From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:19:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:19:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: What we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves Message-ID: What we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5285932-103677,00.html Six views of the west's problems with the Muslim world reveal as much about those who hold them as the conflict itself Timothy Garton Ash Thursday September 15, 2005 Sitting in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a metal arrow on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca and the television showing a female news presenter in full hijab, I feel impelled to write about our troubles with Islam. Four years after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which were perpetrated in the name of Allah, most people living in what we still loosely call the west would agree that we do have troubles with Islam. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but most of the terrorists who threaten us claim to be Muslims. Most countries with a Muslim majority show a resistance to what Europeans and Americans generally view as desirable modernity, including the essentials of liberal democracy. Why? What's the nub of the problem? Here are six different views often heard in the west, but also, it's important to add, in Muslim countries such as Iran. As you go down the list, you might like to put a mental tick against the view you most strongly agree with. It's logically possible to put smaller ticks against a couple of others, but not against them all. 1 The fundamental problem is not just Islam but religion itself, which is superstition, false consciousness, the abrogation of reason. In principle, Christianity or Judaism are little better, particularly in the versions embraced by the American right. The world would be a much better place if everyone understood the truths revealed by science, had confidence in human reason and embraced secular humanism. If we must have a framed image of a bearded old man on the wall, let it be a photograph of Charles Darwin. What we need is not just a secular state but a secular society. This is a view held by many highly educated people in the post-Christian west, especially in western Europe, including some of my closest friends. If translated directly into a political prescription, it has the minor drawback of requiring that some 3 billion to 5 billion men and women abandon their fundamental beliefs. Nor has the track record of purely secular regimes over the last hundred years been altogether inspiring. 2 The fundamental problem is not religion itself, but the particular religion of Islam. Islam, unlike western Christianity, does not allow the separation of church and state, religion and politics. The fact that my Iranian newspaper gives the year as 1384 points to a larger truth. With its systematic discrimination against women, its barbaric punishments for homosexuality and its militant intolerance, Islam is stuck in the middle ages. What it needs is its Reformation. A very widespread view. Two objections are that such a view encourages a monolithic, essentialist understanding of Islam, and tries to understand its history too much in western terms (middle ages, Reformation). If we mean by Islam "what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do", there is a huge spectrum of different realities. 3 The problem is not Islam but Islamism. One of the world's great religions has been misrepresented by fanatics such as Osama bin Laden, who have twisted it into the service of a political ideology of hate. It's these ideologists and movements of political Islamism that we must combat. Working with the benign, peaceful majority of the world's Muslims, we can separate the poisonous fruit from the healthy tree. The view promulgated by Qur'an-toting western politicians such as George Bush and Tony Blair. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? They're not going to insult millions of Muslim voters and the foreign countries upon which the west relies for its imported oil. But do they really believe it? I have my doubts. Put them on a truth serum, and I bet they'd be closer to 2, while many atheist or agnostic European leaders would be at 1. On the other hand, this analysis is made with learning and force by distinguished specialists on the Muslim world. 4 The nub of the problem is not religion, Islam or even Islamism, but a specific history of the Arabs. Among 22 members of the Arab League, none is a home-grown democracy. (Iraq now has some elements of democracy, but hardly home-grown.) Needless to say, this is not a racist claim about Arabs but a complex argument about history, economics, political culture, society and a set of failed attempts at post-colonial modernisation. A case can be made. There are democracies with Muslim majorities (Turkey, Mali). The political scientist Alfred Stepan has written a fascinating article suggesting that, in the democracy stakes, non-Arab Muslim countries have fared roughly as well as non-Muslim countries at a comparable level of economic development. But I'm struck by the fact that even in a traditionally anti-Arab country such as Iran, very few people think the trouble is just with Arabia. 5 We, not they, are the root of the problem. From the Crusades to Iraq, western imperialism, colonialism, Christian and post-Christian ideological hegemonism have themselves created this antipathy to western liberal democracy; and, at the extreme, its mortal enemies. Moreover, after causing (by the Holocaust of European barbarism), supporting or at least accepting the establishment of the state of Israel, we have for more than half a century ignored the terrible plight of the Palestinians. A widespread view among Muslims, and by no means only among Arabs in the Middle East. Also shared, from a different starting point, by some on the western left. Of course, even if this simplistic version of history were entirely true, we couldn't change the past. But we can acknowledge the historical damage for which we are genuinely responsible. And we can do more to create a free Palestine next to a secure Israel. 6 Whatever your view of the relative merits of the west and Islam, the most acute tension comes at the edges where they meet. It arises, in particular, from the direct, personal encounter of young, first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants with western, and especially European, secular modernity. The most seductive system known to humankind, with its polychromatic consumer images of health, wealth, excitement, sex and power, is hugely attractive to young people from often poor, conservative, Muslim backgrounds. But, repelled by its hedonistic excesses or perhaps disappointed in their secret hopes, alienated by the reality of their marginalised lives in the west or feeling themselves rejected by it, a few - a tiny minority - embrace a fierce, extreme, warlike new version of the faith of their fathers. From Mohammed Atta and the Hamburg cell of al-Qaida, through the bombers of Madrid to those of London, this has become a depressingly familiar story. I wish I could find some compelling evidence against this claim. But I can't. (Can some reader help?) Even if we were to assist at the birth of a free Palestine and pull out of Iraq tomorrow, this problem would remain. It threatens to make Europe a less civilised, comfortable place to live over the next 10 years. Now, which of the six views got your largest tick? In answering that question, you will not just be saying something about the Islamic world; you will be saying something about yourself. For what we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves. Tell me your Islam and I will tell you who you are. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:19:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:19:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edward Smith: Catalog Of Correctable Omnipresent Human Flaws Message-ID: Edward Smith: Catalog Of Correctable Omnipresent Human Flaws http://www.transhumanismus.demokratietheorie.de/docs/the_catalog_of_correctable_human_flaws.html [I wonder how the intelligent designers will handle this.] PART 1: Corrections, Enhancements, And Species Names All human bodies have numerous flaws which can be eliminated by geneticly modifying the zygote. Those flaws exist because their elimination was and is not necessary for the survival of the human species. However, their elimination would greatly increase the efficiency of our actions, and thus both our physical prosperity and our quality of life. A distinction must be made between corrections and enhancements. Corrections are removals of negatives whereas enhancements are additions of positives. The line between a correction and an enhancement is not entirely defined, but most modifications clearly fall on one side or the other. A correction constitutes the replacement of an important trait that had evolved away due to lack of necessity, or the correction of a trait that had evolved wrongly due to evolutionary expedience, except when the correction of such a trait satisfies the criteria for being an enhancement. An enhancement constitutes any augmentation of ones abilities that are characterized as being competitive, other than the removal of specific weaknesses, or any elaborate or unnatural addition. Many examples of enhancements are: 1. enhancements, beyond the removal of specific weaknesses, of muscle strength, muscle disinhibition, muscle endurance, cardiovascular endurance, skill, sensory breadth, sensory sensitivity, intelligence, mental skills, appearance, speed of development, or ability to feel pleasure, 2. the ability to extract energy from sunlight, hydrocarbons, or other sources that are unnatural for animals, 3. chameleon-like color-changing ability or other camouflage, 4. echolocation ability (which is mostly applicable in the dark), 5. built-in phosphorescent light(s), 6. built-in fire lighter(s) (most likely phosphoric and sulfuric), 7. wings, fins, claws, gills, serpentine arms, cold-bloodedness, or any other complex animal-like traits, 8. built-in weapons, 9. built-in armor beyond the removal of any specific weaknesses, 10. any purely cosmetic alteration. Obviously, some of such enhancements would not even be practical, especially since artificial non-biological objects can serve many of those functions, though such artificial non-biological objects are often expensive and in any case they depend upon a technological industrial infrastructure and access to that infrastructure. It is evident that enhancements are further subdivisible into at least 2 general types, which are: 1. enhancements that are cosmetic, random, or otherwise not particularly practical, which may be called 'random enhancements', and 2. enhancements that are clearly practical, and which can be applied for the purpose of competition with others, which may be called 'competitive enhancements'. Many enhancements fall on a spectrum between those 2 sub-categories. It is important to first focus on corrections rather than enhancements, the reason being that corrections are limited in their scope (there are most likely only 40-50 possible corrections) and mostly benefit an individual by themself, whereas enhancements are virtually unlimited in their scope, are mostly beneficial to an individual in competition with others, and/or are prone to abuse. Pursuing the latter traits may thus touch off a rash of socially mutually-destructive genetic competition if it is not clear that such enhancements must only be made with the most rightful and socially responsible of intentions, as characterized by the geneticly-determined character of the enhanced beings, such that they have a fine, clear, rightness-seeking abstract focus (caused by the H1, M1, and M3 receptors in unmodified humans), which works in opposition to both crude blind wrongness-seeking focus (caused by the 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C receptors in unmodified humans) and ethically indifferent greed. Luckily though, if a person is rational enough to support transhumanism, then they are more likely to be rational enough to realize that responsibility. The various possible human modifications fall on a spectrum between being a correction and being an enhancement (which may be called the correction-enhancement spectrum), with most possible modifications clearly falling on one side or the other. The further a trait falls toward the enhancement end of the spectrum, particularly in the case of competitive enhancements, the more dangerous it is, and thus the more rightful it's bearer's temperament must be. Being as highly modified humans that can reproduce certainly constitute a new taxonomic class, there should be specific taxonomic names to distinguish significantly-modified humans from unmodified or minimally-modified humans, and to distinguish humans that have only been modified by significant corrections from those that have been modified by significant enhancements (with or without significant corrections also). Taxonomic names, by custom, are latin, meaning that latin terms should be used to describe the 3 human types. The most appropriate latin taxonomic names for humans that are not significantly-modified, significantly-corrected only, and significantly-enhanced, respectively, are 'rudis', 'correctus', and 'altus', which mean in latin, respectively: 'rough, raw, or crude', 'corrected', and 'grown or improved'. As for the taxonomic level of the names, humans that have been modified with significant corrections have not gone substantially beyond natural human form or natural human competitive capacity, nor do they have any traits that primarily serve such functions, nor do they have a virtually unlimited number of possible modifications, whereas humans that have been modified with significant enhancements do have those traits. It is therefore most appropriate for 'rudis' and 'correctus' to distinguish between 2 homo sapien subspecies, and for 'altus' to refer to a different species. There are also different categories of modifications for both correction and enhancement modifications, which can serve to classify the modifications when making lists. Those categories are: 1. biochemical, 2. gross physical, and 3. neurological. A modification can fall under multiple categories to some extent, especially if it is complex, but such traits should be classified into the categories that they best fall under. Those categories may also have subcategories where appropriate, such as 'growth', 'autonomy', 'mobility', 'durability', etcetera, though not all modifications may fall into one of the subcategories. PART 2: Correctable Omnipresent Human Flaws The reference below describes many of, and most likely the vast majority of, geneticly-correctable omnipresent evolutionary flaws of unmodified humans (descriptions begin with "In unmodified humans,"), their corresponding corrected state (descriptions begin with "In the corrected state," and use the verb "will"), and any other relevant basic information. Closely related flaws are described as a single flaw: (If you don't want to read all of these details, skip to part 3: application .) category: BIOCHEMICAL subcategory: excess growth 1. epidermal skin cell division, mouth cell division, and sebum: In unmodified humans, skin cells of the epidermis, which are called keratinocytes, like all human cells except for neurons, constantly divide, and the older keratinocytes are constantly pushed toward the surface and die as the younger keratinocytes at the base of the epidermis replicate. On the skin surface, the dead keratinocytes are either consumed by microbes (mostly bacteria) directly on the skin, or they flake off as dust. In the former case, moderately-toxic and foul-smelling volatile metabolites are produced. In the latter case, dust fills the air and threatens microbial infections in the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract and reduces the oxygen supply to the blood, which in turn raises blood pressure. Dead keratinocytes constitute approximately 80 percent of indoor dust. However, some dead keratinocytes are specialized such that they do not decompose, but serve the useful function of comprising nails and the outer layer of each hair, called the cuticle. Cells that constitute the sebaceous glands divide, fill with sebum oil and die, releasing the sebum oil, which is excreted. Dihydrotestosterone receptors in the sebaceous glands increase the growth and replication of sebum cells (and thus cause increased sebum secretion), which, among the usual effects of sebum, also causes itching. Bacteria convert the sebum into the moderately-toxic volatile chemical propionic acid, which smells like sour milk. The face, ears, and scalp produce a particularly high level of sebum. However, a small amount of sebum may be beneficial to the skin, but that amount is much lower than that which is produced by the face, ears, scalp, and dihydrotestosterone receptors. Many sebum glands on the face, unlike the other sebum glands, are constructed very poorly with narrow openings and large internal sebum stores, such that they are prone to clogging and causing acne. The only way to eliminate most of the dust and toxic chemicals is to constantly wash them off with soap and water, and to do the same to the clothes that one wears (which also requires keeping multiple sets of clothing), which people do, and in so doing consume an average of over an hour of time and a great deal of energy per day. Also, the cells of the lining of the mouth, and especially the cells of the tongue, constantly divide and are consumed by microbes producing the same volatile chemicals as the decomposed keratinocytes. Such chemicals constitute halitosis, aka 'bad breath'. In the corrected state, keratinocytes will not continually reproduce and die except in the case of their useful functions in hair and nails, sebum production will be no higher in particular regions of the body, dihydrotestosterone receptors will not exist on sebaceous glands, poorly-constructed acne-prone sebaceous glands will not exist, and cells of the tongue and other parts of the interior of the mouth will not continually reproduce and die. When the stratum corneum (the outermost layer of the epidermis that consists of keratin-rich keratinocytes) is worn down or damaged, the keratinocytes immediately below the damage will quickly reproduce to repair the damage. 2. hair shedding and pubic hair length: In unmodified humans, hairs continually grow for a biologically-determined period of time, fall out, then immediately continue to grow again. As a result, a large number of hairs are shed. That is only slightly true of the hairs of the top of head and a full beard though, as such hairs grow continuously and shed rarely ever or never. With the exceptions of the hair of the top of heads and full beards, the environment is being constantly contaminated with shed hairs, which typically harbor bacteria as well. Also, shed eyelashes and eyebrows often fall into the eye and cause damage and resulting pain. Beard hairs are the fastest-growing hairs on the body, and trimming, shaving, or plucking the beard hairs is time-consuming. Pubic hairs of the armpit, genital region, and chest are impractically long and are prone to contamination. In the corrected state, hairs, with the possible exception of the hairs of the top of the head, will continue to grow until they are at full length, as gauged by the width of the hair at the base, at which point they will not shed. Plucked hairs will regrow. Hairs of the beard (when applicable), armpit, genital region, and chest (when applicable), will be short hairs of no longer than 3/8ths of an inch (about 9 millimeters), and they will be exclusively soft hairs like the hairs of most of the body, as opposed to thick bristles. 3. hair and nail growth: In unmodified humans, scalp hair, beard hair, finger nails, and toe nails grow constantly and at a slow rate. Because of that, they often grow when growth is not desired, and they often grow too slow when growth is desired, and they must be often cut when they grow past their desired length. The subject of the hair of most of the body is already covered by the modification regarding hair shedding. In the corrected state, there will be related efferent and afferent nerves in the scalp, face, finger tips, and toe tips that allow the frontal lobe to directly start or halt the growth, respectively, of the scalp hair, beard hair, finger nails, and toe nails. The afferent nerves will produce a feedback sensation when a shift in mode has occurred, such that the specific sensation indicates the specific mode, and the frontal lobe may probe any of those regions at any time to sense what mode they are in. 4. anus hairs: In unmodified humans, there is a large number of hairs that surround the anus, and those hairs are of similar length to the pubic hair of the armpits or genitals. As a result, after humans defecate, feces is caught in the hairs unless it is thoroughly washed out, such that it increases the amount of volatile moderately toxic chemicals in the air, and increases the spread of disease-causing intestinal bacteria. In the corrected state, there will be no hairs that grow on the skin within 1 inch (32 millimeters) of the anus. subcategory: general growth 5. growth rate: In unmodified humans, growth is extremely slow, such that, after conception, completing the vast majority of one's growth consumes approximately 19 years (this includes the 9 months of gestation), and completing the myelination and development of the prefrontal cortex and completing the development of the musculature consumes at least 5 more years. That is over one quarter of the average lifespan of an unmodified human, and over one third of the non-senescent lifespan. In the corrected state, the amount of time designated for growth will be drasticly lower than that of unmodified humans. Obviously, this modification can be used for rapid reproduction, an abusable ability, so to balance the advantages with the dangers, the correction will only constitute a moderate reduction in growth time, cutting total growth time by about 2/3rds and cutting gestation time by about 1/3. Gestation growth time, and especially that of early gestation, probably can not be reduced as much as post-birth growth time, the reason being that the majority of developmental organization, which may be delicate, occurs during gestation, and gestation time is already very short relative to post-birth growth time. 6. scarring: In unmodified humans, when the flesh is damaged, it repairs itself but does so crudely and poorly, leaving a scar. The tissue of a scar is more breakable and less elastic than the original tissue. That is in part due to the collagen fibers of the dermis of scars being straight, tight, and brittle, as opposed to the original tissue, in which they are more winding and elastic. In the corrected state, scars will heal completely, such that their tissue is indistinguishable from the original flesh that they replaced. The complete healing of scars is a type of regeneration. Unlike other types of regeneration, the complete healing of scars is biologically relatively simple, and scars are more common than other types of permanent physical damage. 7. regeneration: In unmodified humans, when a body part is cut off or destroyed, it does not regrow, with few exceptions, such as the liver and the finger tips. In the corrected state, any amputated or destroyed body part will regenerate completely, and without being inferior to the original part. Amphibians can regrow amputated parts, so the ability to regenerate is not only possible, but it is natural in some animals. Regrowing lost parts would of course require embryo-like action. It may be that embryological development only works because the cells thereof are relatively unspecialized, such that the genetic modifications must allow the developmental genes to direct the development of specialized cells. 8. age-induced degradation and death: In unmodified humans, all cells except for neurons (which depend upon glial cells to function) constantly divide, which results in one of the two daughter cells having a shortened DNA code due to the copying process, and the other cell being programmed to shortly die. Repeating non-coding genetic sequences called telomeres are at the ends of the entire genetic code of each chromosome, such that DNA replication damages the telomeres before it damages coding DNA, meaning that the telomeres protect the DNA. Over time, the telomeres are used up and coding DNA is damaged, resulting in age-related degradation and eventually death. In germ cells (sperm and eggs), the telomeres are restored by the telomerase-TERT (TERT is an abbreviation for telomere reverse transcriptase) protein complex. Progressive gene destruction via cell replication is not the only cause of age-related degradation. There is also the fact that the brain becomes saturated with memories and pieces of learned information (both of which consist of neuron-to-neuron connections) over time, the majority of which are probably useless or nearly-useless for one's current or future situations, and those memories are never erased completely. There is also the fact that microscopic cracks in the teeth that accumulate with time create deposits of enamel (pure hydroxyapatite crystal, which is hard but brittle) within the dentin (collagen fibers saturated with hydroxyapatite, which is softer but not brittle), which causes the teeth to become more brittle. That may be called 'tooth scarring', and it is an issue of both aging and regeneration, and there may also be other forms of cumulative scarring that cause elements of aging. There may also be parts of the body that do not cease growing after their appropriate growth is complete, but rather continue to grow at a very slow rate, such that they become enlarged with age. The ears may be one of such parts. Continual growth may also be the cause of wrinkles, due to the skin continuing to grow. Automatic age-induced death serves a useful evolutionary purpose, though age-induced degeneration doesn't, except insofar as it is conducive to death. Automatic age-induced death serves the evolutionary purpose of destroying old genetic combinations so as to decrease the consumption of resources which can be consumed by newer genetic combinations, which are typically better evolved. That is usually beneficial to the group, but some older individuals have better genes than the average young person, such that some high-quality older genomes are wasted, and some younger individuals have worse genes than the average old person, such that some low-quality younger genomes are wastefully supported. There is also the fact that growing a new human to replace a dead or senescent one consumes a vast amount of growth time, food, money, and time and energy for education and learning to talk. Death, by the way, is not a form of conscious harm as suffering is. Only memory creates the illusion of a single chronicly-coherent self. Due to the fact that a person's sensations of the past and future moments are not the same as those of the present moment, and the fact that pharmaceuticals can alter a person's fundamental intent (which consists of fundamental abstract perceptions), the conscious self exists in the moment and dies with the passing of every moment. Death is the loss of the physical body, the information stored within the brain, and the neurological traits that create conscious selves of a particular fundamental intent. In the corrected state, no forms of age-induced degeneration or age-induced death will occur, including, but not limited to, telomere shortening, accumulation of unerasable memories and learned pieces of information, cumulative scarring in dentin or elsewhere, or continual growth of tissues after their appropriate size has been attained. Cells will not divide continually as they do in unmodified humans, but rather they will only divide for the purposes of growth and regeneration. The reduced cell division will also reduce the body's demands for energy and protein. All human cells will express telomerase and TERT anyway, such that growth and regeneration will not shorten the telomeres. All of those modifications will only be made on zygotes that have been modified to produce fine, clear, rightful intent, such that the humans so modified will voluntarily die if and when it will benefit the whole of society. subcategory: autonomy 9. vitamins and other essential chemicals: In unmodified humans, there is a dependency upon many different environment-derived chemicals, either for survival, basic health, or optimum function. Those chemicals are the fat-soluble vitamins, the water-soluble vitamins, the essential amino acids, the essential fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, creatine, carnitine, taurine, choline, and antioxidants. Some of such chemicals are produced by the human body, but only in minimal amounts. Consuming all of such chemicals in a sufficient and optimum amount is very difficult, and the dependency thereof is very dangerous due to the unreliable nature of both the economy and the natural environment. Also, any dependence upon rare substances can be used for the purpose of extortion. In the corrected state, humans will possess all of the enzymes necessary to convert common biochemical substances into all of the essential chemicals that are required in small amounts. The enzymes necessary to synthesize the essential chemicals exist in other organisms (else the chemicals would not exist in the first place), so they will be transferred to humans from those organisms. Increasing the production of chemical-synthesizing enzymes that humans already possess requires only a small genetic modification. The enzymes will be expressed only in specialized cells, preferably located on the interior surface of blood vessels, so as to release the chemicals into the blood stream. The specialization is necessary to prevent the newly-implanted enzymes from interfering with biochemicals of other tissues. 10. minerals: In unmodified humans, there is a dependency upon very small amounts of many different elements. The elements calcium and phosphorus serve as essential structural materials of bones and teeth. The elements sodium, calcium, potassium, and chlorine serve as essential electrolytes in neurons. Most other trace minerals serve as coenzymes. Most or all of the required trace elements other than those already mentioned are chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lithium, magnesium, manganese, selenium, zinc, and possibly other elements also. The human body wastes a large quantity of minerals by excreting them in the urine, and possibly some in the feces, rather than recovering and recycling them. Consuming all of the essential elements in an amount that is sufficient for optimum function is very difficult, though corrupt government agencies that serve various food and vitamin companies greatly exaggerate the necessary requirements. The dependence upon constant environmental sources of all of those minerals is very dangerous due to the unreliable nature of both the economy and the natural environment. Also, any dependence upon environmental sources of rare substances can be used for the purpose of extortion. In the corrected state, there will be many proteins that prevent minerals from being excreted from the body, and recover them for reuse, except when there is a large excess of a mineral. 11. cellulase: In unmodified humans, the gene that codes for the proteins of the conversion of cellulose and the related disaccharide cellobiose into glucose, which are collectively called cellulase, are absent. Those proteins are also absent in all other vertebrates. In animals that can digest cellulose, that ability only exists due to the fact that those animals harbor cellulose-digesting microbes, which are delicate and very energy-intensive to maintain. Despite the omnipresence of that lack of ability, the ability to digest cellulose is such a fundamental function that it's absence constitutes a flaw. The vast majority of plant matter is composed of cellulose, meaning that very little plant matter is edible to unmodified humans, and of that which is, little of it is healthy. Also, undigested cellulose in the food of unmodified humans, which constitutes most dietary fiber, is decomposed by archaebacteria which convert it to methane, which causes both farts and gas pains. In the corrected state, humans will possess the genes of the cellulase proteins. The cellulase proteins will be expressed in the small intestine rather than the stomach, as the stomach is highly acidic and may halt the function of the cellulase. 12. stasis ability: In unmodified humans, a large amount of energy, that being over half of the energy of sedentary humans, is constantly consumed for the purpose of sustaining the body temperature of between 97 and 100 degrees fahrenheit (about 37 degrees celsius), which human proteins function best in. The human body temperature drops from birth to adulthood by about 1.5 degrees. The human body constantly generates heat, which is why temperatures above 85 degrees are perceived by humans as hot, even when resting, meaning that the human body wastes a great deal of energy in the generation of heat. If the body temperature drops by even a few degrees, many proteins, especially those of the nervous system, will falter, resulting in a condition called hypothermia, and if it drops as low as 78 degrees fahrenheit (20 degrees below normal), death occurs. Many animals are cold-blooded, such that they can live and function through large temperature changes, and their proteins are functional over a wide range of temperature, though they are less effective than those of warm-blooded animals that are at their optimum temperature. Also, many mammals can hibernate and drop their temperature by over 10 degrees. Due to the laws of thermodynamics, the greater the difference in temperature between 2 adjacent bodies, the higher the rate of heat transfer between the 2. Humans evolved a high blood temperature because the use of clothing allowed it. The average human heart rate is approximately 70 beats per minute. When that beat lowers enough such that the cells do not have sufficient oxygen to maintain their metabolic functions, the most prominent of which is body temperature maintenance, they automatically die. When the human heart rate drops greatly below it's average resting rate, pulmonary edema occurs. Pulmonary edema is the filling of the lungs with fluid from the capillaries. Pulmonary edema due to greatly-decreased heart rate is the result of the pressure in the veins increasing from a negative pressure to a neutral pressure, as fluid is kept out of the lungs due to a pressure balance. Because of all of those facts, humans are very vulnerable to cold and/or starvation, and extremely vulnerable to temporary lapses in heart function. In the corrected state, the pressure balance mechanism of the capillary fluid in the lungs will be replaced with a pressure-independent system. The mechanisms that cause cells to automatically die when only partially deprived of oxygen will not be present. Humans will be able to conserve energy in a manner that is initiated by the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) by dropping their body temperature by at least 30 degrees (at least about 70 degrees fahrenheit) and lowering their heart rate by at least half, at the expense of efficient muscular and neural function. That will be possible because humans will have some of the neuron proteins from cold-blooded animals that will allow the neural system to maintain basic function at low temperatures, particularly the maintenance of heart pumping and breathing, and a minimal amount of consciousness that will allow the frontal cortex to initiate the end of the stasis state when appropriate. The ability to drop the body temperature and/or heart rate even further, with or without the use of biological antifreeze, such that an exceptional amount of energy can be conserved and life can be sustained through great cold and/or starvation, constitutes an enhancement. not within a subcategory: 13. glucose management: In unmodified humans, when a substantial amount of glucose from food is consumed, it is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream due to the effects of the polypeptide gastrin, and in turn it stimulates the production of the protein insulin and the polypeptide GIP (which increases insulin) to rapidly counteract the heightened glucose by storing it as glycogen in the cells, especially muscle and liver cells, and none in neurons or glials. The leftover insulin in turn continues to lower the glucose beyond it's original level. There is no specific hormone that slows digestion without causing an additional effect, such as high insulin (as in the polypeptide GIP). Neurons or glials do not store glucose, nor do they derive energy from lipids in the bloodstream as some tissues do, but they are uniquely dependent upon blood glucose for energy, meaning that increasingly low levels of blood glucose cause corresponding increasing mental fatigue, and a very low level of blood glucose causes death due to neuron dysfunction. When the level of glycogen in the cells is at or near it's maximum, additional glucose is either converted into stored fat or wasted as heat due to an increase in the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. The thyroid gland produces about 4 times as much T4 as T3, but most T4 is converted to T3 within the cells, and T3 is much more potent than T4. T3, and to a lesser extent, T4, produce heat by acting on the mitochondria. The thyroid hormones cause hydrogen ions which are pressurized in the mitochondrial interspace (which are normally directed through the protein ATP synthase (aka ATP synthetase) to produce the energy chemical ATP) to flow back through the protein channels that they were packed though, which produces no ATP but generates a large amount of heat. In the corrected state, there will be a hormone (which may be called digestion-inhibiting hormone here) that inhibits digestion (and therefore the release of glucose and other substances into the bloodstream) without causing any other effects. Digestion-inhibiting hormone will initially be dominant over gastrin, and after food is consumed, gastrin will only rise slowly (unlike in unmodified humans), and will be regulated by the amount of glucose released in the blood, such that a high level thereof halts gastrin production and induces the production of digestion-inhibiting hormone to the appropriate degree, such that there can not be spikes or dips in blood glucose. When the level of glycogen in the cells is at it's maximum, digestion-inhibiting hormone will rise and greatly slow digestion, as contrasted with unmodified humans, in which the excess glucose is converted to fat or burned off as excess heat. The level of glycogen stored in the cells will be directly proportional to the level of somatotropin (aka growth hormone) that is secreted into the bloodstream. 14. muscle latching: In unmodified humans, when a muscle is contracted to a certain degree (and therefore also the part that it moves), it constantly consumes energy in maintaining that state, especially if it is lifting a heavy load. The constant contraction of the muscle causes it to tire quickly. For every human muscle, only about 1/4th of the available muscle fibers are used. That serves the purpose of energy conservation, and it eliminates the necessity of making the bones stronger and heavier, which would further consume energy. When norepinephrine or epinephrine is very high, the latent muscular fibers are disinhibited. In the corrected state, there will be a latching mechanism within the muscles that prevents them from consuming energy when in a constant degree of contraction. The latch though will be capable of being broken with sufficient force in a manner that does not cause any damage, so as to prevent weakened or broken bones, tendons, and/or ligaments. The latching mechanism will also incorporate the latent muscle fibers, so as to prevent any possible damage to the muscle fibers from a heavy load. 15. muscle and cardiovascular adaptation: In unmodified humans, increasing muscle strength, muscle endurance, or general cardiovascular endurance is an extremely time-consuming process, taking several weeks or even several months. When a body is not exercised, the muscles and cardiovascular system eventually degrade to a very weak state. The strength of a muscle is determined by the quantity of myofibrils within it. The endurance of a muscle is determined by the quantity of sarcoplasm in it. Sarcoplasm consists of capillaries and mitochondria. General cardiovascular ability is determined by the strength of the heart muscle, the size of the lungs, and the degree of blood vessel permeation. Dihydrotestosterone receptors in the muscles decrease the speed with which both myofibrils and sarcoplasm grow in response to exercise. In the corrected state, the lower limit to which the muscles and cardiovascular system can degrade due to lack of exercise will be much higher than that of unmodified humans. Adaptive growth of the muscles and cardiovascular system in response to exercise will be 3 times faster than that of unmodified humans. Increasing the speed of muscle or cardiovascular adaptation much more than that constitutes an enhancement. 16. cancer: In unmodified humans, when DNA is damaged, such as by radiation or chemicals, the cell of the DNA has a small but substantial probability of becoming cancer. That is due to the damage of a specific gene or genes. In the corrected state, there will be several genes throughout the genome that produce proteins that serve the sole function of recognizing their cell as cancerous and killing it if that is the case, such that cancer can not occur as a result of general DNA damage. category: GROSS PHYSICAL subcategory: mobility 17. neck turning: In unmodified humans, the head can turn only about 70 degrees to either side by the action of it's own muscles. That limitation is caused by the position of the sternocleidomastoid muscle attachment on the skull, as it is situated not very far back. If the head is relaxed and turned by the hands, it can turn only about 80 degrees. That is due to the tightness of the connective tissues and/or the limit of turning of the cervical vertebra bones. In the corrected state, the sternocleidomastoid muscle attachment on the skull will be situated about 2 inches further back, the connective tissues of the neck that limit neck twisting will be loosened, and the cervical vertebrae will have any necessary alterations to allow the head to turn as far as the other parts allow. Together, that will allow the head to turn about 100 degrees to either side. 18. shoulder mobility: In unmodified humans, the shoulder, the position of which moves with the clavicle (collar bone) can be revolved around the torso about 30 degrees forward and about 60 degrees backward. Resting the shoulder-moving muscles and moving the shoulder via an external force does not increase either of those numbers, meaning that the movement limitation is not due to the muscles of movement, but rather the connective tissues and/or bone. There is no 'shoulder bone', but rather the bone inside the shoulder is the head of the humerus (the upper arm bone). The shoulder often obstructs motion, and especially forward motion, due to it's prominence and relative rigidity of position. In the corrected state, the bones, connective tissues, and muscles of the shoulder region will be such that the shoulder will be able to revolve around the torso 90 degrees forward and 90 degrees backward. 19. thumb and palm finger mobility: In unmodified humans, various connective tissues drasticly restrict the maximum angle of the thumb to the second metacarpal bone (in the edge of the palm), such that when the thumb is aligned with the 2nd palm finger (aka middle finger), it can only extend about 50 degrees away from the palm. As a result, a hand can not effectively hold a large but light-weight load. The palm fingers (meaning the fingers other than the thumb here) have minimal ability to twist, much less twist independently. As a result, a hand can not effectively handle multiple objects. The palm fingers can not bend backward, under their own power, by more than 45 degrees beyond being aligned with the palm, and some individual fingers, especially when straight, can not bend forward or backward relative to the adjacent fingers by more than 45 degrees or less. As a result, many tasks that require the use of only one finger, or a specific combination of fingers, can not be done without the other fingers getting in the way. In the corrected state, the connective tissues that determine the maximum angle of the thumb relative the palm will be long and/or loose enough such that the thumb, when aligned with the middle finger, will have a maximum thumb-to-palm angle of about 100 degrees, and any related necessary muscle structure will be present. All of the palm fingers will be able to twist independently by about 45 degrees in either direction, due to the presence of diagonal muscles that attach to the metacarpals (long bones inside the palm) and the proximal phalanx bones (bones of the fingers nearest to the palm) of the palm fingers, and any related necessary traits of the bones and connective tissues. The palm fingers will be able to bend backward, under their own power, by 90 degrees. Each palm finger will not be any more restrained in it's range of motion, relative to it's maximum range, based upon the degree of bending of any of the other fingers, due to the absence of the relevant restraining connective tissues and/or feedback nerves. 20. eye and ear coverage from sensory excess: In unmodified humans, the eye can cover itself with the thin eyelid, which translucently lets a substantial fraction of light through, probably no more than 1/8th, but that is nonetheless not sufficient to protect from bright lights. The eyes can be squinted further, such that wrinkles of skin protect the eyes more, but that is very energy-consuming. The ears do not have any self-covering mechanism. Because of that, it is necessary to to use the hands to cover or uncover the ears, which interferes with the necessary activity of the hands, and it is necessary to use artificial earphones to cover the ears at all without having to use the hands constantly. In the corrected state, humans will have a second, thicker eyelid that can be lowered without the use of constant flexing. The second eyelid will contain a thick layer (about 2 millimeters) of collagen and cover the eye surface completely. The ear opening will be surrounded by a thick muscle sphincter (about 1/4 inch / 6 millimeters thick) that can be sealed completely. The sphincters of the ears will contain a latching mechanism which eliminates the necessity of constant flexing. The muscles of both structures will be attached to nearby motor nerves. 21. nose and ear coverage from foreign substances: In unmodified humans, neither the nose nor the ears can close themselves. As a result, foreign substances other than air can enter them. That is especially true in the case of submerging the head in a fluid, usually water, at certain angles, in which the fluid enters the nasal sinus and/or auditory canal. In the corrected state, the nose will contain a muscle sphincter that can close the nose opening completely. The ear will contain a small, thin muscle sphincter 1 millimeter within the opening, which can close completely, and is thin enough to allow most sound to pass through. The sphincters of both the nose and the ears will contain a latching mechanism which eliminates the necessity of constant flexing. 22. trachea contamination: In unmodified humans, if a substance, such as a liquid, a thick semi-liquid such as mucus (a solution of the glycoprotein mucin), or a solid object, is in the trachea, there is no way to easily remove the foreign substance. The trachea consists of many incomplete 300-degree cartilage rings with the gap in the back, which are held together by connective tissue. The upper trachea in the throat is a thick one-piece tube of cartilage. Coughing is only effective in removing material from lower levels of the bronchial tree, as air simply flows past substances that adhere to the walls of the trachea. If the lungs are empty of air when a solid object becomes lodged in the trachea, then there is little that can be done to remove it. In the corrected state, the trachea can be contracted semi-shut in the front-to-back dimension by multiple muscle sphincters, which will be possible due to the cartilage being thin on the sides of the trachea. That will allow solid objects to be removed more easily, and it will allow the the area through which the air flows to be reduced, thus allowing substances that adhere to the wall of the trachea to be expelled. subcategory: durability 23. foot vulnerability: In unmodified humans, the foot, due to hundreds of thousands of years of shoe usage, is not suited for it's function of protecting against hard ground substances and various sharp natural objects that are often on the ground. In particular, the foot has vulnerable blood vessels under it that are prone to damage from high pressure, and the bones of the human foot have little protection from impact. In the corrected state, there will be a layer of cartilage about 3/16ths of an inch thick (about 4.5 millimeters) that covers the bone on the soles of the feet. Also, the blood vessels under the feet will be smaller, such that they are less effected by high pressure. 24. butt vulnerability: In unmodified humans, when the weight of the body is on the butt, which in turn is on a hard surface, the weight is concentrated on the 2 small areas (one on each side) of the edges of the blade-like ischium bones and the flesh that is trapped between the bone and the hard surface. That causes some damage to the flesh, and over time, it can warp the structure of the bone, as is evident by the differences in hip bone form in cultures of people that often sit on their butt and those of people who do not. In the corrected state, the lower part of the ischium will be twice as wide as that of an unmodified human, and there will be a 1/4th-inch-thick (8 millimeters) layer of cartilage on the outside edge of the ischium. 25. solar plexus vulnerability: In unmodified humans, there is a large group of interconnected nerve ganglia located behind the stomach. It is popularly called the solar plexus, or more properly, the celiac plexus. The celiac plexus is linked to the stomach, duodenum (the first part of the small intestines), liver, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, and adrenal glands. The celiac plexus uses feedback from each organ to coordinate their actions. If the horizontal middle of the front of the torso, between the 2 downward dips of each side of ribs is quickly impacted with even little force, it temporarily disrupts the function of the celiac plexus, causing indigestion, and it causes a large amount of pain during and immediately after the impact. In the corrected state, the solar plexus will not be prone to being damaged by an impact any more so than the small intestines. 26. esophagus vulnerability: In unmodified humans, the esophagus is particularly vulnerable to damage, and therefore pain, from an impact or pressure on the front of the trachea, as the esophagus is soft and is situated between the vertebra bones and the thick cartilaginous trachea. In the corrected state, the esophagus will be at least twice as thick as that of unmodified humans, such that it will be able to distribute the pressure and therefore be able to withstand a low level of pressure without being damaged. 27. testicle vulnerability: In unmodified humans, in males, the testicles are situated outside the main body, are unprotected, and are very vulnerable to damage and the resulting pain, such that males must be always be cautious not to damage them. In the corrected state, there will be a durable, semi-flexible wall of cartilage of about 1/8th of an inch thick (about 3 millimeters) that lines the scrotum and is anchored on the pelvis bone. 28. vagina vulnerability in childbirth: In unmodified humans, in females, the vagina is not constructed to easily stretch widely enough for a baby to fit through without causing significant tissue damage and resulting pain. In the corrected state, the vagina will be modified to be elastic enough to allow babies to pass through in the absence of tissue damage or the pain that results from it. 29. brain-skull interface: In unmodified humans, there is minimal cushioning substance between the brain and the skull, and as a result, the brain is very vulnerable to damage by mere low-intensity jarring, such as jerking the head by ones own neck muscles. In the corrected state, a cushioning tissue of about 1/4 of an inch (about 7 millimeters) will be between the brain and the skull. The presence of additional cushioning material that can protect the brain against high-intensity jarring constitutes an enhancement. The best biological cushioning substance is a matrix of collagen and elastin fibers and fat. not within a subcategory: 30. saliva secretion: In unmodified humans, there are 3 major sets of glands of the slime called saliva, those being the sublingual gland, the submaxillary gland, and the parotid gland. There are 2 components of saliva, which are the bubbly watery substance serous, which contains digestive enzymes, especially amylase, and the thick bubble-free substance mucus, which is a solution of the glycoprotein mucin. The sublingual glands produce mostly mucus, whereas the submaxillary and parotid glands produce mostly serous. Humans constantly produce and swallow saliva. Saliva serves the purpose of washing away the substances in the mouth that microbes feed and reproduce upon. Microbes in the mouth feed and reproduce on 2 substances, which are pieces of food and dead cells of the interior of the mouth. Due to the other genetic modification of preventing the continual division and death of cells of the interior of the mouth, the latter substance will no longer be a problem. Plain water is sufficient to clean pieces of food from the mouth. In the corrected state, the saliva glands will have the ability to secrete pure water in addition to serous and mucus. The degree of secretion of each of the 3 different types of saliva will be directly controlled by the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain). 31. sinus access: In unmodified humans, the nostril openings are small relative to the size of the nasal sinus, and a large, flat, vertical piece of cartilage called the septum splits both the nasal sinus and the nostrils into 2. The part of the septum in the nose is anchored to bones at the top and bottom of the nose. That causes those 2 bones to be very vulnerable to breakage due to bending of the septum. The nostril openings are constricted relative to the cavity within the nose. The nasal sinus often becomes clogged with semi-dry mucus, due to disease, allergic reactions, or for the purpose of filtering out airborne particles (which is related to allergic reactions). The function of mucus of filtering air is important for improving the oxygen supply to the blood. When the nasal sinus is clogged with mucus, the opposite occurs, as breathing is diverted to the mouth, which causes minimal air filtration. In the corrected state, the nasal septum will not exist and the nostril openings will be unconstricted, such that semi-solid mucus clogs in the nasal sinus can be removed. category: NEUROLOGICAL subcategory: control 32. esophagus peristalsis and gag reflexes: In unmodified humans, the esophagus automatically and irreversibly pushes food or other material down from top to bottom if it is placed in the top of the esophagus. That is called the peristalsis reflex. The intestines also have a peristalsis reflex. Often, a human eats toxic food, due to spoilage or otherwise, and smells the toxic odors of the contaminated food just as it is being swallowed by the peristalsis reflex, and the human is aware of the toxic nature of the food but is unable to regurgitate it because the peristalsis reflex has irreversibly pushed the contaminated food down. When a finger or other object is inserted into the back of the mouth, the gag reflex occurs, which consists of a tightening of the throat combined with a forward heave. That prevents the examination of the back of the mouth or the removal of any thick mucus, other thick semi-liquids, or other objects stuck there. In the corrected state, the esophagus peristalsis reflex will be reversible by the direct control of the conscious brain, and the gag reflex will not be present. 33. sleep induction and necessary duration: In unmodified humans, sleep occurs in relatively rigid cycles, and can be greatly altered by external factors, especially bright light versus dim light, standing versus laying posture (which is the result of the fact that norepinephrine is lower when one is laying, as norepinephrine causes wakefulness), gastrointestinal disturbance (which causes wakefulness), hunger (which causes wakefulness), and emotional arousal (which causes high norepinephrine and therefore wakefulness). Aside from the external factors that alter the time of sleep induction, sleep is primarily induced by neural fatigue. Sleep serves the function of expending energy largely for the purposes of growth, wound healing, and fighting disease, and sleep also serves the functions of consolidating memories and restoring the nervous system. The last of those functions is the one that sleep is most specificly essential for. A human that is completely deprived of sleep dies after approximately 10 days, due to degradation of the nervous system. The complete span of sleep for the average adult human is 7 hours (not 8 hours, as has often been popularized). A few humans, due to rare genetic alleles, can restore themselves with as little as 4 hours of sleep. Evolving rapid restoration to reduce sleep hours is no evolutionary difficulty, as long sleep hours exist primarily for the purpose of conserving energy, though it is not very efficient to that end, as the body temperature and heart rate do not lower greatly. Because of that, prey animals that are always vulnerable, particularly the ungulates, have unlengthened sleep hours, whereas animals that are in little danger, such as predators, have greatly lengthened sleep hours. The rigid sleep cycles create the effect called jet lag when a person has travelled by airplane over several timezones over a short period of time. The rigid sleep cycles, as well as the various external factors that effect sleep, greatly disrupt potential human productivity and schedule-keeping. In the corrected state, humans will be able to induce sleep directly from the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) at any time, with an induction time of no more than 5 seconds, and they will be able to prolong wakefulness in a neurally-fatigued state for several hours without being involuntarily pulled into sleep. Due to accelerated restoration, the necessary duration of sleep will be at least as low as 4 hours. 34. vagus nerve and pituitary effects: In unmodified humans, the heart rate, blood pressure, vasodilation versus vasoconstriction, degree of perspiration on the hands and armpits, cortisol secretion (cortisol weakens various components of the body), and sebum production is not under any substantial direct control by the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain), but rather, with the exception of control by physical necessity (such as exercise or temperature), they are under the control of the emotions, especially anger and anxiety, but also other emotions as well. The control of those physiological functions by the emotions is mediated by norepinephrine, the vagus nerve (one of the 12 cranial nerves), the sympathetic nervous system (which is directed by a row of ganglions on each side of the spinal cord), the parasympathetic nervous system, and the pituitary gland (which is the 'master gland' which directs the other glands of the body). As a result of that emotional control, there are bad and/or distracting effects, such as muscle weakening (due to cortisol), weakened immune system (also due to cortisol), heart problems (due to blood pressure, heart rate, and vasoconstriction), itching (due to increased sebum production), the inability to hold writing utensils (due to palm sweating), and clothes soaking (due to increased armpit sweating). In the corrected state, the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) will have direct control over the physical effects produced by the emotions on heart rate, blood pressure, vasodilation versus vasoconstriction, and cortisol secretion. The emotion-induced physiological effects of increased sweating of the palms and armpits and increased sebum production will be completely absent, as they serve no practical function, at least in modern humans. 35. detrimental strong motivational emotions: In unmodified humans, there is a vulnerability to having powerful emotions that can override the restraining force of judgment. The most notable emotions thereof are anger, fear, and desire for various pleasures. Judgment is caused by the prefrontal cortex. In the corrected state, humans will be able to directly restrain the strength of their motivational emotions from their frontal cortex, which is the thinking part of the brain. 36. penile erection: In unmodified humans, in males, the penis can become erect or stay erect against conscious intent, due to being controlled by other factors, those being psychological sexual arousal and non-psychological factors. Because of that, an erection that is visible can deceptively indicate that a human male is psychologically sexually aroused when they are not, and in turn cause others to consider them to be less responsible in their work ethic than they in fact are, and in turn trust them less than is appropriate. In the corrected state, penile erection will never occur nor maintain itself against conscious intent, due to a direct efferent neural pathway from the motor cortex to terminals that relax the veins of the penis, thereby terminating erection when intended. 37. ovulation periods: In unmodified humans, in females after the age of puberty, there is an involuntary 28-day cycle in which the sex hormones estradiol and progesterone greatly fluctuate, the uterus is prepared for birth with a lining of flesh that is rich in blood vessels, an egg is made fertile for conception, and the egg and the bloody uterus lining are discarded out of the vagina if conception does not occur in what is called menstruation, which is usually the case. The blood and other materials that are involuntarily expelled from the vagina can soil clothing and other objects and can disrupt activities, unless the vagina is plugged or covered with artificial absorbent material during the days that the menstrual discharge occurs or is likely to occur. The involuntary ovulation cycle can cause unintended pregnancy. In the corrected state, ovulation will be initiated directly by the conscious intent of the frontal lobe of the cerebrum, via a brain region adjacent to that which causes voluntary urination, and by no other cause. 38. memory management: In unmodified humans, memories (not excluding learned facts) can be formed and/or maintained against conscious intent, and memories can be lost against conscious intent. As a result, valued memories are often lost and unvalued memories increasingly consume the brain's capacity for memory until it is expended or nearly-expended, and that constitutes a major factor of aging. In the corrected state, there will be direct projections from the frontal lobe (the thinking part of the brain) to the parts of the brain that store memories, such that conscious intent can prevent the formation of a memory, erase or weaken a memory, or make a memory immune to automatic degradation. However, highly familiar, repetitively used memories will not be subject to being erased. not within a subcategory: 39. the hiccup reflex: In unmodified humans, there is an involuntary reflex, called a hiccup, that tightens the diaphragm and resultingly compresses and lifts the lungs and ribs, seals the throat, and creates a small amount of dull pain. In addition to the purposeless dull pain that hiccups cause, they disrupt breathing, talking, eating, and to a lesser extent, every other activity. Hiccups are caused by the phrenic nerve, which controls the contraction of the diaphragm. The phrenic nerve is prone to firing in the absence of stimuli or in the presence of irrelevant stimuli, especially the expansion of the esophagus or stomach due to food and/or drink. In the corrected state, the hiccup reflex will not be present, due to the phrenic nerve not firing in the presence of irrelevant stimuli or no stimuli at all. 40. yawning: In unmodified humans, there is an involuntary movement, called a yawn, in which the mouth opens and air is inhaled, though not necessarily through the mouth. The yawn might serve the useful purpose of clearing built-up carbon dioxide out of the lungs when appropriate, and the opening of the mouth may serve the useful purpose of increasing the effectiveness of the jaw muscle by eliminating the effects of short-term stagnation, as all reflexive stretching may do. However, the involuntary opening of the mouth disrupts speech, eating / drinking, and playing musical instruments, and can cause saliva, food / drink, or transported objects to fall out of the mouth. When a person observes an other person yawn, they themself feel like yawning and often do, which is disruptive to a person's activities. In the corrected state, the yawn will never occur when conscious intent is opposed to it, even if only somewhat opposed, and the observation of an other person's yawn will not increase the probability that one's self will yawn. 41. automatic neuron apoptosis: In unmodified humans, when certain neural pathways are inactive for a certain amount of time, they automaticly degrade. Destroying some of such neurons serves the useful function of making room for glials. To destroy a large fraction of such neurons serves the function of conserving a small amount of energy, at a great expense of functionality. The latter function is the only reason for pathway degradation in the periphery (outside the brain). In the corrected state, no automatic neural pathway degradation due to disuse will occur in the periphery, and the maximum degree of such automatic degradation in the brain will be greatly limited. 42. memory alteration: In unmodified humans, whenever a sensory memory (which is analog, as distinguished from learned facts, which are digital) is recalled, there is a large chance that it will be altered in the retrieval process, especially in the small details that are not specificly noted (as those noted details are digital). As a result, a given sensory memory is likely to become less accurate with every retrieval. In the corrected state, the retrieval of sensory memories will not cause them to be altered or prone to alteration. 43. subliminal messages, suggestion, and hypnosis: In unmodified humans, the action of the body (not excluding the brain) can be made to contradict natural conscious intent via the use of subliminal messages, the power of suggestion, and hypnosis. In the corrected state, subliminal messages, the power of suggestion, and hypnosis will not be capable of causing the action of the body to contradict conscious intent, due to the neural pathways that they depend upon being absent. 44. depression and excess pain: In unmodified humans, physical pain often occurs in uselessly high degrees. Physical pain serves the useful function of causing humans or other conscious animals to not do certain actions that are damaging to themself or to extricate themself from a situation that is damaging themself. Beyond a certain degree, pain does not motivate a person any more than that which is required for them to do all that they can to prevent themself from being damaged. Also, the high degree of pain impairs cognition, which is necessary to devise methods by which to prevent oneself from being damaged. In the corrected state, there will be un upper limit to the degree of physical pain that a human can feel, due to a limitation of the quantity of the brain receptors nk1, nk2, bradykinin receptors, and possibly also the nociceptin receptor. Depression will be completely absent, as it serves no practical function, at least in modern humans. 45. pleasure addiction and tolerance: In unmodified humans, the infusion into the bloodstream of chemicals that produce pleasure, and to a lesser extent the experience of any type of strong pleasure, produces a psychological dependence upon such pleasure so as to avoid a strong painful sensation of restlessness (caused by the nk1 receptor). It also decreases the strength of the pleasure that is produced from the same source (an effect called 'tolerance'), thus motivating erratic and unreliable behavior due to uncertain rewards. Tolerance is caused largely by the nociceptin receptor. In the corrected state, pleasure will not cause addiction or tolerance. 46. socially destructive evolutionary hangover character traits: In unmodified humans, there is malicious intent, malice being defined as the desire to perceive and act with crude blind wrongness, and it's opposite, goodwill, being defined as the desire to perceive and act with fine clear rightness. In a scientificly knowledgeable society, clear-sighted goodwill is beneficial and blind malice is detrimental, whereas in a scientificly unknowledgeable society, including that of the non-human animals, the opposite is more often than not true. Specificly, malice has various effects, which are: 1. the desire to maintain problems rather than overcome them, 2. the desire to arbitrarily control, harass, torture, and steal from others, and 3. the desire to serve a single clan patriarch at the expense of the group. When technology is poor, it is more beneficial to the species to maliciously ignore problems rather then overcome them. When heredity and controlled humane eugenics is unknown of, it is more beneficial to the species to engage in random dominance competition, and to be permissive toward the aggression one's own children, than to breed all individuals without restriction. When the benefits of large-scale teamwork are unknown of, it is better to serve the inefficient whims of a clan patriarch (the instinctive basis of nationalism and the belief in a god) then to live autonomously. Malice is caused by the serotonin receptors 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C, the production of which is induced by sex hormones, whereas goodwill is caused by the histamine receptor H1 and the acetylcholine receptors M1 and M3. The histamine receptor H2 causes perfectionism, which is necessary for an individual to pursue useful large and long-term goals. Activity of the malicious receptors is inhibited by the inhibitory receptor 5-HT1A, and activity of the goodwilled receptors is inhibited by the inhibitory receptor M2 and a receptor of galantamine. Acetylcholine release is facilitated by the presynaptic nicotinic receptors. There are also neuropsychological side effects of goodwill and malice that have evolved as a result of the chronic favor of malice. Those are: 1. The 5-HT2C receptor increases endorphin, the 5-HT2A receptor increases dopamine, the M1 receptor decreases dopamine, and endorphin increases serotonin, 2. Acetylcholine increases the anxiety chemical cholecystokinin (cholecystokinin also causes acceleration pain), and cholecystokinin decreases both serotonin and endorphin. Also, pain that results from acceleration is caused by neural pathways in the brain that use the neurotransmitters cholecystokinin and acetylcholine, 3. M4 acetylcholine receptors convert norepinephrine into epinephrine, 4. Acetylcholine decreases multitasking ability due to the action of the M4 receptors of the striatum and possibly other factors as well, though that may also increase the ability to concentrate, 5. Sex hormones (which induce the production of malice receptors) increase the production of growth hormone (which causes physical and mental energy) or are increased in response to high growth hormone. Specificly, dihydrotestosterone increases the production of growth hormone, and growth hormone increases the production of progesterone and to a lesser extent estradiol, 6. Dihydrotestosterone induces the production of pain-decreasing enkephalin in the cingulate cortex, and estradiol induces the production of beta-endorphin, and 7. Sex hormones increase the quality of the body. Specificly, all of the sex hormones increase fertility, dihydrotestosterone causes muscle disinhibition and increased speed of muscle growth in response to exercise, especially in males, estradiol and progesterone increase bone strength and increase a female's ability to give birth to and breastfeed offspring, and all of the sex hormones improve physical attractiveness. (end of list) All of those detrimental neurological side effects of goodwill may collectively be called 'goodwill side-effect syndrome'. In the corrected state, nuclear sex hormone receptors will not induce the production of 5-HT2 receptors. Sex hormones will be medium to high, as their beneficial effects will occur without their detrimental effects. Serotonin and galanin will be low, and acetylcholine and histamine will be high. Acetylcholine will not increase the level of cholecystokinin, the M4 receptor will not convert norepinephrine into epinephrine, and acetylcholine will not impair multitasking ability, though no ability to concentrate will be sacrificed. Although this modification is a correction, it is also the basic modification that must be made to a genome before any enhancements should be made to it. This modification also guarantees that the modified human will support transhumanism. PART 3: Application As of now, mid 2005, transhumanist work has consisted of nothing except discussions, news-sharing, political debating, and some political work on behalf of issues that are related to transhumanism. There have apparently been no attempts at actually IMPLEMENTING transhumanism, that is, modifying human zygotes (probably produced in test tubes), most likely via a retroviral gene-delivery vector. The genome of an unmodified human has approximately 22,000 genes (in contrast to an early crude estimate of approximately 30,000 genes). Before the genetic modification of human zygotes occurs, it is first necessary to research the relevant genes and proteins of the various traits that are to be modified. That constitutes identifying what genes and proteins produce a specific trait; discovering how they produce that trait; learning their sequences; using that information to extrapolate the nature of the modified genes and proteins and their sequences; and testing the modified genes in animals (preferably fast-growing animals) that are sufficiently geneticly similar to humans in the relevant genes, until the modified genes function successfully. An other option is to geneticly engineer laboratory animals to grow more rapidly (so as to get faster test results) and/or to have more human-like genes (so as to get more accurate test results). It is therefore in the immediate interest of transhumanists to share any of the aforementioned research information. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:19:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:19:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: What we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves Message-ID: What we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5285932-103677,00.html Six views of the west's problems with the Muslim world reveal as much about those who hold them as the conflict itself Timothy Garton Ash Thursday September 15, 2005 Sitting in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a metal arrow on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca and the television showing a female news presenter in full hijab, I feel impelled to write about our troubles with Islam. Four years after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which were perpetrated in the name of Allah, most people living in what we still loosely call the west would agree that we do have troubles with Islam. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but most of the terrorists who threaten us claim to be Muslims. Most countries with a Muslim majority show a resistance to what Europeans and Americans generally view as desirable modernity, including the essentials of liberal democracy. Why? What's the nub of the problem? Here are six different views often heard in the west, but also, it's important to add, in Muslim countries such as Iran. As you go down the list, you might like to put a mental tick against the view you most strongly agree with. It's logically possible to put smaller ticks against a couple of others, but not against them all. 1 The fundamental problem is not just Islam but religion itself, which is superstition, false consciousness, the abrogation of reason. In principle, Christianity or Judaism are little better, particularly in the versions embraced by the American right. The world would be a much better place if everyone understood the truths revealed by science, had confidence in human reason and embraced secular humanism. If we must have a framed image of a bearded old man on the wall, let it be a photograph of Charles Darwin. What we need is not just a secular state but a secular society. This is a view held by many highly educated people in the post-Christian west, especially in western Europe, including some of my closest friends. If translated directly into a political prescription, it has the minor drawback of requiring that some 3 billion to 5 billion men and women abandon their fundamental beliefs. Nor has the track record of purely secular regimes over the last hundred years been altogether inspiring. 2 The fundamental problem is not religion itself, but the particular religion of Islam. Islam, unlike western Christianity, does not allow the separation of church and state, religion and politics. The fact that my Iranian newspaper gives the year as 1384 points to a larger truth. With its systematic discrimination against women, its barbaric punishments for homosexuality and its militant intolerance, Islam is stuck in the middle ages. What it needs is its Reformation. A very widespread view. Two objections are that such a view encourages a monolithic, essentialist understanding of Islam, and tries to understand its history too much in western terms (middle ages, Reformation). If we mean by Islam "what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do", there is a huge spectrum of different realities. 3 The problem is not Islam but Islamism. One of the world's great religions has been misrepresented by fanatics such as Osama bin Laden, who have twisted it into the service of a political ideology of hate. It's these ideologists and movements of political Islamism that we must combat. Working with the benign, peaceful majority of the world's Muslims, we can separate the poisonous fruit from the healthy tree. The view promulgated by Qur'an-toting western politicians such as George Bush and Tony Blair. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? They're not going to insult millions of Muslim voters and the foreign countries upon which the west relies for its imported oil. But do they really believe it? I have my doubts. Put them on a truth serum, and I bet they'd be closer to 2, while many atheist or agnostic European leaders would be at 1. On the other hand, this analysis is made with learning and force by distinguished specialists on the Muslim world. 4 The nub of the problem is not religion, Islam or even Islamism, but a specific history of the Arabs. Among 22 members of the Arab League, none is a home-grown democracy. (Iraq now has some elements of democracy, but hardly home-grown.) Needless to say, this is not a racist claim about Arabs but a complex argument about history, economics, political culture, society and a set of failed attempts at post-colonial modernisation. A case can be made. There are democracies with Muslim majorities (Turkey, Mali). The political scientist Alfred Stepan has written a fascinating article suggesting that, in the democracy stakes, non-Arab Muslim countries have fared roughly as well as non-Muslim countries at a comparable level of economic development. But I'm struck by the fact that even in a traditionally anti-Arab country such as Iran, very few people think the trouble is just with Arabia. 5 We, not they, are the root of the problem. From the Crusades to Iraq, western imperialism, colonialism, Christian and post-Christian ideological hegemonism have themselves created this antipathy to western liberal democracy; and, at the extreme, its mortal enemies. Moreover, after causing (by the Holocaust of European barbarism), supporting or at least accepting the establishment of the state of Israel, we have for more than half a century ignored the terrible plight of the Palestinians. A widespread view among Muslims, and by no means only among Arabs in the Middle East. Also shared, from a different starting point, by some on the western left. Of course, even if this simplistic version of history were entirely true, we couldn't change the past. But we can acknowledge the historical damage for which we are genuinely responsible. And we can do more to create a free Palestine next to a secure Israel. 6 Whatever your view of the relative merits of the west and Islam, the most acute tension comes at the edges where they meet. It arises, in particular, from the direct, personal encounter of young, first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants with western, and especially European, secular modernity. The most seductive system known to humankind, with its polychromatic consumer images of health, wealth, excitement, sex and power, is hugely attractive to young people from often poor, conservative, Muslim backgrounds. But, repelled by its hedonistic excesses or perhaps disappointed in their secret hopes, alienated by the reality of their marginalised lives in the west or feeling themselves rejected by it, a few - a tiny minority - embrace a fierce, extreme, warlike new version of the faith of their fathers. From Mohammed Atta and the Hamburg cell of al-Qaida, through the bombers of Madrid to those of London, this has become a depressingly familiar story. I wish I could find some compelling evidence against this claim. But I can't. (Can some reader help?) Even if we were to assist at the birth of a free Palestine and pull out of Iraq tomorrow, this problem would remain. It threatens to make Europe a less civilised, comfortable place to live over the next 10 years. Now, which of the six views got your largest tick? In answering that question, you will not just be saying something about the Islamic world; you will be saying something about yourself. For what we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves. Tell me your Islam and I will tell you who you are. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:19:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:19:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edward Smith: Catalog Of Correctable Omnipresent Human Flaws Message-ID: Edward Smith: Catalog Of Correctable Omnipresent Human Flaws http://www.transhumanismus.demokratietheorie.de/docs/the_catalog_of_correctable_human_flaws.html [I wonder how the intelligent designers will handle this.] PART 1: Corrections, Enhancements, And Species Names All human bodies have numerous flaws which can be eliminated by geneticly modifying the zygote. Those flaws exist because their elimination was and is not necessary for the survival of the human species. However, their elimination would greatly increase the efficiency of our actions, and thus both our physical prosperity and our quality of life. A distinction must be made between corrections and enhancements. Corrections are removals of negatives whereas enhancements are additions of positives. The line between a correction and an enhancement is not entirely defined, but most modifications clearly fall on one side or the other. A correction constitutes the replacement of an important trait that had evolved away due to lack of necessity, or the correction of a trait that had evolved wrongly due to evolutionary expedience, except when the correction of such a trait satisfies the criteria for being an enhancement. An enhancement constitutes any augmentation of ones abilities that are characterized as being competitive, other than the removal of specific weaknesses, or any elaborate or unnatural addition. Many examples of enhancements are: 1. enhancements, beyond the removal of specific weaknesses, of muscle strength, muscle disinhibition, muscle endurance, cardiovascular endurance, skill, sensory breadth, sensory sensitivity, intelligence, mental skills, appearance, speed of development, or ability to feel pleasure, 2. the ability to extract energy from sunlight, hydrocarbons, or other sources that are unnatural for animals, 3. chameleon-like color-changing ability or other camouflage, 4. echolocation ability (which is mostly applicable in the dark), 5. built-in phosphorescent light(s), 6. built-in fire lighter(s) (most likely phosphoric and sulfuric), 7. wings, fins, claws, gills, serpentine arms, cold-bloodedness, or any other complex animal-like traits, 8. built-in weapons, 9. built-in armor beyond the removal of any specific weaknesses, 10. any purely cosmetic alteration. Obviously, some of such enhancements would not even be practical, especially since artificial non-biological objects can serve many of those functions, though such artificial non-biological objects are often expensive and in any case they depend upon a technological industrial infrastructure and access to that infrastructure. It is evident that enhancements are further subdivisible into at least 2 general types, which are: 1. enhancements that are cosmetic, random, or otherwise not particularly practical, which may be called 'random enhancements', and 2. enhancements that are clearly practical, and which can be applied for the purpose of competition with others, which may be called 'competitive enhancements'. Many enhancements fall on a spectrum between those 2 sub-categories. It is important to first focus on corrections rather than enhancements, the reason being that corrections are limited in their scope (there are most likely only 40-50 possible corrections) and mostly benefit an individual by themself, whereas enhancements are virtually unlimited in their scope, are mostly beneficial to an individual in competition with others, and/or are prone to abuse. Pursuing the latter traits may thus touch off a rash of socially mutually-destructive genetic competition if it is not clear that such enhancements must only be made with the most rightful and socially responsible of intentions, as characterized by the geneticly-determined character of the enhanced beings, such that they have a fine, clear, rightness-seeking abstract focus (caused by the H1, M1, and M3 receptors in unmodified humans), which works in opposition to both crude blind wrongness-seeking focus (caused by the 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C receptors in unmodified humans) and ethically indifferent greed. Luckily though, if a person is rational enough to support transhumanism, then they are more likely to be rational enough to realize that responsibility. The various possible human modifications fall on a spectrum between being a correction and being an enhancement (which may be called the correction-enhancement spectrum), with most possible modifications clearly falling on one side or the other. The further a trait falls toward the enhancement end of the spectrum, particularly in the case of competitive enhancements, the more dangerous it is, and thus the more rightful it's bearer's temperament must be. Being as highly modified humans that can reproduce certainly constitute a new taxonomic class, there should be specific taxonomic names to distinguish significantly-modified humans from unmodified or minimally-modified humans, and to distinguish humans that have only been modified by significant corrections from those that have been modified by significant enhancements (with or without significant corrections also). Taxonomic names, by custom, are latin, meaning that latin terms should be used to describe the 3 human types. The most appropriate latin taxonomic names for humans that are not significantly-modified, significantly-corrected only, and significantly-enhanced, respectively, are 'rudis', 'correctus', and 'altus', which mean in latin, respectively: 'rough, raw, or crude', 'corrected', and 'grown or improved'. As for the taxonomic level of the names, humans that have been modified with significant corrections have not gone substantially beyond natural human form or natural human competitive capacity, nor do they have any traits that primarily serve such functions, nor do they have a virtually unlimited number of possible modifications, whereas humans that have been modified with significant enhancements do have those traits. It is therefore most appropriate for 'rudis' and 'correctus' to distinguish between 2 homo sapien subspecies, and for 'altus' to refer to a different species. There are also different categories of modifications for both correction and enhancement modifications, which can serve to classify the modifications when making lists. Those categories are: 1. biochemical, 2. gross physical, and 3. neurological. A modification can fall under multiple categories to some extent, especially if it is complex, but such traits should be classified into the categories that they best fall under. Those categories may also have subcategories where appropriate, such as 'growth', 'autonomy', 'mobility', 'durability', etcetera, though not all modifications may fall into one of the subcategories. PART 2: Correctable Omnipresent Human Flaws The reference below describes many of, and most likely the vast majority of, geneticly-correctable omnipresent evolutionary flaws of unmodified humans (descriptions begin with "In unmodified humans,"), their corresponding corrected state (descriptions begin with "In the corrected state," and use the verb "will"), and any other relevant basic information. Closely related flaws are described as a single flaw: (If you don't want to read all of these details, skip to part 3: application .) category: BIOCHEMICAL subcategory: excess growth 1. epidermal skin cell division, mouth cell division, and sebum: In unmodified humans, skin cells of the epidermis, which are called keratinocytes, like all human cells except for neurons, constantly divide, and the older keratinocytes are constantly pushed toward the surface and die as the younger keratinocytes at the base of the epidermis replicate. On the skin surface, the dead keratinocytes are either consumed by microbes (mostly bacteria) directly on the skin, or they flake off as dust. In the former case, moderately-toxic and foul-smelling volatile metabolites are produced. In the latter case, dust fills the air and threatens microbial infections in the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract and reduces the oxygen supply to the blood, which in turn raises blood pressure. Dead keratinocytes constitute approximately 80 percent of indoor dust. However, some dead keratinocytes are specialized such that they do not decompose, but serve the useful function of comprising nails and the outer layer of each hair, called the cuticle. Cells that constitute the sebaceous glands divide, fill with sebum oil and die, releasing the sebum oil, which is excreted. Dihydrotestosterone receptors in the sebaceous glands increase the growth and replication of sebum cells (and thus cause increased sebum secretion), which, among the usual effects of sebum, also causes itching. Bacteria convert the sebum into the moderately-toxic volatile chemical propionic acid, which smells like sour milk. The face, ears, and scalp produce a particularly high level of sebum. However, a small amount of sebum may be beneficial to the skin, but that amount is much lower than that which is produced by the face, ears, scalp, and dihydrotestosterone receptors. Many sebum glands on the face, unlike the other sebum glands, are constructed very poorly with narrow openings and large internal sebum stores, such that they are prone to clogging and causing acne. The only way to eliminate most of the dust and toxic chemicals is to constantly wash them off with soap and water, and to do the same to the clothes that one wears (which also requires keeping multiple sets of clothing), which people do, and in so doing consume an average of over an hour of time and a great deal of energy per day. Also, the cells of the lining of the mouth, and especially the cells of the tongue, constantly divide and are consumed by microbes producing the same volatile chemicals as the decomposed keratinocytes. Such chemicals constitute halitosis, aka 'bad breath'. In the corrected state, keratinocytes will not continually reproduce and die except in the case of their useful functions in hair and nails, sebum production will be no higher in particular regions of the body, dihydrotestosterone receptors will not exist on sebaceous glands, poorly-constructed acne-prone sebaceous glands will not exist, and cells of the tongue and other parts of the interior of the mouth will not continually reproduce and die. When the stratum corneum (the outermost layer of the epidermis that consists of keratin-rich keratinocytes) is worn down or damaged, the keratinocytes immediately below the damage will quickly reproduce to repair the damage. 