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 re