rooted in empathy for the feelings of others. And in comes a free-floating sense of angry self-justification. The driver who cuts another off in traffic might once have behaved apologetically, Ms. Truss surmises. Now he is more apt to complete this maneuver with an obscene gesture at whoever got in his way. Much of this is simply common sense and anecdotal observation. But Ms. Truss feels the need to codify it, if only to make her new book resemble her earlier one. (It is no accident that each has a catchy four-syllable title.) So "Talk to the Hand" is arbitrarily divided into six segments. Each of them supposedly provides a reason for refusing to leave one's house and keeping one's distance from the rude new world. Too often, these reasons are trumped-up and rambling. And the book's rants are unfocused. Only occasionally are they illuminating, as when Ms. Truss tries to define the frustration of not knowing what politeness, deference and consideration mean anymore. Surely she is onto something when she assesses the new etiquette questions posed by intrusive gadgetry: How present does one feel when a companion's phone rings? More or less present than the person who placed the call? "Surely we all agree that the question 'Should I do this?' ought to have an automatic subsidiary question, 'Should I do this here?' " she writes trenchantly. But this authoritative voice too often dissolves into a little-me tone, in which Ms. Truss imagines herself as both very famous and adorably fit-to-be-tied. Sometimes, she says, with a "please don't tell anybody" that's coy for a would-be best seller, she just wants to raise her little fists against the forces of rudeness, or thump the table about a world that makes us feel "isolated, solipsistic, grandiose, exhausted, inconsiderate and anti-social." Clearly this fury has replaced her grammar fetish, or she would not be writing things like "they are a member of the weaker sex." "Talk to the Hand" sounds unmistakably English. The locutions ("it is bondage with bells on") make that clear. So does the book's emphasis on a remarkable public service advertising campaign that somehow links a please-don't-litter message with oral sex. And when Ms. Truss ticks off some root causes of rudeness, one of them is "the absence of war." It is inconsiderate, at the very least, to leave that line intact in an American edition. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:21:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:21:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] ACLA: The Human and Its Other Message-ID: American Contemporary Literature Association Annual Meeting The Human and Its Other Princeton, NJ, March 23-26, 2006 http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=12 -------- http://www.professional-lurker.com/archives/001043.html Seminar Title: The Human in Posthuman Technology Seminar Organizer(s): Steven A. Benko, Meredith College (benkos at meredith.edu) Answers to questions of how technology impacts definitions of what it means to be human, what is other than human, what constitutes the good, natural and normal for human life and society, and how subjects can constitute, experience and communicate their own otherness through technology vary widely along the spectrum from humanism to posthumanism. At one end are bioconservative responses that suggest a shared and unchanging conception of human nature threatened by scientific and technological advances that alter or enhance human capabilities and functioning. At the other end are posthuman responses that use science and technology as an occasion for the kind of individuation that relativizes and resists humanism's essentializing ethnocentrism. This seminar will explore literary, philosophical and religious depictions of science and technology in terms of how what is human, other than human, and the relationship between the two is defined. Possible topics include: defining the posthuman through literature; the use of technology to define the human and its other in a specific author or genre; the possibility of developing a critical theory of technology or an ethics of technology vis-?-vis the human, its other, and obligations to preserve what it means to be human or an obligation to the other; the use of religious rituals, tropes or imagery to restrain, encourage, and determine the morality of scientific and technological development and the depiction of what it means to be human/posthuman. The list of accepted seminars for the 2006 Annual Meeting has been posted (go to the paper proposal form; go to the Seminars) and individual paper proposals are now being accepted. The conference is organized primarily into seminars (or "streams"), which consist either of twelve papers, if they meet on all three days of the conference, or eight to nine papers, if they meet on two days. Papers should be 15-20 minutes long-no longer-to allow time for discussion. To propose a paper, first consult the list of accepted seminar proposals. If you find a topic there that fits your paper, select that seminar when you fill out the paper proposal submission form. If you do not find a seminar topic that fits your paper, you may propose your paper for the general pool, out of which additional seminars are likely to be formed. Paper proposals are 250 words, max. Proposals are due no later than November 30th. Paper proposals can be submitted through the ACLA 2006 website (http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/). If you have any questions about this particular seminar, contact the seminar organizer at benkos at meredith.edu. ------------------------------ After the Post-Human, Beyond the 'Cyborg Manifesto' Seminar Organizer(s): Katherine Arens, U of Texas at Austin This seminar (an open call) seeks papers treating texts representing forms of "the human" that do not rest on the too-simple dialectic of "human"/ "other" or "human"/"non-/post-/in-human" privileged by today's scholars (relying respectively on Lacan, Haraway, Haynes, and Lyotard). Such too-simple differences reify concepts of the subject, identity, and agency to privilege Western images of individuality, naturalizing a humanist fallacy and privileging the victim/perpetrator dialectic. Moreover, conceptualizing the human as a binary (or even as staging multiple binaries) establishes "the human" as a necessary reference point for any theoretical investigation, an assumption to be contested as reifying potential critical epistemologies into a weak liberalism and occluding alternate theorizations of the epistemological and real politics inherent in post-industrial, globalized world of information societies. This seminar thus challenges the politics of the personal as limiting critical consciousness. Topics might include, but are not restricted to: networked rationalities; multitude; the masses; collective mind; rhizomes; the noosphere; organs without bodies (and without cyborgs); communities; hives; collectives; archives; families; matrices; webs (electronic and otherwise); pods; clones; virtual communities. Contributions sought which draw theoretical reference points beyond the boundaries of western humanism to include underrepresented media, groups, and other social, economic, artistic, media, praxiological, or epistemological units. Preference will be given to papers that pay clear attention to theoretical points of view while exemplifying what is at stake by reference to specific texts, genres, or media - to papers that unite theory and praxis. -------------------------------- Avant-Garde Androids Ruben Gallo, Princeton University This seminar will explore the transformations of the human body imagined by the various avant-gardes during the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a period in which the celebration of technology transformed our understanding of the human: the typewriter transformed women into writing machines; radio stripped listeners of all senses except one and electrified their hearing; the camera became a prosthetic eye through which the modern world could be seen in a radically new light; modern architecture introduced new possibilities of moving through space. In short, modernity turned human bodies into technologically-determined androids: all senses were now mechanized and the modern world was perceived through a series of equally modern prosthetic devices. This seminar welcomes paper proposals examining the various androids imagined by the avant-gardes: from the surrealist plot to transform authors into automatic writing machines to the futurist design to accelerate hu man movement. How were mechanical inventions recorded on the human body? What effects did radio, film, the gramophone, dictaphones, cameras, automobiles and airplanes have on the human body? How were these transformations perceived by various avant-garde groups around the world? ---------------------------------- Cyborgs Old and New Seminar Organizer(s): Stefani Engelstein, University of Missouri; Carsten Strathausen, University of Missouri This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we strive to become what Freud called a "prosthetic god," following the path toward a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke's seventeenth century paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical, and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of the primate order in the animal kingdom. We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be human without losing sight of the past. Is the "cyborg" still a useful term or has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its "proper" (i.e. hybrid) meaning? Are terms like the "post-human" (K. Hayles) or the "symbiont" (G. Longo) any better? --------------------------------- Ecologies of the (Post)human Seminar Organizer(s): William Castro, Northwestern University Generally, this panel seeks to explore the relations between the human or the post-human subject and its ecologies. The panel seeks contributions from humanists and post-humanists on the ecological, ethical, political, social, and/or economic consequences of such conceptions as "the human," "nature," and their variants One of the goals of the panel will be to debate the extent to which such conceptions themselves already form an or multiple ecology/ies; that is to say, the extent to which they already demarcate and/or engender territories of "real" ecological consequence. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following: How do race, gender, and sexuality shape the ecologies of the (post)human? Where do (post)human ecologies end? How are ecologies shaped by representations? How are representations shaped by ecologies? What kinds of ecologies are there? Are there sound ecologies, cinematic ecologies, etc.? Where is the ecology of the (post)human to be situated? What are the ecologies of empire? Are ecologies real? What ecologies? Are there significant differences between human and post-human ecologies? What do ecologies exclude as part of their self-formation? ------------------------------------ Will Any Humanism Be Possible? Seminar Organizer(s): Antonio A. Garcia, University of Houston-Downtown The term "humanism" has a vexed history, yet one that will not die. Many scholars speak in "post-human" terms, rejecting any concept of humanism on the grounds that the term masks negative agendas and repressive ideas. Yet many others find that they need to hold on to some, perhaps vitiated, concept of humanism, often for political reasons. For example, Edward Said, shortly before he died, wrote a book about humanism. Will any humanism be possible in the future? From this central question a range of questions could emerge. Humanism has been associated with technological and historical progress. Will it continue to be viewed this way? Is humanism possible in the future without progress? Will future humanism(s) hold on to some of the precepts of the humanist tradition, or will it take a different turn entirely, or will it exist at all? Will future humanism(s) be anchored in a tension between religion and secular culture, or is there a way to destabilize such binaries? How do we understand a synthetic approach to diverse cultures after postcolonial critiques to approach a form of global humanism? What are the effects of diasporic phenomena on humanism? Papers are welcome from a variety of critical approaches: Philosophy, Social Theory, Literary Studies, Psychology, Interdisciplinary Studies. ------------------------------ The Animal in a Post-Humanist World Seminar Organizer(s): Kari Weil, CCA What is the function of the animal in a post-humanist world? From Donna Haraway's "Companion Speicies Manifesto", to Steve Baker's discussion of contemporary animal art in "The Post-Modern Animal," to the philosophical ponderings on man and animal by Derrida and Agamben, the question of the animal has been foregrounded as a theoretical question for our times. In the aftermath of what has been seen as a "crisis in humanism" and the insufficiency if not impossibility of the human as promoted by the humanist enterprise, the arts and humanities have made a turn to the animal as a means of both exposing and shoring up human deficiencies especially the deficiencies of our language if not our ways of knowing. The term, "the animal," Derrida reminds us, is itself a construct of a humanist world that posed this impossible, singular identity to oppose and define the identity of the human. Humanism, as Agamben also reminds us, judged itself and its progress in terms of a mastery over "the animal" and the distance "the human" traveled from an animal state. Are these claims justified and sufficient? This panel will consider both the status of the animal for humanism, and the animals ( or Derrida's animot) that might replace the construct of the animal in a post-humanist world. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 14 23:21:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:21:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Pastor Electrocuted During Baptism -- Where was God? Message-ID: Pastor Electrocuted During Baptism -- Where was God? Oct 30, 2005, 7:18 PM US/Eastern [Thanks to Laird for this.] WACO, Texas A pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his church Sunday morning after grabbing a microphone while partially submerged, a church employee said. The Rev. Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in water up to his shoulder in a baptismal at University Baptist Church when he was electrocuted, said Jamie Dudley, a church business administrator and wife of another pastor there. Doctors in the congregation performed chest compressions for 40 minutes before Lake was taken to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, Dudley said. Police said they weren't called and the hospital referred calls to the church. The woman Lake was baptizing was not injured, Dudley said. Pastors at University Baptist Church routinely use a microphone during baptisms, Dudley said. "He was grabbing the microphone so everyone could hear," Dudley said. "It's the only way you can be loud enough." About 800 people attended the morning service, which was larger than normal because it was homecoming weekend at nearby Baylor University, Dudley said. Lake, who had a wife and three children, had been at the church for nine years, the last seven as pastor, Dudley said. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Nov 15 00:01:48 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:01:48 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Pastor Electrocuted During Baptism -- Where wasGod? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: God was in the machine that day :-) -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Premise Checker Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 3:21 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Pastor Electrocuted During Baptism -- Where wasGod? Pastor Electrocuted During Baptism -- Where was God? Oct 30, 2005, 7:18 PM US/Eastern [Thanks to Laird for this.] WACO, Texas A pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his church Sunday morning after grabbing a microphone while partially submerged, a church employee said. The Rev. Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in water up to his shoulder in a baptismal at University Baptist Church when he was electrocuted, said Jamie Dudley, a church business administrator and wife of another pastor there. Doctors in the congregation performed chest compressions for 40 minutes before Lake was taken to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, Dudley said. Police said they weren't called and the hospital referred calls to the church. The woman Lake was baptizing was not injured, Dudley said. Pastors at University Baptist Church routinely use a microphone during baptisms, Dudley said. "He was grabbing the microphone so everyone could hear," Dudley said. "It's the only way you can be loud enough." About 800 people attended the morning service, which was larger than normal because it was homecoming weekend at nearby Baylor University, Dudley said. Lake, who had a wife and three children, had been at the church for nine years, the last seven as pastor, Dudley said. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Nov 15 00:08:58 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:08:58 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Creativity Special (thoughts on group thinking) In-Reply-To: <4378AA8C.6000008@aol.com> Message-ID: Back in the 60's I read "Applied Imagination" by Alec Osborne. Since then I feel that I have developed creativity as a power- an ability to reach into the void and get ideas. Steve Hovland -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Todd I. Stark Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 7:18 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NS: Creativity Special (thoughts on group thinking) One of the most interesting points I took away from this issue of NS was the finding they reported regarding "brainstorming." This is usually proposed in business as a group dynamic, where people's ideas are assumed to trigger other ideas from other people. From experience, I've found this to be largely untrue. Whenever the issue is one that is important to people, they can't seem to avoid censoring themselves and each other rather than triggering creative new combinations. The theory that people can "think together" just doesn't seem to pan out under most conditions, except where the "thinking" is a very primitive form of mob coordination. But that is just my limited experience. One of the articles mentioned that brainstorming has also been found experimentally to work better when people come up with ideas individually first and then get together to evaluate them. Other research shows that groups tend to make slightly better decisions than the average decision maker in the group, but worse than the best decision maker in the group. So working closely with other people in making decisions seems to bring us down roughly to the group average. Not exactly the ideal of "synergy" that we would like to strive for. I suspect this is right, because the creative process occurs more within individual minds than within the communication media we use. A similar misconception occurs in business in "knowledge management." In our zeal to represent knowledge by using external networks we lose track of how sophisticated and different the network of knowledge *within* the human mind really is. Groups can certainly share _information_, but knowledge is really still within individuals rather than being anything stored externally at this point. Network properties are interesting but networks in an animal brain are of a qualitatively different sort than those that we use to connect ourselves together. It's hard enough to get people to talk to each other openly, much less "collaborate" more efficiently through the use of information technology. The better we connect ourselves, the less we seem to think as individuals, so we often and perhaps often rightly resist group processes that supposedly improve on individual thinking. kind regards, Todd _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Nov 15 00:18:16 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:18:16 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] deregulation and culture rot In-Reply-To: <20051114200902.62248.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Gas price gouging is the most recent example of bad behavior by the unregulated. A few years ago California was raped by the electric utilities. The "health care" industry is the largest perpetrator of gouging at the present time. Someone made a lot of money shorting stocks on 911, but the SEC has not investigated. We need regulation for the same reason we need cops: there is a percentage of people who will take advantage if they aren't controlled. Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael Christopher Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 12:09 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] deregulation and culture rot Steve says: >>The whole process of deregulation has turned the economy into a playground for white collar criminals. The decent people are still out there, but corporations overall have become a parasite on our society.<< --I'm not sure if that's a product of deregulation, rather I'm wondering if our entire culture, corporate and non-corporate, has eroded to the point where guilt is dismissed automatically and where criticism is habitually deflected. I've seen that tendency in people at various levels of the social hierarchy, and it's by no means confined to corporate culture. Deregulation may be a symptom, but I'm not sure it's the cause. When responsibility is denied at all levels, it will inevitably be more noticeable in groups that have a great deal of power and influence, but it might be a mistake to blame the powerful alone. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Nov 15 19:34:04 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 11:34:04 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business In-Reply-To: <200511151900.jAFJ0Oe17970@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051115193404.21808.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Frank says: >>But how did it come to pass that "greedy psychotics" took over the business world?<< --If it's true that sociopaths have had an advantage in any field, it would likely have been due to an ability to "play the game" better, to manipulate social networks more effectively than those who concentrated on ability or ethics. And strategies that get results tend to spread throughout a culture, regardless of whether those strategies are ecological or predatory. If it undermines long term stability, that's just the outcome of everyone's short term decisions. >>More seriously, what is there about the *current* rules of business that result in "greedy psychotics" taking over? Have the rules changed? Has the supply of "greedy psychotics" increased? If so, why?<< --It's possible that sociopaths eventually learn to exploit *any* social system, if everyone else falls asleep or is too busy focusing on personal advantage. Perhaps sociopaths exploit everyone else's minor flaws. It may not be the official rules that are the problem, but rather the unofficial culture, the web of personal connections and communication styles. As I said, I have no reason to believe the problem is confined to business, since I've seen groups with little power or money fall under the same spell. >>I urge you to always think about processes and the rules governing those processes.<< --Good advice. The faces change, but the underlying processes remain. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Nov 15 23:41:41 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:41:41 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business In-Reply-To: <20051115193404.21808.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I can't remember the name of the book, but some time ago some people wrote a book claiming that our child- rearing practices were creating an increased number of sociopaths- empathy impaired. When I think about children killing children these days, I think they were right. So I think the supply has changed and the rules have chained as well. Those of us who don't like Bush may want to reflect on the idea that he represents a composite portrait of the American psyche. Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael Christopher Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 11:34 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business Frank says: >>But how did it come to pass that "greedy psychotics" took over the business world?<< --If it's true that sociopaths have had an advantage in any field, it would likely have been due to an ability to "play the game" better, to manipulate social networks more effectively than those who concentrated on ability or ethics. And strategies that get results tend to spread throughout a culture, regardless of whether those strategies are ecological or predatory. If it undermines long term stability, that's just the outcome of everyone's short term decisions. >>More seriously, what is there about the *current* rules of business that result in "greedy psychotics" taking over? Have the rules changed? Has the supply of "greedy psychotics" increased? If so, why?<< --It's possible that sociopaths eventually learn to exploit *any* social system, if everyone else falls asleep or is too busy focusing on personal advantage. Perhaps sociopaths exploit everyone else's minor flaws. It may not be the official rules that are the problem, but rather the unofficial culture, the web of personal connections and communication styles. As I said, I have no reason to believe the problem is confined to business, since I've seen groups with little power or money fall under the same spell. >>I urge you to always think about processes and the rules governing those processes.<< --Good advice. The faces change, but the underlying processes remain. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Nov 15 15:05:54 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 07:05:54 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] War criminals Message-ID: <431902.1132067154921.JavaMail.root@mswamui-cedar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Congress War Criminal.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 89984 bytes Desc: not available URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Wed Nov 16 15:08:04 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:08:04 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <437B4B54.9080207@aol.com> Frank posted this article a while back, it seems relevant to the current discussion since it offers a rationale for how and when psychopaths influence culture. Todd --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Evil lurks at the top? MD urges screening CEOs for psychopaths http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoNews/ts.ts-08-29-0014.html Thursday, August 29, 2002 By ALAN CAIRNS, TORONTO SUN ST.JOHN'S, Nfld. -- A leading expert on psychopaths said the heartbreak, chaos and economic slump caused by corporate corruption could be avoided if prospective CEOs were screened for psychopathy. Saying he was ill at ease with many of North America's top executives who are currently under fire for misleading shareholders and milking hundreds of millions of dollars in company cash, Dr. Robert Hare said corporate North America is likely rife with psychopaths. Hare, whose psychopathic checklist diagnostic tool is used around the world, said ruthless psychopaths who have managed to hide their true nature because of a privileged upbringing can commit their crimes with impunity in the business world. THEY FIT THE MOULD While he stressed that many thieves and fraud artists are not psychopaths, Hare said when executives take hundreds of millions of other people's cash "blatantly and with malicious forethought" they fit the psychopathic mould. "Many people will lose their life savings. Some will have heart attacks, commit suicide. If they are not psychopaths, they sure as hell are not model citizens," he said. Hare said psychopaths typically "eat up" interviewers and head hunters who scrutinize CEO candidates. "For your average psychopath, it's no problem at all." He said screening CEOs and financiers who handle millions could be easily done. "You would check into his family background. He is what he is in all domains -- a rule breaker. The rules don't apply." Hare said companies are more at risk in today's tough economy. "That's when the psychopath moves in ... where there is chaos and the rules no longer apply. Enter the psychopath ... saying: I've got the solution." Hare gave the analogy of psychopaths who rise to power whenever there is chaos in political structures, noting African warlords, the former Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. Steve Hovland wrote on 11/15/2005, 6:41 PM: > I can't remember the name of the book, but some time > ago some people wrote a book claiming that our child- > rearing practices were creating an increased number > of sociopaths- empathy impaired. When I think about > children killing children these days, I think they > were right. > > So I think the supply has changed and the rules > have chained as well. Those of us who don't like > Bush may want to reflect on the idea that he > represents a composite portrait of the American > psyche. > > Steve > > > -----Original Message----- > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael > Christopher > Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 11:34 AM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business > > > > Frank says: > >>But how did it come to pass that "greedy > psychotics" took over the business world?<< > > --If it's true that sociopaths have had an advantage > in any field, it would likely have been due to an > ability to "play the game" better, to manipulate > social networks more effectively than those who > concentrated on ability or ethics. And strategies that > get results tend to spread throughout a culture, > regardless of whether those strategies are ecological > or predatory. If it undermines long term stability, > that's just the outcome of everyone's short term > decisions. > > >>More seriously, what is there about the > *current* rules of business that result in "greedy > psychotics" taking over? Have the rules changed? Has > the supply of "greedy psychotics" increased? If so, > why?<< > > --It's possible that sociopaths eventually learn to > exploit *any* social system, if everyone else falls > asleep or is too busy focusing on personal advantage. > Perhaps sociopaths exploit everyone else's minor > flaws. It may not be the official rules that are the > problem, but rather the unofficial culture, the web of > personal connections and communication styles. As I > said, I have no reason to believe the problem is > confined to business, since I've seen groups with > little power or money fall under the same spell. > > >>I urge you to always think about processes and > the rules governing those processes.<< > > --Good advice. The faces change, but the underlying > processes remain. > > Michael > > > > > __________________________________ > Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 > http://mail.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Nov 16 18:34:26 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:34:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business In-Reply-To: <437B4B54.9080207@aol.com> References: <437B4B54.9080207@aol.com> Message-ID: <437B7BB2.8030909@earthlink.net> For those interested in Dr. Robert Hare's psychopathic checklist might find this link of interest: http://www.hare.org/pclr/index.html Regards, Gerry Reinhart-Waller Todd I. Stark wrote: >Frank posted this article a while back, it seems relevant to the current >discussion since it offers a rationale for how and when psychopaths >influence culture. > >Todd > >--------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Evil lurks at the top? MD urges screening CEOs for psychopaths >http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoNews/ts.ts-08-29-0014.html >Thursday, August 29, 2002 > >By ALAN CAIRNS, TORONTO SUN > >ST.JOHN'S, Nfld. -- A leading expert on psychopaths said the >heartbreak, chaos and economic slump caused by corporate corruption >could be avoided if prospective CEOs were screened for psychopathy. > >Saying he was ill at ease with many of North America's top executives >who are currently under fire for misleading shareholders and milking >hundreds of millions of dollars in company cash, Dr. Robert Hare said >corporate North America is likely rife with psychopaths. > >Hare, whose psychopathic checklist diagnostic tool is used around the >world, said ruthless psychopaths who have managed to hide their true >nature because of a privileged upbringing can commit their crimes with >impunity in the business world. > >THEY FIT THE MOULD > >While he stressed that many thieves and fraud artists are not >psychopaths, Hare said when executives take hundreds of millions of >other people's cash "blatantly and with malicious forethought" they >fit the psychopathic mould. > >"Many people will lose their life savings. Some will have heart >attacks, commit suicide. If they are not psychopaths, they sure as >hell are not model citizens," he said. > >Hare said psychopaths typically "eat up" interviewers and head hunters >who scrutinize CEO candidates. > >"For your average psychopath, it's no problem at all." > >He said screening CEOs and financiers who handle millions could be >easily done. > >"You would check into his family background. He is what he is in all >domains -- a rule breaker. The rules don't apply." > >Hare said companies are more at risk in today's tough economy. > >"That's when the psychopath moves in ... where there is chaos and the >rules no longer apply. Enter the psychopath ... saying: I've got the >solution." > >Hare gave the analogy of psychopaths who rise to power whenever there >is chaos in political structures, noting African warlords, the former >Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. > > > > > > >Steve Hovland wrote on 11/15/2005, 6:41 PM: > > > I can't remember the name of the book, but some time > > ago some people wrote a book claiming that our child- > > rearing practices were creating an increased number > > of sociopaths- empathy impaired. When I think about > > children killing children these days, I think they > > were right. > > > > So I think the supply has changed and the rules > > have chained as well. Those of us who don't like > > Bush may want to reflect on the idea that he > > represents a composite portrait of the American > > psyche. > > > > Steve > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael > > Christopher > > Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 11:34 AM > > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business > > > > > > > > Frank says: > > >>But how did it come to pass that "greedy > > psychotics" took over the business world?<< > > > > --If it's true that sociopaths have had an advantage > > in any field, it would likely have been due to an > > ability to "play the game" better, to manipulate > > social networks more effectively than those who > > concentrated on ability or ethics. And strategies that > > get results tend to spread throughout a culture, > > regardless of whether those strategies are ecological > > or predatory. If it undermines long term stability, > > that's just the outcome of everyone's short term > > decisions. > > > > >>More seriously, what is there about the > > *current* rules of business that result in "greedy > > psychotics" taking over? Have the rules changed? Has > > the supply of "greedy psychotics" increased? If so, > > why?<< > > > > --It's possible that sociopaths eventually learn to > > exploit *any* social system, if everyone else falls > > asleep or is too busy focusing on personal advantage. > > Perhaps sociopaths exploit everyone else's minor > > flaws. It may not be the official rules that are the > > problem, but rather the unofficial culture, the web of > > personal connections and communication styles. As I > > said, I have no reason to believe the problem is > > confined to business, since I've seen groups with > > little power or money fall under the same spell. > > > > >>I urge you to always think about processes and > > the rules governing those processes.<< > > > > --Good advice. The faces change, but the underlying > > processes remain. > > > > Michael > > > > > > > > > > __________________________________ > > Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 > > http://mail.yahoo.com > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Nov 16 19:38:14 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:38:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths In-Reply-To: <200511161900.jAGJ0Ve09428@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051116193814.6961.qmail@web30812.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Steve says >>I can't remember the name of the book, but some time ago some people wrote a book claiming that our child-rearing practices were creating an increased number of sociopaths- empathy impaired. When I think about children killing children these days, I think they were right.<< --No doubt single mothers who are depressed or have frequent mood swings will produce kids who develop immunity to empathy as a survival skill. Without other adults to provide refuge for the child, any emotional imbalance in the mother would be especially difficult for the child to live through without damage. Sociopaths may also be created by a climate of intense social competition, in which those who are more sensitive simply fall to the bottom, unable to exploit group dynamics to their advantage. In that case, sociopaths wouldn't necessarily increase in number, but only in influence. If the "game" is stacked so that those who exploit others have an advantage, many would appear to be sociopathic who are merely adapting. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:39:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:39:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Postrel: Yes, Immigration May Lift Wages Message-ID: Yes, Immigration May Lift Wages http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/business/03scene.html [I'll be checking the Times for responses.] Economic Scene By VIRGINIA POSTREL FROM 1990 to 2000, the number of people working in the United States grew by more than nine million, or around 8 percent, from immigration alone. What effect did all those new foreign-born workers have on the wages of native-born Americans? The answer seems obvious at first. An increase in the supply of workers should push down wages, just as a bumper crop of wheat drives down wheat prices. That is exactly what some influential economic studies, notably by George J. Borjas at Harvard, have found. In a 2003 article, for instance, Professor Borjas calculated that immigrants had depressed the average wage of American-born workers by about 3 percent in the 1990's. But workers are not as uniform as wheat, and 10 years is a long time - long enough for employers to invest in new production and take on more workers. The model of surging supply meeting fixed demand is not realistic. As economists know all too well, changing the assumptions of a model can often change the results. In a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, two other economists using methodology similar to Professor Borjas's but different assumptions get the opposite result. In "Rethinking the Gains From Immigration: Theory and Evidence From the U.S.," Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano of the University of Bologna and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis estimate that immigration in the 1990's increased the average wage of American-born workers by 2.7 percent. (The paper is available at www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gperi.) Although it still relies on a highly stylized model of the economy, their paper adds two complexities that bring it closer to reality. First, the two economists assume that businesses can make additional capital investments to take advantage of the expanded supply of workers. Companies may open new restaurants or stores, add new factory lines or build more houses. In their model, as in the real world, "investment adjusts not to keep fixed the amount of capital but to keep fixed the return to capital," Professor Peri said. As long as businesses can profitably add new production, they hire more workers, and wages do not necessarily go down. Instead, he said, "more workers means more business." As businesses expand, hiring foreign-born workers to do one job may also require hiring more native-born workers with complementary skills. Immigrant engineers, for instance, may create demand for native-born patent lawyers and marketing executives. That is the paper's second refinement. It assumes that immigrants do not always compete for the same jobs as American-born workers. The two groups are not "perfect substitutes," even when they have similar education and the same occupation. A Chinese cook is not the same as a Texas barbecue chef. Immigrants often bring different skills to the American labor force, and concentrate on different occupations from natives. Among high school dropouts, the paper notes, the "foreign-born are highly overrepresented in professions like tailors (54 percent were foreign-born in 2000) and plaster-stucco masons (44 percent were foreign-born in 2000)." By contrast, American-born workers make up more than 99 percent of all crane operators and sewer-pipe cleaners. The same is true at the highest educational levels, where foreign-born college graduates make up 44 percent of all medical scientists but only 4 percent of lawyers. (Immigrants tend to be concentrated at the highest and lowest levels of income and education.) Immigrants do, of course, compete to some extent with native-born workers. The question is how much. To measure wage competition, the economists looked at how much an increase in the number of foreign-born workers affects the wages of other foreign-born workers versus American-born workers with the same educational background. If the groups were perfect substitutes, the change would be the same. But there is a difference. When the number of immigrant college graduates goes up by 4 percent, their wages drop by 1 percent more than the wages of native-born college graduates. Immigrants, in other words, compete more with each other than with American-born workers. Professors Ottaviano and Peri find that recent immigration has had the most negative effects on the least educated. Immigration in the 1990's, they estimate, raised the wages of native-born high school graduates, college dropouts and college graduates by at least 2.5 percent. By contrast, they estimate that the wages of American-born high school dropouts fell by 2.4 percent because of immigration. In an interview, however, Professor Peri noted that Americans are increasingly well educated, so that high school dropouts make up a small, rapidly declining portion of today's native-born work force. In 2000, he said, only 9 percent of American-born workers did not have a high school degree. "If you look at the U.S. labor force," he said, "those people born in the U.S., I am talking about a negative effect for about 9 percent of the population and a positive effect for 91 percent of the population." Virginia Postrel (dynamist.com) is the author of "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness." From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:39:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:39:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Marginal Revolution: Sex on the Margin Message-ID: Sex on the Margin http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/11/sex_on_the_marg.html Sexual preferences are primarily biological in origin. But sexual choice is about preferences and constraints. Raise the price of sex with women and more men will choose to have sex with other men - that's what happens in prisons. In a [97]remarkable paper, Andrew Francis (a graduate student at the University of Chicago) examines how AIDS has changed sexual choice. With admirable precision, Francis lays out the price of sex: ...it is thousands of times more likely that a male would get HIV having sex with a man than having sex with a woman. In terms of AIDS-related mortality, the expected cost of having unprotected sex once with a man is almost $2000, while the expected cost of having unprotected sex once with a woman is less than a dollar. Thus AIDS changes the price of sex, do we observe changes in choice? Francis wants to be careful about causality so he uses a clever instrumental variables approach. He reasons that knowledge of AIDS and thus responsiveness to price is correlated with knowing someone who has AIDS and that knowing someone who has AIDS is exogeneous to other factors influencing sexuality. Unfortunately, it appears that he only has information on whether a relative has AIDS and genetic factors mean exogeneity is unlikely to hold. In fact, we would probably expect that simply knowing someone with AIDS is positively correlated with being homosexual (especially in 1992 when the survey was taken). Indeed, Francis finds, as expected, that women who have a relative with AIDS are more likely to be engage in homosexual acts and identify as being homosexual. But Francis finds that men who have a relative with AIDS are significantly less likely to: ...have had sex with a man during the last sexual event...have had a male sexual partner in the last year... say they are sexually attracted to men...rate having sex with someone of the same gender as appealing...[or] think of themselves as homosexual or bisexual. The tendency to greater homosexuality among women and less among men is exactly what the economic theory predicts given how AIDS affects the price of sex. Genetic and social factors will have greater difficulty resolving this bifurcation so I think Francis has the upper-hand on the argument, although there may be counter-arguments based on the [98]gay-uncle theory). Importantly, note also that Francis finds that not only is sexual choice malleable, as the prison story I opened with suggests, but so are sexual desire and identity. At least on the margin! (A point that non-economists are likely to miss.) Thanks to Emily Oster for the pointer. 97. http://home.uchicago.edu/~afrancis/research/Economics_of_Sexuality.pdf From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:39:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:39:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: Fast Times at Brooksby High Message-ID: Fast Times at Brooksby High http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/10/30/fast_times_at_brooksby_high/ [Click the URL for pictures. It's been said that as we get older, we run through the stages of life backward, winding up a helpless infants. This article is about regression to high school in retirement communities. I went to an all-male boarding school and missed out on the co-educational public high school of my time. And UVa was all male, in undergraduate arts and sciences, too. My regression would be to recreate the living scene there, with wives instead of male roommates. There's a lot to be said for paring down one's possessions to fit into a dorm room! UVa has a superb library, so no great need for books. And 64 CDs can be squeezed onto a single DVD, using MP3 compression. What's brand new would be just this computer. It would replace a typewriter and a high-fi system. The great thing about dorm live was no teevee. Except for being home during the Summer, my life was without teevee, from the Fall of 1958 until I broke down and got one for the children in 1992, when they were 16 and 14, resp. (They have repeated expressed gratitude for my banning teevee from the house. Neighbors were either appalled or praised me for my courage.) So from the Twilight Zone until the last year of L.A. Law, I have largely missed the teevee experience. Alas, a teevee tuner for a computer can be had for $100 or so.] Village People With 2 million Massachusetts baby boomers set to turn 55 between now and 2020, sprawling retirement complexes are cropping up all over. Spend time inside one of these places and you'll see laughter and tears, romance and cliques - and complaints about the chocolate pudding. You may also see your future. By Neil Swidey | October 30, 2005 MIDWAY THROUGH THE FRIDAY morning rehearsal, the 72-year-old woman who plays Carlotta, the melodrama's siren, is trying to avoid a future wardrobe malfunction. "I need my fishnet stockings in a plus size," she says, fire-red lipstick framing her warm smile. The music director, a serious woman with a serious hairdo, decided to update this production of Love Rides the Rails, which is set in the late 1800s, with some contemporary tunes, including "Live and Let Die" by that boy from the Beatles. She is chiding the chorus of ladies with cardigans draped over their shoulders for coming in too late on the refrain. The 91-year-old who plays Dirk, the scoundrel, can dance like moonlight on water, but he is having some difficulty remembering his dastardly lines. So the director conspires to hide a cheat sheet in a folded newspaper he can carry on stage. Watching from the audience, smiling broadly as she takes it all in, is 76-year-old Eugenia Lomas, retired florist and current producer. Love Rides the Rails is the first full-scale theater production in the history of Brooksby Village, a retirement community made up of 10 beige-and-brick apartment buildings arrayed around a man-made pond behind the Wal-Mart on the Peabody-Danvers line. In five years, Brooksby has grown to 1,400 residents, who are all 62 or older. The state Legislature just designated it as a voting sub-precinct. Over the next two years, the population should top 2,000. Brooksby's growth mirrors the quiet explosion in Massachusetts of housing complexes for older people. There are an estimated 150,000 units of age-restricted housing in Massachusetts, in everything from retirement communities and "55-plus active adult" developments to assisted living centers and nursing homes. At least another 20,000 units are in the planning stages. Developers are cashing in on the graying of the state's population, while towns are green-lighting new housing that they hope won't require them to build new schools. And much more gray is on the way. Over the next 15 years, nearly 2 million Massachusetts baby boomers will turn 55, and the over-65 population will grow by 35 percent. The construction boom is unmistakable. Less obvious is the new subculture it's creating. For all its size, Brooksby can sometimes feel as cozy as a cul-de-sac. No one walks by you without saying hello, and gossip courses through the corridors far more quickly than its fleet of 5-mile-per-hour electric wheelchairs. Two months before its premiere, Love Rides the Rails is big news at Brooksby. "With so much talk of pills and illness, it's good to have something for people to get excited about," says Eugenia, an elegant woman who stands 5 feet 1 inch tall and has dark eyes and light-brown hair. It's not the first time that something she has been involved in has dominated the nightly discussion in Brooksby's dining rooms. But Eugenia is relieved that this time the table talk has nothing to do with her love life. She came to Brooksby four years ago for the same reasons many of the other residents made the move. She'd lost a spouse and grown tired of trying to maintain a big empty house. She was concerned about her own health and was determined not to become a burden on her children. She'd seen the value of her North Shore home appreciate beyond anything she could have imagined, and knew the proceeds from its sale could comfortably cover the price of admission and monthly maintenance costs at Brooksby for a long time. Still, the transition was painful. Eugenia's first month here was full of tears. "I was grieving my old life," she says. Then she decided to start a new one. She taught a flower-arranging class. In time, she founded the theater group, got involved with the committee designing a stained glass window for the interfaith chapel, and started hosting a Martha Stewart-style show on Channel 9, Brooksby's in-house TV station. Along the way, she found love. "When I go out to the mall, I feel like an old lady," she says. "In here, I feel very young and very vibrant, and very necessary." As the Rails rehearsal chugs along, Eugenia talks about her first kiss with the retired lobsterman Jack Mahoney. "When you're this age and a man holds you in his arms and kisses you, it's really shocking. I nearly fainted." Quickly, they became, in the language of Brooksby, an item. Eugenia was amazed to discover that she began feeling like a teenager all over again, wondering, "How should I act? How should I look?" More amazing, she noticed how everyone around her was behaving like teenagers, too. When she and Jack walked into the dining room, they could feel the eyes on them. When they got engaged, she heard all the chitchat about the size of her very large diamond. "And when we had a tiff," she says, "the whole place knew." She learned what eventually becomes clear to most people living in a retirement community but what few outside its gates would ever suspect. The social dynamics are nothing like what people were used to in the neighborhoods and workplaces where they spent most of their years, yet strangely familiar. Life in a retirement community is a lot like being back in high school. But more than two years later, the full force of the parallel emerged when Eugenia and Jack broke off their engagement. Sprawling Brooksby suddenly felt uncomfortably small. JOAN CARR, BROOKSBY'S 53-YEAR-OLD executive director, travels one of the enclosed, climate-controlled walkways that connect all of the complex's buildings. She walks past the music room, past the exercise room and pool, past the woodworking shop, where the smell of pine shavings transports you right back to the ninth grade. Or, in her case, back to her last career. Before running a retirement community, she spent nearly eight years as principal of Peabody's high school. She finds plenty of similarities between the two jobs. The politics of dining-hall seating. The jockeying of competing activities. The romance in the hallways. (Most of it is less explicit than the lip-locking in high school, though people around Brooksby do like to talk about the now deceased ex-Marine who, in public view, would let his hands wander up his elderly girlfriend's sweater.) "You see a lot of the cliques happening," she says, "the `in' group and the `out' group." All those familiar archetypes from high school are still around her. The "most popular" and the outcasts, the doers and the complainers. Yet the values are different here. In high school, popularity has always been almost entirely a function of appearance and athletic ability. At Brooksby, the most popular residents are the people who make life better for everyone else. Take Joan Pappalardo, the "Carlotta" with the fishnet stockings. The warm-hearted retired nurse from Medford runs a weekly karaoke night and has a knack for drawing the wallflowers out of their seats. After her last birthday was announced on Channel 9, she received 50 cards. When most people hear "retirement community," they think of overheated places with underfed faces, people in bathrobes shuffling to the cafeteria to nibble on saltines and drink diet ginger ale out of bent straws. But Brooksby is no nursing home. Although it has a skilled nursing facility tucked into the back of the complex, most residents have their own apartments in a setting called "independent living." They spend their days in structured recreation, whether that's feeding their lifelong mah-jongg habit or joining the theater group and discovering their inner ham. (A recent monthly activity calendar listing resident-driven activities ran 16 single-spaced pages.) At night - and around here, that starts at 4 p.m. - they get dressed up to dine. Despite the proliferation of age-restricted housing, the number of nursing home beds in Massachusetts is actually falling, says Bonnie Heudorfer, author of a recent report by the nonprofit Citizens' Housing and Planning Association. The growth is in retirement communities and the "55-plus active adult" developments. The latter often look like any other new single-family neighborhood except the houses feature master bedroom suites on the first floor and no trikes in the driveway. Heudorfer says many towns are approving these projects based on the belief that they won't require new school spending. In reality, they tend to attract "young seniors" - people 55 to 65 - who might have otherwise grown grayer in their three-bedroom colonials but instead are persuaded to move by the promise of never again having to cut their grass or find a plumber. Who do they sell their old colonials to? Young couples with kids who need to be schooled. Large, well-run retirement communities like Brooksby can make good business sense for the cities that host them, Heudorfer says, because they tend to draw from a wider geographical area, attract an older crowd, and handle many services inhouse rather than relying on the city. The average age of a Brooksby resident is 82. And the complex is now Peabody's second largest taxpayer. Erickson Retirement Communities operates Brooksby and 12 other campuses like it across the country, including Linden Ponds in Hingham, which will eventually have 2,500 residents. Four more communities are in development nationally. The Baltimore-based company, which is now evaluating a site in Andover, plans to triple its roster of complexes in five years. It is capitalizing on reverse migration, where seniors who may have sampled retirement living in Florida decide they want to be closer to their grandchildren in their final years. Erickson and others are bringing Florida to where the old people are. New arrivals face a big lifestyle adjustment. Many flourish. Some founder. Look around Brooksby and you see some people literally waiting to die. You see plenty more being reborn. RICK MOORE AND JOANNE HICKEY sit at a window table in the earth toned Harvest Grille. Rick is a tall, 81-year-old retired banking executive who is bald and speaks in low, measured tones. Joanne is a petite, 75-year-old retired teacher who wears a barrette in her silver hair and decorates her sentences with a throaty laugh. They started sharing meals in the spring, after Rick's wife died following a long illness. As with any pair that dines together two nights in row, they immediately became as talked about as a new dessert option. Rick had no use for the ladies who circled around him after his wife's death, approaching him in the exercise room or calling him to see if he could come by to fix their television set. (At Brooksby, single women outnumber single men by more than 3 to 1.) And Joanne had no use for the Casanovas who tried to get her eye. "I did not come to Brooksby to find a man," she says. Rick laughs. "Well, you blew it." Once they became an item, everything changed. Joanne hadn't been the subject of such gossip since she was a cheerleader at Wakefield High. Ten minutes after they've been seated, the hostess directs another woman to join them. By design, there is no dining alone in Brooksby's restaurants. Every meal is an opportunity to meet someone new. In this case, the woman, 80-year-old Marie Gormalley, had already met Rick and Joanne at Mass in the chapel. After a couple walks by their table, Marie says, "They're an item, right? He really has a high opinion of himself." That brings Marie to her next question. "Hey, how long have you two been an item now?" Joanne puts down her napkin and cocks her head. "You know we're married, don't you, Marie?" "No! Well, I heard rumors." Rick and Joanne had told no one but family before they got hitched at the beginning of the summer. Since then, word had begun to trickle out. Plenty of couples have come together at Brooksby, but they are the first to have married. Marie asks Rick when his first wife had passed. "March 8." "Of 2004? Rick shakes his head. "Two thousand and five." "Oh," she says, putting her salad fork down and sitting back in her seat. "Well, you didn't waste much time, did you?" She picks her fork back up and shrugs. "Then again, we haven't got much time to waste." With that, Marie makes her way up to the buffet. Rick and Joanne follow closely behind. All three say the food at Brooksby is quite good. There are three full-service restaurants - one that is buffet style and two that offer table service with menus - as well as a cafe and a pub. Marie says she's mystified that as good as the food generally is, some people spend so much energy complaining about it. "One of them is sitting right over there," she says, gesturing with her head. Joanne nods knowingly, not even needing to turn around. Asked to point her out in the dining room, Joanne says, "She has white hair and glasses." Then she bursts into laughter. "Well, that really narrows it down, doesn't it?" ELEANOR FERRI JONES IS A 92-year-old, 89-pound force of nature who wears stylish clothes and owlish glasses and tools around campus in her motorized wheelchair. An accomplished artist and unflagging critic, she spends her days creating colorful acrylic paintings of life at Brooksby - which she calls "Elegant Alcatraz" - and firing off complaint letters, primarily to the dining services department. She keeps copies in a bulging folder. In one, she demands to know why she was charged 63 cents for a banana. In another, she calls for a detailed analysis of Brooksby's internal costs for takeout meals versus dining room dinners. Three times, she made chocolate pudding and took it to the chef, who has so far been unwilling to switch to her recipe. When she was suspicious of the 4-ounce filet mignon promised on the menu, she brought along her postal scale to dinner; by her measurement, it weighed in at 2.25 ounces. When the chef sat with residents one night to gather feedback, Eleanor was a willing supplier. As the chicken breast was put before her, she says, "it looked like asbestos and didn't taste any better." She asked the chef, "Would you really serve this to a guest in your own house?" She wasn't surprised to find herself the only aggressive interlocutor at the table. "There was one guy who didn't have a tongue, so he said nothing,'' she recalls. "There were two couples and the men there were just ass-kissers, telling him how wonderful the food was, better than the way their wives cooked. Well, if their wives were good cooks, they should have been insulted." Eleanor stresses that she likes life at Brooksby - especially the bridge games - and many people on the staff. She even persuaded her sister to move in. But she says some people just can't accept her outspokenness. "I'm not a typical Brooksbyite, I'll tell you. They're mostly sheep, and I'm the one that rocks the boat. "DESPITE BROOKSBY'S elaborate setup of welcoming committees and social worker visits and organized activities, some residents never really fit in. Just as in high school, certain people exist on the margins. Instead of having dinner in the restaurants, they start lining up outside the Greentree Cafe around 4 o'clock each afternoon, collecting their takeout and dining alone in their apartments. They generally fall into one of two categories that other Brooksby residents label "the people who waited too long" and "the people who were dropped off." The first arrived after their condition had noticeably begun to slip. If you move in when you're mobile and able to join new activities and make new friends, those contacts help sustain you even if your mobility deteriorates. But if you have trouble getting around at the start, you don't have the opportunity to build your support network. The most content people at Brooksby tend to be those who regularly get off campus, despite the fact that, with a bank, medical center, post office, two convenience stores, three beauty salons, and a host of dining options, you never really have to leave. The "dropped off" category describes people who moved in under pressure from their family. As any fan of The Sopranos knows, an arrangement like that seldom ends well. Unlike Tony's mother, none of the unwilling arrivals to Brooksby has been known to call out hits on their children. But it becomes much harder for them to adopt the right mind-set to enjoy life here. Mind-set is key. The people who really thrive are willing to let go of the past - the identity they spent decades forging through work, family, and community - and view Brooksby as a new adventure. "Everything I've done here, I had never done before in my life," says Ede Kann, a slender 92-year-old fashion plate in multicolored pumps and tapered jeans. The people who spend most of their day talking about what they used to do become a drag on everyone. "We're all old, we're all afflicted with one ailment or another, we're all in the same boat," says Jim Calogero, an 84-year-old retired newsman for the Globe and the Associated Press. "What you did doesn't matter, it's what you do now, and who you are now. And who you are now is one of 1,400 residents." Those who live in the past tend to have trouble getting over the little indignities of life in a retirement community. The way they are expected to wear their name tags, with ID numbers, to dinner. And sign out if they're going to be away overnight. And open and close their doors in the morning to dislodge a little latch that signals to the security guard patrolling the corridors that they're not collapsed on the bathroom floor. But those who really dive in, discovering new talents and interests and even loves, see their world expand in so many ways that they aren't bothered by the other ways in which it is forced to contract. At the September meeting of the Resident Advisory Council, the group's 87-year-old chairman excitedly announces that every apartment would be getting a new dust filter. He proceeds to read the full specifications of the filter. "It has control of mold, mildew, algae, fungi. . . . The adhesive is a fiberbond proprietary chemical formulation. . . ." Many of the 150 residents in the crowd hang on his every word. FOR EUGENIA AND JACK, dating in a fishbowl was never easy. But going through a breakup in one was much harder. Jack grew tired of acquaintances coming up to him and wanting to talk down his ex-fiancee. Eugenia felt it was "like grieving a loss all over again." Still, Eugenia chose to focus on the relationship's upside. "It helped bring back my confidence and my pride to know that I was, even at 76, maybe still a little desirable." Jack, a 77-year-old widower, did the same, saying, "I more or less came alive when I moved in here." After the breakup, they continued to be concerned about each other while respecting each other's privacy. They were able to do that because even though Eugenia lives in the older part of campus, she began spending more of her time in the newer part. In time, Jack found a new love, and became engaged once again. "I'm a guy who needs a lady," he said in September. But he would die just a few weeks later. "Jack was very good to me," says Eugenia. She is taking her time before jumping back into a relationship and the fishbowl. "There are a couple of men here that are interested, but I don't like to start any rumors." WHEN YOU ASK MOST Brooksby residents their age, they're as apt as preschoolers to round up. There's an unmistakable pride in having made it this far. But when it comes to the inevitability of the aging process, people are more circumspect. Brooksby's 10 apartment buildings went up in a progression from one side of campus to the other. Sitting in the oldest clubhouse, 79-year-old Freda Shelan explains it this way: "The people on this side came in five years ago. The ones over there are just moving in, and they don't like this idea of the wheelchairs and the walkers. We didn't have many of those here when we moved in. But five years in an older person's life means a heck of a lot." When activities are held on the old side, Freda says, the new people tend not to come. Then again, when events are held in Brooksby's nursing home, which bears the jarringly sunny name "Renaissance Gardens," residents from both the old and new sides of independent living tend to stay away. No one likes to be reminded of what lies ahead. But, deep down, nobody's fooled, says 82-year-old Dot Stewart. "We all know this is God's waiting room, and anybody who tells you differently is lying. We're all waiting for our first interview." Does living in a retirement community help forestall the final call-up? Brooksby's marketing campaign suggests the answer is yes, though it's a hard notion to quantify with data. Their approach stresses preventive care - Brooksby's medical center has four full-time doctors - and a raft of exercise classes. The fitness room appears to be forever in motion, albeit extremely slow motion. Margery Silver, former associate director of the New England Centenarian Study, says people who live to see 100 tend to be sociable, adaptive, good at managing stress, and active both physically and mentally. The communal, active life in a retirement community can help encourage those qualities, says the 73-year-old neuropsychologist, who for four years has lived in Lasell Village, a retirement community in Newton. Still, death is omnipresent. On any suburban street, word of an elderly neighbor's passing is often buffered by news that another neighbor has just given birth or sent a daughter off to college. At Brooksby, all the life-cycle announcements involve death. Obituaries with photos are posted on the bulletin boards in the main gathering spots. Many residents confess to squinting as they walk by them every morning, hoping not to see a familiar face. That gets to the heart of one of the most unfortunate aspects to retirement-community living: their isolation. Gerontologists have found that intergenerational contact is important to staying young. But aside from visits from their grandchildren, the main intergenerational contact that Brooksby residents have is with the high-school kids who work as waiters in the restaurants. In some areas, notably class, the barriers that exist in much of the outside world break down beautifully here. While most retirement communities skew to the wealthy, and public elderly housing skews to the poor, Brooksby is aimed at the full spectrum of the middle class. In the restaurants each night, you can find former truck drivers dining with emeritus professors. (Depending on the size of their apartments, new independent-living residents are charged a deposit of $179,000 to $466,000 per unit, which is refunded to their estates - without interest - after they die and their units have been resold. That last requirement could pose a financial risk if the retirement housing market becomes overbuilt, though right now, Brooksby units typically resell within 90 days. On top of the entrance deposit are monthly nonrefundable fees of $1,300 to $2,100, not counting extra charges for things like storage, parking spaces, and health care.) In other areas, the divisions of the outside world have managed to replicate themselves behind these gates. Frank and Ruby Walters decided two years ago to move to Brooksby after being impressed by the amenities and the overall value. The charming couple has adjusted nicely to the place, making good friends and settling into a routine. Most nights, they eat early at the newest restaurant, called the Overlook, so Ruby can get her billiards fix after dinner in the nearby game room. But in a complex of 1,400 residents, there's something they still find mystifying. After they had put their money down and prepared to move in, Frank asked someone at Brooksby how many other black people lived here. He was told, "You're it." JOANNE SITS ON THE WHITE sofa in her one-bedroom apartment, while Rick runs upstairs to his. The newly-weds are on a waiting list for a two-bedroom place in their building. Until it opens up, they shuttle between the two, sleeping in his because it has a double bed. When she is asked what Rick's ethnic background is, she scrunches her face up. "I think he's Scottish, maybe Welsh. I'm not sure." Later, when the topic of politics arises, she says, "I think he is a Republican, though I have never asked him outright." When Rick returns, he looks on adoringly, and with evident curiosity, as Joanne tells an anecdote about her earlier life. We all have certain expectations about old married couples, which Rick and Joanne's story subtly calls into question. We expect they should know everything about their spouses. But here is an older married couple for whom discovery is a daily occurrence. And we expect that when a husband loses his spouse and soul mate, it should take him years before he can even think about finding love again. Friends reach for the same word - heroic - when they describe Rick's devotion to his first wife, Pat, during the years when Parkinson's was taking her away. He says it was only possible because of the setup at Brooksby, where residents whose health is failing can move to the assisted living or nursing home units on campus while their spouses can remain in independent living, and stay connected to both worlds. There's something very sensible and humane about this setup. Rick and Joanne met one January evening when a group of people gathered outside the dining room were chatting about a Notre Dame-Boston College basketball game. By then, Pat had been in the nursing home for more than a year, and, as her condition deteriorated, Rick was forced to request hospice care. He spent every day with her. When she died in March, he says, "I pretty much collapsed." The combination of grief and fatigue was so potent that he began to understand why so many elderly widowers retreat into a world of sitting at home alone all day watching TV. But a few weeks after his wife's death, he ran into Joanne and asked her to dinner. They had such a good time that he asked her to join him again the next night. That, of course, triggered the gossip machine. But at that point Rick and Joanne were just enjoying each other's company. They were both surprised when romance blossomed - and by how quickly it happened. Because they are both strict Catholics (Joanne's first marriage was annulled), they knew what they would do. "There was no hanky-panky - none at all," Joanne says. "I would say the temptations were there," Rick says. "Oh, of course. Some people say, `Try before you buy' - not in my world." Four months after his wife died, Rick married Joanne. "A lot of people look and they say, `Only four months and they're married!' " Rick says. "What they don't understand is that it was really a year and four months. My wife really did die for all intents and purposes in '04. It was just sustaining her after that, which became my life." "And he'd been grieving that whole time," Joanne says. "I think anybody with any sense would understand that." But they don't let these problems of perception bother them too much. After all, the Brooksby community that at times makes their relationship complicated is the same one that made it possible. IT'S THE LAST SATURDAY night in September, and Brooksby is decked out for the prom. Actually, it's called the Gala, and there are no wrist corsages or limousines. But there's no mistaking that this is the social event of the year. Hundreds of formally dressed attendees ride in shuttle buses from one side of the campus to the banquet room on the other. Eugenia, wearing a wine-colored two-piece number, arrives early to check on her creations. In addition to producing Love Rides the Rails, which will be staged in the same banquet room, the retired florist had turned out 60 centerpieces capturing the gala's theme of "Shanghai Nights." Eugenia's date - she stresses that they're just friends - is a husky 78-year-old named George Fall. Eventually, they are directed to a table in the corner as a flutist plays the theme from Taxi. The party is also going on upstairs in the Overlook. Residents complained that last year's Gala was too crowded, so organizers decided this time to have dining and dancing on two levels, with two live bands. As she works both rooms, executive director Joan Carr explains why this event is more fun than all those high school proms she oversaw. "I don't have to search corsage boxes and hair-spray bottles for smuggled liquor." Upstairs, a 4-foot-10 woman with reddish hair and a lime-green dress moves to the beat of Sinatra as she makes her way back from the buffet line carrying a full plate. Her name is Lillian Cohen, she is in her 80s, and she wears a smile so wide that you'd think this really is her first prom. She sits long enough to nibble at her food before shaking her way out to the dance floor. Her smile will not fade the whole night. At the table she left, an 84-year-old blonde sits with two friends, keeping a running commentary of the events on the dance floor. "We like to watch to see who's going with who," she says. "We look for rings." And outfits. "I see a lot of `mother-of-the-bride' dresses here tonight." The eight-piece band picks up the tempo, as Sinatra gives way to Donna Summer. Lillian in lime green shows no signs of tiring. "She's so cute," says the blonde, "but she's gonna have a lot of aches tomorrow." Two buffet lines, each staffed with eight teenage servers, are positioned on opposite sides of the dance floor. As the band kicks up the tempo to Tina Turner's "Proud Mary," the kids behind one line start grooving in unison. Across the room, the other line takes the bait, led by a 16-year-old wearing a red Chinese dress and a Vietnamese straw hat that she borrowed from a friend. The competition energizes the crowd on the dance floor, which begins to worry the blonde. "There's going to be a couple of hips dislocated here tonight." During the next song, an elderly woman falls down flat on the dance floor. "I told you," the blonde says. Fortunately, the woman quickly gets back on her feet. As the buffet line dance-off intensifies to "Play That Funky Music (White Boy)," a sterno container under a chafing dish begins to smoke. One of the servers breaks from the dance line to tend to it, but the others keep on rolling. The scene downstairs is far more subdued. People nosh on a bounty of shrimp arranged around a giant dragon ice sculpture. Eugenia loves to dance, and, after George sits down, she smiles and says, "I've got to find another man." She does a spirited Copacabana with the husband of her friend and then a smooth waltz with a man in a white dinner jacket. Just before 11 p.m., the dance floor downstairs is empty except for a pair of actual high-school sweethearts, heavy on the hair gel, slow-dancing in their wait-staff uniforms. "Let's go upstairs," Eugenia tells George. She dances and hums all the way out of the banquet room and into the elevator. A minute later, the elevator opens on the second floor to the sounds of "New York, New York." Eugenia flashes a broad smile as she soaks up the scene. It's 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, and she and hundreds like her are living life. She rushes onto the packed dance floor and is immediately pulled into a kick line. Turning to the woman next to her, she joins the chorus without missing a beat. "I'll make a brand new start of it . . . Neil Swidey is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine. E-mail him at swidey at globe.com. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:40:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:40:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Omega Foundation: An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control Message-ID: An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control http://www.nrc.nl/W2/Lab/Echelon/stoa2sept1998.html#1 [Thanks to Laird for this. Note the date. But remember that Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, was already predicting the coming of the surveillance society. Can anyone report on how far technology has advanced since 1998? The website is in Dutch, and I can't evaluate it for its sanity. But the report, whether written by site members or not, seems sober. [Dossier Codenaam Echelon is given as the header of the document, whatever that means.] An Omega Foundation Summary & Options Report For The European Parliament SEPTEMBER 1998 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2. THE ROLE & FUNCTION OF POLITICAL CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES 3. RECENT TRENDS & INNOVATIONS * 3.1 POLICY OPTIONS 4. INNOVATIONS IN CROWD CONTROL WEAPONS * 4.1 POLICY OPTIONS 5. NEW PRISON CONTROL SYSTEMS * 5.1 POLICY OPTIONS 6. INTERROGATION, TORTURE TECHNIQUES & TECHNOLOGIES * 6.1 POLICY OPTIONS 7. DEVELOPMENTS IN SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY * 7.1 Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Surveillance Networks * 7.2 Algorithmic Surveilance Sysytems * 7.3 Bugging & Tapping Devices * 7.4 National & International Communications Interceptions Networks 7.4.1 NSA INTERCEPTION OF ALL EU TELECOMMUNICATIONS 7.4.2 EU-FBI GLOBAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM 7.5 Policy Options 8. REGULATION OF HORIZONTAL PROLIFERATION * 8.1 POLICY OPTIONS 9. CONCLUSIONS Annex 1 Bibliography AN APPRAISAL OF THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL A SUMMARY & OPTIONS REPORT This report represents a summarised version of an interim study, 'An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control' (PE 166.499), (referred to throughout this document as the Interim Report), prepared by the Omega Foundation in Manchester and presented to the STOA Panel at its meeting of 18 December 1997 and to the Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs on 27 January 1998. The Interim Report aroused great interest and the resultant high-profile press comment throughout the European Union and beyond, indicates the level of public concern about many of the innovations detailed by the study. This current report is framed by the same key objectives as the Interim Report , namely:- (i) To provide Members of the European Parliament with a succinct reference guide to recent advances in the technology of political control; (ii) To identify and describe the current state of the art of the most salient developments, further clarifying and updating the areas of the interim report which have aroused the greatest public concern and comment; (iii) To present MEP's with an account of current trends both within Europe and Worldwide; (iv) To suggest policy options covering regulatory strategies for the future democratic control and management of this technology; (v) To provide some further succinct background material to inform the Parliament's response to the proposed declaration by the Commission on electronic evesdropping which has been put on the agenda for the plenary session of the European Parliament, on Wednesday 16 September 1998. This report also has seven substantive sections covering (a) the role and function of the technologies of political control; (b)recent trends and innovations; (c)crowd control weapons; (d)new prisoner control technology; (e) new interrogation and torture technologies; (f)developments in surveillance technology (including the creation of human recognition and tracking devices and the evolution of new global police and military telecommunications interceptions networks; (g)the implications of vertical and horizontal proliferation of this technology and the need for an adequate EU response, to ensure it neither threatens civil liberties in Europe, nor reaches the hands of tyrants. Thus, the purpose of this report is to explore the most recent developments in the technology of political control and the major consequences associated with their integration into processes and strategies of policing and internal control. The report ends each section with a series of policy options which might facilitate more democratic, open and efficient regulatory control, including specific areas where further research is needed to make such regulatory controls effective. A brief look at the historical development of this concept is instructive. Twenty years ago, the British Society for Social Responsibility of Scientists (BSSRS) warned about the dangers of a new technology of political control. BSSRS defined this technology as "a new type of weaponry"..."It is the product of the application of science and technology to the problem of neutralising the state's internal enemies. It is mainly directed at civilian populations, and is not intended to kill (and only rarely does). It is aimed as much at hearts and minds as at bodies." For these scientists, "This new weaponry ranges from means of monitoring internal dissent to devices for controlling demonstrations; from new techniques of interrogation to methods of prisoner control. The intended and actual effects of these new technological aids are both broader and more complex than the more lethal weaponry they complement." BSSRS recognised that the weapons and systems developed and tested by the USA in Vietnam, and by the UK in its former colonies, were about to be used on the home front and that the military industrial complex would in the future, rapidly modify its military systems for police and internal security use. In other words, a new technology of repression was being spawned which would find a political niche in Western Liberal democracies. The role of this technology was to provide a technical fix which might effectively crush dissent whilst being designed to mask the level of coercion being deployed. With the advent of the Northern Irish conflict, the genie was out of the bottle and a new laboratory for field testing these technologies had emerged. There have been quite awesome changes in the technologies available to states for internal control since the first BSSRS publication. Some of these technologies are highly sensitive politically and without proper regulation can threaten or undermine many of the human rights enshrined in international law, such as the rights of assembly, privacy, due process, freedom of political and cultural expression and protection from torture, arbitrary arrest, cruel and inhumane punishments and extra-judicial execution. Proper oversight of developments in political control technologies is further complicated by the phenomena of 'bureaucratic capture' where senior officials control their ministers rather than the other way round. Politicians both at European and sovereign state level, whom citizens of the community have presumed will be monitoring any excesses or abuse of this technology on their behalf, are sometimes systematically denied the information they require to do that job. 2. THE ROLE & FUNCTION OF POLITICAL CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES Throughout the Nineties, many governments have spent huge sums on the research, development, procurement and deployment of new technology for their police, para-military and internal security forces. The objective of this development work has been to increase and enhance each agency's policing capacities. A dominant assumption behind this technocratisation of the policing process, is the belief that it has created both a faster policing response time and a greater cost-effectiveness. The main aim of all this effort has been to save policing resources by either automating certain forms of control, amplifying the rate of particular activities, or decreasing the number of officers required to perform them. The resultant innovations in the technology of political control have been functionally designed to yield an extension of the scope, efficiency and growth of policing power. The extent to which this process can be judged to be a legitimate one depends both on one's point of view and the level of secrecy and accountability built into the overall procurement and deployment procedures. The full implications of such developments may take time to assess. It is argued that one impact of this process is the militarisation of the police and the para-militarisation of the army as their roles, equipment and procedures begin to overlap. This phenomena is seen as having far reaching consequences on the way that future episodes of sub-state violence is handled, and influencing whether those involved are reconciled, managed, repressed, 'lost' or efficiently destroyed. What is emerging in certain quarters is a chilling picture of ongoing innovation in the science and technology of social and political control, including: semi-intelligent zone-denial systems using neural networks which can identify and potentially punish unsanctioned behaviour; the advent of global telecommunications surveillance systems using voice recognition and other biometric techniques to facilitate human tracking; data-veillance systems which can match computer held data to visual recognition systems or identify friendship maps simply by analysing the telephone and email links between who calls whom; new sub-lethal incapacitating weapons used both for prison and riot control as well as in sub-state conflict operations other than war; new target acquisition aids, lethal weapons and expanding dum-dum like ammunition which although banned by the Geneva conventions for use against other state's soldiers, is finding increasing popularity amongst SWAT and special forces teams; discreet order vehicles designed to look like ambulances on prime time television but which can deploy a formidable array of weaponry to provide a show of force in countries like Indonesia or Turkey, or spray harassing chemicals or dye onto protestors. Such marking appears to be kid-glove lin its restraint but tags all protestors so that the snatch squads can arrest them later, out of the prying lenses of CNN. Whilst there are many opposing schools of thought on why these changes are happening now, few doubt that there are fundamental changes taking place in the types of tactics, techniques and technologies available to internal security agencies for policing purposes. Yet many questions remain unanswered, unconsidered or under-researched. Why for example, did such a transformation in the technology used for -political control dramatically change over the last twenty five years? Is there any significance in the fact that former communist regimes in the Warsaw Treaty Organisation and continuing centralised economic systems such as China, are beginning to adopt such technologies? What are the reasons behind a global convergence of the technology of political control deployed in the North and South, the East and West? What are the factors responsible for generating the adoption of such new policing technology - was it technology push or demand pull? What new tools for policing lie on the horizon and what are the dynamics behind the process of innovation and the need for a vast arsenal of different kinds of technology rather than just a few? Are the many ways this technology affects the policing process fully understood? Who controls the patterns of police technology procurement and what are the corporate influences? The technology of political control produces a continuum of flexible options which stretch from modern law enforcement to advanced state suppression. It is multi-functional and has led to a rapid extension of the scope, efficiency and growth of policing power, creating policing revolutions both with Europe, the US and the rest of the world. The key difference being the level of democratic accountability in the manner in which the technology is applied. Yet because of a process of technological and decision drift these instruments of control, once deployed quickly become 'normalised.' Their secondary and unanticipated effects often lead to a paramilitarisation of the security forces and a militarisation of the police - often because the companies which produce them service both markets. 3. RECENT TRENDS & INNOVATIONS Since the 'Technology of Political Control' was first written (Ackroyd et al.,1977) there has been a profusion of technological innovations for police, paramilitary, intelligence and internal security forces. Many of these are simple advances on the technologies available in the 1970's. Others such as automatic telephone tapping, voice recognition and electronic tagging were not envisaged by the original BSSRS authors since they did not think that the computing power needed for a national monitoring system was feasible. The overall drift of this technology is to increase the power and reliability of the policing process, either enhancing the individual power of police operatives, replacing personnel with less expensive machines to monitor activity or to automate certain police monitoring, detection and communication facilities completely. A massive Police Industrial Complex has been spawned to service the needs of police, paramilitary and security forces, evidenced by the number of companies now active in the market.. An overall trend is towards globalisation of these technologies and a drift towards increasing proliferation. One core trend has been towards a militarisation of the police and a paramilitarisation of military forces in Europe. In some European countries, that trend is reversed,e.g. in 1996, the Swiss government (Federal Council and the Military Department) made plans to re-equip the Swiss Army Ordungsdienst with 118 million Swiss Francs of less-lethal weapons for action within the country in times of crisis. (These include 12 tanks, armoured vehicles, teargas, rubber shot and handcuffs). The decision was made by decree preventing any discussion or intervention. Their role will be to help police large scale demonstrations or riots and to police frontiers to 'prevent streams of refugees coming into Switzerland'. There has also been an increasing trend towards convergence - the process whereby the technology used by police and the military for internal security operations, converges towards being more or less indistinguishable. The term also describes the trend towards a universal adoption of similar types of technologies by most states for internal security and policing. Security companies now produce weapons and communications systems for both military and the police. Such systems increasingly represent the muscle and the nervous system of public order squads. Given the potential civil liberties and human rights implications associated with certain technologies of political control, there is a pressing need to avoid the risks of such technologies developing faster than any regulating legislation. MEP'smay wish to consider how best it should develop appropriate structures of accountability to prevent undesirable innovations emerging via processes of technological creep or decision drift. Towards that end, members of the European Parliament may wish to consider the following policy options:- 3.1 POLICY OPTIONS (i) Accepting the principle that the process of innovation of new systems for use in internal social and political control should be transparent, (i.e. open to appropriate public and parliamentary scrutiny and be subject to change should unwanted and unanticipated consequences emerge; (ii) Give consideration to what committee and procedural changes might be needed to ensure that Members of the European Parliament are adequately informed on issues relating to technologies of political control and can effectively act should the need arise; (iii) Consider if there is a need to amend the terms of reference of the Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs Committee to include powers and responsibilities for matters relating to for example, the civil liberties and human rights implications of developments in political control technologies such as:(a) new crowd and prison control weapons and technologies, lethal and less lethal weapons and ammunition; (b)developments in surveillance technologies such as data-veillance, electronic eavesdropping, CCTV, human recognition and tracking systems; (c) private prisons and related equipment and training;; (d) torture and interrogation of detainees; (e) any class of technology which has been shown in the past to be excessively injurious, cruel, inhumane or indiscriminate in its effects. 4. INNOVATIONS IN CROWD CONTROL WEAPONS The Interim Report critically evaluated the so called safety of these allegedly 'harmless crowd control weapons. Using earlier US military data and empirical data on the kinetic energy of all the commonly available kinetic weapons such as plastic bullets, it found that much of the biomedical research legitimating the introduction of current crowd control weapons is badly flawed. All the commonly available plastic bullet ammunition used in Europe breaches the severe damage zone of kinetic energy used to assess such weapons by the US military scientists. (Over 100,000 plastic bullets were withdrawn in the UK in 1996 for possessing excessive kinetic energy but according to this report their replacements are still excessively injurious). The price of protest should not be death, yet given that these weapons are frequently used against bystanders in zone clearance operations, this aspect is particularly important. Likewise there is a need to consider halting the use of peppergas in Europe until independent evaluation of its biomedical effects is undertaken. Special Agent Ward the FBI officer who cleared OC in the USA was found to have taken a $57,000 kickback to give it the OK. Other US military scientists warned of dangerous side effects including neurotoxicity and a recent estimate by the International Association of Chief Police Officers suggested at least 113 peppergas linked fatalities in the US - predominantly from positional asphyxia. Amnesty International has said that the use of pepper spray by Californian police against peaceful environmental activists, is 'cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of such deliberateness and severity that it is tantamount to torture." (Police deputies pulled back protestors heads, opened their eyes and "swabbed" the burning liquid directly on to their eyeballs). Sometimes when technologies are transferred, their characteristics also change. For example CS Sprays authorised for use by the police in the UK from 1996 were five times the concentration of similar MACE products in the US and have dispersion rates which are five times faster. This means that they dump twenty five times as much irritant on a targets face as do US products yet were justified as being the same. In practice this meant that one former Metropolitan police instructor Peter Hodgkinson lost between 40-50% of his corneas after he volunteered to be sprayed at the beginning of trails. Most police forces in the UK have now adopted the spray which was authorised before findings on its alleged safety were published. In the early Nineties, much to the disbelief of serious researchers, a new doctrine emerged in the US - non-lethal warfare. Its advocates were predominantly science fiction writers such as (Toffler A., & Toffler,H., 1994) and (Morris,J., & Morris,C., 1990,1994), who found a willing ear in the nuclear weapons laboratories of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore. The cynics were quick to point out that non-lethal warfare was a contradiction in terms and that this was really a 'rice-bowls' initiative, dreamt up to protect jobs in beleaguered weapons laboratories facing the challenge of life without the cold war. This naive doctrine found a champion in Col. John Alexander (who made his name in the rather more lethal Phoenix assassination programmes of the Vietnam War) and subsequently picked up by the US Defence and Justice Departments. After the controversial and overly public beating of Rodney King (who was subdued by 'an electro-shock 'taser' before being attacked); the excessive firepower deployed by all sides in the Waco debacle (where the police used chemical agents which failed to end the siege); and the humiliations of the US military missions in Somalia - America was in search of a magic bullet which would somehow allow the powers of good to prevail without anyone being hurt. Yet US doctrine in practice was not that simple, it was not to replace lethal weapons with 'non-lethal' alternatives but to augment the use of deadly force, in both war and 'operations other than war', where the main targets include civilians. A dubious pandora's box of new weapons has emerged, designed to appear rather than be safe. Because of the 'CNN factor' they need to be media friendly, more a case of invisible weapons than war without blood. America now has an integrated product team consisting of the US Marines, US Airforce, US Special Operations Command, US Army, US Navy, DOT, DOJ, DOE, Joint Staff, and CINCS Office of SecDef. Bridgeheads for this technology are already emerging since one of the roles of this team is to liaise with friendly foreign governments. Last year, the interim report advised that the Commission should be requested to report on the existence of formal liaison arrangements with the US, for introducing advanced non-lethal weapons into the EU. The urgency of this advice was highlighted in November 1997 for example, when a special conference on the 'Future of Non-Lethal Weapons', was held in London. A flavour of what was on offer was provided by Ms Hildi Libby, systems manager of the US Army's Non-lethal Material Programme. Ms Libby described the M203 Anti-personnel blunt trauma crowd dispersal grenade, which hurtles a large number of small "stinging" rubber balls at rioters. The US team also promoted acoustic wave weapons that used 'mechanical pressure wave generation' to 'provide the war fighter with a weapon capable of delivering incapacitating effects, from lethal to non-lethal'; the non-lethal Claymore mine - a crowd control version of the more lethal M18A1; ground vehicle stoppers; the M139 Volcano mine which projects a net (that can cover a football sized field) laced with either razor blades or other 'immobilisation enhancers' - adhesive or sting; canister launched area denial systems; sticky foam; vortex ring guns - to apply vortex ring gas impulses with flash, concussion and the option of quickly changing between lethal and non-lethal operations; and the underbarrel tactical payload delivery system - essentially an M16 which shoots either bullets, disabling chemicals, kinetic munitions or marker dye. One of the unanticipated consequences of these weapons is that they offer a flexible response which can potentially undermine non-violent direct action. Used to inflict instant gratuitous punishment, their flexibility means that if official violence does tempt demonstrators to fight back, the weapons are often just a switch away from street level executions. At their last conference in Lillehammer, the Nobel Peace Prize winning organisation Pugwash came to the conclusion that the term 'non-lethal should be abandoned, not only because it covers a variety of very different weapons but also because it can be dangerously misleading. "In combat situations, 'sub-lethal' weapons are likely to be used in co-ordination with other weapons and could increase overall lethality. Weapons purportedly developed for conventional military or peacekeeping use are also likely to be used in civil wars or for oppression by brutal governments." Weapons developed for police use may encourage the militarisation of police forces or be used for torture. If a generic term is needed 'less-lethal or pre-lethal weapons might be preferable." Such misgivings are certainly borne out by recent developments. US expert Bill Arkin has warned that the new generation of acoustic weapons can rupture organs, create cavities in human tissue and produce shockwaves of 170 decibels and potentially lethal blastwave trauma. Pugwash considered that "each of the emerging 'less-lethal weapons technologies required urgent examination and that their development or adoption should be subject to public review.' Informed by principle 3 and 4 of the United Nations Basic Principles on The Use of Force & Firearms , MEP's may wish to consider the following options:- 4.1 POLICY OPTIONS (i) Reaffirm the European Parliamentary demand of May 1982, for a ban on the use of plastic bullets; (ii) Establish objective criteria for assessing the biomedical effects of so called non-lethal weapons that are independent from commercial or governmental research; (iii) Seek confirmation from the Commission that: Member States are fully aware of their responsibilities under Principles 3 and 4 of the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force & Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials and to ask for clarification of exactly what steps individual Member States are taking to ensure that these are fully met, given the power of "less-lethal weapons" changes and whether consistent standards apply; (iv) Request the Commission to report on the existing liaison arrangements for the second generation of non-lethal weapons to enter European Union from the USA and call for an independent report on their alleged safety as well as their intended and unforseen social and political effects. (v) During the interim period, consider restricting the deployment by the police, the military or paramilitary special forces, of US made or licensed 2nd. generation chemical irritant, kinetic, acoustic, laser, electromagnetic frequency, capture, entanglement, injector or electrical disabling and paralysing weapons, within Europe. (vi). Establish the following principles across all EU Member States: (a) Research on chemical irritants should be published in open scientific journals before authorization for any usage is permitted and that the safety criteria for such chemicals should be treated as if they were drugs rather than riot control agents; (b) Research on the alleged safety of existing crowd control weapons and of all future innovations in crowd control weapons should be placed in the public domain prior to any decision towards deployment. (c) that deployment of OC (peppergas) should be halted across the EU until independent non-FBI funded research has evaluated any risks it poses to health. 5. NEW PRISON CONTROL SYSTEMS Some of the equipment described above, such as the surveillance, area denial and crowd control technologies, also finds ready use inside permanent prisons and houses of correction. Other devices such as the area denial, perimeter fencing systems, portable coils of razor wire, prison transport vehicles with mini cage cells, to create temporary holding centres. Permanent prisons are however, literally custom built control environments, where every act and thing, including the architecture, the behaviour of the prison officers and daily routines, are functionally organised with that purpose in mind. Therefore many of the technologies discussed above are built in to the prison structure and integral to policing systems used to contain their inmates. For example, area denial technology, intruder detection equipment and surveillance devices are instrumental in hermetically sealing high security prisons. If disturbances develop within a prison, the riot technologies and tactics outlined above, are also available for use by prison officers. The trend has been to train specialized MUFTI (Minimum Force Tactical Intervention) squads for this purpose. Outside Europe, irritant gas has been used not only to crush revolt but also to punish political detainees or to eject reticent prisoners from their cells before execution. The Interim Report describes prison restraint techniques using straitjackets, body belts, leg shackles, padded cells and isolation units, some of which infringe the European Convention against Torture. Apart from mechanical restraint, prison authorities have access to pharmacological approaches for immobilising inmates, colloquially known as 'the liquid cosh.' These vary from psychotropic drugs such as anti-depressants, sedatives and powerful hypnotics. Drugs like largactil or Seranace offer a chemical strait-jacket and their usage is becoming increasingly controversial as prison populations rise and larger numbers of inmates are 'treated'. In the USA, the trend is for punishment to become therapy: 'behaviour modification' - Pavlovian reward and punishment routines using drugs like anectine, producing fear or pain, to recondition behaviour. The possibilities of testing new social control drugs are extensive, whilst controls are few. Prisons form the new laboratories developing the next generation of drugs for social reprogramming, whilst military and university laboratories provide scores of new psychoactive drugs each year. Critics such as Lilly & Knepper (1992, 186-7) argue that in examining the international aspects of crime control as industry, more attention is needed to the changing activities of the companies which used to provide supplies to the military. At the end of the cold war, "with defence contractors reporting declines in sales, the search for new markets is pushing corporate decision making, it should be no surprise to see increased corporate activity in criminal justice." Where such companies previously profited from wars with foreign enemies, they are increasingly turning to the new opportunities afforded by crime control as industry.(Christie, 1994). Several European countries are now experiencing a rapid process of privatisation of prisons by corporate conglomerations, predominantly from the USA. Some of the prisons run by these organisations in the US have cultures and control techniques which are alien to European traditions. Such a process of privatisation can lead to a bridgehead for importing U.S. corrections mentality, methods and technologies into Europe and there is a pressing need to ensure a consensus on what constitutes acceptable practice. There is a further danger that such privatisation will lead to cost cutting practices of human warehousing, rather than the more long term beneficial practice of prisoner rehabilitation. In some European countries, particularly Britain, where changes in penal policy are leading to a rapid rise in prison population without additional resources being applied to the sector, the imperative is to cut costs either through using technology or by privatising prisons. Already, the UK Prison Service has compiled a shopping list of computer based options with existing CCTV surveillance systems being complemented by geophones, identity recognition technology and forward looking infra-red systems which can spot weapons and drugs.. Alongside such proactive technologies, UK prisons will face increasing pressure to tool up for trouble. Much this weaponry including the contract for between ?950,000 and ?2,500,000 of side handled batons, kubotans, riot shields etc. made by the Prison Service in March 1995, are likely to be originally manufactured in the United States. The U.S.A adopts a far more militarised prison regime than anywhere in Europe outside of Northern Ireland. A massive prison industrial complex has mushroomed to maintain the strict control regimes that typify American Houses of Correction. The future prospect is of that alien technology coming here, with very little in the way of public or parliamentary debate. A few examples of US prison technologies and proliferation illustrate the dangers. Many prisons in the U.S, use Nova electronic 50,000 volt extraction shields, electronic stun prods and most recently the REACT remote controlled stun belts. In 1994, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons decided to use remote-controlled stun belts on prisoners considered dangerous to prevent them from escaping during transportation and court appearances. By May 1996, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections said that no longer will inmates be chained together "but will be restrained by the use of stun belts and individual restraints." Promotional literature from US company Stun Tech of Cleveland, Ohio, claims that its high pulse stun belt can be activated from 300 feet. After a warning noise, the Remote Electronically Activated Control Technology (REACT) belt inflicts a 50,000 volt shock for 8 seconds. This high pulsed current enters the prisoners left kidney region then enters the body of the victim along blood channels and nerve pathways. Each pulse results in a rapid body shock extending to the whole of the brain and central nervous system. The makers promote the belt 'for total psychological supremacy..of potentially troublesome prisoners.' Stunned prisoners lose control of the bladders and bowels. 'After all, if you were wearing the contraption around your waist that by the mere push of a button in someone's hand, could make you defecate or urinate yourself, what would you do from the psychological standpoint?" Amnesty International wants Washington to ban the belts because they can be used to torture, and calls them, 'cruel,inhuman and degrading. "Some officials say the belts can save money because fewer guards would be needed. But human rights activists and some jailers oppose them as the most degrading new measure in an increasingly barbaric field." (Kilborn,1997) Already, some European countries are in the process of evaluating stunbelt systems for use here.(Marks, 1996) Without proper licensing and a clear consensus on what is expected from private prisons in Europe, multinational private prison conglomerations could act as a bridgehead for similar sorts of technology to further enter the European crime control industry. Proper limits need to be set when a licence is granted with a comprehensive account taken of that company's past track record in terms of civil liberties, rehabilitation and crisis management rather than just cost per prisoner held. Amnesty International in the USA is currently asking the large multi-national prison corporations to sign up to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and a similar approach with associated contractual obligations, might prove to be a useful way forward here in Europe. Members of the European Parliament may wish to consider the following options:- 5.1 POLICY OPTIONS (i) To let commercial requirements to make profits from prisoners become the primary criterion in running Europe's private jails; (ii). Further examine the use of kill fencing and lethal area denial systems in all prisons within the European Union, whether private or public, with a view to their prohibition; (iii) That the European Parliament establish a rigorous independent and impartial inquiry into the use of stun belts, stunguns and shields , and all other types and variants of electro-shock weapons in Member States, to assess their medical and other effects in terms of international human rights standards regulating the treatment of prisoners and the use of force; the inquiry should examine all known cases of deaths or injury resulting from the use of these instruments, and the results of the inquiry should be published without delay (iv) That the European Commission be asked to:- (a). Ensure that the UN Minimum treatment of prisoners rules banning the use of leg irons on prisoners are implemented in all EU correctional facilities. (b). Implement a ban on the introduction of in-built gassing systems inside European gaols on the basis of the manufacturers warnings of the dangers of using chemical riot control agents in enclosed spaces. Restrictions should also be made on the use of chemical irritants from whatever source in correctional facilities wherever research has shown that a concentration of that irritant could either kill or be associated with permanent damage to health. (c). Explore legal mechanisms to ensure that all private prison operations within the European Union should be subject to a common and consistent licensing regime by the host member. If adopted, no licence should be granted where proven human rights violations by that contractor have been made elsewhere. Consideration might be given to providing a contract mechanism whereby any failure to secure a licence in one European state should debar that private prison contractor from bidding for other European contracts (pending evidence of adequate human rights training and appropriate improvements in standard operating procedures and controls by that corporation or company). (v). Seek agreement between all Member States to ensure that: (a) All riot control, prisoner transport and extraction technology which is in use or proposed for use in all prisons, (whether state or privately run), should be subject to prior approval by the competent member authorities on the basis of independent research; (b) Automated systems of indiscriminate punishment such as built in baton round firing mechanisms, should be prohibited. (c). The use of electro-shock restraining devices or other remote control punishment devices including shock- shields should be immediately suspended in any private or public prison in the European Union, until and unless independent medical evidence can clearly demonstrate that their use will not contribute to deaths in custody, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. 6. INTERROGATION, TORTURE TECHNIQUES & TECHNOLOGIES The Interim Report on the variety of hardware, software and liveware involved in human interrogation and torture. Millennia of research and development have been expended in devising ever more cruel and inhumane means of extracting obedience and information from reluctant victims or achieving excruciatingly painful and long-drawn-out deaths for those who would question or challenge the prevalent status quo. What has changed in more recent times is (i) the increasing requirement for speed in breaking down prisoners' resistance; (ii) the adoption of sophisticated methods based on a scientific approach and (iii) a need for invisible torture which leaves no or few marks which might be used by organisations like Amnesty International to label a particular government, a torturing state. Today, the phenomena of torture has grown to a worldwide epidemic. A report by the Redress Trust, 1996, found that 151 countries were involved in torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, despite the fact that 106 states have ratified, acceded to or signed the Convention Against Torture. Helen Bamber, Director of the British Medical Foundation for the Treatment of the Victims of Torture, has described electroshock batons at 'the most universal modern tool of the torturers' (Gregory,1995) Recent surveys of torture victims have confirmed that after systematic beating, electroshock is one of the most common factors (London, 1993); Rasmussen, 1990). If one looks at the country reports of Amnesty International, (which recently published a survey of fifty countries where electric shock torture and ill treatment has been recorded since 1990), confirm that electroshock torture is the Esperanto of the most repressive states. Since publication of the Interim Report, one news story has uncovered evidence suggesting that Taiwan made electroshock weapons are being sold with the EC "mark of quality", despite the resolution passed by the European Parliament seeking a ban on such devices. There is an urgent need to establish whether this is a bogus claim or whether there really are people in the Commission building whose job is to make sure the electro-shock weapons produced by foreign manufacturers can produce the requisite level of paralysis & helplessness beloved of torturers every where. Members of the European Parliament may wish to consider the following policy options:- 6.1 POLICY OPTIONS (i). That the Civil Liberties Committee should receive expert evidence to determine whether:- (a) New regulations on the nature of in-depth interrogation training should be agreed which prohibit export of such techniques to forces overseas known to be involved in gross human rights violation. (b) All training of foreign military, police, security and intelligence forces in interrogation techniques, can be subject to licence, even if it is provided outside European territory. (c) Restrictions on visits to European MSP related events by representatives of known torturing states can be effectively implemented. (ii) The Commission should be requested to achieve agreement between member States to: (a) Carry out an investigation of claims that the EC "mark of quality" is being used to endorse electroshock devices and Immediately prohibit the transfer of all electroshock stun weapons to any country where such weapons are likely to contribute to unlawful killings, or to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, for example by refusing any export licence where it is proposed that electroshock weapons will be transferred to a country where persistent torture or instances of instances of electric shock torture and ill treatment have been reported; (b) Introduce and implement new regulations on the manufacture, sale and transfer of all electroshock weapons from and into Europe, with a full report to the European Parliament's Civil Liberties committee made each year. [Special consideration should be given to controlling the whole procurement process, covering even the making of contracts of sale, (to prevent a purchase deal made in a European country being met by a supplier or subsidiary outside of the EU, in an effort to obviate extant controls)]. (c). Ensure that the proposed regulations should cover patents and prohibit the patenting of any device whose sole use would be the violation of human rights, via torture or the creation of unnecessary suffering. The onus should be on the patent seeker to show that his patent would not lead to such outcomes. (v) The European Parliament should look at commissioning new work to investigate how existing legislation within member states of the EU, can be brought to bear to prosecute companies who have been complicit in the supply of equipment used for torture as defined by the UN convention of torture. This new work should examine, in conjunction with the Directorate of Human Rights:- (a) The extent to which such technology produced by European companies is being transferred to human rights violators and the role played by international military, police and security fairs organised both inside and outside European Borders; (b)The possible measures that could be set in place to monitor and track any technology transfer within this category and any potential role in this endeavour that might be played by recognised Non-Governmental Organisations. 7. DEVELOPMENTS IN SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY Surveillance technology can be defined as devices or systems which can monitor, track and assess the movements of individuals, their property and other assets. Much of this technology is used to track the activities of dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, student leaders, minorities, trade union leaders and political opponents. A huge range of surveillance technologies has evolved, including the night vision goggles; parabolic microphones to detect conversations over a kilometre away; laser versions, can pick up any conversation from a closed window in line of sight; the Danish Jai stroboscopic camera can take hundreds of pictures in a matter of seconds and individually photograph all the participants in a demonstration or March; and the automatic vehicle recognition systems can tracks cars around a city via a Geographic Information System of maps. New technologies which were originally conceived for the Defence and Intelligence sectors, have after the cold war, rapidly spread into the law enforcement and private sectors. It is one of the areas of technological advance, where outdated regulations have not kept pace with an accelerating pattern of abuses. Up until the 1960's, most surveillance was low-tech and expensive since it involved following suspects around from place to place, using up to 6 people in teams of two working 3 eight hour shifts. All of the material and contacts gleaned had to be typed up and filed away with little prospect of rapidly cross checking. Even electronic surveillance was highly labour intensive. The East German police for example employed 500,000 secret informers, 10,000 of which were needed just to listen and transcribe citizen's phone calls. By the 1980's, new forms of electronic surveillance were emerging and many of these were directed towards automation of communications interception. This trend was fuelled in the U.S. in the 1990's by accelerated government funding at the end of the cold war, with defence and intelligence agencies being refocussed with new missions to justify their budgets, transferring their technologies to certain law enforcement applications such as anti-drug and anti-terror operations. In 1993, the US department of defence and the Justice department signed memoranda of understanding for "Operations Other Than War and Law Enforcement" to facilitate joint development and sharing of technology. According to David Banisar of Privacy International, "To counteract reductions in military contracts which began in the 1980's, computer and electronics companies are expanding into new markets - at home and abroad - with equipment originally developed for the military. Companies such as E Systems, Electronic Data Systems and Texas Instruments are selling advanced computer systems and surveillance equipment to state and local governments that use them for law enforcement, border control and Welfare administration."What the East German secret police could only dream of is rapidly becoming a reality in the free world." 7.1 Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Surveillance Networks In fact the art of visual surveillance has dramatically changed over recent years. Of course police and intelligence officers still photograph demonstrations and individuals of interest but increasingly such images can be stored and searched. Ongoing processes of ultra-miniaturisation mean that such devices can be made to be virtually undetectable and are open to abuse by both indivduals, companies and official agencies. The attitude to CCTV camera networks varies greatly in the European Union, from the position in Denmark where such cameras are banned by law to the position in the UK, where many hundreds of CCTV networks exist. Nevertheless, a common position on the status of such systems where they exist in relation to data protection principles should apply in general. A specific consideration is the legal status of admissibility as evidence, of digital material such as those taken by the more advanced CCTV systems. Much of this will fall within data protection legislation if the material gathered can be searched eg by car number plate or by time. Given that material from such systems can be seemlessly edited, the European Data Protection Directive legislation needs to be implemented through primary legislation which clarifies the law as it applies to CCTV, to avoid confusion amongst both CCTV data controllers as well as citizens as data subjects. Primary legislation will make it possible to extend the impact of the Directive to areas of activity that do not fall within community law. Articles 3 and 13 of the Directive should not create a blanket covering the use of CCTV in every circumstance in a domestic context. A proper code of practice such as that promoted by the UK based Local Government Information Unit (LGIU, 1996) should be extended to absorb best practice from all EU Member States to cover the use of all CCTV surveillance schemes operating in public spaces and especially in residential areas. As a first step it is suggested that the Civil Liberties Committee formally consider examining the practice and control of CCTV throughout the member States with a view to establishing what elements of the various codes of practice could be adopted for a unified code and an enforceable legal framework covering enforcement and civil liberties protection and redress. 7.2 Algorithmic Surveilance Sysytems The revolution in urban surveillance will reach the next generation of control once reliable face recognition comes in. It will initially be introduced at stationary locations, like turnstiles, customs points, security gateways etc. to enable a standard full face recognition to take place. The Interim Report predicted that in the early part of the 21st. century, facial recognition on CCTV will be a reality and those countries with CCTV infrastructures will view such technology as a natural add-on. In fact, an American company Software and Systems has trialed a system in London which can scan crowds and match faces against a database of images held in a remote computer. We are at the beginning of a revolution in 'algorithmic surveillance' - effectively data analysis via complex algoritms which enable automatic recognition and tracking. Such automation not only widens the surveillance net, it narrows the mesh.(See Norris, C., et. al, 1998) Similarly Vehicle Recognition Systems have been developed which can identify a car number plate then track the car around a city using a computerised geographic information system. Such systems are now commercially available, for example, the Talon system introduced in 1994 by UK company Racal at a price of ?2000 per unit. The system is trained to recognise number plates based on neural network technology developed by Cambridge Neurodynamics, and can see both night and day. Initially it has been used for traffic monitoring but its function has been adapted in recent years to cover security surveillance and has been incorporated in the "ring of steel" around London. The system can then record all the vehicles that entered or left the cordon on a particular day. It is important to set clear guidelines and codes of practice for such technological innovations, well in advance of the digital revolution making new and unforseen opportunities to collate, analyze, recognise and store such visual images. Already multifunctional traffic management systems such as 'Traffic Master' , (which uses vehicle recognition systems to map and quantify congestion), are facilitating a national surveillance architecture. Such regulation will need to be founded on sound data protection principles and take cognizance of article 15 of the 1995 European Directive on the protection of Individuals and Processing of Personal Data. Essentially this says that : "Member States shall grant the right of every person not to be subject to a decision which produces legal effects concerning him or significantly affects him and which is based solely on the automatic processing of data." There is much to recommend the European Parliament following the advice of a recent UK House of Lords Report (Select Committee Report on Digital Images as Evidence, 1998). Namely: (i)that the European Parliament ...."produces guidance for both the public and private sectors on the use of data matching, and in particular the linking of surveillance systems with other databases; and (ii) That the Data Protection Registrar be given powers to audit the operation of data matching systems" Such surveillance systems raise significant issues of accountability, particularly when transferred to authoritarian regimes. The cameras used in Tiananmen Square were sold as advanced traffic control systems by Siemens Plessey. Yet after the 1989 massacre of students, there followed a witch hunt when the authorities tortured and interrogated thousands in an effort to ferret out the subversives. The Scoot surveillance system with USA made Pelco cameras were used to faithfully record the protests. The images were repeatedly broadcast over Chinese television offering a reward for information, with the result that nearly all the transgressors were identified. Again democratic accountability is only the criterion which distinguishes a modern traffic control system from an advanced dissident capture technology. Foreign companies are exporting traffic control systems to Lhasa in Tibet, yet Lhasa does not as yet have any traffic control problems. The problem here may be a culpable lack of imagination. 7.3 Bugging & Tapping Devices A wide range of bugging and tapping devices have been evolved to record conversations and to intercept telecommunications traffic. In recent years the widespread practice of illegal and legal interception of communications and the planting of 'bugs' has been an issue in many European States. However, planting illegal bugs is yesterday's technology. Modern snoopers can buy specially adapted lap top computers, and simply tune in to all the mobile phones active in the area by cursoring down to their number. The machine will even search for numbers 'of interest' to see if they are active. However, these bugs and taps pale into insignificance next to the national and international state run interceptions networks. 7.4 National & International Communications Interceptions Networks The Interim Report set out in detail, the global surveillance systems which facilitate the mass supervision of all telecommunications including telephone, email and fax transmissions of private citizens, politicians, trade unionists and companies alike. There has been a political shift in targeting in recent years. Instead of investigating crime (which is reactive) law enforcement agencies are increasingly tracking certain social classes and races of people living in red-lined areas before crime is committed - a form of pre-emptive policing deemed data-veillance which is based on military models of gathering huge quantities of low grade intelligence. Without encryption, modern communications systems are virtually transparent to the advanced interceptions equipment which can be used to listen in. The Interim Report also explained how mobile phones have inbuilt monitoring and tagging dimensions which can be accessed by police and intelligence agencies. For example the digital technology required to pinpoint mobile phone users for incoming calls, means that all mobile phone users in a country when activated, are mini-tracking devices, giving their owners whereabouts at any time and stored in the company's computer . For example Swiss Police have secretly tracked the whereabouts of mobile phone users from the computer of the service provider Swisscom, which according SonntagsZeitung had stored movements of more than a milion subscribers down to a few hundred metres, and going back at least half a year. However, of all the developments covered in the Interim Report, the section covering some of the constitutional and legal issues raised by the USA's National Security Agency's access and facility to intercept all European telecommunications caused the most concern. Whilst no-one denied the role of such networks in anti terrorist operations and countering illegal drug, money laudering and illicit arms deals, alarm was expressed about the scale of the foreign interceptions network identified in the report and whether existing legislation, data protection and privacy safeguards in the Member States were sufficient to protect the confidentiality between EU citizens, corporations and those with third countries. Since there has been a certain degree of confusion in subsequent press reports, it is worth clarifying some of the issues surrounding transatlantic electronic surveillance and providing a short history & update on developments since the Interim Report was published in January 1998. There are essentially two separate system, namely: (i) The UK/USA system comprising the activities of military intelligence agencies such as NSA-CIA in the USA subsuming GCHQ & MI6 in the UK operating a system known as ECHELON; (ii) The EU-FBI system which is linkeding up various law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, police, customs, immigration and internal security; Although the confusion has been further compounded by the title of item 44 on the agenda for the Plenary session of the European Parliament on September 16, 1998, in intelligence terms, these are two distinct "communities" It is worth looking briefly at the activities of both systems in turn, encompassing, Echelon, encryption; EU-FBI surveillance and new interfaces with for example to access to internet providers and to databanks of other agencies. 7.4.1 NSA INTERCEPTION OF ALL EU TELECOMMUNICATIONS The Interim report said that within Europe, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by Satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK. The system was first uncovered in the 1970's by a group of researchers in the UK (Campbell, 1981). A recent work by Nicky Hager, Secret Power, (Hager,1996) provides the most comprehensive details todate of a project known as ECHELON. Hager interviewed more than 50 people concerned with intelligence to document a global surveillance system that stretches around the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, internet, email, faxes and telexes. These sites are based at Sugar Grove and Yakima, in the USA, at Waihopai in New Zealand, at Geraldton in Australia, Hong Kong, and Morwenstow in the UK. The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like Memex. to find key words. Five nations share the results with the US as the senior partner under the UKUSA agreement of 1948, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are very much acting as subordinate information servicers. Each of the five centres supply "dictionaries" to the other four of keywords, Phrases, people and places to "tag" and the tagged intercept is forwarded straight to the requesting country. Whilst there is much information gathered about potential terrorists, there is a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive monitoring of all the countries participating in the GATT negotiations. But Hager found that by far the main priorities of this system continued to be military and political intelligence applicable to their wider interests. Hager quotes from a"highly placed intelligence operatives" who spoke to the Observer in London. "We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate." They gave as examples. GCHQ interception of three charities, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. "At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request," the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes its called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to third world aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex "fixes" on the three organisations. With no system of accountability, it is difficult to discover what criteria determine who is not a target. Indeed since the Interim Report was published, journalists have alleged that ECHELON has benefited US companies involved in arms deals, strengthened Washington's position in crucial World Trade organisation talks with Europe during a 1995 dispute with Japan over car part exports. According to the Financial Mail On Sunday, "key words identified by US experts include the names of inter-governmental trade organisations and business consortia bidding against US companies. The word 'block' is on the list to identify communications about offshore oil in area where the seabed has yet to be divided up into exploration blocks"..."It has also been suggested that in 1990 the US broke into secret negotiations and persuaded Indonesia that US giant AT & T be included in a multi-billion dollar telecoms deal that at one point was going entirely to Japan's NEC. The Sunday Times (11 May, 1998) reported that early on the radomes at Menwith Hill (NSA station F83) In North Yorkshire UK, were given the task of intercepting international leased carrrier (ILC) traffic - essentially, ordinary commercial communications. Its staff have grown from 400 in the 1980's to more than 1400 now with a further 370 staff from the MoD. The Sunday Times also reported allegations that converstaions between the German company Volkswagen and General Motors were intercepted and the French have complained that Thompson-CSF, the French electronics company, lost a $1.4 billion deal to supply Brazil with a radar system because the Americans intercepted details of the negotions and passed them on to US company Raytheon, which subsequently won the contract. Another claim is that Airbus Industrie lost a contract worth $1 billion to Boeing and McDonnel Douglas because information was intercepted by American spying. Other newspapers such as Liberation 21 April 1998) and Il Mondo (20 March 1998, identify the network as an Anglo-Saxon Spy network because of the UK-USA axis. Privacy International goes further. "Whilst recognising that 'strictly speaking, neither the Commission nor the European Parliament have a mandate to regulate or intervene in security matters...they do have a responsibility to ensure that security is harmonised throughout the Union." According to Privacy International, the UK is likely to find its 'Special relationship' ties fall foul of its Maastricht obligations since Title V of Maastricht requires that "Member States shall inform and consult one another within the Council on any matter of foreign and security policy of general interest in order to ensure that their combined influence is exerted as effectivelly as possible by means of concerted and convergent action." Yet under the terms of the Special relationship, Britain cannot engage in open consultatuion with its other European partners. The situation is further complicated by counter allegations in the French magazine Le Point, that the French are systematically spying on American and other allied countries telephone and cable traffic via the Helios 1A Spy sattelite. (Times, June 17 1998) If even half of these allegations are true then the European Parliament must act to ensure that such powerful surveillance systems operate to a more democratic consensus now that the Cold War has ended. Clearly, the Overseas policies of European Union Member States are not always congruent with those of the USA and in commercial terms, espionage is espionage. No proper Authority in the USA would allow a similar EU spy network to operate from American soil without strict limitations, if at all. Following full discussion on the implications of the operations of these networks, the European Parliament is asvised to set up appropriate independent audit and oversight porocedures and that any effort to outlaw encryption by EU citizens should be denied until and unless such democratic and accountable systems are in place, if at all. 7.4.2 EU-FBI GLOBAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM Much of the documentation and research necessary to put into the public domain, the history, structure, role and function of the EU-FBI convention to legitimise global electronic surveillance, has been secured by Statewatch, the widely respected UK based civil liberties monitoring and research organisation. Statewatch have described at length the signing of the Transatlantic Agenda in Madrid at the EU-US summit of 3 December 1995 - Part of which was the "Joint EU-US Action Plan" and has subsequently analysed these efforts as an ongoing attempt to redefine the Atlantic Alliance in the post-Cold War era, a stance increasingly used to justify the efforts of internal security agencies taking on enhanced policing roles in Europe. Statewatch notes that the first Joint Action 'out of the area" surveillance plan was not discussed at the Justice and Home Affairs meeting but adopted on the nod, as an A point (without debate) by of all places, the Fisheries Council on 20 December 1996. In February 1997, Statewatch reported that the EU had secretly agreed to set up an international telephone tapping network via a secret network of committees established under the "third pillar" of the Mastricht Treaty covering co-operation on law and order. Key points of the plan are outlined in a memorandum of understanding, signed by EU states in 1995.(ENFOPOL 112 10037/95 25.10.95) which remains classified. According to a Guardian report (25.2.97) it reflects concern among European Intelligence agencies that modern technology will prevent them from tapping private communications. "EU countries it says, should agree on "international interception standards set at a level that would ensure encoding or scrambled words can be broken down by government agencies." Official reports say that the EU governments agreed to co-operate closely with the FBI in Washington. Yet earlier minutes of these meetings suggest that the original initiative came from Washington. According to Statewatch, network and service providers in the EU will be obliged to install "tappable" systems and to place under surveillance any person or group when served with an interception order. These plans have never been referred to any European government for scrutiny, nor to the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament, despite the clear civil liberties issues raised by such an unaccountable system. The decision to go ahead was simply agreed in secret by "written procedure" through an exchane of telexes between the 15 EU governments. We are told by Statewatch the EU-FBI Global surveillance plan was now being developed "outside the third pillar." In practical terms this means that the plan is being developed by a group of twenty countries - the then 15 EU member countries plus the USA, Australia, Canada, Norway and New Zealand. This group of 20 is not accountable through the Council of Justice and Home Affairs Ministers or to the European Parliament or national parliaments. Nothing is said about finance of this system but a report produced by the German government estimates that the mobile phone part of the package alone will cost 4 billion D-marks. Statewatch concludes that "It is the interface of the ECHELON system and its potential development on phone calls combined with the standardisation of "tappable communications centres and equipment being sponsored by the EU and the USA which presents a truly global threat over which there are no legal or democratic controls."(Press release 25.2.97) In many respects what we are witnessing here are meetings of operatives of a new global military-intelligence state. It is very difficult for anyone to get a full picture of what is being decided at the executive meetings setting this 'Transatlantic agenda. Whilst Statewatch won a ruling from the Ombudsman for access on the grounds that the Council of Ministers 'misapplied the code of access, for the time being such access to the agendas have been denied. Without such access, we are left with 'black box decision making'. The eloquence of the unprecedented Commission statement on Echelon and Transatlantic relations scheduled for the 16th. of September, is likely to be as much about what is left out as it is about what is said for public consumption. Members of the European Parliament may wish to consider the following policy options:- 7.5 POLICY OPTIONS (i) That a more detailed series of studies should be commissioned on the social, political commercial and constitutional implications of the global electronic surveillance networks outlined in this report, with a view to holding a series of expert hearings to inform future EU civil liberties policy. These studies might cover:- (a) The consitutional issues raised by the facility of the US National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept all European telecommunications, particularly those legal commitments made by member States in regard to the Maastricht Treaty and the whole question of the use of this network for automated political and commercial espionage. (b) The social and political implications of the FBI-EU global surveillance system, its growing access to new telecommunications mediums including e-mail and its ongoing expansion into new countries together with any related financial and constitutional issues; (c) The structure, role and remit of an EU wide oversight body, independent from the European Parliament, which might be set up to oversee and audit the activities of all bodies engaged in intercepting telecommunications made within Europe; (ii) The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network (Internet) accessible to US Intelligence Agencies. Nor should the Parliament agree to new expensive encryption controls without a wide ranging debate within the EU on the implications of such measures. These encompass the civil and human rights of European citizens and the commercial rights of companies to operate within the law, without unwarranted surveillance by intelligence agencies operating in conjunction with multinational competitors. (ii) That the European Parliament convene a series of expert hearings covering all the technical, political and commercial activities of bodies engaged in electronic surveillance and to further elaborate possible options to bring such activities back within the realm of democratic accountability and transparency. These proposed hearings might also examine the issue of proper codes of practice to ensure redress if malpractice or abuse takes place. Explicit criteria should be agreed for deciding who should be targeted for surveillance and who should not, how such data is stored, processed and shared and whether such criteria and associated codes of practice could be made publicly available. (iii) To amend the terms of reference of the Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs Committee to include powers and responsibilities for all matters relating to the civil liberties issues raised by electronic surveillance devices and networks and to call for a series of reports during its next work programme, including:- (a) How legally binding codes of practice could ensure that new surveillance technologies are brought within the appropriate data protection legislation?; (b) The production of guidance for both the public and private sectors on the use of data matching, and in particular the linking of surveillance systems with other databases; and addressing the issue of giving Member State Data Protection Registrars appropriate powers to audit the operation of data matching systems" (c) How the provision of electronic bugging and tapping devices to private citizens and companies, might be further regulated, so that their sale is governed by legal permission rather than self regulation? (d) How the use of telephone interception by Member states could be subject to procedures of public accountability referred to in (a) above? (E.g. before any telephone interception takes place a warrant should be obtained in a manner prescribed by the relevant parliament. In most cases, law enforcement agencies will not be permitted to self-authorise interception except in the most unusual of circumstances which should be reported back to the authorising authority at the earliest opportunity. (e) How technologies facilitating the automatic profiling and pattern analysis of telephone calls to establish friendship and contact networks might be subject to the same legal requirements as those for telephone interception and reported to the relevant Member State parliament?;. (f) The commission of a study examining what constitutes best practice and control of CCTV throughout the member States with a view to establishing what elements of the various codes of practice could be adopted for a unified code and a legal framework covering enforcement and civil liberties protection and redress. (iv) Setting up procedural mechanisms whereby relevant committees of the European Parliament considering proposals for technologies which have civil liberties implications (e.g. the Telecommunications Committee) in regard to surveillance, should be required to forward all relevant policy proposals and reports to the Civil Liberties Committee for their observations in advance of any political or financial decisions on deployment being taken. (v) Setting up Agreements betwen Member States Agreement whereby annual statistics on interception should be reported to each member states' parliament in a standard and consistent format. These statistics should provide comprehensive details of the actual number of communication devices intercepted and data should be not be aggregated. (To avoid the statistics only identifying the number of warrants, issued whereas organisations under surveillance may have hundreds of members, all of whose phones may be intercepted). 8. REGULATION OF HORIZONTAL PROLIFERATION The Interim Report warned of the potential of some of these weapons, technologies and systems to undermine international human rights legislation - a consideration particularly poignant in this the 50th. anniversary year of the signing of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Many of the major arms companies have a paramilitary/internal security operation and diversification into manufacturing or marketing this technology, is increasingly taking place. NGO's like Amnesty International, have begun to catalogue the trade in specialised military, security and police technologies, to measure its impact on industrialising repression, globalising conflict, undermining democracy and strengthening the security forces of torturing states to create a new generation of political prisoners, extra-judicial killings and 'disappearances'. (Amnesty International, 1996). The key issue for Members of the European Parliament is how they will deal with the human and political fall out of what is a systemic process of exporting repression: either importing a tidal wave of dispossessed refugees, or keeping them in desperation at the borders of Europe. There is an urgent need for greater transparency and democratic control of such exports and a clearer recognition of their frequent linkage with gross human rights violations in their recipient states. The Interim Report catalogued in some detail , examples of how this technology, including electroshock systems, was being supplied by European countries to assist in acts of human rights violation abroad,despite the fact that a substantial body of international human rights obligations should theoretically prevent such transfers . The European Parliament made a resolution on the 19 January 1995, which called on the Commission to bring forward proposals to incorporate these technologies within the scope of the arms export controls and ensure greater transparency in the export of all military, security and police technologies to prevent the hypocrisy of governments who themselves breach their own export bans. Members of the European Parliament may wish to consider the following policy options:- 8.1 POLICY OPTIONS (i) That new research should be commissioned by the European Parliament to explore the extent to which European companies are complicity supplying repressive technologies used to commit human rights violations and the prospects of instituting independent measures of monitoring the level and extent of such sales whilst tracking their subsequent human rights impacts and consequences; (ii) Consider if there is a need to amend the terms of reference of the Committee for Foreign Affairs and Security to include powers and responsibilities for liaising with Member States to:- (a) Enable the European Parliament to explore the possibilities of using the Joint Action procedures used to establish the EU regulations on the export of Dual Use equipment to draw up common lists of proscribed military, security, police (MSP)technology and training, the sole or primary use of which is to contribute to human rights violations; sensitive MSP technologies which have been shown in the past to be used to commit human rights violations; and military, security and police units and forces which have been sufficiently responsible for human rights violations and to whom sensitive goods and services should not be supplied; (b) Enable Member States to monitor and regulate all exhibitions promoting the sale of security equipment and technology to ensure that any proposed transfers such as electroshock weapons, will not contribute to unlawful killings, or to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; (b) Explore mechanisms to ensure that all military, police and security exhibitions are required to publish guest lists, names of exhibitors, products and services on display and no visas or invitations should be issued to governments or representatives of security forces, known to carry out human rights violations. (c) Find more effective means for ensuring that the sender should take legal responsibility for the stated use of military, security and police transfers in practice, for example making future contracts dependent on adherence to human rights criteria and that such criteria are central to the regulatory process. (iii) That the Commission should be requested to achieve agreement between Member States to undertake changes to their respective strategic export controls so that:- (a) All proposed transfers of security or police equipment are publicly disclosed in advance, especially electroshock weapons, (including those arranged on European territory where the equipment concerned remains outside Member States' borders) so that the human rights situation in the intended receiving country can be taken into consideration before any such transfers are allowed. and that reports are issued on the human rights situation in the receiving countries; (b) Member States Parliaments are notified of all information necessary to enable them to exercise proper control over the implementation of their legal obligations and commitments to international human rights agreements, including receiving information on human rights violations from non-governmental organisations; 9. CONCLUSIONS With proper accountability and regulation, some of the technologies discussed above do have a legitimate law enforcement function; without such democratic control, they can provide powerful tools of oppression.The real threat to civil liberties and human rights in the future, is more likely to arise from an incremental erosion of civil liberties, than it is from some conscious plan. As the globalisation of political control technologies increases, Members of the European Parliament have a right and a responsibility to challenge the costs, as well as the alleged benefits of many so-called advances in law enforcement. This report has sought to highlight some of the areas which are leading to the most undesirable social and political consequences. Members of the Parliament are requested to consider the policy options provided in the report as just a first step to help bring the technology of political control, back within systems of democratic accountability. ANNEX 1 AN APPRAISAL OF THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL AN OMEGA FOUNDATION SUMMARY & OPTIONS REPORT BIBLIOGRAPHY * Note that this bibliography represents an abbreviated list. Those requring a more comprehensive set of references to this topic are referred to the detailed bibliography provided provided in the Interim report, pages 74--100. Ackroyd,C; Margolis,K; Rosenhead,J; Shallice,T (1977) The Technology of Political Control. 1st ed. Pelican Books, Middlesex, UK. American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (1995) Pepperspray Update:More Fatalities, more questions. ACLU. American Defense Preparedness Association (1996) Non-Lethal Defense II Conference,. Proceedings and updated Attendee Roster of a Conference held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, McClean, Virginia, March 6-7,1996. Amnesty International (1997) Arming The Torturers - Electroshock Torture and the Spread of Stun Technology. Amnesty International, International Secretariat, campaign document, (ACT 40/01/97 London,4 March, 1997. Anon. (1993) Phone-Tappers dream machine. Sunday Times January 17, Aubrey,C (1981) Who's Watching You? Britain's Security Services & The Official Secrets Act. 1st ed. Pelican, Middlesex,UK. 204 pages. Ballantyne,R (1996) Back On the Torture Trail. Fortress Europe Letter No. 46, April-May, pp. 5-6 Ballantyne,R (1992) At China's Torture Fair. The Guardian August 14, Bamford,J(1982) The Puzzle Palace. America's National Security Agency and Its Special Relationship with Britain's GCHQ, Sidgwick & Jackson,LtD, London.pp465 Banisar,D (1996) Big Brother goes High-Tech. Covert Action Quarterly 56, Spring, pp. 6-13 BSSRS (Ed.) (1974) The New Technology of Repression - Lessons From Ireland. Vol. BSSRS Paper 2. BSSRS, London. Colvin, M., Noorlander, P., (1998) Under Surveillance: Covert Policing and Human Rights Standards, Justice, London, UK. Council For Science & Society (Ed.) (1978) "Harmless Weapons". Barry Rose, London. Christie,N (1994) Crime control as Industry: Towards GULAGS, Western style. 1st ed. Routledge, London. Forrest,D (Ed.) (1996) A Glimpse of Hell. Reports on Torture Worldwide. Amnesty International. 1st ed. Cassell, London. 214 pages. Gregory,M (1996) Back On The Torture Trail. Dispatches Programme for Channel 4 broadcast in March 1996. Hager,N (1996) Secret Power, New Zealand's Role In the International Spy Network. 2nd. ed. Craig Potton, Nelson, New Zealand. 299 pages. HMSO, (1971)Home Office Report of the enquiry into the Medical and Toxicological aspects of CS (Orthochlorobenzylidene Malononitrile),pp84. Hooper,D (1987) Offficial Secrets-The Use & Abuse of the Act. 1st ed. Secker & Warburg, London. 349 pages. Kitchin,H (1996) A Watching Brief - A code of Practice For CCTV. LGIU, London. 1973 pages. Lilly,JR; Knepper,P (1992) An International Perspective On the Privatisation of Corrections. Howard Journal 31, pp. 650-719 Lilly,JR; Knepper,P (1991) Prisonomics:The iron triangle. The Angolite 16:4, pp. 45-58 London, L., (1993) Evidence of Torture: political repression and human rights abuse in South Africa', Torture 3, 39-40 Kilborn,P (1997) Vengeful America gives prisoners a belting, The Guardian, March 12,p12 MacMahon,M (1996) Control as Enterprise -Some Recent Trends in privatisation and Criminal Justice. Deviance et Societe 20:2, pp. 103-118 Marks,P (1996) Shocked and Stunned. The Guardian July,4 (Online), p. 6 Mittford, J., (1977)The American Prison Business, Peguin, UK Morris,Chris; Morris,Janet; Baines,Thomas (1995) Wepons of mass protection: Nonlethality, Information Warfare and airpower in the Age of Chaos. Airpower Journal Spring, pp. 15-29 National Institute For Justice (Ed.) (1996) Solicitation For Law Enforcement, Courts and Corrections Technology Development, Implementation and Evaluation. US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programmes, Washington DC. Norris,C., Moran, J., & Armstrong, G., (1998) 'Algorithmic Surveillance: The Future of Automatic Visual Surveillance' in Surveillance, Closed Circuit TV and Social Control, Norris,C., Moran, J., & Armstrong, G.(eds.) Ashgate Publishing LtD, Hampshire, UK Privacy International (Ed.) (1995) Big Brother Incorporated - A report On the International Trade in Surveillance Technology and Its Links To The Arms Industry. 1st ed. Vol. 1, November. Privacy International, London. 114 pages. Rasmussen, O.V. , (1990) Medical Aspects of Torture, Copenhagen:Laegeforreningens. Redress (Ed.) (1996) Annual Report 1996. Redress Trust, London. Salem,H; Olajos,EJ; Miller,LL; Thomson,SA (1994) Capsaicin Toxicology Review. Report of U.S Army Edgewood Research, Development and Engineering Center (ERDC). Security Planning Corporation (1972) Nonlethal Weapons For Law Enforcement. Washington,DC. Select Committee On Science & Technology (1998), Digital Images As Evidence, House of Lords, 5th. Report (HL Paper 64, The Stationary Office, London, UK Shallice,T (1974) The Ulster Depth Interrogation Techniques And Their Relation To Sensory Deprivation Research. Cognition 1, pp. 385-405 Shichor,D (1995) Punishment For Profit:Private Prisons/Public Concerns. 1st ed. Sage, Thousand Oaks, California. 293 pages. Tofler,A; Toffler,H (1993): War without Blood? In: War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Little, Brown & Co., London, 125-136. United Nations (1955) Standard Minimum Rules For the Treatment of Prisoners. Adopted by First United nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Geneva., United nations (1984) Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Adopted by UN General Assembly. Resolution 39/46, 10 December, Wright (1981): A Multivariate Time Series Analysis of the Northern Irish Conflict 1969-76. In: Behavioural and Quantitative Perspectives On Terrorism. (Eds: Alexander,Y; Gleason,J,M) Pergamon,, 283-327. Wright,S (1994) Shoot Not To Kill. The Guardian 19 May, Wright,S (1992) Undermining Nonviolence:The Coming Role of New Police Technologies. Gandhi Marg 14, No.1, April-June, pp. 157-165 Wright,S (1987a): Public Order Technology:'Less-Lethal Weapons'. In: Civil Rights, Public Opinion and The State. Working Papers in Criminology ed. (Eds: Rolston,B; Tomlinson,M) The Print Workshop, Belfast, 70-96. Wright,S (1996a): The New Trade in Technologies of Restraint and Electroshock. In: A glimpse of Hell. Reports on torture worldwide. 1st ed. (Ed: Forrest,D) Cassell, London, 137-152. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:40:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:40:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] open Democracy: Paul Rogers: A world becoming more peaceful? Message-ID: Paul Rogers: A world becoming more peaceful? http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/report_2927.jsp 17 - 10 - 2005 The first annual Human Security Report finds despite evidence from Afghanistan to Iraq, Chechnya to Congo that violent conflict around the world is declining. Can this be true? ------------------------------------------ There appear good reasons for most people to think that the world is becoming a more dangerous place. In the four years since the 9/11 attacks, the George W Bush administration has pursued a vigorous counter-terrorism policy that has already terminated two regimes and has, at a conservative estimate, seen at least 40,000 people killed, most of them civilians. United States forces are mired in a deep and bitter insurgency in Iraq, and almost 20,000 more troops are active against a determined Taliban guerrilla force in Afghanistan; they have also engaged in border clashes with Syria, and are involved in a tense standoff with Iran over the latters nuclear developments. If you find Paul Rogerss weekly [90]column on global security valuable, please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a [91]donation so that we can continue our work and keep it free for all Despite this vigorous US strategy, the al-Qaida movement is able to sustain its activities by launching numerous attacks around the world (see the list of incidents in last week's column, [92]America, Iraq, and al-Qaida). This series of large-scale problems surely provide ample evidence for the feeling that global security is threatened. In such circumstances, for a substantial and carefully researched report to claim otherwise seems a nonsense yet that is exactly the conclusion of the first annual [93]human security report published today, 17 October, by the [94]Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (and launched at the United Nations in New York). The Human Security Report (HSR) co-financed by five [95]governments, including Canada and Britain is modelled on that indispensable guide to issues of development, the [96]United Nations Human Development Report, though it is not itself a product of the UN system. It argues that there has in fact been a marked decrease in political violence since the end of the cold war. The number of armed conflicts has decreased by more than 40%, and the number of major conflicts (which it defines as resulting in 1,000 or more "battle-deaths") has declined by 80%. Among its other conclusions, it finds that interstate wars now comprise only 5% of all armed conflicts, far less than in previous eras; that the numbers of people killed in individual wars have declined dramatically in the past five decades; and that the number of international crises fell by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001. The report also says that the number of autocratic regimes, noted for their systematic attacks on human rights, is decreasing. At first sight, the conclusions of the report seem to fly in the face of everyday, tangible experience. However, the report is well researched, carefully constructed and offers explanations for its results. Moreover, it is not alone in its findings. For the past five years, comparable if smaller-scale work by the [97]Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, has generated broadly similar conclusions. Its latest biennial survey, [98]Peace and Conflict 2005, co-authored by veteran peace researcher Ted Robert Gurr, also finds a marked decline in major conflicts since the early 1990s. One explanation these reports offer for the overall decrease in wars in the last two decades is the ending of two of the main "drivers" of conflict: decolonisation and the cold war. Both historical cycles were marked by endemic conflict. The thirty years after 1945 saw numerous small wars regarded as insurgencies or revolutionary threats by colonial powers, and as wars of national liberation by the combatants and their supporters in southeast Asia, Kenya, Cyprus, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, and many other places. There was also massive internal violence surrounding other transitions to independence, including the partition of India in 1947 and the birth of Bangladesh in 1970-71. Many of these conflicts had a [99]wider geopolitical aspect as proxy wars between the United States and its allies and the Soviet bloc. It was characteristic of this cold-war era that these wars, which killed at least 10 million people and wounded 30 million, were fought in the third world including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ethiopia/Somalia rather than Europe. When the two types of conflict, decolonisation and cold war, are taken together, it is not surprising that (as the Human Security Report points out) the two countries that have been most involved in international wars since 1946 are Britain and France; the United States and Soviet Union/Russia are next on the list. The [100]cold war drew to its end in 1989-91 with the fall of the Berlin wall, revolutions across east-central Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This period coincided with the first Gulf war in 1991 to expel Saddam Husseins forces from Kuwait, and was closely followed by bitter conflicts in the [101]Caucasus (Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Chechnya) and the [102]Balkans, as well as one of the worst conflicts of the past century in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Alongside such violent and destructive events was a huge expansion in peacekeeping and conflict-prevention initiatives, principally but not only by the United Nations and its agencies. The Human Security Report argues strongly that these initiatives have had a direct effect in defusing some potential conflicts and easing others. The [103]UN dimension is significant in anticipating possible reactions to the report. The HSR is not an official UN product, but it is very clearly sympathetic with that organisation, and this is likely to induce cynicism from the UNs critics like US ambassador John Bolton and others in American politics and media. At the same time, the evidence the report gathers and the arguments it proposes are not ideologically one-sided: it includes major caveats and is very far from claiming that an era of universal peace is dawning. The invisible casualties The current political context makes the Human Security Report a rare document that provides a more hopeful picture about current indicators of conflict in the world. But a close reading of the HSRs detailed analysis suggests two issues in particular that deserve closer attention. The first is the marked tendency it notes for people to flee from major areas of conflict, seeking security either in neighbouring countries or even further afield. This means that large numbers of people are being exposed to sustained and often extreme dislocation and hardship a trend that may well result in an underestimation of the actual numbers killed and wounded in current conflicts. The second issue is that in any case, the crude counting of casualties can be hugely misleading, especially when conflicts are happening in weak and impoverished societies. Most wars of the modern era take place in just such societies, with sub-Saharan Africa being particularly badly affected. In such circumstances, the effects of war can take years or even decades to overcome. The destruction of schools, hospitals and clinics, damage to farming systems, marketing networks, ports and even bridges will have a far greater effect in poorer countries where most people already live close to the margins. The net effect frequently is to add to malnutrition, susceptibility to disease and, especially, infant mortality and death in childbirth in a manner that is almost entirely missing from the simple, direct statistics of war. Such impacts have, needless to say, been part of conflicts for decades if not centuries. They should be of great concern today, because alongside the great wealth and comfort of rich 21st-century societies a huge proportion of the global human community lives on very basic incomes with no guarantee of a stable future, while hundreds of millions more barely manage to survive at all. It is arguable that no social order that tolerates such vast inequalities can long endure. Two sources of insecurity These qualifications to the optimistic thrust of the HSR still leave a conundrum: why can this report and other similar research suggest that the world is becoming less violent and dangerous when so many analysts and citizens find daily evidence to offer the opposite view? There are perhaps two main explanations. The first is that it is mainly people in the "Atlantic" countries especially the United States and Canada, and western European countries such as Britain and Germany who perceive a world of increasing violence. For this (in world terms) elite group, which includes people directly involved in George W Bush's "global war on terror", media coverage of Iraq and of al-Qaida attacks helps create a pervasive view of global insecurity. But most people in other parts of the world are more directly concerned with immediate worries jobs, health and education, and even water, food and shelter and any larger worries about war may well have diminished in the past two decades. The second explanation is that the 9/11 attacks really did have a profound effect on the United States, by challenging a self-perception of invulnerability that had previously been disturbed as long ago as 1941. The threat to the USs superpower dominance, leading to a war on terror now approaching its fifth year, may actually be distorting its understanding of the global picture of increasing security. In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click [104]here A collection of Paul Rogerss Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris ([105]October 2005) These two arguments require careful attention, but also two strong notes of caution in turn. First, the very vigour of the American response to 9/11 may be creating the conditions for increased instability and conflict. These counter-currents are most evident in the middle east, whose rapidly growing energy resource significance coupled with the [106]advent of China as a competitive agent reinforce existing political tensions. Second, the assessment of whether or not the world has become more peaceful needs to accommodate the greatest human test of all the response to climate change and all the many new insecurities that will come in its wake if it is not brought under control. The "drying out" of the tropics and the impact of global warming on the polar icecaps, which now look increasingly possible, will overshadow every other issue of [107]international security in the coming decades. The huge pressure to migrate they are likely to bring is only one of their likely effects. These two cautions refer to problems that will dominate the coming years and which can still just be addressed by making necessary policy changes. It is in this political context that the Human Security Report is a salutary reminder of what is possible. In many different ways over the past fifteen years there really has been a much-increased effort to prevent conflict, to resolve it when it happens and to improve the worlds capacity for post-conflict peace-building. In the context of so many forces and dynamics of insecurity, that is a powerful message. ------------------------------------------ [108]Human Security Report [109]"Peace and Conflict 2005" report References 85. http://www.opendemocracy.net/content/articles/PDF/2927.pdf 86. http://www.opendemocracy.net/content/articles/PDF/2927.pdf 87. http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Paul_Rogers.jsp 89. http://www.opendemocracy.net/home/index.jsp 90. http://www.opendemocracy.net/columns/view-2.jsp 91. http://www.opendemocracy.net/registration2/donate.jsp 92. http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=2918 93. http://www.humansecurityreport.info/ 94. http://www.ligi.ubc.ca/ 95. http://www.humansecuritycentre.