2. hair shedding and pubic hair length: In unmodified humans, hairs continually grow for a biologically-determined period of time, fall out, then immediately continue to grow again. As a result, a large number of hairs are shed. That is only slightly true of the hairs of the top of head and a full beard though, as such hairs grow continuously and shed rarely ever or never. With the exceptions of the hair of the top of heads and full beards, the environment is being constantly contaminated with shed hairs, which typically harbor bacteria as well. Also, shed eyelashes and eyebrows often fall into the eye and cause damage and resulting pain. Beard hairs are the fastest-growing hairs on the body, and trimming, shaving, or plucking the beard hairs is time-consuming. Pubic hairs of the armpit, genital region, and chest are impractically long and are prone to contamination. In the corrected state, hairs, with the possible exception of the hairs of the top of the head, will continue to grow until they are at full length, as gauged by the width of the hair at the base, at which point they will not shed. Plucked hairs will regrow. Hairs of the beard (when applicable), armpit, genital region, and chest (when applicable), will be short hairs of no longer than 3/8ths of an inch (about 9 millimeters), and they will be exclusively soft hairs like the hairs of most of the body, as opposed to thick bristles. 3. hair and nail growth: In unmodified humans, scalp hair, beard hair, finger nails, and toe nails grow constantly and at a slow rate. Because of that, they often grow when growth is not desired, and they often grow too slow when growth is desired, and they must be often cut when they grow past their desired length. The subject of the hair of most of the body is already covered by the modification regarding hair shedding. In the corrected state, there will be related efferent and afferent nerves in the scalp, face, finger tips, and toe tips that allow the frontal lobe to directly start or halt the growth, respectively, of the scalp hair, beard hair, finger nails, and toe nails. The afferent nerves will produce a feedback sensation when a shift in mode has occurred, such that the specific sensation indicates the specific mode, and the frontal lobe may probe any of those regions at any time to sense what mode they are in. 4. anus hairs: In unmodified humans, there is a large number of hairs that surround the anus, and those hairs are of similar length to the pubic hair of the armpits or genitals. As a result, after humans defecate, feces is caught in the hairs unless it is thoroughly washed out, such that it increases the amount of volatile moderately toxic chemicals in the air, and increases the spread of disease-causing intestinal bacteria. In the corrected state, there will be no hairs that grow on the skin within 1 inch (32 millimeters) of the anus. subcategory: general growth 5. growth rate: In unmodified humans, growth is extremely slow, such that, after conception, completing the vast majority of one's growth consumes approximately 19 years (this includes the 9 months of gestation), and completing the myelination and development of the prefrontal cortex and completing the development of the musculature consumes at least 5 more years. That is over one quarter of the average lifespan of an unmodified human, and over one third of the non-senescent lifespan. In the corrected state, the amount of time designated for growth will be drasticly lower than that of unmodified humans. Obviously, this modification can be used for rapid reproduction, an abusable ability, so to balance the advantages with the dangers, the correction will only constitute a moderate reduction in growth time, cutting total growth time by about 2/3rds and cutting gestation time by about 1/3. Gestation growth time, and especially that of early gestation, probably can not be reduced as much as post-birth growth time, the reason being that the majority of developmental organization, which may be delicate, occurs during gestation, and gestation time is already very short relative to post-birth growth time. 6. scarring: In unmodified humans, when the flesh is damaged, it repairs itself but does so crudely and poorly, leaving a scar. The tissue of a scar is more breakable and less elastic than the original tissue. That is in part due to the collagen fibers of the dermis of scars being straight, tight, and brittle, as opposed to the original tissue, in which they are more winding and elastic. In the corrected state, scars will heal completely, such that their tissue is indistinguishable from the original flesh that they replaced. The complete healing of scars is a type of regeneration. Unlike other types of regeneration, the complete healing of scars is biologically relatively simple, and scars are more common than other types of permanent physical damage. 7. regeneration: In unmodified humans, when a body part is cut off or destroyed, it does not regrow, with few exceptions, such as the liver and the finger tips. In the corrected state, any amputated or destroyed body part will regenerate completely, and without being inferior to the original part. Amphibians can regrow amputated parts, so the ability to regenerate is not only possible, but it is natural in some animals. Regrowing lost parts would of course require embryo-like action. It may be that embryological development only works because the cells thereof are relatively unspecialized, such that the genetic modifications must allow the developmental genes to direct the development of specialized cells. 8. age-induced degradation and death: In unmodified humans, all cells except for neurons (which depend upon glial cells to function) constantly divide, which results in one of the two daughter cells having a shortened DNA code due to the copying process, and the other cell being programmed to shortly die. Repeating non-coding genetic sequences called telomeres are at the ends of the entire genetic code of each chromosome, such that DNA replication damages the telomeres before it damages coding DNA, meaning that the telomeres protect the DNA. Over time, the telomeres are used up and coding DNA is damaged, resulting in age-related degradation and eventually death. In germ cells (sperm and eggs), the telomeres are restored by the telomerase-TERT (TERT is an abbreviation for telomere reverse transcriptase) protein complex. Progressive gene destruction via cell replication is not the only cause of age-related degradation. There is also the fact that the brain becomes saturated with memories and pieces of learned information (both of which consist of neuron-to-neuron connections) over time, the majority of which are probably useless or nearly-useless for one's current or future situations, and those memories are never erased completely. There is also the fact that microscopic cracks in the teeth that accumulate with time create deposits of enamel (pure hydroxyapatite crystal, which is hard but brittle) within the dentin (collagen fibers saturated with hydroxyapatite, which is softer but not brittle), which causes the teeth to become more brittle. That may be called 'tooth scarring', and it is an issue of both aging and regeneration, and there may also be other forms of cumulative scarring that cause elements of aging. There may also be parts of the body that do not cease growing after their appropriate growth is complete, but rather continue to grow at a very slow rate, such that they become enlarged with age. The ears may be one of such parts. Continual growth may also be the cause of wrinkles, due to the skin continuing to grow. Automatic age-induced death serves a useful evolutionary purpose, though age-induced degeneration doesn't, except insofar as it is conducive to death. Automatic age-induced death serves the evolutionary purpose of destroying old genetic combinations so as to decrease the consumption of resources which can be consumed by newer genetic combinations, which are typically better evolved. That is usually beneficial to the group, but some older individuals have better genes than the average young person, such that some high-quality older genomes are wasted, and some younger individuals have worse genes than the average old person, such that some low-quality younger genomes are wastefully supported. There is also the fact that growing a new human to replace a dead or senescent one consumes a vast amount of growth time, food, money, and time and energy for education and learning to talk. Death, by the way, is not a form of conscious harm as suffering is. Only memory creates the illusion of a single chronicly-coherent self. Due to the fact that a person's sensations of the past and future moments are not the same as those of the present moment, and the fact that pharmaceuticals can alter a person's fundamental intent (which consists of fundamental abstract perceptions), the conscious self exists in the moment and dies with the passing of every moment. Death is the loss of the physical body, the information stored within the brain, and the neurological traits that create conscious selves of a particular fundamental intent. In the corrected state, no forms of age-induced degeneration or age-induced death will occur, including, but not limited to, telomere shortening, accumulation of unerasable memories and learned pieces of information, cumulative scarring in dentin or elsewhere, or continual growth of tissues after their appropriate size has been attained. Cells will not divide continually as they do in unmodified humans, but rather they will only divide for the purposes of growth and regeneration. The reduced cell division will also reduce the body's demands for energy and protein. All human cells will express telomerase and TERT anyway, such that growth and regeneration will not shorten the telomeres. All of those modifications will only be made on zygotes that have been modified to produce fine, clear, rightful intent, such that the humans so modified will voluntarily die if and when it will benefit the whole of society. subcategory: autonomy 9. vitamins and other essential chemicals: In unmodified humans, there is a dependency upon many different environment-derived chemicals, either for survival, basic health, or optimum function. Those chemicals are the fat-soluble vitamins, the water-soluble vitamins, the essential amino acids, the essential fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, creatine, carnitine, taurine, choline, and antioxidants. Some of such chemicals are produced by the human body, but only in minimal amounts. Consuming all of such chemicals in a sufficient and optimum amount is very difficult, and the dependency thereof is very dangerous due to the unreliable nature of both the economy and the natural environment. Also, any dependence upon rare substances can be used for the purpose of extortion. In the corrected state, humans will possess all of the enzymes necessary to convert common biochemical substances into all of the essential chemicals that are required in small amounts. The enzymes necessary to synthesize the essential chemicals exist in other organisms (else the chemicals would not exist in the first place), so they will be transferred to humans from those organisms. Increasing the production of chemical-synthesizing enzymes that humans already possess requires only a small genetic modification. The enzymes will be expressed only in specialized cells, preferably located on the interior surface of blood vessels, so as to release the chemicals into the blood stream. The specialization is necessary to prevent the newly-implanted enzymes from interfering with biochemicals of other tissues. 10. minerals: In unmodified humans, there is a dependency upon very small amounts of many different elements. The elements calcium and phosphorus serve as essential structural materials of bones and teeth. The elements sodium, calcium, potassium, and chlorine serve as essential electrolytes in neurons. Most other trace minerals serve as coenzymes. Most or all of the required trace elements other than those already mentioned are chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lithium, magnesium, manganese, selenium, zinc, and possibly other elements also. The human body wastes a large quantity of minerals by excreting them in the urine, and possibly some in the feces, rather than recovering and recycling them. Consuming all of the essential elements in an amount that is sufficient for optimum function is very difficult, though corrupt government agencies that serve various food and vitamin companies greatly exaggerate the necessary requirements. The dependence upon constant environmental sources of all of those minerals is very dangerous due to the unreliable nature of both the economy and the natural environment. Also, any dependence upon environmental sources of rare substances can be used for the purpose of extortion. In the corrected state, there will be many proteins that prevent minerals from being excreted from the body, and recover them for reuse, except when there is a large excess of a mineral. 11. cellulase: In unmodified humans, the gene that codes for the proteins of the conversion of cellulose and the related disaccharide cellobiose into glucose, which are collectively called cellulase, are absent. Those proteins are also absent in all other vertebrates. In animals that can digest cellulose, that ability only exists due to the fact that those animals harbor cellulose-digesting microbes, which are delicate and very energy-intensive to maintain. Despite the omnipresence of that lack of ability, the ability to digest cellulose is such a fundamental function that it's absence constitutes a flaw. The vast majority of plant matter is composed of cellulose, meaning that very little plant matter is edible to unmodified humans, and of that which is, little of it is healthy. Also, undigested cellulose in the food of unmodified humans, which constitutes most dietary fiber, is decomposed by archaebacteria which convert it to methane, which causes both farts and gas pains. In the corrected state, humans will possess the genes of the cellulase proteins. The cellulase proteins will be expressed in the small intestine rather than the stomach, as the stomach is highly acidic and may halt the function of the cellulase. 12. stasis ability: In unmodified humans, a large amount of energy, that being over half of the energy of sedentary humans, is constantly consumed for the purpose of sustaining the body temperature of between 97 and 100 degrees fahrenheit (about 37 degrees celsius), which human proteins function best in. The human body temperature drops from birth to adulthood by about 1.5 degrees. The human body constantly generates heat, which is why temperatures above 85 degrees are perceived by humans as hot, even when resting, meaning that the human body wastes a great deal of energy in the generation of heat. If the body temperature drops by even a few degrees, many proteins, especially those of the nervous system, will falter, resulting in a condition called hypothermia, and if it drops as low as 78 degrees fahrenheit (20 degrees below normal), death occurs. Many animals are cold-blooded, such that they can live and function through large temperature changes, and their proteins are functional over a wide range of temperature, though they are less effective than those of warm-blooded animals that are at their optimum temperature. Also, many mammals can hibernate and drop their temperature by over 10 degrees. Due to the laws of thermodynamics, the greater the difference in temperature between 2 adjacent bodies, the higher the rate of heat transfer between the 2. Humans evolved a high blood temperature because the use of clothing allowed it. The average human heart rate is approximately 70 beats per minute. When that beat lowers enough such that the cells do not have sufficient oxygen to maintain their metabolic functions, the most prominent of which is body temperature maintenance, they automatically die. When the human heart rate drops greatly below it's average resting rate, pulmonary edema occurs. Pulmonary edema is the filling of the lungs with fluid from the capillaries. Pulmonary edema due to greatly-decreased heart rate is the result of the pressure in the veins increasing from a negative pressure to a neutral pressure, as fluid is kept out of the lungs due to a pressure balance. Because of all of those facts, humans are very vulnerable to cold and/or starvation, and extremely vulnerable to temporary lapses in heart function. In the corrected state, the pressure balance mechanism of the capillary fluid in the lungs will be replaced with a pressure-independent system. The mechanisms that cause cells to automatically die when only partially deprived of oxygen will not be present. Humans will be able to conserve energy in a manner that is initiated by the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) by dropping their body temperature by at least 30 degrees (at least about 70 degrees fahrenheit) and lowering their heart rate by at least half, at the expense of efficient muscular and neural function. That will be possible because humans will have some of the neuron proteins from cold-blooded animals that will allow the neural system to maintain basic function at low temperatures, particularly the maintenance of heart pumping and breathing, and a minimal amount of consciousness that will allow the frontal cortex to initiate the end of the stasis state when appropriate. The ability to drop the body temperature and/or heart rate even further, with or without the use of biological antifreeze, such that an exceptional amount of energy can be conserved and life can be sustained through great cold and/or starvation, constitutes an enhancement. not within a subcategory: 13. glucose management: In unmodified humans, when a substantial amount of glucose from food is consumed, it is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream due to the effects of the polypeptide gastrin, and in turn it stimulates the production of the protein insulin and the polypeptide GIP (which increases insulin) to rapidly counteract the heightened glucose by storing it as glycogen in the cells, especially muscle and liver cells, and none in neurons or glials. The leftover insulin in turn continues to lower the glucose beyond it's original level. There is no specific hormone that slows digestion without causing an additional effect, such as high insulin (as in the polypeptide GIP). Neurons or glials do not store glucose, nor do they derive energy from lipids in the bloodstream as some tissues do, but they are uniquely dependent upon blood glucose for energy, meaning that increasingly low levels of blood glucose cause corresponding increasing mental fatigue, and a very low level of blood glucose causes death due to neuron dysfunction. When the level of glycogen in the cells is at or near it's maximum, additional glucose is either converted into stored fat or wasted as heat due to an increase in the thyroid hormones T3 and T4. The thyroid gland produces about 4 times as much T4 as T3, but most T4 is converted to T3 within the cells, and T3 is much more potent than T4. T3, and to a lesser extent, T4, produce heat by acting on the mitochondria. The thyroid hormones cause hydrogen ions which are pressurized in the mitochondrial interspace (which are normally directed through the protein ATP synthase (aka ATP synthetase) to produce the energy chemical ATP) to flow back through the protein channels that they were packed though, which produces no ATP but generates a large amount of heat. In the corrected state, there will be a hormone (which may be called digestion-inhibiting hormone here) that inhibits digestion (and therefore the release of glucose and other substances into the bloodstream) without causing any other effects. Digestion-inhibiting hormone will initially be dominant over gastrin, and after food is consumed, gastrin will only rise slowly (unlike in unmodified humans), and will be regulated by the amount of glucose released in the blood, such that a high level thereof halts gastrin production and induces the production of digestion-inhibiting hormone to the appropriate degree, such that there can not be spikes or dips in blood glucose. When the level of glycogen in the cells is at it's maximum, digestion-inhibiting hormone will rise and greatly slow digestion, as contrasted with unmodified humans, in which the excess glucose is converted to fat or burned off as excess heat. The level of glycogen stored in the cells will be directly proportional to the level of somatotropin (aka growth hormone) that is secreted into the bloodstream. 14. muscle latching: In unmodified humans, when a muscle is contracted to a certain degree (and therefore also the part that it moves), it constantly consumes energy in maintaining that state, especially if it is lifting a heavy load. The constant contraction of the muscle causes it to tire quickly. For every human muscle, only about 1/4th of the available muscle fibers are used. That serves the purpose of energy conservation, and it eliminates the necessity of making the bones stronger and heavier, which would further consume energy. When norepinephrine or epinephrine is very high, the latent muscular fibers are disinhibited. In the corrected state, there will be a latching mechanism within the muscles that prevents them from consuming energy when in a constant degree of contraction. The latch though will be capable of being broken with sufficient force in a manner that does not cause any damage, so as to prevent weakened or broken bones, tendons, and/or ligaments. The latching mechanism will also incorporate the latent muscle fibers, so as to prevent any possible damage to the muscle fibers from a heavy load. 15. muscle and cardiovascular adaptation: In unmodified humans, increasing muscle strength, muscle endurance, or general cardiovascular endurance is an extremely time-consuming process, taking several weeks or even several months. When a body is not exercised, the muscles and cardiovascular system eventually degrade to a very weak state. The strength of a muscle is determined by the quantity of myofibrils within it. The endurance of a muscle is determined by the quantity of sarcoplasm in it. Sarcoplasm consists of capillaries and mitochondria. General cardiovascular ability is determined by the strength of the heart muscle, the size of the lungs, and the degree of blood vessel permeation. Dihydrotestosterone receptors in the muscles decrease the speed with which both myofibrils and sarcoplasm grow in response to exercise. In the corrected state, the lower limit to which the muscles and cardiovascular system can degrade due to lack of exercise will be much higher than that of unmodified humans. Adaptive growth of the muscles and cardiovascular system in response to exercise will be 3 times faster than that of unmodified humans. Increasing the speed of muscle or cardiovascular adaptation much more than that constitutes an enhancement. 16. cancer: In unmodified humans, when DNA is damaged, such as by radiation or chemicals, the cell of the DNA has a small but substantial probability of becoming cancer. That is due to the damage of a specific gene or genes. In the corrected state, there will be several genes throughout the genome that produce proteins that serve the sole function of recognizing their cell as cancerous and killing it if that is the case, such that cancer can not occur as a result of general DNA damage. category: GROSS PHYSICAL subcategory: mobility 17. neck turning: In unmodified humans, the head can turn only about 70 degrees to either side by the action of it's own muscles. That limitation is caused by the position of the sternocleidomastoid muscle attachment on the skull, as it is situated not very far back. If the head is relaxed and turned by the hands, it can turn only about 80 degrees. That is due to the tightness of the connective tissues and/or the limit of turning of the cervical vertebra bones. In the corrected state, the sternocleidomastoid muscle attachment on the skull will be situated about 2 inches further back, the connective tissues of the neck that limit neck twisting will be loosened, and the cervical vertebrae will have any necessary alterations to allow the head to turn as far as the other parts allow. Together, that will allow the head to turn about 100 degrees to either side. 18. shoulder mobility: In unmodified humans, the shoulder, the position of which moves with the clavicle (collar bone) can be revolved around the torso about 30 degrees forward and about 60 degrees backward. Resting the shoulder-moving muscles and moving the shoulder via an external force does not increase either of those numbers, meaning that the movement limitation is not due to the muscles of movement, but rather the connective tissues and/or bone. There is no 'shoulder bone', but rather the bone inside the shoulder is the head of the humerus (the upper arm bone). The shoulder often obstructs motion, and especially forward motion, due to it's prominence and relative rigidity of position. In the corrected state, the bones, connective tissues, and muscles of the shoulder region will be such that the shoulder will be able to revolve around the torso 90 degrees forward and 90 degrees backward. 19. thumb and palm finger mobility: In unmodified humans, various connective tissues drasticly restrict the maximum angle of the thumb to the second metacarpal bone (in the edge of the palm), such that when the thumb is aligned with the 2nd palm finger (aka middle finger), it can only extend about 50 degrees away from the palm. As a result, a hand can not effectively hold a large but light-weight load. The palm fingers (meaning the fingers other than the thumb here) have minimal ability to twist, much less twist independently. As a result, a hand can not effectively handle multiple objects. The palm fingers can not bend backward, under their own power, by more than 45 degrees beyond being aligned with the palm, and some individual fingers, especially when straight, can not bend forward or backward relative to the adjacent fingers by more than 45 degrees or less. As a result, many tasks that require the use of only one finger, or a specific combination of fingers, can not be done without the other fingers getting in the way. In the corrected state, the connective tissues that determine the maximum angle of the thumb relative the palm will be long and/or loose enough such that the thumb, when aligned with the middle finger, will have a maximum thumb-to-palm angle of about 100 degrees, and any related necessary muscle structure will be present. All of the palm fingers will be able to twist independently by about 45 degrees in either direction, due to the presence of diagonal muscles that attach to the metacarpals (long bones inside the palm) and the proximal phalanx bones (bones of the fingers nearest to the palm) of the palm fingers, and any related necessary traits of the bones and connective tissues. The palm fingers will be able to bend backward, under their own power, by 90 degrees. Each palm finger will not be any more restrained in it's range of motion, relative to it's maximum range, based upon the degree of bending of any of the other fingers, due to the absence of the relevant restraining connective tissues and/or feedback nerves. 20. eye and ear coverage from sensory excess: In unmodified humans, the eye can cover itself with the thin eyelid, which translucently lets a substantial fraction of light through, probably no more than 1/8th, but that is nonetheless not sufficient to protect from bright lights. The eyes can be squinted further, such that wrinkles of skin protect the eyes more, but that is very energy-consuming. The ears do not have any self-covering mechanism. Because of that, it is necessary to to use the hands to cover or uncover the ears, which interferes with the necessary activity of the hands, and it is necessary to use artificial earphones to cover the ears at all without having to use the hands constantly. In the corrected state, humans will have a second, thicker eyelid that can be lowered without the use of constant flexing. The second eyelid will contain a thick layer (about 2 millimeters) of collagen and cover the eye surface completely. The ear opening will be surrounded by a thick muscle sphincter (about 1/4 inch / 6 millimeters thick) that can be sealed completely. The sphincters of the ears will contain a latching mechanism which eliminates the necessity of constant flexing. The muscles of both structures will be attached to nearby motor nerves. 21. nose and ear coverage from foreign substances: In unmodified humans, neither the nose nor the ears can close themselves. As a result, foreign substances other than air can enter them. That is especially true in the case of submerging the head in a fluid, usually water, at certain angles, in which the fluid enters the nasal sinus and/or auditory canal. In the corrected state, the nose will contain a muscle sphincter that can close the nose opening completely. The ear will contain a small, thin muscle sphincter 1 millimeter within the opening, which can close completely, and is thin enough to allow most sound to pass through. The sphincters of both the nose and the ears will contain a latching mechanism which eliminates the necessity of constant flexing. 22. trachea contamination: In unmodified humans, if a substance, such as a liquid, a thick semi-liquid such as mucus (a solution of the glycoprotein mucin), or a solid object, is in the trachea, there is no way to easily remove the foreign substance. The trachea consists of many incomplete 300-degree cartilage rings with the gap in the back, which are held together by connective tissue. The upper trachea in the throat is a thick one-piece tube of cartilage. Coughing is only effective in removing material from lower levels of the bronchial tree, as air simply flows past substances that adhere to the walls of the trachea. If the lungs are empty of air when a solid object becomes lodged in the trachea, then there is little that can be done to remove it. In the corrected state, the trachea can be contracted semi-shut in the front-to-back dimension by multiple muscle sphincters, which will be possible due to the cartilage being thin on the sides of the trachea. That will allow solid objects to be removed more easily, and it will allow the the area through which the air flows to be reduced, thus allowing substances that adhere to the wall of the trachea to be expelled. subcategory: durability 23. foot vulnerability: In unmodified humans, the foot, due to hundreds of thousands of years of shoe usage, is not suited for it's function of protecting against hard ground substances and various sharp natural objects that are often on the ground. In particular, the foot has vulnerable blood vessels under it that are prone to damage from high pressure, and the bones of the human foot have little protection from impact. In the corrected state, there will be a layer of cartilage about 3/16ths of an inch thick (about 4.5 millimeters) that covers the bone on the soles of the feet. Also, the blood vessels under the feet will be smaller, such that they are less effected by high pressure. 24. butt vulnerability: In unmodified humans, when the weight of the body is on the butt, which in turn is on a hard surface, the weight is concentrated on the 2 small areas (one on each side) of the edges of the blade-like ischium bones and the flesh that is trapped between the bone and the hard surface. That causes some damage to the flesh, and over time, it can warp the structure of the bone, as is evident by the differences in hip bone form in cultures of people that often sit on their butt and those of people who do not. In the corrected state, the lower part of the ischium will be twice as wide as that of an unmodified human, and there will be a 1/4th-inch-thick (8 millimeters) layer of cartilage on the outside edge of the ischium. 25. solar plexus vulnerability: In unmodified humans, there is a large group of interconnected nerve ganglia located behind the stomach. It is popularly called the solar plexus, or more properly, the celiac plexus. The celiac plexus is linked to the stomach, duodenum (the first part of the small intestines), liver, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, and adrenal glands. The celiac plexus uses feedback from each organ to coordinate their actions. If the horizontal middle of the front of the torso, between the 2 downward dips of each side of ribs is quickly impacted with even little force, it temporarily disrupts the function of the celiac plexus, causing indigestion, and it causes a large amount of pain during and immediately after the impact. In the corrected state, the solar plexus will not be prone to being damaged by an impact any more so than the small intestines. 26. esophagus vulnerability: In unmodified humans, the esophagus is particularly vulnerable to damage, and therefore pain, from an impact or pressure on the front of the trachea, as the esophagus is soft and is situated between the vertebra bones and the thick cartilaginous trachea. In the corrected state, the esophagus will be at least twice as thick as that of unmodified humans, such that it will be able to distribute the pressure and therefore be able to withstand a low level of pressure without being damaged. 27. testicle vulnerability: In unmodified humans, in males, the testicles are situated outside the main body, are unprotected, and are very vulnerable to damage and the resulting pain, such that males must be always be cautious not to damage them. In the corrected state, there will be a durable, semi-flexible wall of cartilage of about 1/8th of an inch thick (about 3 millimeters) that lines the scrotum and is anchored on the pelvis bone. 28. vagina vulnerability in childbirth: In unmodified humans, in females, the vagina is not constructed to easily stretch widely enough for a baby to fit through without causing significant tissue damage and resulting pain. In the corrected state, the vagina will be modified to be elastic enough to allow babies to pass through in the absence of tissue damage or the pain that results from it. 29. brain-skull interface: In unmodified humans, there is minimal cushioning substance between the brain and the skull, and as a result, the brain is very vulnerable to damage by mere low-intensity jarring, such as jerking the head by ones own neck muscles. In the corrected state, a cushioning tissue of about 1/4 of an inch (about 7 millimeters) will be between the brain and the skull. The presence of additional cushioning material that can protect the brain against high-intensity jarring constitutes an enhancement. The best biological cushioning substance is a matrix of collagen and elastin fibers and fat. not within a subcategory: 30. saliva secretion: In unmodified humans, there are 3 major sets of glands of the slime called saliva, those being the sublingual gland, the submaxillary gland, and the parotid gland. There are 2 components of saliva, which are the bubbly watery substance serous, which contains digestive enzymes, especially amylase, and the thick bubble-free substance mucus, which is a solution of the glycoprotein mucin. The sublingual glands produce mostly mucus, whereas the submaxillary and parotid glands produce mostly serous. Humans constantly produce and swallow saliva. Saliva serves the purpose of washing away the substances in the mouth that microbes feed and reproduce upon. Microbes in the mouth feed and reproduce on 2 substances, which are pieces of food and dead cells of the interior of the mouth. Due to the other genetic modification of preventing the continual division and death of cells of the interior of the mouth, the latter substance will no longer be a problem. Plain water is sufficient to clean pieces of food from the mouth. In the corrected state, the saliva glands will have the ability to secrete pure water in addition to serous and mucus. The degree of secretion of each of the 3 different types of saliva will be directly controlled by the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain). 31. sinus access: In unmodified humans, the nostril openings are small relative to the size of the nasal sinus, and a large, flat, vertical piece of cartilage called the septum splits both the nasal sinus and the nostrils into 2. The part of the septum in the nose is anchored to bones at the top and bottom of the nose. That causes those 2 bones to be very vulnerable to breakage due to bending of the septum. The nostril openings are constricted relative to the cavity within the nose. The nasal sinus often becomes clogged with semi-dry mucus, due to disease, allergic reactions, or for the purpose of filtering out airborne particles (which is related to allergic reactions). The function of mucus of filtering air is important for improving the oxygen supply to the blood. When the nasal sinus is clogged with mucus, the opposite occurs, as breathing is diverted to the mouth, which causes minimal air filtration. In the corrected state, the nasal septum will not exist and the nostril openings will be unconstricted, such that semi-solid mucus clogs in the nasal sinus can be removed. category: NEUROLOGICAL subcategory: control 32. esophagus peristalsis and gag reflexes: In unmodified humans, the esophagus automatically and irreversibly pushes food or other material down from top to bottom if it is placed in the top of the esophagus. That is called the peristalsis reflex. The intestines also have a peristalsis reflex. Often, a human eats toxic food, due to spoilage or otherwise, and smells the toxic odors of the contaminated food just as it is being swallowed by the peristalsis reflex, and the human is aware of the toxic nature of the food but is unable to regurgitate it because the peristalsis reflex has irreversibly pushed the contaminated food down. When a finger or other object is inserted into the back of the mouth, the gag reflex occurs, which consists of a tightening of the throat combined with a forward heave. That prevents the examination of the back of the mouth or the removal of any thick mucus, other thick semi-liquids, or other objects stuck there. In the corrected state, the esophagus peristalsis reflex will be reversible by the direct control of the conscious brain, and the gag reflex will not be present. 33. sleep induction and necessary duration: In unmodified humans, sleep occurs in relatively rigid cycles, and can be greatly altered by external factors, especially bright light versus dim light, standing versus laying posture (which is the result of the fact that norepinephrine is lower when one is laying, as norepinephrine causes wakefulness), gastrointestinal disturbance (which causes wakefulness), hunger (which causes wakefulness), and emotional arousal (which causes high norepinephrine and therefore wakefulness). Aside from the external factors that alter the time of sleep induction, sleep is primarily induced by neural fatigue. Sleep serves the function of expending energy largely for the purposes of growth, wound healing, and fighting disease, and sleep also serves the functions of consolidating memories and restoring the nervous system. The last of those functions is the one that sleep is most specificly essential for. A human that is completely deprived of sleep dies after approximately 10 days, due to degradation of the nervous system. The complete span of sleep for the average adult human is 7 hours (not 8 hours, as has often been popularized). A few humans, due to rare genetic alleles, can restore themselves with as little as 4 hours of sleep. Evolving rapid restoration to reduce sleep hours is no evolutionary difficulty, as long sleep hours exist primarily for the purpose of conserving energy, though it is not very efficient to that end, as the body temperature and heart rate do not lower greatly. Because of that, prey animals that are always vulnerable, particularly the ungulates, have unlengthened sleep hours, whereas animals that are in little danger, such as predators, have greatly lengthened sleep hours. The rigid sleep cycles create the effect called jet lag when a person has travelled by airplane over several timezones over a short period of time. The rigid sleep cycles, as well as the various external factors that effect sleep, greatly disrupt potential human productivity and schedule-keeping. In the corrected state, humans will be able to induce sleep directly from the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) at any time, with an induction time of no more than 5 seconds, and they will be able to prolong wakefulness in a neurally-fatigued state for several hours without being involuntarily pulled into sleep. Due to accelerated restoration, the necessary duration of sleep will be at least as low as 4 hours. 34. vagus nerve and pituitary effects: In unmodified humans, the heart rate, blood pressure, vasodilation versus vasoconstriction, degree of perspiration on the hands and armpits, cortisol secretion (cortisol weakens various components of the body), and sebum production is not under any substantial direct control by the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain), but rather, with the exception of control by physical necessity (such as exercise or temperature), they are under the control of the emotions, especially anger and anxiety, but also other emotions as well. The control of those physiological functions by the emotions is mediated by norepinephrine, the vagus nerve (one of the 12 cranial nerves), the sympathetic nervous system (which is directed by a row of ganglions on each side of the spinal cord), the parasympathetic nervous system, and the pituitary gland (which is the 'master gland' which directs the other glands of the body). As a result of that emotional control, there are bad and/or distracting effects, such as muscle weakening (due to cortisol), weakened immune system (also due to cortisol), heart problems (due to blood pressure, heart rate, and vasoconstriction), itching (due to increased sebum production), the inability to hold writing utensils (due to palm sweating), and clothes soaking (due to increased armpit sweating). In the corrected state, the frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) will have direct control over the physical effects produced by the emotions on heart rate, blood pressure, vasodilation versus vasoconstriction, and cortisol secretion. The emotion-induced physiological effects of increased sweating of the palms and armpits and increased sebum production will be completely absent, as they serve no practical function, at least in modern humans. 35. detrimental strong motivational emotions: In unmodified humans, there is a vulnerability to having powerful emotions that can override the restraining force of judgment. The most notable emotions thereof are anger, fear, and desire for various pleasures. Judgment is caused by the prefrontal cortex. In the corrected state, humans will be able to directly restrain the strength of their motivational emotions from their frontal cortex, which is the thinking part of the brain. 36. penile erection: In unmodified humans, in males, the penis can become erect or stay erect against conscious intent, due to being controlled by other factors, those being psychological sexual arousal and non-psychological factors. Because of that, an erection that is visible can deceptively indicate that a human male is psychologically sexually aroused when they are not, and in turn cause others to consider them to be less responsible in their work ethic than they in fact are, and in turn trust them less than is appropriate. In the corrected state, penile erection will never occur nor maintain itself against conscious intent, due to a direct efferent neural pathway from the motor cortex to terminals that relax the veins of the penis, thereby terminating erection when intended. 37. ovulation periods: In unmodified humans, in females after the age of puberty, there is an involuntary 28-day cycle in which the sex hormones estradiol and progesterone greatly fluctuate, the uterus is prepared for birth with a lining of flesh that is rich in blood vessels, an egg is made fertile for conception, and the egg and the bloody uterus lining are discarded out of the vagina if conception does not occur in what is called menstruation, which is usually the case. The blood and other materials that are involuntarily expelled from the vagina can soil clothing and other objects and can disrupt activities, unless the vagina is plugged or covered with artificial absorbent material during the days that the menstrual discharge occurs or is likely to occur. The involuntary ovulation cycle can cause unintended pregnancy. In the corrected state, ovulation will be initiated directly by the conscious intent of the frontal lobe of the cerebrum, via a brain region adjacent to that which causes voluntary urination, and by no other cause. 38. memory management: In unmodified humans, memories (not excluding learned facts) can be formed and/or maintained against conscious intent, and memories can be lost against conscious intent. As a result, valued memories are often lost and unvalued memories increasingly consume the brain's capacity for memory until it is expended or nearly-expended, and that constitutes a major factor of aging. In the corrected state, there will be direct projections from the frontal lobe (the thinking part of the brain) to the parts of the brain that store memories, such that conscious intent can prevent the formation of a memory, erase or weaken a memory, or make a memory immune to automatic degradation. However, highly familiar, repetitively used memories will not be subject to being erased. not within a subcategory: 39. the hiccup reflex: In unmodified humans, there is an involuntary reflex, called a hiccup, that tightens the diaphragm and resultingly compresses and lifts the lungs and ribs, seals the throat, and creates a small amount of dull pain. In addition to the purposeless dull pain that hiccups cause, they disrupt breathing, talking, eating, and to a lesser extent, every other activity. Hiccups are caused by the phrenic nerve, which controls the contraction of the diaphragm. The phrenic nerve is prone to firing in the absence of stimuli or in the presence of irrelevant stimuli, especially the expansion of the esophagus or stomach due to food and/or drink. In the corrected state, the hiccup reflex will not be present, due to the phrenic nerve not firing in the presence of irrelevant stimuli or no stimuli at all. 40. yawning: In unmodified humans, there is an involuntary movement, called a yawn, in which the mouth opens and air is inhaled, though not necessarily through the mouth. The yawn might serve the useful purpose of clearing built-up carbon dioxide out of the lungs when appropriate, and the opening of the mouth may serve the useful purpose of increasing the effectiveness of the jaw muscle by eliminating the effects of short-term stagnation, as all reflexive stretching may do. However, the involuntary opening of the mouth disrupts speech, eating / drinking, and playing musical instruments, and can cause saliva, food / drink, or transported objects to fall out of the mouth. When a person observes an other person yawn, they themself feel like yawning and often do, which is disruptive to a person's activities. In the corrected state, the yawn will never occur when conscious intent is opposed to it, even if only somewhat opposed, and the observation of an other person's yawn will not increase the probability that one's self will yawn. 41. automatic neuron apoptosis: In unmodified humans, when certain neural pathways are inactive for a certain amount of time, they automaticly degrade. Destroying some of such neurons serves the useful function of making room for glials. To destroy a large fraction of such neurons serves the function of conserving a small amount of energy, at a great expense of functionality. The latter function is the only reason for pathway degradation in the periphery (outside the brain). In the corrected state, no automatic neural pathway degradation due to disuse will occur in the periphery, and the maximum degree of such automatic degradation in the brain will be greatly limited. 42. memory alteration: In unmodified humans, whenever a sensory memory (which is analog, as distinguished from learned facts, which are digital) is recalled, there is a large chance that it will be altered in the retrieval process, especially in the small details that are not specificly noted (as those noted details are digital). As a result, a given sensory memory is likely to become less accurate with every retrieval. In the corrected state, the retrieval of sensory memories will not cause them to be altered or prone to alteration. 43. subliminal messages, suggestion, and hypnosis: In unmodified humans, the action of the body (not excluding the brain) can be made to contradict natural conscious intent via the use of subliminal messages, the power of suggestion, and hypnosis. In the corrected state, subliminal messages, the power of suggestion, and hypnosis will not be capable of causing the action of the body to contradict conscious intent, due to the neural pathways that they depend upon being absent. 44. depression and excess pain: In unmodified humans, physical pain often occurs in uselessly high degrees. Physical pain serves the useful function of causing humans or other conscious animals to not do certain actions that are damaging to themself or to extricate themself from a situation that is damaging themself. Beyond a certain degree, pain does not motivate a person any more than that which is required for them to do all that they can to prevent themself from being damaged. Also, the high degree of pain impairs cognition, which is necessary to devise methods by which to prevent oneself from being damaged. In the corrected state, there will be un upper limit to the degree of physical pain that a human can feel, due to a limitation of the quantity of the brain receptors nk1, nk2, bradykinin receptors, and possibly also the nociceptin receptor. Depression will be completely absent, as it serves no practical function, at least in modern humans. 45. pleasure addiction and tolerance: In unmodified humans, the infusion into the bloodstream of chemicals that produce pleasure, and to a lesser extent the experience of any type of strong pleasure, produces a psychological dependence upon such pleasure so as to avoid a strong painful sensation of restlessness (caused by the nk1 receptor). It also decreases the strength of the pleasure that is produced from the same source (an effect called 'tolerance'), thus motivating erratic and unreliable behavior due to uncertain rewards. Tolerance is caused largely by the nociceptin receptor. In the corrected state, pleasure will not cause addiction or tolerance. 46. socially destructive evolutionary hangover character traits: In unmodified humans, there is malicious intent, malice being defined as the desire to perceive and act with crude blind wrongness, and it's opposite, goodwill, being defined as the desire to perceive and act with fine clear rightness. In a scientificly knowledgeable society, clear-sighted goodwill is beneficial and blind malice is detrimental, whereas in a scientificly unknowledgeable society, including that of the non-human animals, the opposite is more often than not true. Specificly, malice has various effects, which are: 1. the desire to maintain problems rather than overcome them, 2. the desire to arbitrarily control, harass, torture, and steal from others, and 3. the desire to serve a single clan patriarch at the expense of the group. When technology is poor, it is more beneficial to the species to maliciously ignore problems rather then overcome them. When heredity and controlled humane eugenics is unknown of, it is more beneficial to the species to engage in random dominance competition, and to be permissive toward the aggression one's own children, than to breed all individuals without restriction. When the benefits of large-scale teamwork are unknown of, it is better to serve the inefficient whims of a clan patriarch (the instinctive basis of nationalism and the belief in a god) then to live autonomously. Malice is caused by the serotonin receptors 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C, the production of which is induced by sex hormones, whereas goodwill is caused by the histamine receptor H1 and the acetylcholine receptors M1 and M3. The histamine receptor H2 causes perfectionism, which is necessary for an individual to pursue useful large and long-term goals. Activity of the malicious receptors is inhibited by the inhibitory receptor 5-HT1A, and activity of the goodwilled receptors is inhibited by the inhibitory receptor M2 and a receptor of galantamine. Acetylcholine release is facilitated by the presynaptic nicotinic receptors. There are also neuropsychological side effects of goodwill and malice that have evolved as a result of the chronic favor of malice. Those are: 1. The 5-HT2C receptor increases endorphin, the 5-HT2A receptor increases dopamine, the M1 receptor decreases dopamine, and endorphin increases serotonin, 2. Acetylcholine increases the anxiety chemical cholecystokinin (cholecystokinin also causes acceleration pain), and cholecystokinin decreases both serotonin and endorphin. Also, pain that results from acceleration is caused by neural pathways in the brain that use the neurotransmitters cholecystokinin and acetylcholine, 3. M4 acetylcholine receptors convert norepinephrine into epinephrine, 4. Acetylcholine decreases multitasking ability due to the action of the M4 receptors of the striatum and possibly other factors as well, though that may also increase the ability to concentrate, 5. Sex hormones (which induce the production of malice receptors) increase the production of growth hormone (which causes physical and mental energy) or are increased in response to high growth hormone. Specificly, dihydrotestosterone increases the production of growth hormone, and growth hormone increases the production of progesterone and to a lesser extent estradiol, 6. Dihydrotestosterone induces the production of pain-decreasing enkephalin in the cingulate cortex, and estradiol induces the production of beta-endorphin, and 7. Sex hormones increase the quality of the body. Specificly, all of the sex hormones increase fertility, dihydrotestosterone causes muscle disinhibition and increased speed of muscle growth in response to exercise, especially in males, estradiol and progesterone increase bone strength and increase a female's ability to give birth to and breastfeed offspring, and all of the sex hormones improve physical attractiveness. (end of list) All of those detrimental neurological side effects of goodwill may collectively be called 'goodwill side-effect syndrome'. In the corrected state, nuclear sex hormone receptors will not induce the production of 5-HT2 receptors. Sex hormones will be medium to high, as their beneficial effects will occur without their detrimental effects. Serotonin and galanin will be low, and acetylcholine and histamine will be high. Acetylcholine will not increase the level of cholecystokinin, the M4 receptor will not convert norepinephrine into epinephrine, and acetylcholine will not impair multitasking ability, though no ability to concentrate will be sacrificed. Although this modification is a correction, it is also the basic modification that must be made to a genome before any enhancements should be made to it. This modification also guarantees that the modified human will support transhumanism. PART 3: Application As of now, mid 2005, transhumanist work has consisted of nothing except discussions, news-sharing, political debating, and some political work on behalf of issues that are related to transhumanism. There have apparently been no attempts at actually IMPLEMENTING transhumanism, that is, modifying human zygotes (probably produced in test tubes), most likely via a retroviral gene-delivery vector. The genome of an unmodified human has approximately 22,000 genes (in contrast to an early crude estimate of approximately 30,000 genes). Before the genetic modification of human zygotes occurs, it is first necessary to research the relevant genes and proteins of the various traits that are to be modified. That constitutes identifying what genes and proteins produce a specific trait; discovering how they produce that trait; learning their sequences; using that information to extrapolate the nature of the modified genes and proteins and their sequences; and testing the modified genes in animals (preferably fast-growing animals) that are sufficiently geneticly similar to humans in the relevant genes, until the modified genes function successfully. An other option is to geneticly engineer laboratory animals to grow more rapidly (so as to get faster test results) and/or to have more human-like genes (so as to get more accurate test results). It is therefore in the immediate interest of transhumanists to share any of the aforementioned research information. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:20:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:20:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Daniel H. Wilson: How to Survive the Robot Uprising Message-ID: How to Survive the Robot Uprising Tips on Defending Yourself against the Coming Rebellion http;//www.robotuprising.com An inspired and hilarious look at how humans can defeat the inevitable robot rebellion-as revealed by a robotics expert. How do you spot a robot mimicking a human? How do you recognize and then deactivate a rebel servant robot? How do you escape a murderous "smart" house, or evade a swarm of marauding robotic flies? In this dryly hilarious survival guide, roboticist Daniel H. Wilson teaches worried humans the keys to quashing a robot mutiny. >From treating laser wounds to fooling face and speech recognition, besting robot logic to engaging in hand-to-pincer combat, How to Survive a Robot Uprising covers every possible doomsday scenario facing the newest endangered species: humans. And with its thorough overview of current robot prototypes-including giant walkers, insect, gecko, and snake robots-How to Survive a Robot Uprising is also a witty yet legitimate introduction to contemporary robotics. Full of charming illustrations, and referencing some of the most famous robots in pop-culture, How to Survive a Robot Uprising is a one-of-a-kind book that is sure to be a hit with all ages. Daniel H. Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he has received master's degrees in Robotics and Data Mining. He has worked in top research laboratories, including Microsoft Research, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Intel Research Seattle. Daniel currently lives with several unsuspecting roommates in a fully wired smart house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is his first book. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:20:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:20:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Foreign Policy: The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Message-ID: The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249&print=1 Posted September 2005 [webOnly.gif] [This is a difficult list. My choices, among those listed, would be Baudrillard, Eco, Geertz, Habermas, and E.O. Wilson, at least for their long term influence. James M. Buchanan, one of the Founding Fathers of Public Choice theory, would certainly qualify as influential, since nearly everyone now accepts the idea that politicians mostly aim to get reelected, though he is hardly an "public intellectual," who weighs in constantly on all the issues of the day. But, then, several of the ones I chose are not on the teevee talk circuit either. I'll have to think about it more and do my own voting. I'm not a fan of Geertz' studious avoidance of biology, for example, but that does not mean he has not been highly influential. Far from it.] Who are the world's leading public intellectuals? FP and Britain's Prospect magazine would like to know who you think makes the cut. We've selected our top 100, and want you to vote for your top five. If you don't see a name that you think deserves top honors, include them as a write-in candidate. Voting closes October 10, and the results will be posted the following month. Name Occupation Country Chinua Achebe Novelist Nigeria Jean Baudrillard Sociologist, cultural critic France Gary Becker Economist United States Pope Benedict XVI Religious leader Germany, Vatican Jagdish Bhagwati Economist India, United States Fernando Henrique Cardoso Sociologist, former president Brazil Noam Chomsky Linguist, author, activist United States J.M. Coetzee Novelist South Africa Gordon Conway Agricultural ecologist Britain Robert Cooper Diplomat, writer Britain Richard Dawkins Biologist, polemicist Britain Hernando de Soto Economist Peru Pavol Demes Political analyst Slovakia Daniel Dennett Philosopher United States Kemal Dervis Economist Turkey Jared Diamond Biologist, physiologist, historian United States Freeman Dyson Physicist United States Shirin Ebadi Lawyer, human rights activist Iran Umberto Eco Medievalist, novelist Italy Paul Ekman Psychologist United States Fan Gang Economist China Niall Ferguson Historian Britain Alain Finkielkraut Essayist, philosopher France Thomas Friedman Journalist, author United States Francis Fukuyama Political scientist, author United States Gao Xingjian Novelist, playwright China Howard Gardner Psychologist United States Timothy Garton Ash Historian Britain Henry Louis Gates Jr. Scholar, cultural critic United States Clifford Geertz Anthropologist United States Neil Gershenfeld Physicist, computer scientist United States Anthony Giddens Sociologist Britain Germaine Greer Writer, academic Australia, Britain J?rgen Habermas Philosopher Germany Ha Jin Novelist China V?clav Havel Playwright, statesman Czech Republic Ayaan Hirsi Ali Politician Somalia, Netherlands Christopher Hitchens Polemicist United States, Britain Eric Hobsbawm Historian Britain Robert Hughes Art critic Australia Samuel Huntington Political scientist United States Michael Ignatieff Writer, human rights theorist Canada Shintaro Ishihara Politician, author Japan Robert Kagan Author, political commentator United States Daniel Kahneman Psychologist Israel, United States Sergei Karaganov Foreign-policy analyst Russia Paul Kennedy Historian Britain, United States Gilles Kepel Scholar of Islam France Naomi Klein Journalist, author Canada Rem Koolhaas Architect Netherlands Enrique Krauze Historian Mexico Julia Kristeva Philosopher France Paul Krugman Economist, columnist United States Hans K?ng Theologian Switzerland Jaron Lanier Virtual reality pioneer United States Lawrence Lessig Legal scholar United States Bernard Lewis Historian Britain, United States Bj?rn Lomborg Environmentalist Denmark James Lovelock Scientist Britain Kishore Mahbubani Author, diplomat Singapore Ali Mazrui Political scientist Kenya Sunita Narain Environmentalist India Antonio Negri Philosopher, activist Italy Martha Nussbaum Philosopher United States Sari Nusseibeh Diplomat, philosopher Palestine Kenichi Ohmae Management theorist Japan Amos Oz Novelist Israel Camille Paglia Social critic, author United States Orhan Pamuk Novelist Turkey Steven Pinker Experimental psychologist Canada, United States Richard Posner Judge, scholar, author United States Pramoedya Ananta Toer Writer, dissident Indonesia Yusuf al-Qaradawi Cleric Egypt, Qatar Robert Putnam Political scientist United States Tariq Ramadan Scholar of Islam Switzerland Martin Rees Astrophysicist Britain Richard Rorty Philosopher United States Salman Rushdie Novelist, political commentator Britain, India Jeffrey Sachs Economist United States Elaine Scarry Literary theorist United States Amartya Sen Economist India Peter Singer Philosopher Australia Ali al-Sistani Cleric Iran, Iraq Peter Sloterdijk Philosopher Germany Abdolkarim Soroush Religious theorist Iran Wole Soyinka Playwright, activist Nigeria Lawrence Summers Economist, academic United States Mario Vargas Llosa Novelist, politician Peru Harold Varmus Medical scientist United States Craig Venter Biologist, businessman United States Michael Walzer Political theorist United States Florence Wambugu Plant Pathologist Kenya Wang Jisi Foreign-policy analyst China Steven Weinberg Physicist United States E.O. Wilson Biologist United States James Q. Wilson Criminologist United States Paul Wolfowitz Policymaker, academic United States Fareed Zakaria Journalist, author United States Zheng Bijian Political scientist China Slavoj Zizek Sociologist, philosopher Slovenia [4][Vote_here.gif] 4. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/redirect/6236.php Criteria The irony of this "thinkers" list is that it does not bear thinking about too closely. The problems of definition and judgment that it involves would discourage more rigorous souls. But some criteria must be spelled out. What is a public intellectual? Someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it. Candidates must have been alive, and still active in public life (though many on this list are past their prime). Such criteria ruled out the likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Milton Friedman, who would have been automatic inclusions 20 or so years ago. This list is about public influence, not intrinsic achievement. And that is where things get really tricky. Judging influence is hard enough inside one's own culture, but when you are peering across cultures and languages, the problem becomes far harder. Obviously our list of 100 has been influenced by where most of us sit, in the English-speaking West. We tried to avoid the "box ticking" problem of having x Chinese, y economists and z under-50s. But we have also tried to give due weight to the important thinkers in all the main intellectual disciplines and centers of population. We also tried to ensure that all names on the list are influential in at least a few countries in their region, if not the entire globe. We may not have succeeded in following all these rules to the letter, but for those of you irritated by our choices, there is a small safety valve--a write-in vote that allows you to nominate a name that wasn't included on our list. -- Prospect and Foreign Policy From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 1 19:20:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:20:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Foreign Policy: Dangerously Unique Message-ID: Dangerously Unique http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3212 MISSING LINKS: COLUMNS ON THE SURPRISES OF GLOBALIZATION Dangerously Unique By Mois?s Na?m September/October 2005 Why our definition of "normalcy" can be costly for everyone else. You are not normal. If you are reading these pages, you probably belong to the minority of the world's population that has a steady job, adequate access to social security, and enjoys substantial political freedoms. Moreover, you live on more than $2 a day, and, unlike 860 million others, you can read. The percentage of humanity that combines all of these attributes is minuscule. According to the World Bank, about half of humanity lives on less than $2 a day, while the International Labour Organization reckons that a third of the available labor force is unemployed or underemployed, and half of the world's population has no access to any kind of social security. Freedom House, an organization that studies countries' political systems, categorizes 103 of the world's 192 nations as either "not free" or "partially free," meaning that the civil liberties and basic political rights of their citizens are limited or severely curtailed. More than 3.6 billion people, or 56 percent of the world, live in such countries. Statistically, a "normal" human being in today's world is poor, lives in oppressive physical, social, and political conditions, and is ruled by unresponsive and corrupt government. But normalcy is not only defined by statistics. Normal implies something that is "usual, typical, or expected." Therefore, normal is not only what is statistically most frequent but also what others assume it to be. In this sense, the expectations of a tiny minority trump the realities of the vast majority. There is an enormous gap between what average citizens in advanced Western democracies--and the richer elites everywhere--assume is or should be normal, and the daily realities faced by the overwhelming majority of people. Information about the dire conditions common in poor countries is plentiful and widely discussed. Curiously, however, expectations about what it means to be normal in today's world continue to reflect the abnormal reality of a few rich countries rather than the global norm. We assume that it is normal to eat at least three meals a day, to walk the streets without fear, and to have access to water, electricity, phones, and public transportation. Sadly, it is not. Today, 852 million people, including many children and the elderly, do not get three meals a day, and when they do, their meals do not provide them with the daily caloric intake required by a normal person. Roughly 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity, and 2.4 billion rely on traditional fuels such as wood and dung for cooking and heating. Thirty percent of the world's population has never made a phone call. Street crime and urban violence are normal in most of the world. The average homicide rate in Latin America and the Caribbean is about 25 per 100,000 inhabitants and, in sub-Saharan Africa, it is roughly 18 murders per 100,000. (In the European Union, there are just 3 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants.) An estimated 246 million children, about 1 in 6, work, and 73 million of them are less than 10 years old. Whereas childbirth is typically an occasion for celebration in high-income countries, it is a source of death, disease, and disability elsewhere. According to the World Health Organization, more than half a million women die every year due to pregnancy-related complications in the developing world, where the risk of maternal mortality is 1 in 61. In rich countries, the risk of maternal mortality is 1 in 2,800. [EMBED] This distorted perception of what is normal can take on subtler forms. Consider, for example, our common assumptions about the quality of the news we get. We tend to assume that the news is free from government interference. Yet, in most of the world, that is not the case. A World Bank survey of media ownership found that in 97 countries, 72 percent of the top five radio stations and 60 percent of the top five TV companies were state-owned. The study also found strong statistical evidence that countries with greater state ownership of the media have fewer political rights, less developed markets, and strikingly inferior education and health. Rich-world assumptions about what constitutes the global norm are costly illusions. Billions of dollars have been wasted by assuming that governments in poorer countries are more or less like those in rich ones, only a little less efficient. Despite constant reminders that most governments in the world are unable to perform relatively simple tasks, such as delivering the mail or collecting the garbage, most recipes for how these countries should solve their problems reflect the sophisticated capabilities taken for granted in rich countries, not the realities that exist everywhere else. We want people to have a better life, and it is natural that our definition of normal serves as a compass for helping others. The gap between what we assume is normal and the reality that billions of people face is driven less by a parochial propensity to impose our experience on others than a sincere expression of our values. Nor should values be abandoned--they are our true north and point us in the direction where progress lies. But our strongly felt ideals must not become the basis for policy. At a time when values have become so common in political discourse, it is important to remain alert to when our advice is built on faulty assumptions about what is normal. When that happens, values lead to bad decisions, not moral clarity. Mois?s Na?m is editor in chief of FOREIGN POLICY. From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 1 07:20:20 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 00:20:20 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] "Avoid Unnecessary Travel" Message-ID: <3519976.1128151221187.JavaMail.root@mswamui-backed.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: UnnecessaryTravel.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 156973 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 2 19:31:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 15:31:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Bizarre and Infamous Join Scholarship in an Archive of Psychology Message-ID: Bizarre and Infamous Join Scholarship in an Archive of Psychology http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/health/psychology/27muse.html By DAN HURLEY AKRON, Ohio - Just 45 minutes from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, half an hour from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton and two blocks from the Inventors Hall of Fame in this city's downtown is an attraction like no other. Where else but at the Archives of the History of American Psychology can visitors see the uniforms and billy clubs used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students ended up acting the role of guards all too realistically; watch a home movie of Freud batting fruit out of a tree with his cane; or have the bumps on their heads measured to calculate their personalities and career prospects with a 1933 psychograph? Forty years after its founding at the University of Akron as a national repository for scholars, the archives - psychology's attic - have amassed not only the papers of more than 740 psychologists, but also a dazzling array of their instruments, ephemera, photographs and films. Although it is a beacon to historians from around the world and the source of hundreds of scholarly articles and books, the archives remains virtually unknown to the public at large. "Never heard of it," said the administrator of an office one floor up in the same building. No sign on Main Street here indicates the presence of the archives in, unfittingly enough, the basement of the former Polsky department store, now a branch of the University of Akron. Not even the directory next to the elevators on the main floor lists it. "Isn't it amazing, all this stuff down in a basement in Akron?" asked the archive director, Dr. David B. Baker, who is also a professor of psychology at the university. Surrounded by century-old devices as arcane as they are beautiful, Dr. Baker described his twin mission to increase the visibility of the archives and the field it illuminates. The archive was named an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in 2003. In April, Roadway Express, the trucking company, announced that it was donating a large building next to the University of Akron to allow the archives to escape its basement hiding place and expand its public offerings. "The field of psychology has mushroomed," he said. "It's getting more and more specialized. But we do have common roots. The place where we all meet is here, in our history." He traced the roots of recent efforts to evaluate the level of consciousness of Terri Schiavo, the comatose Florida woman who died on March 31, to many of the antique instruments in the archives. Built more than a century ago of brass and glass, they were designed to measure perception and the discrimination of visual, audio and tactile stimuli. One instrument built around 1880, the chronoscope, could measure how long it took a person to react to a stimulus down to the hundredth of a second. "Things like reaction time, which now seem deadly dull, were of the utmost importance," Dr. Baker said. "They were some of the very first scientific demonstrations of the ability to measure mind. That's what got people excited 100 years ago." Testing was, in fact, the raison d'?tre of psychology until just after World War II, he noted, when psychologists were first permitted to offer clinical care in response to the needs of returning veterans. Even the bizarre psychograph, Dr. Baker said, was predicated on a theory that remains a bedrock of modern research, that different regions of the brain have differing functions that can be measured and described. Although psychologists and neurologists of today measure those regions using magnetic resonant imaging, 19th-century phrenologists believed that those regions could be calculated from outside. The device is one of three remaining in the United States. With its 1,954 parts housed in a walnut case, it sits in a corner of the reading room, its crown of calipers ready to measure every nook and node of the skull. "You'll have to remove your glasses," John Bean, an undergraduate in psychology who works as an assistant at the archives, said as he put on latex gloves to place the sharp, heavy calipers on a visiting reporter's skull. In less than two minutes, it cranked out a kind of ticker tape giving a five-point rating, from "poor" to "excellent," on 28 personality variables like benevolence, suavity, caution, conscientiousness, acquisitiveness and conjugal love. The device automatically combined the variables to predict suitability for various professions, a process that Mr. Bean modernized with a computer spreadsheet. "Do you want to see your results?" Dr. Baker asked. "Your highest score, you've got 70 percent on mechanic, followed by pugilist, at 60 percent. How did you do on journalist? Forty-five percent. You have a higher score as a zeppelin attendant." Among the more than 1,000 instruments in the collection, a crown jewel is the simulated shock generator designed by Dr. Stanley Milgram. It was used in experiments in the early 1960's to investigate how far people would go to obey instructions from an authority figure. The participants were told that they were in a study on using electric shocks to penalize participants who failed a simple learning test. They were instructed to flick switches that would deliver steadily more intense shocks, from mild to dangerously severe. In fact, despite the convincing labels and knobs, the shocks were imaginary, and volunteers pretended to react in pain to the nonexistent shocks. Dr. Milgram found that nearly half of the real subjects followed orders to inflict pain that they were convinced was real. "It's probably one of the most important psychological experiments of the 20th century," Dr. Baker said. "It deals with a very fundamental question about the nature of good and evil. We like to believe that it would only be a very sick and evil person who would inflict torture on others. He showed us otherwise." Standing 30 feet from the display, he demonstrated a more harmless test of conformity, conducted on visitors to the exhibition. A sign at the front entrance instructed visitors to step only on black tiles in a passageway with a floor of alternating black and white tiles. Sure enough, Dr. Baker watched as a family of visitors followed the instructions. "They were like a group of ducklings there," he said. "That's what Milgram said, we're very compliant." Similar conclusions were reached in the early 70's, when Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford carried out his prison experiment in which students, told to act and dress as prison guards, quickly began mistreating other students dressed as prisoners. On display in addition to the guards' and prisoners' uniforms are fake cans of Chemical Mace and a cell door used in the experiment. For all the interest generated by such displays, the primary draw to historians is a trove of psychologists' papers, the largest such collection in the world. Ronald F. Levant, president of the American Psychological Association, said the papers represented the field's "institutional memory." Dr. Alexandra Rutherford, coordinator of one of only two graduate-level programs in the history of psychology, at York University in Toronto, said she and many of her students had often visited the archives. "AHAP is a world-class resource for any historian of psychology or the social sciences," Dr. Rutherford said, adding that many articles published by psychology journals were based on research there. "I can't tell you how many visits I've made, probably 25," said Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., professor of psychology at Texas A&M. "Probably 75 percent of what I've written in the last 30 years has come at least partially from that collection. Those are the best moments of my professional life, to be able to sit at one of those tables and read somebody else's mail. There's a real rush to that." A bit of the frisson of discovery may be felt walking down Row 17 of the stacks, where the papers of Dr. Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, are in numbered boxes. Box M437, picked at random, had a folder marked "expression, spontaneity." Inside was a column of an undated article from The New Yorker torn from its surrounding page. The article, apparently addressing the question of why writers write, offered this dour answer, "All work and creative action is a way to snatch ourselves from the meaninglessness of transience." Dr. Maslow would have none of it. In his angular, easily legible script, the psychologist famed for extolling the search for peak experiences had scribbled this typically Maslovian answer: "To objectify our subjective thought so as to be able to look at it and improve it toward perfection. To seek peak experiences." Much as he knows that such papers offer profound insights into the history of psychology, Dr. Baker's passion for the peculiar and absurd in the equipment he guards is undeniable. "It's a shame you won't be here on Friday," he said. "A U-Haul full of stuff from this place called the IQ Zoo is coming. They were the ones who worked with Skinner on a pigeon-guided missile. When a collection arrives, it's like Christmas morning. It's like, 'Oh my gosh, look at this stuff.' " It was to make such "stuff" available that Dr. John A. Popplestone and the late Dr. Marion White McPherson, the married couple who taught psychology at the university, established the archives in 1965. Forced to teach a course on the history of psychology, Dr. Popplestone casually said to his wife one evening that the field would never amount to anything without a central archive. He recalled her saying, "That's the best idea you've had in quite a while." From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 2 19:31:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 15:31:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Journal of Religion and Society: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies Message-ID: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies Journal of Religion and Society http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html [Creighton is a Roman Catholic Jesuit university, founded in Omaha in 1878. First, an summary from the Times of London, to which Laird alerted me.] NATIONS WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE DO WORSE RUTH GLEDHILL, TIMES, UK - Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society. It compares the social performance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality. Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills. The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world. "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so." Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Program, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions. . . The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested. . . He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html ------------------- ISSN: 1522-5658 Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies A First Look Gregory S. Paul Baltimore, Maryland Introduction [1] Two centuries ago there was relatively little dispute over the existence of God, or the societally beneficial effect of popular belief in a creator. In the twentieth century extensive secularization occurred in western nations, the United States being the only significant exception (Bishop; Bruce; Gill et al.; Sommerville). If religion has receded in some western nations, what is the impact of this unprecedented transformation upon their populations? Theists often assert that popular belief in a creator is instrumental towards providing the moral, ethical and other foundations necessary for a healthy, cohesive society. Many also contend that widespread acceptance of evolution, and/or denial of a creator, is contrary to these goals. But a cross-national study verifying these claims has yet to be published. That radically differing worldviews can have measurable impact upon societal conditions is plausible according to a number of mainstream researchers (Bainbridge; Barro; Barro and McCleary; Beeghley; Groeneman and Tobin; Huntington; Inglehart and Baker; Putman; Stark and Bainbridge). Agreement with the hypothesis that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and quality restricted to one population (Benson et al.; Hummer et al.; Idler and Kasl; Stark and Bainbridge). A partial exception is given by Barro and McCleary, who correlated economic growth with rates of belief in the afterlife and church attendance in numerous nations (while Kasman and Reid [2004] commented that Europe does not appear to be suffering unduly from its secularization). It is surprising that a more systematic examination of the question has not been previously executed since the factors required to do so are in place. The twentieth century acted, for the first time in human history, as a vast Darwinian global societal experiment in which a wide variety of dramatically differing social-religious-political-economic systems competed with one another, with varying degrees of success. A quantitative cross-national analysis is feasible because a large body of survey and census data on rates of religiosity, secularization, and societal indicators has become available in the prosperous developed democracies including the United States. [2] This study is a first, brief look at an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by social scientists. The primary intent is to present basic correlations of the elemental data. Some conclusions that can be gleaned from the plots are outlined. This is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health. It is hoped that these original correlations and results will spark future research and debate on the issue. The Belief that Religiosity is Socially Beneficial [3] As he helped initiate the American experiment Benjamin Franklin stated that "religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others" (Isaacson: 87-88). When the theory of biological evolution removed the need for a supernatural creator concerns immediately arose over the societal implications of widespread abandonment of faith (Desmond and Moore; Numbers). In 1880 the religious moralist Dostoyevsky penned the famous warning that "if God does not exist, then everything is permissible." Even so, in Europe the issue has not been a driving focus of public and political dispute, especially since the world wars. [4] Although its proponents often claim that anti-evolution creationism[1]<1> is scientific, it has abjectly failed in the practical realms of mainstream science and hi-tech industry (Ayala et al.; Crews; Cziko; Dawkins, 1996, 1997; Dennett; Gould; Koza et al.; L. Lane; Miller; Paul and Cox; Shanks; Wise; Young and Edis). The continuing popularity of creationism in America indicates that it is in reality a theistic social-political movement partly driven by concerns over the societal consequences of disbelief in a creator (Forrest and Gross; Numbers). The person most responsible for politicizing the issue in America, evangelical Christian W. J. Bryan,[2]<2> expressed relatively little interest in evolution until the horrors of WW I inspired him to blame the scientific revolution that invented chemical warfare and other modern ills for "preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible" (Numbers: 178). [5] In the United States many conservative theists consider evolutionary science a leading contributor to social dysfunction because it is amoral or worse, and because it inspires disbelief in a moral creator (Colson and Pearcey; Eve and Harrold; Johnson; Numbers; Pearcey; Schroeder). The original full title for the creationist Discovery Institute was the Discovery Institute for the Renewal of Science and Culture (a title still applied to a division), and the institute's mission challenges "materialism on specifically scientific grounds" with the intent of reversing "some of materialism's destructive cultural consequences." The strategy for achieving these goals is the "wedge" strategy to insert intelligent design creationism into mainstream academe and subsequently destroy Darwinian science (Johnson; Forrest and Gross note this effort is far behind schedule). The Discovery Institute and the less conservative, even more lavishly funded pro-theistic Templeton Foundation fund research into the existence and positive societal influence of a creator (Harris et al.; Holden). In 2000 the Discovery Institute held a neocreationist seminar for members of Congress (Applegate). Politically and socially powerful conservatives have deliberately worked to elevate popular concerns over a field of scientific and industrial research to such a level that it qualifies as a major societal fear factor. The current House majority leader T. Daley contends that high crime rates and tragedies like the Columbine assault will continue as long schools teach children "that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud" (DeLay and Dawson). Today's leaders of the world's largest Christian denomination, the Catholic Church, share a dim view of the social impact of evolution. In his inauguration speech, Benedict XVI lauded the benefits of belief in a creator and contended, "we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution." A leading church cleric and theologian (Schonborn) proclaimed that "the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design" refutes the mindless creation of Darwinian natural selection (also Dean, Dean and Goodstein). [6] Agreement with the hypothesis that popular religiosity is societally advantageous is not limited to those opposed to evolutionary science, or to conservatives. The basic thesis can be held by anyone who believes in a benign creator regardless of the proposed mode of creation, or the believer's social-political worldview. In broad terms the hypothesis that popular religiosity is socially beneficial holds that high rates of belief in a creator, as well as worship, prayer and other aspects of religious practice, correlate with lowering rates of lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity, and abortion, as well as improved physical health. Such faith-based, virtuous "cultures of life" are supposedly attainable if people believe that God created them for a special purpose, and follow the strict moral dictates imposed by religion. At one end of the spectrum are those who consider creator belief helpful but not necessarily critical to individuals and societies. At the other end the most ardent advocates consider persons and people inherently unruly and ungovernable unless they are strictly obedient to the creator (as per Barna; Colson and Pearcey; Johnson; Pearcey; Schroeder). Barro labels societal advantages that are associated with religiosity "spiritual capital," an extension of Putman's concept of "social capital." The corresponding view that western secular materialism leads to "cultures of death" is the official opinion of the Papacy, which claims, "the proabortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church's teaching on contraception is rejected" (John Paul II). In the United States popular support for the cultural and moral superiority of theism is so extensive that popular disbelief in God ranks as another major societal fear factor. [7] The media (Stepp) gave favorable coverage to a report that children are hardwired towards, and benefit from, accepting the existence of a divine creator on an epidemiological and neuro-scientific basis (Benson et al.). Also covered widely was a Federal report that the economic growth of nations positively responds to high rates of belief in hell and heaven.[3]<3> Faith-based charities and education are promoted by the Bush administration[4]<4> and religious allies and lobbies as effective means of addressing various social problems (Aronson; Goodstein). The conservative Family Research Council proclaims, "believing that God is the author of life, liberty and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free and stable society." Towards the liberal end of the political spectrum presidential candidate Al Gore supported teaching both creationism and evolution, his running mate Joe Leiberman asserted that belief in a creator is instrumental to "secure the moral future of our nation, and raise the quality of life for all our people," and presidential candidate John Kerry emphasized his religious values in the latter part of his campaign. [8] With surveys showing a strong majority from conservative to liberal believing that religion is beneficial for society and for individuals, many Americans agree that their church-going nation is an exceptional, God blessed, "shining city on the hill" that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world. But in the other developing democracies religiosity continues to decline precipitously and avowed atheists often win high office, even as clergies warn about adverse societal consequences if a revival of creator belief does not occur (Reid, 2001). Procedures and Primary Data Sources [9] Levels of religious and nonreligious belief and practice, and indicators of societal health and dysfunction, have been most extensively and reliably surveyed in the prosperous developed democracies ([5]Figures 1-9). Similar data is often lacking for second and third world nations, or is less reliable. The cultural and economic similarity of the developing democracies minimizes the variability of factors outside those being examined. The approximately 800 million mostly middle class adults and children act as a massive epidemiological experiment that allows hypotheses that faith in a creator or disbelief in evolution improves or degrades societal conditions to be tested on an international scale. The extent of this data makes it potentially superior to results based on much smaller sample sizes. Data is from the 1990s, most from the middle and latter half of the decade, or the early 2000s. [10] Data sources for rates of religious belief and practice as well as acceptance of evolution are the 1993 Environment I (Bishop) and 1998 Religion II polls conducted by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), a cross-national collaboration on social science surveys using standard methodologies that currently involves 38 nations. The last survey interviewed approximately 23,000 people in almost all (17) of the developing democracies; Portugal is also plotted as an example of a second world European democracy. Results for western and eastern Germany are combined following the regions' populations. England is generally Great Britain excluding Northern Ireland; Holland is all of the Netherlands. The results largely agree with national surveys on the same subjects; for example, both ISSP and Gallup indicate that absolute plus less certain believers in a higher power are about 90% of the U.S. population. The plots include Bible literalism and frequency of prayer and service attendance, as well as absolute belief in a creator, in order to examine religiosity in terms of ardency, conservatism, and activities. Self-reported rates of religious attendance and practice may be significantly higher than actual rates (Marler and Hadaway), but the data is useful for relative comparisons, especially when it parallels results on religious belief. The high rates of church attendance reported for the Swiss appear anomalous compared to their modest levels of belief and prayer. [11] Data on aspects of societal health and dysfunction are from a variety of well-documented sources including the UN Development Programme (2000). Homicide is the best indicator of societal violence because of the extremity of the act and its unique contribution to levels of societal fear, plus the relatively reliable nature of the data (Beeghley; Neapoletan). Youth suicide (WHO) was examined in order to avoid cultural issues related to age and terminal illness. Data on STDs, teen pregnancy and birth (Panchaud et al.; Singh and Darroch) were accepted only if the compilers concluded that they were not seriously underreported, except for the U.S. where under reporting does not exaggerate disparities with the other developing democracies because they would only close the gaps. Teen pregnancy was examined in a young age class in which marriage is infrequent. Abortion data (Panchaud et al.) was accepted only from those nations in which it is as approximately legal and available as in the U.S. In order to minimize age related factors, rates of dysfunction were plotted within youth cohorts when possible. [12] Regression analyses were not executed because of the high variability of degree of correlation, because potential causal factors for rates of societal function are complex, and because it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions. Nor were multivariate analyses used because they risk manipulating the data to produce errant or desired results,[6]<5> and because the fairly consistent characteristics of the sample automatically minimizes the need to correct for external multiple factors (see further discussion below). Therefore correlations of raw data are used for this initial examination. Results [13] Among the developing democracies absolute belief in God, attendance of religious services and Bible literalism vary over a dozenfold, atheists and agnostics five fold, prayer rates fourfold, and acceptance of evolution almost twofold. Japan, Scandinavia, and France are the most secular nations in the west, the United States is the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity otherwise limited to the second and third worlds (Bishop; PEW). Prosperous democracies where religiosity is low (which excludes the U.S.) are referred to below as secular developing democracies. [14] Correlations between popular acceptance of human evolution and belief in and worship of a creator and Bible literalism are negative ([7]Figure 1). The least religious nation, Japan, exhibits the highest agreement with the scientific theory, the lowest level of acceptance is found in the most religious developing democracy, the U.S. [15] A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies (Beeghley; R. Lane). In all secular developing democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows ([8]Figure 2). The especially low rates in the more Catholic European states are statistical noise due to yearly fluctuations incidental to this sample, and are not consistently present in other similar tabulations (Barcley and Tavares). Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developing democracy norm. Mass student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more (National School Safety Center) than all the secular developing democracies combined. Other prosperous democracies do not significantly exceed the U.S. in rates of nonviolent and in non-lethal violent crime (Beeghley; Farrington and Langan; Neapoletan), and are often lower in this regard. The United States exhibits typical rates of youth suicide (WHO), which show little if any correlation with theistic factors in the prosperous democracies ([9]Figure 3). The positive correlation between pro-theistic factors and juvenile mortality is remarkable, especially regarding absolute belief, and even prayer ([10]Figure 4). Life spans tend to decrease as rates of religiosity rise ([11]Figure 5), especially as a function of absolute belief. Denmark is the only exception. Unlike questionable small-scale epidemiological studies by Harris et al. and Koenig and Larson, higher rates of religious affiliation, attendance, and prayer do not result in lower juvenile-adult mortality rates on a cross-national basis.[12]<6> [16] Although the late twentieth century STD epidemic has been curtailed in all prosperous democracies (Aral and Holmes; Panchaud et al.), rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developing democracies ([13]Figure 6). At all ages levels are higher in the U.S., albeit by less dramatic amounts. The U.S. also suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, which are starting to rise again as the microbe's resistance increases ([14]Figure 7). The two main curable STDs have been nearly eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia. Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S. ([15]Figure 8). Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data. Early adolescent pregnancy and birth have dropped in the developing democracies (Abma et al.; Singh and Darroch), but rates are two to dozens of times higher in the U.S. where the decline has been more modest ([16]Figure 9). Broad correlations between decreasing theism and increasing pregnancy and birth are present, with Austria and especially Ireland being partial exceptions. Darroch et al. found that age of first intercourse, number of sexual partners and similar issues among teens do not exhibit wide disparity or a consistent pattern among the prosperous democracies they sampled, including the U.S. A detailed comparison of sexual practices in France and the U.S. observed little difference except that the French tend - contrary to common impression - to be somewhat more conservative (Gagnon et al.). Discussion [17] The absence of exceptions to the negative correlation between absolute belief in a creator and acceptance of evolution, plus the lack of a significant religious revival in any developing democracy where evolution is popular, cast doubt on the thesis that societies can combine high rates of both religiosity and agreement with evolutionary science. Such an amalgamation may not be practical. By removing the need for a creator evolutionary science made belief optional. When deciding between supernatural and natural causes is a matter of opinion large numbers are likely to opt for the latter. Western nations are likely to return to the levels of popular religiosity common prior to the 1900s only in the improbable event that naturalistic evolution is scientifically overturned in favor of some form of creationist natural theology that scientifically verifies the existence of a creator. Conversely, evolution will probably not enjoy strong majority support in the U.S. until religiosity declines markedly. [18] In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies ([17]Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a "shining city on the hill" to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developing democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so. [19] If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life" that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends. Conclusion [20] The United States' deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developing democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism. It is therefore hoped that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will inspire more extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious, less wealthy prosperous democracies. Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions? There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the responsibility of the research community to address controversial issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses. Figures ([18]return) Indicators of societal dysfunction and health as functions of percentage rates of theistic and non-theistic belief and practice in 17 first world developed democracies and one second world democracy. ISSP questions asked: I know God really exists and I have no doubt about it = absolutely believe in God; 2-3 times a month + once a week or more = attend religious services at least several times a month; several times a week - several times a day = pray at least several times a week; the Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word = Bible literalists; human beings [have] developed from earlier species of animals = accept human evolution; I don't know whether there is a God and I don't believe there is a way to find out + I don't believe in God = agnostics and other atheists. 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References 5. http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html#figures 28. http://www.csdp.org/research/hosb1203.pdf 29. http://www.americanvalues.org/html/hardwired.html 30. http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?c=ABOUT_FRC 31. http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/c/pages/fear_of_hell.html 32. http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/references.html 33. http://www.nssc1.org/index2.htm 34. http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 2 19:31:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 15:31:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Demos: Atlas of Ideas Message-ID: Atlas of Ideas http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/currentprojects/atlasproject/ Third Floor, Magdalen House; 136 Tooley Street, London SE1 2TU; Tel: +44 (0) 845 458 5949; Fax: + 44 (0) 20 7367 4201; Email: hello at demos.co.uk [38]hello at demos.co.uk * China, India and the new geography of science Across the world of science, the boundaries are being redrawn. A new political emphasis is being placed on science and innovation by countries such as China, India, and South Korea. At the same time, a gradual process of `offshore innovation' is underway, as higher-value R&D begins to flow overseas. Confronted by these trends, Britain has a choice. It can either retreat into a scientific version of protectionism. Or it can embrace the new opportunities for networking and collaboration that such transformations create. This two-year project, to be carried out in partnership with the Foreign Office and others, will provide a compelling framework for understanding the new geography of science. The project has five central aims: 1. To map emerging trends and patterns in the globalisation of science, with a primary focus on three countries: China, India and South Korea; 2. To forecast how such trends might evolve over the next 10-15 years; 3. To identify new models of networking and collaboration between scientists, policymakers and companies in China, India, South Korea and the UK; 4. To analyse the implications of these trends for science policy and investment in the UK and Europe; 5. To produce an agenda-setting publication which sparks widespread policy and media debate. This project is being carried out in partnership with: * The Foreign and Commonwealth Office * The British Council * Scottish Enterprise * The Medical Research Council * The Institution of Electrical Engineers * South East of England Development Agency * Universities UK * Microsoft Resarch * Vodafone Research themes Research themes and questions will include: 1. Knowledge mapping and forecasting How effectively can we map and predict global trends in R&D and innovation? What patterns can be detected by nation, by region and by sector? How are China, India and South Korea faring in key areas of biotech, ICT, nanotech and climate science? How rapidly are Indian and Chinese companies moving up the R&D value chain? How strong and sustainable is their science base? To what extent are R&D activities starting to spread beyond the hi-tech clusters around Beijing, Delhi, Bangalore and Shanghai? How will all of these trends change over the next decade and beyond? 2. Networks, competition and collaboration How can the UK position itself to take advantage of these developments? What new forms of networking and capacity-building are required? How strong are the UK's links across the Chinese, Indian and Korean R&D communities, when compared to other OECD countries? What are dominant attitudes of Chinese and Indian scientists and business leaders towards the UK? Can funding structures (e.g. research councils, EU Framework programmes) be adapted to maximise the potential for collaboration? 3. Science and sustainable development The rapid development of particular cities in China and India should not obscure the fact that there are still chronic levels of poverty and underdevelopment across vast regions. To what extent can science and innovation contribute to poverty alleviation, sustainable development and good governance in China and India? What role can the UK play in catalysing science-based partnerships to tackle poverty, climate change and other social and environmental problems? What alternative energy and environmental technologies are being developed? Will these enable China and India to `leapfrog' straight to a cleaner, more sustainable model of economic development? 4. New metrics and indicators There is a widespread sense that the traditional metrics and indicators used in these debates are failing to capture some key dimensions of change. What new metrics could we develop? How do we design metrics that are appropriate and usable in the context of rapidly developing economies (like China and India), but which also provide UK policymakers with the reliable evidence base they need? And how do we measure the effectiveness - or otherwise - of networks and collaboration between UK actors and those in other countries? Building on earlier Demos work on innovation systems and network analysis, we will suggest new metrics that could be adopted. 5. Talent attraction and knowledge diasporas As the science and research base improves in China, India and South Korea, will we see an intensifying `war for talent' in science and technology? How will the UK fare? Will fewer students travel to the UK and Europe to study and work? Already there are signs that growing numbers of the Chinese, Indian and Korean `scientific diaspora' are returning home, encouraged by improved working conditions and other incentives. Will this trend gather pace? And will China, India and Korea follow the example of Singapore in directly recruiting US and European scientists to boost their national science capabilities? 6. Innovation, precaution and public engagement How will potential tensions between innovation and precaution affect the global distribution of research and commercialisation? What is the relationship between innovation and democracy? To what extent can arguments about open and plural systems of innovation - often seen as critical to the success of countries like Finland and Sweden - be applied to countries like China? Will higher ethical, environmental and regulatory standards in Europe strengthen its scientific and economic dominance? Or will looser regulation and a less-sensitive public allow China and India to move ahead more quickly? How can the UK encourage higher ethical standards in emerging markets? We will be holding a launch event for the project on 12 October, 2005. For questions, comments or more information on this project, email Molly Webb: [41]molly.webb at demos.co.uk References 38. mailto:hello at demos.co.uk 39. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer 40. http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ 41. mailto:molly.webb at demos.co.uk From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 2 19:31:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 15:31:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Shelley Mallett: Understanding home: a critical review of the literature Message-ID: Shelley Mallett: Understanding home: a critical review of the literature author at The University of Melbourne The Sociological Review Volume 52 Issue 1 Page 62 - February 2004 doi:10.1111/j.1467-954X.2004.00442.x Abstract In recent years there has been a proliferation of writing on the meaning of home within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, history, architecture and philosophy. Although many researchers now understand home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field, there has been little sustained reflection and critique of the multidisciplinary field of home research and the diverse, even contradictory meanings of this term. This paper brings together and examines the dominant and recurring ideas about home represented in the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. It raises the question whether or not home is (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of being in the world? Home is variously described in the literature as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also consider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home. In an effort to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning and experience of home each of these themes are briefly considered in this critical literature review. Home 1. The place or a place where one lives: have you no home to go to? 2. a house or other dwelling. 3. a family or other group living in a house or other place. 4. a person's country, city, esp. viewed as a birthplace, a residence during one's early years, or a place dear to one. 5. the environment or habitat of a person or animal. 6. the place where something is invented, founded or developed: the US is the home of baseball. 7.a. a building or organization set up to care for orphans, the aged etc b. an informal name for a mental home. 12. a home from home a place other than one's own home where one can be at ease. 14. at home in, on, or with. familiar or conversant with. 25. bring home to. a. to make clear to. b. to place the blame on (Collins English Dictionary, 1979: 701) Introduction: dream home Sometimes when I am lying in bed at night awake and restless I play a game to induce sleep. I imagine all the houses I have lived in since I was born. My imaginary journeys invariably begin and end with a stroll through my childhood home [-] a place that I lived in for the first 18 years of my life, a place my family left nearly 20 years ago. Starting at the front door I proceed through all the rooms in the house. As I walk I try to remember the house fittings and furnishings in each room. Memories of my early life, our family life, flood back to me as I move through the space. These memories show no respect for chronological time. Nor do they come with an accompanying autobiographical narrative. A certain equality prevails in this remembered world. Eventful moments in my family life hold equal sway with the mundane activities of domestic life. More recently these imaginary journeys have taken me to places beyond our house, to our street, and the park across the road. Sometimes I see myself playing with friends and neighbours, going to kindergarten, catching the train to school, and walking along the pier or on the sand at the local beach. I observe myself in these places, but mostly the places and me seem as one. Are these happy memories? Perhaps they are best described as benign. Here in this imaginary terrain painful memories are leached of their power. I feel comfortable and secure. I am at home. Sleep comes quickly. Wide awake, poised to write a theoretical reflection on home, it struck me that these nighttime experiences mirror many of the ways home is defined and discussed in the relevant literature. My journeys inflect ideas of home integral to the modern Anglo-European imaginary. In this realm, at once personal and social, house and home are related but not conflated. The birth family house holds symbolic power as a formative dwelling place, a place of origin and return, a place from which to embark upon a journey. This house or dwelling accommodates home but home is not necessarily confined to this place. The boundaries of home seemingly extend beyond its walls to the neighborhood, even the suburb, town or city. Home is place but it is also a space inhabited by family, people, things and belongings [-] a familiar, if not comfortable space where particular activities and relationships are lived. In my account home is a virtual place, a repository for memories of the lived spaces. It locates lived time and space, particularly intimate familial time and space. Thankfully my nighttime recollections are not burdened by the need to provide a comprehensive account of contemporary meanings of home. Sleep would be elusive if that were the case! Absent in my story, yet present in the diverse multi-disciplinary research literature, is the idea of home as homeland, the land of one's forebears. While memories of home are often nostalgic and sentimental, home is not simply recalled or experienced in positive ways. My reflection, however, provides no sense of home as a space of tyranny, oppression or persecution. Equally, the relationship between home, gender, ethnicity and sexuality are overlooked. In the following paper I review and critically reflect on these and other ways home is understood and discussed in the literature. Research on the meaning and experience of home has proliferated over the past two decades, particularly within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, history, architecture and philosophy. This expansion of the field followed several key conferences on home and the publication of a number of edited collections (Gurney, 1997). Many researchers now understand home as a multidimensional concept and acknowledge the presence of and need for multidisciplinary research in the field. However, with the exception of two exemplary articles by Despr?s (1991) and Somerville (1997) few have translated this awareness into genuinely, interdisciplinary studies of the meaning of home.1 Instead researchers generally limit their analyses to particular dimensions of home [-] typically those aspects that routinely fall within their own disciplinary orbit. They explore similar issues about home yet speak in their own disciplinary voice, often confining their discussion to interested researchers in their own discipline. Where criticism is leveled at research in the field it generally focuses on the efficacy and political implications of particular theoretical and methodological approaches used to understand the meaning of home. This should not surprise us because as Saunders and Williams write: Precisely because the home touches so centrally on our personal lives, any attempt to develop a dispassionate social scientific analysis inevitably stimulates emotional and deeply fierce argument and disagreement. The home is a major political background [-] for feminists, who see it in the crucible of gender domination; for liberals, who identify it with personal autonomy and a challenge to state power; for socialists, who approach it as a challenge to collective life and the ideal of a planned and egalitarian social order. (1988: 91) It is the task of this paper to bring together and examine the dominant and recurring ideas about home represented in the literature. This is not a reductive exercise aimed at reconciling disparate dimensions of or disciplinary perspectives on home. Nor is it my intention to produce a definitive interdisciplinary approach to the study of home. My intentions are more modest. This project is designed to promote conversation about home in the literature and facilitate discussion between the disciplines that both reflects and accommodates people's complex and diverse lived experience of home. Of course there are elisions in my own analysis of the field. Most obvious among them is my regrettable lack of discussion of the cross-cultural perspectives on home, place and space. Although important, these perspectives fall beyond the scope of this paper.2 The question then remains, how is home understood, defined and described across the relevant theoretical and empirical literature? This question invokes another that is central to, although not always explicitly stated in, discussion and recurring debates about the meaning of home in the literature. Is home (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of being in the world? Home is variously described as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying. Many authors also consider notions of being-at-home, creating or making home and the ideal home. In an effort to reflect the multi-dimensional nature of home each of these themes are briefly considered below. House and home Many researchers have examined the etymology of the word home as part of a broader agenda to examine the historical antecedents of the term. In an expansive essay on the uses of the term in particular Western languages, Hollander (1991) notes that the Germanic words for home, Heim, ham, heem, are derived from the Indo-European kei meaning lying down and something dear or beloved. In other words, it means something like a place to lay one's head. He suggests that the German word for house, thought of as a building where people live, or a dwelling place for a family, is imbued with the sense of home (see also Rykwert, 1991). In English, the term 'home' derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ham, meaning village, estate or town (Hollander, 1991). Berger (1984 : 55) notes that with the seventeenth century rise of the bourgeoisie, 'two kinds of moralists' have subsequently displaced this meaning of the term. The concept of homeland was appropriated by the ruling classes to promote a form of nationalism and patriotism aimed at protecting and preserving their land, wealth and power. At the same time the idea of home became the focal point for a form of 'domestic morality' aimed at safeguarding familial property, including estates, women and children. Rykwert (1991: 53) notes that the association between house and home was consolidated in English case law in the early 17th century by the Jacobean Judge, Sir Edward Coke. The judge declared, 'The house of everyman is to him as his castle and fortresse, as well as his defense against injury and violence, as for his repose' (Rykwert, 1991 : 53). Later simplified in the nineteenth century to 'The Englishmen's house is his castle' (53), this phrase was popularly appropriated to define and describe home as a haven which comprises both house and surrounding land. Many authors assert that contemporary Anglo-European, Anglo-American or more broadly white Western conceptions of home privilege a physical structure or dwelling, such as a house, flat, institution or caravan (Bowlby et al., 1997: 344; Giddens, 1984). It is a place where space and time are controlled and 'structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and morally' and where domestic 'communitarian practices' are realized (Rapport and Dawson, 1998: 6; Douglas, 1991). House and home are often conflated in the popular media, typically as a means of selling real estate and promoting 'home' ownership. While the building and real estate industries clearly gain from a community's valorization of home ownership, so too do governments with particular social agendas. In fact, as some researchers note, governments of advanced capitalist countries such as Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have actively promoted the conflation of house, home and family as part of a broader ideological agenda aimed at increasing economic efficiency and growth. These governments have attempted to shift the burden of responsibility for citizens' welfare away from the state and its institutions on to the home and nuclear family (Madigan et al., 1990; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). The expansion of the middle classes that occurred during the 1950's and 1960's and the global economic downturn of the late 1970's are cited as some of the reasons for the re-structuring of economies and welfare states that has occurred in these countries over the past two to three decades. As a consequence of this restructuring in these contexts, owner occupied housing has increased, public housing has decreased and housing tenure has increasingly featured in the meaning of home.3 As Madigan et al. (1990) indicate, the literature on the significance of home ownership variously argues that it is a source of personal identity and status and/or a source of personal and familial security (Dupuis and Thorns, 1996). It can also provide a sense of place and belonging in an increasingly alienating world. In attempting to elucidate the relationship between house and home many researchers, particularly architects and historians, have examined the ways design, spatial organization, and furnishings of domestic dwellings influence and inflect concepts and/or ideologies of the home.4 Research of this kind is premised on at least two inter-related ideas. First, most authors uncritically conflate house and home. Second, they assert that the spatial organization of domestic dwellings both influences and reflects forms of sociality associated with and/or peculiar to any given cultural and historical context. In other words, household designs, furnishings and technologies constrain or facilitate cultural and historical modes of relating between the people who share these spaces. A prominent example of this kind of research is the architect, Witold Rybczynski's (1986) book, Home: A Short History of an Idea. Rybczynski examines historical and cultural ideas of home especially as they are inflected through the design of American and European houses, household furnishings and technologies since the Middle Ages and particularly from the seventeenth century onwards. He asserts that during the seventeenth century ideas about privacy, domesticity, intimacy and comfort emerged as organizing principles for the design and use of domestic spaces among the bourgeoisie, particularly in the Netherlands.5 These ideas gradually took hold in other parts of Europe and among other classes as the widespread social change heralded by the industrial revolution effected the constitution of households and participation in and organization of work. Of course how these ideas were manifest aesthetically varied according to social, cultural and historical contexts. The aesthetics themselves also reflected culturally and historically specific ideas about home. The ideas about privacy, intimacy, domesticity and comfort that Rybczynski identifies, are also prominent and recurring themes in contemporary analyses of the meaning of home. Ideal house/home The relationship between house and home has also been examined in extensive research on the notion of the ideal home or house (Chapman and Hockey, 1999a; Wright, 1991). Typically focusing on physical structures, this body of work both reflects and perpetuates common ideas about the ideal home in Anglo-American and Australian contexts. Although the notion of an 'ideal home' is problematized in this work, the authors who address this issue continue to privilege the relationship between house and home, de-emphasizing other idealised meanings of home. For example Porteous (1976) states that independent studies conducted in Australia, Britain and the United States on notions of the ideal home reveal that people from diverse backgrounds express a consistent preference for a free-standing house with a yard and occupied by a single family (see also Cieraad, 1999). Some of the social, historical and political antecedents of this aspiration are explored in an edited collection, Ideal homes?: Social change and domestic life (Chapman and Hockey, 1999a), that reflects on past and present models of the ideal home in Britain (see also Chapman and Hockey, 1999b; Hepworth, 1999; Brindley, 1999; Chapman, 1999). Reflecting on the 1995 British Ideal Home Exhibition, a version of the home shows that occur in many large Western cities, the collection' s editors, Chapman and Hockey (1999b), draw attention to the manipulative marketing techniques employed by the exhibition designers. Show visitors walked through sub-standard mockups of yester-year houses to finally arrive at a fully and luxuriously furnished, brick house of the future. The exhibition Guide booklet emphasized the inadequate design features of the historical houses, drawing attention to house designs and technologies that impacted on people's comfort, privacy, security and budget. The narrative also included descriptions of negative, even calamitous, social events contemporaneous with each historical house. In contrast, descriptions of the house of tomorrow were overwhelmingly positive. Interested in the forces that influence people's perceptions of, and desire for the ideal home, the authors note that ideas about home are not simply shaped by the interests of capital and the manufacturers' marketing departments. Rather they assert that people's personal and familial experiences as well as significant social change, influence their perceived needs and desires in relation to house design. Changing patterns of employment, particularly the organization and location of work, together with shifts in the distribution of wealth, transformations in peoples' ideas about community, family, even the good life, all impact on the notion of the ideal home. Even so people have very limited choice about the design of their houses. Whether they build a new home or live in an established dwelling their choices are constrained by cultural and economic factors as well as developers, architects, urban planners, politicians, engineers and builders, interior designers all of whom have their own ideas about what is a desirable, appropriate and acceptable living space (Chapman and Hockey, 1999b: 5; Shove, 1999). The association between home and the physical dwelling or house is commonly acknowledged in the relevant interdisciplinary literature, with some social researchers arguing that such a conflation reductively represents home as one-dimensional (Douglas, 1991; Rapport and Dawson, 1998; Porteous, 1976). As noted earlier, researchers routinely claim that home is a multi-dimensional concept or a multi-layered phenomenon (Bowlby et al., 1997; Wardaugh, 1999; Somerville, 1992). As such, the physical dwelling or shelter is described as simply one aspect of home. Moreover, it is generally recognized that the relationships between the terms house and home must be established in varying cultural and historical contexts. As part of a broader attempt to define home and clarify the relationship between home and physical shelter, Saunders and Williams (1988), for example, distinguish between house, home and household. Home is conceived by these authors as a locale which, following Giddens (1984), they define as 'simultaneously and indivisibly a spatial and a social unit of interaction' (82). It is the physical 'setting through which basic forms of social relations and social institutions are constituted and reproduced' (82). As such home is a 'socio-spatial system' that represents the fusion of the physical unit or house and the social unit or household. While rejecting any form of environmental or physical determinism the authors argue that the physical aspects of the home, including the location, design, and size of the home, 'both enable and constrain' different relationships and patterns of action' (82). Like Pahl (1984: 20), Saunders and Williams (1988) argue that the household, rather than the individual, is the most 'basic economic unit' through which the relationships of production and consumption can be analyzed. Although it is the 'core domestic unit' of society, the household should not be conflated with the family as the 'kinship system has arguably declined in significance as a structuring principle of social life' (82). As such they stress that there are many and varied household types. In this social constructionist formulation, the home 'is the crucible of the social system' (85) representing a vital interface between society and the individual. It is invested with diverse cultural meanings that differ within and between households and across cultural and social settings. Within households, gender and age are the 'key dimensions' that differentiate household members' perception of the meaning of home. Geographical factors, especially residential location, together with issues such as class, ethnicity and housing tenure, explain some of the variations in the meaning of home that exists between households (Saunders and Williams, 1988; Saunders, 1989). By developing a theoretical approach to the meaning of home that neither conflates home with house or family, Saunders and Williams (1988) remind us of the need to develop a complex view of home that takes into account the interaction between place and social relationships. However, as Somerville (1989) argues in a wide-ranging critique of their work, the proposed relationship between house and household in Saunders and Williams' formulation of home is highly problematic. He takes issue with both their underlying concept of society as an atomistic entity comprising 'basic units' and their understanding of culture as discrete and autonomous. Somerville (1989) argues that empirical evidence suggests that it is 'far from obvious' that home is 'necessarily or always' a fusion of house and household (114). In making this argument he points to the fact that there are many institutional contexts where the term home is invoked (e.g., home for the aged) in which the notion of household simply does not apply. Moreover he asserts that even if we were to accept that the notion of household is a useful construct in defining home (see Jones, 2000), Saunders and Williams offer no theoretical explanation of the mutually constitutive relationship between these so called physical and social units of interaction and their role in the reproduction of social action. This critique could be usefully extended to most of those who write on the ideal home. Between the real and the ideal, the actual and remembered home References to the symbolic potency of the ideal or idealized home recur throughout home literature. For example, Tucker (1994) suggests that 'most people spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home [conceived as the home environment conducive to human existence, i.e. dry land] and the particular ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled'. This may be a confused search, a sentimental and nostalgic journey for a lost time and space. It may also be a religious pilgrimage or 'search for a Promised Land.' One's 'actual home tends to be our best approximation of our ideal home, under a given set of constraining circumstances' (184). Discussion of the ideal home generally focuses on nostalgic or romantic notions of home. Critics of the ideal home reject exclusively positive descriptions and assessments of home as naive expressions of false consciousness that do not reflect people's diverse experience and understanding of home. In so doing they appeal to and inscribe a valorized notion of the real home. In other words the real and ideal home are established as oppositional terms. Those who promote the ideal home are thought to have a diminished grasp of reality or the real. This approach is at odds with the views of researchers such as Somerville (1992) and Jackson (1995) and Rapport and Dawson (1998). Somerville (1992) argues that the concepts of home as ideal and home as reality are integral to the social construction of this term. Writing from a phenomenological perspective Jackson (1995) writes that home 'is always lived as a relationship, a tension. . . . [L]like any word we use to cover a particular field of experience, [home] always begets its own negation. . . . [It] may evoke security in one context and seem confining in another' (122 [-] 3). Although they write on home from quite different theoretical perspectives both authors promote a way of understanding home that holds ideas of the real and the ideal, or the real and the imagined in tension rather than opposition. Accordingly the real and the ideal are not pure and distinct concepts or domains. They are mutually defining concepts and experiences. It is an approach that resonates with Doreen Massey's (1992, 1994) discussion of place, home, and memory. Massey writes that there is 'no single simple "authenticity" [-] a unique eternal truth of an (actual or imagined/remembered) place or home [-] to be used as a reference either now or in the past' (1994: 119). Place is constituted by the particular social relations that occur in a specific location, the social effects that arise in this interaction and its 'positive interrelations with elsewhere' or outside (1992: 13). By its very nature then the identity of a place is 'provisional' or in flux. The boundaries of place and/or home are permeable and unstable. Equally, places have no fixed or essential past. The identity and meaning of a place must be constructed and negotiated. However this does not mean that there is no role for remembering or that remembering will always be a counter-productive, nostalgic longing for something to be as it was in an idealized past. Rather, Massey suggests, following Hooks (1991), that remembering, even memories of the traditional can be important for they 'illuminate and transform the present' (Hooks, 1991: 147; Massey, 1992: 14). It is a point that is reinforced by Rapport and Dawson (1998 : 8) who argue that home encompasses 'cultural norms and individual fantasies'. 'Home brings together memory and longing, the ideational, the affective and the physical, the spatial and the temporal, the local and the global, the positively evaluated and the negatively' (see also Saunders, 1989). Some who write on home and memory suggest that people's home histories, including their tenure in any given home, are crucial to their understanding of the meaning of home (Perkins and Thorns, 2000 ; Giulani, 1991) and their view of the ideal home. Others suggest that the relationship between home and memory is complex and fluid, and must take account of the significance of home experiences and memories at various stages of the life cycle (Csikszentmih?lyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981) and in varying kinship and household configurations (Armstrong, 1993; Somerville, 1997). Home as haven Home is often described in the literature as a haven or refuge. It is depicted as a place and/or space where people can retreat and relax (Moore, 1984). This understanding of home is founded on several related ideas, most obvious among them, the distinction between public and private, and the inside and outside world (Wardaugh, 1999; Altman and Werner, 1985). According to this dichotomy the inside or enclosed domain of the home represents a comfortable, secure and safe space (Dovey, 1985). It is a confined space. Some say it is a feminine space, yet others dismiss this idea as simplistic. In contrast, the outside is perceived as an imposing, if not threatening or dangerous space. It is more diffuse, less defined. Different performative expectations exist for people in this outside space. There are different rules of engagement with people, places and things. Related to this view of home, as a refuge is the idea that it is a private, often familial realm clearly differentiated from public space and removed from public scrutiny and surveillance. The public sphere is associated with work and political engagements and non-kin relationships. In contrast, the private realm of the home is typically understood as a space that offers freedom and control (Darke, 1994), security (Dovey, 1985) and scope for creativity and regeneration (Allan and Crow, 1989; Bachelard, 1969; Korosec-Serfaty, 1984; Cooper, 1976; Finighan, 1980). It is an intimate space that provides a context for close, caring relationships. Saunders and Williams (1988) argue that our understanding of home as a distinct private sphere is informed by three related concepts: privacy, privatism and privatization. In this context privacy at home refers to freedom from surveillance and external role expectations. Privatism is the process whereby people are increasingly withdrawing from communal life and centering or orienting their activities around the home. Privatization refers to the shift away from public or state owned housing towards owner occupied housing and privatized consumption.6 Challenges to the view that home is universally understood and/or experienced as a private haven abound in the research literature (Sibley, 1995 ; Wardaugh, 1999). Most critics take exception to and focus their arguments on one or more of the binary oppositions (inside/outside, work/home, public/private, comfortable/uncomfortable, safe/unsafe) underpinning this notion of home. All reject the idealized view of home perpetuated by such ideas. Some argue that home as haven is an historic and culturally relative idea which is integrally linked to equally fluid concepts of the family. For example, Hareven (1993) states that this view of home emerged among bourgeois households in Britain and France in the mid-eighteenth century and in urban middle class American families in the mid-nineteenth century as a consequence of industrialization, urbanization and the related transformation of family life and work. Prior to industrialization work was primarily situated in households which comprised family members and other non-kin workers and boarders. The organization of these households was predicated on sociability rather than privacy. As industrialization took hold, work was relocated away from the home and, in time, the State assumed greater responsibility for education and health care. As a consequence, households were increasingly seen as a domestic retreat for the nuclear family. Where once all able members of households contributed to work or related activities, in the new era women and children were marginalised from these activities and consigned to a transformed and valorized domestic realm. What began in the upper and middle classes, had by the mid-twentieth century extended into working class families. As many historians, sociologists and human geographers attest, the division between domestic and workspaces and relations, between the private and public realms, was never as neat as the home as haven idea implies. Whether engaged in paid or unpaid labor, women have always worked within the home sphere. Men too have engaged in different and varying forms of domestic, home based labor in these spheres. Also, as writers such as Hepworth (1999) and Tosh (1996) suggest, houses were never exclusively private and/or restricted spaces. Public, social spaces such as the parlor also featured in historical house designs and people other than the inhabitants of the house entered, worked or socialized in this sphere. Contemporary house designs, incorporating open plan or flexible living spaces, parents and/or children's retreats, and studies or home offices increasingly challenge simplistic notions of home as a private haven or refuge from work and the outside world. The advent of technologies such as the personal computer, the fax/phone, email, internet services and the mobile phone has made it possible for more people, particularly middle class professionals and the self-employed, to engage in paid work from home (Duncan, 1996). The reasons for such shifts in the organization of domestic life and work are obviously complex and beyond the scope of this paper, but include transformed gender relations and the consequent need for more flexible child care arrangements. While some experience this as an intrusion, others welcome the flexibility it enables. Other critics suggest that the characterization of home as haven is an expression of an idealized, romanticized even nostalgic notion of home at odds with the reality of peoples' lived experience of home (Jones, 2000 ; Wardaugh, 1999). They reject the view that this so-called private haven is a secure, safe, free or regenerative space (Wright, 1993), for a significant percentage of women, children and young people who are subject to violence and sexual abuse in the home environment (Wardaugh, 1999; Jones, 1995, 2000; Goldsack, 1999). Home for these people is a site of fear and isolation, a prison, rather than a place of absolute freedom and ontological security (Giddens, 1984, 1990; Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). Goldsack (1999), argues that in contrast to men who face risks of violence in the public sphere women are 'more likely to be raped, assaulted and even killed at home than in any other place' (123). Wardaugh (1999) rejects the characterization of home as haven, favoring a phenomenological understanding that 'counterposes inside with outside space' (96). Accordingly, privacy, safety, security, comfort and refuge are not necessarily associated with the inside or home but may be found beyond its reaches. Similarly, danger, fear and insecurity are not necessarily located in the outside world. Like Hooks (1991) and Ahmed (1999) and Massey (1992) she argues that home is not some purified space of belonging, with fixed and impermeable boundaries. Rather it is as Sibley (1995) suggests a space of unavoidable 'tensions surrounding the use of domestic spaces' (94). Wardaugh also argues that subscription to the home as haven idea actually contributes to the 'creation of homelessness'. She notes that 'those who are abused and violated within the family are likely to feel "homeless at home" and many subsequently become homeless in an objective sense, in that they escape [-] or are ejected from [-] their violent homes' (96 [-] 7). Equally those who reject or are unable to conform to conventional ideas and expressions of gender, sexuality and class might be both symbolically and literally 'excluded from and notion or semblance of home' (97). This resonates with Sibley's view of home as a potential space of 'exclusion' where a 'fear of difference', of 'non-conforming people, activities or artifacts' can be projected onto the 'objects and spaces comprising the home' (1995: 91). Ironically many researchers who reject the idealized characterization of home continue to conflate home and dwelling and thereby preserve a clear demarcation between inside and outside. A more radical critique of the understanding of home as an enclosed, private space [-] a haven from the outside world is provided by some of the cross-cultural research. For example, Jackson (1995) implies that nomadic peoples, 'for whom dwelling is not synonymous with being housed and settled' do not focus on ideas of home as a private place clearly differentiated from the outside world. He states that for the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert in Central Australia . . . 'home is where one hails from . . . , but it also suggests the places one has camped, sojourned and lived during the course of one's own lifetime' (122). Similarly, for the people of Nuakata Island, Papua New Guinea, home is variously translated as matrilineal village(s), or the island itself, and is not a private physical dwelling that is clearly differentiated from an outside world (Mallett, 2003). Rather it equates to the lands and places where one's matrilineal forbears stayed or dwelled. While these spaces are not private, enclosed dwellings, they are possessed spaces or territories with defined, though not always visible, boundaries that must be observed and respected by those who do not belong there. Home and family An association between home and family has been noted by many researchers (Jones, 1995, 2000; Finch and Hayes, 1994; Bowlby et al., 1997), however the nature and significance of this relationship for the meaning of home remains keenly contested. So too is the meaning of family. Some authors, so-called traditionalists, suggest that the link between home and family is so strong that the terms are almost interchangeable (Crow, 1989; Oakley, 1976; Bernardes, 1987). When conceived as inter-related or overlapping terms, home typically symbolizes the birth family dwelling and the birth family or family of origin (Gilman, 1980). Home encompasses the house or dwelling that a person lived in immediately after birth and/or their childhood family house(s). It also symbolizes the family relationships and life courses enacted within those spaces. As such it is the place where children are nurtured and reared and finally depart when they come of age (Bowlby et al., 1997; Hunt, 1989; Jones, 1995, 2000). Without the family a home is 'only a house' (Gilman, 1980; Leonard, 1980). According to Bachelard (1969) this house or dwelling is our 'first universe'. As such 'it shelters our daydreaming, cradles our thoughts and memories and provides us with a sense of stability. Throughout our lives the house in which we are born remains "physically inscribed in us" ' (Jackson, 1995: 86; see also Domosh, 1998). Critics of this view of the relationship between home and family concede it has currency in the Western popular imaginary, however they argue that it is ideologically laden and premised on the white, middle class, heterosexual nuclear family (Wagner, 1993; Passaro, 1996; Wardaugh, 1999; Bowlby et al., 1997; Leonard, 1980 ; Hooks, 1990). Under this definition the home belongs both materially and symbolically to the heterosexual couple who enact and promote particular gendered roles and relationships (see Barrett and McIntosh, 1982). Typically children only belong there when they are young and have little power and authority although they have increasing status as evidenced by the increased space accorded them within modern house designs (Jones, 1995, 2000; Ainley, 1991; Finch and Hayes, 1994). Munro and Madigon (1999) suggest that governments and other institutions (e.g. religions, environmental groups) promote an ideological trinity of family, home and community (107). These institutions have a vested interest (material, economic, social, spiritual) in defining the types and expressions of ideal family relationships (Watson and Austerbury, 1986). Saunders and Williams (1988) argue that the nuclear family is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western societies, and that other household forms might be equally pertinent to the constitution of home.7 A vast literature on cross-cultural notions of kinship, place and belonging also suggests that the nuclear family and the nuclear family house are of limited relevance to the meaning of home and family for many people. For example, the family comprises extended family members and home might encompass the places where these extended family members reside. Similarly research on migration, exile and that on home leaving suggests the significance of the relationship between home and family can change over the course of an individual life or in different spatial contexts. Hence, at some points and places in a person's life it may be pivotal, but at others it may be largely irrelevant. Home and gender Within the literature, reflections on the significance of family to the meaning of home invariably occur as part of a broader discussion of the relationship between gender and home. Women are often the focus of this material. This is not surprising given that much of the relevant research [-] whether it is in sociology, anthropology, social psychology, human geography, architecture or history [-] is inspired and informed by feminist theory and debates. Feminist theories, particularly second wave theories have often privileged women's experience, effectively, if not intentionally conflating women and gender (Mallett, 2003). Analyses of the relationship between gender and the meaning of home generally focus on issues of: work or production, consumption, spaces including house design, and/or housing tenure and the house as an expression of status. Early writers on gendered perceptions of home claim that men consider it to be a signifier of status and achievement whereas women view home as a haven (Somerville, 1997; Seeley et al., 1956; Rainwater, 1966). Almost without exception, second-wave feminist writers (of the 1970's and 1980's), particularly but not exclusively socialist feminists, identify home as a site of oppression, tyranny and patriarchal domination of women. Accordingly, it is in this private realm that women are consigned to a life of reproductive and domestic labor (Oakley, 1974; Eisenstein, 1984). While they manage household consumption they do not have economic control of it. Although their work in creating and maintaining (a clean, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing) home and family is, to some extent, valued, they remain socially isolated, with few opportunities to achieve the social, economic and political status accorded their male partners who engage in paid work in the public domain (Madigan et al., 1990). Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm (Darke, 1994; Madigan et al., 1990; Munro and Madigan, 1999). Their emotional and spatial needs are secondary to those of their husband and children. In contrast, for men home is a space in which they have ultimate authority, yet limited responsibility for the domestic and child-rearing duties that take place in it. Home is a haven from the pressure of the outside world, even a site of leisure and recreation. While home is a source of status for men, paid work and other activities in the public realm provide them with alternative and highly valued identities. Related, second-wave feminist research on the interaction between gender, space and home noted how these social and historical ideas about gender roles and relationships in the home environment are inflected in housing designs, domestic interiors and technologies (Goodall, 1990). The impact of and implications of segregated housing estates on women has also been examined. In these contexts women are often socially isolated, have a diminished capacity for paid employment and participation in wider communal and political spheres and often feel fearful, physically vulnerable and insecure (Madigon et al., 1990). Over the last decade or so these feminist critiques of home have been subjected to increased scrutiny by a range of social researchers, including feminist researchers. As Gurney (1997) notes, the work of Saunders (1989, 1990a, 1990b) on gender and the meaning of home provided impetus for some of this work. Convinced that socialist feminist critiques of home were skewing debates within the social sciences, Saunders (1990a) claimed his empirical research revealed that there was an enormous disparity between feminist critiques of home and women's descriptions of the meaning of home. Accordingly the women in his study did not describe home as a place of oppression. While many researchers in the field of urban sociology and housing studies have critiqued Saunders's work on methodological and theoretical grounds, Gurney (1997) refutes his claims on the basis of his own episodic ethnographies of working class owner-occupied households in East Bristol, England. Gurney found that while women initially provide emotional and positive accounts of home whereas as men are more likely to offer 'negative and instrumental meanings of home', this situation was reversed over time, in subsequent or later conversations (see also Richards, 1990). More recent research on gender, work and home has challenged the somewhat narrow, view of home as a private, domestic and female realm where reproductive rather than productive work occurs. For example contemporary research on both rural and urban outworkers or home workers reveals that many women engage in paid work such as sewing, washing ironing, cooking, clerical and administrative tasks, and child minding in their own home environments (Oberhauser, 1995, 1997). Equally, some men, particularly self-employed tradesmen and professionals, routinely engage in paid work from home, be it full or part-time. Many researchers have demonstrated that the sort of paid work men and women engage in, when and in what spaces within the house, impacts on family members experience and their perceptions of home and familial relationships (Massey, 1996; Duncan, 1996b; Phizacklea and Wolkowitiz, 1995). Discussion of women's increased participation in paid employment both within and beyond the home generally focuses on the double burden experienced by women. As such researchers claim that despite some evidence of men's increasing participation in household labor, women continue to experienced and/or describe home as a site of oppression. Women remain pri-marily responsible for domestic labor and over and above this they now choose or are expected to engage in either full or part-time paid employment. Despite this, however, there is a growing body of feminist literature that valorizes women's experience of domestic labour and mothering within home environments. Early work on gender and space argued that certain rooms or space in the family home were gendered (e.g. the kitchen was a female space, the shed a male one, etc.). House designs reflected stereotypical gendered relationships peculiar to a given social and historical period (Hunt, 1989; Lupton, 1992, 1993; Sparke, 1995; Buckley, 1996). More recent discussions of gender and space have argued for a more sophisticated analysis of the ways space is negotiated and lived in the family house/home. There is, for example, increasing recognition that rooms or spaces in the family home are not effectively gendered even when they are designed to meet the requirements of a man or a woman (e.g. height of kitchen benches). Rather it is the activities that are performed in these spaces at given times and in given relational contexts that reflect and/or subvert particular ideas about gender, age, and role (Munro and Madigan, 1999; Mallett, 2003; Bowlby et al., 1997; Massey, 1996). Despite these advances, general debate about gender and the meaning of home remains problematic, if not simplistic. For example many researchers in the field of urban sociology, and housing studies continue to conflate house and home and take little or no account of the widespread critiques of fixed and bounded notions of sex, gender and sexuality that have occurred within feminist and queer theory in the last decade or so (Butler, 1990, 1993; Gatens, 1983; Grosz, 1994; Young, 1990). Consequently many researchers unthinkingly privilege gender rather than say sexuality or a combined sex, gender and sexuality when reflecting on people's understanding and experiences of home (see Madigan et al., 1990; Gurney, 1997; Saunders, 1989). The intersection between gender, sexuality and ethnicity and age is also forgotten or elided in most of these analyses. There are exceptions of course but these largely fall outside of the dedicated literature. Both Hooks (1990) and Crenshaw (1994), for example write about the experience and meaning of home for African-American women and women of color. Crenshaw views the home as a site of oppression and disempowerment for women of colour rooted in the intersecting issues of race and gender. Hooks (1990) acknowledges that home is a potential site of patriarchal oppression for African-American women yet she also argues that it need not be seen as a politically neutral place. It is potentially a site for radical subversive activity for both Afro-American men and women who may feel marginalized in public spaces. Although detailed critique of the research on gender and home is beyond the scope of this paper it is clear that there is a great need for such an analysis in the field. Home/journeying Cultural studies and anthropological literature detailing the experience of migrants and refugees as well as sociological and psychological empirical research on family formation and home-leaving claim that ideas about staying, leaving and journeying are integrally associated with notions of home. These ideas are in turn linked to, among other things, notions of dependency, inter-dependence and autonomy, continuity and dis/location. As such, home, be it defined as a dwelling, a homeland, or even a constellation of relationships, is represented as a spatial and relational realm from which people venture into the world and to which they generally hope to return (Case, 1996). It is a place of origin (however recent or relative) as well as a point of destination. For Ginsburg (1999) home is less about 'where you are from' and 'more about where you are going' (35). This sentiment is also expressed by Tucker (1994), who stresses that 'home-searching is a basic trait of human nature', one which arises out of the propensity of humans to migrate as a means of ensuring their survival (186). Journeys away from home, for no matter how trivial or routine a purpose, are thought to constitute both home and traveler. Dovey (1985) claims that these journeys establish the thresholds and boundaries of home, particularly boundarties associated with time and the experience of being at home. Similarly, people's experience of home influences the meaning and significance of their journeys beyond it. Considered a realm where socio-cultural and historical ideas about family, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and age are reinforced, it is also a space where ideas about who may take particular journeys are enacted. For example, in Western contexts at least, it is commonly expected that young people will reach a point in their life when it is appropriate for them to leave the birth family home. At this time they will ideally establish an independent place of their own without severing all ties to their birth family or the family dwelling. This expectation is premised on, what many see as an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home. According to this construction home is thought of as a nurturing environment underpinned by stable relationships that provide continuity of care and foster interdependence while also facilitating a capacity for independence. Ideas about the age and manner in which young men or women should leave home (i.e., to get married or establish an independent household, to travel, work or go to university) are culturally and historically contingent. Nonetheless usual and socially acceptable routes out of home remain and those young people who take alternative pathways risk social exclusion or marginalisation. The pathway taken out of home, whether chosen or imposed, is often crucial in how these young people and/or their (past, present and future) homes are identified and defined (Jones, 1995; Wardaugh, 1999). These ideas resonate with some of the literature on migrants, refugees and people living in exile. Accordingly the conditions under which people leave their homelands, their journeys beyond and away from home and their destinations are all said to impact on their identity and understanding of home. Many who write about these experiences represent the relationship between home and away as oppositional. As Ahmed (1999) notes, in some postcolonial literature home is a space of belonging and being with clearly defined, fixed boundaries in which the subject is free of desire, at rest, secure and comfortable. In contrast, migration and nomadism are conceived as exceptional and extraordinary encounters with strange lands and strangers that engender homeless states of being or identities in perpetual flux. Ahmed (1999) like others who write on home and travel (Bammer, 1992; Olwig, 1999) rejects the idea that home and away are oppositional experiences and concepts. She argues that home is not a pure bounded and fixed space of belonging and identity that is as familiar as the away is both strange and inhabited by strangers. Home encompasses both movement and strangers. Home can be experienced as strange and/or familiar: It is not simply a question then of those who stay at home, and those who leave, as if these two different trajectories simply lead people to different places. Rather 'homes' always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive and those who leave . . . There is movement and dislocation within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance. (340) In making this argument Ahmed (1999), like Massey (1992) and Hooks (1990) asserts that home is not necessarily a singular place or state of being rather it may be one's country, city or town, where one's family lives or comes from and/or where one usually lives. It may be other places or relationships. These homes hold differing symbolic meaning and salience. It is possible to be homeless in one, some or all of these categories at the same time. This view resonates with Mary Douglas (1991) view of home as a 'kind of space' or 'localizable idea'. 'Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space . . . home starts by bringing some space under control' (289). It cannot be simply equated with shelter, house or household. For Ahmed, along with Gurney, Somerville and others, home and more particularly being at home is a matter, at least in part, of affect or feeling- as the presence or absence of particular feelings. It is also usefully theorized, following Brah (1996), as the lived experience of locality. Being at home involves the 'immersion of a self in a locality'. The locality 'intrudes' upon the self through the senses, defining 'what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers'. Equally the self penetrates the locality. Accordingly the boundaries between home and self and between home and away are permeable. As such when one moves away from home the movement itself occurs in relation to home, it is part of the very 'constitution' of home itself. Being at home (in the world) Ahmed's work is consistent with a significant stream of phenomenological research on home that describes the experience of 'being-at-home' in the world. Understood in this way, home is a (stative) verb rather than a noun, a state of being which is not necessarily bounded by a physical location. Phenomenologists do not attempt to define the essence of home or circumscribe people's experience. Instead they focus on practice, on the diverse ways people 'do' and feel home (Gurney, 1997; Jackson, 1995; Ingold, 1995) rather than the ways that they think about home. They are interested in the dialectical relationship between self and object in the intentional production of home and accord 'epistemological status to the subject's meanings and experience' (Somerville, 1997: 230). As such many explore the 'dynamic processes and transactions' that transform a 'dwelling unit . . . into a home in the context of everyday life' (Despres, 1991: 101; see also Dovey, 1985; Korosec-Serfaty, 1985). These temporal processes can include routinized activities as well as seasonal and/or cyclical events such as birthdays (Saile, 1985). Others writers, inspired by, but not wedded to, phenomenology retain their fascination for people's experiences of being at home in the world, without appealing to fixed notions of society, culture or even the person. These writers de-emphasize without necessarily dismissing the notion of the intentional subject. Michael Jackson's work, particularly his (1995) book, At Home in the World is a prominent example of this approach. His work on home arises form a broader intellectual project to 'describe how in different societies, people work-in reality and through illusion, alone and in concert with others [-] to shape the course of their own lives' (123). As such '[h]ome is grounded less in a place and more in the activity that occurs in the place' (148). Home then is not simply a person, a thing or a place, but rather it relates to the activity performed by, with or in person's, things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now, here and there. Jackson comments that 'we often feel at home in the world when what we do has some effect and what we say carries some weight' (123). All too often the dialectical tension between shaping and being shaped by the world goes too far in one direction, swinging between 'world mastery' and alienation. Many who employ phenomenological approaches to understand the meaning of home are attuned to people's experiences of injustice and inequality in the home sphere and draw attention to this in their work. Wardaugh's (1999) work on homeless women is a recent example. Wardaugh (1999) following Dovey (1985) notes that while home maybe located in space as a particular place (e.g. a house, an apartment, an institution, etc), it is always more than this. It is a physical space that is lived [-] a space that is an 'expression of social meanings and identities' (95). Wardaugh asserts that the concept of home cannot exist without the concept of homelessness. Home and homelessness exist in a dynamic, dialectical relationship. They are not, as some suggest, fixed oppositional terms. Rather they refer to 'complex and shifting experiences and identities' (Wardaugh, 1999: 93) that emerge and unfold in and through time. Critiques of phenomenological or phenomenologically inspired accounts of home take one of two conventional forms. As Somerville (1997) notes, some critics, particularly sociologists, dismiss phenomenological approaches for failing to adequately consider or acknowledge the social and discursive fields that impinge upon and frame experience. Other critics focus on the adequacy, even accuracy of the representations of people's experiences. Prominent among these are the feminist critiques which claim that gendered experiences of home are often overlooked or misrepresented. Surprisingly there has been very little sustained analysis of the methodologies employed by phenomenologically inspired researchers, even though ethnography, episodic ethnographies, in-depth interviewing, even quantitative surveys have all been claimed as legitimate phenomenological methods. The use of quantitative and semi-structured interviews is particularly perplexing given that phenomenology is first and foremost a study of people's accounts of their everyday practices and experiences. Some researchers avoid using phenomenological and social constructionist theories together (Jackson, 1995), claiming that the emphasis on subjective experience integral to phenomenology is at odds with the focus on objective and discrete notions of society (and person) implicit in the social constructionist metaphor (Somerville, 1997). However, many researchers and theorists of home slip between and/or strategically employ the two approaches. This is perhaps best exemplified with brief reference to the work of sociologist, Craig Gurney. Gurney (1997), for example, employs a range of methods including in-depth interviews, episodic ethnographies and survey data to analyze how people make sense of home through lived experience. Although his interest in process and lived experience reflects his considerable debt to phenomenology, he cannot be described as a phenomenologist. Gurney's work is premised on a belief that the worlds people inhabit are socially constructed. By employing the social construction metaphor he appeals to a notion of a passive, ontological social world or society upon which ideas, discourses and practices are elaborated. People make sense of these socially constructed worlds through lived experience. Accordingly he argues that home is an ideological construct that emerges through and is created from people's lived experience. Gurney stresses the importance of emotion (love, intimacy, family, anger, depression, among others) in the discursive construction of the meaning of home, as part of a broader agenda to affirm and consolidate both a sociology of emotions and a feminist epistemology that does not separate reason and emotion. Somerville (1992) is perhaps typical of those theorists who claim that phenomenological accounts of home fail to adequately theorise the social and discursive worlds that impinge on people's notion of home. Like Gurney (1997), Somerville argues that home is an ideological construct but rejects the view that the meaning of home is only established experientially. He writes: Home is not just a matter of feelings and lived experience but also of cognition and intellectual construction: people may have a sense of home even though they have no experience or memory of it. . . . We cannot know what home 'really' is outside of these ideological structures. (530) Here Somerville makes a questionable theoretical distinction between cognition and experience and offers no account of how ideological forms emerge. Elaborating upon the empirical work of Watson and Austerbury (1986) Somerville postulates a provisional, conceptual construction of the meaning of home.8 He identifies six to seven key signifiers of home: 'shelter, hearth, privacy, roots, abode and (possibly) paradise' (332). In this construction, shelter refers to the physical structure or dwelling place that offers protection. This contrasts with a very minimalist notion of home as abode [-] a place, however unstable, where one can stay. Where hearth refers to a welcoming, warm, and relaxing physical environment, heart refers to a loving, supportive, secure and stable environment that provides emotional and physical well being. Home as privacy means a space where one has the capacity to establish and control personal boundaries. The term roots denotes home as a source of identity and meaning in the world and finally paradise refers to a constellation of positive idealized notions of home, evident in but not confined to the other key signifiers. Despite his emphasis on the ideological construction of home, Somerville concludes that the most important thing to know is 'what the home means to different people and to attempt to explain the range of different meanings that we find' (115). In a later article Somerville (1997) elaborates on this view, positing a mulit-disciplinary hybrid approach that attempts to reconcile and integrate (hetero)phenomenological theories with constructivist sociological analyses of the meaning of home. He argures for a unitary social phenonomenology founded on a belief in the socially, historically and culturally contingent nature of social relations- relations that are understood to be 'constructed by the intentional activity of free agents' (238). However in striving for a singular theory of home founded on consistent epistemologies and ontologies Somerville's overlooks the benefits of keeping potentially contradictory theoretical approaches to the study of home in creative tension. There is a sense in which he believes that it is possible to achieve a definitive theory of home, one that 'strikes at the heart of the matter', and one that uncritically relies on a notion of the intentional subject. Home, self, identity and being Many authors refer to the relation between home and identity and/or the concept of the self although few elaborate on the nature of this relationship Some claim for example that the home, which they typically conflate with house, is an expression or symbol of the self. Accordingly the house itself, the interior design of the house, and the decorations and use of space all reflect the occupant's sense of self (see Despr?s, 1991). Clare Cooper's (1976) article entitled the House, as Symbol of the Self is a prominent example of such work. In making this tentative claim, Cooper draws on the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious which links people to their primitive past and is the repository of fundamental forms of psychic energy known as archetypes. Symbols manifest these unconscious archetypes in space and time. Accordingly she speculates that one of the most fundamental archetypes, the free-standing house on the ground, is a frequent symbol of the self (Horelli, 1990). Tucker also suggests that home may be an expression of a person's subjectivity in the world. Alternatively he states it may simply be a space where people feel at ease and are able to express and fulfill their unique selves or identities. The home of which he speaks though is not conflated with the house. It may be an emotional environment, a culture, a geographical location, a political system, a historical time and place, a house etc., and a combination of all of the above (1994: 184). Authors such as Havel (1992; cited by Tucker, 1994) conceive of home as an inalienable source of identity. Havel, like Hollander (1991) imagines home in terms of concentric circles. These circles represent an aspect of existential experience that include, house, village or town, family, social environment, professional environment, the nation, civic society, the civilization and the world. Each is equally important and must be given its due although some may be more important to people at different times in their lives. Havel writes, 'All the circles of our home . . . are an inalienable part of us, and an inseparable element of our human identity. Deprived of all the aspects of his home, man would be deprived of himself, of his humanity' (1992: 31; cited by Tucker, 1994). For philosophers such as Kuang-Ming Wu (1993) home refers to the intersubjective relationships that brings a self, person or I into being or existence. Home is therefore understood as fundamental to being. It is not conceptualised as a place or space. Drawing on the work of Sartre and Martin Buber, Kuang-Ming Wu claims that 'home is being-with-other(s)' (193). This being with others constitutes the person. Following Buber, Kuang-Ming Wu understands the 'I' as relational. It gives expression to a relation while also generating a relation. As such 'I' comes into being in relation to an-other and the other can become my hell and my home. Accordingly, to say that I am at home means 'I am at home in you (singular plural)'. When you accept me as I am, and I accept you accepting me then I am at home and 'I am born in this reciprocal acceptance' (194). 'Home is where I both was born and am being continually born, within that womb called other people, in their being not me' (195). Another strand of research on home and person or more correctly home and being, which has largely been inspired by Heidegger (1971), stresses the importance of building or making to our notion of home and our very existence. Heidegger claims that our building activities are integrally associated with and arise out of our capacity to dwell. In short the forms that we build, whether they be material or imaginary arise out of our immersion in the world- the very homeland of our thoughts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 24; Ingold, 1995: 76). Ginsburg (1998), like Ingold argues that 'human beings are homemakers'. He writes: We make our homes. Not necessarily by constructing them, although some people do that. We build the intimate shell of our lives by the organization and furnishing of the space in which we live. How we function as persons is linked to how we make ourselves at home. We need time to make our dwelling into a home. . . . Our residence is where we live, but our home is how we live. (31) Conclusion: it all depends. . . . How then is home understood? How should home be understood? Or, how could home be understood? Clearly the term home functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people's relationship with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things. It can be a dwelling place or a lived space of interaction between people, places, things; or perhaps both. The boundaries of home can be permeable and/or impermeable. Home can be singular and/or plural, alienable and/or inalienable, fixed and stable and/or mobile and changing. It can be associated with feelings of comfort, ease intimacy, relaxation and security and/or oppression, tyranny and persecution. It can or can not be associated with family. Home can be an expression of one's (possibly fluid) identity and sense of self and/or one's body might be home to the self. It can constitute belonging and/or create a sense of marginalisation and estrangement. Home can be given and/or made, familiar and/or strange, an atmosphere and/or an activity, a relevant and/or irrelevant concept. It can be fundamental and/or extraneous to existence. Home can be an ideological construct and/or an experience of being in the world. It can be a crucial site for examining relations of production and consumption, globalisation and nationalism, citizenship and human rights, and the role of government and governmentality. Equally it can provide a context for analysing ideas and practices about intimacy, family, kinship, gender, ethnicity, class, age and sexuality. Such ideas can be inflected in domestic architecture and interior and urban design. Together, the three questions listed above are relevant to interdisciplinary debates and studies of home. In responding to these questions interested researchers could usefully reflect on people's diverse experience and ways of understanding home while also considering actual and potential (i.e., how is, should and could home be understood?) theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of home. Clearly both the experience and the study of home is value laden. As such researchers in the field need to be clear and transparent about the motivation behind and purposes for their own research. They also need to recognise and acknowledge the limitations of their work and the implication of these limitations for their own and others' understanding of this term. Hollander (1991) puts this succinctly when he argues that both the meaning and study of home 'all depends'. Briefly, how home is and has been defined at any given time depends upon 'specification of locus and extent' and the broader historical and social context. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their incisive critiques. Both reviewers approached this paper with generous spirits. Their commentaries were both invaluable. This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, USA Grant MH61185. I wish to thank Jen Johnson and Alina Turner for discussing the ideas in this paper, Paul Myers for chasing references and Doreen Rosenthal for her academic support. I also wish to thank the Project i team at the Centre for Community Health, UCLA. Notes 1 Wardaugh (1999) and Jackson (1995) draw on a diverse range of home literature, although they do not set out to posit an interdisciplinary approach to the study of home. 2 For a discussion of cross-cultural significance of home, place and space see for example, Low, S. and Lawrence-Z? [n] iga, D., (eds), (2003), Birdwell Pheasant, D. and Lawrence-Z? [n] iga, (1999), Feld and Basso 1996; Fox; 1997; Rapoport 1981; Mallett, 2003. 3 This project on the relationship between home and homelessness is being undertaken as part of Project i, a cross national, longitudinal study of homeless young people in Melbourne and Los Angeles. 4 This is not to suggest that housing and land tenure did not figure in the meaning of home prior to the latter half of the 20th century. In New Zealand for example, following the 19th century land wars the colonial governments appropriated indigenous Maori land which was them leased or sold to European settlers to farm. Later as the urban centres developed, colonial governments extended this offer to include urban home ownership. Legislation introduced at the beginning of the 20th century aimed at 'extending home ownership to the working class' led to nearly 60% owner occupancy rates in New Zealand by 1921 (Dupuis and Thorne, 1998: 400). 5 This approach has been pursued by Hepworth (1999) and Tosh (1996) in their discussion of the design features of the ideal Victorian home. Hepworth argues that the design and organization of Victorian homes valorized notions of security, privacy and respectability, as demonstrated by an emphasis on rooms and external surrounds bounded by walls, doors, locks and keys. The home was conceived as a fortress from the potentially deviant realms of the outside world. As Tosh notes the bourgeois Victorian home was a gendered domain that valorized a form of domesticity founded on the separation of home and work that occurred as a consequence of industrialization. See Brindley (1999) for a discussion of the Modern house in England. 6 Heidi la Mare takes exception to view that the Netherlands was the place where this happened first. 7 Somerville (1989) dismisses Saunders and Williams (1988) analysis of privacy claiming it is simplistic and fails to grasp that the private domain is constituted by social, economic and political relationships both within and beyond the home. 8 Somerville (1989) rejects this claim, arguing that it needs to be supported by empirical research. 9 Watson and Austerbury (1986) claim form their empirical findings of a study of homeless that material conditions, emotional and physical well-being, loving and caring social relations, control and privacy and living/sleeping space are the key dimensions of home identified by their participants. References Ahmed, S., (1999), 'Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement', International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (3): 329 [-] 347. 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Religion and Society: The Development of Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain and Beyond Message-ID: The Development of Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain and Beyond Journal of Religion and Society http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-2.html [Muscular Christianity was alive and well in Mr. Mencken's day. Teddy Roosevelt iirc was a champion. You have to click on the URL to get the Java-based notes. The paragraphs are numbered. They are not links.] Nick J. Watson York St. John's College, University of Leeds Stuart Weir Christians in Sport, UK Stephen Friend York St. John's College, University of Leeds Introduction [1] The development of Muscular Christianity in the second half of the nineteenth century has had a sustained impact on how Anglo-American Christians view the relationship between sport, physical fitness, and religion. It has been argued that the birth of Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain forged a strong ". . . link between Christianity and sport" that ". . . has never been broken" (Crepeau: 2). The emergence of neo-muscular Christian groups during the latter half of the twentieth century (Putney) and the promotion of sport in Catholic institutions, such as the University of Notre Dame, can be seen as a direct consequence of Victorian Muscular Christianity. Modern Evangelical Protestant organizations, such as Christians in Sport (CIS) in England and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) in the U.S., have resurrected many of the basic theological principles used to promote sport and physical fitness in Victorian Britain. [2] The basic premise of Victorian Muscular Christianity was that participation in sport could contribute to the development of Christian morality, physical fitness, and "manly" character. The term was first adopted in the 1850s to portray the characteristics of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Thomas Hughes' (1822-1896) novels. Both Kingsley and Hughes were keen sportsmen and advocates of the strenuous life. Fishing, hunting, and camping were Kingsley's favorite pastimes, which he saw as a "counterbalance" to ". . . education and bookishness" (Bloomfield: 174). Hughes was a boxing coach and established an athletics track and field program and cricket team at the Working Men's College in London where he eventually became Principal (Redmond). Not just writers but social critics, Kingsley and Hughes were heavily involved in the Christian Socialist movement and believed that the Anglican Church had become weakened by a culture of effeminacy (Putney). Kingsley supported the idea that godliness was compatible with manliness and viewed manliness as an "antidote to the poison of effeminacy - the most insidious weapon of the Tractarians - which was sapping the vitality of the Anglican Church" (Newsome: 207). From this, the doctrine of Muscular Christianity was adopted as a response to the perceived puritanical and ascetic religiosity of the Tractarians, later known as the Oxford Movement. [3] Aside from the religious motivations for the evolution and advancement of Muscular Christianity, the Victorians' preoccupation with health is arguably the most significant factor. "No topic more occupied the Victorian mind than Health . . . they invented, revived, or imported from abroad a multitude of athletic recreations, and England became in Sir Charles Tennyson's words, the world's game master" (Haley: 3). Haley suggests there were three main reasons for the prominence of the concept of the healthy body in the mid-nineteenth century. [4] First, the Industrial Revolution brought about a Leisure Revolution within the working class population (Cunningham) and played a major role in focusing the Victorian psyche on health. Paradoxically, the automation of industry had led to sedentary lifestyles and as a consequence an exponential rise in cardio-vascular and respiratory disease. In addition, poor conditions and long arduous working hours in the factories resulted in many contracting occupational diseases. Second, the nineteenth century witnessed a number of major developments in medical science. The founding of physiology as a distinct discipline separate from biological science, and the emergence of physiological psychology engendered a holistic understanding of health and an emphasis on the mind-body connection. Third, and often less publicized, there was a real threat of war from a number of European countries and the Americans. Responding to this, the intelligentsia saw the need to protect the British Empire and produce leaders that were well educated and "manly" (Haley). Kingsley and Hughes, amongst other Protestant elite, saw Muscular Christianity as an appropriate vehicle for advancing British imperialism and increasing the health and well-being of the nation (Putney). Through the medium of sport, Kingsley saw the potential for spiritual, moral, and physical development: . . . in the playing field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still temper, self-restraint, fairness, honor, unenvious approbation of another's success, and all that `give and take'of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial (Kingsley cited in Haley: 119). [5] The aim of this essay is to provide an understanding of the historical and theological development of Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain and how this has contributed to the relationship that exists between Christianity and Sport today. Discussion will focus on the historical and theological roots of the movement and its manifestation in the late twentieth^ and twenty-first century. Historical and Theological Roots of Muscular Christianity [6] The origins of Muscular Christianity can be traced back to the New Testament where St. Paul and others used athletic metaphors to help describe the challenges of the Christian life (1 Corinthians 6:19; 9:24-25; and 2 Timothy. 4: 7).[1]<1> However, the explicit advocacy of sport and exercise, in the guise of Muscular Christianity, did not evolve until the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, and the source of the idiom has been a point of debate amongst scholars (Redmond). It is commonly accepted that a review of Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1857) for the Saturday Review, written by the cleric T.C. Sandars was the first place the term appeared (Simon and Bradley). Ironically, Kingsley abhorred it and wrote a vitriolic response to the author who had used ". . . that painful, if not offensive term, `Muscular Christianity'" (Haley: 109). Thomas Hughes, a friend and supporter of Kingsley, then used the concept in a follow-up to Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), called Tom Brown at Oxford (1861). In contrast to Kingsley, who seemed worried about the negative connotations that may have been attached to the secular phrase "muscular", Hughes used it to promote the athleticism that was so pervasive in his novels (Winn). This said, Rosen notes that he was careful to clearly distinguish the concept of "muscular Christians" from the "musclemen" (athletes without Christian beliefs): "the only point in common between the two being, that both hold it to be a good thing to have strong and well-exercised bodies . . . Here all likeness ends", the Christian belief is ". . . that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes" (Hughes: 99). [7] Interestingly, Redmond has noted that a closer examination of other children's literature long before the birth of the concept in Kingsley and Hughes shows that the general thesis of Muscular Christianity was implicit within works published between 1762 and 1857. The work of writers, such as J.J. Rousseau, William Clarke, Dorothy Kilner, William Howitt, and S.G. Goodrich all possess glimpses of the Christian muscular gospel that flowered in the literature of Kingsley and Hughes. In his classic, Emile (1762), Rousseau emphasizes the importance of physical education in the development of moral character: "Give his body constant exercise, make it strong and healthy in order to make him good and wise . . . The lessons the scholars learn from one another in the playground are worth a hundred fold more than what they learn in the classroom" (cited in Redmond: 9). In conclusion, Redmond suggests neither Kingsley nor Hughes can be accredited with the original "athletic gospel" but they "reaped the harvest" that gave birth to the Muscular Christian movement during the Victorian period. [8] Their personal lives, education, and political and theological affiliations heavily influenced Kingsley's and Hughes' ideas. The period between 1850-1900 was characterized by social unrest and political instability in the form of labor unrest in the working class population and serious problems with public health (Clark). Both Hughes and Kingsley had been sympathizers of Chartism, a political movement that developed in response to the social injustices suffered by the working classes. As a rector and author of social novels such as Yeast (1848), Westward Ho! (1855), and Alton Locke (1850), Kingsley became widely known as the "Chartist clergyman" (McGlynn). Following the House of Commons' decision to reject the Chartist Petition in 1848 and the subsequent demise of Chartism, Kingsley and Hughes continued to support the grievances of the working classes as leading proponents of Christian Socialism. They joined forces with other Christian Socialist thinkers such as F.D. Maurice (1805-1872), J.M. Ludlow (1821-1911), and Thomas Arnold (1795-1842). It was Ludlow who convinced Kingsley and Maurice that Christianity and Socialism could be integrated to offer an antidote to the political doctrine of Chartism (Bloomfield). [9] Although the Christian Socialist movement had a similar goal as Chartism, its primary focus was on providing solutions to social ills through educational and moral change, not change in political legislation (Norman). At the time, this was a radical idea. Before the late 1840s, the Church of England's attitude to implementing social reform was conservative with leading evangelicals emphasizing the hierarchical class system, thus marginalizing the poor and downtrodden. They saw poverty as being self-inflicted through various sins such as self-indulgence and intemperance (Parsons). The class system was also reinforced during the late nineteenth century by the fashionable concept of Social Darwinism. In short, the primary concern of the Victorian Church of England before the mid-nineteenth century had been to "save the lost" (i.e., to win converts) with concern for social welfare often coming a poor second. [10] The Christian Socialists heavily criticized the Church's advocacy of the classic political economy and hierarchical class structure, which had contributed to the dehumanizing and neglect of the working class population during the early nineteenth century (Norman). In respect to Muscular Christianity, Kingsley had stressed the social benefits that accrue from participation in athletic activities, especially in terms of demolishing class divisions. Nevertheless, the Christian Socialist idea of a classless society often concealed ". . . a deeper belief in the class system and in the bourgeois hegemony" which is personified by the middle-class boys depicted in Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays (Allen: 120). And although implicit, there seems to be what Allen calls a "conceptual dilemma" in Hughes' classic work, between "the classless democracy of the athletic body and the hierarchical structure of the class system" (120-21). This tension was also evident in what Hargreaves calls a "leadership cult," which existed in middle-class public schools where society's leaders were being nurtured. [11] The Christian Socialists, a small but very influential group of academics and Protestant clergy, disseminated their ideas primarily through two journals, Politics of the People (1848-1849) and The Christian Socialist (1850-1851). F.D. Maurice, who is recognized as the movement's most influential and leading thinker, also founded the Working Men's College in London in 1854, which ran evening classes, thus acting as a vehicle to educate the working class people. The theology that underpinned the Christian Socialist thesis and which complemented Muscular Christianity can be mainly attributed to Maurice. Heavily influenced by the idealism of Coleridge he believed that the Kingdom of God should be accessible to all members of society, a theology of universal brotherhood (Norman). In Maurice's book The Kingdom of God (1838) and in a later controversial publication Theological Essays (1852), he championed an Incarnational theology, which provided an elevated view of humanity with a stress on the importance of educating the masses to recognize their place in God's Kingdom. [12] During the first half of the nineteenth century, there had been an emphasis on the Atonement within theological circles. Nevertheless, the advent of the Christian Socialist movement, especially in the work of Maurice, saw a shift ". . . to promote the study of social and political questions in the light of the Incarnation" (Norman: 30). This it was argued, has a sound biblical basis in the teachings of Jesus (e.g., Mark 3:20-30; Matthew 12:25-32; Luke 4) and provided the basis for Kingsley's theological position, which recognized the significance of the embodied soul, and in turn the goodness of athleticism and physical strength in the formation of character. Donald Hall has noted that the frequent reference to the body in the Politics for the People and other Christian Socialist literature provides evidence that ". . . the metaphors and pedagogical goals of the Christian Socialists and muscular Christians are inextricably linked" (48). This highlights the importance and significance of Hughes and Kingsley's work within the Christian Socialist movement and its impact upon social and cultural change during the Victorian period. Of the two, Kingsley has written more on the muscular Christian ethic and deserves the credit for providing Muscular Christianity ". . . with a cohesive and conscious philosophy, consisting equally of athleticism, patriotism, and religion" (Putney: 12). [13] It can be argued that the most significant idea to evolve from Kingsley's corpus of writings is "Christian manliness." His doctrine of masculinity had been originally based upon his ". . . instincts which told him that the life of a clergyman was compatible with married life and with that of a sportsman" (Haley: 111). From this, he sought to provide philosophical and theological justification for his feelings and borrowed from a diverse group of thinkers. The philosophical lineage of Kingsleyan masculinity is derived from Plato's concept of thumos, which he interpreted as a primal manly force involved in sex, morality, and fighting (Rosen). Although Bloomfield acknowledges that it is speculative, she suggests Kingsley's work may have also been influenced by the mystical and occult philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). There are a number of clear parallels in their work and perhaps most significantly their ". . . desire - to seek the relationship between soul and body" (173). Due to the influence of Plato's mind-body dualism and the liberal philosophy of Swedenborg in his work, his more orthodox contemporaries frequently accused Kingsley of Neo-Platonism and Pantheism, an accusation that he angrily refuted. These philosophical roots were formed while he was reading Classics at Cambridge University, where he gained a first class degree. He then developed and focused his ideas into a doctrine of social action and reform through reading the works of, and collaborating with essayist and social historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and theologian F.D. Maurice. [14] Carlyle had been influenced by the German Romanticist thought of Herder and Goethe. In trying to synthesize what Kant had described as the noumena and phenomena, Johan Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) had promoted the ". . . veneration of the body as being natural, beautiful manifestation of life and vitality, a vehicle through which, by means of gesture, the soul could speak" (Bloomfield: 180). Hence, it is possible to trace certain elements of German Romanticism in the thought of Kingsley. Haley proposes that Kingsley's notion of the muscular Christian or "healthy hero" was primarily based upon three of Carlyle's ideas: the body is an expression of the spirit and therefore the obedience to healthy impulse is a sign of constitutional harmony; the state of health is acknowledgment of the laws of nature and compliance with these laws; and heroism is a life of action made possible by observing the laws of health (111-12). In light of this, neither Kingsley, Maurice, or Hughes accepted the entire "vague theistic gospel" of Carlyle, but nevertheless it had a significant impact upon their work. Primarily, it was the ". . . angry Old Testament rhetoric of Carlyle's social criticism," which was a ". . . brutally direct stimulus to social action and intervention" that most significantly influenced the Christian socialist theology of Maurice and his associates (Vance: 59). [15] In Alderson's analysis of Christian manliness in Kingsley's novel Alton Locke (1850), he contends that "the imperatives of a counter-revolutionary and Protestant culture . . . enabled the Kingsleyan sense of the ideal male body to become so central to the masculine self-definition of Britain's rulers" (43-44). In addition to the fears within the Protestant elite of the feminization of the Victorian Church, the rise of evolutionary theory and in the late nineteenth century Freudian and Jungian psychologies also helped strengthen Kingsley's notion of masculinity (Rosen). The doctrine of masculinity has been absorbed into the "deep structure" of society and continues to have a pervasive influence in athletics, religion, and men's movements within modern Anglo-American culture. For example, twentieth century men's movements that "seek to rid men of the problems of pre-sixties' macho and post-sixties' sensitivities" owe much to Kingsley (Rosen: 39-40). And in relation to sports participation, Harris proposes that ". . . the muscular novel according to Kingsley and Hughes contributed to the immense vogue of athletics from the late sixties onwards" (11). [16] In light of the widespread and prolonged influence of Kingsley's notion of the muscular Christian, there were notable Victorian and post-Victorian writers, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) and E.M. Forster (1879-1970), who strongly disagreed with Kingsley's ideas (Putney). Forster suggested that those educated within the movement ended up with "well-developed bodies . . . and underdeveloped hearts" (5). Likewise, in a contemporary analysis of values, sport, and education, Grace suggests, "the irony of muscular Christianity is that it elevated sport more than the Gospels" (17). There were also staunch criticisms from a number of leading professors within American academia, especially before 1880. A major reason for this was the American Civil War. Soldiers hardly needed to prove their manliness on a playing field after demonstrating it on the battlefield and thus often derided the concept of Muscular Christianity (Putney). [17] One of the key figures in the Oxford Movement, Catholic theologian John Henry Newman (1801-1890), had also publicly voiced his criticisms of Kingsley's philosophy. In his novel Westward Ho! (1855), Kingsley attacked the Catholic Church, and specifically its asceticism and condemnation of the flesh, and judged what he called "Mariolatry" as a major reason for the feminization of Victorian culture (Schiefelbein). According to Schiefelbein, this points out that Kingsley himself had been prone to confusion between his ascetic impulses and his sexual desires. The result was the most unfortunate (for Kingsley!) and infamous Kingsley-Newman controversy, which centred on a disagreement over the anthropological nature of man. Kingsley promoted a vision of the "divineness of the whole manhood," a synthesis of mind and body, and an education wherein ". . . one did not need to attend a university to form a manly character" (Haley: 119). While Newman agreed with Kingsley's understanding of the wholeness of man, he rejected his anti-intellectualism and emphasis on the corporeal dimension within the Christian life. In agreement with Newman, Fasick has argued against Kingsley's "hyper-masculinity" commenting, "despite his homage to gentleness and patience, Kingsley's real attraction is apparently to the displays of power and aggression with which he adorns his novels" (109). Haley notes that Newman adopted a more sophisticated approach arguing, "the man of philosophic habit has `illumination,' not an inborn, infallible guide to conduct," which in turn differentiated between manliness and what Newman called gentlemanliness (Haley: 118). Kingsley had frequently criticized a number of High Anglican and Catholic clergy, but when he personally attacked Newman, Newman was quick to respond producing Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), a rigorous defense of Catholicism. In the eyes of the intelligentsia, this won Newman the debate, much to Kingsley's embarrassment (Putney). The Fruits of Muscular Christianity: Socio-Cultural Developments in Victorian Britain [18] Following the rise of Chartism and Christian Socialism, and shifting theological perspectives during the mid-Victorian period, a significant number of the Protestant elite, especially Kingsley and Hughes, advocated the use of sports and exercise to promote the harmonious development of mind, body, and spirit (Hall, 1994). Mathisen identified four models of Muscular Christianity that had developed from the ideas of Hughes and Kingsley by the end of the nineteenth century. These are the classical model, evangelical model, the YMCA model, and the Olympic model. The promulgation of sport and physical pursuits in English Public Schools such as Rugby, Eton, and Uppingham, was arguably the most significant socio-cultural development to evolve from "classical" Muscular Christianity. [19] During the late 1850s, the tenets of Muscular Christianity became an integral part of the public school educational system. The primary reason was to encourage Christian morality and help develop the character of the future captains of industry and political leaders, and in turn strengthen the British Empire (Wilkinson). Edward Thring (1821-1887), headmaster of Uppingham between 1853-1857, sums this up when he states, "the whole efforts of a school ought to be directed to making boys, manly, earnest and true" (Rawnsley: 12). The main impetus for the integration of the muscular Christian ethic into Public Schools was Thomas Hughes' book[2]<2> Tom Brown's School Days (1857), a story of a boy whose character was shaped playing sport at Rugby School. Hughes had been heavily influenced by Rev. Dr. Thomas Arnold, his headmaster at Rugby during the 1830s, who instilled in him ". . . a strong religious faith and loyalty to Christ" (Brown: x). Although, it is Arnold that is most frequently cited in the literature as the driving force behind sports in public schools, the Rev. George Cotton had masterminded the sports program at Rugby School under Arnold. Cotton was perhaps the prototype of what Mangan called "a novel kind of school master - the athletic pedagogue" (23). [20] The Muscular Christianity movement within public schools relied heavily upon the notion of Kingsleyan manliness. The sport of rugby was particularly popular as it gave plenty of opportunity to "take hard knocks without malice" (Mason 1981), a desirable trait in possible future leaders of industry and the military. Rugby, Dobbs suggests, was almost the perfect game for the promotion of Muscular Christianity, and if it had not already existed leaders of the movement would have invented it: If the Muscular Christians and their disciples in the public schools, given sufficient wit, had been asked to invent a game that exhausted boys before they could fall victims to vice and idleness, which at the same time instilled the manly virtues of absorbing and inflicting pain in about equal proportions, which elevated the team above the individual, which bred courage, loyalty and discipline, which as yet had no taint of professionalism and which, as an added bonus, occupied 30 boys at a time instead of a mere twenty-two, it is probably something like rugby that they would have devised (89). [21] Dobbs' reference to rugby as an activity that would distract boys from vice and idleness was closely associated to the two unmentionables of the Victorian period: masturbation and homosexuality (Dobre-Laza). It was hoped that "games and religious worship . . ." would ". . . offer the Muscular Christian substitute gratifications for sexual desire . . ." which may otherwise be expressed in the perceived vice of masturbation (Harrington: 50). Homosexuality was also a major concern of public school masters. Holt has commented that ". . . at precisely the moment when the new norms of maleness were coming into force, the incarnation of the opposite of `manliness' was defined in the form of homosexuality, which for the first time was generally designated a crime in 1885" (90). Thus, Kingsleyan masculinity acted as the antithesis of homosexuality and aesthetics during the Victorian age (Dobre-Laza).[3]<3> [22] A number of modern sports historians are skeptical about the motivations behind the original muscular Christians and the implementation of these ideas in nineteenth century public schools. For example, Baker (2000) argues that the ideologies behind the promotion of sport in Victorian Schools were primarily related to class, the Protestant work ethic, and the idea of manliness that was pedaled as an antidote to the feminization of the Church. As Grace has argued, Baker presents a purely functionalist thesis, which has some merit but is a rather narrow and simplistic analysis of a movement that has offered much to our understanding of sport and Christian values. In summary, the birth of Muscular Christianity in nineteenth century public schools has been one of the most significant factors in the development of sport and physical training in our modern educational systems (Mechikoff and Estes). [23] A form of Muscular Christianity was also adopted as an evangelical tool by a number of individuals and groups during the Victorian period. C.T. Studd (1860-1931), a world-renowned cricketer and leader of the so called Cambridge Seven, and the American lay evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), both recognized the compatibility of sport and Christianity. However, their philosophy was not directly in line with "classical" Kingsleyan Muscular Christianity, which was largely a liberal and high Church phenomenon. As evangelicals, they emphasized that sport, although a valid recreational activity, was unimportant compared to gospel ministry. The story of Scotsman Eric Liddell, Olympic athlete, international rugby player, and Christian missionary in the early 1920s, powerfully depicted in the Academy award winning film Chariots of Fire (1981), closely resonates with the type of Muscular Christianity advocated by Studd and Moody. Liddell's decision not to race on a Sunday, due to his Christian faith (Exodus 20: 8), so missing the 100 meter final of the 1924 Olympics and his decision to give up a distinguished athletics career to become a missionary in China (Liddell), demonstrates many of the virtues of the muscular Christian ethic. Vance highlights that Liddell was a popular speaker at evangelical rallies and in universities where students were keen to listen to the testimony and ideas of the "flying Scotsman," and that Liddell has "carried the neo-evangelical version of what was essentially Victorian Christian manliness into the middle of the twentieth century" (172). [24] Muscular Christianity also influenced the founding of the British Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in London in 1844 by George Williams. However, at its inception the YMCA emphasized ". . . bible-study, prayer and education" and had frowned upon sport and athletic activities as an unwanted distraction from evangelism. But they found it increasingly difficult to retain members due to competition with these secular attractions (Vance: 168). Over the next twenty to thirty years more liberal views crept into the philosophy of the YMCA, which had previously been characterized by evangelical piety. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Kingsleyan manliness became a pervasive theme in evangelical literature and rhetoric, and the concept of Muscular Christianity was thoroughly institutionalized into Victorian culture and the YMCA (Rosen). The result was the proliferation of gymnasia and health and fitness programs within the YMCA on both sides of the Atlantic.[4]<4> [25] The main impetus for the founding of the YMCA in Britain had been the unhealthy social conditions arising from the industrial revolution. Young men, who had previously worked in a rural setting, worked ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, in factories with generally appalling conditions. Shortly after the founding of the YMCA in Britain, a number of American Protestant ministers from various denominations, along with Captain Thomas Sullivan, formed a YMCA in Boston in 1851. This was based upon the British model and in time led to the development of the YMCA in numerous major American cities. Two hundred and five were established across the states by 1860 (Putney). The lay evangelists Dwight L. Moody and John Mott (1865-1955) were heavily involved with the American YMCA during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many young men were sent abroad as missionary-like YMCA secretaries and war workers. This was a major dimension of the significant missionary outreach by Christian Churches around the turn of the century (YMCA). [26] In terms of promoting Muscular Christianity, Dr Luther H. Gulick (1865-1918), an instructor in the YMCA Training School in Springfield, MA, was perhaps the most influential figure within the YMCA (Putney). Gulick created the distinctive triangular emblem of the YMCA that conceptualized fitness as an integration of mind, body and spirit, and in turn emphasized their muscular Christian ethos. Putney suggests that Gulick campaigned to ". . . Christianize the gym" (Putney: 71) and in turn reinforced the growing relationship between sport and Christianity. The founding of the Boys' Brigade by Sir William Alexander Smith (1854-1914) in Glasgow in 1883 further strengthened the synthesis of sport and Christianity during the Victorian era. Sport and other activities were used in addition to drills as a means of building Christian manly character. Smith identified the use of outdoor adventure in building character and manliness, and was intrigued by the scouting methods used by soldiers in the Boer war. This led to Smith asking Sir S.S. Baden Powell (1857-1941), a hero of the war, to re-write his Aids to Scouting for the Boys Brigade. Eventually, this resulted in the publication of Scouting for Boys (1907) and the formation of the Boy Scouts in Britain in 1897, an independent organization, which unlike the Boys Brigade evolved into a mainly secular organization (Vance). The Americans soon followed suit with a number of YMCA staff members playing a key role in establishing the Boy Scouts of America in 1910 (YMCA). [27] Commenting on the significance of the YMCA and the movement of Muscular Christianity in which it is embedded, the prominent American psychologist G. Stanley Hall stated with great insight that "among all the marvelous advances of Christianity either within this organization [the YMCA] or without it . . . the future historian of the Church will place this movement of carrying the gospel to the body as one of the most epoch making" (377). Over the last one hundred and fifty years the YMCA has evolved into a worldwide organization and respected Christian institution that has made a significant contribution to the promotion of sport and physical training in a Christian context. [28] The development of the Modern Olympic Games in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) also had strong links with the ideology of Muscular Christianity. Notably, early in his life de Coubertin had contemplated entering the priesthood, having been brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition and attending a Jesuit school. However, he could not accept the dogma of the Church and advocated what has been termed "the religion of humanity"[5]<5> (Baker 2001: 15). Nevertheless, "Coubertin wrote in his memoirs that for him `. . . sport is religion with Church, dogma, cult . . . but especially with religious feeling', thus Coubertin . . . clearly had a religious understanding of Olympism" (Kortzfleisch: 231-36). Widund has also noted the similarities between de Coubertin's understanding of the Olympic ethos and St. Paul's writings, which encourage us to run the "good race" (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). Addressing the members of the International Olympic Committee at a banquet in London, de Coubertin said "the importance of these Olympiads is not so much to win as to take part . . . The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well" (Widund: 11). This became the core message of the modern Olympic movement and was borne in part from de Coubertin's engagement with the Muscular Christian ideal. [29] After reading a French translation of Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays and consequently visiting Rugby School, de Coubertin saw the athletic traditions of the English public schools system as a vehicle for rebuilding the character of France after the Franco-Prussian war (Vance) and as a perfect model for the rebirth of the Ancient Olympics (776 B.C.). In his own words, the philosophy of the games was "to unite ancient spirit and modern form" (Lammer: 107). He viewed the sports arena as ". . . a laboratory for manliness . . . an incomparable pedagogical tool . . . and it was all the invention of the Reverend Thomas Arnold. The Rugby School experiment, he said [inaccurately!], gave birth to `muscular Christianity' . . . a Greek formula perfected by Anglo-Saxon Civilization" (cited in Lucas: 51). In his Pedagogie Sportive (1934) de Coubertin credits Kingsley and Arnold as totally altering the direction and definition of non-professional sport (Lucas). This is certainly true and our next task is to briefly outline how Muscular Christianity has impacted upon the modern world where ". . . the invocation of God and Christ in the world of sports has reached epidemic proportions" (Crepeau: 2). The Legacy of Muscular Christianity in the Modern World [30] Sport in the modern world has become what Pope John Paul II states is a ". . . paradigm of mass psychology" that permeates all levels of contemporary society (in Feeney: 80). The Pope himself enjoyed swimming, skiing, and mountain climbing during his younger years, and is a strong advocate of the philosophy of Muscular Christianity (Feeney). In an address to the National Olympic Committee in Rome in 1979 he commented, "the Church has always been interested in . . . sport, because she prizes everything that contributes constructively to the harmonious and complete development of man, body and soul" (in Feeney: 60). Just prior to the 2004 Athens Olympics, the Vatican recognized the importance of promoting ethics in sports and formed an office for "Church and Sport" within the pontifical Council for the laity. The Council's statement states that the new office will strive to foster "a culture of sport" that is "an instrument of peace and brotherhood among peoples" (Glatz: 12). [31] In line with this, many Catholic colleges and universities, such as the University of Notre Dame, have emphasized the importance of a holistic education that includes sport and athletic activities. Notably, Lawrence Dallaglio, the English rugby union ex-captain who is often venerated for his leadership qualities and who epitomizes "manliness," is a former pupil of Ampleforth College, an English Catholic boarding school. Following the tradition of the nineteenth century public schools, the college is renowned for its sporting prowess, especially its twelve rugby teams. Their mission statement is imbued with the ideals of Victorian Muscular Christianity: To share with parents in the spiritual, moral and intellectual formation of their children . . . to work for excellence in all our endeavours, academic, sporting and cultural . . . to help Ampleforth boys and girls grow up mature and honourable, inspired by high ideals and capable of leadership, so that they may serve others generously. [32] The use of sports and outdoor pursuits as a method of instilling character in leaders has not been restricted to academic institutions. A Devon based Bible College, the Riverside Christian Centre, has recently incorporated "extreme sports" into its curriculum. Sports such as rafting, potholing, abseiling, white-water canoeing and surfing are used as ". . . part of the development of Christian leaders of the future" (Saunders 2003a). This is further evidence of the resurgence of the original muscular Christian ethic adopted by nineteenth century public school headmasters. In part, this has contributed to the establishment of academic research centers, such as The Centre for the Study of Sport and Spirituality at York St. John College, England. Other institutions have developed sports ministry centers that offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in sport and theology. [33] In the United States, the University of Notre Dame and Neumann College formed a sports ministry partnership ". . . with the goal of bringing a faith-based approach to Catholic youth sports programmes in parishes across the country . . . a renewal of Catholic youth sport organizations . . . in the 1920s and 1930s" (The Mendelson Centre and Neumann College). A key part of this venture has been the establishment of the Centre for Sport, Spirituality and Character Development at Neumann College and the Mendelson Centre for Sports, Character and Community at the Notre Dame campus. Dr. Edward Hastings and Len DiPaul, co-directors of the Centre for Sport Spirituality and Character Development, have ". . . a vision of sports as an educational enterprise which promotes the inescapable spiritual and ethical dimension that exists within athletics." The center offered one undergraduate and two undergraduate modules, titled Sport and Spirituality, The Soul of Athletics and The Spiritual, and Moral Dimensions of Athletics respectively. [34] Similarly, the British Protestant Evangelical organization Christians in Sport (CIS) has recently established a one-year course at All Nations Christian College, called Sports and Intercultural Leadership Studies, which is validated by the Open University as a Certificate of Higher Education. Modules offered on the course are Theology of Sport, Sports Mission, and Sports Leadership. Graham Daniels, General Director of CIS, suggests the course will allow graduates to view the world of sport as a mission field. With around twenty-five million people participating in sport in England during April 2003, Daniels sees it as imperative not to ". . . take Christians out of this mission field!" (Saunders 2003b:7). [35] As sport is a major socializing agent in the western world, evangelical groups such as CIS, have been quick to pick up the mantle of the original muscular Christians. Many Protestant evangelical organizations have been founded in the United States. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), Athletes in Action (AIA), and Pro Athletes Outreach (PAO) are three of the largest, and are active in nearly all intercollegiate athletic programs (Crepeau) - an approach wholeheartedly sponsored by the famed evangelist Billy Graham. Graham's regular use of famous sports people in his crusades became a significant mode of evangelical Muscular Christianity from the 1940s until the 1990s (Ladd and Mathisen). Organizations such as the CIS, FIA, and others are active worldwide, sending "Sports Ministers" to third world countries such as Africa, Latin America, and south-east Asia, to deliver the gospel message. [36] Literature in this area is limited; however, recent publications such as Sports Outreach: Principles and Practice for Successful Sports Ministry (Connor) and Into the Stadium: An Active Guide to Sport Ministry in the Local Church (Mason 1982) acknowledge a growing interest. Many well-known sportsmen and women have used their status and popularity as a means of witnessing for their Christian faith. Examples are Olympic triple-jump champion Jonathan Edwards, European golfer Bernhard Langer, and ex-track athlete Kriss Akabusi, who have all been actively involved with CIS and have published autobiographies or biographies describing their lives as Christians in elite sport. [37] Triple jumper, Jonathan Edwards is perhaps the most well known Christian sports person in Britain and has often been portrayed as a modern-day Eric Liddell (Folley). As the British trials for the 1988 Seoul Olympics were on a Sunday, Edwards bravely decided to follow in the footsteps of Liddell and not compete. The media created a furor, much to Edwards' surprise, but some writers clearly saw virtue in Edwards' actions: A religious athlete is a contradiction in terms in our psyched up, hyped up, drugged up days of sport. Eric Liddell, of Chariots of Fire, was already an anachronism when he refused to compete on a Sunday in the Paris Olympic games. But that was 1924 when there were still a few Christians left in Britain. They have become an endangered species who surprise the rest of us with their eccentric belief in God and the soul and other such things you can't buy with a credit card. Jonathan Edwards might as well be a time traveller, hundreds of Years old, who's come along in his personal Tardis to shake things up a bit (cited in Folley: 56-57). [38] Edwards clearly saw his Christian beliefs as more important than sport and money, I am sure to the delight of many evangelicals! He admitted at the time that his decision had not been directly influenced by the story of Liddell and that he was flattered at the comparisons that had been made to the great Scot. He had much respect for Liddell, ". . . an exceptional man . . . who won Olympic gold, but we remember him as a man of faith . . . He committed himself to serve God and, though he could have used success by staying in Scotland and sharing the gospel, he bravely went as a missionary to China" (Folley: 61). Nevertheless, in time Edwards reconsidered and decided to compete on what he had previously viewed as the one true holy day in the week. Using Romans 14:15, which states that "one man considers one day more sacred than the other; another man considers every day alike" he argued that modern-day Christians are not under any requirement to observe the Old Testament law of the Sabbath (Exodus 20:8). This decision provoked a mixed response from family, friends, media, and the sporting world. [39] Aside from the question of competing on Sunday, there is no doubt that Edwards has had a tremendously positive influence on the world of sport and wider culture. Having recently retired from professional athletics, Edwards continues to use the platform his fame and popularity have provided to promote the gospel if not always through explicit evangelism. Like Liddell, he has often spoken at evangelical conferences, and on Easter Sunday 2003 presented the well-known BBC program Songs of Praise. Recently, Edwards has also become a member of a board that oversees standards of taste and decency on television and radio (Buckeridge). To a much lesser degree, this is reminiscent of the work of Kingsley and Hughes, who also strove to reinforce Christian ideals and implement social reform within Victorian culture. [40] Through the example of his life in sport and beyond, Edwards and other Christian athletes provide a welcome response to the ". . . egotism, cynicism, nihilism . . . obsessive focus on money, and win at all costs mentality" (Spencer: 143) that is so pervasive in modern sport. Paradoxically, recent scandals surrounding athletes at the explicitly Christian Baylor University, ". . . who have been pursuing a very public quest to become America's Protestant Notre Dame" (Armstrong: 1), emphasize the disparity between the muscular Christian ideal and today's dominant sports ethic, especially in the United States. Revelations of under-the-table scholarships and drug use have caused much embarrassment. In America it is common place for ". . . coaches and players to make the sign of the cross and spew references to their faiths during post-game jubilation . . . and from their celebrity pulpits . . . encourage their followers to subscribe to their faiths" (Elliott: 1-2). However, it is legitimate to ask how much of this outward witness is demonstrated in athletes' personal lives. Although a high percentage of Americans assert a belief in God, this is not reflected in ". . . ethical conduct inasmuch as many sense that the nation is in moral discord" (Spencer: 145). Writing in Christianity Today, Armstrong suggests a need for a twenty-first century Thomas Arnold to resurrect the genuine Muscular Christian message in American sport and education: . . . the darker side of the "athletic ethic" [in the United States] . . . has little to do with an excess of evangelistic zeal, and everything to do with the usual muck of life in a country too rich and self-indulgent for its own good. Perhaps the memory of the original ideals will spark some modern reformer to usher school athletics, as a prodigal son, back to the father (4). [41] The decline in ethical and moral standards within professional sport has predictably been absorbed into the Olympic Games. Modern day Olympics have been polluted with drug-taking, political boycotts and cheating. Volkwein attributes this primarily to professionalization and commercialization of top-level sport, which has distorted the notion of fair play and the true spirit of sport advocated by de Coubertin at the end of the nineteenth century. Following the rising tide of world terrorism, fuelled by religious fundamentalism, there were serious concerns raised over the safety of athletes and spectators at the 2004 Olympics in Athens (e.g., Bone and McGrory). Fortunately, no such terrorist atrocities occurred. Predictably, there were a number of high profile drug scandals that tainted the games. Embarrassingly for the hosts, it was the controversy surrounding the Greek sprinters, Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, which received the most media attention (e.g., Bose). Despite these depressing facts, the bond between Christianity and the modern Olympics has certainly not been severed. The Olympic Charter includes a reference to freedom of religious worship, which has led the Church and evangelical sports organizations to recognize the opportunity for witness and service at major sporting events (Weir). [42] Explicit Christian ministry at major sporting events started at the 1972 Munich Olympics, with chaplains providing an "unofficial" service to athletes. However, major events ministry did not begin until 1988, at the summer Olympics in Seoul and the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada. The International Bible Society produced an evangelistic booklet in the form of a souvenir program for the 1988 games, which proved to be a major success and a significant development in the history of sports ministry. From this, the use of "non-crass" evangelical literature was a key strategy at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Christian publishers also created many other resources for the 2000 games, such as CDs, websites, and Sports New Testaments. More than one million Christian sports resources were distributed during the period leading up to the Sydney games and perhaps most notably two-hundred and twenty-five thousand Sports New Testaments were sold. Christian outreach also played a major role with approximately forty-five denominations and para-Church ministry groups and seven hundred Churches involved in service and witness across Australia. A conservative estimate suggests that there were two-thousand, two-hundred and twenty-five commitments of faith during the Sydney Olympics (Weir, 2004). Predictably, this success has resulted in the evolution of sports ministry into a worldwide phenomenon. [43] It was estimated that sport ministry, in some form, occurred in-between one-hundred and two-hundred countries throughout the period of the 2004 Athens Olympics. In Athens, the Church of England's Greater Athens Chaplaincy and the local Greek Evangelical Church corroborated to form a group of forty Protestant Chaplains to minister to Olympic athletes for the games in August and the Paralympics in September. In addition, many evangelical sport organizations sent representatives to Athens for the 2004 Olympics. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, AIA sent seventy volunteers ". . . to promote the good will of sport and help in a variety of ways" (AIA: 1). Unfortunately, Coffman may be right in suggesting that although the ethic of Muscular Christianity is still alive in ". . . fit and fresh faced Christians" who ". . . make the best ambassadors for faith . . . you just won't hear about it at the Olympics" (3). Concluding Remarks [44] The aim of this essay was to examine the historical and theological development of Muscular Christianity and how this has impacted upon the relationship between sport and Christianity in the late twentieth and twenty-first century. It can be argued that Muscular Christianity and its rebirth in the form of Sports Ministry, has provided the basis for much of the research and scholarship on Christianity and sport today. During the last thirty years and especially in the last decade, there has been a significant increase in literature exploring the relationship between sport and religion (Novak 1976; Hoffman), the use of Christian prayer in sport (Czech et al; Kreider), spirituality in sport (Hastings; G?tz) and sport psychology (Watson and Nesti), and the relationship between Judaeo-Christian ethics and sport (Grace; Spencer; Stevenson). Hopefully, this will provide a much needed corrective to the negative influences so pervasive in modern sport. [45] There is vast potential for research and scholarship on the relationship between Christianity and sport. Professor Michael Novak, renowned social theorist and author of the seminal text The Joy of Sports (1976), recently noted that ". . . research into the multiple dimensions of sports (religious, psychological, anthropological, philosophical) continues to go deeper . . . sports have an intellectual and moral depth that has been too neglected in academic life" (Novak 2003). The revitalization of the Muscular Christian ethic could be a useful means of combating the obesity pandemic that has engulfed the Western world. Alongside the promotion of sport and exercise, the Christian doctrine of gluttony could be used as a valid method, amongst others, in combating this growing health and social problem. Other areas that are worthy of further investigation include: the effectiveness of sports ministry and evangelism in the modern world; the ethical, sociological and political issues that may surround sports evangelism; the use of sports and outdoor activities in modern educational systems and in training Christian ministers and youth workers; and the spiritual and religious dimensions of the Olympic movement. Acknowledgement: The authors would like to express their gratitude to Ms. Kate Hutchings for her invaluable help with proof-reading. Bibliography AIA 2000 Olympic Summer Games 2000 in Sydney: Outreach. [6]http://www.aiaeurope.com/english/news/olympics2000-frame.html. October 25, 2000. Alderson, David 1996 "An Anatomy of the British Polity: Alton Locke and Christian Manliness." Pp. 43-61 in Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Edited by Ruth Robins and Julian Wolfreys. New York: St. Martin. Allen, Dennis W. 1994 "Young England: Muscular Christianity and the Politics of the Body in `Tom Brown's Schooldays.'" Pp. 114-32 in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Edited by Donald E. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ampleforth College 2004 Mission Statement: Ampelforth College. [7]http://www.ampleforthcollege.york.sch.uk/mission_statement.html. April 5, 2004. Armstrong, Chris 2003 College Sports: Prodigal Son of "Muscular Christianity". http://[8]www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2003/aug15.html . September 3, 2003. Baker, William J. 1994 "To Play or to Pray? The YMCA Question in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1850-1900." International Journal of the History of Sport 11, 1: 42-62. 2000 "Questioning Tom Brown: Sport and the Character Game." Pp. 7-18 in A Fair go for All? Current Issues in Australian Sport Ethics. Edited by John Squires. Sydney: New College Institute for Values Research. 2001 If Christ Came to the Olympics: New College Lectures. Australia: University of New South Wales Press. Ballou, Ralph, B. 1973 "Analysis of the Writings of Selected Church Fathers to A.D. 394 to Reveal Attitudes regarding Physical Activity." Pp. 187-99 in History of Sport and Physical Education to 1900: Selected Topics. Edited by Earle F. Zeigler. Champaign, IL: Stipes. Bone, James, and Daniel McGrory 2004 "US Golden Girl Fears Olympic Terror Attack." The Times March 30: 3. Bose, Mihir 2004 "Greeks Step Up Kenteris Grilling." The Daily Telegraph August 31. Bloomfield, Anne 1994 "Muscular Christian or Mystic? Charles Kingsley Reappraised." The International Journal of the History of Sport 11 2:172-90. Brown, Emma 1880 True Manliness: From the Writings of Thomas Hughes. Boston. D. Lothrop. Buckeridge, John 2003 "Christian Sportsman gets Watchdog Role." Christian Renewal June: 4. Clark, Stephen H. 1996 The Development of Leisure in Britain after 1850. [9]http://www.65.107.211.206/history/leisure2.html. January 25, 2004. Coffman, Elesha 2002 Christian History Corner: Citius, Altius, Sanctus. http://[10]www.christiantytoday.com/ct/2002/105/53.0.html. February 5, 2004. Connor, Steven 2003 Sports Outreach: Principles and Practice for Successful Sports Ministry. Scotland: Christian Focus Publications. Crepeau, Richard C. 2001 Playing with God: The History of Athletes Thanking the "Big Man Upstairs". http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-03-09-sport.shtml. March 9, 2004. Cunningham, Hugh 1980 Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c1780-1880. London: Croom Helm. Czech, Daniel R., Craig A. Wrisberg, Leslee A. Fisher, Charles L. Thompson, and Gene Hayes 2004 "The Experience of Christian Prayer in Sport - An Existential Phenomenological Investigation." Journal of Psychology and Christianity 2: 1-19. Dobre-Laza, Mona 2003 Victorian and Edwardian Sporting Values. [11]http://elt.britcoun.org.pl/s_vict.html. February 5, 2004. Dobbs, Brian 1973 Edwardians at Play: 1890-1914. London: Pelham. Eisen, George 1975 "Physical Activity, Physical Education and Sport in the Old Testament." Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 6: 45-65. Elliott, Philip 2004 Super God: `Jock Idolatry' Gives Evangelical Athletes a Forum at the Super Bowl. [12]http://www.myinky.com/ecp/religion/article0,1626,ECP_782_2617774,00.html March 30, 2004. Fasick, Laura 1993 "The Failure of Fatherhood: Maleness and its Discontents in Charles Kingsley." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 18, 3: 106-11. Feeney, Robert 1995 A Catholic Perspective: Physical Exercise and Sport. US: Aquinas. Folley, Malcom 2001 A Time to Jump: The Authorized Biography of Jonathan Edwards. London: Harper Collins. Forster, Edward M. 1936 Abinger Harvest. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Gay, Peter 1992 "The Manliness of Christ." Pp. 102-16 in Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society. Edited by Robert W. Davis and Richard J. Helmstadter. London: Routledge. Glatz, Carol 2004 "Sports Office Speeds Out of the Blocks." The Catholic Times Sunday August 15: 12. Grace, Damian J. 2000 "Values, Sport and Education." Journal of Christian Education 43, 2: 7-17. G?tz, Ignacio, L. 2001 "Spirituality and the Body." Religious Education 96, 3:2-19. Haley, Bruce 1978 The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hall, Donald E. 1994 "On the Making and Unmasking of Monsters: Christian Socialism, Muscular Christianity, and the Metaphorization of Class Conflict." Pp. 46-65 in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Edited by Donald E. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Granville S. 1902 "Christianity and Physical Culture." Pedagogical Seminary 9, 3: 377. Hargreaves, John E.R. 1986 Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain. London: Polity. Harrington, Henry R. 1971 Muscular Christianity: The Study of the Development of a Victorian Idea. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation: University of Stanford. Harris, Styron. 1990 "The `Muscular Novel': Medium of a Victorian Ideal." Tennessee Philological Bulletin 27: 6-13. Hastings, Edward. 2004 "Spirituality in Sport." Spirituality May/June: 160-66. Hastings, Edward, and Len DiPaul 2003 The Center for Sport, Spirituality and Character Development. [13]http://www.neuman.edu. August 12, 2003. Hoffman, Shirl J., editor 1992 Sport and Religion. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Holt, Richard. 1990 Sport and the British: A Modern History. Oxford: Clarendon. Hughes, Thomas 1861 Tom Brown at Oxford. London: Macmillan. Kortzfleisch, Siegmund V. 1970 "Religious Olympism." Social Research 37: 231-36. Kreider, Anthony J. 2003 "Prayers for Assistance as Unsporting Behavior." Journal of the Philosophy of Sport XXX: 17-25. Ladd, Tony, and James A. Mathisen 1999 Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development American Sport. Michigan: Baker. Lammer, Manfred 1992 "Myth of Reality: The Classic Olympic Athlete." Review for the Sociology of Sport 18: 64-84. Liddell, Eric 1985 The Disciplines of the Christian Life. Nashville: Abingdon. Lucas, John A. 1976 "Victorian `Muscular Christianity': Prologue to the Olympic Games." Olympic Review 99/100: 49-52. Mangan, James A. 1982 "Philathlete Extraordinary: A Portrait of the Victorian Moarlist Edward Bowen. Journal of Sport History 9, 3: 23-40. Mason, Bryan 1981 Association Football and English Society 1863-1915. Brighton: Harvester. 1982 Into the Stadium: An Active Guide to Sport and Recreation Ministry in the Local Church. UK: Spring Harvest. Mathisen, James 1994 "Towards an Understanding of Muscular Christianity: Religion, Sport and Culture in the Modern World." Pp. 192-205 in Christianity and Leisure. Edited by Paul Heintzman, Glen E. Van Andel, and Thomas L. Visker. Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College. McGlynn, Hilary, editor 2000 The Hutchinson Encyclopaedia. Oxford: Helicon. McGrath, Alister E., editor 1996 The NIV Thematic Study Bible. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Mechikoff, Robert, and Steven Estes 2002 A History of Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education. London: McGraw-Hill. The Mendelson Center and Neumann College. 2003 Mendelson Centre: Ministry through Sports Initiative. [14]http://www.nd.edu/~cscc/cmts.html. August 12, 2003. Newsome, David 1961 Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal. London: Cassell. Norman, Edward 1987 "Victorian Values: Stewart Headlam and the Christian Socialists." History Today April: 27-32. Novak, Michael 1976 The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls and Consecration of the American Spirit. New York: Basic. 2003 Personal Communication, October 14. Parsons, Gerald, editor 1988 Religion in Victorian Britain: Vol II. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Putney, Clifford 2001 Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America 1880-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rawnsley, Hardwicke D. 1889 Edward Thring, Teacher and Poet. London: T Fisher Unwin. Redmond, Gerald 1978 "The First Tom Brown's Schooldays: Origins and Evolution of `Muscular Christianity' in Children's Literature." Quest 30: 4-18. Rosen, David 1994 "The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness." Pp. 17-44 in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Edited by Donald E. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saunders, Martin 2003a "Devonian College Embraces Extreme Sports." Christian Renewal November: 5. 2003b "New Course Combines Sport and Theology." Christian Renewal May: 7. Schiefelbein, Michael 1998 "Blighted by a Upas-Shadow: Catholicism's Function for Kingsley in Westward Ho!" Victorian Newsletter 94: 10-17. Simon, Brian, and Ian Bradley 1975 The Victorian Public School. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Spencer, Albert F. 2000 "Ethics, Faith and Sport." Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 12, 1/2: 143-58. Stevenson, Christopher L. 1997 "Christian Athletes and the Culture of Elite Sport: Dilemmas and Solutions. Sociology of Sport Journal 14: 241-62. Vance, Norman. 1985 The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Volkwein, Karin A.E. 1995 "Ethics and Top-Level Sport - A Paradox?" International Review for Sociology of Sport 30, 3/4: 311-319. Watson, Nick J., and Mark Nesti In press "The Role of Spirituality in Sport Psychology Consulting: An Analysis and Integrative Review of Literature." Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. Weir, Stuart 2004 The Ultimate Prize: Great Christian Olympians. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Widund, Ture 1994 "Ethelbert Talbot His Life and Place in Olympic History." Citius, Altius, Fortius: The International Society of Olympic History Journal 2, 2: 7-14. Winn, William E. 1960 "Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Development of `Muscular Christianity'". Church History 29: 66. Wilkinson, Rupert 1964 Gentlemanly Power - British Leadership and Public Schools Tradition. London: Oxford University Press. YMCA 2004 A Brief History of the YMCA Movement. [15]http://www.ymca.net/about/cont/history.html. March 30, 2004. References 6. http://www.aiaeurope.com/english/news/olympics2000-frame.html 7. http://www.ampleforthcollege.york.sch.uk/mission_statement.html 8. http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2003/aug15.html 9. http://www.65.107.211.206/history/leisure2.html 10. http://www.christiantytoday.com/ct/2002/105/53.0.html 11. http://elt.britcoun.org.pl/s_vict.html 12. http://www.myinky.com/ecp/religion/article0,1626,ECP_782_2617774,00.html 13. http://www.neuman.edu/ 14. http://www.nd.edu/~cscc/cmts.html 15. http://www.ymca.net/about/cont/history.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 2 20:21:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 16:21:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Virginia Law Review: Dwight Lee: Symposium on the Theory of Public Choice Message-ID: Symposium on the Theory of Public Choice: Politics, Ideology, and the Power of Public Choice Virginia Law Review MARCH, 1988 74 Va. L. Rev. 191 Dwight R. Lee * * Professor of Economics and holder of the Ramsey Chair of Private Enterprise Economics, University of Georgia. SUMMARY: ... THE major strength of public choice derives from the assumption that individuals, regardless of the decisionmaking environment, are motivated primarily by private interests rather than the public interest. ... According to this view, the private interest assumption misses the very essence of political decision-making and renders public choice largely irrelevant to an understanding of the political process. ... Critics of the private interest assumption buttress their criticism by pointing to numerous studies that indicate that people commonly vote against their economic interests in support of broad ideological concerns. ... The key to the public choice explanation for the importance of ideology in voting is found in the indecisiveness of the individual vote, and the willingness to vote despite this indecisiveness. ... If affecting the outcome of an election were the only benefit an individual could derive from voting, it would be difficult to explain why people vote in the numbers they do. ... The fact that people vote against their economic interest in order to support positions of which they approve for ideological reasons is hardly an embarrassment to public choice theorists. ... Thus, if the voter receives any ideological satisfaction from voting yes, he might as well do so; it will not cost him anything even if the legislation is detrimental to his economic interest. ... ----------- [*191] THE major strength of public choice derives from the assumption that individuals, regardless of the decisionmaking environment, are motivated primarily by private interests rather than the public interest. Economists have long applied this assumption with considerable success to the analysis of market behavior. By applying the private interest assumption to political behavior, public choice economists have been able to use the analytical leverage of economic theory to develop new insights into the operation of the political process. At the same time, critics attack the private interest assumption of public choice. Economics has always attracted criticism on the ground that, even in market settings, individuals are motivated by concerns broader than their private interests. Few deny, however, that private interest is the dominant motive in most market choices; when investigating traditional economic behavior the private interest assumption is widely, if sometimes grudgingly, accepted as a simplification justified by its explanatory power. There is greater resistance to the assumption of private interest as the dominant motive in political activity. Most academics (including most economists) whose work concerns government policy and practice tend to assume, if only implicitly, that political decisionmakers are motivated by the desire to promote the interest of the general community. As stated by political scientist Steven Kelman: "There is the elementary fact that political decisions apply to the entire community. That they do so encourages people to think about others when taking a stand. This is in contrast to making personal decisions, when people think mainly of themselves." 1 According to this view, the private interest assumption misses the very essence of political decision-making [*192] and renders public choice largely irrelevant to an understanding of the political process. 2 Critics of the private interest assumption buttress their criticism by pointing to numerous studies that indicate that people commonly vote against their economic interests in support of broad ideological concerns. 3 Furthermore, the fact that people bother to vote at all is seen as evidence that in a political setting individuals put their civic responsibility ahead of their private interests. If, as public choice economists argue, an individual vote is unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, then why would a person motivated primarily by self-interest bother to vote at all? The purpose of this Article is not to deny that individuals commonly vote on the basis of ideology and against their economic interests, or that individuals will take the trouble to vote, even though they recognize that their vote will surely not affect the outcome of the election. These are obvious facts of political life, and in no way are they inconsistent with public choice analysis or with the private interest assumption that underlies this analysis. Indeed, public choice better explains ideological voting than do the critics who point to ideological voting in an attempt to discredit public choice. The key to the public choice explanation for the importance of ideology in voting is found in the indecisiveness of the individual vote, and the willingness to vote despite this indecisiveness. Parts I and II of this Article present a public choice explanation for the importance of ideology voting. Although the input of voters influences political outcomes, it does not necessarily control those outcomes. The concerns of voters interact with the concerns of organized interest groups to shape legislation. Part III discusses the effect that this interaction has on the ideological content of political decisions. [*193] I. VOTING AND THE LOW COST OF IDEOLOGICAL EXPRESSION That large numbers of people vote is an empirical fact that cannot be denied. But why do they do so? People do not go to the polls to vote for one candidate over another for the same reason they go to the supermarket to choose one product over another. In the supermarket an individual's product choice is decisive; the individual receives the product he chooses because he chose it. The motivation for making choices in the supermarket is dominated by outcome considerations. This is not the case at the polls. The probability that an individual's vote will be decisive in a typical election is effectively zero. An individual may or may not receive the political outcome she favors, but not because she voted for it. The outcome will be the same whether she votes yea, nay, or not at all. The expectation of affecting the outcome has little to do with an individual's motivation to vote. If affecting the outcome of an election were the only benefit an individual could derive from voting, it would be difficult to explain why people vote in the numbers they do. But people receive satisfaction from participating in processes they feel are important, from supporting things they believe are good, and from opposing things they believe are bad. People are motivated to go to the polls and vote for much the same reason they are motivated to go to the sports arena and cheer. It is the satisfaction that comes from participation and expression, not the expectation that they will determine the outcome, that draws people to the polls and to the sports arena. There is no more difficulty reconciling voting with private interest than there is with reconciling attendance at sporting events with private interest. Of course, any activity can be reconciled with private interest by inserting it into the decisionmakers' utility function as a positively valued variable. The obvious criticism of this reconciliation is that the theory that explains everything explains nothing. For example, according to Professors Daniel Farber and Philip Frickey, "Attempts have been made to reconcile voter behavior with the economic model by postulating a 'taste' for voting. This explanation is tautological -- anything people do can be 'justified' by saying they have a taste for doing it." 4 [*194] This criticism notwithstanding, it is obvious that people place positive value on a multitude of things, including participation and expression, and public choice theory is not rendered less useful by acknowledging this fact. Public choice assumes, as does economic theory in general, that, no matter what their objectives, people pursue them rationally. They will allocate their limited resources over alternative activities in order to maximize their personal satisfaction. This assumption moves the analysis beyond the level of a meaningless tautology that says nothing more than "people do those things that they want to do." The general implication of economic analysis is that if the cost of engaging in an activity goes up, people will engage in it less, and vice versa. Applied to politics, the analysis implies that people will behave differently in a political setting than in a market setting because the relative costs of alternative choices are different. This allows behavioral predictions to be made on the basis of objective differences between political and market institutions, and between the incentives they generate. Methodological consistency is therefore possible when evaluating and contrasting differences in political and market behavior. In particular, there is no need to resort to the assumption that people are more concerned with the public interest when making political choises than when making market choices in order to explain the importance of ideology in political behavior. Indeed, by applying the private interest assumption uniformly over both decisionmaking settings, public choice provides an evenhanded explanation of why ideological considerations are more important in political decisions than in market decisions. The fact that people vote against their economic interest in order to support positions of which they approve for ideological reasons is hardly an embarrassment to public choice theorists. To the contrary, the ability to provide a coherent explanation for ideological voting illustrates the power of public choice. People put ideological considerations ahead of economic interests when voting for the simple reason that it costs them almost nothing to do so. Consider the situation facing an individual who is contemplating a vote for expensive environmental protection legislation, or for a candidate who pledges support for the legislation. On the one hand, the individual may feel that it is important to protect the natural environment, not only for himself but for [*195] others as well, and will feel a sense of moral virtue by voting for the legislation. On the other hand, he will realize that the legislation, if enacted, will impose costs on him in the form of higher prices and taxes. The voter can ignore these costs with impunity, however, because his vote will, with near certainty, make no difference as to whether or not the legislation is enacted. Thus, if the voter receives any ideological satisfaction from voting yes, he might as well do so; it will not cost him anything even if the legislation is detrimental to his economic interest. 5 This situation contrasts sharply with that faced by decisionmakers in a market setting. It is possible for consumers to seek goods produced by firms that incur the necessary costs of minimizing the negative environmental impact of their productive processes. If enough consumers expressed their ideological commitments to a clean environment in this way, it would pay firms to invest voluntarily in pollution abatement until, at the margin, the value from a cleaner environment equaled the cost of acquiring it, as reflected in higher product prices. But this is not an effective approach to environmental protection, because few individuals will buy more expensive products, when less expensive products are available, in order to reduce environmental pollution. To act on the basis of ideological considerations by choosing the more expensive products is costly because, as opposed to voting, the individual's choices in the marketplace are decisive. The demand curve for ideological expression is like all demand curves: greater costs result in less quantity demanded. Not surprisingly, then, ideology plays a minor role in market decisions and a major role in voting decisions. II. SPECIAL INTEREST INFLUENCE AND THE HIGH COST OF IDEOLOGICAL EXPRESSION Although voters may make decisions predominantly on the basis of ideological considerations, the outcomes that emerge from the [*196] political process will reflect other considerations as well. Not all political actors will elevate ideology to a dominant role, for the simple reason that for some it is more costly to do so than it is for the individual voter. Special interest groups typically organize around narrowly motivated economic concerns, with little regard for ideological considerations. 6 This is to be expected, given the fact that organized groups are often able to exert decisive influence over political decisions. For an organized group to use this influence to promote an ideologically motivated outcome detrimental to its economic interest would be genuinely costly. 7 The clear implication is that the influence of politically organized groups will reduce the ideological content of political decisions. Public choice analysis suggests, however, that this occurs in ways that are not always obvious to the casual observer. Organized interests will have less influence on the general nature of the legislation that is passed than they will on the detailed implementation and enforcement of that legislation. 8 Consider, for example, the previous discussion of the costlessness of expressing concern for the environment by voting for an environmental protection program. The result is strong electoral, and therefore legislative, support for such programs that has little to do with special interest influence. But after an individual makes a costless expression of support for environmental protection at the polls, much remains to be done if the environment is to be protected adequately. It is unfortunately costly for an individual to express concern for environmental quality by lobbying for the most [*197] efficient environmental protection programs and by monitoring those who implement these programs. Predictably, there is little genuine public surveillance of environmental protection programs, and organized groups have significant latitude to influence environmental programs in ways that serve their private interests. This means, of course, that these programs are far less effective at protecting the environment than they could be. 9 Organized groups often do little to oppose legislation that is potentially adverse to their interests, especially when public opinion strongly favors the legislation. Well-organized groups often will "get on board" and "support" legislation that is inimical to their economic interests. But, as opposed to individuals who voted for the legislation and who quickly forgot it once it was passed, the affected organized interests will be unrelenting in their efforts to influence the day-to-day details of the legislation's implementation. This influence will typically not be exerted on behalf of the broad public interest. Government attempts to help the poor, protect the consumer, and regulate business pricing and practices provide additional examples of supposedly general interest legislation that is subverted by organized interest groups. The initial motivation for the legislation may have been dominated by ideological considerations, but narrow economic concerns motivate the special interest influence that does so much to determine its effect. III. CONCLUSION As critics of public choice are so fond of pointing out, ideological considerations are important in political decisionmaking. But, contrary to the criticism, the importance of ideology in politics is completely consistent with public choice analysis. Indeed, the power of public choice analysis is demonstrated by its ability to explain why ideology is more important in political choices than in market choices, without resorting to an ad hoc bifurcation of underlying [*198] motivations. Public choice assumes that an individual making a political decision is fundamentally the same as one making a market decision. The explanation for the difference in the ideological content of these decisions is found in the differences between political and market institutions, and in the effect these differences have on the costs of alternative choices. It is simply less costly for people to base decisions on ideological considerations in a political setting than in a market setting. The public choice approach does more, however, than explain why ideology is more important in political behavior than in market behavior. The cost of ideological decisionmaking varies over different political settings, and the ideological content of political decisions varies accordingly. Ideological conviction and narrow economic interest interact in interesting ways to determine political outcomes, and public choice provides a methodologically consistent way of analyzing this interaction. In particular, public choice suggests that ideology will be more important than narrow economic interest in providing general direction to legislation, but less important in determining the details of the legislation and how it is implemented. Public choice provides only one window through which to view the political process. Any serious attempt to understand political phenomena requires the view from many windows. But public choice provides a far better perspective on the role of ideology in politics than many of its critics seem to realize. FOOTNOTES: n1 S. Kelman, Making Public Policy: A Hopeful View of American Government 22 (1987). n2 Critics of public choice do not deny that private interest is a powerful motive, but rather argue that public choice overstates its influence over political behavior: "Instead of trying to mix self-interest and altruism into every decision, the individual might try to reserve certain decisions to self-interest and others to altruism." Id. at 244. Steven Kelman leaves no doubt that people tend to give the greatest weight, or "pride of place," to altruism in political decisions. Id. n3 For citation and discussion of many of these studies, see, e.g., id. at 255-59; S. Rhoades, The Economist's View of the World: Government, Markets, and Public Policy 153-58 (1985); Farber & Frickey, The Jurisprudence of Public Choice, 65 Tex. L. Rev. 873, 897-900 (1987). n4 Farber & Frickey, supra note 3, at 894 n.129. n5 Tullock used the indecisiveness of individual votes to explain why people vote for poverty programs that, if passed, will cost them far more than they would contribute voluntarily. Tullock, The Charity of the Uncharitable, 9 W. Econ. J. 379 (1971). For discussions of the implications of the indecisiveness of an individual vote, see Brennan & Buchanan, Voter Choice: Evaluating Political Alternatives, 28 Am. Behav. Scientist 185 (1984); Brennan & Lomasky, The Impartial Spectator Goes to Washington, 1 Econ. Phil. 189 (1985). n6 Some politically active interest groups are organized around ideological issues for largely ideological reasons. However, most politically organized interest groups, certainly most well-financed interest groups, are motivated primarily by narrow economic concerns. n7 The standard explanation for political interest groups' focus on narrow economic interests is that it is easier to organize a group around such interests. See M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action 142-45 (1965). The argument of this Article is that once a group becomes politically influential, no matter what the initial impetus behind its organization, it is costly for it to ignore private economic concerns in order to advance an ideologically motivated agenda. n8 Based on studies of the legislative impact of organized interest groups, some investigators have concluded that these groups have relatively little influence. See, e.g., R. Bauer, I. Pool & L. Dexter, American Business and Public Policy 341-49 (1963). However, the studies underlying this conclusion are flawed because they were concerned almost exclusively with whether Congress passes legislation the interest groups favor, and gave little attention to how these groups influence the details of legislation that is passed. See K. Schlozman & J. Tierney, Organized Interests and American Democracy 8 (1986). n9 There is compelling evidence that pollution control policy is less effective than it could be. See R. Crandall, H. Gruenspecht, T. Keeler & L. Lave, Regulating the Automobile 85-116 (1986); A. Kneese & C. Schultze, Pollution, Prices, & Public Policy (1975). There is also compelling evidence that the deficiencies in pollution control policy are in large measure the result of special interest influence. See J. Thomasian, The Clean Air Act, the Electric Utilities, and the Coal Market (1982); Bureaucracy vs. Environment: The Environmental Costs of Bureaucratic Governance (J. Baden & R. Stroup eds. 1981); Ackerman & Hassler, Beyond the New Deal: Coal and the Clean Air Act, 89 Yale L.J. 1466, 1497-1511 (1980). From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 2 20:21:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 16:21:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ha'va'd L. Rev. Symposium: Changing Images of the State Message-ID: Symposium: Changing Images of the State: The Rise and Fall of the Administrative State Ha'va'd Law Review, 94.4 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1231 Gary Lawson Associate Professor, Northwestern University School of Law. B.A. 1980, Claremont Men's College; J.D. 1983, Yale Law School. I am grateful to Robert W. Bennett, Steven G. Calabresi, Cynthia R. Farina, Patricia B. Granger, Daniel Polsby, Martin H. Redish, Jennifer Roback, Marshall Shapo, and the participants at colloquia at Cornell Law School and Northwestern University School of Law for their insightful comments and suggestions. SUMMARY: ... The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution. ... Furthermore, I am aware of only one instance in the Reagan-Bush era in which the Justice Department formally opposed legislation on such grounds; a 1986 opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel stated that Congress did not have the enumerated power to enact a national lottery. ... Significantly, that power to execute the laws is vested, not in the executive department of the national government, but in "a President of the United States of America." ... Indeed, most contemporary scholars believe that Congress may vest discretionary authority in subordinate officers free from direct presidential control, and early American history and practice reflect this view to a considerable extent. ... This overlap between the executive and judicial functions is not surprising; under many pre-American conceptions of separation of powers, the judicial power was treated as an aspect of the executive power. ... Furthermore, if Professor Ackerman is correct that the Reconstruction Amendments were invalid under formal constitutional rules of ratification, the obvious conclusion seems to be that both the Reconstruction Amendments and the modern administrative state are unconstitutional. ... According to McCutchen, the administrative state is here to stay, and even a very weak theory of precedent ratifies this result. ... --------------- [*1231] The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, 1 and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution. 