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=52 96. http://hdr.undp.org/ 97. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/ 98. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/paper.asp?id=15 99. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/cold_war.htm 100. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CWSC/ 101. http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-caucasus/debate.jsp 102. http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-yugoslavia/debate.jsp 103. http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-UN/issue.jsp 104. http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/paulrogers.htm 105. http://www.ibtauris.com/ibtauris/display.asp?K=510000000937692&sf_01=CAUTHOR&st_01=paul+rogers&sf_02=CTITLE&sf_03=KEYWORD&m=1&dc=1 106. http://www.meforum.org/article/694 107. http://www.humansecuritygateway.info/ 108. http://www.humansecuritycentre.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=59 109. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/paper.asp?id=15 From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:40:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:40:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prospect: Joel Kotkin: Uncool Cities Message-ID: Joel Kotkin: Uncool Cities http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7072&AuthKey=864b5d0a0841d041edb673e66804aea5&issue=510 [No. 115 / Oct 2005] From London and Berlin to Sydney and San Francisco, civic authorities agree that the key to urban prosperity is appealing to the "hipster set" of gays, twentysomethings and young creatives. But the only evidence for this idea comes from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s--and that time is over Joel Kotkin is an Irvine senior fellow with the New America Foundation and author of The City: A Global History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) -------------- The world's great cities face serious, even catastrophic problems. Terrorists have planted bombs in London's Underground and bus systems. Floods have wiped out New Orleans, and fires incinerated scores of impoverished Africans living in crowded, seamy Paris apartments. Everywhere--from New Orleans to London and Paris--the middle classes, whatever their colour, are deserting the core for safer and more affordable suburbs, following in the footsteps of high-tech industries and major corporations. Yet rather than address serious issues like housing, schools, transport, jobs and security, mayors and policy gurus from Berlin and London to Sydney and San Francisco have adopted what can be best be described as the "cool city strategy." If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster set, they insist, all will be well. New Orleans, the most recent victim of catastrophic urban decline, is a case in point. Once a great commercial hub, the city's economic and political elites have placed all their bets on New Orleans becoming a tourist and culture centre. Indeed, just a month before the disaster, city leaders held a conference that promoted a "cultural economy initiative" strategy for attracting high-end industry. The other big state initiative was not levee improvement but a $450m expansion for the now infamous convention centre. This rush to hipness has its precedents, perhaps even in Roman festivals or medieval fairs. But in the past, most cities did not see entertainment as their main purpose. Rome was an imperial seat; Manchester, Berlin, Chicago and Detroit foundries of the industrial age; London, New York, and later Tokyo, global financial centres. Perhaps even worse, the lure of "coolness" leads cities to ignore the fundamental issues--infrastructure, middle-class flight, terrorism--that have so much more to do with their long-term prospects. Cities once boasted of their thriving middle-class neighbourhoods, churches, warehouses, factories and high-rise office towers. Today they set their value by their inventory of jazz clubs, gay bars, art museums, luxury hotels and condos. The advocates of this approach are a new generation of "hip cool" mayors, including Ken Livingstone, Berlin's Klaus Wowereit, San Francisco's Gavin Newsom, Baltimore's Martim O'Malley, Detroit's "hip hop" mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the gay chief executive of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe. Ken Livingstone sees London's future tied to "the richness, breadth and diversity of its cultural and creative resources." Theatres, sports stadiums, museums and cinemas are, he notes, "what many of us enjoy most about living here." Culture, not commerce, is "London's heartbeat." For a city "vulnerable to the up and downs of the global political and economic system," the mayor proclaims, culture and tourism represent an ideal way to counteract "the negative impact of such events." This refocus of urban policy around culture and tourism has wide appeal, particularly in continental Europe. Expensive--and increasingly economically marginal cities--like Paris, Vienna and post-cold war Berlin have all embraced the notion of a culturally-based lifestyle economy. Berlin epitomises the trend. In the 1990s, massive funds were expended to make the restored German capital into the business capital of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions foundered on the city's high taxes, red tape, and generally anti-business culture. Over 100,000 jobs have left in recent years, unemployment is nearly 20 per cent and the population is declining, as people flee to the suburbs or more prosperous parts of Germany. Faced with such problems, what does the mayor of the bankrupt city propose? Cut taxes, build new infrastructure, find ways to keep the middle classes and businesses? No, Mayor Wowereit pegs the future to selling Berlin as "the city of glamour." To him, "the most decisive aspect is to bring creative young people to Berlin." Somehow, he believes, this will turn the city's sad economy around. Similar thinking has been picked up by political and business leaders in grittier places like Liverpool and Manchester, Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit. Faced with population decline of 30 to 40 per cent over the past half century, these cities have all created programmes designed to lure gays, bohemians and young "creatives" to their towns. This ephemeralisation of urbanism derives, in part, from the theories of Richard Florida, an American academic whose theories about the "creative class" have captivated many city leaders. Using research drawn largely from the dot-com era of the late 1990s, Florida insists that the key to urban success lies in attracting such groups of young twentysomething singles, artists and homosexuals. Florida's favourite hip cities, not surprisingly, are places like Sydney, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Boston, areas with lots of students, artists and gays--and the lowest percentages of families. Other less hip locales have been duly forewarned, as a headline in the Washington Monthly put it, that cities "without gays and rock bands are losing the economic race." There is little evidence that this is really how urban economies work. It turns out that many of the most prized members of the "creative class" are not 25-year-old hip cools, but fortysomething adults who, particularly if they have children, end up gravitating to the suburbs and more economically dynamic cities like Phoenix, Boise, Charlotte or Orlando. The false promise of Florida's "creative class" has been obvious for the last five years, particularly with the collapse of the dot-com boom. In the late 1990s there did appear to be a new kind of urban economy--driven by black-clad graphic designers, programmers and marketeers--that was bringing new jobs, wealth and residents to old urban areas from San Francisco's "multimedia gulch" to New York's ultra-trendy "silicon alley." Then the dot-com economy fizzled out, leaving whole districts of New York, San Francisco and Boston with huge vacancy rates and declining job rolls. San Francisco has lost roughly 10 per cent of its jobs and 4 per cent of its residents since 1999. Its job growth rate, like most of the "hip" cities heralded by Florida, has lagged behind the national average, not only in overall jobs but in high-wage technology, business and financial service jobs. There have also been social costs. These cities have become the most divided by class in the US, and often suffer large homeless populations. In some, the largely immigrant service class labour to keep the wealthy population properly served, at least until they can afford to move to the suburbs. Perhaps there is no more searing evidence of the limitations of a culture-based economy than New Orleans. Once a great industrial and commercial centre, the city--despite its huge port--has roughly half the US average of jobs in manufacturing and wholesale trade. Other, more business-focused cities, notably Houston, have taken the lead in the high-paid service jobs connected to trade, such as finance, engineering and medical services. The energy industry, once the lynchpin of the local economy, also decamped, primarily to Houston. All this happened despite New Orelans being a city that was heavily gay, very cool and extremely hip. By the time of the flood, tourism and culture, along with a huge social service bureaucracy, was driving the economy. The problem, of course, is that tourism pays poorly; a 2002 study for the AFL-CIO showed that nearly half of all full-time hotel workers could not earn enough to keep a family out of poverty. Lost in the ghastly images of New Orleans's poor is the fact that the city's whites, about 27 per cent of the population, are wealthier and more educated than their counterparts nationwide. They, of course, welcomed the new nightclubs, coffee shops and galleries that dotted their grander neighbourhoods. New Orleans epitomised the inequality of the hip cool city. While the national gap between black and white per capita income stands at about $9,000, in New Orleans it is almost $20,000. The prospect for older industrial cities, which lack much of a basis for tourism and culture, are even less encouraging. Detroit, in particular, under its "hip hop" Mayor Kilpatrick, continues to slide. Baltimore, another city that has openly embraced the "creative class" theory has languished. It also experienced a shocking increase in crime, and now suffers one of the highest homicide rates in America. Little recognised amid the creative class craze is the fact that a strong and growing middle class is still the key to well balanced urban life. Without a permanent middle class, cities through history--from ancient Rome and 17th-century Venice to 19th-century Amsterdam--have lost their balast, become ever more divided by class, and ceded their central role. London and other amenity-rich cities like New York, Paris, San Francisco and Boston will not become ruins, any more than Venice and Amsterdam did after they entered their elegant dotages. Even New Orleans, owing to its location and historical significance, and troubled Berlin, by dint of being Germany's capital and possessor of an enormous cultural legacy, are unlikely to go the way of Detroit. Indeed, as long as the world economy expands, such cities may find their sustenance as amusement parks for adults. But the people will come from other more dynamic rising cities--places like Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Perth, Calgary, Los Angeles, Houston or Phoenix--that still retain their "animal spirits" and remain the locus of middle-class aspiration. New Yorkers and Londoners still possess the essentials for a more vital future. But first their political leaders must realise that great cities need schools for families, transport that works, jobs for the middle and the aspiring working classes. And they must acknowledge the continuing need to invest heavily in public safety, particularly in an age of terror. These challenges come with a price, and require public money to pay for them. In contrast, the "coolness" strategy both costs little and offends no one. It is the path of least resistance, but one that offers only poor returns. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 16 22:40:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:40:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Scotsman: Athletes 'have reached end of the record road' Message-ID: Scotsman: Athletes 'have reached end of the record road' http://news.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=2216132005 SHAN ROSS THE era of record-breaking sporting performances is coming to an end, scientists predicted yesterday. The women's 1,500 metres world record is one barrier that cannot be smashed unless an athlete uses drugs, said scientists who conducted the study. However, the findings were criticised by sporting organisations and by Frank Dick, one of the UK's most successful coaches, who is credited with being the driving force behind Daley Thompson's Olympic gold medal wins. In a report Are There Limits to Running World Records? published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise, Professor Alan Nevill, of the University of Wolverhampton, who carried out the study with Professor Greg Whyte of the English Institute of Sport, said: "We have identified that there could be a limit to performance and that world records will not continue to rise. "Many of the established men's and women's middle and long-distance running records are already nearing their limits. The results, of course, assume that athletes in the future do not benefit from scientific engineering or drug use. However, I cannot see the women's 1,500m record ever being broken, unless human beings have fundamental changes to their genetic structure." However, Marty Aitken, director of performance at the Scottish Institute of Sport, said earlier predictions about limits had proved inaccurate: "We were always told it was a fact that no-one would run the four-minute mile and it happened." Chris Broadbent, of Scottish Athletics, said: "Records are very rarely broken and when they are, it is by small margins - and that's the way it should be. Excellent training and coaching is what counts." Liz McColgan, who won a silver medal in the 10,000m at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, said: "Prof Nevill is right in some ways. We are nearing optimum, but I think records will still be broken but not by as much as we are seeing at present. With better training techniques, better nutrition and healthier and stronger athletes, you will still get improvement. But then you will always have the cheats." Mr Dick said: "Physically, Daley Thomson didn't stand a chance against the German Jurgen Hingsen, but by applying himself physically and intellectually he beat him into the ground. Records are broken by integrity and strength of spirit, not by scientific predictions." From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 01:51:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 20:51:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business In-Reply-To: <437B7BB2.8030909@earthlink.net> References: <437B4B54.9080207@aol.com> <437B7BB2.8030909@earthlink.net> Message-ID: How much does this cost, Gerry? On 2005-11-16, Gerry Reinhart-Waller opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:34:26 -0800 > From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business > > For those interested in Dr. Robert Hare's psychopathic checklist might find > this link of interest: > http://www.hare.org/pclr/index.html > > Regards, > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > Todd I. Stark wrote: > >> Frank posted this article a while back, it seems relevant to the current >> discussion since it offers a rationale for how and when psychopaths >> influence culture. >> >> Todd >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> Evil lurks at the top? MD urges screening CEOs for psychopaths >> http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoNews/ts.ts-08-29-0014.html >> Thursday, August 29, 2002 >> >> By ALAN CAIRNS, TORONTO SUN >> >> ST.JOHN'S, Nfld. -- A leading expert on psychopaths said the >> heartbreak, chaos and economic slump caused by corporate corruption >> could be avoided if prospective CEOs were screened for psychopathy. >> >> Saying he was ill at ease with many of North America's top executives >> who are currently under fire for misleading shareholders and milking >> hundreds of millions of dollars in company cash, Dr. Robert Hare said >> corporate North America is likely rife with psychopaths. >> >> Hare, whose psychopathic checklist diagnostic tool is used around the >> world, said ruthless psychopaths who have managed to hide their true >> nature because of a privileged upbringing can commit their crimes with >> impunity in the business world. >> >> THEY FIT THE MOULD >> >> While he stressed that many thieves and fraud artists are not >> psychopaths, Hare said when executives take hundreds of millions of >> other people's cash "blatantly and with malicious forethought" they >> fit the psychopathic mould. >> >> "Many people will lose their life savings. Some will have heart >> attacks, commit suicide. If they are not psychopaths, they sure as >> hell are not model citizens," he said. >> >> Hare said psychopaths typically "eat up" interviewers and head hunters >> who scrutinize CEO candidates. >> >> "For your average psychopath, it's no problem at all." >> >> He said screening CEOs and financiers who handle millions could be >> easily done. >> >> "You would check into his family background. He is what he is in all >> domains -- a rule breaker. The rules don't apply." >> >> Hare said companies are more at risk in today's tough economy. >> >> "That's when the psychopath moves in ... where there is chaos and the >> rules no longer apply. Enter the psychopath ... saying: I've got the >> solution." >> >> Hare gave the analogy of psychopaths who rise to power whenever there >> is chaos in political structures, noting African warlords, the former >> Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> Steve Hovland wrote on 11/15/2005, 6:41 PM: >> >> > I can't remember the name of the book, but some time >> > ago some people wrote a book claiming that our child- >> > rearing practices were creating an increased number >> > of sociopaths- empathy impaired. When I think about >> > children killing children these days, I think they >> > were right. >> > >> > So I think the supply has changed and the rules >> > have chained as well. Those of us who don't like >> > Bush may want to reflect on the idea that he >> > represents a composite portrait of the American >> > psyche. >> > >> > Steve >> > >> > >> > -----Original Message----- >> > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >> > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael >> > Christopher >> > Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 11:34 AM >> > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> > Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business >> > >> > >> > >> > Frank says: >> > >>But how did it come to pass that "greedy >> > psychotics" took over the business world?<< >> > >> > --If it's true that sociopaths have had an advantage >> > in any field, it would likely have been due to an >> > ability to "play the game" better, to manipulate >> > social networks more effectively than those who >> > concentrated on ability or ethics. And strategies that >> > get results tend to spread throughout a culture, >> > regardless of whether those strategies are ecological >> > or predatory. If it undermines long term stability, >> > that's just the outcome of everyone's short term >> > decisions. >> > >> > >>More seriously, what is there about the >> > *current* rules of business that result in "greedy >> > psychotics" taking over? Have the rules changed? Has >> > the supply of "greedy psychotics" increased? If so, >> > why?<< >> > >> > --It's possible that sociopaths eventually learn to >> > exploit *any* social system, if everyone else falls >> > asleep or is too busy focusing on personal advantage. >> > Perhaps sociopaths exploit everyone else's minor >> > flaws. It may not be the official rules that are the >> > problem, but rather the unofficial culture, the web of >> > personal connections and communication styles. As I >> > said, I have no reason to believe the problem is >> > confined to business, since I've seen groups with >> > little power or money fall under the same spell. >> > >> > >>I urge you to always think about processes and >> > the rules governing those processes.<< >> > >> > --Good advice. The faces change, but the underlying >> > processes remain. >> > >> > Michael From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:41:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:41:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Scientific American: Did Life Come from Another World? Message-ID: Did Life Come from Another World? http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00073A97-5745-1359-94FF83414B7F0000 October 24, 2005 New research indicates that microorganisms could have survived a journey from Mars to Earth By David Warmflash and Benjamin Weiss Most scientists have long assumed that life on Earth is a homegrown phenomenon. According to the conventional hypothesis, the earliest living cells emerged as a result of chemical evolution on our planet billions of years ago in a process called abiogenesis. The alternative possibility--that living cells or their precursors arrived from space--strikes many people as science fiction. Developments over the past decade, however, have given new credibility to the idea that Earth's biosphere could have arisen from an extraterrestrial seed. Planetary scientists have learned that early in its history our solar system could have included many worlds with liquid water, the essential ingredient for life as we know it. Recent data from NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers corroborate previous suspicions that water has at least intermittently flowed on the Red Planet in the past. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that life existed on Mars long ago and perhaps continues there. Life may have also evolved on Europa, Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, which appears to possess liquid water under its icy surface. Saturn's biggest satellite, Titan, is rich in organic compounds; given the moon's frigid temperatures, it would be highly surprising to find living forms there, but they cannot be ruled out. Life may have even gained a toehold on torrid Venus. The Venusian surface is probably too hot and under too much atmospheric pressure to be habitable, but the planet could conceivably support microbial life high in its atmosphere. And, most likely, the surface conditions on Venus were not always so harsh. Venus may have once been similar to early Earth. Moreover, the expanses of interplanetary space are not the forbidding barrier they once seemed. Over the past 20 years scientists have determined that more than 30 meteorites found on Earth originally came from the Martian crust, based on the composition of gases trapped within some of the rocks. Meanwhile biologists have discovered organisms durable enough to survive at least a short journey inside such meteorites. Although no one is suggesting that these particular organisms actually made the trip, they serve as a proof of principle. It is not implausible that life could have arisen on Mars and then come to Earth, or the reverse. Researchers are now intently studying the transport of biological materials between planets to get a better sense of whether it ever occurred. This effort may shed light on some of modern science's most compelling questions: Where and how did life originate? Are radically different forms of life possible? And how common is life in the universe? From Philosophy to the Laboratory To the ancient philosophers, the creation of life from nonliving matter seemed so magical, so much the realm of the gods, that some actually preferred the idea that ready-made living forms had come to Earth from elsewhere. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago, proposed a hypothesis called "panspermia" (Greek for "all seeds"), which posited that all life, and indeed all things, originated from the combination of tiny seeds pervading the cosmos. In modern times, several leading scientists--including British physicist Lord Kelvin, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius and Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA--have advocated various conceptions of panspermia. To be sure, the idea has also had less reputable proponents, but they should not detract from the fact that panspermia is a serious hypothesis, a potential phenomenon that we should not ignore when considering the distribution and evolution of life in the universe and how life came to exist specifically on Earth. _________________________________________________________________ Earth's biosphere could have arisen from an extraterrestrial seed. _________________________________________________________________ In its modern form, the panspermia hypothesis addresses how biological material might have arrived on our planet but not how life originated in the first place. No matter where it started, life had to arise from nonliving matter. Abiogenesis moved from the realm of philosophy to that of experimentation in the 1950s, when chemists Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago demonstrated that amino acids and other molecules important to life could be generated from simple compounds believed to exist on early Earth. It is now thought that molecules of ribonucleic acid (RNA) could have also assembled from smaller compounds and played a vital role in the development of life. [trans.gif] ADVERTISEMENT [trans.gif] In present-day cells, specialized RNA molecules help to build proteins. Some RNAs act as messengers between the genes, which are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and the ribosomes, the protein factories of the cell. Other RNAs bring amino acids--the building blocks of proteins--to the ribosomes, which in turn contain yet another type of RNA. The RNAs work in concert with protein enzymes that aid in linking the amino acids together, but researchers have found that the RNAs in the ribosome can perform the crucial step of protein synthesis alone. In the early stages of life's evolution, all the enzymes may have been RNAs, not proteins. Because RNA enzymes could have manufactured the first proteins without the need for preexisting protein enzymes to initiate the process, abiogenesis is not the chicken-and-egg problem that it was once thought to be. A prebiotic system of RNAs and proteins could have gradually developed the ability to replicate its molecular parts, crudely at first but then ever more efficiently. This new understanding of life's origins has transformed the scientific debate over panspermia. It is no longer an either-or question of whether the first microbes arose on Earth or arrived from space. In the chaotic early history of the solar system, our planet was subject to intense bombardment by meteorites containing simple organic compounds. The young Earth could have also received more complex molecules with enzymatic functions, molecules that were prebiotic but part of a system that was already well on its way to biology. After landing in a suitable habitat on our planet, these molecules could have continued their evolution to living cells. In other words, an intermediate scenario is possible: life could have roots both on Earth and in space. But which steps in the development of life occurred where? And once life took hold, how far did it spread? Scientists who study panspermia used to concentrate only on assessing the basic plausibility of the idea, but they have recently sought to estimate the probability that biological materials made the journey to Earth from other planets or moons. To begin their interplanetary trip, the materials would have to be ejected from their planet of origin into space by the impact of a comet or asteroid. While traveling through space, the ejected rocks or dust particles would need to be captured by the gravity of another planet or moon, then decelerated enough to fall to the surface, passing through the atmosphere if one were present. Such transfers happen frequently throughout the solar system, although it is easier for ejected material to travel from bodies more distant from the sun to those closer in and easier for materials to end up on a more massive body. Indeed, dynamic simulations by University of British Columbia astrophysicist Brett Gladman suggest that the mass transferred from Earth to Mars is only a few percent of that delivered from Mars to Earth. For this reason, the most commonly discussed panspermia scenario involves the transport of microbes or their precursors from Mars to Earth. Simulations of asteroid or comet impacts on Mars indicate that materials can be launched into a wide variety of orbits. Gladman and his colleagues have estimated that every few million years Mars undergoes an impact powerful enough to eject rocks that could eventually reach Earth. The interplanetary journey is usually a long one: most of the approximately one ton of Martian ejecta that lands on Earth every year has spent several million years in space. But a tiny percentage of the Martian rocks arriving on Earth's surface--about one out of every 10 million--will have spent less than a year in space. Within three years of the impact event, about 10 fist-size rocks weighing more than 100 grams complete the voyage from Mars to Earth. Smaller debris, such as pebble-size rocks and dust particles, are even more likely to make a quick trip between planets; very large rocks do so much less frequently. Could biological entities survive this journey? First, let us consider whether microorganisms could live through the ejection process from the meteorite's parent body. Recent laboratory impact experiments have found that certain strains of bacteria can survive the accelerations and jerks (rates of changes of acceleration) that would be encountered during a typical high-pressure ejection from Mars. It is crucial, however, that the impact and ejection do not heat the meteorites enough to destroy the biological materials within them. Planetary geologists formerly believed that any impact ejecta with speeds exceeding the Martian escape velocity would almost certainly be vaporized or at least completely melted. This idea was later discounted, though, following the discovery of unmelted, largely intact meteorites from the moon and Mars. These findings led H. Jay Melosh of the University of Arizona to calculate that a small percentage of ejected rocks could indeed be catapulted from Mars via impact without any heating at all. In short, Melosh proposed that when the upward-propagating pressure wave resulting from an impact reaches the planetary surface, it undergoes a 180-degree phase change that nearly cancels the pressure within a thin layer of rock just below the surface. Because this "spall zone" experiences very little compression while the layers below are put under enormous pressure, rocks near the surface can be ejected relatively undeformed at high speeds. Next, let us consider survivability during the entry into Earth's atmosphere. Edward Anders, formerly of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the the University of Chicago, has shown that interplanetary dust particles decelerate gently in Earth's upper atmosphere, thus avoiding heating. Meteorites, in contrast, experience significant friction, so their surfaces typically melt during atmospheric passage. The heat pulse, however, has time to travel a few millimeters at most into the meteorite's interior, so organisms buried deep in the rock would certainly survive. Over the past five years a series of papers by one of us (Weiss) and his colleagues analyzed two types of Martian meteorites: the nakhlites, a set of rocks blasted off Mars by an asteroid or comet impact 11 million years ago, and ALH84001, which left the Red Planet four million years earlier. (ALH84001 became famous in 1996 when a group of scientists led by David McKay of the NASA Johnson Space Center claimed that the rock showed traces of fossilized microorganisms akin to Earth's bacteria; a decade later researchers are still debating whether the meteorite contains evidence of Martian life.) By studying the magnetic properties of the meteorites and the composition of the gases trapped within them, Weiss and his collaborators found that ALH84001 and at least two of the seven nakhlites discovered so far were not heated more than a few hundred degrees Celsius since they were part of the Martian surface. Furthermore, the fact that the nakhlites are nearly pristine rocks, untouched by high-pressure shock waves, implies that the Martian impact did not heat them above 100 degrees C. Many, though not all, terrestrial prokaryotes (simple one-celled organisms such as bacteria that lack a membrane-bound nucleus) and eukaryotes (organisms with well-defined nuclei) could survive this temperature range. This result was the first direct experimental evidence that material could travel from planet to planet without being thermally sterilized at any point from ejection to landing. The Problem of Radiation For panspermia to occur, however, microorganisms need to survive not only ejection from the first planet and atmospheric entry to the second but the interplanetary voyage itself. Life-bearing meteoroids and dust particles would be exposed to the vacuum of space, extremes in temperature and several different kinds of radiation. Of particular concern is the sun's high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light, which breaks the bonds that hold together the carbon atoms of organic molecules. It is very easy to shield against UV, though; just a few millionths of a meter of opaque material is enough to protect bacteria. Indeed, a European study using NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), a satellite deployed by the space shuttle in 1984 and retrieved from orbit by the shuttle six years later, showed that a thin aluminum cover afforded adequate UV shielding to spores of the bacterial species Bacillus subtilis. Of the spores protected by the aluminum but exposed to the vacuum and temperature extremes of space, 80 percent remained viable--researchers reanimated them into active bacterial cells at the end of the mission. As for the spores not covered by aluminum and therefore directly exposed to solar UV radiation, most were destroyed, but not all. About one in 10,000 unshielded spores stayed viable, and the presence of substances such as glucose and salts increased their survival rates. Even within an object as small as a dust particle, solar UV would not necessarily render an entire microbial colony sterile. And if the colony were inside something as large as a pebble, UV protection would be sharply increased. Informative as it was, the LDEF study was conducted in low Earth orbit, well within our planet's protective magnetic field. Thus, this research could not say much about the effects of interplanetary charged particles, which cannot penetrate Earth's magnetosphere. From time to time, the sun produces bursts of energetic ions and electrons; furthermore, charged particles are a major component of the galactic cosmic radiation that constantly bombards our solar system. Protecting living things from charged particles, as well as from high-energy radiation such as gamma rays, is trickier than shielding against UV. A layer of rock just a few microns thick blocks UV, but adding more shielding actually increases the dose of other types of radiation. The reason is that charged particles and high-energy photons interact with the rocky shielding material, producing showers of secondary radiation within the meteorite. These showers could reach any microbes inside the rock unless it was very big, about two meters or more in diameter. As we have noted above, though, large rocks make fast interplanetary voyages very infrequently. Consequently, in addition to UV protection, what really matters is how resistant a microbe is to all components of space radiation and how quickly the life-bearing meteorite moves from planet to planet. The shorter the journey, the lower the total radiation dose and hence the greater the chance of survival. In fact, B. subtilis is fairly robust in terms of its radiation resistance. Even more hardy is Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterial species that was discovered during the 1950s by agricultural scientist Arthur W. Anderson. This organism survives radiation doses given to sterilize food products and even thrives inside nuclear reactors. The same cellular mechanisms that help D. radiodurans repair its DNA, build extra-thick cell walls and otherwise protect itself from radiation also mitigate damage from dehydration. Theoretically, if organisms with such capabilities were embedded within material catapulted from Mars the way that the nakhlites and ALH84001 apparently were (that is, without excessive heating), some fraction of the organisms would still be viable after many years, perhaps several decades, in interplanetary space. Yet the actual long-term survival of active organisms, spores or complex organic molecules beyond Earth's magne-tosphere has never been tested. Such experiments, which would put the biological materials within simulated meteoritic materials and expose them to the environment of interplanetary space, could be conducted on the surface of the moon. In fact, biological samples were carried onboard the Apollo lunar missions as part of an early incarnation of the European radiation study. The longest Apollo mission, though, lasted no more than 12 days, and samples were kept within the Apollo spacecraft and thus not exposed to the full space-radiation environment. In the future, scientists could place experimental packages on the lunar surface or on interplanetary trajectories for several years before returning them to Earth for laboratory analysis. Researchers are currently considering these approaches. Meanwhile a long-term study known as the Martian Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE) is under way. Launched by NASA in 2001 as part of the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, MARIE's instruments are measuring doses of galactic cosmic rays and energetic solar particles as the spacecraft circles the Red Planet. Although MARIE includes no biological material, its sensors are designed to focus on the range of space radiation that is most harmful to DNA. Future Studies As we have shown, panspermia is plausible theoretically. But in addition, important aspects of the hypothesis have made the transition from plausibility to quantitative science. Meteorite evidence shows that material has been transferred between planets throughout the history of the solar system and that this process still occurs at a well-established rate. Furthermore, laboratory studies have demonstrated that a sizable fraction of microorganisms within a piece of planetary material ejected from a Mars-size planet could survive ejection into space and entry through Earth's atmosphere. But other parts of the panspermia hypothesis are harder to pin down. Investigators need more data to determine whether radiation-resistant organisms such as B. subtilis or D. radiodurans could live through an interplanetary journey. And even this research would not reveal the likelihood that it actually happened in the case of Earth's biosphere, because the studies involve present-day terrestrial life-forms; the organisms living billions of years ago could have fared much worse or much better. Moreover, scientists cannot quantify the likelihood that life exists or once existed on planets other than Earth. Researchers simply do not know enough about the origin of any system of life, including that of Earth, to draw solid conclusions about the probability of abiogenesis occurring on any particular world. Given suitable ingredients and conditions, perhaps life needs hundreds of millions of years to get started. Or perhaps five minutes is enough. All we can say with any certainty is that by 2.7 billion years ago, or perhaps several hundred million years earlier, life-forms were thriving on Earth. Because it is not possible at this time to quantify all the steps of the panspermia scenario, investigators cannot estimate how much biological material or how many living cells most likely arrived at Earth's surface in a given period. Moreover, the transfer of viable organisms does not automatically imply the successful seeding of the planet that receives them, particularly if the planet already has life. If, for example, Martian microbes arrived on Earth after life independently arose on our planet, the extraterrestrial organisms may not have been able to replace or coexist with the homegrown species. It is also conceivable that Martian life did find a suitable niche on Earth but that scientists have simply not identified it yet. Researchers have inventoried no more than a few percent of the total number of bacterial species on this planet. Groups of organisms that are genetically unrelated to the known life on Earth might exist unrecognized right under our noses. Ultimately, scientists may not be able to know whether and to what extent panspermia has occurred until they discover life on another planet or moon. For example, if future space missions find life on the Red Planet and report that Martian biochemistry is very different from our own, researchers would know immediately that life on Earth did not come from Mars. If the biochemistries were similar, however, scientists might begin to wonder if perhaps the two biospheres had a common origin. Assuming that Martian life-forms used DNA to store genetic information, investigators could study the nucleotide sequences to settle the question. If the Martian DNA sequences did not follow the same genetic code used by living cells on Earth to make proteins, researchers would conclude that Mars-Earth panspermia is doubtful. But many other scenarios are possible. Investigators might find that Martian life uses RNA or something else entirely to guide its replication. Indeed, yet-to-be-discovered organisms on Earth may fall into this category as well, and the exotic terrestrial creatures might turn out to be related to the Martian life-forms. Whether terrestrial life emerged on Earth or through biological seeding from space or as the result of some intermediate scenario, the answer would be meaningful. The confirmation of Mars-Earth panspermia would suggest that life, once started, could readily spread within a star system. If, on the other hand, researchers find evidence of Martian organisms that emerged independently of terrestrial life, it would suggest that abiogenesis can occur with ease throughout the cosmos. What is more, biologists would be able to compare Earth organisms with alien forms and develop a more general definition of life. We would finally begin to understand the laws of biology the way we understand the laws of chemistry and physics--as fundamental properties of nature. From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:42:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:42:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Physics Today: Einstein's Mistakes Message-ID: Einstein's Mistakes http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-11/p31.html Science sets itself apart from other paths to truth by recognizing that even its greatest practitioners sometimes err. [12]Steven Weinberg Albert Einstein was certainly the greatest physicist of the 20th century, and one of the greatest scientists of all time. It may seem presumptuous to talk of mistakes made by such a towering figure, especially in the centenary of his annus mirabilis. But the mistakes made by leading scientists often provide a better insight into the spirit and presuppositions of their times than do their successes.[13]^1 Also, for those of us who have made our share of scientific errors, it is mildly consoling to note that even Einstein made mistakes. Perhaps most important, by showing that we are aware of mistakes made by even the greatest scientists, we set a good example to those who follow other supposed paths to truth. We recognize that our most important scientific forerunners were not prophets whose writings must be studied as infallible guides--they were simply great men and women who prepared the ground for the better understandings we have now achieved. The cosmological constant In thinking of Einstein's mistakes, one immediately recalls what Einstein (in a conversation with George Gamow[14]^2) called the biggest blunder he had made in his life: the introduction of the cosmological constant. After Einstein had completed the formulation of his theory of space, time, and gravitation--the general theory of relativity--he turned in 1917 to a consideration of the spacetime structure of the whole universe. He then encountered a problem. Einstein was assuming that, when suitably averaged over many stars, the universe is uniform and essentially static, but the equations of general relativity did not seem to allow a time-independent solution for a universe with a uniform distribution of matter. So Einstein modified his equations, by including a new term involving a quantity that he called the cosmological constant. Then it was discovered that the universe is not static, but expanding. Einstein came to regret that he had needlessly mutilated his original theory. It may also have bothered him that he had missed predicting the expansion of the universe. This story involves a tangle of mistakes, but not the one that Einstein thought he had made. First, I don't think that it can count against Einstein that he had assumed the universe is static. With rare exceptions, theorists have to take the world as it is presented to them by observers. The relatively low observed velocities of stars made it almost irresistible in 1917 to suppose that the universe is static. Thus when Willem de Sitter proposed an alternative solution to the Einstein equations in 1917, he took care to use coordinates for which the metric tensor is time-independent. However, the physical meaning of those coordinates is not transparent, and the realization that de Sitter's alternate cosmology was not static--that matter particles in his model would accelerate away from each other--was considered to be a drawback of the theory. [15]Einstein, de Sitter, Eddington, Lorentz, and Ehrenfest [16]Figure 1 It is true that Vesto Melvin Slipher, while observing the spectra of spiral nebulae in the 1910s, had found a preponderance of redshifts, of the sort that would be produced in an expansion by the Doppler effect, but no one then knew what the spiral nebulae were; it was not until Edwin Hubble found faint Cepheid variables in the Andromeda Nebula in 1923 that it became clear that spiral nebulae were distant galaxies, clusters of stars far outside our own galaxy. I don't know if Einstein had heard of Slipher's redshifts by 1917, but in any case he knew very well about at least one other thing that could produce a redshift of spectral lines: a gravitational field. It should be acknowledged here that Arthur Eddington, who had learned about general relativity during World War I from de Sitter, did in 1923 interpret Slipher's redshifts as due to the expansion of the universe in the de Sitter model. (The two scientists are pictured with Einstein and others in [17]figure 1.) Nevertheless, the expansion of the universe was not generally accepted until Hubble announced in 1929--and actually showed in 1931--that the redshifts of distant galaxies increase in proportion to their distance, as would be expected for a uniform expansion (see [18]figure 2). Only then was much attention given to the expanding-universe models introduced in 1922 by Alexander Friedmann, in which no cosmological constant is needed. In 1917 it was quite reasonable for Einstein to assume that the universe is static. [19]Graph of Recessional velocities of nearby galaxies [20]Figure 2 Einstein did make a surprisingly trivial mistake in introducing the cosmological constant. Although that step made possible a time-independent solution of the Einstein field equations, the solution described a state of unstable equilibrium. The cosmological constant acts like a repulsive force that increases with distance, while the ordinary attractive force of gravitation decreases with distance. Although there is a critical mass density at which this repulsive force just balances the attractive force of gravitation, the balance is unstable; a slight expansion will increase the repulsive force and decrease the attractive force so that the expansion accelerates. It is hard to see how Einstein could have missed this elementary difficulty. Einstein was also at first confused by an idea he had taken from the philosopher Ernst Mach: that the phenomenon of inertia is caused by distant masses. To keep inertia finite, Einstein in 1917 supposed that the universe must be finite, and so he assumed that its spatial geometry is that of a three-dimensional spherical surface. It was therefore a surprise to him that when test particles are introduced into the empty universe of de Sitter's model, they exhibit all the usual properties of inertia. In general relativity the masses of distant bodies are not the cause of inertia, though they do affect the choice of inertial frames. But that mistake was harmless. As Einstein pointed out in his 1917 paper, it was the assumption that the universe is static, not that it is finite, that had made a cosmological constant necessary. Aesthetically motivated simplicity Einstein made what from the perspective of today's theoretical physics is a deeper mistake in his dislike of the cosmological constant. In developing general relativity, he had relied not only on a simple physical principle--the principle of the equivalence of gravitation and inertia that he had developed from 1907 to 1911--but also on a sort of Occam's razor, that the equations of the theory should be not only consistent with this principle but also as simple as possible. In itself, the principle of equivalence would allow field equations of almost unlimited complexity. Einstein could have included terms in the equations involving four spacetime derivatives, or six spacetime derivatives, or any even number of spacetime derivatives, but he limited himself to second-order differential equations. This could have been defended on practical grounds. Dimensional analysis shows that the terms in the field equations involving more than two spacetime derivatives would have to be accompanied by constant factors proportional to positive powers of some length. If this length was anything like the lengths encountered in elementary-particle physics, or even atomic physics, then the effects of these higher derivative terms would be quite negligible at the much larger scales at which all observations of gravitation are made. There is just one modification of Einstein's equations that could have observable effects: the introduction of a term involving no spacetime derivatives at all--that is, a cosmological constant. But Einstein did not exclude terms with higher derivatives for this or for any other practical reason, but for an aesthetic reason: They were not needed, so why include them? And it was just this aesthetic judgment that led him to regret that he had ever introduced the cosmological constant. Since Einstein's time, we have learned to distrust this sort of aesthetic criterion. Our experience in elementary-particle physics has taught us that any term in the field equations of physics that is allowed by fundamental principles is likely to be there in the equations. It is like the ant world in T. H. White's The Once and Future King: Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. Indeed, as far as we have been able to do the calculations, quantum fluctuations by themselves would produce an infinite effective cosmological constant, so that to cancel the infinity there would have to be an infinite "bare" cosmological constant of the opposite sign in the field equations themselves. Occam's razor is a fine tool, but it should be applied to principles, not equations. It may be that Einstein was influenced by the example of Maxwell's theory, which he had taught himself while a student at the Z?rich Polytechnic Institute. James Clerk Maxwell of course invented his equations to account for the known phenomena of electricity and magnetism while preserving the principle of electric-charge conservation, and in Maxwell's formulation the field equations contain terms with only a minimum number of spacetime derivatives. Today we know that the equations governing electrodynamics contain terms with any number of spacetime derivatives, but these terms, like the higher-derivative terms in general relativity, have no observable consequences at macroscopic scales. Astronomers in the decades following 1917 occasionally sought signs of a cosmological constant, but they only succeeded in setting an upper bound on the constant. That upper bound was vastly smaller than what would be expected from the contribution of quantum fluctuations, and many physicists and astronomers concluded from this that the constant must be zero. But despite our best efforts, no one could find a satisfactory physical principle that would require a vanishing cosmological constant. [21]Graph of Measurements on distant supernovae [22]Figure 3 Then in 1998, measurements of redshifts and distances of supernovae by the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team showed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as de Sitter had found in his model (see the article by Saul Perlmutter, PHYSICS TODAY, April 2003, [23]page 53). As discussed in [24]figure 3, it seems that about 70% of the energy density of the universe is a sort of "dark energy," filling all space. This was subsequently confirmed by observations of the angular size of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. The density of the dark energy is not varying rapidly as the universe expands, and if it is truly time-independent then it is just the effect that would be expected from a cosmological constant. However this works out, it is still puzzling why the cosmological constant is not as large as would be expected from calculations of quantum fluctuations. In recent years the question has become a major preoccupation of theoretical physicists. Regarding his introduction of the cosmological constant in 1917, Einstein's real mistake was that he thought it was a mistake. A historian, reading the foregoing in a first draft of this article, commented that I might be accused of perpetrating Whig history. The term "Whig history" was coined in a 1931 lecture by the historian Herbert Butterfield. According to Butterfield, Whig historians believe that there is an unfolding logic in history, and they judge the past by the standards of the present. But it seems to me that, although Whiggery is to be avoided in political and social history (which is what concerned Butterfield), it has a certain value in the history of science. Our work in science is cumulative. We really do know more than our predecessors, and we can learn about the things that were not understood in their times by looking at the mistakes they made. Contra quantum mechanics The other mistake that is widely attributed to Einstein is that he was on the wrong side in his famous debate with Niels Bohr over quantum mechanics, starting at the Solvay Congress of 1927 and continuing into the 1930s. In brief, Bohr had presided over the formulation of a "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics, in which it is only possible to calculate the probabilities of the various possible outcomes of experiments. Einstein rejected the notion that the laws of physics could deal with probabilities, famously decreeing that God does not play dice with the cosmos. But history gave its verdict against Einstein--quantum mechanics went on from success to success, leaving Einstein on the sidelines. All this familiar story is true, but it leaves out an irony. Bohr's version of quantum mechanics was deeply flawed, but not for the reason Einstein thought. The Copenhagen interpretation describes what happens when an observer makes a measurement, but the observer and the act of measurement are themselves treated classically. This is surely wrong: Physicists and their apparatus must be governed by the same quantum mechanical rules that govern everything else in the universe. But these rules are expressed in terms of a wavefunction (or, more precisely, a state vector) that evolves in a perfectly deterministic way. So where do the probabilistic rules of the Copenhagen interpretation come from? Considerable progress has been made in recent years toward the resolution of the problem, which I cannot go into here. It is enough to say that neither Bohr nor Einstein had focused on the real problem with quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen rules clearly work, so they have to be accepted. But this leaves the task of explaining them by applying the deterministic equation for the evolution of the wavefunction, the Schr?dinger equation, to observers and their apparatus. The difficulty is not that quantum mechanics is probabilistic--that is something we apparently just have to live with. The real difficulty is that it is also deterministic, or more precisely, that it combines a probabilistic interpretation with deterministic dynamics. Attempts at unification Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics contributed, in the years from the 1930s to his death in 1955, to his isolation from other research in physics, but there was another factor. Perhaps Einstein's greatest mistake was that he became the prisoner of his own successes. It is the most natural thing in the world, when one has scored great victories in the past, to try to go on to further victories by repeating the tactics that previously worked so well. Think of the advice given to Egypt's President Gamal Abd al-Nasser by an apocryphal Soviet military attach? at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis: "Withdraw your troops to the center of the country, and wait for winter." And what physicist had scored greater victories than Einstein? After his tremendous success in finding an explanation of gravitation in the geometry of space and time, it was natural that he should try to bring other forces along with gravitation into a "unified field theory" based on geometrical principles. About other things going on in physics, he commented[25]^3 in 1950 that "all attempts to obtain a deeper knowledge of the foundations of physics seem doomed to me unless the basic concepts are in accordance with general relativity from the beginning." Since electromagnetism was the only other force that in its macroscopic effects seemed to bear any resemblance to gravitation, it was the hope of a unification of gravitation and electromagnetism that drove Einstein in his later years. I will mention only two of the many approaches taken by Einstein in this work. One was based on the idea of a fifth dimension, proposed in 1921 by Theodore Kaluza. Suppose you write the equations of general relativity in five rather than four spacetime dimensions, and arbitrarily assume that the 5D metric tensor does not depend on the fifth coordinate. Then it turns out that the part of the metric tensor that links the usual four spacetime dimensions with the fifth dimension satisfies the same field equation as the vector potential in the Maxwell theory of electromagnetism, and the part of the metric tensor that only links the usual four spacetime dimensions to each other satisfies the field equations of 4D general relativity. The idea of an additional dimension became even more attractive in 1926, when Oskar Klein relaxed the condition that the fields are independent of the fifth coordinate, and assumed instead that the fifth dimension is rolled up in a tiny circle so that the fields are periodic in that coordinate. Klein found that in this theory the part of the metric tensor that links the fifth dimension to itself behaves like the wavefunction of an electrically charged particle, so for a moment it seemed to Einstein that there was a chance that not only gravitation and electromagnetism but also matter would be governed by a unified geometrical theory. Alas, it turned out that if the electric charge of the particle is identified with the charge of the electron, then the particle's mass comes out too large by a factor of about 10^18. It is a pity that Einstein gave up on the Kaluza-Klein idea. If he had extended it from five to six or more spacetime dimensions, he might have discovered the field theory constructed in 1954 by C. N. Yang and Robert Mills, and its generalizations, some of which later appeared as parts of our modern theories of strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions.[26]^4 Einstein apparently gave no thought to strong or weak nuclear forces, I suppose because they seem so different from gravitation and electromagnetism. Today we realize that the equations underlying all known forces aside from gravitation are actually quite similar, the difference in the phenomena arising from color trapping for strong interactions and spontaneous symmetry breaking for weak interactions. Even so, Einstein would still probably be unhappy with today's theories, because they are not unified with gravitation and because matter--electrons, quarks, and so on--still has to be put in by hand. Even before Klein's work, Einstein had started on a different approach, based on a simple bit of counting. If you give up the condition that the 4 ? 4 metric tensor should be symmetric, then it will have 16 rather than 10 independent components, and the extra 6 components will have the right properties to be identified with the electric and magnetic fields. Equivalently, one can assume that the metric is complex, but Hermitian. The trouble with this idea, as Einstein became painfully aware, is that there really is nothing in it that ties the 6 components of the electric and magnetic fields to the 10 components of the ordinary metric tensor that describes gravitation, other than that one is using the same letter of the alphabet for all these fields. A Lorentz transformation or any other coordinate transformation will convert electric or magnetic fields into mixtures of electric and magnetic fields, but no transformation mixes them with the gravitational field. This purely formal approach, unlike the Kaluza-Klein idea, has left no significant trace in current research. The faith in mathematics as a source of physical inspiration, which had served Einstein so well in his development of general relativity, was now betraying him. Even though it was a mistake for Einstein to turn away from the exciting progress being made in the 1930s and 1940s by younger physicists, it revealed one admirable feature of his personality. Einstein never wanted to be a mandarin. He never tried to induce physicists in general to give up their work on nuclear and particle physics and follow his ideas. He never tried to fill professorships at the Institute for Advanced Studies with his collaborators or acolytes. Einstein was not only a great man, but a good one. His moral sense guided him in other matters: He opposed militarism during World War I; he refused to support the Soviet Union in the Stalin years; he became an enthusiastic Zionist; he gave up his earlier pacifism when Europe was threatened by Nazi Germany, for instance urging the Belgians to rearm; and he publicly opposed McCarthyism. About these great public issues, Einstein made no mistakes. Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a member of the physics and astronomy departments and heads the physics department's Theory Group. References 1. 1. The set of mistakes discussed in this article is not intended to be exhaustive. They are a selection, mostly chosen because they seemed to me to reveal something of the intellectual environment in which Einstein worked. In PHYSICS TODAY, March 2005, [27]page 34, Alex Harvey and Engelbert Schucking have described an erroneous prediction of Einstein regarding the rates of clocks on Earth's surface, and in his book Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA (1981), p. 328, Arthur I. Miller has discussed an error in Einstein's calculation of the electron's transverse mass. 2. 2. G. Gamow, My World Line--An Informal Autobiography, Viking Press, New York (1970), p. 44. I thank Lawrence Krauss for this reference. 3. 3. A. Einstein, Sci. Am., April 1950, p. 13. 4. 4. Oddly enough, at a conference in Warsaw in 1939, Klein presented something very like the Yang-Mills theory, on the basis of his five-dimensional generalization of general relativity. I have tried and failed to follow Klein's argument, and I do not believe his derivation makes sense; it takes at least two extra dimensions to get the Yang-Mills theory. It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers--not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell. 5. 5. E. Hubble, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 15, 168 (1929). 6. 6. A. G. Riess et al., [28]Astrophys. J. 607, 665 (2004) [29][SPIN]. From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:42:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:42:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Singapore's Regeneration Message-ID: Singapore's Regeneration The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.11 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i12/12a04201.htm With an open checkbook, the tiny city-state draws top scientists By MARTHA ANN OVERLAND Singapore Cao Tong, a professor at the National University of Singapore, admits that he is essentially a pawn of the government. And he could not be more thrilled. "Nowhere else could I have just walked in and started a program from ground zero," says Dr. Cao, a professor of dentistry who was awarded a half-million-dollar grant to back his oral-tissue-regeneration project. "Within one year I was set up." The young Chinese-born researcher is using embryonic stem cells to try to generate new dental tissue and bone cells. It is a risky proposition in a field that is prone to more failures than successes. But this is precisely the kind of research that Singapore believes will make it a world leader in biotechnology. "I'm part of the government plan," laughs Dr. Cao, flashing a smile. "And that's fine with me." Dr. Cao is not alone. In the past five years, thousands of researchers, many of them in the biomedical sciences, have been lured to Singapore with promises of state-of-the-art laboratories and blank checks with few strings attached. Singapore's support for stem-cell research has attracted researchers who might otherwise never have imagined working in the tiny city-state off the tip of Malaysia. "There's an infectious enthusiasm here," says Alan Colman, a member of the team that cloned Dolly, the sheep. Mr. Colman was recruited to Singapore from Britain in 2002 with offers of research money and, more importantly, unfettered access to embryonic stem cells. "They have decided to make biomedical science work," says Mr. Colman, who is investigating how stem cells might treat diabetes, "and they'll do what is necessary to make it happen." Determined to transform Singapore into a life-sciences hub that would attract research and industry, the government has sunk billions into developing its biotechnology facilities. Last year Singapore opened Biopolis, a $300-million "science city" that is to be central to the development effort. The 500-acre glass-and-steel science complex, with state-of-the-art laboratories, lecture halls, and computer rooms, feels like a college campus. The buildings have been given futuristic names, such as Helios, Nanos, and Proteos, and the talking elevators are emblazoned with the words "invent" and "research." Scientists here have relatively easy access to mass spectrometers and DNA-sequence analyzers -- each costing around half a million dollars. Below ground are animal laboratories, including a vivarium, which is designed to hold a quarter of a million mice. Above ground are day-care facilities, restaurants, a pub, and a fitness center. But along with the glossy architecture and the money behind it come some drawbacks: A lack of political freedom and a cultural tendency not to question authority, which can cut down on the new ideas that junior researchers in a laboratory generate. Many have questioned whether Singapore, a tropical island with a handful of universities and a fledgling scientific community, could attract and keep the kind of talent needed to transform the country into a bioengineering leader. Even if the money and the facilities were there, would scientists, who thrive best in creative and permissive environments, move to an autocratic nation better known among some for its policy of caning and for banning chewing gum? Some academics are clearly bothered by the city-state's repressive political climate, where criticizing the government can land you in jail. The U.S. State Department, in its February 2005 human-rights report on Singapore, said the government had used its powers to handicap political opposition and "to restrict significantly freedom of speech and freedom of the press." Last month the University of Warwick, in England, announced that concerns about academic freedom were one of the reasons it had decided not to open a campus in Singapore. But it appears that scientists who are looking for a safe and well-ordered environment in which to conduct their research are not put off by restrictions on their freedoms. So what if we can't chew gum without a doctor's prescription, joked several scientists who were interviewed for this article. Singapore may be the ultimate "nanny state," some of those who have moved here say, but it is a small price to pay to live in a pristine, practically crime-free city, with good schools and cheap hired help. While the lack of homegrown talent concerns some scientists and government officials, Singapore's limitations have so far not affected its ability to attract top foreign researchers. "Five years ago we weren't on the map," says Barry Halliwell, executive director of the National University of Singapore's Graduate School for Integrative Science and Engineering. Mr. Halliwell, formerly of the University of California and the University of London, now recruits staff for Singapore's life-science projects. "It was hard to convince people to come. Now if there is someone I want, I can get them. I just poached a professor from Yale," says Mr. Halliwell, referring to Markus R. Wenk, who was hired as an assistant professor by the department of biochemistry. America's Loss, Singapore's Gain The United States and Britain have been at the forefront of stem-cell research ever since scientists in the 1980s discovered that embryonic cells are able to develop into nearly every different cell type. Because of the versatility of these cells, it is believed that they can be directed, as they divide, to develop into specific types of cells -- such as heart, lung, or pancreas cells -- which could then be used to replace damaged or diseased tissue, revolutionizing medicine. But now it is widely believed that the United States, which has placed strict limits on federally financed stem-cell research, is losing out to Asian countries such as South Korea, China, and now Singapore. Researchers are nervous about the future financing of stem-cell research in the United States, says Ian McNiece, director of the division of biomedical sciences at the Johns Hopkins U. in Singapore, the university's only biomedical research facility outside of the United States. His own work is in compliance with U.S. guidelines and uses only federally approved colonies, or lines, of stem cells. (Mr. McNiece is free to use any cell lines but at the moment he prefers to use those approved by the NIH because they are provided at no cost.) Yet his Singapore lab is not subject to the whims of American politics, such as lawsuits intended to block research that already has federal or state approval. As he shows off his state-of-the-art lab in Biopolis, with its centrifuges and subzero storage units that have all been underwritten by the Singaporean government, Mr. McNiece says he is not worried about competition from places such as California. Last year voters there passed Proposition 71, which approved $3-billion for stem-cell research. Even spread out over 10 years, it dwarfs anything Singapore is doing. But Mr. McNiece says it won't be the panacea some in the United States are hoping for. "The money isn't there yet," says Mr. McNiece, echoing the opinions of other managers here, who are wary that California money could lure away some of the talent they have worked so hard to land. Lawsuits have prevented the state from releasing the money so far. Aside from financial concerns, scientists in the United States also worry that stem-cell research is becoming a political football, with new bills being introduced at the state and federal levels seemingly every month. Singapore, on the other hand, is seen as a safe haven. The government has banned "reproductive cloning" which could conceivably lead to a new human being. But "therapeutic cloning," in which stem cells are harvested from embryos no older than 14 days, is permitted. Perhaps most importantly, with no real organized opposition to this kind of research, there is no climate of fear among researchers. "Unlike in the United States, 'embryonic stem cells' are not dirty words here," says Ariff Bongso, director of in vitro fertilization and andrology at the National University of Singapore. "You'd be shocked to hear politicians talking about stem-cell research in parliament. It's heaven for a scientist here." This freedom has allowed Sri Lankan-born Dr. Bongso, who some scientists credit with having been the first person to successfully isolate human embryonic stem cells, to develop new cell lines, or groups of cells isolated from a single embryo. All the cell lines approved by the U.S. government are grown in a medium of mouse cells, which increases the chance of contamination once the cells are implanted back into humans. New lines are needed, he says, if researchers hope to use their discoveries to cure diseases. At a time when governments around the world are cutting their science budgets, Singapore's pockets remain deep. Though it could take decades to see significant returns from its investment, the government just announced it will spend $7-billion on biotechnology over the next five years, up from the almost $4-billion it spent between 2000 and 2005. "For a company like ours, you need venture capital," which Singapore has been happy to provide, says Soren M?ller Bested, the Danish chief technical officer of CordLife. His company, which collects and stores stem cells from umbilical cords, has received 11 grants from the government to set up shop here. "Money can't buy you everything, but it helps a lot." Mr. Bested and others acknowledge that one hole in Singapore's plan may be the lack of skilled manpower. CordLife has had a difficult time finding Singaporeans to hire. They have had to recruit much of their staff from abroad. "I can build a lab anywhere," says Mr. Bested. "But if I can't find people with suitable skills, then it is useless." Officials here acknowledge that the country still suffers from a shortage of senior scientists. And it is costly to bring in people from the outside. While it is willing to foot the bill for now, the tiny city-state must eventually produce homegrown talent for its plan to be viable. The government is in an all-out push to ensure that Singaporeans will be ready. In addition to sending people overseas for advanced degrees in the sciences, the National University of Singapore has expanded significantly in the past decade. Competitive hiring and admissions have raised its international profile. The administration has adopted more American-style educational practices, emphasizing analysis and inquiry rather than rote learning. Ph.D. students, for example, must now defend their dissertations. This year the Times Higher Education Supplement, in London, named the National University of Singapore one of the top 25 universities in the world. As part of its strategy, Singapore is investing millions in order to become an education hub, or, as officials like to say, a "Global Schoolhouse." They understand that the city-state needs to raise its international stature as an incubator of ideas and entrepreneurship if it is going to continue to attract and keep senior scientists and biomedical companies. But an added benefit is that eventually fewer Singaporeans will have to go abroad to get a quality education. The University of Warwick notwithstanding, the government's initiative has been remarkably successful. In the past ten years, Singapore has convinced prestigious institutions such as the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish programs here. Duke University recently agreed to help set up a graduate medical school here. The Singaporean government will underwrite the $310-million cost. Still, there are some issues that may stand in the way of Singapore's future as a research powerhouse. There is nervousness among some that the city-state has become too successful too fast and thus its citizens, now that they enjoy one of the highest living standards in Asia, are growing complacent. In a speech delivered to senior government officials two years ago, Shih Choon Fong, president of the National University of Singapore, questioned whether the country, with its homogeneous pursuits and aspirations, had grown sluggish. Moreover, scientific breakthroughs require risk taking, which many here are adverse to. And the act of challenging conventional ideas, which is fundamental to new discoveries, is considered a sign of disrespect. "There is still this Asian problem of unquestioning belief, that elders have all the wisdom," says Mr. Colman, of sheep-cloning fame, who is now the chief executive of ES Cell International, a partnership between the Singaporean government and scientists at Australia's Monash University. "The society is a very compliant one. That is changing but there is a long ways to go." From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:42:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:42:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Malaysia's Stagnation Message-ID: Malaysia's Stagnation The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.11 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i12/12a04301.htm Ethnic quotas and a byzantine bureaucracy hamper the country's attempt to become a scientific powerhouse By MARTHA ANN OVERLAND Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia After graduating from medical school in Canada in the 1970s, Eng Hin Lee was eager to return home. The young Malaysian doctor wanted to be closer to his family, and he was tired of the harsh Canadian winters that never seemed to end. He also missed the simple pleasures of home, such as eating Chinese dim sum, which means "to touch the heart." Dr. Lee knew that Malaysia, a young country hobbled by poverty, could not match the opportunities and salaries paid abroad. But he felt strongly that there was a place for him there. So the young doctor packed his bags and moved home. "I wanted to go back to help," says Dr. Lee. Yet when he returned it became obvious it would be difficult to pursue his research goals. Biomedical science in Malaysia was in its nascent stage. Labs were pitifully equipped. There was no significant scientific environment in which to grow or contribute. After two frustrating years, he packed his bags again. But it wasn't because of the money. It wasn't because of the labs. Dr. Lee, who is ethnically Chinese, did not feel welcome in his own country. Racial policies that had been put in place while he was away made it clear to him that he would never advance. For years the Chinese community in Malaysia had excelled in education and in business. The majority Malay community of farmers and fisherman controlled little of the country's wealth. Following anti-Chinese riots in 1969, however, Malaysia aggressively put into place national policies to promote the country's Bumiputra, or "sons of the soil." Quotas governing everything from education to employment suddenly put the brakes on the aspirations of the country's minorities. "It was obvious you wouldn't get very far if you weren't the right race," says Dr. Lee. Today he works at the National University of Singapore, where he is in charge of a huge lab that is conducting cutting-edge research in stem-cell biology. Dr. Lee, an orthopedic surgeon, leads a team of top scientists culled from all over the world. "Having come here I think I made the right choice," says Dr. Lee, referring to Singapore's premier teaching hospital. In Malaysia, "I probably would not have become a head of department and dean of the Faculty of Medicine." Malaysia's racial policies have changed little since Dr. Lee left 30 years ago. Today Malays are practically guaranteed admission into public universities, and they receive nearly all of the scholarships despite performing lower academically than other ethnic groups. By law, Malays are given most of the government jobs and are awarded most of the business contracts. Bumiputra even pay lower interest rates and housing prices. Unable to gain admission into the few quality universities in the country, each year tens of thousands of young Chinese and Indian Malaysians leave to attend institutions abroad. With few jobs open to them if they were to return, the best and brightest rarely come back. Efforts to lure Malaysian-born scientists home through its Brain Gain schemes, begun 10 years ago, have been an embarrassment. A Losing Proposition Yet Malaysia, like neighboring Singapore, is banking on becoming a biotechnology hub. Hoping to offset its declining electronics manufacturing industry, the nation has invested millions of dollars to build science parks and research facilities. And like Singapore, it has launched a major campaign to lure top-notch scientists to its shores. But Malaysia's ethnic policies have come back to haunt it. Despite the similarities between the two countries, which until 1965 were one and the same, the results could not be more different. Malaysia has failed to attract even a tiny fraction of the 35,000 scientists the government says it needs to become a biotech powerhouse. In fact, Malaysia has lost far more people to brain drain than it has been able to hire from abroad. Even efforts to bolster Malaysia's science infrastructure have attracted few takers. Projects such as the Multimedia Super Corridor have ended up as fancy office space for foreign high-tech companies. The once much-touted BioValley, envisioned along the lines of Singapore's Biopolis, remains an empty dirt lot two years after it was announced. And though the government is spending more money on research and laboratory facilities, even the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation grudgingly admits that the number of patent applications has barely budged from where it was 10 years ago. "We definitely don't have our act together," says Lim Guan Eng, the secretary general of the opposition Democratic Action Party. Politicians who talk of Malaysia becoming a leader in the sciences are fooling themselves, he says. "We have nothing to offer them," says Mr. Lim, referring to Malaysians who left out of frustration with the country's racial policies. "We don't have world-class universities. We don't have world-class teachers. The best people have left the country, and they aren't coming back." Part of the Problem In Malaysia, the universities are considered part of the problem, not the solution, explains Charles Santiago, a political economist who runs the Kuala Lumpur-based group Monitoring Sustainability of Globalization. Professors, as public employees, have to sign loyalty oaths. They can be fired for criticizing the government. Spies in the classrooms help ensure they don't, according to Mr. Santiago and others. "Universities are seen as the machinery of the government," says Mr. Santiago, one of the rare people who will openly criticize the authoritarian government. "This has stifled academic excellence. Our Ph.D.'s are not qualified. Our universities and our intellectual life suffer from credibility. In the end we are unable to compete in the global marketplace." Yazid Hamid, chief executive of the Academy of Knowledge for Accounting and Leadership, has seen the effects of that firsthand. His academy runs basic training programs for employees of Malaysia's large state-run energy and telecommunication companies. He says his fellow Malays lack the skills as well as the drive that those firms demand. Students are spoon-fed through college and expect to be handed a job when they graduate, he says. Most of them are incompetent, he says, and that is the main reason that Malaysia has 50,000 unemployed graduates even though the country has a severe shortage of workers. Mr. Hamid is one of many Malays who strongly advocate doing away with the pro-Bumiputra policies. He believes that quotas were needed to help reverse the fortunes of the Malays, which was long overdue. But he says the cost has become too high. The country consistently scores poorly in surveys that measure innovation, R&D capabilities, and entrepreneurship. He blames it on quotas. "If you really want to drive this nation, you have to get rid of quotas," says Mr. Hamid. "Only without regard to ethnicity can we truly be a global player." Increasingly, politicians at the highest level are publicly acknowledging that Malaysia's ethnic policies are partly to blame for the culture of mediocrity. Fong Chan Onn, Malaysia's human-resources minister, recently acknowledged that many of the country's unemployed graduates with degrees in information technology lack the skill or aptitude to be software programmers. 'Put Down Your Crutches' Last year, in his first address as prime minister to his pro-Malay ruling party, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi told Malays to put down their crutches because "we may eventually end up in wheelchairs." He repeated the call in June, lambasting Malays for squandering the opportunities offered by the pro-Bumiputra policies. Remarkably, he still has his job. And for some, that alone is a sign of progress. After many senior government officials, including the prime minister at the time, Mahathir Mohamad, recognized the need for reforms, affirmative action in state universities ended in 2003. Officially, quotas were dead. But instead of a single examination for all students, as promised, the Ministry of Education designed a new system that once again heavily favors Malays. Bumiputras now take a one-year course before they can enroll in a college. Most Chinese and Indian students participate in a two-year program and much more rigorous end-of-year exams. Despite the disparities, an A in one program carries the same weight as an A in the other. Last year, under this system, 128 straight-A students were denied seats in medical school. All of them were ethnic Chinese and Indian. There are no new plans to dismantle the pro-Malay policies. It will take more political resolve than Malaysia has at the moment. Meanwhile, the government is now floating a new Brain Gain scheme. The newest program doesn't require Malaysian skilled professionals to actually move back to Malaysia. Instead, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation wants to encourage Malaysians living abroad to contribute from afar. It is unclear exactly how such a plan will work or if it will work at all. But Eng Hin Lee, the Malaysian scientist in Singapore, says the solution is far simpler than creating yet another doomed Brain Gain scheme. "We would love to go back," says Dr. Lee. "But first you have to make us feel we are welcome." From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:42:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:42:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: The word: Connectome Message-ID: The word: Connectome http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18825251.000 >From issue 2525 of New Scientist magazine, 12 November 2005, page 62 [Happy to comply with your request for the full article, Brian.] THE human brain is a fantastic maze of connections, a vast network of networks that circulates information and determines how we think and act. One of the many big puzzles left in neurology is working out which parts of the brain are connected - and how the networks function. That's why top neuroscientist Olaf Sporns of Indiana University at Bloomington and his team are hoping for some lively debate about their new blueprint to map those connections. Sporns is calling it "the human connectome" after the billion-dollar human genome project, but it's bound to be far more sophisticated. Why? Well, the genome is one-dimensional, while the connectome will be four-dimensional (three space, one time). The information needed to build the connectome is also far more elusive. Our brains contain roughly 10^11 neurons, with an estimated 10^14 possible connections. The magnitude of these numbers makes it impossible for the connectome to map the brain at the level of single neurons and synapses. Luckily, that may not be necessary because nerve cells tend to act in groups. What will the connectome look like? At first, it will be a huge set of numbers from which cognitive patterns can be deduced. Input the coordinates of two brain regions and the connectome will give the probability of those two parts talking to one another. The coordinates refer to voxels (3D pixels), which is useful because it's how neuroscientists map the brain, so the connectome can be cross-referenced to other data. But in future, with the right technology, we could build a dynamic 4D model with the brain's connections operating in real time. Just think: one little thought, and the model would light up like a Christmas tree! "The brain is a maze of connections, a vast network of networks" So how much is known already? There are a few precedents: large-scale connection patterns have been mapped for animal brains such as the macaque, cat and rat. But for human connections, researchers will need sophisticated imaging techniques that show how the brain's anatomy relates to its dynamic function. For that, they'll build on existing techniques such as diffusion tensor imaging, functional MRI and EEGs. They'll also need the snazzy software used to map connections in the web and other large networks. Not to mention computers such as the giant 10 petaflop baby that Japan is planning. The pay-off? Oh, just a few useful things such as finding out much more about how the different regions of the brain interact when we think or act, what injuries to particular regions do, and how our cognitive networks differ from those of other species. Not surprisingly, the connectome will demand a worldwide effort by anatomists, brain imagers and computational scientists. And more billions than the genome project. Sporns thinks a first draft of the connectome could be ready in a few years. Watch this space. From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:42:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:42:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Pat Robertson Warns Town Of Disaster Over School Board Vote Message-ID: Pat Robertson Warns Town Of Disaster Over School Board Vote http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Robertson_Evolution.html Thursday, November 10, 2005 ? Last updated 8:03 p.m. PT [Thanks to Laird for this.] THE ASSOCIATED PRESS VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they "voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design. All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce "intelligent design" - the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power - as an alternative to the theory of evolution. "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club." Eight families had sued the district, claiming the policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state. The federal trial concluded days before Tuesday's election, but no ruling has been issued. Later Thursday, Robertson issued a statement saying he was simply trying to point out that "our spiritual actions have consequences." "God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever," Robertson said. "If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them." Robertson made headlines this summer when he called on his daily show for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to "kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 17 20:42:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:42:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Genetic Find Stirs Debate on Race-Based Medicine Message-ID: Genetic Find Stirs Debate on Race-Based Medicine http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/health/11heart.html By NICHOLAS WADE In a finding that is likely to sharpen discussion about the merits of race-based medicine, an Icelandic company says it has detected a version of a gene that raises the risk of heart attack in African-Americans by more than 250 percent. The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta. Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent. The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics. Dr. Kari Stefansson, the company's chief executive, said he would consult with the Association of Black Cardiologists and others as to whether to test a new heart attack drug specifically in a population of African-Americans. The drug, known now as DG031, inhibits a different but closely related gene and is about to be put into Phase 3 trials, the last stage before a maker seeks the Food and Drug Administration's approval. Last year a drug called BiDil evoked mixed reactions after it was shown to sharply reduce heart attacks among African-Americans, first in a general study and then in a targeted study, after it failed to show efficacy in the general population. The drug, invented by Dr. Jay N. Cohn, a cardiologist at the University of Minnesota, prompted objections that race-based medicine was the wrong approach. Geneticists agree that the medically important issue is not race itself but the genes that predispose a person to disease. But it may often be useful for physicians to take race into account because the predisposing genes for many diseases follow racial patterns. The new variant found by DeCode Genetics is a more active version of a gene that helps govern the body's inflammatory response to infection. Called leukotriene A4 hydrolase, the gene is involved in the synthesis of leukotrienes, agents that maintain a state of inflammation. Dr. Stefansson said he believed that the more active version of this gene might have risen to prominence in Europeans and Asians because it conferred extra protection against infectious disease. Along with the protection would have come a higher risk of heart attack because plaques that build up in the walls of the arteries could become inflamed and rupture. But because the active version of the gene started to be favored long ago, Europeans and Asians have had time to develop genetic changes that offset the extra risk of heart attack. The active version of the inflammatory gene would have passed from Europeans into African-Americans only a few generations ago, too short a time for development of genes that protect against heart attack, Dr. Stefansson suggested. The DG031 drug being tested by DeCode Genetics affects a second gene, but one that is also involved in control of leukotrienes. Because the drug reduces leukotriene levels and inflammation, it may help African-Americans who have the variant of the hydrolase gene. "It would make scientific, economic and particularly political sense to have a significant part of the clinical trials done in an African-American population," Dr. Stefansson said. A spokeswoman for the black cardiologists' group, which supported the BiDil trial, said the group's officials were not ready to discuss the new gene. Dr. Troy Duster of New York University, an adviser to the federal Human Genome Project and a past president of the American Sociological Association, said he saw no objection to a trial, provided it focused on African-Americans with the risk-associated variant of the gene and took into account that people with ancestry from different regions of Africa might show variations in risk. But Dr. Charles Rotimi, a genetic epidemiologist at Howard University, said a separate study of African-Americans would not be desirable. The variant gene may be overactive in African-Americans because of their greater exposure to deleterious environments, Dr. Rotimi said. Dr. Cohn, the inventor of BiDil, said it was "always best to study a drug in a highly responsive group," rather than testing large populations where possible benefits to subgroups could be missed. From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Nov 17 21:05:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:05:28 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths In-Reply-To: <20051116193814.6961.qmail@web30812.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I think these authors were concerned that mothers returning to work after a month or 6 weeks after the birth were the cause of the problem. Children need appropriate attention for the first 2 years if they are to develop healthy attachment. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Michael Christopher Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 11:38 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] sociopaths Steve says >>I can't remember the name of the book, but some time ago some people wrote a book claiming that our child-rearing practices were creating an increased number of sociopaths- empathy impaired. When I think about children killing children these days, I think they were right.<< --No doubt single mothers who are depressed or have frequent mood swings will produce kids who develop immunity to empathy as a survival skill. Without other adults to provide refuge for the child, any emotional imbalance in the mother would be especially difficult for the child to live through without damage. Sociopaths may also be created by a climate of intense social competition, in which those who are more sensitive simply fall to the bottom, unable to exploit group dynamics to their advantage. In that case, sociopaths wouldn't necessarily increase in number, but only in influence. If the "game" is stacked so that those who exploit others have an advantage, many would appear to be sociopathic who are merely adapting. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From guavaberry at earthlink.net Thu Nov 17 22:45:52 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:45:52 -0500 Subject: Sony BMG Re: [Paleopsych] sociopaths in business In-Reply-To: References: <437B4B54.9080207@aol.com> <437B7BB2.8030909@earthlink.net> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20051117174201.01dbd4b0@mail.earthlink.net> Aaah Yes, Andy Lack and Mitch Bainwol @ Sony BMG fits this description. see Educational CyberPlayGround Music and Copyright Law http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/musiclaw.html Digital Rights Management http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/drm.html COPYLEFT - COMMON LICENSE AND OPEN SOURCE EXPLAINED Fighting P2P http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/copyleft.html best, karen At 08:51 PM 11/16/2005, you wrote: >>>North America is likely rife with psychopaths. >> >><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>Guavaberry Books >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/GuavaberryBooks/ >>Domino ? - Traditional Children's Songs, Proverbs, and Culture U.S.V.I. >>Find Music Books by The Funk Brothers - 2x Grammy Winners >> >>Educational CyberPlayGround >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ >> >>National Children's Folksong Repository >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/NCFR/ >> >>Hot List of Schools Online >>Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters >>http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community >> >> >>7 Hot Site Awards >>New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, >>USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty >><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:17:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:17:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hermenaut: An Idler's Glossary Message-ID: An Idler's Glossary http://www.hermenaut.com/a158.shtml [This is quite an entertaining list, though it goes on too long. The significance for my theme of deep culture change is that certain terms here are relatively new. According to the OED, "nonchalant" dates from 1734 and "insouciant" from 1829. (I presume the underlying French words do not go back much further than this and, as I think nearly always the case, that the behavior did not go back much further than the word coined to describe that behavior.) [I'd like a new word, similar to nonchalant and insouciant, to describe someone who takes leave from the world's struggles by being too quickly agreeable with whoever comes along and tries to get him active in a cause but actually keeps his distance. He plays at being a kind of sophisticate by too readily agreeing with the analysis of world's ills that he is presented with. So nonchalant and insouciant aren't quite the words. [We may be seeing a new phenomenon here, new enough to merit a new word. Not entirely brand new, of course, but still distinct. I just can't describe it very well. [I asked at a conference session of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences if what brand new emotion (beyond those categorized under the Big Five) any of the futurists were proposing, the idea being that future men or future members of new species might have richer emotional lives. No one had thought of this before.] ------------------------- "Dawdler." "Layabout." "Shit-heel." "Loser." For as long as mankind has had to work for a living, which is to say ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, people who work have disparaged those who prefer not to. This glossary, which closely examines the etymology and history of over two hundred idler-specific terms and phrases (whether pejorative, positive, or simply descriptive), aims not merely to correct popular misconceptions about idling, but to serve as a preliminary foundation for a new mode of thinking about working and not-working. It is intended to be specifically useful for journalists, who will never again have any excuse for describing an indolent person as "languid," Epicurean behavior as "dissipated," or an idler as a "slacker."--JG absentminded: Losing oneself in thought, or in dreaming dreams--to the point of being unaware of one's surroundings or actions--is a cerebral pleasure available only to the unemployed idler. As such, the condition of being absentminded is neither superior nor inferior to, but merely different from and related to that Zen-like engaged-yet-detached attentiveness, or "mindfulness," which characterizes true idleness. See: DAYDREAMER, DISTRACTED, DREAMER, FORGETFUL, IDLENESS, THOUGHTLESS, MIND-WANDERING. acedia: To Aquinas, the melancholy condition of acedia [from the Greek for "absence of care"] which afflicted solitary Christian monks and hermits--causing them to apathetically shirk work and seek "undue rest"--is a sin. Walter Benjamin noted that acedia had re-emerged, among sophisticated urbanites in 19th century Paris, as ennui; and Aldous Huxley described it as a "subtle and complicated vice," composed of boredom, sorrow, and despair at the futility of everything. It seems that neither an ascetic contemplation of the divine, nor an immersion in the pleasures of the flesh will suffice; one must instead balance these modes of being with care. See: APATHETIC, BORED, ENNUI, DETACHED, SPLEEN. accidie: See: ACEDIA. amble: To amble is to take a leisurely walk, but not in the highest sense of the word "leisure." Until the 16th century, the word was used to refer to a particular (leisurely) gait of a horse; and, like a horse who walks slowly because it's exhausted, we who pride ourselves on "ambling" might as well be ambulating. The difference is one of pace, not mode. See: FREE TIME. ambulate: Although often used to mean "walk at a leisurely pace" (because, one imagines, of its similarity to the word "amble"), to ambulate is simply to walk. See: AMBLE. anabhogya-carya: In Hinduism, anabhogya-carya is any purposeless activity which helps one become detached from the world of goal-oriented action. See: DETACHED, FIDDLE AROUND, WAITING FOR GODOT. apathetic: Because of his supine position and air of detachment, the idler is too often accused--by "serious," "committed," and "active" persons--of being apathetic. As used to mean "without feeling or emotion," it would better be applied to those unfortunate souls who, precisely because they haven't dropped out of society, have been (to quote Philip K. Dick) "androidized." If, however, it's supposed to mean "lacking interest or concern," we should note that the idler is deeply concerned with, and interested in, following his own subjective pathos, through self-potentiation. See: ACEDIA, BLAS?, CARELESS, COMPLACENT, DETACHED, ENNUI, INDIFFERENT, PASSIVE, SLACKNESS. asleep at the switch: Why demonize those unfortunate souls who are asleep at the switch--since every non-idle person is asleep-while-awake? See: ABSENTMINDED, DAYDREAMER. asleep at the wheel: Driving is like being asleep: On a long trip, time and space seem to become a dream-like projection of your own consciousness. That's why being asleep at the wheel can actually provide great insight into the nature of reality. See: INDOLENT. ataractic: The pseudo-medical term "ataraxia" [Greek for "calmness"] refers to that class of drugs which tranquilizes; to be ataractic, then, is to be tranquilized. However, although tranquillity is surely a desirable state, tranquilization is not! See: INDOLENT. avoider: Although avoidance is not a particularly brave way of abandoning one's duties, the avoider ["one who withdraws, i.e., so as to leave a place empty"] is not necessarily a coward. An obsolete, but important, definition of "avoidance" is: The highly courageous act of clearing away received truths, in order to face what Hegel called "the abyss of nothingness"... whose proper name is contained in the term itself: The Void. See: BALK, DETACHED, DIZZY, GIDDY, PASSIVE, QUIT. balk: When an athlete abruptly fails to complete his motion, he is penalized for having "balked"; when a beast of burden abruptly stops short and refuses to proceed, it's whipped. As Foucault explains, we must discipline those who experience moments of complete lucidity ("What the hell am I doing?") lest their madness come to seem sane. Remember that the French use the same word to mean "hesitate" and "balance": To balk [see DEBAUCHED for the word origin] habitually might be pathological, but it might also be a Taoist-like state of grace. See: AVOIDER, BARTLEBY, DO-NOTHING, INACTIVE, KICK BACK, QUITTER. Bartleby: Melville's office drone who will neither work nor quit his job is both an inspiration to would-be idlers and a great puzzle. He isn't lazy, nor does he seem to resent or hate his employer (or want a different job), nor does he prefer a life of sensual pleasure, nor is he interested in making a spectacle of himself in order to help others see the light. He just "prefers not to" do anything. He has lost faith in the goodness of the world; he is lackadaisical, in the most tragic sense of that word. This, it seems, is a form of passive resistance--against God. See: ACEDIA, BALK, DETACHED, INDIFFERENT, LACKADAISICAL, PASSIVE, QUITTER, SPLEEN. beggar: "Beg" is one of those words which isn't derived from anything; it has always meant exactly what it means. (This usually indicates a word of great force.) Any person who won't work, and who lives by asking complete strangers for aid, is either lazy, mentally ill, or a saint. Don't assume you can tell the difference. See: BUM, CADGER, SCROUNGER, SPONGER. benchwarmer: Hey, somebody's gotta do it. See: AVOIDER. blas?: It's a sad commentary on the triumph of the middlebrow that an indifference to pleasure or excitement, as a result of excessive indulgence or enjoyment, is considered "sophisticated." Despite his unconcern for those things that matter to most people, the idler is always "hot," and never "cool." See: APATHETIC, CARELESS, ENNUI, INDIFFERENT, NONCHALANT. bon vivant: See: SYBARITE. boondoggler: Given the extreme pointlessness of scouting, it seems appropriate that the term "boondoggle," coined by an American scoutmaster (as a name for the braided cord scouts wear as a neckerchief slide), has come to mean a wasteful or impractical activity. A boondoggler is not a true idler, but merely an "artful dodger" who evades his responsibilities through trickery or deceit, for purposes of graft. See: DODGER. bootless: Must every non-useless, non-unprofitable activity involve wearing boots? Quite the contrary, wouldn't you say? Let's start using "slipshod" to mean any activity which is not an end in itself. See: FLIP-FLOP, SLIPSHOD. bored: Being bored [a term which appeared suddenly, out of nowhere, among the smart set in the 1760s] is the condition--which Guy Debord called the "worst enemy of revolutionary activity"--of being too restless to concentrate, but too apathetic to bust a move. Fortunately, unless one's boredom becomes magnified to a sort of frustrated world-rejection, it's just a mood... and soon passes. Also note that Lin Yutang says that "philosophy began with the sense of boredom," since both involve dreaming wistfully of an ideal world. See: ACEDIA, APATHETIC, ENNUI, SPLEEN. bum: Like "queer" or "bitch," this term for a wandering mendicant has long since been re-appropriated, as in the song, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum." As opposed to the guy who sits in the same spot every day asking for a hand-out, the bum [from the German for "saunter"] roams freely throughout the city, the country, the planet: He is king of the road. See: BEGGAR, LOAF, SAUNTER. cadger: Cadging, the ancient art of imposing upon the generosity of others, is an essential skill for the would-be idler, since poverty is the easiest way to obtain a great deal of free time. According to Henry Miller, who calls it "mooching," when performed without squeamishness or reservations, cadging is both exhilarating and instructive. So long as a cadger [from the Scandinavian word for "huckster"] is generous in turn (though not necessarily in kind), he ought not to be considered a deadbeat, freeloader, or sponger. See: BEGGAR, SCROUNGER. capricious: To be governed by caprice [from the Latin for "hedgehog's head"; think of spiky-haired idlers like Einstein and Sid Vicious] is to give in to one's every fantastic whim, irresponsible vagary, or irrational desire. The true idler knows better than to fill his waking moments with turbulence and hurry but as long as one remains grounded to some extent, capriciousness ought not to be discouraged. See: DESULTORY, DISTRACTED, DIZZY, ECCENTRIC, FLIGHTY. carefree: See: CARELESS. careless: Idlers are often spontaneous, relaxed, and untroubled: In this sense, careless is synonymous with "carefree," meaning free of sadness. The other sense of the term--being negligent or derelict in one's duties--may apply to the slacker, but an idler's duty is poiesis, creation of himself and his world. In this, he is never careless. See: DETACHED, DODGER, INSOUCIANT. carpet knight: See: VOLUPTUARY. castle builder: Building castles in Spain, or castles in the air, is fine for schoolchildren, and of course it's unfair to describe every "impracticable" project in this manner, but the idler ought not to spend too much time among the clouds. See: DAYDREAMER. catnap: See: NAP. clock-watcher: This term, which was coined twenty-five years after the invention of the time clock, ought not to be re-appropriated by idlers. Like "slacker," it refers to someone who should, but won't, quit his job (or drop out of school, etc.). See: KILL TIME. coast: As a form of locomotion, meaning to glide, slide, skid, or skate along without propulsive power, to coast [from the Latin for "rib," which came to mean "a slope down which one slides"] is divine. As a metaphor, meaning to proceed easily without special application of effort or concern, coasting is a dangerous sport; sometimes an idler must pedal, too. See: DISTRACTED. complacent: Despite his apparent disinclination to "better" himself, the idler can never be complacent [Latin for "pleased with (oneself)"], as he is always seeking to create himself. See: APATHETIC, PASSIVE. cop-out: See: AVOIDER. couch potato: Although idlers have enjoyed lying supine on couches for centuries, staring at the ceiling and thinking deep thoughts, that activity has been (almost) spoiled by the invention of the TV remote. Why? Not so much because channel-surfing is bad for you (although channel-pottering is better, of course), but because one would not want to be taken for a couch potato, whose unhappy existence is devoted to distraction-without-end. See: SLACKER, SLUGGARD. cunctation: See: BALK. dally: See: DAWDLE. dawdle: Paul Virilio, noting that Socrates was invariably late (atopos) to every appointment, suggests that philosophy itself is born of "idle (often pointless) curiosity, born of the disappearance of physical effort once this becomes unnecessary." And let's not forget Oscar Wilde's injunction that "punctuality is the thief of time." Dawdle, then, by all means! See: FL?NEUR. daydreamer: This escapist activity is fine for slackers, but idlers must resist it! As Simone Weil noted, although the imagination can be a powerful tool for liberation, the daydreamer ["dream" is from an Indo-European word meaning "deception"] may be tempted into "filling up the void with compensatory illusions." On a less philosophical level, the painter Delacroix insisted that the imagination "remained impotent and sterile if it was not served by a resourceful skill which could follow it in its restless and tyrannical whims." Don't daydream, then: Dream, and follow your dreams, instead. See: ABSENTMINDED, DREAMER, FORGETFUL. deadbeat: See: SPONGER. debauched: The verb debauch, meaning to lead away from virtue or excellence, to corrupt by sensuality or intemperance, or to seduce from chastity, is of French origin (of course), and is derived from the same root as the word "balk," or horizontal support beam. A debauched person, then, to his detractors, seems to be lacking an internal source of moral reinforcement: He is sagging, scattered, not "upright." See: DISSIPATED, SYBARITE, SLOUCH. derelict: See: CARELESS. desert: See: QUIT. desultory: The Latin root of desultory means "of a circus reader who leaps from horse to horse"--which sounds wonderful in a way, but which carries connotations of being trapped on a merry-go-round. Dr. Johnson wrote of his friend "Sober" that "[his] art is, to fill the day with petty business, to have always something in hand which may raise curiosity, but not solicitude, and keep the mind in a state of action, but not of labor." Steadfastness is not necessarily a virtue, and changeability need not always be erratic, but this seems an exhausting form of idleness! See: CAPRICIOUS, DISTRACTED, DRIFTER, FL?NEUR, FLIGHTY. detached: Religiously speaking, detachment is not so much a form of aloofness or disengagement as it is a loving embrace of, and renewed fascination with the world--from a position of critical, even ironic distance. As counseled in The Bhagavad-Gita, the religiously detached person renounces the fruits of his actions without renouncing action itself. See: ACEDIA, APATHETIC, INDIFFERENT, NONCHALANT, WAITING FOR GODOT. devil-may-care: See: CARELESS. dilatory: Dilatory, a synonym for "delaying," comes from the Latin past participle of the word for "defer," or "submit," as in a bureaucracy, where every question is referred to someone else, endlessly. Not, then, to be used as a synonym for "dawdling," nor even "procrastination." See: DAWDLE, PROCRASTINATOR. dilly-dally: See: DAWDLE. dissipated: The whole force of the term dissipated [from the Latin for "spend or use up wastefully of foolishly"] lies in the Protestant idea that one can somehow glorify God by accumulating capital. The idler prefers that part of the Bible in which Jesus asks us to consider the lilies, which toileth not, yet which are more beautiful than Solomon in all his splendor. Remember, too, that the moral of the parable of the "Prodigal Son" is that you aren't superior just because you keep your nose to the grind-stone. See: SYBARITE. dissolute: Around the 14th century, actions marked by indulgence in things deemed vices began to be described as dissolute, meaning that they dissolve, or disintegrate, the actor. This paranoia about "keeping it together" is, according to some theorists, the source of vices such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. See: DISSIPATED, SYBARITE. distracted: Although one must struggle against the centripetal forces of traction (all those entities which would hold us back, keep us in our place), the centrifugal forces of distraction (all those phenomena which would shatter our hard-won state of lucid mindfulness) can be equally as powerful. See: ABSENTMINDED, CAPRICIOUS, COAST, DESULTORY, INATTENTIVE. dizzy: It is every thinking person's duty to cultivate the voluptuous panic of vertigo, by staring into that void in which all the forms and norms of our daily lives are revealed to be meaningless. The problem with dizziness is not, however (as Sartre noted), how to keep from falling over the precipice, but how to keep from throwing ourselves over; how to remain dizzy [an Old English word which originally meant "foolish"] without becoming giddy, scatterbrained, fatally distracted, stupid? See: AVOIDER, DISTRACTED, FLIGHTY, GIDDY. do-nothing: In politics, a do-nothing is an anti-progressive reactionary; in all other spheres, he is a saint. Oscar Wilde described his life's work as the "art of doing nothing," and insisted that for the person living in a society which worships action, "to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world." See: BARTLEBY, GOOD-FOR-NOTHING, IDLER, INACTIVE, PASSIVE, UKULELE IKE, WAITING FOR GODOT. dodger: A dodger shirks his duties and evades his responsibilities neither for purposes of graft, nor out of fear, but simply out of a overwhelming distaste for labor. Think of Henry Miller ditching his career and family because he believed that "work... is an activity reserved for the dullard." As Miller eventually discovered, though, dodging is not enough: No matter how artful he may be, the dodger who doesn't quit the job or situation he detests is nothing but a goldbricking slacker; he's just killing time. See: BARTLEBY, KILL TIME, SINECURIST, SKIVER, SLACKER, TRUANT. dormant: Animals who lie dormant have the right idea: The only thing better than a nap is a nap which lasts all winter. But, at the same time, one doesn't want to be hebetudinous or torpid, does one? See: HIBERNATE, SLEEPY. dozev: See: NAP. dreamer: Not to be confused with a pleasant, escapist chimera or romance, a (waking) dream is an engaged vision of a better reality; as such, it only seems impracticable or impossible to uptightniks and punctiliocrats. As Henry Miller puts it: "The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world... In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal." See: DAYDREAMER. drifter: As la d?rive, drifting was an essential component of the "revolution of everyday life" to those idlers par excellence, the Situationists. In order to free the senses from the "tyranny of the ordinary," Guy Debord & Co. would drop their usual motives for movement and allow themselves to drift across the urban terrain, driven hither and thither by the winds of desire. The drifter is not, however, to be confused with the person who lives a life of lax desultoriness. See: FL?NEUR, SAUNTER. drop out: See: QUIT. drowsy: The etymological notion underlying drowsy seems to be "heaviness," as in eyelids made heavy by dreary, drizzly weather. See: TIRED. dummy: In bridge, the dummy is that player whose hand is being played by the declarer. Far from being useless to the other players, the dummy is now free to mix a few drinks. See: IDLER WHEEL. easy-going: See: CARELESS. eccentric: Although often dismissed as being a "weirdo," by virtue of having liberated himself from the stress-producing pressures of social conformity, the eccentric [literally, "out of the center," deviating from the norm] person is, according to British psychologist David Weeks, actually happier and healthier than we so-called "normal" types. See: CAPRICIOUS. ennui: Boredom may come and go, but ennui [from the Latin word for "hatred of life itself"] is a totalizing force which judges the world... and finds it unspeakably tedious. To be ennuy? is to be paralyzed by apathy and disgust, but simultaneously nerve-ridden by over-stimulated sensations. To the over-sophisticated urbanite, each tick of the clock can seem to say, as it did to Baudelaire: "I am life, intolerable, implacable life!" See: ACEDIA, APATHETIC, BLAS?, BORED, LACKADAISICAL, LETHARGIC, SPLEEN. Epicurean: The Greek philosopher Epicurus evolved a code of life and behavior which stressed the avoidance of pain, but his name has since been used as an adjective to describe those who actively seek pleasure (particularly, for some reason, through eating). Not every idler is a pleasure-seeker, and vice versa; in fact, many idlers are quite ascetic. However, the history of idleness would be woefully incomplete were great Epicurean idlers like Dr. Johnson, Oscar Wilde, and Lin Yutang left out, hence the inclusion in this glossary of those words used to describe pleasure-seekers. See: LUXURIOUS, SYBARITE, VOLUPT?. estivate: Although one hears tales of starving artists and writers of the past summering in a cottage by the sea, these days only children, the ill, and the unemployed can afford to estivate [from the Latin for "summer"]. Why is that? See: HIBERNATE, VACATION. fain?ant: When a Frenchman does nothing, it's somehow more fabulous than when anyone else does nothing. That's just a fact. See: DO-NOTHING. fart around: One cannot literally fart around until one stops going to work. This is an excellent reason for quitting your job. See: FIDDLE AROUND. fickle: See: DESULTORY. fiddle around: Confucius's grandson Tsesse insisted that the well-ordered life was a perfect balance of action and inaction, and that the human spirit is happiest when we leave things half-done. Not to be confused with frittering, or the debilitating condition of desultoriness, to fiddle around (also known as "farting," "futzing," "footling," "pottering," "piddling," and "puttering" around)--is in its very aimlessness the embodiment of the philosophical ideal of leisure, and the Zen art of... well, anything. See: DESULTORY, DRIFTER, IDLENESS, TINKER, WAITING FOR GODOT. fill time: See: KILL TIME. fl?neur: "Idle man-about-town": O, how much is contained in that definition! The fl?neur practices a kind of refined street theater, thumbing his nose at hurrying urban crowds by loitering ostentatiously. For Baudelaire--who admired famous fl?neurs like Nerval, who is said to have walked a lobster around Paris on a pale blue leash--the "perfect fl?neur" is that urbanite who is neither aloof from the crowd nor surrendered to it, but both at once; this "kaleidoscopic" faculty allows him to perceive the subtle eruptions of the infinite into the everyday. (Clearly, the fl?neur does not suffer from ennui, nor is he blas?.) See: DRIFTER, IDLER, INDOLENT, LOUNGE. flighty: To be flighty means to be skittish, and easily routed. But it also suggests capriciousness, which (as previously noted) is only a problem when one isn't properly "grounded"--because desultoriness, giddiness, and ennui may result. But after all, Nietzsche has written that "He who seeth the abyss, but with eagle's eyes--he who with eagle's talons graspeth the abyss: He hath courage." So... avoid being feather-headed, but by all means: Take wing! See: DESULTORY, DIZZY, GIDDY. flip-flop: Flip-flop, which used to mean "waffle," was transformed into a synonym [derived from flip flops, a favorite footwear of idlers] for "procrastinate"--by the spouse of the author of this glossary. See: BOOTLESS, PROCRASTINATE, SLIPSHOD. foot-dragger: See: DAWDLE. footle: A euphemism for the physical act of love, to footle is equivalent to "fucking around." Such a delightful pastime ought not to be thought of as synonymous with "wasting time," then, but rather with "fiddling around." See: FIDDLE AROUND. forgetful: The daydreaming slacker is forgetful [from the German for "losing one's grip"], in the sense of "a negligent failure to remember," to be sure. The absentminded idler, on the other hand, from time to time intentionally places over his own head what Nietzsche calls "a firm dome of forgetfulness"--which allows him to forget both past and future, in order to be able better to concentrate on the present. See: ABSENTMINDED, DAYDREAMER, LETHARGIC. forty winks: See: NAP. freeloader: See: SPONGER. free time: Free time, in the sense of "freedom to," is electrifying and beautiful. Free time in the sense of "freedom from," however, is merely restful and relaxing. The former is another way of saying "leisure" or "idleness," that state of being in which actions are performed for their own sake; the latter is another way of saying "vacation," or "recess," which are simply those scheduled (and mandated) periods during which work is suspended, so we androidized human beings can recharge our batteries. The former, then, is true freedom; the latter, slavery under the guise of freedom. See: IDLENESS, LEISURELY, RECESS, RECUPERATE, RELAX, VACATION, WORK. fritter: See: KILL TIME. fuck around: See: FIDDLE AROUND, FOOTLE. funker: How good it would be to re-appropriate the word funker [from an obsolete Flemish word for "paralyzing fear"] which contains within itself the holy monosyllable "funk"! But no, this glossary needs a term which specifically refers to one who shrinks from his duties and responsibilities out of fear, and this is the one. See: DODGER. futz: A Yiddish term which literally means to "fart around." See: FART AROUND, FIDDLE AROUND. giddy: In his existential psychoanalysis of Baudelaire, Sartre wrongfully accuses that great idler of "bending over his own freedom and becoming giddy at the sight of the bottomless abyss." For those of us who practice avoidance (as a via negativa to the blissful state of idleness), giddiness in this sense is a very real and present danger: Instead of being creatively "dizzy," the giddy person is just in a tizzy. In the etymological sense of the word--it's German for "possessed by God"--the term "enthusiastic" is preferred. See: AVOIDER, DIZZY, FLIGHTY. goldbricker: See: DODGER. good-for-nothing: Ah, nothingness! In Buddhism, the realization of the void is the sudden understanding that all things are intimately interconnected--and that, as a result, the world is a million-fold more fecund and wonderful than you'd ever imagined. The good-for-nothing will always be with us; but perhaps some of us are good for Nothing? See: DO-NOTHING, LOSER. goof-off: See: DODGER. head in the clouds: see: CASTLE BUILDER. hebetudinous: This excellent, medical-sounding word for "lethargy," as in "dullness," ought to be applied to slackers, not idlers. See: LETHARGIC, TIRED. hedonist: The Greek word for "pleasure" is derived from the word for "sweetness," which is why we ought only to describe as "hedonistic" that way of life which takes the pursuit of sweet pleasures as its highest goal. (Lin Yutang, for example, writes that the most significant inventions in the history of mankind are "smoking, drinking, and tea.") Those who prefer bitter pleasures to sweet ones must look elsewhere for an adjective. See: EPICUREAN. hibernate: A term coined by Charles Darwin's grandfather (who was also a naturalist), to hibernate [from the Latin for "winter"] means to pass the winter in a state of quiescent sleep. See: DORMANT, ESTIVATE. hit the sack: Also known as "sacking out," to hit the sack is a World War II-era slang expression for going to sleep. As such, it carries unpleasant connotations of sleeping-because-one-has-been-working-to-the-point-of-exhaustion. See: SLEEPY. hobo: See: BUM. holiday: See: VACATION. idleness: "Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself," insisted a young Robert Louis Stevenson. Idleness [from the Old English word for "useless," which came to mean "lazy"] may involve lying in bed... but it can also involve a great deal of concentrated effort. That's because idleness is not (unlike slackness), the opposite of "work," but is instead a hard-won mode of existence in which whatever one does is an act of creativity. See: FREE TIME, IDLER, INDOLENT, LEISURELY, USELESSNESS, WAITING FOR GODOT. idler: "There are plenty of lazy people and plenty of slowcoaches, but a genuine idler is a rarity," writes idling expert Jerome K. Jerome. "He is not a man who slouches about with his hands in his pockets. On the contrary, his most startling characteristic is that he is always intensely busy." Despite the dictionary definition, then, although the idler might not "work" in any recognizable fashion, he is neither shiftless nor lazy. His energies, having been freed from the merry-go-round of the working life, are channeled into the pursuit of wisdom and pleasure. See: IDLENESS, OTIOSE. idler wheel: By moving in a direction contrary to the motion of the rest of the machine of which it is a part, the idler wheel performs the vital function of transferring energy from one cog to another. There's a lesson in here, somewhere, about the usefulness of the idler to society; but it's a distasteful line of thought, don't you think? See: DUMMY. idlesse: The only difference between idlesse and "idleness" is that the former is French, and therefore incomparably more sophisticated. See: IDLENESS. inactive: Sartre writes that "all human activities are equivalent, on principle doomed to failure. Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations." But just try telling that to your boss, or spouse. Or to the authorities. Guy Debord noted that of all the offenses committed by the Situationists, the one considered most threatening by the police was their "prodigious inactivity." See: DO-NOTHING, INERT, SUPINE, UKULELE IKE. inattentive: Slackers don't pay attention to their work, and one can certainly understand why. But, as Simone Weil discovered, attention is not a matter of holding one's breath and wrinkling one's brow, but "suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object." This kind of attention, or mindfulness, is only possible in the state of perfect idleness. See: ABSENTMINDED, DISTRACTED, FORGETFUL. inconstant: see DESULTORY. incurious: see APATHETIC, DETACHED. indifferent: Not to be confused with apathy, indifference is a difficult mode of existence in which one is simultaneously engaged with and detached from the phenomenal word, as in Camus's longed-for "passionate world of indifference." See: CARELESS, DETACHED, NONCHALANT. indolent: For Keats, neither Love nor Ambition nor even Poesy contain joy "so sweet as drowsy noons,/And evenings steep'd in honied indolence." Although indolence [from the Latin for "feeling no pain"] strongly resembles habitual laziness, or sluggishness, it's less a physical aversion to activity or effort than it is a romantic repudiation of what Keats calls "the voice of busy common-sense." To the idler, nothing is so precious as what Bergson calls "duration": time divorced from productive operations, and dedicated instead to contemplation and reverie. See: FREE TIME, IDLENESS, USELESS, LANGUID, LIMPSY, OTIOSE, UKULELE IKE. inert: The inert [from the Latin for "idle"--in the sense of "unskilled, and therefore unable to work"] mode of the idler can be misleading. For, as Dr. Johnson writes, "the diligence of an Idler is rapid and impetuous, as ponderous bodies forced into velocity move with violence proportionate to their weight." See: DO-NOTHING, SLOTHFUL. insouciant: The mien of the person practicing engaged detachment, or passionate indifference, should be neither serious nor smirking--for these indicate a feeling of self-superiority which true ironic detachment precludes. The light-hearted unconcern of the insouciant [a French word derived from the Latin for "not agitated"] person ought not to be confused with cynicism or superciliousness. See: CARELESS, DETACHED, INDIFFERENT, NONCHALANT, WAITING FOR GODOT. jib: To jib is to refuse to proceed further, as when a jib sail flaps from side to side. One thinks, here, of Kierkegaard's description of the disorienting flapping motion made by the contraction and expansion of the ironist's self. See: BALK, VAGRANT. karoshi: This Japanese term for "death from overwork" will surely become as common in Western countries as "karaoki." Goldbricking is a pretty good way to avoid karoshi; but quitting is better. See: WORK. kef: In the Middle East, kef is a state not of lassitude, but indolence. See: INDOLENT, TIRED. kick back: Although to kick back has come to mean "relaxing," it actually means to fight for your right to be idle; to kick against the pricks who'd hold you back; to kick over the traces and kick out the jams. See: BALK, LIBERTINE. kill time: "Filling," "passing," "wasting" time: Before 1887, no one ever even considered disrespecting time in this fashion. That's the year the time clock was invented, after which time itself was increasingly commodified, "duration"--Bergson's term for time which is full and rich, and not divided artificially--began to be guarded jealously by those in power, and wage slaves began to kill time. See: FREE TIME, SLACKER, WORK. knock about: See: BUM. lackadaisical: Although often used as a synonym for "carefree" or "insouciant," this term is derived from "lackaday," as in "alas, the day." Proust-like, the lackadaisical person--crippled by nostalgia for times past--lacks the will to get out of bed. See: BLAS?, ENNUI, OBLOMOV, SPLEEN. laggard: Because life used to be nasty, brutish, and short, and one had to keep up with the pack or risk being eaten by wild animals, every language has its own way of contemptuously describing someone who goes slowly, and falls behind. Laggard is how the Norwegians say it. Those of us who live in "civilized" societies, however, often find that the more we lag, the less likely we are to die young. See: DAWDLE. lallygag: See: LOLLYGAG. languid: Languor is an enervated weakness or weariness of the body or mind. The languid [from the Latin for "weak"] neurasthenic--who cannot bear to experience any of the human passions, and who languishes so attractively, has given a bad name to the indolent idler, who may be perfectly fit and full of energy. (Note that Oscar Wilde's infamous languidness was just a pose.) See: LISTLESS, SLUGGISH, SPLEEN, TIRED, TORPID. lassitude: Lassitude comes from the Latin word for "tired," which also gives us "late"--as in "too tired to get there on time." See: TIRED. laxity: See: SLACKNESS. layabout: One might use layabout as a synonym for "slacker," as opposed to "idler," except that the term was re-appropriated by Paul Morand (author of the never-completed manual "For the Use of the New Idle"), who liked to boast that he belonged to "the great secret society of layabouts enjoying the scorn of a world which works too hard." See: LOSER. lazy: Lazy [from the German for "slack"] has largely replaced the native English terms "slack" and "idle" as the main word for expressing the concept "averse to work"... but of course the slacker and the idler are averse to work for wholly different reasons. The indolence of the dawdling idler makes him seem lazy, it's true... but we must distinguish, with Aristotle, between laziness (aergia) on the one hand, and abstention-from-worldly-activities-in-order-that-one-may-be-more-medit ative (skhole), on the other. The lazybones suffers from a deficiency in will, and spirit; not so the idler. See: LANGUID, SLUGGISH, TIRED, TORPOR. leisurely: Those of us who live in "advanced" capitalist societies seem to possess a great deal of "leisure time," and we're obsessed with "leisure activities"--but only because we're so exhausted. As Sartre has the protagonist of Nausea observe, the seemingly leisurely Sunday crowd at the seashore has "only one day in which to smooth out their wrinkles, their crow's feet, the bitter lines made by a hard week's work." As Aristotle notes, because this kind of leisure [from the Latin for "being permitted"] is made necessary by work, although it can produce a feeling of relief, it's still a form of work. Only those activities which are desirable for their own sakes (e.g., the hearing and making of music and poetry, conversation with friends, contemplation), Aristotle insisted, can be described as "leisurely." See: FREE TIME, IDLENESS, OTIOSE. lentitudinous: See: DAWDLE. lethargic: Whereas the ennuy? person is afflicted with an oppressive sense of the too-muchness of existence, the lethargic [the River Lethe, in Greek mythology, is the river of oblivion] person is rendered stagnant by the dullness of it all: He is dead-while-alive. See: ENNUI, LANGUID, SLUGGISH, TIRED, TORPID. libertine: A libertine [from the Latin word for "free"] is a free-thinker, especially in religious (which these days means "cultural") matters, and struggles to free himself from the restraints of all prevailing conventions. Because such free thought must be suppressed, "libertine" has come to be a synonym for "leading a dissolute life"; relatively few libertines, however, do. See: KICK BACK. lick and a promise: This titillating way of saying "perfunctory performance of a task" makes it seem somehow better than goldbricking, or slacking off. But it probably isn't. See: DODGER, KILL TIME, SLACKNESS. lie-abed: After becoming semi-paralyzed, French poet Jo? Bousquet decided that spending one's life in bed can be a great blessing: It helped him realize, for example, that "the world is larger in me than in the world." See: LOLL, RECUMBENT, SUPINE. limpsy: "My illness unblocked me, it gave me the courage to be myself," writes Nietzsche. "Am I a philosopher? Who cares?" To be limpsy, then, is not the same as being languid, or lethargic, because--like nihilism, for Nietzsche--it's the kind of illness "from which you return newborn." See: INDOLENT, UKULELE IKE. listless: "List," in this context, is Old English for "lust." One must be depressed, indeed, to get to this state. See: LANGUID, TORPID. loaf: The word "loafer" comes from the German word for "land-runner," i.e., "one who wanders around the countryside." Loaf, as a verb, is a back-formation from "loafer," and ought to be used to described someone who travels around aimlessly. See: BUM, SAUNTER, SCAMP. loiter: See: DAWDLE. loll: Lin Yutang suggests that we can achieve "the highest wisdom of living" by alternating between the "absolutely erect working posture" and "the posture of stretching ourselves on a sofa." See: LOLLYGAG, RECUMBENT, PUT ONE'S FEET UP, SUPINE. lollop: See: LOLLYGAG lollygag: In the 14th and 15th centuries, the so-called "Lollards"--a pejorative meaning something like "traveling mutterers"--traveled about England preaching that human nature is not sinful but perfect, and that because the world is still the Garden of Eden (i.e. it's not "fallen"), no one should work. The Calvinists decided that this all too attractive religious heresy was a sin... which is why to loll and to lollygag have come to mean "act or move in a lax, lazy manner." Really, they should be considered synonyms for "idleness." See: IDLENESS, LOLL, SLOTHFUL. loser: The true loser is someone who is inactive only by default, i.e., because he's failed in his bid to get ahead in society. Bousquet, who wrote that "My life is externally the life of a reject, and I wouldn't want it any other way," is an excellent example of the "beautiful loser," that highly evolved species whose members are doomed to failure, but who embrace their fate with joy. See: GOOD-FOR-NOTHING. lotus-eater: Was there really once a society of people--the Lotophagi, who lived on the north coast of Africa, according to Homer--who spent every day lost in the dreamy indolence produced by eating the lotus blossom? Although recreational drugs are a lot of fun, it's preferable that the idler seek paradise itself, and not what Baudelaire called the "artificial paradises" of opium and hashish. See: INDOLENT. lounge: To lounge [a Middle English pejorative for "idle fellow"] is to engage in the most spectacular form of indolence as yet known to us. Unlike the fl?neur, who loiters in the public square, the lounger--not to be confused with "lounge lizard," who merely poses as a lounger--prefers to outwit ennui in the cool, dim depths of a red-velvet-swathed bar (a.k.a. a "lounge"). Thanks to the recent cocktail music revival, this much-neglected term has made an astonishing comeback. See: FL?NEUR, INDOLENT, INSOUCIANT. lumpish: See: SLUGGISH. luxurious: Originally a pejorative term denoting sinful self-indulgence, luxury [from the Latin for "excess"] has only in the past couple of hundred years come to acquire positive connotations of costliness and comfort. The idea that there's a "necessary" amount of pleasure and comfort beyond which one ought not to go is, of course, old-fashioned and absurd. So to describe a lecherous (or just sensuous) person as "luxurious" is equally absurd. That said, there's a strong school of thought among idlers--Lin Yutang, for example--that moderation and balance in all things is the best route to true happiness. See: SYBARITE, VOLUPTUARY. malingerer: If one must dodge (instead of quit) one's duties or work, feigning physical incapacity is always a good strategy. See: DODGER, SLACKER. meander: The Maeander River, which flows through Turkey into the Aegean, was famous in ancient times for its winding course--which is how its name became a synonym for wandering aimlessly or casually, without urgent destination. See: SAUNTER. Micawberish: Is anyone's heart so hard that it doesn't go out to Micawber, the secret hero of David Copperfield, who lives in optimistic expectation of better fortune--but won't lift a finger to make it come any sooner? See: LOSER. mind-wandering: Aquinas believed that mind-wandering was a "daughter sin" of acedia. But just as the melancholy concomitant with acedia can give one insight, so too can mind-wandering expand our horizons. It's a lot less project-oriented than "brainstorming," too. See: ABSENTMINDED, DREAMER. moocher: See: CADGER. mosey: See: AMBLE. nap: "A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae," writes Henry Miller. "Gestated enough ideas to last me three days." Not to be confused with being asleep at the switch or the wheel, to sleep lightly and briefly during the day, when everyone else is busy at work, is the kind of pleasure even the most ascetic of idlers can endorse whole-heartedly. See: TIRED. negligent: See: CARELESS, FORGETFUL, INATTENTIVE. no-account: See: GOOD-FOR-NOTHING. nonchalant: Etymologically, nonchalant comes from the French expression for "not hot under the collar." This is not the same thing, however, as being "cool," if by that term you mean blas?, sophisticated indifference. Nonchalance is instead a stylish form of engaged detachment. See: DETACHED, INDIFFERENT, INSOUCIANT. oblivious: see DAYDREAMER, INATTENTIVE. Oblomov: Oblomov, the lethargic protagonist of Goncharov's novel of that title, is such a well-realized and sympathetic character that his name has become synonymous with "beautiful loser." But it's clear that Oblomov's indolence is not principled; instead, he's just a schlimazel who's idle only because he's too lazy to be as successful as he'd like to be. See: LAZY, LETHARGIC, SLUGGARD. oscitant: Oscitant, from the Latin for "yawn," is a listless, enervated state. See: LANGUID, TIRED, TORPID. otiose: One of the most important pieces of information that a glossary of idle terms can impart is this: The Latin word for "business" is negotium (as in "negotiate")--which means "not idling." Get it? Otium, or leisure, was once considered the true goal of life; and business was just what you did when you weren't idling. So how did "otiosity" come to mean "producing nothing of value?" See: IDLENESS, LEISURE. pass time: See: KILL TIME. passive: There's a big difference between being passive [from the Latin for "acted upon"] in the sense of "not taking an active part" or being "non-cooperative" on the one hand, and in the sense of "lacking in energy or will" on the other. As we know from the phenomenon of "passive resistance," sometimes not acting can require a whole lot more energy and will than acting can. See: BARTLEBY, DO-NOTHING, SIT BACK. perambulate: Although often used as a synonym for "saunter," to perambulate is simply to ambulate in a circle. What's the point of that? See: AMBULATE. piddle: See: FIDDLE AROUND. piss-puddle: Piss-puddle is a pejorative verb coined by a friend of the author of this glossary to describe her boyfriend's tendency to collapse on the couch when he was supposed to be making himself useful. See: PROCRASTINATE, UKULELE IKE. playboy: Playboy, a turn-of-the-century descriptor for "a man who lives a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure" has come to mean, thanks to the magazine of that name, "a man who lives a life devoted to the pursuit of women with enormous breasts." See: SYBARITE. pococurante: The Italians, it's said, work hard... but are under no illusion that work is the most important thing in life. That's why we should all start using the Italian word pococurante, which means nonchalant, a lot more. See: INDIFFERENT, INSOUCIANT, NONCHALANT. poky: See: DAWDLE. potter: To potter is to move or act aimlessly or idly; it comes from the Old English word for "poke," as in "poke around." See: FIDDLE AROUND. procrastinator: Procrastination in artists, muses the great literary critic Cyril Connolly, "is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict... all true artistic indolence is deeply neurotic; a pain not a pleasure." In the procrastinator [from the Latin for "put forward until tomorrow"] that lamentable failure of body and will which is languor, or torpor, becomes inextricably imbricated with artistic perfectionism. It can be impossible, however--for anyone, including the procrastinator--to tell these apart. See: LANGUID, LAZY, TORPID. (not) pull one's weight: See: DODGER. put off: See: PROCRASTINATE. put one's feet up: "How many hostesses have feared and trembled for an evening party in which the guests are not willing to loosen up," writes Lin Yutang. "I have always helped... by putting a leg up on top of a tea table or whatever happened to be the nearest object, and in that way forced everybody else to throw away the cloak of false dignity." See: LOLL. putter: See: POTTER. quiescent: To be quiescent [from the Latin for "become quiet"] is to be momentarily inactive, tranquilly at rest; it's not the same as being sluggish or torpid. See: INERT, SLOTHFUL, UKULELE IKE. quitter: "The trumpet is my enemy," said Herb Alpert in 1969, when he disbanded Tijuana Brass and quit performing. The quitter [from the Latin for "free"--as in "set yourself free"] ought not to be disparaged, for as Evan Harris, author of The Quit, argues, quitting is a creative art, an end in itself, a life-affirming "Yes!" See: BALK, BARTLEBY. rake: Rake [from "rakehell"] is a 17th-century slang word for "dissolute person." See: DISSOLUTE. ramble: To ramble [Middle English for "roam"] means to wander for pleasure, without a fixed destination. See: SAUNTER. recalcitrant: Etymologically, to be recalcitrant means to "kick back." Recalcitrance, then, is more than stubborn disobedience; it's a revolutionary (or at least rebellious) act of revenge. See: KICK BACK. recess: During a recess [from the Latin for "recede"], business-as-usual doesn't actually stop. Instead, it just goes into recharging-the-batteries mode. See: VACATION. recumbent: From the same Latin root as "incubate," which originally meant to literally "lie down on," when one is recumbent, ideas always start hatching. See: LIE-ABED, LOLL, SUPINE. recuperate: Nietzsche writes that "More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a 'need to recuperate' and is beginning to be ashamed of itself." Etymologically, to recuperate is to "take back" what was stolen from you; why not stop being a victim of robbery, instead? See: FREE TIME, LEISURELY, RELAX, VACATION. relax: To relax [from the Latin for "loose," which also gives us "languish" and "slack"] means to recuperate, i.e., in order that one can return to work with new energy. As comedian Keith Allen says, "'relaxation' is a load of cack, it's just shit... I'm that relaxed all the year round, you understand?" Idlers who've quit their jobs tend to find that they have energy to spare. See: FREE TIME, LEISURELY, RECUPERATE, VACATION. repose: See: RECUMBENT. rest: As with tiredness, and sleep, rest is one of those physical necessities which cannot be judged in and of itself. But there are different modes of resting: for example, relaxation is not the same thing as lolling. See: LOLL, RELAX, TIRED. rou?: This synonym for "rake" is French for "broken on the wheel"; the dissolute person was once thought to deserve this punishment. Such is the vengefulness of the jealous working person! See: RAKE. sandman: A candy-colored clown who tiptoes to our rooms every night. See: SLEEPY. saunter: Thoreau, who wrote magnificently about the pleasures of walking aimlessly through nature, insisted that saunterers were, by virtue of their mode of ambulating, not just going toward but already in the Saint Terre. A lovely idea, and not far wrong, etymologically. Saunter actually comes from the Middle English word for "walking about musingly"; it is derived from the word "saint," as holy men were thought to spend much of their time in this manner. See: BUM, DRIFTER, FL?NEUR, LOAF, SCAMP, SCROUNGER. scamp: Like "bum" and "loaf," this obsolete verb meaning "to roam about idly" has come to be a pejorative descriptor for any footloose and fancy-free person. Lin Yutang, resisting the militarization of his homeland, insisted that the scamp--not the soldier--is the highest form of humanity. Whereas the latter surrenders his individuality and obeys orders, Yutang points out, the former remains curious, dreamy, humorous, wayward, incalculable, and unpredictable. See: BUM, LOAF, SAUNTER. scatterbrained: See: DIZZY, GIDDY. schlimazel: A schlimazel [an Anglicization of the Yiddish compound "shemozzle"--"bad" and "luck"] is a pathetic failure, someone who wants to succeed but cannot. See: OBLOMOV. schnorrer: See: SPONGER. scrimshanker: See: DODGER. scrounger: From an Old English word meaning "wander about idly," a scrounger is one who gets only what he needs, and only when he needs it, by foraging, scavenging, or cadging. Although it's become synonymous with sponging, scrounging is actually a noble art which combines--as the word itself seems to do--sauntering, lounging, and creativity. See: BEGGAR, BUM, CADGER, SAUNTER, SCAMP. shamble: Walking awkwardly, with dragging feet, is not to be confused with "foot-dragging" in the sense of dawdling. See: DAWDLE. shilly-shally: See: DAWDLE. shiftless: If shiftless ["shift" is a 16th century English word for "resourcefulness"] is taken to mean "lacking in resourcefulness," then the shiftless person is precisely the opposite of a scrounger. However, as a term sometimes used to mean "lacking in ambition," it ought to be reclaimed by idlers. See: UNAMBITIOUS. shirker: See: DODGER. shit-heel: Henry Miller writes, of young people who "know enough not to want to do a stroke of honest work," that "they prefer to be shit-heels, if they have to be. Fine! I salute them." See: CADGER. siesta: This highly civilized practice of catching forty winks during the hottest part of the day is found only in the most advanced civilizations. See: NAP. sinecurist: For as long as bureaucracies have existed, there have been people eager to obtain offices and positions that require little or no work. However, although a sinecure is preferable (for obvious reasons) to a job that's demanding, a sinecurist is a bird in a gilded cage: He may become too complacent to fly, even if the cage door is left open. See: DODGER, SLACKER. sit back: "When things are going to rack and ruin," writes Henry Miller, "the most purposeful act may be to sit still." See: DO-NOTHING, INACTION, PASSIVE. skiver: "Never sell yourself, just give," says Keith Allen. To skive [which came into English via those World War I British servicemen who liked the French word for "dodge" (esquiver)] means to fail to do your duty in a glorious, larger-than-life, instructive manner. See: DODGER, FL?NEUR. slackness: Not to be confused with Lin Yutang's notion of "The Noble Art of Leaving Things Undone," slackness [from the same Latin word for "loose" which gives us "languish" and "relaxation"] refers to a blameworthy lack of due or necessary diligence, precision, or care. It's one thing not to care about work which is forced upon you, but an apathetic response to the prospect of any kind of sustained effort whatsoever is something else entirely. Despite the Church of the Subgenius's attempt to appropriate this word for idlers and skivers, then, "slack" ought to go on being used as a synonym for "lazy." See: APATHETIC, BLAS?, COMPLACENT, LAZY, SLACKER. slacker: Richard Linklater's movie Slacker may reference R.L. Stevenson's "Apology for Idlers," but Linklater himself admitted that it was a "kiss-off to a certain mindset--wallowing in negativity and being very alienated." Dr. Johnson, that great supporter of idleness, frowned upon those so-called idlers who "boast that they do nothing, and thank their stars that they have nothing to do," and who "exist in a state of unruffled stupidity, forgetting and forgotten; who have long ceased to live." Unlike the idler, in whom work and leisure have combined to become something fine, the slacker remains unhappily trapped in that dichotomy. See: DODGER, LEISURELY, FREE TIME, KILL TIME, SLACKNESS, VACATION. sleepy: The periodic suspension of consciousness (during which the powers of the body are restored) that we call "sleep" cannot be criticized on moral grounds, since it's an unavoidable natural phenomenon, like weather. It can, however, be criticized aesthetically, since it can be accomplished in so many different fashions, and because some people do it with so much more panache than others. See: NAP, TIRED. slipshod: Yet another curious conflation of footwear with modes of existence. How did "wearing loose shoes" come to mean "negligent"? Was Bruce Lee, in his kung fu slippers, negligent? Of course not! In honor of Lee's philosophy, then, we should use slipshod to refer to a person who acts without attachment to the fruits of his actions. See: FLIP-FLOP, BOOTLESS. slothful: In Madness and Civilization, Foucault writes that the practice of sentencing prisoners and madmen to forced labor arose because of the (Calvinist) idea that "God helps those who help themselves." Just as homosexuality was once considered a perverse variant of the sin of willfulness, so too was sloth [from the same German word which gives us "slow"] once considered an absurd--because, so the thinking went, the slothful person was poverty-stricken--variant of the sin of pride. Now that we've seen where the worship of speed has landed us, we should know better. See: DAWDLE, INDOLENT, LOLLYGAG. slouch: It seems unnecessarily cruel to use this term for "excessive relaxation of body muscles" to describe a lazy or incompetent person. See: LOLL. slowcoach: See: SLOTHFUL. slug-a-bed: Goncharov is careful to show that Oblomov is not supine in the manner of a slug-a-bed (for whom lying down is a real sensual pleasure), but instead because of his lax hebetudinousness. See: EPICUREAN, LOLL. sluggard: "My indolence," lamented Dr. Johnson, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness." The sluggard [from the Norwegian word for "large heavy body," which came to mean "slow-moving person"] is a lazily inactive person, one whom lassitude has rendered tediously slow-witted and dull. See: LANGUID, LASSITUDE, TORPID, OBLOMOV. slumberous: To be slumberous [from the Middle English word for "doze"] is to be tired in the sense of lethargic, torpid. Slumberousness is not the same thing as indolence. See: LASSITUDE, LETHARGIC, TIRED, TORPID. snooze: See: NAP. somnolent: See: DROWSY. spare time: See: FREE TIME. spleen: Like ennui, spleen [from the Greek word for that internal organ believed to be the seat of moroseness, or bad temper: hence "splenetic"] is an affliction suffered by over-stimulated sophisticates. The term was used in the mid-nineteenth century by Romantic poets to refer to a particularly tempestuous compound of boredom, lethargy, and despair: Sartre describes Baudelaire (for whom spleen was a central principle) as suffering from a "feverish, sterile agitation which knew that it was in vain and which was poisoned by a merciless lucidity." See: ACEDIA, ENNUI, LETHARGIC. sponger: Unlike the moocher, a sort of prodigal Holy Fool to whom all right-thinking people must be generous, the sponger is a greedy, calculating parasite. Giving to the moocher can be a momentary rebellion against the project-oriented economic life; only suckers, marks, and soft touches give to a sponger. See: CADGER. stargazer: "We are all lying in the gutter," wrote Oscar Wilde, "but some of us are looking at the stars." The stargazer is not a lazy daydreamer; instead, he is absentminded in the best possible sense. See: ABSENTMINDED, DREAMER. stroll: Baudelaire, who was forced to flee his creditors by moving to Belgium, complained that "strolling, something that nations with imagination love, is not possible in Brussels." See: DRIFTER, FL?NEUR, SAUNTER. supine: From the Latin for "lying on one's back," to be supine has come to mean "inactive." But as Damien Hirst suggests with his maxim "Minimum effort for maximum effect," there's nothing wrong with being inactive. See: INACTIVE, LIE-ABED, LOLL, RECUMBENT, SLUG-A-BED. swinger: See: SYBARITE. sybarite: The inhabitants of ancient Sybaris, a Greek colony in southern Italy, supposedly devoted themselves to unrestrained self-indulgence--which is how their name became synonymous with "pleasure-seeker." Unlike the Epicurean, whose quest for pleasure isn't necessarily an exhausting one, the sybarite works at having fun. What's the point of that? See: DISSIPATED, DISSOLUTE, LUXURIOUS. thoughtless: Because of his absentmindedness, the idler is often accused of being thoughtless--not in the sense of "insensitive," but in the sense of "unthinking," or "scatterbrained." But as R. L. Stevenson makes clear, it is instead those "dead-alive" people engaged in a conventional occupation who "pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious toiling in the gold-mill," and who possess "not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train." See: ABSENTMINDED, DISTRACTED, FORGETFUL. tinker: How did the itinerant mender of household utensils [tinker is either a contraction of "worker in tin," or an onomatopoetic word for the sound of pots being repaired] come to be synonymous with "unsuccessful mender" and "bungler"? Why are we so threatened by rootlessness, and by the thought that someone would rather fiddle around than hold down a steady job? See: FIDDLE AROUND. tired: Everyone gets tired, but not all modes of tiredness are equal. The supine idler seeks inspiration in that state of consciousness which arises between sleep and waking; but the person who is slumberous, drowsy, or languid is just giving in to the annihilating force of torpor. See: LANGUID, LASSITUDE, RECUMBENT, RELAX, SUPINE, TORPID. torpid: Like the torpedo fish, which numbs its prey with an electric shock, "torpor" [from the Latin for "stiff," "numb"] is an enervating force which renders its victims sluggish, dull, and stagnant. See: LANGUID, LASSITUDE, LETHARGIC, SLUGGARD, TIRED. tramp: see BUM. truant: R.L. Stevenson writes that "while others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men." See: DODGER, OTIOSE, SCAMP, UNEMPLOYED. unconcerned: see APATHETIC, DETACHED. unemployed: "I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement," remarks one of Wilde's characters, "if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life." To be unemployed doesn't just mean "not engaged in a gainful occupation"; it also means, etymologically, "not being used": Keep that in mind. See: QUIT, TRUANT, WORK. unambitious, unindustrious, unproductive, unpunctilious: Un-, un-, un-! Why aren't the words "unanal," "unuptight," and "unboring" in the dictionary?! After quitting his job and moving to Paris, Henry Miller wrote a book which begins: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive." So much for the world and its un-'s. See: GOOD-FOR-NOTHING, LOSER, SKIVER. useless: "There is something tragic," writes Wilde, "about the enormous number of young men...who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession." Note also Lin Yutang's maxim that "a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner" is what makes life worth living. Useless actions are, in some theories, the best way to resist the hegemony of a project-oriented society. See: ANABHOGYA-CARYA, DETACHED, FIDDLE AROUND, IDLENESS, OTIOSE. Ukulele Ike: Before musician Cliff Edwards became a character actor (and the voice of Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket), he performed under the pseudonym Ukulele Ike. His wistfully happy plinking has rendered many a person--including, in particular, a friend of the author of this glossary--absolutely paralyzed by beauty and emotion. See: DO-NOTHING, INACTIVE, INDOLENT, VOLUPT?. vacation: "I think that if I had two or three quiet days of just sheer thinking I'd upset everything," Henry Miller complained. "I ought to go to the office one day and blow out [my boss's] brains. That's the first step." Now you know why your vacation [from the Latin for "freedom"] is always so short, and so exhaustingly packed with activities: Thinking must not be permitted. See: FREE TIME, LEISURELY, RECUPERATE, RELAX, WORK. vagabond: See: BUM. vagrant: From the Latin for "wander," vagrant should be used as a romantic adjective for "undecided"; "vague," a close etymological relative, should remain a pejorative. If a synonym for "bum" is required, use "vagabond" instead, please. See: MIND-WANDERING. vegetate: Whereas seemingly passive behavior can actually be quite revolutionary, to vegetate is simply to allow oneself to become stagnant. See: PASSIVE, RELAX. volupt?: Aldous Huxley, noting with approval that the French are neither concerned with trying to find a metaphysical justification for the raptures of physical passion, nor propagandists of sensuality, suggests that there is no English equivalent for volupt? [from the Latin word for "pleasure," which gives us "voluptuous"]. If "voluptuousness," meaning "full of pleasure to the senses," carried the connotation of detached (but not blas?) enjoyment, we'd be close: The Epicurean seeks volupt?; the sybarite, voluptuousness. See: DETACHED, EPICUREAN, INDIFFERENT, NONCHALANT. voluptuary: Despite the close etymological relationship to the word volupt?, a voluptuary is a person whose chief interests are luxury and the gratification of his sensual appetites. As such, he is a sybarite, not an Epicurean. See: SYBARITE. waiting for one's ship to come in: See: MICAWBERISH. waiter on providence: See: MICAWBERISH. waiting for Godot: In Beckett's much-referenced (but little-understood) play Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon continue to do what they must do, even though it's frustrating and pointless, and even though no one can understand what it is they're doing, because they just can't do anything else. The idler, whose project of self-creation often looks to outsiders like laziness or useless footling, should be able to relate. As Damien Hirst says, of his own apparent inactivity: "It's like when a car is idling. You have the possibility of going somewhere, but you're not going anywhere. But that doesn't mean you're not doing anything. The energy's there." See: DO-NOTHING, GOOD-FOR-NOTHING, IDLENESS, SCAMP, SHIFTLESS, SLIPSHOD. waste time: "There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one," writes Jerome K. Jerome. See: KILL TIME. weasel: See: SCAMP. whiffler: See: VAGRANT. while away the hours: Not to be confused with killing or wasting time, to while away the hours "conferrin' with the flowers, consultin' with the rain" (as the Scarecrow sings in the film The Wizard of Oz) is a delightfully foolish variant of fiddling around. See: FIDDLE AROUND. whimsical: see ECCENTRIC. whimsy: see DAYDREAMER. wishy-washy: See: VAGRANT. woolgathering: Although woolgathering has come to mean "daydreaming," this seems unfair to woolgatherers, who from all accounts tend not to be slackers but idlers. See: STARGAZER. work: "Work, work, in order that by becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable," writes Paul Lafargue. "Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production." Bertrand Russell writes that it is the ruling class's "desire for comfortable idleness which is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their [idle] example." 