2 The original New Dealers were aware, at least to some degree, that their vision of the national government's proper role and structure could not be squared with the written Constitution: 3 The Administrative Process, James Landis's classic exposition of the New Deal model of administration, fairly drips with contempt for the idea of a limited national government subject to a formal, tripartite separation of powers. 4 Faced with a choice between the administrative state and the Constitution, the architects of our modern government chose the administrative state, and their choice has stuck. There is a perception among some observers, however, that this post-New Deal consensus has recently come under serious legal attack, [*1232] especially from the now-departed Reagan and Bush administrations. 5 But though debate about structural constitutional issues has clearly grown more vibrant over the past few decades, 6 the essential features of the modern administrative state have, for more than half a century, been taken as unchallengeable postulates by virtually all players in the legal and political worlds, including the Reagan and Bush administrations. The post-New Deal conception of the national government has not changed one iota, nor even been a serious subject of discussion, since the Revolution of 1937. 7 Part I of this Article sketches, in purely descriptive fashion, some of the most important ways in which the modern administrative state, without serious opposition, contravenes the Constitution's design. 8 Many elements of this design remain poorly understood even after more than two centuries, and my brief discussion here is unlikely to be satisfying. Nonetheless, my discussion at least touches on such important issues as the scope of Congress's legislative powers, the contours and constitutional source of the nondelegation doctrine, the character of the unitary executive created by Article II, and the extent to which administrative adjudication is inconsistent with Article III. Part II briefly ponders some possible responses to the enormous gap between constitutional meaning and constitutional practice. For those of us for whom the written Constitution (as validly amended) is the only Constitution, 9 the seemingly irrevocable entrenchment of the [*1233] post-New Deal structure of national governance raises serious doubts about the utility of constitutional discourse. I. THE DEATH OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT The United States Congress today effectively exercises general legislative powers, in contravention of the constitutional principle of limited powers. Moreover, Congress frequently delegates that general legislative authority to administrative agencies, in contravention of Article I. Furthermore, those agencies are not always subject to the direct control of the President, in contravention of Article II. In addition, those agencies sometimes exercise the judicial power, in contravention of Article III. Finally, those agencies typically concentrate legislative, executive, and judicial functions in the same institution, in simultaneous contravention of Articles I, II, and III. In short, the modern administrative state openly flouts almost every important structural precept of the American constitutional order. A. The Death of Limited Government The advocates of the Constitution of 1789 were very clear about the kind of national government they sought to create. As James Madison put it: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined." 10 Those national powers, Madison suggested, would be "exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce," 11 and the states would be the principal units of government for most internal matters. 12 The expectations of founding-era figures such as James Madison are instructive but not controlling for purposes of determining the Constitution's original public meaning: the best laid schemes o' mice, men and framers gang aft a-gley. The Constitution, however, is well designed to limit the national government essentially to the functions described by Madison. Article I of the Constitution vests in the national Congress "[a]ll legislative powers herein granted," 13 and thus clearly indicates that the national government can legislate only in accordance with enumerations [*1234] Article I then spells out seventeen specific subjects to which the federal legislative power extends: such matters as taxing and borrowing, interstate and foreign commerce, naturalization and bankruptcy, currency and counterfeiting, post offices and post roads, patents and copyrights, national courts, piracy and offenses against the law of nations, the military, and the governance of the nation's capital and certain federal enclaves. 15 Article IV further grants to Congress power to enforce interstate full-faith-and-credit requirements, to admit new states, and to manage federal territories and property. 16 Article V grants Congress power to propose constitutional amendments. 17 This is not the stuff of which Leviathan is made. None of these powers, alone or in combination, grants the federal government anything remotely resembling a general jurisdiction over citizens' affairs. The Commerce Clause, for example, is a grant of power to regulate "Commerce . . . among the several States," 18 not to regulate "all Activities affecting, or affected by, Commerce . . . among the several States." The Commerce Clause clearly leaves outside the national government's jurisdiction such important matters as manufacturing (which is an activity distinct from commerce), 19 the terms, formation, and execution of contracts that cover subjects other than the interstate shipment of goods, and commerce within a state's boundaries. Nor does the Necessary and Proper Clause, 20 which the founding generation called the Sweeping Clause, grant general legislative powers to the national government. This clause contains two significant internal limitations. First, it only validates laws that "carry[] into Execution" other granted powers. To carry a law or power "into Execution" means to provide the administrative machinery for its enforcement; it does not mean to regulate unenumerated subjects in order to make the exercise of enumerated powers more effective. 21 Second, and more fundamentally, laws enacted pursuant to the Sweeping Clause must be both "necessary and proper" for carrying into [*1235] execution enumerated powers. As Patty Granger and I have elsewhere demonstrated at length, the word "proper" in this context requires executory laws to be distinctively and peculiarly within the jurisdictional competence of the national government -- that is, consistent with background principles of separation of powers, federalism, and individual rights. 22 Thus, the Sweeping Clause does not grant Congress power to regulate unenumerated subjects as a means of regulating subjects within its constitutional scope. 23 Nor does the power of the purse give Congress unlimited authority, though here the limits are a bit fuzzy. The Constitution contains a Taxing Clause, 24 but it does not contain a "spending clause" as such. 25 Nevertheless, Congress acquires the power to spend from two sources. First, the Sweeping Clause permits Congress to pass appropriations laws -- provided that such laws "carry[] into Execution" an enumerated power and are "necessary and proper" for doing so. Second, as David Engdahl has pointed out, Congress's power "to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States" 26 seems to provide a general spending power. 27 But a general power to spend is not a general power to regulate. Even if Congress can impose whatever conditions it pleases on the receipt of federal funds, those conditions are contractual in nature, a fact that limits both their enforceability and their scope. 28 Moreover, it is not obvious that the Property Clause gives Congress wholly unlimited power to enact spending conditions, though identifying any limits on such power would require careful consideration of the meaning of the phrase "dispose of," the relationship between the Property Clause and the Sweeping Clause, and the viability of a general doctrine of unconstitutional conditions. Admittedly, some post-1789 amendments to the Constitution expand Congress's powers beyond their original limits. For example, the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments authorize Congress to enforce prohibitions against, respectively, involuntary servitude 29 and racially discriminatory voting practices; 30 the Fourteenth Amendment [*1236] gives Congress power to enforce that Amendment's numerous substantive constraints on states; 31 and the Sixteenth Amendment permits Congress to impose direct taxes without an apportionment requirement. 32 These are important powers, to be sure, but they do not fundamentally alter the limited scope of Congress's power over private conduct. Of course, in this day and age, discussing the doctrine of enumerated powers is like discussing the redemption of Imperial Chinese bonds. There is now virtually no significant aspect of life that is not in some way regulated by the federal government. This situation is not about to change. Only twice since 1937 has the Supreme Court held that a congressional statute exceeded the national government's enumerated powers, 33 and one of those holdings was overruled nine years later. 34 Furthermore, both cases involved the direct regulation of state governments in their sovereign capacities. To the best of my knowledge, the post-New Deal Supreme Court has never invalidated a congressional intrusion into private affairs on ultra vires grounds; instead the Court has effectively acquiesced in Congress's assumption of general legislative powers. 35 The courts, of course, are not the only, or even the principal, interpreters of the Constitution. Under the Constitution, it is emphatically the province and duty of the President to say what the law [*1237] is 36 -- and hence to veto bills that contravene constitutional limits. During their twelve years in office, however, the Reagan and Bush administrations made no serious attempt to resuscitate the doctrine of enumerated powers. I do not know of a single instance in which President Reagan or President Bush vetoed or even opposed legislation on the ground that it exceeded Congress's enumerated powers. Furthermore, I am aware of only one instance in the Reagan-Bush era in which the Justice Department formally opposed legislation on such grounds; a 1986 opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel stated that Congress did not have the enumerated power to enact a national lottery. 37 Thus, the demise of the doctrine of enumerated powers, which made possible the growth of the modern regulatory state, has encountered no serious real-world legal or political challenges, and none are on the horizon. B. The Death of the Nondelegation Doctrine The Constitution both confines the national government to certain enumerated powers and defines the institutions of the national government that can permissibly exercise those powers. Article I of the Constitution provides that "[a]ll legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." 38 Article II provides that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." 39 Article III specifies that "[t]he judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." 40 The Constitution thus divides the powers of the national government into three categories -- legislative, executive, and judicial -- and vests such powers in three separate institutions. To be sure, the Constitution expressly prescribes some deviations from a pure tripartite scheme of separation, 41 but this only underscores the role of [*1238] the three Vesting Clauses in assigning responsibility for governmental functions that are not specifically allocated by the constitutional text. Although the Constitution does not contain an express provision declaring that the Vesting Clauses' allocations of power are exclusive, 42 it is a mistake in principle to look for such an express declaration. 43 The institutions of the national government are creatures of the Constitution and must find constitutional authorization for any action. Congress is constitutionally authorized to exercise "[a]ll legislative Powers herein granted," the President is authorized to exercise "[t]he executive Power," and the federal courts are authorized to exercise "[t]he judicial Power of the United States." Congress thus cannot exercise the federal executive or judicial powers for the simple reason that the Constitution does not vest such power in Congress. Similarly, the President and the federal courts can exercise only those powers vested in them by the Constitution: the general executive and judicial powers, respectively, plus a small number of specific powers outside those descriptions. Thus, any law that attempts to vest legislative power in the President or in the courts is not "necessary and proper for carrying into Execution" constitutionally vested federal powers and is therefore unconstitutional. 44 Although the Constitution does not tell us how to distinguish the legislative, executive, and judicial powers from each other, 45 there is [*1239] clearly some differentiation among the three governmental functions, which at least generates some easy cases. Consider, for example, a statute creating the Goodness and Niceness Commission and giving it power "to promulgate rules for the promotion of goodness and niceness in all areas within the power of Congress under the Constitution." If the "executive power" means simply the power to carry out legislative commands regardless of their substance, then the Goodness and Niceness Commission's rulemaking authority is executive rather than legislative power and is therefore valid. But if that is true, then there never was and never could be such a thing as a constitutional principle of nondelegation -- a proposition that is belied by all available evidence about the meaning of the Constitution. Accordingly, the nondelegation principle, which is textually embodied in the command that all executory laws be "necessary and proper," constrains the substance of congressional enactments. Certain powers simply cannot be given to executive (or judicial) officials, because those powers are legislative in character. A governmental function is not legislative, however, merely because it involves some element of policymaking discretion: it has long been understood that some such exercises of discretion can fall within the definition of the executive power. 46 The task is therefore to determine when a statute that vests discretionary authority in an executive (or judicial) officer has crossed the line from a necessary and proper implementing statute to an unnecessary and/or improper delegation of distinctively legislative power. While I cannot complete that task here, the core of the Constitution's nondelegation principle can be expressed as follows: Congress must make whatever policy decisions are sufficiently important to the statutory scheme at issue so that Congress must make them. Although this circular formulation may seem farcical, 47 it recognizes that a statute's required degree of specificity depends on context, takes seriously the well-recognized distinction between legislating and gap-filling, and corresponds reasonably well to judicial application of the nondelegation principle in the first 150 years of the nation's history. 48 If it does not precisely capture [*1240] the true constitutional rule of nondelegation, it is a plausible first approximation. 49 In any event, it is a much better approximation of the true constitutional rule than is the post-New Deal positive law. The Supreme Court has not invalidated a congressional statute on nondelegation grounds since 1935. 50 This has not been for lack of opportunity. The United States Code is filled with statutes that create little Goodness and Niceness Commissions -- each confined to a limited subject area such as securities, 51 broadcast licenses, 52 or (my personal favorite) imported tea. 53 These statutes are easy kills under any plausible interpretation of the Constitution's nondelegation principle. The Supreme Court, however, has rejected so many delegation challenges to so many utterly vacuous statutes that modern nondelegation decisions now simply recite these past holdings and wearily move on. 54 Anything short of the Goodness and Niceness Commission, it seems, is permissible. 55 [*1241] The rationale for this virtually complete abandonment of the nondelegation principle is simple: the Court believes -- possibly correctly -- that the modern administrative state could not function if Congress were actually required to make a significant percentage of the fundamental policy decisions. Judicial opinions candidly acknowledge this rationale for permitting delegations. For example, the majority in Mistretta v. United States 56 declared that "our jurisprudence has been driven by a practical understanding that in our increasingly complex society, replete with ever changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives." 57 When faced with a choice between the Constitution and the structure of modern governance, the Court has had no difficulty making the choice. Contrary to conventional wisdom, neither did the Reagan and Bush administrations. Neither President Reagan nor President Bush ever vetoed or opposed legislation on the express ground that it violated the nondelegation doctrine. Nor, to my knowledge, did the Reagan-Bush Justice Departments ever formally make such an objection to proposed or actual legislation. 58 Thus, the demise of the nondelegation doctrine, which allows the national government's now-general legislative powers to be exercised by administrative agencies, has encountered no serious real-world legal or political challenges, and none are on the horizon. C. The Death of the Unitary Executive Article II states that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." 59 Although the precise contours of this "executive Power" are not entirely clear, 60 at a minimum it includes the power to execute the laws of the United States. [*1242] Other clauses of the Constitution, such as the requirement that the President "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," 61 assume and constrain this power to execute the laws, 62 but the Article II Vesting Clause is the constitutional source of this power -- just as the Article III Vesting Clause is the constitutional source of the federal judiciary's power to decide cases. 63 Significantly, that power to execute the laws is vested, not in the executive department of the national government, but in "a President of the United States of America." 64 The Constitution thus creates a unitary executive. Any plausible theory of the federal executive power must acknowledge and account for this vesting of the executive power in the person of the President. Of course, the President cannot be expected personally to execute all laws. Congress, pursuant to its power to make all laws "necessary and proper for carrying into Execution" the national government's powers, can create administrative machinery to assist the President in carrying out legislatively prescribed tasks. But if a statute vests discretionary authority directly in an agency official (as do most regulatory statutes) rather than in the President, the Article II Vesting Clause seems to require that such discretionary authority be subject to the President's control. 65 This model of presidential power is not without its critics. Indeed, most contemporary scholars believe that Congress may vest discretionary authority in subordinate officers free from direct presidential control, 66 and early American history and practice reflect this view to a considerable extent. 67 Nonetheless, the Vesting Clause inescapably [*1243] vests "the executive Power" directly and solely in the person of the President. Accordingly, scholars sometimes deny that the Article II Vesting Clause is a grant of power to the President to execute the laws, 68 but none has yet adequately rebutted the compelling textual and structural arguments for reading the Vesting Clause as a grant of power 69 -- a grant of power specifically and exclusively to "a President of the United States." Thus, the important question is what form the President's power of control over subordinates must take in order to ensure a constitutionally unitary executive. There are two evident possibilities. First, the President might be thought to have the power personally to make all discretionary decisions involving the execution of the laws. On this understanding, the President can step into the shoes of any subordinate and directly exercise that subordinate's statutory powers. 70 Second, one might think that, although the President cannot directly exercise power vested by statute in another official, any action by that subordinate contrary to presidential instructions is void. 71 Either alternative is plausible, though the latter is perhaps more consistent with Congress's power under the Sweeping Clause to structure the executive department. 72 [*1244] Congress and the President have fought hard in recent years over control of the federal administrative machinery, and the courts have adjudicated such disputes in some high-profile cases. 73 Significantly, however, neither of the two possible constitutional mechanisms of presidential control has played a role in those battles. No modern judicial decision specifically addresses the President's power either directly to make all discretionary decisions within the executive department or to nullify the actions of insubordinate subordinates. Instead, debate has focused almost exclusively on whether and when the President must have unlimited power to remove subordinate executive officials. That is an interesting and important question, but it does not address the central issue concerning the executive power. Even if the President has a constitutionally unlimited power to remove certain executive officials, that power alone does not satisfy the Article II Vesting Clause. If an official exercises power contrary to the President's directives and is then removed, one must still determine whether the official's exercise of power is legally valid. If the answer is "no," then the President necessarily has the power to nullify discretionary actions of subordinates, and removal is therefore not the President's sole power of control. If the answer is "yes," then the insubordinate ex-official will have effectively exercised executive power contrary to the President's wishes, which contravenes the vesting of that power in the President. A presidential removal power, even an unlimited removal power, is thus either constitutionally superfluous or constitutionally inadequate. 74 Congress, the President, and the courts [*1245] have accordingly been spending a great deal of energy arguing about something of relatively little constitutional significance. The death of the unitary executive cannot be traced to the New Deal revolution. The First Congress, in the so-called Decision of 1789, engaged in one of the most spirited and sophisticated debates on executive power in the nation's history, but did not once focus on a presidential power to make discretionary decisions or to veto actions by subordinates. 75 Moreover, many Attorneys General in the nineteenth century affirmatively denied that the President must always have the power to review decisions by subordinates. 76 The absence of a functioning unitary executive principle, however, may well have made the Revolution of 1937 possible. Judging from the political conflict that is often generated by disputes between Congress and the President, it is at least arguable that Congress would never have granted agencies their current, almost-limitless powers if Congress recognized that such power had to be directly under the control of the President. 77 Although the Reagan and Bush administrations often fought hard to defend their views of the proper role of the President, they did not directly assert their power to invalidate discretionary actions of subordinates or to make discretionary executive decisions when statutes confer power directly on subordinates. Opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel from the Reagan-Bush era have sometimes insisted that congressional attempts to place executive authority beyond presidential supervision are unconstitutional, 78 but neither President Reagan nor President Bush ever made either of the two plausible conceptions of [*1246] the unitary executive the focal point of a separation of powers dispute. The unitary executive has met its fate almost as meekly as have the principles of enumerated powers and nondelegation. D. The Death of the Independent Judiciary Article III provides that "[t]he judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." 79 The judges of all such federal courts are constitutionally guaranteed tenure during good behavior as well as assurance that their salaries will not be diminished during their time in office. 80 One of the principal functions of administrative agencies is to adjudicate disputes, yet "administrative adjudicators plainly lack the essential attributes that Article III requires of any decisionmaker invested with 'the judicial Power of the United States.'" 81 Is adjudication by administrative agencies therefore another instance of abandonment of a fundamental constitutional principle? Maybe. Administrative adjudication is problematic only if it must be considered an exercise of judicial power. But an activity is not exclusively judicial merely because it is adjudicative -- that is, because it involves the application of legal standards to particular facts. Much adjudicative activity by executive officials -- such as granting or denying benefits under entitlement statutes -- is execution of the laws by any rational standard, 82 though it also fits comfortably within the concept of the judicial power if conducted by judicial officers. 83 This overlap between the executive and judicial functions is not surprising; under many pre-American conceptions of separation of powers, the judicial power was treated as an aspect of the executive power. 84 Agency adjudication is therefore constitutionally permissible under Article III as long as the activity in question can fairly fit the definition of executive power, even if it also fairly fits the definition of judicial power. Some forms of adjudication, however, are quintessentially judicial. The conviction of a defendant under the criminal laws, for [*1247] example, is surely something that requires the exercise of judicial rather than executive power. Although it is difficult to identify those activities that are strictly judicial in the constitutional sense, perhaps Justice Curtis had the right answer in Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co. 85 when he suggested that the Article III inquiry merges with questions of due process: if the government is depriving a citizen of "life, liberty, or property," 86 it generally must do so by judicial process, which in the federal system requires an Article III court; 87 but if it is denying a citizen (to use discredited but useful language) a mere privilege, it can do so by purely executive action. Wherever the line is drawn, however, at least some modern administrative adjudication undoubtedly falls squarely on the judicial side. Most notably, the imposition of a civil penalty or fine is very hard to distinguish from the imposition of a criminal sentence (especially when the criminal sentence is itself a fine). If the latter is judicial, it is difficult to see why the former is not as well. Some scholars believe that administrative adjudication is constitutionally permissible as long as the administrative decisions are subject to Article III appellate court review that is "adequately searching" 88 and "meaningful." 89 And there's the rub. An agency's interpretation of a statute that it administers receives considerable deference under current law. 90 More fundamentally, agency fact-finding is generally subject to deferential review under numerous statutes that expressly require courts to affirm agency factual conclusions that are supported by "substantial evidence." 91 This kind of deferential review arguably fails to satisfy Article III. Article III certainly would not be satisfied if Congress provided for judicial review but ordered the courts to affirm the agency no matter what. That would effectively vest the judicial power either in the agency or in Congress. There is no reason to think that it is any different if Congress instead simply orders courts to put a thumb (or perhaps two forearms) on the [*1248] agency's side of the scale. I do not make this claim with full confidence (and thus do not emphasize the Reagan and Bush administrations' failure to advance it), but it seems to me that Article III requires de novo review, of both fact and law, of all agency adjudication that is properly classified as "judicial" activity. Much of the modern administrative state passes this test, but much of it fails as well. E. The Death of Separation of Powers The constitutional separation of powers is a means to safeguard the liberty of the people. 92 In Madison's famous words, "[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." 93 The destruction of this principle of separation of powers is perhaps the crowning jewel of the modern administrative revolution. Administrative agencies routinely combine all three governmental functions in the same body, and even in the same people within that body. 94 Consider the typical enforcement activities of a typical federal agency -- for example, of the Federal Trade Commission. 95 The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission's rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission's findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission's complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. 96 But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, [*1249] possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law. This is probably the most jarring way in which the administrative state departs from the Constitution, and it typically does not even raise eyebrows. The post-New Deal Supreme Court has never seriously questioned the constitutionality of this combination of functions in agencies. 97 Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did Presidents Reagan or Bush ever veto or object to legislation on this ground. II. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? The actual structure and operation of the national government today has virtually nothing to do with the Constitution. There is no reasonable prospect that this circumstance will significantly improve in the foreseeable future. If one is not prepared (as I am) to hold fast to the Constitution though the heavens may fall, what is one supposed to do with that knowledge? One option, of course, is to argue directly that the Constitution, properly interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning, is actually flexible enough to accommodate the modern administrative state. But although some of the claims I make in Part I with respect to Articles II and III may ultimately prove to be wrong in some important respects, the most fundamental constitutional problems with modern administrative governance -- unlimited federal power, rampant delegations of legislative authority, and the combination of functions in administrators -- are not even remotely close cases. The Commerce Clause does not give Congress jurisdiction over all human activity, 98 and the Sweeping Clause does not give Congress carte blanche to structure the government any way it chooses. 99 [*1250] A second option is to insist that the administrative state can be reconciled with the Constitution if only we reject the methodology of original public meaning. I cannot enter here into a discussion of interpretative theory, but for those of us who believe that "a dash of salt" refers to some identifiable, real-world quantity of salt, 100 originalist interpretivism is not simply one method of interpretation among many -- it is the only method that is suited to discovering the actual meaning of the relevant text. 101 A third option, pursued at length by Bruce Ackerman, is to argue that the Constitution has been validly amended, through means other than the formal process of Article V, in a fashion that constitutionalizes the administrative state. 102 Professor Ackerman claims that the [*1251] ratifications of the original Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments were knowingly "illegal" under then-governing formal norms for the ratification of fundamental law. 103 The New Deal, he contends, reflected a similarly self-conscious rejection of the formal mechanisms for constitutional change. According to Professor Ackerman, if the formally deficient "ratifications" of the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments are legally valid, it is difficult to see why the same cannot be true of the formally deficient "ratification" of the New Deal structure of governance via the 1936 election and the concomitant Revolution of 1937. I cannot here do justice to Professor Ackerman's elegant and still-growing edifice, so I will content myself with some preliminary thoughts. For purposes of constitutional interpretation, the creation of the Constitution is the legal equivalent of the Big Bang; the Constitution, whatever its normative significance may be, is an irreducible fact from which constitutional interpretation proceeds. Accordingly, from an interpretative, as opposed to a justificatory, standpoint, irregularities in the Constitution's ratification validate further irregularities only if the original irregularity reflects a background principle that was then incorporated into the Constitution and the subsequent irregularity conforms to that principle. Professor Ackerman's proposed method of constitutional amendment does not follow the form of the background principle employed by the original ratifiers/usurpers. 104 Furthermore, if Professor Ackerman is correct that the Reconstruction Amendments were invalid under formal constitutional rules of ratification, the obvious conclusion seems to be that both the Reconstruction Amendments and the modern administrative state are unconstitutional. Professor Ackerman's response is that the formally deficient ratifications of the Reconstruction Amendments, which occurred under the regime of the Constitution of 1789, "provide us with 'historic [*1252] precedents[]' [for such ratifications] which we are no more justified in ignoring than Marbury v. Madison." 105 But if precedent is a validating concept under the Constitution, why not invoke precedent more straightforwardly? This suggests a fourth option for dealing with the modern administrative state: conclude, with Henry Monaghan, that because "[p]recedent is, of course, part of our understanding of what law is," 106 the administrative state's firm entrenchment through precedent constitutes legal validation. I have elsewhere argued, however, that the use of horizontal precedent in federal constitutional interpretation is itself forbidden by the Constitution. 107 Those who believe in some form of precedent have the fifth option, ingeniously advanced in a recent manuscript by Peter McCutchen, 108 of seeking "a form of constitutional damage control." 109 According to McCutchen, the administrative state is here to stay, and even a very weak theory of precedent ratifies this result. 110 But our goal, his theory continues, should be to approximate the "first-best" world as nearly as we can from within a state of constitutional disequilibrium. As McCutchen puts it: Where unconstitutional institutions are allowed to stand based on a theory of precedent, the Court should allow (or even require) the creation of compensating institutions that seek to move back toward the constitutional equilibrium. The Court should allow such institutions even where the compensating institutions themselves would have been unconstitutional if considered standing alone. 111 For example, the legislative veto, standing alone, is plainly unconstitutional because it violates the Article I presentment requirement. 112 But the legislative veto helps compensate for widespread, unconstitutional delegations to agencies. A first-best world would have neither delegations nor legislative vetoes, but a world with both delegations [*1253] and legislative vetoes is closer to the correct constitutional "baseline" than is a world with only delegations. 113 If there is any proper role for precedent in constitutional theory, McCutchen is probably right: if an incorrect precedent creates a constitutional disequilibrium, it is foolish to proceed as though one were still in an equilibrium state. As discussed above, however, I do not believe that there is any proper role for horizontal precedent in constitutional theory. 114 There remains a sixth option: acknowledge openly and honestly, as did some of the architects of the New Deal, that one cannot have allegiance both to the administrative state and to the Constitution. If, however, one then further follows the New Deal architects in choosing the administrative state over the Constitution, one must also acknowledge that all constitutional discourse is thereby rendered problematic. The Constitution was a carefully integrated document, which contains no severability clause. It makes no sense to agonize over the correct application of, for example, the Appointments Clause, the Exceptions Clause, or even the First Amendment when principles as basic to the Constitution as enumerated powers and nondelegation are no longer considered part of the interpretative order. What is left of the Constitution after excision of its structural provisions, however interesting it may be as a matter of normative political theory, simply is not the Constitution. One can certainly take bits and pieces of the Constitution and incorporate them into a new, hypothetical document, but nothing is fostered other than intellectual confusion by calling that new document the Constitution. 115 Modern champions of the administrative state, however, seem loathe to abandon the sheltering language of constitutionalism. But tactical considerations aside, it is not at all clear why this is so. Perhaps instead of assuming that the label "unconstitutional" should carry normative weight, the constitutional problems of the administrative state can lead us to ask whether it should carry any weight -- with judges or anyone else. After all, the moral relevance of the Constitution is hardly self-evident. 116 [*1254] And at that point, the humble lawyer must plead incompetence. Questions about the Constitution's normative significance, as with all questions about how people ought to behave, are distinctively within the domain of moral theory. A legal scholar qua legal scholar can tell us, as a factual matter, that one must choose between the Constitution and the administrative state. He or she can tell us that the architects of the New Deal chose the administrative state and that that choice has been accepted by all institutions of government and by the electorate. 117 But only the best of moral philosophers can tell us which choice is correct. 118 FOOTNOTES: n1 I use the word "unconstitutional" to mean "at variance with the Constitution's original public meaning." That is not the only way in which the word is used in contemporary legal discourse. On the contrary, it is commonly used to mean everything from "at variance with the private intentions of the Constitution's drafters" to "at variance with decisions of the United States Supreme Court" to "at variance with the current platform of the speaker's favorite political party." These other usages are wholly unobjectionable as long as they are clearly identified and used without equivocation. The usage I employ, however, is the only usage that fully ties the words "constitutional" and "unconstitutional" to the actual meaning of the written Constitution. A defense of this claim would require an extended essay on the philosophy of language, but I can offer some preliminary observations: consider a recipe that calls for "a dash of salt." If one were reading the recipe as a poem or an aspirational tract, one might seek that meaning of "dash" that is aesthetically or morally most pleasing. But if one is reading it as a recipe, one wants to know what "dash" meant to an informed public at the time the recipe was written (assuming that the recipe was written for public consumption rather than for the private use of the author). Of course, once the recipe is understood, one might conclude that it is a bad recipe, either because it is ambiguous or, more fundamentally, because the dish that it yields simply isn't very appealing. But deciding whether to try to follow the recipe and determining what the recipe prescribes are conceptually distinct enterprises. If the Constitution is best viewed as a recipe -- and it certainly looks much more like a recipe than a poem or an aspirational tract -- application of the methodology of original public meaning is the appropriate way to determine its meaning. n2 Cf. Cass R. Sunstein, Constitutionalism After the New Deal, 101 HARV. L. REV. 421, 447-48 (1987) (noting that the New Deal "altered the constitutional system in ways so fundamental as to suggest that something akin to a constitutional amendment had taken place"). n3 See 1 BRUCE ACKERMAN, WE THE PEOPLE 44 (1991); Sunstein, supra note 2, at 430. n4 See JAMES M. LANDIS, THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS passim (1938). n5 This perception is evident more from the quantity and tone than from the specific content of recent discussions of the structural Constitution, but a few scholars have stated the point expressly. See Alfred C. Aman, Jr., Introduction, 77 CORNELL L. REV. 421, 427 (1987) (claiming that structural issues "of fundamental importance" "are again up for grabs"); Sunstein, supra note 2, at 509 (noting that "[t]he last three decades have seen a growing rejection of the New Deal conception of administration"). n6 See Geoffrey P. Miller, From Compromise to Confrontation: Separation of Powers in the Reagan Era, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 401, 401 (1989). n7 Modern debates about the scope and structure of the national government tend to concern such relatively peripheral matters as the removability of administrative officials, see, e.g., Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 682-83 (1988); Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714, 721-34 (1986), or the national government's power directly to regulate state governments, see, e.g., New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408, 2419-32 (1992); Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Auth., 469 U.S. 528, 537-47 (1985); National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833, 852-55 (1976), overruled by Garcia, 469 U.S. at 531 (1985). n8 Cynthia Farina has aptly described this explicitly non-normative project as an exercise in "legal archaeology." n9 It is possible to maintain that the phrase "the Constitution of the United States" refers not to the text of a specific document, but refers instead, in the fashion of England's unwritten constitution, to a set of practices and traditions that have evolved over time. As a matter of practical governance, such unwritten practices are surely more important than the instructions contained in the written Constitution, but this Article is concerned solely with the written texts that have been submitted to and ratified by the American electorate. Cf. Akhil Reed Amar, Our Forgotten Constitution: A Bicentennial Comment, 97 YALE L.J. 281, 282-85 (1987) (noting discrepancies between the document produced by the constitutional convention and the document ratified by the electorate). n10 THE FEDERALIST No. 45, at 292 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). n11 Id. n12 See id. at 292-93. In my favorite passage from The Federalist, Madison boldly proclaimed that the federal revenue collectors "will be principally on the seacoast, and not very numerous." Id. at 292. n13 U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 1 (emphasis added). n14 This understanding is expressly confirmed by the Tenth Amendment, which declares that "[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Id. amend. X. n15 See id. art. I, ? 8, cls. 1-17. n16 See id. art. IV, ?? 1, 3. n17 See id. art. V. n18 See id. art. I, ? 8, cl. 3. n19 See Richard A. Epstein, The Proper Scope of the Commerce Power, 73 VA. L. REV. 1387, 1388-89, 1393-95 (1987). n20 U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 8, cl. 18 (providing that Congress shall have the power "[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof"). n21 See Epstein, supra note 19, at 1397-98. n22 See Gary Lawson & Patricia B. Granger, The "Proper" Scope of Federal Power: A Jurisdictional Interpretation of the Sweeping Clause, 43 DUKE L.J. 267, 335-36 (1993). n23 See id. at 331-32. But see DAVID E. ENGDAHL, CONSTITUTIONAL FEDERALISM IN A NUTSHELL 18-19 (2d ed. 1987) (arguing that Congress may regulate unenumerated subjects in the course of implementing enumerated powers); David E. Engdahl, The Spending Power 9-14 (April 14, 1993) (unpublished manuscript, on file with the Harvard Law School Library) (same). n24 See U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 8, cl. 1. n25 See Engdahl, supra note 23, at 29-32 (demonstrating that the Taxing Clause is not a proper source of a federal spending power). n26 U.S. CONST. art. IV, ? 3, cl. 2 (emphasis added). n27 See Engdahl, supra note 23, at 30-31. n28 See id. at 37-63. n29 See U.S. CONST. amend. XIII, ? 2. n30 See id. amend. XV, ? 2. n31 See id. amend. XIV, ? 5. n32 See id. amend. XVI. Other amendments also grant power to Congress. See id. amend. XIX, cl. 2 (giving Congress the power to enforce a prohibition on gender-based discriminatory voting practices); id. amend. XXIII, ? 2 (giving Congress the power to enforce the District of Columbia's participation in the electoral college); id. amend. XXIV, ? 2 (giving Congress the power to enforce a prohibition against poll taxes); id. amend. XXVI, ? 2 (giving Congress the power to enforce a prohibition against denying eighteen-year-old people the vote on account of age). n33 See New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408, 2428-29 (1992); National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833, 852 (1976). n34 See Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Auth., 469 U.S. 528, 531 (1985) (overruling Usery). n35 See, e.g., Perez v. United States, 402 U.S. 146, 156-57 (1971) (holding the Consumer Credit Protection Act to be within Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce); Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 128-29 (1942) (holding regulation of the production of wheat grown for personal consumption to be within Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce). The lower federal courts have basically followed suit, though there has been a modest counterrevolution in the past two years. See Hoffman Homes, Inc. v. Administrator, United States EPA, 961 F.2d 1310, 1311 (7th Cir.) (stating that the EPA could not regulate, as "wetlands" subject to the Clean Water Act, a small depression that occasionally filled with rainwater), vacated, 975 F.2d 1554 (7th Cir. 1992); United States v. Cortner, 834 F. Supp. 242, 244 (M.D. Tenn. 1993) (holding that Congress could not make carjacking a federal criminal offense, because the activity "lacks any rational nexus to interstate commerce"); cf. United States v. Lopez, 2 F.3d 1342, 1366-68 (5th Cir. 1993) (holding that Congress could not, in the absence of explicit legislative findings of an effect on interstate commerce, prohibit knowing possession of a firearm within one thousand feet of a school). n36 See Frank H. Easterbrook, Presidential Review, 40 CASE W. RES. L. REV. 905 (1989-1990). n37 10 Op. Off. Legal Counsel 40, 40-42 (1986). n38 U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 1. n39 Id. art. II, ? 1. n40 Id. art. III, ? 1. n41 The President, through the presentment and veto provisions, see id. art. I, ? 7, cls. 2-3, is given a sui generis role in the legislative process that defies classification along tripartite lines. See Gary Lawson, Territorial Governments and the Limits of Formalism, 78 CAL. L. REV. 853, 858 n.19 (1990). The Vice President is made an officer of the Senate and is given the power to break ties in that body. See U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 3, cl. 4. The Senate is given the seemingly judicial power to try impeachments. See id. art. I, ? 3, cl. 6. Certain other powers, such as the power to make treaties and to appoint national officers, are shared among the various departments. See id. art. II, ? 2, cl. 2. n42 A number of state constitutions of the founding era did contain such express separation of powers provisions. The most famous example is the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: In the government of this Commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: To the end it may be a government of laws and not of men. MASS. CONST. of 1780, pt. I, art. 30; see also VA. CONST. of 1776 P2 ("The legislative, executive, and judiciary departments shall be separate and distinct, so that neither exercise the powers properly belonging to the other."). n43 I am profoundly indebted to Marty Redish for this important insight. n44 U.S. CONST. art I, ? 8, cl. 18 (emphasis added). The word "proper" in the Sweeping Clause provides the textual vehicle for enforcement of the Constitution's nondelegation principle. See Lawson & Granger, supra note 22, at 333-34. n45 See Thomas W. Merrill, The Constitutional Principle of Separation of Powers, 1991 SUP. CT. REV. 225, 256 ("[T]he Constitution makes no effort to define the 'legislative,' 'executive,' and 'judicial' powers."). The framers harbored no illusions that these powers were self-defining. Madison, for example, observed in The Federalist: Experience has instructed us that no skill in the science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define, with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces -- the legislative, executive, and judiciary. . . . Questions daily occur in the course of practice which prove the obscurity which reigns in these subjects, and which puzzle the greatest adepts in political science. THE FEDERALIST NO. 37, at 228 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). The problem of distinguishing the three functions of government has long been, and continues to be, one of the most intractable puzzles in constitutional law. See Wayman v. Southard, 23 U.S. (10 Wheat.) 1, 46 (1825) ("[T]he maker of the law may commit something to the discretion of the other departments, and the precise boundary of this power is a subject of delicate and difficult inquiry. . . ."). See generally William B. Gwyn, The Indeterminacy of the Separation of Powers and the Federal Courts, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 474, 503 (1989). n46 See Paul M. Bator, The Constitution as Architecture: Legislative and Administrative Courts Under Article III, 65 IND. L.J. 233, 264 (1990). n47 Circularity of this kind is neither fatal nor unprecedented. For example, under relevant (and correct) case law, a federal employee is an officer subject to the Appointments Clause, U.S. CONST. art. II, ? 2, cl. 2, if he or she is sufficiently important to be subject to the Appointments Clause. See Lawson, supra note 41, at 865 n.63. n48 For a description and analysis of the case law on nondelegation, see Cynthia R. Farina, Statutory Interpretation and the Balance of Power in the Administrative State, 89 COLUM. L. REV. 452, 478-88 (1989). n49 Marty Redish has independently formulated a very similar principle for distinguishing the legislative and executive powers, which he calls the "political commitment principle." See MARTIN H. REDISH, THE CONSTITUTION AS POLITICAL STRUCTURE (forthcoming 1994) (manuscript ch. 5, at 2-4, on file with author). This principle requires of valid legislation "some meaningful level of normative political commitment by the enacting legislators, thus enabling the electorate to judge its representatives." Id. ch. 5, at 4; see also David Schoenbrod, The Delegation Doctrine: Could the Court Give It Substance?, 83 MICH. L. REV. 1223, 1252-58 (1985) (distinguishing between statutes that prescribe rules of conduct and invalid statutes that merely state legislative goals). n50 See Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 541-42 (1935); Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388, 430 (1935). The Court does occasionally invoke delegation concerns in the course of statutory interpretation. See, e.g., Industrial Union Dep't, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Inst. (Benzene), 448 U.S. 607, 646 (1980) (plurality opinion) (holding that an OSHA statute, if interpreted broadly, would be a sweeping and unconstitutional delegation of power). n51 See 15 U.S.C. ? 78j(b) (1988) (proscribing the use or employment, "in connection with the purchase or sale of any security . . ., [of] any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance in contravention of such rules and regulations as the [Securities and Exchange] Commission may prescribe as necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors"). n52 See 47 U.S.C. ? 307(a) (1988) (prescribing that the Federal Communications Commission shall grant broadcast licenses to applicants "if public convenience, interest, or necessity will be served thereby"). n53 See 21 U.S.C. ? 41 (1988) (forbidding the importation of "any merchandise as tea which is inferior in purity, quality, and fitness for consumption to the standards" set by the Secretary of Health and Human Services). n54 See, e.g., Touby v. United States, 111 S. Ct. 1752, 1756 (1991); Skinner v. Mid-America Pipeline Co., 490 U.S. 212, 218-24 (1989); Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 378-79 (1989). n55 The problem with the Goodness and Niceness Commission under current law (if indeed there is a problem) would be that it had been delegated too much of Congress's power in one fell swoop. Modern law, in other words, will permit Congress to create a set of miniature Goodness and Niceness Commissions, no one of which has authority over all aspects of life, but would likely balk at a single agency exercising unconstrained legislative authority over too broad a range of subjects. See Industrial Union Dep't, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Inst. (Benzene), 448 U.S. 607, 646 (1980) (plurality opinion) (narrowly construing the Occupational Safety and Health Act because a broad construction would give the Secretary of Labor "unprecedented power over American industry" and would thus constitute "such a 'sweeping delegation of legislative power' that it might be unconstitutional") (quoting Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 539 (1935)). n56 488 U.S. 361 (1989). n57 Id. at 372. n58 David Schoenbrod has documented that President Reagan never vetoed a bill on nondelegation grounds nor did his Justice Department ever oppose such legislation. See David Schoenbrod, How the Reagan Administration Trivialized Separation of Powers (and Shot Itself in the Foot), 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 459, 464-65 (1989). I have confirmed that this same fact is true of the Bush administration through my own recollections and those of several Bush administration officials and by consulting published opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel. n59 U.S. CONST. art. II, ? 1, cl. 1. n60 See Steven G. Calabresi & Kevin H. Rhodes, The Structural Constitution: Unitary Executive, Plural Judiciary, 105 HARV. L. REV. 1153, 1177 n.119 (1992). n61 U.S. CONST. art. II, ? 3, cl. 3. n62 See Calabresi & Rhodes, supra note 60, at 1198 n.221. n63 See Steven G. Calabresi, The Vesting Clauses As Power Grants, 88 NW. U. L. REV. (forthcoming 1994) (manuscript at 2, on file with the Harvard Law School Library). n64 U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 1, cl. 1. n65 The qualifier "discretionary" is important. If a statute requires a ministerial act, such that a writ of mandamus would properly lie to compel its performance, it does not matter in whom the statute vests power. See Kendall v. United States, 37 U.S. (12 Pet.) 524, 610-13 (1838). n66 See, e.g., Thomas O. McGarity, Presidential Control of Regulatory Agency Decisionmaking, 36 AM. U. L. REV. 443, 465-72 (1987) (arguing that Congress "may provide that the President may not substitute his judgment . . . for that of the official to whom Congress has delegated decisionmaking power"); cf. Lawrence Lessig & Cass R. Sunstein, The President and the Administration, 94 COLUM. L. REV. 1, 55 (1994) (claiming that, under an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, "Congress has wide discretion to vest . . . [administrative powers] in officers operating under or beyond the plenary power of the President"). n67 Several legal scholars have compiled impressive lists of historical materials suggesting that many early legal actors and writers did not contemplate any wide-ranging presidential power of supervision. See Lessig & Sunstein, supra note 66, at 15-17; Morton Rosenberg, Presidential Control of Agency Rulemaking: An Analysis of Constitutional Issues That May Be Raised by Executive Order 12,291, 23 ARIZ. L. REV. 1199, 1205-10 (1981). n68 See Lessig & Sunstein, supra note 66, at 46-52; McGarity, supra note 66, at 466; Rosenberg, supra note 67, at 1209. n69 Steve Calabresi has recently formulated and marshalled these arguments. See Calabresi, supra note 63, at 4-22; Steven G. Calabresi, The Trinity of Powers and the Lessig/Sunstein Heresy passim (March 6, 1994) (unpublished manuscript, on file with the Harvard Law School Library). I can here summarize only a few of Professor Calabresi's arguments. First, the Sweeping Clause gives Congress power to carry into execution "all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 8, cl. 18 (emphasis added). In view of this language, it is very hard to argue that the Article II Vesting Clause does not vest powers. Second, a close textual and structural comparison of Articles II and III demonstrates that the Vesting Clauses in each Article serve the same function. Inasmuch as the Article III Vesting Clause must be read as a grant of power to courts to decide cases rather than as merely a designation of office, the Article II Vesting Clause must also be a grant of power. Third, the Article II Vesting Clause is the only plausible source of a constitutional power to execute the laws. The only other conceivable source of such a power -- the Take Care Clause, U.S. CONST. art II, ? 2, cl. 3 (declaring that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed") -- is worded as a duty of faithful execution rather than as a grant of power. n70 See Calabresi & Rhodes, supra note 60, at 1166. n71 See id.; Lee S. Liberman, Morrison v. Olson: A Formalist Perspective on Why the Court Was Wrong, 38 AM. U. L. REV. 313, 353-54 (1989). n72 The executive power, unlike the legislative and judicial powers, has always been understood to be delegable by the President. See Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 424-25 (1989) (Scalia, J., dissenting); 2 ANNALS OF CONG. 712 (1792) ("[I]t is of the nature of Executive power to be transferrable to subordinate officers; but Legislative authority is incommunicable, and cannot be transferred.") (statement of Representative Findley). Accordingly, if the President can directly exercise all powers vested by statute in executive officials, the President can presumably designate any subordinate official to exercise that power. Thus, if a statute vests authority to promulgate standards for workplace safety in the Secretary of Labor, the President could, on this understanding, personally assume that power and then delegate it to the Secretary of Defense. Perhaps this is the correct view of the President's power, but it seems more plausible to suppose that Congress can at least determine which subordinate officials, if any, are permitted to exercise delegated executive powers. See Geoffrey P. Miller, The Unitary Executive in a Unified Theory of Constitutional Law: The Problem of Interpretation, 15 CARDOZO L. REV. 201, 205 (1993). On this supposition, if a statute vests power to promulgate workplace standards in the Secretary of Labor, the President cannot personally promulgate safety standards nor designate anyone other than the Secretary of Labor to perform that task, although the President can issue instructions -- including instructions so detailed that they take the form of regulations -- with which the Secretary of Labor must comply if he or she is to act at all. n73 See, e.g., Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 696-97 (1988) (upholding the constitutionality of the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act); Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714, 721-27 (1986) (striking down a provision of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act that gave the Comptroller General a role in the appropriations process). n74 It is therefore constitutionally nonexistent as well. The only mode of removal specifically mentioned in the Constitution is impeachment. See U.S. CONST. art. II, ? 4. Accordingly, one could reasonably believe: that impeachment is the only permissible form of removal, that Congress's power to create offices carries with it the power to prescribe the form of removal, or that the power of removal follows the power of appointment, so that if the Senate must consent to an officer's appointment, it must also consent to that officer's removal. See Lawson, supra note 41, at 883 n.172. One can infer a presidential removal power only by assuming that such a power is necessary in order to ensure a unitary executive. See Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 132-35 (1926) (making such an inference). Inasmuch as even the strongest removal power does not ensure compliance with the Article II Vesting Clause, any such inference of a constitutionally based presidential removal power seems hard to justify. n75 See 1 ANNALS OF CONG. 384-412, 473-608, 614-31, 635-39 (1789). Should this fact give pause to advocates of the unitary executive? Probably, although the framers' silence is not decisive in the face of compelling textual and structural arguments for presidential control of execution. In order to establish that something is the original meaning of a constitutional provision, one needs to show that the general public would have acknowledged that meaning as correct if all relevant arguments and information had been brought to its attention. Actual instances of usage (or non-usage) are therefore probative but not dispositive. n76 See, e.g., 18 Op. Att'y Gen. 31, 32 (1884); 11 Op. Att'y Gen. 14, 15-19 (1864); 1 Op. Att'y Gen. 624, 625-29 (1823). But see 6 Op. Att'y Gen. 326, 339-46 (1854) (disavowing the reasoning and conclusions of these opinions). n77 See Merrill, supra note 45, at 253-54. Nor is it obvious that courts would have validated limitless delegations directly to the President rather than to "expert, non-political" agencies. n78 See 15 Op. Off. Legal Counsel 8, 16-17 (1991) (construing a statute to permit the Secretary of Education to review decisions of administrative law judges on the ground, inter alia, that foreclosure of review would be unconstitutional); 13 Op. Off. Legal Counsel 299, 306-07 (1989) (objecting generally to concurrent reporting requirements that allow agencies to transmit budget requests or legislative proposals to Congress without presidential review); 12 Op. Off. Legal Counsel 58, 60-71 (1988) (asserting the unconstitutionality of a congressional resolution requiring the Centers for Disease Control to mail AIDS information free from executive supervision). n79 U.S. CONST. art. III, ? 1. n80 See id. n81 Joshua I. Schwartz, Nonacquiescence, Crowell v. Benson, and Administrative Adjudication, 77 GEO. L.J. 1815, 1835 (1989). n82 See Freytag v. Commissioner, 111 S. Ct. 2631, 2654-56 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment); Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., 59 U.S. (18 How.) 272, 280 (1855); Frank H. Easterbrook, "Success" and the Judicial Power, 65 IND. L.J. 277, 280-81 (1990). n83 See Freytag, 111 S. Ct. at 2655; Murray's Lessee, 59 U.S. at 284. n84 See REDISH, supra note 49, ch. 5, at 9-11 (discussing Locke and Montesquieu). n85 59 U.S. (18 How.) 272 (1855). n86 U.S. CONST. amend. V. n87 Legislation that does not require executive and judicial adherence to principles of due process is not "proper" under the Sweeping Clause and thus would have been unconstitutional even before ratification of the Fifth Amendment in 1791. See Lawson & Granger, supra note 22, at 329-30. n88 Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Of Legislative Courts, Administrative Agencies, and Article III, 101 HARV. L. REV. 916, 918 (1988). n89 Martin H. Redish, Legislative Courts, Administrative Agencies, and the Northern Pipeline Decision, 1983 DUKE L.J. 197, 227. n90 See Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. National Resources Defense Counsel, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842-43 (1984). n91 See, e.g., 5 U.S.C. ? 706(2)(E) (1988) (specifying the substantial evidence test); 29 U.S.C. ? 660(a) (1988) (same). n92 See Calabresi & Rhodes, supra note 60, at 1155-56. n93 THE FEDERALIST NO. 47, at 301 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). n94 See Sunstein, supra note 2, at 446-47. n95 See OFFICE OF THE FED. REGISTER, NATIONAL ARCHIVES & RECORD ADMIN., UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT MANUAL 1993/1994, at 612-17 (1993). n96 See FTC v. Standard Oil Co., 449 U.S. 232, 245 (1980) (refusing to permit judicial review of the filing of an administrative complaint on the ground that such agency action is nonfinal). n97 See Rebecca L. Brown, Separated Powers and Ordered Liberty, 139 U. PA. L. REV. 1513, 1556 (1991). n98 See supra p. 1234. n99 Although, as Lawrence Lessig and Cass Sunstein point out, the Sweeping Clause gives Congress substantial power to control the manner in which the executive department executes the laws, see Lessig & Sunstein, supra note 66, at 66-69, that power is limited by the Sweeping Clause's terms. Congress is permitted to create a particular governmental structure if, but only if, other constitutional provisions or background understandings establish that such a structure conforms to a "proper" conception of separation of powers. See Lawson & Granger, supra note 22, at 333-34; see also Lessig & Sunstein, supra note 66, at 67 n.278, 69 (noting that there are constitutional limits on Congress's power under the Sweeping Clause). Thus, the scope of Congress's power to structure the national government depends largely on the extent to which the Vesting Clauses of Articles II and III do or do not grant power to the President and the federal courts, respectively -- and thus do not or do leave governmental powers unallocated by the constitutional text. Accordingly, Professors Lessig and Sunstein's conclusion that "the framers wanted to constitutionalize just some of the array of power a constitution-maker must allocate, and as for the rest, the framers intended Congress (and posterity) to control as it saw fit," id. at 41, ultimately rests, as a textual matter, on their argument that the Article II and Article III Vesting Clauses are not grants of power, see id. at 46-52 -- an argument that is very difficult to sustain either textually or structurally. See supra note 69. (Patty Granger and I are grateful to Professors Lessig and Sunstein for their generous use of our article on the Sweeping Clause in their recent work on the presidency. See Lessig & Sunstein, supra note 66, at 41 n.178, 67 n.278. At the risk of appearing to quibble in the name of clarification, however: Professors Lessig and Sunstein cite our article, under a "see also" signal, in support of the conclusion that the framers left the allocation of some important governmental powers to "Congress (and posterity) to control as it saw fit." See id. at 41 n.178. Our article neither directly supports nor directly rebuts such a claim of congressional power. It demonstrates that Congress can structure the government only through laws that are objectively necessary and proper, see Lawson & Granger, supra note 22, at 276, but whether a particular governmental structure is "proper" depends on constitutional norms external to the Sweeping Clause. Thus, as noted above, the soundness of Professors Lessig and Sunstein's conclusion concerning congressional power depends largely on the soundness of their interpretation of the Article II and Article III Vesting Clauses. The phrase "necessary and proper" in the Sweeping Clause is a neutral player in that dispute -- although the Sweeping Clause's use of the phrase "powers vested" supports a power-granting construction of the Vesting Clauses. See supra note 69. By way of further clarification: Professors Lessig and Sunstein cite -- and endorse -- our conclusion that the word "proper" in the Sweeping Clause constrains Congress's power, but with the proviso that they "do not agree that the clause is a limitation on Congress's power (rather than a grant of power)." Lessig & Sunstein, supra note 66, at 67 n.278. In fact, on this point (as on many others), there is no disagreement among us. Ms. Granger and I emphatically maintain that the Sweeping Clause is a grant of power to Congress, see, e.g., Lawson & Granger, supra note 22, at 270, 276, 328, but insist that it is a grant of limited rather than unlimited power.) n100 See supra note 1. n101 I suspect that this claim is controversial only because of a failure to distinguish between theories of interpretation and theories of adjudication. Imagine, for example, that a second American revolution openly discards the Constitution, so that there is no chance that any conclusions about the Constitution's meaning could have any significant effects on the real world. In the absence of any plausible concern about the practical consequences of constitutional interpretation (and putting aside for the moment the interpretative significance of precedent), it seems inconceivable that one would even think to apply anything other than originalist interpretivism when interpreting the Constitution -- just as no one would today think of interpreting the Articles of Confederation by any other method. In other words, I suspect that originalist interpretivism is controversial only because its descriptive interpretative conclusions are widely thought to have prescriptive adjudicative consequences. n102 See ACKERMAN, supra note 3, at 34-57; Bruce Ackerman, Constitutional Politics/Constitutional Law, 99 YALE L.J. 453, 510-15 (1989) [hereinafter Ackerman, Constitutional Politics]; Bruce Ackerman, The Storrs Lectures: Discovering the Constitution, 93 YALE L.J. 1013, 1051-57 (1984). n103 The Constitution was ratified in a manner inconsistent both with the amendment process specified in the Articles of Confederation and with the ratification procedures of a number of state constitutions. The ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments involved something very close to vote fraud. See Ackerman, Constitutional Politics, supra note 102, at 500-07. n104 Akhil Amar has argued that the ratification of the original Constitution was valid because it was consistent with an accepted background norm for the ratification of fundamental law: ratification by direct majority vote of "We the People." That norm, he argues, is carried forward in the existing Constitution as an unenumerated right of the people, so an amendment ratified by direct majority vote would be constitutionally valid. See Akhil Reed Amar, Philadelphia Revisited: Amending the Constitution Outside Article V, 55 U. CHI. L. REV. 1043, 1044 (1988). This analysis, however, cannot save the administrative state, because no such amendment has ever been so ratified. n105 Ackerman, Constitutional Politics, supra note 102, at 508 (paraphrasing Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 449 (1939)). n106 Henry P. Monaghan, Stare Decisis and Constitutional Adjudication, 88 COLUM. L. REV. 723, 748 (1988) (emphasis added). n107 See Gary Lawson, The Constitutional Case Against Precedent, 17 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 23, 25-33 (1994). It is perhaps a bit arrogant to toss off a proposition of this magnitude so casually, but the prima facie case against precedent is undeceptively simple: if interpreters have the power and duty to prefer the Constitution to statutes or executive acts because the Constitution is supreme law, they a fortiori have the same power and duty to prefer the Constitution to prior judicial decisions. n108 Peter B. McCutchen, Mistakes, Precedent, and the Rise of the Administrative State: Toward a Constitutional Theory of the Second Best (October 20, 1993) (unpublished manuscript, on file with the Harvard Law School Library). n109 Id. at 3. n110 See id. at 26-32. n111 Id. at 3, 4. n112 U.S. CONST. art. I, ? 7, cls. 2-3. n113 See McCutchen, supra note 108, at 62-65. n114 See supra note 107. n115 See Suzanna Sherry, An Originalist Understanding of Minimalism, 88 NW. U. L. REV. 175, 182 (1993). Of course, there may be tactical reasons for casting normative political arguments in the (often unaccommodating) language of constitutionalism. If official actors or the public believe, or act as though they believe, that the Constitution matters, effective rhetorical strategy requires that one couch arguments in constitutional language -- and perhaps even that one lie about one's goals and methods. But truth-seekers have no interest in such rhetorical games. n116 See Gary S. Lawson, An Interpretivist Agenda, 15 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 157, 160-61 (1992); Larry Simon, The Authority of the Constitution and Its Meaning: A Preface to a Theory of Constitutional Interpretation, 58 S. CAL. L. REV. 603, 606-07, 613-19 (1985). n117 Political candidates seeking office typically do not call for abolishing administrative government in the name of the Constitution, which suggests that such a platform probably would not garner a large percentage of the popular vote. n118 See Gary S. Lawson, The Ethics of Insider Trading, 11 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 727, 778 (1988) ("It is conceivable that the ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical problems of the ages will be solved by an article in a twentieth-century, English-language law journal. But I rather doubt it."). From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 2 23:10:52 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 16:10:52 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Grand Canal in Venice from the Rialto Bridge Message-ID: I'm not sure I sent this. If not, I hope it inspires fond memories in some of you, and ambition to see it yourself in others :-) If you haven't been there, Venice is about a 3-day event. Steve -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Grand Canal.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 172178 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Oct 3 01:30:27 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2005 19:30:27 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Journal of Religion and Society: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <434089B3.9070906@solution-consulting.com> This is an amazingly silly study, as it contradicts tons of social research on the actual effects of religion. America is a sui generis, and to compare us with any other country is ridiculous. Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Other than that I have no strong opinion. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with > Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies > Journal of Religion and Society > http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html > [Creighton is a Roman Catholic Jesuit university, founded in Omaha in > 1878. First, an summary from the Times of London, to which Laird > alerted me.] > > NATIONS WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE DO WORSE > > RUTH GLEDHILL, TIMES, UK - Religious belief can cause damage to a > society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual > promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. > According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only > unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to > social problems. The study counters the view of believers that > religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of > a healthy society. > > It compares the social performance of relatively secular countries, > such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator > rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in > the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it > inspires atheism and amorality. > > Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that > religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to > lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and > abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been > described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the > devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills. > > The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US > academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their > churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the > hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly > sceptical world. > > "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator > correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult > mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the > prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most > dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly > so." > > Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used > data from the International Social Survey Program, Gallup and other > research bodies to reach his conclusions. . . > > The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous > democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least > devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates > of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than > in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " > uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and > adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested. . . > > He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared > with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian > countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing > murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and > abortion, he added. > > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html > > ------------------- > > ISSN: 1522-5658 > > Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with > Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies > > A First Look > > Gregory S. Paul > Baltimore, Maryland > > Introduction > > [1] Two centuries ago there was relatively little dispute over the > existence of God, or the societally beneficial effect of popular > belief in a creator. In the twentieth century extensive secularization > occurred in western nations, the United States being the only > significant exception (Bishop; Bruce; Gill et al.; Sommerville). If > religion has receded in some western nations, what is the impact of > this unprecedented transformation upon their populations? Theists > often assert that popular belief in a creator is instrumental towards > providing the moral, ethical and other foundations necessary for a > healthy, cohesive society. Many also contend that widespread > acceptance of evolution, and/or denial of a creator, is contrary to > these goals. But a cross-national study verifying these claims has yet > to be published. That radically differing worldviews can have > measurable impact upon societal conditions is plausible according to a > number of mainstream researchers (Bainbridge; Barro; Barro and > McCleary; Beeghley; Groeneman and Tobin; Huntington; Inglehart and > Baker; Putman; Stark and Bainbridge). Agreement with the hypothesis > that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based > on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and > quality restricted to one population (Benson et al.; Hummer et al.; > Idler and Kasl; Stark and Bainbridge). A partial exception is given by > Barro and McCleary, who correlated economic growth with rates of > belief in the afterlife and church attendance in numerous nations > (while Kasman and Reid [2004] commented that Europe does not appear to > be suffering unduly from its secularization). It is surprising that a > more systematic examination of the question has not been previously > executed since the factors required to do so are in place. The > twentieth century acted, for the first time in human history, as a > vast Darwinian global societal experiment in which a wide variety of > dramatically differing social-religious-political-economic systems > competed with one another, with varying degrees of success. A > quantitative cross-national analysis is feasible because a large body > of survey and census data on rates of religiosity, secularization, and > societal indicators has become available in the prosperous developed > democracies including the United States. > > [2] This study is a first, brief look at an important subject that has > been almost entirely neglected by social scientists. The primary > intent is to present basic correlations of the elemental data. Some > conclusions that can be gleaned from the plots are outlined. This is > not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause > versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health. It > is hoped that these original correlations and results will spark > future research and debate on the issue. > > The Belief that Religiosity is Socially Beneficial > > [3] As he helped initiate the American experiment Benjamin Franklin > stated that "religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, > give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us > benevolent, useful and beneficial to others" (Isaacson: 87-88). When > the theory of biological evolution removed the need for a supernatural > creator concerns immediately arose over the societal implications of > widespread abandonment of faith (Desmond and Moore; Numbers). In 1880 > the religious moralist Dostoyevsky penned the famous warning that "if > God does not exist, then everything is permissible." Even so, in > Europe the issue has not been a driving focus of public and political > dispute, especially since the world wars. > > [4] Although its proponents often claim that anti-evolution > creationism[1]<1> is scientific, it has abjectly failed in the > practical realms of mainstream science and hi-tech industry (Ayala et > al.; Crews; Cziko; Dawkins, 1996, 1997; Dennett; Gould; Koza et al.; > L. Lane; Miller; Paul and Cox; Shanks; Wise; Young and Edis). The > continuing popularity of creationism in America indicates that it is > in reality a theistic social-political movement partly driven by > concerns over the societal consequences of disbelief in a creator > (Forrest and Gross; Numbers). The person most responsible for > politicizing the issue in America, evangelical Christian W. J. > Bryan,[2]<2> expressed relatively little interest in evolution until > the horrors of WW I inspired him to blame the scientific revolution > that invented chemical warfare and other modern ills for "preaching > that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the > supernatural from the Bible" (Numbers: 178). > > [5] In the United States many conservative theists consider > evolutionary science a leading contributor to social dysfunction > because it is amoral or worse, and because it inspires disbelief in a > moral creator (Colson and Pearcey; Eve and Harrold; Johnson; Numbers; > Pearcey; Schroeder). The original full title for the creationist > Discovery Institute was the Discovery Institute for the Renewal of > Science and Culture (a title still applied to a division), and the > institute's mission challenges "materialism on specifically scientific > grounds" with the intent of reversing "some of materialism's > destructive cultural consequences." The strategy for achieving these > goals is the "wedge" strategy to insert intelligent design creationism > into mainstream academe and subsequently destroy Darwinian science > (Johnson; Forrest and Gross note this effort is far behind schedule). > The Discovery Institute and the less conservative, even more lavishly > funded pro-theistic Templeton Foundation fund research into the > existence and positive societal influence of a creator (Harris et al.; > Holden). In 2000 the Discovery Institute held a neocreationist seminar > for members of Congress (Applegate). Politically and socially powerful > conservatives have deliberately worked to elevate popular concerns > over a field of scientific and industrial research to such a level > that it qualifies as a major societal fear factor. The current House > majority leader T. Daley contends that high crime rates and tragedies > like the Columbine assault will continue as long schools teach > children "that they are nothing but glorified apes who have > evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud" (DeLay and > Dawson). Today's leaders of the world's largest Christian > denomination, the Catholic Church, share a dim view of the social > impact of evolution. In his inauguration speech, Benedict XVI lauded > the benefits of belief in a creator and contended, "we are not some > casual and meaningless product of evolution." A leading church cleric > and theologian (Schonborn) proclaimed that "the overwhelming evidence > for purpose and design" refutes the mindless creation of Darwinian > natural selection (also Dean, Dean and Goodstein). > > [6] Agreement with the hypothesis that popular religiosity is > societally advantageous is not limited to those opposed to > evolutionary science, or to conservatives. The basic thesis can be > held by anyone who believes in a benign creator regardless of the > proposed mode of creation, or the believer's social-political > worldview. In broad terms the hypothesis that popular religiosity is > socially beneficial holds that high rates of belief in a creator, as > well as worship, prayer and other aspects of religious practice, > correlate with lowering rates of lethal violence, suicide, > non-monogamous sexual activity, and abortion, as well as improved > physical health. Such faith-based, virtuous "cultures of life" are > supposedly attainable if people believe that God created them for a > special purpose, and follow the strict moral dictates imposed by > religion. At one end of the spectrum are those who consider creator > belief helpful but not necessarily critical to individuals and > societies. At the other end the most ardent advocates consider persons > and people inherently unruly and ungovernable unless they are strictly > obedient to the creator (as per Barna; Colson and Pearcey; Johnson; > Pearcey; Schroeder). Barro labels societal advantages that are > associated with religiosity "spiritual capital," an extension of > Putman's concept of "social capital." The corresponding view that > western secular materialism leads to "cultures of death" is the > official opinion of the Papacy, which claims, "the proabortion culture > is especially strong precisely where the Church's teaching on > contraception is rejected" (John Paul II). In the United States > popular support for the cultural and moral superiority of theism is so > extensive that popular disbelief in God ranks as another major > societal fear factor. > > [7] The media (Stepp) gave favorable coverage to a report that > children are hardwired towards, and benefit from, accepting the > existence of a divine creator on an epidemiological and > neuro-scientific basis (Benson et al.). Also covered widely was a > Federal report that the economic growth of nations positively responds > to high rates of belief in hell and heaven.