'Nuff said. See: FREE TIME, LEISURELY, SLACKER, KILL TIME, VACATION. worker: Although idlers do work, of course, we need a term which means not just someone who works, but someone who has been ruined by work, and this might as well be it. See: SLACKER, THOUGHTLESS. A version of this article originally appeared in The Idler. From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:17:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:17:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Dowd) 'Are Men Necessary?': See the Girl With the Red Dress On Message-ID: 'Are Men Necessary?': See the Girl With the Red Dress On New York Times Book Review, 5.11.13 http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2005/11/13/books/1131097876396.html ARE MEN NECESSARY? When Sexes Collide. By Maureen Dowd. 338 pp. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $25.95. By KATHRYN HARRISON LET'S, for a moment, judge a book by its cover. One need not read Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?" to answer the question. The retro pulp-fiction jacket features a bombshell in a clingy red dress strap-hanging under the leering gaze of her fellow subway riders, all male. For the use of this illustration, Dowd enthusiastically thanks the artist, Owen Smith, adding, "The girl in the red dress will always be my red badge of courage." Below such an image, the subtitle, "When Sexes Collide," seems both wish and prediction. Crack open "Are Men Necessary?" and the author's first words are flirtatious: "For men. Friends and more, past, present and future. You know who you are." Those of us left out of the innuendo can assume that, beyond her dedicatees, men make up a hefty portion of her readership. Dowd, whose dead-clever aim and feisty delight in skewering politicians juiced up her reporting from The New York Times's Washington bureau, has produced a twice-weekly column for The Times's Op-Ed page for the last 10 years. Having published those pertaining to G. W. and company as "Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk," she has now collected and expanded on her opinions about a topic that would appear to interest her at least as much as presidential shenanigans: the never-to-be-resolved sexual contest between men and women. The title, "Are Men Necessary?," refers nominally to scientific speculation that the Y chromosome, which has been shedding genes over evolutionary time, may disappear entirely within the next ten million years, a hypothesis countered by newer studies showing that the Y of the human species has been stable for the past six million years. Neither development, of course, has any bearing on the coupling opportunities for humankind as we know it. But it is exactly this kind of "news" that offers Dowd a provocative snag, tweaked to advantage in her columns. Her Cuisinart style of info processing and her embrace of popular culture invite all manner of unexpected applications, allowing, for example, a "Seinfeld" character to help us understand the relative simplicity of males, whose sex is determined by only one Y, as opposed to the female's two X's. "Maybe that 'Seinfeld' episode is right," she muses, "where George Costanza tries to prove that man's passions can all be fulfilled at the same time if he can watch a hand-held TV while 'pleasuring' a woman while eating a pastrami on rye with spicy mustard." Beyond science, "Are Men Necessary?" addresses the confusion of postfeminist dating, gender conflicts in the workplace, the media's disparate treatment of men and women, American culture's saturation with sexual imagery, our collective obsession with youth and appearances, the objectification of women by men and, finally, sex as "a tripwire in American history." For Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her commentary on Monica-gate and who has covered the fate of women politicians from Geraldine Ferraro to Hillary Clinton, this last topic has been more high wire than tripwire - one on which she's cartwheeled through many a career, fashioning herself an attention-grabbing costume of sparkling jabs. But what makes Dowd an exceptionally good columnist on the Op-Ed page - her ability to compress and juxtapose, her incisiveness, her ear for hypocrisy and eye for the absurd - does not enable her to produce a book-length exploration of a topic as complex as the relations between the sexes. Consumed over a cup of coffee, 800 words provide Dowd the ideal length to call her readers' attention to the ephemera at hand that may reveal larger trends and developments. But smart remarks are reductive and anti-ruminative; not only do they not encourage deeper analysis, they stymie it. Producing one of her trademark staccato repetitions - for example, on cosmetic surgery: "We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest. Biology used to be destiny. Now biology's a masquerade party" - Dowd effectively dismisses a subject by virtue of proclamation. Does she let loose three arrows instead of one because she can't choose the cleverest among them? Typically, her formula is to articulate a thesis, punch it up with humor and then follow with anecdotal support or examples taken from TV shows, advertisements, overheard conversations - all cultural detritus is fair game. Often she quotes from reputable sources, CNN or The Times or a professional journal like Science; more often she applies witty asides, snippy comparisons ("Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks") and tabloid-style alliteration (e.g., "dazzling dames" and "He mused that men are in a muddle"). When a few hundred pages' worth of these observations are published in one book, they suffer the opposite of synergy, adding up to less than the sum of their parts. Energizing in small morning doses, the author's fast-talking spins on the spin can rear-end one another until the pileup exhausts a reader's patience. Polemics tend to ignore subtleties and contradictions, so one may be reluctant to grant Dowd the authority of a responsible guide to a territory as fraught as sexual politics. Her habit of deploying her mother as a narrative device - in the attempt to give credence to the idea that she has affection and respect for someone, if not for the people she's undercutting in adjacent sentences? - is reminiscent of Lieutenant Columbo's invoking his wife with the ulterior purpose of distracting and confusing the murderer he's trying to catch. When Dowd claims she's "shy and oversensitive," amid numerous references to her hobnobbing with the powers that be, both political and cultural, it seems manipulative. LIKE most people who work hard at seeming to be naturally funny, Maureen Dowd comes across as someone who very much wants to be liked, even though she has problematically joined forces with those women who are "sabotaging their chances in the bedroom" by having high-powered careers. "A friend of mine called nearly in tears the day she won a Pulitzer," Dowd reports in a passage about men threatened by successful women. " 'Now,' she moaned, 'I'll never get a date!' " Reading this, I can't help wondering if Dowd is that self-same "friend." After all, it's rare that she resists naming her friends, most of whom have names worth dropping: "my witty friend Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant critic"; "my friend Leon Wieseltier"; "the current Cosmo editor, my friend Kate White"; "my late friend Art Cooper, the editor of GQ for 20 years"; "my pal Craig Bierko"; et al. Dowd's gift for memorably buoyant attacks ensures that she's quoted not only en route to work and around the water cooler but well into the dinner hour; they tend to bob to the mind's surface through the daily tide of minutiae, providing ready conversational flotsam. But for a woman who says, quoting Carole Lombard, "I never forget that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick," an award-winning acid tongue just may be a tragic flaw. Kathryn Harrison is the author of the memoir "The Kiss" and, most recently, "Envy," a novel. From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:18:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:18:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: New Discoveries of the Dwarf Human Species Message-ID: Anthropology: New Discoveries of the Dwarf Human Species http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051111-3.htm The following points are made by Daniel E. Lieberman (Nature 2005 437:957): 1) The recent announcement[1,2] of a newly discovered species of tiny human from the Indonesian island of Flores was astonishing. This intriguing scientific story continues with new work[3] which describes further fossil evidence from the cave of Liang Bua on Flores. The original fossil remains[1] consisted primarily of a single partial skeleton (LB1), excavated from deposits in Liang Bua dated to the end of the last ice age. Stone tools, evidence of fire-making and the bones of a dwarfed elephant species were also found, those bones apparently being the result of hunting. 2) The LB1 skeleton, dated to 18,000 years ago, was probably a female, just over a meter tall. It had a brain volume of 380 cm^(3), roughly the size of a chimpanzee brain. Although LB1 has a somewhat primitively shaped pelvis, it shares many derived characteristics of the genus Homo, particularly in the teeth, jaw and cranium. These similarities, combined with other distinctive features, led Brown and colleagues[1] to propose a new species, Homo floresiensis. They further suggested that H. floresiensis was a dwarfed descendant of Homo erectus, another hominid species, which is thought to have arrived on Flores by 800,000 years ago[4]. 3) Homo floresiensis caused a stir by challenging preconceptions. If it is a new species, then we shared this planet with other hominids much more recently than anyone thought -- long after the Neanderthals became extinct, after modern humans arrived in Australia, and at about the time that agriculture was first invented. More unusual is the proposal that H. floresiensis evolved from H. erectus through dwarfing. This phenomenon, known as endemic or island dwarfing, sometimes occurs on islands when species are released from the pressures of predation but become constrained by limited resources and small population sizes[5]. In such conditions, large animals tend to become smaller and small animals tend to become larger. The process was clearly occurring on Flores, whose fauna includes giant rats and now-extinct miniature elephants. What captures the imagination is that dwarfing might have occurred in humans, who often buffer themselves from natural selection through cultural means such as tool production and fire-making, both evident at Liang Bua[2]. 4) The Liang Bua finds have generated controversy. Two alternative hypotheses, yet to be published in the peer-reviewed literature, have been proposed. One is that the LB1 skeleton is a pygmy human, not a new hominid species. The other is that LB1 is a human who suffered from a form of microcephaly, a pathological condition characterized by an abnormally small brain and head, and which can also cause dwarfism. 5) Morwood and colleagues[3] now counter some of these claims with evidence recovered during excavations in 2004. The material substantially expands the sample attributed to H. floresiensis, and provides additional details about the proposed species. The new fossils consist of the right humerus, radius and ulna of the LB1 skeleton, the mandible of a second individual (LB6), and assorted other remains including two tibiae, a femur, two radii, an ulna, a scapula, a vertebra, and various toe and finger bones. The researchers think that the sample includes the remains of at least nine individuals. References (abridged): 1. Brown, P. et al. Nature 431, 1055-1061 (2004) 2. Morwood, M. J. et al. Nature 431, 1087-1091 (2004) 3. Morwood, M. J. et al. Nature 437, 1012-1017 (2005) 4. Morwood, M. J., O'Sullivan, P. B., Aziz, F. & Raza, A. Nature 392, 173-176 (1998) 5. Foster, J. B. Nature 202, 234-235 (1964) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: PALEOANTHROPOLOGY: ON THE FLORES FOSSILS The following points are made by M.M. Lahr and R. Foley (Nature 2004 431:1043): 1) The recently discovered Homo floresiensis fossils (1,2) probably left no descendants, are not very old, and were found on a remote island. Despite this, they are among the most outstanding discoveries in palaeoanthropology for half a century. The find is startling. It is of a pygmy-sized, small-brained hominin, which lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, and which was found on the island of Flores together with stone tools, dwarf elephants and Komodo dragons. 2) The Flores fossils add a new and surprising twig to the hominin family tree, which diverged from the chimpanzee lineage about 7 million years ago. The first African hominins existed 7-1.2 million years ago, were 1-1.5 meters tall, walked upright on two legs (i.e., were bipedal), and had chimpanzee-size brains. These early forms comprised as many as six genera and fourteen species, of which the australopithecines are the best known. By 2.5 million years ago, our own genus, Homo, had emerged, with its different body shape, slower growth, greater reliance on meat in the diet, and "encephalization" -- larger brains than expected for body size. These were the first hominins to make stone tools systematically and to colonize Eurasia. They include the familiar names of H. habilis, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis and, finally, H. sapiens, which put in an appearance about 160,000 years ago. The new fossil is part of this Homo group. 3) Flores lies to the east of Java, and was probably never connected to the mainland. The presence of 800,000-year-old simple stone tools first attracted attention in 1998 (3), raising the controversial possibility that H. erectus had produced them and had crossed major sea barriers to reach Flores. Now we have the announcement of the discovery of an 18,000-year-old hominin skeleton from a cave, Liang Bua, on Flores. Although this date is more than 140,000 years after modern humans evolved in Africa, more than 25,000 years after H. sapiens reached Australia, and about 10,000 years after the last known Neanderthal, the skeleton is that of a new species -- Homo floresiensis. Its most remarkable features are its diminutive body (about a meter in height) and brain size (at 380 cm^(3), the smallest of any known hominin). 4) Homo floresiensis is a challenge -- it is the most extreme hominin ever discovered. An archaic hominin at that date changes our understanding of late human evolutionary geography, biology and culture. Likewise, a pygmy and small-brained member of the genus Homo raises questions about our understanding of morphological variability and allometry -- the relation between the size of an organism and the size of any of its parts. Brown et al(1) claim that the skeleton, designated LB1, represents a new species within the genus Homo. They believe that it may have been a female. They also conclude that it was a dwarfed descendant of Javanese H. erectus, and part of an endemic island fauna.(4,5) References (abridged): 1. Brown, P. et al. Nature 431, 1055-1061 (2004) 2. Morwood, M. J. et al. Nature 431, 1087-1091 (2004) 3. Morwood, M. J., O'Sullivan, P. B., Aziz, F. & Raza, A. Nature 392, 173-176 (1998) 4. Conway Morris, S. Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) 5. Wood, B. & Richmond, B. G. J. Anat. 197, 19-60 (2000) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: ANTHROPOLOGY: ON HOMINID FOSSILS The following points are made by Jeffrey H. Schwartz (Science 2004 305:53): 1) The period from 1 million to 500,000 years ago (~1 to 0.5 Ma) is well represented in the human fossil records of Europe and Asia. Sites containing such fossils include Ceprano, Italy (~0.9 to 0.8 Ma), the TD-6 level at Atapuerca's Gran Dolina, Spain (~0.78 Ma), Trinil, Indonesia (1 to 0.7 Ma), some parts of the Sangiran Dome, Indonesia (1.5 to 1 Ma), Lantian, China (~1 Ma), and probably Zhoukoudian, China (0.55 to 0.3 Ma). 2) By contrast, Africa has been unusually uninformative about this part of human evolution. Three partial mandibles unearthed more than 50 years ago at Tighenif (Ternifine) in Algeria (~0.7 Ma) are similar in dental morphology to specimens from Gran Dolina (1), but the former are rarely mentioned in the literature. The question thus remained: Where are the African fossils? 3) The recent discovery of the partial Daka skull (~1 Ma) at the Bouri site, Middle Awash, Ethiopia (2), provided part of the answer. Potts et al (3) recently reported that the archaeologically and faunally rich site of Olorgesailie, Kenya, has divulged its first hominid fossils: a partial frontal and more fragmentary temporal bone dated 0.97 to 0.9 Ma. Like the Daka specimen, these fragments (KNM-OL 45500) were assigned to the species Homo erectus. 4) Potts et al. correctly assess the "Homo erectus" debate: "The entire sample of fossils from Africa, Asia, and Europe exhibits wide morphological variation that some researchers divide into multiple lineages and others place in a single, polytypic species." They opt for the latter hypothesis and conclude that "comparison of the KNM-OL 45500 with other crania . . . illustrates that metric and qualitative similarities cut across temporal and spatial groups of fossil specimens." Assuming that a vast array of specimens of differing morphologies constitute the same species, favorable comparisons between some of them in one or a few morphologies are expected, especially if primitive retentions and shared derived features are not sorted out. 5) But this does not clarify the question, "What is H. erectus?" One is left primarily with the traditional approach to the genus Homo: H. erectus is not H. habilis, H. heidelbergensis, or H. sapiens, whatever they are. 6) Recognizing that "Homo erectus" may be more a historical accident than a biological reality might lead to a better understanding of those fossils whose morphology clearly exceeds the bounds of individual variation so well documented in the Trinil/Sangiran sample. In the meantime, OL 45500 should remind us that hominid systematics must be an endeavor of testing long-entrenched hypotheses, especially when those who turn to these hypotheses acknowledge them as being problematic.(4,5) References (abridged): 1. J. H. Schwartz, I. Tattersall, The Human Fossil Record, vol. 4, Craniodental Morphology of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Orrorin (Wiley-Liss, New York, in press) 2. B. Asfaw et al., Nature 416, 317 (2002) 3. R. Potts, A. K. Behrensmeyer, A. Deino, P. Ditchfield, J. Clark, Science 305, 75 (2004) 4. J. H. Schwartz, I. Tattersall, The Human Fossil Record, vol. 2, Craniodental Morphology of Genus Homo (Africa and Asia) (Wiley-Liss, New York, 2003) 5. J. H. Schwartz, I. Tattersall, Acta Anthropol. Sin. 19 (suppl.), 21 (2000) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:18:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:18:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Special Drug Just for You, at the End of a Long Pipeline Message-ID: A Special Drug Just for You, at the End of a Long Pipeline http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/health/08phar.html [What's remarkable is that the obvious opportunity to warn against genetics leading to racism was not taken.] By [63]ANDREW POLLACK A new drug for acne, Aczone, was approved in July, but with a catch. The Food and Drug Administration said it would require that patients first be tested for an enzyme deficiency that could put them at risk of developing [64]anemia from the drug. The age of personalized medicine is on the way. Increasingly, experts say, therapies will be tailored for patients based on their genetic makeup or other medical measurements. That will allow people to obtain drugs that would work best for them and avoid serious side effects. [65]Skip to next paragraph Illustration by John Weber Multimedia [66]Graphic [67]Tailoring the Dosage [68]Tailoring the Dosage But the case of Aczone illustrates a barrier to this new era. Pharmaceutical companies fear that if testing for such genetic markers is required, that will discourage doctors from prescribing a drug or limit a drug's sales to a subset of patients. Upon learning of the testing requirement for Aczone, Astellas, one of its developers, abandoned the drug. The other developer, QLT, is planning another clinical trial in hopes of having the testing requirement lifted. It argues that in a previous clinical trial, only 1.4 percent of patients had the enzyme deficiency and none developed anemia. Tailoring drugs to patients can introduce problems for doctors, as well as drug makers. Transfused blood is an example. Many transfusion centers would love to have a single type of blood suitable for everyone, rather than having to keep different types in stock and worrying that severe problems may occur if the wrong type is transfused. Still, many physicians, regulators, market analysts and pharmaceutical executives agree that despite the obstacles, personalized medicine is inevitable. About 40 of the 50 psychiatrists at the Mayo Clinic use genetic tests to help choose which drugs to prescribe, said Dr. David A. Mrazek, chairman of psychiatry at Mayo. And some companies are offering tests directly to consumers. Mary Jane Q. Cross, an artist in Newport, N.H., developed a permanent tremor on the right side of her body after taking the antidepressant Prozac 14 years ago. She now paints with her fingers because she cannot hold a brush. A year ago, she paid about $600 to Genelex, a company in Seattle, for genetic tests that showed she would have trouble tolerating certain drugs, possibly including Prozac. "Had I known that 14 years ago, I would not have used the drug," Ms. Cross said. Recently, when she had an emergency appendectomy, she advised the doctors to use a low dose of [69]anesthesia based on her genetic test results. "My husband had to go home in the middle of the night to get the material, bring it back and make it clear to them that this was an important issue," she said. Scientists are finding numerous examples of variations in genes that help predict who will respond to a drug or who will suffer side effects. Most drug companies now routinely collect [70]DNA samples from patients in clinical trials to look for such markers. In March, the F.D.A. issued guidelines to encourage drug companies to pursue personalized medicine, and the agency is adding information about genetic tests to the labels of a few drugs. Since June, the label for Camptosar, a Pfizer drug for colon [71]cancer, has advised doctors that a lower starting dose may be appropriate for the 10 percent of people who have a particular version of a gene called UGT1A1. The variant makes them more prone to a side effect, serious decline in white blood cells. But despite progress, many more years of work will be required before combinations of drugs and tests, sometimes called theranostics, could reach the market. "I don't see any indication that there is a drug that will come to market in the next five years that will have a DNA-targeted market," said Dr. Gualberto Rua?o, president of Genomas, a company working on genetic tests for drug use. For that to happen, Dr. Rua?o said, the drug and the genetic test would have to be tested together in a clinical trial. "What Phase 3 trial is ongoing now where they have selected the patients based on genetic markers?" he asked. Choosing a drug based on a patient's genes is called pharmacogenetics or pharmacogenomics. But pharmacogenetics is just one part of personalized medicine. In fact, all medicine is already personalized to some extent. Cancer patients are treated based on their body size; the type, size and extent of a [72]tumor; and so on. Genetic testing would add just one element to this. Some experts say genes, which provide the instructions for making proteins, may not be the best approach, because a gene, even if present, is not always active. "Genetic markers per se will be less useful than things further downstream, like proteins in the blood," said Dr. Mark Fishman, head of drug discovery research at Novartis. Asked for examples of pharmacogenetics, experts usually cite Herceptin, a [73]breast cancer drug given to the 20 to 30 percent of patients whose tumors have abundant levels of a protein called Her2. That Herceptin was approved seven years ago and remains the best example attests to the difficulties in the field. Another example is that doctors treating patients with [74]H.I.V. or AIDS often test a patient's [75]virus for mutations that induce resistance to particular drugs. In both cases, however, it is the disease-causing agent that is being tested, not the patient's genes. Tumor genes are very different from normal genes. So the tests are really diagnostic rather than pharmacogenetic, not much different from characterizing a bacterial infection to prescribe the proper [76]antibiotic. The first widespread use of testing a patient's own genes is likely to be for variations in enzymes involved in metabolizing drugs, particularly those in a family called the Cytochrome P450 enzymes. People with genetic variations that limit the effectiveness of a particular enzyme may not be able to break down a drug quickly enough, allowing dangerously high levels to build up. In June, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a letter from doctors in Fargo, N.D., about a patient who died after receiving a low dose of the antidepressant Paxil, apparently because of an inability to metabolize the drug. Enzyme testing may allow people who metabolize a drug poorly to receive a lower dose to avoid side effects. In contrast, ultrafast metabolizers may need more than the usual dose for the drug to be effective. In some cases, however, the opposite is true. Codeine provides pain relief because it is turned into morphine in the body through an enzyme called 2D6. In December, The New England Journal of Medicine printed a report of a fast metabolizer who received a small dose of codeine as a cough suppressant and developed a life-threatening overdose of morphine. A slow metabolizer, in contrast, would experience little pain relief because the codeine would not be effectively converted into morphine. This year, the F.D.A. approved a test developed by Roche that uses a new type of DNA chip to detect variations in the 2D6 and 2C19 genes, which play a role in metabolism of about 25 percent of prescription drugs. Other clinical laboratories offer their own tests, which do not require F.D.A. approval. Gwynne Wolin, a retired medical transcriber from Coconut Creek, Fla., said she had become sick from taking certain drugs like the heart drug Inderal. A few months ago, she paid $550 to Genelex to test the genes of four drug-metabolizing enzymes. The results showed that she was a poor metabolizer in using the 2C19 enzyme and somewhat slower than normal for the 2D6 enzyme. Mrs. Wolin said the findings gave her evidence to help her refuse certain drugs. "I've been labeled uncooperative a couple of times," she said, referring to her doctors' reactions. "But I've shown them my records, and they've accepted it." Dr. Mrazek of the Mayo Clinic said he used the tests to help choose antidepressants, particularly for children. There has been concern that some children can turn suicidal or aggressive on antidepressants, and some evidence suggests this may be linked to high drug levels, he said. Dr. Mrazek said Prozac and Paxil were metabolized by the 2D6 enzyme. About 10 percent of Caucasians have a variation in the enzyme that make them poor at eliminating the drugs from their bodies. For those patients, he said, he may prescribe Celexa or Lexapro, antidepressants metabolized primarily by another enzyme, 2C19. So far, though, few psychiatrists, or any doctors, use these tests. The pharmacogenomics laboratory at the University of Louisville, one of the main clinical labs that offer metabolism tests, performed 3,500 to 5,000 in the last year, according to its director, Roland Valdes Jr. Many doctors are unfamiliar with tests, Dr. Valdes said. Some say that their usefulness has not been proven and that it is not always clear how much to raise or lower a dose based on the test results. Doctors' reluctance to change habits is another factor. One of the oldest examples of a pharmacogenetic test is for 6-mercaptopurine, or 6MP, a drug used to some forms of childhood [77]leukemia and inflammatory bowel diseases. About 1 Caucasian in 300 is a very slow metabolizers of 6MP, because he has two copies of a variant of a gene for a protein called TPMT. In these poor metabolizers, the drug can cause a severe, even fatal, decline in white blood cells. But when the F.D.A. held a meeting in 2003 to consider requiring the test for patients prescribed 6MP, some doctors opposed the idea. They argued that the test was not needed because they were already watching for side effects and reducing the drug's dose if necessary. Testing everyone, they argued, would be too costly, given the relatively low incidence of the gene variant. And, they said, requiring the test might scare doctors away from using a drug that could cure cancer. The F.D.A. decided to put information about the test on the drug label, but not to require testing. Health insurers are in some cases balking at paying for pharmacogenetic tests. It might seem that insurers would welcome tests that allowed side effects to be avoided or drugs to be used only in patients who would benefit from them. A test for a single enzyme like 2D6 costs $100 to $500. But a person would need to have the test only once in a lifetime, and it would apply to all the drugs metabolized by that enzyme. Yet Blue Cross Blue Shield concluded that the usefulness of the metabolism tests was not established. In particular, the insurer said, there have been no prospective studies, in which some patients are given the test and others are not to see whether those who are tested do better. Such a genetic test would be useful for the blood thinner warfarin. Even a little bit too much warfarin can cause potentially fatal internal bleeding. In this case, however, the challenge is to find a genetic marker. The 2C9 enzyme metabolizes warfarin. But it is only one of several factors that control the level of the drug in the blood. A recent study pointed to another gene, vitamin K epoxide reductase, as a better predictor. Finding genetic markers is not always easy. "There are a lot of drugs where simply it's not the right tool," said Richard S. Judson, former chief scientific officer of Genaissance, a pharmacogenomics company. Dr. Judson said his company had tried but failed to find genetic variations to help determine which [78]cholesterol-lowering statin was best for a particular patient. Other problems might arise, as well. It might be hard for doctors to deny a drug to a desperate patient, even if a genetic test predicted that it was unlikely to work. "There would be no way with a safe drug for a serious condition that you could tell people they can't take the drug," said Dr. Allen Roses, senior vice president for genetics research at GlaxoSmithKline. "It wouldn't be ethical." Pharmacogenetics, however, does offer drug makers some advantages that might offset the risk that a particular drug would be limited in its use to a subset of patients. For example, a company may be able to charge a higher price if the drug is highly likely to be effective. "We're not going to have a single blockbuster," Dr. Roses said. "We'll take five minibusters." Clinical trials could also be far smaller, cheaper and quicker if a drug was tested just on patients for whom it was likely to work. Several companies are trying to rescue drugs that failed in clinical trials by retesting them only on people they are likely to work for. Dr. Roses said drug companies were likely to test their drugs on all patients and hope for a broad approval. But if that failed they would request approval for a subset of the patient population. One spur to the use of such tests in the future could be the fear of [79]malpractice lawsuits. If a patient suffers side effects from a drug, doctors might be sued for not using an available test. Pharmaceutical companies might also want to direct drugs at specific patient groups to avoid liability, as in the thousands of lawsuits filed against Merck by people claiming to have been harmed by the pain reliever Vioxx. Merck, which pulled Vioxx from the market last year, marketed the drug very broadly, increasing the company's legal risk when Vioxx was found to cause heart attacks. "I think you are seeing a change in the air," said Lawrence J. Lesko, who heads the pharmacogenomics working group at the F.D.A. "With the concern that everybody has about risk management there's not a lot of pushback from the companies," Dr. Lesko said. References 63. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ANDREW%20POLLACK&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANDREW%20POLLACK&inline=nyt-per 64. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/anemia/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 65. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/health/08phar.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1131465468-V/Up0vKwsooHD5zKh12uYQ&pagewanted=all#secondParagraph 69. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/anesthesiaandanesthetics/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 70. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/geneticsandheredity/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 71. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/cancer/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 72. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/tumors/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 73. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/breastcancer/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 74. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/aids/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 75. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/viruses/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 76. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/antibiotics/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 77. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/leukemia/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 78. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/cholesterol/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 79. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/malpractice/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:56:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:56:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Blog: Exercise adds years to life and improves quality Message-ID: Exercise adds years to life and improves quality http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/exercise_adds_years_to_life_and_improves_quality_9281 Exercise is a lot like spinach ??? everybody knows it's good for you; yet many people still avoid it, forgoing its potential health benefits. But researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who study the effects of exercise on aging point to new findings that may inspire people to get up, get out and get moving on a regular basis. The research team, led by kinesiology professor Edward McAuley, found that previously sedentary seniors who incorporated exercise into their lifestyles not only improved physical function, but experienced psychological benefits as well. "The implications of our work are that not only will physical activity potentially add years to your life as we age, but the quality of those years is likely to be improved by regular physical activity," McAuley said. Results of the study appear in an article titled "Physical Activity Enhances Long-Term Quality of Life in Older Adults: Efficacy, Esteem and Affective Influences," published in the current issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine. Co-authors with McAuley on the report are UI kinesiology professor Robert W. Motl; psychology professor Ed Diener; and current and former graduate students Steriani Elavsky, Liang Hu, Gerald J. Jerome, James F. Konopack and David X. Marquez. The UI research indicated positive psychosocial and cognitive outcomes -- in effect, significant quality-of-life gains -- among participants who remained physically active long after they began an initial randomized, six-month exercise trial consisting of walking and stretching/toning exercises. Results were gleaned from a battery of surveys and assessments administered at one- and five-year intervals following the initial exercise regimen. McCauley said the study -- which assessed physical activity levels, quality of life, physical self-esteem, self-efficacy and affect in a large sample (174) of adults over age 65 -- is believed to be the only one to date to examine the relationship between physical activity and quality of life over such a long time. "Self-efficacy," McAuley noted, can be defined as "the belief, or self-confidence, in one's capacity to successfully carry out a task"; while "affect" refers to reported levels of happiness or contentment. The researchers found that participants who continued to be physically active a year after baseline responses were recorded -- through engagement in leisure, occupational or home activities, such as house-cleaning or gardening -- were "fitter, had higher levels of self-efficacy and physical self-esteem, expressed more positive affect and reported, in turn, a better quality of life." Increased physical activity over time, as indicated by results of the five-year follow-up, "was associated with greater improvements in self-esteem and affect. Enhanced affect was, in turn, associated with increases in satisfaction with life over time," the researchers noted. "Our findings are important on several fronts," McAuley said. "First, we demonstrated that physical activity has long-term effects on important aspects of psychosocial functioning through its influences on self-efficacy, quality of life and self-esteem." "Second, there is a growing interest in the relationship between physical activity and quality of life, especially in older adults. However, much of this work suggests a direct relationship between the two. Our work takes the approach, and the data support it, that physical activity influences more global aspects of quality of life through its influence on more proximal physical and psychological factors such as affect, self-efficacy and health status." A related, two-year study conducted in McAuley's lab looked at the roles played by physical activity, health status and self-efficacy in determining "global quality of life," or satisfaction with life among older adults. The research focused on a different sample of 249 older black and white women. Results of that study will be published in an article titled "Physical Activity and Quality of Life in Older Adults: Influence of Health Status and Self-Efficacy" in a forthcoming edition of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine. In that study, the researchers tested three potentially competing models of the physical activity/quality-of-life relationship and ultimately concluded that their findings "offer a strong theoretical foundation for understanding physical activity and quality-of-life relationships in older adults." McAuley said the study's results confirm earlier findings by other researchers suggesting "changes in levels of functioning in older adults with chronic conditions were not predicted simply by health status or disease state, but also by physical activity and self-efficacy." In other words, he said, there is a tendency among adults with lower self-expectations of their physical abilities to give up -- to reduce the number of activities they engage in as well as the degree of effort they expend toward that end. "These reductions, in turn, provide fewer opportunities to experience successful, efficacy-enhancing behaviors leading to further reductions in efficacy," McAuley said. "Our data would suggest that such declines are likely to lead to subsequent reductions in health status and, ultimately, quality of life." >From University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Submitted by BJS on Fri, 2005-11-11 10:14. From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:56:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:56:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wilson Quarterly: Spirituality in America Message-ID: Spirituality in America http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.print&essay_id=146855&stoplayout=true Autumn 2005 Wilson Quarterly First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.14 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/11/2005111401j.htm A glance at the autumn issue of The Wilson Quarterly: 19th-century roots of today's spirituality Liberals and conservatives have both deplored many Americans' preference for a personalized spirituality over organized religion for, among other things, its "New Age quirkiness and anarchic individualism," says Leigh E. Schmidt, a professor of religion at Princeton University. But, he writes, spirituality is actually "an important American tradition" with long ties to "social and political progressivism." The concept of spirituality developed in 19th-century America thanks in large part to the transcendentalist movement, says Mr. Schmidt. The transcendentalists, he writes, sought out a "mystical experience" and believed they could fulfill that aim by living a spiritual life that was isolated and meditative. In 1871, for instance, the transcendentalist and poet Walt Whitman wrote that "only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all." Despite the focus on solitude, the transcendentalists could push for social change, writes Mr. Schmidt. The second-generation transcendentalist William R. Alger was a recluse, says Mr. Schmidt, but he was also a major abolitionist. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who served as a colonel for an African-American regiment in the Civil War, was another spiritual transcendentalist who forced change by getting Americans to be more sympathetic to all types of religion. His efforts, says Mr. Schmidt, brought about "an ever-widening religious exchange." That history, writes Mr. Schmidt, "is worth recovering from the heap of critical commentary, as both a counterweight to the Religious Right and a resource for the Left (which is now so often tone-deaf on spiritual matters.)" --Jason M. Breslow ---------------------- by Leigh E. Schmidt America may be polarized, but in one activity its social critics have achieved a rare unanimity: lambasting American "spirituality" in all its New Age quirkiness and anarchic individualism. The range of detractors is really quite impressive. James A. Herrick, an evangelical Christian author, deplores the "new spirituality" as a m?lange of Gnostics, goddess worshipers, and self-proclaimed UFO abductees out to usurp the place of Christianity: all told, a widespread but shallowly rooted challenge to the mighty religious inheritance of the West. The neoconservative pundit David Brooks of The New York Times thinks that a "soft-core spirituality," with its attendant "psychobabble" and "easygoing narcissism," is epidemic. Observers on the left are no less prone to alarm. One pair of such commentators warned recently that the rebranding of religion as "spirituality" is part of corporate capitalism's "silent takeover" of the interior life, the sly marketing of a private, consumerist faith in the service of global enterprise. Even many scholars of religion have jumped on the bandwagon. Martin E. Marty, the widely esteemed historian of American Christianity and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, published an opinion piece this past January in Christian Century in which he labeled the "spirituality" versus "religion" debate "a defining conflict of our time." He made crystal clear that he stood on the side of the old-time religion of church pews, potluck suppers, and hymnbooks, against the "banal" and "solipsistic" world of "religionless spirituality." More recently, in the July-August issue of Utne magazine, Paul R. Powers, a professor of religious studies at Lewis and Clark College, thumped the editors for reprinting a "soft-headed" article on spirituality: "Why American liberals who seem so happy to embrace difference in various contexts want, when it comes to religion, to sweep it under the rug of some invented, undefined, supposedly universal `spirituality' remains one of the true religious mysteries of our times." Detractors of American religious seeking have been building their case for a while now. A bellwether was Habits of the Heart (1985), the best-selling, multiauthored sociological study of the corrosive effects individualism was having on American civic and religious institutions. The authors deeply lamented "liberalized versions" of morality and spirituality and argued that the old romantic ideals of self-reliance and the open road were now undermining the welfare of community, family, and congregation. "Finding oneself" and "leaving church" had, sadly enough, become complementary processes in a culture too long steeped in the expressive individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and their fellow wayfarers. More and more Americans were crafting their own religious stories apart from the rich moral vocabularies and collective memories that communities of faith provided. The social costs of such disjointed spiritual quests were evident not only in the fraying of church life but in eroding commitments to public citizenship, marriage, and family. All this criticism of the "new spirituality" has obscured and diminished what is, in fact, an important American tradition, one in which spiritual journeying has long been joined to social and political progressivism. Emerson's "endless seeker" was, as often as not, an abolitionist; Whitman's "traveling soul," a champion of women's rights; Henry David Thoreau's "hermit," a challenger of unjust war. A good sense of the continuing moral and political import of this American vocabulary of the spirit comes from Barack Obama, the recently elected Democratic senator from Illinois. Obama has said that, despite the results of the 2004 election, it "shouldn't be hard" to reconnect progressive politics with religious vision: "Martin Luther King did it. The abolitionists did it. Dorothy Day did it. . . . We don't have to start from scratch." Perhaps Obama's most telling remark came in his observations about his mother's faith: "My mother saw religion as an impediment to broader values, like tolerance and racial inclusivity. She remembered churchgoing folks who also called people nigger. But she was a deeply spiritual person, and when I moved to Chicago and worked with church-based community organizations, I kept hearing her values expressed." Obama's invocation of "spiritual" as an inclusive term, inextricably interwoven with the "broader values" of American democracy, is important and carefully chosen diction. It not only conjures up Whitman's ghost but also suggests some of the poet's own audacity. As a concept of consequence in American culture, spirituality was born of the romantic aspirations and ethical passions of Emersonians, Whitmanites, and other religious liberals. Its history is worth recovering from the heap of critical commentary, as both a counterweight to the Religious Right and a resource for the Left (which is now so often tone-deaf on spiritual matters). In 1800, the word spirituality had little resonance in the evangelical Protestant vernacular of personal devotion, but during the ensuing century of transcendentalist ferment, it gradually shifted from being an abstractly metaphysical term, denoting an attribute of God or the immaterial quality of the soul, to one highly charged with independence, interiority, and eccentricity. "The ripeness of Religion is doubtless to be looked for in this field of individuality," Whitman wrote in Democratic Vistas in 1871, "and is a result that no organization or church can ever achieve. . . . I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all. Only here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight." Or, as the Harvard poet and philosopher George Santayana remarked succinctly in 1905, "This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality." Spirituality was a hard term to pin down, all the more so once it took transcendentalist flight. Despite the airy and expansive qualities that came to be conferred upon spirituality in Emersonian and Whitmanite circles, it had certain defining characteristics, six of which were especially prominent: o a yearning for mystical experience or epiphanic awareness o a valuing of silence, solitude, and sustained meditation o a belief in the immanence of the divine in nature and attunement to that presence o a cosmopolitan appreciation of religious variety, along with a search for unity in diversity o an ethical earnestness in pursuit of justice-producing, progressive reforms o an emphasis on self-cultivation, artistic creativity, and adventuresome seeking This liberal reimagining of the interior life and its fruits had sweeping and enduring effects on American religious life, often for the good. It created a more open and expansive sense of religious identity; it challenged American Christian claims to supremacy and exclusivity; and it promoted an "ethical mysticism." Liberals, indeed, could be rather tendentious about the latter. For instance, John Wright Buckham, a Methodist, insisted in 1915 on a "social mysticism" of active service to others, a spirituality that engaged the industrial crisis and the economic order. Without that component, Buckham would not count a person's piety under his heading of "Normal Mysticism." Of course, spirituality as it was crafted by these 19th-century cosmopolitans and their heirs always had plenty of idiosyncrasies and failings. Still, its makers engaged in a sharply self-critical exchange, in which they anticipated most of the challenges that are still posed to their vision of religious interiority. Take the devotion to solitude, for example. These religious liberals prized serene meditation, romanticized the hermit's life, and longed for mystical experience in forests and mountains rather than in churches. Were those emphases not a prescription for solipsism and isolation, and an ultimately fatal alienation from community and tradition? William R. Alger, a second-generation transcendentalist who (unlike Emerson) never left the Unitarian ministry, offered the era's fullest exposition of seclusion in The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (1866). "The aboriginal woods of western North America," Alger fantasized, "seem as if they might harbor a million anchorites, not one of whom should be within a day's journey of any other." Yet he meditated on solitude precisely because he was seeking a remedy for the larger social estrangements and self-absorbed anxieties he found all around him in a market-dominated world of go-getting success and failure. "This is the malady of the age--an age of Narcissuses," he claimed. The occasional retreat into solitude that he recommended was actually imagined as a means of liberating its practitioners from the increasingly "morbid consciousness of self." So was Alger merely turning solitude into a form of feel-good therapy? Was he saying that well-to-do city folk needed a nice summer cottage where they could refresh their souls before rejoining the capitalist grind? Certainly he imagined his advice as having a lot more bite than that. Though he had reverently attended Thoreau's funeral and listened with solemn attention as the church bell "tolled the forty-four years he had numbered," Alger was an unusually harsh in-house critic when it came to the Concord hermit's supposed "pampering of egotism." In a scornful critique, Alger asserted that Thoreau the writer was "constantly feeling himself, reflecting himself, fondling himself, reverberating himself, exalting himself, incapable of escaping or forgetting himself." As a champion of a liberal and eclectic spirituality, Alger tried to lead his readers and congregants out of "self-nauseated weariness" into "God's closet." Romancing solitude was pivotal for Alger, but it was not a matter of quietist retreat from the social and political world. Like his compatriots Theodore Parker and Franklin Sanborn, Alger nurtured reform commitments, particularly to the abolitionist cause. As Boston's official Fourth of July orator in 1857, he was, by turns, hissed and applauded for his forceful denunciation of "the Slave-Power and its lovers." "The battle between Slavery and Freedom in America is irreconcilable," Alger exclaimed, dismissing an "ostrich-policy" of celebrating the nation's independence while evading the crisis at hand. Taken aback by the furor, the board of aldermen refused him the usual etiquette of gratitude and publication; the snub launched Alger's speech into mass circulation and helped make his reputation as an antislavery agitator. Alger was also ready, as were many of the transcendentalists, to take his readers figuratively to Persia, India, and China, and in those intellectual excursions he displayed the same misconceptions as other appropriators of "the mystic East." Many of his cultural oppositions in The Poetry of the Orient (1856) consisted of the usual fare, pitting "the enterprising young West" against "the meditative old East." Like the poet Coleman Barks today, Alger was particularly dazzled by the "electric freedom" of the 13th-century Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din ar-Rumi, and even proposed that Americans incorporate the "diversified disciplines" of Sufism into their own lives as a way to discover spiritual ecstasy and wonder. It was not an uncommon presumption in transcendentalist circles: Distant religious cultures offered separable scriptures and "detachable ritual morsels" for the delectation of North American dabblers weary of their own unenchanted world. The transcendentalist encounter with Asian religions was often trivializing and homogenizing, an exercise in reducing cultural differences to a universal religion that looked uncannily like Concord writ large across the globe. But transcendentalist piety offered more than the predictable shortcomings of Orientalist fantasy. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a radical abolitionist who went on to serve as a colonel in an African-American regiment in the Civil War, heralded religious liberalism's widening vision in "The Sympathy of Religions," an essay first published in 1871 and extensively circulated thereafter. "I have worshiped in an Evangelical church when thousands rose to their feet at the motion of one hand. I have worshiped in a Roman Catholic church when the lifting of one finger broke the motionless multitude into twinkling motion, till the magic sign was made, and all was still once more," Higginson observed, grandly sweeping aside the Protestant-Catholic antagonisms still festering across the country, before launching himself further afield. "But I never for an instant have supposed that this concentrated moment of devotion was more holy or more beautiful than when one cry from a minaret hushes a Mohammedan city to prayer, or when, at sunset, the low invocation, `Oh! the gem in the lotus--oh! the gem in the lotus,' goes murmuring, like the cooing of many doves, across the vast surface of Thibet." In so minimizing liturgical differences, Higginson committed most of liberalism's universalizing sins, but he also imagined a cosmopolitan piety in which religious identities were open, fluxional, and sympathetic rather than closed, fixed, and proselytizing. Religious encounters across cultures were imagined as engaging rather than threatening; they were seen as occasions for parliamentary gatherings rather than mission stations. "When we fully comprehend the sympathy of religions," Higginson concluded, "we shall deal with other faiths on equal terms." The radicalism of Higginson and his compeers created the space for an ever-widening religious exchange in American culture. In 1897, the Hindu swami Saradananda joined the conversation (and the New England lecture circuit) with his own discourse on "The Sympathy of Religions." "By sympathy," Saradananda explained, "the Vedantist [an adherent of a 19th-century Hindu reform movement] does not mean a kind of dull indifference, or haughty toleration, which seems to say, `I know you are wrong and my religion is the only true one, yet I will let you follow it, and perhaps one day your eyes will be opened.' His sympathy is not a negative one, but it is of a direct, positive nature, which knows that all religions are true, they have the same goal." Hindus, Saradananda insisted, did not reduce the "religious orchestra of the universe" to mere "monotones." The sympathy of religions, he assured, would not be purchased at the price of particularity and variation: "The mission of Vedanta to the West is not to make Christians Hindus, but to make the Christian a better Christian, a Hindu a better Hindu, and a Mohammedan a better Mohammedan." Reaching God required specific paths, not a uniform one "in the place of the many." The liberal architects of American spirituality came rather quickly to realize that their vision of one universal religion was at cross-purposes with their equally important ideals of cosmopolitan variety and democratic individuality. Most were not particularly interested in rolling back transcendentalist notions of spontaneity, creativity, and spiritual independence for the sake of religious unanimity. As the conversation among them unfolded, many insisted that for liberals to be truly liberal, their religious cosmopolitanism could not become bland and colorless. In an 1895 lecture, the Reform rabbi Solomon Schindler, after a warm introduction from Higginson himself, argued that all the talk of unifying the religions or reducing them to a common core suggested a misguided conformity. "The happiest state will come to pass," Schindler claimed, "when each individual will be allowed to formulate his own ideas regarding the universe and his position in and relation to it. Not one unified religion is the goal, but as many millions of religions as there will be individuals." Democratic individuality, not liberal universality, was the central spiritual value. The roots of today's seeker spirituality are tangled, but they go deep in American culture and often prove, on closer inspection, to be surprisingly robust. It is hard, once one has traveled any length on the roads forward from Emerson and Whitman, not to be impressed by the tenacity of this joined tradition of spiritual seeking and political progressivism in American religious life. Take, for example, the visionary ecumenist Sarah Farmer, who, in 1894, in Eliot, Maine, organized her own summer school for the comparative study of religion and social activism. A genius as a religious and political go-between, she hosted everyone from D. T. Suzuki, emergent ambassador of Zen Buddhism, to George Herron, renowned advocate of Christian socialism, to W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pioneering feminist and economist, to Anagarika Dharmapala, Sinhalese Buddhist critic of British colonialism. One partisan eulogized her, with some fairness, as "the actual fulfiller of Emerson in terms of applied influence." Or consider Rufus Jones, a liberal Quaker who wrote more extensively on mysticism than any other American in the first half of the 20th century, and who crucially popularized the notion of the "seeker" as a modern religious type. Jones also managed, while holding a professorship at Haverford College and writing more than a book a year on average, to help lead the American Friends Service Committee from its founding in 1917. The AFSC was initially organized to support civil service for Quaker conscientious objectors during World War I, but with the aid of Jones's internationalist vision, it soon expanded its domain to relief work with refugees across Europe, for which service it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. Throughout his life, Jones imagined his Quaker faith as much through the romantic prism of Emerson, Whitman, and John Greenleaf Whittier as on the basis of the journal of George Fox, the 17th-century founder of the Religious Society of Friends. In our own time, there is the example of Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, who speaks of an "Emancipatory Spirituality" and expressly connects the material work of liberal progressivism to lived spiritual practice. He is adamant that what the Democrats really need is a better understanding of religion and "the politics of meaning," a sturdier commitment to engaging the deeper values and transcendent hopes of Americans. "The liberal world," he claims, "has developed such knee-jerk hostility to religion" that it has "marginalized those many people on the left who actually do have spiritual yearnings." Echoes of the same idiom can be heard in The Future of American Progressivism (1998), by Roberto Unger and Cornel West. Unger and West link "the re-energizing of democratic politics" to "the American religion of possibility." For good measure, they even point to Whitman's Democratic Vistas as the bible of that religious-political amalgam. When the renowned psychologist of religion William James was asked in 1904, "What do you mean by `spirituality'?" he responded: "Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of `otherworldly' fancy." That is the kind of whimsical, individualistic answer that would have earned James no small amount of scorn from today's cultural critics had they heard it from some supposed avatar of the New Age. Yet for all of James's vaunted privatizing of religion--he defined it, for his purposes, as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude"--he always remained very much interested in the fruits of faith, the inner resources of saintliness. What kinds of interior lives produced the energy and dedication of the saints, "their extravagance of human tenderness"? Without some sense of the spirit's vast potentialities, James wondered, how would Americans ever confront their "material attachments" and regain "the moral fighting shape"? "Naturalistic optimism," he wrote, "is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake" compared with the hopes and demands that the spiritual life was capable of fostering. A Whitmanite individualist, James allowed the churches no monopoly on mystical experience or social conscience; a wide-awake pragmatist, he also believed that liberals and progressives turned away from the spiritual at their own peril. On both points Senator Obama apparently concurs, and there's nothing "soft-core," "softheaded," or "sponge-cake" about that. Leigh E. Schmidt, professor of religion at Princeton University, is the author most recently of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (2005), from which this essay has been developed. From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 19 01:57:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:57:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Osama's Fate Message-ID: Osama's Fate When Osama bin Laden died, he was met at the Pearly Gates by George Washington, who slapped him across the face and yelled, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!" Patrick Henry approached, punched him in the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end our liberties but you failed." James Madison followed, kicked him in the groin and said, "This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!" Thomas Jefferson was next, beat Osama with a long cane and snarled, "It was evil men like you who inspired me to write the Declaration of Independence." The beatings and thrashings continued as George Mason, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans unleashed their anger on the terrorist leader. As Osama lay bleeding and in pain, an Angel appeared. Bin Laden wept and said, "This is not what you promised me." The Angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in Heaven. What did you think I said?" From HowlBloom at aol.com Sat Nov 19 06:19:29 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 01:19:29 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] kicking fear around with proteins Message-ID: <22e.1ca8f25.30b01df1@aol.com> Put the following two articles together and you get the following conclusion: The protein stathmin kicks fear into high gear and the protein gastrin stomps the pedal of fear?s brakes. Gastrin is a protein from the intestines, a protein involved in having a good meal. So does being well fed should make you fearless? The folks who made up our clich?s may have been more accurate than they knew when they said that people who are fearless ?have guts.? By the way, I?ve been looking for the stress-handling system in the brain for the last decade. It looks as if the stathmin and gastrin system may be a part of it. When I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1988 and my stress handling system lost its inhibitory abilities and ramped up my stress sensitivity beyond all imagining, was I overloaded with stathmin and stripped of gastrin? Howard ________ Retrieved November 18, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8337 Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless * 17:00 17 November 2005 * NewScientist.com news service Deactivating a specific gene transforms meek mice into daredevils, researchers have found. The team believe the research might one day enable people suffering from fear ? in the form of phobias or anxiety disorders, for example ? to be clinically treated. The research found that mice lacking an active gene for the protein stathmin are not only more courageous, but are also slower to learn fear responses to pain-associated stimuli, says geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. In the experiments, the stathmin-lacking mice wandered out into the centre of an open box, in defiance of the normal mouse instinct to hide along the box?s walls to avoid potential predators. And to test learned fear, the mice were exposed to a loud sound followed by a brief electric shock from the floor below them. A day later, normal mice froze when the sound was played again. Stathmin-lacking mice barely reacted to the sound at all. Neural responses In both mice and humans, the amygdala area of the brain serves as the control centre of basic fear impulses. Stathmin is found almost exclusively in this and related brain areas. The protein is known to destabilise microtubule structures that help maintain the connections between neurons. This allows the neurons to make new connections, allowing the animal to learn and process fear experiences, Shumyatsky says. Without it, the neural responses are stilted. The lack of the protein does not appear to affect other learning experiences, as both sets of mice were able to memorise the paths out of mazes equally well. ?This is a good sign for an eventual clinical application that could let people deal with their fears in an entirely different way,? Shumyatsky says. In 2002, Shumyatsky and colleagues published a study on a similar gene encoding for a protein called GRP. But this protein seems only to be associated with learned fear, and would therefore only have clinical implications for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Stathmin, on the other hand, seems to affect both learned and innate fear, which could lead to treatments for a much broader range of phobias and anxiety disorders, Shumyatsky says. Journal reference: Cell (DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2005.08.038) Printable version Email to a friend RSS Feed Cover of latest issue of New _________ Site: ScienceDaily Magazine Page URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021213062425.htm Original Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute Date Posted: 12/13/2002 Researchers Discover Gene That Controls Ability To Learn Fear Researchers have discovered the first genetic component of a biochemical pathway in the brain that governs the indelible imprinting of fear-related experiences in memory. The gene identified by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University encodes a protein that inhibits the action of the fear-learning circuitry in the brain. Understanding how this protein quells fear may lead to the design of new drugs to treat depression, panic and generalized anxiety disorders. The findings were reported in the December 13, 2002 issue of the journal Cell, by a research team that included Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators Eric Kandel at Columbia University and Catherine Dulac at Harvard University. Lead author of the paper was Gleb Shumyatsky, a postdoctoral fellow in Kandel's laboratory at Columbia University. Other members of the research team are at the National Institutes of Health and Harvard Medical School. According to Kandel, earlier studies indicated that a specific signaling pathway controls fear-related learning, which takes place in a region of the brain called the amygdala. "Given these preliminary analyses, we wanted to take a more systematic approach to obtain a genetic perspective on learned fear," said Kandel. One of the keys to doing these genetic analyses, Kandel said, was the development of a technique for isolating and comparing the genes of individual cells, which was developed at Columbia by Dulac with HHMI investigator Richard Axel. Shumyatsky applied that technique, called differential screening of single-cell cDNA libraries, to mouse cells to compare the genetic activity of cells from a region of the amygdala called the lateral nucleus, with cells from another region of the brain that is not known to be involved in learned fear. The comparison revealed two candidate genes for fear-related learning that are highly expressed in the amygdala. The researchers decided to focus further study on one of the genes, Grp, which encodes a short protein called gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP), because they found that this protein has an unusual distribution in the brain and is known to serve as a neurotransmitter. Shumyatsky's analysis revealed that the Grp gene was highly enriched in the lateral nucleus, and in other regions of the brain that feed auditory inputs into the amygdala. "Gleb's finding that this gene was active not only in the lateral nucleus but also in a number of regions that projected into the lateral nucleus was interesting because it suggested that a whole circuit was involved," said Kandel. Shumyatsky next showed that GRP is expressed by excitatory principal neurons and that its receptor, GRPR, is expressed by inhibitory interneurons. The researchers then undertook collaborative studies with co-author Vadim Bolshakov at Harvard Medical School to characterize cells in the amygdala that expressed receptors for GRP. Those studies in mouse brain slices revealed that GRP acts in the amygdala by exciting a population of inhibitory interneurons in the lateral nucleus that provide feedback and inhibit the principal neurons. The researchers next explored whether eliminating GRP's activity could affect the ability to learn fear by studying a strain of knockout mice that lacked the receptor for GRP in the brain. In behavioral experiments, they first trained both the knockout mice and normal mice to associate an initially neutral tone with a subsequent unpleasant electric shock. As a result of the training, the mouse learns that the neutral tone now predicts danger. After the training, the researchers compared the degree to which the two strains of mice showed fear when exposed to the same tone alone -- by measuring the duration of a characteristic freezing response that the animals exhibit when fearful. "When we compared the mouse strains, we saw a powerful enhancement of learned fear in the knockout mice," said Kandel. Also, he said, the knockout mice showed an enhancement in the learning-related cellular process known as long-term potentiation. "It is interesting that we saw no other disturbances in these mice," he said. "They showed no increased pain sensitivity; nor did they exhibit increased instinctive fear in other behavioral studies. So, their defect seemed to be quite specific for the learned aspect of fear," he said. Tests of instinctive fear included comparing how both normal and knockout mice behaved in mazes that exposed them to anxiety-provoking environments such as open or lighted areas. "These findings reveal a biological basis for what had only been previously inferred from psychological studies -- that instinctive fear, chronic anxiety, is different from acquired fear," said Kandel. In additional behavioral studies, the researchers found that the normal and knockout mice did not differ in spatial learning abilities involving the hippocampus, but not the amygdala, thus genetically demonstrating that these two anatomical structures are different in their function. According to Kandel, further understanding of the fear-learning pathway could have important implications for treating anxiety disorders. "Since GRP acts to dampen fear, it might be possible in principle to develop drugs that activate the peptide, representing a completely new approach to treating anxiety," he said. However, he emphasized, the discovery of the action of the Grp gene is only the beginning of a long research effort to reveal the other genes in the fear-learning pathway. More broadly, said Kandel, the fear-learning pathway might provide an invaluable animal model for a range of mental illnesses. "Although one would ultimately like to develop mouse models for various mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression, this is very hard to do because we know very little about the biological foundations of most forms of mental illness," he said. "However, we do know something about the neuroanatomical substrates of anxiety states, including both chronic fear and acute fear. We know they are centered in the amygdala. "And while I don't want to overstate the case, in studies of fear learning we could well have an excellent beginning for animal models of a severe mental illness. We already knew quite a lot about the neural pathways in the brain that are involved in fear learning. And now, we have a way to understand the genetic and biochemical mechanisms underlying those pathways." Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit Howard Hughes Medical Institute as the original source. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Nov 19 14:24:52 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 06:24:52 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] kicking fear around with proteins In-Reply-To: <22e.1ca8f25.30b01df1@aol.com> Message-ID: I recently ran across a biotech company that is working on technology to turn on any one of the thousands of enzymes produced by the body. Biotech in general is very involved with proteins, which the body also creates in the thousands. Perhaps you should be looking at the brains in your thorax rather than the brains in your cranium :-) Steve Hovland -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Friday, November 18, 2005 10:19 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Cc: planetbloom at hotmail.com; bdyed at earthlink.net Subject: [Paleopsych] kicking fear around with proteins Put the following two articles together and you get the following conclusion: The protein stathmin kicks fear into high gear and the protein gastrin stomps the pedal of fear?s brakes. Gastrin is a protein from the intestines, a protein involved in having a good meal. So does being well fed should make you fearless? The folks who made up our clich?s may have been more accurate than they knew when they said that people who are fearless ?have guts.? By the way, I?ve been looking for the stress-handling system in the brain for the last decade. It looks as if the stathmin and gastrin system may be a part of it. When I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1988 and my stress handling system lost its inhibitory abilities and ramped up my stress sensitivity beyond all imagining, was I overloaded with stathmin and stripped of gastrin? Howard ________ Retrieved November 18, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8337 Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless * 17:00 17 November 2005 * NewScientist.com news service Deactivating a specific gene transforms meek mice into daredevils, researchers have found. The team believe the research might one day enable people suffering from fear ? in the form of phobias or anxiety disorders, for example ? to be clinically treated. The research found that mice lacking an active gene for the protein stathmin are not only more courageous, but are also slower to learn fear responses to pain-associated stimuli, says geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. In the experiments, the stathmin-lacking mice wandered out into the centre of an open box, in defiance of the normal mouse instinct to hide along the box?s walls to avoid potential predators. And to test learned fear, the mice were exposed to a loud sound followed by a brief electric shock from the floor below them. A day later, normal mice froze when the sound was played again. Stathmin-lacking mice barely reacted to the sound at all. Neural responses In both mice and humans, the amygdala area of the brain serves as the control centre of basic fear impulses. Stathmin is found almost exclusively in this and related brain areas. The protein is known to destabilise microtubule structures that help maintain the connections between neurons. This allows the neurons to make new connections, allowing the animal to learn and process fear experiences, Shumyatsky says. Without it, the neural responses are stilted. The lack of the protein does not appear to affect other learning experiences, as both sets of mice were able to memorise the paths out of mazes equally well. ?This is a good sign for an eventual clinical application that could let people deal with their fears in an entirely different way,? Shumyatsky says. In 2002, Shumyatsky and colleagues published a study on a similar gene encoding for a protein called GRP. But this protein seems only to be associated with learned fear, and would therefore only have clinical implications for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Stathmin, on the other hand, seems to affect both learned and innate fear, which could lead to treatments for a much broader range of phobias and anxiety disorders, Shumyatsky says. Journal reference: Cell (DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2005.08.038) Printable version Email to a friend RSS Feed Cover of latest issue of New _________ Site: ScienceDaily Magazine Page URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021213062425.htm Original Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute Date Posted: 12/13/2002 Researchers Discover Gene That Controls Ability To Learn Fear Researchers have discovered the first genetic component of a biochemical pathway in the brain that governs the indelible imprinting of fear-related experiences in memory. The gene identified by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University encodes a protein that inhibits the action of the fear-learning circuitry in the brain. Understanding how this protein quells fear may lead to the design of new drugs to treat depression, panic and generalized anxiety disorders. The findings were reported in the December 13, 2002 issue of the journal Cell, by a research team that included Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators Eric Kandel at Columbia University and Catherine Dulac at Harvard University. Lead author of the paper was Gleb Shumyatsky, a postdoctoral fellow in Kandel's laboratory at Columbia University. Other members of the research team are at the National Institutes of Health and Harvard Medical School. According to Kandel, earlier studies indicated that a specific signaling pathway controls fear-related learning, which takes place in a region of the brain called the amygdala. "Given these preliminary analyses, we wanted to take a more systematic approach to obtain a genetic perspective on learned fear," said Kandel. One of the keys to doing these genetic analyses, Kandel said, was the development of a technique for isolating and comparing the genes of individual cells, which was developed at Columbia by Dulac with HHMI investigator Richard Axel. Shumyatsky applied that technique, called differential screening of single-cell cDNA libraries, to mouse cells to compare the genetic activity of cells from a region of the amygdala called the lateral nucleus, with cells from another region of the brain that is not known to be involved in learned fear. The comparison revealed two candidate genes for fear-related learning that are highly expressed in the amygdala. The researchers decided to focus further study on one of the genes, Grp, which encodes a short protein called gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP), because they found that this protein has an unusual distribution in the brain and is known to serve as a neurotransmitter. Shumyatsky's analysis revealed that the Grp gene was highly enriched in the lateral nucleus, and in other regions of the brain that feed auditory inputs into the amygdala. "Gleb's finding that this gene was active not only in the lateral nucleus but also in a number of regions that projected into the lateral nucleus was interesting because it suggested that a whole circuit was involved," said Kandel. Shumyatsky next showed that GRP is expressed by excitatory principal neurons and that its receptor, GRPR, is expressed by inhibitory interneurons. The researchers then undertook collaborative studies with co-author Vadim Bolshakov at Harvard Medical School to characterize cells in the amygdala that expressed receptors for GRP. Those studies in mouse brain slices revealed that GRP acts in the amygdala by exciting a population of inhibitory interneurons in the lateral nucleus that provide feedback and inhibit the principal neurons. The researchers next explored whether eliminating GRP's activity could affect the ability to learn fear by studying a strain of knockout mice that lacked the receptor for GRP in the brain. In behavioral experiments, they first trained both the knockout mice and normal mice to associate an initially neutral tone with a subsequent unpleasant electric shock. As a result of the training, the mouse learns that the neutral tone now predicts danger. After the training, the researchers compared the degree to which the two strains of mice showed fear when exposed to the same tone alone -- by measuring the duration of a characteristic freezing response that the animals exhibit when fearful. "When we compared the mouse strains, we saw a powerful enhancement of learned fear in the knockout mice," said Kandel. Also, he said, the knockout mice showed an enhancement in the learning-related cellular process known as long-term potentiation. "It is interesting that we saw no other disturbances in these mice," he said. "They showed no increased pain sensitivity; nor did they exhibit increased instinctive fear in other behavioral studies. So, their defect seemed to be quite specific for the learned aspect of fear," he said. Tests of instinctive fear included comparing how both normal and knockout mice behaved in mazes that exposed them to anxiety-provoking environments such as open or lighted areas. "These findings reveal a biological basis for what had only been previously inferred from psychological studies -- that instinctive fear, chronic anxiety, is different from acquired fear," said Kandel. In additional behavioral studies, the researchers found that the normal and knockout mice did not differ in spatial learning abilities involving the hippocampus, but not the amygdala, thus genetically demonstrating that these two anatomical structures are different in their function. According to Kandel, further understanding of the fear-learning pathway could have important implications for treating anxiety disorders. "Since GRP acts to dampen fear, it might be possible in principle to develop drugs that activate the peptide, representing a completely new approach to treating anxiety," he said. However, he emphasized, the discovery of the action of the Grp gene is only the beginning of a long research effort to reveal the other genes in the fear-learning pathway. More broadly, said Kandel, the fear-learning pathway might provide an invaluable animal model for a range of mental illnesses. "Although one would ultimately like to develop mouse models for various mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression, this is very hard to do because we know very little about the biological foundations of most forms of mental illness," he said. "However, we do know something about the neuroanatomical substrates of anxiety states, including both chronic fear and acute fear. We know they are centered in the amygdala. "And while I don't want to overstate the case, in studies of fear learning we could well have an excellent beginning for animal models of a severe mental illness. We already knew quite a lot about the neural pathways in the brain that are involved in fear learning. And now, we have a way to understand the genetic and biochemical mechanisms underlying those pathways." Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit Howard Hughes Medical Institute as the original source. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Nov 17 20:53:16 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 12:53:16 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Dear Arnie Message-ID: <10953134.1132260797382.JavaMail.root@mswamui-thinleaf.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Dear Arnie.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 78558 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Euterpel66 at aol.com Sat Nov 19 18:32:10 2005 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 13:32:10 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] kicking fear around with proteins Message-ID: <25a.1a731d4.30b0c9aa@aol.com> In a message dated 11/19/2005 9:26:39 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, shovland at mindspring.com writes: Perhaps you should be looking at the brains in your thorax rather than the brains in your cranium :-) Steve Hovland I always thought it was lower down than that in men. Lorraine Rice Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ---Andre Gide http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Nov 20 15:36:29 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 07:36:29 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] kicking fear around with proteins In-Reply-To: <25a.1a731d4.30b0c9aa@aol.com> Message-ID: Over the years I have concluded that men and women have brains in the same places :-) -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Euterpel66 at aol.com Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2005 10:32 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] kicking fear around with proteins In a message dated 11/19/2005 9:26:39 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, shovland at mindspring.com writes: Perhaps you should be looking at the brains in your thorax rather than the brains in your cranium :-) Steve Hovland I always thought it was lower down than that in men. Lorraine Rice Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ---Andre Gide http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:43:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:43:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: Fountain Pens "too risky" For under-14-year-olds" Message-ID: Fountain pens 'too risky for under-14s' http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/12/npens12.xml [Somehow, I am still alive. I'm sure I had fountain pens from grade school, since ball point pens were not widespread until later. It was too late for a quill, so when I didn't use a pencil, it must have been a fountain pen. Any further reminiscences?] "Fountain pens are too dangerous for children under the age of 14, the British Standards Institution says.After decades when young pupils were encouraged to master penmanship, the benefits of developing good handwriting are now seen to be outweighed by the risk of swallowing the cap. Waterman has inserted a small slip with its pens which reads: "This product is not intended for use by anyone under the age of 14 years."British Standard 7272, drafted in 1990 and updated several times, sets out strict guidelines on how pens should be made. It says a pen cap should have a small hole to allow a child to breathe if he or she swallows it. Pens with no hole are seen as unsuitable for under-14s. .... Kevin Jones, the headmaster of St John's College School, Cambridge, with 460 pupils aged four to 13, said: "Perhaps I will have to employ pen police." From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:43:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:43:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science Message-ID: Philosophers Notwithstanding, Kansas School Board Redefines Science http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/sciencespecial2/15evol.html By DENNIS OVERBYE Once it was the left who wanted to redefine science. In the early 1990's, writers like the Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel and the French philosopher Bruno Latour proclaimed "the end of objectivity." The laws of science were constructed rather than discovered, some academics said; science was just another way of looking at the world, a servant of corporate and military interests. Everybody had a claim on truth. The right defended the traditional notion of science back then. Now it is the right that is trying to change it. On Tuesday, fueled by the popular opposition to the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Kansas State Board of Education stepped into this fraught philosophical territory. In the course of revising the state's science standards to include criticism of evolution, the board promulgated a new definition of science itself. The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science. The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." Adrian Melott, a physics professor at the University of Kansas who has long been fighting Darwin's opponents, said, "The only reason to take out 'natural explanations' is if you want to open the door to supernatural explanations." Gerald Holton, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, said removing those two words and the framework they set means "anything goes." The authors of these changes say that presuming the laws of science can explain all natural phenomena promotes materialism, secular humanism, atheism and leads to the idea that life is accidental. Indeed, they say in material online at kansasscience2005.com, it may even be unconstitutional to promulgate that attitude in a classroom because it is not ideologically "neutral." But many scientists say that characterization is an overstatement of the claims of science. The scientist's job description, said Steven Weinberg, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the University of Texas, is to search for natural explanations, just as a mechanic looks for mechanical reasons why a car won't run. "This doesn't mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is," Dr. Weinberg wrote in an e-mail message. "Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God's will." The opposition to evolution, of course, is as old as the theory itself. "This is a very long story," said Dr. Holton, who attributed its recent prominence to politics and the drive by many religious conservatives to tar science with the brush of materialism. How long the Kansas changes will last is anyone's guess. The state board tried to abolish the teaching of evolution and the Big Bang in schools six years ago, only to reverse course in 2001. As it happened, the Kansas vote last week came on the same day that voters in Dover, Pa., ousted the local school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design. As Dr. Weinberg noted, scientists and philosophers have been trying to define science, mostly unsuccessfully, for centuries. When pressed for a definition of what they do, many scientists eventually fall back on the notion of falsifiability propounded by the philosopher Karl Popper. A scientific statement, he said, is one that can be proved wrong, like "the sun always rises in the east" or "light in a vacuum travels 186,000 miles a second." By Popper's rules, a law of science can never be proved; it can only be used to make a prediction that can be tested, with the possibility of being proved wrong. But the rules get fuzzy in practice. For example, what is the role of intuition in analyzing a foggy set of data points? James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science at the University of Toronto, said in an e-mail message: "It's the widespread belief that so-called scientific method is a clear, well-understood thing. Not so." It is learned by doing, he added, and for that good examples and teachers are needed. One thing scientists agree on, though, is that the requirement of testability excludes supernatural explanations. The supernatural, by definition, does not have to follow any rules or regularities, so it cannot be tested. "The only claim regularly made by the pro-science side is that supernatural explanations are empty," Dr. Brown said. The redefinition by the Kansas board will have nothing to do with how science is performed, in Kansas or anywhere else. But Dr. Holton said that if more states changed their standards, it could complicate the lives of science teachers and students around the nation. He added that Galileo - who started it all, and paid the price - had "a wonderful way" of separating the supernatural from the natural. There are two equally worthy ways to understand the divine, Galileo said. "One was reverent contemplation of the Bible, God's word," Dr. Holton said. "The other was through scientific contemplation of the world, which is his creation. "That is the view that I hope the Kansas school board would have adopted." From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:44:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:44:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Revealing Behavior in 'Orangutan Heaven and Human Hell' Message-ID: Revealing Behavior in 'Orangutan Heaven and Human Hell' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/15conv.html A Conversation With Carel van Schaik By CONNIE ROGERS People keep asking Carel van Schaik if there is anything left to discover in fieldwork. "I tell them, 'A lot,' " said Dr. van Schaik, the Dutch primatologist. "Look at gorillas. We've been studying them for decades, and we just now have discovered that they use tools. The same is true for orangutans." In 1992, when Dr. van Schaik began his research in Suaq, a swamp forest in northern Sumatra, orangutans were believed to be the only great ape that lived a largely solitary life foraging for hard-to-find fruit thinly distributed over a large area. Researchers thought they were slow-moving creatures - some even called them boring - that didn't have time to do much but eat. But the orangutans Dr. van Schaik found in Suaq turned all that on its head. More than 100 were gathered together doing things the researchers had never seen in the wild. Dr. van Schaik worked there for seven years and came to the radical conclusion that orangutans were "every bit as sociable, as technically adept and as culturally capable" as chimpanzees. His new conclusions about how apes - and humans - got to be so smart are detailed in his latest book, "Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture." Now a professor of anthropology at the University of Zurich and the director of its Anthropological Institute and Museum, Dr. van Schaik discussed his findings in a recent telephone interview from his office there. Q. What were you looking for in the Suaq swamp? A. We'd been working in a mountainous area in northern Sumatra, and it felt as if we were missing the full picture of orangutan social organization. All higher primates - all of them - live in distinct social units except for the orangutan. That's a strong anomaly, and I wanted to solve it. Q. How was Suaq different from other orangutan habitats? A. It was an extraordinarily productive swamp forest with by far the highest density of orangutans - over twice the record number. The animals were the most sociable we'd ever seen: they hang out together, they're nice to each other, they even share food. Q. But you almost left this orangutan habitat after a year? A. We'd never worked in a place like this, and it was exhausting. To get into the swamp where they were we would wade through water - sometimes chest deep, two hours in, two hours out every day. There were countless species of mosquitoes. It was what I call orangutan heaven and human hell. But then someone noticed that they were poking sticks into tree holes. It sounded like tool use, so we decided to build boardwalks in the swamp, and things got a lot easier. Q. Were orangutans using tools? A. It turned out Suaq had an amazing repertoire of tool use. They shape sticks to get at honey and insects. Then they pick another kind of stick to go after the scrumptious fat-packed seeds of the neesia fruit. One of them figured out that you could unleash the seeds with a stick and that was a big improvement in their diet. Lean times are rare at Suaq, not only because the forest is productive, but because the orangutans can get to so much more food by using tools. So they can afford to be more sociable. Q. How did you discover that the tool use is socially transmitted? A. Well, one way to prove it is to see if the orangutans use tools everywhere the neesia tree exists. This was in the late 90's. Swamps were being clear-cut and drained everywhere, and the civil war in Aceh was spreading. I felt like an anthropologist trying to document a vanishing tribe. It turned out that in the big swamps on one side of a river, the orangutans do use tools, and in the small swamp on the other side, they don't. Neesia trees and orangutans exist in both places. But the animals can't cross the river, so the knowledge hadn't spread. At that point, the penny dropped and I realized their tool use was cultural. Q. So your discovery that the orangutans learned tool use from one another explains "the rise of human culture" part of your book's subtitle? A. Well, yes. Orangutans split off from the African lineage some 14 million years ago. If both chimps and orangutans make tools, our common great ape ancestor probably had the capacity for culture. Q. I always thought we got smart after we came down from the trees. A. Actually orangutans are the largest arboreal mammal and have no predators up in the trees so they live a very long time - up to 60 years in the wild - and have the slowest life history of any nonhuman mammal including elephants and whales. A slow life history is key to growing a large brain. The other key to intelligence is sociability. Q. Were orangutans more social in the past? A. I guess the rich forest areas that allowed them to live in groups were much more common in the past - they're the ones that are best for rice growing and farming - but there's no way of knowing for sure. Q. If social inputs make you smarter, why aren't monkeys cleverer? A. One thing we know is that being close to others isn't enough. Highly tolerant sociability is important - that you can be relaxed next to others. You need to be able to focus on what your neighbor is doing and not worry about whether he is going to sneak something or beat up on you. It's that kind of social tolerance that is common to all great apes. It's rare in monkeys - except cebus monkeys; they're tool users, long-lived and socially very tolerant. Q. You end your book with a bleak picture of the future of orangutans because of habitat conversion and illegal logging. Since then there's been a devastating tsunami and people need to cut down even more trees to put roofs over their heads. What does the future look like now? A. One way to help people in Sumatra would be to donate wood on a large scale. But things may be better in Borneo. There's a new Indonesian president, and in the last few months it looks as if the government is serious about cracking down on illegal logging. That leaves me more hopeful. From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:44:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:44:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Merck Manual, the Hypochondriac's Bible Message-ID: Merck Manual, the Hypochondriac's Bible http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/health/15case.html [Mr. Mencken was quite a hypochondriac, but I don't recall his ever mentioning the Merck Manual.] Cases By HARRIET BROWN A copy of The Merck Manual of Medical Information has lived on my night table for over 25 years. Sometimes the thick red book tops the bedside pile; other times it's buried under a stack of newer obsessions. But it's always within easy reach for emergencies, bouts of insomnia and ordinary bedtime browsing. My postcollege roommate introduced me to The Merck in 1979. In the beginning, I paged through her copy each time I needed reassurance about some twinge, tingle or suspected tumor. When I realized I was borrowing it every day, I knew it was time to buy my own. The Merck, as we devotees call it, was first published in 1899. It was a little book, only 192 pages, aimed at doctors, pharmacists and, presumably, those in situations that had no doctors or pharmacists. Albert Schweitzer took a copy of it to Africa in 1913; 16 years later, Adm. Richard Byrd hauled one to the South Pole. I hauled my copy mostly to the bathroom, where I would lie in a steaming tub and pore over my symptoms du jour. Sometimes I'd turn pages at random, dipping into chapters like a dowser hunting for water, trusting to intuition and luck to find whatever I was looking for. Back then I read The Merck the way some people go to horror movies, seeking the cathartic release of other people's troubles, the rush of catastrophe averted. I might have problems, but at least I didn't have, say, cardiac tamponade - "the most serious complication of pericarditis," according to the book. I didn't have tropical sprue or a pulmonary embolism or, God forbid, Budd-Chiari syndrome. At least, I didn't think I had any of them. I was pretty sure, on the other hand, that I did have hypochondria, or, in the lingo of The Merck, hypochondriasis. When, in my 20's, I learned that I had mitral valve prolapse, I inspected at some length The Merck's line drawing of the heart. This was in the pre-Internet era, when you couldn't just Google a four-color, 3-D rendering of the heart or any other internal organ. There was a diagram of the heart's electric circuitry, a road map more engrossing to me than any terrestrial topography. There was a representation of the left anterior descending artery, the superior vena cava, the atrioventricular node. I studied atrial fibrillation and flutter, sick sinus syndrome and tachycardia. The very words were glorious, Latinate, thrilling in the way they both distanced me from what was going on in my body and deepened my understanding. I learned the fine art of diagnosis from The Merck, too, despite the fact that I never got around to attending med school. To this day, I am known as something of a lay medical expert among my friends and family. They bring me their symptoms; I tell them what to ask their doctors. When I don't have a hunch, I look it up. I am, if I say so myself, very often right. In my 30's, I turned to The Merck whenever my children got sick. I preferred it to the pediatric bible of my generation, Dr. Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care," whose prescriptive, often judgmental tone got on my nerves. Even when The Merck led me astray, it seemed better attuned to the situation. Once at 2 in the morning, when my 8-year-old broke out in a blistering rash and spiked a fever of 104, my frantic page-turning prompted me to diagnose smallpox. (I was wrong, obviously; she had Kawasaki syndrome, which in some ways isn't so far off.) On the other hand, The Merck can be frustrating when you're in worried-parent mode. Try looking up a simple stomachache in the index. You'll find a list under stomach that includes "acid in," "arteriovenous malformations in," "bleeding in," "intubation of," "obstruction of" and "tumors of" but nothing under garden-variety stomach pain. Still, The Merck is more than just a handy reference book. While I can now find online answers to any question that occurs to me (and many that haven't), my copy of The Merck is dog-eared, its front cover curling back, its two-inch-wide spine broken in several places. For one thing, it's a tangible object; its unimaginative chapter headings and small type inspire a bibliophile's affection the way a computer monitor never could. But my attachment goes beyond the merely physical. For me, The Merck is a talisman against the frightening unknown. Pretty much all of the life-shattering ailments that have struck my family and friends have been things I've never heard of. So by worrying about ailments like endocrine neoplasia or Refsum disease, I am actively warding them off, keeping myself and my loved ones safe. Of course, I'm aware this is magical thinking on, say, a 3-year-old's level. Still, so far, so good. It is human nature to want to name things, to put a face on the bogeyman. The scariest thing of all - death - has a name, and it is no less scary for having one. But there's an entry for that, too, in The Merck Manual. And somehow that comforts me. From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:44:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:44:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Predictions: Is Your Heart at Risk? Get the Tape Measure Message-ID: Predictions: Is Your Heart at Risk? Get the Tape Measure http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/health/15meas.html?pagewanted=print Vital Signs By NICHOLAS BAKALAR The most common way of determining who is obese, body mass index or B.M.I., may not be the most accurate in determining the risk of cardiovascular disease. A study in the Nov. 5 issue of Lancet, the medical journal, has found that waist-to-hip ratio is a better predictor of heart attack. A waist-to-hip ratio (waist measurement divided by hip measurement) below 0.85 in women or 0.9 in men is average. Anything above that is a risk for heart disease. The researchers, led by Dr. Salim Yusuf, a professor of medicine at McMaster University near Toronto, studied 12,461 people who had had a first heart attack and compared them to a matched group of 14,637 without heart disease. A body mass index greater than 28.2 in women or 28.6 in men did indicate an increased risk of heart attack, but the relationship disappeared after adjusting for age, sex, geographic region and tobacco use. Waist-to-hip ratio, on the other hand, showed a continuous relationship to heart attack risk even after adjusting for other risk factors. Those in the highest fifth were 2.52 times as likely to have a heart attack as those in the lowest fifth. "I don't want to tell people to abandon B.M.I. if this will make them uncomfortable," Dr. Yusuf said, "but that is what we are doing in our studies, at least in terms of risk assessment." Waist-to-hip ratio was a predictor of heart attack even in people regarded as very lean, those with body mass indexes under 20. Also, there was no evidence of a threshold where the risk would level off: the higher the waist-to-hip ratio, the higher the risk of a heart attack. From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:44:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:44:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] How to Get to Real Humans when Making a Fone Call Message-ID: How to Get to Real Humans when Making a Fone Call http://paulenglish.com/ivr/ [Thanks to Laird for this!] Here are the secret numbers and tips to bypass IVR phone menus to get to a human. Do you know a new cheat? Go to http://paulenglish.com/ivr/info.html. Name Fone No. Steps to Find a Human FINANCE American Express 800-528-4800 0 ATT Universal 800-950-5114 ## Bank of America 800-900-9000 1 loan; 2 account; 3 investing; 4 info; or 00 to human Bank One 877-226-5663 0 thru the options to get a live person Capital One Visa 800-867-0904 ignore prompts and invalid entry warnings; press #0 five times Charles Schwab 800-435-9050 3 then 0 Chase 800-CHASE24 5 pause 14*0 CitiBank 800-374-9700 1 online support; 2 billpay; 3 non-online; 4 credit card; or 0 to human Discover 800-347-2683 ***** E-Trade 800-387-2331 #### Fidelity 800-544-6666 ignore prompt for social security number, just enter ### MasterCard 800-MC-ASSIST 000 on each menu MBNA 800-421-2110 00 when menu starts Paypal 650 864-8000 cf http://paypalsucks.com/PayPalPhoneNumbers.shtml Sovereign Bank 800-SOV-BANK 1 english; 1 personal; 3 then social#; passcode, #; then 0 (1-3x) Sun Trust Banks 404-588-7815 Yes US Bank 800-US BANKS 000(0) Visa 800-847-2911 000 (ignore prompts saying that it's an invalid entry) Wachovia 800-922-1800 accounts personal banking Washington Mutual 800-756-8000 At any time after the announcement(s) start 'O'. Wells Fargo 800-869-3557 0,0,0 Western Union 800-325-6000 0 FONE, WIRED AT&T 800-222-0300 .. BellSouth 877-678-2355 *0 SBC 800-585-7928 Again, an (intelligent, this time) IVR wants YOUR phone number first. Verizon DSL 800 567 6789 "Say ""I don't know it"" then ""technician""" FONE, WIRELESS AT&T Wireless 800-888-7600 No easy escape Cellular One 888-910-9191 "4, say ""agent"", then #" Cingular 800-331-0500 For faster service, the option that you are looking to close your account, You get the same ppl but an immediate answer Cricket 800-274-2538 313 Nextel 800-639-6111 0 five times Sprint PCS 888-788-5001 "00, then say ""agent""" T-Mobile 800-TMOBILE "Stay ""representative"" at any time." Verizon Wireless 800-922-0204 #00 or enter phone # then 0 then 4 GOVERNMENT INS 800-375-5283 After selecting English, (with a 2 second delay between) 2 6 2 4 Social Security 520-364-1241 At prompt 0 Veterans Affairs 800-827-1000 1,0 INSURANCE Aetna 800-537-9384 "2, then say ""operator"" (check this)" Aetna 800-680-3566 * then 0 anytime AFLAC 800-99-AFLAC *** Ameritas 8007451112 00000 BlueCross 800-800-4298 Press 2 CIGNA 800-516-2898 REGARDING A BILL Cigna 800-849-9000 ## GEICO 800-841-3000 Wait for prompt then 6, 1, 5 Humana 800-4-HUMANA After entering insurance number and details, 0. Medicare 800-633-4227 "After the opening prompt say ""agent""." Principal Life 800-247-4695 1 for english, 2, then 0 several times until it redirects you to an operator. PHARMACY CVS local listing dial local store, after promt. press 6 will connect to store manager Eckerd 800-eckerds 0 for pharmacy, 8* for manager Rite Aid Local Store Press 3 to speak to the pharmacy Walgreens local store 0 for a pharmacy employee PRODUCTS Bose 800-444-2673 Direct to human! Sonos 800-680-2345 1 sales; 2 support Sony 800-222-7669 "When prompted by the automated voice system to answer ANY questions, just say ""Agent""" RETAIL Advance Auto 800-314-4243 0 when the automated message begins Amazon.com 800-201-7575 Direct to human! Best Buy 800-365-0292 00 Best Buy local store wait for extension prompt (sometimes must 4), then ext. 2021 Circuit City local store 0 for customer service or 218 for store manager eBay 800-322-9266 0 Home Shopping Net 800-284-3100 0 K-Mart local store 0 Lowes local store 0 for customer service or #450 for commercial sales Old Navy 800-OLD-NAVY 0 Overstock.com 800-843-2446 At the main menu, 0 three to four times to bypass the menu QVC 800-367-9444 0 Safeway local store As soon as voice prompt starts type 1200 to get human Sears 800-4-MY-HOME Silence don't push numbers just sit there and you will be placed at front of que. Target local store 0 during greeting. "Toys ""R"" Us" local store 0 Wal-Mart 800-546-1897 0 SHIPPING FedEx 888-GO-FEDEX "At message say ""Representative""" UPS 800-pick-ups yes USPS 800-275-8777 7-3-2 or send them some junk mail TECHNOLOGY AOL 888-346-3704 0 Apple 800-275-2273 "000; if virtual rep answers, say ""operator""" Compaq 800-652-6672 No easy escape Dell 888-560-8324 2 order; 3 support; 4 purchase help; or 00 to human Dell Service 800-624-9897 option 1, xt 7266966, option 1, option 4, option 4 Earthlink 888-earthlink 1 find a dialin number; 2 billing; 3 sales; 4 support Epson 800-922-8911 yes Gateway 800-846-2301 00# HP 800-474-6836 "Say ""agent""." HP 888-560-8324 00 IBM 800-IBM-4YOU You go into a hold queue immediately Microsoft 800-936-5700 Always 0. This is true for just about any MS number. QuickBooks 888-729-1996 1 purchase; 2 billing; 3 registration; 4 tech support or 0 to human Symantec 800-441-7234 00 TRAVEL American Airlines 800-433-7300 "00, then say ""agent""" Amtrak 800-872-7245 "0 or say ""agent""" Continental 800-523-3273 "Three Delta 800-221-1212 0 then say ""operator""" Delta 800-221-1212 "say ""agent"" four times - every time it asks for a response from you" jetBlue 800 JET-BLUE 1 flight status; 2 reservations; 3 vacation packages Kayak.com 203 899-3120 0 Northwest 800-225-2525 Star, 0, after initial greeting Southwest 800-435-9792 Calls answered by operator; during busy times you might have to hold United 800-864-8331 Do nothing, wait for human. US Airways 800-428-4322 4, wait, 1 Walt Disney World 407-824-4521 Direct line to Magic Kingdom Guest Relations TEEVEE/SATELLITE Comcast 800-266-2278 Customer service, but an IVR wants your number first. Direct TV 800-347-3288 0 repeatedly Dish Network 800-333-3474 0 during menu Sirius (888) 537-SIRIUS 0 TiVo 877-367-8486 "Say ""Live Agent""" Xm Radio 800-998-7900 Direct to human! From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 20 18:44:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:44:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Self-Effacing Scholar Is Psychiatry's Gadfly Message-ID: A Self-Effacing Scholar Is Psychiatry's Gadfly http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/15prof.html Scientist at Work | David Healy By BENEDICT CAREY His mother in Ireland is entirely unaware of his international reputation, as far as he can tell. His neighbors in the hamlet of Porthaethwy, on an island off the coast of Wales, are equally oblivious, or indifferent. His wife, who knows too well the furor he has caused, says simply, "How could you be right and everyone else wrong?" Dr. David Healy, a psychiatrist at the University of Cardiff and a vocal critic of his profession's overselling of psychiatric drugs, has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as both a scholar and a pariah. In 1997 he established himself as a leading historian of modern psychiatry with the book "The Antidepressant Era." Around the same time, he became more prominent for insisting in news media interviews and scientific papers that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide, an unpopular position among his psychiatric colleagues, most of whom denied any link. By 2004, British and American drug regulators, responding in part to Dr. Healy and other critics, issued strong warnings that the drugs could cause suicidal thinking and behavior in some children and adolescents. But Dr. Healy went still further, accusing academic psychiatry of being complicit, wittingly or not, with the pharmaceutical industry in portraying many drugs as more effective and safer than the data showed. He regularly gets invitations to lecture around the world. But virtually none of his colleagues publicly take his side, at least not in North America. "It's strange. I don't even know about friends, what they think about me," Dr. Healy said in New York, as he waited for a flight after giving a lecture at Columbia. "You don't really know who you can trust." Because of his controversial views, Dr. Healy has lost at least one job opportunity, at the University of Toronto in 2001. In some circles, his name has become so radioactive that it shuts down discussion altogether. "People have called it the Healy effect," said Dr. Jane Garland, chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Clinic at British Columbia Children's Hospital in Vancouver, who shares some of Dr. Healy's concerns about drug risks. "If you even raise the same issues he does, you're classified as being with David Healy and that makes people very reluctant to talk. He has become very isolated." Some colleagues have called him reckless, a false martyr whose grandstanding in the news media has driven away patients who need help. But they cannot dismiss him entirely. And for those who wish to understand what it takes to defy a scientific fraternity without entirely losing one's standing - or nerve - he has become a case study. Self-effacing on the surface, so soft-spoken he is sometimes barely audible, Dr. Healy, 51, seems far too agreeable to be a rabble-rouser. He acknowledges that antidepressants often work well, and he prescribes them in his own practice. He has consulted with drug makers, considers himself a part of the psychiatric establishment, and says that at least initially, he had no interest in shaking up the status quo. But when challenged, his voice quickens and his tone hardens. "He has this humility, maybe it's a family thing, but intellectually, I think he enjoys a duel," said Vera Sharav, a patient advocate who is president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection and a close ally. "And he has been stabbed in the back so often he just won't back down." In a pretrial hearing several years ago, for a suit against Pfizer, maker of the antidepressant Zoloft, Dr. John Davis, a psychiatrist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, took issue with Dr. Healy's testimony. "The lawyers on both sides were very skillful, very smart," Dr. Davis said, "but in the middle of my presentation - it wasn't a court trial, but a hearing - Dr. Healy got so incensed he got up, edged the plaintiff's lawyer out of the way and cross-examined me himself." Dr. Healy, he said, "couldn't sit there and let someone else do it; he wanted to come for me directly." But Dr. Davis, who does not himself accept drug company money, said he still respected Dr. Healy as a researcher. Betrayals - small and large - seem to fuel Dr. Healy's sense of mission. In New York several years ago, while poring through Pfizer documents, he found a handwritten note that described a conversation between a drug company employee and an old friend and colleague. Its subject was "the Healy problem." Dr. Healy froze, he recalled. He had gone to school with this psychiatrist, had known him for 20 years. When he called his friend to ask about the note, he said, the other psychiatrist shrugged it off. Through freedom of information requests and other methods, Dr. Healy has hoarded a variety of e-mail messages and other correspondence on "the Healy problem." He hands out copies at talks as evidence of a whisper campaign that he said started in the late 1990's, after he testified on behalf of plaintiffs suing Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac. "After that I was no longer invited to speak at professional association events, and I started seeing these things written about me," he said. Snubs followed slights. The job offer at Toronto's prestigious Center for Addiction and Mental Health, which came with a substantial pay increase, fell through. A raise he believes he was due years ago from Britain's National Health Service was delayed, he said. And there were accusations that his legal consulting fees, which he says have been about $40,000 a year since 1997, were affecting his scientific judgment. "Fees for an expert witness cannot be made contingent on the outcome of a case, but Healy is a repeat player in these legal actions, and future opportunities depend on past performance and a credible, predictable testimony," Dr. James Coyne of the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a recent article in The American Journal of Bioethics: "Lessons in Conflict of Interest: The Construction of the Martyrdom of David Healy and the Dilemma of Bioethics." Dr. Healy bristles at this criticism and says that his views, which he aired in scientific papers before consulting with lawyers, have cost him more in lost salary than he has earned as an expert witness. In about 9 of 10 cases he evaluated, he said, he concluded that the drug did not contribute to violent behavior. Yet such verbal assaults, some from former colleagues and others from drug companies and leading psychiatrists, have worked to fuse the man and his mission so that the two are now hard to separate. "He takes these things personally, and I would too," said Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto who is working with Dr. Healy on a book. "But it's not a matter of ego: he is offended because he believes that the field is not listening to the science." David Healy grew up with two sisters in Raheny, a suburb of Dublin, where his father worked as a civil servant in the health department and his mother ran the household. It was the 1950's, and Raheny was then a solidly middle-class community north of Dublin, on the working man's side of the tracks. After determining that he would probably not become a professional athlete, the boy became a committed student, strongly drawn to science, as his father had been. He graduated with high honors in medicine from University College in Dublin, and later worked in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, conducting basic research on serotonin, a brain chemical linked to mood. Dr. Healy later joined the psychiatry department at Cambridge University in England as a research associate before moving to Wales, where he is now a psychiatrist in the North Wales department of psychological medicine and a professor at the University of Cardiff. He soon became familiar with isolation. He sat at his desk in the dead quiet from 8 p.m. to midnight, on an island off an island, and wrote without tiring: over the last 15 years he has published more than 100 scientific papers and more than a dozen books on the history of psychiatric drug development. "I work at night because there is absolutely nothing going on where I live," he said. It was the reaction of two of his patients to Prozac in the early 1990's, Dr. Healy has written, that led him to question its safety. In 1990, Harvard researchers had reported several cases of suicidal thinking in patients on the drugs. But an analysis by the Food and Drug Administration found no evidence of increased risk, and psychiatrists largely ignored advocates who insisted the risk was real. After completing his own analysis, Dr. Healy came to agree with the critics, and he wrote letters to British drug regulators urging them to review the data related to suicide. By 2003, the BBC had reported on his objections; GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, had come forward with unpublished data showing an increase in irritability and suicidal thinking in some minors on the drug; and British regulators began investigating the entire class of drugs. Drug company researchers and some psychiatrists moved quickly to deflate what they saw as overblown concern over drugs that they said had helped avert suicide in many severely depressed people. In 2004, Pfizer wrote a 50-page letter to the F.D.A. challengingDr. Healy's analysis, including his extrapolation from a small number of uncertain cases. The American Psychiatric Association publicly took issue with the new warnings on suicide risk. And many psychiatrists said publicly that denouncing the drugs would drive away people who needed them. Dr. Healy held his ground. He had, his friends and colleagues say, absolute confidence that he knew the topic as well as anyone. He concedes that no one knows what effect the F.D.A. warning will have. But this uncertainty, he says, is all the more reason that medical journals, professional groups like the psychiatric association, and drug regulators should make raw data from clinical trials public. "It wouldn't take much to bring a change. People don't realize the power they have," Dr. Healy said. As for Dr. Healy himself, he says he will continue to write and practice, traveling to lecture several times a year. He will also continue to follow his own scientific instincts, regardless of whom he offends. A new book, written with Dr. Shorter, is likely to alienate psychiatry's critics by defending one of psychiatry's most controversial treatments, electroshock therapy. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:42:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:42:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Chronicle Colloquy: Acupuncture Meets Aspirin Message-ID: Acupuncture Meets Aspirin http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/11/altmed/chat.php3 [Article appended. I'll be asking to what extent acupuncture is a progressive field. An enthusiastic accupunturist came to give a noon talk where I work and, like far too many speakers, spent nearly all his time on his message. I had to leave early but did manage to interrupt to ask him whether some particular technique he was describing was a new practice. He said it wasn't. I am extremely suspicious of any field that does not progress. The whole study of paranormal phenomenon is still where it was 150 years ago, namely documenting that there are phenomena we do not understand. The pile of documentation gets bigger, if new reports come in faster than old reports get explained away, but there are no laws to be had, not even trends and correlations.] Thursday, November 17, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time More than half the nation's medical schools require some study of non-Western healing methods, like acupuncture, herbs, and meditation, and the number is growing. Do future doctors need to know about alternative and complementary medicine? Or is incorporating those methods into medical-school curricula just an attempt to pander to popular tastes? >> Click here to [55]ask a question. 55. http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/11/altmed/question.php3 The discussion has not started yet. Join us here on Thursday, November 17, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. The Topic Since the early 1990s, acupuncture, herbs, massage, and meditation have found their way into traditional medical schools, and now more than half the nation's accredited schools require at least some study of alternative or complementary medicine. Proponents say future doctors need to know about treatments that are increasingly entering the mainstream. They should know, for example, if an herbal remedy a patient is using might interfere with his chemotherapy. But many medical-school professors and students go further: They see no reason why they shouldn't refer a patient to an acupuncturist or chiropractor if other methods have failed. Is it irresponsible to teach remedies that many doctors consider flaky or even dangerous? If medical students should not be trained in those methods, should they at least be taught to evaluate them, given that more than one-third of Americans now turn to alternative remedies? Or is incorporating those methods into the curriculum merely pandering to popular tastes? ? [57]Take 2 Herbal Remedies and Call Me in the Morning (11/18/2005) The Guest Michael J. Baime is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and director of the Penn Program for Stress Management. He has practiced meditation since 1969 and directs nontraditional courses, including "Spirituality and Medicine" and "Mind/Body Medicine." His current research projects include investigations into the use of meditation as a treatment for multiple sclerosis and obesity. He will respond to questions and comments about these issues on Thursday, November 17, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Readers are welcome to post questions and comments now. A transcript will be available at this address following the discussion. Acupuncture, Herbs, and a Chinese Gong The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.18 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i13/13a01201.htm By KATHERINE S. MANGAN Laurel, Md. The Tai Sophia Institute for the Healing Arts is a two-hour drive from the hustle and bustle of the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and hospitals, but with its Zen-like atmosphere and labs stocked with Chinese herbs, it feels worlds apart. The school is housed in a two-story, red-brick building in an office park in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. From the outside, it could be any generic office. But inside, soothing music plays in the lobby over the sound of a gurgling fountain. Curved walls draw a visitor in along a carpet inlaid with a navy stripe that snakes through the building like a river. The walls, painted in colors like eggplant, pumpkin, and cream, are decorated with student projects bursting with stones and twigs that depict the cycles of nature. Classrooms are drenched in sunlight from wall-to-wall windows that look out on herb gardens and a stone labyrinth that students built for patients to wander through. At noon, the school's greeter strikes a Chinese gong over the intercom. "It reminds us how blessed we are to be alive," says Robert M. Duggan, an acupuncturist who founded the institute in 1974 as the College of Chinese Acupuncture. He has served as its president since then. Students and faculty members greet each other with Eastern-style bows and Western-style hugs. The school's name, combining the Chinese word for great (Tai) and the Greek word for wisdom (Sophia) reflects the meeting of Eastern and Western healing practices. The staff also comes from a mix of both traditional and nontraditional higher-education backgrounds. Mary Ellen Petrisko, vice president for academic affairs, worked as a top executive with the Maryland Higher Education Commission and the University of Maryland's University College before moving to Tai Sophia three years ago. "When you walk in, there's a kind of serenity and a nice, pleasant energy that doesn't make you feel frenetic or stressed," says Ms. Petrisko, who was hired to provide structure and help ensure accreditation for what had before been "basically a mom-and-pop operation." Since then, the school has expanded its scope and begun working on joint education and research projects with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Tai Sophia enrolls 125 students -- up from 40 a decade ago. Seventy are studying acupuncture, and the rest are evenly divided between botanical healing and applied healing arts. Herbs, Mr. Duggan says, are a $10-billion industry in the United States that needs people who understand how they interact with one another, and with other pharmaceuticals. Journals on botanical healing, acupuncture, and other remedies line the bookshelves of the school's library, along with magazines like Arthritis Today and Alternative Medicine. The library's circulation coordinator, wearing a purple and green tie-dyed shirt and jeans, points out human models marked with meridian points where acupuncturists will insert needles. He leads Mr. Duggan and a visitor along bookshelves of research materials that support alternative forms of medicine. Says Mr. Duggan: "People say it's unproven, but the amount of data is unbelievable." It will take more than data and connections to an Ivy League medical school to win over some skeptics, but after more than 30 years as an acupuncturist and president of the school, Mr. Duggan has a clear sense of purpose. As he escorts a visitor back to the lobby, he points out the window at four forked branches that are wrapped in colorful yarn and staked in the ground, as part of an American Indian tradition, marking the north, south, east, and west poles of the campus. Regardless of how the outside world views it, this school knows which way it's heading. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:42:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:42:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE Colloquy Transcript: What College Presidents Think Message-ID: What College Presidents Think The Chronicle of Higher Education: Colloquy Transcript http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/11/presidents/ [I forgot to send in my question!] Thursday, November 3, at 12 p.m., U.S. Eastern time The topic An extensive Chronicle survey of college presidents, the first of its kind, provides a rare glimpse at the leaders of the profession: how they spend their time both on the job and off; their politics; whether they think they were prepared for their jobs (a minority says yes); how future college leaders might be better prepared; and what they think about the myriad issues facing higher education today. The office, increasingly similar to that of corporate chief executive, is still occupied largely by white men who rose through the administrative ranks. Yet an overwhelming majority agree on few key higher-education issues, including tenure, student drinking, college athletics, and rising tuition costs. Are the survey results surprising? What do they say about the state of the college president today? Are presidents today weaker or stronger than in the past? Do they seem to spend their time wisely? Do the survey results suggest that American higher education is in good hands? Are the right kinds of people rising to leadership positions? What questions should we have asked? ? [54]What College Presidents Think: Leaders' Views About Higher Education, Their Jobs, and Their Lives (11/4/2005) The guests John DiBiaggio was president of Tufts University from 1992 to 2001, and before that he led Michigan State University and the University of Connecticut. He is now a consultant with Academic Search Consultation Service, a higher-education executive-search firm. John Maguire, former dean of admissions at Boston College, is chairman of Maguire Associates, an educational-consulting firm in Bedford, Mass., that conducted the survey and analyzed the results for The Chronicle. _________________________________________________________________ A transcript of the chat follows. _________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey Selingo (Moderator): Hello everyone, I'm Jeffrey Selingo, business and politics editor at The Chronicle. This week The Chronicle published the results of an extensive survey of 4-year college presidents that was conducted over the summer. It showed, among other things, that a majority of college presidents are more worried about financial issues than educational ones, want to do away with faculty tenure, and voted for John Kerry in last year's presidential election. With us today to discuss the results are John DiBiaggio, a former president at three institutions, including most recently at Tufts University, and now a presidential search consultant, and John Maguire, chairman of Maguire Associates, which analyzed the results for The Chronicle. Let's get started and submit your questions at any point. _________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey Selingo (Moderator): Before we get to the questions, both guests have some opening comments to get us going. _________________________________________________________________ John Maguire: After serving as a faculty member and Dean at Boston College, I founded Maguire Associates in 1983 and now serve as its Chair. Over the last 22 years we have served hundreds of clients and have contributed to the evolution of market research and consulting in higher education. In the last 10 years I have worked with 200 or more college and university presidents and served on several Boards. The survey findings corroborate what we have been hearing on the ground. Clearly, as the survey documents, fundraising and budget issues are highly important to presidents as they have to be in order for any institution to survive. What surprised us was the emphasis on money issues relative to some others. However, theres a big difference between the type of institution that chooses to raise funds in order to initiate an exciting new program, and one that must raise money to avoid layoffs or curtailing programs. The data in the survey are a treasure trove of information about the realities of the college presidency today, and as we mine the data further we expect to expand greatly on the understandings that have already been achieved. _________________________________________________________________ John DiBiaggio: The principal issues I found interesting in the survey were these:(1) finances, particularly rising health care costs and diminishing state support at public institutions; (2) increasing emphasis on private fund raising, at both the private and public colleges; (3) escalation in tuition and fees and concomitant public concerns in that regard(4) enrollment and retention issues(5) growing demands for accountability; (6) the all encompassing nature of the role, allowing little or no time for leisure or personal relationships outside of the institution; (7) reluctance to speak out on issues that may have any political implications, i.e., stem cell research, the death penalty, birth control; (8) faculty tenure( which I basically favor), particularly the virtual impossibility of firing a tenure faculty member, even when the violation(s) clearly merit doing so. I was a little surprised that deferred maintenance, decreased federal student aid and ever growing regulatory requirements were not cited as areas of major concern. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Paula Rooney, Dean College: Is there a difference in the perception of the Presidency and the time requirements between the genders and additionally those who have small children during their tenure? John Maguire: There definitely are significant differences between the genders in this study. Women presidents are more likely to understand the importance of campus morale and student outcomes than many of their male counterparts. As for the specific question about presidents with small children, this was not addressed directly in the survey -- nor do I recall any direct reference in the open-ended comments. Given the fact that only 6% of all respondents were under 50, it would have been difficult to get meaningful statistics even if we had asked about children at home. _________________________________________________________________ Question from D. Gail, research university: Two questions: l. Why do women continue to make up only 18-20% of college presidencies? 2. I thought, per the literature, that the traditional path to the presidency was through the academic ranks? Are there often used administrative paths or is selection more random? John Maguire: The numbers of women at the top in academe are growing at a faster rate than in businessnow at 26% in the Northeast. This still reflects proportions on faculties and in higher level administration. Boards who select presidents are still male dominated, but that too is changing. As for the second question: Chair to Dean to Provost is the traditional route. Marketing, enrollment, and financial VPs now move up more often. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Ed Merwin, Jr., Univ. of South Carolina Salkehatchie: Were you surprised by the number of presidents who wanted to do away with tenure? Average salaries for College/University presidents easily run around $500,000 per anum. When a president leaves, he/she is usually "well compensated; to help with retirement. Teaching faculty, even department heads, can only dream of such rewards. Tenure MUST be retained, if we are to encourage research, scholarship, and effective teaching. John DiBiaggio: No I was not surprised. Not because most presidents feel that tenure is not important in terms of protecting academic freedom, but rather because they perceive it to have become more of an issue of job security. Many feel that it is almost impossible to dismiss a tenured faculty member, even when their behavior may have been very aggregious. However I personally feel that academic freedom is still very important. You suggest that average presidential salaries run around $500,000 per annum. I don't believe that to be the case except in a few exceptional circumstances. I certainly didn't receive that type of compensation during my presidencies. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Vanasa McCallister, Michigan State University: It was stated that student retention rates are one of the key goals/concerns of today's college president. With the stated need for constant fiduciary communication regarding funding and a balanced budget, what recommendations would you have to increase student retention rates, especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds and returning adult students when these populations are more likely to need funding and new programs, not generate revenue? John Maguire: Good retention will almost always help with the revenue side of the budget. There are many approaches to improving retentionrelated to orientation, connecting students, especially those at risk, to faculty advisors and mentors, and to improving programs and documenting value. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Andrew Hacker, Queens College (NYC): I note that "quality of faculty" ranks third among presidential "worries". What does this mean? Are they dissatisfied with, say, the intellectual capacities of their professors? Do they worry that they can't attract good people? Or keep them? Or are too many of their professors slacking off? Can you give me a few presidents' quotes, as they expanded on this worry? Many thanks. John Maguire: All of the above. Research we've done over the years connects "quality of faculty" with everything from academic achievement, scholarship, and teaching capability to civility and ability to mentor students. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Administrator, U. of Texas: I was discouraged to see that only 19% of presidents come from within their own institutions. What's your advice to someone who wants to become a president, but is place-bound? John DiBiaggio: That is a dissappointing statistic, but I'm afraid one that is far to accurate. Unfortunatley universities feel they need to bring in a president from outside their own campus. I believe that to be a short-sighted view because there may be well qualified people within their own instyitutions and those people will have the advantage of knowing the institution well, eliminating the need for a significant learning curve. In the searches I conduct, I urge the committees responsible to not overlook internal candidated who merit consideration. I guess it is always dificult to be ahero in your own backyard. _________________________________________________________________ Question from C. Dreifus, Columbia Univeristy: I was surprised to read on the study how many college Presidents thought that quality of the faculty was an issue of concern. Could you say more? Is this a concern about full time tenured faculty and what they are producing, the quality of adjuncts that are being attracted at adjunct pay, what? The response intriqued, but cried for amplification. John Maguire: This was partially addressed in response to a previous question. Over the years we've done factor analysis to identify variables that "quality of faculty" associates with. Needless to say, this is a very multi-layered variable, and the issues you raise are often a part of the concern. Based on the survey, we can't say much more - very few of the open-ended responses addressed the issue of faculty quality. Certainly this is a question that would benefit from further research. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Mathew Kanjirathinkal: What do college presidents gain by viewing themsleves as CEO's of a corporation, and what do they lose? How do they reconcile the differences between corporate culture and academic culture in dealing with their stakeholders? John DiBiaggio: I don't really believe that college and university presidents perceive themselves as the presidents of a corporation. Neither do they believe or see their colleges or universities as businese. On the other hand they recognize that in these difficult financial times they have to behave in a more business like manner, while appreciating that there is a distinct difference in the cultures of an academic environment and a corporation or business. I trust that they will behave accordingly. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Raymond Linville, Radford University: What recommendations would you make to college presidents about being skilled in dealings with the media, especially in regard to potentially controversial topics? John DiBiaggio: Well this is a dificult question because of the increasing political inclinations of many who serve as trustees or regants. However, in my view, university and college presidents are still highly respected in our society and their views are given serious consideration. I believe, therefore, that they have a responsibility to speak out on important social issues, especially in areas in which they have expertise. I also recognize that in can be dificult to do so, especially in these very emotionally-charges times. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jeffrey Selingo: Were you surprised that so many presidents were open out their opinions on hot-button issues in the survey? John DiBiaggio: I did not perceive that there was an openess to discuss hot-buttom issues except in a confidential format. I have been dissapointed by the lack of outspokeness by presidents in the past. While it can be dificult to do so I still think it is important that the pulpit provided to a president be used in a manner that is helpful in resolving critical issues. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Andrew Mytelka, Chronicle of Higher Ed: Two questions. Based on the survey results, what should presidential-search committees be doing that they are not typically doing now? And should presidential-search committees be set up differently than they typically are (e.g., different membership, different size, etc.)? John DiBiaggio: I think search committees need to be truly representative of the community and of a size that is manageable. I think they should also be open to candidates from a diversity of backgrounds and not preclude consideratiuon of internal candidates. Clearly the demands of the positions have grown over the years and candidates should have the ability to deal with the multiplicity of issues that the contemporary president encounters. _________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey Selingo (Moderator): We're about half way through today's discussion. Please keep your questions coming. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jeffrey Selingo: What are we to make of the number of presidents who never attend religious services given that the U.S. is a fairly religious country? John Maguire: 11% is not a particularly surprising number. Recent CIRP (UCLA/Astin) studies show that an increasing number of entering freshmen nationally (and their parents) are not specifying any religious preference. The data on presidents are quite consistent with national trends. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jeffrey Selingo: Presidents said in the survey they don't socialize with friends very often probably because they don't have time. Is it damaging to a presidency if the person in the position becomes too lonely and disconnected from reality? John DiBiaggio: I think it is very dificult for anyone in a position of leadership to have close relationships with anyone at work. I encourage presidents to maintain friendships outside of work if possible. The hesitancy that some have to develop too close a relationship with others on campus is the fear that they will be based on some sort of personal gain. I think it is critical to have a life beyond the campus and many achieve that by having homes in other areas to which they can occasionally escape. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Ben Davis: It appears from the articles that many - if not most - presidents were surprised by the fiduciary responsibilities they assumed with the position. Is that the case or were they merely reflecting the increasing emphasis on that aspect of their duties? John DiBiaggio: Well I think its both. The responsiblilites have grown because of financial management in part because of reductions of state support at public institutions and the ever increasing need to raise money in the privates. Additionally universities provide more services than in the pst which are not only costly but also require increased oversight. Todays universities are huge complexes often including residence halls, food services, security, as well as a number amenities that students expect. _________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey Selingo (Moderator): We got a few questions from community colleges about why they were not included. The issues that presidents of two-year institutions face are different in some ways than those of four-year colleges. As a result, it was difficult to design a survey to include both. We hope to do a similar survey of two-year college presidents at some point in the future. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jeffrey Selingo: John Maguire has something to add on that point as well, John? John Maguire: While I won't presume to speak for The Chronicle on this question, we did discuss the option of surveying all 3,000+ American institutions of higher education at one time and agreed that the differences across institution types were significant enough to warrant separate studies. As you may have noted, the present survey was already quite lengthy, and adding further complexity would likely have reduced the response rate considerably. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jeffrey Selingo: This is a question to both guests: We see this emphasis on finances and fundraising in the survey, yet boards typically hire academics. Will we ever, and when, see more CFO's and development officers move into the ranks of presidents? John Maguire: We are already seeing CFOs, marketing and development officers moving into the presidency. In my travels I have seen changes just within the past few years in the makeups of client presidencies. And more often today, CFOs have broader perspectives on academic programming, student life, and marketing, which will make them better candidates for future presidencies. We are also seeing provosts whose perspectives are broadening in the other direction. Given that over 50% of the presidents are over 60, there will be a major turnover in college presidencies in the next decade. This broadened perspective and active mentoring will be essential to ensure that qualified candidates emerge--both internally and externally. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Raymond Linville, Radford University: More experience with fund raising was reported as a need for college presidents. What can they do to better acquire these skills? John DiBiaggio: That is indeed the case at both public and private institutions. In the public sector as reductions have occured in state support the need for fundraising to maintain the integrity of programs has become more common. In the private sector there has always been a need for private support, but this has even become more intensive in recent years. The increased burden on students and their families due to rising tuition and fees has made the need for fundraising even more critical in order to provide student aid. Very few presidents have had preparation to engage in extensive fundraising and have to learn it through trial and error, however, they seem to manage to do so with the help of their development officers, especially if one measures their success by the reports of capital campaigns seeming to achieve their goals. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Diane; small community college: What results did you find most surprising when comparing the survey results between presidents of private and public institutions? John Maguire: I was surprised that the public presidents were so much less likely than private presidents to be "highly satisfied" with their compensation package (13% versus 35%). Also, I would not necessarily have predicted that public presidents were substantially more likely to have been provosts or chief academic officers than private presidents (42% versus 26%). Finally, public presidents were almost twice as likely to view retention as a "very great concern" as private presidents (50% versus 29%). _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jeffrey Selingo: John, could the findings of this survey be useful to search committees in looking for a president or boards as they evaluate presidents? John DiBiaggio: I believe so because it does seem to spell out the responsibilities that a president must now assume. Search committees should look for candidates who have the requisite skills to carry out those responsibilities. It is obvious that a president must spend a considerable amount of time on external affairs, including fundraising. This suggests that other may be responsible for day to day operational matters, and the current president must be able to delegate and oversee those activities. _________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey Selingo (Moderator): We have a few more minutes, so if you have a question to ask, please do it now. We have a few more to get to yet. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Lisa Atkins, Univ. of Central Florida: Given the current situation at American University, what is your stance on Presidents as role models? As a future student affairs administrators, it disappoints me to see the growing number of senior administrators that are being exposed for wrongful spending. I wonder, how do these particular individuals think that what they've done is justified? John DiBiaggio: I do believe that presidents are role models not only for the students at their institutions, but their communities at large. I believe their behavior should reflect that important responsibility, and I have been cognisant of that. I have been embarrassed as have others, by the personal conduct of a few of our colleagues but I am pleased that that is indeed a limited minority. The vast majority of college and university presidents have exemplory behavior, and I believe are superb role models for others to emulate. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Andrew Mytelka, Chronicle of Higher Ed: The survey found that 60% of presidents think big-time college sports are more of a liability than an asset. The presidents also said athletic ability should be accorded the lowest weight in admissions decisions in comparison to such other factors as socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, artistic ability, ability to pay full tuition, and gender. How come we rarely hear college presidents speaking out about their true views of the role of college sports? John DiBiaggio: I among others believe college sports have an important role on our campuses for those who have the skill to participate, for those who enjoy watching sports, and for school spirit and moral. The over-commercialization of sports have led to behaviors that all universities should find unacceptable - lowering academic standards for the admission of skilled athletes, obscene salaries being paid to coaches in major sports, construction of expensive athletic abilities when other critical needs are left unmet, and scheduling of sports events during times when students should be attending classes, are some examples of behaviors that should not be permitted. In my view, these issues can only be addressed at the campus level by institutional leadership, rather than through a vehicle such as the NCAA. _________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey Selingo (Moderator): That's all we have time for today. Sorry we couldn't get to all the questions. Thanks to both guests today for making time in their schedule for this chat. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:42:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:42:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Skeptical Inquirer: Obesity: Epidemic or Myth? Message-ID: Obesity: Epidemic or Myth? http://www.csicop.org/si/2005-09/obesity.html New evidence shows that the obesity epidemic is not as bad as we have been led to believe. However, that doesnt mean that we should dismiss the problem either. PATRICK JOHNSON _________________________________________________________________ You have probably heard that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been fervently warning that we are in imminent danger from our expanding waistlines since the beginning of this decade. However, evidence has recently emerged indicating that the CDCs warnings were based on questionable data that resulted in exaggerated risks. This new evidence has led to a hostile backlash of sorts against the CDC. The editors of the Baltimore Sun recently called the earlier estimates the Chicken Little Scare of 2004. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a group that has long been critical of the CDC, declared unequivocally on its Web site and in print ads in several newspapers around the country that the obesity scare was a myth (figure 1). Even Jay Leno poked fun at the CDC in one of his Tonight Show monologues, making the observation that not only are we fat. . . . We cant do math either. Not everybody believes the new data, however. Cable talk show host Bill Maher commented during an episode of his show Real Time with Bill Maher about it being a shame that lobbyists were able to manipulate the CDC into reducing the estimated risk. So which is it? Are we in imminent danger, or is the whole concept a myth? Looking at the scientific evidence it is clear that the extreme views on either side of the argument are incorrect. There is no doubt that many of our concerns about obesity are alarmist and exaggerated, but it is also apparent that there is a real health risk associated with it. The Controversy Between 1976 and 1991 the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the United States increased by about 31 percent (Heini and Weinsier 1997), then between 1994 and 2000 it increased by another 24 percent (Flegal et al. 2002). This trend, according to a 2004 analysis, shows little sign of slowing down (Hedley et al. 2004). The fact that more of us are getting fatter all the time raises a significant public health concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began calling the problem an epidemic in the beginning of this decade as the result of research that estimated 280,000 annual deaths as a consequence of obesity (Allison et al. 1999). Since then there has been a strong media campaign devoted to convincing Americans to lose weight. In 2003, Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the CDC, made a speech claiming that the health impact of obesity would be worse than the influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century or the black plague of the Middle Ages. In 2004 the campaign reached a fever pitch when a report was released that increased the estimate of obesity-related deaths to 400,000 (Mokdad et al. 2004). Finally, in March of this year, a report appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine that predicted a decline in life expectancy in the United States as a direct result of obesity (Olshansky, et al. 2005). Despite the assertions that obesity is causing our society great harm, however, many scientists and activist groups have disputed the level of danger that it actually poses. Indeed, a recent analysis presented in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by Katherine Flegal of the CDC and her colleagues calls the severity of the dangers of excess body fat into question, indicating that the number of overweight and obesity-related deaths is actually about 26,000about one fifteenth the earlier estimate of 400,000 (Flegal et al. 2005). There is little argument about the fact that, as a nation, more of us are fatter than ever before; the disagreement lies in the effect that this has on our health. The campaign to convince us to lose weight gained much of its momentum in 2004; not only were there high-profile public health initiatives devoted to stopping the obesity epidemic, but the idea had pervaded popular culture as well. Movies like Morgan Spurlocks Super Size Me were the topic of many a discussion, and there were regular news reports about the dangers of too much fat. During this campaign, however, there were some notable dissenters. Paul Ernsberger, a professor of nutrition at Case Western Reserve University, has been doing research since the 1980s that led him to assert that obesity is not the cause of ill health but rather the effect of sedentary living and poor nutrition, which are the actual causes. Another prominent researcher, Steven Blair, director of the Cooper Institute of Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, has been an author on several studies indicating that the risks associated with obesity can be significantly reduced if one engages in regular physical activity, even if weight loss is not present. According to Blair, weight loss should not be ignored but a greater focus should be placed on physical activity and good nutrition. Both Ernsberger and Blair indicated to me that they thought the new research by Flegal and her colleagues provides a more accurate picture of the mortality risk associated with obesity. [Obesity-Poster.jpg] Figure 1. This advertisement, paid for by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), ran in magazines and newspapers across the country. The ad was issued in response to the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found obesity-caused death rates had been exaggerated. However, CCF, an advocacy group for restaurants and food companies, has its own agenda. While scientists like Ernsberger and Blair have been presenting their conclusions in the scientific forum, others have taken a more inflammatory approach. In his 2004 book, The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that the public health problem we have associated with obesity is a myth and further claims that our loathing of fat has damaged our culture (see Benjamin Radfords review on page 50). The most antagonistic group, however, is the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) (www.consumerfreedom.com), which implies that the obesity epidemic is a conspiracy between the pharmaceutical industries and the public health establishment to create a better market for weight-loss drugs. Numerous articles on the organizations Web site bash several of the most prominent obesity researchers who have disclosed financial ties to the pharmaceutical industries. Paul Ernsberger echoed this sentiment. He told me that the inflated mortality statistics were all based on the work of David Allison, a well-known pharmacoeconomics expert. These experts create cost-benefit analyses which are part of all drug applications to the FDA. These self-serving analyses start by exaggerating as much as possible the cost to society of the ailment to be treated (obesity in the case of weight-loss drugs). The risks associated with the new drug are severely underestimated, which results in an extremely favorable risk-benefit analysis, which is almost never realized once the drug is on the market. Experts who can produce highly favorable risk-benefit analyses are very much in demand, however. The claims made by the CCF are given some credence by Ernsbergers corroboration; however, there is a noteworthy problem with their own objectivity. On their Web site they present themselves as a consumer-minded libertarian group that exists to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes evident that the CCF is an advocacy group for restaurants and food companies, who have as much to gain by the threat of obesity being a myth as the pharmaceutical industry does by the danger being dire. It is clear that there are agenda-determined interests on both sides of the issue. Therefore, the best way to discern what is necessary for good health is to shift our focus away from the sensational parts of the controversy and look at the science itself. Current Science and Obesity Risks In their recent article, Katherine Flegal and her colleagues (2005) point out that the earlier mortality estimates were based on analyses that were methodologically flawed because in their calculations the authors used adjusted relative risks in an equation that was developed for unadjusted relative risk. This, according to Flegals group, meant that the old estimates only partially accounted for confounding factors. The older estimates, furthermore did not account for variation by age in the relation of body weight to mortality, and did not include measures of uncertainty in the form of [standard errors] or confidence intervals. These authors also point out that the previous estimates relied on studies that had notable limitations: Four of six included only older data (two studies ended follow-up in the 1970s and two in the 1980s), three had only self-reported weight and height, three had data only from small geographic areas, and one study included only women. Only one data set, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I, was nationally representative (Flegal et al. 2005). In their current investigation, Flegals group addressed this problem by using data only from nationally representative samples with measured heights and weights. Further, they accounted for confounding variables and included standard errors for the estimates. Obesity was determined in this analysis using each subjects body mass index, which is a simple height-to-weight ratio. A BMI of 18 to 24 is considered to be the normal weight, 2529 is considered overweight, and 30 and above is considered obese. The data from this study indicated that people who were underweight experienced 33,746 more deaths than normal-weight people, and that people who were overweight or obese experienced 25,814 more deaths than the normal-weight folks. This estimate is being reported in the popular media as being one- fifteenth the earlier estimate of 400,000. However, conflating the categories of overweight and obesity this way is misleading. At first glance, it appears that underweight poses a bigger threat to our health than overweight and obesity, and that the earlier estimates were profoundly exaggerated. However, in this study the people who fit into the obese category actually experienced 111,909 excess deaths compared to normal-weight subjects. In contrast, those who were categorized as overweight experienced 86,094 fewer deaths than those who were normal weight. The figure of 25,815 is the difference between the obesity deaths and the overweight survivals. In the original study by David Allison and his colleagues (Allison et al. 1999) it is actually estimated that 280,000 deaths result from overweight and obesity and that 80 percent, or 224,000, of these deaths occurred in people who were in the obese category. However, the study by Mokdad and colleagues (2004), using the same methods developed by Allison et al., estimated 400,000 obesity-related deaths, and subsequently fueled much of the recent fervor surrounding the obesity epidemic. In this study, no distinction was made between overweight and obesity and the authors failed to distinguish between obesity, physical inactivity, and poor diet. All of these variables were simply lumped together. A few things become clearer after examining the data. First, it appears that our categories are mislabeled; being classified as overweight appears to give one an advantage (statistically, anyway) over those who are in the ideal weight range. [1] Moreover, it is inappropriate to consider overweight and obese as one group. Despite the current hype, the initial overestimation by Allison and his group was not as exaggerated as is being publicized; compared to that study, the new estimate is actually about half of the old number. Finally, it is apparent that many at the CDC were simply confirming their own biases when they accepted the estimate by Mokdad et al. The categories in that studythat was, intriguingly, co-authored by CDC director Julie Gerberding, which may provide some insight into why it was so readily acceptedwere far too broad to provide useful information. The fact that this flaw was ignored shows how easy it is to accept evidence that supports our preconceived notions or our political agendas. There is another problem inherent in all of the above mortality estimates. They are based on epidemiological data that show correlation but leave us guessing as to causation. Various factors are interrelated with increased mortalityobesity, inactivity, poor nutrition, smoking, etc. Yet, without carefully controlled experiments, it is hard to determine which factors causeand which are symptoms ofpoor health. This is a difficult limitation to overcome, however, because we cant recruit subjects and have them get fat to see if they get sick and/or die sooner. Most institutional review boards would not approve that sort of research, and furthermore I cant imagine that there would be a large pool of subjects willing to participate. There are, however, observational data that were collected with fitness in mind, which help to clarify the picture somewhat. In 1970 researchers at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, began to gather data for a longitudinal study that was called, pragmatically enough, the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study (ACLS). This study looked at a variety of different variables to estimate the health risks and benefits of certain behaviors and lifestyle choices. What set this study apart from other large-scale observational studies, however, was that instead of relying on self-reporting for variables like exercise habits, they tested fitness levels directly by way of a graded exercise test (GXT). A GXT requires a person to walk on a treadmill as long as he or she can with increases in speed and incline at regular intervals. This is the most reliable way we know of to assess a persons physical fitness. With an accurate measure of the subjects fitness levels, researchers at the Cooper Institute have been able to include fitness as a covariate with obesity. Analysis of the data obtained in the ACLS shows that there is a risk associated with obesity, but when you control for physical activity, much of that risk disappears (Church et al. 2004; Katzmarzyk et al. 2004; Katzmarzyk et al. 2004; Lee et al. 1999). One study showed that obese men who performed regular exercise had a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease than lean men who were out of shape (Lee et al. 1999). Steven Blair, who runs the Cooper Institute and was an author on all four of the above-mentioned studies, however, does not think obesity should be ignored. I do think obesity is a public health problem, although I also think that the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is a declining level of average daily energy expenditure . . . it will be unfortunate if it is now assumed that we should ignore obesity. I do not think that the [health] risk of obesity is a myth, although it has been overestimated. Blair believes that a focus on good nutrition and increased physical activity rather than on weight loss will better serve us. In spite of the fact that there are virtually no controlled clinical trials examining the effects of obesity in people, we can make some inferences from animal research. Investigations performed by Ernsberger and his colleagues have shown that, over time, weight cycling (temporary weight loss followed by a regain of that weight, otherwise known as yo-yoing) in obese laboratory animals increases blood pressure, enlarges the heart, damages the kidney, increases abdominal fat deposits, and promotes further weight gain (Ernsberger and Koletsky 1993; Ernsberger et al. 1996; Ernsberger and Koletsky 1999). This indicates that the yo-yo effect of crash dieting may be the cause of many of the problems we attribute to simply being fat. Even though there is a health risk from being too fat, you can eliminate much of the potential risk by exercising. Moreover, it is probably a bad idea to jump from diet to diet given the negative consequences the yo-yo effect can have. According to another study published in JAMA, the risk of cardiovascular disease has declined across all BMI groups over the past forty years as the result of better drugs (Gregg et al. 2005). None of this means, however, that we should simply abandon our attempts to maintain a healthy weight; obese people had twice the incidence of hypertension compared to lean people and, most significantly, there has been (according to the above study) a 55 percent increase in diabetes [2] that corresponds to the increase in obesity. So while we are better at dealing with the problem once it occurs, it is still better to avoid developing the problem in the first place. Condemning the CDC Whatever side of the argument you are on, it is apparent that many in the CDC acted irresponsibly. However, despite the fact that the initial, exaggerated estimate came from people at the CDC, we should keep in mind that so did the corrected number. While this can be frustrating to the casual observer, it is also a testament to the corrective power of the scientific method. Science is about provisional truths that can be changed when evidence indicates that they should be. The fact that scientific information is available to the public is its greatest strength. Most of us, for whatever reasonwhether its self-interest or self-delusiondont view our own ideas as critically as we should. The fact that scientific ideas are available for all to see allows those who disagree to disprove them. This is what has happened at the CDC; the most current study has addressed the flaws of the earlier studies. It is true that many of those in power at the CDC uncritically embraced the earlier estimates and overreacted, or worse simply accepted research that was flawed because it bolstered their agendas. But that failure lies with the people involved, not with the CDC as an institution or with the science itself. The evidence still shows that morbid obesity is associated with an increased likelihood of developing disease and suffering from early mortality, but it also shows that those who are a few pounds overweight dont need to panic. Whats more, it is clear that everyone, fat or thin, will benefit from regular exercise regardless of whether they lose weight. The lesson to be learned from this controversy is that rational moderation is in order. Disproving one extreme idea does not prove the opposite extreme. As Steven Blair told me, It is time to focus our attention on the key behaviors of eating a healthful diet (plenty of fruits and veggies, a lot of whole grains, and not too much fat and alcohol) and being physically active every day. Notes 1. This is not the first time this has been shown. The following studies are also large-scale epidemiological studies that have found the overweight category is where the longest lifespan occurs: Waaler H.T. 1984. Height and weight and mortality: The Norwegian experience. Acta Medica Scandinavica Supplementum 679, 156; and Hirdes, J., Forbes, W. 1992. The importance of social relationships, socieoeconomic status and health practices with respect to mortality in healthy Ontario males. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 45:175182. 2. This is for both diagnosed and undiagnosed individuals. References Allison, D.B., et al. 1999. Annual deaths attributable to obesity in the United States. Journal of the American Medical Association 282: 153038. Blair, Steven, and James Morrow, Jr. 2005. Comments on U.S. dietary guidelines. Journal of Physical Activity and Health 2: 137142. Campos, Paul. 2004. The Obesity Myth. New York, New York: Gotham Books. Church, T., et al. 2004. Exercise capacity and body composition as predictorof mortality among men with diabetes. Diabetes Care 27(1): 8388. Ernsberger, Paul, and Richard Koletsky. 1993. Biomedical rationale for a wellness approach to obesity: An alternative to a focus on weight loss. Journal of Social Issues 55(2): 221259 Ernsberger, Paul, and Richard Koletsky. 1999. Weight cycling and mortality: support from animal studies. Journal of the American Medical Association 269: 1116. Ernsberger P., et al. 1994. Refeeding hypertension in obese spontaneously hypertensive rats. Hypertension 24: 699705. Ernsberger P., et al. 1996. Consequences of weight cycling in obese spontaneously hypertensive rats. American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology 270: R864R872. Flegal, Katherine M., et al. 2000. Journal of the American Medical Association 288(14): 17231727. Flegal, K., et al. 2005. Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association 293(15): 186167. Gregg, E., et al. 2005. Secular trends in cardiovascular disease risk factors according to body mass index in U.S. adults. Journal of the American Medical Association 293(15): 186874. Hedley, A., et al. 2004. Prevalence of overweight and obesity among US children, adolescents, and adults, 19992000. Journal of the American Medical Association 291: 28472850. Heini, Adrian F., and Roland L. Weinsier. 1997. Divergent trends in obesity and fat intake patterns: The American paradox. Journal of the American Medical Association 102(3): 254264. Katzmarzyk, Peter, et al. 2004. Metabolic syndrome, obesity, and mortality. Diabetes Care 28(2): 39197. Katzmarzyk, Peter, Timothy Church, and Steven Blair. 2004. Cardiorespiratory fitness attenuates the effects of the metabolic syndrome on all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality in men. Archives of Internal Medicine 164: 109297. Lee, Chong Do, Steven Blair, and Andrew Jackson. 1999. Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality in men. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 69: 37380. Mark, David. 2005. Deaths attributable to obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association 293(15): 191819. Mokdad, A.H., et al. 2004. Actual causes of death in the United States. Journal of the American Medical Association 291: 123845. Olshansky, S, Jay., et al. 2005. A potential decline in life expectancy in the United States in the 21st century. New England Journal of Medicine 352(11): 113845. About the Author Patrick Johnson is a biology instructor at Washtenaw Community College in southeast Michigan and a clinical exercise physiologist who writes frequently about health, nutrition, and fitness claims. He lives with his wife and his eight-year-old son. E-mail: johnsonp @wccnet.edu. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:43:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:43:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: MIT Researchers Unveil a $100 Laptop They Hope Will Benefit Children Worldwide Message-ID: MIT Researchers Unveil a $100 Laptop They Hope Will Benefit Children Worldwide News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.16 http://chronicle.com/free/2005/11/2005111602t.htm By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Saying they hope to bring every child in the world a computer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are set to unveil a laptop that will cost around $100, run on batteries that can be recharged by turning a crank, and connect to the Internet wirelessly by piggybacking on the connection of a nearby user. The machine will make its debut today at the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society, which is taking place this week in Tunis, Tunisia. Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Lab, is expected to show off a working prototype during a speech at the summit. In January, Mr. Negroponte announced plans to create the low-cost laptop and to work with developing nations, as well as with state governments in this country, to have school systems purchase the machines and give them to millions of students around the world. That would narrow the digital divide, and could spark innovations in commercial laptops as well. But it remains to be seen whether the prototype persuades leaders to purchase the laptops on the scale that Mr. Negroponte hopes -- at least a million units per country, with production beginning at the end of next year, possibly in some of the buyer nations. Mr. Negroponte said in an e-mail interview this week that production would not go forward until he had commitments from several countries with orders totalling at least 5 million laptops. "I hope it will be 10 million," he added. MIT has helped set up a nonprofit organization, called [72]One Laptop per Child, that is coordinating the development of the laptop and working with government leaders. The nonprofit group has received $1.5-million each from five companies -- Advanced Micro Devices, BrightStar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat. Each company gave an additional $500,000 to the MIT Media Lab to support the laptop's development. Though some might argue that poor children in developing nations have greater needs than shiny new computers, leaders of MIT's effort say that the educational benefits of Internet access far outstrip the project's cost. "There is no other way that has been suggested of giving people a radical change in their access to knowledge except through digital media," said Seymour A. Papert, a professor emeritus of learning research at MIT's Media Lab who is involved in the laptop project. Mr. Negroponte said he was not yet ready to accept purchase orders from anyone because he wants government leaders to look at the prototype first and see if it meets their needs. "We need to have the flexibility to do this right, not on an artificial deadline," he said. "Also, it would be foolish for anybody to sign a [purchase order] without seeing it." "Come February or March, that should all change," Mr. Negroponte added. The project's leaders are in talks with several nations, including Brazil, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Africa, that are potential buyers of the laptops. "No country has signed a check," said Mr. Papert. "The status is that there's been a lot of interest, and some countries are very far along in the process that they would have to go through in order to do it." The governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, a Republican, is calling for his state to buy one of the laptops for every Massachusetts middle- and high-school student, starting in late 2006. Innovative Design The screen is the feature the laptop's developers are most proud of, said Mr. Papert. It has two modes -- color and black and white. The black-and-white mode consumes very little energy and has an extremely high resolution that makes for easy reading, even in sunlight. It will measure either seven-and-a-half or eight inches diagonally -- about the same size as screens on portable DVD players. The machine can be configured to use either two or four rechargeable C-size batteries. By using two batteries, users can also insert a hand-cranked charging device to recharge the machine on the go. Mr. Negroponte said he hoped the laptop would run at least 10 minutes for each minute of cranking. That means students will get a physical workout while using the machines, but they will be truly wireless and portable. When a user is near an electrical socket, the laptop can be plugged in using a power cord that doubles as a carrying strap. The laptop will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system. It will have a flash memory drive, which uses less energy than a conventional hard drive but also has less capacity. The capacity of the drive will depend on how much the equipment costs at the time the laptops are produced, but officials say the laptops will probably hold either 500 megabytes or 1 gigabyte of data. That means the laptops will hold less information than most iPod digital-music players. Though $100 is the target price for the laptops, producers may not hit that right away, Mr. Negroponte said during a presentation about the project at a technology conference in Cambridge, Mass., in September. "One thing that we've told governments is our price will float," he said, and that the governments will get the equipment at cost. "Whatever the price is hereafter, it's going to go down, not up." He added that the machine might cost $115 at first, but might later drop to something like $85 as the production process became more efficient or technology costs went down. Mr. Papert said there were features he wanted on the machines that were not possible because of cost constraints. For instance, there's no built-in camera, as originally planned, and no DVD-ROM drive, he said. "All along the line it's trade-offs and compromises." The machine will have several USB ports so users can connect such devices themselves. The laptop's designers also promise that the laptop will not change much, and that any future machines will be fully compatible with the initial models. Political Battles Ahead It is not yet clear that the project can clear the bureaucratic and political hurdles necessary to get foreign governments to spend millions on laptops and their distribution. In fact, an official in Chile has recently indicated that the country wouldn't be signing on anytime soon. Hugo Mart?nez, director of a program in Chile that provides technology services, told the newspaper La Tercera that the country was not planning to join the project immediately. "The first shipment of computers from Negroponte's project is going to be delivered between December of 2006 and January of 2007, and for that reason it would be overly idealistic to commit [to buy] a certain number of computers that do not yet exist." He also noted that the educational value of providing laptops to students was still not proven. Mr. Negroponte said Thailand and Brazil had expressed "the most sustained commitment" to the project. "We have one of our people full time in Brazil, as of the beginning of November," he said. Mr. Papert said Brazil was interested in the project not only for educational reasons, but also because it hopes that participating could help put the country on the map as an electronics producer. "They're looking for a niche in the high-tech market," he said. He noted that Brazil might produce one million laptops for use in Brazil and another million for export to other countries in the region. Officials in Brazil could not be reached for comment. Mr. Romney, the Massachusetts governor, hopes to purchase laptops for his state as part of a broad education-reform plan he submitted to the Massachusetts legislature in September. Mr. Romney requested some $54-million to pay for the laptops, support, and training for 500,000 students. "Governor Romney's goal is to help prepare students for success in an increasingly competitive and technological world," said Felix Browne, a spokesman for the governor. "He believes that laptop computers are powerful tools that can help kids pursue their own avenues of discovery and take their learning beyond the classroom." Massachusetts would not be the first state to give out laptops to students. Maine started giving out Apple iBooks to all seventh-graders in 2002, as part of a project that Mr. Papert was also involved with. The program in Maine "is producing some very good results," Mr. Papert said. "There's more engagement -- they're learning it better with more enthusiasm." He noted, however, that the laptops "are not, on the whole, producing a radical change in what the children learn." That's because of resistance to change by some education leaders, he said. He said laptops would likely have a bigger impact in developing nations. "In places where there's hardly any education at all, there's also no conservatism about the school systems," he argued. "People in developing countries really want to develop -- they really want to change," he said. "They see it is conceivable for a country to pull itself up from the lowest to the really highest levels of economic operation, and everybody thinks education is a part of that." References 72. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:43:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:43:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sci Am: Lust for Danger Message-ID: Lust for Danger October 2005 Issue Scientific American A ruinous night at the roulette table. A bungee jump into an abyss. Such actions defy human reason, but we still seek the thrill By Klaus Manhart The two empty cars sit idling, side by side. Jim and Buzz each get into their vehicles, close the doors and push their gas pedals to the floor, racing headlong toward the edge of a cliff. The canyon below comes into view--they should each leap from their driver's seats before their cars vault into the abyss, but the first one to bail out loses. At the last possible moment Jim throws open his door and dives out onto the ground. Buzz waits too long and plummets over the edge to certain death. In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean's character, Jim, symbolizes a turbulent generation of young people in the 1950s who went to extremes to find their own identities. Teenagers pushed risky behavior to the limit, senselessly putting their lives on the line. Yet this desire to court danger crosses every era, age group and social class. Reckless driving, for example, is common on highways around the world. Mountain climbers cling to sheer rock faces, skiers rush down steep slopes, married people have secret affairs, and partygoers drink to excess. When danger calls, it seems, many are ready to respond. Today men and women of all ages are suddenly playing Texas Hold 'Em in homes, schools, offices and casinos, risking real money just for the thrill of it. In the late 1990s responsible parents who for years had safely put their savings into family bank accounts risked everything on grossly speculative high-tech stocks in hopes of cashing in on the dot-com boom. Thrill-seeking behavior is ubiquitous in other cultures, too: in Africa and South America, members of various tribes risk all their worldly possessions on games of chance. Why do we have such a passion for dangerous situations, even when the outcome can literally be fatal? Because these activities give the brain a chemical high, and we like how it feels. And why would the brain reward us for risky behavior? Because taking chances helped early humans find food and mates, and those successful risk takers passed on their genes to us. Still, we certainly have the reasoning power to deny ourselves dangerous pleasures, yet so frequently we do not, and today psychologists are trying to determine why we can't seem to avoid the trouble we get ourselves into. Adventurers Rule The quest to explain why we lust for danger has ebbed and flowed over the years. But as our understanding has progressed, it has become evident that humans are driven to take risks--and the more that they do, the more likely they are to thrive. According to the accepted theory most recently advanced by biologist Jay Phelan of the University of California at Los Angeles and economist Terry Burnham, formerly of Harvard Business School, our penchant stems from prehistoric times, when the world was populated by two basic types of humans: those who nested and those who ventured forth. Nesters pretty much stayed in their caves, subsisting on plants and small animals in their immediate vicinity, remaining ever cautious. Adventurers roamed the land; although their daring exploits put them at greater risk of getting killed, they also discovered the tastier fruits and the more productive hunting grounds. At the same time, they gathered practical survival experience, becoming better equipped to withstand the rigors of nature. These more capable doers were frequently able to live long enough to have numerous children, successfully passing on their genes until their type eventually came to dominate our species. Our passion for taking risks is therefore a biological legacy, and a preference for such behavior continues to pervade society today. Of course, rational thinking in the 21st century can readily overcome such biological preference. Yet it is difficult to deny that the brain interprets risky behavior as a sign of strength. For example, psychologists have shown that young women, at gut level, are more attracted to "dangerous" men than to "safe" men. One reason is that despite obvious complications, the "outlaw" type may be more likely to come out on top should conflict with others arise. The "tough guy" may appear to offer women greater protection for physical survival. This association is particularly evident in cultures that have changed little throughout the ages. In the 1960s and 1970s American cultural anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon of the University of California at Santa Barbara conducted a study of the Yanomamo Indians, who live along the Brazilian-Venezuelan border. He discovered that certain males lived with many more women than the rest, and every one of these men was known as a fearless warrior. These men also fathered far more offspring than their more timid tribesmen. Chagnon concluded that aggression-oriented genes win the upper hand in human reproduction. Addicted to Dopamine In the past decade, studies of brain chemicals and genes have supported Chagnon's supposition. Humans are driven to seek thrills, and for some, the more they find the more they want. Such drives vary greatly among individuals. For certain people, even the minimum bet during a friendly game of poker can rattle the nerves. Others relish parachuting out of airplanes. The difference may be explained by each person's dopamine system--how much of this neurotransmitter people have and how readily it can transmit messages between neurons. For the biggest thrill seekers, dopamine brings about a very real state of intoxication; the more that is released by a thrill, the greater their rush. Psychologists refer to such behavior as "sensation seeking," and a mix of physical and psychological factors are at work. People with a greater need to be energized by dopamine generally accept the physical, social or financial risks of sensation seeking as part of the game. But what causes the strong dopamine response? Psychologist Marvin Zuckerman of the University of Delaware maintains that the culprit is monoamine oxidase B. This enzyme is one of the chemicals that breaks down dopamine. The less monoamine oxidase B a person has, the more the dopamine flows, and the more likely he or she is to be a thrill seeker. Genes may play a part, too. In 1996 scientists discovered a gene called the D4 dopamine receptor, quickly dubbed the novelty-seeking gene. It provides the code for a specific dopamine receptor and was thought to be responsible for minimizing the anxiety that normally accompanies risky behavior. People who have this receptor tend to go to excessive measures to get a rush. For these folks, commonplace situations that other people would find stimulating produce little more than boredom. Other experts are not convinced about this gene's power, however. Some 18 studies done since 1996 have examined the link between its occurrence and thrill-seeking behavior, but only half of them have found any quantifiable connection. Invincible Me To some psychologists, a person's readiness to give in to the temptation to seek thrills is an extreme case of a more general human trait--the tendency to estimate risk poorly and to overinflate anticipated performance. For example, according to psychological surveys, most people believe themselves to be healthier than the average person. They also feel that they are more astute in judging profit-making schemes. Experts refer to this phenomenon as the "optimistic bias." It occurs when danger is recognized but the level of risk is not accurately perceived. This skewed view would explain why a heavy smoker tends to estimate his cancer risk as less severe than a moderate smoker of the same age and gender does. Underestimation also suppresses our fearful emotions. We simply assume that we will not be affected or at least that we are less susceptible to harm than others might be. As a result, we also become less willing to take precautions. Studies by Matthew Kreuter of the Saint Louis University School of Public Health and Victor J. Strecher of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor indicate that people often indulge in unhealthy or risky behavior despite being fully aware of the danger involved. Examples abound, such as the five skiers near Park City, Utah, this past winter who ignored warning signs and jumped fences to ski down unchecked terrain--to their deaths. Humans in general are not very good at weighing risks. We are "probability blind." If a roulette wheel stops on red five times in a row, many onlookers will hold the false belief that on the next spin, chances are higher than normal that the wheel will hit black. Of course, every spin has the same mathematical probability of coming up red or black: 50-50. Yet casino gamblers by the thousands succumb to such fallacious thinking. In much the same way, people are scared of plane crashes far more than car accidents, because an airline disaster is more dramatic, even though a much higher percentage of travelers die while riding on the road. We also roundly fear spectacular causes of death, such as murder, being struck by lightning or being bitten by a poisonous snake, even though the chance that we would fall prey to such an exotic demise is very small. Casino owners, lottery ticket sellers and insurance agents shamelessly exploit our miscalculations to sell that "winning" ticket or that "safety" policy against odds that are highly unlikely. How is it, then, that the human brain, which can comprehend much more complex mathematical relationships, can make such fundamental errors in judgment? Evolution may provide an answer here as well. As the brain developed over millennia, events such as attacks from enemies and bites from snakes posed real dangers that became strongly imprinted in our neural circuitry. Our fears are therefore not completely unfounded, yet they do not really pertain to the modern world. Still, the brain cannot easily adjust to such abstract probabilities. How many people who buy a lottery ticket are really considering the fact that they must rule out 14 million incorrect numerical combinations in choosing the exact winner? Instead we apply bogus, though seemingly time-tested, rules of thumb. As psychologists Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and the late Amos Tversky discovered in their research on statistical fallacies, we tend to believe that the more memorable an event, the more often it is likely to occur. Fake It Instead In dangerous situations, bad math, underestimation of risk and overestimation of our own strengths conspire to make us lose more than win, yet we willingly wade into them anyway. Mathematicians who study gambling have calculated that in the long term, players always come out on the losing end. Statistically, for example, regular roulette players win about 95 percent of their investment--that is, they lose 5 percent of their money. Sociologists often say that playing such games is the equivalent of paying a "stupidity tax." In risky situations, our insufficient sense of probability enters into a dangerous liaison with dopamine intoxication. In assessing our chances, we cannot trust our intuitive, primitive brains to make decisions. Rather we must rely on an unemotional analysis of the actual factors that are involved. Of course, that is easier said than done. For many people, reason simply takes a vacation when the chance for thrills arises. Deliberate precautions may therefore be the best way to counter temptation. One proven strategy recommended by psychologists is self-policing--setting limits before an activity begins. Gamblers, who run the risk of losing their shirts, can bring a predetermined amount of money with them into a casino or tell friends to escort them out, forcibly if needed, at a certain time. Greek hero Odysseus, who wanted to hear the seductive song of the Sirens, cheated death with such a strategy: he ordered his crew to lash him to their ship's mast and to fill their own ears with wax so they would not hear the song that would have tempted them to steer onto the rocks. A second strategy is to substitute artificial danger for real danger. We do not have to abstain completely from the dopamine high or risk our health or wealth. Modern society offers many safe thrill-seeking situations: the exhilarating ride of a roller coaster, the fright of a horror film, the fast-paced intensity of a video game. These experiences drive up our dopamine levels and make us feel keenly alive. Our brains do not differentiate whether the rush is real or manufactured. We can live on the edge without risking going over it. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:43:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:43:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Remapping the Cultural Territories of America Message-ID: Remapping the Cultural Territories of America http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/books/16jeff.html Critic's Notebook By MARGO JEFFERSON The Believer is a monthly magazine as smartly designed as the comics we call graphic novels. It is filled with what was once labeled new journalism and is now called experimental or creative nonfiction. So I was drawn to the September issue, advertising as it did an essay about "cultural criticism as experimental fiction" by Greg Bottoms. As it turned out, the subject was George W. S. Trow, a founder of National Lampoon and a staff writer at The New Yorker for some 20 years. But a Believer essay flings a wide net. This one included references to "WASP civilization," Gertrude Stein, Donald Barthelme and Gap jeans. I started thinking about those who had helped pioneer this bold and eccentric tradition of creative nonfiction, which uses many voices and techniques: storytelling, from the monologue to the novel; analysis, historical and literary; travel writing; reflection and confession. I thought of that forgotten poet Vachel Lindsay and his wonderful 1915 book, "The Art of the Moving Picture"; of the novelist and biographer Thomas Beer, whose "Mauve Decade" (1926) reads like a satiric historical novel about the 1890's. I also thought of two women, Constance Rourke and Zora Neale Hurston, whose cultural obsessions match those of critics today. They were out to remap the cultural territories; shift the boundaries that separated folk, popular and high art; explore the American character (what we now call the national psyche). I'll save Lindsay and Beer for another time because Rourke and Hurston are cultural cousins. They did some of their best work in the late 1920's and 30's. Both had scholarly training, though neither had a Ph.D. Rourke was a historian drawn to myth and legend; Hurston an anthropologist drawn to fiction and theater. Rourke was white, Hurston black. But in the end, their investigations linked them as surely as DNA tests have linked the white and black descendants of Thomas Jefferson. They began in what I'll call separate but equal neighborhoods. Rourke wrote about white cultural myths and traditions, iconic figures from Paul Bunyan to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Hurston wrote about the roots and characteristics of black American culture: language, folklore, music and dance, the will to improvise. Imagination helped them vault past intellectual barriers put up by other critics and scholars. Hurston exploded claims that black America lacked a past, a coherent body of social and artistic practices that make up a civilization. Rourke's greatest book, "American Humor" (1931), erased the notion that American culture was deficient because it lacked Europe's stable and polished lineage. It begins: "Toward evening of a midsummer day at the latter end of the eighteenth century a traveler was seen descending a steep red road into a fertile Carolina valley. He carried a staff and walked with a wide, fast, sprawling gait, his tall shadow cutting across the lengthening shadows of the trees. His head was crouched, his back long; a heavy pack lay across his shoulders." It's the beginning of a story - the story of an American type, the Yankee peddler with his shrewd talk and deadpan delivery. By the time she has fully drawn his portrait, we can see that his descendants include Johnny Carson and Bill Maher. Then she goes on to the extravagant Southwest frontiersman (think of the young Elvis Presley) and the minstrel, with his fables and eccentric rhythms, shifting between black and white masks (think of hip-hop). Rourke is a quiet writer, but her observations can sting. The American, she notes, "envisages himself as an innocent in relation to other peoples; he showed the enduring conviction during the Great War." And in most wars that followed, a modern reader can add. A few years after "American Humor," Zora Neale Hurston published a series of brilliant essays with titles like "Characteristics of Negro Expression" and "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals." She laid out some of the principles of black vernacular, from double descriptives like "low-down" and "sham-polish" to verbal nouns like "uglying away." ("Dissed" is today's best example.) "Mules and Men" is her 1935 chronicle of black folklore and folk life: storytelling contests and juke joint blues in Florida (where she grew up) and voodoo in New Orleans. We see the process by which folk life becomes the stuff of myth and art. But Hurston never insists that this progression goes from simple to complex. The gospel hymns sung in a Southern church, she observes, are likely to be far more rhythmically complex than those arranged for a choir with classical training. Always theatrical, she frames her tales with the adventures she had while collecting them. (Of her escape from a juke joint fight, she writes: "Blood was on the floor. I fell out of the door over a man lying on the steps, who either fell himself trying to run or got knocked down.") She narrates in her own vivid standardized English, but speaks black English with the people of Florida and New Orleans. When necessary she lies. One night at a dance, a man tells her that she looks wealthy compared to everyone else. She confides to the reader: "I mentally cursed the $12.74 dress from Macy's that I had on among all the $1.98 mail-order dresses. I looked about and noted the number of bungalow aprons and even the rolled down paper bags on the heads of several women. I did look different and resolved to fix all that no later than the next morning. " 'Oh, Ah ain't got doodley squat,' I countered. 'Mah man brought me dis dress de las' time he went to Jacksonville. We wuz sellin' plenty stuff den and makin' good money. Wisht Ah had dat money now.' " This certainly exposes the issues anthropologists still struggle with: the conflict between being a participant and an observer, the morality of being an outsider passing as an insider. And then, there is the power of the language that she recorded, embellished and reinvented. Here is an excerpt from her version of a curse made famous by Marie Leveau, the queen of hoodoo: "That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them. That the North wind shall freeze their blood and numb their muscles and that it shall not be tempered to them. That the West wind shall blow away their life's breath and will not leave their hair grow, and that their finger nails shall fall off and their bones shall crumble. That the East wind shall make their minds grow dark, their sight shall fail and their seed dry up so that they shall not multiply." Both she and Rourke knew, as all cultural critics must, that what Hurston called "our so-called civilization" is nothing more - or less - than "the exchange and re-exchange of ideas between groups." From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 21 18:43:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:43:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The American Interest: Fukuyama, et alia: Defining the American Interest Message-ID: Francis Fukuyama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen & Josef Joffe: Defining the American Interest http://the-american-interest.com/cms/abstract.cfm?Id=6 [Well, all right, here's the inaugural issue of a journal to counter the neo-cons in foreign policy, maybe in more than marginal ways. But Frank wrote a whole book arguing that transhuman technologies are a bigger threat than what goes on Iran or Red China or whatever. So why is he back to foreign policy? My answer is just that its easier to write about something one has already written a great deal about and to which others reply and to which one further replies. One the other hand, there are far fewer transhumanists arguing back and they aren't nearly so high up the totem pole. There's only a small room for transhumanists on the talk shows but lots and lots of foreign policy droaners every night on the Jim Lehrer Newshour. Jim, how come foreign policy is much more serious than domestic policy? I think Mr. Mencken would have an answer to that.] First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.15 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/11/2005111501j.htm When it comes to predicting the future, intellectuals "tend to get things hopelessly wrong," writes Owen Harries, a member of the Global Advisory Council for this new, independent journal, which was founded shortly after the demise of The Public Interest and a rift among the editors of The National Interest (The Chronicle, April 15). According to a statement from members of its editorial board, who include Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the new journal is dedicated to the theme of "America in the World." In his article, Mr. Harries writes that over the last century, intellectuals have had an "appalling record of prediction." For instance, in 1910, four years before the First World War, Norman Angell, who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, forecast the end of all armed conflict -- whoops. Nor should anyone forget, Mr. Harries writes, "the apocalyptic conclusion" reached in the 1970s by intellectuals who believed overpopulation and industrial growth would end the world by the 21st century. Mr. Harries credits George Orwell for one theory on why the intelligentsia get the future wrong. Orwell said that intellectuals suffer from "power worship," or "the tendency to assume that whoever, or whatever, is winning at the moment is going to prevail in the long term," according to Mr. Harries. Intellectuals do that regularly, he adds, "if not compulsively." Considering another example of false forecasting from the 1970s, he writes that many intellectuals then considered America's counterculture, domestic assassinations, government corruption, and mounting death toll in Vietnam as sure signs of democracy's end. The events led Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an intellectual who later served as a U.S. senator, to say that American democracy would have "simply no relevance in the future." But, he notes, a democratic surge swept across Europe, Latin America, and Asia shortly thereafter, culminating with the fall of the Soviet Union. "Certainly there is plenty of evidence of such worship in the history of the last century," writes Mr. Harries. "How else can one explain the widespread adoration among intellectuals of such vile and murderous figures as Stalin and Mao Zedong, which persisted long after evidence of their true nature was abundantly available?" The inaugural issue also includes an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and an essay by Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut on market-based solutions to global warming. The article, "Suffer the Intellectuals," is available to subscribers at http://the-american-interest.com/cms/abstract.cfm?Id=17 The editorial statement -- by Mr. Fukuyama, Mr. Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen, and Josef Joffe -- is available at http://the-american-interest.com/cms/abstract.cfm?Id=6 --Jason M. Breslow ------------------------ The American Interest (AI) is a new and independent voice devoted to the broad theme of "America in the world." Our agenda is threefold. The first is to analyze America's conduct on the global stage and the forces that shape it--not just its strategic aspects, but also its economic, cultural and historical dimensions. American statecraft is not simply about power but also purpose. What is important to the world about America is therefore not just its politics, but the society from which those politics arise--including America's literature, music and art, as well as its values, public beliefs and its historical imagination. The AI's second aim is to examine what American policy should be. It is our view that the challenges and opportunities of our time transcend the assumptions and vocabulary used by both the Left and Right in recent years, and that we need to move beyond the defense of obsolete positions. We therefore seek to invite the best minds from a variety of professions to engage in lively and open-ended debate founded on serious, sustained arguments and evidence. We wish to provoke and enlighten, not to plead or to please the guardians of any ideology. We take a pragmatic attitude toward policy problems, privileging creativity and effectiveness over contending orthodoxies. Third, though its name is The American Interest, our pages are open to the world. The simple and inescapable defining fact of our era is that America is the foremost actor on the world stage. For good or ill, the United States affects the lives of billions because of its dominance in military, economic and, ever more so, cultural affairs. Hence, the AI invites citizens of all nations into the American national dialogue, convinced that Americans have much to learn from the experience and perspectives of others. There is of course no single or simple "American interest." The United States is what novelist Tom Wolfe once labeled our "wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country"; it is a complex society that not just foreigners but Americans themselves often do not well understand. Therefore, The American Interest will not represent any single point of view. The names listed on our editorial board and global advisory council form an eclectic group, though not infinitely so. As the pages below attest, we share many first principles, but we often disagree energetically on their application. Both through what we share and what we contest, we mean to enliven and to enlighten the public debate. We therefore invite adepts of all political schools and persuasions, and those too busy thinking to concern themselves with labels, to join the fray. In our five annual issues we want to provide the premier forum for serious and civil discussion on the full spectrum of issues--domestic and international--that shape America's role on the world stage. We seek a discourse characterized by mutual respect, humility and passion for useful truths. From thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Nov 21 19:19:32 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:19:32 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Skeptical Inquirer: Obesity: Epidemic or Myth? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43821DC4.9070203@aol.com> Some thoughts ... In practical terms, it comes down to confusing two problems: the problem of trying to apply statistics to individuals, and the problem of trying to inform public health policy with statistics. As with environmentalism, the statistics on risks and incidence of obesity have often been interpreted in such a way as to make them seem worse than they are, usually with the well-intentioned goal of extraploating from real data and heading off worse problems. However in the process, important distinctions often get neglected. Two points in particular: (1) some people have serious health risks related to obesity such as diabetes, sleep apnea, and heart disease, while others can carry a remarkable amount of body fat without much real health impact other than slowing them down a bit. The serious health impact of body fat depends heavily on other risk factors. This means that some non-trivial number of people will be unfairly treated as health risks when we create public policy that equates obesity with poor health, while for many it will be a legitimate connection. (2) the health risks of overweight yield a completely different curve than those of morbid obesity, there is a sharp discontinuity. Many people actually have fewer health problems when carrying slightly more body fat, at least until it becomes gross obesity. There isn't really much health justification for representing mild overweight and gross obesity as points on the same continuum for purposes of risk factor analysis. Some of the worst risk factors are not aggravated by body fat until it becomes fairly extreme. It is simply not fair to judge a person's health by the fact that they are not lean. Obesity is a legitimate health problem and contributes heavily to serious complications in many people and it is increasing in the U.S.. That much is not myth. The measures we take to try to stem it are likely to unfairly affect people that are not unhealthy at their body weight. That much is also true. The tension of trying to interpret obesity as an epidemic or an overreaction depending on your goals and how you are affected seems hard to avoid. kind regards, Todd Premise Checker wrote on 11/21/2005, 1:42 PM: > Obesity: Epidemic or Myth? > http://www.csicop.org/si/2005-09/obesity.html > > New evidence shows that the obesity epidemic is not as bad as we have > been led to believe. However, that doesnt mean that we should dismiss > the problem either. > > PATRICK JOHNSON > _________________________________________________________________ > > You have probably heard that we are in the midst of an obesity > epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have > been fervently warning that we are in imminent danger from our > expanding waistlines since the beginning of this decade. However, > evidence has recently emerged indicating that the CDCs warnings were > based on questionable data that resulted in exaggerated risks. > > This new evidence has led to a hostile backlash of sorts against the > CDC. The editors of the Baltimore Sun recently called the earlier > estimates the Chicken Little Scare of 2004. The Center for Consumer > Freedom, a group that has long been critical of the CDC, declared > unequivocally on its Web site and in print ads in several newspapers > around the country that the obesity scare was a myth (figure 1). Even > Jay Leno poked fun at the CDC in one of his Tonight Show monologues, > making the observation that not only are we fat. . . . We cant do > math > either. Not everybody believes the new data, however. Cable talk show > host Bill Maher commented during an episode of his show Real Time > with > Bill Maher about it being a shame that lobbyists were able to > manipulate the CDC into reducing the estimated risk. > > So which is it? Are we in imminent danger, or is the whole concept a > myth? Looking at the scientific evidence it is clear that the extreme > views on either side of the argument are incorrect. There is no doubt > that many of our concerns about obesity are alarmist and exaggerated, > but it is also apparent that there is a real health risk associated > with it. > > The Controversy > > Between 1976 and 1991 the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the > United States increased by about 31 percent (Heini and Weinsier > 1997), > then between 1994 and 2000 it increased by another 24 percent (Flegal > et al. 2002). This trend, according to a 2004 analysis, shows little > sign of slowing down (Hedley et al. 2004). The fact that more of us > are getting fatter all the time raises a significant public health > concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began > calling the problem an epidemic in the beginning of this decade as > the > result of research that estimated 280,000 annual deaths as a > consequence of obesity (Allison et al. 1999). Since then there has > been a strong media campaign devoted to convincing Americans to lose > weight. In 2003, Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the CDC, > made a > speech claiming that the health impact of obesity would be worse than > the influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century or the black > plague of the Middle Ages. In 2004 the campaign reached a fever pitch > when a report was released that increased the estimate of > obesity-related deaths to 400,000 (Mokdad et al. 2004). Finally, in > March of this year, a report appeared in the New England Journal of > Medicine that predicted a decline in life expectancy in the United > States as a direct result of obesity (Olshansky, et al. 2005). > > Despite the assertions that obesity is causing our society great > harm, > however, many scientists and activist groups have disputed the level > of danger that it actually poses. Indeed, a recent analysis presented > in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by > Katherine > Flegal of the CDC and her colleagues calls the severity of the > dangers > of excess body fat into question, indicating that the number of > overweight and obesity-related deaths is actually about 26,000about > one fifteenth the earlier estimate of 400,000 (Flegal et al. 2005). > > There is little argument about the fact that, as a nation, more of us > are fatter than ever before; the disagreement lies in the effect that > this has on our health. The campaign to convince us to lose weight > gained much of its momentum in 2004; not only were there high-profile > public health initiatives devoted to stopping the obesity epidemic, > but the idea had pervaded popular culture as well. Movies like Morgan > Spurlocks Super Size Me were the topic of many a discussion, and > there > were regular news reports about the dangers of too much fat. > > During this campaign, however, there were some notable dissenters. > Paul Ernsberger, a professor of nutrition at Case Western Reserve > University, has been doing research since the 1980s that led him to > assert that obesity is not the cause of ill health but rather the > effect of sedentary living and poor nutrition, which are the actual > causes. Another prominent researcher, Steven Blair, director of the > Cooper Institute of Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, has been an > author on several studies indicating that the risks associated with > obesity can be significantly reduced if one engages in regular > physical activity, even if weight loss is not present. According to > Blair, weight loss should not be ignored but a greater focus > should be > placed on physical activity and good nutrition. Both Ernsberger and > Blair indicated to me that they thought the new research by Flegal > and > her colleagues provides a more accurate picture of the mortality risk > associated with obesity. > > [Obesity-Poster.jpg] > Figure 1. This advertisement, paid for by the Center for Consumer > Freedom (CCF), ran in magazines and newspapers across the country. > The > ad was issued in response to the study in the Journal of the American > Medical Association that found obesity-caused death rates had been > exaggerated. However, CCF, an advocacy group for restaurants and food > companies, has its own agenda. > > While scientists like Ernsberger and Blair have been presenting their > conclusions in the scientific forum, others have taken a more > inflammatory approach. In his 2004 book, The Obesity Myth, Paul > Campos > argues that the public health problem we have associated with obesity > is a myth and further claims that our loathing of fat has damaged our > culture (see Benjamin Radfords review on page 50). The most > antagonistic group, however, is the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) > (www.consumerfreedom.com), which implies that the obesity epidemic is > a conspiracy between the pharmaceutical industries and the public > health establishment to create a better market for weight-loss drugs. > Numerous articles on the organizations Web site bash several of the > most prominent obesity researchers who have disclosed financial ties > to the pharmaceutical industries. Paul Ernsberger echoed this > sentiment. He told me that the inflated mortality statistics were all > based on the work of David Allison, a well-known pharmacoeconomics > expert. These experts create cost-benefit analyses which are part of > all drug applications to the FDA. These self-serving analyses > start by > exaggerating as much as possible the cost to society of the > ailment to > be treated (obesity in the case of weight-loss drugs). The risks > associated with the new drug are severely underestimated, which > results in an extremely favorable risk-benefit analysis, which is > almost never realized once the drug is on the market. Experts who can > produce highly favorable risk-benefit analyses are very much in > demand, however. > > The claims made by the CCF are given some credence by Ernsbergers > corroboration; however, there is a noteworthy problem with their own > objectivity. On their Web site they present themselves as a > consumer-minded libertarian group that exists to promote personal > responsibility and protect consumer choices. Upon closer examination, > however, it becomes evident that the CCF is an advocacy group for > restaurants and food companies, who have as much to gain by the > threat > of obesity being a myth as the pharmaceutical industry does by the > danger being dire. > > It is clear that there are agenda-determined interests on both sides > of the issue. Therefore, the best way to discern what is necessary > for > good health is to shift our focus away from the sensational parts of > the controversy and look at the science itself. > > Current Science and Obesity Risks > > In their recent article, Katherine Flegal and her colleagues (2005) > point out that the earlier mortality estimates were based on analyses > that were methodologically flawed because in their calculations the > authors used adjusted relative risks in an equation that was > developed > for unadjusted relative risk. This, according to Flegals group, meant > that the old estimates only partially accounted for confounding > factors. The older estimates, furthermore did not account for > variation by age in the relation of body weight to mortality, and did > not include measures of uncertainty in the form of [standard errors] > or confidence intervals. These authors also point out that the > previous estimates relied on studies that had notable limitations: > Four of six included only older data (two studies ended follow-up in > the 1970s and two in the 1980s), three had only self-reported weight > and height, three had data only from small geographic areas, and one > study included only women. Only one data set, the National Health and > Nutrition Examination Survey I, was nationally representative (Flegal > et al. 2005). In their current investigation, Flegals group addressed > this problem by using data only from nationally representative > samples > with measured heights and weights. Further, they accounted for > confounding variables and included standard errors for the estimates. > > Obesity was determined in this analysis using each subjects body mass > index, which is a simple height-to-weight ratio. A BMI of 18 to 24 is > considered to be the normal weight, 2529 is considered overweight, > and > 30 and above is considered obese. The data from this study indicated > that people who were underweight experienced 33,746 more deaths than > normal-weight people, and that people who were overweight or obese > experienced 25,814 more deaths than the normal-weight folks. This > estimate is being reported in the popular media as being one- > fifteenth the earlier estimate of 400,000. However, conflating the > categories of overweight and obesity this way is misleading. > > At first glance, it appears that underweight poses a bigger threat to > our health than overweight and obesity, and that the earlier > estimates > were profoundly exaggerated. However, in this study the people who > fit > into the obese category actually experienced 111,909 excess deaths > compared to normal-weight subjects. In contrast, those who were > categorized as overweight experienced 86,094 fewer deaths than those > who were normal weight. The figure of 25,815 is the difference > between > the obesity deaths and the overweight survivals. In the original > study > by David Allison and his colleagues (Allison et al. 1999) it is > actually estimated that 280,000 deaths result from overweight and > obesity and that 80 percent, or 224,000, of these deaths occurred in > people who were in the obese category. However, the study by Mokdad > and colleagues (2004), using the same methods developed by Allison et > al., estimated 400,000 obesity-related deaths, and subsequently > fueled > much of the recent fervor surrounding the obesity epidemic. In this > study, no distinction was made between overweight and obesity and the > authors failed to distinguish between obesity, physical inactivity, > and poor diet. All of these variables were simply lumped together. > > A few things become clearer after examining the data. First, it > appears that our categories are mislabeled; being classified as > overweight appears to give one an advantage (statistically, anyway) > over those who are in the ideal weight range. [1] Moreover, it is > inappropriate to consider overweight and obese as one group. Despite > the current hype, the initial overestimation by Allison and his group > was not as exaggerated as is being publicized; compared to that > study, > the new estimate is actually about half of the old number. > Finally, it > is apparent that many at the CDC were simply confirming their own > biases when they accepted the estimate by Mokdad et al. The > categories > in that studythat was, intriguingly, co-authored by CDC director > Julie > Gerberding, which may provide some insight into why it was so readily > acceptedwere far too broad to provide useful information. The fact > that this flaw was ignored shows how easy it is to accept evidence > that supports our preconceived notions or our political agendas. > > There is another problem inherent in all of the above mortality > estimates. They are based on epidemiological data that show > correlation but leave us guessing as to causation. Various factors > are > interrelated with increased mortalityobesity, inactivity, poor > nutrition, smoking, etc. Yet, without carefully controlled > experiments, it is hard to determine which factors causeand which are > symptoms ofpoor health. This is a difficult limitation to overcome, > however, because we cant recruit subjects and have them get fat to > see > if they get sick and/or die sooner. Most institutional review boards > would not approve that sort of research, and furthermore I cant > imagine that there would be a large pool of subjects willing to > participate. There are, however, observational data that were > collected with fitness in mind, which help to clarify the picture > somewhat. > > In 1970 researchers at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in > Dallas, Texas, began to gather data for a longitudinal study that was > called, pragmatically enough, the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study > (ACLS). This study looked at a variety of different variables to > estimate the health risks and benefits of certain behaviors and > lifestyle choices. What set this study apart from other large-scale > observational studies, however, was that instead of relying on > self-reporting for variables like exercise habits, they tested > fitness > levels directly by way of a graded exercise test (GXT). A GXT > requires > a person to walk on a treadmill as long as he or she can with > increases in speed and incline at regular intervals. This is the most > reliable way we know of to assess a persons physical fitness. > > With an accurate measure of the subjects fitness levels, researchers > at the Cooper Institute have been able to include fitness as a > covariate with obesity. Analysis of the data obtained in the ACLS > shows that there is a risk associated with obesity, but when you > control for physical activity, much of that risk disappears > (Church et > al. 2004; Katzmarzyk et al. 2004; Katzmarzyk et al. 2004; Lee et al. > 1999). One study showed that obese men who performed regular exercise > had a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease than lean men > who were out of shape (Lee et al. 1999). > > Steven Blair, who runs the Cooper Institute and was an author on all > four of the above-mentioned studies, however, does not think obesity > should be ignored. I do think obesity is a public health problem, > although I also think that the primary cause of the obesity epidemic > is a declining level of average daily energy expenditure . . . it > will > be unfortunate if it is now assumed that we should ignore obesity. I > do not think that the [health] risk of obesity is a myth, although it > has been overestimated. Blair believes that a focus on good nutrition > and increased physical activity rather than on weight loss will > better > serve us. > > In spite of the fact that there are virtually no controlled clinical > trials examining the effects of obesity in people, we can make some > inferences from animal research. Investigations performed by > Ernsberger and his colleagues have shown that, over time, weight > cycling (temporary weight loss followed by a regain of that weight, > otherwise known as yo-yoing) in obese laboratory animals increases > blood pressure, enlarges the heart, damages the kidney, increases > abdominal fat deposits, and promotes further weight gain (Ernsberger > and Koletsky 1993; Ernsberger et al. 1996; Ernsberger and Koletsky > 1999). This indicates that the yo-yo effect of crash dieting may be > the cause of many of the problems we attribute to simply being fat. > > Even though there is a health risk from being too fat, you can > eliminate much of the potential risk by exercising. Moreover, it is > probably a bad idea to jump from diet to diet given the negative > consequences the yo-yo effect can have. According to another study > published in JAMA, the risk of cardiovascular disease has declined > across all BMI groups over the past forty years as the result of > better drugs (Gregg et al. 2005). > > None of this means, however, that we should simply abandon our > attempts to maintain a healthy weight; obese people had twice the > incidence of hypertension compared to lean people and, most > significantly, there has been (according to the above study) a 55 > percent increase in diabetes [2] that corresponds to the increase in > obesity. So while we are better at dealing with the problem once it > occurs, it is still better to avoid developing the problem in the > first place. > > Condemning the CDC > > Whatever side of the argument you are on, it is apparent that many in > the CDC acted irresponsibly. However, despite the fact that the > initial, exaggerated estimate came from people at the CDC, we should > keep in mind that so did the corrected number. While this can be > frustrating to the casual observer, it is also a testament to the > corrective power of the scientific method. > > Science is about provisional truths that can be changed when evidence > indicates that they should be. The fact that scientific > information is > available to the public is its greatest strength. Most of us, for > whatever reasonwhether its self-interest or self-delusiondont view > our > own ideas as critically as we should. The fact that scientific ideas > are available for all to see allows those who disagree to disprove > them. This is what has happened at the CDC; the most current study > has > addressed the flaws of the earlier studies. It is true that many of > those in power at the CDC uncritically embraced the earlier estimates > and overreacted, or worse simply accepted research that was flawed > because it bolstered their agendas. But that failure lies with the > people involved, not with the CDC as an institution or with the > science itself. > > The evidence still shows that morbid obesity is associated with an > increased likelihood of developing disease and suffering from early > mortality, but it also shows that those who are a few pounds > overweight dont need to panic. Whats more, it is clear that everyone, > fat or thin, will benefit from regular exercise regardless of whether > they lose weight. > > The lesson to be learned from this controversy is that rational > moderation is in order. Disproving one extreme idea does not prove > the > opposite extreme. As Steven Blair told me, It is time to focus our > attention on the key behaviors of eating a healthful diet (plenty of > fruits and veggies, a lot of whole grains, and not too much fat and > alcohol) and being physically active every day. > > Notes > > 1. This is not the first time this has been shown. The following > studies are also large-scale epidemiological studies that have found > the overweight category is where the longest lifespan occurs: Waaler > H.T. 1984. Height and weight and mortality: The Norwegian experience. > Acta Medica Scandinavica Supplementum 679, 156; and Hirdes, J., > Forbes, W. 1992. The importance of social relationships, > socieoeconomic status and health practices with respect to mortality > in healthy Ontario males. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 45:175182. > > 2. This is for both diagnosed and undiagnosed individuals. > > References > > Allison, D.B., et al. 1999. Annual deaths attributable to obesity in > the United States. Journal of the American Medical Association 282: > 153038. > > Blair, Steven, and James Morrow, Jr. 2005. Comments on U.S. dietary > guidelines. Journal of Physical Activity and Health 2: 137142. > > Campos, Paul. 2004. The Obesity Myth. New York, New York: Gotham > Books. > > Church, T., et al. 2004. Exercise capacity and body composition as > predictorof mortality among men with diabetes. Diabetes Care 27(1): > 8388. > > Ernsberger, Paul, and Richard Koletsky. 1993. Biomedical rationale > for > a wellness approach to obesity: An alternative to a focus on weight > loss. Journal of Social Issues 55(2): 221259 > > Ernsberger, Paul, and Richard Koletsky. 1999. Weight cycling and > mortality: support from animal studies. Journal of the American > Medical Association 269: 1116. > > Ernsberger P., et al. 1994. Refeeding hypertension in obese > spontaneously hypertensive rats. Hypertension 24: 699705. > > Ernsberger P., et al. 1996. Consequences of weight cycling in obese > spontaneously hypertensive rats. American Journal of Physiology: > Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology 270: R864R872. > > Flegal, Katherine M., et al. 2000. Journal of the American Medical > Association 288(14): 17231727. > > Flegal, K., et al. 2005. Excess deaths associated with underweight, > overweight, and obesity. Journal of the American Medical Association > 293(15): 186167. > > Gregg, E., et al. 2005. Secular trends in cardiovascular disease risk > factors according to body mass index in U.S. adults. Journal of the > American Medical Association 293(15): 186874. > > Hedley, A., et al. 2004. Prevalence of overweight and obesity > among US > children, adolescents, and adults, 19992000. Journal of the American > Medical Association 291: 28472850. > > Heini, Adrian F., and Roland L. Weinsier. 1997. Divergent trends in > obesity and fat intake patterns: The American paradox. Journal of the > American Medical Association 102(3): 254264. > > Katzmarzyk, Peter, et al. 2004. Metabolic syndrome, obesity, and > mortality. Diabetes Care 28(2): 39197. > > Katzmarzyk, Peter, Timothy Church, and Steven Blair. 2004. > Cardiorespiratory fitness attenuates the effects of the metabolic > syndrome on all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality in men. > Archives of Internal Medicine 164: 109297. > > Lee, Chong Do, Steven Blair, and Andrew Jackson. 1999. > Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause and > cardiovascular disease mortality in men. American Journal of Clinical > Nutrition 69: 37380. > > Mark, David. 2005. Deaths attributable to obesity. Journal of the > American Medical Association 293(15): 191819. > > Mokdad, A.H., et al. 2004. Actual causes of death in the United > States. Journal of the American Medical Association 291: 123845. > > Olshansky, S, Jay., et al. 2005. A potential decline in life > expectancy in the United States in the 21st century. New England > Journal of Medicine 352(11): 113845. > > About the Author > > Patrick Johnson is a biology instructor at Washtenaw Community > College > in southeast Michigan and a clinical exercise physiologist who writes > frequently about health, nutrition, and fitness claims. He lives with > his wife and his eight-year-old son. E-mail: johnsonp @wccnet.edu. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Nov 21 19:36:57 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:36:57 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Chronicle Colloquy: Acupuncture Meets Aspirin In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <438221D9.9020800@aol.com> Well yeah, exactly right. I think it is true that there is sufficient empirical data and sufficient investigation of some possible mechanisms of action to say that acupuncture has as at least as much surface legitimacy as a modality as many surgical and pharmaceutical treatments, at least for some problems, and a plausibly better track record for adverse effects in most cases. The remaining gap between acupuncture and Western medicine is not one of perceived efficacy as much as it is one of incorporating it as a modality into the Western research model so that it can potentially be improved even further. We don't have much trouble testing the effects of therapeutic massage, but when we deal with something that has a lot of distinctly non-mechanistic aspects to its theory like acupuncture or Yoga (or hypnotherapy for that matter!), we get all caught up in being unable to capture the practice variables in a way that lets us tweak and improve on them. It shouldn't prevent us from validating the practice in some sense, but it definitely makes it harder to translate it into a model that helps us understand better the way it works. Todd Premise Checker wrote on 11/21/2005, 1:42 PM: > Acupuncture Meets Aspirin > http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/11/altmed/chat.php3 > > [Article appended. I'll be asking to what extent acupuncture is a > progressive > field. An enthusiastic accupunturist came to give a noon talk where I > work and, > like far too many speakers, spent nearly all his time on his message. > I had to > leave early but did manage to interrupt to ask him whether some > particular > technique he was describing was a new practice. He said it wasn't. I am > extremely suspicious of any field that does not progress. The whole > study of > paranormal phenomenon is still where it was 150 years ago, namely > documenting > that there are phenomena we do not understand. The pile of > documentation gets > bigger, if new reports come in faster than old reports get explained > away, but > there are no laws to be had, not even trends and correlations.] > > > Thursday, November 17, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time > More than half the nation's medical schools require some study of > non-Western healing methods, like acupuncture, herbs, and meditation, > and the number is growing. Do future doctors need to know about > alternative and complementary medicine? Or is incorporating those > methods into medical-school curricula just an attempt to pander to > popular tastes? > > >> Click here to [55]ask a question. > 55. http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/11/altmed/question.php3 > > The discussion has not started yet. > Join us here on Thursday, November 17, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. > > The Topic > > Since the early 1990s, acupuncture, herbs, massage, and meditation > have found their way into traditional medical schools, and now more > than half the nation's accredited schools require at least some study > of alternative or complementary medicine. > Proponents say future doctors need to know about treatments that are > increasingly entering the mainstream. They should know, for example, > if an herbal remedy a patient is using might interfere with his > chemotherapy. But many medical-school professors and students go > further: They see no reason why they shouldn't refer a patient to an > acupuncturist or chiropractor if other methods have failed. > Is it irresponsible to teach remedies that many doctors consider > flaky > or even dangerous? If medical students should not be trained in those > methods, should they at least be taught to evaluate them, given that > more than one-third of Americans now turn to alternative remedies? Or > is incorporating those methods into the curriculum merely > pandering to > popular tastes? > > ? [57]Take 2 Herbal Remedies and Call Me in the Morning > (11/18/2005) > > The Guest > > Michael J. Baime is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the > University of Pennsylvania and the founder and director of the Penn > Program for Stress Management. He has practiced meditation since 1969 > and directs nontraditional courses, including "Spirituality and > Medicine" and "Mind/Body Medicine." His current research projects > include investigations into the use of meditation as a treatment for > multiple sclerosis and obesity. He will respond to questions and > comments about these issues on Thursday, November 17, at 2 p.m., U.S. > Eastern time. Readers are welcome to post questions and comments now. > A transcript will be available at this address following the > discussion. > > Acupuncture, Herbs, and a Chinese Gong > The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.18 > http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i13/13a01201.htm > > By KATHERINE S. MANGAN > Laurel, Md. > > The Tai Sophia Institute for the Healing Arts is a two-hour drive > from > the hustle and bustle of the University of Pennsylvania's medical > school and hospitals, but with its Zen-like atmosphere and labs > stocked with Chinese herbs, it feels worlds apart. > > The school is housed in a two-story, red-brick building in an office > park in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. From the outside, it > could > be any generic office. But inside, soothing music plays in the lobby > over the sound of a gurgling fountain. Curved walls draw a visitor in > along a carpet inlaid with a navy stripe that snakes through the > building like a river. > > The walls, painted in colors like eggplant, pumpkin, and cream, are > decorated with student projects bursting with stones and twigs that > depict the cycles of nature. Classrooms are drenched in sunlight from > wall-to-wall windows that look out on herb gardens and a stone > labyrinth that students built for patients to wander through. > > At noon, the school's greeter strikes a Chinese gong over the > intercom. "It reminds us how blessed we are to be alive," says Robert > M. Duggan, an acupuncturist who founded the institute in 1974 as the > College of Chinese Acupuncture. He has served as its president since > then. > > Students and faculty members greet each other with Eastern-style bows > and Western-style hugs. The school's name, combining the Chinese word > for great (Tai) and the Greek word for wisdom (Sophia) reflects the > meeting of Eastern and Western healing practices. > > The staff also comes from a mix of both traditional and > nontraditional > higher-education backgrounds. Mary Ellen Petrisko, vice president for > academic affairs, worked as a top executive with the Maryland Higher > Education Commission and the University of Maryland's University > College before moving to Tai Sophia three years ago. > > "When you walk in, there's a kind of serenity and a nice, pleasant > energy that doesn't make you feel frenetic or stressed," says Ms. > Petrisko, who was hired to provide structure and help ensure > accreditation for what had before been "basically a mom-and-pop > operation." Since then, the school has expanded its scope and begun > working on joint education and research projects with the University > of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. > > Tai Sophia enrolls 125 students -- up from 40 a decade ago. Seventy > are studying acupuncture, and the rest are evenly divided between > botanical healing and applied healing arts. Herbs, Mr. Duggan says, > are a $10-billion industry in the United States that needs people who > understand how they interact with one another, and with other > pharmaceuticals. > > Journals on botanical healing, acupuncture, and other remedies line > the bookshelves of the school's library, along with magazines like > Arthritis Today and Alternative Medicine. > > The library's circulation coordinator, wearing a purple and green > tie-dyed shirt and jeans, points out human models marked with > meridian > points where acupuncturists will insert needles. He leads Mr. Duggan > and a visitor along bookshelves of research materials that support > alternative forms of medicine. > > Says Mr. Duggan: "People say it's unproven, but the amount of data is > unbelievable." > > It will take more than data and connections to an Ivy League medical > school to win over some skeptics, but after more than 30 years as an > acupuncturist and president of the school, Mr. Duggan has a clear > sense of purpose. > > As he escorts a visitor back to the lobby, he points out the > window at > four forked branches that are wrapped in colorful yarn and staked in > the ground, as part of an American Indian tradition, marking the > north, south, east, and west poles of the campus. Regardless of how > the outside world views it, this school knows which way it's heading. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From HowlBloom at aol.com Tue Nov 22 07:22:20 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 02:22:20 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: why wildlife thrives in North America--from Valerius Geist Message-ID: <23d.21960ff.30b4212c@aol.com> Dear Howard, Thank you! Your invitation with that of Steve Zuckermann to VisionquestLive is highly appreciated. Thank you also putting your book online, which is excellent as ever! I cannot attend VisionquestLive due to the exorbitant cost of travel within this continent, but, having read a good portion of your book, I may be permitted to make a comment even one that, in think-tank-circumstances, might be considered to be helpful to your goal. Too bad you and I have not discussed this earlier, however, better late than never! The devil is in the details! I too have been singing a eulogy to a uniquely North American way of using capitalism, namely by embedding into commerce not private, but public ownership of a huge renewable resource, wildlife, in order to generate ? highly - successful ecological regeneration and restoration while simultaneously creating massive wealth and employment. The devil is in the details! The greatest environmental success story in the 20th century is the restoration of wildlife and biodiversity to the North American continent. I beg you to prove me wrong on this one! At the end of the 19th century wildlife as a whole, not merely the hapless buffalo, were nearly eradicated continent wide by a classical case of the ? tragedy of the commons?. From this destruction rose, through private initiative, a system of wildlife conservation which restored wildlife in the succeeding decades, but simultaneously made it a source of great wealth creation, of incredibly innovative, diverse industry, and of large scale public participation by all classes of North American society. So successful is this system of grass-roots conservation that parts of the environmental community is exploring how to apply it globally. I am appending a paper in press I gave in Ireland on that topic. Here capitalism thrives on the sustainable use of a public resource. And that?s a miracle, because the lessons of this system have been lost in exploiting ocean fisheries, or old growth forest, or agriculture ..etc. Had we applied the lessons of our successful system of wildlife conservation to other renewable resources, if we were to mange other renewable resources the way North Americans managed deer or wild geese, then captains of industry applying current practices would be in jail! Capitalism is a tool. It is a powerful tool. It is like molten steel which, uncontained in a crucible and carefully managed is sheer wreckage! And that?s the rub! What the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation shows is how, in a thoroughly capitalistic society, grassroots democracy cutting across all classes of North Americans can be captured to deliver an enormous public good, while generating private wealth and rich employment! This model show HOW to twist capitalism to deliver great public good. It shows how capitalism can be a joyous, diverse, marvelously positive enterprise. The devil is in the details! Capitalism by itself is a tool, more complex than an ax or a gun, far more complex and dynamic, but a tool just the same. What counts in progress is how to use that tool. And that?s where the wildlife conservation model North Americans evolved over a century is so insightful. And that?s what we need to understand: by what hands-on means do we progress towards that which you address in your thoughts as revitalizing capitalism. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: _VisionquestLive Featuring Howard Bloom_ (mailto:summit at netcarrier.com) To: _Global Entertainment and Media Summit_ (mailto:steve at globalentertainmentnetwork.com) Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 3:43 AM Subject: Howard Bloom's "Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul in the Machine at VisionquestLive December 3-4 Good Morning, Howard Bloom and Steve Zuckerman have teamed up to unveil and invite you to VisionquestLive for the weekend of December 3rd and 4th in New York City. Based around Bloom's book, "Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul in the Machine," VisionquestLive is a two day immersion in a highly powerful and productive think tank featuring some of the brightest and most compassionate minds from the world of entertainment, media, science and humanity. Just imagine what happens when you actively participate in an environment conducive to producing result---- and imagine if you could get into their minds and allow their passion to inspire and empower you to realize your full potential. According to Howard Bloom, " We need to find our heart and soul. Our reasons for working from 9 to 5. We need to live our dreams---and making them happen no matter what. More specifically we have to to move up a notch or two." To quote Bloom's Reinventing Capitalism, "We have to use a capacity in our daily work that only saints have previously been required to possess,"--something Bloom calls "tuned empathy." To paraphrase Bloom, we will help you re-perceive what's under our noses every day, a set of moral imperatives and of heroic demands that are implicit in the Western Way of Life. We will help you see your magic, your gifts, and your utopian capacities. Bloom shows how the Capitalism of Passion and the upgrade it can generate in our daily lives and in the place we work each day offers those of us who are emotionally starved a solid meal--the exuberance of satisfying others, the exhilaration of feeling wanted, the elation of creativity, and the knowledge that we've contributed to something far, far bigger than ourselves. By reinventing capitalism and injecting our own souls in the machine, you and I can raise the bar of human possibility. Let's do it together at VisionQuestLive. 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Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.13.4/176 - Release Date: 11/20/2005 ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: wildlife model for reiventing capitalism 11-22-05.doc Type: application/octet-stream Size: 109568 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 22 16:47:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:47:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis Message-ID: This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/science/22hypno.html [This is quite an important article, not so much what is says about hypnosis particularly, but about top-down processing, that what you think and how you categorize the world shapes what you see. If this can be extended to several top-down processes, we can better appreciate why so readily ignore disconcordant information and arguments from bearers of bad news and Premise Checkers.] By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true. The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish. "The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms." Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders. There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought. Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured. Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep. Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd. In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered. Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function. One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs. For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom. The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top. Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up. These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face. The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled. This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality. According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable. One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said. In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore. The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue. For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect. Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said: "Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them. "This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self." Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner. In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors. When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated. Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said. Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said. From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 22 16:50:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:50:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Screening for Abnormal Embryos Offers Couples Hope After Heartbreak Message-ID: Screening for Abnormal Embryos Offers Couples Hope After Heartbreak http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/health/22gene.html [Will we slide all the way down the slippery slope to utopia? Not if even post-humans inherit the "abiding infirmities of the human race" that Mr. Mencken so often spoke of.] By LAURIE TARKAN After enduring six miscarriages and undergoing six artificial inseminations and two in vitro fertilizations, Kelly Santos, at the age of 35, was dealt the final blow. "My doctor told me that I would never have a biological child," said Ms. Santos, who lives in Gillette, N.J. The diagnosis was a chromosomal translocation, a mix-up in the arrangement of a few genetic pieces that leads to a high proportion of abnormal embryos and a 90 percent rate of miscarriage. "It was depressing having all those miscarriages, but when they told me it was over, I wanted to kill myself," she said. By chance, she heard about a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a test that can screen out the abnormal embryos that cause miscarriages. A year later, using the technique, she gave birth to a healthy girl, Olivia. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, referred to as P.G.D., is an increasingly popular way to ensure a healthy pregnancy for women who have had multiple miscarriages, those having I.V.F. treatment and couples that are carriers of a genetic disorder. Only healthy, disease-free embryos are implanted into the uterus, increasing the odds of having a successful pregnancy and a healthy child. The test is no guarantee that a miscarriage can be avoided because many factors can interrupt the normal course of a pregnancy. P.G.D. has also been used by parents who want to have a child who is a tissue match for a sibling with a devastating disease. These so-called save-your-siblings can provide umbilical cord cells to the other child, in some cases saving the sibling's life. And a study published in Nature's online edition last month reported that P.G.D. is also being used to develop embryonic stem cell lines without destroying the embryo. Amid the excitement, some experts urge caution, because of a lack of research on the procedure's success rate, error rate and potential risks. Ethicists worry about a procedure that can also allow couples to choose the sex of their child and may one day be used to select embryos for traits like intelligence and physical strength. There are some failures, and they can be devastating. Doreen Flynn, 29, of Lewiston, Me., had one daughter with Fanconi anemia, a disease that leads to bone marrow failure and a high risk of leukemia and other cancers at a young age. Ms. Flynn and her husband had P.G.D. to create a tissue-matched baby to provide cells to save their daughter. Ms. Flynn said she had two tissue-matched embryos transferred, both of which she expected to be disease-free based on medical information she had received. She opted out of the amniocentesis because of the small risk of miscarriage. Two months after the babies were born, they were tested for Fanconi and both girls had the disease. "You feel so guilty because you're trying to help one daughter and you end up hurting two other children," Ms. Flynn said. "Now we understand that it's not an exact science and there's room for error." Still, those who have been helped by P.G.D. describe it as nothing short of miraculous. According to a 2004 survey by the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, about two-thirds of the respondents approved of the use of P.G.D. to prevent a fatal childhood disease and for tissue matching to save a sibling, said Kathy Hudson, the center's director. The procedure was first successfully performed in humans in 1989 in London, after years of animal testing. It is currently performed in about 10 percent of I.V.F. procedures annually in the United States. (Some 100,000 I.V.F. cycles were performed as of 2002, the most recent year to have complete statistics.) The test adds an estimated $2,000 or more to the already high cost of in vitro fertilization, which can range from $7,000 to $10,000 for each attempt. A majority of women turning to P.G.D. are those who have had more than three miscarriages due to a translocation. Second on the list are I.V.F. patients who are over 35 and have a high risk of having offspring with chromosomal abnormalities, like Down syndrome. Without P.G.D., many women over 35 get an amniocentesis around the 15th week of pregnancy to test for disabling genetic diseases. If a disease is found, the couple then faces the choice of having an abortion or bearing the child. Andrew R. LaBarbera, scientific director of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, said, "That's very distasteful for many people who don't have a problem undergoing P.G.D. to avoid this situation." Also using the procedure are couples who are carriers of single-gene disorders like cystic fibrosis, fragile X and Tay-Sachs disease. These couples have an extremely high risk of passing the disease on to their children and may have already given birth to a child with the disease. Tests can be given for more than 100 single-gene disorders. P.G.D. is performed when an embryo has only six to eight cells, called blastomeres. The zona pellicuda, the outer shell of the embryo, is opened with a micro needle, and a single blastomere is removed by gentle suction and sent to a P.G.D. lab for analysis. This does not kill the embryo because at this stage, each blastomere is capable of developing into a complete organism, or totipotent. It is not until the embryo passes the 16-cell stage that it begins to differentiate and give rise to stem cells. Yuri Verlinsky, director of Reproductive Genetics Institute, a leading P.G.D. lab based in Chicago, projects that in the next couple of years, P.G.D. "is going to be done for every I.V.F. case, because it definitely improves results." But Dr. Hudson said there was not enough data on the risks and benefits of P.G.D. and on the long-term health risks to the child. Numbers coming out of the leading labs show that P.G.D. leads to sharply lower rates of miscarriage and abnormalities, but the data have been reported in different forms by the labs themselves, not by independent researchers. Santiago Munne, director of Reprogenetics in West Orange, N.J., another leading center, published his miscarriage rates in the August issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility. He reported doing the test for 58 women with recurrent miscarriages. They had experienced an average of 3.9 previous pregnancies, of which 87 percent were lost. After P.G.D., the miscarriage rate was only 16.7 percent. At Reproductive Genetics, Dr. Verlinsky reported that of the 4,000 P.G.D. tests his lab has performed, there were 900 pregnancies and 700 live births. Some experts are concerned about the rate of misdiagnosis. There is a phenomenon called mosaicism, which occurs when the eight cells that make up the early embryo are not identical. Mosaicism occurs in about 30 percent of embryos. So a biopsied cell could be abnormal while neighboring cells are normal. During growth, the normal cells could dominate, producing a completely healthy embryo. But with P.G.D., those embryos would likely be discarded. On the other hand, if the biopsied cell is normal but the other cells are abnormal, the result may be a diseased embryo. "About 4 percent of P.G.D. will be misdiagnosed because of mosaicism and maybe 1 percent more are misdiagnosed due to technical error," said Dr. Munne, drawing from his own data on chromosomal abnormalities. Most of these abnormal embryos, though, will not implant or survive, he said. Dr. Munne said his own rate of clinical error, when a defective embryo does implant and thrive, is 6 in 5,000 cases. Of these six, all but one spontaneously miscarried; the other pregnancy was terminated. Dr. Verlinsky reported rates of error for single-gene testing. Of 250 babies, 5 were misdiagnosed; 2 were missed because of technical errors and 3 were because of human error - transferring the wrong embryos. But error rates vary among centers, and Dr. Munne recommends asking for these figures before getting P.G.D. Some experts worry that couples may not appreciate the risks. In one survey, Dr. Hudson interviewed P.G.D. patients to see if they understood the potential risks. "We got the impression that while the information had been transmitted, it was not received," she said. Many couples having P.G.D. see the procedure as foolproof and choose not to have amniocentesis once pregnant because of the small risk involved, said Dr. Serena H. Chen, director of the division of reproductive endocrine and infertility at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J. There are other ethical questions about creating one child to save another. The most pressing, Dr. LaBarbera said, is what happens when the cord blood transplant does not work and the parents decide to put the child through a bone marrow transplant? "That's a very painful procedure, but when you ask parents, they will do anything to save a child they have," Dr. LaBarbera said. There is no solid research on long-term effects on P.G.D. children, but the potential risk of the procedure should be weighed against the reason a family is getting it, Dr. Hudson said. "In the case of a family who's facing a one in four or a one in two chance of having a child with a fatal genetic disease," she said, "the context is quite different from those who want to pick the sex of a kid," she said. From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 22 17:44:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:44:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: Pharm Land: "Generation Rx" Message-ID: NYTBR: Pharm Land: "Generation Rx" http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2005/11/20/books/1124986788383.html [First chapter appended.] GENERATION Rx How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies. By Greg Critser. 308 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.95. By JOE QUEENAN Published: November 20, 2005 APOCALYPTIC literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem or [61]Tom DeLay. This is what makes Greg Critser's "Generation Rx" such an unexpected delight. Although his message is unrelievedly depressing - drug companies, with the nation's physicians and the federal government already on the payroll, have transmogrified a self-reliant nation into a herd of functional drug addicts - there is something so congenial and non-self-righteous about the way he tells his story that few of the scoundrels singled out for public obloquy will take personal offense. Unlike the malignantly partisan [66]Michael Moore or [67]Ralph Nader, arguably the least bubbly reformer since Oliver Cromwell, Critser spreads his gospel of rack and ruin in an almost good-natured way, explaining who paid off whom and how many Americans died as a result of it, but without getting especially nasty. Indeed, what prevents "Generation Rx" from reading like a writ of indictment is the author's folksy turns of phrase, which sometimes go off in unintentionally hilarious directions. Thus, describing the evolution of Glaxo from a sleeping giant to a juggernaut, Critser says that "in the boggy pharma jungle," the company "swung on the vine of prior greatness while withering on stultifying British business practices." Marveling at the liver, he writes, "It is the only organ that can, with time, regenerate itself, a kind of [68]Donald Trump of the human body." And he identifies Washington as "an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney." Here it is unclear whether he is arguing that the nation's capital is an unfathomable brothel open to every client except [69]Karl Rove and [70]Dick Cheney, or that everyone, including Rove and Cheney, is welcome at the brothel, though they alone can fathom it. Whatever the case, it certainly makes a nice break from all the dreary paragraphs about prostaglandins, rofecoxib and Heliobacter pylori. These strange analogies, bizarre metaphors and weird solecisms provide reassuring grace notes in a book whose thrust is otherwise quite sober. They also make one wonder if the people involved in the editing process may not have experimented with a few [71]pharmaceuticals themselves. "Generation Rx" contends that large drug companies have co-opted the federal government, seduced the medical establishment and mesmerized a temperamentally supine public into taking far more drugs than is strictly necessary, much less healthy. Worse, Americans have fallen victim to "polypharmacy": using so many drugs for so many ailments that they have no idea how the various medications are interacting. Nevertheless, this is not the work of a conspiracy theorist. The public, particularly "the Tribe of High-Performance Aging," genuinely adores Viagra, Zoloft, Paxil and Prozac, believing that they vastly improve one's quality of life. As in his previous book, "Fat Land," Critser says the public has been complicitous in its own seduction. Gleefully voting with their tongues, Americans use drugs to combat [72]depression (Paxil, Prozac), reduce the ruckus from the kids (Ritalin), make bedtime more like a night in the seraglio (Viagra) and turn the workplace into a hearty party (Vicodin). Despite the book's misleading title, the triumph of "big pharma" is yet another national tragedy, like Michael Flatley's career, that can be laid directly at the feet of baby boomers. As Critser writes, "The generation of Americans who rebelliously experimented with drugs is now a generation upon whom drugs are experimented, with barely a squeak of protest." Actually, this argument is a bit hard to follow. Young baby boomers never protested against drugs, merely their price, quality, availability and the advisability of buying them from furtive men named Sweet Memphis or Chucky the Swede. So why on earth should they complain about drugs now? (For the answer to this question, go ask Alice. When she's 10 feet tall.) Because of the dry nature of the subject, "Generation Rx" is unlikely to replace Harlan Coben as bedtime reading. Moreover, while some details may be new, the overall theme - doctors are on the drug industry tab, Republican legislators view regulation as Stalinist, consumers have developed an almost Incan belief in the power of chemicals, lobbyists run everything - is not. Still, the book is a lively, well-told tale, chock-full of fascinating tidbits that will bring a smile to the face of even the gloomiest Gus. For example, the Learning Annex, in addition to its tutelage in pole dancing, offers an online course called "Three Days to a Pharmaceutical Sales Job Interview!" And a New York internist's Web site offers "pen amnesty" to physicians who wish to quietly turn in all the writing materials they have had foisted on them by drug companies over the years. Some assertions seem debatable. When the author reports that Vioxx, "by one count," has caused as many as 100,000 heart attacks, one wonders: precisely whose count was that? Similarly, when he reports that by the late 1990's, the United States was consuming 90 percent of the world's Ritalin, some may be shocked. Judging from the children of the corn my son and daughter have been dragging in off the street for the past 20 years, I would have sworn that number was far too low. Unsurprisingly, one of Critser's major villains in the pharmaceuticalization of America is the Reagan administration, which helped tear down the Chinese wall that once separated regulators from drug makers and created, in Critser's view, an ambience of potentially disastrous chumminess. Yet he lauds [73]William Rehnquist, a staunch conservative, for issuing a prescient warning about the unforeseen perils of direct-to-consumer advertising. "Pain getting you down?" he wrote derisively in a dissenting 1976 Supreme Court opinion. "Insist that your physician prescribe Demerol. You pay a little more than for aspirin, but you get a lot more relief." Nothing in the book is more alarming than the disclosure that the drug industry spent $50 million on political campaigns between 1999 and 2003. True, it is comforting to read that "Republican causes and candidates" pocketed almost 80 percent of the cash; if only from the shareholder's perspective, it is reassuring to know that at least the money is being spent wisely. But from a patriot's point of view, the paltry size of the bribe is unnerving. Compared with the billions in revenue garnered by the sale of hyped, dangerous or ineffective drugs, $50 million is mere chicken feed. This suggests not only that our politicians can be bought, which is bad, but that they can be bought cheap, which is worse. Somebody, pass the Demerol. Joe Queenan's most recent book is "Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country." First chapter of "Generation Rx" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/books/chapters/1120-1st-crits.html By GREG CRITSER In the world of bureaucratic Washington, D.C., few if any possess the gravitas and smarts to get away with quoting Teddy Roosevelt. Lewis Engman, Richard Nixon's 1973 appointee as chairman of the powerful Federal Trade Commission (FTC), was one of the few. A Midwesterner with traditional Republican inclinations, Engman had "the gift," as one friend later put it - people simply wanted to be around him. He was a handsome man, with a broad brow and piercing dark eyes, and he was a social creature, stylishly dressed and coiffed and noticeable on the D.C. cocktail circuit, where he could be seen in the company of many of the president's closest advisers. Engman was a personable, if tightly wound, man as well, comfortable with business types and staff typists alike; when a young FTC appointee named Elizabeth Hanford (later Dole) had a minor accident and ended up in the emergency room on the day she was to be installed, Engman took his entire staff over to the hospital and swore her in while she was still in bed. More importantly in a town of fiercely guarded opinions and fiefdoms, Lew Engman could take the heat of debate. He seemed to revel in it. Often he intentionally recruited lawyers with whom he did not agree. "The notion," a former staffer recalls, "was that the tension would produce the best resolution." That didn't mean Engman was thwarted very often; yes, he could be imperious and even arrogant, but "he was so personable and passionate that you wanted to agree with the guy." Frustrated with the slow pace of getting anything done in D.C., Engman loved to invoke TR's famous "Man in the Arena" speech. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better," he would quote, his brow furrowing. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, but who knows great enthusiasms ... so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." It was an appropriate mission statement for a young man charged with running the FTC, which oversaw the business of the world's most powerful, if at the time troubled, economy. The FTC itself had grown increasingly controversial. For decades the commission had operated somewhat like a European or Japanese finance ministry, not simply policing industry's outright frauds and cons, but also regulating competition itself. The agencies under its purview, from the Civil Aviation Board (CAB) to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), were so cozy with their respective industries that it was all but impossible for an upstart entrepreneur to compete. Traditionally the FTC chairman, in a tacit admission of the powerful regional political interests that had created that coziness, remained mute on the situation. "The policy was never to criticize another government agency," recalls Art Amolsch, who worked for Engman at the time and went on to become the foremost observer of the agency. "That's why the FTC was always known as the Old Lady of Pennsylvania Avenue. It was averse to almost any change and inclined to say no to anyone who dared suggest otherwise." For a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, responding to lawsuits and studies by Ralph Nader over everything from unsafe cars to overpriced drugs, the commission had gone on a proconsumer binge under Chairman Miles W. Kirkpatrick, and mainstream business types, the core of the imperiled president's political base, had railed against him during the 1972 election season. To calm them, in 1973 Nixon appointed Engman; he was supposed to "restore order." In other words, to put things back where they were before the Naderites inside the commission got out of control again. But Nixon, and whoever had done the personnel file work, misjudged Engman's consumer credentials. Although he was a classic 100-percent-free-trade, procompetition Republican, Engman had developed a strong proconsumer bent. As Time magazine would later put it, Engman saw the world as a "Ralph Nader out of Adam Smith." You could best serve the consumer, he deduced, by opening up the marketplace. With that in mind and the national economy in trouble - inflation was up and productivity was down - Engman went looking for ways to use the FTC's power to make the country more competitive and to make American life more affordable. Quickly he diagnosed a novel cancer on the nation's economic corpus: the regulatory agencies themselves. By making it so hard for small businesspeople to enter their respective industries, the CAB and ICC were hurting the consumer and inhibiting innovation, thereby retarding long-term economic growth and keeping prices unnaturally high. In a brilliant, landmark speech at the normally staid Financial Analysis Conference in 1974, he laid out his thesis: "Much of today's regulatory machinery does little more than shelter producers from the normal competitive consequences of lassitude and inefficiency ... [it] has simply become perverted." As a result, "the consumer is paying plenty in the form of government- sanctioned price fixing." It was time, Engman said, to consider serious deregulation. Engman also went after what he called "professional conspiracy." He sued the American Medical Association over its ban on physician advertising - something he believed deprived consumers of the ability to get the best doctor for the best price. He went after state medical societies for their bans on the advertisement of prescription drug and eyeglass prices. In fourteen months he filed thirty-four antitrust actions. "The consumer was always the bottom line for Lew," recalls Bob Lewis, who served on Engman's staff. "'Is this going to benefit the consumer?' That was always the question he asked at the end of the debate about anything." By the time he left the FTC in 1977, when a Democratic administration was about to take office, Engman had succeeded in making deregulation a mainstream Republican goal. At age forty-two, he was a GOP legend. And so it was hardly surprising that, in the fall of 1980, with a new president named Ronald Reagan onboard who was committed to getting government out of every aspect of American life, Engman would again be sought for his leadership skills. This time the organization in need of help was the Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Associations. The PMA represented the nation's biggest brand-name drug makers, who were often referred to simply as "big pharma" or simply "pharma." (The organization itself formally changed its name to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, PhRMA, in 1994.) The PMA believed that the industry was in a crisis, suffering from increasing costs, slipping sales, foreign competition, and government overregulation. It was a crisis so severe as to provoke pharma CEOs to wonder out loud "whether there will even be a U.S. pharmaceuticals industry in twenty years." Then again, just about every major industry wondered something like that in the early 1980s, when it was widely believed that Japan was doing to U.S. industry what it had failed to do with bombs thirty-five years earlier. Some, if not most, of pharma's immediate crisis was of its own making, although this was not something most drug CEOs would admit. As a group and individually, they had simply failed to invest in new drug sciences and drug development. Instead, they had relied on (and indeed encouraged) the FDA's lack of a generic-drug approval process, giving pharmaceutical companies de facto monopolies - and huge profit margins - on many widely used drugs. This state of affairs had provoked a legal backlash of its own; district courts from New York to California were actively contemplating, and in some cases ruling, that many traditional pharmaceutical patents were invalid. The Supreme Court itself had grown hostile to the very notion of patents. In the pharma executive suite of the time, there was only one word for that: shock. Yet some pharma problems were largely out of the industry's direct control. America in the late 1970s and early 1980s was going through one of its cyclical periods of what might be dubbed pharmaceutical stoicism. As a percentage of annual health expenditures, the Rx share was actually shrinking. And while cocaine might be hip, prescription drugs were uncool on a number of levels. On the cultural plane, drug makers were the domain of the blue-chip world, with which the baby boom had yet to fall in love. The growing alternative-medicine movement, with its reliance on herbs and vitamins, appealed to a generation concerned with what was natural. The movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest rekindled old suspicions about psychiatric medications, one of the industry's most profitable monopolies. News stories about abuse of Valium, one of the most profitable postwar drugs, led to its reclassification as a controlled substance in 1978, making it harder to prescribe. There were scares over new heart medications and horror stories about pharmaceutical industry negligence, and a new generation of ambitious politicians had no qualms about capitalizing on such fears. When a young congressman named Albert Gore learned from a staffer that a Pfizer attorney had made an off-the-cuff remark about how expensive it was to monitor the adverse events of one of his products ("What, are we supposed to schlep all over the world just to track down one goddamn side effect?" the attorney had sputtered), Gore promptly publicized the incident. Abroad and in D.C., big pharma was, more than ever, big fair game. Worse from the point of view of pharmaceutical CEOs were attitudes and trends among young physicians and medical students. Many of them were deeply suspicious of the business end of medicine. Some of their attitudes grew from social activism by med students in the early 1970s, who were concerned with overmedication and polypharmacy. (Overmedication is the unnecessary use of medications in general; polypharmacy is the simultaneous use of several medications to treat one or more conditions.) The concern was deepest among young psychiatrists. "In our day, it was almost an aesthetic thing to be against polypharmacy," recalls one. "It was more beautiful if you could do it with just one or two pills." Many believed that growing rates of polypharmacy were fueled by pharma promotional activities, like giving out free samples and stethoscopes. "At national meetings, the idea we talked about was to reject the goodies," recalls Dr. Terry Kupers, who was head of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in the 1970s. "[Pharma sales representatives] would show up at grand rounds, and we would confront them and turn down the goodies. We also went to our intern meetings within our institutions and told our supervisors that we did not want [the reps] on grand rounds. It was happening at enlightened medical schools around the country. We did it as a statement." The statement registered in establishment realms, a further worry to pharma, when, in 1978, a number of influential medical journals began to consider banning prescription drug ads in their pages. As Steve Conafay, then a lobbyist for Pfizer, recalls, "There was definitely the feeling that the industry was under attack and that something big had to be done." Donald Rumsfeld, then the CEO of G. D. Searle, Inc., makers of a wide variety of drugs and chemicals, summed up the general attitude when, upon greeting FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy, he "sat down across from me," recalls Kennedy, "slumped a little, and said, 'What are we doing wrong?'" With Reaganism ascendant, the question quickly turned into: What is the government doing wrong? For Engman, now ensconced in PMA's head office, the question should have been: What can I wring out of the new political reality - Reagan's pronounced antiregulatory bent - that will directly benefit my membership, the nation's brand-name drug makers? Certainly many of his members were clamoring for a preemptive strike, with several advocating an assault on the FDA and its much hated efficacy requirements. (Congress had passed a law in 1962, known as the Kefauver Amendments, changing the Food and Drug Act and mandating that makers of new drugs prove not just that their products were safe, but that they actually worked.) The chief of research at Pfizer, then as now one of the more politically active pharmaceutical companies, had been railing against the efficacy rules for years, saying they got in the way of delivering good new drugs. But Engman didn't think that way. He wasn't interested in deregulation for deregulation's sake. Perhaps it was that consumer bug, or perhaps it was his heady experience as leader of an agency that served "the public." Whatever the exact source of Engman's reservations, his eventual choice of legislative priorities finally came down to one issue: patent restoration. The subject had bubbled under the surface of FDA-industry relations for years. Simply put, the industry believed that the FDA was eating up the length of its patents, and profits, because of its slowness in processing new drug applications. Companies with a new discovery had to file for a patent as soon as possible, to establish ownership of the idea, but then had to wait years for approval. By the time the drug was approved, the company might have as little as half the original seventeen years of patent life usually guaranteed to innovators. That led to higher prices, longer waits for new drugs, and a general disincentive to invest in new medications. It was true that the studies proving the case for patent restoration - for laws that would give pharma additional compensatory patent time - were weak and inconclusive, but the essence of the industry argument struck a nerve with Engman: here again was a case of overregulation hurting the economy of the nation and depriving the consumer of an improved product. What should Engman's PMA do? Sometime during the fall of 1980, he got an idea. He would use his old political contacts to shepherd legislation to extend pharmaceutical patents, adding up to seven years of exclusive marketing time for new drugs that had taken too long to get through the FDA approval process. For a while, all of the old Engman magic seemed to work. He circulated studies showing exactly how industry suffered from FDA bureaucracy - and how few new important drugs made it through the system. He lined up experts from leading medical schools to testify on the subject before Congress. By late 1982, he had managed to push the political process as well. A bill extending patent life was passed by the Senate and referred to the House for an expedited vote. Yet the world - and particularly Washington, D.C. - does not lie under the spell of magic for long, and Engman's bill went down to unexpected defeat. One reason was the weather; a dense winter storm had settled over Foggy Bottom on the morning of the vote, delaying the arrival of several key supporters. Then there was another, less natural phenomenon: a man named Henry Waxman. . . . From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 22 17:44:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:44:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: The Prodigy Puzzle Message-ID: The Prodigy Puzzle New York Times Magazine, 5.11.30 http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2005/11/20/magazine/1124987258967.html By ANN HULBERT 'So you're the geniuses," Senator Carl Levin said, looking pleased as he peered over his glasses. He was addressing the flaxen-haired Heidi Kaloustian, a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Michigan, and John Zhou, a superfriendly 17-year-old senior at Detroit Country Day School, unusual visitors to Room 269 of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. Michigan had distinguished itself, Levin had been informed: the state boasted two Davidson Fellows, and he had clearly been told these teenagers came trailing brainy superlatives. "Genius loves company," announced the September press release about the students who had won scholarships awarded annually since 2001 by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a foundation that supports "profoundly intelligent" youths, a more recent term for off-the-charts children. "Seventeen prodigies," the press release went on, were "to be honored at the Library of Congress for contributions to society" in the fields of science, math, technology, music and literature. Even among these superstars, the young Michiganders stood out. All the accolades and attention added up to a thrilling but evidently also somewhat disorienting experience, at least for one of them. "I'm generally pretty shy, hesitant to show my work," Heidi told me over the summer - a reticence that had only partly been drummed out of her by joining her high school's poetry-slam team at a teacher's insistence. Sitting on the couch awaiting the senator, she looked slightly dazed at being in the limelight: Heidi was one of the four Davidson "fellow laureates" this year - recipients of the top $50,000 scholarship awards for projects they had submitted. She was also the first laureate ever in literature, with a writing portfolio she titled "The Roots of All Things." John, a scientist whose 2005 accomplishments also included semifinalist standing in the national math, physics and biology olympiads, was taking his $25,000 award in stride. He was one of five winners at that level. The remaining eight Fellows received $10,000 each - money to be disbursed for approved educational purposes for up to 10 years. Apparently feeling his visitors deserved more than the usual small talk, Senator Levin forged on with "Where are your souls?" "You mean what are our projects?" John responded, ready with the title of his: "A Study of Possible Interactions Among Rev1, Rev3 and Rev7 Proteins From Saccharomyces Cerevisiae." John laughed along with everyone else when Levin remarked, "I understood the word 'protein,' " and with the confident charm of a youth who has spent lots of time with adults, he told the senator he really enjoyed seeing him at a recent AIDS walk in Michigan (for which John had organized a school team). Turning to Heidi, who explained that she wrote both poetry and prose, Levin was prompted to joke, "So writers are worth twice as much as scientists these days?" It was a short step to reminiscences about college-tuition bills for his own daughters. The Senate photographer then sprang into action, arranging a classic portrait of future promise: professorial senator in the middle, flanked on one side by a bright-eyed youth and on the other by a mother wearing a grin her child might later tell her looks goofy. For the Davidson Fellows who came to Washington in late September for a gathering that culminated in an evening reception at the Library of Congress, the visit to Capitol Hill was more than a photo op. It was an effort to help promote the vision of their patrons, the founders of the Reno-based Davidson Institute, Bob and Jan Davidson. Drawing on a fortune earned in the educational-software business, the Davidsons established themselves as a well-endowed new presence on the gifted-education scene in 1999. Their goal is not just to support extraordinary youthful achievements, though their contributions to the cause of enriching precocious childhoods have been wide-ranging. The institute's enterprises include, in addition to the fellowships, a free consulting service now assisting 750 "Young Scholars" between the ages of 4 and 18 who qualify with top test scores (99.9th percentile, I.Q.'s of at least 145) or, for those without a battery of assessments, portfolio submissions. The Davidsons have also begun the Think Summer Institute, offering college courses for 12- to 15-year-olds. Next fall the Davidson Academy, a public middle and high school for the profoundly gifted, will open on the Reno campus of the University of Nevada. How much pleasure the Davidsons, in their early 60's, take in celebrating the accomplishments of the fellows was obvious at the reception: Bob, strong-jawed and a jokester, and the elfin Jan glowed like godparents as they beckoned the multicultural array of prize-winners up to the dais to speak about their projects - "prodigious work," a term the Institute favors, ranging from the adorable 6-year-old Marc Yu's piano performance to the 17-year-old Kadir Annamalai's work on the "growth of germanium nanowires," useful in thermoelectric devices. It is the Davidsons' other, related aim that calls forth a different kind of fervor. Authors (with Laura Vanderkam) of a book called "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Minds" (2004), they are on a mission to remedy what they are convinced is a widespread neglect of exceptionally talented children. That means challenging the American myth that they are weirdos or Wunderkinder best left to their own devices or made to march with the crowd. "By denying our most intelligent students an education appropriate to their abilities," Jan Davidson warns a nation in the midst of a No Child Left Behind crusade, "we may also be denying civilization a giant leap forward." Precocious children are not only avid learners eager for more than ordinary schools often provide, the Davidsons emphasize; they are also a precious - and imperiled - resource for the future. The Davidsons, joined by many other advocates of the gifted, maintain that it is these precocious children who, if handled right, will be the creative adults propelling the nation ahead in an ever more competitive world. As things stand, the argument goes, the highly gifted child is an endangered species in need of outspoken champions like the Davidsons, who are role models for the "supportive, advocating parent" they endorse. The youths have their chance to engage in advocacy, too, and the Davidsons had selected very personable prodigies to visit Washington to publicize the don't-hold-children-back message. (Video presentations are part of the fellowship application process.) "Rounded like an egg" is the simile John Zhou used in the SAT-prep classes he taught (though he himself, a perfect scorer, didn't take any), where he recommends blending a well-honed talent with other interests to "erase the image of the nerd or the geek" - a balanced profile the Davidsons would surely endorse. Their fellows fitted it and proved ideal ambassadors of well-tended youthful brilliance. Admirably poised, they were getting precocious practice for the future eminence that, they were told more than once that day, awaits them. The Davidsons are not the first Americans dedicated to cultivating early promise and dismantling the popular image of highly gifted children as misfits, an affront to a nation founded on egalitarian principles. More than three-quarters of a century ago, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, armed with his newly minted I.Q. test, set out to challenge the myth that unusually intelligent and talented children are "puny, overspecialized in their abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic and morally undependable." His longitudinal "Genetic Studies of Genius" aimed to prove the opposite: highly gifted youths tended not only to enjoy more wholesome childhoods than ordinary kids but also to become extraordinary adults. His labors have since helped spawn a rich field of research and outreach devoted to exceptionally gifted children - though you might not guess it from the embattled rhetoric employed by gifted-child advocates in general, not just the Davidson Institute. The lament uttered half a century ago that in philistine America "there are no little leagues of the mind" could not be made in our turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy. Thanks precisely to programs like those run by the Davidson Institute, there is what you might call a farm system devoted to finding talent and developing it, and though the process isn't streamlined, it has become ever more extensive. You merely have to look at the r?sum?s of the Davidson Fellows, which list a stunning array of distinctions - from music and Intel competitions to math and science olympiads to participation in highly selective summer programs. Even as they sound the alarm, prominent advocates themselves celebrate the widening span of resources. Consider, for example, "A Nation Deceived," the Templeton National Report on Acceleration issued last year and subtitled, "How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." In its brief for more grade skipping and subject acceleration, it indicts an educational system that indeed gives talented students short shrift. (Federal money for the "gifted and talented" is minuscule compared with the quarter billion in this year's No Child Left Behind budget, and state and local efforts, though often better, are uneven.) Yet in the course of promoting the benefits of leaping ahead, "A Nation Deceived" also extols "a whole host of outside-of-school opportunities, including award ceremonies, summer programs, after-school or Saturday programs, distance-learning programs and weekend workshops and seminars," to which the talent search serves as a "gateway" for the topmost students, who also have a variety of early college options to consider, like California State University at Los Angeles's lively early-entrance program. Julian Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor and a pioneer of the gifted-child movement, marveled not long before he died last summer at age 87 at how a dearth of opportunities had given way to a "wealth of facilitative options." Perhaps the time has come to examine a rather different myth, embraced by gifted-child advocates themselves: that children of unusual intelligence and accomplishments remain a misunderstood, marginalized resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity. In fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era. Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child, and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind. In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while, the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a different version of the question arises, but it is considered less often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and future-oriented trajectory? If the mold-breaking creativity and innovation that advocates invoke are what society wants more of, perhaps it is worth asking whether anointing the ranks of talent-search stars with a sense of foreordained distinction and steering them onto a prize- and degree-laden fast track, the earlier the better, may have its costs. Of course, it is every parent's hope to help satisfy highly gifted children's zeal for mastery and give them fulfilling childhoods, and programs like those the Davidson Institute runs help make that easier. But a look back over a century suggests it may be hubris if the goal of the guidance is to shape truly exceptional destinies in adulthood. Well-intentioned efforts to smooth the path and hone expertise in a hurry might even - who knows? - be a hindrance in the mysterious process by which mature originality ultimately expresses itself. L ong before 20th-century psychology turned its attention to young geniuses, children with extraordinary powers were enshrined in myth as figures to be at once feared and revered. Baby Hercules had occasion to display his prowess in strangling serpents because jealous Juno, angered that Jupiter had sired a son with a mere mortal, dispatched snakes to his cradle. Twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple after Passover, "sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions," invites not only astonishment "at his understanding and answers," but also rebukes from his bewildered parents; they're unsettled by his insistence that he "must be about my Father's business," well aware that he isn't referring to Joseph. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the first early Christian attempt to fill in Jesus' life before that temple story, awe is mixed with terror. Jesus is an alarming little boy who doesn't merely make real birds out of clay and work other miracles but causes the death of those who scold him for not resting on the Sabbath and shames masters who try to instruct him in his letters. From the divine/demonic child of antiquity to the Romantic era's idealization of the innocent imaginative genius was perhaps not as big a leap as it seems: the prodigy was the very emblem of prophecy, in touch with mystical truth and powers outside of human time. In his different guises, the phenomenal young emissary came bearing an implicit message: adults beware. Lewis Terman, however, was not a man readily daunted, and his endeavor embodied the ambitions and the confusions - and the elusive predictions - that have marked gifted research and development ever since. Five years after he revised Alfred Binet's intelligence test, creating what became known as the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test, he put it to use in a pioneering survey of a little-understood population. When Terman began seeking gifted California schoolchildren to participate in his "Genetic Studies of Genius" in 1921, he was undertaking the first youthful talent search, eager not just to explore the nature of gifted children but ultimately to predict and improve their chances of future greatness. Convinced that intellectual capacity was innate, he was a eugenicist eager to see the brightest selected out and trained up to guide society. But he was also aware that no one knew when or how, much less which, buds of brilliance might ultimately produce glorious flowers. Terman became determined to see to it that the proverb "early ripe, early rotten" wouldn't describe their fate. He would do his best to boost, not just stand back and trace, the trajectories of subjects, whose well-rounded giftedness augured such promise. If that interfered with the purity of his findings and predictions, so, too, did Terman's methods for choosing his subjects. His approach made it less than surprising that the Termites, as the study participants were nicknamed, proved exemplary schoolchildren, not lopsided or eccentric at all. Terman's tool, the I.Q. test, was devised in and for an academic context, focusing on verbal and quantitative reasoning and memory skills, which meant scores at the high end correlated closely with classroom success. He was in search of the overall high performers, and his fieldwork further ensured a sample low on idiosyncratic characters. Since Terman didn't have the resources to comprehensively test the more than a quarter-million students in the California school districts he was looking at, he enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with the kids they considered the best, a group unlikely to include "some nerdy person in the corner mumbling to himself," points out Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in the scientific study of historical genius. Testing this cohort - as well as other batches of bright children he rounded up earlier - Terman emerged with an overwhelmingly white and middle-class sample of roughly 1,500 students whose average age was 11 and whose I.Q.'s ranged between 135 and 200, about the top 1 percent. (The mean I.Q. in this group was 151, and 77 subjects tested at 170 or higher.) It is worth noting that his methods selected for a conscientious breed of parents as well, given that lengthy questionnaires about their children were part of the drill. The data reviewed in the first volume of findings, in 1925, demolished "the widespread opinion that typically the intellectually precocious child is weak, undersized or nervously unstable." Terman's inventories - of physical and personality traits, books read, intellectual and recreational interests, family background - revealed children physically superior as well as more trustworthy and honest, and much better at school (where about 85 percent of them had skipped grades) than a nongifted group used for a rough comparison. On the East Coast, a fellow psychologist, Leta Hollingworth of Columbia University Teachers College - a forerunner whom the Davidsons salute - chimed in with similar positive findings about the gifted students she studied in two public schools. For the rare specimens with I.Q.'s of 180 or higher, the record was somewhat more mixed on the question of social adjustment (more recent studies on "psychological well-being" continue to conflict); Hollingworth drew particular attention to the problem of disengagement at school. But home life in their samples' comparatively well-off and small families seemed enviable. "Fortunately," Hollingworth wrote, "the majority of gifted children fall by heredity into the hands of superior parents, who are themselves of fine character and worthy to 'set example.' " With this portrait, the pioneers confronted a tension that exists to this day in the quest to rally support for the select cohort. Such a positive account of gifted children was good for their image, but less so for the message that, as Terman proclaimed at the close of the first volume, "the great problems of genius" require urgent attention. The young geniuses seemed to be doing nicely - perhaps all too competently, in fact. In the 1930 follow-up volume to "Genetic Studies of Genius," the Terman team betrayed a hint of defensiveness that reappeared in the 25-year and 35-year follow-ups. Anticipating later critics, they cautioned against undue expectations. "The title is not meant to imply that the thousand or more subjects who have entered into the investigations described are all potential geniuses in the more common meaning of that term. A few of the group may ultimately achieve that degree of distinction, but not more than a few." The urge to forecast, then as now, drives research on childhood giftedness - yet as Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent talk, precocity in general doesn't turn out to be a very reliable predictor of truly exceptional mature performance. When a colleague of Terman's, Catharine Cox, undertook the curious exercise of retrospectively computing the youthful I.Q.'s of 300 adult geniuses in the past (drawing on facts from their biographies), she found they were high - but far from the whole story. She also discovered the importance of other qualities, especially persistence and confidence. And she presciently warned that tests "cannot measure spontaneity of intellectual activity; perhaps, too, they do not sufficiently differentiate between high ability and unique ability, between the able individual and the extraordinary genius." Cox concluded that "the extraordinary genius who achieves the highest eminence is also the gifted individual whom intelligence tests may discover in childhood," with the crucial caveat that "the converse of this proposition is yet to be proved." Focusing on a small cohort of children with I.Q.'s above 180, Hollingworth's case studies couldn't supply clear-cut evidence that a high-testing childhood was a precursor of later extraordinariness. The few she followed into early maturity excelled in their early 20's at academic and intellectual work, and won honors. But she wasn't sure what to conclude about creativity and originality, plainly disappointed that her sample didn't display more. She speculated that this was partly because of nurture: "so harnessed to the organized pursuit of degrees," in one child's case, and subjected to an "education so scrupulously supervised and so sedulously recorded that he had little time for original projects" in another. "The gifted group at midlife," as the Termites were called in the 35-year follow-up study, were highly educated for the time, professionally very successful and well adjusted. But the Terman team tried not to sound too let down that "a majority of gifted women prefer housewifery to more intellectual pursuits," right in step with postwar America. In 1956, the year Terman died, a Nobel Prize was awarded to William Shockley, who as a California schoolboy didn't make the cut for the Termites but went on to help invent the transistor (and was later hailed as a catalyst in the creation of Silicon Valley, and also pilloried as a racist eugenicist). In 1968, another reject, Luis Alvarez, won the prize for his work in elementary particle physics. No Termite ever became a Nobel laureate, though some became well-published scientists and multiple patent holders. Alumni include journalists, poets and movie directors as well as professors, among whom psychologists have been particularly distinguished, perhaps not surprisingly. Terman, after all, pulled Stanford strings and did everything he could to help his prot?g?s, who had been selected for what are often now called "schoolhouse gifts" and had grown up as a self-identified group imbued, not least by him, with expectations of academically approved achievement. The fact that "the group has produced no great musical composer," as the study's authors wistfully noted, "and no great creative artist" perhaps wasn't so surprising, either. In part, of course, that is because such figures don't surface very often. In part, it was because "special abilities" weren't what they were testing for - the I.Q.'s appeal was its assessment of general cognitive ability, and the "globally gifted" child was the figure the Terman group fixed on. But in part it was also because when special talents were spotted in their high I.Q. mix, they resisted systematic analysis. Fewer than half of the kids who had shown distinctive artistic abilities stuck with those interests, though musicians were more likely to. (Even in music, the field best known for spawning prodigies, the yield of distinguished mature artists is low. Out of an unusually large concentration of 70 young musical marvels in the San Francisco area in the 1920's and 30's, only 6 went on to notable adult careers: Leon Fleisher, Ruth Slenczynska and Hephzibah Menuhin on the piano, and Isaac Stern, Ruggiero Ricci and Yehudi Menuhin on the violin.) Terman and his colleagues focused on a batch of precocious literary girls. The researchers set out to compare their work with the juvenilia of eminent writers of the past. But quality and development tended to be highly uneven. That was obvious, for example, in a sampling of the 100 poems produced between ages 6 and 8 by the prolific Betty Ford, an engaging girl with an I.Q. of 188 who was said to skip and dance as she dictated her poetry, if she wasn't feverishly typing it out by herself. Nor did the juvenilia of the great provide a steady standard. In fact, a panel of judges rated poems by the young Longfellow and Shelley below those of Betty and other nobodys. As Terman's team concluded: "One would hardly be justified in attempting to devise methods for the prediction of adult literary accomplishment. Too many factors other than natural ability go to determine the amount and merit of achievement." The 8-year-old Betty herself suggested as much in "Blackbirds," which the judges rated among the poorest of her poems: "But to tell what I have in mind,/Is harder by far, than to guess/What the twitter of those birds mean,/As they spatter their words about." The Stanford-Binet I.Q. test reached middle age along with the Termites, looking disappointingly staid itself. At least it did from the vantage of those increasingly convinced that youthful giftedness could not be reduced to a fixed and innate general intellectual ability or potential. In postwar America, the terms "gifted" and "talented" crowded out "genius," which sounded suspiciously elitist, and a quest was under way for a wider, democratic conception of human excellence. Psychologists pushed toward a more multifaceted understanding of giftedness, turning their attention to "divergent thinking" and creative capacities - fluency, originality, flexibility - as well as to a wider range of less distinctively intellectual abilities, like "task commitment." It was time, too, to take a more interactive, social view of the emergence and growth of talent, whose very existence in childhood, after all, depended on adult recognition. Youthful giftedness could not be fully appreciated, or cultivated, without viewing it as a social construct, a capacity that flourishes thanks to a confluence of forces: a domain of knowledge with clearly demarcated rules a child can master, adult models and mentors ready to assist and a receptive cultural context. All of these factors help explain why highly structured, permanently valued fields like music and math prove especially hospitable to prodigies. It's also why precocious mental calculators and map makers, for example, were once a sought-after variety of prodigy and no longer are. Some 50 years after Terman, giftedness was a social construct in flux and in the spotlight. The first federal definition of "children capable of high performance," announced in the Office of Education's Marland Report of 1972, which led to legislation on education for the gifted, was a symptomatic catch-all. The formulation covered students "with demonstrated achievement and/or ability in any of the following areas, singly or in combination: general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, visual- or performing-arts aptitude, psychomotor ability." The lineup still led off with what Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College and the author of "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities" (1996), describes as "the smooth and even image of the globally gifted child." Yet narrower talents - and perhaps quirkier and more uneven ones - now received independent billing, for the old faith had been shaken that I.Q. and creativity were so closely correlated after all. The problem was, there were no good tools for tracking skills like "creative or productive thinking," and in any case, what could that really mean in childhood, a period dedicated to mastering, not generating, knowledge? Looking back to the 1980's, David Henry Feldman, who teaches child development at Tufts University and is the author, with Lynn T. Goldsmith, of "Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential" (1986), recalls a sense of frustration with psychometricians and with "creativity as measured by creativity tests, as in how many ways can you use or describe a brick" - but also a sense of ferment. He was busy examining the uncanny extremes that Terman's study had skirted - Feldman's book probes six specialized prodigies and their hothouselike homes - and he found himself sharing ideas with an eclectic array of psychologists tackling the development of creativity from different angles. Among them were Howard Gardner, who was soon to begin work on his theory of "multiple intelligences," and Howard Gruber and Dean Keith Simonton, both busy looking at the history of creative eminence. But the impulse to "recharge" the prodigy notion with some of its "original power and mystery," as Feldman put it in his book, failed to gather scientific momentum, he now ruefully admits. (He awaits further brain research.) In the meantime, a less global assessment method than the I.Q. exam had proved itself ideal for identifying the most familiar item on that Marland Report list of special capacities, "specific academic aptitude." There is nothing like a ready tool, and a numerical measure, to cut a phenomenon down to more accessible - and usable - size in America. The test was the SAT, which Julian Stanley, who established Johns Hopkins as a center of gifted education and research, went ahead and administered in 1969 to an 8th-grade math whiz he had heard was not only excelling in a summer computer course at Hopkins but also helping graduate students. Joe aced the math portion. It emerged that among children under 13 who scored in the very highest percentiles on grade-level standardized tests, there were some who could match or outperform the average high-school senior SAT-taker, particularly on the math section, but also on the verbal section and sometimes on both. The SAT could thus be used as a device for winnowing the top and tiptop performers in specific areas very early. With the help of colleagues, Stanley inaugurated the Johns Hopkins talent search and began gathering subjects for the second-most-famous longitudinal gifted study: the continuing Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which includes a superselect cohort of students who scored 700 or above on the math or the verbal section before turning 13 (a feat performed by 1 in 10,000 children, those the Davidsons and others label "profoundly gifted"). Intervention was Stanley's real goal, and acceleration - not mere enrichment - became his mission, which meant packing the earliest SMPY phenoms off to college very young. Soon Johns Hopkins had started intensive summer programs where students could devour whole-year math courses, and before long literature classes too, in mere weeks. The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth model caught on. Stanley helped start centers at Duke and Northwestern, and there are now programs as well at the University of Denver, the University of Iowa and Vanderbilt University. "The idea that we should try to make a universal man out of one person isn't appealing to me somehow," Stanley once said, not sharing Terman's interest in the omnibus genius. Instead he and his team emphasized a more specialized vision: to spot children's narrower talent as linguistic or numerical "symbol analyzers" and, by supporting it early and intensively, help spur them on to excel in that field as adults. It is an endeavor, they have pointed out, right in step with the spirit of the information age that was dawning as the SMPY unfolded. What began as a regional talent search has become national, annually testing nearly a quarter-million students. Last year the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth alone recognized about 400 students who scored above 700 on either or both sections - which suggests the net is quite successful in catching the top kids. In the SMPY's most select group of high scorers - the 1 in 10,000 cohort - almost all have enjoyed some form of academic acceleration, and Stanley's hope of orchestrating self-fulfilling prophecies so far seems mostly to have panned out. Early adolescent math or verbal trajectories are borne out in about two-thirds of the cases, with the notable exception that high verbal males are as likely to pursue an undergraduate degree in the sciences as in the humanities and arts. Advanced degrees are far more common in this SMPY group than in the general population. Participants also more often receive tenure and take out patents, cited as evidence that the SAT measures "much more than book-learning potential." As SMPY researchers await the analysis of data on the cohort at age 50, it is worth noting their scaled-down accomplishment. They have created what amounts to effective early career-profiling - an instrumental goal rather different from the inspirational visions of their predecessors. Where Hollingworth sought cultural "originations" from her highest I.Q. cohort (not just cultural "conservation"), the new mission is to answer the need for "human-capital specialization" by fine-tuning and facilitating particular expertise earlier and faster. It is hard to say what might have become of these already high-scoring middle schoolers had they never sat for the SAT and enjoyed summer courses and been anointed as extra-special. Stanley and his associates have not aspired to conduct a rigorously controlled experiment. They do like to claim, though, that if they had been in charge, the future Nobel laureates Shockley and Alvarez would have made the cut. What they neglect to note is that the two of them didn't need finding. It is interesting, though, to wonder what difference, if any, it might have made to Shockley's career had his alternately domineering and indulgent mother received guidance in rearing her brilliant but obnoxious son. And who knows what might have happened had Shockley received an early (nonmaternal) imprimatur of promise and a chance to mingle with brilliant peers - rather than the insult, which reportedly rankled him all his life, of scoring too low (129) to qualify for the Terman study. Might he have avoided his late-life notoriety? Or is it conceivable that he might not have helped invent the transistor at all? There is no predicting the fate of the fellows anointed by the Davidson Institute over the past five years, and of course the award itself is just one identity-marking moment for them. But the emergence of this junior MacArthur grant at the turn of the millennium points up the persistent tensions in talent development. On the one hand, it is worth wondering whether the inflated rhetoric of adult approval might prove a burden of sorts for children who are already much lauded. Leta Hollingworth advised long ago against placing highly gifted children "in a position which will be a constant stimulus to live up to the role of child prodigy" and warned against overusing "genius," a term generally understood to imply domain-altering powers no child can possibly yet have. Confidence is a crucial ingredient of success in carving out a distinctive path, but too many early plaudits can undermine risk-taking and drive. Outsize external expectations can also be daunting for precocious learners and performers as they make the maturational leap from the work of mastering rules and skills to the challenge of asserting more self-conscious control of their gifts. On the other hand, the Davidsons' revival of the reverent terminology is a reminder that precocious accomplishments are wondrous in themselves: the monumental efforts and results children are capable of can be amazing, never mind what those children may (or may not) go on to become. These are awards for hard-earned achievement, not for test-taking ability or abstract potential, Jan Davidson emphasizes as she explains why she feels it is appropriate for the fellows to speak to the press and be saluted by senators and congressmen. By the same token, she doesn't want to see public attention drawn to the other lucky beneficiaries of the Institute's help, the 750 Young Scholars, who are selected merely "for being smart, a God-given gift." The arduous fellowship application (which asks about the labors and mentors involved, and the social significance envisaged) is wisely geared to older adolescents: despite the talk of "prodigies," only 3 of this year's 17 are younger than 16. In Washington, effusions over the fellows' precocious promise and polish are offset by an emphasis on their persistence and their initiative in seeking out guidance - surely a better identity than "genius" for kids with, let's hope, lots of exploratory stumbling ahead of them. At the evening reception in the Library of Congress, John Zhou and the other dark-suited teenage scientists seemed to be in their element, chatting over the hors d'oeuvres as if they were veterans of public events like this - which the handsome Lucas Moller, who was clearly practiced at answering lay inquiries, gave every sign of being. Moller, a 17-year-old from Moscow, Idaho, has been researching Mars dust ever since fifth grade, when at the suggestion of his scientist father he submitted an entry to a NASA-sponsored school contest and won. It was the beginning of a relationship with a NASA mentor, which has led him on to other related projects and assorted conferences. The basic pattern proved to be common. Entering competitions and finding internships or connections, governmental or academic: from Stephanie Hon (working on Alzheimer's) to Milana Zaurova (studying malignant brain cancer), nearly every science/technology fellow had a similar tale of closely mentored opportunity to tell in the morning discussions that the Davidsons videotaped for clips to quote from when they lecture. It was not quite grist for the "genius denied" paradigm: if schools couldn't offer direct help, no fellow said schools actively stood in the way. In fact, with all the enabling institutions, it was sometimes hard to tell exactly where and how the young scientists' drives originated. Over lunch, John Zhou's mother - whose husband left China after Tiananmen Square, with her following later - confessed that she had despaired that her bored sixth grader's energy was disappearing into computer games, only to be reassured when she succeeded in redirecting it into Web design, and he became a whirlwind of accomplishment (even setting up a site for a branch of his city's library). "I don't know if I was going to fall through the cracks, like my mother said," John said with a laugh. He was more inclined to credit the example of other purposeful kids as the real catalyst for his many endeavors. As a group, the scientific fellows are definitely not lacking in passion, the galvanic trait everyone invokes these days, including the Davidsons and the fellows themselves. Bob and Jan astutely pressed the kids to also discuss their frustrations - a darker side of intense commitment that too often gets left out, notes Felice Kaufmann, a psychologist who has been following up on a similar group, called the Presidential Scholars. The young scientists obliged. Stephanie Hon, for example, was crushed to think six weeks of research had been in vain, only to discover that a computer glitch accounted for her nonresults - "the best of both worlds," as she put it, "taste the failure but still have the success." No one could say these fellows lack tenacity. What they wouldn't be confused with, though, is that figure of lab lore, the unkempt obsessive pursuing the experiment everybody says is fruitless, or the kid outdoors absorbed for hours watching insects. These are well-connected youths with timely projects - security devices and computer innovations, as well as urgent diseases - who have kept very busy excelling at a well-tailored array of other interests as well, from the saxophone to ballroom dancing and the Boy Scouts. The musician fellows did not blend in quite so effortlessly that evening, since two of the four of them looked rather young to be mingling at a reception in such an elegant setting: Marc Yu, who plays the cello in addition to the piano, and the 12-year-old Karsten Gimre, also a pianist (as well as a sophomore at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore., majoring in math and physics). When it comes to "true" prodigies, preadolescents with spectacular abilities, the Davidson Institute follows the historical pattern of finding them mainly in the realm of music. In publicly touting the very young performers as prodigies, the Institute steps into an ongoing debate. For at least a quarter century now, there has been "a benevolent conspiracy" among influential musical figures to fend off burnout by trying to foster "a more humanistic, nonexploitative approach to the development of talent," as the writer Marie Winn put it in a New York Times Magazine article in 1979. What a researcher named Jeanne Bamberger has termed a "midlife" crisis seems to occur for prodigious young musicians: a transitional period of cognitive and emotional maturation during which only some performers manage to move beyond intuitive imitation to a more reflective sense of direction. Parents must carve out space for precocious players to "have a childhood. . .an adolescence," according to influential figures like Itzhak Perlman; resist the pressure, they urge, to "get management" and a packed schedule of practice and performance. Yet pressure also unavoidably goes with the terrain of musical promise. After all, even if most musicians with phenomenal early talent won't emerge as great mature artists, the stars of the future will surely have been young phenomenons. Marc's mother is well aware of that - and knows that constructive practice at Marc's age requires an adult at his side. So does Marc, who appreciates how much work his idols Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang devoted to honing the technique that no virtuoso can do without. The message for kids that Marc passed on in his session with the Davidsons will no doubt be their most used quotation. "You should play Game Boy less," he said in his slightly lisping cadence, "and you should practice more." Marc's cello teacher understandably worries about all the attention (he has been on "The Tonight Show" and "Oprah"), yet this bubbly boy who can bear down on his music with undaunted intensity seems proof of the pleasure - never mind future fame - this kind of driven focus can bring. Karsten, who by age 6 had already placed first in the International Young Artists Concert at the Kennedy Center, couldn't help casting more of a shadow with his listlessness in his morning session with the Davidsons. To their opening question about how he got started on the piano, he quietly replied: "Actually, I didn't want to do it. My mother wanted me to have something to do when I was older. And then I liked it." Asked at the end about what lay ahead, he said, "I really don't know what I'm doing," adding with a sigh that he would "just graduate in math and physics." By then it had become clear that Karsten, even before facing any subtle maturational challenges of adolescence, had run into a physical obstacle: elbow tendonitis had forced a hiatus in his playing, he said, and now his wrist hurt. Though he is feeling better, it was the kind of setback that could well leave a phenomenal performer sounding temporarily adrift. As the Library of Congress reception was breaking up, the literary laureate was standing off to the side, feeling "very weird," she commented. Heidi Kaloustian, the only fellow in literature, hastened to say she had "great respect for science," but the evening had brought home to her just what a different place she was in from the young researchers. A professional path seemed to open out before them, with scientific papers already in the works for some, patent possibilities in view for others, further lab options surely ahead for all. Almost as if in sisterly solidarity, Maia Cabeza, the lone girl musician, came up to ask Heidi eagerly whether her portfolio - which, along with her poetry, contains a striking trio of fictional portraits of female coming-of-age ordeals in other cultures - was going to be published. Trying not to sound too appalled, Heidi answered: "I wouldn't dream of trying. I have so much more to learn." Heidi confided that the fellowship, though hugely welcome, has also been daunting. "I have to top something when I'm not even sure how I did it." It is not that she lacked teachers; she felt indebted to one in particular, and had a fabulous summer with other artistic kids at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan. Her spirited mother, an avid reader and nurse, who, instead of whisking her daughters to a round of activities, made sure they had lots of time with books, clearly has inspired confidence in her daughter. Still, to have an imagination like Heidi's is to be aware of how mysterious the future twists and turns may be (and how rarely $50,000 drops down on struggling writers). Unexpectedly, given that nonverbal brilliance is popularly associated with an aura of weirdness, it is the Davidson Fellows outside the realms of math, science and technology who look quirky by comparison, kids who have embarked on sometimes unwieldy projects that propel them they are not quite sure where. With criteria far less clear-cut in the nonquantitative fields, the institute's judges (who are anonymous) are evidently eager to reward reach and a degree of intellectual nonconformity, and on one occasion extreme youth: a 10-year-old named Alexandra Morris received a fellowship for her literary work. (There is even an "outside the box" category, though so far no winners.) The first year of the fellowships, 2001, 15-year-old Daniel Ohrenstein was awarded for tackling "The Endeavor of Seeing the Essential Nature of Existence," a series of rather woolly philosophical lectures that Ohrenstein, now an engineering major, says he shies from rereading since he has become a convert to "clear thinking" and "vowed never to use the words 'everything' and 'nothing' again." That same year, 16-year-old Rachel Emery says she was rescued by the Davidson award she won for an existential-fantasy novella written in what her mother calls the depths of depression. An eclectic energy has fueled her subsequent course through Simon's Rock, an experimental college designed for high-school-age students, and on to Wellesley, where she continues to work on several novels and to be, as she puts it, "constitutionally incapable of attempting anything on a reasonable scale." For caution about forecasting and scripting the futures of the highly gifted, there is no better place to look than the past. History has plenty of humbling examples, one of them cited by the psychologist Howard Gruber, who observed that "any fellowship-awards committee comparing young [Thomas] Huxley's plans when setting out on the voyage of the Rattlesnake with young Darwin's plans when setting out on the voyage of the Beagle - both wrote them down in a page or so - would have given first place to Huxley and put Darwin on the waiting list." It was precisely Huxley's impressive "hard-edged analytic objectivism," Gruber speculated, that may have proved a handicap, where Darwin's vaguer, receptive cast of mind was crucial. "When someone asked Albert Einstein, 'What is your key to success?' " Dean Keith Simonton says, his answer was "I'm just curious." Simonton went on: "How do you cultivate that? It's a hard thing to do." He notes that Einstein himself "couldn't be mentored, refused to listen to his teachers, went his own way." Nobody, of course, expects to handpick the next Einstein. Still, it is worth remembering that the solicitously individualized "scaffolding" for the highly gifted that experts currently recommend, and the pre-professional alacrity that programs like the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and the Davidson Fellowships often reward, are themselves experiments in progress. Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off, take a real risk." Creativity and innovation, he says he is convinced, depend on "exposure to the unusual, to the diverse, to heterogeneity," which inspires a "recognition that there are a lot of different ways of looking at different things." There are also all kinds of ways that this "awareness that there's more than one possible world" can dawn. (The fact that it is built into the immigrant experience is one reason, on top of an ethos of incredibly hard work, that Simonton says he believes kids of recently arrived families so often dominate the ranks of the spectacularly talented.) No one would recommend throwing more obstacles in highly gifted children's way. But as experts sound the alarm about the brilliant minds that aren't being found or are being frustrated, it is some solace to think that the real geniuses aren't necessarily being denied. They are biding their time and will take us by surprise. Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children." From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 22 17:44:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:44:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed:Waiting for Their Moment in the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman Message-ID: Waiting for Their Moment in the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/opinion/16wed4.html Editorial Observer By HELENE COOPER You can't get to Bukavu, Congo, from Monrovia, Liberia. Like just about everywhere else in Africa, the two places are separated by dense rain forests, interminable wars and impassable dirt roads that don't go anywhere. Yet they might as well be the same place. "Oh, finally, now I'm home," I thought as I crawled out of the tiny single-engine plane and jumped onto the landing strip of what passes for Bukavu's airport. It was about six months ago, and I was on a reporting trip throughout Africa. It was a weird trip for me because I was there to write about poverty and development, yet everywhere I went, from Accra, Ghana, to Mekele, Ethiopia and Kisumu, Kenya, I kept thinking that none of those places, for all of their endemic poverty or corruption, seemed as bad off as my own home country, Liberia. Until, that is, I got to Bukavu. After the semidesert of Ethiopia and the savannas of Kenya, Bukavu was otherworldly lush, with that tropical just-rained smell that often greets me when I go home to Liberia. Leafy, green mountains and valleys surrounded the teeming city, with rich banana trees and tea plantations dotting the countryside: the same luxuriant, verdant landscape we have around Monrovia. And the same inexplicable sense of abandonment that comes from having a population ravaged by years of pointless civil wars. Thousands upon thousands of young boys troll fetid, trash-strewn streets, with nowhere to go. Downtown buildings, long devoid of any commerce, are marked with holes from rockets, grenades and the various other projectiles common to all of the continent's numerous wars. A few private cars - mufflers dragging, crammed with 10, 15, even 20 people - travel the crater-filled streets, but mostly just the white United Nations S.U.V.'s. What struck me most, though, in Bukavu were the women. As I drove into the city, I passed women I have known all of my life. There were old women - old in Africa means 35 or so - with huge bundles of bamboo sticks on their back. In most cases, the burdens were larger than the backs carrying them as they trudged up one hill after another. There were market women in their colorful dresses - in Liberia we would call them lapas - huddled together on the side of the road selling oranges, hard-boiled eggs and nuts. There were young women and girls, sitting in front of village huts bathing their sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in rubber buckets. No electricity or running water was anywhere close, but one 10-year-old girl had dragged a bucket of dirty creek water up the hill to her house so she could wash her 4-year-old sister. These were the women I grew up with in Liberia, the women all across Africa - the worst place there is to be a woman - who somehow manage to carry that entire continent on their backs. In Liberia, when their sons were kidnapped and drugged to fight for rebel factions, and when their husbands came home from brothels and infected them with H.I.V., and when government soldiers invaded their houses and raped them in front of their teenage sons, these were the women who picked themselves up and kept going. They kept selling fish, cassava and kola nuts so they could feed their families. They gave birth to the children of their rapists in the forests and carried the children on their backs as they balanced jugs of water on their heads. These are the women who went to the polls in Liberia last week. They ignored the threats of the young men who vowed more war if their chosen presidential candidate, a former soccer player named George Weah, didn't win. "No Weah, no peace," the boys yelled, chanting in the streets and around the polling stations. The women in Liberia, by and large, ignored those boys and made Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who is 67, the first woman to be elected to lead an African country. I wasn't surprised that Mr. Weah immediately said the vote had been rigged, although international observers said it had not been. In the half-century since the Europeans left Africa, its men have proved remarkably adept at self-delusion. No one can be sure what kind of president Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated banker who was imprisoned by one of the many men who ran Liberia into the ground over the last few decades, will be. There are plenty of African women who have brought us shame, like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. But after 25 years of war, genocide and anarchy, it's a good bet that Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf will smoke the men who preceded her in running the country. It's not going to be that hard to do; she is following Charles Taylor and Samuel Doe, both butchers of the first degree. Ever since the voting results started coming in a few days ago, showing what the Liberian women had done, I've been unable to get one image from Bukavu out of my mind. It is of an old woman, in her 30's. It was almost twilight when I saw her, walking up the hill out of the city as I drove in. She carried so many logs that her chest almost seemed to touch the ground, so stooped was her back. Still, she trudged on, up the hill toward her home. Her husband was walking just in front of her. He carried nothing. Nothing in his hand, nothing on his shoulder, nothing on his back. He kept looking back at her, telling her to hurry up. I want to go back to Bukavu to find that woman, and to tell her what just happened in Liberia. I want to tell her this: Your time will come, too. From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 22 17:44:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:44:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Digital Chosunilbo: No Sex Please, We're Asian Message-ID: No Sex Please, We're Asian Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition): Daily News in English About Korea http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200511/200511100010.html Updated Nov.10,2005 18:25 KST Asia's rapid economic growth and the heavy stresses associated with it are taking their toll on people's sex-lives, a worldwide survey suggests. According to the annual global sex survey by the U.K. condom manufacturer Durex, people the world over have sex on average around twice a week or 103 times a year. At the bottom of the list was Japan, a nation with a word for "death from overwork," with 45 times per year, short of even half the global average. Singaporeans ranked second with 73 times. Nine Asian countries were among the bottom 10: India with 75 times, Indonesia with 77, Hong Kong with 78, Malaysia with 83, Vietnam with 87, Taiwan with 83, and China with 96. Sexually liberated Sweden was the only non-Asian country with 92 times a year. Korea was not included in the survey covering 41 countries and 317,000 people. On the other hand, the Greeks were estimated to have the most vigorous sex-lives with 138 times of a year, followed by Croatians with 134 times. Serbians and Mongolians came in joint third place with 128 times, followed by France (120), Britain (118), the Netherlands and Poland (115), the U.S. (113) and Australia (108). From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:19:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:19:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Times: Caution! Mind under construction Message-ID: Caution! Mind under construction http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8123-1856545,00.html Body&Soul teen special November 05, 2005 It?s not just the hormones, says Vivienne Parry. During puberty teenagers? brains are undergoing a radical readjustment When the hormones start to arrive by the truckload at puberty, something very strange happens to children. They can turn overnight from sweet, adorable creatures into an unpredictable and combustible blend of know-it-all arrogance and furious leave-me-alone vulnerability. They are spotty, moody, truculent and can?t concentrate for more than two minutes at a time. They also become hugely self-conscious, suddenly finding everything, including their parents ?sooo embarrassing?. And there is a darker side too. Soaring rates of death, three quarters of which result from accidents or ?misadventure?, illicit use of drugs or alcohol, risky sexual behaviours and the first signs of emotional disorders which may be lifelong. Hormones have a lot to answer for ? or have they? Puberty is undoubtedly an extraordinary hormonal event and humans are lucky that they on have to go through it only once, unlike most animals which go through this hormonal onslaught with every breeding season. The first hormone event takes place, unseen, between age 6 and 8 and involves the adrenal glands, which sit atop each kidney. They step up production of male hormones, particularly one called DHEA, which the body uses as construction material for other hormones. These androgens prime follicles for pubic hair growth and make the skin greasy. The next big step is when the brain begins production of a key hormone called GnRH (gonadotrophin releasing hormone). This is the true onset of puberty, although what triggers it is unknown. It?s not just age because age at puberty varies worldwide. Nutritional status is important, with percentage body fat especially so for girls. Pulses of GnRH then make the pituitary gland produce the hormones which will act on ovary and testes to produce sperm and eggs. The effect is dramatic. In boys, up to 50 times more testosterone is available than before puberty. It sculpts their bodies and jawlines, increases their muscles and makes them think about sex every other minute (as little as that? is the reaction of most 13-year-old boys). In girls, oestrogen rearranges body fat, and stimulates the growth of womb and breast. They begin to have periods and to ovulate, although very irregularly at first. In both sexes, body-hair growth is promoted. A range of teen traits is directly influenced by hormones. Spots, for instance, are caused by skin sensitivity to testosterone. Fridge-raiding is caused by higher levels of the hormone cortisol, which sharpens the appetite and makes adolescents seek the food that they need for growth. Not getting up until lunchtime is caused by alterations in the secretion of melatonin (see page 11). We can see what surges of reproductive hormones do to rutting stags or nesting birds in the mating season, so there?s no doubt that these hormones can affect behaviour, but they have never seemed adequately to explain the complexities of human teenage behaviour. Neither has anyone managed to correlate degree of teenage angst with hormone levels. But recently a whole new explanation has emerged. It was always thought that the brain stopped developing within a couple of years of birth. During pregnancy and early life, a huge number of nerve connections (synapses) are formed, but these are then pruned radically. ?It?s a way of making the brain more efficient,? says Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and an expert on the adolescent brain. She gives the example that, worldwide, all babies can distinguish the difference between the sound of the letters R and L. In the Japanese language however there is no difference and, after about a year, Japanese babies lose the ability to distinguish these sounds. They don?t need it. This example relates to the sensory areas of the brain and was long assumed to be true of the entire brain ? that ?plasticity? as it is called, was lost by about 3 years old. But post-mortem work in the Eighties on adolescent brains suggested something very different. It wasn?t confirmed until just a few years ago, when MRI scans of adolescent brains revealed the stunning truth. Not only is there major reorganisation in the teenage brain but it continues to develop until the early twenties. Puberty coincides with two brain events. A process called myelination, which massively increases brain activity. There is also a pruning exercise among synapses which have proliferated during childhood as the brain is fine-tuned in response to the environment: strengthening synapses used frequently, ditching the rest. The pruning takes place mainly in the pre-frontal cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for executive action ? a shopping list of the things that teenagers struggle with: priority setting, impulse inhibition, planning and organisation. The changes in the adolescent brain primarily affect motivation and emotion, which manifest themselves as mood swings and conflict with authority. The combination of a hormone such as testosterone, which drives bravado, with an impaired ability to reason, is an explosive one. The pre-frontal cortex is also responsible for our self-identity and for socialisation and empathy. Research has already shown that one effect of this brain reorganisation is a 20 per cent dip at puberty in the ability to gauge emotions from faces. This is likely to make teenagers less able to read social situations or recognise when they are treading on dangerously thin ice with authority figures. Dr Blakemore is currently researching empathy in teenagers, and her work suggests that this also seems to dip at puberty. ?It would mean they are less able to put themselves in other people?s shoes and imagine how they feel.? One aspect of teenage brains is that they get a bigger reward from nicotine and alcohol than adults. As a result, those who begin drinking before the age of 15 are four times more likely to develop alcohol dependence than than those who begin drinking later. Teenagers are by turns maddening and glorious. But, as they are caught in limbo between adult and child, we should treasure and understand them. Blame their brains, not them. If your child is between the age of 10 and 16 and would like to volunteer for a brain scan (in Central London) please contact Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore by e-mail at s.blakemore at ucl.ac.uk. The Truth about Hormones by Vivienne Parry (Atlantic Books, ?9.99) is available from Times Books First at ?9.49, p&p is free: 0870 1608080: www.timesonline/booksbuyfirst King of chemistry ALEXANDER MAYALL: ?I like science because it has a proper right or wrong answer. Chemistry is my favourite because it?s about what everything in the universe is made from and you get to look at the way it all fits together. I also find it quite easy. In my last project, for my Standard Assessment Tasks, I got a level 7 (the national average is 5 to 6). I found that memorising the symbols for all the different chemicals is the hardest thing ? it?s best to approach that like having to learn spellings. Experiments are fun. Something always happens and you?re never sure what. We did quite a good one with magnesium and steam; it made hydrogen. You can set that alight and then watch it burn. You learn the reaction that the metals have towards the steam. The teacher told us that the test tube might break ? and it did. I know that there are some moral issues involved in science. One of them is playing God ? now that reseachers are able to create life in an unnatural environment. Some people are taken aback at the idea of duplicating people. I haven?t made up my mind completely on this yet ? but if it helps keep people alive, I?m all for it. I think that science plays a big role in the world today. Especially in the discovery of new medicines. If a scientist creates a new medicine then that?s something that they deserved to be praised for.? Adolescent genius The fact that teenagers? brains are busy re-organising connections gives them a brilliant advantage over adults. Their thinking is unconventional, they are more open to ideas and change. It?s no accident that teenagers are behind some of the world?s great discoveries, particularly in technology: # Take Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron. She was just 17 when she met Charles Babbage, the inventor of the difference engine, an elaborate calculating machine and forerunner of modern computers. It was Ada, not Babbage, who saw that his machine could be used to manipulate symbols. Her contribution to computing has been recognised by Microsoft ? her image is on their product-authenticity hologram stickers. # Bill Gates, of Microsoft, began to program computers at 13. He started up his company when he was just 19. # Aidan Macfarlane is co-author of the book series based on questions sent to the TeenageHealthFreak.org website and is a cheerleader for teens: ?Teenagers see the world in a different way. Their brain is still plastic and disconnecting, so they question everything. They?re wonderful.? From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:19:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:19:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reuters: Scientist Find Gene For Fearful Responses Message-ID: Scientists find fear gene Nov 17, 3:32 PM (ET) [Thanks to Laird for this.] WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists may have found a gene for fear -- a gene that controls production of a protein in the region of the brain linked with fearful responses. Their finding, published on Thursday, could lead to new treatments for mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder and generalized anxiety. The gene, known as stathmin or oncoprotein 18, is highly concentrated in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with fear and anxiety, the researchers report in Thursday's issue of the journal Cell. "This is a major advance in the field of learning and memory that will allow for a better understanding of post- traumatic stress disorder, phobias, borderline personality disorder and other human anxiety diseases," said Gleb Shumyatsky of Rutgers University in New Jersey, who worked on the study. "It will provide important information on how learned and innate fear is experienced and processed, and may point the way to apply new therapies." Mice genetically engineered so they would not produce stathmin had brain irregularities and were less able to remember fear-conditioned responses, the researchers reported. Learned fear develops after conditioning -- as when a person is stung by a wasp and fears the insects afterward. These memories are formed in the amygdala. "This is the first time it has been shown that the protein called stathmin -- the product of the stathmin gene -- is linked to fear conditioning pathways," said Vadim Bolshakov, director of the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at Harvard University's McLean Hospital, who also worked on the study. Also, the mice showed unusual behavior. Mice instinctively avoid open spaces, but the stathmin-free mice showed no fear and often explored more open areas than normal mice, the researchers found. So the gene may control both learned and innate fear, the researchers said. The mice might be useful for testing drugs and other treatments of anxiety disorders, they said. From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:19:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:19:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] UPI: Group wants to see humans extinct Message-ID: Group wants to see humans extinct http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20051116-040458-3167r Make no mistake about it, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement isn't anti-child, it's more like anti-human. The VHE is dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth, founder Les Knight told Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle. With 16,000 people born per hour and a current global population of 6.5 billion, there are already more than enough people on the planet, Knight said. A 1994 study concluded a single person born in the 1990s would be responsible during a lifetime for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste, the newspaper said. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will necessitate the slaughter of 2,000 animals. "Wherever humans live, not much else lives," Knight said. "It isn't that we're evil and want to kill everything -- it's just how we live." Knight, who had a vasectomy at age 25, emphasizes VHE likes kids and says many of its members are parents as well as children. From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:19:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:19:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Winnowing the Field of America to One Representative Message-ID: Winnowing the Field of America to One Representative http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/books/review/18book.html Books of The Times | 'The Average American' [Mr. Mencken would be delighted with this book, even if what he said about the average Americano was far more profound.] Kevin O'Keefe THE AVERAGE AMERICAN The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen By Kevin O'Keefe By WILLIAM GRIMES All Americans can be average some of the time, but only one American, apparently, can be perfectly average all the time. Kevin O'Keefe, a marketing consultant, set out to find that person five years ago, armed with fresh data from the 2000 national census and a burning desire to pursue and comprehend the very thing he had spent most of his time avoiding: life as lived, defined and loved by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. "The Average American" is the logbook of that quest. Mr. O'Keefe tries, somewhat feebly, to put a philosophical gloss on his statistical journey. "If I could find the numbers, I could find the person, and if I could find the person, maybe I could find a piece of myself," he writes, but "The Average American," from start to finish, is nothing more (or less) than a clever game. The author starts with a pool of candidates that embraces all 281,421,906 official residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia counted in the 2000 census, and chapter by chapter, using the census and other statistical sources, introduces new categories of averageness that gradually whittle that number down to one. His eventual winner, and the community he lives in, comes the closest of all Americans to matching 140 criteria, from average height and weight to average annual rainfall. As a piece of statistical analysis, "The Average American" is wobblier than a three-legged table. A multitude of numbers are thrown around, some from official government sources like the Census Bureau and others from opinion polls and marketing surveys. The author does not actually insist that his winning candidate match each and every criterion. In many cases, it's enough that he belongs to the statistical majority. For example, the average American has 12.7 years of education, but Mr. O'Keefe decides that a high school diploma, which the majority of Americans have, would be sufficient. No one is likely to look too closely at the methodology, just as no one, listening to a joke, wonders why a rabbi and a priest would walk into a bar. "The Average American" is really just an excuse to play with numbers and overturn commonly held notions of what the average American does and thinks. It's also a golden opportunity for the author to hit the road, always traveling in a midsize car, and spend time with people like Myklar the Ordinary, a magician who carefully explains to his audiences that there is no such thing as magic, and Rich Bean, the first politician to run under the banner of the Average American Party. Not to mention an 88-year-old Brooklynite named Harry Average. It is not surprising to learn that most American families do not consist of a working father, stay-at-home mother and children. It is surprising to learn that such families account for only 7 percent of the population. In 1948, 4 percent of American said they were in favor of marriages between blacks and whites. In 2002 the number was 65 percent, and in 2003, 72 percent. The majority of Americans say they do not want to become famous. Mr. O'Keefe, ruthlessly swinging his statistical scythe, eliminates vast populations at a single go. Since most Americans live in a one-unit owner-occupied detached dwelling, or private home, more than 50 percent of Los Angeles County and 99.5 percent of Manhattan disappear from contention. The majority of American towns get at least some snowfall. Residents of those that do not fall off the list of contenders. So long, Florida, except for a few thousand residents near the Georgia and Alabama borders, as well as large parts of Texas, and all beachside residents in California from Santa Monica to Mexico. City dwellers and country folk also fall by the wayside, since most Americans live in suburbs. Gradually, the average American takes form. He (or she) spends 95 percent of the time indoors, thinks abortion is morally wrong but supports the right to have one, owns an electric coffeemaker, has nine friends and at least one pet, and would rather spend a week in jail than become president. He (or she) lives within a 20-minute drive of a Wal-Mart, attends church at least once a month, prefers smooth peanut butter to chunky, lives where the average annual temperature is between 45 and 65 degrees, and believes that Jews make up 18 percent of the population (the actual figure is between 2 and 3 percent). Mr. O'Keefe, a Manhattanite who married late in life, expresses more than average astonishment that most Americans, even though they do not live in Manhattan or mingle with powerful and famous people, describe themselves as happy and place a higher value on family than on work. He also comes across as a lot more average than he thinks he is. He's a lot less interesting than most of the people he meets, but his project is intriguing, combining as it does the elements of a detective story and the trivia interest of Ripley's Believe It or Not. With the clock ticking, Mr. O'Keefe narrows his search to 94 houses, and diligently makes contact with one adult resident in each, probing with his list of questions. "This is a joke, right?" one woman asks. Not on your life. One by one, his prospects flunk the test. One has too many cars. Another lacks a pet. And so it goes, down to the wire. Fittingly, the book's final chapter lies midway between a foregone conclusion and a twist ending. The author winds up in a strangely familiar place, talking to a strangely familiar figure. And average, even when distilled to its quintessence, turns out to be exactly what you'd expect. What's wrong with that? From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:19:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:19:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Washington With Kids: First the Museums, Then the City Message-ID: Washington With Kids: First the Museums, Then the City http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/travel/escapes/18downtime.html [Save this one permanently, even if you don't have children. Good advice for adults, too. I work right across from the Mall and have been going there on a lunch break every week for over twenty years. It's the greatest block in the world! Send me an e-mail if you plan to come to the area.] Downtime By ANNE GLUSKER LIKE many major tourist destinations, the nation's capital has two faces: there's Washington, place of public lives and public monuments, which is where most visitors venture, and there's D.C. (as residents refer to it), the private city where inhabitants live and work, where families eat and amuse their kids often in ways - and places - far from the tourist realm. The ideal Washington weekend borrows a bit from each world. The Mall, for instance, is packed with museums, and they're free, but Washingtonians know that the Mall can be an extremely tiring place and have devised ways to concentrate their visits so that everyone - both parents and children - is enriched without being exhausted. The Air and Space Museum may be a perennial must-do for many kids, but the National Gallery (Constitution Avenue between Third and Ninth Streets NW; 202-737-4215) makes for an adult-pleasing alternative, and its children's programs are innovative and well thought out (go to www.nga.gov/kids to find out about drop-in workshops, story hours and films). The Sculpture Garden, at the museum's northern end, offers ice skating in winter and jazz concerts in summer, and the outsize Oldenburg eraser and Scott Burton chairs present great juvenile art history talking points. Try to visit around lunchtime, as the cafeteria's food is several steps above what you'll find at most of the other Mall museums, and the sublime gelato (with fall flavors including pumpkin and cider) will be popular with all ages . Another great lunchtime museum stop is the new National Museum of the American Indian (Fourth Street and Independence Avenue SW, next to the Air and Space Museum; 202-633-1000), whose collection aims to present objects like cooking baskets and baby bonnets in context rather than as isolated art objects. The restaurant serves Indian foods from all over the Americas, and the fry bread ($2.75) is a carbo-loaded treat. A secret to making sense of the abundance of riches on the Mall is to edit well. At the National Museum of Natural History (10th Street and Constitution Avenue NW; 202-633-1000), head upstairs to the O. Orkin Insect Zoo to hold live insects in your hand or to see tarantulas being fed. At the National Museum of American History (14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW; 202-633-1000), a sure-fire winner is the downstairs transportation exhibition, where kids can see vintage subway and street cars, a steam locomotive and other items of interest to the wheel-obsessed set. For further forays into transportation, consider a visit to the Air and Space Museum's new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (14390 Air and Space Museum Parkway, Chantilly, Va.; 202-633-1000) near Dulles Airport. It's centered on a palatial airplane hangar and covers in three-dimensional form the history of aviation from the Wright Brothers era to the space shuttle Enterprise. But Washington is not just about museums. The city and its immediate surroundings offer a surprisingly wide range of outdoor activities, from hiking in Rock Creek Park to biking, fishing or renting a rowboat. The possibilities even include a dramatic waterfall of surging power. The National Park Service offers a series of free guided bicycle rides around the Mall organized around such themes as nature, landmarks or history. For information, call Jason Martz at (202) 438-4391. A bike ride along the placid C & O Canal's towpath will take you far from the hustle and bustle of official Washington. The park service offers guided bike rides there, as well as hourlong mule-pulled boat rides; call (202) 653-5190. An outfit called Better Bikes (202-293-2080, www.betterbikesinc.com) will deliver a bike to your hotel room and even throw in a local trail map, helmet, lock and backpack. Rates are $38 a day for a mountain bike or $48 for a hybrid, and $25 for kids under four feet tall. For a truly surprising adventure, drive about 15 miles up the Potomac to the Great Falls, which can be viewed from either the Virginia or the Maryland side of the river. As the water crashes, you'll have to remind yourself that you're on the Eastern Seaboard and not in some isolated national park out west. On the Maryland side, a sturdy wooden walkway provides both stroller and wheelchair access; it takes you out over the water and over to Olmsted Island, a naturalist's delight. Teenagers with bravado might want to attempt the aptly named Billy Goat Trail nearby. (On the Maryland side, the visitors' center is in the historic Great Falls Tavern, 11710 MacArthur Boulevard, in Potomac, 301-767-3714; there is also a visitor's center on the Virginia side, 703-285-2965.) IT'S easy to find ways to spend an hour or so of downtime in Washington. For those with small children, the train table at Barstons Child's Play (5536 Connecticut Avenue NW, near Chevy Chase Circle; 202-244-3602) will provide a welcome respite. The books section is stellar, a sort of minibookstore. If your children are in need of running-around time, head a few blocks west to Livingston Park (at the intersection of Livingston Street and Reno Road), an excellent neighborhood playground. And for some adult-child relaxation, Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Avenue NW; 202-364-1919), a world-class independent bookstore, boasts a good children's section downstairs, with a cozy hidden-away nest called the Rabbit Hole, complete with pillows and a few prebattered you-don't-have-to-buy-'em books. Hungry? A little-known fact is that Washington is a great pizza town, which of course makes it a great eating destination for kids. Pizzeria Paradiso, with outposts in Dupont Circle and Georgetown (2029 P Street NW, 202-223-1245; and 3282 M Street NW, 202-337-1245), has what many devotees swear is the best pizza in the city. The lamb and pork sandwiches are also fairly addictive. Pizzeria Paradiso's former owner, Peter Pastan, opened Two Amys with a partner a few years ago in the shadow of the National Cathedral (3715 Macomb Street; 202-885-5700). The name honors the owners' wives, and the pizza is outstanding. The appetizers are unlike any you'll find in most pizza joints, and include an unusual dish of deviled eggs in a Spanish-style green sauce, and suppli, a heart-stopping rendition of Italian fried rice balls. Meals at all these restaurants average $20 a person. For scrumptious blueberry pancakes on a Saturday morning or crab-cake sandwiches any day, head to Eastern Market (225 Seventh Street SE, 202544-0083), a wonderful old city market in a handsome 19th-century red-brick building on Capitol Hill. Breakfast or lunch is well under $10 a person. After a stroll or bike ride on the Georgetown section of the C & O Canal towpath, you'll be near the elegant new Leopold's Kafe & Konditorei (3315 M Street; 202-965-6005). Its d?cor is in the super-streamlined Design Within Reach mode but its menu is straight out of old Vienna. The seductive pastry case is hard to bypass, and the other selections run the gamut from eggs with smoked ham for breakfast ("fruehstueck" on the menu) to a hearty veal schnitzel. Prices range from $10 for a snack to $30 and up for a meal. Hotels in all price ranges abound in and around Washington (check the Washington, D.C. Convention and Tourism Corporation's Web site, www.washington.org, for options). A safe bet for families is the Hyatt Regency Washington (400 New Jersey Avenue NW, 202-737-1234), which has a pool in a health club available to guests for $12 a day at a convenient Capitol Hill location. Standard rooms are generally $179 to $219, but often less online or in packages. If you're on a budget or would like to stay in a residential neighborhood, try one of the two antiques-filled Kalorama Guest Houses. These B & B complexes are in the Woodley Park neighborhood (2700 Cathedral Avenue, 202-328-0860) near the National Zoo and in the restaurant-filled Adams Morgan area (1854 Mintwood Place NW, 202-667-6369). Rooms are $55 to $135 a night (children must be at least 6). From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:19:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:19:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Timid Mice Made Daring by Removing One Gene Message-ID: Timid Mice Made Daring by Removing One Gene http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/science/18brave.html [Thanks to W. David for this.] By [3]BENEDICT CAREY Scientists working with mice have found that by removing a single gene they can turn normally cautious animals into daring ones, mice that are more willing to explore unknown territory and less intimidated by sights and sounds that they have learned can be dangerous. The surprising discovery, being reported today in the journal Cell, opens a new window on how fear works in the brain, experts said. Gene therapy to create daredevil warriors is likely to remain the province of screenwriters, but the new findings may help researchers design novel drugs to treat a wide array of conditions, from disabling anxiety in social settings to the sudden flights of poisoned memory that can persist in the wake of a disaster, an attack or the horror of combat. The discovery may well prove applicable to humans, the experts said, because the brain system that registers fear is similar in all mammals. Moreover, the genetic change did not appear to affect the animals' development in other ways. "Potential clinical applications could be quite important" for people with "fear-related mental disorders," said Dr. Gleb Shumyatsky, an assistant professor of genetics at Rutgers, who led a team that included investigators from Columbia, Harvard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Brain scientists who were not involved in the study said the study's finding was unexpected. "The way I see it, there are three types of studies in science: one that moves a theory along, one that closes it and another that opens a new door altogether," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped finance the research. "This one opens a new chapter, introducing an entirely new molecular candidate for the study of anxiety, and we're going to be hearing a lot about it in the next 10 years." The researchers found the fear-related gene by analyzing brain tissue, in particular the tiny prune-shaped region called the amygdala, which previous studies had shown to be especially active when animals and humans were afraid or anxious. They found that a protein called stathmin, produced by the stathmin gene, was highly concentrated in the amygdala but hard to detect elsewhere in the brain. Using genetic engineering, the scientists removed the gene from mice and bred a line of the animals, all missing the same gene. Those animals developed into normal adults, as far as the researchers could tell, and learned as ably on standard tests as a group of normal mice. In one test, they learned to expect a small shock to their feet after hearing a loud tone. "They looked normal," Dr. Shumyatsky said. "They weren't stupid. They would run away if you tried to pick them up." But when presented with the same loud tone 24 hours later, the genetically engineered mice froze in place - a standard measure of learned fear - only about 60 percent as long as the control group. When left alone on an unfamiliar white surface, the engineered mice also spent about twice as long exploring as did the normal mice. This "open field" test is standard measure of innate caution. To be sure that it was the gene change and not some other quality that explained the differences, the researchers tested hearing and pain sensitivity in the altered mice. Both were normal. In the paper, the authors suggest that stathmin, the protein that the engineered mice were missing, may help brain cells form new memories in the amygdala, where unconscious fears appear to be stored. (Conscious memories are filed elsewhere.) In theory, a drug that inhibits the activity of stathmin could prevent or slow that process. That, in turn, might blunt the impact of traumatic experiences in people who are vulnerable to disabling memories of those experiences. Reducing stathmin activity in the amygdala might also allow people to overcome innate or learned anxieties. Dr. Shumyatsky said doctors already had a drug that acts on the same brain molecules as stathmin does; it is Taxol, a cancer drug. Taxol works throughout the brain, however, and not exclusively in the amygdala, which the new study suggests is the best target. "It would be very interesting to study things like this, but it is still very early," Dr. Shumyatsky said. "This study is only a first step." Still, it is a step that could take the study of fear in a new direction. In an e-mail message, Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University wrote: "While we are a long ways away, it is possible in the future that we will be able to identify amygdala-specific genes that can be used to play a role in amygdala-specific drug therapy. Studies like this are the kind we need in order to get to this point." From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 03:20:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:20:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: Opinion: Bicultural Europe is doomed Message-ID: Bicultural Europe is doomed http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/11/15/do1502.xml [Thanks to Laird for this.] By Mark Steyn (Filed: 15/11/2005) Three years ago -December 2002 - I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation: "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." At the time, this was taken as confirmation of my descent into insanity. I can't see why. Compare, for example, the Iraqi and the European constitutions: which would you say reflected a shrewder grasp of the realities on the ground? Or take last week's attacks in Jordan by a quartet of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's finest suicide bombers. The day after the carnage, Jordanians took to the streets in their thousands to shout "Death to Zarqawi!" and "Burn in hell, Zarqawi!" King Abdullah denounced terrorism as "sick" and called for a "global fight" against it. "These people are insane," he said of the husband-and-wife couple dispatched to blow up a wedding reception. For purposes of comparison, consider the Madrid bombing from March last year. The day after that, Spaniards also took to the streets, for their feebly tasteful vigil. Instead of righteous anger, they were "united in sorrow" - i.e. enervated in passivity. Instead of wishing death on the perpetrators, the preferred slogan was "Basta!" - "Enough!" - which was directed less at the killers than at Aznar and Bush. Instead of a leader who calls for a "global fight", they elected a government pledged to withdraw from any meaningful role in the global fight. My point in that symposium was a simple one: whatever their problems, most Islamic countries have the advantage of beginning any evolution into free states from the starting point of relative societal cohesion. By contrast, most European nations face the trickier task of trying to hold on to their freedom at a time of increasing societal incoherence. True, America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations, and then evolved into successful "multicultural" societies. But that's not what's happening in Europe right now. If you want to know what a multicultural society looks like, read the names of America's dead on September 11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Hispanic, Arab, Indian, Chinese - in a word, American. Whether or not one believes in "celebrating diversity", that's a lot of diversity to celebrate. But the Continent isn't multicultural so much as bicultural. There are ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that's it: "two solitudes", as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there's three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing We are the World. But if there's just two - you and the other - that's generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it's no longer quite clear who is the majority and who is the minority - a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward. Take Fiji - not a comparison France would be flattered by, though until 1987 the Fijians enjoyed a century of peaceful stable constitutional evolution the French were never able to muster. At any rate, Fiji comprises native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, 46.2 per cent are Fijians and 48.6 per cent are Indo-Fijians; 50-50, give or take, with no intermarrying. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Col Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first of his two coups, resulting in the Queen's removal as head of state and Fiji being expelled from the Commonwealth. Is it that difficult to sketch a similar situation for France? Even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs federalists in Quebec. Picture a French election circa 2020, 2025: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly. The Chiraquiste crowd give a fatalistic shrug and Mr de Villepin starts including crowd-pleasing suras from the Koran at his poetry recitals. But would Mr Le Pen or (by then) his daughter take it so well? Or would the temptation to be France's Col Rabuka prove too much? And the Fijian scenario - a succession of bloodless coups - is the optimistic one. After all, the differences between Fijian natives and Indians are as nothing compared with those between the French and les beurs. I love the way those naysayers predicting doom and gloom in Baghdad scoff that Iraq's a totally artificial entity and that, without some Saddamite strongman, Kurds, Sunnis and Shias can't co-exist in the same state. Oh, really? If Iraq's an entirely artificial entity, what do you call a state split between gay drugged-up red-light whatever's-your-bag Dutchmen and anti-gay anti-whoring anti-everything-you-dig Muslims? If Kurdistan doesn't belong in Iraq, does Pornostan belong in the Islamic Republic of Holland? In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 per cent to 31 per cent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 per cent to 44 per cent. So Europe's present biculturalism makes disaster a certainty. One way to avoid it would be to go genuinely multicultural, to broaden the Continent's sources of immigration beyond the Muslim world. But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancien regime of indolent geriatrics. France faces tough choices and, unlike Baghdad, in Paris you can't even talk about them honestly. As Jean-Claude Dassier, director-general of the French news station LCI, told a broadcasters' conference in Amsterdam, he has been playing down the riots on the following grounds: "Politics in France is heading to the Right and I don't want Right-wing politicians back in second or even first place because we showed burning cars on television." Oh, well. You can understand why the Quai d'Orsay is relaxed about Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third. You heard it here first. You probably won't hear it on Mr Dassier's station at all. From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Nov 24 05:18:59 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:18:59 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] Eshel and Pavel--time as a translator Message-ID: <28f.2cc76a.30b6a743@aol.com> Eshel--It's been much too long since we've communicated and I've missed you. Have I introduced you to Pavel Kurakin, from the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow? Thanks to Pavel I gave a presentation at the international conference Quantum Informatics 2005 in Moscow a month ago. That presentation stressed the fact that no quantum particle is an island. All particles in the real world are part of mobs. So understanding mob behavior is critical to physics. My example of a mob in motion was derived from your work on bacterial colonies and credited you heavily. The dialog below also owes a great deal to you--specifically to the questions you tossed me on information way back when. And as I continue the discussion, which I'll do below, you'll become even more a part of it. Howard In a message dated 11/23/2005 9:18:47 AM Eastern Standard Time, kurakin1970 at yandex.ru writes: hb: Time is a communication of past to future via the interpretive process we call the present. pavel kurakin: fantastic formulation. it could seem trivial but one point: "communication" means flow in both sides. Triviality turns out to be extreme innovation. this is what i call "hidden time" and what you call "mob emotions". I would add "plans". hb: Rich, rich thought-food, Pavel. My first intuition is that the communication called time is one-way But thinking through your inner time hypothesis and pondering the link to the future that the word "plans" involves, you may be right. The inner-time hypothesis is about two-way communication in which the present signals to a semblance of the future and moves according to the feedback it gets back. A plan, a sense of a future objective, plays a major role in Eshel Ben-Jacob's interpretation of bacterial colonies as creative webs. I also suspect a goal plays a role in the rules by which the present translates the past into future. Which brings us back to teleonomy. Teleonomy is biologist Ernst Mayr's way of smuggling a whiff of teleology back into legitimate science. Do you know about teleology and teleonomy? Here's a for more relevant question. If the present is the process that translates the past into the future, what rules does it use? And do those rules change as the complexity of the present and of the future grow? 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 Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Nov 24 03:50:34 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:50:34 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Commercial ISS and Lunar Resupply Options Message-ID: <2a0.e57d7.30b6928a@aol.com> The NASA report is extremely exciting. Congratulations on stimulating the space agency to think commercial. The report leaves out one tried and true component that could help achieve its goals--the X-Prize. A series of X-Prize contests leading to low-earth orbit, fuel depots in space, and eventually the moon and beyond may prove far more effective in mobilizing talent than inviting bids. The X-Prize competitors and sponsors have proven that a competition between technologies forced to show their stuff is far more convincing, exciting, and effective, than a battle between batches of paperwork. Howard NASA and the Business of Space STATUS REPORT Date Released: Friday, November 18, 2005 Source: _NASA HQ_ (http://www.nasa.gov/) American Astronautical Society 52nd Annual Conference Michael D. Griffin NASA Administrator 15 November 2005 When President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration in January 2004, he made many specific points, including one which has been little noted, but which we here all believe; that the pursuit of the Vision will enhance America's economic, scientific and security interests. He also made it clear that the first step in the plan was to use the Space Shuttle to complete the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS), after which the ISS would be used to further the goals of exploration beyond low Earth orbit. These issues are all closely related, and I believe it is time to discuss in more detail how the ISS will be used to accomplish them, and how it will fit into a broader strategy for 21st century space exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond in a way that will spur commerce, advance scientific knowledge, and expand humanity's horizons. We are entering the dawn of the true space age. Our nation has the opportunity to lead the way. It is an opportunity we are eager to pursue, and one which we are unwilling to postpone. But the exploration of the solar system cannot be what we want it to be as an enterprise borne solely by the American taxpayer, or even by the taxpayers of the nations willing to join with us in this enterprise. If we are to make the expansion and development of the space frontier an integral part of what it is that human societies do, then these activities must, as quickly as possible, assume an economic dimension as well. Government-directed space activity must become a lesser rather than a greater part of what humans do in space. To this end, it is up to us at NASA to use the challenge of the Vision for Space Exploration to foster the commercial opportunities which are inherent to this exciting endeavor. Our strategy to implement the Vision must, and we believe does, have the potential to open a genuine and sustainable era of space commerce. And the International Space Station will provide the first glimpses into this new era. Before we pursue this thought further, let us summarize a few statistics from the ISS program. On November 2nd, we marked the fifth year of consecutive human occupancy of the Station. The Station has hosted 97 visitors from ten countries in its approximately 425 cubic meters, a volume roughly the size of a typical three-bedroom home. Of these, 29 have been crew members of the twelve ISS expeditions which have flown to date. With the most recent spacewalk by Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur and Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev, 63 have been conducted in support of ISS assembly, totaling nearly 380 hours. And through the partnership we have with 15 other nations, we have learned to work together on an incredibly complex systems engineering project. While it certainly has not always gone smoothly, the simple fact of its accomplishment has been an amazing feat. My oft-stated view is that the international partnership is, in fact, the most important long-term benefit to be derived from the ISS program. I think it is a harbinger of what we can accomplish in the future as we move forward to even more ambitious objectives in space. Indeed, the value of this international collaboration was endorsed once again by a recent vote in Congress, which lessened certain restrictions placed on our ability to cooperate with Russia in the arena of manned spaceflight. This Congressional action helps to ensure the continuous presence of American astronauts on the station. It continues to reflect our government's commitment to nonproliferation objectives, while recognizing the value of international cooperation in space exploration. So, how can the ISS that we are building today help us to move beyond low Earth orbit tomorrow? To begin, we are focusing human research on ISS on the highest risks to crew health and other issues we will face on long exploratory missions. This research will help us understand the effects of long duration spaceflight on the human body, such as bone and muscle loss, so that we can develop medical standards and protocols to manage such risks. We have already had some successful anecdotal experience among ISS crewmembers with exercise countermeasures. Perhaps ISS-based research will one day help us to evaluate the efficacy of drugs to counter osteoporosis, or long-term exposure to the radiation environment, or to test advanced radiation detectors. The station will help us learn to deal with crew stress on long missions, to enable them to remain emotionally healthy. With the ISS as a testbed, we can learn to develop the medical technologies, including small and reliable medical sensors and new telemedicine techniques, needed for missions far from home. A milestone in that arena was achieved a year ago, when the journal Radiology published its first research paper submitted directly from the Station, ISS Science Officer Mike Fincke's account of the first use of ultrasound in space for a shoulder examination. The ISS can host, and test, developmental versions of the new lox/methane engines we will need for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), and many other systems that we will need for Mars. These include the development and verification of environmental control, life support, and monitoring technologies, air revitalization, thermal control and multiphase flow technologies, and research into flammability and fire safety. As I have often said, when we set out for Mars, it will be like sealing a crew into a submarine and telling them not to ask for help or return to port for several years. We can't do that today. We have to be able to do it before people can go to Mars. We'll learn to do it on the ISS, and later on the Moon. And so, fundamentally, the ISS will allow us to learn to live and work in space. And even though this research is focused on the tasks associated with setting up research bases on the Moon and preparing the way for Mars exploration, it will also benefit millions of people here on Earth. What we learn about bone loss mitigation and cardiovascular deconditioning, the development of remote monitoring and medical care, and water reclamation and environmental characterization technology obviously has broader benefits. One certainly would not build a space station to achieve these goals. But given that we have it, we intend to maximize the science return from ISS in ways that will benefit both space exploration and our society at large. But now let us turn to what I believe will be an even greater benefit of the ISS, and that is its role in the development of space as an economic arena. In order that we may devote as much of NASA's budget as possible to the cutting edge of space exploration, we must seek to reduce the cost of all things routine. Here in 2005, the definition of "routine" certainly should include robust, reliable, and cost effective access to space for at least small and medium class payloads. Unfortunately, it does not, and frankly, this is not an area where it is reasonable to expect government to excel. Within the boundaries of available technology, when we want an activity to be performed reliably and efficiently, we in our society look to the competitive pressures of the free market to achieve these goals. In space, these pressures have been notably lacking, in part because the space "market" has historically been both specialized and small. There have been exceptions ? notably in the communications satellite market ? but the key word here is "exceptions". Broadly speaking, the market for space services has never enjoyed either the breadth or the scale of competition which has led, for example, to today's highly efficient air transportation services. Without a strong, identifiable market, the competitive environment necessary to achieve the advantages we associate with the free market simply cannot arise. I believe that with the advent of the ISS, there will exist for the first time a strong, identifiable market for "routine" transportation service to and from LEO, and that this will be only the first step in what will be a huge opportunity for truly commercial space enterprise, inherent to the Vision for Space Exploration. I believe that the ISS provides a tremendous opportunity to promote commercial space ventures that will help us meet our exploration objectives and at the same time create new jobs and new industry. The clearly identifiable market provided by the ISS is that for regular cargo delivery and return, and crew rotation, especially after we retire the shuttle in 2010, but earlier should the capability become available. We want to be able to buy these services from American industry to the fullest extent possible. We believe that when we engage the engine of competition, these services will be provided in a more cost-effective fashion than when the government has to do it. To that end, we have established a commercial crew/cargo project office, and assigned to it the task of stimulating commercial enterprise in space by asking American entrepreneurs to provide innovative, cost effective commercial cargo and crew transportation services to the space station. This fall, NASA will post a draft announcement which seeks proposals from industry for flight demonstrations to the International Space Station of any combination of the following: external unpressurized cargo delivery and disposal, internal pressurized cargo delivery and disposal, internal pressurized cargo delivery and recovery, and crew transport. As these capabilities are demonstrated in the years ahead, we will solicit proposals for ongoing ISS transportation services from commercial providers. This announcement offers the opportunity for industry to develop capabilities that, once proven, NASA will purchase with great regularity, just as we regularly purchase launch services for our robotic spacecraft today. Once the announcement is on the street, we will receive proposals by late January, with the intent to execute agreements by May of next year. This competition will be open to emerging and established companies, with foreign content allowed, consistent with American law and policy. Proposals can include any mix of existing or new designs and hardware. NASA does not have a preferred solution. Our requirements will be couched, to the maximum extent possible, in terms of performance objectives, not process. Process requirements which remain will reflect matters of fundamental safety of life and property, or other basic matters. It will not be government "business as usual". If those of you in industry find it to be otherwise, I expect to hear from you on the matter. With this plan, and providing of course that we retain the support of the Congress necessary to carry it out, we will put about a half-billion dollars in play over the five years to promote competition that is good for the private sector and good for the public interest. I'm confident that this kind of financial incentive, on different terms than are usual with NASA, or indeed with any government entity, will result in the emergence of substantial commercial providers. Such successes will, in their turn, serve as a justification for even greater use of such "non-traditional" acquisition methods. As I have said in other venues, my use of the words "non-traditional" here is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because what we are talking about is completely traditional in the bulk of our economy which is not driven by government procurement. In this larger economy, when there exist customers with specific needs and the financial resources to satisfy these needs, suppliers compete avidly to meet them. We need more of this in the space enterprise. But as stated earlier, this is only the first step. An explicit goal of our exploration systems architecture was to provide an avenue for the creation of a substantial space economy by suitably leveraging government investment to meet its stated mission requirements. The architecture we announced in September was designed so that NASA would provide, but would provide only, the essential transportation elements and infrastructure to get beyond low Earth orbit. The heavy lift launchers and crew vehicles necessary to journey beyond LEO cannot, in anything like the near future, be provided by any entity other than NASA, on behalf of the U.S. government. The analogy I have used elsewhere is that NASA will build the "interstate highway" that will allow us to return to the Moon, and to go to Mars. We as a nation once had the systems to build this "interstate highway" leading out into the solar system, we should have retained and evolved them, but we did not. So we need to rebuild them. But the "highways" themselves are not, and are not supposed to be, the interesting part. What is interesting are the destinations and, particularly to the point of the present discussion, the service stations, hotels, and other businesses and accommodations that we will find at the "exit ramps" of our future "interstate highways" in space. It is here that a robust commercial market can develop to support our exploration goals, and eventually to go beyond them. I think we are at the start of something big, somewhat akin to what we saw with the personal computer 25 years ago. To my point, NASA's exploration architecture does what it must. It fulfills the mission required of it by the President, according to the terms of a major speech and written policy. It does so in a fashion which some have labeled as "boring" or "lacking pizzazz", but which others have observed makes efficient use of the building blocks that we as a nation own today, and in which the pieces "fit together like a fine Swiss watch". I believe these seemingly divergent views are merely two sides are the same coin, reflecting the fact that the plan delivers what it must, without including what it need not. Nothing else is acceptable in these fiscally challenging times. But the building blocks of our architecture could easily be used to accomplish much more, with the right leverage from commercial providers. To see how this is so, observe first that our "1.5 launch solution" separates the smaller crew launch from that of the heavy, high- value cargo, both on Shuttle-derived launch vehicle variants. While this approach allows us to meet lunar return mission requirements with U.S. government systems ? no external entities are in the critical path for mission accomplishment ? it does not exclude such entities, and indeed provides several "hooks" and "scars" by which their services can be used to facilitate or enhance the mission. By the time we are ready to return to the Moon, the ISS will have been completed and will be in receipt of routine commercial resupply and crew rotation service for, we hope, several years. So, if the plan for stimulating the development of ISS commercial crew rotation capability is successful, it becomes possible to envision the crew launch phase of the lunar mission being carried out on commercial systems. This would be a service we could purchase commercially, leaving the very heavy lift requirements to the government system, for which it is less likely that there will be other commercial applications during this period. Whether or not this occurs, other options are also possible. Astute observers will note that the Shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle (SDHLV) that we have proposed is not, as a rocket, being optimally utilized for its lunar mission. This is because some of the fuel in the so-called "Earth departure stage" is used to lift the lunar payload into Earth orbit, but additional fuel must yet be retained for the translunar ignition burn of over 3 km/s. From a purely architectural point of view, the SDHLV is an expensive vehicle, most aptly utilized for lifting only expensive cargo, such as the man-rated systems it carries. But in our architecture, some of its lift capacity must be utilized to carry fuel into low Earth orbit. This is unsatisfying, because when on the ground, fuel is about the cheapest material employed in any aspect of the space business. Its value in orbit (at least several thousand dollars per pound) is almost completely a function of its location rather than intrinsic to its nature. In contrast, the value of, say, the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) brought up on the heavy-lifter will be well over $100 K per pound, most of which represents its intrinsic cost. The additional value it acquires when transported to its new position in LEO remains a small part of the total value. Logically, then, we should seek to use the SDHLV only for the highest-value cargo, and specifically we should desire to place fuel in orbit by the cheapest means possible, in whatever manner this can be accomplished, whether of high reliability or not. However, in deciding to embark on a lunar mission, we cannot afford the consequential damage of not having fuel available when needed. Recognizing that fact, our mission architecture hauls its own Earth- departure fuel up from the ground for each trip. But if there were a fuel depot available on orbit, one capable of being replenished at any time, the Earth departure stage could after refueling carry significantly more payload to the Moon, maximizing the utility of the inherently expensive SDHLV for carrying high-value cargo. But NASA's architecture does not feature a fuel depot. Even if it could be afforded within the budget constraints which we will likely face ? and it cannot ? it is philosophically the wrong thing for the government to be doing. It is not "necessary"; it is not on the critical path of things we "must do" to return astronauts to the Moon. It is a highly valuable enhancement, but the mission is not hostage to its availability. It is exactly the type of enterprise which should be left to industry and to the marketplace. So let us look forward ten or more years, to a time when we are closer to resuming human exploration of the Moon. The value of such a commercially operated fuel depot in low Earth orbit at that time is easy to estimate. Such a depot would support at least two planned missions to the Moon each year. The architecture which we have advanced places about 150 metric tons in LEO, 25 MT on the Crew Launch Vehicle and 125 MT on the heavy-lifter. Of the total, about half will be propellant in the form of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, required for the translunar injection to the Moon. If the Earth departure stage could be refueled on-orbit, the crew and all high-value hardware could be launched using a single SDHLV, and all of this could be sent to the Moon. There are several ways in which the value of this extra capability might be calculated, but at a conservatively low government price of $10,000/kg for payload in LEO, 250 MT of fuel for two missions per year is worth $2.5 B, at government rates. If a commercial provider can supply fuel at a lower cost, both the government and the contractor will benefit. This is a non-trivial market, and it will only grow as we continue to fly. The value of fuel for a single Mars mission may be several billion dollars by itself. Once industry becomes fully convinced that the United States, in company with its international partners, is headed out into the solar system for good, I believe that the economics of such a business will attract multiple competitors, to the benefit of both stockholders and taxpayers. Best of all, such an approach enables us to leverage the value of the government system without putting commercial fuel deliveries in the critical path. If the depot is there and is full, we can use it. But with the architecture we have advanced, we can conduct missions to the Moon without it. The government does not need to have oversight, or even insight, into the quality and reliability of the fuel delivery service. If fuel is not delivered, the loss belongs to the operator, not to the government. If fuel is delivered and maintained in storage, the contractors are paid, whether or not the government flies its intended missions. If long-term delivery contracts are negotiated, and the provider learns to effect deliveries more efficiently, the gain is his, not the government's. Since fuel is completely fungible, it can be left to the provider to determine the optimum origin, size and method of a delivering it. And finally, though I would rather not do it, it is even possible that we could develop such a market in stages, with the first fuel tank provided by the government, and then turned over to a commercial provider to store and maintain fuel for future missions, and to expand the tank farm as warranted by the market. To maintain and operate the fuel depot, periodic human support may be needed. Living space in Earth orbit may be required; if so, this presents yet another commercial opportunity for people like Bob Bigelow, who is already working on developing space habitats. So the logistics needs of the fuel depot may provide more of the same opportunities that we will pioneer with ISS. Fuel and other consumables will not always be most needed where they are stored. Will orbital transfer and delivery services develop, with reusable "space tugs" ferrying goods from centralized stockpiles to other locations? The fuel depot operator will need power for refrigeration and other support systems. This might well be left to specialty suppliers who know nothing of the storage and maintenance of cryogenic tank farms, but who know a lot about how to generate and store power. Could these be standard power modules, developed and delivered for a fee to locations specified by the user? In the course of conducting many fuel replenishment missions and associated operations, commercial launch and orbital systems of known and presumably high reliability will be developed and evolved. Government mission planners will be able to take advantage of these systems, which will become "known quantities" by virtue of their track record rather than through the at best mixed blessings of government development oversight. There will also be a private sector role in supporting a variety of lunar surface systems and infrastructure, including lunar habitats, power and science facilities, surface rovers, logistics and resupply, communications and navigation, and in situ resource utilization equipment. There may or may not be gold on the Moon ? I'm not sure we care ? but we may well witness a 21st century gold rush of sorts when entrepreneurs learn to roast oxygen from the lunar soil, saving a major portion of the cost of bringing fuel to the lunar surface. Will a time come when it is more economical to ship liquid oxygen from the lunar surface to low Earth orbit, then to bring it up from Earth? This will all start to become "really real" in 10 years or so. As I see it, these are exactly the kinds of enterprises to which government is poorly suited, but which in the hands of the right entrepreneur can earn that person a cover on Fortune magazine. But it will take enlightened government management to bring it about, management as much in the form of what not to do, as to do. In the coming years and decades, NASA must focus on its core government role as a provider of infrastructure broadly applicable to the common good, and too expensive for any single business entity to develop. NASA must remain on the frontier, and must conscientiously architect its plans to favor the inclusion of entrepreneurs through arms-length transactions wherever possible, restricting the use of classic "prime contracts" to situations where they are the right tool, not the default tool. With the beginning of space station operations five years ago, we are now at a point children born at the beginning of the 21st century will live their lives knowing that there will always be people living and working in space. And the number of people who will be engaged in such activity will grow by leaps and bounds if we in government are faithful in executing our role in helping the private sector to step up to these new opportunities. I hope there are many entrepreneurs in this audience who have the vision to help us help them pioneer the commercial space frontier. You, and all those engaged in the quest that we are undertaking, have my sincere thanks and appreciation. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Nov 24 15:08:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 07:08:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Eshel and Pavel--time as a translator In-Reply-To: <28f.2cc76a.30b6a743@aol.com> Message-ID: If complexity increases over time then conscious entities would require new, larger scale abstractions in order to understand and possibly manipulate the whole. Steve H. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 9:19 PM To: kurakin1970 at yandex.ru Cc: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Eshel and Pavel--time as a translator Eshel--It's been much too long since we've communicated and I've missed you. Have I introduced you to Pavel Kurakin, from the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow? Thanks to Pavel I gave a presentation at the international conference Quantum Informatics 2005 in Moscow a month ago. That presentation stressed the fact that no quantum particle is an island. All particles in the real world are part of mobs. So understanding mob behavior is critical to physics. My example of a mob in motion was derived from your work on bacterial colonies and credited you heavily. The dialog below also owes a great deal to you--specifically to the questions you tossed me on information way back when. And as I continue the discussion, which I'll do below, you'll become even more a part of it. Howard In a message dated 11/23/2005 9:18:47 AM Eastern Standard Time, kurakin1970 at yandex.ru writes: hb: Time is a communication of past to future via the interpretive process we call the present. pavel kurakin: fantastic formulation. it could seem trivial but one point: "communication" means flow in both sides. Triviality turns out to be extreme innovation. this is what i call "hidden time" and what you call "mob emotions". I would add "plans". hb: Rich, rich thought-food, Pavel. My first intuition is that the communication called time is one-way But thinking through your inner time hypothesis and pondering the link to the future that the word "plans" involves, you may be right. The inner-time hypothesis is about two-way communication in which the present signals to a semblance of the future and moves according to the feedback it gets back. A plan, a sense of a future objective, plays a major role in Eshel Ben-Jacob's interpretation of bacterial colonies as creative webs. I also suspect a goal plays a role in the rules by which the present translates the past into future. Which brings us back to teleonomy. Teleonomy is biologist Ernst Mayr's way of smuggling a whiff of teleology back into legitimate science. Do you know about teleology and teleonomy? Here's a for more relevant question. If the present is the process that translates the past into the future, what rules does it use? And do those rules change as the complexity of the present and of the future grow? 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 Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Thu Nov 24 22:53:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 17:53:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reinventing Capitalism Message-ID: Howard, I'm about a third of the way through the book. It's a great deal of fun, but I'm going to have to wait to see if you deal with the issues I would raise. There's a huge tendency to elide concepts. We observe love in animals but yet there's the claim that love was invented during the European middle ages and so is a Western provincialism. We can speak of the idea of home in territorial mammals, but the idea of home also comes only when civilizations with real estate that could be located by longitude and latitude arose. Same with property rights. Animals have it, but it was only in Western Europe that property in intangible things like a business were rendered secure. (In Islam, whenever a capitalist amassed a big pile, it would be looted.) Now your book is very fine as a hymn to human creativity and I dug out the article in Current Anthropology on make-up during the Middle Pleistocene, which says very little about make-up, really. You say skin paint serves two purposes. One is to show I'm one of you, a member of your group. The other is to show I'm someone special you must pay attention to. You then argue that all this powers cultural evolution. You say we went beyond make-up to creating distinctive clothes. It took new tools to stitch mammoth hides together to make these clothes, and these tools found all sorts of other uses. Very well, but still I dislike make-up intensely. It turns out that I'm more of a Christian than I thought I was: Early Christian writers argued that, since God had created man in his own image, the modification of this image was necessarily a deviation, and, more specifically, a sin. Insofar as a man is not his true image, that is, the image of God, he must be fallen, alienated from God, so that masks necessarily embody man as sinful. By the same arguments, a person's appearances should not be different from the inward awareness God has created. More generally, masks embody sin itself, and in the Middle Ages ancient theatrical masks became the patterns for devils and demons, associated with Hell. Such arguments (and the deep-seated assumptions to which they are related) are clearly variants on the themes stated above. The mask makes manifest a reality, which is not just an absolutely false self, but an evil one, dangerous because it is a possible transformation, rooted in human freedom and in original sin itself. By implication, the true image is the person's own visage, which might, however, be seen as the mask of truer, higher, spiritual reality, regarded as both individual and divine. This view presumes the constancy of the inner, or our *selves*, which we fell cannot be changed, or should not be changed, by a change in outer appearance. We are, or should be, we believe, essentially the same person with a mask or without. Modern Western actors do not wear masks, although they may be 'character actors' or type-cast, just as ancient comic masks represented many 'characters.' The actor is successful when convincing identity is achieved with the role, although such skills continue to be regarded with ambivalence at the same time that the actor has become a more and more important example in modern life. It is not hard to see why portraiture (often from masks) has been such an important genre in Western art; appearance is the unique mask of the self. But for present purposes it is sufficient to note that our own attitudes are culturally specific, that masks point toward some of our most fundamental questions regarding self-identity and authenticity, and such beliefs are themselves deeply involved in cultural choices about the significance of masks and masking. --David Summers, _Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism_ (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 2003): Chapter 4, Images, section 13, Masks, p. 305. Your point that much of what many regard as wasteful consumerism is really creative play at work. It is well-taken, but I'll have to read on to see how you deal specifically with the Western legal foundations of property and the market economy. A generalized appreciation of human creativity does not imply endorsement of a quite specific set of Western institutions. You see, it's not the principle of trade that the anti-globalists fret about, nor any urge to return to Communism or even a return to conditions before capitalism, in the Western sense since the Industrial Revolution, but rather the feared consequences of globablism: McDonaldization, Disneyification, standardization, American "democratic captialism" running roughshod over all other ways of life, the leveling of the world's cultures to the lowest common denominator, growing inequality in this country and throughout the world, loss of jobs, an speeding up of the tempo of change beyond what is psychologically sustainable. You can surely add to the list of charges. I'll have to read further in the book to see how you treat these concerns, how you argue that what is feared won't happen in some cases and how, in other cases, these changes are actually for the good. I'll also be eager to see how you parcel out the "winners and losers in globablization" (Google this phrase and you'll get lots and lots of hits. There's a book coming out by a rock-solid economist, Guillermo de la Dehesa, by that title. The book has been delayed at least six months, though, so I can't report on it. I doubt it will go into culture very much, though. Frank From checker at panix.com Fri Nov 25 02:11:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:11:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: The food you eat may change your genes for life Message-ID: The food you eat may change your genes for life http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18825264.800.html 17 November 2005 IT SOUNDS like science fiction: simply swallowing a pill, or eating a specific food supplement, could permanently change your behaviour for the better, or reverse diseases such as schizophrenia, Huntington's or cancer. Yet such treatments are looking increasingly plausible. In the latest development, normal rats have been made to behave differently just by injecting them with a specific amino acid. The change to their behaviour was permanent. The amino acid altered the way the rat's genes were expressed, raising the idea that drugs or dietary supplements might permanently halt the genetic effects that predispose people to mental or physical illness. It is not yet clear whether such interventions could work in humans. But there is good reason to believe they could, as evidence mounts that a range of simple nutrients might have such effects. Two years ago, researchers led by Randy Jirtle of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, showed that the activity of a mouse's genes can be influenced by food supplements eaten by its mother just prior to, or during, very early pregnancy (New Scientist, 9 August 2003, p 14). Then last year, Moshe Szyf, Michael Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, showed that mothers could influence the way a rat's genes are expressed after it has been born. If a rat is not licked, groomed and nursed enough by its mother, chemical tags known as methyl groups are added to the DNA of a particular gene. The affected gene codes for the glucocorticoid receptor gene, expressed in the hippocampus of the brain. The gene helps mediate the animal's response to stress, and in poorly raised rats, the methylation damped down the gene's activity. Such pups produced higher levels of stress hormones and were less confident exploring new environments. The effect lasted for life (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 847). Now the team has shown that a food supplement can have the same effect on well-reared rats at 90 days old - well into adulthood. The researchers injected L-methionine, a common amino acid and food supplement, into the brains of well-reared rats. The amino acid methylated the glucocorticoid gene, and the animals' behaviour changed. "They were almost exactly like the poorly raised group," says Szyf, who announced his findings at a small meeting on environmental epigenomics earlier this month in Durham, North Carolina. "This opens up new ways of thinking about treating and preventing diseases caused by how our DNA is expressed"Though the experiment impaired well-adjusted animals, the opposite should be possible, and Szyf has already shown that a chemical called TSA that is designed to strip away methyl groups can turn a badly raised rat into a more normal one. No one is envisaging injecting supplements into people's brains, but Szyf says his study shows how important subtle nutrients and supplements can be. "Food has a dramatic effect," he says. "But it can go both ways," he cautions. Methionine, for instance, the supplement he used to make healthy rats stressed, is widely available in capsule form online or in health-food stores - and the molecules are small enough to get into the brain via the bloodstream. Rob Waterland from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who attended the meeting, says Szyf's ideas are creating a buzz, as they suggest that methylation can influence our DNA well into adulthood. A huge number of diseases are caused by changes to how our DNA is expressed, and this opens up new ways of thinking about how to prevent and treat them, he says. But Waterland points out there is still much work to be done. Substances like methionine and TSA are, he says, a "sledgehammer approach", in that they are likely to demethylate lots of genes, and we don't even know which they will affect. But he speculates that techniques such as "RNA-directed DNA methylation", so far tested only in plants but theoretically possible in mammals, may allow us to target such methylation much more precisely. >From issue 2526 of New Scientist magazine, 17 November 2005, page 12 From checker at panix.com Fri Nov 25 02:11:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:11:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Phil Rushton: Extended Kin Selection and Genes for In-Group Loyalty Message-ID: Extended Kin Selection and Genes for In-Group Loyalty Press release date: 14-Nov-2005: http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2005-11/cdri-gct111305.php Downloadable Article: http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton_pubs.htm Genes Contribute to Patriotism and Group Loyalty Research showing how genes affect group loyalty and patriotism was published in the October 2005 issue of Nations and Nationalism, an academic journal of the London School of Economics. Entitled "Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology, and genetic similarity theory," it shows how genes provide "social glue" in groups as small as two spouses and best friends or in those as large as nations and alliances. The evidence comes from studies of identical and non-identical twins, adopted and non-adopted children, blood tests, social assortment, heritabilities, family bereavements, and large-scale population genetics. For example, identical twins grieve more for their co-twin than do non-identical twins. And, family members grieve more for children who resemble their side of the family than they do their spouse's side. Also, spouses who are more genetically similar have longer and more satisfying marriages. Based on their DNA, two randomly chosen individuals from the same ethnic group are found to be as related as first cousins. Thus, two random people of English ancestry are the equivalent of a 3/8 cousin compared to people from the Near East; a 1/2 cousin by comparison with people from India; and like full cousins by comparison with people from China. The study's author, J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario said, "This explains why people describe themselves as having "ties of blood" with members of their own ethnic group, who they view as "special" and different from outsiders; it explains why ethnic remarks are so easily taken as 'fighting words.'" Human social preferences, like mate choice and ethnic nepotism, are anchored in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Adopting a "gene's eye" point of view allows us to see that people's favoritism to kin and similar others evolved to help replicate shared genes. Since in aggregate people share more genes with their co-ethnics than they do with their relatives, ethnic nepotism is a proxy for family nepotism. The paper describes the history of the Jewish people as providing perhaps the best-documented example of how genetic similarity intersects culture, history, and even politics. Jewish groups are genetically similar to each other even though they have been separated for two millennia. Jews from Iraq and Libya share more genes with Jews from Germany and Russia than either group shares with the non-Jewish populations among whom they have lived over the intervening centuries. Recent DNA studies of the ancient Hindu caste system has confirmed that upper castes are more genetically related to Europeans than are lower castes who are genetically more related to other south Asians. Although outlawed in 1960, the caste system continues to be the main feature of Indian society, with powerful political repercussions. The paper described the group-identification processes as innate--part of the evolved machinery of the human mind. Even very young children make in-group/out-group distinctions about race and ethnicity in the absence of social learning. ### Full Citation: Rushton, J. P. (2005). Ethnic nepotism, evolutionary psychology, and genetic similarity theory. Nations and Nationalism, 11, 489-507. Article Abstract: Genetic Similarity Theory extends Anthony D. Smith's theory of ethno-symbolism by anchoring ethnic nepotism in the evolutionary psychology of altruism. Altruism toward kin and similar others evolved in order to help replicate shared genes. Since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia is the 'dark side' of human altruism. A review of the literature demonstrates the pull of genetic similarity in dyads such as marriage partners and friendships, and even large groups, both national and international. The evidence that genes incline people to prefer others who are genetically similar to themselves comes from studies of social assortment, differential heritabilities, the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, blood tests, and family bereavements. DNA sequencing studies confirm some origin myths and disconfirm others; they also show that in comparison to the total genetic variance around the world, random co-ethnics are related to each other on the order of first cousins. Professor J. Philippe Rushton, Ph.D., D.Sc. Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton_bio.htm Tel: 519-661-3685 From checker at panix.com Fri Nov 25 02:11:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:11:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Toronto Star: A beautiful combination Message-ID: A beautiful combination http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1131750620270 MIRIAM J. LAW SMITH These are composite images of the faces of 10 women with the highest level of estrogen and 10 women with the lowest levels.The composite image of 10 women with high estrogen levels is on the left. Men chose it as the most attractive in the study. Researchers link estrogen to looks Nov. 13, 2005. 07:50 AM CHRISTOPHER HUTSUL TORONTO STAR _________________________________________________________________ Beauty, as it turns out, isn't skin deep. A study at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, has shown that attractiveness in females relates to the hormonal composition of blood. Researchers found that men tend to be attracted to women who have high levels of estrogen, a naturally occurring sex hormone linked to fertility. The report also found that women with high estrogen levels had more feminine features, such as bigger eyes, fuller lips and smoother skin. The researchers photographed 59 women between 18 and 25, who were wearing no makeup, and took a urine sample from each subject for hormone analysis. A group of men then rated the women in the photographs for health, femininity and attractiveness. The results showed that men were most attracted to the women who tested for high levels of estrogen. Miriam Law Smith, who helped carry out the research, says men were, in effect, choosing the women best poised to bear children. "From an evolutionary point of view, it would now make sense that men prefer feminine female faces because those are the women who have higher estrogen levels, and who are ultimately more fertile," says Law Smith. "In our evolutionary past, men who favoured women with feminine features would be choosing the more fertile female, thus would have had more babies and be passing on more of their genes." The study also suggests cosmetics do much more than merely add a touch of colour to a woman's face. Law Smith believes women wear makeup to mimic the facial cues that allude to heightened fertility. A woman with low levels of estrogen, then, would be more likely to wear more makeup. "What we think is happening here is that women are using makeup to cover up the cues of low fertility that would normally be found in the face," she says. It seems to work. In an alternate test, photographs were taken of the same women, this time wearing makeup. The rankings showed no correlation between beauty and estrogen levels. The women had successfully mimicked the facial fertility cues. Law Smith has been asked repeatedly if the study will result in new beauty treatments. The point of the experiment, she says, was not to find a way to enhance female beauty but to explore the workings of human attraction. She points out that while estrogen supplements have been known to clear up skin, they aren't likely to give a developed woman more feminine features. "We wouldn't suggest that this research could implicate the use of estrogen supplements to improving women's (attractiveness)," says Law Smith. "I would never recommend giving adults or adolescents estrogen in the hope that it would make them more attractive." That men are hardwired to be attracted to the women at the peak of fertility an affinity that doesn't lessen with men's age seems to paint a bleak picture for older women. But Smith Law says the test shows only men's initial reaction and doesn't take into consideration the other elements that come into play when choosing a partner. Interestingly, the phenomenon doesn't appear to apply when the genders are switched. "Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine-looking faces, but it's different in terms of determining attractiveness because masculine men aren't always found more attractive," says Law Smith. "Females tend to have a lot more variation on what they find attractive. A handsome, rugged man might ultimately not make a good father... Multiple motives contribute to female preference, whereas male preference, across all cultures and time, tend to favour the most feminine-looking females." Answer: The composite image of 10 women with high estrogen levels is the one on the left. From checker at panix.com Fri Nov 25 02:11:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:11:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Harvard Mag: Edward O. Wilson: Intelligent Evolution Message-ID: Edward O. Wilson: Intelligent Evolution http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/110518.html The consequences of Charles Darwin's "one long argument" by Edward O. Wilson Pellegrino University professor emeritus Edward O. Wilson, a scholarly giant of biodiversity and sociobiology, remains at heart a teacher. His latest lesson concerns the continuing consequences of Charles Darwin's "timeless and consistently inspirational" science. At a moment when discussion of evolution and "intelligent design" preoccupies American political discourse to a surprising degree, shedding more heat than light on the nature of life and life science, Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote. In November, W. W. Norton & Company will publish From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin. For this single, enormous volume, Wilson has selected the versions of, and written introductions to, each of the iconic texts: The Voyage of the Beagle ("intellectually the most important travel book of all time"); the first edition of On the Origin of Species ("the greatest scientific book of all time"); The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (the further step that "Darwin had to take...from the premise that evolution is universal"); and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals ("both an old-fashioned descriptive treatise and the most modern of Darwin's major works," which "could serve as a guidebook for novelists" -- and "as part of the foundation of modern psychology"). Wilson has also written a general introduction, placing Darwin at the very center of the revolution in modern life science and understanding, and an afterword, on the "noble yet troubling legacy" that unfolds today in the collision between religious faith and scientific humanism. In those essays, reprinted here, Wilson draws on his lifelong immersion in the scientific enterprise and his study of the foundational Darwinian texts to present his view surrounding these "great unanswered questions of philosophy." ~The Editors ~ o o o ~ We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system -- with all these exalted powers -- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. ~Charles Darwin The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) Great scientific discoveries are like sunrises. They illuminate first the steeples of the unknown, then its dark hollows. Such expansive influence has been enjoyed by the scientific writings of Charles Darwin. For over 150 years his books, the four most influential of which are reprinted here for the first time as a bound set, have spread light on the living world and the human condition. They have not lost their freshness: more than any other work in history's scientific canon, they are both timeless and persistently inspirational. From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, edited, with introductions, by Edward O. Wilson, will be published in November 2005 by W.W. Norton & Company. The four classics, flowing along one to the next like a well-wrought narrative, trace the development of Darwin's thought across almost all of his adult life. The first, Voyage of the Beagle (1845), one of literature's great travel books, is richly stocked with observations in natural history of the kind that were to guide the young Darwin toward his evolutionary worldview. Next comes the "one long argument," as he later put it, of On the Origin of Species (1859), arguably history's most influential book. In it the now middle-aged Darwin massively documents the evidences of organic evolution and introduces the theory of natural selection. The Descent of Man (1871) then addresses the burning topic foretold in On the Origin of Species: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." Finally, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) draws close to the heart of the matter that concerns us all: the origin and nature of mind, the "citadel" that Darwin could see but knew that science at the time could not conquer. The adventure that Darwin launched on all our behalf, and which continues into the twenty-first century, is driven by a deceptively simple idea, of which Darwin's friend and staunch supporter Thomas Henry Huxley said, and spoke for many to follow, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!" Evolution by natural selection is perhaps the only one true law unique to biological systems, as opposed to nonliving physical systems, and in recent decades it has taken on the solidity of a mathematical theorem. It states simply that if a population of organisms contains multiple hereditary variants in some trait (say, red versus blue eyes in a bird population), and if one of these variants succeeds in contributing more offspring to the next generation than the other variants, the overall composition of the population changes, and evolution has occurred. Further, if new genetic variants appear regularly in the population (by mutation or immigration), evolution never ends. Think of red-eyed and blue-eyed birds in a breeding population, and let the red-eyed birds be better adapted to the environment. The population will in time come to consist mostly or entirely of red-eyed birds. Now let green-eyed mutants appear that are even better adapted to the environment than the red-eyed form. As a consequence the species eventually becomes green-eyed. Evolution has thus taken two more small steps. Crabo cribrarius All drawings from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, by Charles Darwin, in two volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871) unless otherwise noted. Scans of drawings courtesy of Kathleen Horton The full importance of Darwin's theory can be better understood by realizing that modern biology is guided by two overwhelmingly powerful and creative ideas. The first is that all biological processes are ultimately obedient to, even though far from fully explained by, the laws of physics and chemistry. The second is that all biological processes arose through evolution of these physicochemical systems through natural selection. The first principle is concerned with the how of biology. The second is concerned with the ways the systems adapted to the environment over periods of time long enough for evolution to occur -- in other words the why of biology. Knowledge addressing the first principle is called functional biology; that addressing the second is called evolutionary biology. If a moving automobile were an organism, functional biology would explain how it is constructed and operates, while evolutionary biology would reconstruct its origin and history -- how it came to be made and its journey thus far. The impact of the theory of evolution by natural selection, nowadays grown very sophisticated (and often referred to as the Modern Synthesis), has been profound. To the extent it can be upheld, and the evidence to date has done so compellingly, we must conclude that life has diversified on Earth autonomously without any kind of external guidance. Evolution in a pure Darwinian world has no goal or purpose: the exclusive driving force is random mutations sorted out by natural selection from one generation to the next. Tragelaphus strepsiceros All biological processes are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, and arose through evolution of these physicochemical systems through natural selection. Sitana minor (male with the gular pouch expanded) What then are we to make of the purposes and goals obviously chosen by human beings? They are, in Darwinian interpretation, processes evolved as adaptive devices by an otherwise purposeless natural selection. Evolution by natural selection means, finally, that the essential qualities of the human mind also evolved autonomously. Humanity was thus born of Earth. However elevated in power over the rest of life, however exalted in self-image, we were descended from animals by the same blind force that created those animals, and we remain a member species of this planet's biosphere. The revolution in astronomy begun by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 proved that Earth is not the center of the universe, nor even the center of the solar system. The revolution begun by Darwin was even more humbling: it showed that humanity is not the center of creation, and not its purpose either. But in freeing our minds from our imagined demigod bondage, even at the price of humility, Darwin turned our attention to the astounding power of the natural creative process and the magnificence of its products: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (first edition, 1859) ~ o o o ~ If I lived twenty more years and was able to work, how I should have to modify the Origin, and how much the views on all points will have to be modified! Well, it is a beginning, and that is something. ~Charles Darwin Letter to J.D. Hooker, 1869 Darwin lived thirteen more years after writing this letter to Joseph Hooker, and he did manage to modify the theory of evolution by natural selection, expanding it in The Descent of Man (1871) to include human origins and in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) to address the evolution of instinct. The ensuing 130 years have seen an enormous growth of the Darwinian heritage. Joined with molecular and cellular biology, that accumulated knowledge is today a large part of modern biology. Its centrality justifies the famous remark made by the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1973 that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual documentation, or more illuminating, than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection or, as it is popularly called, Darwinism. Thus it is surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rocklike conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 percent that accept the prophecies of the Book of Revelation as truth, and yet in more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious Right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as "only a theory" rather than a "fact." Yet biologists, particularly those statured by the peer review and publication of substantial personal research on the subject in leading journals of science, are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably firm evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution. Cercopithecus petaurista From left to right: Semnopithecus comatus, Cebus capucinus, Ateles marginatus, and Cebus vellerosus. Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: There are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (and most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels, nor any god or gods conspicuously different from those accepted in the believer's faith. Flipping the scientific argument upside down, the intelligent designers join the strict creationists (who insist that no evolution ever occurred in the first place) by arguing that scientists resist the supernatural theory because it is counter to their own personal secular beliefs. This may have a kernel of truth; everybody suffers from some amount of bias. But in this case bias is easily overcome. The critics forget how the reward system in science works. Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame. He will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible! Even a combined Nobel Prize and Templeton Prize (the latter designed to encourage search for just such harmony) would fall short as proper recognition. Every scientist would like to accomplish such an epoch-making advance. But no one has even come close, because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory, and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science. There is only the residue of hoped-for default, which steadily shrinks as the science of biology expands. In all of the history of science only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth and therefore humanity are not the center of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble. Copernicus delayed publication of his masterwork On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until the year of his death (1543). For his extension of the idea subsequently, Bruno was burned at the stake, and for its documentation Galileo was shown the instruments of torture at Rome and remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Today we live in a less barbaric age, but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion, the one born of Darwinism, still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favoring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity. Evolution by natur-al selection, to be as concise as possible, has changed everything. In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition, each logically consistent within its own, independent premises. The dominant of these hypotheses, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge, and friend. We interpret his will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities. The second worldview is that of political behaviorism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence the mind originates almost wholly as a result of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based "human nature," people can be molded to the best possible political and economic system, namely, as urged upon the world through most of the twentieth century, communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure. Callionymus lyra (upper figure, male; lower figure, female). The hereditary responses and propensities that de ne our species arose by evolution, forming the behavioral part of what Darwin called the indelible stamp of our lowly origin. Dog "in a humble and affectionate frame of mind." Drawing of dog from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, by Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1872) Both of these worldviews, God-centered religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical worldview, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world's population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. It is the commonality of the hereditary responses and propensities that define our species. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 percent of its existence, it forms the behavioral part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called the indelible stamp of our lowly origin. To understand biological human nature in depth is to drain the fever swamps of religious and blank-slate dogma. But it also imposes the heavy burden of individual choice that goes with intellectual freedom. Such was the long journey for Darwin, the architect of the naturalistic worldview. He began his voyage on the Beagle as a devout Christian who trained for the ministry. "Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox," he wrote much later in his autobiography, "and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality." His later drift from the religion of his birth was stepwise and slow. Still on H.M.S. Beagle during its circumnavigation of the globe (1831-1836) he came to believe that the "false history" and reports of God's vengeful feelings made the Old Testament "no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." The miracles of Jesus seemed to him to suggest that people living at the time of the Gospels were "ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us." The growth of disbelief was so slow that Darwin felt no distress. In a striking passage of his autobiography he expressed his final and complete rejection of Christian dogma based solely on blind faith: I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And that is a damnable doctrine. Did Charles Darwin recant in his last days, as some religious critics have hopefully suggested? There is not a shred of evidence that he did or that he was presented with any reason to do so. Further, it would have been wholly contrary to the deliberate, careful manner with which he approached every subject. Pneumora Rhynchaea capensis The great naturalist did not abandon Abrahamic and other religious dogmas because of his discovery of evolution by natural selection, as one might reasonably suppose. The reverse occurred. The shedding of blind faith gave him the intellectual fearlessness to explore human evolution wherever logic and evidence took him. And so he set forth boldly, in The Descent of Man to track the origin of humanity, and in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to address the evolution of instinct. Thus was born scientific humanism, the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature. So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion. Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. In the early part of this century, the toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us. In any case, the dilemma to be solved is truly profound. On the one side the input of religion on human history has been beneficent in many ways. It has generated much of which is best in culture, including the ideals of altruism and public service. From the beginning of history it has inspired the arts. Creation myths were in a sense the beginning of science itself. Fabricating them was the best the early scribes could do to explain the universe and human existence. Yet the high risk is the ease with which alliances between religions and tribalism are made. Then comes bigotry and the dehumanization of infidels. Our gods, the true believer asserts, stand against your false idols, our spiritual purity against your corruption, our divinely sanctioned knowledge against your errancy. In past ages the posture provided an advantage. It united each tribe during life-and-death struggles with other tribes. It buoyed the devotees with a sense of superiority. It sacralized tribal laws and mores, and encouraged altruistic behaviors. Through sacred rites it lent solemnity to the passages of life. And it comforted the anxious and afflicted. For all this and more it gave people an identity and purpose, and vouchsafed tribal fitness -- yet, unfortunately, at the expense of less united or otherwise less fortunate tribes. Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles Darwin left us. From checker at panix.com Fri Nov 25 02:12:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:12:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] FOXNews: Robertson: God May Smite Down Town That Voted Out Anti-Evolution School Board Message-ID: Robertson: God May Smite Down Town That Voted Out Anti-Evolution School Board http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,175247,00.html Friday, November 11, 2005 VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they "voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design. All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce "intelligent design" -- the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power -- as an alternative to the theory of evolution. "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club." Eight families had sued the district, claiming the policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state. The federal trial concluded days before Tuesday's election, but no ruling has been issued. Later Thursday, Robertson issued a statement saying he was simply trying to point out that "our spiritual actions have consequences." "God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever," Robertson said. "If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them." Robertson made headlines this summer when he called on his daily show for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to "kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Nov 25 16:11:22 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 08:11:22 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: The food you eat may change your genes for life In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Not at all surprising. Taking a fish oil capsule can have a variety of positive benefits on depression, irritability, and eyesight. Tyrosine and choline supplements put your brain into hyperdrive. Steve H. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Premise Checker Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2005 6:11 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: The food you eat may change your genes for life The food you eat may change your genes for life http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18825264.800.html 17 November 2005 IT SOUNDS like science fiction: simply swallowing a pill, or eating a specific food supplement, could permanently change your behaviour for the better, or reverse diseases such as schizophrenia, Huntington's or cancer. Yet such treatments are looking increasingly plausible. In the latest development, normal rats have been made to behave differently just by injecting them with a specific amino acid. The change to their behaviour was permanent. The amino acid altered the way the rat's genes were expressed, raising the idea that drugs or dietary supplements might permanently halt the genetic effects that predispose people to mental or physical illness. It is not yet clear whether such interventions could work in humans. But there is good reason to believe they could, as evidence mounts that a range of simple nutrients might have such effects. Two years ago, researchers led by Randy Jirtle of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, showed that the activity of a mouse's genes can be influenced by food supplements eaten by its mother just prior to, or during, very early pregnancy (New Scientist, 9 August 2003, p 14). Then last year, Moshe Szyf, Michael Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, showed that mothers could influence the way a rat's genes are expressed after it has been born. If a rat is not licked, groomed and nursed enough by its mother, chemical tags known as methyl groups are added to the DNA of a particular gene. The affected gene codes for the glucocorticoid receptor gene, expressed in the hippocampus of the brain. The gene helps mediate the animal's response to stress, and in poorly raised rats, the methylation damped down the gene's activity. Such pups produced higher levels of stress hormones and were less confident exploring new environments. The effect lasted for life (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 847). Now the team has shown that a food supplement can have the same effect on well-reared rats at 90 days old - well into adulthood. The researchers injected L-methionine, a common amino acid and food supplement, into the brains of well-reared rats. The amino acid methylated the glucocorticoid gene, and the animals' behaviour changed. "They were almost exactly like the poorly raised group," says Szyf, who announced his findings at a small meeting on environmental epigenomics earlier this month in Durham, North Carolina. "This opens up new ways of thinking about treating and preventing diseases caused by how our DNA is expressed"Though the experiment impaired well-adjusted animals, the opposite should be possible, and Szyf has already shown that a chemical called TSA that is designed to strip away methyl groups can turn a badly raised rat into a more normal one. No one is envisaging injecting supplements into people's brains, but Szyf says his study shows how important subtle nutrients and supplements can be. "Food has a dramatic effect," he says. "But it can go both ways," he cautions. Methionine, for instance, the supplement he used to make healthy rats stressed, is widely available in capsule form online or in health-food stores - and the molecules are small enough to get into the brain via the bloodstream. Rob Waterland from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who attended the meeting, says Szyf's ideas are creating a buzz, as they suggest that methylation can influence our DNA well into adulthood. A huge number of diseases are caused by changes to how our DNA is expressed, and this opens up new ways of thinking about how to prevent and treat them, he says. But Waterland points out there is still much work to be done. Substances like methionine and TSA are, he says, a "sledgehammer approach", in that they are likely to demethylate lots of genes, and we don't even know which they will affect. But he speculates that techniques such as "RNA-directed DNA methylation", so far tested only in plants but theoretically possible in mammals, may allow us to target such methylation much more precisely. >From issue 2526 of New Scientist magazine, 17 November 2005, page 12 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Nov 25 16:15:02 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 08:15:02 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Reinventing Capitalism In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think that "globalism" has peaked and that we will become more tribal and local. Both "globalism" and "free trade" have been nothing more than code words for a system of oppression of the many by the few. Steve H. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Premise Checker Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2005 2:53 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Reinventing Capitalism Howard, I'm about a third of the way through the book. It's a great deal of fun, but I'm going to have to wait to see if you deal with the issues I would raise. There's a huge tendency to elide concepts. We observe love in animals but yet there's the claim that love was invented during the European middle ages and so is a Western provincialism. We can speak of the idea of home in territorial mammals, but the idea of home also comes only when civilizations with real estate that could be located by longitude and latitude arose. Same with property rights. Animals have it, but it was only in Western Europe that property in intangible things like a business were rendered secure. (In Islam, whenever a capitalist amassed a big pile, it would be looted.) Now your book is very fine as a hymn to human creativity and I dug out the article in Current Anthropology on make-up during the Middle Pleistocene, which says very little about make-up, really. You say skin paint serves two purposes. One is to show I'm one of you, a member of your group. The other is to show I'm someone special you must pay attention to. You then argue that all this powers cultural evolution. You say we went beyond make-up to creating distinctive clothes. It took new tools to stitch mammoth hides together to make these clothes, and these tools found all sorts of other uses. Very well, but still I dislike make-up intensely. It turns out that I'm more of a Christian than I thought I was: Early Christian writers argued that, since God had created man in his own image, the modification of this image was necessarily a deviation, and, more specifically, a sin. Insofar as a man is not his true image, that is, the image of God, he must be fallen, alienated from God, so that masks necessarily embody man as sinful. By the same arguments, a person's appearances should not be different from the inward awareness God has created. More generally, masks embody sin itself, and in the Middle Ages ancient theatrical masks became the patterns for devils and demons, associated with Hell. Such arguments (and the deep-seated assumptions to which they are related) are clearly variants on the themes stated above. The mask makes manifest a reality, which is not just an absolutely false self, but an evil one, dangerous because it is a possible transformation, rooted in human freedom and in original sin itself. By implication, the true image is the person's own visage, which might, however, be seen as the mask of truer, higher, spiritual reality, regarded as both individual and divine. This view presumes the constancy of the inner, or our *selves*, which we fell cannot be changed, or should not be changed, by a change in outer appearance. We are, or should be, we believe, essentially the same person with a mask or without. Modern Western actors do not wear masks, although they may be 'character actors' or type-cast, just as ancient comic masks represented many 'characters.' The actor is successful when convincing identity is achieved with the role, although such skills continue to be regarded with ambivalence at the same time that the actor has become a more and more important example in modern life. It is not hard to see why portraiture (often from masks) has been such an important genre in Western art; appearance is the unique mask of the self. But for present purposes it is sufficient to note that our own attitudes are culturally specific, that masks point toward some of our most fundamental questions regarding self-identity and authenticity, and such beliefs are themselves deeply involved in cultural choices about the significance of masks and masking. --David Summers, _Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism_ (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 2003): Chapter 4, Images, section 13, Masks, p. 305. Your point that much of what many regard as wasteful consumerism is really creative play at work. It is well-taken, but I'll have to read on to see how you deal specifically with the Western legal foundations of property and the market economy. A generalized appreciation of human creativity does not imply endorsement of a quite specific set of Western institutions. You see, it's not the principle of trade that the anti-globalists fret about, nor any urge to return to Communism or even a return to conditions before capitalism, in the Western sense since the Industrial Revolution, but rather the feared consequences of globablism: McDonaldization, Disneyification, standardization, American "democratic captialism" running roughshod over all other ways of life, the leveling of the world's cultures to the lowest common denominator, growing inequality in this country and throughout the world, loss of jobs, an speeding up of the tempo of change beyond what is psychologically sustainable. You can surely add to the list of charges. I'll have to read further in the book to see how you treat these concerns, how you argue that what is feared won't happen in some cases and how, in other cases, these changes are actually for the good. I'll also be eager to see how you parcel out the "winners and losers in globablization" (Google this phrase and you'll get lots and lots of hits. There's a book coming out by a rock-solid economist, Guillermo de la Dehesa, by that title. The book has been delayed at least six months, though, so I can't report on it. I doubt it will go into culture very much, though. Frank _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:07:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:07:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Letters: Are Japan's Schools Really Better? Message-ID: Are Japan's Schools Really Better? (7 Letters) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/25/opinion/l25japan.html To the Editor: Re "Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools," by Brent Staples (Editorial Observer, Nov. 21): I agree that better teacher training and better methodology are important ingredients in improving American elementary and secondary education, but two other factors should be discussed. The first concerns content. American teachers, particularly in science and mathematics, are, on average, deficient in their understanding of the disciplines they teach. It is only with better education in the content of their disciplines that they will be able to impart this knowledge, and the accompanying love of the subject, to young students. The second concerns the status of the teaching profession, which in our market-oriented society correlates with salaries. The same pool of young people that yields excellent doctors, excellent scientists and excellent performers in virtually any field will produce excellent teachers if given appropriate incentives. American society today is getting what it is willing to pay for in its system of education. Peter Kahn Ithaca, N.Y., Nov. 21, 2005 The writer is a mathematics professor at Cornell University. o To the Editor: I agree with Brent Staples that the United States should learn from Japan about teacher development systems. A narrow focus on "the process through which teachers are taught to teach," however, is not enough. In Japan and several other Asian countries, teachers benefit from the administrative culture of their schools and enjoy substantial support from the public. Unlike American teachers, who are isolated in their individual classrooms, teachers often have collective offices where they can conveniently consult with one another. Moreover, with intensive cooperation from Asian parents, who value education as their first priority, teachers can easily extend their educational objectives from classrooms to homes. In asking teachers to improve the quality of teaching, we need to nurture an environment that facilitates the effectiveness and growth of teachers as well. Yingji Wang State College, Pa., Nov. 21, 2005 o To the Editor: I was shocked to read Brent Staples's glowing review of Japan's educational system. I have been teaching English at a private girls' high school in Japan for the last year and have witnessed none of the zeal for improving "student understanding" that Mr. Staples so enthusiastically supports. Students' understanding is relevant only insofar as it increases their chances of passing university entrance exams. Classes consist of lectures, not discussions, and students are taught to memorize, not analyze. Japanese students may perform better than American students on standardized tests, but they lack critical thinking skills. Mr. Staples also cites several countries, Japan among them, that have ministries of education responsible for "educational quality control." But "quality control" for Japan's ministry means promoting the use of history textbooks that whitewash or omit information about Japan's brutality against its Asian neighbors in the first half of the 20th century. Is this the kind of "quality" we want in our educational system? Ellen Rubinstein Okayama, Japan, Nov. 21, 2005 o To the Editor: As Brent Staples says, Americans "roll their eyes" when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The culture of education in America is that learning should be fun and a process of self-discovery. Such a culture barely exists in Asia. Sure, it would be great if learning could be more entertaining or exciting. But that is not a precondition for learning in Asia as it is in the United States. Colin Wang Schofield, Wis., Nov. 21, 2005 o To the Editor: My son teaches seventh-grade math in the Bronx as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows program. He works incredibly hard on lesson strategies to teach critical thinking rather than rote memorization. His principal and co-workers are committed and helpful. He gets weekly feedback from his math mentor. A gifted professor at the City University of New York teaches his weekly math education course. But discipline and concentration can sometimes be in short supply among a class of 26 12- and 13-year-olds - especially during a long day when they have neither recess nor gym. After school many return to the safety of their apartments without access to sports or exercise. Even with the most rigorous teacher development, students need daily exercise and sports to become healthy and effective learners. Mary E. O'Brien, M.D. New York, Nov. 21, 2005 o To the Editor: Why do we always look at teaching methods when discussing the state of education in the United States, especially in inner-city schools? There are other pressing issues that need to be addressed. Let's discuss the parents who are failing to instill in their children the values that would bring them to class ready to respect their teachers and learn. And how about the states and cities that are failing students by refusing to pay salaries that would attract a better caliber of educator, one who would be more likely to stay the course and make a difference in students' lives? Mark E. Speer New York, Nov. 21, 2005 o To the Editor: It is time to take an honest look at the No Child Left Behind Act as the true failure that it is. The plan is all about the "shock and awe" of testing results instead of the substantial results of formidable changes to our teaching. Any educational policy that bases a child's failure on a single test result is mean-spirited and warped. This system is more concerned with saving the teacher from embarrassment, and the administration from poor ratings. It is not concerned with the future of our children. Marilyn Schiffmann New York, Nov. 21, 2005 From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:07:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:07:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Times: Lord William Rees-Mogg: A pope for our times: why Darwin is back on the agenda at the Vatican Message-ID: Lord William Rees-Mogg: A pope for our times: why Darwin is back on the agenda at the Vatican http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1052-1860310,00.html The Times November 07, 2005 William Rees-Mogg IN THE mid-1980s I was a member of a Vatican body with the impressive title International Committee of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Each year we had a meeting with Pope John-Paul II; on one occasion he gave us lunch and served a light white wine from, I think, a papal vineyard. The other members of the committee included a splendid Ibo lady, the head of the Catholic Women's Movement in Nigeria, an Indian nun, a Japanese Jesuit and a Francophone president of an African nation who believed that French culture and a sound classical education would be the best answer to Africa's educational problems. I enjoyed our discussions, which were almost always held in French. The idea, which came from the Pope himself, was far-sighted. We foresaw what has subsequently been called the "clash of civilisations"; we tried to relate that conflict to the widely differing cultures of the billion members of the Roman Catholic Church. We discussed the impact of particular developments in modern science but so far as I can remember we did not try to deal with the central problem of the relationship between science and religion; that seems to have come now. Our chairman was Cardinal Paul Poupard, an admirable example of the cultivated French intellectual in the Roman Curia; he is still the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Whether the council still has an international committee I do not know, since I left it nearly 20 years ago. Last week the cardinal was giving a press conference before a meeting in Rome of scientists, philosophers and theologians; this week they will be discussing the difficult subject of infinity. Cardinal Poupard had a beautifully trained French mind and inner loyalty to the Catholic faith. Nothing he says is said without careful thought. At the press conference he was discussing the issue of evolution, which is the critical dividing line between science and religion. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species shook religious belief when it was first published in 1859 in a way that Isaac Newton's equally important Principia had not shaken the faith of 1687. In The Times Martin Penner reported the cardinal's argument. He had said that the description in Genesis of the Creation was "perfectly compatible" with Darwin's theory of evolution, if the Bible were read properly. "Fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim." He argued that the real message of Genesis was that the Universe did not make itself, and had a creator. "Science and theology act in different fields, each in its own." In Rome, the immediate reaction was that this was a Vatican rejection of the fundamentalist American doctrine of "intelligent design". No doubt the Vatican does want to separate itself from American creationists, but the significance surely goes further than that. This is not another Galileo case; the teachings of the Church have never imposed a literal interpretation of the language of the Bible; that was a Protestant mistake. Nor did the Church condemn the theory of evolution, though it did and does reject neo-Darwinism when that is made specifically atheist. Indeed, one can go back nearly 1,500 years before Darwin and find St Augustine of Hippo, the most commanding intellect of all the early doctors of the Church, teaching a doctrine of evolution in the early 5th century. In one of his greatest works, De Genesi ad Litteram, he stated that God did not create an organised Universe as we see it now, but in the beginning created all the elements of the world in a confused and "nebulous" mass. In this mass were the mysterious seeds of the creatures who were to come into existence. Augustine's thought does therefore contain the elements of a theory of evolution, and even a genetic theory, but does not have natural selection. St Augustine has always been orthodox. He did not foresee modern science in AD410, but he did have an extraordinary grasp of the potential evolution of scientific thought. Cardinal Poupard's address to the journalists should not be seen as a matter of the Roman Church changing its mind and accepting Darwin after 145 years. It is a precautionary statement, distancing the Church from the American attack on Darwinism that Rome considers to be neither good science, nor good theology. It will also be taken as an indication of the priorities of the present Pope Benedict XVI. His critics had expected him to be more conservative than his predecessor. I tended to share this expectation myself, but refrained from expressing it because new leaders always surprise one; they move in directions no one had previously foreseen. We should have been more conscious of differences between the national traditions of the Catholic Church in Poland and in Germany. The Polish Church, which trained John-Paul II, had always combined conservative theology with support for the national claims to liberty. The German Church has always been challenged by the modernism of German theology. In the 16th century Germany was the region where the Reformation happened. German theologians on the Roman Catholic side had to understand the arguments of the Reformers if they were to reply to them. In the 18th century Germans were fully exposed to the French Enlightenment. In the 19th century they were exposed to German philosophers such as Hegel, and to the challenge of German biblical scholarship. Modernism itself in the late 19th century had a great influence on German Catholic opinion. All these arguments are well understood by Benedict XVI, because so many of them are German arguments. Cardinal Poupard's statement clarified the acceptance of Darwinism and rightly asserted that religious belief is compatible with the theory of evolution. He also gave a further indication that the mindset of Benedict XVI may be a good deal more modern than had been expected. One should have foreseen that with a German pope. The German Church has a strong tradition of theological inquiry in which Benedict XVI has been educated. Print this article Send to a friend Back to top of page ALSO IN THIS SECTION The new Macmillan -- and David Cameron has never had it so good A pope for our times: why Darwin is back on the agenda at the Vatican Crushing freedom's voice Warriors, statesmen, prelates. Can young David live up to his ancestors? From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:08:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:08:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Peter Drucker: Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit Message-ID: Peter Drucker: Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5165460 Nov 17th 2005 The one management thinker every educated person should read Corbis ON NOVEMBER 11th, a few days short of his 96th birthday, Peter Drucker died. The most important management thinker of the past century, he wrote about 40 books (the last, "The Effective Executive in Action" will be published in January) and thousands of articles. He was a guru to the world's corporate elite, not just in his native Europe and his adoptive America, but also in Japan and the developing world (one devoted South Korean businessman even changed his first name to Mr Drucker). And he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters--that, in his own rather portentous formula, "Management is the organ of institutions...the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance." Did he succeed? The range of his influence was extraordinary. George Bush is a devotee of Mr Drucker's idea of "management by objectives". ("I had read Peter Drucker," Karl Rove once told the Atlantic Monthly, "but I'd never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action.") Newt Gingrich mentions him in almost every speech. Mr Drucker helped to inspire privatisation--an idea that in the 1980s galvanised Britain's sclerotic economy. He changed the course of thousands of businesses. He spawned two huge revolutions at General Electric--first when GE followed the radical decentralisation he preached in the 1950s, and again in the 1980s when Jack Welch rebuilt the company around Mr Drucker's belief that it should be first or second in a line of business, or else get out. Yet Mr Drucker is also cited as a muse by both the Salvation Army and the modern mega-church movement. Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, from big organisations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Mr Drucker's fingerprints. This is not to say that Mr Drucker was invariably right--or even always sensible. He was given to making sweeping statements that sometimes turned out to be nonsense. He argued, for example, that the great American research universities are "failures" that would soon become "relics"--odd for a man who made so much of the knowledge economy. He was slow to shift his attention from big firms to entrepreneurial start-ups. But he was much more often right than wrong. And even when he was wrong he had a way of being thought-provoking. The man who became famous as an American management thinker was really a Viennese Jewish intellectual. The author of this article once visited him in his home in Claremont, California--a modest affair when set beside the mansions of most management gurus. His choice of a restaurant for lunch was more modest still. But as Mr Drucker talked it was easy to forget about the giant plastic wagon wheels that decorated the walls or even the execrable food. He talked with his deep, heavy Teutonic accent about meeting Sigmund Freud (as a boy), John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein (as a student at Cambridge). He said that he liked to keep his mind fresh by taking up a new subject every three or four years (he was heavily immersed in early medieval Paris at the time). The overall effect was rather like listening to Isaiah Berlin channelled by Henry Kissinger. Mr Drucker was born in 1909 in the Austrian upper middle class--his father was a government official--and educated in Vienna and Germany. He earned a doctorate in international and public law from Frankfurt university in 1931. In normal times this would have led to a distinguished, if predictable, academic career. But those were not normal times--and Mr Drucker was not a man to bow down to the confines of academic disciplines. He spent his 20s trying to avoid Adolf Hitler and drifting among a number of jobs, including banking, consultancy, academic law and journalism (his journalistic career included a spell as the acting editor of a women's page). Along the way, he became increasingly convinced that the best hope for saving civilisation from barbarism lay in the humdrum science of management. He was too sensitive to the thinness of the crust of civilisation to share the classic liberal faith in the market, but too clear-sighted to embrace the growing fashion for big-government solutions. The man in the grey-flannel suit held out more hope for mankind than either the hidden hand or the gentleman in Whitehall. He finally found a home in American academia, teaching politics, philosophy and economics. But it was not exactly a happy home. His first two books--"The End of Economic Man" (1939) and "The Future of Industrial Man" (1942)--had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. This might have sealed his fate as just another discontented academic maverick. But "The Future of Industrial Man" attracted the attention of General Motors--then the world's biggest company--with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. The car company invited Mr Drucker to paint its portrait--and offered him unique access to GMers from Alfred Sloan down. The resulting book--"The Concept of the Corporation"--changed the young man's life. The book not only became an instant bestseller, in Japan as well as in America, remaining in print ever since. It also helped to create a management fashion for decentralisation. By the 1980s, about three-quarters of American companies had adopted a decentralised model. Mr Drucker later boasted that the book "had an immediate impact on American business, on public service institutions, on government agencies--and none on General Motors." Mr Drucker the management guru had been born. Knowledge workers The two most interesting arguments in "The Concept of the Corporation" actually had little to do with the decentralisation fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with "empowering" workers. Mr Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector--partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. He was equally scathing of managers who simply regarded companies as a way of generating short-term profits. In the late 1990s he turned into one of America's leading critics of soaring executive pay, warning that "in the next economic downturn, there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the super-corporate chieftains who pay themselves millions." The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Mr Drucker argued that the world is moving from an "economy of goods" to an economy of "knowledge"--and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine--the idea at the heart of Frederick Taylor's stopwatch management--and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Mr Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither "bosses" nor "workers", but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans. All this sounds as if Mr Drucker was an exponent of the airy-fairy human-relations school of management. But there was also a "hard" side to his work. Mr Drucker was responsible for inventing one of the rational school of management's most successful products--"management by objectives" (this is the one that Mr Bush still follows). In one of his most substantial works, "The Practice of Management" (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group of more specialised managers. For his critics (who had a point), this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Mr Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. >From early on, Mr Drucker tried to apply his interest in management in a universal way. For instance, he realised that America has no monopoly on management wisdom. This might not sound like much of an insight today, in the light of the Asian miracles. But in 1950s America--when most American managers dismissed Japan as a maker of cheap knickknacks and the rest of Asia as an irrelevance--it was a revelation. Mr Drucker used his newfound fame in Japan to flesh out his suspicion that Japan was turning itself into an economic powerhouse. (As a sideline he managed to develop a fine collection of Japanese art.) He wrote extensively about Japanese management techniques long before they became popular in America in the 1980s. But he also exported many American techniques to a country that was desperate to learn from Uncle Sam. More than just a business thinker If Mr Drucker helped make management a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is "the defining organ of all modern institutions", not just corporations; and the management school that bears his name at Claremont College recruits a third of its students from outside the business world. In the public sector, as well as championing privatisation, he helped to inspire the reinventing-government movement that Al Gore promoted with some success in the 1990s. That movement has gone into eclipse at the federal level, but is still forging ahead in some states, such as Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney, the governor, is a powerful supporter. Some of Mr Drucker's most innovative work was with voluntary and religious institutions (indeed, Mr Bush singled out his contribution to civil institutions when he awarded him the presidential medal of freedom three years ago). Mr Drucker told his clients, who included the American Red Cross and the Girl Scouts of America, that they needed to think more like businesses--albeit businesses that dealt in "changed lives" rather than in maximising profits. Their donors, he warned, would increasingly judge them not on the goodness of their intentions, but on the basis of their results. One perhaps unexpected example of Druckerism is the modern mega-church movement. He suggested to evangelical pastors that they create a more customer-friendly environment (hold back on the overt religious symbolism and provide plenty of facilities). Bill Hybels, the pastor of the 17,000-strong Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, has a quotation from Mr Drucker hanging outside his office: "What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?" Mr Drucker went further than just applying business techniques to managing voluntary organisations. He believed that such entities have many lessons to teach business corporations. They are often much better at engaging the enthusiasm of their volunteers--and they are also better at turning their "customers" into "marketers" for their organisation. These days, business organisations have as much to learn from churches as churches have to learn from them. What he got wrong There are three persistent criticisms of Mr Drucker's work. The first is that he was never as good on small organisations--particularly entrepreneurial start-ups--as he was on big ones. "The Concept of the Corporation" was in many ways a fanfare to big organisations: "We know today that in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production," Mr Drucker opined, "the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all." The book helped to launch the "big organisation boom" that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Mr Drucker's enthusiasm for management by objectives helped to lead business down a dead end. Most of today's best organisations have abandoned this idea--at least in the mechanistic form that it rapidly assumed. They prefer to allow ideas--including ideas for long-term strategies--to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed from on high. And they tend to eschew the complex management structures of the management-by-objectives era. The reason is that top management is often cut off from the people who know both their markets and their products best (a criticism that certainly rings true in Mr Bush's White House, though that is another story). Third, Mr Drucker is criticised for being a maverick in the management world--and a maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field. He taught in tiny Claremont rather than at Harvard or Stanford. He never grappled with the rigours of quantitative techniques. There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own--as Michael Porter did with strategy and Theodore Levitt did with marketing. He would throw out a highly provocative idea--such as the idea that the West has entered a post-capitalist society, thanks to the importance of pension funds--without really clarifying his terms or tying up his arguments. There is some truth in the first two arguments. Mr Drucker never wrote anything as good as "The Concept of the Corporation" on entrepreneurial start-ups. This is odd, given his personality: this prophet of the "age of organisations" was a quintessential individualist who was happiest ploughing his own furrow. (One of his favourite sayings was, "One either meets or one works.") It is also remarkable since he spent so much of his life in southern California--a hotbed of individualism and entrepreneurialism that helped to produce the small-business revolution of the 1980s. Mr Drucker's work on management by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier (and later) writing on the importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument--that he was too much of a maverick--is both short-sighted and unfair. It is short-sighted because it ignores Mr Drucker's pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas can help galvanise companies. And he helped to make management fashionable with a constant stream of popular writing. It may be over-egging things to claim that Mr Drucker was "the man who invented management". But he certainly made a unique contribution to the development of the subject. It is true that he cannot be put into any neat academic pigeonhole: he liked to refer to himself as a "social ecologist" rather than a management theorist, still less a management guru (he once quipped that journalists use the word "guru" only because "charlatan" is too long for a headline). It is true that he eschewed the system-building of some of his fellow academics. And he preferred reading Jane Austen to doing multivariate analysis. But system-building often produces castles in the air rather than enduring insights. (It is notable that Mr Drucker's most systematic work--on management by objectives--has lasted least well.) Mr Drucker made up for his lack of system with a stream of insights on an extraordinary range of subjects: he was one of the first people to predict, back in the 1950s, that computers would revolutionise business, for example. His reading of history enabled him to see through the fog that clouds less learned minds: he liked to puncture breathless talk of the new age of globalisation by pointing out that companies such as Fiat (founded in 1899) and Siemens (founded in 1847) produced more abroad than at home almost as soon as they got off the ground. These days management theory is increasingly dominated by academic clones who produce papers on minute subjects in unreadable prose. That certainly does not apply to a man who claimed that the academic course that most influenced him was on, of all things, admiralty law. The legacy The biggest problem with evaluating Mr Drucker's influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom--in other words, that he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren't banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. Remember the way that many British bosses scoffed when Japanese carmakers set up factories in Britain and told their Geordie workers that they had to think as well as rivet, weld and hammer? Moreover, Mr Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations--particularly religious organisations--remained at the cutting edge. America's business academics have only just begun to look seriously at the organisational transformation that he helped to pioneer. Mr Drucker has a way of getting the last word. Richard Nixon once began a pep talk to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare with a side-swipe at him. "Mr Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. It's the aim of my administration to prove Mr Drucker wrong." In retrospect, Mr Nixon failed even at those potentially achievable tasks. Asked which management books he paid attention to, Bill Gates once replied, "Well, Drucker of course," before citing a few lesser mortals. Management theory has not evolved into the world's most rigorous or enticing intellectual discipline. But in Peter Drucker it at least found a champion whom every educated person should take the trouble to read. On November 1st 2001 we published a survey by Mr Drucker called "The Next Society". It can be found at www.economist.com/nextsociety From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:07:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:07:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools Message-ID: Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/opinion/21mon4.html By BRENT STAPLES The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board. Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad - especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons. Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is "nothing like ours." Nevertheless, the Japanese system has features that could be fruitfully imitated here, as the education reformers James Stigler and James Hiebert pointed out in their book "The Teaching Gap," published in 1999. The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as "lesson study," allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom. The lesson-study groups focus on refining methods that improve student understanding. In doing so, the groups go step by step, laying out successful strategies for teaching specific lessons. This reflects the Japanese view that successful teaching is the product of intensive teacher development and self-scrutiny. In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight - if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track. There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control. The United States, by contrast, has 50 different sets of standards for 50 different states - and within states, the quality of education depends largely on the neighborhood where the student lives. No Child Left Behind was meant to cure this problem by penalizing states that failed to improve student performance, as measured by annual tests. The states have gotten around the new law by setting state standards as low as possible and making state tests easy. This strategy was exposed as fraudulent just last month, when states that had performed so well on their own exams performed dismally on the alternative and more rigorous test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. No Child Left Behind was based on the premise that embarrassing test scores and government sanctions would simply force schools to improve educational outcomes for all students. What has become clear, however, is that school systems and colleges of education have no idea how to generate changes in teaching that would allow students to learn more effectively. Indeed, state systems that have typically filled teaching positions by grabbing any warm body they could find are only just beginning to think about the issue at all. Faced with lagging test scores and pressure from the federal government, some school officials have embraced the dangerous but all-too-common view that millions of children are incapable of high-level learning. This would be seen as heresy in Japan. But it is fundamental to the American system, which was designed in the 19th century to provide rigorous education for only about a fifth of the students, while channeling the rest into farm and factory jobs that no longer exist. The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors abroad. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach. We will also need to drop the arrogance and xenophobia that have blinded us to successful models developed abroad. From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:08:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:08:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan Message-ID: Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/international/asia/19comics.html [The caption for the cartoon on the front page reads: "In an anti-Korean comic book popular in Japan, a Korean, right, has narrow eyes while two Japanese characters have Caucasian feature," including blond hair, I might add. Is the appeal of blondes universal? Certainly in Latin America. I'm not so sure about India.] By NORIMITSU ONISHI TOKYO, Nov. 14 - A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave" exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!" In another passage the book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of." In another comic book, "Introduction to China," which portrays the Chinese as a depraved people obsessed with cannibalism, a woman of Japanese origin says: "Take the China of today, its principles, thought, literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive." The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months. In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, the books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia. They also point to Japan's longstanding unease with the rest of Asia and its own sense of identity, which is akin to Britain's apartness from the Continent. Much of Japan's history in the last century and a half has been guided by the goal of becoming more like the West and less like Asia. Today, China and South Korea's rise to challenge Japan's position as Asia's economic, diplomatic and cultural leader is inspiring renewed xenophobia against them here. Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature, is honorary chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the nationalist organization that has pushed to have references to the country's wartime atrocities eliminated from junior high school textbooks. Mr. Nishio is blunt about how Japan should deal with its neighbors, saying nothing has changed since 1885, when one of modern Japan's most influential intellectuals, Yukichi Fukuzawa, said Japan should emulate the advanced nations of the West and leave Asia by dissociating itself from its backward neighbors, especially China and Korea. "I wonder why they haven't grown up at all," Mr. Nishio said. "They don't change. I wonder why China and Korea haven't learned anything." Mr. Nishio, who wrote a chapter in the comic book about South Korea, said Japan should try to cut itself off from China and South Korea, as Fukuzawa advocated. "Currently we cannot ignore South Korea and China," Mr. Nishio said. "Economically, it's difficult. But in our hearts, psychologically, we should remain composed and keep that attitude." The reality that South Korea had emerged as a rival hit many Japanese with full force in 2002, when the countries were co-hosts of soccer's World Cup and South Korea advanced further than Japan. At the same time, the so-called Korean Wave - television dramas, movies and music from South Korea - swept Japan and the rest of Asia, often displacing Japanese pop cultural exports. The wave, though popular among Japanese women, gave rise to a countermovement, especially on the Internet. Sharin Yamano, the young cartoonist behind "Hating the Korean Wave," began his strip on his own Web site then. "The 'Hate Korea' feelings have spread explosively since the World Cup," said Akihide Tange, an editor at Shinyusha, the publisher of the comic book. Still, the number of sales, 360,000 so far, surprised the book's editors, suggesting that the Hate Korea movement was far larger than they had believed. "We weren't expecting there'd be so many," said Susumu Yamanaka, another editor at Shinyusha. "But when the lid was actually taken off, we found a tremendous number of people feeling this way." So far the two books, each running about 300 pages and costing around $10, have drawn little criticism from public officials, intellectuals or the mainstream news media. For example, Japan's most conservative national daily, Sankei Shimbun, said the Korea book described issues between the countries "extremely rationally, without losing its balance." As nationalists and revisionists have come to dominate the public debate in Japan, figures advocating an honest view of history are being silenced, said Yutaka Yoshida, a historian at Hitotsubashi University here. Mr. Yoshida said the growing movement to deny history, like the Rape of Nanjing, was a sort of "religion" for an increasingly insecure nation. "Lacking confidence, they need a story of healing," Mr. Yoshida said. "Even if we say that story is different from facts, it doesn't mean anything to them." The Korea book's cartoonist, who is working on a sequel, has turned down interview requests. The book centers on a Japanese teenager, Kaname, who attains a "correct" understanding of Korea. It begins with a chapter on how South Korea's soccer team supposedly cheated to advance in the 2002 Word Cup; later chapters show how Kaname realizes that South Korea owes its current success to Japanese colonialism. "It is Japan who made it possible for Koreans to join the ranks of major nations, not themselves," Mr. Nishio said of colonial Korea. But the comic book, perhaps inadvertently, also betrays Japan's conflicted identity, its longstanding feelings of superiority toward Asia and of inferiority toward the West. The Japanese characters in the book are drawn with big eyes, blond hair and Caucasian features; the Koreans are drawn with black hair, narrow eyes and very Asian features. That peculiar aesthetic, so entrenched in pop culture that most Japanese are unaware of it, has its roots in the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century, when Japanese leaders decided that the best way to stop Western imperialists from reaching here was to emulate them. In 1885, Fukuzawa - who is revered to this day as the intellectual father of modern Japan and adorns the 10,000 yen bill (the rough equivalent of a $100 bill) - wrote "Leaving Asia," the essay that many scholars believe provided the intellectual underpinning of Japan's subsequent invasion and colonization of Asian nations. Fukuzawa bemoaned the fact that Japan's neighbors were hopelessly backward. Writing that "those with bad companions cannot avoid bad reputations," Fukuzawa said Japan should depart from Asia and "cast our lot with the civilized countries of the West." He wrote of Japan's Asian neighbors, "We should deal with them exactly as the Westerners do." As those sentiments took root, the Japanese began acquiring Caucasian features in popular drawing. The biggest change occurred during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905, when drawings of the war showed Japanese standing taller than Russians, with straight noses and other features that made them look more European than their European enemies. "The Japanese had to look more handsome than the enemy," said Mr. Nagayama. Many of the same influences are at work in the other new comic book, "An Introduction to China," which depicts the Chinese as obsessed with cannibalism and prostitution, and has sold 180,000 copies. The book describes China as the "world's prostitution superpower" and says, without offering evidence, that prostitution accounts for 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product. It describes China as a source of disease and depicts Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi saying, "I hear that most of the epidemics that broke out in Japan on a large scale are from China." The book waves away Japan's worst wartime atrocities in China. It dismisses the Rape of Nanjing, in which historians say 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese soldiers in 1937-38, as a fabrication of the Chinese government devised to spread anti-Japanese sentiment. The book also says the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 - which researched biological warfare and conducted vivisections, amputations and other experiments on thousands of Chinese and other prisoners - was actually formed to defend Japanese soldiers against the Chinese. "The only attractive thing that China has to offer is Chinese food," said Ko Bunyu, a Taiwan-born writer who provided the script for the comic book. Mr. Ko, 66, has written more than 50 books on China, some on cannibalism and others arguing that Japanese were the real victims of their wartime atrocities in China. The book's main author and cartoonist, a Japanese named George Akiyama, declined to be interviewed. Like many in Taiwan who are virulently anti-China, Mr. Ko is fiercely pro-Japanese and has lived here for four decades. A longtime favorite of the Japanese right, Mr. Ko said anti-Japan demonstrations in China early this year had earned him a wider audience. Sales of his books surged this year, to one million. "I have to thank China, really," Mr. Ko said. "But I'm disappointed that the sales of my books could have been more than one or two million if they had continued the demonstrations." From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:08:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:08:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Matt Nuenke reviews Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement by Nicholas Agar. Message-ID: Matt Nuenke reviews Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement by Nicholas Agar. http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/agar.htm A review of Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement by Nicholas Agar. Bioethicists have been very active in helping to set policy or legislation with regards to what procedures should and should not be allowed for genetic engineering, cloning, distributive justice, etc. In Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement, 2004, Nicholas Agar argues for allowing everyone to use whatever technology is available, except in a few cases, to enhance their children's genetic opportunitiesfree of disease, low intelligence, small stature, ugliness, and anything else that can be improved upon. One thing struck me as very odd however: neither Agar nor any of the other bioethicists he discusses give any value to the genetic interests of parents in producing children that will be fitter to continue reproduction. For example, I would assume that parents leave their money to their children because not only do they want their children to live betterhappier lives, but they also want to equip their children with additional resources to have more children. This is such a well-studied subject in evolutionary biology, that to ignore it for human reproduction places most bioethicists outside of science altogether; they are merely a new secular priesthood. That being said, I found many interesting speculations in this book, as well as rebuttals to other's ethical arguments against genetic engineering, making it great fodder for discussing numerous peripheral aspects of eugenics. Agar states that, "The improvement of human stock is no business of the eugenics that this book preaches. Indeed, I do not presume to make any judgments about what to count as such an improvement and how it might be accomplished. Twentieth-century eugenicists thought that bettering humanity would require the strict regulation of reproduction. The eugenics defended here differs in being primarily concerned with the protection and extension of reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom as it is currently recognized in liberal societies encompasses the choice of whether or not to reproduce, with whom to reproduce, when to reproduce, and how many times to reproduce. What I call liberal eugenics adds the choice of certain of your children's characteristics to this list of freedoms. At the book's center are powerful genetic technologies that will enable prospective parents to make such a choice. More specifically, I will argue that prospective parents should be empowered to use available technologies to choose some of their children's characteristics." With the above disclaimer, he then goes on to discuss eugenics as if it had no long term consequences for society, parents, or groups that practice it, as if genetic enhancement is like having your children's teeth straightened: a one time procedure with no consequences for your children's children. Perhaps Agar is aware of eugenics' goal of not only improving one's children's characteristics, but making those improvements available on down the genealogical path to all future generations. We constantly hear how we do not want to leave our huge national debt to our children, then too many ignore future generations genetic debts such as disease, low intelligence, irrationality, and all the other genetic debts that have accumulated over millions of years of genetic meandering. Today, the two most practical methods used for genetic engineering enhancement are Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) where multiple fertilized eggs are tested for any known disease, with the most disease free egg(s) implanted for reproduction, and sperm and egg banks, where donors supply eggs or sperm from the elitethose who are tall, attractive, intelligent, athletic, and free of disease or emotional problems. With PGD, parents use natural variation to select the best of possible children to be born. With sperm banks, the best donors are selected. It is also possible of course to purchase the best two of the best donors, then select the most disease free fertilized eggs using PGD for implantation into a surrogate mother. When cloning becomes possible, then these super-selected children could be reproduced in abundance, without knowing exactly which genes are involved in traits such as high intelligence. The winning combinations will just be multiplied and reassembled as desired, leading to a new elite population group. Agar has some interesting comments on race: "When one chooses a mate one is often also choosing what kind of person will contribute genes to one's children. We accept that racist people can refuse to have children with members of a race they despise because we think that who one is attracted to and repelled by is beyond state regulation. Our negative judgments about their characters do not lead us to force them into relationships with people for whom they claim no attraction. By analogy, perhaps no moral reason could be sufficiently strong to justify the state's intruding on individuals' eugenic choices. Insisting that racism be no motive for the use of enhancement technologies would, in effect, be like insisting that people be sexually attracted to others regardless of skin color." Note that he is judgmental against the assumed characteristics of racists, but racists are to have no judgment about the characteristics of other races or people. Is a racist any different from a person who hates people who litter, drives recklessly, or has low intelligence? Most normal people have emotions of disgust or aversion towards some types of other people, whether those emotions are based on individual characteristics or characteristics that are common to a religion, political party, sports fans, or races. So why are racists the only group not allowed to have a preference for their own kind? I would also submit that most people are therefore racists, based on Agar's criteria, because most people prefer their own kin likeness. With brain imaging technology, it may be possible to confirm that feelings of hostility between human races is part of our reptilian brain, and not easily subject to modification, any more than we could intellectually alter our sexual attraction to another gender change our preferences from attractive to ugly people. These are not acquired feelings; they are built in and deep, beyond easy access. Our more advanced human brains however are very adept at deception, self-deception, and manipulation of others for their own benefit. Antiracism then is just the latest attempt to transfer wealth from Western nations to third world nations or to third world people living in Western nations. Agar quotes Steven Pinker in why there should not be too much enthusiasm for genetic engineering by futurologists. They are essentially technological limitations, and he ignores the political ramifications of genetic engineering. Once it becomes common knowledge that the differences between groups is primarily genetic, especially intelligence, the current egalitarian political zeitgeist will turn away from socialism to a more free wheeling capitalism, where those who have will keep, and those who don't will slide further behind. Parents will realize that it is far better to make sure that their children are born innately intelligent, and let them develop naturally as nature intended. Pushing children too hard too fast, as Agar shows later in the book, is not beneficial. Na?ve environmentalism will be replaced by a more balanced interactionist perspective when it comes to having children: start with good genes, let them develop naturally, and they will grow up productive and happyon average. This realization will also have another major impact on world population distributions. Once it is fully understood that Blacks from South Africa or Amerindians from Mexico have a very low probability of success in a technology demanding culture, where they will be an economic drag on the economy, the open borders will be slammed shut. Eugenics will then in fact be in play at least with regards to who we let in to the West, and how far we are willing to allow those already here reproductive freedom when they are incapable of supporting a family. Reproductive rights also means reproductive responsibility. Agar states, "The idea that my clone would resemble me in every significant respect relies on one of the most pervasive contemporary misunderstandings of biology. This misunderstanding is genetic determinism, the view that our genes dictate all but superficial aspects of our phenotypes, or visible traits. Genetic determinism lies behind many of the misguided hopes and fears about the new genetic technologies." He makes this claim about whom? I am not aware of any scientist, eugenicist, or educated person who believes that identical twins are exactly alike, nor would clones be exactly alike. However, identical twins reared apart are generally quite similar in such features as attractiveness, height, intelligence, and athleticism. Therefore, he sets up a straw man. If anything, we are still in denial with regards to genes, and the environmental determinists are still in the majority, denying any racial differences in average intelligence. Then he states, "The twin or clone of a genius might easily miss out on the precise combination of early educational or nutritional influences required for the making of great intelligence." Now he is guilty of environmental determinism. Yet, no one has been able to show that environmental factors have much influence on adult intelligence. Any potentially highly intelligent child will do just fine with a typical education, nutrition, and avoidance of any mishaps like playing too much soccer that can cause brain damage. Bioethicists seem especially concerned with human aspirations that compared to futurists border on messianic zealotry. Agar states, confusingly, "This theory [utilitarianism] comports better with our intuitions about the way we should live. Most of us do not set the accumulation of units of pleasure as life's single aim; rather we pursue goals involving family, careers and friends and we consider a good life to be one in which many of these significant goals are achieved. Preference utilitarians can readily grant that being naturally somber does not stand in the way of a satisfactory existence; many people who have sunny temperaments nonetheless fail to satisfy their most important desires, something that many of the less temperamentally buoyant achieve. This variant of utilitarianism also gives strongly counterintuitive answers to questions about human genetic engineering. For example, Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer wonder whether it would be possibleand desirable?to attempt to genetically engineer people whose capacities and goals, while possibly truncated, are in harmony with their limited passions? The goal of designing humans who are both limited to easily satisfiable preferences and meet the criteria for personhood is likely to pose technological difficulties for enhancers. But the claim that if feasible it should be mandatory seems even more absurd than the idea of compulsory [enhanced mood] therapy." If you are confused by the above, so was I. The most eugenicists want to do is equip people with higher average intelligence, normal stature, pleasant looks, athleticism, and to be free of disease. I have never heard any eugenicists discuss much in the way of improving a person's behavioral traits or level of natural contentment. Nevertheless, no genetic enhancement say in overall happiness, would in any way lead to some sort of disharmony. I really have no idea how an enhanced person could in any way be truncated, in disharmony, have limited passions, etc. Humans have enough trouble understanding what it means to be conscious, much less fine-tuning the meaning of life in its various forms. These discussions beg an even broader question: What is the purpose of an egalitarian ethics that calls for redistributive justice? Are humans really happier because of how much wealth they have accumulated? If yes, then it is advantageous to accumulate as much wealth as possible and not give to those in need. If wealth is relative, then it is even more advantageous to obtain greater wealth, as much as possible, because it means little to have absolute wealth if all those around you are wealthier still. That is, humans compete for resources because having greater resources means out competing one's competitors. Looked at in this way, being destitute in sub-Saharan Africa means little in terms of relative happiness, if everyone around you is in the same situation. The same is true at Ivy League universities, it means little to the average student that they can afford a cell phone, an iPod, fly home for vacation, etc., because of family wealth when those all around you have the same level of wealth. Evolution has equipped humans with a homeostatic level of relative contentmentsex, food, shelter, dominance, killing off a competingneighboring tribe along with the excitement of the killthese proximate emotions were evolutionary successful at promoting life and reproduction. Just accumulating more wealth for its own sake means little in terms of happinesshumans merely readjust their ambitions upward and start the struggle all over again. This is the idiocy of egalitarianismit has no basis in human nature. Agar concludes that, "it is hard to see how someone could be harmed by being brought into existence as a human clone. Had he not been created by somatic cell nuclear transfer, he simply would not have existed at all. Utilitarian lawmakers who accepted a person-affecting condition on moral discourse could avoid making [mood enhancing] therapy compulsory by pointing out that their moral principle simply does not apply to the countless different kinds of people we could bring into existence. The problem is that person-affecting utilitarianism avoids the aforementioned absurd conclusions only by offering no guidance on how we should use enhancement technologies. Kantians also seem forced to choose between absurdity and silence when they confront enhancement technologies. According to the version of Kant's Categorical Imperative most often used to resolve bioethical dilemmas, one should never treat another person exclusively as a means to an end." He then goes on to discuss those who would clone for a means to their own ends (or not end in death): "The Raelians would create special kinds of human beings merely to satisfy the vanity of those who misguidedly see somatic cell nuclear transfer as a means of perpetuating their own existences. But first appearances are deceptive. People have always had selfish motives for reproducing. They want kids to save marriages, to ensure pampered retirements, or to find some new purpose in life. This selfishness in respect of individuals who do not yet exist seems perfectly compatible with proper parental concern once children's lives are under way. The fact is that it is hard to have non-instrumental motives in respect of a person who does not yet exist. Compare the aforementioned instrumental motives with the absence of motive that anticipates the existence of children whose parents were just too drunk or drugged to remember to use contraception. These children don't seem better off simply in virtue of the fact that there were no instrumental reasons for their existence." I think he makes a very good point here. When people say, "I want the best for my children," they mean they want their children to be happy, but also they want their children to be successful and to pass on the genes that we all use temporarily while we are alive. In fact, in a modern technological world, it is hard to justify having children for any reason other than because a) we just want children and/or b) we want children to pass on our genes. In a modern society, one would be better off setting up a savings account and putting money aside for retirement, rather than rely on one's children to take care of you in old age. Children are used by society however. We spend large amounts of money on educating our children to be productive workers, we teach them to be patriotic so that they will fight and die for their country if the need arises, we imbue them with virtues that are beneficial for the society but not necessarily good for the individual, etc. Children, as far as society sees them, are instrumental for the future prosperity of the country; they are a means to an end. Agar continues, "Philosophers have thought hard about whether potentially rational human embryos have a moral entitlement to be born. The advent of enhancement technologies raises the issue of whether human embryos have any moral claim on a rational existence. Those who argue against any right to rational existence would point out that the discovery of human intelligence genes and the invention of techniques for transferring them into non-human embryos may herald an era in which every mammalian embryo is potentially a rational being. Kant seems to have little to contribute to this particular exchange on enhancement technologies beyond the idea that if we do deliberately create non-rational beings in place of rational ones, our treatment of them will not be constrained by the Categorical Imperative." There was a great debate apparently eons agoI have lost the reference and if anyone knows of it I would like to hear from you. Anyway, the debate was about whether life is worth living, and how can we prove that it is. It seems that when bioethicists debate a "right to be born," they suffer a multitude of objections: is the life going to be a good life, is the planet already overpopulated, but more importantly, is it wise to add humans and what kinds of humans to the existing billions of people already here? The history of humanity has always been one of overpopulation followed by warfare, genocide, starvation or disease (Keeley 1996; LaBlanc 2003). I find little support to any claim that life in itself has value outside of various evolutionary drives to reproduce. Agar continues, "Utilitarianism and Kantianism orient our intuitions about right and wrong towards certain kinds of moral problemthose involving people whose existence is not at issue. We can use these theories to help us to decide whether or not we are permitted to end someone's existence, but not to decide whether or not someone should ever exist." Agar then discusses Leon R. Kass who is on the President's Counsel on Bioethics, "Kass is very impressed by the queasiness that typically accompanies contemplation of the possibility of cloning humans. He proposes that this unease is 'the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power to fully articulate it.' Kass continues: 'We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.' In chapter 2 I argued that we must make the new genetic technologies morally transparent. According to Kass, significant parts of morality itself are not transparent. We often know that we are disgusted by a certain practice without understanding precisely why we are disgusted. Kass asks of other abhorrent activities such as 'fatherdaughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or even just (just!) raping and murdering another human being whether anybody's failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect.' The contention that there is no decisive argument against human cloning should be understood not as support for cloning, but instead as an expression of rationality's impotence when faced with an issue that bears on human existence in such a fundamental way. Instinctual disgust is the only reliable guide." I find these types of arguments so shallow and absurd because they smack of intolerant religious dogma. Its as if we should have suppressed the revelation that the earth was a ball, floating in space, rather than flat, because people would be terrified of falling off otherwise. Just like other scientific trends, many people hate new technologies and change, while others embrace it. Kass may be "repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings," but I am equally repelled by miscegenation, especially between Blacks and Whites, as well as having that sinking feeling when I see Blacks in my neighborhood. I would argue that my lizard brain's emotional disgust is a much deeper part of human nature than feeling disgust from various changes in values and technologies that are new to our only recently evolved executive brains. He continues, "Kass makes the same kinds of points against human genetic engineering. The embryo that a couple offers to a genetic engineer for modification may contain nuclear DNA from both of them. But the attempt to improve upon sex's power to provide the kinds of children we want threatens the meanings of love and of making families that we humans have layered on to the biological functions of sex and reproduction. Transhumanists deny that enhancement technologies destroy meaning. They speak of 'aesthetic and contemplative pleasures whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human has yet experienced' and 'love that is stronger, purer, and more secure than any human has yet harbored.' Deciding who to believe requires moral images constructed from other cases in which a technology has separated the satisfaction of a desire from its customary foundation. We can use our judgment about whether this separation has destroyed meaning as a guide to what to say about the similar propensity of enhancement technologies." Well, circumcision comes to mind, a painful ritual to make a people different and deter others from joining the tribe, as well as natural childbirth versus being sedated. I see no reason why a couple that would take the time, expend the money, go through the somewhat painful process of harvesting eggs, etc. to make their children healthier, happier and wise would not be making a much greater commitment to reproduction than those who procreate because they happen to be horny and failed to discuss the consequences. The future of our children will be far more secure, safe, and productive when sex is finally separated from reproduction. Nature no longer needs horniness to make humans reproduce. After all, reproduction between lizards is essentially an act of rape, not love. If humans maintained that form of reproduction, would Kass be arguing that giving up rape as part of reproduction some how diminishes the "meaning of rape and of making families?" Agar continues, "Kass presents the use of genetic technologies to treat disease 'by eliminating the patient' as a 'peculiar innovation in medicine.' But he is wrong. Consider the following example. Women who drink during pregnancy sometimes give birth to children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition characterized by abnormal facial features, stunted growth and central nervous system problems. Suppose a woman who is currently drinking heavily asks her doctor for advice about whether or not she should get pregnant. He responds that she should not get pregnant until she has cut down on her drinkingin effect advising that she substitute the child she would have while not drinking for the one she would have while on alcohol. Does the fact that the healthy child would not exist at all had his mother become pregnant earlier make him a beneficiary of therapy? If we count his existence as a benefit conferred by the doctor, then we should be similarly generous to a skeptical father who postpones his daughter's marriage, thereby delaying the birth of her first child. This does not seem right. The important point is that, however we understand the case of the doctor advising his patient to cut down on her drinking before getting pregnant, it is not medical malpractice. We would not accuse the doctor of recklessly straying outside of the therapeutic domain. Perhaps no one is benefited, but disease is still prevented, and if so, the moral image of therapy can encompass PGD and gene therapy on gametes or early embryos. Both conventional doctors and gene therapists act morally in allowing a healthy baby to be born in place of an unhealthy one [by genetically selecting the healthiest eggs for implantation]." Kass seems to be oblivious to alternative moral or ethical norms. In Mother Nature, Hrdy portrays humans as routinely killing or abandoning their children as a practical matter under varying ecological circumstances (Hrdy ??). Sometimes, the elite didn't want to be bothered by raising children and sent them off, poor people often abandoned their children to die, and numerous cultures killed their newly born children whenever prospects looked poor or the children were deemed unfit or cursed. That has been the norm for thousands of years, it is still practiced in many parts of the world, and it seems to be quite moral for humans to make decisions about the viability of their childrenlet this one die, and invest in another later on with better potential for survival. That is human morality as it was practiced before the modern age, and it has merit. Why should a family or society invest resources in less than ideal children when we have the ability to select the quality of the children that we wish to raise to adulthood? Far too many families are torn apart because a child is disabled. It would be better for all to terminate the defective at birth, and have a healthy babya decision that benefits the whole family and society in general. Disabled children demand an inordinate amount of resources that should be diverted to the children with more potential for the future. Turning back to genetic determinism Agar states, "Genetic determinists make the formation of a person's embryo an extremely significant event for her identity. According to them, the formation of a person's genome causally necessitates her every significant characteristic. In chapter 2 I suggested that genetic determinism fails to take account of the important role of the environment. The question of the relative significance to human beings of environmental and genetic influences has occasioned many an academic spat. Genetic determinism finds its ideological counterpart in environmental determinism." Agar is wrong in his assumption that eugenicists think only in terms of genes and not development, especially in raising children. I and many others in the particularistracialist eugenics' movement are very concerned about how to raise our children so that they will feel bound to their tribe, prosper emotionally and intellectually, and be provided with an environment that allows them to find their own nicheas long as it is not becoming a self-hating White. Eugenicists I believe would be much less demanding of their children in their early years, because being aware of their intellectual potential, pushing children too hard and too early, is not beneficial. Children need to develop at a slow enough pace to learn how to think, not just what to think. So contrary to Agar's conjectures, eugenicists believe in balancing nature and nurture. It is the egalitarian Left that rejects the interactionist concept of development. Even more bizarre than Kass's philosophy, Agar goes on to Fukuyama's. "Fukuyama's account of human nature is a fusion of two different scientific ideas. He says that human nature comprises 'the species typical characteristics shared by all human beings qua human beings.' 'Species typical' is to be understood in the way that biologists do when they say 'pair bonding is typical of robins and catbirds but not of gorillas and orangutans.' Fukuyama also invokes genes, saying 'human nature is the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors.' He allows that genes do not fix traits like intelligence or height. Instead, they set 'limits to the degree of variance possible.' Fukuyama elaborates on this idea, saying that 'the finding that IQ is 40 to 50 percent heritable already contains within it an estimate of the impact of culture on IQ and implies that even taking culture into account, there is a significant component of IQ that is genetically determined.' His point is best explained by reference to something that E. O. Wilson has called the genetic leash. This softer version of genetic determinism specifies that although genes do not precisely fix traits, they fix limits within which traits can vary. Fukuyama says 'there are limits to the degree of variance possible, limits that are set genetically: if you deprive a population of enough calories on average, they starve to death rather than growing smaller, while past a certain point, increasing calorie intake makes them fatter, not taller.' This, according to Fukuyama, is what morally separates changes to a person's genes from changes to her environment. While the consequences of environmental changes could never be of sufficient magnitude to take our humanity from us, the consequences of genetic changes may be. No leash limits the efforts of genetic engineers. They can insert as many NR2B genes [that makes mice smart] as their scruples allow. In doing so, they corrupt human nature by going beyond the maximum extension of the leash. Genetic engineers who want only to treat Alzheimer's and diabetes do not corrupt human nature because they respect the leash." The last few sentences are a bit confusing, but what Agar is trying to say is that when we mess with germline genetic changes, we change humans genetically into the future. However, how does this change human nature? For example, if a group used PGD along with IVF to select the brightest future child out of a dozen genetically tested embryos, they are only selecting for the best, just like entrance exams to a university. Human nature is not changed, just the average human intelligence. It only changes the frequency of some genes (actually alleles or gene variants) over others, which is how humans evolved and races differ. If this changes human nature, then there must be more than one human nature out there, contrary to what Fukuyama and many evolutionary psychologists claim. Agar continues, "The best way to introduce concerns about the biotechnology's impact on liberal social arrangements is by way of Fukuyama's reflections on both of these topics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, established him as a leading defender of liberal democracy. In it, Fukuyama declared that history, considered as a progression of political arrangements, was over. Soon, and evermore, all human societies would be liberal democratic ones. Fukuyama spent much of the 1990s rebutting arguments for the staying power of various illiberal social arrangements. With the 2002 publication of Our Posthuman Future, he turns his attention towards biotechnology, a threat that he finds more potent than communism or religious fundamentalism. According to Fukuyama, biotechnology has the power to restart history by replacing humans with posthumans. Posthumans may have imposed upon them, or perhaps even choose, political arrangements very different from liberal democratic ones." I find this assertion by Fukuyama to be so bizarre that he is definitely on the fringe. First, there is no reason why our current liberal democracies have any forgone staying power just because Fukuyama says so. If humans fall into a dysgenic trend, say with an average IQ of 85 around the world, liberal democracy cannot be sustained. It takes knowledgeable people to keep democracy safe from its inherent corroding influences (Somit & Peterson 1997; Hoppe 2001). Democracy is not a stable political system by any means. In addition, if we can increase the average intelligence of a population group, we can replace representative democracy with direct democracy with constitutional guarantees to protect segments of the population from the possible oppressiveness of direct democracy. A highly intelligent population group is far better equipped to think for themselves, rather than being manipulated by politicians, the media, interest group propaganda, etc. Fukuyama wants to stop the natural progression that the enlightenment, freedom, and innate intelligence has made possible. Could anyone really claim that today's democratic liberalism is the solution to all of the world's present and future problems? Absurd, we will always be trying to improve our political systems. Agar then tries to address the truly strange human trait of effort: "The human marathon runner feels totally exhausted at Mile 23, but at least he can claim the credit for having got that far. The posthuman athlete, still feeling good, deserves no congratulations. She is simply performing up to her design specifications. Eric Juengst suggests the label 'biomedical Calvinism' for the view that those who win races because they have taken performance-enhancing drugs or had their genomes modified are denied the possibility of putting in the effort that would make their apparent achievements worthwhile. If there is any credit due for the victory won by the genetically engineered athlete, it should go to the person who did the work modifying his genome. However, if an athlete's winning advantage derives from the chance recombination of his parents' DNA, then there is no other agent for the credit to default to; his parents did not choose which of their genes to pass on to him. He truly deserves his medal." Do humans really think this way? Do we look at someone who is beautiful versus ugly and dismiss their good fortune because no effort was put into being beautiful, just the luck of the genes? How about a lawyer that passes the bar exam on her first try, not because she studied hard, but because she is just plain brilliant. Does another lawyer get congratulated more enthusiastically after passing the bar exam after the sixth time? Probably not, I doubt that they would brag about how much effort they put in. More than likely, they would be just a tad embarrassed. Humans do not normally weigh deservedness when it comes to accomplishments; we give credit for the outcome even when they have natural abilities, like the Kenyan marathon runners. Whether parents pay special athletic coaches or educational tutors for their children's environmental enhancement, or whether they use genetic engineering to enhance their children's ability, in the end it is the same. "Effort" is not something that most people want to face when seeking goals, they would far prefer to have the ability to make the task easier, then go on to more difficult tasks. Agar then discusses the outcome of one of the children from Graham's Repository for Germinal Choice [2](see my review of The Genius Factory). He notes that one particular gifted child with an IQ of 180, ended up studying comparative religion rather than scienceas if this was some kind of failure. With the flawed logic spewed out by the current crop of bioethicists, we could certainly use some enhanced intelligence in the non-scientific fields. But even more important, unlike pushing this gifted child into scienceonly to have them turn their back on it by pushing environmental enhancementsthe genetic enhancements are available for future generations. The genius baby turned religious scholar will pass on to his children more intelligence genes, then they in turn can decide how to use their enhanced intelligence. Genetic intelligence is forever; environmental enhancements have to be repeated every generation. Which approach is more economical? Genetic selection of the best fertilized-eggs for implantation currently costs about $10,000. To educate a child for one year currently costs about the same. You do the math of where we should be spending our money if we want smart, educable children in the future. Agar returns to Kass: "The beneficiaries of genetic engineering to boost intelligence, like the beneficiaries of the best educations, ought to be capable of more than others, but this does not mean that they live lives without character building struggle; it does not make their achievements meaningless. Consider the following objection to human genetic engineering made by Leon Kass: '[T]he price to be paid for producing optimum or even genetically sound babies will be the transfer of procreation from the home to the laboratory. Increasing control over the product can only be purchased by the increasing depersonalization of the entire process and its coincident transformation into manufacture. Such an arrangement will be profoundly dehumanizing ...'" Well maybe to Kass, but it seems that many people don't feel any dehumanizing when they use alternative means to reach an intended goal. Is a man dehumanized because he needs to take Viagra to have sex? Does masturbation to video porn now dehumanize masturbation because instead of our imaginations, the new machines don't require any imagination? Many single moms who are financially sound are getting pregnant at "the factory" and they do not report the child that results or themselves as "dehumanized." To many, feeling dehumanized is being turned down by a mate for sex, being denied that anticipated promotion, or being unable to perform an assigned task at work. Another example is someone feeling dehumanized by getting a face lift at the cosmetic surgery factory, rather than applying tons of makeup to cover up wrinkles at home (or worse still while driving to work). Agar rebuts Kass, "Once we accept that environments also make personalities, we should be prepared to pass the same judgment on 'manufacture by education' as we do on 'manufacture by genetic engineering.' If some forms of education are innocent of the charge of manufacture, then likewise so are some forms of genetic engineering." On the other side, Blacks are always being held up and praised for doing better on performance tests as a result of "teaching to the test," Head Start programs, additional schooling during the summer months, special tutoring, etc. Shouldn't we also be able to make the claim that these exceptional environmental enhancement programs' outcomes are equally undeserved using Kass's argument for undeservedness via environmental enhancement? Agar then turns to Jurgen Habermas objections to genetic enhancement: "Habermas identifies what he thinks is a difference between environmental and genetic improvements. Unlike the latter, environmental enhancements can be questioned or challenged by the person who receives them. One has the option of rebelling, perhaps unsuccessfully, against after-school math lessons. No similar option exists in respect of genetic engineering. One is simply born with one's genome engineered to include a parental 'fifth column.' Habermas describes the likely experiences of a genetically enhanced adolescent: 'To the extent that his body is revealed to the adolescent who was eugenically manipulated as something which is also made, the participant perspective of the actual experience of living one's own life collides with the reifying perspective of a producer.... The parents' choice of a genetic program for their child is associated with intentions which later take on the form of expectations addressed to the child, without, however providing the addressee with an opportunity to take a revisionist stand. The programming intentions ...have the peculiar status of a one-sided and unchallengeable expectation.'" Agar has his own means of dismissing Habermas, but I will provide my own: however parents open up a child's options in life, whether they are environmental or genetic enhancements, they are merely expanding opportunity, not directing the child's ultimate goal. I have no doubt that when genetically enhanced children reach puberty, the hormones will be raging, and they will follow their own paths as they desire, just like any other adolescent. They will not feel any different from any other child, except learning will be easier, they will have fewer genetic diseases, they will not be short, they will be reasonably athletic, they will be attractive, and they will be smart. It seems to me that this is the perfect formula for providing eugenically enhanced children with the most open of futures. Whatever they desire, they will be better equipped to seek itunless of course they have some strange desire to be in a circus freak-show. Agar goes on to explain how extreme environmental enhancements can leave children damaged: it is called "hothousing." Parents take extreme measures to teach their children early and well, only to have them become zombies of rote learning, without the ability to organize facts and search out solutions to problems on their own. These children are suffocated, not developing in a natural way, that leads to destroying any option of a "right to an open future." Their overbearing and demanding parents drive them beyond what they are naturally capable of for their age. Genetic enhancement does thisprovide children with the talent to pursue many different opportunitiesthen lets them do what suites them the best. As Agar notes, "Infertile couples are now offering financial inducements of up to US $100,000 for the eggs of women with demonstrated Ivy League educations, attractiveness, elite scholastic aptitude scores, specific ethnicities, and backgrounds free of major family medical issues." Agar states, "The moral image of nurture helps us to understand a popular objection against genetic enhancement. According to this objection, we should not allow enhancement because attributes like increased intelligence, stronger muscles and more charming personalities are positional goods. Positional goods are sought because they give a competitive advantage over others. Suppose the great cost of enhancement means that only the rich will have any real freedom to enhance their children. Inequalities resulting from genetic enhancement layered on existing educational and dietary inequalities will turn the gap between the rich and the poor into a gulf between their children." Greatlet this speciation event commence so that we can move those capable of understanding and appreciating genetic enhancement beyond the reach of the bottom feeders that we have tolerated for too long already. But what about justice for all? Agar notes, "I stressed that enhancement technologies present us with problems that seem quite unlike those we have confronted before. However, the challenge I have just described seems quite familiar. Isn't it just the issue, long pondered by philosophers, of what counts as a just distribution of the goods required for a good life? Political philosophers have proposed a number of accounts of how houses, doctors' visits and retirement moneys should be distributed and of how best to achieve what they deem a just distribution. Why shouldn't we see enhancements as just more goods to feed into a society's distributive apparatus? John Rawls's distributive scheme currently enjoys the most widespread philosophical support. Rawls proposes a 'difference principle', which allows deviation from equal distribution of goods such as liberty and opportunity only when an unequal distribution helps everybody, most especially the worst off. Were we to entrust enhancements to Rawls we would grant the rich better access only if the worse off were to be benefited by this pattern of access. We would be confident about the fairness of this way of allocating enhancements to the extent that we were confident about Rawls's theory of justice." Fortunately, Rawls's theory of justice is dead on arrival. It has no scientific basis other than feel good socialism. It is a failed philosophy. Agar then turns to manipulating behavioral traits: "The moral image of NURTURE can help us to respond to such a use of enhancement technologies. R. Paul Churchill argues that parents have an obligation to educate their children to be moral altruists. He claims that the aim of raising healthy, happy and autonomous human beings does not conflict with, indeed is often promoted by, the goal of raising altruists. It does seem unlikely that parents would benefit their children by making them psychopaths. Those completely devoid of empathy may flourish in the short term, but they are usually exposed in the end. Perhaps geneticists will find genes that can be modified so as to reduce but not entirely eliminate the capacity to empathize. It seems to me that even slight moral impairment is likely to handicap many life plans. A person who is incapable of acknowledging the full moral worth of others is likely to find forming meaningful relationships with them more difficult. However, even if enhancement by way of moral impairment did not harm its recipients, it should be banned. This should be apparent once we take into account the plights of those whose spouses, neighbors and colleagues are morally impaired." This is where the debate gets down and dirtyAgar along with other bioethicists are out of touch with evolutionary realities. It is true that when humans were confined to small bands of huntergatherers, psychopaths could be held in check. If they became too much of a liability, they were banished or hacked to death. The same is true in small villages, where psychopaths, through gossip, could be countered by alerting others to the danger they posed. In a modern, cosmopolitan society however that is no longer truean intelligent psychopath can do very well in terms of reproductive success and economic success. They can go after whatever they want without the shame, guilt, or shyness that many of us feel if we don't conform to accepted behaviors. Today, it is the empathetic suckerthe altruistthat will do less well. Trivers and Hamilton in addition have shown that altruism is merely a means to advance reproductive success for cooperation in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. That world no longer exists. As Agar notes, "Moral and political philosophers have defended a variety of views about reciprocity's significance. According to some, it is at the heart of morality. Moral rules emerge from the needs of rational beings to cooperate with one another to generate goods and protect against threats." Then Agar returns to the bizarre, "Conceiving of diversity as only instrumentally valuable makes it vulnerable to enhancement technologies. It is the manifest diversity in conceptions of the good life that supplies much of the motivation for the liberal doctrine. As enhancement technologies eliminate or reduce differences between people, they eliminate or reduce the need for laws protecting citizens' rights to make unpopular choices about the good life." This seems not to be incorrect, just highly indeterminable. First, we don't know yet whether enhancement technologies will increase the differences between people or reduce them. That all depends if it is the elite who will take advantage of genetic engineering, or it will be the state(s) policy to raise everyone up to at least a minimal level of enhancementor both at the same time in different parts of the world. Second, with enhancement will come a whole new set of values. Highly enhanced people could be egalitarians, inegalitarians, indifferent to lesser human beingswe will not know until it happens. One thing is fairly certain because it exists todaythe elite will dictate the policy and the value system of the state using the media, and control of resources. Agar goes on to warn, "The morally noxious homogenizing influence that I will focus on is prejudice. A program of liberal enhancement would prevent a state from using the reproductive acts of its citizens to implement its bigoted ideology. But no society is entirely free of prejudice. Despite efforts to protect them, people suffer because of their genders, racial backgrounds, religious commitments and sexual orientations. Often this prejudice is subconscious but, conscious or not, it can still influence enhancement choices. Enhancement technologies will turn reproduction into another means of expressing prejudice. They will grant racism and homophobia an unprecedented efficacy. While today these attitudes make many people miserable, in the future genetic technologies may enable them to shape successive generations. The progressive elimination of psychological and physical characteristics that, for whatever reason, attract prejudice will dramatically reduce diversity. Many racists wrongly believe that the color of one's skin indicates the possession of particular intellectual, moral and physical virtues. Racism has the great advantage, from the perspective of the genetic engineer, of focusing on superficial characteristics of human beings." Of course, all people have their prejudices, including those who hate prejudiced people. That is the conundrum of value systems, they change but there are always those behaviors and kinds that are in and those that are anathema to most people. Humans are easily indoctrinated into changing many of their attitudes, but I believe that the more intelligent human being will be better equipped to bias their prejudices towards those values, actions, and human kinds that are truly inimical to society. For example, will an enhanced intellect be more or less prejudiced towards pedophiles? Well, if they understand the organic nature of the condition (if that is what it really is) they would be less condemning but would also perhaps be more protective in keeping pedophiles away from children. Again, Agar speculates too much about human nature when we still do not understand if humans are even truly rationalStanovich et al. would say we are not (Stanovich 1999, 2004; Gigerenzer & Todd 1999; Giovannoli 1999). Bioethicists seem to be all about speculation, as if X always leads to Y. With regards to racistsor what eugenicists call race realiststhose who are educated know that the color of one's skin has no meaning whatsoever with regards to intelligence, behavioral traits or anything other than just the amount of melanin produced. Race is not about color, it is about real differences in the frequency of genetic alleles that have taken place within breeding populations. Blacks have low intelligence, they act out, they are more violent, and with their own form of racism, they blame all of their problems on Whites and Jews. Racism is coalitional psychology: it is found in the chimpanzee, our closest ancestor, as well as in humans. In addition, assortative mating is the norm among animals. Sexual selection is strongly influenced by the likeness between mating pairs, and is a powerful component of speciation (Jernvall in Hall 2003). It is highly likely that as the world becomes more multicultural, and some races or population groups interbreed, others will be in the process of sorting themselves based on intelligence, looks, personality, etc. Some humans will breed for intellect, while others for athletic ability, because both can pay off big time (sports is a long shot of course, while intellect is a sure bet for at least a highly prestigious job if not enormous wealth). Now, along with a diaspora form of racial separation based on selected traits, speciation can be driven by technology. Agar states that, "Leon Kass worries that the advent of reproductive cloning will create an immoral market in Michael Jordan's genome. The combination of genetic engineering and cloning may enable people to become the parents of a white Mike." It is interesting that the same people who deny that athletic talent or intelligence is highly genetic, now worry that evil Whites will steal athletic Black genes, then make the child look White. These are some bizarre science fiction scenarios, not on the technical side but the value laden moral side. Likewise, Blacks could clone a White genius but change their genes so that they are Black in color. But is color a factor? The last time I looked at the young and old women alike at the health club, getting a tan was still very much in, even with the risks of skin cancer. I saw one young women at the club who was very dark with a very attractive caramel color, and I couldn't determine if it was the new spray-on tan or the real thing. More than likely, when we can alter skin color through genetic engineering, the color selected could be dark just as easily as white, and the preference would probably change over time. Dark skin has more sexual appeal when it is combined with White features, and it would also protect sun lovers with ultraviolet light protection. Agar continues these absurd speculations, "Racism may become relevant to decisions about the welfare of future persons in another, more insidious, way. It does not have to be a motive of parents-to-be for it to influence their enhancement choices. Although prospective parents may recognize that the claims of homophobes or racists are false, they should nevertheless acknowledge that these claims make up part of the social environment in which their children will live. Consider this fact in the light of my appeals in chapter 5 and chapter 6 that we ought neither to reduce our children's real freedom, nor to infringe their autonomy. Racism and homophobia are threats to real freedom and autonomy. A person may think about the transmission of his dark variants of the melanin-producing genes in the same way as he does about passing on his asthma-risk genes. This prospective parent is unlikely to be fooled into thinking that being black or having asthma reduces one's moral worth. He may feel that his conception of himself has been formed by these characteristics, and hence be reluctant, or even find it impossible, to imagine his life as a white non-asthmatic. However, he may at the same time understand that the path of the person he is about to bring into existence will be easier if he is white and non-asthmatic." Agar above conflates science, religion and preferences of humans. What does he mean by "claims of homophobes or racists are false?" From a religious perspective, homosexuality is often taboo, while culturally it is celebrated in many cosmopolitan niches. As for science, homosexuality is studied just like introversion or neuroticism. And it is the same with racismanyone not of the chosen people are lesser people, some people regard other races preferentially or disparagingly, and science looks to behavior genetics to determine how races differ from environmental influences versus genetic influences. As to what he means by "racism and homophobia are threats to real freedom and autonomy" I cannot determine. The fact that I am not "hung" like Michael Jordan certainly has reduced my freedom to pursue women like those that I would have liked. The same can be said for homely people, short people, shy people, and a host of other traits that are limiting in a very judgmental world. As for autonomy, in the world we live in today, to be Black gives one a great deal of autonomy on making claims or excuses for why they should be given preferences for jobs, education and benefits over those that cannot use their minority status for special freedoms and opportunities. Only minorities are allowed to form special interests groups based on raceWhites are condemned if they try it. Agar elaborates, "Helping a person to escape prejudice by changing his genome misdiagnoses the problem. Being black or gay is not a disability. It is a mistake to seek biotechnological solutions to problems that have nothing at all to do with genes. The fault is in the attitudes of racist people, not in the genomes of the people they hate. We should change the attitudes, not the genomes. We would block the homogenizing combination of enhancement technologies and prejudice by banning choices that collude with unjust environments." Agar misses the primary objective, conscious or not, as to why parents use genetic enhancements: it is to give their children the ability to prosper and procreate, if they so choose, thus passing their genes to future generations. If your child is a homosexual they perceptually at least may not procreate or will not do so with as high a numbers on average as heterosexuals. In addition, parents have the right to apply enhancements that they feel are more desirable like attractiveness, height, and athleticism as an aesthetic concern. If parent(s) find homosexuals disgusting, then they have a right to try to avoid that behavioral type. If lesbians find heterosexuals disgusting, they can opt for birthing homosexuals. To be human is to have prejudices, but with greater intelligence, we equip ourselves to check on our prejudices to see if they make sense. Not all prejudice is wrong or immoral. Agar argues that, "By analogous reasoning, the fact that dark-skinned people suffer only because they live in a social environment shaped to some extent by morally wrong racist attitudes does not make any less real their suffering. If light-to-dark skin gene therapy is justified to avoid the ill effects of UVB then why should not dark-to-light skin therapy be justified to avoid the ill effects of racism? Both ozone depletion and racism are ugly realities, but they are realities nonetheless. Of course, it would certainly be preferable to eliminate racism, but prejudice, racial or otherwise, is an entrenched feature of most societiesit cannot be changed overnight. Optimists may think that education can reduce prejudice, but they would not deny there is still much to do. Parents have little control over whether their child will be born into a society in which there are many racistsbut they can use enhancement technologies to prevent the child from being harmed by this morally defective environment. "The logic of the above reasoning can be summarized as follows. The mere recognition that a certain harm has its origins in a morally defective environment does not alter its reality. If parents are allowed to use enhancement technologies to spare their children the harms imposed by mild asthma then they should also be allowed to spare them the same amount of harm inflicted by racists and homophobes. "However, there is a difference between using genetic engineering to escape the harmful effects of ozone depletion, on the one hand, and using it to escape the harmful effects of prejudice, on the other. In the former case, collusion with injustice may remove part of the motivation for addressing the real problem, but it does not prevent us from doing something about it. The technologies that would make a future person's skin darker are not themselves ozone-depleting. We can darken people's skins while still fighting to reduce emissions harmful to the ozone layer. This two-pronged approach to the problem should be motivated by the recognition that the thinning of the ozone layer not only harms humans, it also harms the environment. Some philosophers think that the environment is valuable in itself. Even those who deny that nature has intrinsic value think that humans derive a wide range of goods from it. Ozone depletion threatens these goods. "Now consider parents who replace dark with light skin alleles in the genomes of their future child. The value of a procedure that transforms a black fetus into a white one depends to some extent on the continuing existence of people to serve as targets for the prejudice that is avoided. Prospective parents may succeed in sparing their child the burden of prejudice, but, in doing so, they increase the burden on children who continue to be born with the dark variants. Whether they intend it to or not, their complicity with prejudice will be seen as endorsing the idea that moral value really is determined by one's skin color. The complicity is likely to make racism more efficacious, encouraging the very idea of prejudice. The same points apply to genetic engineering to change sexual orientation. The perhaps accidental endorsement of homophobia will make it worse for the gay people who remain in our society. It is hard to imagine a successful fight against prejudice in the very society in which there is a widely exercised freedom on the part of parents to remove from their children the characteristics that would make them objects of prejudice. "Suppose, improbably, that therapy to alter sexual-orientation genes and skin color genes were not only to be made universally available, but also that every prospective parent used them to make their children invisible to bigotry, and furthermore that they are universally successful. There would be no more black or gay people left to hatebut the arbitrariness of bigotry allows the same motives that underlie the prejudice whose targets we have eliminated to fix on other targets. They would default to other morally irrelevant attributes of people. Those who would have been homophobes could find some part of the broad spectrum of heterosexual behavior to focus on with equivalent vehemence. The hatred of racists would be replaced with loathings fixed on other easily recognizable distinguishing characteristics of people, such as their religious beliefs or sporting affiliations. Thus, in order to put an end to prejudice, the processes of homogenization would need to proceed to the point of making us all indistinguishable from one another. "It is because of this close connection between the moral badness of racism and the action of removing dark skin alleles that we should not allow parents to choose this modification for their children. We imagine a widely exercised prerogative to use genetic engineering to spare one's future child the harmful effects of UVB being combined with a successful struggle against the agents damaging the ozone layer. Neither the gene therapy nor sun-blocks prevent us from recognizing and acting against the wrongness of the circumstances that necessitate them. This is not the case when we deflect bigotry by genetically modifying skin color or sexual orientation." Agar seems to be singularly obsessed with racism and homophobia, but he fails to realize that if Blacks used genetic enhancement to increase their intelligence and conscientiousness, reduce their violence, becoming productive members of society, their dark skin would be irrelevant. It is not skin color that causes Whites, Jews, East Asians, and very dark Indian Asians from fleeing Black neighborhoods, it is in recognition that Blacks' high levels of violence and low intelligence leads to neighborhood decline. Agar and the rest of his liberal eugenic' advocates have also forgotten that very near and dear segment of the world's population, the ubiquitous indigenous people. Their advocates want to preserve their tribal way of life, free of modernism's corrupting influence, and preserve the lands they occupy as they have for thousands of years. If the rest of us cosmopolitan genetic progressives use enhancement technologies to change our racial characteristics, will these indigenous natives become just another attraction like an African safariwhere we can use them to look back at our primitive past? They will eventually be left so far behind that we will see them being closer to apes than to enhanced humans. Throughout the literature of bioethicists is a common theme: there is a denial that intelligence is primarily genetic while at the same time there is a fear that genetic enhancement for intelligence will not be distributed equally to everyone. The elite will have ever more children that are more intelligent, leading to a gradual speciation between enhanced humans and the unenhanced underclass. They want it both ways, to deny any innate differences in average intelligence between races, while arguing for a redistribution of intelligence genes to bring Blacks, Amerindians, and others up to the innate intelligence of Whites, Jews and East Asians. It was not too many years ago that everyone was declaring that eugenics was dead; it was a pseudoscience. Now, they are scrambling to try to make the implementation of eugenics an egalitarian mandate of the socialist society. I am confident however that we are getting very close to a point where eugenicistsfuturists will start to split away from others, forming our own societies for accumulating wealth, to produce children that are as perfect as possible to win the evolutionary arms race to the top. The separation of course does not have to be complete physical separation. We can continue to live in the resource rich cosmopolitan environment, working with others not like ourselves, but retreat in our leisure hours to our own communities to raise our children within a eugenic value system. No altruism or empathy towards outsiders, no socializing with outsiders, and no sharing of any sort with outsiders. The good life will be one where we share in the awe and passion of intellectualism, futurism, wealth accumulation, and producing children to carry on after we depart. --- published 10/21/2005 by Matt Nuenke References 2. http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/Plotz.htm From checker at panix.com Sat Nov 26 02:08:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:08:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Parents' Effect on Achievement Shaky Message-ID: Parents' Effect on Achievement Shaky http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/21/AR2005112101287_pf.html Parents' Effect on Achievement Shaky Other Factors May Play Greater Role, Study Says By Jay Mathews Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 22, 2005; A10 Maria Allen, a parent who has been critical of her Fairfax County school system, recently called the principals of three Richmond elementary schools to find out why -- and how -- it is that their low-income black students were doing better than similar students in her school system. Their answer was telling, she said. "The bottom line is this," Allen said one principal told her. "We don't have an expectation of the home. We don't blame the home. We can't teach parents. We don't worry about whose responsibility it should be. We just consider it ours." Parental involvement is often cited as vital to raising student achievement. The best schools usually have the most school-oriented parents, many experts say. So doesn't it make sense that all schools need that kind of support at home? But a new study of low-income public schools in California has concluded that several other factors, including teaching the state's rigorous academic content and getting experienced teachers, have much more influence on achievement than does parents' involvement. The findings have inspired a national debate on the subject, with some parents like Allen saying the study is correct and others saying parental influence should not be so quickly dismissed. Attempting to clarify the study after seeing the conflicting interpretations, the nonprofit EdSource group in Mountain View, Calif., which led the project, as well as others in the 11-member research team cautioned against concluding that parents are not important. "In fact, parent involvement was found to be positively correlated" with scores on California's academic performance index (API), the authors said. However, they said, other factors "had a far greater impact on school performance." The group surveyed 5,500 teachers and 257 principals at California public elementary schools with large numbers of low-income students. They compared the methods used at each school with the average score on the 200-to-1,000-point API scale, which is based on state test results. The four practices most closely associated with high student performance were putting greater emphasis on student achievement, tightening the curriculum to fit the state academic standards, using student assessments to identify and remove weaknesses in instruction, and assembling certified and experienced teachers and principals with the best educational equipment. The student characteristics of the 257 schools were very similar, but the schools' API averages varied by as much as 250 points. The authors calculated that, on average, strong emphasis of the four leading approaches was associated with 16- to 18-point higher API scores, while emphasis on "involving and supporting parents" was associated with a 9.9-point API difference. Some experts said this matched what they have seen in other parts of the country. Karin Chenoweth, a senior writer with the Achievement Alliance, a Washington-based group promoting school improvement, said she recently visited Lincoln Elementary School in Mount Vernon, N.Y., with plenty of parental involvement, and Frankford Elementary School in Frankford, Del., which had very little. "Both schools are very high-poverty, and both have 100 percent or close to 100 percent of their kids meeting state standards, depending on the grade level or subject," she said. "Principals need to make schools welcoming places for parents," said Elizabeth Useem, a research consultant with the group Research for Action in Philadelphia, "but that is different from putting huge amounts of time into trying to get parents involved in governance or in coming to events at school planned for them. It takes a long time for parental governance input to work its way into classroom learning -- and even then, it might not be helpful input." Many principals insist, however, that working with parents is crucial. Miriam Hughey-Guy, principal of Barcroft Elementary School in Arlington, said: "Parents need to know what their children are learning in school. They need to understand the educational system from the beginning to the end." To make that happen, Hughey-Guy schedules many events that draw parents to the school. Last week, for example, she invited parents to view student science exhibits on Tuesday night, with pizza as an added inducement. On Wednesday morning, she had an open house for parents and community members. Thursday night was McSchool Night -- a gathering and fundraiser at a McDonald's. "Building positive relationships through outreach efforts such as newsletters, fliers, telephone calls, personal contacts, family gatherings, attending neighborhood and/or out-of-schools events is vital," Hughey-Guy said. Betsy Devlin-Foltz, secretary of the Parent Teacher Student Association at Einstein High School in Silver Spring, said her group realized that many of the school's Hispanic parents did not have Internet access and missed news of coming events but often drove their children to school. So, she said, her group "tries to hand out fliers in English and Spanish in the drop-off loop before important events." Like the California study's authors, researchers say that regular parental contact correlates with achievement, even if it is unclear how much. "I've published four research reviews on this topic since 1981 . . . and I'm convinced that parent involvement is a key factor in the achievement gap and in improving low achievement," said Anne T. Henderson, a senior consultant with the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University. Robert F. Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence in Lexington, Ky., said his group has worked to increase parental involvement for years and has many success stories. "Schools should make unequivocal public commitments to involving parents," he said. "An effective strategy we've found is to identify parent leaders and prepare them to reach other parents." Ann Monday, assistant superintendent for instruction in Fairfax County, noted Allen's comments about county schools and said she thought that "achievement should be more broadly defined than just test scores." She said there is too much research showing parents playing a significant role to ignore them. But Allen said she was still disappointed when the Fairfax County superintendent's community advisory committee recently put the greatest emphasis on parental involvement. "Great schools and school systems . . . aren't obsessed with teaching the parents," Allen said. "They aren't making excuses. They are focused on one thing: teaching the children." From HowlBloom at aol.com Sat Nov 26 04:49:53 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 23:49:53 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Message-ID: <287.493bd0.30b94371@aol.com> Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a treatment for a short film in 2001. As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges with Eshel. Take a look: Could swarms of robo-microbes Made by humans and biology The techno teams That come from dreams The wet dreams of technology Could cyborg microbes by the trillions Launched as space communities Explore the dark beyond our skies Thrive on starlight, climb and dive through wormholes and through nebulae? Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space And tame time with phrenology? Could they ride herd on mass stampedes of x-rays and raw energy corralling flares spat by black holes at the cores of galaxies? Could genes retooled In swarms of cells Become our new conquistadors? Could they explore Galactic shores And synapse reports To our brains? >From global thinking Could we go To cosmos-hopping megaminds One small step for E. coli A giant step for human kind? The article: Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1132979630-umqKos8Hc Aa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri dish? Scientists have created living photographs made of bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an image. Bacteria are not about to replace conventional photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a single image. But the feat shows the potential of an emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves designing living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might design a circuit. "We're actually applying principles from engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the photography project, which is described in a paper being published today in the journal Nature. One team of synthetic biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. The technology could also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations of things that can easily be done with electronics. Synthetic biologists have, for instance, made the biological equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and off. To make the bacterial film, common E. coli bacteria were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced only when the bacteria are in the dark. The camera, developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, black-and-yellowish picture. Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability to control single biological cells in a population," said Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at Texas. Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes to cells for three decades, and the distinction between synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is not always clear. Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of experimentation, in contrast to true engineering, like building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts and has a fairly predictable outcome. "We haven't been able to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and predictably engineer biological systems," said Drew Endy, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It means the complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are quite limited." Professor Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have created a catalog of biological components, which they call BioBricks, which are sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions like turning on a gene. Still, since cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is open to question how predictable biological engineering can ever be. M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for college students to design "genetically engineered machines." The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist who has been learning about biology at the university. By chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But since E. coli live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black precipitate is produced. The scientists created sort of a chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Nov 24 15:10:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 07:10:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Commercial ISS and Lunar Resupply Options In-Reply-To: <2a0.e57d7.30b6928a@aol.com> Message-ID: We should not assume that "we" own space. The Japanese have quietly built a very sophisticated space program. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 7:51 PM To: kcox12 at houston.rr.com; lcannon at buzzaldrin.com; rebeccacross at comcast.net; BobKrone at aol.com; Smicharlie at aol.com; gaianh at yahoo.com; david.j.korsmeyer at nasa.gov; dlivings at davidlivingston.com; DWSPACE at aol.com; richard.e.eckelkamp at nasa.gov; edgarmitchell at email.msn.com; edward.kiker at SMDC-CS.ARMY.MIL; arcoscielos at yahoo.com; ebenjacob at ucsd.edu; fwhite66 at post.harvard.edu; raymond.j.garbos at baesystems.com; feng.hsu1 at jsc.nasa.gov; hlyon at marlow.com; isaacsonj at hotmail.com; JSSDesign at aol.com; KTConnor at sprynet.com; DrRSKirby at aol.com; lgdowning at sbcglobal.net; LonnieSchorer at aol.com; m.schwab at homeplanetdefense.org; m.f.hannon at worldnet.att.net; LangdonM at aol.com; paul.werbos at verizon.net; ray.chase at anser.org; SherryEBell at aol.com; tommatula at hotmail.com; hope.grove at comcast.net; thomas.e.diegelman at nasa.gov; taylort at mac.com; msdror at mscc.huji.ac.il Cc: planetbloom at hotmail.com; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Commercial ISS and Lunar Resupply Options The NASA report is extremely exciting. Congratulations on stimulating the space agency to think commercial. The report leaves out one tried and true component that could help achieve its goals--the X-Prize. A series of X-Prize contests leading to low-earth orbit, fuel depots in space, and eventually the moon and beyond may prove far more effective in mobilizing talent than inviting bids. The X-Prize competitors and sponsors have proven that a competition between technologies forced to show their stuff is far more convincing, exciting, and effective, than a battle between batches of paperwork. Howard NASA and the Business of Space STATUS REPORT Date Released: Friday, November 18, 2005 Source: NASA HQ American Astronautical Society 52nd Annual Conference Michael D. Griffin NASA Administrator 15 November 2005 When President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration in January 2004, he made many specific points, including one which has been little noted, but which we here all believe; that the pursuit of the Vision will enhance America's economic, scientific and security interests. He also made it clear that the first step in the plan was to use the Space Shuttle to complete the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS), after which the ISS would be used to further the goals of exploration beyond low Earth orbit. These issues are all closely related, and I believe it is time to discuss in more detail how the ISS will be used to accomplish them, and how it will fit into a broader strategy for 21st century space exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond in a way that will spur commerce, advance scientific knowledge, and expand humanity's horizons. We are entering the dawn of the true space age. Our nation has the opportunity to lead the way. It is an opportunity we are eager to pursue, and one which we are unwilling to postpone. But the exploration of the solar system cannot be what we want it to be as an enterprise borne solely by the American taxpayer, or even by the taxpayers of the nations willing to join with us in this enterprise. If we are to make the expansion and development of the space frontier an integral part of what it is that human societies do, then these activities must, as quickly as possible, assume an economic dimension as well. Government-directed space activity must become a lesser rather than a greater part of what humans do in space. To this end, it is up to us at NASA to use the challenge of the Vision for Space Exploration to foster the commercial opportunities which are inherent to this exciting endeavor. Our strategy to implement the Vision must, and we believe does, have the potential to open a genuine and sustainable era of space commerce. And the International Space Station will provide the first glimpses into this new era. Before we pursue this thought further, let us summarize a few statistics from the ISS program. On November 2nd, we marked the fifth year of consecutive human occupancy of the Station. The Station has hosted 97 visitors from ten countries in its approximately 425 cubic meters, a volume roughly the size of a typical three-bedroom home. Of these, 29 have been crew members of the twelve ISS expeditions which have flown to date. With the most recent spacewalk by Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur and Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev, 63 have been conducted in support of ISS assembly, totaling nearly 380 hours. And through the partnership we have with 15 other nations, we have learned to work together on an incredibly complex systems engineering project. While it certainly has not always gone smoothly, the simple fact of its accomplishment has been an amazing feat. My oft-stated view is that the international partnership is, in fact, the most important long-term benefit to be derived from the ISS program. I think it is a harbinger of what we can accomplish in the future as we move forward to even more ambitious objectives in space. Indeed, the value of this international collaboration was endorsed once again by a recent vote in Congress, which lessened certain restrictions placed on our ability to cooperate with Russia in the arena of manned spaceflight. This Congressional action helps to ensure the continuous presence of American astronauts on the station. It continues to reflect our government's commitment to nonproliferation objectives, while recognizing the value of international cooperation in space exploration. So, how can the ISS that we are building today help us to move beyond low Earth orbit tomorrow? To begin, we are focusing human research on ISS on the highest risks to crew health and other issues we will face on long exploratory missions. This research will help us understand the effects of long duration spaceflight on the human body, such as bone and muscle loss, so that we can develop medical standards and protocols to manage such risks. We have already had some successful anecdotal experience among ISS crewmembers with exercise countermeasures. Perhaps ISS-based research will one day help us to evaluate the efficacy of drugs to counter osteoporosis, or long-term exposure to the radiation environment, or to test advanced radiation detectors. The station will help us learn to deal with crew stress on long missions, to enable them to remain emotionally healthy. With the ISS as a testbed, we can learn to develop the medical technologies, including small and reliable medical sensors and new telemedicine techniques, needed for missions far from home. A milestone in that arena was achieved a year ago, when the journal Radiology published its first research paper submitted directly from the Station, ISS Science Officer Mike Fincke's account of the first use of ultrasound in space for a shoulder examination. The ISS can host, and test, developmental versions of the new lox/methane engines we will need for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), and many other systems that we will need for Mars. These include the development and verification of environmental control, life support, and monitoring technologies, air revitalization, thermal control and multiphase flow technologies, and research into flammability and fire safety. As I have often said, when we set out for Mars, it will be like sealing a crew into a submarine and telling them not to ask for help or return to port for several years. We can't do that today. We have to be able to do it before people can go to Mars. We'll learn to do it on the ISS, and later on the Moon. And so, fundamentally, the ISS will allow us to learn to live and work in space. And even though this research is focused on the tasks associated with setting up research bases on the Moon and preparing the way for Mars exploration, it will also benefit millions of people here on Earth. What we learn about bone loss mitigation and cardiovascular deconditioning, the development of remote monitoring and medical care, and water reclamation and environmental characterization technology obviously has broader benefits. One certainly would not build a space station to achieve these goals. But given that we have it, we intend to maximize the science return from ISS in ways that will benefit both space exploration and our society at large. But now let us turn to what I believe will be an even greater benefit of the ISS, and that is its role in the development of space as an economic arena. In order that we may devote as much of NASA's budget as possible to the cutting edge of space exploration, we must seek to reduce the cost of all things routine. Here in 2005, the definition of "routine" certainly should include robust, reliable, and cost effective access to space for at least small and medium class payloads. Unfortunately, it does not, and frankly, this is not an area where it is reasonable to expect government to excel. Within the boundaries of available technology, when we want an activity to be performed reliably and efficiently, we in our society look to the competitive pressures of the free market to achieve these goals. In space, these pressures have been notably lacking, in part because the space "market" has historically been both specialized and small. There have been exceptions ? notably in the communications satellite market ? but the key word here is "exceptions". Broadly speaking, the market for space services has never enjoyed either the breadth or the scale of competition which has led, for example, to today's highly efficient air transportation services. Without a strong, identifiable market, the competitive environment necessary to achieve the advantages we associate with the free market simply cannot arise. I believe that with the advent of the ISS, there will exist for the first time a strong, identifiable market for "routine" transportation service to and from LEO, and that this will be only the first step in what will be a huge opportunity for truly commercial space enterprise, inherent to the Vision for Space Exploration. I believe that the ISS provides a tremendous opportunity to promote commercial space ventures that will help us meet our exploration objectives and at the same time create new jobs and new industry. The clearly identifiable market provided by the ISS is that for regular cargo delivery and return, and crew rotation, especially after we retire the shuttle in 2010, but earlier should the capability become available. We want to be able to buy these services from American industry to the fullest extent possible. We believe that when we engage the engine of competition, these services will be provided in a more cost-effective fashion than when the government has to do it. To that end, we have established a commercial crew/cargo project office, and assigned to it the task of stimulating commercial enterprise in space by asking American entrepreneurs to provide innovative, cost effective commercial cargo and crew transportation services to the space station. This fall, NASA will post a draft announcement which seeks proposals from industry for flight demonstrations to the International Space Station of any combination of the following: external unpressurized cargo delivery and disposal, internal pressurized cargo delivery and disposal, internal pressurized cargo delivery and recovery, and crew transport. As these capabilities are demonstrated in the years ahead, we will solicit proposals for ongoing ISS transportation services from commercial providers. This announcement offers the opportunity for industry to develop capabilities that, once proven, NASA will purchase with great regularity, just as we regularly purchase launch services for our robotic spacecraft today. Once the announcement is on the street, we will receive proposals by late January, with the intent to execute agreements by May of next year. This competition will be open to emerging and established companies, with foreign content allowed, consistent with American law and policy. Proposals can include any mix of existing or new designs and hardware. NASA does not have a preferred solution. Our requirements will be couched, to the maximum extent possible, in terms of performance objectives, not process. Process requirements which remain will reflect matters of fundamental safety of life and property, or other basic matters. It will not be government "business as usual". If those of you in industry find it to be otherwise, I expect to hear from you on the matter. With this plan, and providing of course that we retain the support of the Congress necessary to carry it out, we will put about a half-billion dollars in play over the five years to promote competition that is good for the private sector and good for the public interest. I'm confident that this kind of financial incentive, on different terms than are usual with NASA, or indeed with any government entity, will result in the emergence of substantial commercial providers. Such successes will, in their turn, serve as a justification for even greater use of such "non-traditional" acquisition methods. As I have said in other venues, my use of the words "non-traditional" here is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because what we are talking about is completely traditional in the bulk of our economy which is not driven by government procurement. In this larger economy, when there exist customers with specific needs and the financial resources to satisfy these needs, suppliers compete avidly to meet them. We need more of this in the space enterprise. But as stated earlier, this is only the first step. An explicit goal of our exploration systems architecture was to provide an avenue for the creation of a substantial space economy by suitably leveraging government investment to meet its stated mission requirements. The architecture we announced in September was designed so that NASA would provide, but would provide only, the essential transportation elements and infrastructure to get beyond low Earth orbit. The heavy lift launchers and crew vehicles necessary to journey beyond LEO cannot, in anything like the near future, be provided by any entity other than NASA, on behalf of the U.S. government. The analogy I have used elsewhere is that NASA will build the "interstate highway" that will allow us to return to the Moon, and to go to Mars. We as a nation once had the systems to build this "interstate highway" leading out into the solar system, we should have retained and evolved them, but we did not. So we need to rebuild them. But the "highways" themselves are not, and are not supposed to be, the interesting part. What is interesting are the destinations and, particularly to the point of the present discussion, the service stations, hotels, and other businesses and accommodations that we will find at the "exit ramps" of our future "interstate highways" in space. It is here that a robust commercial market can develop to support our exploration goals, and eventually to go beyond them. I think we are at the start of something big, somewhat akin to what we saw with the personal computer 25 years ago. To my point, NASA's exploration architecture does what it must. It fulfills the mission required of it by the President, according to the terms of a major speech and written policy. It does so in a fashion which some have labeled as "boring" or "lacking pizzazz", but which others have observed makes efficient use of the building blocks that we as a nation own today, and in which the pieces "fit together like a fine Swiss watch". I believe these seemingly divergent views are merely two sides are the same coin, reflecting the fact that the plan delivers what it must, without including what it need not. Nothing else is acceptable in these fiscally challenging times. But the building blocks of our architecture could easily be used to accomplish much more, with the right leverage from commercial providers. To see how this is so, observe first that our "1.5 launch solution" separates the smaller crew launch from that of the heavy, high- value cargo, both on Shuttle-derived launch vehicle variants. While this approach allows us to meet lunar return mission requirements with U.S. government systems ? no external entities are in the critical path for mission accomplishment ? it does not exclude such entities, and indeed provides several "hooks" and "scars" by which their services can be used to facilitate or enhance the mission. By the time we are ready to return to the Moon, the ISS will have been completed and will be in receipt of routine commercial resupply and crew rotation service for, we hope, several years. So, if the plan for stimulating the development of ISS commercial crew rotation capability is successful, it becomes possible to envision the crew launch phase of the lunar mission being carried out on commercial systems. This would be a service we could purchase commercially, leaving the very heavy lift requirements to the government system, for which it is less likely that there will be other commercial applications during this period. Whether or not this occurs, other options are also possible. Astute observers will note that the Shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle (SDHLV) that we have proposed is not, as a rocket, being optimally utilized for its lunar mission. This is because some of the fuel in the so-called "Earth departure stage" is used to lift the lunar payload into Earth orbit, but additional fuel must yet be retained for the translunar ignition burn of over 3 km/s. From a purely architectural point of view, the SDHLV is an expensive vehicle, most aptly utilized for lifting only expensive cargo, such as the man-rated systems it carries. But in our architecture, some of its lift capacity must be utilized to carry fuel into low Earth orbit. This is unsatisfying, because when on the ground, fuel is about the cheapest material employed in any aspect of the space business. Its value in orbit (at least several thousand dollars per pound) is almost completely a function of its location rather than intrinsic to its nature. In contrast, the value of, say, the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) brought up on the heavy-lifter will be well over $100 K per pound, most of which represents its intrinsic cost. The additional value it acquires when transported to its new position in LEO remains a small part of the total value. Logically, then, we should seek to use the SDHLV only for the highest-value cargo, and specifically we should desire to place fuel in orbit by the cheapest means possible, in whatever manner this can be accomplished, whether of high reliability or not. However, in deciding to embark on a lunar mission, we cannot afford the consequential damage of not having fuel available when needed. Recognizing that fact, our mission architecture hauls its own Earth- departure fuel up from the ground for each trip. But if there were a fuel depot available on orbit, one capable of being replenished at any time, the Earth departure stage could after refueling carry significantly more payload to the Moon, maximizing the utility of the inherently expensive SDHLV for carrying high-value cargo. But NASA's architecture does not feature a fuel depot. Even if it could be afforded within the budget constraints which we will likely face ? and it cannot ? it is philosophically the wrong thing for the government to be doing. It is not "necessary"; it is not on the critical path of things we "must do" to return astronauts to the Moon. It is a highly valuable enhancement, but the mission is not hostage to its availability. It is exactly the type of enterprise which should be left to industry and to the marketplace. So let us look forward ten or more years, to a time when we are closer to resuming human exploration of the Moon. The value of such a commercially operated fuel depot in low Earth orbit at that time is easy to estimate. Such a depot would support at least two planned missions to the Moon each year. The architecture which we have advanced places about 150 metric tons in LEO, 25 MT on the Crew Launch Vehicle and 125 MT on the heavy-lifter. Of the total, about half will be propellant in the form of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, required for the translunar injection to the Moon. If the Earth departure stage could be refueled on-orbit, the crew and all high-value hardware could be launched using a single SDHLV, and all of this could be sent to the Moon. There are several ways in which the value of this extra capability might be calculated, but at a conservatively low government price of $10,000/kg for payload in LEO, 250 MT of fuel for two missions per year is worth $2.5 B, at government rates. If a commercial provider can supply fuel at a lower cost, both the government and the contractor will benefit. This is a non-trivial market, and it will only grow as we continue to fly. The value of fuel for a single Mars mission may be several billion dollars by itself. Once industry becomes fully convinced that the United States, in company with its international partners, is headed out into the solar system for good, I believe that the economics of such a business will attract multiple competitors, to the benefit of both stockholders and taxpayers. Best of all, such an approach enables us to leverage the value of the government system without putting commercial fuel deliveries in the critical path. If the depot is there and is full, we can use it. But with the architecture we have advanced, we can conduct missions to the Moon without it. The government does not need to have oversight, or even insight, into the quality and reliability of the fuel delivery service. If fuel is not delivered, the loss belongs to the operator, not to the government. If fuel is delivered and maintained in storage, the contractors are paid, whether or not the government flies its intended missions. If long-term delivery contracts are negotiated, and the provider learns to effect deliveries more efficiently, the gain is his, not the government's. Since fuel is completely fungible, it can be left to the provider to determine the optimum origin, size and method of a delivering it. And finally, though I would rather not do it, it is even possible that we could develop such a market in stages, with the first fuel tank provided by the government, and then turned over to a commercial provider to store and maintain fuel for future missions, and to expand the tank farm as warranted by the market. To maintain and operate the fuel depot, periodic human support may be needed. Living space in Earth orbit may be required; if so, this presents yet another commercial opportunity for people like Bob Bigelow, who is already working on developing space habitats. So the logistics needs of the fuel depot may provide more of the same opportunities that we will pioneer with ISS. Fuel and other consumables will not always be most needed where they are stored. Will orbital transfer and delivery services develop, with reusable "space tugs" ferrying goods from centralized stockpiles to other locations? The fuel depot operator will need power for refrigeration and other support systems. This might well be left to specialty suppliers who know nothing of the storage and maintenance of cryogenic tank farms, but who know a lot about how to generate and store power. Could these be standard power modules, developed and delivered for a fee to locations specified by the user? In the course of conducting many fuel replenishment missions and associated operations, commercial launch and orbital systems of known and presumably high reliability will be developed and evolved. Government mission planners will be able to take advantage of these systems, which will become "known quantities" by virtue of their track record rather than through the at best mixed blessings of government development oversight. There will also be a private sector role in supporting a variety of lunar surface systems and infrastructure, including lunar habitats, power and science facilities, surface rovers, logistics and resupply, communications and navigation, and in situ resource utilization equipment. There may or may not be gold on the Moon ? I'm not sure we care ? but we may well witness a 21st century gold rush of sorts when entrepreneurs learn to roast oxygen from the lunar soil, saving a major portion of the cost of bringing fuel to the lunar surface. Will a time come when it is more economical to ship liquid oxygen from the lunar surface to low Earth orbit, then to bring it up from Earth? This will all start to become "really real" in 10 years or so. As I see it, these are exactly the kinds of enterprises to which government is poorly suited, but which in the hands of the right entrepreneur can earn that person a cover on Fortune magazine. But it will take enlightened government management to bring it about, management as much in the form of what not to do, as to do. In the coming years and decades, NASA must focus on its core government role as a provider of infrastructure broadly applicable to the common good, and too expensive for any single business entity to develop. NASA must remain on the frontier, and must conscientiously architect its plans to favor the inclusion of entrepreneurs through arms-length transactions wherever possible, restricting the use of classic "prime contracts" to situations where they are the right tool, not the default tool. With the beginning of space station operations five years ago, we are now at a point children born at the beginning of the 21st century will live their lives knowing that there will always be people living and working in space. And the number of people who will be engaged in such activity will grow by leaps and bounds if we in government are faithful in executing our role in helping the private sector to step up to these new opportunities. I hope there are many entrepreneurs in this audience who have the vision to help us help them pioneer the commercial space frontier. You, and all those engaged in the quest that we are undertaking, have my sincere thanks and appreciation. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Nov 26 14:52:45 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: <287.493bd0.30b94371@aol.com> Message-ID: Some people think our DNA came here from space encapsulated in bacteria... Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM To: isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il Cc: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a treatment for a short film in 2001. As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges with Eshel. Take a look: Could swarms of robo-microbes Made by humans and biology The techno teams That come from dreams The wet dreams of technology Could cyborg microbes by the trillions Launched as space communities Explore the dark beyond our skies Thrive on starlight, climb and dive through wormholes and through nebulae? Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space And tame time with phrenology? Could they ride herd on mass stampedes of x-rays and raw energy corralling flares spat by black holes at the cores of galaxies? Could genes retooled In swarms of cells Become our new conquistadors? Could they explore Galactic shores And synapse reports To our brains? From global thinking Could we go To cosmos-hopping megaminds One small step for E. coli A giant step for human kind? The article: Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri dish? Scientists have created living photographs made of bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an image. Bacteria are not about to replace conventional photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a single image. But the feat shows the potential of an emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves designing living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might design a circuit. "We're actually applying principles from engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the photography project, which is described in a paper being published today in the journal Nature. One team of synthetic biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. The technology could also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations of things that can easily be done with electronics. Synthetic biologists have, for instance, made the biological equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and off. To make the bacterial film, common E. coli bacteria were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced only when the bacteria are in the dark. The camera, developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, black-and-yellowish picture. Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability to control single biological cells in a population," said Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at Texas. Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes to cells for three decades, and the distinction between synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is not always clear. Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of experimentation, in contrast to true engineering, like building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts and has a fairly predictable outcome. "We haven't been able to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and predictably engineer biological systems," said Drew Endy, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It means the complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are quite limited." Professor Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have created a catalog of biological components, which they call BioBricks, which are sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions like turning on a gene. Still, since cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is open to question how predictable biological engineering can ever be. M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for college students to design "genetically engineered machines." The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist who has been learning about biology at the university. By chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But since E. coli live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black precipitate is produced. The scientists created sort of a chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 27 17:11:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 12:11:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 048: Liberals and Conservatives Find Common Ground at Student-Debt Forum Message-ID: Meme 048: Liberals and Conservatives Find Common Ground at Student-Debt Forum sent 5.11.27 I started making some various remarks, but there were so many of them, I decided to turn this into a meme. The main theme is the biggest drawback of student loans, but I also reflect on how Washington works. I shouldn't say I am angry about it, so much as reflective. My solution is pluralism, the realization that there is no universalist monopoly on truth, much less on political truth. Hooray for Allan Carlson! In the article below, he speaks out against student loans as delaying family formation. He has no feeling for the heredity of ability, though. But he raised the most important drawback to student loans. When I worked on higher education issues, I asked that a study be made to determine whether the outlay for Federal student aid programs would get more kids through college if they took the form of grants or subsidized loans. Loans are indeed subsidized, to the tune of 25% to 50% of the amount, depending on the loan and how the calculations were made, though some of the experts below think that loans are a free lunch. The fact is that even "unsubsidized" loans, at "market" interest rates, cost the taxpayers money, if only to sock them with defaulted loans that cannot or are not collected. The liberals there, who have zero understanding of the economic concept of opportunity costs and trade-off responded, saying we "need" more of both! At the time the supposedly conservative Reagan administration's "policy" was to proportionately shift Federal monies from grants to loans. I urged that a study be conducted to find out what is in fact the case. I once was called upon to estimate the present discounted lifetime earnings of high school vs. college graduates. The latter is higher, of course, but that is largely due to 1) the greater ability of those who complete college, 2) the show of a willingness to sit patiently behind desks, listen to a professor drone on, study, write papers, and generally display even more ability to follow orders, and 3) the positioning effects that help you get your first job (but you're on your own after that, as many studies have shown. So far down the list that my default hypothesis (still unrefuted by any study: we'd hear endless about such a study, even a bad one, if such a study existed) is that what one actually learns from these professors is minuscule. I am not popular due to my morbid attachment to reality. Our brains evolved, not to apprehend reality so much as to get along in social groups. This is the primary reason why the brains of primates (and humans esp.) are too big for what it would take to maneuver the purely physical environment. Truth-seeking is an accidental byproduct of gene-culture co-evolution, and it's an open question whether a critical mass of truth seekers necessary to keep science and liberty going. Anyhow, at one time I got the raw figures of earning by educational attainment for each age from a Labor Department report. They need to be massaged, since there's a discount rate and a predicted annual growth in GDP/capita rate, both of which must be supplied by the user of the data. Well, I supplied a number of alternative estimates, but the political appointee at the time simply selected a high one, since Secretary William Bennett would be able to show that college graduates could "afford" to repay their loans. I protested, saying that Bennett was also dubious of the value of higher education and wanted to reduce Federal aid. (During the last two years of his tenure, he had been so affected with the Beltway mentality, but this time to use the Federal government to promote "conservative values" rather than to take the Feds out of the education business, that his budget proposal was for an *increase* in Federal education spending! Because of this, I have regarded him ever since as Washington, DC's biggest hypocrite.) It would have been better to chose realistic estimates of the discount rate (3%) and GDP/capita growth (2%) *and* to further reduce the present discounted value of lifetime earnings to remove the three factors I mentioned above. I was overridden. Bennett went on the air with inflated estimates, despite my warnings that his earlier questioning of the value of higher education contradicted what he said and that he'd be caught by reporters in this contradiction. So maybe the political appointee was not so dumb. He was unable to grasp what I said about these three factors, but he must have realized that, as the late Prime Minister of Great Britain, Harold Wilson, stated, "In politics, a week is a long time," and so there was no danger of Bennett's being trapped. (Actually, the political appointee in question, like so many others "burrowed in" and got a permanent Civil Service job. Talking to him years and years later, I came to respect his intelligence, in other areas. Oh, when Bill Clinton became President, the new Democratic political appointees were idealistic hotheads and fretted about all those Republicans who had burrowed in dubiously. Wiser hands prevailed. They were told to cool it, since in four or eight years, they too would want to burrow in.) Time came much later to present lifetime earnings estimates again. I realized that the previous estimates were much too high, even as raw figures that do not take out ability and so on. By this time new data from Labor had come, and once again I chose alternate discount and growth rates. But somehow, it was felt that someone might actually remember the earlier figures. I was told that the same estimate as before must be handed out to the public and was asked to recalculate a 3 1/2% discount rate, since 3% was too low and 4% too high! (I don't remember if these were the actual figures, but it was a half percent in between and still above what I thought was realistic for a lifetime.) Democrats, in my experience, are a little better. They are "good government" types and sometimes seek actual information on how programs will work, so as to improve them. What's amazing, or was amazing, for I've gotten used to it, is that Democrats can actually be more radical. It was a Brookings Institution report (by Moe and Chubb iirc) that beat a drum from private education, not Republican compromisers. There are about 10-20 free market or conservative types where I work, out of 4700 employees. Many of these had burrowed in. The first Bush administration was less "conservative" than the Reagan one and was hostile to Reagan retreads. This is even more the case with the second Bush administration. They have fully bought into the egalitarian rhetoric of liberals but differ in that they say conservative *means* will better accomplish those liberal *ends*. Hence, the No Child Left Behind Act, whose biggest consequences will be to centralize education from the school district and county level to the State level and, this is the worst drawback, to leave the gifted behind. The culture divide is very much at work here. Bush is widely admired (even now) for upholding moral absolutes and *standing firm*. And all his appointees have a huge loyalty to Bush and will *stand firm* he wants or what they think he wants. Meanwhile, families are not being formed. Allan Carlson's voice will have little impact. Carlson--I read his stuff a long time ago--once deplored the vanishing of a "family wage," meaning that employers would "traditionally" pay fathers more than unmarried men. This shows a complete lack of understanding market processes, for any such premium would quickly vanish because of competition. I certainly have never heard of such a thing, and I stopped reading Carlson, though I'm glad he's still at it. It would be such a great anomaly that all economists would hear about it. Except for the still taboo area of innate differences in group intelligence, the profession is remarkably open. Indeed, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, one of the most prestigious and allegedly and not infrequently written for the lay reader, has a regular feature called "anomalies." ----------------- Liberals and Conservatives Find Common Ground at Student-Debt Forum The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.11.25 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i14/14a03402.htm By STEPHEN BURD Washington Policy makers need to devote more attention to helping student-loan borrowers with low incomes who have taken on unmanageable levels of debt, several student-aid experts said last week at a conference here about student indebtedness. The gathering marked the official start of the Project on Student Debt, an effort led by Robert M. Shireman, a former education-policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The project is intended to develop public-policy proposals to reduce the burden of student debt for those least able to afford it. The conference was held at the headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank that co-sponsored it. In an interview, Mr. Shireman, who has been a sharp critic of the student-loan industry, emphasized his collaboration with scholars at the institute. "Here is an effort in which conservatives and liberals are both asking whether there are problems with rising student debt, and if there are, how we might address them," he said. Some speakers last week focused on the downside of borrowing. After asking rhetorically whether students are borrowing too much, Tamara Draut, director of the economic-opportunity program at Demos, an independent think tank, said "absolutely yes." Ms. Draut, whose book Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead is scheduled to be published in January by Doubleday, noted that the median earnings of 25- to 34-year-olds have generally fallen over the past 30 years, while housing prices in major metropolitan areas have soared. As a result, she said, high levels of indebtedness are making it more difficult for student-loan borrowers to pursue public-service careers, such as teaching; to seek graduate degrees; and to save money for the future. Loans as Contraception? A speaker on the conservative side had similarly dire warnings. Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, a nonprofit research institute in Rockford, Ill., said that the rising level of debt is harmful to society because borrowers are more likely to put off getting married and having children. Citing studies that have correlated more education with having fewer children, Mr. Carlson called student loans "a highly effective form of contraception." "The anti-marriage and anti-natal effects of student-loan debt are the consequences of poorly conceived public policy," he said. "Accordingly, policy makers face a special moral imperative to set things right." As an example of how that might be done, he proposed that Congress use student-loan forgiveness as an incentive for child bearing. Under his plan, for every child born to or adopted by married parents, the federal government would pay off one-fourth of their outstanding student debt, up to $5,000 each for the mother and the father. Families that had four children could erase as much as $20,000 per parent, he said. Several higher-education researchers, however, cautioned against a blanket disapproval of student loans. They noted that loans enable millions of students each year to pursue a higher education and, as a result, to improve their lives and their standard of living significantly. Instead, they said, policy makers should focus squarely on low-income people who have assumed too much debt. Sandy Baum, an economics professor at Skidmore College and a senior policy analyst for the College Board, rejected the use of a common standard for measuring debt burden. Student-aid experts tend to say that student-loan borrowers have unmanageable levels of debt if they are making payments in excess of 8 percent of their monthly incomes. The measure is based on a loan-industry recommendation. Ms. Baum argued that it makes no sense to use the same standard to determine what is affordable for a borrower with an annual income of $20,000 and one earning $100,000 per year. "Individuals with higher incomes can afford to devote a higher proportion of their incomes to debt payment," she said. Using surveys of student-loan borrowers conducted by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation from 1998 to 2003, Ms. Baum and a colleague set out to determine acceptable levels of debt for borrowers at different income levels. They concluded that borrowers with pretax incomes of less than half the national median -- which is $37,543 for full-time workers 25 and older -- cannot reasonably be expected to repay their loans. "Students who end up with very low post-schooling income," she said, "should be allowed to suspend repayments and possibly have the interest on their outstanding balance subsidized." Borrowers with incomes near the median, Ms. Baum said, should not devote more than about 10 percent of their incomes to student-loan repayment. Those with higher incomes can afford a greater debt load, she said, but their payments should never exceed 17 percent to 20 percent of their incomes. Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University, also called on policy makers to do more to help those with low incomes who are struggling to repay their student-loan debt. He proposed that the federal government provide a tax credit to people who devote a larger share of their incomes to student-loan payments. Under his plan, for example, borrowers whose total payments for a year exceeded 10 percent of the portion of their income above $10,000 would receive a refundable tax credit. The maximum credit a borrower could claim in any single year would be calculated based on the amount it would cost to pay off the loan, with interest, over a 10-year period. Mr. Kane said that his plan "would effectively cap repayments at a reasonable proportion of income, without requiring borrowers to extend their repayment indefinitely." The Project on Student Debt is being supported primarily by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has started its own Partnership to Reduce the Burden of Student Debt. The partnership is a two-year, $3.5-million project that aims to identify "practical policy options" to deal with families' concerns with the growing indebtedness of students. [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From checker at panix.com Sun Nov 27 17:18:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 12:18:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 049: Benjamin H. Barton: Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy Message-ID: Meme 049: Benjamin H. Barton: Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy sent 5.11.27 The article below is absolutely hilarious. It is libertarian and Public Choice theory applied to Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter novels. What's amazing is that such an article could appear in the law journal of a mainstream university, which is far from having anti-statist tendencies. Time was when both libertarianism and Public Choice theory were shunned, more in America than in Europe. Indeed, James Buchanan feels that he would never have won the Nobel Prize had the award been decided by Americans. Today, both libertarian and Public Choice representatives have a seat at the table in public policy debates. Even still, articles in the American Economic Review, the top publication in the field, when fully within the Public Choice perspective, studiously avoid citing the work of Buchanan, Tullock, and nearly all members of the Virginia school. But there's a larger reason for this meme. Eighteen days after 9/11, I wrote a meme on what I had learned from 9/11. I repeat it after Barton's article. I have held to it ever since, until now. I Checked my Premise, in other words, and am not far from sure that freedom is not going to end in America. I don't think my reasoning in that meme is unsound. Indeed, with the upcoming "civic" generation, it still might. What actually happened is that no monolithic explanation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has emerged. There never were an pronounciamentos by those behind the attacks, and none of those captured have revealed their motives. Of course, Osama stated he was angry at the United States keeping soldiers on the sacred territory of Saudi Arabia and at our foreign policy toward Israel, the Palestinians, and the whole Moslem world. But we also know that fanatics will find excuses and justifications and should not be taken at their word. I think envy is the largest factor, as Moslem terrorists have struck in countries wherever they are. Justifying these attacks because of the Crusades is just silly. We also know that most of the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia, at the time when the 18-24 year-old male population bulge was at its peak. When the bulge peaked about 1980 in Iran, the Shah was replaced by Khomeni. Hormones matter. We also know that the Islamic fundamentalists do not come from illiterate, backward rural areas but are overrepresented in engineering and medical schools. It's a big deal to such a student in the low- to mid-IQ Middle East, but when they come to the West, they are not exceptional at all. Their failed expectations fuel envy and foster fanaticism. And whether or not they stay in Moslem countries, they carry their religion with them to smooth their movement into a more secular world. They become what I call "Scruppies," scripture-pounding Yuppies, who believe in the Koran literally but, as with every literalist, carefully selecting passages that justify worldly success and money making. It's exactly what the Puritans did centuries before. Now mine is just one interpretation, novel perhaps in noting the IQ factor. What is significant for the survival of freedom is that we all have been faced with fanaticism that cries out for explanation. Rather than have one explanation imposed from on high, as in the attack on Pearl Harbor, we have been astounding open to competing explanations. Today, of course, the motives behind Japanese attack is wide open for debate. Invoking evil doesn't wash, not as self-sufficient. The nature of evil, too, has been open to wide discussion, even before 9/11. See, for example, the 2000 Summer issue of The Hedgehog Review, entitled "Evil," online at, http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/THRtoc2-2.html . I have argued that universalism vs. pluralism is becoming the *major* left-right political axis in the 21st century, replacing equality vs. inequality in the later 20th century and central planning vs. free market in the earlier 20th century. Libertarians and Public Choice scholars (they are NOT the same things!) have chipped away at both 20th century left-wing interpretations, but now they are everywhere, even in the Michigan Law Review. And biological inegalitarians are getting published in top publications, too. Enjoy the article below. You can't help but enjoy it! Its publication, not by some right-wing think tank but in the Michigan Law Review, signals that pluralism is winning against universalism (I consider myself very much a 21st century leftist) and that the end of freedom is at least being delayed. --------------- Benjamin H. Barton1: Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy 104 MICH. L. REV. __ (forthcoming May, 2006). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=830765 HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. By J.K. Rowling. New York: Scholastic Press. 2005. Pp. 1, 652. $29.99. What would you think of a government that engaged in this list of tyrannical activities: tortured children for lying;2 designed its prison specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates;3 placed citizens in that prison without a hearing;4 ordered the death penalty without a trial;5 allowed the powerful, rich or famous to control policy;6 selectively prosecuted crimes (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges);7 conducted criminal trials without defense counsel;8 used truth serum to force confessions;9 maintained constant surveillance over all citizens;10 offered no elections and no democratic lawmaking process;11 and controlled the press?12 1 Associate Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law. B.A. 1991, Haverford College; J.D. 1996, University of Michigan. The author gives special thanks to Indya Kincannon, Tom Galligan, Jeff Hirsch, Jennifer Hendricks, Helen Hershkoff, Jeff Thomas, Andrew Morriss, the participants at a Harry Potter and the Law presentation at the 2005 Law and Literature Conference in Gloucester, England, the University of Tennessee College of Law for generous research support, and the Honorable Diana Gribbon Motz. 2 First, a word of warning: if you have not read the Harry Potter books you may want to skip some or all of the footnotes. I will explain critical plot and character references in the main text, but will treat the footnotes as a place for legal and textual support, added analysis, and references for Harry Potter readers. Ministry employee (and evil bureaucrat extraordinaire) Dolores Umbridge forces Harry to write "I must not tell lies" over and over again with an enchanted quill that slices those words into his hand and writes in blood. The worst part of the punishment is that Harry was actually telling the truth and was punished for publicly announcing Voldemort's return. Pp. 219, 346; see also J.K. ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX 263-68 (2003) [hereinafter THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX]. 3 The wizard prison, Azkaban, is staffed by dementors, magical beings that suck all hope and life out of the inmates. See, e.g., J.K. ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN 97 (1999) [hereinafter THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN] (describing Azkaban as "the worst place" and stating that "[m]ost of the prisoners go mad in there"). 4 In The Half-Blood Prince the Ministry arrests and holds a minor character named Stan Shunpike without a trial on "suspicion of Death Eater activity," although no one seems to think that Shunpike is actually guilty. Pp. 221, 331, 346-47. The "Death Eaters" are the evil Lord Voldemort's supporters. Similarly, in The Chamber of Secrets the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, sends one of Harry's favorite teachers, Hagrid, to Azkaban without a hearing or any opportunity to present a defense because the "Ministry's got to do something" in response to attacks at Hogwarts. Fudge further defends the action by saying "I'm under a lot of pressure. Got to be seen doing something." See J.K. ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS 261 (1999) [hereinafter THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS]. 5 In The Prisoner of Azkaban the dementors have permission from the Ministry to kill Sirius Black upon capture, and without any further trial, with the "dementor's kiss." See THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, supra note __, at 247. Similarly, Barty Crouch was given the dementor's kiss without a trial in J.K. ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE 609-10 (2000) [hereinafter THE GOBLET OF FIRE]. 6 There are innumerable examples of this. Throughout the first five books Harry's schoolboy enemy Draco Malfoy's Death Eater Dad Lucius Malfoy is shown to have inordinate governmental access and influence. See, e.g., THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, supra note __, at 125, 218 (arranging to have Hagrid's Hippogriff executed by the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures); THE GOBLET OF FIRE, supra note __, at 91-92 (appearing as the Minister of Magic's honored guest at the Quidditch world cup). 7 The lengthy detention of Stan Shunpike on the mere suspicion of Death Eater activity is a good example. Pp. 221, 331, 346-47. Harry himself is another example. In book three the Ministry of Magic pooh-poohs a charge of the improper underage use of magic, see THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, supra note __, at 43-46, and in book five they attempt to prosecute Harry to the limit of the law (and beyond) for the same charge. See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 26-27, 137-51. 8 Harry's trial in book five is an obvious example. See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 137-51. 9 See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __ at 629-31 (Dolores Umbridge interrogating Harry); THE GOBLET OF FIRE, supra note __, at 593-600 (Dumbledore interrogating Barty Crouch). 10 The Ministry of Magic keeps tabs on all uses of magic in order to detect any improper or underage uses of magic. P. 368. 11 This requires an inference from the first chapter of The Half-Blood Prince. See discussion infra Part III.A. 12 In The Order of the Phoenix the wizard newspaper (The Daily Prophet) regularly disparages Harry and Professor Dumbledore as deranged for claiming that Voldemort has returned. See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 94, 306-8 (stating that the Daily Prophet is discrediting Dumbledore under pressure from the Ministry of Magic); id. at 73-75 (same for Harry). You might assume that the above list is the work of some despotic central African nation, but it is actually the product of the Ministry of Magic, the magician's government in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. When Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released this summer I, along with many others, bought and read it on the day of its release.13 I was immediately struck by Rowling's unsparingly negative portrait of the Ministry of Magic and its bureaucrats. I decided to sit down and reread each of the Harry Potter books with an eye towards discerning what exactly J.K. Rowling's most recent novel tells us about the nature, societal role, and legitimacy of government. 13 I did not, however, dress up as a Wizard or go to one of the local bookstore's midnight Harry Potter parties. Cf. Triumph the Insult Comic, Triumph Versus Star Wars Geeks, http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/2536/details/ (Video of Triumph insulting Star Wars geeks in costumes, including this question: "How do you explain this [outfit] to your imaginary girlfriend?"). I did this for several reasons. First, with all due respect to Richard Posner, Cass Sunstein or Peter Schuck,14 no book released in 2005 will have more influence on what kids and adults around the world think about government than The Half-Blood Prince. It would be difficult to overstate the influence and market penetration of The Harry Potter series.15 Somewhere over the last few years the Harry Potter novels passed from a children's literature sensation to a bona fide international happening. 14 See RICHARD A. POSNER, PREVENTING SURPRISE ATTACKS: INTELLIGENCE REFORMS IN THE WAKE OF 9/11 (2005); CASS SUNSTEIN, RADICALS IN ROBES: WHY EXTREME RIGHT-WING COURTS ARE BAD FOR AMERICA (2005); PETER H. SCHUCK, MEDITATIONS OF A MILITANT MODERATE (2005). 15 Over 10 million copies of The Half Blood Prince were sold internationally in its first 24 hours of release. See Smothered in HP, THE ECONOMIST, September 3, 2005, at 75 ("Garagemen in Beirut were selling it; fisherman on the Greek island of Hydra too."). Over 275 million Harry Potter novels have been sold worldwide, placing them among the best selling novels of all time. See Wikipedia, Harry Potter, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter (last visited September 22, 2005). Second, Rowling's scathing portrait of government is surprisingly strident and effective. This is partially because her critique works on so many levels: what the government does (see above), how the government is structured, and the bureaucrats who run the show. All three elements work together to depict a Ministry of Magic run by self- interested bureaucrats bent on increasing and protecting their power, often to the detriment of the public at large. In other words, Rowling creates a public-interest scholar's dream (or nightmare) government. Her critique is also particularly effective because, despite how awful Rowling's Ministry of Magic looks and acts, it bears such a tremendous resemblance to current Anglo-American government. Rowling's negative picture of government is thus both subtle and extraordinarily piercing. Taken in the context of the Harry Potter novels and the personalities of the bureaucrats involved, each of the above acts of government misconduct seem perfectly natural and familiar to the reader. The critique works because the reader identifies her own government with Rowling's Ministry of Magic. Lastly, The Half-Blood Prince is a tremendous work of fiction that deserves a more careful reading of its themes and plot. It continues a trend in the Harry Potter novels: over the last six books Rowling's Harry Potter novels have gotten longer, more complex, and much, much darker. The first two Harry Potter books tell straightforward stories of good triumphing over evil (Harry defeating the evil Lord Voldemort) at the magical Hogwarts School.16 The next four books present a more complex vision of an entire wizard society, including a wizard government, and an international struggle against Voldemort and his followers that does not feature easy answers, instant triumphs, unblemished heroes, or even clear lines between good and evil.17 16 The first two books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets clock in at a tidy 309 and 341 pages respectively, and feature quite similar narratives: the evil Lord Voldemort's attempts to return to power through unlikely pawns (a teacher in The Sorcerer's Stone and a student in The Chamber of Secrets) are foiled by Harry and his friends. See J.K. ROWLING, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE (1997) [hereinafter SORCERER'S STONE]; THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, supra note __. In moral tone these books are very black and white, and in subject matter they are basically circumscribed to happenings at or around Hogwarts. 17 Each of the last four books is longer and more complex than the first two, and each abandons the "Harry triumphs over Voldemort" structure of the first two. The bulk of the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, deals with the allegedly deadly prisoner of Azkaban, Sirius Black's pursuit of Harry. See THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, supra note __. It turns out that Sirius was wrongfully accused and convicted (a running theme in each of the next three books), and he resumes his role as Harry's godfather at the end of the book. Book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, tells the story of Voldemort's return to power, and features the first death in the series (one of Voldemort's Death Eaters murders Hogwarts student Cedric Diggory). See THE GOBLET OF FIRE, supra note __. Book Five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is darker yet. Harry hits puberty, and is a moody mess throughout the book. For the first time Harry's impetuousness and desire to confront Voldemort backfires, as Sirius Black is murdered, and Harry leads his friends into a trap set by Lord Voldemort. See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __. Rowling's decision to eschew the tried and true formula of her first two books in favor of longer books featuring deaths, imperfect characters and moral ambiguity is both exceptional and refreshing. She could have repeated her formula from the first two books to great acclaim. Instead, she created a much richer world, where the more typical elements of magic and childhood collide with satire and social commentary in the mold of Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift.18 18 Some will complain that this is ridiculously high praise, and I do not use those names lightly. Twain, Swift, and now Rowling, use simple stories that are aimed at children in form and style, but that run much deeper in subject matter and social critique. Given the overwhelming popularity and influence of the Harry Potter books it is worth examining what Rowling has to say about government and its role in society. Part I gives a short synopsis of the plot and themes of The Half-Blood Prince and its predecessors, and describes how the Half-Blood Prince cements Rowling's negative portrayal of government. Part II argues that The Half-Blood Prince presents a government that fits perfectly into the public choice model of self-interested bureaucrats running roughshod over the broader public interest. Part III asserts that The Half-Blood Prince's unflattering depiction of government is particularly damning because it so closely resembles British and American government, but without many of the features that potentially undermine the public choice critique. Rowling's vision of government consists almost solely of bureaucracy, without elections to offer the sheen of democracy, without a free press or independent judiciary to act as a check on bureaucratic excess, and few true public servants to counteract craven bureaucrats. Part IV talks a little bit about how Rowling's personal story may explain her disdain for government and bureaucracy and Part V concludes that Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill.19 19 Mill's On Liberty is widely considered the seminal and original work of libertarian philosophy. See Paul M. Secunda, Lawrence's Quintessential Millian Moment and Its Impact on the Doctrine of Unconstitutional Conditions, 50 VILL. L. REV. 117, 118-25 (2005) (describing Lawrence v. Texas as a libertarian, and essentially "Millian" decision); JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY viii (Alburey Castell ed., 1947) (1859) ("No finer book has been written on the case for man's right to think and act for himself than Mill's essay."). I. HARRY POTTER AND THE REPULSIVE MINISTRY OF MAGIC Rowling's Harry Potter books, up to and including The Half-Blood Prince, slowly but surely build an impregnable invective against government, while still telling charming fantasy stories about witches and wizards at a school for magic.20 Each of the first six Harry Potter books follows a similar template. They begin with Harry Potter living with his extremely unlikable "muggle"21 relations. They then proceed over the course of a school year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Each year presents a new mystery to be resolved or a Lord Voldemort inspired challenge to overcome, as well as the details of Harry's social life and school work.22 20 Six books and roughly 3300 pages into the story of Harry Potter the Michigan Law Review is probably the wrong place for any kind of comprehensive synopsis. Instead I offer a minimalist version of the back story and a greater focus on Rowling's representation of government. There are several excellent options for more thorough synopses. The first three books have been made into movies, albeit movies that greatly undersell the source material. See HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE (Warner Bros. 2001); HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (Warner Bros. 2002); HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (Warner Bros. 2004). There are also some hilarious Harry Potter fan sites that offer synopses, and everything else Potter related. See, e.g., Mugglenet.com, http://www.mugglenet.com/ (last visited September 16, 2005). 21 Muggle is Rowling's term for the non-magical world and people, i.e. all (most?) of her readers. Humorously, the Oxford English Dictionary recently added "muggle" to its word list. See Muggle Goes into Oxford English Dictionary, CBBC NEWSROUND, March 24, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/uk/newsid_2882000/2882895.stm. Rowling uses these muggle interludes to great effect. Some of her most penetrating social critiques involve how magical folk and Harry view the lives of a "typical" family in a fictional British suburb, Little Whinging. 22 I am going to skip over this aspect of Rowling's work for brevity's sake, but The Half-Blood Prince offers a captivating picture of adolescence and school life, including Harry's first true love, and a budding romance between his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. The last three books all have the same meta-narrative: Lord Voldemort has returned from the dead and is seeking to kill Harry and take over the world.23 Book Four, The Goblet of Fire, ends with Voldemort's return to full power (and the murder of fellow student Cedric Diggory). In Book Five, The Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort tries to discover the exact contents of the prophesy that proclaims that either Harry or Voldemort are destined to kill the other.24 In the Half-Blood Prince Harry and the Hogwart's headmaster (and Harry's hero) Professor Dumbledore explore the history and nature of Voldemort, presumably in preparation for Harry's final battle against Voldemort in the next, and final, book in the series. 23 Lord Voldemort thus follows in the long tradition of truly evil villains who aim high: full domination of everyone and everything. Cf. THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE (Paramount Pictures 2004) (The evil villain Plankton proclaims: "By tomorrow I will rule the world!" SpongeBob replies: "Well . . . good luck with that."). 24 "And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives." See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 841 (emphasis omitted). The first five books lay the groundwork for Rowling's depiction of the Ministry of Magic in The Half-Blood Prince. The first three books take a relatively light-hearted view of the wizard government. Rowling gives us goofy and highly-bureaucratic sounding government offices like "The Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office"25 or "The Department of Magical Catastrophes"26 and a portrait of the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, as a bumbling, but well-meaning, political hack.27 25 See THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, supra note __, at 30-31. 26 See THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, supra note __, at 208. 27 See, e.g., id. at 41-47. In The Goblet of Fire we have the first real hints of Rowling's darker vision for the Ministry of Magic. The depiction of how the Ministry handled Voldemort's first rise to power features over-zealous prosecutions and the suspension of civil rights.28 Most notably, at the end of the book the Ministry refuses to believe that Voldemort has returned to power, and actually works to discredit and repress Harry's story.29 28 See THE GOBLET OF FIRE, supra note __, at 456-61, 508-18. 29 See id. at 610-17. These steps are ostensibly taken to "avoid a panic that will destabilize everything [the Ministry has] worked for these last thirteen years." Id. at 613. Dumbledore offers a likelier explanation: Fudge is "blinded . . . by the love of the office [he holds.]" Id. at 614. The end of The Goblet of Fire presages the open hostility between the Ministry of Magic and Harry and Dumbledore in The Order of the Phoenix. The Ministry attempts to kick Harry out of school, they strip Dumbledore of his various government positions (including headmaster of Hogwarts), sick the evil-bureaucrat par excellence Dolores Umbridge on Hogwarts, and generally bring the full weight of the Ministry's powers to bear upon Harry and Dumbledore.30 30 See, e.g., THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 26-27, 71-75, 93-95,137-51, 212-14, 239-40, 265-68, 296-98, 306-8, 351-52, 415-16, 551, 567, 610-21, 624, 747. Nevertheless, The Order of the Phoenix ends on hopeful note: Fudge finally recognizes that Voldemort has returned to power.31 We are left with the impression that Fudge will now use the full powers of the Ministry to battle Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters.32 After all, even the most hardened libertarian generally recognizes that government is best suited to fight wars against aggressors and pursue police actions against those who threaten the well-being of others.33 31 See id. at 816-19. 32 See id. at 845-48. 33 See, e.g., Issues and Positions: National Platform of the Libertarian Party, http://www.lp.org/issues/printer_platform_all.shtml (last visited September 16, 2005). The Half-Blood Prince, however, offers no such succor to government. The Ministry remains remarkably ineffective in its battle against Voldemort. (pp. 7-18, 648- 49). Cornelius Fudge is replaced as Minister of Magic by Rufus Scrimgeour, a savvy veteran of the battles against Lord Voldemort, and yet the tone and actions of the Ministry remains unchanged. (pp. 7-18). In fact, Scrimgeour's decision to try to calm the public by detaining individuals who are likely innocent (pp. 221, 331, 346-47), and his attempts to use Harry as a "mascot" (p. 346) or "poster boy" (p. 650) for the ministry are arguably worse than Fudge's actions.34 34 Harry himself notes that it is hard to tell whether Fudge or Scrimgeour is more distasteful: "You never get it right, you people, do you? Either we've got Fudge, pretending everything's lovely while people get murdered right under his nose, or we've got you [Scrimgeour], chucking the wrong people into jail and trying to pretend you've got 'the Chosen One' [Harry] working for you!" P. 347. Perhaps The Half-Blood Prince's most devastating criticism of the Ministry has little to do with Voldemort, however. It is what service in the Ministry of Magic has done to Percy Weasley. Harry's best friend at Hogwarts is Ron Weasley, a member of a large and likable magical family that informally adopts Harry as their own. Percy Weasley is Ron's older brother, and throughout the first three books he is depicted as a bit of a rule-loving stuffed shirt, but the portrait is sympathetic and it is clear that he is still a lovable member of the Weasley family. In The Goblet of Fire Percy goes to work for the Ministry of Magic in a junior capacity, and at once finds a home for his love of rules and talent for minutiae.35 In The Order of the Phoenix, however, Percy takes the side of the Ministry against Harry and Dumbledore, and ends up alienating his entire family as a result.36 This offers the first object lesson in government service: Percy essentially loses his soul and all that should matter to him by following his blind ambition. 35 See THE GOBLET OF FIRE, supra note __, at 52-53, 57-58. 36 See THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 70-72, 296-99. The Half-Blood Prince, however, offers Percy a chance at redemption. Now that the Ministry recognizes that Voldemort has returned and that Harry is the best chance of defeating him, Percy could admit he was wrong about Dumbledore and Harry and rejoin the family. Yet, Percy refuses to bend and remains estranged. (p. 96). Of course that does not free Percy from the clutches of the government. The first encounter between Harry and Scrimgeour occurs at the Weasley family Christmas dinner, which Scrimgeour crashes with Percy as his excuse. (pp. 341-42). The violation of the Weasley family, and Scrimgeour's callous use of Percy to gain access to Harry, is hardly lost on the readers. The depths that Scrimgeour and Percy will plumb to co-opt Harry are more offensive and distasteful than even the list of government wrong-doing that began this Review because we experience them directly through the eyes of Harry and the Weasley family.37 37 This is because it is directly experienced by Harry, and the well of good feelings every reader has for the Weasley family. This is likewise true when Scrimgeour reiterates his request to Harry at the Hogwarts funeral that ends the book. (pp. 647-50). We fully sympathize with Harry's refusal to help the Ministry, how could he do otherwise? Thus, the replacement of Fudge with Scrimgeour and the hardening of Harry's negative feelings towards the Ministry finalizes Rowling's portrait of the Ministry of Magic and its bureaucrats. Before The Half-Blood Prince it was possible to imagine that the Ministry of Magic was trying hard, but was misguided or ineffectual. After The Half-Blood Prince the reader reaches the inexorable conclusion that Harry (and Rowling for that matter) has little use for government. II. HARRY POTTER AND THE PUBLIC CHOICE GOVERNMENT The odd thing about Rowling's Ministry of Magic is how closely it accords with the public choice critique of government. The central tenet of public choice theory is that the best way to understand the actions of governmental actors is to assume they are primarily (or solely) motivated by self-interest.38 The theory has been applied to the actions and incentives of virtually every government actor and sector,39 but it seems to have been most popular as an explanation of bureaucratic behavior. One of the earliest public choice scholars, William Niskanen, theorized that self-interested bureaucrats would seek to expand their budgets and influence at the expense of the public.40 41 This theory has since spawned a cottage industry of public choice analyses of bureaucracy. 38 See, e.g., Edward L. Rubin, Public Choice, Phenomenology, and the Meaning of the Modern State, 87 CORNELL L. REV. 309, 310 (2002) ("The essential and familiar components of [the public choice] model are that human beings are instrumentally rational and motivated by self-interest."). Note that not every public choice analysis of government results in a critique. See David B. Spence & Frank Cross, A Public Choice Case for the Administrative State, 89 GEO. L.J. 97 (2000) (applying public choice theory to prove that the administrative state can be defended as a rational choice of busy voters and legislators). 39 See, e.g., DENNIS C. MUELLER, PUBLIC CHOICE II 43-373 (1989) (applying public choice scholarship to any and all types of democracy and areas of government); R. DOUGLAS ARNOLD, CONGRESS AND THE BUREAUCRACY (1979) (exploring Congress' ability to influence and control bureaucracy); Benjamin H. Barton, An Institutional Analysis of Lawyer Regulation: Who Should Control Lawyer Regulation ~V Courts, Legislatures, or the Market?, 37 GA. L. REV. 1167, 1185-1210 (2003) (utilizing tools of economic analysis and public choice theory to state supreme courts). 40 See WILLIAM A. NISKANEN, BUREAUCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT (1971). For an update and analysis of Niskanen's ground-breaking work, see THE BUDGET MAXIMIZING BUREAUCRAT: APPRAISALS AND EVIDENCE (Andre Blais & Stephanie Dion eds., 1991). 41 See, e.g., ALBERT BRETON & RONALD WINTROBE, THE LOGIC OF BUREAUCRATIC CONDUCT (1982) (using the tools of economic analysis to explain bureaucratic conduct); TERRY L. ANDERSON & DONALD R. LEAL, FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM 57-58 (2d. ed., 2000) (arguing that public choice theory explains the failure of many environmental regulations); WILLIAM T. GORMLEY, JR., TAMING THE BUREAUCRACY (1989) (same for bureaucracy as a whole). Niskanen's bureaucrats, however, look like rank amateurs next to Scrimgeour and Fudge, who detain suspects indefinitely so the government appears to be addressing Voldemort's return, and ask the sixteen year-old Harry to act as a Ministry mascot to fulfill his "duty to be used by the Ministry." Pp. 221, 331, 346. Of all the self-interested bureaucrats in the Ministry of Magic, however, Dolores Umbridge takes the cake. In The Order of the Phoenix she is sent to Hogwarts as a new professor and the "High Inquisitor." By the end of the book she has taken over as the headmaster from Dumbledore, created an "inquisitorial squad" of students to act as student informants and enforcers, and has generally turned Hogwarts into a mini-fascist state. We eventually learn that in her thirst for power she sent dementors to attack Harry and his cousin Dudley in Little Whinging, attempted to use an "unforgivable curse" on Harry, and has generally broken any and all laws in an effort to discredit Harry and gain favor with Fudge. In The Half-Blood Prince Harry is horrified to learn that she is still a powerful force at the ministry and appalled at her gall for attending a Hogwarts funeral. Pp. 345, 642. The greatest strength of the public choice theory is, of course, its simplicity, and how much it comports with our own experience of government.42 The word bureaucrat itself has come to have a negative connotation,43 and many would instinctively agree that bureaucrats look out for their own interests ahead of the interests of the public. 42 See James Q. Wilson, The Politics of Regulation, in THE POLITICS OF REGULATION 360 (James Q. Wilson ed., 1980) ("The virtues of the economic perspective on regulation are clear . . . it offers an elegant and parsimonious way of explaining a great deal of human behavior."). 43 In researching this Review I came across a fascinating little book that discusses the long history of administrative arms of governments, and the relatively shorter history of bureaucracy as a concept. See BUREAUCRACY: THE CAREER OF A CONCEPT (EUGENE KAMENKA & MARTIN KRYGIER EDS., 1979). It also covers the popular dislike of bureaucracy. See Martin Krygier, State and Bureaucracy in Europe: The Growth of a Concept, in supra note __, at 2 (noting that the word bureaucracy has had "a busy career as a weapon of popular invective"). The power of Rowling's portrait of bureaucratic activity is similarly its believability. Given the list of Ministry of Magic activities at the start of this Review this is no mean feat. Rowling makes the Ministry's actions reasonable with well-drawn characters and difficult situations. Fudge, the original Minister of Magic, is portrayed as a classic bumbling politician: not quite up to the job, but generally genial and harmless (pp. 5-15). Fudge's replacement, Scrimgeour is described as the battle-hardened leader offering "an immediate impression of toughness and shrewdness." (p. 16). Dolores Umbridge is the uber-bureaucrat, an unctuous climber who begins every discussion with a phony "Hem Hem" and ends each with multiple references to Ministry protocols.44 Percy Weasley is the classic young striver, willing to adopt any position of the Ministry in order to get ahead. 44 See, e.g., THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 211. When you combine these characters, different in every way except for their overweening self-interest, with the extreme circumstances of the return of Voldemort, the reader believes that the Ministry is capable of almost anything. Furthermore, anyone who has lived in post-9/11 England or America will recognize the themes raised by The Half-Blood Prince: government by and for public relations effect, the indefinite detention of suspects for show, obtrusive governmental searches,45 and government pamphlets offering silly advice of little help.46 Meanwhile, there is little in the way of actual help. 45 The Half-Blood Prince features several scenes where the students are searched leaving Hogwarts, creating this response from Ron Weasley: "'What does it matter if we're smuggling dark stuff OUT?' demanded Ron, eyeing the long Secrecy Sensor with apprehension. 'Surely you ought to be checking what we bring back IN?' His cheek earned him a few extra jabs with the sensor . . . ." P. 243. 46 Consider the Ministry's pamphlet "Protecting Your Home and Family against Dark Forces." Pp. 42-43, 61-62. The most powerful aspect of Rowling's portrait of the Ministry of Magic as a corrupt, self-perpetuating bureaucracy is how natural it all seems. Rowling creates a government that fits (and actually exceeds) each of the public choice assumptions about government, and closely resembles our own government in personnel and activities. III. HARRY POTTER AND THE BUREAUCRACY THAT ATE GOVERNMENT WHOLE Despite the intuitive power of public choice theory, defenders of government and bureaucracy remain unconvinced, and offer a spirited critique of public choice theory. Interestingly, Rowling foresees many of these defenses of government and her portrayal of the Ministry of Magic parries them with ease. A. The Democratic Defense The first line of attack against public choice theory is always that bureaucrats must answer to elected officials, who must in turn answer to the voters.47 This defense has both descriptive and normative aspects. As a descriptive/empirical matter, defenders of bureaucracy question whether bureaucrats really have the ability or capacity to hoodwink elected executives or legislators who have to answer to their constituents.48 As a normative matter, defenders of bureaucracy argue that democracy justifies bureaucracy as a result of deliberation and public buy-in.49 47 See, e.g., Daryl J. Levinson, Empire-Building in Constitutional Law, 118 HARV. L. REV. 915, 933-34 (2005) (noting political oversight as a check on self-interested bureaucracies). 48 See Spence & Cross, supra note __, at 119 ("[T]he empirical evidence on independent bureaucracies does not support the claims that independent bureaucrats advance their own interests at the expense of the commonwealth; to the contrary, greater independence may better promote the public interest."); Edward Rubin, The Conceptual Explanation for Legislative Failure, 30 LAW & SOC. INQUIRY 586-90 (2005). 49 See BRIAN J. COOK, BUREAUCRACY AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 1-28 (1996) (arguing that bureaucracy both responds to and fosters democratic impulses); LARS UDEHN, THE LIMITS OF PUBLIC CHOICE: A SOCIOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE ECONOMIC THEORY OF POLITICS 184-88, 329-61 (1996) (asserting that much of public choice theory is anti-democratic, and that deliberative democracy can support a legitimate bureaucratic state). Rowling strips the Ministry of Magic of even this most basic justification, as Fudge is replaced by Scrimgeour as the Minister of Magic with no mention of an election.50 To the contrary, Rowling uses the passive voice of the verb "to sack" repeatedly to describe Fudge's fate.51 The lack of an election is highlighted by a meeting between the muggle Prime Minister (presumably Tony Blair) and Fudge (the former Minister of Magic) and Scrimgeour (the new Minister). (Pp. 1-18). The description of the muggle Prime Minister features a discussion of elections and political opponents, two elements of governmental life that are notably absent from the Ministry of Magic. 50 Prior to The Half-Blood Prince it was an open question whether the wizarding world had any elections. The fact that the Ministry stripped Dumbledore of his titles and positions in The Order of the Phoenix made it seem unlikely, but not impossible, that elections occurred. 51 We first learn the news from Fudge himself: "I was sacked three days ago!" P. 15. Harry later uses similar verbiage. P. 60. Scrimgeour is described as "appointed Minister of Magic," again with no description of who did the "appointment." Pp. 40-41. One mystery that remains after The Half-Blood Prince is the legislative or rule- making power of the Ministry of Magic. It is clear that the Ministry enforces the laws, and there are discussions in the books about adopting new laws, but there is never any mention of a legislature or legislative process. The hints that Rowling drops, however, are not encouraging.52 52 Harry's trial in Book Five suggests that the laws are quite pliable and possibly subject to change at the Minister of Magic's whim. During the trial Fudge and Dumbledore argue over a point of law and the following exchange occurs: "'Laws can be changed,' said Fudge savagely. 'Of Course they can,' said Dumbledore, inclining his head. 'And you certainly do seem to be making many changes, Cornelius.'" THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 149. These omissions are purposeful authorial decisions by Rowling. A government that has no elections and no democratic process for lawmaking obviously lacks the legitimacy of a democratic regime. Nevertheless, the overall similarity of the Ministry of Magic to our own government in actions, motivation, and personnel suggests that elections and democratic lawmaking actually have little, if any, effect on government as experienced by it subjects. B. The Structural Defense Defenders of bureaucracy frequently note that bureaucrats are overseen by other governmental and non-governmental entities.53 In the American system, for example, bureaucrats are subject to varying levels of oversight by the President, Congress, a politically appointed head of the agency, and a free press to root out any wrong-doing. 53 See JAMES Q. WILSON, BUREAUCRACY: WHAT GOVERNMENT AGENCIES DO AND WHY THEY DO IT 235- 94 (1989) (describing the roles of congress, the president and the courts in overseeing bureaucratic activities). The first thing to note about Rowling's Ministry of Magic is that she has created a government structure that appears to be 100% bureaucracy. There is a Minister of Magic, but he is appointed, not elected. It is unclear who appoints the Minister of Magic, but perhaps the elites. There are multiple offices and committees below the Minister, but each of these appear to be classic bureaucracies within bureaucracies, each staffed by a junior minister with their own area of responsibility. There is a judicial body, the Wizengamot, which Rowling describes as the "the Wizard High Court."54 We have good reason to believe it is substantially controlled by the Minister of Magic, and it certainly does not seem to be an independent check on Ministry authority.55 54 THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 95. 55 In the Order of the Phoenix Dumbledore is fired as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot because of his criticism of Ministry policy. See id. When Harry later appears before the Wizengamot to answer the trumped up charges of underage use of magic Fudge appears to be the main officiator and leader. See id. at 137-51. Although Harry successfully pleads his case before the Wizengamot the sheer procedural irregularities and Ministry domination of the proceeding offer little hope of an independent judiciary to stem government abuses. There are thus no governmental bodies outside the Ministry of Magic to act as a check upon government abuses. Again, this suggests that neither governmental structure nor checks and balances matter much: bureaucracy will run roughshod regardless. C. The Free Press Free speech and freedom of the press are generally taken as constitutional guarantees in America, and fundamental to a just and responsive government. In the narrower sense, a free press is considered another check on bureaucratic or governmental misconduct.56 56 See, e.g., Potter Stewart, "Or of the Press," 26 Hastings L.J. 631, 634 (1975) ("The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press was . . . to create a fourth institution outside the Government as an additional check on the three official branches."). Humorously, Rowling even denies the magical world a free press (or even a functional press).57 Both The Half-Blood Prince and The Order of the Phoenix are replete with instances of the Ministry leaning on the press to print what is essentially government propaganda.58 Again, this strips the government of even the possibility of press oversight, or realistically public oversight, since wizards (not unlike us poor muggles) typically rely upon the press for information outside of their daily experience. 57 If you think the depiction of the press as a government puppet is unflattering, Rowling has actually lightened up since her portrayal of the evil reporter Rita Skeeter (the reporter equivalent of Dolores Umbridge) in The Goblet of Fire. Throughout The Goblet of Fire Skeeter followed a well-known pattern of the press: she built Harry up as a hero at first, only to tear him down later, with unfair and scurrilous selective reporting on both ends. See THE GOBLET OF FIRE, supra note __, at 275-76, 380-81, 444-45, 531- 32. Just as I speculate later about why Rowling might not have much use for government, see discussion infra Part IV, I think Rowling's depiction of the press is likely a reaction to her own life. Rowling's abrupt arrival as a magnet for Britain's rough and tumble tabloids following her success as an author must have been brutal. 58 P. 221 (repeating The Daily Prophet's uncritical reporting on the Stan Shunpike arrest); id. at 314 (alleging that the Ministry squashed a story that Scrimgeour is a vampire in the alternative press). See also THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 94 ("[T]he Ministry is leaning heavily on the Daily Prophet not to report any of what they're calling Dumbledore's rumor mongering."). D. Bureaucrats are People Too Another line of defense is the public-minded bureaucrat. Some theorists argue that the public choice critique ignores what government officials are really like. They are not greedy, self-interested budget-maximizers. Instead, they are decent and publicly oriented.59 59 See, e.g., ANTHONY DOWNS, INSIDE BUREAUCRACY 50-84 (1989). Rowling rolls over this possibility in three ways. There are five main characters that are Ministry employees: Fudge, Scrimgeour, Umbridge, Percy Weasley, and Arthur Weasley (Ron and Percy's father).60 The first four of these five characters are basically villains, and are unquestionably motivated by self-interest and a naked lust for power rather than the public interest. 60 You could include Barty Crouch from The Goblet of Fire on this list, although it would not improve the overall batting average for public-interested Ministry employees. The fifth of those characters, Arthur Weasley, is actually the exception that proves the rule. He is a decent, hard-working bureaucrat who loves his work at the Ministry. Of course, in Rowling's Ministry no good deed goes unpunished. Arthur Weasley is described as a relative failure. At one point in The Order of the Phoenix Harry is taken to his office, which is in the basement, down several long hallways and is "slightly smaller than a broom cupboard."61 Lastly, in the Half-Blood Prince two of the most revered characters, Dumbledore and Harry, clearly have little use for the Ministry or its bureaucrats.62 61 THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, supra note __, at 132-34. Arthur does get a small promotion (and presumably a better office) in The Half-Blood Prince. P. 84. 62 In The Half-Blood Prince Dumbledore notes that he has been offered the job of Minister of Magic, "[b]ut the Ministry never attracted me as a career." Pp. 442-43. Dumbledore similarly disparages the Ministry's attempts at public safety through leaflet. Pp. 61-62. Likewise, Harry declares his loyalty to Dumbledore over the Ministry twice in The Half-Blood Prince, making clear that Harry pledges his allegiance to those he respects and trusts instead of feeling any over-riding obligation to the government. Pp. 343-48, 647-50. E. Love or Leave It There is not a strong scholarly tradition of what I am calling the "love it or leave it" defense, but I think it exists, and has actually come to the fore in recent years. This defense of government basically requires citizens to accept the legitimacy of the government and its actions as a duty of citizenship, and then rebukes any criticisms as unpatriotic. The interesting thing about this defense is that it explicitly raises the question of governmental legitimacy: if one assumes governmental legitimacy, it may be appropriate to ask a citizen to "love it or leave it." If one leaves open the possibility that governments and laws may lack legitimacy, it becomes much harder to simply order blind allegiance. Rowling makes quick work of this potential defense. In The Half-Blood Prince Harry makes it clear that he feels no independent duty to be used by the Ministry for the benefit of the public. Harry's decision should come as no surprise: throughout the novels Harry seems to pick and choose certain school rules and even Ministry laws to follow or disregard depending on the situation and his own sense of morality or duty. Rowling treats these decisions by Harry as if they are natural and easy, but taken together with Harry's rejection of the Ministry's overtures in The Half-Blood Prince Rowling presents a remarkably contingent and situational approach to both government and law. In sum, Rowling has created a world where all of our negative governmental stereotypes have come true. She combines familiar character types and government structures with a vision of government by the bureaucrats and for the bureaucrats to create a devastating critique of Anglo-American government. IV. J.K. ROWLING AND THE LIBERTARIAN MINDSET Anyone familiar with Rowling's personal story will know that when she started the Harry Potter series she spent a period of time unemployed and on public assistance in Edinborough, divorced with a young child. These biographic details are frequently juxtaposed with Rowling's current financial status.63 63 See Jim Auchmutey, Author to Deliver New 'Harry Potter,' Third Child in 2005, ATLANTA J.-CONST., December 22, 2004, at H1; Wikipedia, J.K. Rowling, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling (last visited September 16, 2005). Rowling's personal story provides two insights into her feelings towards government. First, in both England and the U.S. there is no quicker route to hating the government than dealing with the various bureaucracies that handle public assistance. As a general rule you can predict how user-friendly a bureaucracy will be by determining whether the served constituency regularly votes and/or gives campaign contributions.64 Obviously those persons unfortunate enough to have to rely upon the government for assistance are unlikely to have sufficient funds to donate to political causes. Similarly, poor people are less likely to vote than other socio-economic groups.65 As such, you can expect that the bureaucracies set up to deal with the poor will be relatively badly run and user unfriendly. 64 Consider, for example, the Social Security disability system, which has been described as "one of the least user-friendly bureaucracies known to the administrative state." Barbara A. Sheehy, An Analysis of the Honorable Richard Posner's Social Security Law, 7 CONN. INS. L.J. 103, 104 (2001); cf. BRUCE ACKERMAN & IAN AYRES, VOTING WITH DOLLARS: A NEW PARADIGM FOR CAMPAIGN FINANCE 14 (2002) (arguing that a campaign finance reform that would grant each voter "patriot dollars" to donate to politicians would "reshape the political marketplace and enable it to become more responsive to the judgments of equal citizens than to the preferences of unequal property owners"). 65 Ironically, this may be partially because the least educated citizens are the least equipped to handle the bureaucratic process of registering and appearing to vote. See Jonathan Nagler, The Effect of Registration Laws and Education on U.S. Voter Turnout, 85 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 1393, 1395-1403 (1991). If the public assistance bureaucracy does not answer to its customers, e.g. the poor, than to whom do they respond? The obvious answer is legislators and members of the executive branch. In times of tight government funding it seems clear that these parties will exert pressure on the bureaucracy to grant fewer applications and to root out any fraud or waste in the system. As a result, the best scenario for poor people may be a disinterested bureaucracy, since an interested bureaucracy may meet them with skepticism or outright hostility. Moreover, since each approved application costs the government money there is pressure to make the system as unwieldy and complicated as possible to deter applications. The Social Security Disability system is a typical example. The application process for disabled individuals (including mentally disabled individuals) requires pages of paperwork, medical testimony and records, and months and years of perseverance.66 Thus, I think that Rowling's experience on public assistance likely soured her on bureaucracy for a lifetime. 66 See, e.g., CAROLYN A. KUBITSCHEK, SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY: LAW & PROCEDURE IN FEDERAL COURT (1994). In Knoxville, Tennessee, where I live and teach law, the SSI Disability office recently moved from the Federal building downtown (where it was a short walk from the various homeless shelters, and reachable on almost any bus line) to a strip mall in the distant suburbs where there are not sidewalks and there is infrequent bus service. Second, Rowling's story smacks of success through self-reliance and sheer force of will. The Harry Potter novels likewise show a strong strain of self-reliance and stubborn independence, and Rowling came upon these themes the hard way. Anyone who has pulled herself out of poverty as Rowling has is likely to believe that self-reliance and hard-work are the keys to success, and to be conversely wary of government intervention. V. HARRY POTTER AND THE FUTURE LIBERTARIAN MAJORITY The Libertarian Party claims to be the fastest growing political party in the United States.67 After reading The Half-Blood Prince I am much more convinced. The libertarian movement relies upon two interrelated concepts to recruit: a) "that government is best which governs least;"68 and b) self-reliance and respect of individual rights should be paramount.69 The Half-Blood Prince makes both of these points exceptionally well. 67 See Libertarian Party - America's Third Largest Party, http://www.libertarianparty.net/issues/party.shtml (last visited September 16, 2005). 68 HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Civil Disobedience, in COLLECTED ESSAYS AND POEMS 203, 203 (Elizabeth Hall Witherell ed., 2001). 69 See MURRAY N. ROTHBARD, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO (Hans-Hermann Hoppe ed., 2002) (stating a theory of libertarian political philosophy); MURRAY N. ROTHBARD, THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY (1982) (same, in a more academic structure); ROBERT NOZICK, ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA 183-231 (1974) (offering a libertarian critique of the Rawlsian state). Rowling taps into the current general distrust of government in the US70 and the UK71 and creates a Ministry of Magic that simultaneously echoes and critiques our own governments. On the one hand she creates a government that is repulsive in its structure, personnel, and actions. On the other, she crafts this government to appear closely related to our own government. This juxtaposition creates a powerful and subtle critique of government. 70 See The Pew Research Center, How Americans View Government: Deconstructing Distrust, March 10, 1998, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=95. 