[3]<3> Faith-based > charities and education are promoted by the Bush administration[4]<4> > and religious allies and lobbies as effective means of addressing > various social problems (Aronson; Goodstein). The conservative Family > Research Council proclaims, "believing that God is the author of life, > liberty and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as > the basis for a just, free and stable society." Towards the liberal > end of the political spectrum presidential candidate Al Gore supported > teaching both creationism and evolution, his running mate Joe > Leiberman asserted that belief in a creator is instrumental to "secure > the moral future of our nation, and raise the quality of life for all > our people," and presidential candidate John Kerry emphasized his > religious values in the latter part of his campaign. > > [8] With surveys showing a strong majority from conservative to > liberal believing that religion is beneficial for society and for > individuals, many Americans agree that their church-going nation is an > exceptional, God blessed, "shining city on the hill" that stands as an > impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world. But in the > other developing democracies religiosity continues to decline > precipitously and avowed atheists often win high office, even as > clergies warn about adverse societal consequences if a revival of > creator belief does not occur (Reid, 2001). > > Procedures and Primary Data Sources > > [9] Levels of religious and nonreligious belief and practice, and > indicators of societal health and dysfunction, have been most > extensively and reliably surveyed in the prosperous developed > democracies ([5]Figures 1-9). Similar data is often lacking for second > and third world nations, or is less reliable. The cultural and > economic similarity of the developing democracies minimizes the > variability of factors outside those being examined. The approximately > 800 million mostly middle class adults and children act as a massive > epidemiological experiment that allows hypotheses that faith in a > creator or disbelief in evolution improves or degrades societal > conditions to be tested on an international scale. The extent of this > data makes it potentially superior to results based on much smaller > sample sizes. Data is from the 1990s, most from the middle and latter > half of the decade, or the early 2000s. > > [10] Data sources for rates of religious belief and practice as well > as acceptance of evolution are the 1993 Environment I (Bishop) and > 1998 Religion II polls conducted by the International Social Survey > Program (ISSP), a cross-national collaboration on social science > surveys using standard methodologies that currently involves 38 > nations. The last survey interviewed approximately 23,000 people in > almost all (17) of the developing democracies; Portugal is also > plotted as an example of a second world European democracy. Results > for western and eastern Germany are combined following the regions' > populations. England is generally Great Britain excluding Northern > Ireland; Holland is all of the Netherlands. The results largely agree > with national surveys on the same subjects; for example, both ISSP and > Gallup indicate that absolute plus less certain believers in a higher > power are about 90% of the U.S. population. The plots include Bible > literalism and frequency of prayer and service attendance, as well as > absolute belief in a creator, in order to examine religiosity in terms > of ardency, conservatism, and activities. Self-reported rates of > religious attendance and practice may be significantly higher than > actual rates (Marler and Hadaway), but the data is useful for relative > comparisons, especially when it parallels results on religious belief. > The high rates of church attendance reported for the Swiss appear > anomalous compared to their modest levels of belief and prayer. > > [11] Data on aspects of societal health and dysfunction are from a > variety of well-documented sources including the UN Development > Programme (2000). Homicide is the best indicator of societal violence > because of the extremity of the act and its unique contribution to > levels of societal fear, plus the relatively reliable nature of the > data (Beeghley; Neapoletan). Youth suicide (WHO) was examined in order > to avoid cultural issues related to age and terminal illness. Data on > STDs, teen pregnancy and birth (Panchaud et al.; Singh and Darroch) > were accepted only if the compilers concluded that they were not > seriously underreported, except for the U.S. where under reporting > does not exaggerate disparities with the other developing democracies > because they would only close the gaps. Teen pregnancy was examined in > a young age class in which marriage is infrequent. Abortion data > (Panchaud et al.) was accepted only from those nations in which it is > as approximately legal and available as in the U.S. In order to > minimize age related factors, rates of dysfunction were plotted within > youth cohorts when possible. > > [12] Regression analyses were not executed because of the high > variability of degree of correlation, because potential causal factors > for rates of societal function are complex, and because it is not the > purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal > link between religion and social conditions. Nor were multivariate > analyses used because they risk manipulating the data to produce > errant or desired results,[6]<5> and because the fairly consistent > characteristics of the sample automatically minimizes the need to > correct for external multiple factors (see further discussion below). > Therefore correlations of raw data are used for this initial > examination. > > Results > > [13] Among the developing democracies absolute belief in God, > attendance of religious services and Bible literalism vary over a > dozenfold, atheists and agnostics five fold, prayer rates fourfold, > and acceptance of evolution almost twofold. Japan, Scandinavia, and > France are the most secular nations in the west, the United States is > the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity > otherwise limited to the second and third worlds (Bishop; PEW). > Prosperous democracies where religiosity is low (which excludes the > U.S.) are referred to below as secular developing democracies. > > [14] Correlations between popular acceptance of human evolution and > belief in and worship of a creator and Bible literalism are negative > ([7]Figure 1). The least religious nation, Japan, exhibits the highest > agreement with the scientific theory, the lowest level of acceptance > is found in the most religious developing democracy, the U.S. > > [15] A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in > Christian Europe and the American colonies (Beeghley; R. Lane). In all > secular developing democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen > homicide rates drop to historical lows ([8]Figure 2). The especially > low rates in the more Catholic European states are statistical noise > due to yearly fluctuations incidental to this sample, and are not > consistently present in other similar tabulations (Barcley and > Tavares). Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the > 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that > retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard > (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates > of homicides well above the secular developing democracy norm. Mass > student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since > the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more (National School > Safety Center) than all the secular developing democracies combined. > Other prosperous democracies do not significantly exceed the U.S. in > rates of nonviolent and in non-lethal violent crime (Beeghley; > Farrington and Langan; Neapoletan), and are often lower in this > regard. The United States exhibits typical rates of youth suicide > (WHO), which show little if any correlation with theistic factors in > the prosperous democracies ([9]Figure 3). The positive correlation > between pro-theistic factors and juvenile mortality is remarkable, > especially regarding absolute belief, and even prayer ([10]Figure 4). > Life spans tend to decrease as rates of religiosity rise ([11]Figure > 5), especially as a function of absolute belief. Denmark is the only > exception. Unlike questionable small-scale epidemiological studies by > Harris et al. and Koenig and Larson, higher rates of religious > affiliation, attendance, and prayer do not result in lower > juvenile-adult mortality rates on a cross-national basis.[12]<6> > > [16] Although the late twentieth century STD epidemic has been > curtailed in all prosperous democracies (Aral and Holmes; Panchaud et > al.), rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three > hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution > secular developing democracies ([13]Figure 6). At all ages levels are > higher in the U.S., albeit by less dramatic amounts. The U.S. also > suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection > rates, which are starting to rise again as the microbe's resistance > increases ([14]Figure 7). The two main curable STDs have been nearly > eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia. Increasing adolescent > abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and > worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing > non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high > in the U.S. ([15]Figure 8). Claims that secular cultures aggravate > abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the > quantitative data. Early adolescent pregnancy and birth have dropped > in the developing democracies (Abma et al.; Singh and Darroch), but > rates are two to dozens of times higher in the U.S. where the decline > has been more modest ([16]Figure 9). Broad correlations between > decreasing theism and increasing pregnancy and birth are present, with > Austria and especially Ireland being partial exceptions. Darroch et > al. found that age of first intercourse, number of sexual partners and > similar issues among teens do not exhibit wide disparity or a > consistent pattern among the prosperous democracies they sampled, > including the U.S. A detailed comparison of sexual practices in France > and the U.S. observed little difference except that the French tend - > contrary to common impression - to be somewhat more conservative > (Gagnon et al.). > > Discussion > > [17] The absence of exceptions to the negative correlation between > absolute belief in a creator and acceptance of evolution, plus the > lack of a significant religious revival in any developing democracy > where evolution is popular, cast doubt on the thesis that societies > can combine high rates of both religiosity and agreement with > evolutionary science. Such an amalgamation may not be practical. By > removing the need for a creator evolutionary science made belief > optional. When deciding between supernatural and natural causes is a > matter of opinion large numbers are likely to opt for the latter. > Western nations are likely to return to the levels of popular > religiosity common prior to the 1900s only in the improbable event > that naturalistic evolution is scientifically overturned in favor of > some form of creationist natural theology that scientifically verifies > the existence of a creator. Conversely, evolution will probably not > enjoy strong majority support in the U.S. until religiosity declines > markedly. > > [18] In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator > correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult > mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the > prosperous democracies ([17]Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous > democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin > predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional > of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost > always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a "shining city on the > hill" to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic > measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the > general trend because there is not a significant relationship between > it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have > combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high > rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of > human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and > the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None > of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing > high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly > religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from > less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developing > democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, > sometimes outstandingly so. > > [19] If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal > health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the > opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to > national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means > utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to > govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data > examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, > pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come > closest to achieving practical "cultures of life" that feature low > rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related > dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developing > democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most > successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution > democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good > conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. > The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal > disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions > requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal > conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a > doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends. > > Conclusion > > [20] The United States' deep social problems are all the more > disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth > among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN > Development Programme, 2000, 2004). Spending on health care is much > higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third > to two or more, than in any other developing democracy (UN Development > Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient > western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and > physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, > and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus > effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social > conditions and religiosity versus secularism. It is therefore hoped > that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will > inspire more extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions > include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the > exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a > much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious, less > wealthy prosperous democracies. Conversely, how do the latter achieve > superior societal health while having little in the way of the > religious values or institutions? There is evidence that within the > U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of > evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal > dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west > having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, > marital and related problems than the northeast where societal > conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach > European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the > responsibility of the research community to address controversial > issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies > need to chart their future courses. > > Figures ([18]return) > > Indicators of societal dysfunction and health as functions of > percentage rates of theistic and non-theistic belief and practice in > 17 first world developed democracies and one second world democracy. > ISSP questions asked: I know God really exists and I have no doubt > about it = absolutely believe in God; 2-3 times a month + once a week > or more = attend religious services at least several times a month; > several times a week - several times a day = pray at least several > times a week; the Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be > taken literally, word for word = Bible literalists; human beings > [have] developed from earlier species of animals = accept human > evolution; I don't know whether there is a God and I don't believe > there is a way to find out + I don't believe in God = agnostics and > other atheists. > > [19]Figure 1 > [20]Figure 2 > [21]Figure 3 > [22]Figure 4 > [23]Figure 5 > [24]Figure 6 > [25]Figure 7 > [26]Figure 8 > [27]Figure 9 > > Legend > > A = Australia > C = Canada > D = Denmark > E = Great Britain > F = France > G = Germany > H = Holland > I = Ireland > J = Japan > L = Switzerland > N = Norway > P = Portugal > R = Austria > S = Spain > T = Italy > U = United States > W = Sweden > Z = New Zealand > > Bibliography > > Abma, Joyce, Gladys Martinez, William Mosher and Brittany Dawson > > 2004 "Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive > Use, and Childbearing, 2002, National Center for Health Statistics." > Vital Health Statistics 23 (24). > > Applegate, David > > 2000 "Anti-evolutionists Open a New Front." 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Futures 36: 1009-23. > > Barcley, Gordon and Cynthia Tavares > > 2003 International Comparisons of Criminal Justice Statistics 2001. > [28]http://www.csdp.org/research/hosb1203.pdf. > > Barna > > 2003 "A Biblical Worldview has a Radical Effect on a Person's Life." > Barna Research Online. http://www.barna.org. > > Barro, Robert > > 2004 "Spirit of Capitalism: Religion and Economic Development." > Harvard International Review 25 (4). > > Barro, Robert and Rachel McCleary > > 2003 "Religion and Economic Growth Across Countries." American > Sociological Review 68: 760-81. > > Beeghley, Leonard > > 2003 Homicide: A Sociological Explanation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and > Littlefield. > > Benson, Peter et al. > > 2004 "Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative > Communities." [29]http://www.americanvalues.org/html/hardwired.html. > > Bishop, George > > 1999 "What Americans Really Believe, and Why Faith Isn't as Universal > as They Think." 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Rockland, MA: Charles River Media. > > Pearcey, Nancy > > 2004 Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity. > Wheaton, IL: Crossways. > > PEW > > 2002 Global Attitudes Project. > > Putman, Robert > > 2000 Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. > New York: Simon & Schuster. > > Reid, T. R. > > 2001 "Hollow Halls in Europe's Churches." Washington Post 5/6: A1, > A22. > > 2004 The United States of Europe. New York: Penguin. > > Rosenfeld, Richard > > 2004 "The Case of the Unsolved Crime Decline." Scientific American 290 > (2): 82-89. > > Schonborn, Christoph > > 2005 "Finding Design in Nature." New York Times 7/7: A27. > > Schroeder, Gerald > > 1997 The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical > Wisdom. NewYork: Broadway. > > Scott, Eugenie > > 1999 "The Creation/Evolution Continuum." Reports of the National > Center for Science Education 19 (4): 16, 17, 21. > > Shanks, Niall > > 2004 God, the Devil and Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. > > Singh, Sushella and Jacqueline Darroch > > 2000 "Adolescent Pregnancy and Childbearing: Levels and Trends in > Developed Countries." Family Planning Perspectives 32: 14-23. > > Sommerville, C. > > 2002 "Stark's Age of Faith Argument and the Secularization of Things: > A Commentary." Sociology of Religion 63: 361-72. > > Stark, Rodney and William Bainbridge > > 1996 Religion, Deviance and Social Control. New York: Routledge. > > Stepp, Laura > > 2004 "An Inspired Strategy." Washington Post 3/21: D1, D6. > > UN Development Programme > > 2000 Human Development Report 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. > > 2004 Human Development Report 2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press. > > WHO > > 2001 "Suicide Prevention." > [34]http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/ > country_reports/en/index.html. > > Wise, Donald > > 1998 "Creationism's Geologic Time Scale." American Scientist > 86:160-73. > > Young, Matt and Taner Edis (eds.) > > 2004 Why Intelligent Design Fails. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University > Press. > > References > > 5. http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html#figures > 28. http://www.csdp.org/research/hosb1203.pdf > 29. http://www.americanvalues.org/html/hardwired.html > 30. http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?c=ABOUT_FRC > 31. > http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/c/pages/fear_of_hell.html > 32. http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/references.html > 33. http://www.nssc1.org/index2.htm > 34. > http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/country_reports/en/index.html > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:00:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:00:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] U. Chi. L. Rev.: Madison's Nightmare Message-ID: Madison's Nightmare. University of Chicago Law Review SPRING, 1990 57 U. Chi. L. Rev. 335 Richard B. Stewart Assistant Attorney General, Environment and Natural Resources Division, U.S. Department of Justice. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice or the United States. The assistance of Jonathan Wiener in the preparation of this article is gratefully acknowledged. SUMMARY: ... The separation of powers within the national government would provide an additional safeguard against domination by factions while preventing the growth of excessive and irresponsible central power. ... Originally the states performed the bulk of the regulation, but eventually the national government stepped in as decentralized regulation in a federal system of numerous states proved to be hampered by several factors. ... The courts' relaxation of traditional separation of powers limitations freed the national government to meet these demands. ... The task of controlling these new federal powers was largely assumed by the federal courts, which developed new subconstitutional principles of administrative law to replace the now waning separation of powers jurisprudence that had previously limited the scope of the national government. ... Rather, it has made clear that Congress and the states retain political discretion to determine and change the content of the benefits afforded. ... Even more liberalized standing, ready judicial review of administrative discretion, more stringent procedural requirements, assured access for public advocacy groups, greater judicial control of agency discretion through statutory construction and other techniques, and more expansive judicial remedies (especially against state and local government), are affirmed as the solution to the ills of the centralized regulatory welfare state. ... The national government would focus on the general plan of reconstitution, foregoing detailed central planning of social and economic life. ... --------------- [*335] I. THE SPECIAL INTEREST REGULATORY WELFARE STATE James Madison identified domination by economic and ideological factions as the central problem in a liberal polity. He argued that such domination was more likely to occur in smaller, territorially limited units of government than in the proposed national government. An extended republic would encompass so many diverse and scattered factions that no single interest group could gain dominance, nor could permanent coalitions be maintained. Liberated from servitude to faction, federal officials would forswear parochial and partisan loyalties and adopt measures for the common good. 1 The separation of powers within the national government would provide an additional safeguard against domination by factions while preventing the growth of excessive and irresponsible central power. 2 The form of national political integration achieved through the new Constitution's legal structure would thus ensure government in the public interest. Economic integration and development would accompany political integration, aided by federally guaranteed free movement of labor, goods, and capital within a multi-state economy. Furthering Madison's vision, the federal courts during the nineteenth century provided security for interstate contracts and investments, encouraged [*336] the growth of multi-state business corporations, curbed state protectionism, and fostered the development of a common commercial law. These measures, together with Congress's creation of a national currency and its investment, along with the states, in a transportation infrastructure, promoted economic growth and the rise of regional and national markets. Other aspects of economic policy and virtually the entire field of social life were left to the states and localities. With the striking exception of slavery, events throughout the nineteenth century amply justified Madison's optimism. By the end of the nineteenth century economic growth had resulted in full-scale industrialization and spawned giant multi-state business corporations. 3 These developments generated demands for political control of the new leviathans -- demands asserted not only by consumers and workers but also by business, as small businesses sought protection against the competition of large enterprises, and the large enterprises sought governmental measures to stabilize the vicissitudes of the market. The courts could not or would not provide such protection. Private adjudication was inherently ill-suited to addressing the collective consequences of industrialization. Moreover, most judges were firmly committed to market competition as the preferred mode for organizing economic activity. Legislatures responded more favorably to these demands, but generally rejected government ownership of industrial enterprises as a solution. Instead, they chose regulation. Originally the states performed the bulk of the regulation, but eventually the national government stepped in as decentralized regulation in a federal system of numerous states proved to be hampered by several factors. First, the interstate mobility of capital and commodities, which the federal courts have so zealously promoted, undermines the willingness of states to impose stringent controls on business enterprises. States fear that such measures will handicap their own industries in competition with those of other states, and also drive business investment elsewhere. Second, many of the smaller states have far fewer administrative resources than the corporations that they seek to regulate. Finally, coordination problems make a system of decentralized state regulations especially ill-suited for controlling national transportation systems and product markets. Thus, federal regulation was first enacted in these areas. [*337] The dominant form of government regulation, whether at the state or national level, was a "command and control" system implemented by specialized administrative agencies. This system was first developed in railroad regulation, where price, entry, and service controls were used to combat the perceived evils of market power. It was later extended to such diverse fields as pharmaceuticals, trade practices, and broadcasting. 4 Then came the Great Depression, a vivid lesson in economic interdependence. Fresh political demands arose for ambitious new federal regulatory programs aimed at stabilizing the national economy. The command and control system of regulation was extended to labor relations, securities, agriculture, trucking, aeronautics, and other sectors. The New Deal also produced the first wave of large-scale national social insurance and welfare programs, including the social security and unemployment systems. These and later national social welfare programs responded to the states' inability to meet the growing demand for government provision of social services and assistance. As theorists of fiscal federalism have shown, there are grave structural impediments to providing such benefits through a system of decentralized government. 5 The interstate mobility of commodities and capital discourages states from raising taxes to fund generous social programs because states fear burdening their own businesses and triggering an exit of wealth. An additional disincentive is the mobility of individuals among states -- a mobility that has been legally guaranteed by the federal courts. States fear that if they adopt generous social programs, they will attract an influx of the needy, necessitating further tax increases. On the other hand, this fear may be overstated, because in practice many poor, ill, aged, or otherwise needy individuals cannot readily move and may remain trapped in poorer states or localities that lack the fiscal resources to adequately provide for them. 6 Two basic types of national measures have been enacted by Congress to deal with these fiscal federalism problems. One consists of the federal government delivering benefits to individuals in the form of cash (social security retirement and disability payments) [*338] or near-cash (food stamps and payment of medical expenses). The other consists of federal grants to states and localities to support various state and local social services (education, housing, health care services, rehabilitation, transportation) that otherwise might not be adequately funded because of the factors previously noted. These grants are generally conditioned on the states and localities dedicating the funds to specific purposes, supplying matching funds, and complying with various other requirements. 7 When these and similar regulatory and social welfare programs were challenged on constitutional grounds, the Supreme Court sustained them, repudiating earlier dual federalism jurisprudence that had sought to allocate distinct roles to the state and federal governments. In doing so, the Court not only had to construe Congress's taxing, spending, and commerce powers very broadly, but also had to reject claims that these exertions of national authority violated structural principles of federalism protecting state autonomy. Moreover, the implementation of these federal programs required the development of vast and unprecedented federal bureaucracies. In sustaining the validity of these new bureaucratic arrangements, the Court allowed Congress to delegate broad lawmaking powers to administrative agencies, invest them with adjudicatory powers that would traditionally have been exercised by courts, and limit the President's power to remove and thus control their directors. At the same time, the Court abandoned constitutional protection for common law economic rights and liberties. This was the New Deal constitutional revolution. 8 In its aftermath, majoritarian politics determined economic and social policy, creating a system of competitive federalism in which either the federal government or the states could adopt and implement such policies. Increasingly, it was the national government that was best able to meet rising political demands for economic stabilization, growth, and economic justice. The courts' relaxation of traditional separation of powers limitations freed the national government to meet these demands. Congress created the regulatory and social welfare programs of the New Deal and Great Society, and established [*339] vast administrative bureaucracies to implement these programs. The abandonment by the Supreme Court of dual federalism and other structural principles of constitutional law was little mourned. 9 Commentators found adequate safeguards for federalism in the political structuring of the Constitution, which provided for territorially-based representation in Congress and in the presidential electoral college. Also, the national political parties have a decentralized structure based primarily on states and large cities. This system was thought to ensure the effective representation of state and local interests in Congress. Given this composition, Congress would accordingly be sensitive to federalism values and not enact new national programs unless necessary to meet overriding national need. 10 Moreover, the several branches of the federal government were increasingly viewed as more responsive to racial and other minorities than state or local governments. As federal civil rights legislation extended and enforced the initiatives of the federal courts during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the successes of the civil rights movement were emulated by advocates for the poor and for consumer and environmental interests. The advocates asserted that their constituents were not adequately served either by the market or by state and local governments. They thus sought appropriate protection from the federal courts and Congress. In the period 1965-1980, Congress adopted sweeping new environmental, health, safety, and antidiscrimination regulatory statutes. There are at present over sixty major federal programs regulating business and non-profit organizations. Congress dramatically increased funding for direct federal social insurance and assistance programs, many of which also apply to state and local governments. Congress also greatly increased federal funding of conditional grant programs to states and localities. They now impose over one thousand different sets of conditions and requirements on state and local governments. Nonprofit organizations such as universities and health care institutions that receive federal grants are also subject to these conditions. In many cases, these grants regulate [*340] not only the recipients' substantive policies, but their organizational structure, employment practices, and decisionmaking procedures as well. State and local governments submit to these requirements because of irresistible pressures from local interest group constituencies that stand to benefit from the federal funds. 11 On Madisonian premises, the growth of these federal programs should be welcomed as an authentic expression of the public interest and an appropriate consequence of the national government's superior performance in promoting that interest. The Founders, one could argue, clearly intended for a politics of the national good to override state and local measures. National regulatory and social programs can be understood as correctives for state and local neglect fostered by indifference, the local entrenchment of privilege, or the structural impediments in a federal system to decentralized regulation and redistribution. These confident assumptions of latter-day champions of national control have, however, been badly shaken during the past decade. It is now widely understood that the processes through which national measures are adopted and enforced do not always ensure that assertions of national power serve the general interests. Instead, they can invite the very domination by faction that Madison so desired to prevent. This realization has been sharpened by the rise of public choice theory, which applies the methodology of economics to political conduct. 12 Public choice theorists use a more detailed formulation of Madison's faction analysis to look beyond stated public interest goals and to focus on political incentives and their interplay with institutional arrangements. Genuine aspirations for social and economic progress may be subverted by institutional structures that fail to properly reconcile the incentives of the various decisionmakers. Several factors explain the vulnerability of national policy to factional control. First, the strength of traditional territorially-based political parties has been sapped by the rise of a new political system, one based on the national media, mass mailings, and single issue political contributions. This system is dominated by nationally-organized economic and ideological interest groups of single issue rather that majoritarian politics. [*341] Second, federal conditional grant programs, sometimes celebrated as a form of "cooperative federalism," 13 are used to co-opt state and local interest groups and officials. The programs do so by exploiting such groups' dependency on federal monies to convert them into supporters of federal measures rather than defenders of state and local independence. Third, the dominant reliance on legalistic "command and control" strategies to achieve national goals inevitably involves a substantial shift of decisionmaking power from Congress and the President to federal bureaucracies and courts, sidestepping the already weakened federalism and separation of powers safeguards against factions. Command and control regulatory strategies attempt to achieve national goals by requiring or proscribing specific conduct on the part of regulated entities, such as the use of specific pollution control technologies, or the adoption of particular workplace safety measures. The rapid growth of federal controls has outstripped the capacity of Congress or the President to responsibly make the thousands of decisions required to dictate conduct throughout a vast, diverse, and dynamic nation. Such decisions are either delegated within Congress to subcommittees that are subject to only weak political accountability, or outside the legislative branch to federal bureaucracies and courts -- whose political accountability is even weaker. The exercise of administrative discretion is heavily influenced by organized economic and ideological interest groups, who offer political support, threaten political opposition, and deploy legal remedies to block or delay administrative actions. Since the 1960s, it has been popular wisdom that regulatory agencies are typically "captured" by the industries that they are supposed to regulate. But economic interests beyond the regulated entities have also played a major role in influencing agency decisionmaking. These include labor, government contractors, agricultural interests, and other client groups. In recent years, a variety of new ideological interest groups, including organizations championing the environment, consumers, religion, the handicapped, women, abortion rights, unborn children, and others, have arisen to join the "regulation game." 14 [*342] Rather than offsetting each other through mechanisms of countervailing power, as Madison envisaged, these groups have instead divided power among themselves. This parcelling of power has been accomplished though congressional delegations of authority to functionally specialized bureaucracies. Each of these new power centers is dominated by the officials of the agency in question and the small number of legislators and private groups interested in that agency's decisions. Madison identified the problem of factional domination in teritorially limited government. The growth of the national regulatory welfare state, however, has spawned a new form of factional domination. By an irony of inversion, Madison's centralizing solution to the problem of faction has produced Madison's Nightmare: A faction-ridden maze of fragmented and often irresponsible micro-politics within the government. 15 The post-New Deal constitutional jurisprudence of majoritarian politics has helped produce this result, because the demands for national regulatory and spending programs have outstripped the capacity of the national legislative process to make decisions that are accountable and politically responsive to the general interest. This has subverted the very premises of Madisonian politics. ATTEMPTING TO CURE MADISON'S NIGHTMARE THROUGH ADMINISTRATIVE LAW: ENTITLEMENTS AND PUBLIC INTEREST LAW The shortcomings of the new bureaucratic system, at once centralized and fractionalized, constitute Madison's Nightmare. Affected political constituencies have viewed these shortcomings from two basic perspectives. The constituencies that were supposed to have benefited from new bureaucratic and regulating programs -- the poor and disadvantaged, environmentalists, consumers, and workers' organizations -- have found the benefits delivered to be far below those promised. The constituencies whose conduct has been centrally regulated in order to provide these benefits -- state and local governments, businesses, and large nonprofit organizations -- believe that their institutional autonomy and freedom of initiative have been unduly and arbitrarily curtailed. Both problems can be traced to the inherent difficulty in attempting to order a vast and dynamic country through the Federal Register and the Federal Reports. [*343] The legal commands adopted by central agencies are necessarily crude, dysfunctional in many applications, and rapidly obsolescent. These characteristics, which have received much publicity in the United States in recent years and helped fuel the political movement for deregulation, are the inescapable result of centralization. Bureaucrats in Washington simply cannot gather and process the vast amount of information needed to tailor regulations to the nation's many variations in circumstances and the constant changes in relevant conditions. In order to reduce decisionmaking costs, national officials adopt uniform regulations that are inevitably procrustean in application. 16 The same problems that have plagued the Soviet effort at central management of the economy hamper American efforts to plan selected aspects of the economy through centralized regulations. These dysfunctions not only overburden the regulated entities but also cause them to fail at their intended goals. Legal blueprints drafted in Washington inevitably fall short of their postulated outcomes and produce unintended side effects when officials attempt to apply them to unforseen or changed conditions. The problem of "implementation gaps" is exacerbated by the dependence of the federal government on the states to enforce federal regulations. This enforcement problem is vast. 17 Furthermore, the Supreme Court has steadfastly refused to preempt the growth of the centralized regulatory welfare state. During the 1980s, attacks on the system's shortcomings became politically popular. The Reagan administration even attacked its constitutional underpinnings, which had remained virtually unchanged and unchallenged since their New Deal foundation. With a few wavering exceptions, however, the Court refused to reconsider key, long-established rulings that had construed Congress's commerce and spending powers in sweeping terms, unconstrained [*344] by federalism concerns. 18 The Court meanwhile abandoned received separation of powers understandings in order to allow Congress to delegate its own lawmaking authority to administrative bureaucracies effectively insulated from political control. At the same time and fueled in important part by powerful civil rights concerns, state and local governments were induced by conditioned grants of funds or directly coerced by federal regulators to implement federal programs and to conform their own programs to federal standards. The task of controlling these new federal powers was largely assumed by the federal courts, which developed new subconstitutional principles of administrative law to replace the now waning separation of powers jurisprudence that had previously limited the scope of the national government. Administrative agencies in the United States have long been required to follow adjudicatory hearing procedures in making decisions, and their decisions have been subject to judicial review. But review was traditionally afforded only to regulated actors subject to coercive orders. Beginning in the late 1960s, the federal courts created new remedies for the beneficiaries of social programs by recognizing individual claims to benefits as entitlements protected by procedural due process. Following Charles Reich's logic, 19 courts held that benefits analogous to traditional common law property rights -- including social insurance, assistance payments, housing, and employment -- could not be withheld by the government without affording the affected individual an administrative hearing and judicial review. This stratagem was, however, of limited reach because of the government's need to readjust the content of most broad benefits in light of changing economic and social conditions. [*345] The federal courts accordingly developed other remedies for the beneficiaries of collective benefits such as a cleaner environment, safer workplaces and products, or a better-informed consumer market. Reacting to the emerging perception of "capture" of regulatory agencies by regulated entities, federal courts in the late 1960s began to extend rights to administrative hearings and judicial review to consumer representatives, environmental and civil rights groups, and other collective interests affected by agency decisions. The result was a new "interest representation" model of administrative law in which all affected groups have the right to participate in agency decisionmaking procedures and obtain judicial review in order to ensure that the agency has adequately considered their interests. 20 The key developments included greatly expanded principles of standing to obtain judicial review; a changed approach to statutory interpretation that recognized legally enforceable agency obligations to protect the interests of program beneficiaries; the creation of "paper hearing" rulemaking procedures that afforded all interested groups an opportunity to submit data, analyses, and comments to an administrative record without hobbling the agency process under trial-type adjudicatory procedures; and the creation of a "hard look" standard of review of administrative discretion to ensure that an agency's decision addressed in a reasoned fashion the concerns and contentions of the interested parties. The interest representation model attempted to cure Madison's Nightmare by frankly acknowledging the delegation of legislative discretion to administrators and creating a judicial forum in which all interests could participate. The hope was that decisions in furtherance of the public interest would emerge out of the judicially-supervised clash of factions. The new system of administrative law sought to cure "implementation gaps" by giving new legal remedies to consumer, environmental, and other "public interest" groups. In addition to securing review of administrative action or inaction, courts empowered these groups to enforce federal controls directly against regulated firms or state and local governments. The protections of the interest representation process were not, however, limited to the beneficiaries of federal programs. The heavy reliance on central mandates to carry out these programs bore heavily on business firms, state and local governments, and nonprofit organizations. [*346] The courts thus also sought to provide relief to those regulated, by requiring agencies to pay greater attention to compliance burdens and to ameliorate the arbitrary consequences of uniform rules. III. THERMIDOR The attempt to cure Madison's Nightmare through new systems of administrative law has produced improvements, but may in the end only succeed in entrenching the nightmare. The "new property" ideal -- to afford individual social program benefits the same security as traditional property rights -- could not be fully reconciled with the exigencies of bureaucratic administration and the inevitable limitations on the legal resources available to claimants. The security of traditional property interests lay as much in market forces as in their legal underpinnings. The administrative capacities and traditions necessary to equivalent protection of special program beneficiaries were and remain sadly underdeveloped. Formal adjudicative hearings cannot provide a substitute without creating intolerable delay, cost, and other burdens. Moreover, the interests affected even by programs that provide individual benefits have a collective character that cannot be reduced to bipolar adjudication. The interest representation version of administrative law frankly recognizes these collective elements. But it puts a premium on organizational and legal resources, and these resources are unevenly distributed. Once the traditional model of adjudication is abandoned in favor of an interest representation approach, there is no feasible way to ensure that all affected interests are represented, or that the litigants truly represent the broader constituencies for which they claim to speak. A combination of bureaucratic hearings and review by unelected judges is an unlikely process for selecting and implementing measures in the general interest. Courts and agencies are buried in lengthy adversary hearings that often take many years to resolve. Federalism values are severely undermined because interest groups can circumvent state and local political processes by bringing federal court actions to force local officials to carry out national directives. No one bears clear responsibility for decisions. The already severe fragmentation of central authority is exacerbated by treating each agency decision as an isolated event to be judicially reviewed on the basis of its separate [*347] evidentiary record. The result is a self-contradictory attempt at "central planning through litigation." 21 The Supreme Court has reacted to the burdens and dysfunctions of Great Society administrative jurisprudence only by priming its growth; it has failed either to reject the new approach or to develop any alternative systemic remedy for Madison's Nightmare. The Court has, however, taken several steps to ameliorate the inevitable difficulties of subjecting administrative management to trial-type adjudicatory procedures in the name of the "new property." Thus, it has refused to recognize substantive constitutional entitlements to social benefits such as assistance payments, education, and housing. Rather, it has made clear that Congress and the states retain political discretion to determine and change the content of the benefits afforded. The judicial role is limited to ensuring adequate procedural guarantees for whatever advantages the political authorities choose to provide, regardless of claimants' needs or their expectations of entitlement. 22 In addition, the procedural protections afforded have in almost all instances been sharply depreciated from the judicial adjudication model through use of a cost-benefit calculation that gives considerable weight to administrators' concerns for managerial efficiency. 23 Goldberg v Kelly 24 remains an isolated high water mark of a reformist tide long ebbed. The Court has also pulled back from full implementation of the interest representation model for protection of collective interests. Liberal standing to secure judicial review still prevails, with only a few trimmings at the margins. But the ability of regulatory program beneficiaries to mandate affirmative protection by federal agencies or state authorities has been restricted. 25 The Supreme Court has underscored the broad discretion of agencies to determine the substantive content of administrative policies, 26 and has given them a similar discretion in shaping administrative procedures. 27 These accommodations to political-managerial interests in [*348] the context of collective benefits closely resemble the similar accommodation the courts have made in the "new property" context. The accommodations have often been accompanied, in judicial opinions and more explicitly in academic commentary, by invocations of the superiority of political processes for resolving issues of social and economic policy. These invocations, however, seldom betray real enthusiasm for these political processes. The case for cutbacks in Great Society administrative jurisprudence rests far more on discontent with its burden than on affirmative support for any particular alternative. The problem of Madison's Nightmare therefore persists. IV. CURING MADISON'S NIGHTMARE Political and academic discourse identifies three prevailing cures for Madison's Nightmare: reinvigoration of judicial controls over the administrative state; structural change to restore political responsibility; and dissolution of the regulatory welfare state through deregulation and devolution. This essay briefly considers each of these alternatives and offers a fourth -- reconstitute law. A. Reinvigoration of Administrative Law Many hold that the Supreme Court's retreat from Great Society administrative jurisprudence is a mistake, and that reinvigorated judicial supervision of the regulatory welfare state is the best cure for Madison's Nightmare. Even more liberalized standing, ready judicial review of administrative discretion, more stringent procedural requirements, assured access for public advocacy groups, greater judicial control of agency discretion through statutory construction and other techniques, and more expansive judicial remedies (especially against state and local government), are affirmed as the solution to the ills of the centralized regulatory welfare state. The author himself has joined parts of this chorus, believing that the Supreme Court has sometimes spoken in too sweeping terms and that a more finely-tailored adjustment of judicial controls was preferable. 28 But refurbishing judicial innovations of the late 1960s is not a sufficient remedy for Madison's Nightmare in the 1990s. These remedies respond more to the symptoms of the [*349] problem than its underlying roots. They may nonetheless be worthwhile, even if costly and burdensome; contemporary administrative law does afford greater access and accountability than would otherwise be available. But administrative law alone is not a sufficient response, as its most knowledgeable advocates recognize. 29 Moreover, the current and likely future federal judiciary has little enthusiasm for it. B. Constitutional Fundamentalism Critics of the national regulatory welfare state have sought to shake its jurisprudential foundation by advocating judicial revival of traditional structural principles of constitutional law. The federal courts were, for example, urged to revive a form of dual federalism by reserving certain functions or fields to the states and limiting the powers of the federal government in order to protect state and local independence. The Supreme Court attempted such a revival in its 1976 decision, National League of Cities v Usery, 30 invalidating as an unconstitutional invasion of state autonomy the application of national minimum wage laws (adopted by Congress in an exercise of its commerce power) to municipal employees. This decision, however, bore little fruit and in 1985 the Court overruled it. 31 Proposals to revive the constitutional principles prohibiting delegation of legislative power to agencies, and limiting the transfer of adjudicatory responsibilities from courts to federal agencies, have similarly been unavailing. 32 The problem seems to be that a full-fledged revival of traditional structural principles would impose serious limits on federal governmental powers and plunge the courts into acute and perilous political controversy. On the other hand, more modest efforts to use constitutional adjudication to limit federal power at the margins, as exemplified by National League of Cities, inevitably seem arbitrary. Similarly, any judicial effort to reserve certain functions or fields of policy to the states runs up against the need for national [*350] measures to deal with the far-reaching consequences of integration in a federal system (at least one comprising fifty states) 33 and the impossibility of principled, a priori line-drawing. Alternatively, the judges could prohibit the national government from using certain policy instruments, such as conditions on federal grants to state and local governments, that are especially destructive of federalism values. But such instruments may sometimes be necessary to achieve common goals. And if such measures were prohibited, Congress could devise alternatives (such as total federal preemption) that are equally or perhaps even more destructive. Finally, case-by-case judicial balancing of national and state interests leaves major national programs prey to subjective, shifting assessments by unelected judges. The court's overruling of National League of Cities reflects its unwillingness to venture these hazards. Another possible constitutional cure for Madison's Nightmare is invalidation of broad congressional delegations of regulatory authority to federal administrative agencies. 34 Advocates claim that forcing Congress to make detailed policy choices would restore political accountability, reinvigorate the political safeguard of federalism, and ensure more responsible decisions in the general interest. But such a step would also amount to a constitutional counterrevolution. The Supreme Court has only twice invalidated national statutes as unconstitutional delegations of legislative power. 35 These decisions, rendered early in the New Deal period, were soon abandoned. The Court concluded that it should not, save in the most extreme and improbable circumstances, second-guess congressional decisions that broad delegations are necessary and proper means of realizing regulatory and welfare goals. 36 Resurrecting the doctrine against delegation of legislative powers would force the courts to make essentially subjective and standardless judgments about which delegations are constitutionally permissible [*351] and which are not. Similar difficulties would attend judicial efforts to impose strict limits on Congress's transfer of adjudicatory authority from courts to agencies. Even if the courts did enforce the non-delegation doctrine rigorously and in doing so invalidated many current federal programs, it seems likely that Congress would react by passing the writing of detailed measures on to its own legislative subcommittees. Experience with Congress's use of the legislative veto of agency regulations suggests the hazards inherent in this approach. 37 Subcommittees are subject to the same interest group influences as administrative agencies. Moreover, the safeguards of public hearings and judicial review that apply to federal administrative agencies do not apply to Congress or its subcommittees. Increased internal delegations by Congress could well have the effect not of ending but of prolonging Madison's Nightmare. Some changes in structural jurisprudence may nonetheless be justified as enhancing political responsibility and accountability. For example, the Supreme Court's decisions in INS v Chadha 38 and Bowsher v Synar 39 have properly restrained Congress's efforts to exercise ongoing controls over powers delegated to the executive. In addition, the freedom of the President and his staff to deliberate with and advise administrative officials deserves firmer elaboration and protection. Finally, the issues of campaign financing and incumbent entrenchment require systematic examination in concert with more traditional discussions of the legal foundation of national governance and politics. But such measures alone will not cure Madison's Nightmare. C. Deregulation and Devolution The Reagan administration's New Federalism program proposed that much of the national regulatory welfare state be dismantled through a combination of deregulation and devolution of responsibilities to state and local governments. Many forms of economic regulation are indeed unjustified. Greater reliance on market competition in many areas will enhance consumer welfare. 40 Much of the deregulation accomplished in the United States in recent years in fields such as energy, transportation, communications, [*352] and financial services has been a success. But markets alone cannot be relied upon to resolve many of the environmental, health, safety, and consumer problems created by industrialization and mass marketing. Moreover, state and local governments cannot deal effectively with these problems of market failure in the face of economically integrated national markets, product and capital mobility, and the rise of large multi-state businesses. Similarly, the mobility of commodities, capital, and people, as well as disparities in resources, prevents states and localities from adequately meeting social welfare needs. National measures are thus required to deal with the problems generated by a national economy. D. Reconstitutive Law The most promising solution to Madison's Nightmare is not indiscriminate devolution and deregulation. Neither is it a constitutional counterrevolution by the courts, nor stiffer judicial controls on administrators through administrative law. The best solution is to adopt new strategies for achieving national goals in lieu of the centralizing command and control techniques relied upon so heavily in recent decades. The ultimate goal of national measures is to ensure that decisions by state and local governments, individuals, businesses, and nonprofit organizations promote national norms and goals. Command and control regulation attempts to achieve such harmonization by dictating the precise outcome of specific decisions within these various institutional systems. Rather than dictating conduct within other institutions, the national government can instead use more indirect methods to achieve "strategic coupling" of the institutions' decisions with national norms and goals. 41 The laws governing these institutions can be reconstituted in order to steer the overall tendency of institutions' decisions in the desired direction without attempting to dictate particular outcomes in every situation. Reconstitutive law can in many areas replace command law as a means of promoting national goals. 42 For example, the National Labor Relations Act transformed the structure of decisionmaking in labor relations from a model of private employer-employee contract to one of collective bargaining, reconstituting the labor market to emphasize the collective and inframarginal voice of [*353] workers, and collective decisions by employers, rather than relying on the signals given by marginal worker mobility. 43 The "bubble" and other emissions trading innovations adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency allowed regulatory permissions to be bought and sold, creating a new form of market property and a reconstituted market. 44 Antitrust law reconstituted the terms of market competition. A related form of reconstitution is to substitute one form of regulatory structure for another: during the 1930s federal legislation adopted for many sectors of the economy a system of administrative price, quantity and service controls in lieu of a system of markets governed by antitrust. In the economic deregulation movement of the past fifteen years, this process was reversed. Many of the social regulatory goals -- including environmental, health, and worker and consumer protection -- that have received priority in recent decades can also be promoted through reconstitutive measures. For example, the elaborate existing system of central regulatory controls on air and water pollution in the United States could be replaced by a system of transferable pollution permits that would simultaneously limit the total amounts of pollution permitted and allow authorizations to pollute to be freely bought and sold among polluters. The government would have to monitor emissions to ensure that no source was polluting in excess of its permit rights. But the national government would no longer attempt to dictate through uniform regulations how much each plant may emit, or what control technologies to employ. The total costs of pollution control -- currently over $ 60 billion annually in the United States -- would likely be reduced 50 percent or more because each plant could adopt the most cost-effective control method available to it, and plants that could control more cheaply would assume more of the clean-up burden and hold fewer permits. There would be a strong economic incentive for all firms to pollute less, conserve resources, develop innovative technologies, and sell excess permits. States or regional authorities could be [*354] given a major role in the initial allocation of permits and the subsequent management of the pollution permits market. 45 In other areas of regulation, different reconstitutive strategies could be used. For example, the current reliance on central administrative commands to promote occupational health and safety in the United States could be significantly reduced if measures were taken to promote greater efforts by employers and employees to address health and safety problems. Such measures could include disclosure of information about workplace hazards, joint employer-employee selection of occupational hazard officers, and steps to promote resolution of health and safety issues through collective bargaining. This approach would substitute flexibility and innovation for the current system of rigid and relatively ineffective central commands. 46 The problem of ensuring adequate provisions of social services to the needy by states and localities could be resolved by adopting a general system of horizontal income transfers among states and localities in place of the existing overgrown and fragmented system of federal conditional rights. The federal tax system would be used to transfer resources from states with strong revenue bases or few needy persons to states and localities with few revenue bases and many needy persons. States and localities receiving these transfers would enjoy wide discretion on how the monies would be spent. Such a system would reduce disparities among states and localities in the resources available to meet social needs. It would also help avoid the frustrating combination of exiting wealth and entering needy individuals that threatens state efforts to increase benefits through higher taxes. 47 Wider adoption of such reconstitutive strategies would go far towards curing Madison's Nightmare. Renunciation of efforts to centrally mandate the decisions of states, localities, businesses, and nonprofit organizations would promote federalism values by restoring decisionmaking responsibility and flexibility to these institutions. The operational overload imposed on all branches of the federal government by the current command and control strategy would be greatly eased. The national government would focus on the general plan of reconstitution, foregoing detailed central planning of social and economic life. [*355] Eliminating central overload would also help restore political responsibility to the center. The main goals and measures of reconstitution could be debated and resolved by Congress and the President, reducing the delegation of vast decisionmaking responsibility to unelected bureaucrats and judges. The political safeguards of federalism and separation of powers principles would both be reinvigorated. And the current system of faction dominated, legal-bureaucratic micropolitics would be gradually transformed into one closer to Madison's vision of a politics of the national good. Such change cannot be accomplished through constitutional adjudication by judges. In an integrated federal system of many states, it is not possible to achieve social and economic justice, restore federalism values, and promote a more responsible politics of the national good by simply cutting back on the role of the central government and reintroducing other structural limitations on national authority. What is needed is not a reduction in national authority, but its affirmative exercise in new ways. What is needed is not judicial limitations on national authority, but the replacement of command law with reconstitutive law. The courts are powerless to dictate such a change to Congress and the President. This change can only be accomplished through political initiatives. What reason is there to expect that a new politics, one more favorable to reconstitutive strategies, will arise? It can hardly be expected that the factions that have entrenched themselves in the congressional and bureaucratic subsystems of centralized power will lightly yield place. Current conditions, however, seem favorable to the emergence of a new politics. The public has not abandoned its aversion to centralized controls -- an aversion that propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House. The deregulatory and decentralizing initiatives of the Reagan presidency were a necessary and salutary check on the growth of Madison's Nightmare. Those initiatives that have succeeded enjoy continued support and are unlikely to be reversed to any great extent. But at the same time, the public is committed to national goals of social and economic justice, public health and safety, and the protection of the environment. Reconstitutive strategies can respond to these public sentiments and create a third course between indiscriminate deregulation and devolution on the one hand, and attempted government by central decree on the other. Moreover, there are two powerful external constraints that will force the United States to develop less cumbersome, more cost-effective alternatives to the dominant command and control form of regulation. The first is the political constraint on increased federal [*356] spending. The current system of command regulation, which requires tremendous centralization of information and decisionmaking, is generally far more costly for the government to administer than alternatives that place greater reliance on market incentives. In addition, command and control regulation typically gives away valuable public resources and privileges for free, including use of the air and water to emit industrial residuals, radio and television frequencies, and airport landing slots. Regulatory programs that use market-based approaches are far more likely to generate appropriate revenues for the government. 48 The second invigorating constraint is international competitiveness. The command and control approach penalizes investment and innovation because of high compliance costs, the restrictions imposed by uniform, inflexible directives, and the delay and uncertainty created by protracted litigation and administrative licensing and standard-setting proceedings. As it strives to restore the international vitality of its key industries, the United States can no longer afford to maintain a regulatory system that puts it at a severe disadvantage in competing with other developed nations. Greater use of market-based and other reconstitutive strategies will be needed in order to reduce compliance burdens and encourage diversity, flexibility, and innovation on the part of businesses, consumers, nonprofit organizations, and state and local governments. Such strategies will permit the United States to meet social goals that it deservedly holds important, without compromising the nation's productivity and its economic standing in the world community. FOOTNOTES: n1 See Federalist 10 (Madison) in Clinton Rossiter, ed, The Federalist Papers 77, 77-78 (New Am Lib, 1961). n2 See Federalist 51 (Madison) in id at 320, 323-35. n3 See Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard, 1977). n4 Stephen Breyer, in Regulation and its Reform (Harvard, 1982), analyzes the functional relations between different types of market activity thought to require government modification, and different types of tools (including command and control measures) that government might use to regulate such activity. n5 See, for example, Wallace E. Oates, Fiscal Federalism (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). n6 See Oates, Fiscal Federalism at 49-53; and Richard B. Stewart, Federalism and Rights, 19 Ga L Rev 917, 949-50 (1985). n7 Another technique, adopted by Congress in the 1930s to deal with unemployment compensation, is to impose a federal tax on business but recognize an offsetting credit if a state imposes a similar tax and uses the proceeds in ways specified by Congress. See Steward Machine Co. v Davis, 301 US 548 (1937) (upholding constitutionality of Title IX of the Social Security Act). n8 See Bruce A. Ackerman, The Storrs Lectures: Discovering the Constitution, 93 Yale LJ 1013, 1069 (1984). n9 See Edward S. Corwin, The Passing of Dual Federalism, 36 Va L Rev 1, 21-23 (1950). n10 See Morton Grodzins, The American System 254-89 (Rand McNally, 1966); Herbert Wechsler, The Political Safeguards of Federalism: The Role of the States in the Composition and Selection of the National Government in Arthur W. MacMahon, ed, Federalism: Mature and Emergent 97 (Russell & Russell, 1962). This view remains popular today. See Garcia v San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 US 528, 551-52 (1985) (states should look to Congress, not courts, for protection of their interests). n11 Richard B. Cappalli, 2 Federal Grants and Cooperative Agreements ? 11:24 at 54-55 (Callaghan, 1982). n12 See, for example, Daniel A. Farber and Philip P. Frickey, The Jurisprudence of Public Choice, 65 Tex L Rev 873 (1987); James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (U Mich, 1962). n13 See Grodzins, The American System at 25-48 (cited in note 10). n14 See Bruce M. Owen and Ronald Braeutigam, The Regulation Game: Strategic Uses of the Administrative Process 2-30 (Ballinger, 1978). Various theories of the regulatory process are explored in Barry M. Mitnick, The Political Economy of Regulation 79-167 (Columbia, 1980). n15 See Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism 200-06 (Norton, 2d ed 1978). n16 See Eugene Bardach and Robert A. Kagan, Going By the Book (Temple, 1981). n17 There are over 200,000 industrial sources of air pollution, 200,000 sources of water pollution, and over one million generators of hazardous wastes subject to national regulation. Since states and municipalities have already established regulatory authority in these areas and are thus well-equipped to monitor and enforce, national programs related to the environment and many other fields rely heavily on state implementation and enforcement. Such reliance is also inherent in the conditional grant programs. States, however, are reluctant, for reasons already noted, to enforce national regulations against their own industries or raise taxes in order to comply with costly federal grant conditions. See page 3 above. In order to prevent state backsliding, federal officials have resorted to court actions and other coercive measures to command compliance. This coercion directly short-circuits state and local political processes. n18 The Court had decades earlier established Congress' broad authority under the spending power, see, for example, Helvering v Davis, 301 US 619 (1937) (upholding old age benefits); and Steward Machine Co. v Davis, 301 US 548 (upholding unemployment compensation), and the commerce clause, see, for example, Wickard v Filburn, 317 US 111 (1942) (upholding the Agricultural Adjustment Act); United States v Darby, 312 US 100 (1941) (upholding the Fair Labor Standards Act); NLRB v Jones & Laughlin Steel Co., 301 US 1 (1937) (upholding the National Labor Relations Act); and West Coast Hotel v Parrish, 300 US 379 (1937) (upholding minimum wage and maximum hour rules). The Rehnquist Court's general refusal to depart from these precedents is illustrated in its reversal of field from National League of Cities to Garcia, discussed in the text at notes 30-32, and in, for example, South Dakota v Dole, 483 US 203 (1987) (upholding federal law conditioning state receipt of federal highway funds on state passage of 21-year-old minimum drinking age); Hodel v Virginia Mining & Reclamation Assn., 452 US 264 (majority), 307 (Rehnquist concurring in the judgment) (1981) (upholding Surface Mining Conservation and Reclamation Act under, among other things, commerce powers). n19 In Charles A. Reich, The New Property 73 Yale L J 733 (1964). n20 See Richard B. Stewart, Reformation of American Administrative Law, 88 Harv L Rev 1669, 1760-90 (1975). n21 See Richard B. Stewart, The Discontents of Legalism: Interest Group Relations in Administrative Regulation, 1985 Wis L Rev 655, 655. n22 Dandridge v Williams, 397 US 471, 487 (1970); and Bishop v Wood, 426 US 341, 349-50 (1976). n23 Mathews v Eldridge, 424 US 319, 343-47 (1976); and Heckler v Campbell, 461 US 458, 465-68 (1983). n24 397 US 254 (1970). n25 Heckler v Chaney, 470 US 821, 837-38 (1985). n26 Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v NRDC, 467 US 837 (1984); and Campbell, 461 US 458. n27 Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v NRDC, 435 US 519 (1978). n28 Richard B. Stewart, Vermont Yankee and the Evolution of Administrative Procedure, 91 Harv L Rev 1805, 1821 (1978); and Richard B. Stewart and Cass R. Sunstein, Public Programs and Private Rights, 95 Harv L Rev 1193, 1305-07 (1982). n29 Cass R. Sunstein, Constitutionalism After the New Deal, 101 Harv L Rev 421, 485-91 (1987); Cass R. Sunstein, Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, 103 Harv L Rev 405, 505 (1989); Christopher F. Edley, Jr., Administrative Law (Yale, 1990). n30 426 US 833 (1976). n31 Garcia v San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 US 528 (1985). n32 Such proposals are reflected in, for example, Justice Rehnquist's opinions in Industrial Union Dept. v American Petroleum Institute, 448 US 607, 671 (1980) (concurring in the judgment), and American Textile Manufacturers Institute v Donovan, 452 US 490, 543 (1981) (dissenting). n33 Experience in Canada and the Federal Republic of Germany suggests that in a federal system that has a smaller number of states and constitutionally derived reservations to the states of power in specific fields, the states may be able to agree on common measures to deal effectively with the effects of economic integration. For example, in Germany broadcast regulation is the responsibility of the Lander, but a largely unified system of governmental policy has nonetheless emerged. n34 This remedy is advocated in Lowi, The End of Liberalism at 128-56 (cited in note 15), which documents the rise of factional micropolitics within the national regulatory welfare state. n35 See Panama Refining Co. v Ryan, 293 US 388 (1935); and A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v United States, 295 US 495 (1935). n36 See Stephen G. Breyer and Richard B. Stewart, Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy 68-95 (Little, Brown, 2d ed 1985). n37 See Harold H. Bruff and Ernest Gellhorn, Congressional Control of Administrative Regulation: A Study of Legislative Vetoes, 90 Harv L Rev 1369, 1433-37 (1977). n38 462 US 919 (1983). n39 478 US 714 (1986). n40 See Breyer, Regulation and Its Reform ch 8 (cited in note 4). n41 The concept of "strategic coupling" is developed in Gunther Teubner, After Legal Instrumentalism? Strategic Models of Post-Regulatory Law, 12 Intl J Soc L 375 (1984). n42 The notion of "reconstitutive law" is explained in Richard B. Stewart, Reconstitutive Law, 46 Md L Rev 86 (1986). n43 See, for example, Richard Freeman and James Medoff, What Do Unions Do? (Basic Books, 1984); Paul Weiler, Governing the Workplace (Harvard, forthcoming 1990). n44 See, for example, Bruce A. Ackerman and Richard B. Stewart, Reforming Environmental Law, 37 Stan L Rev 1333 (1985); Robert W. Hahn and Gordon L. Hester, Marketable Permits: Lessons for Theory and Practice, 16 Ecol L Q 361 (1989); James T.B. Tripp and Daniel J. Dudek, Institutional Guidelines for Designing Successful Transferable Rights Programs, 6 Yale J Reg 369 (1989); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Emissions Trading Policy Statement, 51 Fed Reg 43814 (1986). n45 See Ackerman and Stewart, 37 Stan L Rev at 1355-59 (cited in note 44). n46 See W. Kip Viscusi, Risk by Choice 156-62 (Harvard, 1983). n47 See Richard B. Stewart, Federalism and Rights, 19 Ga L Rev 917, 975-79 (1985) for further development of this proposal. n48 See Ackerman and Stewart, 37 Stan L Rev at 1343-44 (cited in note 44). From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:00:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:00:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Public Choice at the Dawn of the Special Interest State: The Story of Butter and Margarine. Message-ID: Public Choice at the Dawn of the Special Interest State: The Story of Butter and Margarine. California Law Review, 89.1 77 Calif. L. Rev. 83 Geoffrey P. Miller Associate Dean and Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School; A.B. 1973, Princeton University; J.D. 1978, Columbia University. I would like to thank the participants at faculty workshops at Washington and Northwestern University Law Schools for their helpful comments, Linda Brinker, Brian Hedlund, and Leon Greenfield for valuable research help, the John M. Olin Foundation for financial assistance, and Randall R. Lee of the CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW for outstanding editorial work. SUMMARY: ... Yet for over three quarters of a century, between the 1870s and the 1950s, margarine was the victim of a sustained and concerted pattern of discrimination by the national government and almost every state in the union. ... In 1873 the dairy industry experienced the first stages of a profound technological change that would revolutionize American dairying: the growth of the factory system for processing milk into cheese and butter. ... The dairy industry entered politics in earnest in 1877, when margarine began to challenge the hegemony of butter in the nation's diet. ... In a unitary system, the dairy industry might have eliminated margarine through system-wide prohibitory legislation that could have been enforced against manufacturers throughout the country. ... Still, a tax of ten cents per pound was unlikely to raise much revenue because it would increase the cost of margarine to the point where it could not compete with butter. ... The margarine and butter forces descended on the White House with a vengeance, the former claiming that the bill was the worst sort of class legislation, the latter proclaiming the absolute necessity of the bill as a means of protecting the dairy farmer against ruinous competition from counterfeit butter. ... If the dairy industry could be protected against margarine, then cotton might seek protection against wool, or one grade of butter against another grade of butter. ... HIGHLIGHT: Nothing on earth, save the virtue of woman, is more susceptible to scandal than butterfat. W.D. Hoard 1 ----------------- [*83] Few substances seem as innocuous as the prosaic table spread and shortening agent oleomargarine. Yet for over three quarters of a century, between the 1870s and the 1950s, margarine was the victim of a sustained and concerted pattern of discrimination by the national government and almost every state in the union. The antimargarine laws that resulted were the construct of a powerful, highly sophisticated special interest: the American dairy industry. The story of these laws -- and of the margarine industry's struggle against them -- in many respects epitomizes the growth and development of special interest politics in the United States. Indeed, the initial battles in the margarine war provide some of the earliest examples of special interest lobbying by one domestic industry for federal protection against competition from another, less powerful, domestic industry. This Article provides a history of the first battle in the margarine war, 2 which culminated in the passage of the federal Oleomargarine Act [*84] of 1886. 3 Intended as an application of the theory of public choice to one [*85] set of historical and industrial circumstances, this Article illustrates the subtle and complex interplay among politics, technology, markets, and law in American society. This study highlights three important problems in the theory of public choice. 4 First, it confronts the classic problem of explaining the formation of large groups. 5 Public choice theory posits that political interest groups are much more likely to arise when the number of interested parties is small because the costs of organizing a large group are much higher than the costs of forging a small coalition. Furthermore, the free-rider effects 6 that plague any organizing campaign multiply as the size of the group in question increases. In short, returns diminish in scale as the number of constituents in an interest group grows. 7 A simplistic application of public choice theory would predict that the dairy lobby could never have been created, due to its sheer size. That lobby represented approximately five million dairy farmers and thousands of factory owners and middlemen. The costs and free-rider effects of organizing this massive group into a cohesive political force would seem prohibitive. Yet such a lobby was indeed created at the dawn of the special interest state in this country. How was this development possible? This Article explains the creation of the dairy lobby by examining [*86] its origins. It theorizes that the dairy industry drew on a preexisting structure of state, regional, and national organizations when it finally entered politics. These institutions, originally established to combat certain industry economic problems, enabled dairy leaders to overcome the organizational and free-rider costs that otherwise might have doomed their campaign. This pattern explains a seeming anomaly, which has perplexed public choice theorists. A second issue in public choice theory highlighted in this study is how the two basic structural principles of American government -- federalism and separation of powers -- affect the growth and efficacy of special political interests. This Article posits that, in the case of the margarine controversy, federalism benefited the dairy industry, while separation of powers hindered it. The existence of a federal system benefited the dairy lobby because the industry could initiate campaigns for state legislation, where free-rider and organization costs were low relative to national politics. Legislation could easily be obtained in states with powerful dairy constituencies, providing impetus for the enactment of similar legislation in other states. The industry could use the states as "laboratories" -- not in Brandeis' positive sense of controlled environmental settings for the creation of anticompetitive statutes designed to serve narrow special interests. Once state legislative campaigns were underway, the industry could marshal its resources to obtain federal legislation. State statutes provided models for such federal action. Even setbacks in the dairy industry's campaign at the state level, such as unfavorable judicial rulings, could stimulate lobbying at the federal level. Federal legislation provided a body of protections that overlapped and supplemented the state statutes and held the promise of eliminating margarine manufacture entirely. If the federal law proved inadequate for any reason, the industry could launch a new state-level campaign. To be sure, federalism did not wholly benefit the dairy industry, because the resources necessary to achieve protection at two levels were potentially greater than those required in a unitary system, and because certain states could serve as havens for margarine manufacturers. On the whole, however, federalism facilitated the growth of the special interest state. Separation of powers, on the other hand, tended to hinder the dairy industry's campaign. To achieve its goal of eliminating competition from [*87] margarine, the industry needed the active cooperation of all three branches of government at both the state and federal levels. Merely enacting legislation was not enough, because legislation needed enforcement to have effect. In fact, the dairy industry encountered resistance from both the judicial and the executive branches of government in its campaign. Prosecutors failed to enforce the antimargarine laws with any vigor. Even when prosecutors brought enforcement actions, courts often threw them out on technical or constitutional grounds. The effect of separation of powers is not entirely clearcut, because the splintering of authority among three branches allowed the dairy industry to focus its organizational resources on the government arm in which the industry was likely to have the most influence -- the legislature, where five million votes carried significant force. In a unitary system, the dairy industry could not have concentrated its fire in this fashion. Nevertheless, the effect of separation of powers generally inhibited the development of the special interest state. This Article highlights a third aspect of public choice theory: the question of how economic conditions in an industry affect an interest group's readiness to lobby for protective legislation. In the case of the dairy industry, it appears that political activity increased in times of adverse economic conditions. Dairy lobbying was more intense when butter prices were low and less intense when butter prices were high -- even though low butter prices also meant low margarine sales because margarine is a substitute for butter. Why an industry's anticompetitive activity should be more intense in times of economic downturn than in prosperous times is something of a puzzle. Enhanced lobbying in times of downturn might have reflected either reduced fears of new entry into the industry (which would otherwise dissipate the benefits derived from lobbying), or dairy farmers' willingness to pay more to protect a benefit they had than to purchase a benefit that they did not have. 9 These observations about the growth of large group lobbies, the effects of government structure, and the relevance of economic conditions may have validity across a range of industries and time periods. This Article, however, focuses on a single industry during a limited period. Whether the effects posited here exist elsewhere must await further research. Part I of this Article describes the origins of the dairy lobby by examining the structure of the industry, the growth of factory dairying, and the establishment of precursors to the dairy lobby in the form of private associations. It then examines the origin of the margarine industry [*88] and compares the resources available to the dairy and margarine industries at the outset of the political struggle. Part II discusses the dairy industry's early state campaigns and describes the first antimargarine laws. Part III examines the industry's federal campaign that culminated in the Oleomargarine Act of 1886. The Article concludes by examining the antimargarine campaign from the perspective of public choice theory, relating the controversy to some of the broader themes outlined above. I ORIGINS OF THE BUTTER LOBBY The dairy industry in the early 1870s showed no indication that, in less than two decades, it would become one of the nation's most potent political lobbies. To be sure, dairy farmers represented a huge potential voting bloc. They were, however, almost entirely disorganized. No single farmer had an interest in organizing the industry to reduce price fluctuations or develop markets. The free-rider problems that plague any attempt to organize an interest group were especially severe in the case of the dairy industry. 10 Moreover, the establishment of an industry lobby had little precedent in either the farming sector or elsewhere in the economy. No federal programs for farmers existed, 11 nor were there any significant state programs. Dairy farmers believed more in the virtues of sound management and hard work than in salvation through government intervention. 12 Although the dairy farmer, like other American agriculturalists, was swept up by the granger crusade of the 1870s, 13 the granger movement then focused on broad questions of national policy and did not contemplate organizing dairy farmers into an interest group capable of forcing its special agenda on the nation's political institutions. Nevertheless, within little more than a decade the industry had become a powerful and organized special interest lobby. How the lobby evolved is a question of some historical interest. Its answer may shed light on the United [*89] States' transformation into a special interest state during the last part of the nineteenth century. A. Structure of the Dairy Industry Profound technological and economic changes in the 1870s and 1880s transformed dairying from a cottage industry into a sophisticated, industrialized area of commerce. The industrialization of American dairying, moreover, facilitated the creation of a national political lobby when margarine threatened to replace butter as a staple of the national diet. 1. Dairy Farming in 1873 By the time commercial production of margarine started in the United States in 1873, 14 dairy farming was already one of the largest domestic industries. As many as five million farmers owned at least one milk cow during this period. 