71 Pauline Park, Is Tony Blair Spun Out?, THE GULLY, September 5, 2003, http://www.thegully.com/essays/britain/030905_blair_spin_kelly.html. The truly surprising aspect of the Half-Blood Prince is how effortlessly Rowling covers the questions of the nature, role and legitimacy of government in what is ostensibly a work of children's literature. I must admit that when I sat down to reread the Harry Potter books in light of The Half-Blood Prince I did not expect to find the overwhelming skepticism of government that seeps through Rowling's work. Of course, the ability to entertain first and foremost, while providing other levels of discourse is the hallmark of great and thoughtful literature, and The Half-Blood Prince is both. ---------------------- Meme 016: What I Learned from the WTC Attacks 1.9.29 One of the fellows on one of the lists I subscribed to asked whether anyone's opinions changed as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Eighteen days later, I offer these thoughts: The Empire will continue. There is no hope of reviving the Old Republic. The Imperialists have won. Darwinists should have known all along that there is no return to the past, but it took the attacks for this to sink in. The question remains whether the Empire will operate wisely. I am not sanguine and offer my predictions. 1. Freedom will end in America, not directly by government but by massive pressures to conform. That this will happen is entirely consistent with the Neil Strauss-William Howe theory of cycles of four generations in American history, propounded by them in _Generations_, _13th Gen_ (called Generation X by others), _The Fourth Turning_, and _Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation_ (called Generation Y by others). Chapter nine of the last book is entitled "Zero Tolerance (Conduct)." The coming times will be what they call a "civic" age, characterized, as far as I am concerned, by bullying. The war will immensely exacerbate these trends. I predict that employers will ask prospective employees to allow a background check and most will comply. These checks will include credit card purchases and Internet activity. It will come to include library borrowings, toll booth passings, videos captured by surveillance cameras, return addresses for mail, and myriad other activities that are collected privately but can be divulged with the prospective employee's permission. (Just wait till digital eye recognition cameras are in every building and possibly next to every traffic light.) Knowing what details people will reveal over the net merely to get a $5 savings coupon, just think what monitoring they will allow to gain or keep a job. This surveillance in the emerging "civic" age is worse than signing loyalty oaths during the McCarthy era. Involvement in hate groups, an ever-expanding list kept by http://www.hatewatch.com and similar groups, will be monitored. These lists will come to include the Boy Scouts. (Prospective employees at prestigious firms who have belonged to the homophobic Boy Scouts will not be granted employment. As time goes on, all but lowly-paid day workers will fear sending their sons to the Boy Scouts.) Internet service providers will be pressured to deny service to hate groups. And the federal government will not allow contracts with firms any of whose members have been involved in hate groups. This includes most firms. There will be much talk about how free speech continues in America, trumpeting in particular that the worst hate sites continue (those that can find ISPs), except that employers will request that home computers be monitored for suspicious activity. There does exist anonymizer software, largely used now so that pornographic sites can be visited, but using anonymizer sites can be recorded and give rise to great suspicion. Libertarians will blame the end of freedom solely on the government contract clause, but the reality is that freedom results from the attitude of the people. It is the people who affect the activities of the government; the reverse causality is much weaker. 2. The war cannot be won by either side. The West (Darwinian civilization, really, but I drop the point) cannot defeat Islam; Islam cannot defeat the West, even if terrorist acts become routine, esp. if our escalation of the conflict unites the entire Moslem world against us. When we tire of the war after the current "civic" generation has passed, just as we got tired of the Vietnam war, the Arabs may indeed push the Israelis into the sea. What the Empire should do is promote states based upon ethnicity, for this has become the primary basis of identity in most of the world, whether we like it or not. This will involve the Empire imposing a solution on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the parties over there should agree to accept any solution Jimmy Carter (there is no finer man for the job) decides. We will guarantee the security of the nations there, will pay for any relocation expenses, and will not tolerate any further territory grabs. But I doubt that, in the current hysteria, such counsel of moderation will prevail. 3. I relish being in what Galbraith called "the vortices of seething controversy." I fancy that this serves the higher purposes of Checking Premises, thereby furthering our understanding. I read widely and am willing to learn from the postmodernist left as well as from the Old Republican right. I do not read books with the attitude, "GRRR! How can I refute that?" I have been trying to stir up discussion on such ideas of mine that Western civilization has been replaced by Darwinian civilization. I have not garnered the discussion of ideas that I would like, but there seems to be no room at all during the current hysteria for any discussion beyond the range of the moment and not even for any real discussion about the moment. Like Mr. Mencken during World War I and World War II, I may decide to disappear for the duration. I will retire, continue to do my own reading and thinking, and relax with such tomes as _Samuel Johnson: The Major Works._ I shall signal my withdrawal by republishing Albert Jay Nock's "Isaiah's Job." [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From isaacsonj at hotmail.com Sat Nov 26 20:40:51 2005 From: isaacsonj at hotmail.com (Joel Isaacson) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:40:51 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Nov 26 23:52:34 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:52:34 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in spaceOne of those guys, but I can't remember either. Whichever one he was, he also did a lot of acid. -----Original Message----- From: Jill Andresevic [mailto:andresevic at earthlink.net] Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2005 9:29 AM To: Steve Hovland; The new improved paleopsych list; isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il Cc: jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Steve / Howard, I read that Watson or Crick (not sure which one) wrote about DNA being sent to Earth on a spaceship, because his theory was Earth could not create life, therefore life had to brought here from another place (interesting how this is not something well known, if indeed it is true). This also could connect to the fact that a pig and a chicken and a human embryo all look very much the same early in embryonic development, since I am speculating that there was one form of DNA that then evolved into different life forms. I am not a professional scientist like most of you (I am guessing), just a fan of Howard?s. Curious as to what you think of this, if anything. Jill ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- From: "Steve Hovland" Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 To: "The new improved paleopsych list" , , Cc: , , , "Jill Andresevic" , , , Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Some people think our DNA came here from space encapsulated in bacteria... Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM To: isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il Cc: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a treatment for a short film in 2001. As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges with Eshel. Take a look: Could swarms of robo-microbes Made by humans and biology The techno teams That come from dreams The wet dreams of technology Could cyborg microbes by the trillions Launched as space communities Explore the dark beyond our skies Thrive on starlight, climb and dive through wormholes and through nebulae? Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space And tame time with phrenology? Could they ride herd on mass stampedes of x-rays and raw energy corralling flares spat by black holes at the cores of galaxies? Could genes retooled In swarms of cells Become our new conquistadors? Could they explore Galactic shores And synapse reports To our brains? From global thinking Could we go To cosmos-hopping megaminds One small step for E. coli A giant step for human kind? The article: Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adx nnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print ------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------- November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri dish? Scientists have created living photographs made of bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an image. Bacteria are not about to replace conventional photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a single image. But the feat shows the potential of an emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves designing living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might design a circuit. "We're actually applying principles from engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the photography project, which is described in a paper being published today in the journal Nature. One team of synthetic biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. The technology could also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations of things that can easily be done with electronics. Synthetic biologists have, for instance, made the biological equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and off. To make the bacterial film, common E. coli bacteria were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced only when the bacteria are in the dark. The camera, developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, black-and-yellowish picture. Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability to control single biological cells in a population," said Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at Texas. Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes to cells for three decades, and the distinction between synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is not always clear. Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of experimentation, in contrast to true engineering, like building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts and has a fairly predictable outcome. "We haven't been able to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and predictably engineer biological systems," said Drew Endy, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It means the complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are quite limited." Professor Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have created a catalog of biological components, which they call BioBricks, which are sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions like turning on a gene. Still, since cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is open to question how predictable biological engineering can ever be. M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for college students to design "genetically engineered machines." The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist who has been learning about biology at the university. By chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But since E. coli live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black precipitate is produced. The scientists created sort of a chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Nov 26 23:53:50 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:53:50 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: Message-ID: These are exciting ideas you are writing about! -----Original Message----- From: Joel Isaacson [mailto:isaacsonj at hotmail.com] Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2005 12:41 PM To: andresevic at earthlink.net; shovland at mindspring.com; paleopsych at paleopsych.org; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il Cc: jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Hi Jill, Yes! Francis Crick (with Leslie Orgle) suggested something of the kind more than 30 years ago... I am writng a paper that, in fact, concludes with this theme. Following is an exrept: Futuristic research directions. Panspermia relates to a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the universe, and that life on our planet began by such seeds landing on it from outer space and propagating themselves. Francis Crick (with Leslie Orgel) suggested in 1973 a theory of directed panspermia, where seeds of life (such as DNA fragments) may have been purposely spread by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Critics argue that space travel is damaging to life because of exposure to radiation, cosmic rays and stellar winds. Introduce now the notion of telepanspermia which postulates panspermia that is guided by means of coded fantomark patterns (or their streaks), not necessarily through the physical transport of actual "seeds" via meteors, comets, and the like. Telepanspermia may be guided by means akin to pilot waves in Bohmian quantum mechanics. So, working on guiding mechanisms in telepanspermia may converge with non-local hidden variable theories in fundamental physics. Development of an information theory that is extended to fantomark-coded messages and streaks would be crucial, as it would facilitate the invention of superior intelligent artifacts; could hold a key to communication with extraterrestrial modes of intelligence; and eventually help us understand our cosmic ancestry and the relationship between implicate and explicate orders, as outlined by David Bohm. Ref [ ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- From: Jill Andresevic To: Steve Hovland ,The new improved paleopsych list ,, CC: ,,,,, Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 12:28:34 -0500 Steve / Howard, I read that Watson or Crick (not sure which one) wrote about DNA being sent to Earth on a spaceship, because his theory was Earth could not create life, therefore life had to brought here from another place (interesting how this is not something well known, if indeed it is true). This also could connect to the fact that a pig and a chicken and a human embryo all look very much the same early in embryonic development, since I am speculating that there was one form of DNA that then evolved into different life forms. I am not a professional scientist like most of you (I am guessing), just a fan of Howard?s. Curious as to what you think of this, if anything. Jill ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- From: "Steve Hovland" Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 To: "The new improved paleopsych list" , , Cc: , , , "Jill Andresevic" , , , Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Some people think our DNA came here from space encapsulated in bacteria... Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of HowlBloom at aol.com Sent: Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM To: isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il Cc: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a treatment for a short film in 2001. As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges with Eshel. Take a look: Could swarms of robo-microbes Made by humans and biology The techno teams That come from dreams The wet dreams of technology Could cyborg microbes by the trillions Launched as space communities Explore the dark beyond our skies Thrive on starlight, climb and dive through wormholes and through nebulae? Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space And tame time with phrenology? Could they ride herd on mass stampedes of x-rays and raw energy corralling flares spat by black holes at the cores of galaxies? Could genes retooled In swarms of cells Become our new conquistadors? Could they explore Galactic shores And synapse reports To our brains? From global thinking Could we go To cosmos-hopping megaminds One small step for E. coli A giant step for human kind? The article: Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adx nnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print ------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------- November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri dish? Scientists have created living photographs made of bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an image. Bacteria are not about to replace conventional photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a single image. But the feat shows the potential of an emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves designing living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might design a circuit. "We're actually applying principles from engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the photography project, which is described in a paper being published today in the journal Nature. One team of synthetic biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. The technology could also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations of things that can easily be done with electronics. Synthetic biologists have, for instance, made the biological equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and off. To make the bacterial film, common E. coli bacteria were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced only when the bacteria are in the dark. The camera, developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, black-and-yellowish picture. Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability to control single biological cells in a population," said Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at Texas. Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes to cells for three decades, and the distinction between synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is not always clear. Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of experimentation, in contrast to true engineering, like building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts and has a fairly predictable outcome. "We haven't been able to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and predictably engineer biological systems," said Drew Endy, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It means the complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are quite limited." Professor Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have created a catalog of biological components, which they call BioBricks, which are sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions like turning on a gene. Still, since cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is open to question how predictable biological engineering can ever be. M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for college students to design "genetically engineered machines." The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist who has been learning about biology at the university. By chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But since E. coli live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black precipitate is produced. The scientists created sort of a chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Nov 27 22:59:33 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 15:59:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <438A3A55.20408@solution-consulting.com> And materialists say that God is an unlikely explanation . . . Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: > One of those guys, but I can't remember either. > Whichever one he was, he also did a lot of acid. > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* Jill Andresevic [mailto:andresevic at earthlink.net] > *Sent:* Saturday, November 26, 2005 9:29 AM > *To:* Steve Hovland; The new improved paleopsych list; > isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il > *Cc:* jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; > kblozie at yahoo.com; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; > ohbeeb at yahoo.com > *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > future in space > > Steve / Howard, I read that Watson or Crick (not sure which one) > wrote about DNA being sent to Earth on a spaceship, because his > theory was Earth could not create life, therefore life had to > brought here from another place (interesting how this is not > something well known, if indeed it is true). This also could > connect to the fact that a pig and a chicken and a human embryo > all look very much the same early in embryonic development, since > I am speculating that there was one form of DNA that then evolved > into different life forms. I am not a professional scientist like > most of you (I am guessing), just a fan of Howard?s. Curious as to > what you think of this, if anything. Jill > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > *From: *"Steve Hovland" > *Date: *Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 > *To: *"The new improved paleopsych list" > , , > > *Cc: *, , > , "Jill Andresevic" , > , , > *Subject: *RE: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > future in space > > > Some people think our DNA came here from space > encapsulated in bacteria... > > Steve > > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] > *On Behalf Of > *HowlBloom at aol.com > *Sent:* Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM > *To:* isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il > *Cc:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; > sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; > idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com > *Subject:* [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > future in space > > > Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only > amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a > treatment for a short film in 2001. > > > > As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges > with Eshel. Take a look: > > > > > > Could swarms of robo-microbes > > Made by humans and biology > > The techno teams > > That come from dreams > > The wet dreams of technology > > > > Could cyborg microbes by the trillions > > Launched as space communities > > Explore the dark beyond our skies > > Thrive on starlight, climb and dive > > through wormholes and through nebulae? > > Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space > > And tame time with phrenology? > > > > Could they ride herd > > on mass stampedes > > of x-rays and raw energy > > corralling flares spat by black holes > > at the cores of galaxies? > > > > Could genes retooled > > In swarms of cells > > Become our new conquistadors? > > Could they explore > > Galactic shores > > And synapse reports > > To our brains? > > > > From global thinking > > Could we go > > To cosmos-hopping megaminds > > One small step for E. coli > > A giant step for human kind? > > > > The article: > > > > > > Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a > Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri > dish? Scientists have created *living photographs made of > bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin > sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an > image.* Bacteria are not about to replace conventional > photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a > single image. But *the feat shows the potential of an emerging > field called synthetic biology, which involves designing > living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might > design a circuit.* "We're actually applying principles from > engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, > assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the > University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the > photography project, which is described in a paper being > published today in the journal Nature. *One team of synthetic > biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a > malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short > supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled > the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize > microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. *The technology could > also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. > So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have > been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations > of things that can easily be done with electronics. *Synthetic > biologists have*, for instance, *made the biological > equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and > off*. To make the bacterial film, *common E. coli bacteria > were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced > only when the bacteria are in the dark.* *The camera, > developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a > temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole > in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white > 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet > of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from > hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. > The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the > growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, > black-and-yellowish picture. > * > Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being > able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances > on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability > to control single biological cells in a population," said > Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at > Texas. *Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes > to cells for three decades, and the distinction between > synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is > not always clear. *Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic > engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single > gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, > for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the > hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of > experimentation, in contrast to *true engineering, like > building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts > and has a fairly predictable outcome.* "We haven't been able > to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and > predictably engineer biological systems," said *Drew Endy, an > assistant professor of biological engineering at the > Massachusetts Institute of Technology.* "It means the > complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are > quite limited." Professor Endy *and colleagues at M.I.T. have > created a catalog of biological components, which they call > BioBricks*, which are s*equences of DNA that can perform > particular functions like turning on a gene*. Still, since > cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is > open to question how predictable biological engineering can > ever be. *M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for > college students to design "genetically engineered machines." > The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in > part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial > photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist > who has been learning about biology at the university.* By > chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San > Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, > had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two > groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it > is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But *since E. coli > live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and > Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to > respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make > them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added > to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black > precipitate is produced. *The scientists created sort of a > chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in > the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. > When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the > enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company > Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us > Work for Us Site Map Back to Top > > > > > > ---------- > Howard Bloom > Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the > Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind > From The Big Bang to the 21st Century > Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York > University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute > www.howardbloom.net > www.bigbangtango.net > Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board > member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The > Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New > York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement > of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political > Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International > Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for > Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. > For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: > www.paleopsych.org > for two chapters from > The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of > History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer > For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from > the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Nov 27 23:05:19 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 16:05:19 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopathic leaders Message-ID: <438A3BAF.4050500@solution-consulting.com> An ongoing thread in this group, psychopathic leaders. I have long believed such psychopaths more attracted to politics (esp. the left) than business where they are more likely to be weeded out. Anyway, a local story about a new book: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view2/1,4382,635164147,00.html?textfield=Mao+ Historians delve into Mao's evil *By Dennis Lythgoe * Deseret Morning News Although it is doubtful that most Chinese citizens will ever learn about it, Mao Tse Tung may have been even more vicious than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in his determination to kill his own people. From the time he conquered China in 1949, Mao caused the deaths of more than 70 million Chinese in peacetime. Image Lisa Weiss So claim two historians, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who have published a magnum opus, "Mao: The Unknown Story." During a conference call from California, the authors expressed pride in finishing what they are not shy to call the definitive work on Mao's life. Chang is a native of China, having been a Red Guard briefly at the age of 14, and then he was a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker and an electrician before becoming a university lecturer. Her previous book, a more personal one about life under Mao, is called "Wild Swans." Halliday, a Russian historian formerly on the faculty of King's College, University of London, has written or edited several books, including a biography of filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Chang and Halliday are married, and their talents complement each other. She dealt with all the Chinese sources, while Halliday speaks six languages and is fluent in Russian. So "95 percent" of what he contributed to the book came from Russian sources. Mao was "worse than Stalin two ways," Halliday said. "Whereas Stalin used elites to torment or torture people in secret, Mao pushed torture into the public domain to terrorize the whole population. So most people saw his atrocities. He got the larger part of the population to participate in the torture. Mao brutalized the society more than Stalin. He also threatened people's private lives ? with respect to sex and information, especially ? more than Stalin did. In terms of fear and horror, life for the Chinese was more horrific than for Russians under Stalin." Image Lisa Weiss Jon Halliday and Jung Chang are authors of "Mao: The Unknown Story." In addition, Chang asserts that "Mao destroyed more culture in China than Stalin did in Russia. Mao criticized Stalin for allowing the classics to be read. Books were burned in China on a large scale. I grew up in China and we had virtually nothing to read. The only thing we could read were the quotations of Chairman Mao." Halliday said that it was clear early on that Mao had ambitions to lead the entire world. "Most people don't know the extent to which Mao destroyed the visible signs of Chinese culture ? the walls, the city gates and numerous monuments ? so that the cities look completely different. Mao wanted to destroy everything that was old. In doing so, he cut modern China off from its past. He visually brutalized the landscape of China." Chang added that "in the so-called 'leap forward,' Mao bought nuclear technology from Russia and Eastern Europe at the expense of the starvation and overwork of his own people. He imported huge industrial products and used food to purchase it, leaving his people to die. He wanted China to be a military superpower so he could himself dominate the world." And how does the current Chinese regime deal with Mao's considerable legacy? In Chang's view, current Chinese leaders "choose to perpetuate the myth of Mao, in part to enforce their own legitimacy. Chinese leaders have made it an offense to criticize Mao. The Chinese banned my first book, and they are banning this one as well. People may only read things praising Mao. The generation growing up today have no idea what Mao was like." Chang is now immersed in the translation of "Mao" into Chinese. It will be published next year by a Taiwan publisher. "Many people in China have heard about this book," said Chang, "and some will find ways to read it. As the truth about Mao trickles into China, pressure will build to reject Mao and his legacies, many of which still dominate the country." Although Mao was never known for charismatic leadership, he may not have needed it. Halliday said: "He never had to run for election or consult with the people. When he came to power, there was no uprising. Mao had the skills to operate in a room with a few people who would turn out the vote. He hardly ever appeared in public. Most people never heard his voice." On the other hand, Mao was also haunted by fear, causing him to build an enormous security network, including numerous guards, underground tunnels and bomb-proof shelters. Halliday said: "He was a fanatic ? he knew that there were people who wanted to kill him." It is essentially unknown in the West that Mao wrote poetry, "very good poetry," in Chang's opinion, "until he took power, then the quality went downhill. He lost his flair. But he was educated in the Chinese tradition, in which poetry played an important role." That doesn't mean Mao would have become a great thinker had he not chosen government, Halliday said. "When you examine his statements philosophically, they were pretty empty. If you ask people to provide one good idea Mao had, most would have a hard time coming up with anything." While one of Mao's most important means of control was the use of torture, Chang said, "He depended on terror and torture. He gave instructions about how to apply torture and when to stop it. He said if you stop it too early, it defeats its purposes. But it you apply it too late, the subject might be dead. Mao was a torture /artist/." From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Nov 27 23:11:55 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 16:11:55 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Mao bio book review Message-ID: <438A3D3B.9010003@solution-consulting.com> http://deseretnews.com/dn/view2/1,4382,635164149,00.html?textfield=Mao+ Mao bio details his reign of cruelty *By Dennis Lythgoe * Deseret Morning News /MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Knopf, 814 pages, $35./ Image The overwhelming domination of millions of modern Chinese by Mao Tse Tung has never been given proper historical treatment. Until now. "Mao: The Unknown Story," a biography by scholars who know both Chinese and Russian, is a welcome addition to modern scholarship. The erudite authors tell of Mao's rush to power by climbing over Chiang Kai Shek, his causing the 1961 death of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history, his ready access to Russia's Joseph Stalin (his model in most respects), the intimate connection between Chinese and Russian communism, Mao's dominating personality and lack of respect for nearly all people, the Cultural Revolution that degraded, intimidated and tortured virtually every class of society and his unrelenting desire to control the entire world. The argument presented here, and the mass of materials uncovered from archives around the world, leave a convincing case that Mao at least deserves equal billing with Stalin and Adolf Hitler for his tyrannical leadership and for his murderous behavior toward his own people. Chang and Halliday also paint a detailed portrait of Mao the man ? someone who had no sense of idealism at all and no ability to exercise love and respect for other human beings, least of all his family. He had several wives and children and freely abandoned them all. He claimed his second wife was "the love of his life," but he abandoned her and their three children ? and later when her life was in danger and he could have saved her, he did nothing. Mao was also a known, consistent womanizer. He considered his most infamous wife, his last ? known as "Madame Mao" ? to be "full of venom," and he used her to accomplish his dirty work. He compared her to a scorpion. Indeed toward the end of his life, he feared a coup from her. And when he died in his bed in 1976, Madame Mao and the so-called "Gang of Four," who allegedly conspired with her, were imprisoned by Chinese authorities. Although Mao himself was always a voracious reader, he hypocritically attacked reading with communist party members. At a public gathering in 1962, he attacked novels, adding, "The more books you read, the more stupid you become." Later, he said, "You can read a little, but reading too much ruins you, really ruins you." Similarly, he attacked opera, even though he personally loved it and had a collection of more than 2,000 cassettes and records. By 1963, he was criticizing all art forms ? opera, theater, folk arts, music, fine arts, dance, cinema, poetry and literature ? because they were "very murky" and should be considered as "poisonous weeds." As for singers, poets, playwrights and writers, "Drive the whole lot of them to the villages. No food for those who don't go." When Mao began his purging in 1965 (the Cultural Revolution) he began with peasants, then he attacked intellectuals, and finally the inner circle of his own advisers. People from all walks of life were systematically intimidated, tortured and removed from their homes. Mao carefully orchestrated the whole thing without feeling, understanding fully that he was disrupting and emasculating the entire country. The book is the product of prodigious research, but the writing is only serviceable. There is a great deal of unnecessary repetition. A good editor could have cut the manuscript in half and still retained the most important materials and conclusions. This is not the definitive book on Mao ? but it is an impressive collection of materials that convinces the reader of the realities of Mao's reign of evil. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 28 00:45:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 19:45:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 050: Skeptic: David J. Buller: Sex, Jealousy & Violence Message-ID: Meme 050: Skeptic: David J. Buller: Sex, Jealousy & Violence sent 5.11.27 Frank Miele's response, "Evolutionary Psychology is Here to Stay," appended below, is very good. But what's extraordinary about this exchange is that Buller, for all his reservations about specific conclusions of evolutionary psychology is one himself, unlike Steven Jay Gould. It's just that Buller is more inclined to see our Stone Age brains mediated and moderated by specific learning in specific cultures. Gould's exaggerated attacks on sociobiology stemmed from two 20th century leftist preoccupations, central planning and egalitarianism. Central planning is, of course, in the interests of central planners (professors most especially), and they hate the idea that our biology limits what these planners can achieve. I will not say that Buller's, or even Gould's, criticisms are without merit. The one I like the most is that sociobiological explanations are ad hoc, circular, and unverifiable. A sociobiologist claims some psychological factor in our makeup is due to its adaptiveness during (where else?) the Era of Evolutionary Adaptiveness. He can't actually go back to the Stone Age and see what was really adaptive there, so he just presumes that it was in fact adaptive. This kind of attack is good clean fun and should serve as a warning to us all, which it has. But what counts is not whether sociobiology offers perfect explanations but how well it stacks up against earlier, non-biological social explanations. (We economists do look at competition.) Just think about the concepts that are used to explain events and historical developments in history and the social sciences. "Peer pressure," does this have anything like an exact definition? Do studies ever try to quantify it? Do the variables that do, if they do, get used to measure it stack up against routine criticisms? Ditto for utility in economics (economists do know the standard objections), the Industrial "Revolution" in history, and so on through every concept used. Religion, culture, society, are these defined? No they are not. Religions are more like medical diagnoses (or what Wittgenstein called "family resemblances."): if four of six criteria are present, then you've got a religion, although no one criterion is essential. (By the way, those who say there are no races, since anthropologists come up with different counts, should give us a count of the number of cultures in the world or stop using the concept.) And so if you have four of six criteria for a certain disease, the physician now *understands* what is the matter with you and gives you a certain pill. And a candidate for a religion meets four of six criteria, the scholar now *understands* what's afoot and then can say or predict a lot more about this now-certified religion. This is how our Stone Age minds work, by this *feeling* of supposed understanding. How it could be otherwise, I do cannot imagine, not in a world that is not neatly divided up into neat, discrete categories and not the continuous mess we see, and certainly not in a world where our brains are only so big and where extracting facts is costly and where making theories out of the facts is costlier. (Overarching theme of mine: the world partakes of both the discrete and the continuous.) The moral is that sociobiology works just as well as fields that eschew the biological and pretend a kind of Creationism, that evolutionary processes have stopped and that men might as well have been created. I said above that Gould attacked sociobiology, not only on 20th century-leftist central planning grounds but on (later) 20th century-leftist egalitarian grounds. Dangerously, sociobiology might just wander into human differences! What's decidedly remarkable is what Buller says of evolutionary psychology: A second problem concerns the doctrine that our minds are adapted to the Stone Age. First, this idea greatly underestimates the rate at which natural and sexual selection can drive evolutionary change. Recent studies have demonstrated that selection can overhaul a species' adaptations in as few as eighteen generations (for humans, roughly 450 years). This leaves wide open the possibility of racial differences in intelligence!^ Indeed, evolutionary psychology is a field that split off from sociobiology precisely for its inegalitarian possibilities and studiously avoids studying anything that smacks of individual differences, with the lone exception of sex. [^Old timers will remember when "Ashley Montagu" would insist that human races could not be more than 35,000 years old and that *therefore* racial differences in intelligence could not have emerged, contradicting the "racist" Carleton Coon, who claimed a period ten times as long. The good (AntiRacist) guys were the "young earth creationists." Similarly, the conservative Fundamentalists insist on early dates for the books of the New Testament as we know them and that *therefore* there was not enough time for them to have been tampered with by early Christians. The less literalist liberals say the Gospels as we have them came late, after much tampering to carry them away from the plain message of Jesus (which just happens to be what liberals want to hear). Neither side has any idea how long it takes to alter sacred documents! And my friend at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no idea how likely a nuclear accident is and, therefore, whether safety standards are not much to high already: he's just a good liberal wanted to crack down on corporate greed. He honestly admitted this charge! As far as the NT goes, I was much impressed that J.A.T. Robinson, a liberal, would argue in _Redating the New Testament_ (1976) that all the NT books, in draft at least, antedate the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD. Update to 2000 and the publication of Dennis R. MacDonald (Claremont School of Theology), 1946- , _The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark_ (New Haven: Yale University Press) and I'm convinced that there probably was little or no tampering, early or late, but that this Gospel is a deliberate literary creation out of a collection of sayings of the actual Jesus railing against the hypocrisy of his day and merged to be compatible with resurrection account that appeared the suppression of competition (killing by the Roman government) at the urging of rent-seekers (Jewish religious establishment). Mark used Old Testament prophecies and added lots of details about Jesus' life by way of numerous dense and sequential parallels with the Homeric epics, all altered to hint to the reader that Jesus is superior to Odysseus. It's the documentation of the parallels, a typical literary form at the time called mimesis, that is MacDonald's contribution. And so the best argument in my mind for Christianity (as opposed to arguments for God in general), namely the uncanny unity of the Bible, has been resolved to my satisfaction.] The expected attacks on 20th century-leftist egalitarian grounds are quite absent in Buller's article. This backs up my thesis that egalitarianism, as the 21st century rolls on, is becoming less and less the major preoccupation of politics. I'd have to reread Buller to horn it into my idea that pluralism is becoming the major preoccupation of politics in the current century, but I'm not going to stretch my thesis. Just quite possibly, Buller's article, refreshingly, is just about the scientific merits and demerits of evolutionary psychology and that politics drives his thinking very little, compared to Steven Jay Gould. P.S. Could someone give me a good pr?cis about the modularity debates? It makes no evolutionary sense to have hundreds or thousands of these modules, as Buller claimed. And there's nothing incompatible with these separate modules and submodules and an overall brain efficiency, which in intelligence is called *g*. When getting Jensen to autograph a copy of the 1969 Winter issue of the _Ha'va'd Educational Review_ at an AAAS meeting on 1991.2.17, I asked him if his notions were incompatible with those of Howard Gardner. He said no, and I asked him if his idea was that intelligence is quick wit at the neuronal level, and he said that was a good summary. _________________________________________________________________ David J. Buller: Sex, Jealousy & Violence http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n01_sex_jealousy.html (from Skeptic magazine Vol. 12, No 1) This quarter, Skeptic.com presents an article excerpted from Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, by David J. Buller. A Skeptical Look at Evolutionary Psychology In nearly every newspaper or magazine these days you can find evolutionary explanations for a variety of human behaviors -- for what we seek in mates, why we are sometimes unfaithful, why we love our children (but not our stepchildren), why men and women differ, and even why husbands kill their wives. All of these explanations are offered in the name of evolutionary psychology. But what is evolutionary psychology? There are actually two different answers to this question, and it is useful to clearly distinguish them. On the one hand, many behavioral scientists define evolutionary psychology simply as "the evolutionary study of mind and behavior."1 So conceived, evolutionary psychology is a field of inquiry, akin to mechanics, which is defined not by any specific theories about human psychology, but by the questions it investigates. And these questions cover a broad spectrum. Why do males in some hunter-gatherer populations hunt, which offers highly variable caloric returns, when they could reliably provide their families with equivalent calories by gathering? Why do women in some hunter-gatherer populations wait an average of four years between pregnancies? What evolutionary forces drove cortical expansion in humans? How and why did altruism, or language, evolve? On the other hand, several prominent and influential behavioral scientists -- led on the popular front by Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate) and David Buss (The Evolution of Desire and The Murderer Next Door) and on the academic front by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (The Adapted Mind) -- define evolutionary psychology as a specific set of doctrines concerning the evolutionary history and current nature of the human mind. In this sense, evolutionary psychology as a field of inquiry has been elevated by its practitioners to an all encompassing paradigm of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). A defining doctrine of EP is that the human mind is massively modular, containing "hundreds or thousands" of "special-purpose minicomputers" called "modules," each of which evolved during the Pleistocene to solve a problem of survival or reproduction faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.2 Endowed with substantial innate knowledge, yet a very narrow range of expertise, each module is dedicated exclusively to solving a single problem -- for example, detecting cheaters in social exchanges. A second defining doctrine of EP is that our minds remain adapted to a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer lifestyle -- that, psychologically, we are living fossils of our Stone Age ancestors.3 Accordingly, the evolved nature of the human mind is allegedly discoverable by "reverse engineering" the mind from the vantage of our Pleistocene past -- figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then hypothesizing the modules that evolved to solve them.4 Despite being an ardent fan of evolutionary psychology, I'm deeply skeptical about the Evolutionary Psychology paradigm. One problem concerns EP's claim that the human mind is massively modular. Our best evidence indicates, instead, that the human mind is adapted to adapt to highly variable and often rapidly changing environments.5 Our species' great cognitive achievement was not the evolution of a legion of idiots savants, but the evolution of cortical plasticity, which enables the brain to reorganize itself in response to changing epistemic demands. In this respect, the brain is very similar to the immune system, which manufactures antibodies as needed in response to changing pathogenic demands.6 A second problem concerns the doctrine that our minds are adapted to the Stone Age. First, this idea greatly underestimates the rate at which natural and sexual selection can drive evolutionary change. Recent studies have demonstrated that selection can overhaul a species' adaptations in as few as eighteen generations (for humans, roughly 450 years). Second, the principal driving forces in human psychological evolution have been the demands of competition and cooperation with fellow humans. This created an arms race in human psychological evolution, in which every bit of evolution in human psychology changed the competitive and cooperative environments to which human psychology needed to adapt. And this arms race accelerated the rate of human psychological evolution. So there has undoubtedly been significant human psychological evolution since the Pleistocene. We're not simply Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, struggling to survive and reproduce in evolutionarily novel suburban habitats.7 But this is all highly theoretical stuff. Nothing persuades quite like sound empirical results. And on this score EP has appeared very persuasive. Indeed, EPists boast a number of impressive discoveries, including a sex difference in mate preferences (that males prefer nubility, while females prefer nobility), evolved strategies of infidelity, a sex difference in jealousy, and the reason why stepchildren suffer a high risk of maltreatment. All of these claims have received tremendous media attention, and the coverage has made it appear that these "discoveries" have unassailable evidence in their favor. But a closer look at the evidence reveals ample grounds for skepticism regarding EP's claims about the nature of the mind. Indeed, there isn't unequivocal evidence to support EP's most highly publicized "discoveries." In what follows, I will focus on three of the most widely cited claims (presented in much greater detail in my recently published book, Adapting Minds). Her Cheating Mind In Alfred Kinsey's classic sex surveys, 50% of married men, and 26% of married women, reported having had extramarital sex.8 Why? According to EP, since a man's maximum potential lifetime reproductive output is limited only by the number of pregnancies he can cause, every extramarital encounter represents another potential offspring. But a woman's maximum potential lifetime reproductive output is limited by the number of pregnancies she can carry to term, and a single mate can provide a woman with all the sperm she needs for those pregnancies. So, EPists ask, what reproductive benefits do women gain from infidelity? David Buss claims to have the answer: while women can't increase the quantity of their offspring through extramarital affairs, as men can, they can increase the quality of their offspring. A woman can harvest "good genes" from an extramarital sex partner, and those good genes can provide her offspring with better health, superior disease resistance, and greater attractiveness to the opposite sex. Moreover, as long as she keeps the affair concealed, a woman who has an extramarital affair with a male with good genes gets the reproductive benefits of both worlds: She obtains superior genes for a child who can then be reared on the resources provided by her cuckolded long-term mate with inferior genes. "Some women pursue a `mixed' mating strategy," says Buss, "ensuring devotion and investment from one man while acquiring good genes from another."9 Because of the reproductive payoffs of this "mixed" mating strategy, women evolved a "psychology of infidelity,"10 or "a psychological mechanism in women specifically designed to promote short-term mating" when resources have already been secured from a long-term mate, the short-term extrapair sex is likely to go undetected, and the extrapair partner has better genes than the long-term mate.11 The mechanism that promotes extrapair sex under these conditions is, according to Buss, a female psychological adaptation. Three findings provide the core evidence for Buss's claim that female short-term infidelity is an adaptation. First, an interesting study found that, on average, the more symmetrical a male, the higher his attractiveness rating by female panelists.12 This is significant because many biologists believe symmetry (in which the two sides of the body are mirror images of one another) is a sign of developmental stability, an ability to resist the harmful effects of pathogens and minor mutations. The study also found that highly symmetrical men, on average, reported having been chosen by women as an extrapair sexual partner more often than less symmetrical men. And this, Buss claims, shows that women prefer extrapair partners with good genes. In another experiment, T-shirts were washed in unscented laundry detergent and issued to male participants who were required to sleep in them for two consecutive nights.13 During the two-day period, the males were to refrain from using scented soaps, eating spicy foods, drinking alcohol, smoking, and having sex. After the two days, female subjects smelled the T-shirts both during ovulation and during the infertile phase of their menstrual cycles, and they rated each T-shirt for "pleasantness" and "sexiness" of smell. The scents of the T-shirts of highly symmetrical men were rated highest -- but only by women who were ovulating. Buss concludes that "women detect the scent of symmetry, prefer that scent when ovulating, and choose more symmetrical men as affair partners."14 Third, in a British study, women who reported extrapair involvements also reported that approximately 60% of their copulations during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycles took place with their extrapair partners, whereas about 60% of their copulations during the infertile phase of their cycles took place with their in-pair partners.15 So, when women have affairs, the majority of their sexual activity when they are fertile occurs with their affair partners, which tips the odds of paternity in favor of the extrapair partner. Buss argues that these findings provide rather definitive support for the following picture: women have a long-term mating psychology, which leads them to seek a long-term mate who will provide resources. But, once they've landed such a mate, women can become motivated by a psychological mechanism that is "specifically designed to promote short-term mating," and this will motivate extramarital affairs with males with good genes. However, the claim that women have a psychological adaptation "specifically designed to promote short-term" infidelity goes well beyond the evidence. In fact, the pattern of female short-term infidelity described by Buss is best explained as a byproduct of other psychological and physiological adaptations, rather than as a direct result of an adaptation specifically for short-term infidelity. Let's begin with the question of why women cheat at all. A number of studies, conducted over decades, have consistently found that sexual dissatisfaction in marriage is the leading factor in causing women to engage in short-term extramarital sexual affairs,16 and these results have recently been corroborated by EPists.17 Indeed, although women who are emotionally dissatisfied in marriage seek extramarital emotional involvements, they are not more likely than satisfied women to have extramarital sexual affairs; only sexually dissatisfied women are more likely to have extramarital sexual involvements.18 Moreover, women who are sexually dissatisfied in marriage have been found to be over twice as likely as sexually satisfied women to have extramarital sex.19 Accordingly, the fact that women engage in short-term extramarital affairs can be explained simply as resulting from a frustrated "sex drive" (for lack of a better term). When the "sex drive" is going unsatisfied in marriage, women sometimes seek sexual satisfaction outside marriage. This may have reproductive benefits, but it is explicable without appeal to a mechanism specifically designed to harvest "good genes" from an extrapair partner. Of course, while this may explain why women take extramarital sex partners, it doesn't explain why their sexual activity with their extrapair partners increases during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycles. But several studies have consistently found a peak in the levels of female desire for sex, fantasy about sex, masturbation, and initiation of sex during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle.20 The rise in female desire and female-initiated sexual activity during the fertile phase is probably an adaptation, since it is too well designed for reproduction to be an accident or byproduct of something else. So, the increase in sexual activity with extrapair partners during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle is really just a byproduct of a generalized increase in female-initiated sexual activity during that period. Buss is aware of this research, but argues that it can't explain the facts about female short-term infidelity, since it was only sexual activity with extrapair partners, not sexual activity in general, that was found to increase during the fertile phase. But the reason for this extrapair bias is relatively mundane. First, the large majority of women who have extramarital sexual affairs are sexually dissatisfied in their marriages. Second, if a sexually dissatisfied married woman is seeking sexual satisfaction through an extrapair involvement, she will be unlikely to repeat extrapair sexual encounters with men who fail to satisfy, since there are potential costs to getting caught in an infidelity. So, any male who is a regular extrapair partner of a married woman is very likely a man with whom sex is gratifying in a way it is not with her husband. Therefore, when a woman experiences an increased desire for sex during the fertile phase of her cycle, she is far more likely to arrange to have satisfying sex with her extrapair partner than to have unsatisfying sex with her husband. Still, EPists will argue, none of this explains why women tend to choose symmetrical men as their extrapair partners. But, again, this is merely a byproduct of more general mate preferences. By Buss's theory, symmetry is one of the things that women seek in a long-term mate because it supposedly signals "good genes." Even if women have an evolved preference for symmetrical men, this preference may be part of a single set of mate preferences, which is operative in choosing both long-term and short-term mates. To illustrate, suppose that women seek long-term mates who have only two qualities -- symmetry and a willingness to provide resources. When a woman seeks a partner for a short-term infidelity, the same preference structure could be operative, but resources become irrelevant. When resources drop out of the equation, only the preference for symmetry remains. Here, then, is the byproduct explanation of female short-term infidelity. Suppose that women possess the following three adaptations, among others: the "sex drive" (the desire for a regular and fulfilling sex life, together with the patterns of planning and acting so as to ensure the satisfaction of that desire), a peak in sexual desire during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle (with its attendant increase in female-initiated sexual activity), and a preference for symmetrical males (which is one of several mate preferences). When a woman is sexually dissatisfied in her marriage, she is more likely to begin an extramarital sexual involvement (because of the "sex drive"). In selecting an extrapair partner, the same preferences that were operative in choosing a long-term mate will also be operative, but some of them (for example, a willingness to provide resources) will be irrelevant to the specifically sexual role for which the extrapair partner is being selected. As irrelevant preferences drop out of the selection process, the preference for symmetry comes to loom large, so women will tend to choose symmetrical men as extrapair partners. Then, once a woman begins an extramarital affair, her peaking desire for sex during the fertile phase of her menstrual cycle causes an increase in the number of sexual encounters that she initiates. And, because sex with her husband is less gratifying than sex with her affair partner, the sexual encounters she initiates will be almost exclusively with her extrapair partner, so that sex with her highly symmetrical affair partner will be concentrated during the fertile phase of her menstrual cycle. In this way, the above three adaptations can conspire under circumstances of sexual dissatisfaction in marriage to produce a pattern of behavior that appears to be the direct result of an adaptation specifically for short-term infidelity. So the available evidence doesn't provide convincing support for the claim that women have an evolved psychological mechanism specifically for strategic infidelity. His Sexual Jealousy According to Buss, jealousy is a psychological adaptation, an emotional alarm that is designed to go off whenever we detect signs of a partner's potential infidelity and to mobilize us to avoid or minimize our reproductive losses. I believe that this hypothesis is one of EP's significant contributions to our understanding of the human mind. But Buss doesn't stop here. He further argues that, since men and women faced different threats to reproductive interests throughout human evolutionary history, the sexes have evolved distinct jealousy mechanisms, which "contain dedicated design features, each corresponding to the specific sex-linked adaptive problems that have recurred over thousands of generations of human evolutionary history" (Buss et al., 1999, p. 126). It is a woman's sexual infidelity, Buss argues, that threatens a man's reproductive interests by undermining his confidence in paternity and putting him at risk of investing his resources in another man's offspring. A woman's reproductive interests, in contrast, are threatened by a male's emotional involvement with another woman, since that potentially entails a loss of his resources. Thus, Buss hypothesizes, women's jealousy "is triggered by cues to the possible diversion of their mate's investment to another woman, whereas men's jealousy is triggered primarily by cues to the possible diversions of their mate's sexual favors to another man."21 box 1 To test for a sex difference in jealousy, Buss and his colleagues (1992) designed the following questionnaire. This questionnaire, or a minor variant of it, was then administered to subjects in six societies. Instructions: Please think of a serious committed romantic relationship that you have had in the past, that you currently have, or that you would like to have. Imagine that you discover that the person with whom you've been seriously involved became interested in someone else. What would distress or upset you more (please circle only one): Dilemma 1 (A) Imagining your partner forming a deep emotional attachment to that person [emotional infidelity]. (B) Imagining your partner enjoying passionate sexual intercourse with that other person [sexual infidelity]. Dilemma 2 (A) Imagining your partner trying different sexual positions with that other person [sexual infidelity]. (B) Imagining your partner falling in love with that other person [emotional infidelity]. The principal data that Buss cites in support of this theory are responses to forced-choice questionnaires that have been administered in six cultures (Box 1). These data show that significantly more men than women report that the thought of a partner's sexual infidelity is more distressing than the thought of a partner's extrapair emotional involvement. In no study did more women than men report sexual infidelity to be more upsetting than emotional infidelity. Indeed, on average, across all studies, many more men than women reported sexual infidelity to be more upsetting than emotional infidelity -- 51% of the men versus 22% of the women in response to Dilemma 1 (Table 1), and 38% of the men versus 13% of the women in response to Dilemma 2 (Table 2). table 1. percentage choosing (B) sexual infidelity as more upsetting in Dilemma 1 (by survey sample) Survey sample USA USA USA USA USA USA (Buss et al.1992)28 (Buss et al. 1999)22 (Buunk et al. 1996)31 (DeSteno & Salovey 1996a)29 (Geary et al. 1995)54 (Pietrzak et al. 2002)55 Male 60 76 61 55 53 73 Female 17 32 18 32 23 4 Survey sample China Netherlands Germany Korea Japan Average (Geary et al. 1995)54 (Buunk et al. 1996)31 (Buunk et al. 1996)31 (Buss et al.1999)22 (Buss et al. 1999)22 Male 21 51 28 59 38 51 Female 5 31 16 18 13 22 But these results don't actually confirm Buss's theory. Buss claims that male jealousy will "focus on cues to sexual infidelity because a long-term partner's sexual infidelity jeopardizes his certainty of paternity," whereas female jealousy will focus on cues to emotional infidelity because of potential loss of parental resources.22 To confirm Buss's theory, it's necessary to confirm these predictions -- to confirm, for example, that males care more about sexual infidelity than they do about emotional infidelity, not simply that they care more about sexual infidelity than females do. But the data do not show this. Indeed, on average, only half of male subjects chose sexual infidelity as more distressing than emotional infidelity in response to Dilemma 1 (Table 1), and a full 62% chose emotional infidelity over sexual infidelity in response to Dilemma 2 (Table 2). table 2. percentage choosing (A) sexual infidelity as more upsetting in Dilemma 2 (by survey sample) Survey sample USA USA USA USA Survey sample (Buss et al. 1992)28 (Buss et al. 1999)22 (Buunk et al. 1996)31 (Harris & Christenfeld 1996a)29 Male 44 43 44 47 Female 12 11 12 12 Survey sample Netherlands Germany Korea Japan Average (Buunk et al. 1996)31 (Buunk et al. 1996)31 (Buss et al. 1999)22 (Buss et al. 1999)22 Male 23 30 53 32 38 Female 12 8 22 15 13 Moreover, there are some anomalous data for which Buss's theory can't easily account. First, there is significant cultural variation in the questionnaire results. While the percentages of males reporting sexual infidelity to be more upsetting than emotional infidelity in response to Dilemma 1 are as high as 76% in a U.S. sample and 59% in the Korean sample, they are as low as 21% in the Chinese sample and 28% in the German sample (Table 1). Similarly, although the percentages of males selecting sexual infidelity in response to Dilemma 2 are as high as 47% in a U.S. sample and 53% in the Korean sample, they are as low as 23% in the Dutch sample and 30% in the German sample (Table 2). These low-side outliers hardly support Buss' claim that male jealousy is focused on cues of sexual infidelity and that this is true "across cultures."23 Second, the results of three studies in which the infidelity dilemmas were administered to homosexual men are difficult to reconcile with Buss's claim that there is a sex difference in the evolved "design features" of the psychological mechanisms of jealousy. In one study, only 24% of homosexual men chose sexual infidelity as more upsetting than emotional infidelity in Dilemma 1, and only 5% chose sexual infidelity as more upsetting in Dilemma 2.24 Another study administered only Dilemma 2 to a sample of homosexual men, of whom only 13% chose sexual infidelity as more upsetting than emotional infidelity.25 Finally, when both dilemmas were administered to both homosexual and heterosexual men and women, it was found that homosexual men were even less upset by sexual infidelity than were heterosexual women.26 Third, the psychologist Christine Harris found that, although heterosexual males who were asked to imagine their partners' having sex with another male showed greater physiological arousal than those who were asked to imagine their partners' forming an emotional attachment to another man, males who were asked to imagine having sex with their own partners showed just as great a physiological arousal as those imagining being cuckolded.27 Indeed, Harris found that there was no significant difference between the one group's physiological arousal in response to imagined sexual infidelity and the other group's physiological arousal in response to imagined sexual intercourse. This indicates that the results obtained by Buss and his colleagues are confounded by the fact that males become more aroused by imagining events with sexual content, in general, than by imagining events with emotional content. And this is something that Buss himself has admitted would undermine his theory.28 I believe that a more minimal hypothesis concerning the nature of our evolved jealousy mechanism can better account for the data. I call it the relationship jeopardy hypothesis, according to which both sexes have the same evolved capacity to learn to distinguish threatening from nonthreatening extrapair involvements and to experience jealousy to a degree that is proportional to the perceived threat to a relationship in which one has invested mating effort. This same capacity leads to a common sex difference in how infidelities are viewed, however, because the sexes acquire different beliefs about opposite-sex sexual strategies. So the standard sex difference is a product of typical differences in the information believed by the sexes, not of a sex difference in the design of the mechanisms that process that information. Consider how the relationship jeopardy hypothesis accounts for the data. According to the relationship jeopardy hypothesis, the sexes differ in their acquired beliefs about infidelity, and a series of studies found precisely that.29 These studies found that men believe that, for women, sex implies love more than love implies sex and that women believe that, for men, love implies sex more than sex implies love. The most dramatic finding was that women believe that it is not that likely that a man's having sex with a woman implies any kind of emotional involvement with her. Given these beliefs, men should find sexual infidelities more distressing than women because a female's sexual infidelity signals a potential threat to a relationship (via the likely combination with an emotional involvement) that is greater than the potential threat signaled by a male's sexual infidelity (which is likely not accompanied by an emotional involvement). Moreover, as we saw earlier, women having extramarital sex are far more likely to be dissatisfied in their marriages than unfaithful men.30 So, even in the absence of an accompanying emotional involvement, a woman's sexual infidelity is threatening because it signals dissatisfaction in the relationship in a way that a man's sexual infidelity does not. Thus, if both sexes have the same evolved capacity to distinguish threatening from nonthreatening infidelities and respond accordingly, we should expect men to find emotional infidelities very threatening, but we should also expect men to find sexual infidelities more threatening to a relationship than women find them. And Buss's questionnaire results show both effects. In addition, if the relationship jeopardy hypothesis is correct, if there are cultural differences in the degree to which sexual infidelity is correlated with desertion, then the members of a culture in which there is a weaker correlation between sexual infidelity and desertion should be less bothered by sexual infidelity than the members of a culture in which the correlation is stronger. Interestingly, Buss and his colleagues noted that the German and Dutch "cultures have more relaxed attitudes about sexuality, including extramarital sex, than does the American culture," and that in the Netherlands "a majority feels extramarital sexual relationships are acceptable under certain circumstances."31 Accordingly, German and Dutch males should be less likely than American males to assume that a female partner's sexual infidelity portends desertion, and consequently they should be less distressed by sexual infidelity than American males. And, on average, 61% of American males chose sexual infidelity as more distressing than emotional infidelity in response to Dilemma 1 (Table 1), and 44% chose sexual infidelity in Dilemma 2 (Table 2). In contrast, on average, only 40% of German and Dutch males chose sexual infidelity in Dilemma 1 (Table 1), and only 26% chose sexual infidelity in Dilemma 2 (Table 2). Finally, when homosexual and heterosexual men and women were asked their beliefs about relationships and infidelity, the only significant correlation that emerged was between degree of distress over sexual infidelity and the belief that sexual infidelity indicated likely abandonment.32 All subjects -- whether men or women, whether homosexual or heterosexual -- were far more likely to be distressed by an imagined sexual infidelity if they believed that sexual infidelity portends the end of a relationship. Further, heterosexual males were by far the most likely to believe that a sexual infidelity is a likely precursor to abandonment. Women, both homosexual and heterosexual, were far more likely than heterosexual men to "discount" a sexual infidelity as nonthreatening to a relationship, and homosexual men were even more likely than women to discount a sexual infidelity as nonthreatening. If these beliefs were processed by the mechanism postulated by the relationship jeopardy hypothesis, it would generate precisely the pattern of questionnaire responses from heterosexual men and women Buss found, but also the responses of homosexual men discussed earlier. Thus, not only is there not good evidence of Buss's hypothesized sex difference in the "design features" of the jealous mind, but Buss's hypothesis doesn't easily account for a variety of data. In contrast, a simpler hypothesis, according to which there is no sex difference in the "design features" of the mind, but only in the beliefs typically acquired by the sexes, better explains all the data. His Abuse of Her Children One of the "discoveries" that Pinker and Buss frequently tout as a signature achievement of EP is the finding, by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, that children who live with stepparents are at a greater risk of maltreatment than children who live with both genetic parents.33 An evolutionary perspective on human psychology should lead us to expect this, Daly and Wilson argue, because "parental investment is a precious resource, and selection must favor those parental psyches that do not squander it on nonrelatives."34 Daly and Wilson hypothesize that motivational mechanisms of parental love have evolved to be triggered by (genetic) offspring during a "critical period." Once triggered, parental love serves as "inhibition against the use of dangerous tactics in conflict with the child."35 Since these evolved mechanisms of parental love, which inhibit violence, aren't triggered in substitute (nongenetic) parents, "angry lapses of parental solicitude" in conflictual situations more frequently elicit "the use of dangerous tactics" from substitute parents than from genetic parents.36 This leads Daly and Wilson to what they call "the most obvious prediction from a Darwinian view of parental motives": "Substitute parents will generally tend to care less profoundly for children than natural parents, with the result that children reared by people other than their natural parents will be more often exploited and otherwise at risk."37 In particular, since stepparenthood is the most common form of substitute parenthood, Daly and Wilson expect stepchildren to be at greater risk than genetic children. Even more particularly, since at least 80% of children living in stepfamilies live with a stepfather and a genetic mother,38 Daly and Wilson expect that this elevated risk to stepchildren is due to maltreatment at the hands of stepfathers.39 Daly and Wilson cite several studies as confirmation of this prediction, but most provide only indirect evidence, since they lacked important controls. The best direct evidence for this prediction is Daly and Wilson's landmark 1985 study of 99 cases of child maltreatment in the municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth in Ontario, Canada, during a one-year period from 1982 to 1983.40 Daly and Wilson found that children under the age of five who lived with a genetic parent and a stepparent were 40.1 times more likely to be victims of maltreatment than same-aged children who lived with both genetic parents (Table 3). The relative risk to stepchildren aged five and up dropped sharply, and even sharper for stepchildren aged eleven and up, but in all age groups children living with a genetic parent and a stepparent were at a significantly greater risk of becoming victims of maltreatment than children living with both genetic parents. table 3. maltreatment risk for children living with a stepparent and a genetic parent, relative to children living with both genetic parents, by child's age (Hamilton-Wentworth, 1982-1983). Child's age when maltreated 0-4 yrs. 5-10 yrs. 11-17 yrs. Times a child with one stepparent is more likely to be maltreated compared to those with both genetic parents 40.1 19.4 9.8 There are, however, three shortcomings of Daly and Wilson's study. First, Daly and Wilson's sample consisted of 99 cases of maltreatment, which included not only physical abuse (inflicted injury), but 21 cases of sexual abuse and an unreported number of "unintentional omissions" considered neglect by a child welfare professional. But sexual abuse and physical abuse appear to be distinct phenomena with distinct etiologies. Indeed, intrafamilial child sexual abuse is rarely accompanied by physical abuse,41 so it doesn't consist in "the use of dangerous tactics in conflict with the child." Moreover, in the U.S., the class of "unintentional omissions" often includes allowing truancy and failing to secure a child with a seat belt.42 These also don't involve "the use of dangerous tactics in conflict" situations. Since Daly and Wilson claim that stepchildren are at greater risk because the "inhibition against the use of dangerous tactics in conflict" is not triggered in stepparents, cases of maltreatment that don't involve the use of dangerous tactics in conflict don't belong in the sample against which to test their prediction. If we want to understand the "lapses of parental love" that result in "the use of dangerous tactics in conflict with the child," as Daly and Wilson claim, we should explore data regarding physical abuse, rather than the amorphous category of maltreatment, to test whether substitute parents are more physically abusive than genetic parents. In order to test Daly and Wilson's prediction against a much larger and far more representative sample of cases of physical abuse, Elliott Smith, the Associate Director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, and I analyzed child abuse data compiled in the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3). We found that children under the age of five living in a stepfamily were 8.2 times more likely to be physically abused than same-aged children living with both genetic parents (Table 4), which is drastically lower than the 40-times-greater risk of maltreatment that Daly and Wilson found. And children aged five and above who lived in a stepfamily were only 3.3 times more likely to be physically abused than same-aged children living with both genetic parents. table 4. rates of physical abuse (per thousand children) by household composition, NIS-3 (United States, 1993) Child's age when maltreated 0-4 yrs. 5-10 yrs. 11-17 yrs. Overall Rate of abuse per 1,000 for two genetic parents 1.7 3.2 3.1 2.7 Rate of abuse per 1,000 for one genetic parent plus one stepparent 13.9 10.2 10.5 10.7 While not as dramatic as Daly and Wilson's findings, these results nonetheless appear to confirm Daly and Wilson's prediction. But this brings us to the second methodological shortcoming of Daly and Wilson's study. Daly and Wilson's data concern the risk of maltreatment to children living in households of varying parental composition, rather than a child's risk of being maltreated by a stepparent or genetic parent. That is, Daly and Wilson's data don't identify the perpetrators of maltreatment, even though their hypothesis predicts that stepfathers will be disproportionately represented among perpetrators. Since the NIS-3 data identified perpetrators, they allow a more direct test of Daly and Wilson's prediction, and those data yield two surprises. First, in a clear anomaly for Daly and Wilson's hypothesis, single genetic fathers were actually 1.7 times more likely than stepfathers to physically abuse their children (Table 5). Second, the data on physical abuse of children living with a genetic mother and a stepfather show that genetic mothers are involved in a significant portion of that abuse, either acting alone or in concert with the stepfather (Table 6). table 5. rates of physical abuse (per thousand children) by a father acting alone, NIS-3 (United States, 1993) Child's age when maltreated 0-4 yrs. 5-10 yrs. 11-17 yrs. Overall Parents in household genetic father only 19.8 9.8 10.1 11.4 Parents in household genetic mother plus stepfather 11.1 7.1 6.1 6.8 table 6. rates of physical abuse (per thousand children) in genetic mother-stepfather households, NIS-3 (United States, 1993) Child's age when maltreated 0-4 yrs. 5-10 yrs. 11-17 yrs. Overall Perpetrator: genetic mother acting alone 1.6 0.8 1.91.5 Perpetrator: stepfather acting alone 11.1 7.1 6.16.8 Perpetrator: both parents4.8 1.9 3.83.2 Nonetheless, children who were abused by a parent acting alone were 4.5 times more likely to be abused by their stepfather than by their genetic mother (Table 6), and this does appear to confirm Daly and Wilson's prediction. But this brings us to the third of the methodological shortcomings of Daly and Wilson's study, which is a shortcoming of our NIS-3 study as well. Daly and Wilson's sample and the NIS-3 sample consisted entirely of officially reported cases of child maltreatment -- that is, cases of maltreatment that were brought to the attention of a professional who worked in a capacity concerned with child welfare, were investigated in some way by that professional or others to whom the cases were referred, and were determined to be genuine cases of child maltreatment by the investigators. But some family violence researchers have pointed out that child welfare professionals sometimes take the presence of a stepparent in the household into consideration in deciding whether a bruise or broken bone resulted from an accident or abuse.43 That is, many child welfare professionals take the presence of a stepparent in a household to be partly diagnostic of maltreatment. So, Gelles and Harrop argue, "injuries to children with non-genetic parents are more likely to be diagnosed and reported as abuse."44 As a result, official case reports of child maltreatment may contain a bias against stepparents, which distorts the facts concerning the relative rates of maltreatment by stepparents and genetic parents. Daly and Wilson are fully aware of the potentially confounding effects of diagnostic bias on their studies, but they dismiss it with the following single argument: "If reporting or detection biases were responsible for the overrepresentation of stepparents among child abusers, then we would expect the bias, and hence the overrepresentation, to diminish as we focused upon increasingly severe and unequivocal maltreatment up to the extreme of fatal batterings."45 "At the limit," they argue, "we can be reasonably confident that child murders are usually detected and recorded."46 When Daly and Wilson examined "validated" cases of child homicide in America47 and cases of child homicide in Canada that were "known to Canadian police,"48 they found that stepchildren were far more likely to be victims of fatal maltreatment than children living with both genetic parents. Thus, Daly and Wilson conclude that comparable findings regarding non-fatal maltreatment are not confounded by a reporting bias against stepparents. There is substantial evidence, however, that "validated" child homicides and those "known to police" are but a partial record of child maltreatment fatalities in the United States, and there is little reason for doubting that Canada is similar in this regard. Indeed, when review boards undertook comprehensive studies of up to nine sources of information about each child fatality in four U.S. states, they consistently found that only 40-50% of all identifiable child maltreatment fatalities, including inflicted injury fatalities, were coded as maltreatment fatalities on death certificates or in police records.49 The remainder were coded as accidental deaths or, more commonly, deaths due to an "undetermined manner." More importantly, analysis of Colorado records revealed direct evidence of a potential diagnostic bias against "stepfathers."50 For maltreatment fatalities at the hands of "other relatives," which included legally married stepfathers, were 1.37 times more likely to be recorded as maltreatment fatalities on death certificates than were maltreatment fatalities perpetrated by genetic parents. Moreover, maltreatment fatalities at the hands of "other unrelated" individuals, which included "live-in boyfriends" of victims' mothers, were 8.71 times more likely to be recorded as such on death certificates than maltreatment fatalities at the hands of genetic parents. This last fact is particularly important for two reasons. First, Daly and Wilson classified "live-in boyfriends" as stepfathers (as did Smith and I).51 Second, in the Canadian filicide data mentioned above, Daly and Wilson found that "common-law" stepfathers accounted for a full 89% of the filicides that were attributed to stepfathers in police records.52 Thus, "common-law" stepfathers, who almost single-handedly accounted for the higher rate of filicide among stepfathers in Daly and Wilson's study, were in a group that is 8.71 times more likely than genetic parents to have a perpetrated child maltreatment fatality actually identified as a maltreatment fatality in official records. If, as Daly and Wilson argue, the effects of any reporting bias should be less in cases of fatal maltreatment than in cases of non-fatal abuse, this degree of reporting bias in U.S. cases of fatal maltreatment implies a higher degree of reporting bias in cases of non-fatal abuse, which is then more than sufficient to account for the overrepresentation of stepchildren in the NIS-3 data (Table 4). So, available evidence indicates that American physical abuse data are sufficiently confounded by reporting bias that they can't confirm Daly and Wilson's hypothesis, and there is little reason to think that the Canadian records are immune to this problem. Since all of our evidence to date concerning stepparental abuse derives from official case reports, we simply don't know whether stepparents are more likely than genetic parents to abuse their children. Daly and Wilson's claim that stepparents are more likely than genetic parents to abuse their children goes beyond the available reliable evidence. Conclusion I've argued that some of the principal pieces of evidence cited in support of three of Evolutionary Psychology's highly publicized "discoveries" in fact fail to establish EP's claims. And I argue in Adapting Minds that other evidence cited in support of these "discoveries" suffers similar evidentiary problems. EP's other "discoveries" enjoy no better empirical support. For example, I argue in Adapting Minds that the evidence fails to establish Buss's claims about evolved mate preferences (that males are fixated on nubility, while females are fixated on nobility) and Cosmides' claim that we have an evolved module for detecting cheaters in social exchanges.53 Although EP is a bold and innovative explanatory paradigm, it has not provided convincing evidence for its claims about the nature and evolution of human psychology. We really don't yet know how to understand human psychology from an evolutionary perspective. Perhaps some day we will achieve that understanding, but that day is not at hand. Coming to terms with the shortcomings of Evolutionary Psychology, however, may help us eventually achieve a new and improved evolutionary psychology. References 1. Caporael, Linnda R. 2001. "Evolutionary Psychology: Toward a Unifying Theory and a Hybrid Science." Annual Review of Psychology 52: 607-628. 2. Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby (1997). The Modular Nature of Human Intelligence. In A. B. Scheibel and J. W. Schopf (Eds.), The Origin and Evolution of Intelligence (pp. 71-101). Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.; Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton.; Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides (2000). Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of the Mind and Brain. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The New Cognitive Neuro-sciences (second ed., pp. 1167-1178). Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press. 3. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 1990. "The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments." Ethology and Sociobiology 11: 375-424. 4. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 1992. "The Psychological Foundations of Culture." In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (pp. 19-136). New York: Oxford University Press. 5. Sterelny, Kim. 2003. Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 6. Buller, David J. 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, chapter 4. 7. Buller, 2005, chapter 3. 8. Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.; Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders. 9. Buss, David M. 2000. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. New York: Free Press, 162. 10. Buss 2000, 159. 11. Greiling, Heide, and David M. Buss. 2000. "Women's Sexual Strategies: The Hidden Dimension of Extra-Pair Mating." Personality and Individual Differences 28: 929-963, 960. 12. Gangestad, Steven W., and Randy Thornhill. 1997. "The Evolutionary Psychology of Extrapair Sex: The Role of Fluctuating Asymmetry." Evolution and Human Behavior 18: 69-88. 13. Thornhill, Randy, and Steven W. Gangestad. 1999. "The Scent of Symmetry: A Human Sex Pheromone That Signals Fitness?" Evolution and Human Behavior 20: 175-201. 14. Buss 2000, 162. 15. Baker, R. Robin, and Mark A. Bellis. 1993. "Human Sperm Competition: Ejaculate Manipulation by Females and a Function for the Female Orgasm." Animal Behaviour 46: 887-909. 16. Terman, Lewis M. 1938. Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness. New York: McGraw-Hill.; Chesser, Eustace. 1956. The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman. London: Hutchinson's Medical Publications.; Bell, Robert R., and Dorthyann Peltz. 1974. "Extramarital Sex among Women." Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality 8: 10-31.; Tavris, Carol, and Susan Sadd. 1975. The Redbook Report on Female Sexuality. New York: Delacorte.; Glass, Shirley P., and Thomas L. Wright. 1985. "Sex Differences in Type of Extramarital Involvement and Marital Dissatisfaction." Sex Roles 12: 1101-1120.; Glass, Shirley P., and Thomas L. Wright. 1992. "Justifications for Extramarital Relationships: The Association between Attitudes, Behaviors, and Gender." Journal of Sex Research 29: 361-387.; 17. Greiling and Buss 2000. 18. Glass and Wright 1985, 1992. 19. Bell and Peltz 1974; Tavris and Sadd 1975. 20. Adams, David B., Alice Ross Gold, and Anne D. Burt. 1978. "Rise in Female-Initiated Sexual Activity at Ovulation and Its Suppression by Oral Contraceptives." New England Journal of Medicine 299: 1145-1150.; Hill, Elizabeth M. 1988. "The Menstrual Cycle and Components of Human Female Sexual Behaviour." Journal of Social and Biological Structures 11: 443-455.; Stanislaw, Harold, and Frank J. Rice. 1988. "Correlation between Sexual Desire and Menstrual Cycle Characteristics." Archives of Sexual Behavior 17: 499-508.; Regan, Pamela C. 1996. "Rhythms of Desire: The Association between Menstrual Cycle Phases and Female Sexual Desire." Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 5: 145-156. 21. Buss, David M. 1994. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. New York: Basic Books, 128. 22. Buss, David M., Todd K. Shackelford, Lee A. Kirkpatrick, Jae C. Choe, Hang K. Lim, Mariko Hasegawa, et al. 1999. "Jealousy and the Nature of Beliefs About Infidelity: Tests of Competing Hypotheses About Sex Differences in the United States, Korea, and Japan." Personal Relationships 6: 125-150, 125. 23. Buss, David M. 1999. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 326. 24. Sheets, Virgil L., and Marlow D. Wolfe. 2001. "Sexual Jealousy in Heterosexuals, Lesbians, and Gays." Sex Roles 44: 255-276. 25. Harris, Christine R. 2002. "Sexual and Romantic Jealousy in Heterosexual and Homosexual Adults." Psychological Science 13: 7-12. 26. Bailey, J. Michael, Steven Gaulin, Yvonne Agyei, and Brian A. Gladue. 1994. "Effects of Gender and Sexual Orientation on Evolutionarily Relevant Aspects of Human Mating Psychology." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66: 1081-1093. 27. Harris, Christine R. 2000. "Psychophysiological Responses to Imagined Infidelity: The Specific Innate Modular View of Jealousy Reconsidered." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78: 1082-1091. 28. Buss, David M., Randy J. Larsen, Drew Westen, and Jennifer Semmelroth. 1992. "Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Psychology." Psychological Science 3: 251-255, 255. 29. DeSteno, David A., and Peter Salovey. 1996a. "Evolutionary Origins of Sex Differences in Jealousy?" Psychological Science 7: 367-372.; DeSteno, David A., and Peter Salovey. 1996b. "Genes, Jealousy, and the Replication of Misspecified Models." Psychological Science 7: 376-377.; Harris, Christine R., and Nicholas Christenfeld. 1996a. "Gender, Jealousy, and Reason." Psychological Science 7: 364-366.; Harris, Christine R., and Nicholas Christenfeld. 1996b. "Jealousy and Rational Responses to Infidelity across Gender and Culture." Psychological Science 7: 378-379. 30. Glass and Wright 1985, 1992. 31. Buunk, Bram P., Alois Angleitner, Viktor Oubaid, and David M. Buss. 1996. "Sex Differences in Jealousy in Evolutionary and Cultural Perspective: Tests from the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States." Psychological Science 7: 359-363. 32. Sheets and Wolfe 2001. 33. Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. 1985. "Child Abuse and Other Risks of Not Living with Both Parents." Ethology and Sociobiology 6: 197-210. 34. Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. 1988. Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 83. 35. Ibid., 75. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 83. 38. Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. 1994. "Some Differential Attributes of Lethal Assaults on Small Children by Stepfathers Versus Genetic Fathers." Ethology and Sociobiology 15: 207-217, 208.; Buller, 2005, 389. 39. Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. 1999. The Truth About Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 40. Daly and Wilson, 1985. 41. Parker, Hilda, and Seymour Parker. 1986. "Father-Daughter Sexual Abuse: An Emerging Perspective." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 56: 531-549. 42. Christoffel, Katherine Kaufer, Peter C. Scheidt, Phyllis F. Agran, Jess F. Kraus, Elizabeth McLoughlin, and Jerome A. Paulson. 1992. "Standard Definitions for Childhood Injury Research: Excerpts of a Conference Report." Pediatrics 89: 1027-1034. 43. Gelles, Richard J., and John W. Harrop. 1991. "The Risk of Abusive Violence among Children with Non-Genetic Caretakers." Family Relations 40: 78-83.; Giles-Sims, Jean. 1997. "Current Knowledge About Child Abuse in Stepfamilies." Marriage and Family Review 26: 215-230.; Giles-Sims, Jean, and David Finkelhor. 1984. "Child Abuse in Stepfamilies." Family Relations 33: 407-413. 44. Gelles, 1991, 79. 45. Daly and Wilson, 1988, 88. 46. Daly and Wilson, 1999, 31. 47. Daly and Wilson, 1988, 88-89. 48. Daly, Martin, and Margo Wilson. 2001. "An Assessment of Some Proposed Exceptions to the Phenomenon of Nepotistic Discrimination against Stepchildren." Annales Zoologici Fennici 38: 287-296, 291. 49. Christoffel, Katherine K., Nora K. Anzinger, and David A. Merrill. 1989. "Age-Related Patterns of Violent Death," Cook County, Illinois, 1977 through 1982. American Journal of Diseases of Children 143: 1403-1409.; Ewigman, Bernard, Coleen Kivlahan, and Garland Land. 1993. "The Missouri Child Fatality Study: Underreporting of Maltreatment Fatalities among Children Younger Than Five Years of Age," 1983 through 1986. Pediatrics 91: 330-337.; Herman-Giddens, Marcia E., Gail Brown, Sarah Verbiest, Pamela J. Carlson, Elizabeth G. Hooten, Eleanor Howell, et al. 1999. "Underascertainment of Child Abuse Mortality in the United States." Journal of the American Medical Association 282(5): 463-467.; Crume, Tessa L., Carolyn DiGuiseppi, Tim Byers, Andrew P. Sirotnak, and Carol J. Garrett. 2002. "Underascertainment of Child Maltreatment Fatalities by Death Certificates," 1990-1998. Pediatrics 110(2): e18. 50. Crume et al. 2002. 51. Daly and Wilson, 1985. 52. Daly and Wilson, 2001, 291. 53. Cosmides, Leda. 1989. "The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Studies with the Wason Selection Task." Cognition 31: 187-276. 54. Geary, David C., Michael Rumsey, C. Christine Bow-Thomas, and Mary K. Hoard. 1995. "Sexual Jealousy as a Facultative Trait: Evidence from the Pattern of Sex Differences in Adults from China and the United States." Ethology and Sociobiology 16: 355-383. 55. Pietrzak, Robert H., James D. Laird, David A. Stevens, and Nicholas S. Thompson. 2002. "Sex Differences in Human Jealousy: A Coordinated Study of Forced-Choice, Continuous Rating-Scale, and Physiological Responses on the Same Subjects." Evolution and Human Behavior 23: 83-94. _________________________________________________________________ Frank Miele: Evolutionary Psychology is Here to Stay http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n01_here_to_stay.html (from Skeptic magazine Vol. 12, No 1) A Response to Buller "Adaptationism pervades every level of biological inquiry, and always has, because at every level descriptions of relevant phenomena are almost invariably functional descriptions. The only scientifically coherent account of the origin of adaptations, and hence the only scientifically coherent account of `function', is evolution by selection." -- Donald Symons The opening motions in philosopher David J. Buller's case against Evolutionary Psychology (EP) appeared on his web site,1 followed by the major argument in his book, Adapting Minds.2 More recently, Buller argued against leading evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly and Margot Wilson, and David Buss in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science (TCS), which allowed them to respond to Buller's critique.3 In his Skeptic article in this issue, Buller takes his case to a more popular jurisdiction. His brief against EP has two parts: 1. A general critique of the concept of the modular ("Swiss Army Knife") model of the mind, which he describes as a core dogma of EP. If this foundation crumbles, the entire edifice of Evolutionary Psychology will fall. 2. A specific critique of the data used to support two "signature achievements" of EP: Martin Daly and Margot Wilson's Cinderella Effect; and David Buss's studies of male-female differences in jealousy. This article reviews the arguments and data for and against Evolutionary Psychology, Buller's criticisms, and the responses to them. How Modular is the Mind? Debate, Not Dogma David Buller is "deeply skeptical" of what he calls EP's two "defining doctrines." First, that the human mind is "massively modular," composed of a myriad of independent, special purpose ("domain-specific") modules, each evolved to help our ancestors survive and reproduce during the hunter-gather period of human evolution. Second, that no subsequent cognitive adaptations to novel environments have occurred. According to Buller, evolutionary psychologists think that we are "a legion of idiots savants" who struggle to get by like "Fred and Wilma Flintstone" dumped out of a time machine into modern suburbia. Modularity and adaptation to novel environments are two of the central debates, not dogmas, in EP. They are described in the textbook by David Buss, one of the evolutionary psychologists whose work Buller claims to have refuted. Interestingly, Buller cites Buss's first edition, but not the second (2004), which updates the coverage of these issues. The view that "humans must possess a large number of specialized psychological mechanisms, each dedicated to solving specific adaptive problems," Buss summarizes, is "widely accepted within the field of evolutionary psychology and indeed lies at the foundation of evolutionary approaches." However, he then quotes several evolutionary psychologists who have "recently argued that in addition to these specific mechanisms humans also have evolved several domain-general mechanisms." His list of such general purpose processes includes: "intelligence, concept formation, analogical reasoning, working memory, and classical conditioning." Finally, Buss notes that we "routinely solve ancient adaptive problems in highly novel ways" and that "everyone recognizes that humans have been able to flourish in an environment very different from that in which we evolved." While he concludes that the specificity-generality debate remains an open question, Buss emphasizes that no evolutionary psychologist has ever claimed that domain-specific modules are hermetically sealed off from each other by any neurocognitive firewalls. Rather, discovering "the precise nature of information sharing" between modules lies at the cutting edge of research.4 CSI Cinderella -- Buller's Critique of Daly & Wilson Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margot Wilson have spent over two decades studying the nature of nurturing from an evolutionary viewpoint. Based on Darwinian theory they hypothesized the "Cinderella Effect" -- children living with stepparents would be far more likely to be abused than would children living with both genetic parents. They reasoned that in species like ours that provide substantial parental care, evolution would select for nurturing behavior that was directed toward genetic, rather than non-genetic, children in order to increase their odds of reaching maturity and reproducing. In the cold evolutionary calculus of Richard Dawkins' proverbial selfish gene, "Why invest in a competitor's product?" All other things being equal, the greater the degree of genetic relatedness, the greater probability of helping and the lesser the probability of hurting someone else. Neither Daly and Wilson nor any other evolutionary psychologists have ever argued that this is the only factor causing child abuse. Rather, they say it is the major factor in explaining human parenting. Nor have they denied the role played by socioeconomic or cultural factors, but instead have documented them. The Cinderella Effect for lethal, non-lethal, and sexual abuse has been verified not only by Daly and Wilson and their students, but by other researchers as well, working in different countries, applying various statistical methods and experimental designs, to a number of independent datasets. On the flip side, selective caregiving to genetic children over stepchildren has been documented as well. Daly and Wilson have summarized just some of the research supporting the Cinderella Effect in their responses to Buller, which I recapitulate here.5 1. From infancy on, stepchildren suffer higher lethal and nonlethal accident and injury rates, probably because they are less watched over and protected. 2. Stepchildren leave home at a higher rate, at a younger age, and more often give family conflict as their reason. 3. Parents were five times more likely to provide their genetic children with money for college than their stepchildren. 4. In Britain, both mothers and stepfathers expressed even lower aspirations for their stepchildren's education than did poorer single mothers. 5. Stepchildren in Dominica suffer reduced growth and higher stress hormone levels than age mates living with their genetic parents in the same village and material conditions. 6. In Trinidad, village stepfathers spend significantly less time with their children than genetic fathers and many more of their interactions are nasty. 7. Hunter-gatherer stepfathers in Tanzania watch over their stepchildren in camp, but unlike genetic fathers, never play with them. Buller lists three "serious shortcomings" in the research by Daly and Wilson. Together, he says, they "conspire to cast doubt" on the reality of the Cinderella Effect. First, Buller states that while the best evidence for the Cinderella Effect comes from their "landmark 1985 study," Daly and Wilson went wrong by lumping physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect together into a single category of abuse. He counters their results with those from his own analysis of the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3). While Daly and Wilson found that children under five who lived with a genetic parent and a stepparent were 40 times more likely to suffer abuse than those living with both genetic parents, his NIS-3 data show that they were only 3.3 times more likely to be abused. Buller concedes that this still shows a Cinderella Effect, but a much smaller one. (Note, however, Daly and Wilson's data are from Canada, Buller's from the U.S. Reporting procedures and protocols are quite different in the two countries.) Next, Buller criticizes the fact that Daly and Wilson analyzed their data by households, not by identity of the perpetrator. The NIS-3 data do. How can we be sure that the abuse in the Canadian studies was really committed by the stepfathers and not the genetic mothers? (It's much less common for children to live with their genetic fathers and stepmothers). This allows Buller to expose what he says is "a clear anomaly for Daly and Wilson's hypothesis, single genetic fathers were 1.7 times more likely than stepfathers to physically abuse their children." (Rightmost column in Buller's Table 5: 11.4/6.8 ~= 1.7). Were Daly and Wilson unaware of the issue of failing to ID the perps or the increased risk of abuse for children living with only one genetic parent? Have they avoided them in order to bolster the Cinderella Effect? Clearly not. Both are spelled out in an article that Daly and Wilson published as far back as 1981!6 First they explain that: We present the data in terms of household composition rather than perpetrator for several reasons. While stepparents are relatively frequent perpetrators of abuse, so to a lesser extent are natural parents with stepparent spouses. The labelled "perpetrator" is not necessarily the instigator, and moreover, one party may assume responsibility to protect another. In the case of neglect, identification of a single perpetrator seems inappropriate. For these reasons, household composition is the more reliable datum.7 In this 1981 article, Figure 24-1 clearly shows that "Father-only is much the riskiest situation."8 To my knowledge, Daly and Wilson were the first to document this. As they state in their abstract, while socioeconomic, psycho-pathological, and developmental factors all play a role in explaining child abuse, "an evolutionary perspective may provide a more encompassing view of circumstances exacerbating the risk of abuse and neglect and of the ultimate rational for variations in parental solicitude and negligence."9 While conceding that his own analysis of the NIS-3 data "does appear to confirm" (emphasis added) the Cinderella Effect, Buller's third criticism is that the officials who investigate abuse cases are biased in attributing blame to stepparents while tending to dismiss charges against biological parents. He supports this argument with the results of a Colorado study, which showed that child fatalities caused by abuse at the hands of "other relatives" (including stepfathers legally married to the genetic mothers) were "1.37 times more likely to be recorded as the result of maltreatment on death certificates" than were those for genetic parents. This bias in reporting, Buller argues, is sufficient to account for the mild Cinderella Effect that appears to be present in the NIS-3 data. Then where are the dead bodies? Daly and Wilson reply that if stepfathers were always caught while genetic fathers usually get away with it, "there would have to have been more than 500 undiscovered paternal murders [in Canada] each year," above the average of 4 that are detected, to make the two rates equal. In fact, "fewer than 400 Canadian children under 5 years of age died annually in 1974-1990 from all causes other than diseases and congenital abnormalities."10 In his response to Daly and Wilson's defense, Buller falls back on saying that his argument "was not that bias in U.S. data accounts for overrepresentation in Canadian or other data, but that overrepresentation in those data may be found to be an artifact of recording if empirical research into bias, such as that of the Colorado study, were conducted."11 However, the amount of bias required in the Canadian data would have to be enormous. Other lines of evidence provide additional support for the Cinderella Effect. Victim self report studies show a higher percentage of abuse attributed to stepparents than to genetic parents. And stepparents themselves report that they experience less parental love toward stepchildren than they do toward genetic children. For Buller's critique to hold up, all of these lines of independent evidence would have to be similarly biased. This is possible, but not probable. The Case of the Green-Eyed Monster(s): Buller's Critique of Buss David Buss and his colleagues have studied the Darwinian basis of mating, conflict between the sexes, social status, homicide, and jealousy.12 Buller concentrates his attack on jealousy. Buss predicted that "because reproductive consequences of infertility and partner loss for males and females are parallel in some respects, and asymmetric in others,"13 they would be similar in some respects, but different where evolution presented them with different problems. They would differ because, "males risk both lowered paternity probability and investment in rival gametes if their mates have sexual contact with other males," while females "do not risk lowered maternity probability through partner infidelity, but they do risk the diversion of their mate's commitment and resources to rival females."14 For a male, being a cad isn't so bad, but being cuckolded definitely is. "It is a wise father who knows his own child." For a female, however, "maternity is a certainty," so being left holding the baby by a deadbeat dad is definitely bad, especially if his resources are being squandered dallying with Dolly. In their TCS response to Buller, Buss and co-author Martie Haselton list four ways males and females were predicted to be similar, and 13 ways in which they were predicted to be different. Derived from Darwinian theory, they have all been tested and confirmed.15 Boxes 1 and 2 in Buller's article here summarize the critical male-female difference -- the response to sexual versus emotional infidelity. In every case, males were more upset than females by the sexual scenario. Buller does not question the data, only Buss's conclusion. Confirming the evolutionary explanation requires evidence that males become more upset about sexual infidelity than they do about the emotional unfaithfulness. In his TCS reply, Buss notes that he and his colleagues "were careful to state the prediction not in terms of absolute levels of jealousy, which are affected by many factors external to the hypothesis, but rather in sex differences in sensitivities to different forms of infidelity."16 Buller retorts that this is "retrofitting their predictions to the data."17 Is it? In 1992, Buss et al. wrote that their "central hypothesis" derived from Darwinian theory was that both sexes should be distressed over both sexual and emotional infidelity but that the "two kinds of infidelity should be weighted differently by men and women."18 (Emphasis added.) In 1999, Buss emphasized the point that, "Both sexes, of course, are distressed by both forms of infidelity, and the evolutionary hypothesis suggests that they should be, given their correlated nature in everyday life....The hypothesis, rather, is about sex differences in the emotional weighting of the aspects of infidelity."19 (Emphasis added.) Buss's original reasoning may not satisfy Buller, but his response is hardly "retrofitting." Buller cites a study that shows that males are more physiologically aroused than females by sexual content generally which, he says, "Buss himself had admitted would undermine his theory." What Buss actually wrote is that future research "could profitably explore" their correlation."20 And what, if not adaptation, explains the greater male arousal? While cultural factors play some part, Buss and his colleagues have not denied them, but documented them.21 Buller offers an alternative to the evolutionary explanation, which he dubs "the relationship jeopardy hypothesis." It says the sex difference is "a product of typical differences in the information believed by the sexes, not of a sex difference in the design of the mechanisms that process that information." This "belief hypothesis" is based on the research of DeSteno and Salovey.22 Evolutionary psychologists are hardly ignorant of it. The 1999 paper by Buss et al., which Buller cites, addresses their methodological critique of the evolutionary hypothesis and details the conceptual difficulties with the belief hypothesis. Finally, it describes the results of four experiments that pitted the two against each other and found "the belief hypothesis is not well supported."23 Like the Cinderella Effect, the sex difference in jealousy has been confirmed by other researchers, in different countries, applying various experimental designs and statistical methods to a number of independent datasets. Conclusion: Cased Dismissed In his case against Evolutionary Psychology, Buller misses -- or skillfully avoids -- the big picture. The interesting, though by no means novel, points he makes fit Richard Dawkins' description of earlier such criticisms as "a catalogue of methodological shortcomings of particular studies."24 Buller fashions his arguments like a defense attorney in a criminal case. He attempts to sow doubt regarding this or that piece of evidence, or to offer alternative interpretations as to what might have happened. The scientific method, however, is like a civil case, where the standard is not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but rather "the preponderance of evidence." Moreover, a civil case does not require an either-or verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty;" rather, liability can be apportioned. Likewise, in the behavioral sciences especially, a good theory or hypothesis need not explain everything, but only provide the simplest and most coherent explanation. Evolutionary psychology satisfies philosopher Imre Lakatos' criterion that true science is "progressive." It has proven able "to `digest' (successfully account for) apparent anomalies and generate novel predictions and explanations" and therefore has "the hallmarks of a currently progressive research program capable of providing us with new knowledge of how the mind works."25 A glance at the recently published Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology26 (edited by David Buss) shows just how vigorous and productive the field is. Important challenges remain, however. The most important are determining the role of domain-specific versus domain-general processes27 and integrating evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, neurosciences, and psychometrics.28 The critics notwithstanding, Evolutionary Psychology is here to stay. References 1. http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/research.shtml 2. Buller, D. J. 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 3. In addition to Buller's web site see http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/buller.htm for the TCS responses by Tooby & Cosmides, Daly & Wilson, and Buss. 4. Buss, D. M. 2004. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. pp. 56-57. NY: Pearson. 5. For detailed descriptions of the original studies and citations to them see Daly & Wilson's web page (http://psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/research.html) that also contains their classic article, "The `Cinderella Effect': Elevated Mistreatment of Stepchildren in Comparison of Those Living with Genetic Parents" as well one of their replies to Buller. Another reply by Daly & Wilson appears in the journal, Trends in Cognitive Sciences in November 2005. 6. Daly, M. and M. I. Wilson. 1981. "Abuse and Neglect of Children in Evolutionary Perspective." In Alexander, R. D. and D. W. Tinkle. (Eds.). Natural Selection and Social Behavior. NY: Chiron Press, pp. 405-416. 7. Ibid. p. 408. 8. Ibid. p. 409. 9. Ibid. p. 405. 10. Daly, M. and Wilson, M. 2005. Reply to David Buller. http://psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/research.html, p. 1 11. Buller, D. J., J. Fodor, and T. Crume. 2005. "The Emperor is Still Under-Dressed." Trends in Cognitive Science. (forthcoming), p. 2. 12. http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/AboutDavid.h tm 13. Buss, D. M. and M. Haselton. 2005. "The Evolution of Jealousy: A Reply to Buller." Trends in Cognitive Science. November. p. 1. (http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/pdffiles/ buss_haselton_reply_to_buller.doc) 14. Buss, D.M., R. J. Larsen, W. Westen, and J. Semmelroth. 1992. "Sex Difference in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Psychology." Psychological Science. Vol. 3 No. 4. p. 251. 15. Buss and Haselton, 2005, pp. 1-2. 16. Ibid., p. 3. 17. Buller, Fodor, and Crume, 2005, p. 1. 18. Buss et al., 1992, p. 251. 19. Buss D. M., T. K. Shackelford, L. A. Kirkpatrick, J. C. Choe, H. K. Lim, M. Hasegawa, T. Hasegawa, and K. Bennett. 1999. "Jealousy and the Nature of Beliefs about Infidelity: Test of competing Hypotheses about Sex Differences in the United States, Korea, and Japan." Personal Relationships. Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 125-126. 20. Buss et al., 1992, p. 255. 21. Buss et al., 1999, pp. 139-146. 22. DeSteno, D. A., and P. Salovey. 1996. "Evolutionary Origins of Sex Differences in Jealousy?" Psychological Science Vol. 7, pp. 367-372. DeSteno, D. A., and P. Salovey. 1996. "Genes, Jealousy, and the Replication of Misspecified Models." Psychological Science Vol. 7, pp. 376-377. 23. Buss et al., 1999, p. 148. 24. Dawkins, R. 2005. "Afterword." In Buss, D. M. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. NY: Wiley, pp. 977-978. 25. Ketellar, T., and Ellis, B. J. 2000. "Are Evolutionary Explanations Unfalsifiable? Evolutionary Psychology and the Lakatosian Philosophy of Science." Psychological Inquiry. Vol. 11. No. 1. p. 2. 26. Buss, D. M. 2005. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. NY: Wiley. 27. Buss, D. M. 2004, pp. 56-57. 28. Bailey, J. M. 1997. "Are Genetically Based Individual Differences Compatible With Species-Wide Adaptations?" In Segal, N. L., G. E. Weisfeld, and C. C. Weisfeld. (Eds.) Uniting Psychology and Biology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, pp. 81-100. Segal, N. L., and K. B. MacDonald. 1998. "Behavior Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology: A Unified Perspective on Personality Research." Human Biology. Vol. 70, pp. 159-184. From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Nov 28 02:56:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 18:56:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: <438A3A55.20408@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: If one defines God very broadly... Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2005 3:00 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space And materialists say that God is an unlikely explanation . . . Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: > One of those guys, but I can't remember either. > Whichever one he was, he also did a lot of acid. > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* Jill Andresevic [mailto:andresevic at earthlink.net] > *Sent:* Saturday, November 26, 2005 9:29 AM > *To:* Steve Hovland; The new improved paleopsych list; > isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il > *Cc:* jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; > kblozie at yahoo.com; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; > ohbeeb at yahoo.com > *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > future in space > > Steve / Howard, I read that Watson or Crick (not sure which one) > wrote about DNA being sent to Earth on a spaceship, because his > theory was Earth could not create life, therefore life had to > brought here from another place (interesting how this is not > something well known, if indeed it is true). This also could > connect to the fact that a pig and a chicken and a human embryo > all look very much the same early in embryonic development, since > I am speculating that there was one form of DNA that then evolved > into different life forms. I am not a professional scientist like > most of you (I am guessing), just a fan of Howard?s. Curious as to > what you think of this, if anything. Jill > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- > *From: *"Steve Hovland" > *Date: *Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 > *To: *"The new improved paleopsych list" > , , > > *Cc: *, , > , "Jill Andresevic" , > , , > *Subject: *RE: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > future in space > > > Some people think our DNA came here from space > encapsulated in bacteria... > > Steve > > > -----Original Message----- > *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] > *On Behalf Of > *HowlBloom at aol.com > *Sent:* Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM > *To:* isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il > *Cc:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; > sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; > idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com > *Subject:* [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > future in space > > > Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only > amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a > treatment for a short film in 2001. > > > > As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges > with Eshel. Take a look: > > > > > > Could swarms of robo-microbes > > Made by humans and biology > > The techno teams > > That come from dreams > > The wet dreams of technology > > > > Could cyborg microbes by the trillions > > Launched as space communities > > Explore the dark beyond our skies > > Thrive on starlight, climb and dive > > through wormholes and through nebulae? > > Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space > > And tame time with phrenology? > > > > Could they ride herd > > on mass stampedes > > of x-rays and raw energy > > corralling flares spat by black holes > > at the cores of galaxies? > > > > Could genes retooled > > In swarms of cells > > Become our new conquistadors? > > Could they explore > > Galactic shores > > And synapse reports > > To our brains? > > > > From global thinking > > Could we go > > To cosmos-hopping megaminds > > One small step for E. coli > > A giant step for human kind? > > > > The article: > > > > > > Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adx nnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------- > November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a > Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri > dish? Scientists have created *living photographs made of > bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin > sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an > image.* Bacteria are not about to replace conventional > photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a > single image. But *the feat shows the potential of an emerging > field called synthetic biology, which involves designing > living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might > design a circuit.* "We're actually applying principles from > engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, > assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the > University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the > photography project, which is described in a paper being > published today in the journal Nature. *One team of synthetic > biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a > malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short > supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled > the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize > microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. *The technology could > also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. > So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have > been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations > of things that can easily be done with electronics. *Synthetic > biologists have*, for instance, *made the biological > equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and > off*. To make the bacterial film, *common E. coli bacteria > were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced > only when the bacteria are in the dark.* *The camera, > developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a > temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole > in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white > 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet > of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from > hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. > The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the > growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, > black-and-yellowish picture. > * > Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being > able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances > on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability > to control single biological cells in a population," said > Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at > Texas. *Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes > to cells for three decades, and the distinction between > synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is > not always clear. *Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic > engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single > gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, > for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the > hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of > experimentation, in contrast to *true engineering, like > building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts > and has a fairly predictable outcome.* "We haven't been able > to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and > predictably engineer biological systems," said *Drew Endy, an > assistant professor of biological engineering at the > Massachusetts Institute of Technology.* "It means the > complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are > quite limited." Professor Endy *and colleagues at M.I.T. have > created a catalog of biological components, which they call > BioBricks*, which are s*equences of DNA that can perform > particular functions like turning on a gene*. Still, since > cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is > open to question how predictable biological engineering can > ever be. *M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for > college students to design "genetically engineered machines." > The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in > part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial > photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist > who has been learning about biology at the university.* By > chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San > Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, > had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two > groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it > is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But *since E. coli > live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and > Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to > respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make > them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added > to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black > precipitate is produced. *The scientists created sort of a > chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in > the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. > When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the > enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company > Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us > Work for Us Site Map Back to Top > > > > > > ---------- > Howard Bloom > Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the > Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind > From The Big Bang to the 21st Century > Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York > University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute > www.howardbloom.net > www.bigbangtango.net > Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board > member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The > Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New > York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement > of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political > Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International > Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for > Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. > For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: > www.paleopsych.org > for two chapters from > The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of > History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer > For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from > the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Nov 28 03:02:20 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 19:02:20 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopathic leaders In-Reply-To: <438A3BAF.4050500@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: Psychopaths in business may be weeded out, but not always before they do a lot of damage- witness the busines scandals of recent years. And I think that in the last 10-15 years the general management style of corporations has become more psychopathic- lean and mean, with an emphasis on mean. Steve -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2005 3:05 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] psychopathic leaders An ongoing thread in this group, psychopathic leaders. I have long believed such psychopaths more attracted to politics (esp. the left) than business where they are more likely to be weeded out. Anyway, a local story about a new book: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view2/1,4382,635164147,00.html?textfield=Mao+ Historians delve into Mao's evil *By Dennis Lythgoe * Deseret Morning News Although it is doubtful that most Chinese citizens will ever learn about it, Mao Tse Tung may have been even more vicious than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in his determination to kill his own people. From the time he conquered China in 1949, Mao caused the deaths of more than 70 million Chinese in peacetime. Image Lisa Weiss So claim two historians, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who have published a magnum opus, "Mao: The Unknown Story." During a conference call from California, the authors expressed pride in finishing what they are not shy to call the definitive work on Mao's life. Chang is a native of China, having been a Red Guard briefly at the age of 14, and then he was a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker and an electrician before becoming a university lecturer. Her previous book, a more personal one about life under Mao, is called "Wild Swans." Halliday, a Russian historian formerly on the faculty of King's College, University of London, has written or edited several books, including a biography of filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Chang and Halliday are married, and their talents complement each other. She dealt with all the Chinese sources, while Halliday speaks six languages and is fluent in Russian. So "95 percent" of what he contributed to the book came from Russian sources. Mao was "worse than Stalin two ways," Halliday said. "Whereas Stalin used elites to torment or torture people in secret, Mao pushed torture into the public domain to terrorize the whole population. So most people saw his atrocities. He got the larger part of the population to participate in the torture. Mao brutalized the society more than Stalin. He also threatened people's private lives ? with respect to sex and information, especially ? more than Stalin did. In terms of fear and horror, life for the Chinese was more horrific than for Russians under Stalin." Image Lisa Weiss Jon Halliday and Jung Chang are authors of "Mao: The Unknown Story." In addition, Chang asserts that "Mao destroyed more culture in China than Stalin did in Russia. Mao criticized Stalin for allowing the classics to be read. Books were burned in China on a large scale. I grew up in China and we had virtually nothing to read. The only thing we could read were the quotations of Chairman Mao." Halliday said that it was clear early on that Mao had ambitions to lead the entire world. "Most people don't know the extent to which Mao destroyed the visible signs of Chinese culture ? the walls, the city gates and numerous monuments ? so that the cities look completely different. Mao wanted to destroy everything that was old. In doing so, he cut modern China off from its past. He visually brutalized the landscape of China." Chang added that "in the so-called 'leap forward,' Mao bought nuclear technology from Russia and Eastern Europe at the expense of the starvation and overwork of his own people. He imported huge industrial products and used food to purchase it, leaving his people to die. He wanted China to be a military superpower so he could himself dominate the world." And how does the current Chinese regime deal with Mao's considerable legacy? In Chang's view, current Chinese leaders "choose to perpetuate the myth of Mao, in part to enforce their own legitimacy. Chinese leaders have made it an offense to criticize Mao. The Chinese banned my first book, and they are banning this one as well. People may only read things praising Mao. The generation growing up today have no idea what Mao was like." Chang is now immersed in the translation of "Mao" into Chinese. It will be published next year by a Taiwan publisher. "Many people in China have heard about this book," said Chang, "and some will find ways to read it. As the truth about Mao trickles into China, pressure will build to reject Mao and his legacies, many of which still dominate the country." Although Mao was never known for charismatic leadership, he may not have needed it. Halliday said: "He never had to run for election or consult with the people. When he came to power, there was no uprising. Mao had the skills to operate in a room with a few people who would turn out the vote. He hardly ever appeared in public. Most people never heard his voice." On the other hand, Mao was also haunted by fear, causing him to build an enormous security network, including numerous guards, underground tunnels and bomb-proof shelters. Halliday said: "He was a fanatic ? he knew that there were people who wanted to kill him." It is essentially unknown in the West that Mao wrote poetry, "very good poetry," in Chang's opinion, "until he took power, then the quality went downhill. He lost his flair. But he was educated in the Chinese tradition, in which poetry played an important role." That doesn't mean Mao would have become a great thinker had he not chosen government, Halliday said. "When you examine his statements philosophically, they were pretty empty. If you ask people to provide one good idea Mao had, most would have a hard time coming up with anything." While one of Mao's most important means of control was the use of torture, Chang said, "He depended on terror and torture. He gave instructions about how to apply torture and when to stop it. He said if you stop it too early, it defeats its purposes. But it you apply it too late, the subject might be dead. Mao was a torture /artist/." _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Nov 28 05:52:05 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:52:05 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] Repulsion cues in ants Message-ID: <2b6.ba1680.30bbf505@aol.com> In his 1978 book Life Strategies, Valerius Geist, a charter member of this group, wrote that all animal communication boils down to two words, yes and no, to two sort of signals, attraction cues and repulsion cues. Meanwhile, in his work during the 1990s with bacteria, Eshel Ben-Jacob discovered that the same positive and negative signals appeared on the microscopic level, where bacteria also issue attraction and repulsion signals, chemical come-hithers and chemical stay aways. When Pavel Kurakin and I started work on a joint project about quantum partilcles a year or more ago, Pavel was hoping I could give him an example of attraction and repulsion cues among ants. I couldn't. There were equivalent signals among bees. But ants, from what I knew of the literature, had just one chemical semaphore--come hither. They made do on just attraction cues. Nonetheless the leap that Pavel was making, the inference that ants, too, had attraction and repulsion cues, seemed a good one. But was it true? New data seem to indicate that, in fact, Pavel's inference was on target. Ants have more than come-over-here-and-check-this-out signals. Their chemical, pheromonal language also lets them give each other repulsion cues. It lets them tell others to shun this place and stay away. Here's the confirmation of what springs from the work of Val Geist and Eshel Ben-Jacob, this time cropping up among ants. Howard ------------ Retrieved November 27, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20051126/fob4.asp Science News Online Week of Nov. 26, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 22 Unway Sign: Ant pheromone stops traffic Susan Milius Researchers say that they've discovered a new kind of traffic sign on ant highways? a chemical "Do not enter" that lets the insects avoid wasting time on paths that don't lead to food. a6763_1188.jpg COMMUTERS' CHOICE. Ants follow chemical paths that increase traffic toward known food bonanzas and avoid thankless journeys. Robinson Ant science has for decades focused on chemical attractants that define trails, says Elva J.H. Robinson of the University of Sheffield in England. However, the new tests give evidence of a repellent pheromone, which hasn't yet been identified, she and her colleagues report in the Nov. 24 Nature. "Nobody believed that such a thing existed," says Robinson. There has certainly been resistance to the idea over the years, says Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol in England. In the 1990s, he and his colleagues mathematically modeled ant trails. Complementing attractants with a hypothetical repellent to block useless trails in a model system "vastly increased its efficiency," he says, but other scientists' reviews of that model were "scathing." Robinson says that she wasn't thinking about repellents when she started her laboratory experiments on foraging trails in pharaoh's ants (Monomorium pharaonis). "We got some quite unexpected results," she says. Some of the ants started zigzagging or doing U-turns when approaching a trail that only Robinson knew didn't lead to food. "It looked as if ants had suddenly developed psychic abilities," she says. She and her colleagues set up two-pronged, paper-covered platforms where ants could forage. One setup had a feeder on one prong but no food on the other. After ants had used it for a while, the researchers moved the paper from the no-food prong to one prong of a different platform that had previously had a working ant trail and feeder on each prong. The researchers put a neutral piece of paper?one from an area of the ants' lab home that had no trail?on the second prong, which had also carried a feeder. Of the ants in the new setup that came to the fork and made a choice, some 70 percent avoided the branch with the paper from the no-food prong. Something on the paper must have turned away traffic, the researchers concluded. The prong's paper was most repellent near the fork. Also, the ants often changed course some 15 body lengths before the fork. Chemical ecologist David Morgan of Keele University in England says that biologists "just haven't really looked" for negative pheromones on ant trails, but the new paper "might now start a great flood of interest." As for do-not-enter signs in other ant species, "I would be very shocked indeed if they didn't find them," says Franks. If you have a comment on this article that you would like considered for publication in Science News, send it to editors at sciencenews.org. Please include your name and location. References: Robinson, E.J., et al. 2005. 'No entry' signal in ant foraging. Nature 438(Nov. 24):442. Further Readings: Milius, S. 2004. Road rage keeps ants moving smoothly. Science News 165(March 20):190. Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040320/note16.asp. ______. 2002. Ant traffic flow: Raiding swarms with few rules avoid gridlock. Science News 163(Dec. 21):388. Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021221/fob3.asp. For more on Pharaoh's ants, go to http://www.shef.ac.uk/aps/mbiolsci/stuart-hutchinson/pharaore-ant.html. Sources: Nigel Franks School of Biological Sciences University of Bristol Woodland Road Bristol BS8 1UG United Kingdom E. David Morgan Chemical Ecology Group Lennard-Jones Laboratory School of Chemistry and Physics Keele University Staffordshire ST5 5BG United Kingdom Elva Robinson Department of Animal and Plant Sciences Sheffield University Western Bank Sheffield S10 2TN United Kingdom http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20051126/fob4.asp From Science News, Vol. 168, No. 22, Nov. 26, 2005, p. 340. Copyright (c) 2005 Science Service. All rights reserved. ---------- 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, Advanced Technology Working Group, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Nov 28 01:17:57 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:17:57 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: <438A3A55.20408@solution-consulting.com> References: <438A3A55.20408@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <438A5AC5.1030008@earthlink.net> Jill and all, I'm not certain that Watson or Crick concocted their theory because they were looped out on acid. Think back to Ernest Haeckel and what he had proposed. If you need a refresher, here is one of my "home pages": http://home.earthlink.net/~waluk/origin_of_species.html I also am without professional scientist credentials but I'm a faithful fan of Howard's. Regards, Gerry Reinhart-Waller Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > And materialists say that God is an unlikely explanation . . . > Lynn > > Steve Hovland wrote: > >> One of those guys, but I can't remember either. >> Whichever one he was, he also did a lot of acid. >> >> -----Original Message----- >> *From:* Jill Andresevic [mailto:andresevic at earthlink.net] >> *Sent:* Saturday, November 26, 2005 9:29 AM >> *To:* Steve Hovland; The new improved paleopsych list; >> isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il >> *Cc:* jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; >> kblozie at yahoo.com; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; >> ohbeeb at yahoo.com >> *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our >> future in space >> >> Steve / Howard, I read that Watson or Crick (not sure which one) >> wrote about DNA being sent to Earth on a spaceship, because his >> theory was Earth could not create life, therefore life had to >> brought here from another place (interesting how this is not >> something well known, if indeed it is true). This also could >> connect to the fact that a pig and a chicken and a human embryo >> all look very much the same early in embryonic development, since >> I am speculating that there was one form of DNA that then evolved >> into different life forms. I am not a professional scientist like >> most of you (I am guessing), just a fan of Howard?s. Curious as to >> what you think of this, if anything. Jill >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> *From: *"Steve Hovland" >> *Date: *Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 >> *To: *"The new improved paleopsych list" >> , , >> >> *Cc: *, , >> , "Jill Andresevic" , >> , , >> *Subject: *RE: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our >> future in space >> >> >> Some people think our DNA came here from space >> encapsulated in bacteria... >> >> Steve >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] >> *On Behalf Of >> *HowlBloom at aol.com >> *Sent:* Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM >> *To:* isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il >> *Cc:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; >> sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; >> idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com >> *Subject:* [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our >> future in space >> >> >> Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only >> amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a >> treatment for a short film in 2001. >> >> >> >> As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges >> with Eshel. Take a look: >> >> >> >> >> >> Could swarms of robo-microbes >> >> Made by humans and biology >> >> The techno teams >> >> That come from dreams >> >> The wet dreams of technology >> >> >> >> Could cyborg microbes by the trillions >> >> Launched as space communities >> >> Explore the dark beyond our skies >> >> Thrive on starlight, climb and dive >> >> through wormholes and through nebulae? >> >> Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space >> >> And tame time with phrenology? >> >> >> >> Could they ride herd >> >> on mass stampedes >> >> of x-rays and raw energy >> >> corralling flares spat by black holes >> >> at the cores of galaxies? >> >> >> >> Could genes retooled >> >> In swarms of cells >> >> Become our new conquistadors? >> >> Could they explore >> >> Galactic shores >> >> And synapse reports >> >> To our brains? >> >> >> >> From global thinking >> >> Could we go >> >> To cosmos-hopping megaminds >> >> One small step for E. coli >> >> A giant step for human kind? >> >> >> >> The article: >> >> >> >> >> >> Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web >> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print >> >> >> >> >> >> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> >> November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a >> Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri >> dish? Scientists have created *living photographs made of >> bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin >> sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an >> image.* Bacteria are not about to replace conventional >> photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a >> single image. But *the feat shows the potential of an emerging >> field called synthetic biology, which involves designing >> living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might >> design a circuit.* "We're actually applying principles from >> engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, >> assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the >> University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the >> photography project, which is described in a paper being >> published today in the journal Nature. *One team of synthetic >> biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a >> malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short >> supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled >> the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize >> microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. *The technology could >> also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. >> So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have >> been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations >> of things that can easily be done with electronics. *Synthetic >> biologists have*, for instance, *made the biological >> equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and >> off*. To make the bacterial film, *common E. coli bacteria >> were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced >> only when the bacteria are in the dark.* *The camera, >> developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a >> temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole >> in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white >> 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet >> of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from >> hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. >> The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the >> growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, >> black-and-yellowish picture. >> * >> Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being >> able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances >> on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability >> to control single biological cells in a population," said >> Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at >> Texas. *Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes >> to cells for three decades, and the distinction between >> synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is >> not always clear. *Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic >> engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single >> gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, >> for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the >> hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of >> experimentation, in contrast to *true engineering, like >> building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts >> and has a fairly predictable outcome.* "We haven't been able >> to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and >> predictably engineer biological systems," said *Drew Endy, an >> assistant professor of biological engineering at the >> Massachusetts Institute of Technology.* "It means the >> complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are >> quite limited." Professor Endy *and colleagues at M.I.T. have >> created a catalog of biological components, which they call >> BioBricks*, which are s*equences of DNA that can perform >> particular functions like turning on a gene*. Still, since >> cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is >> open to question how predictable biological engineering can >> ever be. *M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for >> college students to design "genetically engineered machines." >> The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in >> part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial >> photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist >> who has been learning about biology at the university.* By >> chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San >> Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, >> had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two >> groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it >> is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But *since E. coli >> live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and >> Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to >> respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make >> them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added >> to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black >> precipitate is produced. *The scientists created sort of a >> chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in >> the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. >> When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the >> enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company >> Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us >> Work for Us Site Map Back to Top >> >> >> >> >> >> ---------- >> Howard Bloom >> Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the >> Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind >> From The Big Bang to the 21st Century >> Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York >> University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute >> www.howardbloom.net >> www.bigbangtango.net >> Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board >> member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The >> Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New >> York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement >> of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political >> Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International >> Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for >> Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. >> For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: >> www.paleopsych.org >> for two chapters from >> The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of >> History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer >> For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from >> the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 btillier at shaw.ca Mon Nov 28 15:42:24 2005 From: btillier at shaw.ca (Bill Tillier) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 08:42:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in space In-Reply-To: <438A5AC5.1030008@earthlink.net> Message-ID: Hi all: Sir Frederic Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe advanced the idea that biological material could come to the earth's surface from space in the 1970's. They were widely panned for the idea at the time. Since, the findings of biochemical molecules in space and the analysis of meteorites have supported the idea. Here is a blurb from New Scientist, January 11 2002. Bill Tillier. For the first time, millions of bacterial spores have been purposely exposed to outer space, to see how they are affected by solar radiation. The results support the idea that life could have arrived on Earth in the form of bacteria carried from Mars on meteorites. The idea that life started elsewhere and spread through space is called panspermia. It was first proposed in 1903 by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who suggested that solar radiation might propel single spores across solar systems. Then, in the 1970s, astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe studied the infrared spectra of interstellar grains of dust and concluded that they were dried, frozen bacteria. They put forward the controversial suggestion that life on Earth originated when such bacteria arrived from space. But critics of their work said that cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun would kill unprotected spores. Recent discoveries of Martian meteorites that have reached Earth have raised the possibility that bacterial spores could have hitched a ride on these rocks. Most meteorites spend millions of years in space, but meteorites taking a direct route would make it from Mars to Earth in just a few years - too short a time to experience much damage from deadly cosmic rays. The Sun's UV radiation might still pose a danger, however. To assess its effects, Gerda Horneck of the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne and her colleagues carried out a series of remote-controlled two-week experiments aboard the Russian Foton satellite. > -----Original Message----- > From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Gerry > Reinhart-Waller > Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2005 6:18 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list; "Jill Andresevic"@earthlink.net > Cc: Steve Hovland; JZ; Oohbeeb at yahoo.com; sjlee at howardbloom.net; > Kimberly Blozie; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our future in > space > > > Jill and all, > > I'm not certain that Watson or Crick concocted their theory because they > were looped out on acid. Think back to Ernest Haeckel and what he had > proposed. If you need a refresher, here is one of my "home pages": > > http://home.earthlink.net/~waluk/origin_of_species.html > > I also am without professional scientist credentials but I'm a faithful > fan of Howard's. > > Regards, > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > > > > > Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > > > And materialists say that God is an unlikely explanation . . . > > Lynn > > > > Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >> One of those guys, but I can't remember either. > >> Whichever one he was, he also did a lot of acid. > >> > >> -----Original Message----- > >> *From:* Jill Andresevic [mailto:andresevic at earthlink.net] > >> *Sent:* Saturday, November 26, 2005 9:29 AM > >> *To:* Steve Hovland; The new improved paleopsych list; > >> isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il > >> *Cc:* jz at bigbangtango.net; sjlee at howardbloom.net; > >> kblozie at yahoo.com; idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; > >> ohbeeb at yahoo.com > >> *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > >> future in space > >> > >> Steve / Howard, I read that Watson or Crick (not sure which one) > >> wrote about DNA being sent to Earth on a spaceship, because his > >> theory was Earth could not create life, therefore life had to > >> brought here from another place (interesting how this is not > >> something well known, if indeed it is true). This also could > >> connect to the fact that a pig and a chicken and a human embryo > >> all look very much the same early in embryonic development, since > >> I am speculating that there was one form of DNA that then evolved > >> into different life forms. I am not a professional scientist like > >> most of you (I am guessing), just a fan of Howard?s. Curious as to > >> what you think of this, if anything. Jill > >> > >> > >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >> *From: *"Steve Hovland" > >> *Date: *Sat, 26 Nov 2005 06:52:45 -0800 > >> *To: *"The new improved paleopsych list" > >> , , > >> > >> *Cc: *, , > >> , "Jill Andresevic" , > >> , , > >> *Subject: *RE: [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > >> future in space > >> > >> > >> Some people think our DNA came here from space > >> encapsulated in bacteria... > >> > >> Steve > >> > >> > >> -----Original Message----- > >> *From:* paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org > >> [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] > >> *On Behalf Of > >> *HowlBloom at aol.com > >> *Sent:* Friday, November 25, 2005 8:50 PM > >> *To:* isaacsonj at hotmail.com; eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il > >> *Cc:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org; jz at bigbangtango.net; > >> sjlee at howardbloom.net; kblozie at yahoo.com; Jill Andresevic; > >> idigdarwin at yahoo.com; BobKrone at aol.com; ohbeeb at yahoo.com > >> *Subject:* [Paleopsych] re: bacterial engineering and our > >> future in space > >> > >> > >> Joel--The article you sent, the one below, is not only > >> amazing. It dovetails with a piece of poetry I wrote as a > >> treatment for a short film in 2001. > >> > >> > >> > >> As usual, the poem was inspired immensely by my interchanges > >> with Eshel. Take a look: > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> Could swarms of robo-microbes > >> > >> Made by humans and biology > >> > >> The techno teams > >> > >> That come from dreams > >> > >> The wet dreams of technology > >> > >> > >> > >> Could cyborg microbes by the trillions > >> > >> Launched as space communities > >> > >> Explore the dark beyond our skies > >> > >> Thrive on starlight, climb and dive > >> > >> through wormholes and through nebulae? > >> > >> Could they re-landscape Einstein?s space > >> > >> And tame time with phrenology? > >> > >> > >> > >> Could they ride herd > >> > >> on mass stampedes > >> > >> of x-rays and raw energy > >> > >> corralling flares spat by black holes > >> > >> at the cores of galaxies? > >> > >> > >> > >> Could genes retooled > >> > >> In swarms of cells > >> > >> Become our new conquistadors? > >> > >> Could they explore > >> > >> Galactic shores > >> > >> And synapse reports > >> > >> To our brains? > >> > >> > >> > >> From global thinking > >> > >> Could we go > >> > >> To cosmos-hopping megaminds > >> > >> One small step for E. coli > >> > >> A giant step for human kind? > >> > >> > >> > >> The article: > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> Retrieved November 25, 2005, from the World Wide Web > >> > >> > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/national/24film.html?adxnnl=1&em > c=eta1&adxnnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print > >> > >> > >> > mc=eta1&adxnnlx=1132979630-umqKos8HcAa3U8FsuKGPrQ&pagewanted=print> > >> > >> > >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > -------------- > >> > >> November 24, 2005 Live From the Lab, a Culture Worth a > >> Thousand Words By ANDREW POLLACK Your portrait in a petri > >> dish? Scientists have created *living photographs made of > >> bacteria, genetically engineering the microbes so that a thin > >> sheet of them growing in a dish can capture and display an > >> image.* Bacteria are not about to replace conventional > >> photography because it takes at least two hours to produce a > >> single image. But *the feat shows the potential of an emerging > >> field called synthetic biology, which involves designing > >> living cellular machines much as electrical engineers might > >> design a circuit.* "We're actually applying principles from > >> engineering into designing cells," said Christopher A. Voigt, > >> assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the > >> University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the > >> photography project, which is described in a paper being > >> published today in the journal Nature. *One team of synthetic > >> biologists is already trying to engineer bacteria to produce a > >> malaria drug that is now derived from a tree and is in short > >> supply. And J. Craig Venter, who led one team that unraveled > >> the human DNA sequence, has said he now wants to synthesize > >> microbes to produce hydrogen for energy. *The technology could > >> also be used to create new pathogens or synthesize known ones. > >> So far, however, most synthetic biology accomplishments have > >> been like the bacterial film - somewhat bizarre demonstrations > >> of things that can easily be done with electronics. *Synthetic > >> biologists have*, for instance, *made the biological > >> equivalent of an oscillator, getting cells to blink on and > >> off*. To make the bacterial film, *common E. coli bacteria > >> were given genes that cause a black pigment to be produced > >> only when the bacteria are in the dark.* *The camera, > >> developed at the University of Texas, Austin, is a > >> temperature-controlled box in which bacteria grow, with a hole > >> in the top to let in light. An image on a black-and-white > >> 35-millimeter slide is projected through the hole onto a sheet > >> of the microbes. Dark parts of the slide block the light from > >> hitting the bacteria, turning those parts of the sheet black. > >> The parts exposed to light remain the yellowish color of the > >> growth medium. The result is a permanent, somewhat eerie, > >> black-and-yellowish picture. > >> * > >> Scientists involved in the project said they envisioned being > >> able to use light to direct bacteria to manufacture substances > >> on exquisitely small scales. "It kind of gives us the ability > >> to control single biological cells in a population," said > >> Jeffrey J. Tabor, a graduate student in molecular biology at > >> Texas. *Scientists, of course, have been adding foreign genes > >> to cells for three decades, and the distinction between > >> synthetic biology and more conventional genetic engineering is > >> not always clear. *Proponents of synthetic biology say genetic > >> engineering so far has mainly involved transferring a single > >> gene from one organism into another. The human insulin gene, > >> for instance, is put into bacteria, which then produce the > >> hormone. Each project, they say, requires a lot of > >> experimentation, in contrast to *true engineering, like > >> building a microchip or a house, which uses standardized parts > >> and has a fairly predictable outcome.* "We haven't been able > >> to transform it into a discipline where you can simply and > >> predictably engineer biological systems," said *Drew Endy, an > >> assistant professor of biological engineering at the > >> Massachusetts Institute of Technology.* "It means the > >> complexity of things we can make and can afford to make are > >> quite limited." Professor Endy *and colleagues at M.I.T. have > >> created a catalog of biological components, which they call > >> BioBricks*, which are s*equences of DNA that can perform > >> particular functions like turning on a gene*. Still, since > >> cells differ from one another and are extremely complex, it is > >> open to question how predictable biological engineering can > >> ever be. *M.I.T. has also begun holding a competition for > >> college students to design "genetically engineered machines." > >> The bacterial camera was an entrant in 2004 and was made in > >> part using BioBricks. Mr. Tabor said the idea for bacterial > >> photography came from Zachary Booth Simpson, a digital artist > >> who has been learning about biology at the university.* By > >> chance, the Texas team learned that Professor Voigt in San > >> Francisco and one of his graduate students, Anselm Levskaya, > >> had already developed a bacterial light sensor. So the two > >> groups teamed up. The E. coli bacterium was chosen because it > >> is easy for genetic engineers to work with. But *since E. coli > >> live in the human gut, they cannot sense light. Mr. Voigt and > >> Mr. Levskaya put in a gene used by photosynthetic algae to > >> respond to light. The bacteria were also given genes to make > >> them produce an enzyme that would react with a chemical added > >> to the growth medium. When that reaction occurs, a black > >> precipitate is produced. *The scientists created sort of a > >> chain reaction inside the bacteria. When the bacteria are in > >> the dark, the enzyme is produced, turning the medium black. > >> When the bacteria are exposed to light, production of the > >> enzyme is shut off. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company > >> Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us > >> Work for Us Site Map Back to Top > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> ---------- > >> Howard Bloom > >> Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the > >> Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind > >> From The Big Bang to the 21st Century > >> Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York > >> University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute > >> www.howardbloom.net > >> www.bigbangtango.net > >> Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board > >> member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The > >> Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New > >> York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement > >> of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political > >> Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International > >> Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for > >> Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. > >> For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: > >> www.paleopsych.org > >> for two chapters from > >> The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of > >> History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer > >> For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from > >> the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net > >> > >> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> 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 > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Free Edition. > Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.13.8/184 - Release Date: 11/27/2005 > -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.13.8/184 - Release Date: 11/27/2005 From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 28 22:51:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:51:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: How to Tame an Inflated Entertainment Budget Message-ID: How to Tame an Inflated Entertainment Budget http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/business/19money.html Your Money By DAMON DARLIN You probably spend more on entertainment than you do on groceries, clothing or gasoline. If you don't believe it, take a few minutes to total your monthly costs, starting with the services that have you locked in: basic cable television, and any premium channels, like HBO or Showtime; Netflix to rent videos; TiVo for digital recording; your high-speed Internet connection; and perhaps, satellite radio and streaming music like Yahoo Music. You are already up to about $200 a month, or $2,400 a year. Don't forget your iTunes music and video downloads, plus magazines, movie rentals, movie tickets, live shows and sporting events. Add in your cellphone and any of its video, data and premium content. The average American spends more on entertainment than on gasoline, household furnishings and clothing and nearly the same amount as spent on dining out, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among the affluent, the 20 percent of households with more than $77,000 a year in pretax income, more money is spent on entertainment - $4,516 a year - than on health care, utilities, clothing or food eaten at home. The average income of households in that quintile is a little more than $127,000. Because they account for a disproportionate share of spending in the economy, they are the group that trend watchers and marketers focus on. (From the unexplained fact department: People in the western part of the country spend about 20 percent more on entertainment than the national average, the government statisticians also show.) Over the last 10 years, outlays for entertainment outpaced overall expenditures. Spending on health care and education, which almost doubled in that period, grew faster. Entertainment budgets will only grow larger. With a proliferation of electronics like giant flat-screen TV's, video iPods and devices to send music, photos and video from room to room in your house, not to mention a proliferation of services to deliver entertainment on cellphones and laptops, you will be opening your wallet more often. How do you get a handle on it? Take up shadow puppets, perhaps, and enjoy good conversations in front of the fireplace? Not likely; for all the talk of the Information Age, we are really in the Entertainment Age, where our lives are centered on the pursuit of happiness. Nevertheless, innovation may actually offer ways to trim costs, if technology does not first spur us to consume ever more entertainment. Consider Netflix. Before Reed Hastings came up with the idea of mailing DVD's in a flimsy red envelope, your only option was renting movies at the neighborhood video store for $3.50 a pop (before sales tax). Netflix charges a flat fee of $17.99 plus tax a month for all the videos you can watch. If you watch six DVD's a month, you are doing better than the video store. Watch enough of them and you can drive the cost below 75 cents a movie and save $120 a month over going to a video store. The trick is, of course, to watch the movies right after receiving them and return them as quickly as possible. A middle school science teacher in Seattle, Justin Baeder, wondered whether he saved very much getting his DVD's through the mail. So he created an Excel spreadsheet that calculates exactly how much he does save. It turned out to be just a little, about $6 a month, but he loves Netflix and keeps using it. He's posted the calculator on his Web blog, the Republic of Geektronica at www.geektronica.com. All you need to do is download it and paste your Netflix rental history, which Netflix provides on its site, into the spreadsheet. Netflix's success - it now has 3.6 million subscribers - has attracted other entrepreneurs to its business model. For $15 a month, Gamefly sends two video game discs for any of the game machines like the Microsoft Xbox and the new Xbox 360, DS from Nintendo or PSP and PS2 from Sony. As with Netflix, as soon as you send one back, you are sent another one. A subscription looks pretty smart when you consider a new game costs as much as $50 and your children (O.K., you) get bored with it after eight hours of play. Another option is to buy used games from stores like EB Games or GameSpot. (New releases show up quickly and go for about half price.) The game industry is trying to push prices higher for the hottest games, to as much as $60, but even at that price, on a dollar-to-minutes-of-enjoyment basis, video games may be one of the best values, about 12.5 cents a minute for the easily bored, or fractions of a penny for those who can play "Half Life" their whole life. Among the worst? Live opera works out to about 37 cents a minute, for a middling seat in the New York Metropolitan Opera house to hear "Aida," compared with 7 cents a minute for "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" at a Loews Cineplex. But a Gwen Stefani concert, in again, middling seats, is about $1.25 a minute and that's with a serving of Black Eyed Peas thrown in. If you accept statistics that the average American's TV is on eight hours a day, a $100-a-month cable bill is really only a bit more than half a cent for each minute of entertainment. Yahoo Music adopted the subscription model as well. Instead of paying 99 cents to download a song on iTunes, Yahoo charges $5 a month, if you pay for a year's subscription upfront, so you can download as many songs as you want onto your computer or MP3 player. It's cheaper than iTunes, though the selection of music isn't as extensive. Napster and RealNetworks have a similar service. There is a rub. As long as you keep paying the subscription, Yahoo lets you keep the music; when you stop, the music stops. In fact, it will disappear right off your computer. That is the genius of subscriptions. But in Yahoo we also see just how costly the reliance becomes. Just a few months after starting the service, Yahoo doubled the price. If you don't pay it, you lose the music. That may be one reason it has been slow to catch on despite being cheaper than iTunes. Here's a tip: If you want to put payment of your subscriptions on automatic, use a credit card rather than have payments deducted straight from a bank account. It's easier to manage credit card payments and it may be easier to monitor for price increases. But we've only been nibbling around edges so far. It's the D.S.L., cable and phone bills that are bleeding you. The Federal Communications Commission recently studied cable prices and found that in those areas with competition, fees rose 3.6 percent in 2003 compared with a rate of 5.6 percent in those regions without competition. In the 1990's, they were sometimes rising as much as three times the rate of inflation. The cable industry says that rate increases have moderated so that they now are just a bit more than the overall rate of inflation and wage growth. A new pricing system may offer some temporary relief. Since cable companies offer Internet service and phone service, Internet service providers offer phone service, and phone companies offer cable TV and Internet service as well as cable TV services over the Internet, they are trying to lock up consumers in this new topsy-turvy world with bundled services. It is called triple play or quadruple play (four-play presumably being too racy), and it offers some advantages to consumers. Sprint Nextel recently announced a joint venture with five of the largest cable TV companies to offer a co-branded wireless device next year that will stream video over a wireless network. SBC Communications, soon to be renamed AT&T, says that 66 percent of its customers already have some form of bundled service, usually phone and Internet service. It is offering a "super bundle promotion" of D.S.L. Internet service, satellite TV and long-distance phone service for $100. One can also throw Cingular wireless phone service into the bundle. It claims that a consumer can save $89 to $179 a month depending on the level of phone service they get. Companies are finding that because consumers perceive a value, they end up upgrading to higher tiers of service. "There is a barrier to exit," admitted Frank Mona, executive director of consumer marketing for SBC, "but it is not huge. In this competitive environment, we can't afford not to do that." Of course not. As long as we get more entertainment, we'll pretend not to notice. E-mail: yourmoney at nytimes.com From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 28 22:51:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:51:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NPR: 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey Message-ID: 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080 [Thanks to Sarah for this. Best to click on the URL.] On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or "ice-pick" lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings. Freeman, equal parts physician and showman, became a barnstorming crusader for the procedure. Before his death in 1972, he performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states. One of Freeman's youngest patients is today a 56-year-old bus driver living in California. Over the past two years, Howard Dully has embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy. In researching his story, Dully visited Freeman's son; relatives of patients who underwent the procedure; the archive where Freeman's papers are stored; and Dully's own father, to whom he had never spoken about the lobotomy. "If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a lobotomy," Dully says. "The only thing you'd notice is that I'm very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I've always felt different -- wondered if something's missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it. So two years ago I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy." Neurologist Egas Moniz performed the first brain surgery to treat mental illness in Portugal in 1935. The procedure, which Moniz called a "leucotomy," involved drilling holes in the patient's skull to get to the brain. Freeman brought the operation to America and gave it a new name: the lobotomy. Freeman and his surgeon partner James Watts performed the first American lobotomy in 1936. Freeman and his lobotomy became famous. But soon he grew impatient. "My father decided that there must be a better way," says Freeman's son, Frank. Walter Freeman set out to create a new procedure, one that didn't require drilling holes in the head: the transorbital lobotomy. Freeman was convinced that his 10-minute lobotomy was destined to revolutionize medicine. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove his point. As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face. Freeman performed the procedure for the first time in his Washington, D.C., office on Jan. 17, 1946. His patient was a housewife named Ellen Ionesco. Her daughter, Angelene Forester, was there that day. "She was absolutely violently suicidal beforehand," Forester says of her mother. "After the transorbital lobotomy there was nothing. It stopped immediately. It was just peace. I don't know how to explain it to you, it was like turning a coin over. That quick. So whatever he did, he did something right." Ellen Ionesco, now 88 years old, lives in a nursing home in Virginia. "He was just a great man. That's all I can say," she says. But Ionesco says she remembers little about Freeman, including what he looked like. By 1949, the transorbital lobotomy had caught on. Freeman lobotomized patients in mental institutions across the country. "There were some very unpleasant results, very tragic results and some excellent results and a lot in between," says Dr. Elliot Valenstein, who wrote Great and Desperate Cures, a book about the history of lobotomies. Valenstein says the procedure "spread like wildfire" because alternative treatments were scarce. "There was no other way of treating people who were seriously mentally ill," he says. "The drugs weren't introduced until the mid-1950s in the United States, and psychiatric institutions were overcrowded... [Patients and their families] were willing to try almost anything." By 1950, Freeman's lobotomy revolution was in full swing. Newspapers described it as easier than curing a toothache. Freeman was a showman and liked to shock his audience of doctors and nurses by performing two-handed lobotomies: hammering ice picks into both eyes at once. In 1952, he performed 228 lobotomies in a two-week period in West Virginia alone. (He lobotomized 25 women in a single day.) He decided that his 10-minute lobotomy could be used on others besides the incurably mentally ill. Anna Ruth Channels suffered from severe headaches and was referred to Freeman in 1950. He prescribed a transorbital lobotomy. The procedure cured Channels of her headaches, but it left her with the mind of a child, according to her daughter, Carol Noelle. "Just as Freeman promised, she didn't worry," Noelle says. "She had no concept of social graces. If someone was having a gathering at their home, she had no problem with going in to their house and taking a seat, too." Howard Dully's mother died of cancer when he was 5. His father remarried and, Dully says, "My stepmother hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she'd do anything to get rid of me." A search of Dully's records among Freeman's files archived at George Washington University turned up clues about why Freeman lobotomized him. According to Freeman's notes, Lou Dully said she feared her stepson, whom she described as defiant and savage looking. "He doesn't react either to love or to punishment," the notes say of Howard Dully. "He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.' He turns the room's lights on when there is broad sunlight outside." On Nov. 30, 1960, Freeman wrote: "Mrs. Dully came in for a talk about Howard. Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs. Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of transorbital lobotomy. Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband, that I would have to talk with him and make it stick." Then on Dec. 3, 1960: "Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on. I suggested [they] not tell Howard anything about it." In an entry dated Jan. 4, 1961, two and a half weeks after the boy's lobotomy, Freeman wrote: "I told Howard what I'd done to him... and he took it without a quiver. He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing." Dully says that when Lou Dully realized the operation didn't turn him "into a vegetable, she got me out of the house. I was made a ward of the state. "It took me years to get my life together. Through it all I've been haunted by questions: 'Did I do something to deserve this?, Can I ever be normal?', and most of all, 'Why did my dad let this happen?'" For more than 40 years, Howard Dully had never discussed the lobotomy with his father. In late 2004, Rodney Dully agreed to talk with his son about the operation. "So how did you find Dr. Freeman?" Howard Dully asks. "I didn't," Rodney Dully replies, adding that Lou Dully was the one. "She took you... I think she tried some other doctors who said, '...there's nothing wrong here. He's a normal boy.' It was the stepmother problem." Why would a father let this happen to his son? "I got manipulated, pure and simple," Rodney Dully says. "I was sold a bill of goods. She sold me and Freeman sold me. And I didn't like it." The meeting proves cathartic for Howard Dully. "Although he refuses to take any responsibility, just sitting here with my dad and getting to ask him about my lobotomy is the happiest moment of my life," Howard Dully says. Rebecca Welch's mother Anita was lobotomized by Freeman for postpartum depression in 1953. After spending most of her life in mental institutions, Anita McGee now lives in a nursing home in Birmingham, Ala. Rebecca visits her every week. She believes Walter Freeman's lobotomy destroyed her mother's life. "I personally think that something in Dr. Freeman wanted to be able to conquer people and take away who they were," Welch says. At a meeting in the nursing home, Welch and Howard Dully find common ground in their experiences with Freeman. "It does wonders to know that other people have the same pain," Dully says. Howard Dully's two-year journey in search of the story behind his lobotomy is over. "I'll never know what I lost in those 10 minutes with Dr. Freeman and his ice pick," Dully says. "By some miracle it didn't turn me into a zombie, crush my spirit or kill me. But it did affect me. Deeply. Walter Freeman's operation was supposed to relieve suffering. In my case it did just the opposite. Ever since my lobotomy I've felt like a freak, ashamed." But now, after meeting with Welch and her mother, Dully says his suffering is over. "I know my lobotomy didn't touch my soul. For the first time I feel no shame. I am, at last, at peace." After 2,500 operations, Freeman performed his final ice-pick lobotomy on a housewife named Helen Mortenson in February 1967. She died of a brain hemorrhage, and Freeman's career was finally over. Freeman sold his home and spent the rest of his days traveling the country in a camper, visiting old patients, trying desperately to prove that his procedure had transformed thousands of lives for the better. Freeman died of cancer in 1972. [12]Listen to this story... [13]Download [14][icon_arrow_orange.gif] To download, PC users right-click and select "save target as." Mac users control-click and "save (or download) link as." [15]Howard Dully during his transorbital lobotomy, Dec. 16, 1960. Howard Dully during his transorbital lobotomy, Dec. 16, 1960. George Washington University Gelman Library Howard Dully holding one of Dr. Walter Freeman's original ice picks, January 2004. Howard Dully holding one of Dr. Walter Freeman's original ice picks, January 2004. Courtesy Sound Portraits, George Washington University Gelman Library More About the Story * Nov. 16, 2005 [17]Walter Freeman's Lobotomies: Oral Histories * Nov. 16, 2005 [18]Frequently Asked Questions About Lobotomies * Nov. 16, 2005 [19]A Lobotomy Timeline More From Sound Portraits Additional interviews, oral histories and information about the documentary: * [20]'My Lobotomy' Excerpts from the Story * [21]In 2004, for the first time since the operation, Rodney Dully, Howard Dully's father, agreed to discuss the lobotomy with his son. * [22]Walter Freeman's son Frank tells Howard Dully about the origins of the transorbital lobotomy developed by Dr. Freeman. * [23]Howard Dully meets Carol Noelle, who describes the results of a Freeman lobotomy on her mother. Dr. Walter Freeman operating on a patient, c. 1950. Dr. Walter Freeman operating on a patient, c. 1950. University Archives, The Gelman Library, The George Washington University * [24]Hear a 1968 Diary Entry from Dr. Walter Freeman Dully family Howard, standing in front, with his parents, June Dully and Rodney Dully (holding Howard's brother Brian), in Oakland, Calif., c. 1950. Courtesy Howard Dully Howard Dully's stepmother, Lou, in California, 1955. Howard Dully's stepmother, Lou, in California, 1955. Howard Dully, tree climbing in Los Altos, Calif., 1955. Howard Dully, tree climbing in Los Altos, Calif., 1955. Oral Histories Patricia Moen and Wolfhard Baumgartel Harvey Wang Patricia Moen was lobotomized by Walter Freeman in 1962 at the age of 36. As a staff physician at Ohio, Wolfhard Baumgartel observed Freeman perform a series of lobotomies. * [25]Read Their Oral Histories [27]All Things Considered, November 16, 2005 ? Related NPR Stories * Aug. 10, 2005 [28]Nobel Panel Urged to Rescind Prize for Lobotomies * March 10, 2005 [29]Tales of a Medical Renegade: 'The Lobotomist' Lobotomy Resources * [49]Psychosurgery.org: A site dedicated to lobotomy survivors and their relatives * [50]'The Lobotomist,' a biography of Walter Freeman by Jack El-Hai * [51]The Walter Freeman / James Watts Collection at George Washington University * [52]An Account of One of Dr. Walter Freeman's Transorbital Lobotomies [53]Sound Portraits "My Lobotomy" was produced by Piya Kochhar and Dave Isay at Sound Portraits Productions. The editor was Gary Covino. Special thanks to Larry Blood and Barbara Dully. Major funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. More Resources Great & Desperate Cures by Elliot S. Valenstein (Basic Books, 1986) Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine by Jack Pressman (Cambridge University Press, 1998) [54]The Lobotomist by Jack El-Hai References 12. javascript:getMedia('ATC', '16-Nov-2005', '6', 'RM,WM'); 13. http://anon.npr-mp3.speedera.net/anon.npr-mp3/atc/20051116_atc_dully.mp3 14. http://anon.npr-mp3.speedera.net/anon.npr-mp3/atc/20051116_atc_dully.mp3 15. http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2005/nov/lobotomy/icepick.html 16. http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2005/nov/lobotomy/icepick.html 17. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014594 18. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014565 19. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014576 20. http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/my_lobotomy/ 21. javascript:getStaticMedia('/atc/20051116_atc_dullydad','RM,WM'); 22. javascript:getStaticMedia('/atc/20051116_atc_frankfreeman','RM,WM'); 23. javascript:getStaticMedia('/atc/20051116_atc_Noelle','RM,WM'); 24. javascript:getStaticMedia('/atc/20051116_atc_freeman','RM,WM'); 25. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014594 26. http://www.npr.org/contact/lobotomy.html 27. http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2 28. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4794007 29. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4529662 30. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080#email 31. javascript: void(0); 32. http://www.npr.org/about/privacypolicy.html 33. http://www.npr.org/about/privacypolicy.html 34. http://www.npr.org/transcripts/index.html?bottom 35. http://www.npr.org/about/privacypolicy.html 36. http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/rundown_archive_hub.php 37. http://www.npr.org/transcripts/ 38. http://www.npr.org/stations/ 39. http://shop.npr.org/ 40. http://www.npr.org/about/ 41. http://www.npr.org/contact/ 42. http://www.npr.org/help/ 43. http://www.npr.org/about/termsofuse.html 44. http://www.npr.org/about/permissioninfo.html 45. http://www.npr.org/about/privacypolicy.html 46. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080#email 47. javascript: window.print(); void(1); 48. http://www.newslibrary.com/nlsearch.asp?region=NR&pub_s_siteloc=TRANSCRIPT&pub_d_origin=newtranscript&label_topics=5014080 49. http://www.psychosurgery.org/ 50. http://www.lobotomist.com/ 51. http://www.gwu.edu/gelman/archives/collections/freeman_watts.html 52. http://home.att.net/~larvaluebug/archlarry6-03.html 53. http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/my_lobotomy/ From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 28 22:52:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:52:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired: Kevin Kelly: Unto us the Machine is born Message-ID: Kevin Kelly: Unto us the Machine is born http://www.smh.com.au/news/next/unto-us-the-machine-is-born/2005/11/14/1131816858554.html?oneclick=true 5.11.15 By 2015 the internet as we know it will be dead, killed by a globe-spanning artificial consciousness, writes founding Wired editor Kevin Kelly. THE web continues to evolve from an entity ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs were launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that some day everyone would write a letter or take a photograph. What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical - but in favour of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer? No one. And that's just fine. A world in which production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination. But if a roiling mess of participation is all we think the web will become, we are likely to miss the big news, again. The experts are certainly missing it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed more than 1200 professionals in 2004, asking them to predict the net's next decade. One scenario earned agreement from two-thirds of respondents: "As computing devices become embedded in everything from clothes to appliances to cars to phones, these networked devices will allow greater surveillance by governments and businesses." Another was affirmed by one-third: "By 2014, use of the internet will increase the size of people's social networks far beyond what has traditionally been the case." These are safe bets, but they fail to capture the web's disruptive trajectory. The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun Microsystem's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said: "The network is the computer." His phrase sums up the destiny of the web: as the operating system for a megacomputer that encompasses the internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies, but our minds. Today the Machine acts like a very large computer, with top-level functions that operate at about the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network ing runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip" spans 1 billion active PCs, which is about the number of transistors in one PC. This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the web have hundreds of billions of neurons, or webpages. Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, and each webpage branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is. Since each of its "transistors" is itself a personal computer with a billion transistors running lower functions, the Machine is fractal. In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors, expanding its complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has already surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil ("Human 2.0", Next 25/10). For this reason some researchers pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the net as the computer most likely to think first. Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI "that would be proud of me", has invented massively parallel supercomputers, in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer such as IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast tangle of the global Machine. In 10 years the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fibre-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing. Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximise what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine. ONE great advantage the Machine holds in this regard: it's always on. It is very hard to learn if you keep getting turned off, which is the fate of most computers. AI researchers rejoice when an adaptive learning program runs for days without crashing. The foetal Machine has been running continuously for at least 10 years (30 if you want to be picky). I am aware of no other machine that has run that long with no downtime. Portions may spin down because of power outages or cascading infections,but the entire thing is unlikely to go quiet in the coming decade. It will be the most reliable gadget we have. And the most universal. By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won't matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV. By 2015 the '90s image of convergence will turn inside-out. Each device is a differently shaped window that peers into the global computer. Nothing converges. The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any screen. And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. Each of us already does it every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that learns. Think of the 100 billion times a day humans click on a webpage as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge. The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it. What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something rather than remember it. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy. There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born. You and I are alive at this moment. We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilisation. Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognised as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilisation, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning. Netscape's float was a puny rocket to herald such a moment. First moments are like that. After the hysteria dies, the millions of dollars made and lost, the strands of mind, once achingly isolated, come together. Today, our Machine is born. It is on. They couldn't have done it without you The total number of webpages now exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive. In fewer than 4000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan. The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help-wanted ads, satellite images of any place on earth - just to name a few applications - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works. This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze on a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It's there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn't everyone?). Ten years ago you would have been told there wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the web at this scale was impossible. But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible. In about 4000 days, eBay has gone from marginal experiment in community markets in the San Francisco Bay area to the most profitable spin-off of hypertext. At any one moment, 50 million auctions race through the site. What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site useable. Owners of Adobe, Apple and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer's forum web pages. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organising intelligence for a new economy. No web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences - and they knew a lot - confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy and resources coming from? The audience. I run a blog about cool tools. The web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. My site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations - free on inquiry. This spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and re-use, and thus promotes consumers into producers. The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folk to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias or creating public tutorials for changing a flat tyre. A study found that only 40 per cent of the web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion. This follows the industrial age, by the way, when mass-produced goods outclassed anything you could make yourself. The impulse for participation has up-ended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking into the main event. Once, we, the public, just about only uploaded. Today, the poster child of the new internet regime is BitTorrent, under which users upload stuff while they are downloading. It assumes participation. And the web embeds itself into every class, occupation and region. Everyone missed the 2002 flip-point when women online suddenly outnumbered men. The average user is now a 41-year-old woman. What could be a better mark of irreversible acceptance than adoption by the technology-reluctant American rural sect, the Amish? On a visit recently, I was amazed to hear some Amish farmers mention their websites. "Amish websites?" I asked. "For advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills in our shop." "Yes, but . . ." "Oh, we use the internet terminal at the public library. And Yahoo!" I knew then the battle was over. Back to the future Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build on the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson, who in 1965 envisioned his own scheme, which he called "Xanadu". But he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine. At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape made Marc Andreessen a millionaire. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. He told me about his scheme for organising all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty. Legend has it that Ted Nelson invented Xanadu as a remedy for his poor memory and attention deficit disorder. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the (hyper)links between them visible and permanent. He sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was clear to me a hyperlinked world was inevitable. But what surprises me is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. The web revolution heralded a new kind of participation that is developing into a culture based on sharing. By ignoring the web's reality, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago. Originally published in Wired From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 28 22:52:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:52:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Newsday: Girls gone wild Message-ID: Girls gone wild http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-vert4495558nov06,0,6555086,print.story?coll=ny-bookreview-headlines BY EMILY GORDON Emily Gordon is a writer in Brooklyn. November 6, 2005 One afternoon last winter, I went by myself to see "Inside Deep Throat," the explicit documentary about the making of the classic porn movie, and found it hilarious and informative. Still, it bothered me that the filmmakers seemed to endorse the line that star Linda Lovelace, a subsequent anti-porn spokeswoman, was a loon to say she was ever abused by either the industry or anyone in it. Afterward, I talked to two young hipster guys who'd gotten a kick out of the movie and also mocked Lovelace's change of heart. "But it's very well-documented," I began - and I could see the red alert in their eyes: Tiresome feminist harangue ahead! Pro-sexual expression crusader or uptight speechmaker? They were both roles I resented being shoehorned into. This annoyingly familiar dilemma makes it somewhat difficult to address the theme of Ariel Levy's "Female Chauvinist Pigs." In a tone of deep disapproval, Levy outlines the ways in which women - by endorsing, imitating and producing the "raunch culture" of porn stars, strippers, exhibitionist celebrities like Paris Hilton, "Girls Gone Wild" flashers and other shameless hussies - are eroding the gains of the second-wave feminist movement under the banner of feminist choice-making, individuality and sexual freedom. Indeed, she argues briefly but persuasively, many young women have "relinquished any sense of themselves as a collective group with a linked fate." American women are indeed barraged with images of their counterparts acting like Jessica Rabbit. Levy argues that regardless of whether these women are drunk, peer-pressured spring-breakers or former women's studies majors cheering on pole-dancing at New York's exclusive Cake parties and flamboyantly smooching their female friends, they're all making the opposite of an empowered statement. She interviews both disapproving pioneer feminists and unsure-sounding younger women to prove the point. Levy's polar universe leaves no room for more ambiguous figures, such as the triumphantly unionized strippers in San Francisco or retro-burlesque dancers all over the country whose art form is genre-bendingly new and old at once. There are no quotes from articulate young feminists about how, for instance, porn (including the non-mainstream, female-centered variety) could be in any way entertaining, sexy or edifying. One of Levy's major points is both vital and extremely well-illustrated. Adolescent girls are under tremendous pressure to adopt an image of sexual willingness and to prove it. Unlike women in their 20s or 30s, they're unlikely to have a media-savvy filter for the messages they absorb. As a result, they're in serious danger of being slandered at school and online, of sacrificing their youth to self-conscious nymphettishness, of getting pregnant and contracting STDs more often than girls in other comparable countries, and of learning too late that sex is something they should actually enjoy. Her chapter on the confusing paradoxes of contemporary urban lesbian culture will also have relevance for younger lesbians unsure of where they fit in. Unfortunately, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" as a whole lacks the requirements of really energizing feminist polemics - a smooth, engaging prose style; a bird's-eye view of class, race and geography; and a rallying cry for concrete solutions or alternatives. Most distractingly, Levy provides readers almost no sense of her own background with or relationship to these subjects, except in a few tantalizing statements (inevitably in parentheses). On the penultimate page of the conclusion, she writes, "Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety." The complicated nature of that anxiety is worthy of a more focused look. From checker at panix.com Mon Nov 28 22:52:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:52:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: Joe Epstein: You're a Winner! Message-ID: Joe Epstein: You're a Winner! http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110007513 Prizes are nice, but they don't say anything about the quality of your achievements. Monday, November 7, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST I am all for literary and cultural prizes, and, uncomplicated truth to tell, I only wish that more of them came to me. Thus far too few have. I don't see many more in my future either, unless, like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright, I acquire a fair amount of flowing white hair and live well into my 80s, at which point, I gather, what are considered reactionary and even stupid opinions are no longer held against you. Such prizes as I have won have brought me little monetary improvement and no social prestige whatsoever. I have a single honorary degree, as opposed to the more than 200 possessed by John Hope Franklin. I was presented with a National Medal for the Humanities, but lots of people I know took the occasion to say that it was a shame that I had to be given it by George W. Bush. I responded by saying that I myself would have preferred that it had been presented by Abraham Lincoln, but then one can't have everything. I once won a fiction prize of $250 that required me to write a speech and spend a weekend in Hartford, Conn., to collect it. I turned it down, which earned me the lifelong enmity of the Jewish couple who bestow the prize. In the realm of honors, mine has been a varied if not a rich career. Some--by now perhaps all--cultural prizes have had the shine rubbed off them by having been given to undeserving people, an ample number of serious jackasses among them. Everyone knows that the list of writers who did not win the Nobel Prize--Tolstoy, Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden--is much more impressive than the list of those who have. Moreover, there is something about winning the Nobel Prize in literature that makes one posthumous no matter how much longer one goes on to live. Since he won his Nobel Prize, for example, I no longer feel the need to read V.S. Naipaul. A sociology of cultural prize-giving has now been written by James F. English, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and it contains a great deal of useful information. Mr. English knows everything there is to know about the mechanics of prize-giving, from the appointing of judges to the globalizing of cultural prizes to the exploiting of prizes for further self-aggrandizement. As "The Economy of Prestige" makes clear, Mr. English has mastered the subject in little and large, and it is one full of interest about the way cultural life operates in our day. Pity that Mr. English is an almost entirely arrhythmical writer who indites endlessly lengthy sentences in long shapeless paragraphs that make reading his book considerably less than a d?jeuner sur l'herbe. If Harvard University Press gives an award for the best-written book it has published in 2005, Mr. English's probably shouldn't be in the running. In a characteristically barbed-wire sentence, he writes: "What has transformed society since the 1970s is not the rise of a new class per se but the rise of a formidable institutional system of credentialing and consecrating which has increasingly monopolized the production and distribution of symbolic capital, especially but not exclusively of educational honors and degrees, while at the same time making the accumulation of control of such capital more and more necessary to any exercise of power." Translation: Prizes, however superfluous and foolish, can still be made to pay off for those who win them and those who award them. Mr. English understands that the phenomenon of prizes for cultural attainment--from the Nobel Prize and the Oscars on down--is ultimately one of those jokes available to insiders, even as prizes continue to work their magic on the large majority of people not in the know. ("Gee, Dad, it's a Pulitzer!") And everyone connected with such prizes, as he shows, has a more or less obvious agenda. Their point, and the larger point of Mr. English's book, is that the awarding, the judging and the accepting of prizes for cultural achievement is, at bottom, about one form or another of self-promotion. Still, prizes and honors multiply for all sorts of reasons. Setting up a poetry or local theatrical award can be a way to memorialize a dead relative on the cheap; prizes are also useful to corporations hoping to make white sheep of themselves by appearing simultaneously culture-minded and philanthropic. In an appendix, Mr. English lists the awards and honors currently given in the various fields of cultural achievement, and it is extensive. In the category of prizes not given, I have long thought that there ought to be a Nobel Prize for marriage. This would be awarded to long-suffering mates in famously difficult pairs. In the past, some of the winners might have been Countess Sophia Tolstoy, Mrs. Dostoyevsky, Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), Lionel Trilling, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, though which of the two Clintons is more deserving isn't all that easy to determine. Meanwhile every ethnic group has its hall of fame, and so does every craft and sport. I went to high school with a man who is currently president of the Ping-Pong Hall of Fame; in his prime he was said to be able to beat quite good players using his shoe instead of a paddle. Search hard enough and you may be able to find an award for an unpublished non-Jewish lesbian poet under five feet tall. All this prize-giving has made the field of culture rather like one of those progressive preschools where, on graduation day, even the most hopeless child is given a prize for not actually maiming his classmates. Mr. English touches upon but does not give quite enough room in his book to the political impulses behind prize-giving. The Nobel Prize in literature is often--and fairly persuasively--accused of being awarded on the basis of a writer's politics. This year's award to Harold Pinter, who is quite out of control in his hatred of America, is a vivid example; since Mr. Pinter has done little of note in recent years, his Nobel seems aimed less at honoring him than at attacking the U.S. for being in Iraq. But politics plays a role domestically too. Because so many of the important American prizes are controlled by liberals, which means that they are given only to people with the correct politics, conservative institutions have begun to award their own prizes, given to people with correctly conservative politics. But in the end, it doesn't matter. Winning is everything, whatever the agenda. In the economy of prestige, awards are good for publicity, for getting better jobs and for shutting up one's wary relatives. As for the prizes themselves, I was once told that if anyone tells you that you are the best at anything you do, ask that person who is the second-best. Learning who it is should take most of the air out of the accolade. Very nice to win prizes, I'd say, so long as you understand that they don't mean anything serious about the true quality of your achievement. Take the money, wisdom suggests, and walk all the way to the bank, suppressing as best you are able the silly smile that threatens to break out at the thought that you have really gotten away with it yet again. Mr. Epstein is the author of "Ambition" and "Envy," among many other books. From checker at panix.com Tue Nov 29 17:46:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:46:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Idiotorial: A Victory for Education Message-ID: A Victory for Education http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/opinion/29tue3.html [Mr. Mencken would surely have agreed that education beyond the eighth grade is wasted on the masses, or rather all but the gifted. And that parents who are not willing and able to pay for their children's education up to the eighth grade have no business having them in the first place. The problem with school reforms is that they result in more centralization of education and, even worse for the gifted, "accountability" to tests that measure what is memorized rather than how well students think. This misemphasis harms the gifted.] A federal judge in Michigan took exactly the right action last week when he dismissed a transparent attempt by the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, to sabotage the No Child Left Behind education act. The ruling validates Congress's right to require the states to administer tests and improve students' performance in exchange for federal education aid. Unfortunately, it will not put an end to the ongoing campaign to undermine the law, which seeks to hold teachers and administrators more closely accountable for how their schools perform. Another lawsuit, by Connecticut, is still pending. Moreover, the N.E.A. is likely to appeal the decision in its own suit in an effort to continue its campaign of vilification against the law. The No Child Left Behind program is the first in American history to require that states improve students' performance, and shrink the achievement gap between rich and poor students, in exchange for the billions of dollars they receive in federal aid. The teachers' union tipped its hand when it argued in the lawsuit that its members were being stigmatized when the schools where they worked were found to be performing poorly under federal law. Why does it put so much emphasis on the teachers? What about the children whose lives are cast into permanent shadow when they have to attend dismal, nonperforming schools? The N.E.A. and the local school districts that joined the suit claimed that the federal government had illegally required the states and localities to spend their own money on testing. While it seems clear that test development is one of the better-financed parts of the law, improving school systems nationwide will certainly require more time, effort and money than the country has yet invested. But that should not be an excuse for doing nothing. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 02:56:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:56:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 051: The Maureen Dowd Theory of Western Civilization (plus Deepak Lal) Message-ID: Meme 051: The Maureen Dowd Theory of Western Civilization (plus Deepak Lal) Here's a letter I submitted to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is followed by the article by Rodney Stark itself. There are other theories about how unintended consequences ulitimately resulted in Western capitalism. One that you may not know about is a purely cultural one, not a gene-culture co-evolutionary one like the one I am proposing. Lal traces the eventual emergence of capitalism to some decisions by Popes Gregory I and Gregory VII that were intended only to benefit the church. I appended articles by and an interview with him. But whether capitalism would have come about by a different route had the two Gregs ruled otherwise is another matter. I think it would have. ------------------ To the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education Rodney Stark, "How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science" (December 2), overlooks the fact that Byzantine Christianity did not lead to scientific rationalism. Nor does he explain why European Christians focused on the writings of the more rational Church fathers rather than on those of obfuscators, obscurantists, and occultists. All religions have these two sides voluminously represented in their writings. The answer lies with temperament. Europeans are more individualistic. For Europeans, it is not what the authorities say but the sovereignty of one's own individual reason. To explain this, I present (?invoke) the Maureen Dowd theory of Western Civilization. The blue eyes and flaming red hair of Ms. Dowd owe originally to biological adaptations to the climate of Ireland. The side effect was to make men and women more distinct and individuated from each other. They paid more attention to one another, less to the authorities, and more toward the external, observable world, most especially to the Maureens of that external world. When Darwin's other process, sexual selection, gets into the act, evolution can really take off (Geoffrey Miller, _The Mating Mind_). Antlers, as everyone knows, are sexual attractors: they help male deer acquire mates even as they hinder them in getting food. Antlers are too big for the physical environment. Eyes in humans are too often blue, I contend, when they are far from Ireland. Unlike antlers, reason, one might think, would help get food, but in fact the brains of primates are big, not so much to get food by finding out objective truth as to get along with conspecifics. Primates, and man especially, are social animals. Better to go along to get along. It was flaming red heads (blondes, too) with blue eyes that quite accidentally triggered off the revolution of individualism and objectivism. And who is more individuated (the objectivity is sometimes questionable) than Ms. Dowd? -------------- How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.12.2 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i15/15b01101.htm By RODNEY STARK When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and Islamic nations were "backward" by comparison with 15th-century Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many civilizations had pursued alchemy, the study led to chemistry only in Europe? Why was it that, for centuries, Europeans were the only ones possessed of eyeglasses, chimneys, reliable clocks, heavy cavalry, or a system of music notation? How had the nations that had arisen from the rubble of Rome so greatly surpassed the rest of the world? Several recent authors have discovered the secret to Western success in geography. But that same geography long also sustained European cultures that were well behind those of Asia. Other commentators have traced the rise of the West to steel, or to guns and sailing ships, and still others have credited a more productive agriculture. The trouble is that those answers are part of what needs to be explained: Why did Europeans excel at metallurgy, shipbuilding, or farming? The most convincing answer to those questions attributes Western dominance to the rise of capitalism, which took place only in Europe. Even the most militant enemies of capitalism credit it with creating previously undreamed of productivity and progress. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that before the rise of capitalism, humans engaged "in the most slothful indolence"; the capitalist system was "the first to show what man's activity can bring about." Capitalism achieved that miracle through regular reinvestment to increase productivity, either to create greater capacity or improve technology, and by motivating both management and labor through ever-rising payoffs. Supposing that capitalism did produce Europe's own "great leap forward," it remains to be explained why capitalism developed only in Europe. Some writers have found the roots of capitalism in the Protestant Reformation; others have traced it back to various political circumstances. But, if one digs deeper, it becomes clear that the truly fundamental basis not only for capitalism, but for the rise of the West, was an extraordinary faith in reason. A series of developments, in which reason won the day, gave unique shape to Western culture and institutions. And the most important of those victories occurred within Christianity. While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guides to religious truth. Christian faith in reason was influenced by Greek philosophy. But the more important fact is that Greek philosophy had little impact on Greek religions. Those remained typical mystery cults, in which ambiguity and logical contradictions were taken as hallmarks of sacred origins. Similar assumptions concerning the fundamental inexplicability of the gods and the intellectual superiority of introspection dominated all of the other major world religions. But, from early days, the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase understanding of Scripture and revelation. Consequently Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past. At least in principle, if not always in fact, Christian doctrines could always be modified in the name of progress, as demonstrated by reason. Encouraged by the scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice. The rise of capitalism also was a victory for church-inspired reason, since capi-talism is, in essence, the systematic and sustained application of reason to com-merce -- something that first took place within the great monastic estates. During the past century Western intellectuals have been more than willing to trace European imperialism to Christian origins, but they have been entirely un-willing to recognize that Christianity made any contribution (other than intolerance) to the Western capacity to dominate other societies. Rather, the West is said to have surged ahead precisely as it overcame re-ligious barriers to progress, especially those impeding science. Nonsense. The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians. Unfortunately, even many of those historians willing to grant Christianity a role in shaping Western progress have tended to limit themselves to tracing beneficial religious effects of the Protestant Reformation. It is as if the previous 1,500 years of Christianity either were of little matter, or were harmful. Such academic anti-Roman Catholicism inspired the most famous book ever written on the origins of capitalism. At the start of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber published what soon became an immensely influential study: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In it Weber proposed that capitalism originated only in Europe because, of all the world's religions, only Protestantism provided a moral vision that led people to restrain their material consumption while vigorously seeking wealth. Weber argued that, before the Reformation, restraint on consumption was invariably linked to asceticism and, hence, to condemnations of commerce. Conversely, the pursuit of wealth was linked to profligate consumption. Either cultural pattern was inimical to capitalism. According to Weber, the Protestant ethic shattered those traditional linkages, creating a culture of frugal entrepreneurs content to systematically reinvest profits in order to pursue ever greater wealth, and therein lies the key to capitalism and the ascendancy of the West. Perhaps because it was such an elegant thesis, it was widely embraced, despite the fact that it was so obviously wrong. Even today The Protestant Ethic enjoys an almost sacred status among sociologists, although economic historians quickly dismissed Weber's surprisingly undocumented monograph on the irrefutable grounds that the rise of capitalism in Europe preceded the Reformation by centuries. Only a decade after Weber published, the celebrated Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne noted a large literature that "established the fact that all of the essential features of capitalism -- individual enterprise, advances in credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc. -- are to be found from the 12th century on, in the city republics of Italy -- Venice, Genoa, or Florence." A generation later, the equally celebrated French historian Fernand Braudel complained, "All historians have opposed this tenuous theory, although they have not managed to be rid of it once and for all. Yet it is clearly false. The northern countries took over the place that earlier had so long and brilliantly been occupied by the old capitalist centers of the Mediterranean. They invented nothing, either in technology or business management." Braudel might have added that, during their critical period of economic development, those northern centers of capitalism were Catholic, not Protestant -- the Reformation still lay well into the future. Further, as the Canadian historian John Gilchrist, an authority on the economic activity of the medieval church, pointed out, the first examples of capitalism appeared in the great Christian monasteries. Though Weber was wrong, however, he was correct to suppose that religious ideas played a vital role in the rise of capitalism in Europe. The material conditions needed for capitalism existed in many civilizations in various eras, including China, the Islamic world, India, Byzantium, and probably ancient Rome and Greece as well. But none of those societies broke through and developed capitalism, as none evolved ethical visions compatible with that dynamic economic system. Instead, leading religions outside the West called for asceticism and denounced profits, while wealth was exacted from peasants and merchants by rapacious elites dedicated to display and consumption. Why did things turn out differently in Europe? Because of the Christian commitment to rational theology, something that may have played a major role in causing the Reformation, but that surely predated Protestantism by far more than a millennium. Even so, capitalism developed in only some locales. Why not in all? Because in some European societies, as in most of the rest of the world, it was prevented from happening by greedy despots. Freedom also was essential for the development of capitalism. That raises another matter: Why has freedom so seldom existed in most of the world, and how was it nurtured in some medieval European states? That, too, was a victory of reason. Before any medieval European state actually attempted rule by an elected council, Christian theologians had long been theorizing about the nature of equality and individual rights -- indeed, the later work of such secular 18th-century political theorists as John Locke explicitly rested on egalitarian axioms derived by church scholars. All of this stemmed from the fact that from earliest days, the major theologians taught that faith in reason was intrinsic to faith in God. As Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second century, "Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason -- nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason." Consequently it was assumed that reason held the key to progress in understanding scripture, and that knowledge of God and the secrets of his creation would increase over time. St. Augustine (c. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God, remarking that although there are "certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp ... one day we shall be able to do so." Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine went on at length about the "wonderful -- one might say stupefying -- advances human industry has made." All were attributed to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon his creation, a "rational nature." Those views were repeated again and again through the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra Giordano, in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them." Christian faith in reason and in progress was the foundation on which Western success was achieved. As the distinguished philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it during one of his Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1925, science arose only in Europe because only there did people think that science could be done and should be done, a faith "derivative from medieval theology." Moreover the medieval Christian faith in reason and progress was constantly reinforced by actual progress, by technical and organizational innovations, many of them fostered by Christianity. For the past several centuries, far too many of us have been misled by the incredible fiction that, from the fall of Rome until about the 15th century, Europe was submerged in the Dark Ages -- centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery -- from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously, rescued; first by the Ren-aissance and then by the Enlightenment. But, as even dictionaries and encyclopedias recently have begun to acknowledge, it was all a lie! It was during the so-called Dark Ages that European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world. Some of that involved original inventions and discoveries; some of it came from Asia. But what was so remarkable was the way that the full capacities of new technologies were recognized and widely adopted. By the 10th century Europe already was far ahead in terms of farm-ing equipment and techniques, had unmatched capacities in the use of water and wind power, and possessed superior military equipment and tactics. Not to be overlooked in all that medieval progress was the invention of a whole new way to organize and operate commerce and industry: capitalism. Capitalism was developed by the great monastic estates. Throughout the medieval era, the church was by far the largest landowner in Europe, and its liquid assets and annual income probably exceeded that of all of Europe's nobility added together. Much of that wealth poured into the coffers of the religious orders, not only because they were the largest landowners, but also in payment for liturgical services -- Henry VII of England paid a huge sum to have 10,000 masses said for his soul. As rapid innovation in agricultural technology began to yield large surpluses to the religious orders, the church not only began to reinvest profits to increase production, but diversified. Having substantial amounts of cash on hand, the religious orders began to lend money at interest. They soon evolved the mortgage (literally, "dead pledge") to lend money with land for security, collecting all income from the land during the term of the loan, none of which was deducted from the amount owed. That practice often added to the monastery's lands because the monks were not hesitant to foreclose. In addition, many monasteries began to rely on a hired labor force and to display an uncanny ability to adopt the latest technological advances. Capitalism had arrived. Still, like all of the world's other major religions, for centuries Christianity took a dim view of commerce. As the many great Christian monastic orders maximized profits and lent money at whatever rate of interest the market would bear, they were increasingly subject to condemnations from more traditional members of the clergy who accused them of avarice. Given the fundamental commitment of Christian theologians to reason and progress, what they did was rethink the traditional teachings. What is a just price for one's goods, they asked? According to the immensely influential St. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), the just price is simply what "goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale." That is, a just price is not a function of the amount of profit, but is whatever uncoerced buyers are willing to pay. Adam Smith would have agreed -- St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) did. As for usury, a host of leading theologians of the day remained opposed to it, but quickly defined it out of practical existence. For example, no usury was involved if the interest was paid to compensate the lender for the costs of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities, which was almost always easily demonstrated. That was a remarkable shift. Most of these theologians were, after all, men who had separated themselves from the world, and most of them had taken vows of poverty. Had asceticism truly prevailed in the monasteries, it seems very unlikely that the traditional disdain for and opposition to commerce would have mellowed. That it did, and to such a revolutionary extent, was a result of direct experience with worldly imperatives. For all their genuine acts of charity, monastic administrators were not about to give all their wealth to the poor, sell their products at cost, or give kings interest-free loans. It was the active participation of the great orders in free markets that caused monastic theologians to reconsider the morality of commerce. The religious orders could pursue their economic goals because they were sufficiently powerful to withstand any attempts at seizure by an avaricious nobility. But for fully developed secular capitalism to unfold, there needed to be broader freedom from regulation and expropriation. Hence secular capitalism appeared first in the relatively democratic city-states of north-ern Italy, whose political institutions rested squarely on church doctrines of free will and moral equality. Augustine, Aquinas, and other major theologians taught that the state must respect private property and not intrude on the freedom of its citizens to pursue virtue. In addition, there was the central Christian doctrine that, regardless of worldly inequalities, inequality in the most important sense does not exist: in the eyes of God and in the world to come. As Paul explained: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor fee, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." And church theologians and leaders meant it. Through all prior recorded history, slavery was universal -- Christianity began in a world where as much as half the population was in bondage. But by the seventh century, Christianity had become the only major world religion to formulate specific theological opposition to slavery, and, by no later than the 11th century, the church had expelled the dreadful institution from Europe. That it later reappeared in the New World is another matter, although there, too, slavery was vigorously condemned by popes and all of the eventual abolition movements were of religious origins. Free labor was an essential ingredient for the rise of capitalism, for free workers can maximize their rewards by working harder or more effectively than before. In contrast, coerced workers gain nothing from doing more. Put another way, tyranny makes a few people richer; capitalism can make everyone richer. Therefore, as the northern Italian city-states developed capitalist economies, visitors marveled at their standards of living; many were equally confounded by how hard everyone worked. The common denominator in all these great historical developments was the Christian commitment to reason. That was why the West won. Rodney Stark is university professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, to be published in December by Random House. _________________________________________________________________ Modernization Versus Westernization by Deepak Lal http://www.project-syndicate.org/series/series_text.php4?id=1064&lang=1 Everyone nowadays seems obsessed about the question as to whether or not Islam can be reconciled with modernization. In discussing this issue, what constitutes modernization is often confused with westernization. Understanding the difference is vital. India's encounter with the West over the past three centuries underscores the distinction between the two processes - modernization and Westernization - that are often assumed to be synonymous. In fact, modernization does not entail Westernization, as the example of contemporary Japan demonstrates. Whereas modernization entails a change in belief about the way the material world operates, Westernization entails a change in cosmological beliefs about the way that one should live. Like China and unlike Japan, India resisted changes in its ancient beliefs about the way the world works (and should work) which modernization entails. Instead, like many Islamic countries today, India wrongly believed Gandhi's doctrine that modernization necessarily means Westernization. Fitfully, and under the influence of the British Raj, parts of the economy and society were modernized during the second half of the 19^th century of laissez-faire and free trade. Some of the traditional literary castes also embraced Westernization. British policy turned India into a pioneer of Third World industrialization, with an economy increasingly based on domestic capital and entrepreneurship combined with imported technology. But modernization stalled when protectionist pressures from Lancashire and the exigencies of Imperial finance led the British to abandon free trade and laissez faire. At the same time, Westernization fueled the rise of a nationalist movement. The introduction of income taxes and UK labor laws in the late 19^th century led to nearly a century of mounting state intervention in the economy, a process that accelerated after independence. This damaged India's growth prospects and hopes of alleviating its ancient scourge of mass poverty. The breakdown of the global economy in the first half of the 20^th century in the wake of the First World War further eroded India's incipient integration into the world economy during the British Raj. Finally, beginning with the economic reforms of 1991, India at last rejected inward-looking policies, returning to where it left off at the end of the 19^th century. We now have a fairly clear quantitative picture of the performance of the Indian economy throughout this period. During the 130 years from 1868 until 1999-2000, per capita income more than tripled, as national income increased by a factor of eight while the population grew nearly five-fold. This suggests that the age-old combination of economic stagnation and cultural stability that I call the "Hindu Equilibrium" seems finally to have been broken. But on closer inspection, it turns out that this was largely due to the economic performance of the last two decades. The sub-period from 1868-1900 saw the beginning of industrialization and India's partial integration into the world economy under the Raj. National income did not stagnate, as nationalist historians once maintained, but grew modestly, at an average annual rate of 1.1%. Growth was fastest from 1870-1890, followed by large fluctuations in output. A fairly low rate of population growth ensured a modest annual rise in per capita income of about 0.7% during this period. The second sub-period, 1900-1945, saw the breakdown of the global economy and the start of India's population explosion. Growth of per capita income decelerated between 1902 and 1930 and declined further in the last fifteen years of British rule until 1947. After 1920, this was due entirely to the rise in population growth, to 1.22 % per year, which outpaced fairly high output growth throughout the decade until 1930. Over this entire 45-year sub-period, output grew at just above 1% annually--the same rate as under the Raj--but yearly population growth soared to 0.8%, causing virtual stagnation of per capita income. The third sub-period, 1950-1980, marked the heyday of economic planning. Infrastructure investment - which had been difficult for the embattled British Raj to finance--suddenly boomed. This, together with high agricultural growth rates, led to a dramatic rise in output, which increased at an annual average rate of 4.5%. But the demographic explosion that began in the 1920's had by now driven the rate of population growth up to 3% per year, so that annual per capita income grew by only 1.5%. A departure from what the late Raj Krishna dubbed the "Hindu rate of growth" came only in the fourth sub-period, from 1980-1999. Partial economic liberalization, undertaken by the Rajiv Gandhi government in the mid-1980s, and the more substantial Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh economic reforms in 1991, boosted national income growth to an average annual rate of 6.8%. At the same time, yearly population growth slowed to an average of 2.3%, so that per capita income rose at an impressive annual rate of 4.5%, making a dent in India's mass structural poverty for the first time in millennia. If India can now complete the unfinished business of fully integrating into the global economy, there is no reason why it cannot improve upon its impressive recent growth performance. If it succeeds, Nehru's pledge, on the eve of Indian independence, "to wipe every tear from every eye," will finally be redeemed. India's Economic Performance : 1868-2000 Year Per Capita Income (at 1948-49 prices- Rs.) Population (million) 1868 176 209 1900 213 238 1945 244 319 1950 221 359 1980 318 679 1999-00 602 991 Average Annual Growth Rates (per cent per annum) 1868-2000 1868-1900 1900-1945 1950-1980 1980-2000 per capita income 2.6 0.7 0.3 1.5 4.5 population 3.6 0.4 0.8 3.0 2.3 national income 6.2 1.1 1.1 4.5 6.8 Deepak Lal, Professor of international development at the University of California, Los Angeles, has advised many governments. His books include: "The Poverty of 'Development Economics'", "The Hindu Equilibrium", and "The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth." References 42. http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributors/contributor_comm.php4?id=452 -------------- Deepak Lal on Culture and Development http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v22n1/lal-llosa.html My UCLA colleague Jared Diamond wrote a marvelous book called Guns, Germs, and Steel. He asked, Why is it that Africa, the birthplace of man, tends to be one of the planet~Rs poorest places? And why is it that Eurasia, a latecomer in evolutionary terms, is wealthier and more powerful? His argument is that Eurasia~Rs ecological circumstances gave it a head start because they made settled agriculture possible. My starting point is, Why is it that of those Eurasian civilizations stretching from Mesopotamia to the Yellow River in China only one, what we now call the West, experienced Promethean growth? A millennium ago, the greatest empire was the Islamic Abbaside empire. The great efflorescence in China under the Sung was still to come. The Sung had the technological ingredients for the industrial revolution, but it did not occur in China. So technological explanations are inadequate. Many economic historians have tried to explain the economic growth of the West in terms of political factors. One theory is that decentralization resulted in competition among states, making them less predatory and allowing property rights to develop. But the trouble with that theory is India. It had contestable states, cultural unity just like Western Christendom, and early technology. Most of the cross-cultural historical explanations just don~Rt wash. As Joseph Needham has said, it~Rs a package; no single element will explain it. My thesis is that cultural factors are missing from the explanations. Human beings are unique because of their intelligence. Most species have to mutate into a new species to survive in a changed environment. Man, on the other hand, learns through a process of trial and error to adapt to a new environment, adopting new social customs. Those social customs are then transferred from one generation to the next, essentially through childhood socialization, and form part of a culture. I~Rd like to distinguish between two types of beliefs. One, material beliefs, is what economists are largely concerned about. In order to make a living, people change their material beliefs in response to technological changes. The second set of beliefs I call cosmological. They concern, in Plato~Rs words, how one should live~Wmankind~Rs place in the world, ideas about God, the purpose of life. There~Rs a lot of anthropological and cross-cultural evidence that material beliefs are malleable. If the environment changes, people will change their beliefs. You have only to look at how quickly peasants in many developing countries become industrial workers once the environment changes. In contrast, cosmological beliefs are extremely difficult to change. If you understand the importance of these two types of beliefs, you can look at transactions costs to understand why we have certain social institutions to curb self-seeking behavior. The formal constraint is the law. The informal constraint is morality. Those institutional constraints on self-seeking behavior are required to reduce transactions costs. There are two types of transactions costs. One is the transactions costs of exchange, that is, the costs of finding a trading partner. The other type of transactions costs is the costs of policing opportunistic behavior. We basically are self-seeking egotists who will lie, cheat, steal, and free ride if we can. Clearly, in your social and business interactions, you can~Rt monitor an agent~Rs actions. The agent has many incentives to lie, cheat, and steal. So such opportunistic behavior has to be controlled. Cosmological beliefs are very important for policing transactions costs. To see that, we need to go back and see what cosmological beliefs were in ancient civilizations and why they were altered. Evolutionary anthropology argues that if you want to see what basic human nature is, you should look at the human animal in the Stone Age. In the hunter-gatherer phase you have a lot of face-to-face contact with other members of the tribe, and clearly cooperation does yield mutual gains. Evolutionary anthropologists call this reciprocal altruism. For economists, it is a Prisoner~Rs Dilemma game in which the goal is to get people to cooperate rather than defect. The trouble starts once you have settled agriculture. Economic space expands, a lot of anonymous strangers appear, and our nasty opportunistic instincts come to the fore and we lie, cheat, steal, hit the strangers on the head. Most agrarian civilizations have tried to internalize moral codes to prevent that type of opportunistic behavior. That is really the purpose of morality. Moral codes were not always based on religions. They allow societies to police opportunistic behavior. And they form the essential core of the cosmological beliefs of civilizations. Those beliefs are usually transmitted by playing on the moral emotion of shame. Shame is used to this day to turn hunter-gatherer monsters into moral, civilized beings. If you want to know the content of cosmological and material beliefs, you have to go back to the origins of agrarian civilizations. One of the most important aspects of cosmological beliefs is political legitimacy. What do people consider politically legitimate? You have to look at the cosmological beliefs of early civilizations. For example, when Chinese civilizations were created, in the confined Yellow River area, they were constantly threatened by northern barbarians who kept trying to exploit them like cattle. The Chinese created a tightly controlled bureaucratic state to prevent barbarian intrusions from the north, putting up the Great Wall of China. In that respect, Chinese history is repeating itself today. You~Rve got this bureaucratic authoritarian state being formed, you get little rebellions, the mandate of heaven is taken away, you have a period of chaos, and then another bureaucratic authoritarian state is established. That ancient political habit is very strong in China. To expect China to suddenly become an imitation of America is absurd. People don~Rt change their habits quickly after 2,000 years. The cosmological beliefs of agrarian civilizations are not very conducive to modern economic growth, for two reasons. First, the need to prevent opportunistic self-serving behavior meant that those moral codes were not very individualistic. Second, agrarian civilizations take a very dim view of markets and merchants. So the puzzle is, Why, out of the blue, do you have one little corner of the huge Eurasian landmass taking off? I argue that the major change arose because of the unintended consequences of two papal revolutions. One was Gregory the Great~Rs changes in Church law pertaining to families in the sixth century, and the second, which created the whole legal and commercial infrastructure for the market economy, was Gregory VII~Rs assertion in 1075 that the pope was the ruler of all Christendom and the direct representative of God on earth and, as such, had authority over all things temporal. From the beginning the Christian church had been in the business of acquiring property, largely from rich widows. Pope Gregory I~Rs rules concerning sex and marriage overturned traditional domestic patterns all over Eurasia, where inheritance of land was extremely important. Gregory made it more difficult for people to have heirs. All sorts of ways of ensuring an heir were banned. Demographers estimate that, as a result of these injunctions, 40 percent of families lacked male heirs. That meant you had a huge inflow of property to the church. By the end of the seventh century, the church held about one-third of the land in France. What happens when you have such a huge honeypot? It attracts predators, from both inside and outside. Gregory VII essentially created the church state. To protect the church~Rs property, the whole administrative and legal and commercial apparatus of a modern state had to be created. And that great revolution, mostly a legal one, created infrastructure that led to the rise of the West. The two papal revolutions are not at all conjoined. Some people maintain that the Western family was essential for the industrial revolution; there~Rs no evidence of that. There are others who claim that industrialization will actually lead to Western-style family domain; there~Rs no evidence of that, either. You can choose whatever you like in the cosmological sphere, which affects the domestic domain, and still adopt Gregory VII~Rs market-based revolution. So I conclude, looking across civilizations, that to the extent societies can adapt, they~Rre perfectly willing to accept changes in material beliefs, but they~Rre not nearly as willing to accept changes in cosmological beliefs. You can modernize without Westernizing. -------------- Love And Marriage http://www.ccsindia.org/people_dl_marriage.htm [1]Deepak Lal Thursday, January 8, 1998 The early Church had a self-interest in overthrowing traditional Eurasian family values, writes Deepak Lal. The ultimate fear of the cultural nationalists is that modernisation will undermine traditional mores concerning marriage and the family. The resistance to the purported cultural pollution coming over the satellite channels and the shenanigans concerning the Miss World contest reflect this fear. But is it justified? Since Marx and Engels there has been the view that with modernisation the traditional extended family identified with pre-industrial societies is doomed. Modern families will become more and more like western families: with love marriages, nuclear families and a cold-hearted attitude to the old. There are others who maintain that as the western style of family seems to go back at least to the Middle Ages in northern Europe. This family pattern was not merely the consequence but the cause of the western industrial revolution. Research by the Cambridge anthropologist, Jack Goody, (The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive) cast serious doubts on both these positions. First, as historical evidence shows, the western family revolution predated the industrial revolution. Clearly, the latter could not have caused the former. Second, as Goody shows, the purported advantages of the western system, leading to a greater control of fertility, were to be found in many other Eurasian family systems which, however, did not deliver industrial revolutions. But that the western Christian world, particularly in its north-western outpost, deviated from what had been the traditional family pattern in Eurasia from about the late 6th century seems undeniable. The major difference was that in the West, the Church came to support the independence of the young: in choosing partners, setting up households and entering into contractual rather than affective relationships with the old. They promoted love marriages. But why did the Church promote love marriages? It has been thought that romantic love, far from being a universal emotion, was a western social construct of the age of chivalry in the Middle Ages. Recent anthropological and psychological research, however, confirms that this erroneous-romantic love is a universal emotion. (Jankowiak (ed): Romantic Passion; and Fisher: Anatomy of Love) Moreover, it has a biological basis. Neuro-psychologists have shown that it is associated with increased levels of phenylethylamine, an amphetamine-related compound. Interestingly, the same biochemicals are also to be found in other animal species like birds. However, it appears that this emotion is ephemeral. After a period of attachment, the brain's receptor sites for the essential neuro-chemicals become desensitised or overloaded and the infatuation ends, setting up both the body and brain for separation i divorce. This period of infatuation has been shown to last for about three years. A cross-cultural study of divorce patterns in 62 societies between 1947-1989 found that divorces tend to occur around the fourth year of marriage. A universal emotion with a biological basis calls for an explanation. Socio-biologists maintain that in the primordial environment, it was vital for males and females to be attracted to each other to have sex and reproduce and also for the males to be attached enough to the females to look after their young until they were old enough to move into a peer group and be looked after by hunting-gathering band. The traditional period between successive human births is four years -- which is also the modal period for those marriages which end in divorce today. Darwin strikes again! The biochemistry of love, it seems, evolved as an "inclusive fitness" strategy of our species. The capacity to love may be universal but its public expression is culturally controlled. Given its relatively rapid decay with settled agriculture, the evolved instinct for mates to stay together for about four years and then move on to new partners to conceive and rear new young would have been dysfunctional. Settled agriculture requires settled households. Not surprisingly, most agrarian civilisations sought to curb the explosive primordial emotion which would have destroyed their way of making a living. They have used cultural constraints to curb this dangerous hominid tendency by relying on arranged marriages, infant betrothal and the like, restricting romantic passion to relationships outside marriage. The West stands alone in using this dangerous biological universal emotion as the bastion of its marriages as reflected in the popular song: "Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage". The reason for this western exceptionalism goes back to the earliest period of the Christian Church, which from its inception had grown as a temporal power through gifts and donations - particularly from rich widows. So much so, that in July 370 the Emperor Valentinian addressed a ruling to the Pope that male clerics and unmarried ascetics should not hang around the houses of women and widows and try to worm themselves and their churches into their bequests at the expense of the women's families and blood relations. The Church was thus from the beginning in the race for inheritances. The early Church's extolling of virginity and preventing second marriages helped it in creating more single women who would leave bequests to it. This process of inhibiting a family from retaining its property and promoting its alienation accelerated with the answers that Pope Gregory I gave to some questions. Four of these nine questions concerned sex and marriage. Gregory's answers overturned the traditional Mediterranean and Middle Eastern patterns of legal and customary practices in the domestic domain. The traditional system was concerned with the provision of an heir to inherit family property and allowed marriage to close kin, marriages to close affines or widows of close kin, the transfer of children by adoption, and finally concubinage. Gregory amazingly banned all four practices. Thus, for instance, adoption of children was not allowed in England till the 19th century. There was no basis for these injunctions in Scripture, Roman law or the existing customs in the areas that were Christianised. This Papal family revolution made the Church unbelievably rich. Demographers have estimated that the net effect of the prohibitions on traditional methods to deal with childlessness was to leave 40 per cent of families with no immediate male heirs. The Church became the chief beneficiary of the resulting bequests. But the Church also had to find a way to prevent the social chaos which would have ensued if the romantic passion its greed had unleashed as the basis for marriage had been allowed to run its course in a settled agrarian civilisation. First, it separated love and sex, and then created a fierce guilt culture based on Original Sin. Its pervasive teaching against sex and the associated guilt it engendered provided the necessary antidote to the "animal passions" that would otherwise have been unleashed by the Church's self-interest in overthrowing of the traditional Eurasian system of marriage. But once the Christian God died with the scientific and Darwinian revolutions, these restraints were finally removed. The family became sick in the West, as the western humanoids reverted to the "family" practices of their hunter-gatherer ancestors. However, there is no reason whatsoever for the rest of the world to follow this peculiar and particular western trajectory. It is not modernisation but the unintended consequences of Pope Gregory I's family revolution which have led to the death in the West of the Eurasian family values. The author is James S Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California, LA. Thursday, January 8, 1998 References 1. http://www.ccsindia.org/people_dl_deepak.htm ------------- Deepak Lal (interview): Papal Revolutions, Political Habits, and Predatory States Policy, Spring 1999 http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/Spr99/spr99-5.pdf Jason Soon talks to Deepak Lal Jason Soon is Assistant Editor of Policy. Deepak Lal is James S. Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a highly acclaimed economist who, along with Peter Bauer, has long challenged the statist nostrums of development economics and proven to be correct in the long run. His latest book, Unintended Consequences, is a wide ranging examination of the origins of economic and political liberalism and the consequences of this for the differential rates of development between Western and other societies. The main thesis of his book was presented as a speech to the Special Regional Meeting of the Mont P?lerin Society, held recently in Indonesia, and provoked much debate among delegates. Jason Soon: You once wrote a book called The Poverty of Development Economics. How would you assess the state of development economics since then? Deepak Lal: When I first wrote it, development economics was essentially the economics of planning and regulation and it was really written in anger because it had done great damage to many developing economies, particularly India. The most amazing thing which has happened since then, of course, is that in the early 1980s you saw the collapse of the type of dirigiste policies recommended by development economics. My book seems to have done its bit in demolishing the intellectual arguments for dirigisme. JS: Are there any contemporary writers in the field of development economics whom you admire? DL: The field is much broader than economics so it's hard to say. I think the broadness of the discipline has to be emphasised. Inmy book with Myint, The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth, I spent a lot of time on political economy to try and explain why countries did not follow the type of policies which would yield equitable and poverty-reducing growth. And that meant that I had to look at a broader range of issues and then link that with all the cultural issues which my latest book Unintended Consequences addresses. JS: Would you then attribute the improvements in development economics to developments in other areas of economics which takes us away from the na?ve view of benevolent social planners, such as public choice theory? DL: Yes. In a sense my political economy book was inspired by public choice but the trouble with public choice theory as it stands is that it was really written with the institutions of the US in mind. For many developing countries, that's not relevant. Part of the exercise is to try and develop the sort of model or sets of models applicable to developing countries. I think the model which best fits most developing countries is what I call the predatory state. I think this has many more insights than public choice theory. JS: You argued in your speech to this conference, explored at greater length in your book, that of the trinity of liberties -political, economic and civil-economic and civil liberties are essential to a good polity and you are therefore more likely to prescribe them as, in a sense, universal solutions. But you are less convinced of the 'universality' of political liberty. DL: Yes, I think that without economic and civil liberties you can't preserve private property. You need some way of protecting private property and contract for the market to work. But I think those institutions can be readily adopted by adopting the appropriate legal and commercial codes and installing an independent judiciary. JS: But why isn't political liberty part of the prescription? DL: Both through human history and the history of current developing countries one can see that civil and economic liberty is possible without political liberty. Political liberty is a good in itself but there is no necessary connection between political liberties such as the right to vote and growth and development. JS: Perhaps the argument which critics of your contention would make is that civil and economic liberties may not be sustainable in the long run without political liberty. Let's put this argument in terms of economic theory. We can conceive of the ruler as revenue maximising. The problem is then to subvert the private interests of the ruler to the public interest. It is agreed among liberals that policies which are in the public interest are those generally supportive of civil and economic liberties. Such policies are also more likely to maximise the wealth of a society in the long run and thus from the perspective of a ruler with a long run time horizon, are more likely to maximise his revenues in terms of taxes collected. Thus, as you argued at the conference, it is feasible that a hereditary monarchy might pursue policies in the public interest given that the time horizon of the ruler is lengthened by considerations for his dynasty's welfare. He will thus want to maximise the present value of long run tax revenues. But in an authoritarian bureaucracy where there aren't any clear and stable succession mechanisms (partly because of the perceived illegitimacy of the process to the general public) the dictator will merely aim at short- run rent extraction. You then have the predatory state. DL: There are two points to be made. Natural resource endowments determine how predatory the state is. In the political sense, the best thing is not to have any natural resources. Think of Hong Kong or Singapore, they're rocks. The only way their rulers are going to get any revenues is by cultivation of human resources and open market policies whether you'rea democracy or a dictatorship or a monarchy. Itmakes no difference when you don'thave natural resources what form of government there is to ensure development. Remember that democratic government, after all, serves the interests of the median voter. So all that happens is that any sort of democratic government will extract rents and transfer them to the median voter. In an autocratic system it will go to the cronies. So the form of government if you have natural resource endowments isn't going to make a difference to the development path you go down, which will necessarily be less than ideal. I don't think that the rent seeking and rent extraction problem can be solved. There's no unique form of government which will solve the problem in a natural resource rich country like Indonesia and that's why I prefer to go back to some form of government which is in tune with the political habits of the people. That particular form is more likely to be sustainable than some constructed democratic system. Therefore it seems to me that the way forward in Indonesia is to keep to some model of the traditional Javanese king. There are good kings and bad kings and they are ultimately held responsible for their behaviour. Just look at Soeharto. Of course the Javanese kings will take a certain cut of tax revenues for themselves and their cronies. On the other hand, so long as they provide public goods which are important to development, that's fine and I think Soeharto by and large did this. The question is what happens when you change leaders? If you have a bad king, the bad king is replaced. It's true, it's not a peaceful change. But that doesn't mean that the long run stability of the system is destroyed. It's just another form of succession. JS: So you argue that the stability of succession problem in a dictatorship isn't too much of an issue. But nonetheless isn't the high magnitude of turmoil during a succession, even if this turmoil only crops up infrequently, going to be a major consideration for, say, the international investment community? Not to mention the danger that during this turmoil civil and economic liberties may slide back as an overreaction to political crises? Doesn't the importance of the succession problem finally lead us back to Churchill's contention that democracy is the worst possible system you can think of except for the alternatives? I suppose one alternative, as you canvassed, is a proper hereditary system but that is hardly feasible in modern times. DL: Well, there can be all sorts of political forms. You can clothe them with all sorts of labels. The question of political stability is like the problem of changing terms of trade. It just means that the expected income stream is slightly different. Investors with long time horizons will take these things into account. These problems are extremely exaggerated. Finding fixes is dangerous. That's what all this constitution making is all about-it's failed. Countries which employ traditional forms of governance have a greater chance of success. JS: I now want to address your theory that the rise of the West can be attributed to changes in church doctrine. You suggest that changes in church doctrine led to the rise of cultural individualism which in turn led to the rise of the West. From this you also derive the contention that liberty is a Western concept. DL: Absolutely. If you start asking yourself, 2000 years ago in all the Eurasian civilisations-Roman, Greek, Hindu, Chinese, Egyptian, etc-each of them had the preconditions for growth. The Chinese even had all the technological ingredients and Hindu civilisations had algebra. What was different in the West? There was something else. It comes down to their views about how human beings interact with each other. Therewas a great change in the conception of social relationships. Max Weber came to the same, correct conclusion but he got his dates wrong. He said the great change occurred during the Protestant revolution but we know capitalism started well before this. The first Papal revolution in the 6th century, promoted the independence of the young. Once that happened, the communal ties of the young to the old were broken. People then essentially had contractual relations with their children. Wills go back to the 9th century in the West. Then you have the story about the church's greed in trying to get bequests and inheritances. This induced the 11th century Papal revolution which really provided all the legal and commercial instruments needed for capitalism. It created the joint stock companies, the commercial law and accounting systems, all that was essential to a modern economy. This gradually put western Europe on a different trajectory. Add to this the freeing of individuals away from their community and this led to the industrial revolution. JS: The alternative scenario of how the West grew rich picks up in part on what you said before about the role of the Church in developing the soft infrastructure of the capitalist economy. This interpretation would emphasise the fact that in western Europe, partly for reasons of geography and partly from contingent historical factors, societies were splintered into competing nation-states. The real source of the superiority of the soft infrastructure of the West thus lay in its evolution through jurisdictional competition facilitated by the freedom of entry and exit enjoyed by merchants. One notable example of this is the development of the law merchant. DL: I'll tell you what the difficulty is with this argument- India. India had warring states, free entry and exit between them, a common culture. You had exactly similar conditions yet the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe. It can't be just jurisdictional competition. JS: What exactly is the role of cultural individualism in differentiating the trajectory taken by the West? Because obviously the nub of your argument isn't that cultural individualism is important in sustaining development, otherwise that would imply a superiority to Western values in sustaining economic development and growth, and that The 11th century Papal revolution provided all the legal and commercial instru- ments needed for capitalism. It created the joint stock companies, the commercial law, accounting systems, all that was essential to a modern economy. would take us back to the issue about the trinity of liberties. DL: Well the individualism comes in in two ways. The cultural individualism promoted by the first Papal revolution then led to a sequence of events leading to Gregory's 7th Papal revolution. That only occurred because the Church wanted to preserve its property and that property existed because the first Papal revolution, by dissolving communal family ties, promoted individualism. So my thesis is really that given this sequence of events the rise of individualism was essential to get the legal and commercial instruments constructed by the Church to cash in on bequests and inheritances. But once you have this infrastructure the rest of the world can adopt it without giving up their own value systems. JS: So your theory really hinges on the standardisation of the common law and other commercial instruments by the church. DL:This created the framework for civil and economic liberties. It arose on a purely contingent basis. There's no theory of history involved here. Hayek emphasises spontaneous order. But all the common law that came after the Papal revolution has in a sense been constructed. It was a contructivist exercise. JS: But the jurisdictional competition ... DL: That still holds. You need all these things together. JS: Arguably what set the stage for the jurisidictional competition is political fragmentation and that came with feudalism. DL: But the political fragmentation starts at the end of the Roman empire. The real issue is the tying down of labour to the land-this is a common problem faced by agrarian civilisations. Feudalism in the West gave rise to property rights in land for people outside the royal family and courtiers. That arose because of the ability to raise revenue directly. In India by contrast you had a very decentralised system which was based on caste. But there wasn't the same capacity to free people from their ties to the land because the caste system localised people more and India didn't have the legal and commercial framework for a more direct and flexible form of revenue collection. Thus in India traders were constantly subject to expropriation. You had predatory behaviour even though there was jurisidictional competition. JS: So in fact the jurisidictional competition that prevailed in the West was qualitatively different. DL: The predatoriness of the state came in a different form. The tax take on the Indian subcontinent was less than in Elizabethan England. Whoever was the overlord in India was accepted automatically because of the caste system. And then he had a right to a certain share of the village revenue automatically. That meant that the ruler had no incentive to disturb relationships. As a result you had something resembling the contractual relations between the barons and serfs in Europe. Feudalism was thus not an important differentiating factor in the West. What was important was the constructed legal framework without which none of the other things which made the West successful would have fit together. JS: But in China there was sufficient centralisation to impose a constructivist framework ... DL: It could have but it wasn't invented ... JS: And what stopped it from being invented was precisely the centralisation of power which instead allowed the State to be predatory without losing rents ... DL: And also because there was no distinction between state and society or state and religion. But in both Hindu and Western civilisations the state was placed below society. The brahmin in Hindu civilisation stands above the prince and in Christianity there is Augustine's primacy of the city of God. JS: Arguably the sustainability of the soft infrastructure for capitalist innovation developed by the West lies in continued contestability. Feudalism was not an important differen- tiating factor in the West. What was important was the constructed legal framework. DL: I'm not sure about that. Once you've got it, it can go with all sorts of political forms. JS: The other part of your paper which interested me was your take on the Chinese family firm and the increased relevance of the putting out system in the post-Fordist era. I suppose that could be framed as a response to Fukuyama's contention that many East Asian countries, being low-trust societies due to factors such as political instability or State repression in the past, were in danger of hindering their development. This was because by restricting the potential management pool to members of the family rather than including non- kin relations, they had much less chance of choosing the best talent and therefore of diversifying and expanding their firms. DL: I don't agree with Fukuyama at all. Firstly no mode of production is ideal for all circumstances. Today, the family firms have found a niche. The second reason that Fukuyama is wrong is that trust is also a family value. What the Papal revolution did was create a system in which people didn't need to trust each other to get things done. I don't have to trust you but I sign a contract with you and have it enforced by someone else. The market extends the exchange between us. There's no reason why once China accepts the legal and commercial framework of the West the family businesses there won't expand as has happened in the West. I suppose you can put a cultural spin on it. Because Asian families are still intact it's much easier to have these large family enterprises than if they were just nuclear families. JS: Now on to a few shorter questions. You once wrote an essay called `Markets and Mandarins' in which you were critical of neoclassical welfare economics and you expressed some interest in Austrian economics. DL: The problem is that neither of these schools are quite satisfactory. Neoclassical economics has this utopian vision of perfect competition from which you measure deviations in an actual economy. It's a nice way of thinking about things but the reason it has gone wrong is that it's started drawing policy conclusions in terms of desirable interventions. That's where Austrian economics is much more sensible-it shows you why neoclassical economics' derived intervention is utopian. No real economy can ever be in a state of perfectly competitive equilibrium. Hence Hayek's insight about the division of knowledge being absolutely essential to a market economy, and the importance of the Austrian insights about the role of the entrepreneur and disequilibrium. On the other hand it seems to me that Austrian economics, the radical subjectivist version-not Hayek but Mises-which wants essentially to remove objective reasoning away from economics, becomes like a religion. I don't like that at all. If I'm trying to look at a particular market and how some prices are moving, neoclassical economics provides a way of thinking which is rigorous and can be tested. So I'm not at all one of those people who want to throw out neoclassical economics. I look at myself as a neoclassical economist with an Austrian spin. JS: Some participants at this conference have raised the issue of whether the Asian crisis was really a refutation of economic liberalism. DL: I don't buy that at all. Looking at the Asian crisis, there were two sorts of people. My side said that there was never free trade in the Asian miracle countries, but high outward orientation, a glass half full or half empty. People on my side said the Asian miracle economies hadn't gone down the full path to liberalism but they had gone further down than India or parts of Latin America. What we were then saying during the miracle growth period was that even a partial move towards a liberal economy could yield all these benefits. But the other side was saying that these countries had grown because of smart interventions like industry policy. But what the crisis then showed was the debauching of the financial sector entailed by this `Asian model' is always a time bomb waiting to go off. JS: So it was the consequence of those interventions in the financial sector which built up and debauched the whole system. DL: Yes, for instance in Japan and Korea. It didn't happen in Taiwan. All those countries which were soft versions of Japan and Korea suffered. JS: You have expressed the view that the moral hazards created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had a hand in the crisis. You have also argued that the World Bank and IMF are past their used-by dates. But if there's a need to transplant the soft infrastructure of Western capitalism into the East Asian countries and to ensure transparency perhaps this could be an alternative role for one of these organisations. DL: It could be. On the other hand, these skills can come from accounting firms and so on. The countries can pay for these services. There are no special skills in the IMF or World Bank in giving this advice. JS: I've met a lot of Indian libertarians at this conference. DL: You've met all of them. You've probably met every single Indian libertarian at this conference, there aren't anymore. JS: Do you think that the prospects for liberalism are better in India than in other Asian countries? DL: In the long run I think so. This goes back to the question we've been groping around on political freedom. India has done a lot less than other countries in economic reform because of its democratic system. But once the reforms take place and once people see the benefits from the full liberal democratic system in India there will be a lot more people there who will recognise the desirability of such a system. JS: Let's go back to this political freedom issue. You've expressed the view that what Oakeshott calls the no enterprise state is the best form of governance. DL: Yes, but that's a characterisation of the content, not a form of government. JS: But perhaps in the long run a liberal democracy constrained by a constitution might be the best means of preserving a no enterprise state compared to other forms of governance. DL: No, because just look at experience. The US is theoretically a constitutional democracy but this hasn't stopped predatory behaviour by the State. The predator there is different-it's the median voter. I think it's an insoluble problem in principle. JS: So how much ground would you give to the particularities of a culture and the political habits of its people, in deciding the extent of its governance? More importantly, how would you decide whether this is genuinely culturally based or a creation of an authoritarian elite, as some have alleged in the case of Singapore? DL: I don't like Singapore but there's not a great deal of tyranny there. The fact that in the last 30 to 40 years it's been a stable system suggests to me that there has been some legitimacy in the system. So who am I to judge? You should look at this with the eyes of an anthropologist. Try and explain what is it about the system which fits in with the political habits of the people and if that's so, that's so. ----------------- As Japan has shown, and China will too, the west's values are not necessarily universal http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5198003-103677,00.html Martin Jacques Friday May 20, 2005 Not so long ago, Japan was the height of fashion. Then came the post-bubble recession and it rapidly faded into the background, condemned as yesterday's story. The same happened to the Asian tigers: until 1997 they were the flavour of the month, but with the Asian financial crisis they sank into relative obscurity. No doubt the same fate will befall China in due course, though perhaps a little less dramatically because of its sheer size and import. These vagaries tell us nothing about east Asia, but describe the fickleness of western attitudes towards the region's transformation. A combination of curiosity and a fear of the unknown fuel a swelling interest, and then, when it appears that it was a false alarm, old attitudes of western-centric hubris reassert themselves: the Asian tigers were victims of a crony culture and Japan was simply too Japanese. During Japan's crisis, western - mainly American - witch doctors advised that the only solution was to abandon Japanese customs like lifetime employment and adopt more Anglo-Saxon practices such as shareholder value. The age-old western habit of believing that its arrangements - of the neo-liberal variety, in this instance - are always best proved as strong as ever: it is in our genes. The fact that the US was at the time in the early stages of its own bubble might have suggested a little humility was in order. In the event, Japan largely ignored the advice and has emerged from its long, post-bubble recession looking remarkably like it did before the crisis. Japan has long been part of the advanced world. It was the only non-western country to begin its industrialisation in the 19th century, following the Meiji Restoration in 1867. It has the second largest economy and enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. By any standards, it is a fully paid-up member of the exclusive club of advanced nations. Yet Japan is quite unlike any western society. In terms of the hardware of modernity - cars, computers, technology, motorways and the rest - Japan is, unsurprisingly, largely familiar. However, in terms of social relations - the way in which society works, the values that imbue it - it is profoundly different. Even a casual observer who cannot understand Japanese will almost immediately notice the differences: the absence of antisocial behaviour, the courtesy displayed by the Japanese towards each other, the extraordinary efficiency and orderliness that characterise the stuff of everyday life, from public transport to shopping. For those of a more statistical persuasion, it is reflected in what are, by western standards, extremely low crime rates. Not least, it finds expression in the success of Japanese companies. This has wrongly been attributed to an organisational system, namely just-in-time production, which, it was believed, could be imitated and applied with equal effect elsewhere. But the roots of the success of a company such as Toyota lie much deeper: in the social relations that typify Japanese society and that allow a very different kind of participation by the workforce in comparison with the west. As a result, non-Japanese companies have found it extremely difficult to copy these ideas with anything like the same degree of success. So how do we explain the differences between Japan and the west? The heart of the matter lies in their different ethos. Individualism animates the west, now more than ever. In contrast, the organising principle of Japanese society is a sense of group identity, a feeling of being part of a much wider community. Compared with western societies, Japan is a dense lattice-work of responsibilities and obligations within the family, the workplace, the school and the community. As Deepak Lal argues in his book Unintended Consequences, the Japanese sense of self is quite distinct from the western notion of individualism. As a result, people behave in very different ways and have very different expectations, and their behaviour is informed by very different values. This finds expression in a multitude of ways. Following the recent train crash in which 106 people died, the president of the operating company, JR West, was forced to resign: this is the normal and expected response of a company boss when things go seriously wrong. Income differentials within large corporations are much less than in their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, because it is group cohesion rather than individual ego that is most valued. Even during the depth of the recession, the jobless figure never rose much above 5%: it was regarded as wrong to solve a crisis by creating large-scale unemployment. Even those who do the more menial tasks - shop assistants, security staff, station attendants and canteen workers - display a pride in their work and a courtesy that is in striking contrast to the surly and resentful attitude prevalent in Britain and other western societies. In a survey conducted by the Japanese firm Dentsu, 68% of Americans and 60% of Britons identified with "a society in which everyone can freely compete according to his/her will and abilities" compared with just 22% of Japanese. In the same survey, only 15% of Japanese agreed with the proposition that "it's all right to break the rules, depending on the circumstances", compared with 37% of Americans and 39% of Britons. This finds rather bizarre expression - to an Englishman at least - in the way pedestrians invariably wait for the pedestrian lights to turn to green even when there is not the slightest sign of an approaching vehicle. Even the preferred choice of car reflects the differing ethos: whereas in the US and Britain, the fashionable car of choice is a 4x4 - the very embodiment of a "bugger you and the environment" individualism - the equivalent in Japan is the tiny micro-car, much smaller than a Ford Ka - a genre that is neither made nor marketed in the UK. The differences are legion, and not always for the better. Japan, for example, is still blighted by a rigid and traditional sexual division of labour. In a survey on the gender gap published last week by the World Economic Forum, Japan came 38th out of 58 countries, an extraordinarily low ranking for a developed nation. Or take democracy, that hallowed and allegedly universal principle of our age. Japan has universal suffrage, but the idea of alternating parties in government is almost entirely alien. Real power is exercised by factions within the ruling Liberal Democrats rather than by the other political parties, which, as a consequence, are largely marginal. We should not be surprised: in a society based on group culture rather than individualism, "democracy" is bound to be a very different kind of animal. Far from conforming to the western model then, Japan remains profoundly different. And so it has always been. After the Meiji Restoration it deliberately sought to engineer a modernisation that was distinctively Japanese, drawing from its own traditions as well as borrowing from the west. Globalisation notwithstanding, this is still strikingly the case. Indeed, Japan remains unusually and determinedly impervious to many of the pressures of globalisation. The lesson here, perhaps, is that we should expect the same to be true, in some degree or another, of the Asian tigers - and ultimately China too. That is not to say they will end up looking anything like Japan: China and Japan, for example, are in many respects chalk and cheese. But they will certainly be very different from the west because, like Japan, they come from very different histories and cultures. ? Martin Jacques is a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies at Aichi University in Japan [4]martinjacques1 at aol.com [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Juliet Clutton-Brock: Factory farm ethics Message-ID: Juliet Clutton-Brock: Factory farm ethics The Times Literary Supplement, 5.11.9 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2112505 HUNTERS, HERDERS, AND HAMBURGERS The past and future of human-animal relationships Richard W. Bulliet 256pp. | Columbia University Press. $27.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?18. | 0 231 13076 7 IN DEFENSE OF ANIMALS The second wave Peter Singer, editor 248pp. | Oxford: Blackwell ?50 (paperback, ?9.99). US $59.95 (paperback, $21.95). | 1 4051 1940 3 ANIMAL ETHICS Robert Garner 189pp. | Oxford: Polity. ?55 (paperback, 315.99). US $59.95 (paperback, $24.95). | 0 7456 3078 2 In Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, Richard W. Bulliet divides the history of human-animal relations into four eras: separation, the time when he presumes that humans or pre-human hominids became self-aware as a species; predomestic, the period of hunter-gathering; domestic, lasting from the Neolithic until, say, 1900, when around 40 per cent of US citizens lived on farms and were self-sufficient on their land; post-domestic, our present age of mass production when only about 2 per cent of US citizens live on farms. These divisions are used by Bulliet as a basis for his hypothesis that the changing patterns of how humans perceive animals, both wild and domestic, are a reflection of the development of societies over time. However, the divisions might have been easier to understand if domestic had been named the "age of the home farm" and post-domestic the "age of the factory farm". In Bulliet's view, domestic societies lived close to the land, and people took for granted the killing of farm animals and had few moral qualms about consuming animal products. In early domestic societies, the sacrificial killing of animals was common practice, while later, in Europe, blood sports such as bear- and bull- baiting were immensely popular. In post-domestic societies, there has been a great change, and with the divorce from the realities of keeping, breeding and killing livestock, people experience feelings of guilt, shame and disgust when they think about the industrial processes to which domestic animals are subjected. In future, as urbanism spreads, post-domestic people will be separated increasingly from live animals and they will gain their only experiences of them from print and from the electronic media. Bulliet has an impressive knowledge of archaeozoology and the history of human relationships with animals, and he ranges over a great diversity of topics from current theories about the process of domestication in the prehistoric period to the modern creation of pet cemeteries and pet-loss counselling. The difficulty for the reader is that a plethora of anecdotes and legends areis cited and they are described with such exuberance, and often at considerable length, so it is difficult to follow the trend of the author's many ideas. Richard Bulliet is more concerned with human attitudes and behaviour in relation to animals than he is with how to prevent cruelty to animals, but he does recognize the urgent, worldwide need to remedy the appalling standards of animal welfare that predominate in our post-domestic (factory farm) age. Public objection to cruelty to farm animals has only gathered momentum in the past half-century, but it has had a long history in science and medical research, dating from anger against the philosophical pronouncements of Ren? Descartes (1596-1650) and early experiments that were carried out on live animals. These raised horrified comments such as that of Dr Johnson, who wrote in 1758: "Among the inferiour professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive". The explosion of interest in science, during the nineteenth century, of necessity led to a great increase in experiments on live animals, before anaesthetics were in widespread use. From 1875, as a result of sustained opposition by the public, an anti-vivisection bill was put before Parliament, which was debated and then led to a Royal Commission, on which T. H. Huxley served as Counsel for Science. Arguments waged to and fro, very much as they have in the past twenty years, with this comment being made by Huxley in a letter to Darwin on January 22, 1875: "If physiological experimentation is put down by law, hunting, fishing, and shooting, against which a much better case can be made out, will soon follow". It was to be more than a hundred years before debate on this topic was renewed with such vigour, and it may be claimed that Peter Singer has been one of its chief protagonists. The first edition of In Defence of Animals was published in 1985 and contained a large number of short essays by a diversity of authors, from a lawyer to academic philosophers to political lobbyists, and its aim, as stated by Singer, itsthe book'sits editor, was to provide a platform for the new animal-liberation movement. It certainly succeeded, as was shown by the majorcoup that was recently achieved, when the flotation of Huntingdon Life Sciences as a company on the New York Stock Exchange was postponed forty-five minutes before trading began. The new edition has a larger and more attractive format, American spelling, and only one unchanged essay. The final chapter is boldly named "Ten Points for Activists"; it is a revision by Singer of the chapter in the first edition, by the late Henry Spira, named "Fighting To Win", and gives measured advice to those who wish to campaign for animals. As their long-running battle against Huntingdon Life Sciences shows, activists are still more concerned with the fate of animals in scientific and medical establishments than they are with the welfare of farm animals. There are historical as well as economic and political reasons for this, but not biological ones, for the iniquities and cruelties of the factory farm far outnumber those of medical research, as cogently described in several harrowing essays both in In Defense of Animals and in Robert Garner's new book, Animal Ethics. Garner succeeds in presenting a clearly written and eminently readable account of present thinking on the moral status of animals, and whether those mammals that have cognitive abilities approaching those of humans, such as the great apes, should be regarded as full persons. The concept of personhood is outlined both by Garner and in Peter Singer's collection. Both books discuss whether full personhood is morally significant and what it means for the treatment of those with and without it. Garner asks, if animals are considered to be moral agents, whether humans are then morally obliged to intervene to protect animals when they are attacked by other animals, for example when a wolf attacks a sheep. A recent letter in the Independent (September 2, 2005) from D. J. Walker pointed to the political implications of this: "I wonder if the resettlement of the grey wolf to control the red deer and roe deer populations in Scotland might contravene the law against hunting with dogs. Are wild packs specifically exempted, or are their activities not regarded in law as cruel?". On the other side of the personhood discussion, it could be argued that it is justified for humans to exploit animals because animals exploit each other: nature is red in tooth and claw, and as humans are part of nature, they are entitled to behave in this way too. This argument that humans are part of nature has been used to contend (for example, by Stephen Budiansky in The Covenant of the Wild, 1992) that the enfolding of wild animals such as wolves, sheep and horses into human societies andwith their subsequent domestication, was a natural process from which the species benefited by their great increase in numbers. This can be easily turned into the facile mantra that these animals chose domestication and therefore it is all right for humans to exploit them. In 1776, Dr Johnson pondered on this: "There is much talk of misery which we cause to the brute creation; but they are recompensed by existence. If they were not useful to man, and therefore protected by him, they would not be nearly so numerous . . . . But the question is, whether the animals who endure such sufferings of various kinds, for the service and entertainment of man, would accept of existence upon the terms on which they have it." It is clear that by awarding moral status or indeed equal rights to animals and humans, the contortions in thinking would be boundless, but even without this the moral maze is probably intractable. To give one crucial example, mentioned by Robert Garner, in Britain to keep a bird in a cage where it cannot spread its wings is illegal under the 1911 Protection of Animals Act; but this is precisely what is allowed for poultry in battery cages. Sadly, it is unlikely that even the best efforts of those responsible for finalizing the forthcoming Animal Welfare Bill will be able to do much to alleviate the horrors of the factory farm. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: European Gene Deadly In African Americans: Increases Heart Risk Message-ID: European Gene Deadly In African Americans: Increases Heart Risk Heart risk gene hits African Americans hardest New Scientist, 14 November 2005 [Thanks to Laird for this.] A gene commonly found in Americans of European descent can be deadly when carried by African Americans, a new study has revealed. The gene variant more than triples the risk heart attack in African American populations, the researchers found. African Americans are known to be more prone to heart attacks and the researchers suggest this may partly be due to European ancestry in those individuals, although environmental factors are certainly involved. K??ri Stefansson at Decode Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, and colleagues, isolated a gene variant called HapK, which is found in 30% of European Americans and 6% of African Americans. The variant also occurs in about 35% of people in Asia, but native Africans do not possess the gene. Stefansson proposes that the gene mutation must have occurred after the migration of human populations from Africa, about 50,000 years ago. HapK is involved in series of biochemical steps that leads to inflammation in the body. Its role is not fully understood but it is believed to increase the propensity of fatty deposits in the arteries ??? atherosclerotic plaques ??? to rupture, leading to a heart attack. 250% increased risk Stefansson studied the significance of the gene variant in more than 3000 people in three groups, one at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, one at Emory University in Atlanta, and one at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, all in the US. In the study, published in Nature Genetics, they found that HapK was associated with a slight increase in risk of heart attack for participants of European descent ??? just 16% ??? while those of African descent were 3.5 times more likely to suffer a heart attack (equivalent to a 250% increase in risk). ???If you???re an African American with the variant gene you are close to certain to have a heart attack if nothing is done about it,???"It???s very important to screen and find this subgroup,??? Stefansson says. His biopharmaceutical company has two potential drug therapies in clinical trials which act by regulating the inflammatory pathway that HapK is involved in. Micro-flora defence Martin Godfrey, a physician at the British Cardiac Society, notes: ???There are significant ethnic variations in heart attack risk. Black people in Britain and America are particularly at risk and they have increased incidence of strokes and high blood pressure.??? Stefansson speculates that the variant is so dangerous in African Americans because, unlike European Americans, they have not had thousands of years to adjust to its presence in their genome. ???The inflammatory pathway probably developed as a protective response to micro-organisms; and as populations inhabited very different areas, the micro-flora they encountered was vastly different,??? he says. ???That may be the reason for the differences in frequency of the variant.??? Journal reference: Nature Genetics From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Inside Higher Ed: Dialectics of Disaster Message-ID: Dialectics of Disaster http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/11/01/mclemee 5.11.1 By [19]Scott McLemee An earthquake hit the city of Lisbon 250 years ago this morning. And while everybody is now probably just about sick to death of popular history books with subtitles like Styrofoam: The Extruded Polystyrene that Changed the World -- well, the Lisbon earthquake didn't just change the world, it shook the cosmos. The present calendar year, with its rapid sequence of natural disasters -- from tsunami to hurricane, to earthquake, to whatever comes next -- has been memorable and terrifying. But in a sense, it has all happened in the wake of Lisbon. A range of options for understanding such catastrophes took shape then. It wasn't just one disaster, but a rapid string of them. The earthquake was followed by a firestorm that destroyed most of the buildings that hadn't already collapsed. Then came the flood, as ocean waves hit the reeling port city. So many people died that no reliable count was ever possible. Historians now give usually give estimates between 10,000 and 20,000 fatalities, though one contemporary source indicated it might be up to 70,000. The tremors could be felt throughout the continent as well as northern Africa. And in any case, the large number of foreign visitors in Lisbon -- the fourth largest city in Europe, and the hub of Portugal's empire -- meant that the news hit home in country after country. (It was one of those moments in history when the world suddenly felt a lot smaller.) After a month or so, pamphlets offering first-hand accounts of the destruction, and sermons on its meaning -- as well as analyses by the public intellectuals of the day, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant -- all began pouring forth from the presses, to be snapped up just as fast as they appeared. And it wasn't just the fascination that often a news event. Material on Lisbon kept coming out, year after year. For a century and more afterward, the earthquake held its place in the public memory as the greatest natural disaster of modern times. As late as 1931, the German literary critic Walter Benjamin would deliver a lecture on the Lisbon catastrophe as part of an educational radio program for children. (The notion of this incredibly esoteric Marxist theorist playing Mister Rogers is a little hard to wrap one's mind around, but the talk is available in volume two of Harvard University Press's edition of Benjamin's [23]Selected Writings. One of the structures to collapse from the aftershock was that spirit of optimism that had been growing up, steadily, over the first half of the century. The wars of religion were looking like a nightmare from which civilization was finally able to wake up. Scientific research, post-Newton, was progressing by leaps and bounds. Scholars communicated at breathtaking speeds, thanks to the new learned societies. And in the larger cities, you could go to the coffee houses, not just for caffeine but to read newspapers and magazines and get into interesting arguments. (If you were illiterate, penniless, or female -- let alone some combination thereof -- the progress of enlightened optimism might not be quite so obvious, of course.) The situation in Portugal before the earthquake would have seemed like evidence of the forward motion. King Jose I was a rather George W. Bush-esque sovereign, who seems to have been very interested in playing cards and otherwise remaining in a state of deep relaxation. But he had the good sense to delegate authority to an experienced diplomat and canny statesman named Pombal, whose policies were, on the whole, forward-looking. He challenged the influence of the Jesuits, and stood up for the interests of the country's rising merchant class. Legend has it that underlings asked Pombal what to do after the earthquake, and he responded simply: "Bury the dead and feed the living." Maybe this never happened. But it sounds in keeping with his temperament; anyway, just don't tell anybody at FEMA that it was apocryphal. Naturally, with the offense Pombal had given the Jesuits, it was not hard to put a theological spin on the earthquake: It was, in effect, the Lord's way of getting Europe's attention. Perhaps that sounds familiar? But so might a story that was passed around among the more cynical members of the population: Many churches were destroyed, but it was said that a notorious row of brothels remained untouched. (Likewise, it was subtle of God to punish New Orleans, that den of vice, while leaving the French Quarter standing.) So people adhering to the old-time religion, with its wrathful deity, had little difficulty explaining the earthquake. And to that minority of Enlightenment thinkers who considered God an unnecessary hypothesis, the whole sad story was equally unproblematic. As one of Diderot's biographers puts it, "The Lisbon earthquake presented him with no intellectual problem whatever." Things were much harder for anyone who embraced the idea that the universe was the product of intelligent design by a rational and benign Creator. While the Supreme Being had given us the capacity to be rational and benign, too, He was not otherwise inclined to think about us all that much. But philosophers of this bent had argued -- with great ingenuity, and in a plausible enough manner -- that the deity had rigged things up to the long-term benefit of humanity. Even the seeming evils in the world were, from this point of view, challenges to improve our understanding and behavior. But it was hard to see what the Great Designer of the Universe had in mind with Lisbon. Voltaire, in particular, took it hard -- and the result was one of the most durable works of satire ever written, Candide (1759), his ironic reckoning with the doctrine that we lived in "the best of all possible worlds." (The first chapter ends with Candide watching the Lisbon earthquake from a ship off the coast. Things only get worse from there.) But it was in the immediate aftermath of the disaster that Voltaire penned his most heartfelt response -- a long poem, published a few months after the event, that is by turns sarcastic and deeply bewildered at the collapse of what little remained of his religious faith. (I'll quote from a [24]version in English that appeared in 1912, translated by [25]Joseph McCabe. ) Weaving in descriptions of the scene he had read in news accounts, Voltaire tried to understand how it made sense, given his earlier sense of the world: Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All's well, "And contemplate this ruin of a world. Behold these shreds and cinders of your race, This child and mother heaped in common wreck, These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts -- A hundred thousand whom the earth devours, Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet, Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs, In racking torment end their stricken lives. He had written for years, at great personal risk, against the dogmatism of the religious authorities. But now his own rationalistic "natural theology" seemed equally repulsive: God either smites the inborn guilt of man, Or, arbitrary lord of space and time, Devoid alike of pity and of wrath, Pursues the cold designs he has conceived.... Whatever side we take we needs must groan; We nothing know, and everything must fear. A little later, in August 1756, Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented on the poem in a long letter to Voltaire. It's hard to imagine how Voltaire could have read Rousseau's musings without yelling. If the orthodox religious folk of the 1750s understood the earthquake in terms not too far from those used by their brethren today, Rousseau sounds a little like a contemporary survivalist, possibly living in Montana. For one thing, the letter opens by informing Voltaire that he's living in solitude. (There would be plenty more of that in years to come, as Rousseau became increasingly convinced that other philosophers were conspiring against him.) But things get really Unabomber-ish when Rousseau disagrees that the earthquake was grounds for Voltaire's existential crisis. For one thing, the people in Lisbon were partly responsible for their fate: "It was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories," writes Rousseau. "If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer, or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues away and as happy as if nothing had happened." But no, the people of Lisbon had grown too civilized for our own good. "We have to stay and expose ourselves to further tremors, many obstinately insisted, because what we would have to leave behind is worth more than what we could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take -- one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money?" Furthermore, Rousseau asked, how can we really know that the earthquake added to the sum of anyone's suffering? "Of the many persons crushed under Lisbon's ruins," he wrote, "some, no doubt, escaped greater misfortunes.... Is there a sadder end than that of a dying man tortured with useless treatments, whose notary and heirs do not allow him respite, whom the doctors kill in his own bed at their leisure, and whom the barbarous priests artfully try to make relish death? For me, I see everywhere that the misfortunes nature imposes upon us are much less cruel than those that we please to add." Meanwhile, in Germany, a struggling professor named Immanuel Kant was preparing the first of his own series of pamphlets on the earthquake. (Only much later, with his seismological years well behind him, did Kant work out his own philosophical system.) He left the question of divine providence out of it. Instead, he focused on just what had happened, and how. Kant speculated that large pockets of subterranean gas sometimes exploded, or otherwise escaped to the surface, shaking the ground violently as they did. Wrong, as it turned out -- but not a bad guess, not at all. But in avoiding metaphysical questions about the disaster, it seemed as if Kant, too, were taking the measure of a new world then coming into view. He could -- with a clear conscience -- leave aside all those questions about meaning plumbed by the priests' sermons, Voltaire's poem, and Rousseau's letter. And so can we, now -- until, as happens from time to time, we just can't ignore them anymore. Scott McLemee writes [26]Intellectual Affairs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. [27]Suggestions and ideas for future columns are welcome. Comments Dialectics of Disaster The Lisbon quake also had an effect on British prison reformer John Howard. [28]Sally Greene, at 4:18 pm EST on November 3, 2005 Sage Rousseau "Furthermore, Rousseau asked, how can we really know that the earthquake added to the sum of anyone's suffering?" We can't, of course. Well spotted, J-J. It could be that every single person who died in the earthquake was due to fall into the fire and be burned to death later that day. Who knows. [29]Ophelia Benson, at 2:15 pm EST on November 4, 2005 Dialectics of Disaster Make that John Howard. [30]Sally Greene, at 12:52 pm EST on November 5, 2005 References 19. mailto:scott.mclemee at insidehighered.com 20. http://insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs 21. http://insidehighered.com/emailthispage/22923 23. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/JENWA2.html 24. http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Voltaire0265/OnToleration/HTMLs/0029_Pt05_Lisbon.html 25. http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=963 26. http://insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs 27. mailto:intellectual.affairs at insidehighered.com 28. http://greenespace.blogspot.com/ 29. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/ 30. http://greenespace.blogspot.com/ From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Inside Higher Ed: Falling Into the Generation Gap Message-ID: Falling Into the Generation Gap http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/24/mclemee 5.11.24 By [19]Scott McLemee A few weeks ago, sitting over a cup of coffee, a writer in his twenties told me what it had been like to attend a fairly sedate university (I think he used the word "dull") that had a few old-time New Left activists on its faculty. "If they thought you were interested in anything besides just your career," he said, "if you cared about ideas or issues, they got really excited. They sort of jumped on you." Now, I expected this to be the prelude to a little tribute to his professors - how they had taken him seriously, opened his mind to an earlier generation's experience, etc. But no. "It was like they wanted to finish their youth through you, somehow," he said. "They needed your energy. They needed you to admire them. They were hungry for it. It felt like I had wandered into a crypt full of vampires. After a while, I just wanted to flee." It was disconcerting to hear. My friend is not a conservative. And in any case, this was not the usual boilerplate about tenured radicals seeking to brainwash their students. He was not complaining about their ideas and outlook. This vivid appraisal of his teachers was not so much ideological as visceral. It tapped into an undercurrent of generational conflict that the endless "culture wars" seldom acknowledge. You could sum it up neatly by saying that his professors, mostly in their fifties and sixties by now, had been part of the "Baby Boom," while he belonged to "Generation X." Of course, there was a whole segment of the population that fell between those two big cultural bins -- people born at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s. Our cohort never had a name, which is probably just as well. (For one thing, we've never really believed that we are a "we." And beside, the whole idea of a prepackaged identity based on what year you were born seems kind of tacky.) One effect of living in this no-man's-land between Boomers and Xers is a tendency to feel both fascinated and repulsed by moments when people really did have a strong sense of belonging to a generation. The ambivalence is confusing. But after a while it seems preferable to nostalgia -- because nostalgia is always rather simple-minded, if not dishonest. The recent documentary [28]The Weather Underground (a big hit with the young-activist/antiglobalization crowd) expressed doe-eyed sadness that the terrible Amerikan War Machine had forced young idealists to plant bombs. But it somehow never mentioned that group's enthusiasm for the Charles Manson "family." (Instead of the two-fingered hippie peace sign, Weather members flashed a three-finger salute, in honor of the fork used to carve the word "war" into one of the victims' stomach.) Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger have a lot of things to answer for - but that particular bit of insanity is not one of them. Paul Berman, who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University during the strike of 1968, has been writing about the legacy of the 1960s for a long time. Sometimes he does so in interesting ways, as in parts of his book [29]A Tale of Two Utopias; and sometimes he draws lessons from history that make an otherwise placid soul pull out his hair with irritation. He has tried to sort the positive aspects of the 1960s out from the negative -- claiming all the good for a revitalized liberalism, while treating the rest as symptoms of a lingering totalitarian mindset and/or psychological immaturity. Whatever the merits of that analysis, it runs into trouble the minute Berman writes about world history -- which he always paints in broad strokes, using bright and simple colors. In his latest book, Terror and Liberalism, he summed up the last 300 years in terms that suggested Europe and the United States had grabbed their colonies in a fit of progress-minded enthusiasm. (Economic exploitation, by Berman's account, had nothing to do with it, or not much.) Liberalism and Terror is a small book, and easy to throw. His [30]essay in the new issue of Bookforum is, to my mind, part of the thoughtful, reflective, valuable side of Berman's work. In other words, I did not lose much hair reading it. The essay has none of that quality my friend mentioned over coffee - the morbid hunger to feast off the fresh blood of a younger generation's idealism. Berman has fond recollections of the Columbia strike. But that is not the same as being fond of the mentality that it fostered. "Nothing is more bovine than a student movement," he writes, "with the uneducated leading the anti-educated and mooing all the way." The foil for Berman's reflections is the sociologist Daniel Bell, who left Columbia in the wake of the strike. At the time, Bell's book [31]The End of Ideology was the bete noir of young radicals. (It was the kind of book that made people so furious that they refused to read it - always the sign of the true-believer mentality in full effect.) But it was Bell's writing on the history of the left in the United States that had the deepest effect on Berman's own thinking. Bell noticed, as Berman puts it, "a strange and repeated tendency on the part of the American Left to lose the thread of continuity from one generation to the next, such that each new generation feels impelled to reinvent the entire political tradition." There is certainly something to this. It applies to Berman himself. After all, Terror and Liberalism is pretty much a jerry-rigged version of the [32]Whig interpretation of history, updated for duty in the War on Terror. And the memoiristic passages in his Bookforum essay are, in part, a record of his own effort to find "the thread of continuity from one generation to the next." But something else may be implicit in Bell's insight about the "strange and repeated tendency" to lose that thread. It is a puzzle for which I have no solution readily at hand. Namely: Why is this tendency limited to the left? Why is it that young conservatives tend to know who Russell Kirk was, and what Hayek thought, and how Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 prepared the way for Reagan's victory in 1980? Karl Marx once wrote that "the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." So how come the conservatives are so well-rested and energetic, while the left has all the bad dreams? Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Comments Generation amputations At every time and place where the left speaks in clear, uncompromised voice, the state leaves a giant bloody footprint. It is a perfectly natural impulse to run as fast as you can away from that footprint. After generations of lynchings, Palmer raids, inquisitions, vigilantes, Pinkertons, feds, police riots, red squads, goon squads, undercover agents provocateurs, Cointelprograms, blacklists, Alien and Sedition Acts, Smith Acts, Taft-Hartley Acts, PATRIOT Acts and uncountable suspicious violent deaths of important leaders, it's a miracle that there's a left left to scratch your head about. On the other hand, no one ever risked more than a paper cut writing justifications for imperial aggression. Just ask Berman. ethan young Ethan Young, at 2:25 pm EST on March 24, 2005 Response to Ethan Young There has certainly been repression of the left in the course of American history. Yet the level of it has never been so severe as in some other countries -- where, despite incredible levels of violence directed against it, leftist movements survived and thrived. So, as causal explanations go, that dog won't hunt. As for people offering left-tinged support for American military intervention...sure, such do exist. But they are fewer in number than, say, people disposed to fits of enthusiasm for any given despotism waving a "progressive" or "anti-imperialist" flag. This is what makes studying the history of American radicalism such a melancholy thing. [33]Scott McLemee, columnist at Inside Higher Ed, at 4:48 pm EST on March 24, 2005 Another Berman book on the Left You may be interested to know there's another Berman book in the offing, which I am publishing. It's called "Power and the Idealists" (formerly entitled The Passion of Josckhka Fischer") and it's about Fischer, Regis Dubray, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and, above all Bernard Kouchner... Regards,Richard [34]Nashrichard at softskull.com [35]Richard Nash, Soft Skull Press, at 5:29 pm EST on March 24, 2005 hunt or run We're barking up different trees. My point is comparing the disposition of left and right as if the playing field is level will always leave you with confusion and distorted perspectives. Repression has special weight in the US, because the closer you are to creature comfort, the less prepared you are to face real danger, no matter how heartfelt the cause. There's a lot wrong with the US left -- vestiges of Stalin-cultism mark just one aspect of a deeper crisis. And I don't argue that Berman, Radosh, Hitchens et al. are the left's problem, not any more at least. Can an anti-democratic system as powerful as US imperialism be fought with principled democratic politics? If so, how? If not, should we give up? My generation, and the one before mine, have made no progress with this dilemma in 50 years. I worry a lot that X, Y and Z won't either. ethan young ethan young, at 4:36 am EST on March 25, 2005 down the memory hooooole Berman's 'strange tendancy' is also known as the `memory hole'. The history of the left in America is marked by an almost reflexive embrace of totalitarianism and genocide -- from National Socialism to Stalinism, Maoism and Kampuchean communism, to the various identity cults active on campus today. And yet, rather than confronting their mistakes, leftists deny them, ignore them, forget them, or simply re-define the terms. I suspect that this `loss of continuity' derives from an inability to confront the past. max, at 6:36 pm EDT on April 3, 2005 References 19. mailto:scott.mclemee at insidehighered.com 20. http://insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs 21. http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/11/15/histmath 22. http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/24/golub 23. http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/20/technology 24. http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/19/wilson 25. http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/29/siu From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis Message-ID: This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/science/22hypno.html [This is quite an important article, not so much what is says about hypnosis particularly, but about top-down processing, that what you think and how you categorize the world shapes what you see. If this can be extended to several top-down processes, we can better appreciate why so readily ignore disconcordant information and arguments from bearers of bad news and Premise Checkers.] By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true. The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish. "The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms." Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders. There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought. Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured. Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep. Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd. In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered. Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function. One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs. For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom. The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top. Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up. These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face. The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled. This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality. According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable. One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said. In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore. The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue. For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect. Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said: "Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them. "This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self." Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner. In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors. When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated. Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said. Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In Give and Take of Evolution, a Surprising Contribution From Islands Message-ID: In Give and Take of Evolution, a Surprising Contribution From Islands http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/science/22isla.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted= By CARL ZIMMER Islands hold a special place in the hearts of evolutionary biologists. When Charles Darwin visited the Gal?pagos Islands in 1835, he was stunned by the diversity of birds, which helped guide him to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Beginning in the middle of the last century, the ornithologist Ernst Mayr laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the way new species evolve, arguing that they mainly emerged when populations became geographically isolated. Mayr based his theory on his studies of birds from Pacific islands. Yet islands have generally been considered evolutionary dead ends. After animals and plants emigrated from the mainland, it was believed that they became so specialized for island life that they could not leave. They eventually became extinct, only to be replaced by new arrivals from the mainland. "They were like baubles of the evolutionary past," said Christopher E. Filardi, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. But Dr. Filardi and Robert Moyle, a colleague at the museum, have found evidence that islands can act as engines of evolution instead of dead ends. Animals can spread from island to island, giving rise to an explosion of new species, and even colonizing the mainland again. The results suggest that conserving biodiversity on islands is vital for the evolution of new species in the future. Dr. Filardi made this discovery by studying a group of Pacific island birds, known as monarch flycatchers, that were among the birds Mayr studied 80 years ago. Dr. Mayr could compare only the anatomy and colors of monarch flycatchers. Dr. Filardi, on the other hand, was able to analyze their DNA. He collected it from some species by going to remote islands, while Dr. Moyle extracted other samples from preserved flycatchers stored at the museum, going back to the 1800's. The scientists identified 13 species that shared a common ancestor in Australia or New Guinea between 2 million and 5.6 million years ago. The descendants of that ancient bird spread thousands of miles to islands as far-flung as Fiji and Hawaii. New species arose along the way, undergoing drastic changes at a rapid rate. In one lineage, the monarch flycatchers tripled their body size in less than a million years. "This stuff can happen really fast," Dr. Filardi said. This evolutionary wave returned to its origins when flycatchers from the Solomon Islands colonized Australia and New Guinea. Dr. Filardi and Dr. Moyle published their results in the Nov. 10 issue of Nature. "Many aspects of island bird evolution are going to have to be rewritten," said Jon Fjeldsa, an ornithologist at the University of Copenhagen. Other recent studies suggest that islands may also be engines of evolution for many other animals and perhaps even plants. In the June issue of The Journal of Biogeography, for example, Kirsten Nicholson of Washington University and her colleagues published a study of lizards that live in Central and South America. The team demonstrated that 123 mainland species are the descendants of an ancestor that lived in the West Indies. "I have a feeling that in the next 10 years we're going to see a lot more of this," Dr. Filardi said. Today monarch flycatchers and other island species are under serious threat from habitat loss and from rats and other animals introduced by humans. Rising seas from global warming could destroy some islands altogether. Dr. Filardi argues that the new findings make preserving island biodiversity even more urgent, because islands may be an important source of new biodiversity. "It's the potential that the earth has to reinvent itself in the future," he said. "Islands may have more to do with that than we ever thought." From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:24:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:24:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Effects: When Mindful Awareness Goes to Your Head Message-ID: Effects: When Mindful Awareness Goes to Your Head http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/health/22effe.html Vital Signs By ERIC NAGOURNEY People who meditate regularly appear to undergo changes in parts of the brain that handle perception and attentiveness, a new study suggests. The study sample is small, and it is unclear what the changes may mean, but researchers said that when they compared M.R.I. scans of people who meditated with those of people who did not, they found more gray matter in the frontal cortexes of those who meditate. "We presume it's a good thing, but we don't know for sure," said the lead author of the study, Sara W. Lazar, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. The study appears in the current issue of NeuroReport. While early studies have found evidence that people who meditate extensively, like Buddhist monks, experience long-lasting changes in their brains, the researchers here were interested in what effect, if any, more moderate amounts of meditation have. For this study, they looked at 20 people who practiced a form of meditation known as mindful awareness, which does not involve the repetition of a mantra. Five of the volunteers taught meditation or yoga, but the rest held traditional jobs and reported meditating on average once a day for 40 minutes. All had taken part in at least one weeklong mediation retreat at some point. These volunteers, the researchers found, had thicker tissue in the parts of the brain involved in attention and sensory processing than the other volunteers did. The difference was especially notable in older volunteers, suggesting that meditation may help reduce the cortical thinning that comes with age, the researchers said. The study could not establish that the differences were attributable to meditation, but Dr. Lazar noted that other studies had found structural changes in jugglers' brain, presumably caused by the demands of their craft. She said the researchers believed other forms of meditation and even yoga might produce the same results. From checker at panix.com Wed Nov 30 23:37:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:37:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Exploring a Hormone for Caring Message-ID: Exploring a Hormone for Caring http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/health/22horm.html By NICHOLAS WADE The lack of emotional care given to infants in some Romanian and Russian orphanages has provided researchers an opportunity to study the hormonal basis of the mother-child bond. Researchers led by Seth D. Pollak of the University of Wisconsin have found that these children, even three and a half years after adoption into Wisconsin families, produce two critical hormones in a different pattern from children with traditional upbringings. The hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, are small proteins produced by the pituitary gland in the center of the brain. Although they influence bodily functions like giving milk and the water balance, they also have a range of effects on social behavior, at least in laboratory rodents and monkeys. These include fostering positive interactions with other individuals, notably the social bonds between mother and child and the sexual bonds between male and female. In June this year, oxytocin was reported to elevate the level of trust among people who received a nasal spray of it before playing a game created to test their tolerance for being betrayed by other players. The game was created by an economist, Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich. Dr. Pollak and his colleagues have looked at how the two hormones are involved in shaping the bonds between mother and child. In normally raised children aged about 4? years, they found, oxytocin levels rise after half an hour of physical interaction with their mothers. But the previously neglected children in their study did not show this oxytocin jump, Dr. Pollak and his colleagues write in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The hormone levels were measured from samples of the children's urine. Dr. Pollak believes that oxytocin acts through the brain's reward system and gives infants a positive feeling about social interactions. The finding that the adopted children in the study apparently get less of an oxytocin reward could explain why some children from Eastern Europe, as they grow older, have difficulty forming social relationships. "Tens of thousands of these infants are entering the U.S. every year, and the children are having problems in social relationships, and we haven't a clue why," Dr. Pollak said. Many young children when distressed will accept comfort only from a parent, not a stranger, but some previously neglected children will run to the nearest adult, sometimes ignoring their adoptive parents. The Wisconsin team noted that the adopted children in their study produced very low levels of vasopressin. This hormone, they say, is critical for recognizing individuals as familiar, an essential step in forming social bonds. Dr. Charles Nelson, a Harvard pediatrician who has studied children in Romanian orphanages, said the Wisconsin team's method of measuring the two hormones in urine, if reliable, would be a major advance in tracking emotional development in infants. The new finding can be interpreted in several ways. One possibility, Dr. Nelson said, is that there is a sensitive period in the first two years of life for developing a strong relationship, and that later relationships depend on the biological mechanism having been set correctly, as judged by the oxytocin response. It could be that the previously neglected children have missed this critical window of development, Dr. Nelson said. Or, the biological system may be flexible and it will just take longer for the children to develop a normal oxytocin response. . The best possible intervention for neglected orphan children would seem to be adoption into loving families. But maybe this is not enough and if so, the oxytocin measurements may point to the need to do something else, Dr. Nelson said. It is unclear why humans, a highly social species, are not born with an innate ability to form social relationships instead of having to develop the skill in infancy, as is apparently the case. Perhaps the arrangement is a safeguard against forming bad relationships, Dr. Nelson suggested.