15 Unlike other large industries such as the capital-intensive mills and railroads, dairying was still an industry of small producers. 16 Probably a majority of dairy farmers kept a cow to supply personal needs. They sold milk on the market mostly during the peak production period in the spring and early summer, if at all. 17 Dairy products were almost wholly processed on the farm. The farmer sold a portion of the raw milk he produced and converted the rest into butter or cheese, sending it to market in stone jars, soap and candle boxes, tobacco and candy pails, and barrels of all sizes. 18 The quality of the dairy products depended on the skill of the individual farmer. 19 Dairy farms were spread out over every state and territory during this period. This wide geographic dispersion of American dairying was due, in part, to the ecological flexibility of the milk cow, able to survive in all sorts of climates and on various kinds of feed. The lack of centralization also reflected the technological difficulties of bringing fluid milk to markets. A notoriously perishable commodity, fluid milk could sour or, [*90] worse, become infected with disease if not consumed within a few days after production. With refrigeration still in its infancy, pasteurization decades in the future, 20 and relatively primitive transportation systems beyond the railroads' path, milk had to be produced very close to its markets. 21 Dairy farming was not uniformly distributed throughout the country, however. A vast dairy belt about 150 miles wide, extending from New England westward for about 1800 miles, produced most of the nation's milk, cheese, and butter. 22 New York led the nation in butter production by far, followed by Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. 23 The fastest growing butter producing states were Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, where farmers were turning from wheat production to the tending of milk cows. 24 Southern states were relatively weak dairy producers. 2. Growth of Factory Dairying In 1873 the dairy industry experienced the first stages of a profound technological change that would revolutionize American dairying: the growth of the factory system for processing milk into cheese and butter. The first dramatic shift in dairy technology occurred with the production of factory cheese after the Civil War. Factory cheese had numerous advantages over farm cheese. It generally had a higher quality because expertise in cheese making could be concentrated in the factory. 25 The factory could develop more effective marketing methods 26 and could produce cheese in quantities sufficient for sale in national and foreign markets. Cheese factories sprang up across the dairy states during the 1860s; 27 by 1899, 94.5% of the nation's cheese was produced in factories. 28 The industrialization of butter production lagged about a decade behind that of cheese. Initially, the process of making butter in factories (known as "creameries") differed little from the process on the farm. Compared to farm butter production, creameries earned only relatively minor returns to capital. 29 Thus, creameries existed exclusively as [*91] adjuncts of cheese-manufacturing plants. 30 In 1878, however, the invention of the centrifugal cream separator triggered a revolution in butter making. 31 The centrifugal separator proved much more efficient at removing the butterfat from milk than the older method of gravity separation. 32 Because centrifugal separators required a substantial capital investment and could process milk in bulk, they were suitable only for factory use. 33 Butter produced in factories ("creamery butter") quickly gained a reputation as having a better taste and a more consistent quality than farm butter 34 -- connotations that attach to the term "creamery butter" even today. The relative market prices of creamery and farm butter reflected the strong consumer preference for the former. In 1878, Wisconsin creamery butter sold for 38 to 40 per pound compared with only about 13 per pound for farm butter. 35 These technological and market developments facilitated an explosive rise in creamery manufacture of butter. 36 Virtually nonexistent in 1869, Wisconsin's creamery butter production rose to 489,000 pounds in 1879, 14,060,000 pounds in 1889, 61,814,000 pounds in 1899, and 103,885,000 pounds in 1909. 37 Nationwide, factory butter constituted an insignificant percentage of total butter production in 1870. It rose to 3.6% in 1880, 14.9% in 1890, and 28.2% in 1900. 38 B. Precursors of the Dairy Lobby Dairying's factory system stimulated the establishment of formal and informal organizations that would eventually serve as building blocks in the creation of a national lobby. Although these groups took a variety of forms and represented differing interests, they all served the goal of improving and expanding dairy markets. The most important groups were (1) factory owners, (2) producer associations, (3) boards of trade and produce exchanges, and (4) producer and dealer cartels. [*92] 1. Factory Owners With the growth of factory-produced cheese and butter, a new figure assumed a leading role in the politics of dairying -- the factory dairyman. As entrepreneurs, factory dairymen set up butter and cheese factories to exploit the profit opportunities introduced by the new dairying technology. Although they professed solidarity with dairy farmers and swore allegiance to the ideals of animal husbandry, factory dairymen were more manufacturers and businessmen than farmers. While many factory owners maintained herds of milk cows in the early days of factory dairying, their interest in milk production gradually became secondary to their manufacturing businesses. 39 The interests of factory owners and dairy farmers conflicted in certain respects. Factory owners monitored the operations of their suppliers to improve product quality. They explored new means of production and constantly encouraged farmers to improve operations -- a call that many farmers strongly resisted. 40 As purchasers of the dairy farmer's product, they inevitably bickered over terms such as price, quality, and risk. 41 Moreover, farmers who manufactured their own butter or cheese competed directly with factory owners. Despite these tensions, factory dairymen were well-qualified for the role of industry champions. First, their interests coincided with those of dairy farmers on issues affecting the industry generally. Both groups, for example, wanted to stave off competition from nondairy products. Farmers could trust factory dairymen to represent them in a campaign focused on eliminating competition from butterfat substitutes. Second, factory owners had stronger incentives to organize the industry than did farmers because margarine threatened them more than it did farmers. Factory owners wanted to protect their capital investments, which were both larger and less diversified than the investments of dairy farmers. 42 The dairy farmer could market raw milk in fluid form or for cheese; if milk production became unprofitable he could send his cows to the stockyards and convert land to other productive use. In contrast, the creamery owner faced ruin if butter making became unprofitable. In addition, the relatively small number of factory owners alleviated the pervasive free-rider problems that hampered the organization of an undifferentiated mass of small dairy producers. [*93] Third, factory owners generally possessed intellectual and organizational abilities well-suited for industry leaders. 43 Aware of the rapid growth of industry and science in the United States and of the far-reaching consequences these trends portended for dairying, the owners participated in wholesale markets for cheese and butter that were national and even international in scope. Involvement in these markets gave factory dairymen a broad overview of the dairy industry's problems and a network of contacts with dairy leaders in other states. These qualifications enabled factory owners to spearhead the industry's early campaigns against margarine. They masterminded the industry's overall strategy and directed its day-to-day operations. This relatively cohesive cohort of specially qualified and motivated leaders helped crystallize the industry into a powerful lobby in the legislative battle for protection against margarine. 2. Dairy Associations A variety of county, state, and national dairy associations represented a second important precursor to the national dairy lobby. These associations attempted to expand regional markets for dairy products. They responded to two important market needs: 1) coping with a perceived problem of "overproduction"; and 2) policing against opportunistic behavior by members. a. Overproduction Dairy farming, like other areas of agriculture, was often said to suffer from "overproduction." 44 Repeated constantly at industry meetings, the bugbear of overproduction haunted dairy farmers. Yet dairymen seldom explained exactly what they meant by the term. It implied that simply too much milk was on the market. Presumably, the concern was based on the following postulate: In a system of factory dairying, with interlinked geographic markets, any exogenously caused rise in the supply of dairy products would drive prices down. Faced with lower prices, dairy farmers would have to step up production to break even. Their efforts would be futile, however, because the more they produced, the more prices would fall and thus the less they earned for their labors. This concept of overproduction makes little economic sense. Prices in dairy markets are functions of supply and demand. An unexpected increase in supply or decrease in demand will cause prices to fall, perhaps even to the point where the farmer suffers an outright loss. This situation will not last, however, because some farmers will leave the market. Supply [*94] will contract, driving prices back to levels at which farmers can earn competitive returns on their capital investment and labor. Under traditional market theory, a sustained condition of overproduction in an unregulated competitive market is impossible. 45 As applied to conditions in dairying in the late nineteenth century, references to overproduction were more accurately complaints about the industry's lack of barriers to entry. 46 Low butter prices cut into farmers' profits and reduced the value of their herds. During these periods farmers were indeed overproducing, in the sense that the industry no doubt operated on low profit margins. But low prices in one period must have been balanced by high prices in another, when farmers earned good profits on their investment in farm and herd. Indeed, despite the variability in butter prices, the total number of dairy cows increased in linear fashion over the entire period, growing from approximately ten million cows in 1870 to approximately fourteen million cows in 1886. 47 The increase in the number of cows suggests that dairy farming was not unprofitable relative to other occupations during this period. Thus, it seems apparent that references to "overproduction" were often disguised complaints about the lack of protection against competition. 48 The problem of overproduction (or lack of supercompetitive profits) could be mitigated either by reducing output or by increasing demand. Output could be reduced by forming a cartel. The free-rider and organizational costs of cartelizing the butter industry as a whole, however, were probably prohibitive, given thousands of dairy factories shipping butter [*95] into geographically extended markets. 49 Increasing demand represented a more feasible alternative because butter produced in areas with good reputations sold for more than butter from other areas. 50 A region's farmers and factory owners could raise prices by increasing the reputation of their product relative to products from other regions. Although the benefits of increased demand would partially dissipate over time through new entry, supercompetitive profits were possible in the short term. Even in the long run, profits were unlikely to be completely dissipated because the potential for cartels was stronger in narrowly segmented markets. b. Opportunism A basic technological limitation in dairying rested in the difficulty of assessing the quality of dairy products on simple inspection. 51 Butterfat content and resistance to spoilage principally determined the value of dairy products. Neither quality could be measured directly. No simple measure of butterfat content existed until the introduction of the Babcock butterfat test in 1890. 52 Grading of milk and cream did not become commonplace until early in the twentieth century. 53 As to perishability, almost anyone could detect spoiled cheese, rancid butter, or sour milk, but it was virtually impossible to ascertain how long a fresh dairy product would remain fresh. Middlemen, retailers, and exporters assumed spoilage risk while the products rested in their control. 54 These technological shortcomings created a classic form of market failure which George A. Akerlof terms the "market for lemons." 55 The difficulty in directly measuring the quality of dairy products subjected dairy markets to severe informational asymmetries in which the seller knew more about the quality of the product than did the buyer. In such conditions, buyers must rely on some statistic as a proxy for qualities [*96] that cannot be directly measured. The nature of that statistic in the dairy industry depended on the market in which the dairy product was sold. In raw milk supply markets, the volume of milk supplied by the farmer served as the operative statistic. 56 In wholesale and retail markets for processed dairy products, the statistics were weight, variety, and geographic origin. Hard cheese might command a higher price than soft; Wisconsin butter might sell for more than Iowa butter, and so on. 57 But the use of statistics in place of direct quality measures invites selsellers to behave opportunistically, which creates the market for lemons. Akerlof describes the problem as follows: There are many markets in which buyers use some market statistic to judge the quality of prospective purchases. In this case there is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise, since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller. As a result, there tends to be a reduction in the average quality of goods and also in the size of the market. 58 In the dairy industry sellers could, and did, behave opportunistically. Farmers, knowing they would be paid on a volume basis, supplied milk that was watered or partly skimmed, fed their cows on inadequate fodder, or simply used inferior animals that produced milk low in butterfat. 59 Owners of cheese factories, knowing that their product would sell in foreign markets at the same price as all other American cheese of the same type, manufactured cheese out of skim milk laced with vegetable oil. 60 Butter manufacturers, knowing that their product was sold by weight, churned it with water to produce "overruns" 61 and failed to maintain high standards of cleanliness and care. 62 Middlemen, knowing that the value of processed dairy products depended on geographic location, obtained cheap butter or cheese from one state and passed it off as premium merchandise from another state. 63 Butter factories contrived to insert the word "Elgin" in their names, hoping consumers would mistakenly associate their product with Elgin butter, widely known as the [*97] nation's finest. n64Retailers sold margarie and "renovated" butter to customers at premium butter prices. 65 The list could be extended. 66 Although informational asymmetries existed in the dairy industry prior to 1876, the growth of industrialization in dairying severely aggravated the lemons problem. In dairying's days as a cottage industry, buyers often obtained their butter, milk, and cheese from a farmer whose reputation depended on the quality of his product. 67 Knowing that buyers would go elsewhere if his products turned out to be inferior, the farmer supplied goods of reliable quality. In contrast, the factory system separated buyers and sellers by several layers of middlemen such as wholesalers, jobbers, and retailers. 68 Moreover, goods of different suppliers were consolidated into common pools and sold as fungible units. Producers pooled milk for sale to factories; factories sold cheese and butter into markets where price was determined by the factory's location; and dairymen across the country operated in a world market where the price for american butter and cheese depended on its general reputation for quality. These developments meant that the price a supplier could obtain no longer wholly depended on the quality of his product. Accordingly, the problem of opportunistic behavior in dairy markets became acute after the advent of factory dairying. The lemons markets that developed posed a threat to the industry at all levels of production and distribution. As Akerlof points out, a lemons market is a market in breakdown. 69 Because buyers expect that sellers will behave opportunistically, the amount they are willing to pay drops below the amount demanded by sellers of higher quality goods. Thus, inferior goods tend to drive superior ones off the market in a peculiar manifestation of Gresham's Law. 70 Because social and private returns differ, the consequence is a deadweight social loss. 71 [*98] c. The Growth of Dairy Associations Factory dairymen and other dairy industry leaders responded to these two problems of dairying -- overproduction and informational asymmetry -- by organizing the industry on a county-wide and eventually state-wide basis. 72 Small groups of producers and factory men formed the first dairy associations in order to enhance the prestige of dairy products from their region. These associations aimed to mitigate the lemons problem and increase demand by establishing a reputation for quality in dairy products produced by the associations' members. Dairy association activities typically included entering the products of their region in fairs and expositions, encouraging the use of modern dairying techniques by local farmers, and preventing opportunistic behavior by their members. 73 Associations developed first at the local level because organizational costs and free-rider effects are lower in small groups than in large groups. Once in place, however, these local associations greatly reduced the costs of statewide organization because a state association could be constructed out of the local groups. Accordingly, dairy associations quickly grew to statewide proportions. In 1866, a group of New York cheese makers formed the American Dairymen's Association, which -- although purportedly national in scope -- essentially operated as a New York organization. 74 Vermont (the greatest dairy state in milk produced per square mile) 75 organized a dairy association in 1869. 76 Likewise a small elite principally concerned with the expansion of the factory interest in their state formed the Wisconsin Dairymen's Association. 77 In addition to general dairy associations, specialized organizations with broad geographic scope sprang up for the purpose of enhancing the value and prestige of particular dairy cow breeds. 78 These broader associations originally intended to increase domestic consumption of their members' products and exploit the possibilities of entering foreign markets. 79 In other words, the associations helped dairymen maintain supercompetitive profits through continuous expansion of markets. State dairy associations also informed dairy farmers [*99] about market conditions and new developments in dairy science through association gatherings, county fairs, and publications. These educational activities improved the quality of dairy products produced within the states. 80 Various dairy newspapers serving different parts of the country were loosely affiliated with the state dairy associations. 81 The most influential periodical in Wisconsin was the Jefferson County Union, published by William D. Hoard, a prominent spokesman for the factory interests, later Governor of Wisconsin, and ultimately leader of the industry's national campaign against margarine in 1900-1902. 82 The Rural New Yorker exerted similar influence in New York and New Jersey. 83 The activities of the state dairy associations were not explicitly political at first, except for a few isolated incidents of petitioning state legislatures for protection against particular, defined evils. 84 However, organizing the industry into unified groups focused on a common end naturally facilitated the exercise of political power; the dairy leaders' goals, moreover, were such that they could be accomplished through legislation. 3. Boards of Trade and Produce Exchanges Boards of trade and dairy produce exchanges made up a third key building block in the national dairy lobby. As the factory system expanded, wholesale merchants began to play an important role in the distribution of butter and other products. To facilitate their operations, merchants organized into boards of trade and produce exchanges such as the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, the Elgin Board of Trade, the Chicago Produce Exchange, and the Baltimore Produce Exchange. 85 These bodies facilitated dairy product transactions in extended geographic markets by allowing buyers and sellers to convene in a centralized location at which prices could be set quickly and accurately. They defined classes and grades of butter to encourage quality standardization. 86 Most [*100] initiated inspection programs for grading particular lots of butter. 87 In addition to grading, inspectors often counseled producers on improving the quality of their products. 88 By standardizing the product, they widened the geographic scope of dairy markets, inducing other dairy groups to organize at regional and national levels. As preexisting organizations of dairy merchants, boards of trade and produce exchanges readily enlisted in the campaign against margarine. 4. Cartels Cartels of buyers and sellers of fluid milk became a fourth organizational form that contributed to the antimargarine campaign. Because of its extreme perishability, fluid milk could be marketed only in limited geographic areas or in areas served by efficient rail transportation. This natural market limitation reduced the number of participants in milk markets and thereby facilitated cartelization. Both buyers' and sellers' cartels formed during this period. 89 Around 1880, producers began to band together into regional associations to control prices paid by dealers. 90 The president of the Orange County Milk Producers' Association of New York described how organizing into a county-wide association gave the farmers enhanced bargaining power in the milk market: [F]or a number of years prior to the year 1883 business had been depressed, from the fact that the men with whom the farmers were dealing were sharp and unscrupulous in their business ways and had succeeded in reducing the prices of milk to a figure that made the business unprofitable. In 1882 we formed an organization of the producers of milk for the New York market, an organization of farmers in that particular section, for the purpose of mutual protection. We succeeded in 1883 in forming a strong association of some eight hundred members, and became an incorporated body, and succeeded by the withholding of milk, or by what was known at that time as the Orange County Milk War, in increasing the price of milk to the farmers of our county so that they received in the years 1883 and 1884 nearly a million dollars more for their product than they had received prior to that time. . . . 91 Purchasers of fluid milk also established their own buyers' cartels. In response to the growth of the Orange County Milk Producers' Association, the creameries and larger milk dealers in the New York City milkshed organized the New York Milk Exchange Limited, which attempted to control the industry through overt price fixing. The bylaws of the [*101] exchange required members to adhere to specified rates paid to dealers and charged to consumers. 92 Producer and purchaser associations thus organized the dairy industry into groups that could easily become politically active when the need arose. Although the producer associations' goals were initially adverse to those of factory owners and milk dealers, there was no reason why these different interests could not cooperate on matters of mutual concern. Margarine, because it threatened the interests of dairy farmers as well as factory owners, provided an obvious rallying point for the whole industry. The factory system created a high degree of economic interdependence among dairymen, stimulating the formation of various associations and groups at different geographical levels. It took but a small step to turn these groups to political action once the appropriate issue arose. Accordingly, when the leaders of the dairy industry decided to counter the margarine threat through political action, they did not face the daunting task of organizing five million farmers and a substantial number of middlemen, retailers, and factory owners from scratch. Rather, the dairy lobby crystallized out of powerful but previously nonpolitical bodies which themselves had been organized in response to the factory system in dairying. C. Origins of the Margarine Industry Although the dairy industry established a base for organized political action by the mid-1870s, only an external threat finally galvanized the industry's leaders into entering politics in earnest. That threat arrived on the scene in the form of margarine, an unanticipated technological development that irrevocably altered the political organization of the dairy industry. A French chemist, Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, invented margarine sometime in the late 1860s. He made the product from oleo (refined caul fat of beef) churned with milk, salt and a few other ingredients. 93 Mistakenly believing that his invention contained margaric acid, Mege-Mouries called it "oleo-margarine," a name that quickly achieved universal [*102] acceptance. 94 The product was a smashing success. When colored with vegetable dye, margarine was a dead ringer for yellow butter. It had a buttery taste, 95 could be substituted for butter in cooking or as a spread, and had similar qualities of perishability and digestibility. Above all, margarine could be sold at about half the price of butter. 96 The commercial potential of margarine immediately became apparent. Entrepreneurs around the world eagerly sought to exploit the product. Commercial margarine production in this country began when Mege-Mouries obtained a United States patent on his invention and sold it to the United States Dairy Company. 97 The invention, however, proved impossible to protect; competitors filed over 180 patents in the ensuing years that designed around the Mege-Mouries claim by specifying slightly different procedures for treating the fat or including minor ingredients not contained in the original patent. 98 Soon margarine producers operated in a number of states, shipping their products nationwide. Margarine manufacture remained a fairly concentrated industry during this period. Fifteen margarine factories operated in 1880, twelve in 1890, and only twenty-four by 1900. 99 Among the first major margarine producers were the great Chicago meat packing firms. 100 These firms enjoyed important advantages over other producers: ready access to meat fats, an efficient rail transportation system, centralized facilities for manufacture and shipment, and nationwide marketing networks. The meat packers enhanced their advantage when they discovered in the 1870s that they could increase quality and lower manufacturing costs by substituting neutral lard (processed hog fat) for some of the oleo oil. 101 Chicago quickly became an important center of oleomargarine manufacture. 102 One additional technological development became important to the subsequent politics of margarine: the practice of some margarine producers to substitute small amounts of cottonseed oil for some of the oleo or neutral lard. Cottonseed oil was considerably cheaper than these other fats, although it could not be used in quantity because the taste could not be completely neutralized and because the oil adversely affected margarine's [*103] melting qualities. 103 The use of cottonseed oil, however, gave the Southern cotton states an interest in promoting the margarine business, an interest which later proved politically significant in the national struggle over margarine. D. Political Resources of the Dairy and Margarine Interests As the struggle between butter and margarine began, the two industries enjoyed fundamentally different political resources; these resources dictated each industry's political strategy. The dairy industry's resources favored legislative action, while the resources of the margarine forces favored executive and judicial action (or inaction). A representative legislature clearly favored the dairy industry for three reasons. First, the industry enjoyed the support of the nation's five million dairy farmers who sold on cash markets, coupled with middlemen and factory owners whose livelihoods depended on butter. These voters had a strong personal interest in protecting butter markets against competition from margarine because their capital was not highly diversified. This was especially true of middlemen and factory men who dealt specifically in butter rather than dairy products generally. Second, the various private industry organizations could monitor elected officials and mobilize their constituencies to reward pro-dairy votes and punish pro-margarine votes. Finally, the presence of dairy farmers in every state allowed the industry to mobilize on a national level, while the relative concentration of dairying in New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Vermont gave the industry sufficient power in certain states to overcome local lawmakers' initial resistance to new and unfamiliar legislation. The margarine industry enjoyed far less direct voting power. In contrast to butter production, margarine production was capital-intensive, with only a few thousand people working directly in that business. Only in Chicago was the direct voting support for margarine manufacturers a significant factor. Nationally, livestock and cotton interests were aligned with the margarine manufacturers because meat fats and cottonseed oil were used in margarine manufacture. However, their interest in protecting margarine manufacturers was relatively slight. While livestock owners could profit from margarine, their livelihoods did not depend on it, since margarine added only marginally to the total value of a head of beef or a hog. As to cotton interests, the technological problems of using cottonseed oil in margarine left the value of margarine largely unrealized. In one sense the margarine interests were allied with the largest voting bloc of all, the general public, since the public undoubtedly benefited [*104] from the availability of a cheap and palatable butter substitute. Immigrants and blue collar workers, who could not otherwise afford to put butter on their tables, were the most obvious beneficiaries. Despite their size, however, these segments of the public were completely unorganized. Thus, while the several million dairy farmers organized into an effective political power group, the many millions of immigrants and blue collar workers almost never participated actively in the controversy. The dairy industry's advantage in raw voting power was offset somewhat by the margarine industry's greater access to capital. Margarine manufacturers tended to be large corporations with substantial cash incomes. 104 They could raise the funds necessary to combat the dairy industry's campaign with ease and could treat the expenditures as an ordinary cost of doing business. Firms in the dairy industry tended to be smaller, and therefore enjoyed considerably less access to ready capital. 105 Moreover, margarine interests suffered less from agency and freerider effects than did the dairy industry. Although the farmer might be willing to write constituent mail or to vote as recommended by dairy leaders, he was much less likely to send hard-earned cash to somebody who might not use it as the farmer wished. Margarine manufacturers, on the other hand, spent their capital themselves, thereby reducing agency costs. Unilateral expenditures by margarine manufacturers did raise free-rider problems, but the relatively high degree of concentration in the industry mitigated these concerns. 106 Expenditures by Armour and Swift, for example, would rebound largely to their own benefit because of their large market shares. At the outset of the battle over margarine, therefore, the two industries possessed different strengths and weaknesses. The next Part describes how the competing industries used these resources in the first skirmishes of the margarine war. [*105] II THE DAIRY INDUSTRY ENTERS POLITICS The dairy industry entered politics in earnest in 1877, when margarine began to challenge the hegemony of butter in the nation's diet. The industry's policy was clear from the start: Do everything possible to ensure that margarine did not compete freely with butter. The butter interests' search for protection hardly seems surprising from the perspective of today's political environment, where special interests routinely vie for government favors. In its era, however, the dairy industry's battle against margarine was unusual. It was among the first national campaigns by one domestic industry to enlist the government to crush competition from another. In a sense, the first shots in the margarine war mark the birth of the modern special interest state. A. The Initial Dairy Industry Response Although margarine posed an obvious threat to butter, the dairy interests did not immediately organize effective political opposition to the product. The industry's initial hesitation resulted principally from a belief that margarine did not threaten the factory interests. When margarine first appeared in the United States in 1873, creameries were still in their infancy. Most dairy factories produced only cheese, a product that margarine did not threaten. Those factory owners who had moved into butter production may well have seen margarine as more a blessing than a curse. "Creamery butter" had begun to command a significantly higher price than farm butter. 107 If margarine displaced butter at all, it would drive out farm butter, 108 to the advantage of commercial butter producers. Quite possibly, inferior farm butter created something of a lemons market that depressed the prices of creamery butter. If margarine eliminated farm butter, the position of creamery butter could improve. This view of margarine may explain why some industry leaders regarded the product with apparent equanimity during its first years on the market. 109 In addition, favorable conditions in the dairy industry between 1873 and 1877 assuaged concerns about competition from margarine. Dairy farming had been profitable since the Civil War. Butter prices increased [*106] threefold between 1861 and 1866, 110 presumably as a result of wartime shortages. Although prices dropped after 1866, they remained well above their prewar levels. 111 After 1872, prices began to rise again. The average price of butter in Wisconsin was 18 per pound in 1873, a major improvement over the 14.6 per pound of the previous year. 112 By 1874, Wisconsin butter had jumped to 21.8 per pound; and prices remained relatively high through 1877. 113 Moreover, the number of milk cows increased significantly during this period, with only a slight decline in the average price per cow. 114 Although high butter prices undoubtedly enhanced margarine sales, 115 this fact, if observed at all, apparently did not disturb the industry's general sense of well-being. Given the prosperous times, the absence of any significant dairy industry clamor about imitation butter is not surprising. Industry leaders, however, had sorely underestimated the margarine threat. If unscrupulous dealers could palm farm butter off on consumers as creamery butter, they could do the same with margarine and earn equal or greater profits from their fraud. The lemons problem would be exacerbated, not improved. The problem of fraudulently representing margarine as butter was well-known by the mid-1870s. Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, published in 1874, records the boasts of an early oleomargarine salesman overheard on a Mississippi steamboat: 'Now as to this article,' said [the salesman], 'it's from our house; look at it -- smell of it -- taste it. Put any test on it you want to. Take [*107] your own time -- no hurry -- make it thorough. There now -- what do you say? Butter, ain't it? Not by a thundering sight -- it's oleomargarine! Yes, sir, that's what it is -- oleomargarine. You can't tell it from butter; by George, an expert can't! . . . We supply most of the boats in the West; there's hardly a pound of butter on one of them. We are crawling right along -- jumping right along is the word. We are going to have that entire trade. Yes, and the hotel trade too. You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, outside of the biggest cities. Why, we are turning out oleomargarine now by the thousands of tons. And we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to take it -- can't get around it, you see. Butter don't stand any show -- there ain't any chance for competition. Butter's had its day -- and from this out, butter goes to the wall.' 116 Twain's report boded ill for the dairy industry, although it would be a few years before industry leaders fully realized that a grain of truth might lie behind the boasts of the oleomargarine salesmen. The threat posed by margarine became apparent, however, when the relative prosperity that had prevailed through 1877 gave way late in that year to a disastrous downturn in prices. Average wholesale Wisconsin butter in 1877 was only 16.3 per pound and falling. 117 By 1878, Wisconsin butter had dropped to 13.2 per pound, recovering only slightly to 13.6 in 1879. 118 As the following graph illustrates, national butter prices reflected a similar downturn, falling from approximately 20 per pound in 1877 to approximately 14 per pound in 1879. 119 The average value of milk cows fell rapidly during this period as well, dropping from [*108] about $ 27.50 in 1877 to approximately $ 21.50 in 1879. 120 The resulting hardship for dairy farmers and factory owners energized the forces of opposition to margarine. 121 [SEE ILLUSTRATION IN ORIGINAL] B. State Antimargarine Laws By 1877, margarine's rapidly growing acceptance in cities across the country represented a serious threat to the dairy industry. When dairy industry leaders awoke to the threat, they quickly drew on the preexisting structure of industry organizations to press for legislative action. 1. First-Generation Statutes State dairy associations, led by New York's association, first pressed for antimargarine protection in the form of labelling statutes sometime in 1877. New York's leadership in the first years of the campaign against margarine resulted from a combination of factors. First, the leading American margarine producer during the earliest years, the United States Dairy Company, was located in New York. 122 Second, New York City, the state's primary butter market, was particularly vulnerable to competition from margarine because of its large blue collar and immigrant population. Third, New York's large share of the butter market minimized the free-rider inhibitions against being the first to start a campaign against margarine. The dairymen of the first state to act against margarine would perform a free service for their fellow dairymen in other states by drafting proposed legislation, adducing evidence necessary to support the proposal, developing a model of effective political organization that dairy interests in other states could emulate, and demonstrating that antimargarine legislation could actually be obtained. Because New York was the nation's leading dairy state, its dairymen would capture a greater percentage of the gains from their organizing efforts than would the dairymen from any other state. It was not surprising, therefore, that New York led the early battles against margarine. New York enacted an antimargarine law in 1877 at the direct urging of the butter interests. 123 Missouri followed suit the same year. 124 Six states adopted labelling laws in 1878: California, 125 Connecticut, 126 [*109] Maryland, 127 Massachusetts, 128 Ohio, 129 and Pennsylvania. 130 Three more states passed legislation in 1879: Delaware, 131 Illinois, 132 and Tennessee. 133 Others soon fell into line; by 1886, thirty-four states and territories had enacted some version of margarine labelling legislation. 134 These first-generation antimargarine statutes ostensibly countered the problem of palming-off by requiring proper labelling, prescribing penalties for fraudulent misrepresentation, or both. 135 The original Wisconsin law, for example, required that imitation butter made with tallow (beef fat) be labelled "oleomargarine" in half-inch letters, and, if made with lard, be labelled "butterine." 136 Some statutes required hotels, restaurants, and boarding houses to post public notices if they served margarine to guests. 137 These statutes were designed to eliminate a particular lemons problem in retail butter markets. If consumers could not easily distinguish margarine from butter, then sellers would have an incentive to substitute margarine for the more expensive product. The first-generation statutes, if effectively enforced, could alleviate this market breakdown. Accordingly, the dairy interests had little trouble portraying the measures they sought as protecting the public interest. Although the first-generation statutes appeared justifiable as public interest measures, 138 the dairy industry's support for these laws was no [*110] doubt also motivated by a less benign purpose. As late as 1886, members of the industry professed the view that most consumers would not knowingly eat oleomargarine if given the choice. 139 Presumably those sentiments were even stronger in the earliest days of the conflict between margarine and butter. Dairy industry leaders probably believed that the first-generation laws would not only inform consumers, but would also effectively drive margarine out of business. Unfortunately for the dairy industry, the first-generation statutes failed to accomplish either their explicit purpose of eliminating market fraud or their implicit purpose of destroying the margarine industry. First, neither the executive nor the judicial branches of the government vigorously enforced the antimargarine laws. Judges often sympathized with the plight of retailers charged with purveying a harmless food item. 140 Prosecutors were reluctant to pursue margarine cases which were time-consuming and expensive, requiring the services of undercover agents and analytic chemists as well as lawyers. 141 Accordingly, law enforcement officials typically devoted little time or effort to enforcing the margarine laws. 142 The low penalties for violations posed an additional enforcement problem. Even when prosecutions did occur, margarine distributors could afford to simply pay their fines and continue in business. 143 Presumably even a low probability of prosecution could have achieved significant deterrence, if high penalties for violations of these statutes were [*111] imposed. 144 However, increased penalties would probably have been counterproductive; judges, juries and prosecutors would have even greater incentives to nullify the antimargarine laws. Accordingly, under a system of separation of powers in which the laws were enforced by prosecutors and judges of general jurisdiction, the dairy industry could not achieve an acceptable level of enforcement. Palming-off apparently continued to be a serious problem. 145 A second major problem was consumers' continuing demand for margarine over butter, due in part to a significant price differential. Although statistics on margarine production are not available for this period, the evidence indicates that the margarine trade was booming. Margarine prices increased from 11 per pound in 1879 to 13 per pound in 1880, 146 suggesting an increase in demand. The jump in butter prices between 1879 (14 per pound) and 1880 (17 per pound) also suggests increased margarine demand 147 since margarine is a substitute for butter and increases in butter prices undoubtedly increased the demand for margarine. The rapid increase in margarine sales between 1880-1886 indicates that margarine quickly gained consumer acceptance. 2. Prohibitory Statutes Despite the increased margarine trade, dairy forces failed to undertake any significant new initiatives during the period from 1879 to 1883. 148 This may be explained by the profitability of dairying during this period. Butter prices rose to 20 per pound in 1881 and remained close to that level through 1883. 149 Butter exports surged from 21.5 million [*112] pounds in 1878 to 39.5 million pounds in 1880. 150 Just as the depressed condition in the industry precipitated the initial campaign of 1877, the ensuing prosperity of 1880-1883 dampened any desire to continue an aggressive campaign. Sometime in 1883, however, butter prices began to break, falling to 18 per pound in 1884, 17 per pound in 1885, and 16 per pound in 1886. 151 The situation in export markets was also troubling. Margarine exports, which had risen rather steadily since 1877, exceeded butter exports for the first time in 1882. By 1883, margarine exports had risen sharply (from 21 to 31 million pounds) while butter exports had plummeted (from 14.5 to 12.5 million pounds). 152 Although butter exports recovered somewhat after 1883, rising to over 20 million pounds in 1885, 153 they remained far below margarine exports. The one unambiguously positive sign for dairy farmers was the price of milk cows, which rose sharply between 1879 ($ 21.50 per cow) and 1884 ($ 31.50 per cow). 154 The value of milk cows dropped during the following two years, however, falling to $ 29.50 in 1885 and $ 27.50 in 1886. 155 Accordingly, dairy farmers' complaints about the industry's depressed conditions increased between 1883 and 1886. 156 The economic downturn sparked a new round of antimargarine [*113] activity by the dairy lobby, even though the decline in butter prices evidently suppressed the margarine trade during those years as well. 157 To counter the continued threat of margarine, dairy interests in several states obtained progressively more stringent antimargarine laws. These laws represented a major shift in regulatory philosophy, moving away from labelling legislation toward prohibitory legislation that outlawed margarine altogether. 158 The movement for prohibitory legislation quickly gained momentum. By 1886 nine states had enacted prohibitory statutes: Maine, 159 Michigan, 160 Minnesota, 161 Missouri, 162 New Jersey, 163 New York, 164 Ohio, 165 Pennsylvania, 166 and Wisconsin. 167 New Hampshire whimsically required that margarine be colored pink. 168 Not surprisingly, most of the states enacting prohibitory legislation were among the nation's leading dairy states in 1886. 169 Prohibitory legislation held a number of advantages over the earlier labelling laws. It was easier to enforce because it could be applied against a small group of manufacturers and wholesalers rather than a large, dispersed, and shifting retail class. More importantly, if effectively enforced, it not only eliminated the problem of fraud but also threatened to eliminate competition from margarine altogether. Many of these second-generation [*114] state statutes included viable enforcement mechanisms to remedy the notorious inefficacy of the labelling legislation. Again New York took the lead, establishing in 1884 an office of dairy commissioner specifically charged with uncovering and prosecuting violations of the margarine law. 170 The State provided the commissioner with a generous budget, a force of inspectors, and staff experts to document whether substances sold as butter were actually margarine. 171 The legislative creation of independent departments specifically charged with enforcing the margarine laws provided a means of circumventing some of the obstacles to effective interest group activity created by the separation of powers. To be sure, the dairy commissions did not exercise judicial or legislative functions: their role was to detect and prosecute offenses of existing law before courts of general jurisdiction. Their functions were purely executive in nature. However, their specific legislative mandate -- focused as it was on one particular industry -- substantially undercut the prosecutorial discretion that had stymied earlier efforts to enforce the margarine laws. Created to enforce the antimargarine laws with vigor, the commissioners responded to the expectations of the dairy interests. In this respect the dairy commission was a precursor of the independent regulatory agency, a device that grew in later years to circumvent the barriers to interest group activity under a system of separation of powers. 172 From the dairy interests' viewpoint, prohibitory legislation's principal advantage lay in its elimination of all competition from margarine. At the same time, however, this effect also weakened the legal case for such legislation. Prohibitory legislation was obviously overinclusive if its goal was to attack fraud. In stamping out fraud, it would also prevent legitimate competition from margarine. The dairy industry therefore began to supplement the fraud contention with the argument that margarine was dangerous to the public health. Legislation banning the product outright could be justified easily if margarine were shown to be unhealthful. In support of its public health claim, the dairy interests charged that margarine caused dyspepsia and a host of other ailments. 173 The industry fomented claims that margarine contained diseased or putrid beef, [*115] dead horses, dead hogs, dead dogs, mad dogs, and drowned sheep. 174 In New York, dairy interests engineered an investigation into margarine by the state senate's public health committee. 175 Managed by friends of the dairy industry, the investigation proved little more than a witchhunt. The committee received "evidence" that margarine was made with the worst sorts of filthy grease, that workmen had lost toenails because of the process, and so on. 176 Just as the committee heard all kinds of far-fetched charges, the case in favor of margarine's healthfulness was suppressed. Eminent authorities, such as Professor Charles I. Chandler of Columbia College, a former president of the New York City Board of Health, were interviewed but not called before the committee when it became evident that they would testify to the healthfulness of margarine. 177 Not surprisingly, the committee recommended total prohibition of margarine. 178 The charge that margarine was unhealthful, however, was exceedingly weak. Margarine and butter were virtually identical in chemical composition. 179 Even the dairy commissioner of New York failed to uncover any evidence that the components of margarine were harmful, despite having expended several years and much money in efforts to do so. 180 The fact that margarine was nothing more than a mixture of ingredients universally recognized as healthful demonstrated the futility of the task. Nor was there merit to the charge that the fat of decaying or diseased animals was used in margarine. Recognized nutritional scientists testified that only the freshest and highest quality fats could be used in manufacturing margarine. 181 Moreover, the dairy industry's charges were somewhat hypocritical given the unsanitary conditions prevailing in that industry at the time. Raw milk was produced on thousands of farms across the country where sanitation was unknown. 182 Flies, straw, and dung contaminated many milking stalls. Milk arrived at creameries in cans containing an inventory [*116] of daily farm life -- bars of soap, dishrags, potatoes, parsnips, and hairpins, together with the product of the cow that lent such fertility to its pastures. 183 Health experts nurtured a strong -- and ultimately justified -- suspicion that dairy products often transmitted tuberculosis, a major cause of human mortality. 184 Not surprisingly, microscopists who testified about the existence of bacteria in margarine were not invited to investigate butter similarly. 185 Even so, the industry successfully maintained its bogus charges against margarine for a time. A House of Representatives committee concluded that margarine was "detrimental to the public health, being the fruitful cause of dyspepsia and other diseases." 186 The United States Supreme Court accepted findings that margarine might be dangerous to health in upholding Pennsylvania's prohibitory statute. 187 Prohibitory legislation held the promise of effectively denying consumers access to margarine even if they affirmatively desired to buy the product. Nevertheless, prohibitory legislation at the state level was not wholly satisfactory to the dairy interests. For one thing, prohibitory legislation was much more difficult to obtain than labelling laws. States with weak dairy lobbies were unlikely to enact such legislation. As noted above, 188 by 1886 such legislation had passed only in those relatively few states with strong dairy interests. Thus, a strategy directed solely at enactment of prohibitory legislation at the state level would not effectively prohibit margarine nationwide. Second, prohibitory legislation, while relatively easy to enforce against in-state manufacturers of margarine, could not bar the production of margarine in other states. Out-of-state manufacturers easily could ship margarine to wholesalers in states with prohibitory statutes, which could then be distributed to retailers for sale to the public. 189 Enforcing prohibitory legislation against these in-state retailers and wholesalers proved exceedingly difficult. Not only was detecting margarine sales by retailers expensive, but even if the retailer were prosecuted, [*117] the chances of conviction were low because of sympathetic judges and juries. 190 The failure of state prohibitory legislation to cut off interstate commerce in margarine illustrates how the system of federalism, otherwise beneficial to the dairy industry, inhibited its campaign in one respect. In a unitary system, the dairy industry might have eliminated margarine through system-wide prohibitory legislation that could have been enforced against manufacturers throughout the country. In a federal system, however, the industry could not prohibit margarine completely. Prohibitory legislation in individual states would not eradicate in-state margarine sales if the substance could be manufactured elsewhere -- especially if (as the Supreme Court later ruled) 191 the commerce clause limited state power to restrain interstate shipments. Furthermore, even federal prohibitory legislation would not eliminate all manufacture if (as the Court also later ruled) 192 the federal government had no right to regulate manufacturers within a state. 193 The danger of judicial invalidation proved to be another drawback of prohibitory legislation. Effective enforcement of the prohibitory laws required judicial, as well as executive, action. Although the problem of executive enforcement could be remedied to some extent by legislation establishing specialized agencies with strong enforcement incentives, it proved much more difficult for the dairy industry to elicit cooperation from the judiciary. Constitutional prohibitions could not be overturned by legislation. It was difficult, even in states with elected judiciaries, to bring direct political pressure to bear on state judges. Thus, the dairy industry's voting power was relatively ineffective in stimulating favorable judicial action. In People v. Marx, 194 the margarine forces finally achieved the constitutional victory they had sought. 195 The New York Court of Appeals declared a prohibitory statute unconstitutional as interfering with liberty [*118] of contract. 196 On the basis of expert trial testimony, the court found that margarine was both healthful and virtually indistinguishable chemically from butter. 197 Moreover, the court took judicial notice that the law's purpose was to suppress the manufacture and sale of margarine, that the law had been passed at the behest of the dairy industry, that it effectively expropriated the capital of margarine producers, and that as a consequence of the prohibition, "such of the people of the State as cannot afford to buy dairy butter must eat their bread unbuttered." 198 The Marx opinion recognized that the challenged legislation represented something new in the politics of the state -- a phenomenon that if allowed to develop into a trend would carry pernicious consequences for the public at large. The sole reason for the New York statute, said the court, was to keep butter prices high by suppressing competition from margarine. 199 According to the court, "[m]easures of this kind are dangerous even to their promoters," 200 because if the principle of protectionism were constitutionally sustained, its reach could not be limited to any particular industry. On the contrary, margarine manufacturers could suppress the dairy industry if they obtained enough legislative clout. 201 The court warned that "[i]llustrations might be indefinetely multiplied of the evils which would result from legislation which should exclude one class of citizens from industries, lawful in other respects, in order to protect another class against competition. We cannot doubt that such legislation is [unconstitutional]." 202 The Marx case significantly set back dairy interests. A decision by the highest court of the nationhs largest dairy state, especially one written in such a tone of moral outrage, was damaging enough. More immediately, Marx opened up the massive New York City market to the margarine business -- a potentially devastating blow to the powerful dairy interests in Orange County and elsewhere in the state. The dairy industry responded, as seen in Part III, with a renewed effort to check margarine production on the federal level. III THE FEDERAL STATUTE OF 1886 A. The Proposed Statute Federal legislation had been on the agenda of various dairy leaders [*119] since about 1880. The National Association for the Prevention of the Adulteration of Butter (NAPAB), a group of dairymen and butter merchants formed in 1879 and headquartered in New York, 203 spearheaded the initial efforts. Although it focused most of its efforts in New York, this group also lobbied dairy state representatives in Congress. In 1880 204 an Illinois congressman introduced a bill to tax margarine at 10 per pound. A House committee held hearings on the subject in 1882 and recommended passage of antimargarine legislation. 205 These initiatives were rather desultory; no powerful national campaign against margarine existed prior to 1885. In 1885, however, several forces combined to stimulate a successful campaign for federal antimargarine legislation. First and most important, dairy industry conditions suffered a downturn. In 1883, butter sold for 19 per pound but dropped the following year to 18 per pound, and in 1885 to 17 per pound. 206 The situation became especially serious in Wisconsin, where prices dropped from 19.2 per pound in 1882 to 14.1 per pound in 1885. 207 At the same time, the value of milk cows dropped by almost a quarter. 208 Large numbers of cows were slaughtered in the Chicago stockyards because they were worth more as carcasses than as milk producers. 209 Second, by 1885 margarine had become a major industry. Estimates of nationwide margarine production in 1886 ranged from two hundred million pounds per year (the dairy industry's figure) 210 to between thirty-two and thirty-five million pounds (a margarine manufacturer's estimate). 211 Whatever the actual figures, margarine production was clearly big business in 1886. Margarine also gained a strong competitive position in the export market during this time. In 1880, approximately forty million pounds of butter were exported as compared with twenty million pounds of margarine. By 1885 their positions were almost perfectly reversed; butter exports had fallen to only approximately twenty-two million pounds while margarine exports had increased to over thirty-seven million [*120] pounds. 212 Decided in June of 1885, the Marx case provided the third and perhaps most immediate stimulus to the dairy industry's federal campaign, convincing industry leaders that they could not rely upon state governments to protect their interests adequately. 213 They required a national strategy as well. Although, as will be noted, 214 federal prohibitory legislation also faced constitutional difficulties, the industry had reason to hope that the federal taxing power could accomplish what the state police power had failed to do in New York. 215 To organize a federal campaign, the American Agricultural and Dairy Association -- successor to the New York organization formed twenty years earlier 216 -- called a national convention of dairymen in New York City early in 1885. 217 Delegates came from twenty-six states and all sectors of the industry. Their numbers included representatives of state governors, delegates from state agricultural societies and boards of agriculture, state and local dairy associations and granges, and representatives of the produce and mercantile exchanges of New York and other cities. 218 Under the leadership of a New York dairyman, the convention agreed to a bold plan of seeking federal legislation designed to suppress the margarine industry. 219 As it emerged from the House Committee on Agriculture, their legislation combined both prohibitory and regulatory aspects. The prohibitory part of the bill involved a tax of ten cents per pound. 220 The tax would raise the price of margarine at least as high as that of creamery butter, destroying margarine's commercial viability. The proposal's regulatory aspect required that margarine be labelled as such. 221 Margarine found to contain ingredients deleterious to human health would be confiscated and forfeited. 222 The bill required manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers of margarine to obtain licenses to carry on their trade, for which they had to pay large fees: $ 600 for manufacturers, $ 480 for wholesalers, and $ 48 for retailers. 223 The bill also imposed [*121] fines and criminal penalties for violations, and charged the Commissioner of Internal Revenue with responsibility for collecting the tax and for prescribing regulations fleshing out the statutory requirements. 224 A sophisticated piece of legislative drafting, the bill drew on prior state legislation, borrowing those features that had been successful and scrapping the parts that had proved ineffective. Consequently, it was cleverly framed to emphasize the dairy industry's asserted public interest rationales for limiting margarine. The labelling requirements were ostensibly designed to deter fraudulent sales of margarine as butter, while the inspection and forfeiture provisions were supposedly intended to deal with the alleged unhealthful conditions of margarine manufacture. The taxing and licensing features could be presented as revenue measures designed to support the costs of enforcing the regulatory provisions. The taxing provisions of the bill also provided a rationale for vesting enforcement responsibility in the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, an official who enjoyed a considerable reputation for vigorous enforcement of the revenue laws. 225 At the same time, the bill seemed reasonably calculated to survive constitutional challenge. The federal government's power to prohibit margarine outright was questionable. For one thing, express prohibition would be subject to the same type of substantive due process objections that had doomed the New York statute in that state's highest court. 226 Perhaps more important, an absolute prohibition on all margarine sales and manufacture would almost certainly have run afoul of the commerce clause as then interpreted. 227 On the other hand, the Supreme Court's decisions suggested that the taxing power provided a broader source of federal authority than the commerce power. 228 The federal government's taxing authority was not limited to matters in interstate commerce. Thus Congress could tax the manufacture and intrastate sale of margarine even if it could not regulate these matters directly under the commerce clause. Moreover, the Supreme Court had already upheld a statute imposing a prohibitory federal tax on state bank notes, 229 suggesting that even a prohibitory margarine tax might be upheld. [*122] B. Congressional Consideration The dairy industry had no difficulty finding willing sponsors for its proposal in the House of Representatives. 230 The political pressures brought to bear by the dairy industry were remarkable for the time and respectable even by the standards of today's Congress. The dairy interests in the various states organized a massive letter-writing campaign, generating over 104,000 petitions for the bill. The most intense pressure, as might be expected, came from the big dairy states: New York (21,923 petitions), Pennsylvania (15,487), Iowa (11,601), Ohio (10,081), Minnesota (8,282), Illinois (7,533), and Wisconsin (6,482). 231 The bill was heavily lobbied by state and local granges, national producer groups such as the National Butter, Cheese and Egg Association, the American Agricultural Association, the American Agricultural and Dairy Association, 232 state and local producer or creamery groups, 233 dairy merchants and produce exchanges, 234 the New York Dairy Commission, 235 a leader of a producers' cartel, 236 and individual factory dairymen. 237 In this manner, many of the dairy organizations described earlier in this Article 238 contributed to the political pressure in favor of the proposed federal statute. The bill's opponents included margarine producers, western cattlemen anxious to protect a market for beef fat, various boards of trade, labor organizations, and cotton producers who wanted to protect an incipient market for cottonseed oil. 239 But unlike the well-organized butter [*123] forces, the promargarine interests found themselves unable to muster a powerful and concerted defense of their product. One company, Armour & Co., which at that time was the largest margarine producer nationwide, organized much of the opposition to the bill. 240 The margarine interests proved ineffective because they had not developed patterns of cooperation and joint action. Aside from their desire to protect the margarine business, livestock owners, cotton growers, and margarine manufacturers shared few interests. The bill's proponents mustered a variety of ostensibly legitimate arguments on its behalf. First, they charged that margarine was a threat to the public health 241 -- an argument that had already been extensively rehearsed in battles with the margarine interests at the state level. The pro-dairy legislators dutifully repeated the familiar slanders about dead animals and Bright's kidney disease. 242 In addition, someone in the pro-dairy camp looked up the various patents for margarine, all of which listed slightly different ingredients to avoid infringing on the original Mege-Mouries process. The ingredients listed in the patents for these different margarines included a variety of revolting and dangerous substances, including nitric acid, sulphuric acid, carbolic acid, and caustic soda. 243 Proponents of the margarine tax read from this list in the congressional debates to suggest that margarine was unhealthful. 244 In fact, however, few of these patents were actually used in margarine production, and most of the offensive ingredients were simply acids used in the processing of the animal fat and formed no part of the substance ultimately purveyed to the public. 245 [*124] Second, proponents urged that the bill was necessary to prevent the fraudulent passing-off of margarine as butter. 246 Although this argument could have supported the labelling provisions, it could not easily justify taxation, the feature most desired by the dairy industry. Further, the bill's proponents did not explain convincingly why state legislation was not the more appropriate means of preventing fraud. Third, proponents urged that the bill was legitimately framed as a revenue measure. 247 The need for extra revenue seemed debatable, however, because the government had enjoyed a surplus the previous year. 248 There was some reason to believe that 1887 would bring a revenue shortfall. 249 Still, a tax of ten cents per pound was unlikely to raise much revenue because it would increase the cost of margarine to the point where it could not compete with butter. Opponents of the measure thus repeatedly denounced the purported revenue justification as sham. 250 Fourth, proponents claimed that the bill was needed to preserve the dairy industry, a "great national industry" and "one of the chief industries of the country." 251 They failed to explain, however, why the dairy industry merited special protection, particularly when protecting the dairy industry would inflict harm on another domestic industry. Opponents charged that the measure was obviously intended to stamp out the margarine industry to protect and benefit the dairy industry. 252 They claimed that such a motive was morally illegitimate and constitutionally suspect. Although proponents usually denied that they intended to enact class legislation designed to protect one domestic industry against competition from another, the charge had considerable substance. A contemporary political scientist, Henry C. Bannard, observed that House and Senate leaders "rushed the bill through, with the avowed determination of enhancing the price of butter for the sole benefit of those engaged in the manufacture of this one article." 253 Even the bill's proponents admitted in candid moments that it constituted class legislation. In the words of Congressman Scott of Pennsylvania, a chief supporter of the bill, "[h]aving done this much for itself without the fostering aid of class legislation, the great farming interest [*125] may rightfully insist upon a hearing when it appeals for protection against an insidious foe whose further advancement must inevitably destroy its chief support." 254 Others were equally frank. One New Yorker remarked that "[t]his oleomargarine business is a bad business . . . and the sooner it is exterminated the better it will be for us." 255 A member from Wisconsin opposed any reduction in the proposed tax, arguing that a lower tax "might not accomplish the object that I am free to say inclines me to the support of the measure under consideration, for I fly the flag of an intent to destroy the manufacture of the noxious compound by taxing it out of existence." 256 Confronted with overwhelming political support for the dairy cause, the margarine interests realized that they could not stop passage of some form of antimargarine legislation. They adopted the strategy of trying to amend the bill to eliminate or drastically reduce its most offensive feature -- the prohibitory tax. 257 On balance, this strategy proved quite successful. The House halved the margarine tax to five cents per pound, 258 and the Senate dropped the tax to two cents per pound. 259 In other respects, however, the bill emerged from Congress much as the dairy industry had proposed, with provisions for labelling, forfeiture, and licensing. It passed the House by a vote of 177 to 101 260 and the Senate by a vote of 37 to 24. 261 The bill was then presented to President Cleveland for his signature. The margarine and butter forces descended on the White House with a vengeance, the former claiming that the bill was the worst sort of class legislation, the latter proclaiming the absolute necessity of the bill as a means of protecting the dairy farmer against ruinous competition from counterfeit butter. 262 Many petitioners did not even bother to disguise their motives as public-spirited; as the President dryly observed, "those on both sides of the question whose advocacy or opposition is based upon [*126] no broader foundation than local or personal interest have outnumbered all the others." 263 One Washington paper, in a humorous editorial, pictured the President listening to a barnyard convention in the White House back lot, describing his sensations as he listened to the cackle of the hens and the lowing of the cows and overheard their discussions of how they would punish him politically if he did not sign the measure. 264 The press showed intense interest in the bill, with speculation rife as to whether the President would sign or veto. 265 Opinion was evenly split between the view that the President favored the bill but was going to veto it, and that he was conscientiously opposed to it but had decided to sign it. 266 Eventually the President signed the bill, issuing an explanation that courageously managed to credit the arguments made by all sides to the controversy. 267 The President acknowledged that if the matter were presented to him as an initial matter he might doubt the need for additional taxes, and he agreed that if the real purpose of the measure were "to destroy, by the use of the taxing power, one industry of our people for the protection and benefit of another," he would doubtless veto the measure. 268 But, said the President, in this context his function involved deference to a coordinate branch of government, and he was not entitled to indulge any suspicions of improper motives on Congress' part. After bowing to the margarine forces, the President then paid his respects to the butter interests by mouthing the usual platitudes about hard-working farmers and the virtues of butterfat. 269 One waggish newspaper declined a reader's request that the President's message be reproduced in full, observing that the full text could be summarized as follows: "For many obvious reasons this bill should not become a law. I therefore return it approved to the body in which it originated." 270 C. The 1886 Statute in Perspective Prosaic as it may have been in subject matter, the Margarine Tax Act of 1886 represents something of a watershed in American politics. It was among the first instances of federal legislation in which one domestic industry sought to enlist the government's coercive power to stamp out [*127] competition from another domestic industry. The involvement of smaller banks in Andrew Jackson's campaign to abolish the Second Bank of the United States might provide the closest analogy. 271 That campaign, however, was not spearheaded by smaller banks as an organized group. 272 Tariff legislation, with its long history of discrimination against foreign industry for the protection of domestic interests offers another analogy. 273 But tariff laws had always been directed against foreign interests, and are thus distinguishable from a statute designed to protect one domestic industry against competition from another. The margarine tax also bore a certain resemblance to the various types of federal sumptuary legislation that discriminated against items or activities considered to be morally questionable, such as alcohol and tobacco. 274 But this type of legislation targeted products that were at least arguably harmful in their own right. In the case of margarine, once the bogus health argument was put aside, the only harm involved was the weakening of the butter market. Advocates of the bill also cited laws banning counterfeit currency 275 -- a spurious analogy, at best, to a proposal taxing margarine (or "counterfeit butter") out of existence. The bill's opponents repeatedly emphasized its unusual nature. 276 They warned that if the statute were enacted, the principle of protection would have no logical stopping place. 277 If the dairy industry could be [*128] protected against margarine, then cotton might seek protection against wool, or one grade of butter against another grade of butter. As the bill approached passage, its opponents sought to delay matters by introducing facetious amendments for the protection of various items of commerce against competition by new technology. One Congressman proposed to impose a punitive tax on the manufacture and sale of glass eggs, so "that the great American hen may be properly protected." 278 Although these remarks were humorous, they served the serious purpose of illustrating the effects of protecting one domestic industry against competition from another more technologically advanced industry, if taken to its logical conclusion. These dangers were not merely theoretical. Political scientist Henry C. Bannard warned that legislation of this sort was already gaining favor in state legislatures. A bill introduced into the Ohio legislature would have prohibited the consumption of beef slaughtered and dressed outside the state. In Illinois, the coopers' union sought the passage of legislation prohibiting the use of second-hand flour barrels and butter firkins. 279 Once lawmakers opened the Pandora's box of domestic protection, the types of legislation sought would be limitless. If protectionist legislation of this sort were allowed, the power of special interest political lobbies would obviously be greatly enhanced. Several members of Congress commented on the power that the special interests had already gained in the legislative process. As one Congressman remarked: I am amazed, I lack words to express my astonishment, that the American Congress could be absolutely converted, deliberately converted, into a great wrestling-ground, a gymnasium where all the business athletes of the country come to wrestle for supremacy, a prize-ring where jobbers come to blows and where the big jobs knock the little jobs out." 280 Members of Congress understood that the sudden emergence of the dairy lobby represented something new in American politics. Several members lamented the fact that power was seeping away from members who voted according to their individual consciences to groups of constituents who pressured their representatives. Senator Vance was not far from the mark when he punned that "butter, like conscience, [had] made [*129] cowherds of them all." 281 Another Senator who voted for the measure said that "it is an outrageous bill, but we have got to vote for it. We do so in the hope and belief that the Supreme Court will declare it unconstitutional." 282 Political scientist Henry Bannard agreed that this legislation was unprecedented, observing that "[t]his enactment . . . marks a new era in our political history. It widens the sphere of sumptuary legislation, emphasizes the interference theory of government, and extends the doctrine of protection to domains never before reached in our history." 283 As one of the first successful efforts by one domestic industry to obtain federal legislative protection against competition from another, the margarine tax statute of 1886 marks the birth of the modern special interest state. The period between 1875 and 1900 constituted the great formative era of industrial interest groups: meat packers, 284 cattlemen, 285 wool growers, 286 butchers, 287 coopers, 288 and many other industrial groups formed associations during this period, all of them dedicated to protecting their markets from competition through the application of government force. Before 1875, interest groups in the modern sense were unusual; after 1900 they were ubiquitous. Why was this quarter-century the formative period for modern political lobbies? Two forces may have produced the growth of special interest groups: first, the rapid industrialization of the American economy during this period, which disrupted established livelihoods and occupations; 289 and second, the return to normalcy following the Civil War and Reconstruction, which encouraged a focus on narrow self-interest that had been temporarily set aside during the war's cataclysmic events. The growth of special interest politics during this period is a topic that might usefully be addressed in a study broader in scope than this Article. CONCLUSION The dairy industry's early campaign against margarine illustrates the complex interplay of markets, technology, politics, and law in American [*130] society of the time. Among the first efforts by a domestic industry to stamp out competition from another domestic industry, the story of that campaign presents a useful case history for the theory of public choice. This Article has analyzed the early antimargarine battles to explore three fundamental questions. First, given organizational costs and free-rider effects, how did a mass of five million dairy farmers and many thousands of factory owners and merchants coalesce so quickly into a potent political interest group? This Article shows that the industry succeeded in forging an effective lobby by drawing on a well-developed set of preexisting institutions, such as factory owners, state and local dairy associations, boards of trade and produce exchanges, and at least one producers' cartel, which had been formed for nonpolitical purposes such as stimulating demand for dairy products or correcting market failures. Second, how did the basic structural features of the American political system -- federalism and separation of powers -- affect the growth and development of special interest lobbies? The Article demonstrates that federalism generally facilitated interest group activity, because states could act as laboratories for the development of anticompetitive legislation, and because the interest group could achieve two layers of protection in a federal system. The effect of federalism was not unambiguous, however, because states could provide havens for margarine manufacture and because two levels of protection may have required greater resources than a unitary system. On the other hand, separation of powers generally hindered interest group activity because the group seeking protection had to enlist the active cooperation of three separate branches of government. Again, however, the effect was not unambiguous because the splintering of government authority into three branches allowed the interest group to concentrate its fire on the branch where the group's political resources were likely to be most influential. Third, how did economic conditions in the industry affect the level of interest group activity? This Article suggests that the level of interest group activity was generally higher during depressed times than during prosperous times. The dairy industry initiated its antimargarine campaigns during times of falling butter prices: 1877 (first-generation state statutes), 1884 (second-generation state statutes), and 1886 (the federal statute). The industry did not initiate campaigns in times of relatively high butter prices (1874-77, 1881-83), even though margarine sales were also high during these periods. Once a campaign had been initiated, however, the industry was able to sustain some momentum even in prosperous times, as demonstrated by the continuous enactment of first-generation statutes in various states between 1881 and 1883. These observations, of course, are based on events in a single industry [*131] during a limited time frame. The Article, then, leaves open whether they hold true for other industries and other time periods. How these theories fare in other situations may provide a potentially fruitful subject for further research. FOOTNOTES: n1. G. RANKIN, WILLIAM DEMPSTER HOARD 180 (1925) (quoting William Dempster Hoard, Governor of Wisconsin from 1888 to 1891 and a leading nineteenth-century dairyman). n2. Surprisingly, there appears to be no general history of the margarine controversy. The matter is treated in passing in E. LAMPARD, THE RISE OF THE DAIRY INDUSTRY IN WISCONSIN: A STUDY OF AGRICULTURAL CHANGE 1820-1920, at 257-66 (1963). This outstanding work, however, focuses only on the controversy's aspects affecting Wisconsin dairy interests. A few works discuss the controversy in general comparisons of margarine and butter. See W. PABST, BUTTER AND OLEOMARGARINE: AN ANALYSIS OF COMPETING COMMODITIES (Studies in History, Economics and Public Law No. 427, 1937); K. SNODGRASS, MARGARINE AS A BUTTER SUBSTITUTE (Fats and Oils Studies No. 4, 1930); E. WIEST, THE BUTTER INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES (Studies in History, Economics and Public Law No. 165, 1916); see also W. MCCUNE, THE FARM BLOC (1943) (describing the dairy lobby's campaign against margarine in the early 1940s); M. OKUN, FAIR PLAY IN THE MARKETPLACE 250-86 (1986) (describing aspects of the controversy relevant to the battle over pure food and drug laws, especially in New York); S. RIEPMA, THE STORY OF MARGARINE (1970) (reviewing the subject in a general treatise on margarine as a commodity from a promargarine perspective). A few law review articles examine the matter from the standpoint of legal doctrine. See Storke, Oleomargarine and the Law, 18 ROCKY MTN. L. REV. 79 (1946); Note, Oleomargarine and the Constitution, 10 MONT. L. REV. 46 (1949); Note, The Oleomargarine Controversy, 33 VA. L. REV. 631 (1947). A useful compendium of margarine statutes is found in S. Zwick, The Effects of Certain Supreme Court Decisions upon State Margarine Policies (1950) (unpublished master's dissertation). n3. Oleomargarine Act of 1886, ch. 840, 24 Stat. 209. See infra text accompanying notes 203-270. The dairy industry's campaign against butterfat substitutes lasted from the 1870s through the 1950s (and even into the 1960s in a few major dairy states). When the legislation described in this Article proved ineffective, the dairy industry organized a new campaign at both the state and federal levels intended to discourage margarine sales by regulating the product's color, either by forbidding yellow margarine or by mandating that margarine be colored pink. See K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 90-91. The federal Oleomargarine Act of 1902, ch. 784, 32 Stat. 193, imposed a prohibitive tax on colored margarine, thus effectively requiring that margarine sold in interstate commerce remain in its "natural" (white) color. This law hampered the margarine industry because consumers would not buy white margarine. However, the industry circumvented these "white" laws by using special fats that gave margarine a naturally yellow tinge, by including small dye packages in the bricks for use in coloring margarine at home, and at least initially by simply disobeying the federal statute. See K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2 at 62-76; 1911 COMM'R ANN. REP. 17-19. Additionally, an omitted comma in the 1902 statute, coupled with the development of hydrogenation as a technique for solidifying vegetable oils, allowed the development of a huge industry in margarine made from coconut oil, a product not subject to the federal statute and which therefore could be sold in colored form. K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 78-84. Congress brought "nut" margarine within the federal statute in 1930. Act of July 10, 1930, ch. 882, 46 Stat. 1022. Congress closed the loophole for "naturally" colored margarine in 1931. Act of Mar. 4, 1931, ch. 520, 46 Stat. 1549. Meanwhile, disastrous Depression conditions stimulated a new round of repressive state legislation in the form of heavy margarine taxes. See Storke, supra note 2, at 84. The political equilibrium changed dramatically in the following years. Technological developments permitted cottonseed and soybean oils to become important ingredients in margarine by the late 1930s, see S. RIEPMA, supra note 2, at 124-26, creating a powerful domestic constituency in favor of margarine. Butter shortages during the Second World War led to increasing consumer complaints about restrictive margarine legislation. Id. Public interest groups lobbied for repeal of the margarine laws. Id. After a protracted battle, Congress repealed the federal oleomargarine tax in 1950. Act of Mar. 16, 1950, ch. 61, 64 Stat. 20. Margarine legislation was also repealed or judicially invalidated in most states, with the last holdout, Wisconsin, repealing its statute in 1967. Act of May 31, 1967, ch. 42, 1967 Wis. Laws 44. Today, margarine outsells butter by more than two to one. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, U.S. DEPT. OF COMMERCE, STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES 114 (1988) (10.8 pounds of margarine and 4.9 pounds of butter consumed per capita in 1985). In addition to battling against margarine, the dairy industry stoutly resisted competition from milkfat substitutes in the fluid milk and cheese markets. Congress imposed a prohibitive tax on "filled cheese" (skimmed-milk cheese laced with vegetable oil) in 1896, Act of June 6, 1896, ch. 337, 29 Stat. 253, and outlawed the sale of "filled milk" (evaporated skim milk laced with vegetable oil) in 1923, Filled Milk Act of 1923, 21 U.S.C. ?? 61-64. The federal filled-cheese statute was repealed in 1974. Act of Oct. 26, 1974, ? 3, 88 Stat. 1466. In addition, despite having been twice upheld by the Supreme Court, see Carolene Products Co. v. United States, 323 U.S. 18 (1944), United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144 (1938), the filled-milk statute has been declared unconstitutional by a federal district court. Milnot Co. v. Richardson, 350 F.Supp. 221 (S.D.Ill. 1972). It is no longer enforced. See Miller, The True Story of Carolene Products, 1987 SUP. CT. REV. 397 (1987); Strong, A Post-Script to Carolene Products, 5 CONST. COMM. 185 (1988). n4. For introductions to public choice theory see I. MCLEAN, PUBLIC CHOICE: AN INTRODUCTION (1987); D. MUELLER, PUBLIC CHOICE (1979). Mueller defines public choice as "the economic study of nonmarket decisionmaking, or simply the application of economics to political science." D. MUELLER, supra, at 1; see also Brennan & Buchanan, Is Public Choice Immoral? The Case for the "Nobel" Lie, 74 VA. L. REV. 179, 179 (1988) ("the application of the theoretical method and techniques of modern economics to the study of political processes"); Tollison, Public Choice and Legislation, 74 VA. L. REV. 339, 339 (1988) ("economic theory of legislation"); J. Macey, Public Choice: The Theory of the Firm and the Theory of Market Exchange (1988) (unpublished manuscript) ("the application of game theory and microeconomic analysis to the production of law by legislatures, regulatory a agencies and courts"). n5. In the words of Robert D. Tollison, a leading public choice theorist: A basic principle as well as a basic conundrum underlies the demand for legislation. The principle is that groups who can organize for less than one dollar in order to obtain one dollar of benefits from legislation will be the effective demanders of laws. The conundrum is that economists have little idea of how successful, cost-effective interest groups are formed. That is, how do groups overcome free rider problems and organize for collective action so as to be able to seek one dollar for less than one dollar? The plain truth is that economists know very little about the dynamics of group formation and action. Tollison, supra note 4, at 341-42 (footnote omitted). n6. A free rider is someone who takes advantage of the beneficial activities of others but who does not contribute her fair share to the cost of these activities. A standard example is the sailor at sea who navigates with the help of a lighthouse on shore, the upkeep of which is paid by others. For exposition, see D. MUELLER, supra note 4, at 14-18. n7. For accounts of the economic theory of groups, see M. OLSON, THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION: PUBLIC GOODS AND THE THEORY OF GROUPS 53-65 (1965); Stigler, Free Riders and Collective Action: An Appendix to Theories of Economic Regulation, 5 BELL J. ECON. & MGMT. SCI. 359 (1974); Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation, 2 BELL J. ECON. & MGMT. SCI. 3 (1971). n8. See New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 310-11 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) ("It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."). n9. See Miller, supra note 3, at j26-27 (1987) (discussing the correlation between economic conditions and the dairy industry's campaign against filled milk). n10. For a classic discussion of how free-rider problems can interfere with effective political organization, see M. OLSON, supra note 7. n11. In contrast, today's farm lobby recently obtained the most costly federal farm subsidies in history during a period of overall retrenchment in government spending. See Schneider, Cost of Farm Law Might be Double Original Estimate, N.Y. Times, July 22, 1986, at 1, col. 4 (cost of new farm legislation might reach $ 35 billion in fiscal year 1986). n12. See J. WILLIAMS, THE EXPANSION OF RURAL LIFE 10-11 (1926) (discussing "sentiment of liberty" among American farmers in 1874, which included a "sentiment of economic independence" and a "sentiment for freedom from political regulation, an attitude of free enterprise"). Leaders of the dairy industry preached "an austere discipline of technical and intellectual fitness for a competitive universe in which the only sure token of grace was 'extra' prices." E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 340. n13. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 338-39. n14. E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 234. This date is only an estimate; the actual point at which commercial margarine production started in the United States is not precisely known. S. RIEPMA, supra note 2, at 110. n15. See J. SCHLEBECKER, A HISTORY OF AMERICAN DAIRYING 4 (1967); Testimony Taken Before the Senate Comm. on Agriculture and Forestry in Regard to the Manufacture and Sale of Imitation Dairy Products, 49th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1886) [hereinafter 1886 Hearings] (statement of Joseph H. Reall, President of the American Agricultural and Dairy Association). n16. See U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, MILK MARKETING: A REPORT TO THE TASK FORCE ON ANTITRUST IMMUNITIES 19 (1977) [hereinafter JUSTICE REPORT]. n17. See id. at 19-20. n18. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 256 (statement of H. W. Henshaw). n19. See E. GUTHRIE, THE BOOK OF BUTTER: A TEXT ON THE NATURE, MANUFACTURE AND MARKETING OF THE PRODUCT 188 (1923). n20. See JUSTICE REPORT, supra note 16, at 20-21. n21. Id. at 19. n22. 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 3 (remarks of L. I. Seaman). n23. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 78 (figures for 1870). n24. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 4 (Minnesota); E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 47-56 (Wisconsin); E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 78. n25. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 94. n26. See id. at 97-98. n27. See id. at 94-96. n28. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 11-13. n29. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 204; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 40. Perhaps for this reason, creameries were relatively small throughout the nineteenth century. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 4. n30. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 110; see E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 20. n31. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 57; E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 204-08. n32. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 54-55; W. PABST, supra note 2, at 14-15. n33. See J. SCHLEBECKER, supra note 15, at 25-26; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 40. The creamery's advantages in separation technology were reduced a few years later by the introduction of hand separators suitable for use on the farm. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 65; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 28-29. n34. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 189; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 16; 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 4 (remarks of L. I. Seaman). n35. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 111. n36. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 39 (tying growth of factory system to the introduction of power and hand separators, extension of railroad service, and superior quality of creamery butter). n37. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, app. at 453. n38. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 38. n39. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 101-05 (describing the importance of factory owners to the growth of Wisconsin dairying). n40. Id. at 97-99, 105. n41. See id. at 98-99. n42. Factory dairymen needed to purchase a fairly wide variety of equipment that could not realistically be turned to other uses. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 54-83 (separators), 123-26 (power churns), 155-59 (cutters), 183-85 (cold storage facilities). n43. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 104-46. n44. See id. at 121. n45. See J. DOLL, V. RHODES & J. WEST, ECONOMICS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION, MARKETS AND POLICY 263-82 (1968). n46. In the twentieth century, by contrast, "overproduction" typically describes the surplus that can be expected to accompany government price support programs for farm products. See generally THE OVERPRODUCTION TRAP IN U.S. AGRICULTURE (G. Johnson & R. Ruance eds. 1972). n47. [SEE ILLUSTRATION IN ORIGINAL] n48. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 25 (statement of W. P. Richardson) (complaining that competition from other milk producers had disrupted a producers' cartel). n49. See generally G. STIGLER, THE THEORY OF PRICE 230-37 (1966). n50. See infra notes 63-64 and accompanying text. n51. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 84-87. n52. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 197-202; J. SCHLEBECKER, supra note 15, at 31. Dairy leaders unanimously agreed ont he revolutionary effects of the Babcock test. In the words of William Dempster Hoard, the test came "none too soon to enable some dairymen to correct certain practices of which they had been guilty and which, if continued, would have barred them from passing through the portals where Saint Peter stands as the faithful sentinel." G. RANKIN, supra note 1, at 161. n53. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 86 (cream first graded in 1905). n54. The spoilage problem became particularly acute in the export market for cheese, where domestic manufacturers had taken to "filling" cheese made from skim milk with various animal or vegetable fats. Filled cheese, which could not readily be distinguished from ordinary cheese, spoiled much more rapidly than cheese made from whole milk, and often turned during the voyage to European markets. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 245-48. n55. Akerlof, The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism, 84 Q.J. ECON. 488 (1970). n56. E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 25. n57. See id. at 128-29. Price differentials based on geographic origin were often pronounced. In 1877, for example, butter from Elgin, Illinois sold for 38 to 40 per pound, while the best New York butter sold for only 30 to 33 per pound. Id. at 129. Butter from other areas sold for even less. n58. Akerlof, supra note 55, at 488. n59. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 99; M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 192-93; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 25. n60. See Act of June 6, 1896, ch. 337, 29 Stat. 253 (regulation and taxation of filled cheese). n61. E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 217; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 33-34 (defining "overrun" as the increase of finished butter attributable to water and substances other than fat). n62. See Oleomargarine: Hearings Before the House Comm. on Agriculture, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. 196 (1900) [hereinafter 1900 House Hearings], reprinted in The Oleomargarine Bill: Hearings on H.R. 3717 Before the Senate Comm. on Agriculture and Forestry, 56th Cong., 2d Sess. 703 (1901). n63. See id. n64. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 202. n65. On renovated butter, see E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 216-18; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 229-34. n66. For example, farmers who delivered whole milk to creameries received a pro rata share of a common pool of skim milk which they typically fed to livestock. This skim milk was often of degraded or inferior quality and was sometimes infected with tuberculosis or other diseases. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 28, 35-36. The introduction of a separator suitable for farm use in the 1890s mitigated this particular problem. See id. at 35-36; T. PIRTLE, HISTORY OF THE DAIRY INDUSTRY 82-83 (1926). n67. See JUSTICE REPORT, supra note 16, at 19; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 159. n68. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 159. n69. See Akerlof, supra note 55, at 488-89. n70. Gresham's Law states that bad money tends to drive out good money in an economy where both are in use. See id. at 489. As Akerlof observes, the analogy to Gresham's Law is not precise because money users know which is bad money and which is good, whereas purchasers of goods subject to severe quality uncertainty are not able to distinguish between good and poor quality commodities. Id. at 490. n71. Id. at 488. n72. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 124-25 (describing the growth of small local groups into Wisconsin dairy associations). n73. See, e.g., E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 189 (describing the influence of dairy associations in developing grading systems for butter). n74. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 122. n75. E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 79. n76. Id. at 101. n77. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 104. n78. See, e.g., 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 1 (mentioning the Holstein Breeders Association). n79. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 122-25; 128-29. n80. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 128. n81. See T. PIRTLE, supra note 66, at 140-41. n82. Hoard is beatified in G. RANKIN, supra note 1. The Jefferson County Union started publication in 1870. Hoard later established the most influential national journal for the dairy industry, Hoard's Dairyman, which first appeared in 1885. The success of Hoard's Dairyman provides some measure of the growing power of the dairy lobby: its circulation was a mere 700 in 1885, over 11,000 in 1892, and nearly 70,000 by 1918. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 341. n83. See G. RANKIN, supra note 1, at 204. n84. For example, in 1864 the New York State Cheese Manufacturers' Association obtained a law prohibiting dilution of milk by farmers supplying cheese factories. E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 25 n.2. n85. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 194-95; 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 130. n86. E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 195. n87. Id. at 198-200. n88. Id. at 200. n89. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 25 (statement of W. P. Richardson, President, Orange County Milk Producers' Association). n90. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 199. n91. 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 25 (statement of W. P. Richardson). n92. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 200. n93. S. RIEPMA, supra note 2, at 7-8; M. SCHWITZER, MARGARINE AND OTHER FOOD FATS: THEIR HISTORY, PRODUCTION AND USE 60 (1956); K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 125-26; Van Alphen, Hippolyte Mege Mouries, in MARGARINE: AN ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC HISTORY 1869-1969 5, 6-7 (J. Van Stuyvenberg ed. 1969). Mege-Mouries began his research with the bizarre hypothesis that melting the fatty tissue of cow udders would produce the basic fat material of butter. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 257-58. He was awarded a prize by Napoleon III for developing the best butter substitute. M. SCHWITZER, supra, at 59; K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 125. n94. S. RIEPMA, supra note 2, at 6-7; K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 129. n95. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 252-53. n96. For a comparison of margarine and butter prices between 1877 and 1886, see infra notes 117-119 and accompanying text. n97. M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 252; W. PABST, supra note 2, at 19; Note, The Oleomargarine Controversy, supra note 2, at 632. n98. See W. PABST, supra note 2, at 19. n99. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 258. n100. See K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 132-33. n101. See id.; W. PABST, supra note 2, at 20. n102. See W. PABST, supra note 2, at 21. n103. See K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 134-36; E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 221. n104. For example, Armour & Co., the great Chicago packing house, was among the biggest margarine manufacturers at the time. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 102 (statement of George H. Webster); id. at 224-27. The United States Dairy Company was affiliated with the Commercial Manufacturing Company, which was the largest company in the United States, according to one witness at the Senate hearings. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 252; 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 146 (statement of James H. Seymour). United States Dairy Company was also linked with H.K. and F.B. Thurber & Co., the nation's largest wholesale grocer. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 100, 252. n105. In 1904, the average value of product per creamery was $ 24,000, compared with $ 400,000 for margarine factories. W. PABST, supra note 2, at 22. Although data are not available for earlier years, the discrepancy was probably larger before 1886. Dairy farms, of course, were even smaller operations than creameries. See supra notes 16-17 and accompanying text. n106. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 105 (statement of George H. Webster) (noting that there were about thirty margarine producers nationwide); supra notes 99-102 and accompanying text. n107. The advantage was pronounced by 1878 and almost certainly existed five years earlier. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 110-11. n108. See E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 235 (describing competition between oleomargarine and cheaper grades of butter). n109. See E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 258. A Wisconsin factory owner declared with apparent pleasure that margarine was "giving better satisfaction than most dairy butter as now made," and predicted that unless dairy (farm) butter improved, margarine would drive it off the market. Id. n110. Guthrie reports wholesale butter prices of 14.75 per pound in 1861 and 44.5 per pound in 1866. E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 199. n111. Id. n112. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 455. n113. Id. n114. [SEE ILLUSTRATION IN ORIGINAL] n115. For analysis of demand cross-elasticities between margarine and butter, see E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 206-08. n116. M. TWAIN, LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI 328-29 (1923). n117. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 455. n118. Id. n119. Source: 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 184-85. n120. See supra note 114. n121. See W. PABST, supra note 2, at 30; see also M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 255-56. n122. See M. Okun, supra note 2, at 252. n123. Act of June 5, 1877, ch. 415, 1877 N.Y. Laws 441. The title of the New York statute was "An act for the protection of dairymen, and to prevent deception in sales of butter." Id. See also M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 254-55. n124. Act of Apr. 28, 1877, 1877 Mo. Laws 319. Although the Missouri statute passed the legislature before the New York law, New York's law was approved and became effective a few weeks earlier than the one passed by Missouri. See id.; supra note 123. n125. Act of Mar. 26, 1878, ch. 352, 1877-78 Cal. Stat. 535. n126. Act of Mar. 27, 1878, ch. 121, 1878 Conn. Pub. Acts 337. n127. Act of Apr. 5, 1878, ch. 493, 1878 Md. Laws 826. n128. Act of Apr. 3, 1878, ch. 106, 1878 Mass. Acts 70. n129. Act of May 15, 1878, 1878 Ohio Laws 558. n130. Act of May 22, 1878, No. 112, 1878 Pa. Laws 87. The Pennsylvania law was submitted for advance approval to organizations such as the Solebury Farmers' Club, the Bucks County Agricultural Society, and the Doylestown Agricultural and Mechanics Institute. E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 237. n131. Act of Feb. 10, 1879, ch. 154, 16 Del. Laws 223. n132. Act of May 31, 1879, 1879 Ill. Laws 95. n133. Act of Mar. 24, 1879, ch. 169, 1879 Tenn. Acts 212. n134. See Act of Apr. 2, 1885, No. 127, 1885 Ark. Acts 204; Act of Apr. 6, 1885, 1885 Colo. Sess. Laws 282; Act of Mar. 10, 1885, ch. 64, ?? 3-7, 1885 Dakota Laws 110; Act of Feb. 17, 1881, ch. 3280, No. 62, 1881 Fla. Laws 84; Act of Sept. 21, 1883, No. 261, 1882-83 Ga. Laws 124; Act of Jan. 27, 1885, 1884-85 Idaho Sess. Laws 61; Act of Mar. 3, 1883, ch. 62, 1883 Ind. Acts 78; Act of Mar. 12, 1880, ch. 39, 1880 Iowa Acts 34; Act of Feb. 28, 1883, ch. 154, 1883 Me. Acts 125; Act of June 10, 1881, No. 254, 1881 Mich. Pub. Acts 346; Act of Mar. 2, 1881, ch. 133, 1881 Minn. Laws 175; Act of Mar. 9, 1882, ch. 50, 1882 Miss. Laws 85; Act of Mar. 10, 1885, 1885 Mont. Laws 51; Act of Feb. 20, 1883, ch. 53, 1883 Neb. Laws 239; Act of Feb. 4, 1881, ch. 14, 1881 Nev. Stat. 24; Act of Aug. 11, 1881, ch. 57, 1881 N.H. Laws 476; Act of Feb. 21, 1884, ch. 15, 1884 N.J. Laws 24; Act of Feb. 25, 1885, 1885 Or. Laws 127; Act of June 8, 1880, ch. 829, 1880 R.I. Acts & Resolves 8; Act of Feb. 10, 1880, ch. 64, 1879-80 Va. Acts 49; Act of Nov. 25, 1884, No. 88, 1884 Vt. Laws 82; Act of Feb. 4, 1886, 1885-86 Wash. Laws 118; Act of Mar. 3, 1881, ch. 40, 1881 Wis. Laws 39. n135. See K. SNODGRASS, supra note 2, at 89-90. n136. Act of Mar. 3, 1881, ch. 40, 1881 Wis. Laws 39. n137. See, e.g., Act of Sept. 21, 1883, No. 261, 1882-83 Ga. Laws 124. n138. The economic justification for these statutes can be rephrased in modern terminology using Akerlof's "lemons" model, discussed at supra notes 55-71 and accompanying text. According to Akerlof's scenario, some merchants who knew that consumers could not easily tell the difference between butter and margarine would palm off margarine as butter. Consumers, however, would come to realize that they were likely to receive margarine rather than butter and, accordingly, would lower the amount they were willing to pay for any table spread or shortening agent. As the market price went down, butter would be driven off the market, to be replaced by margarine. Eventually consumers who desired to purchase butter would be unable to do so. This scenario of market breakdown provides a solid contemporary economic justification of the first-generation statutes (assuming the accuracy of the factual premises that consumers could not easily distinguish butter and margarine and that some of them would be willing to pay premium prices for genuine butter). n139. See, e.g., 17 CONG. REC. 4894 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Millard); id. at 4901 (remarks of Rep. Frederick). n140. See, e.g., 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 7 (remarks of L.I. Seaman) ("[T]here appear to be so many milk-and-water judges on the bench, who seem to regard the violation of the [margarine] law in the light that they do some other unimportant violations of it, that it is an exception when a man is fined even."). n141. One of the earliest margarine prosecutions in New York fell apart when the experts failed to agree on whether the chief exhibit was margarine or butter. M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 256. See also 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 9 (remarks of Gardiner B. Chapin). n142. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 9 (remarks of Gardiner B. Chapin (state antimargarine laws are "not generally executed at all"); id. at 11 (remarks of James Hughes); id. at 13 (remarks of Victor E. Piollet) n143. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 7 (remarks of L.I. Seaman) ("These people violate the law, and then when they are arrested and convicted they pay the fine of $ 100 and go back and repeat the offense, and yet make money by it"); id. at 11 (remarks of James Hughes). n144. See generally Becker, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Analysis, 76 J. POL. ECON. 169 (1968) (discussing the relationship between frequency of enforcement and size of sanction in deterring crime); Stigler, The Optimum Enforcement of the Laws, 78 J. POL. ECON. 526 (1970) (discussing the conditions for optimum enforcement in terms of costs of enforcement and costs of violations). n145. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 8-9 (remarks of Gardiner B. Chapin). n146. See id. at 184-85. n147. See id. n148. The industry did, however, continue to press for labelling legislation in additional states, see supra note 134, and did make desultory efforts to obtain federal protection, see infra notes 204-205. n149. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 27 (remarks of S. P. Hibbard) (dairying a prosperous business in 1880 and part of 1881). At least one industry representative testified in 1886 that business had been depressed for a number of years prior to 1883, but the statement refers to special conditions in the New York fluid milk market where dealers had apparently formed a buyers' cartel to drive prices down. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 25 (statement of W. P. Richardson). n150. [SEE ILLUSTRATION IN ORIGINAL] n151. See id. and accompanying text. n152. See id. n153. See id. n154. See supra note 114. n155. See id. n156. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 25-26 (statement of W. P. Richardson) ("depression in the butter counties"); id. at 28 (statement of S. P. Hibbard); id. at 31-33 (statement of G. W. Martin). n157. Margarine fell from 15 per pound in 1883 to 11 per pound in 1886, probably reflecting reduced demand caused by lower butter prices. See supra note 119 and accompanying text. n158. Pennsylvania's prohibitory statute, enacted in 1885, was typical. It provided in pertinent part that "no person . . . shall manufacture out of any oleaginous substance . . . any article designed to take the place of butter . . . produced from pure unadulterated milk, or cream from the same . . . nor shall sell or offer for sale, or have in his . . . possession with intent to sell the same as an article of food." Act of May 21, 1885, No. 25, 1885 Pa. Laws 22. n159. Act of Mar. 3, 1885, ch. 297, 1885 Me. Acts 247. n160. Act of June 12, 1885, no. 186, 1885 Mich. Pub. Acts 256. n161. Act of Mar. 5, 1885, ch. 149, 1885 Minn. Laws 189. n162. Act of Mar. 24, 1881, 1881 Mo. Laws 120. n163. Act of May 5, 1884, ch. CXCIV, 1884 N.J. Laws 289. n164. Act of Apr. 24, 1884, ch. 202, 1884 N.Y. Laws 255. n165. Act of Apr. 27, 1885, no. 705, 1885 Ohio Laws 159. n166. Act of May 21, 1885, supra note 158. n167. Act of Apr. 8, 1885, ch. 361, 1885 Wis. Laws 333. n168. Act of Aug. 26, 1885, ch. 68, 1885 N.H. Laws 269. n169. Butter Produced States Population (Pounds) Illinois 3,077,871 53,657,943 Indiana 1,978,301 37,377,797 Iowa 1,624,615 55,481,958 Kansas 996,096 21,671,762 Michigan 1,636,937 38,821,890 Minnesota 780,773 19,161,385 Missouri 2,168,380 28,572,124 New York 5,082,871 111,922,423 Ohio 3,198,062 67,634,263 n170. Act of Apr. 29, 1884, ch. 202, ? 9, 1884 N.Y. Laws 255, 257. n171. Id. The state appropriated $ 30,000 a year for the dairy commission. Id. In two years the dairy commission made over 300 arrests and obtained nearly 100 convictions. 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 20 (statement of B. F. Van Valkenburgh, assistant dairy commissioner). Despite these efforts, however, enforcement problems persisted in New York. Id. at 20-21. n172. See generally Miller, Independent Agencies, 1986 SUP. CT. REV. 41, 74 ("agency independence provides a useful mechanism for compromise and accommodation among competing political interest groups.") n173. See, e.g., H.R. REP. NO. 2028, 49th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1886). n174. See, e.g., 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 35, 41, 46. n175. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 274-75. n176. 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 68 (remarks of Charles I. Chandler). n177. See id. Chandler's credibility, however, is not entirely above suspicion, since he had previously served as an expert witness for the United States Dairy Company in actions for infringement of the Mege patent. M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 272. n178. M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 275. n179. E.g., 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 72-73. n180. Id. at 22 (statement of B. F. Van Valkenburgh). Although the commissioner conceded that chemistry could not prove that margarine was unhealthy, he did argue that the substance could cause physiological harm. Id. n181. E.g., id. at 60 (statement of Prof. Henry Morton). n182. A leading dairy authority stated as late as 1916 that "[t]he unsanitary conditions under which the greater portion of the supply of milk is produced and marketed is a rebuke to society. . . . [O]n a great many farms, where dairying is not specialized, sanitation is very sadly neglected." E. WIEST, supra note 2, at 15. n183. See 1900 House Hearings, supra note 62, at 121 (statement of John Dadie, Esq.). n184. See, e.g., 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 64 (statement of Professor Henry Morton); 1900 House Hearings, supra note 62, at 121 (statement of John Dadie, Esq.); E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 96-98. n185. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 45 (statement of Dr. Thomas Taylor) (explaining that no analysis was made of butter because "it is generally supposed that butter is made from healthy cows"). Any microscopic investigation of butter would have discovered bacteria galore. See E. GUTHRIE, supra note 19, at 35-44, 177-80. n186. H.R. REP. NO. 2028, supra note 173, at 2. n187. Powell v. Pennsylvania, 127 U.S. 678, 684-86 (1888) (declaring Pennsylvania's prohibitory statute to be a legitimate exercise of police power to protect public health). n188. See supra notes 159-170 and accompanying text. n189. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 20 (statement of B. F. Van Valkenburgh); id. at 152 (statement of James H. Seymour); 17 CONG. REC. 4911 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Henderson). n190. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 20-21 (statement of B. F. Van Valkenburgh); id. at 169 (statement of W. S. Truesdell). n191. Leisy v. Hardin, 135 U.S. 100, 124-25 (1890) (invalidating state statute prohibiting sale of out-of-state liquors). n192. United States v. E.C. Knight Co., 156 U.S. 1, 12-13 (1895) (control of manufacturing not subject to regulation under commerce clause). n193. Both these impediments have since been overcome, thus significantly reducing the degree to which federalism inhibits interest group activity. See Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) (effectively overruling E. C. Knight); Plumley v. Massachusets, 155 U.S. 461, 478-79 (1894) (sustaining state statute prohibiting sale of margarine colored to look like butter). n194. 99 N.Y. 377, 2 N.E. 29 (1885). n195. A prohibitory statute in Missouri had earlier been upheld, the court observing that "the legislature may do many things in the legitimate exercise of [the police] and other powers, which, however unwise or injudicious they may be, are not obnoxious to the objection of being beyond the scope of legislative authority." State v. Addington, 77 Mo. 110, 117 (1882). n196. Marx, 99 N.Y. at 386-87, 2 N.E. at 33-34. n197. Id. at 381-82, 2 N.E. at 30. n198. See id. at 383-87, 2 N.E. at 31-34. n199. Id. at 387, 2 N.E. at 33. n200. Id. n201. Id. n202. Id. at 387, 2 N.E. at 34. n203. M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 256. n204. Id. at 261-63. n205. See Manufacture and Sale of Oleomargarine, H.R. REP. NO. 1529, 47th Cong., 1st Sess. (1882). n206. See supra notes 149 & 151 and accompanying text. n207. E. LAMPARD, supra note 2, at 455. n208. H.R. REP. NO. 2028, supra note 173, at 2 (reporting that the value of milk cows had dropped from $ 40 per head to $ 30 per head, representing a total capital loss of $ 150,000,000). n209. See id. (300,000 milk cows slaughtered in 1885 in Chicago alone). n210. Id. This figure may have represented as much as one-fifth of the nation's annual production of butter. See 17 CONG. REC. 4865 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Scott). n211. 1186 Hearings, supra note 15, at 224 (statement of George H. Webster). n212. See supra notes 150 & 153 and accompanying text. n213. See 17 CONG. REC. 4894 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Millard) (observing that the New York legislature had attempted in vain to regulate the margarine business in that state). n214. See infra notes 226-229 and accompanying text. n215. See id. n216. See supra note 74 and accompanying text. n217. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 238 (statement of F. K. Moreland, counsel to the American Agricultural and Dairy Association). n218. See 17 CONG. REC. 4865 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Scott). n219. See M. OKUN, supra note 2, at 100, 279. n220. 17 CONG. REC. 5055 (1886). n221. Id. at 5053, 5173. n222. Id. at 5166. n223. See id. at 4977. n224. See id. at 5037, 5044, 5161. The text of the bill (with one important amendment discussed below) was substantially similar to the provision eventually enacted into law. See Act of Aug. 2, 1886, ch. 840, 24 Stat. 209, 212-13. n225. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 11 (statement of James Hughes). n226. See supra text accompanying notes 194-202. n227. The Supreme Court ruled that manufacturing was beyond the reach of federal power under the commerce clause in United States v. E. C. Knight Co., 156 U.S. 1 (1895). n228. See D. CURRIE, THE CONSTITUTION IN THE SUPREME COURT 317-20 (1985). n229. Veazie Bank v. Fenno, 75 U.S. (8 Wall.) 533 (1869). n230. Four bills initially were referred to the Judiciary Committee for an assessment of their constitutionality. The Judiciary Committee issued a report deferring judgment on two bills and concluding that the other two were unconstitutional. H.R. REP. No. 1880, 49th Cong., 1st Sess. 4 (1886). With some parliamentary legerdemain, members of Congress who supported the dairy cause engineered the referral of one bill to the Agriculture Committee, a favorable forum, instead of the Revenue Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, which had a stronger claim to jurisdiction. The Agriculture Committee was given jurisdiction over the measure by a direct vote of the House. H.R. REP. No. 2028, supra note 173, at 1. n231. See 17 CONG. REC. 4930 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Price). Each of these states was among the nation's top twelve dairy states in 1886. See supra note 170. n232. See 17 CONG. REC. 4931 (1886). n233. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 144 (statement of A. M. Fuller, representing the Pennsylvania State Dairymen's Association); id. at 167 (statement of W. S. Truesdell, representing the Mississippi Valley Dairy and Creamery Association). n234. See id. at 10 (statement of James Hughes of the Produce Exchange of Baltimore City); id. at 17 (statement of W. H. Duckworth, commission merchant and dairy farmer); id. at 27 (statement of S. P. Hibbard, commission merchant); id. at 130 (statement of Col. R. M. Littler, secretary of the Chicago Produce Exchange). n235. See id. at 20 (statement of B. F. Van Valkenburgh, assistant dairy commissioner of New York). n236. See id. at 25 (statement of W. P. Richardson). n237. See id. at 201 (statement of G. W. Simpson). n238. See supra notes 39-92 and accompanying text. n239. See, e.g., 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 173 (statement of Irus Coy, representing the Chicago Live Stock Exchange); id. at 195 (statement of Howard M. Holden of the Kansas City Live Stock Exchange); id. at 209 (letter from Wyoming Stock-Growers' Association); 17 CONG. REC. 4898 (1886) (Pittsburgh Grain and Flour Exchange); id. at 4905 (Cotton-Seed Crushers' Association); id. at 4914 (Chicago Board of Trade); id. at 4970 (Knights of Labor); id. at 4971 (Union Stock Yard and Transit Company); id. at 5117 (Trades Assembly of Western Pennsylvania). Retail grocers split on the bill, with an official representative from New York favoring the bill, see 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 163 (statement of Lawrence J. Callanan), and other retail grocers speaking against it, see id. at 194 (statement of J. Merrill Currier); id. at 233 (statement of George M. Harris). n240. See 17 CONG. REC. 4903 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Hepburn) ("I am glad to say that the whole of this opposition emanates from a single house in the city of Chicago which manufactures 9,000,000 pounds of this bogus butter"); id. at 4919 (remarks of Rep. Morgan) (attributing virtually all of the arguments and petitions in opposition to the bill to Armour's influence); id. at 4914-15 (remarks of Rep. Dunham) (submitting affidavit of Philip D. Armour); id. at 4925 (remarks of Rep. Farquhar) (identifying Armour as the nation's largest margarine manufacturer); id. at 5124 (remarks of Rep. Parker) (citing press report that Armour's representatives had travelled to Cleveland to persuade the Knights of Labor to oppose the bill). n241. See, e.g., 17 CONG. REC. 4865 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Scott). n242. See 17 CONG. REC. 4869 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Hopkins); id. at 4931 (report of House Committee on Agriculture). n243. See id. at 4931 (1886) (report of House Committee on Agriculture). n244. See, e.g., id. at 4868 (remarks of Rep. Hopkins); id. at 5129 (remarks of Rep. Evans). n245. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 96-97 (remarks of Professor James F. Babcock). n246. See, e.g., 17 CONG. REC. 4865-66 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Scott). n247. See, e.g., id. at 4927 (remarks of Rep. Price). n248. See id. at 5076 (remarks of Rep. McCreary); id. at 4936 (remarks of Rep. Wilson). n249. See id. at 4904 (remarks of Rep. Henderson) (quoting a report from the Secretary of the Treasury estimating a deficit of $ 24,600,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1887). n250. See, e.g., id. at 4936 (remarks of Rep. Wilson); id. at 4972 (remarks of Rep. Morrison); id. at 4898 (remarks of Rep. Mills). n251. See, e.g., id. at 4865, 4867 (remarks of Rep. Scott). n252. See, e.g., id. at 4871 (remarks of Rep. Reagan) ("[t]he object is clearly to legislate in favor of one class of people and against another class"); id. at 5050 (remarks of Rep. Browne) (the bill "destroys competition and robs one citizen to put the money in the pocket of another"). n253. Bannard, The Oleomargarine Law, 2 POL. SCI. Q. 545, 554 (1887). n254. 17 CONG. REC. 4866 (1886). n255. Id. at 4894 (remarks of Rep. Millard). n256. Id. at 5082 (remarks of Rep. Hudd); see also id. at 4872 (remarks of Rep. Hiscock) (acknowledging that the bill "may possibly have the effect of stamping [the margarine] industry out of existence"). n257. See, e.g., id. at 5209 (vote on amendment that would have reduced the tax to three cents a pound). At least one pro-dairy legislator strongly suggested that the bill's proponents would agree to reduction in the size of the tax so long as the principle of taxing oleomargarine were accepted. See id. at 4868 (remarks of Rep. Hopkins) ("I would not imperil [the bill's] passage in the House by obstinately adhering to the tax of 10 cents per pound . . . where some other member, actuated by honest motives, as I presume him to be, should feel that 2 or 5 per pound is as much as should be imposed"). n258. Id. at 5210. n259. Id. at 7201-02. n260. Id. at 5213. n261. Id. at 7202. n262. See H.R. EXEC. DOC. No. 368, 49th Cong., 1st Sess. 1-2 (1886). n263. Id. at 1. n264. See The Oleomargarine Bill: Hearings on H.R. 3717 Before the Senate Comm. on Agriculture and Forestry, 56th Cong., 2d Sess. 396 (1901) (remarks of Henry E. Davis) (describing the newspaper editorial). n265. See Washington Post, July 31, 1886, at 1, col. 8 (describing a stir among the press corps when the Speaker of the House received a message thought to be a veto of the margarine bill). n266. Washington Post, July 31, 1886, at 2, col. 1. n267. H.R. EXEC. DOC. No. 368, supra note 262, at 1-4. n268. Id. at 2. n269. Id. n270. Bannard, supra note 253, at 557. n271. See B. HAMMOND, BANKS AND POLITICS IN AMERICA: FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR 405-450 (1957). n272. See id. n273. Dairy forces used this analogy in debate on the bill. See, e.g., 17 CONG. REC. 4894 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Millard). n274. See id. at 4894 (remarks of Rep. Millard). n275. See, e.g., id. at 4977 (remarks of Rep. Milliken). n276. See id. at 4870 (remarks of Rep. Hammond) ("never have we undertaken to give protection to one individual of our own people as against another individual of our own people"); id. at 4917 (remarks of Rep. Glass) ("[t]he Government of the United States has no right to tax an industry out of existence, or to tax one industry oppressively for the benefit of another"); id. at 5056 (remarks of Rep. Butterworth) (asking whether the "time has come when you are willing to wipe out one legitimate domestic industry which but for your antagonistic legislation might survive and flourish, to wipe it out simply because it is the competitor of another domestic industry"). n277. See, e.g., id. at 4914 (remarks of Rep. Dunham) ("if we, by legislation or by taxing a product in order to force up the price of butter, can succeed in this case, in the next Congress another large interest or large class in the country will apply to us to tax something else, so that they can keep up the price of their product"); id. at 4936 (remarks of Rep. Wilson) ("[o]nce we establish the principle that the sovereign power of taxation with which the people intrust their servants can be perverted from its only honest purpose of raising taxes, and be used to oppress, to suppress, or to destroy the industry of any class of our citizens in order to increase the profits of the industry of any other class of our citizens, and this ceases to be a government of equal laws and becomes at once a government of privileged classes and occupations"); id. at 5050 (remarks of Rep. Browne) ("[t]his bill seeks a class legislation in its present shape of the most pronounced type. A great danger lurks under its thin di[s]guises; it makes a precedent which may be at any time employed to destroy the weak in the interest of the strong. The theory upon which this bill proceeds may be used to justify any legislative monopoly however monstrous or exacting"); id. at 4898 (remarks of Rep. Mills) ("[i]f you can destroy [the margarine] industry, you can destroy any other by abusing the power of taxation"); id. at 5091 (remarks of Rep. Daniel) ("in this bill is the doctrine that Congress may create monopoly, and may help monopoly to crush out and destroy every wholesome industry" that is opposed by superior political force); id. at 5156 (remarks of Rep. Wellborn) ("there cannot be found in all the history of the Republic a more dangerous precedent than that which the enactment of this bill . . . would establish"). n278. Id. at 5010-11. n279. Bannard, supra note 253, at 545. n280. 17 CONG. REC. 4918 (1886) (remarks of Rep. Dunn). n281. See Washington Post, July 20, 1886, at 2, col. 3. n282. Washington Post, July 21, 1886, at 2, col. 1. n283. Bannard, supra note 253, at 546. n284. See R. CLEMEN, THE AMERICAN LIVESTOCK AND MEAT INDUSTRY 802-03 (1923). n285. See 1886 Hearings, supra note 15, at 209. n286. See S. MISC. DOC. NO. 99, 49th Cong., 1st Sess. (1886). n287. See R. CLEMEN, supra note 284, at 242-43. n288. See Bannard, supra note 253, at 545. n289. See M. SKLAR, THE CORPORATE RECONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM, 1890-1916: THE MARKET, THE LAW, AND POLITICS (1987); I. TARBELL, THE NATIONALIZING OF BUSINESS 1878-98 (1936). From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:00:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:00:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: (Trivers) The kindness of strangers Message-ID: The kindness of strangers http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5271019-110738,00.html Despite switching disciplines - from maths to law to history then the sciences - Robert Trivers profoundly influenced evolutionary biology with his theory that our sense of justice has Darwinian explanations. But he suffered severe mental breakdowns and his career at Harvard was dogged by controversy. After 15 years in genetics he has now turned to anthropology Andrew Brown Saturday August 27, 2005 Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic heroes of 20th-century science if he'd died in the 70s, as some people supposed he would. But here he is, loping down the quiet, pale corridors of Harvard's Programme in Evolutionary Development, a powerfully built man about six foot tall, bespectacled, dressed in trainers, narrow blue cord trousers, a black leather jacket and a knitted watchman's cap. His language matches the macho clothes: for an Ivy League professor, he says "fuck" a lot. In the early 70s, as a graduate student at Harvard with no formal training in biology, he wrote five papers that changed forever the way that evolution would be understood. He came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs. Then he analysed the reasons why, in almost all species, one sex is pickier about who it mates with than the other; then the ways in which children can be genetically programmed to demand more attention than their parents can provide. Even the way in which patterns of infanticide vary by sex and class in the Punjab is predicted by one of Trivers's papers. EO Wilson, who coined the term sociobiology, described him as one of the most influential - and consistently correct - theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time. But he was reckless, aggressive and suffered from bipolar disorder which led him into agonising, debilitating breakdowns. His work was politically controversial. Harvard would not give him a professorship and towards the end of the 70s he seemed to vanish. In fact, he went in 1979 to the University of California in Santa Cruz, then a university with a reputation for drug abuse and slackness. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime mistake," he says, "in the sense that I can't afford to make another one like that. I survived, and I helped raise my children for a while; but that was all." He also switched his attention from theoretical biology to the detailed and difficult study of stretches of DNA and their conflicts within particular bodies. He says: "Call it arrogance, overconfidence, or ignorance; it was mostly ignorance, I think. I naively thought - this was my phrase - I'll whip genetics into shape in three to five years. Fifteen years later, genetics has whipped me into shape. You do not whip genetics into shape within three to five years. It took me eight to 10 to understand what I was reading." He is bringing out a book, Genes in Conflict, written with a younger colleague, Austin Burt, which summarises everything that is known about conflicts within the genome; but at just the point when the two of them know as much as anyone can about this discipline he has switched back to anthropology. His next project is to show that we have evolved the capacity to deceive ourselves because it makes us better at lying to other people. This kind of wild leap between disciplines has characterised his life. He was born in 1943, the second of seven children born to Howard and Mildred Trivers, who had met at graduate school in Harvard in the 30s. His father, whom he characterises as clever but ineffectual, had pursued postgraduate studies in German philosophy in Germany, until 1938 when even he noticed it was time for a Jewish student to leave. He was able to do this because his own father, an immigrant from Lithuania, had made a fortune in the rag trade: his gimmick was the two-pants suit, which consisted of a jacket with two pairs of trousers, since they would wear out first. During the second world war, Howard Trivers worked for the army, and produced the regulations for denazification: he was rewarded with a post in the state department, so Robert Trivers grew up in a diplomatic household, a handicap he has triumphantly overcome: his opponents at Harvard are described as fools, and he says Richard Lewontin, the intellectual leader of the campaigns against sociobiology, grossly underestimated the role that selection plays in the makeup of the genome, while sanctioning all sorts of slanders against his opponents. Trivers says of his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould's theory that the female orgasm was merely a by- product of the fact that the opposite sex has them, "It makes you wonder just how close Steve had ever been to that blessed event if he thought it was a side-effect ..." He was sent to grand schools - at Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts, where the Bushes went, he was regarded as a promising mathematician after he taught himself calculus, in three months, aged 14; and he took two advanced maths courses before he arrived at Harvard. Typically enough, he then lost interest in maths, and decided to be a lawyer instead, fighting injustice, defending people who were minimally criminal. He had grown up in Washington as well as Berlin and Copenhagen, and was keenly aware of injustice and racial discrimination. In order to become a lawyer, he had to have a humanities degree, so his first studies at Harvard were in American history. They were interrupted by the first, and worst, of his breakdowns, which took the form of spiralling mania - staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and then collapsing. He was hospitalised, and treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs. While recovering, he took courses in art, and was hired to illustrate, and then to write, a series of textbooks for high schools. Despite his history degree, it was obvious to his supervisors that he knew little about human biology, so he was given the animals to write about, and started to learn modern Darwinian biology. He fell in love with the logic of evolution. In the flow of genes through generations, and the steady, inexorable shaping of behaviour by natural selection, he saw a geometry of time, as beautiful as the geometry of space that Newton and Galileo had discovered. His mentor was an ornithologist called Bill Drury, whose memory he venerates. Drury was an expert on herring gulls. Trivers says: "He knew enough that if God had made him a herring gull, he would have known 90% of what he needed to survive." Drury became very close to his pupil and his trust was reciprocated: "Bill and I were walking in the woods one day, and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of 10 people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said 'Can I add three names to that list?'. That was his only comment." The textbook series was meant to be as influential as the new mathematics, and to transform the teaching of biology, which meant that Trivers himself had to get a thorough understanding of animal behaviour. In the event, it was killed by Christian conservatives. It taught evolution as fact, and examined human behaviour as an anthropologist might, so the states where it might have sold in millions would have nothing to do with it. It sold 50,000 or 60,000 copies where it might have sold five or six million. Trivers determined to take a doctorate in biology; but university protocol meant that Drury could not be his adviser. Instead, he chose the curator of herpetology, Ernest Williams, who derailed his original plan to study monkeys in favour of going to Jamaica to study lizards. Trivers admits: "I was also quite frankly, interested in the women. When we flew to Jamaica I took one look at the women and one look at the island and decided to become a lizard man if that's what it took to go back there." Since that first epiphany, he has lived for about 13 years in Jamaica, off and on; he has married two Jamaican women. Though he no longer studies lizards, he still has a long-term project going on the island, which studies symmetry in growing children. Symmetry is important in Trivers' theories because it is a measure of fidelity to the genetic masterplan, and so of health and desirability. More symmetrical children should appear more attractive to their peers, even if the differences are not consciously discernible. Some of the experiments that have arisen from this are extraordinary. They have measured which way round children cuddle dolls; it appears that the more closely your ears resemble each other, the more likely you are to hold a doll (or a baby) with its head to the left. The theoretical justification for this is that the left ear feeds into the right side of the brain, which is normally where most information about feelings is processed. But a child with asymmetrical ears is more likely to have an unusual distribution of tasks between the two sides of the brain - both traits being expressions of a disturbance in the normal growth of the head and brain. The asymmetries Trivers is measuring in a very detailed fashion are very small, quite undetectable in normal life, yet we seem to be unconsciously very sensitive to them. Symmetrical children are consistently judged to be the best dancers, which is also a measurement of sexual attractiveness. Theory would predict that women measure attractiveness more closely than men do. Sure enough, the gap between those judged best and worst dancers was greatest among the boys. Unlike the other founders of sociobiology, Trivers was more interested in human than in animal behaviour. The founding genius of sociobiology, Bill Hamilton, was a naturalist and romantic who felt himself ill at ease in the modern world, and had a passion for insects, especially wasps. EO Wilson loves ants and arranged his office at Harvard so that there were ant colonies in perspex all around the walls, and the visitor might think he was inside a gigantic ants' nest. Wilson added one final chapter on humans to his book Sociobiology almost as an afterthought, though this caused a bitter feud that has divided the Harvard biology faculty to this day. Trivers, however, started his theories from what he could observe of human behaviour, and then went looking for genetic causes whose logic would apply across the whole living world. It seemed to some biologists in the 60s that the central problem of their discipline was why animals are nice to each other. Previous generations had explained this as an adaptation for the good of the species but there seemed to be no mechanism that could make this true. If I sacrifice myself for you, this may very well benefit the tribe to which we both belong, It may even benefit humanity as a whole. But this is an act, other things being equal, which will increase the number of your descendants, not of mine. So your genes, less eager for sacrifice, will spread through the population and eventually the species will consist entirely of members who do not cooperate with each other. How, then, do we account for the obvious and widespread fact that the world is full of cooperative species, whose members will sacrifice their own immediate interests for others? One answer had been encapsulated in a pub joke by the British biologist (and communist) JBS Haldane, who was asked, in the 50s, whether a man should lay down his life for his brother. "For two brothers," he said, "or four cousins." In other words, genes that benefit your relatives are likely to spread through the population, even if they damage the bearer sometimes, because the relatives will be likely to carry their own copies. This insight was reached independently by Bill Hamilton, as a student, who worked it out in mathematical detail in 1963, and showed how it could explain the behaviour of ants and bees, whose curious pattern of reproduction means that females are more closely related to their sisters than to their offspring. But there is cooperation in many species which do not have these patterns of relatedness; also between animals which are not closely related, nor even members of the same species. Even among humans, as Trivers observed, many people will more readily sacrifice themselves for their friends than for their relatives - an observation easy to make among the rebellious youth of the 60s. So a more general kind of rule than Hamilton had supplied was needed. Trivers came up with the notion of reciprocal altruism. In plain language, this said that self-sacrifice could be understood as self-interest providing there was a chance the beneficiary would repay the deed in the future. The example he gave in the first paper was that of a man who sees someone drowning and rescues him. Providing, says Trivers, that the benefit of being saved is much greater than the cost of rescuing the swimmer, then it makes sense to dive in and play the lifeguard because the person you rescue from drowning may do the same for you some day. This example became extremely famous, and has been held up to scorn on the grounds that anyone likely to drown is not someone you would choose as the lifeguard when you are yourself in danger. But in the original paper, Trivers side-stepped this objection by suggesting either that the swimmer was in difficulties because of a sudden cramp or that they were being rescued with a branch extended from the bank. It may seem absurd that people devoted so much effort to arguing about what was only meant to be an illustration of a more general principle, but the stakes were high. Before writing the paper, Trivers attempted, and failed, to get a grasp of the state of moral arguments about altruism. "What was missing from the papers was exactly what was missing from the discipline itself: any functional understanding of the behaviours that they were discussing. Why did it make sense for the organism to [behave unselfishly]? This was, of course, what evolutionary biology, and myself in particular, was set to provide." Of course the idea that we have moral sentiments because they are useful and profitable seems to many people to misunderstand or deny the nature of morality. The whole point of altruistic behaviour is that we do it without thought of reward - sometimes, without any thought at all, as when rescuing people from drowning, or pulling them back from an oncoming car. There are less dramatic examples, however, which include sharing food, helping the sick, the very young, and the old, even when we are not related to them, and sharing tools and knowledge. All these are nearly universal human habits; in fact we describe societies where they don't happen as inhuman. This kindliness became part of human nature, Trivers argued, because kind instincts were rewarded and this happened because our ancestors lived sufficiently long lives in small stable groups to keep track of who owed whom favours. The great originality of the theory is not that it says that we are under certain circumstances naturally benevolent. Plenty of people had made that observation before. What no one had seen was that this benevolence requires a very strong sense of fairness if it is to become an established instinct. Fairness, or justice, has its roots for Trivers in the determination to see that other people are not cheating us, and taking favours without giving anything in return. From abstract notions about the flow of genes he had come up with concrete and testable ideas about the ways our minds work; and it turned out to be demonstrably true that we find it much easier to solve logical puzzles if they are framed as if they are about cheating rather than an emotionally neutral subject, even though the two ways of putting the problem are logically equivalent. The paper on reciprocal altruism, written before he had even gained a doctorate, has been enormously influential. Robin Dunbar, the professor of behavioural ecology at Liverpool University, says Trivers played a fundamentally important role in the development of modern evolutionary studies of behaviour and ecology. His four key early papers spawned (and continue to spawn) research in the study of both animals and humans. The importance of his contribution is beyond question. The modern field of behavioural ecology (the name under which sociobiology now travels) would simply not have been the same had he not written these papers. Trivers' early work set the foundation for a biologically based system of ethics, in which a preference for some sorts of justice was part of our nature. Matt Ridley, whose book The Origins of Virtue is largely an expansion and restatement of Trivers's argument, says that when he was a student at Oxford, and got a postcard from Trivers asking for a reprint of one of his papers, "It was like getting a postcard from God"; and the whole line of popularising Darwinian books from Richard Dawkins all the way down to Steven Pinker descends from Trivers's insights. There is a paradox here. Ridley, a former science editor of the Economist, takes the moral of Trivers's work to be distinctly Thatcherite, and in general the attacks on sociobiology, as well as the defences of it, have taken it to be a Right-wing construction, and a way to defend power and privilege by showing they are part of human nature. Even fairly left-wing Darwinists like Daniel Dennett tend to discover from their study of human nature that the perfect way for humans to live is that favoured by professors at good universities on the East Coast. But Trivers, one-time friend of the Black Panthers, loathes the Bush regime more than most forms of authority. He thinks biology teaches us to be wary of the idea that any particular individual could be perfectly designed by evolution: "You're always facing a new world to which you're poorly adapted. So if you look at any given individual, and ask how the hell did [they] survive for 4.5bn years, then it is helpful to think of all these error-prone processes: sexual reproduction ensures that there is lots of variation in the population, and most of it will be less than optimal." His second big idea was parental investment. Parents and children would have differing genetic interests, he saw, because a parent would wish to spread its investment of energy and time over all its children, to guard against the possibility of any one of them dying, whereas any individual child would want more than the parent should optimally give. As a baby mammal, it is to your advantage to suckle for as long as possible, but your mother may leave more grandchildren if she weans you in favour of a younger sibling. Three more classic papers followed before a second breakdown, in 1972. After that, his interests shifted away from social theory in animals. He got married, for the first time, to Lorna Staples, with whom he had four children, including twins; and grew increasingly frustrated with Harvard's refusal to give him a properly paid job. He attributed this to Lewontin, so he took particular pleasure, earlier this year, in being invited back to Harvard to lecture Lewontin's own students. "It's like killing those fuckers and stealing the young away from them." He has also quarrelled with his own side. He had written a foreword to the first edition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, a book which popularised many of his ideas when it appeared in 1976; but it did not appear in the translation and when the book was republished in 1989, the foreword was dropped altogether, and replaced by a second author's preface, a breach of academic etiquette which made Trivers angry. Dawkins says that dropping the foreword was an accident and that he hopes to reinstate it. Trivers was disinclined to allow it to be published: "My first wife, a wonderful woman, used to refer to Dick as the Selfish Gene, just because of the way he acts"; however, he has now relented and Dawkins confirms it will appear in future editions. In Santa Cruz in the 80s, Trivers formed a fast friendship with Huey Newton, the Black Panther, whom he described as an untutored genius, but one who was also in some respects unteachable. The two men planned a book on deceit and self-deception. Newton, Trivers says, was an expert on both. His youngest daughter was Newton's god-daughter. A baby photograph of her, taken for her first passport, hangs in his office at Harvard, and with it comes a story about Newton: "We said to Huey, if she were going to be the judge at your trial, would you do the crime? And he looked at the picture for a while, and said, no. So we had it blown up and framed, and he hung the picture above his bed to remind himself not to do the crime. Did it work? I'm not sure it helped at all, because he was basically someone who did whatever he felt like doing." Trivers also wrote a textbook of animal behaviour, which failed in its purpose of assuring him of a small income for life, but proved influential in the way the subject was taught. In 1995, he moved back to Rutgers University, in New Jersey, as a professor of anthropology and biology, but continued to work on the conflicts that can arise within the genome. Although this required him to master an entirely new field of science he felt it was related to his earlier studies. They had concentrated on conflicts that appear within species once you realise that the unit of self-interest is the individual. Now he was looking at conflicts within individuals, which arise when genes inside an organism are in conflict. He says: "There are people who say to me, you never would have done it if you thought it would take you 15 years. And I say, no, of course I wouldn't. So they say, well self-deception, namely blinding yourself to the cost, is adaptive. Then I say, you cannot prove that, because you never know what I would have accomplished with those 15 years not devoted to genetics. Maybe I'd have made major insights into psychology ... The general trajectory in academia is to do ever easier things, so you start with social theory based on natural selection. Then you do deceit and self-deception, if that's really easier - at least it's vaguer; then you do religion, then you do your autobiography. "So in retrospect I did something unusual, which is very rewarding." Genes in Conflict by Robert Trivers and Austin Burt will be published by Harvard University Press in November. Robert Trivers Born: February 19 1943, Washington DC. Education: Phillips Academy, Andover; Harvard (1965 BA history, '72 Phd biology. Married: 1974-1988 Lorna Staples (three daughters: Natasha and Natalia (twins), Alelia, one son Jonathan); '97-2004 Debra Dixon (one daughter, Aubrey). Occupation: Harvard 1971-72 instructor in anthropology; '73-75 assistant professor of biology; '75-78 associate professor of biology; '78-94 professor of biology, University of California, Santa Cruz; '94- professor of anthropology and biological sciences, Rutgers; 2005 (spring) visiting professor of psychology, Harvard. Selected publications: 1985 Social Evolution; 2002 Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:01:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:01:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: An Epidemology of Representations: A Talk with Dan Sperber Message-ID: An Epidemology of Representations: A Talk with Dan Sperber http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sperber05/sperber05_index.html How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small-scale local processes I am talking about are, on the one hand, psychological processes that happen inside people's brains, and on the other hand, changes that people bring about in their common environment-- for instance the noise they make when they talk or the paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk--and through which they interact. Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system. AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS [7.27.05] A Talk with Dan Sperber Dan Sperber Edge Video [10]Broadband | [11]Modem Introduction Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist who has focused on the more cognitive, more naturalist, approaches linked to evolution. "For a long time," he says, "my ideas were not very well received among anthropologists. They've been discussed a lot, but I found myself spending too much time with my fellow anthropologists arguing the basics of the field rather than moving forward in research. I got involved in linguistics, experimental psychology, philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, and lots of fascinating topics--and continuing also the conversation with anthropologists. Anthropology is a discipline that has been in crisis all my life." Dan Sperber's parents were both eastern-European Jews; his father, Manes Sperber, a famous novelist, was born in Galicia, grew up in Vienna, then moved to Germany. He met his mother, who came from Latvia, in France in the 30s . Manes Sperber was a Communist, was very active in the party, but left the party at the time of the Moscow trials. Sperber was born in France. "That's my culture," he says. "I am French. Still, there are French people who are much more French than I am. They have roots as they say, but the image of roots has always made me smile. You know, I'm not a plant." The reason he gives for having become an anthropologist is that he was raised an atheist. There was no god in the family. His father, Manes Sperber, was from a Jewish family, had refused to do his bar mitzvah, and he transmitted zero religion to his son, but at the same time, he had deep respect for religious people. There was no sense that they are somehow inferior. This left the young Sperber with a puzzle: how can people, intelligent decent people, be so badly mistaken? Sperber is known for his work in developing a naturalistic approach to culture under the name of "epidemiology of representations", and, with British linguist Deirdre Wilson, for developing a cognitive approach to communication known as "Relevance Theory". Both the epidemiology of representations and relevance theory has been influential and controversial. He is also known for his early work on the anthropology or religion, in which he tried to understand, in a generalist manner and in a positive way (i.e. without making them into idiots), why people could be religious. He took part in classical anthropological studies but he also argued from the start that you have to look at basic innate mental structures, which, he argued, "played quite an important role in the very possibility of religious beliefs, in the fact that, more generally, beliefs in the supernatural fixate in the way they do in the human mind, are so extraordinarily catching". Sperber's "catchiness", a theory he has been exploring for a generation, connects with Malcolm Gladwell's idea of a "tipping point". "I've never met Gladwell, " he says, "but when his book came out, many people sent me the book, or told me to read it, telling me that here's the same kind of thing you've been arguing for a long time. Yes, you get the kind of epidemiological process of something gradually, almost invivibly spreading in a population and then indeed reaching a "tipping point." That's the kind of dynamic you may find with epidemiological phenomena. Still, I don't believe that Gladwell or anybody else, myself included, has a satisfactory understanding of the general causes of the dynamics of cultural distribution." " Now, if I could just write with the slickness of Gladwell, and coin one of his best-selling titles such as Blink! or The Tipping Point. . . but I guess I would also have to give up trying to convey much of the hard substance of my work. Oh well..". Edge is pleased to present An Epidemiology of Representations: A Talk with Dan Sperber. -- [12]JB DAN SPERBER, Directeur de Recherche au CNRS, Paris, is a French social and cognitive scientist. He is the author of Rethinking Symbolism, On Anthropological Knowledge, and Explaining Culture. He is also the co-author, (with Deirdre Wilson) of Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Sperber holds a research professorship at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and has held visiting positions at Cambridge University, the British Academy, the London School of Economics, the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the University of Bologna, and the University of Hong-Kong. [13]DAN SPERBER's Edge Bio Page _________________________________________________________________ AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS [DAN SPERBER:] What I want to know is how, in an evolutionary perspective, social cultural phenomena relate to psychological mental phenomena. The social and the psychological sciences,when they emerged as properly scholarly disciplines with their own departments in the nineteenth century took quite different approaches, adopted different methodologies, asked different questions. Psychologists lost sight of the fact that what's happening in human minds is always informed by the culture in which individuals grow. Social scientists lost sight of the fact that the transmission, the maintenance, and the transformation of culture takes place not uniquely but in part in these individual psychological processes. This means that if what you're studying is culture, the part played by the psychological moments, or episodes, in the transmission of culture should be seen as crucial. I find it unrealistic to think of culture as something hovering somehow above individuals -- culture goes through them, and through their minds and their bodies and that is, in good part, where culture is being made. I've been arguing for a very long time now that one should think of the evolved psychological makeup of human beings both as a source of constraints on the way culture can develop, evolve, and also, of course, as what makes culture possible in the first place. I've been arguing against the now discredited "blank slate" view of the human mind--now splendidly laid to rest by Steve Pinker--but it wasn't discredited when I was a student, in fact the "blank slate" view was what we were taught and what most people went on teaching. Against this, I was arguing that there were specific dispositions, capacities, competencies, in the human mind that gave rise to culture, contributed to shaping it, and also constrained the way it can evolve -- so that led me to work both in anthropology--and more generally in the social sciences--,which was my original domain, and,more and more, in what was to become cognitive sciences. In those years, the late 60s, psychology was in the early stags of the "cognitive revolution." It was a domain that really transformed itself in a radical manner. This was, and still is, a very exciting intellectual period in which to live, with, alas, nothing comparable happening in social sciences, (where little that is truly exciting has happened during this period in my opinion). I wanted the social sciences to take advantage of this revolution in the study of cognition and I've tried to suggest how this could be done. How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small-scale local processes I am talking about are, on the one hand, psychological processes that happen inside people's brains, and on the other hand, changes that people bring about in their common environment--for instance the noise they make when they talk or the paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk--and through which they interact. Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system. A good part of my work has been to study, in large part with British linguist Deirdre Wilson, the mechanisms of human communication and show that they're much more complex and interesting than is generally assumed, and much less preservative and replicative and more constructive than one might think: understanding involves a lot of construction, and not just reconstruction, and very little by way of simple replication. When you are told something, the simple view of what happens would be: 'ah! These are words, they have meaning,' and so you decode the meaning of the word and you thereby understand what the speaker meant. A more realistic and, as I said, also a more interesting idea is that the words don't encode the speaker meaning, they just give you evidence of the speaker's meaning. When we speak we want our audience to understand something that's in our mind. And we have no way to fully encode it, and trying at least to encode as much as possible would be absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic utterances, however rich and complex they may be, cannot fully encode our thoughts. But they can give strong richly structured piece of evidence of what our thoughts are. From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich pieces of evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared background knowledge, drawing on the common cultural, on the local situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so on. You construct a complex representation helped by all these different factors. You to end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the words used by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your own, relevant to you, a recognition, to begin with, of what the speaker meant, from which you extract what is relevant to you. We're not that interested when we try to comprehend what others say, in getting in our minds a copy of what they had in mind, we're interested in getting that which is of use and of relevance to us, and we see what others are trying to tell us as a source of insight and information from which we can indeed construct a thought of our own. The same is true of imitation; rarely are you concerned when you imitate other people's behavior in copying them exactly. What you want when you see others doing something that you think is worth doing, for instance, cook a souffl?, it's not to copy the exact gestures and the exact souffle that you saw, with its qualities, and also maybe its defects, your goal is to cook a good souffl?, your good souffl?. The goal of these partly preservative processes of communication and imitation is not to copy per se, but to take advantage of information provided by others in order to build thoughts of our own, knowledge of our own, objects of our own, behaviors of our own, for which we take part of the responsibility. The process is constructive in that sense. Communication is a very broad notion --one should ask whether it makes sense to look for a general theory of communication, given that the notion covers such a variety of processes -- processes of communication among machines; biologists talk about communication among cells; by "animal communication" biologists mean also unitentional deception as when the viceroy butterfly has wings mimicking the pattern found on the poisonous monarch butterfly, so as not to be eaten by predator birds, and so on. All these form of communication and many others are communication in a very broad sense where some information--in some broad sense of information too--is provided by one device or organism, and is used by another. There are some commonalities linked to this general definition of communication, and indeed, Shannon and Weaver for instance were interested in such a very basic notion. But if we think of communication in biological terms, it is not clear that we have the subject matter of a useful general theory. Think of locomotion. How much can you get from a general theory of locomotion, even sticking to the biological domain and leaving aside artifacts, airplanes, cars, bicycles. I doubt that there is much to get from a general theory of locomotion that would cover fish swimming, birds flying, snakes crawling, us walking, and so on. If you're studying human locomotion, then you look at the specific organs, the way, for instance, we do it, why we do it, what evolutionary pressure have selected our particular way of doing it. Even more--much more--than human bipedal upright walking, human communication is very special, it's quite unlike the communication you find in other animals. Not just because of language, which indeed has no real equivalent among other species, but also because of another reason which is also quite remarkable but that has not been stressed, and on which Deirdre Wilson and I have been doing a lot of work, namely that if you look at human languages as codes -- which in a sense they undoubtedly are -- they are very defective codes! When say, vervet monkeys communicate among themselves, one vervet monkey might spot a leopard and emit an alarm cry that indicates to the other monkeys in his group that there's a leopard around. The other vervet monkeys are informed by this alarm cry of the presence of a leopard, but they're not particularly informed of the mental state of the communicator, and they don't give a damn about it. The signal puts them in a cognitive state of knowledge about the presence of a leopard, similar to that of the communicating monkey -- here you really have a smooth coding-decoding system. In the case of humans, when we speak we're not interested per se in the meaning of the words, we register what the word means as a way to find out what the speaker means. Speaker's meaning is what's involved. Speaker's meaning is a mental state of the speaker, an intention he or she has to share with us some content. Human communication is based on the ability we have to attribute mental state to others, to want to change the mental states of others, and to accept that others change ours. When I communicate with you I am trying to change your mind. I am trying to act on your mental state. I'm not just putting out a kind of signal for you to decode. And I do that by providing you with evidence of a mental state in which I want to put you in and evidence of my intention to do so. The role of what is often known in cognitive science as "theory of mind," that is the uniquely human ability to attribute complex mental states to others, is as much a basis of human communication as is language itself. I am full of admiration for the mathematical theory of information and communication, the work of Shannon, Weaver, and others, and it does give a kind of very general conceptual framework which we might take advantage of. But if you apply it directly to human communication, what you get is a mistaken picture, because the general model of communication you find is a coding-decoding model of communication, as opposed to this more constructive and inferential form of communication which involves infering the mental stateof others, and that's really characteristic of humans. I have been developing my own approach to culture under the general heading of "epidemiology of representations". The first thing to do, of course, is to take away the negative connotation of epidemiology -- it's not the epidemiology of diseases -- epidemiology is the study of the distribution of certain items or conditions in the population. One can study the distribution of particular pathological conditions, but you can also study the distribution of good habits, or thoughts, or representations, artifacts, or forms of knowledge. I'm not assuming that culture is good -- I don't want to have a cultural epidemiology to be on the side of the angels, as opposed to medical anthropology on the side of the demons. What's I like about epidemiology is that it's the one social science that is truly naturalistic in studying what happens in populations, typically in human populations, and it explains the macro phenomena at the level of population such as epidemics, by the aggregation of the micro processes both inside individuals and in their interaction. I believe that the cultural and the social in general should be approached in the same manner. Of course I'm not the only one to do that, a number of people, mostly coming from biology, like Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus W. Feldman, E.O Wilson and Xharles Lumsden, Richard Dawkins, Bill Durham, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson, have developed different conceptions which in this broad sense are epidemiological, or, another way to put it: they are forms of "population-thinking" applied to culture. You take what happens at the population level to results from the microprocesses affecting individuals in the population. Dawkins, who is particularly clear and simple in a good way in his approach, offers a contrast to my approach. For Dawkins, you can take the Darwinian model of selection and apply it almost as is to culture. Why? Because the basic idea is that, just as genes are replicators, bits of culture that Dawkins called "memes" are replicators too. If you take the case of population genetics, the causal mechanisms involved split into two subsets. You have the genes, which are extremely reliable mechanisms of replication. On the other hand, you have a great variety of environmental factors -- including organisms which are both expression of genes and part of their environment --, environmental factors that affect the relative reproductive success of the genes. You have then on one side this extremely robust replication mechanism, and on the other side a huge variety of other factors that make these competing replication devices more or less successful. Translate this into the cultural domain, and you'll view memes, bits of culture, as again very strong replication devices, and all the other factors, historical, ecological, and so on, as contributing to the relative success of the memes. What I'm denying, and I've mentioned this before, is that there is a basis for a strong replication mechanism either in cognition or in communication. It's much weaker than that. As I said, preservative processes are always partly constructive processes. When they don't replicate, this does not mean that they make an error of copying. Their goal is not to copy. There are transformation in the process of transmission all the time, and also in the process of remembering and retrieving past, stored information, and these transformations are part of the efficient working of these mechanisms. In the case of cultural evolution, this yields a kind of paradox. On the one hand, of course, we have macro cultural stability -- we do see the same dish being cooked, the same ideologies being adopted, the same words being used, the same song being sung. Without some relatively high degree of cultural stability--which was even exaggerated in classical anthropology--, the very notion of culture wouldn't make sense. How then do we reconcile this relative macro stability at the cultural level, with a lack of fidelity at the micro level? You might think: if it's stable at the macro level, what else could provide you this macro stability apart from the faithful copying at the micro level? It's the only possible explanation that most people think of. But that's not the only one, and it's not even a plausible one. Dawkins himself has pointed out that each act of of cultural transmission may involve some mistakes in copying, some mutation. But if that is the case, then the Darwinian selection model isunlikely to apply, at least in its basic form. The problem is reconciling this macro stability with the micro lack of sufficient fidelity. The answer, I believe, is linked precisely to the fact that in human, transmission is achieved not just by replication, but also by construction. If it were just replication, copying, and there were lots of errors of copy all the time, then nothing would stabilize and it's unlikely that the selective pressures would be strong enough to produce a real selection comparable to the one you see in biology. On the other hand, if you have constructive processes, they can compensate the limits of the copying processes. What happens is this. Although indeed when things get transmitted they tend to vary with each episode of transmission, these variations tend to gravitate around what I call "cultural attractors", which are, if you look at the dynamics of cultural transmission, points or regions in the space of possibilities, towards which transformations tend to go. The stability of cultural phenomena is not provided by a robust mechanism of replication. It's given in part, yes, by a mechanism of preservation which is not very robust, not very faithful, (and it's not its goal to be so). And it's given in part by a strong tendency for the construction -- in every mind at every moment-- of new ideas, new uses of words, new artifacts, new behaviors, to go not in a random direction, but towards attractors. And, by the way, these cultural attractors themselves have a history. Dawkins, of course, is only one of the people who have proposed new ways of modeling cultural evolution. He's important because he brings it down to the simplest possible version -- there's a great merit in simplicity. He sees cultural evolution at the same time as being analogous to biological evolution, and as being an evolution almost independent from biological evolution: it has just been made possible by the biological evolution of homo sapiens, which has given us the mind we have, and which, so the story goes, makes us capable indeed of endlessly copying contents. We are supposed to be imitation machines, "meme machines" to use Susan Blakemore's phrase, and this explains that. Dawkins, in a strange way, presents something very similar to the blank slate view of the mind. The blank slate view, as I was taught it in anthropology, says the human mind is capable of learning anything -- whatever content would be provided by culture can be written on the blank slate. Well, the general imitating machine does more or less the same thing. It's capable of imitating just whatever type of content it is presented with, and the relative success of some contents against others, has to do with the selective forces. The idea that the human mind is such a kind of universal imitation machine is hardly better psychology, in my view, than the blank slate story. Others, E.O Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson, have asked to what extent the evolved dispositions that both constrain and make possible culture are, in return, affected by cultural evolution itself so as to yield a kind of gene-culture coevolution. Instead of having two evolutionary scenarios running in parallel, one biological evolution, the other cultural evolution, you get some degree of interaction, possibly a strong interaction, between gene and culture. The general idea has got to be correct. The details, in my opinion, are still very poorly understood. For a variety of reasons, I believe that memes are not the right story about cultural evolution. This is because in the cultural case, replication is not very successful in explaining cultural stability. I also believe that among the factors we need to take into account to explain cultural attraction of which I was talking before, are evolved aspect of the human psychology. The one type of scholarship and research that has to be brought into the picture, in my view, is evolutionary psychology, as defended in particular in the work of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steve Pinker and taken up in more critical ways by a growing number of developmental psychologists and of philosophers. To understand culture, we have to understand the complexity of the psychological makeup of human beings. We have to go to really deep psychology, understood both in a richly cognitive manner and with a proper evolutionary perspective, to put start explaining cultural evolution. We need a representation of a human mind that's complex in an appropriate manner, true to the empirical data, and rich enough indeed to explain the regularities the, stability, and the variability of culture. This is them a different story, but it's still a Darwinian story. It's a Darwinian story in the sense that it's an application of population thinking, which tries to explains the macro phenomena in terms of a micro processes and properties, and which doesn't assume that there are types or essences of macro cultural and social things. Macro regularities are always the outcome of distribution of micro features, evolving all the time. In this Darwinian story however, instead of causal processes in culture as split between robust replication devices and a variety of selection factor, we have a much more promiscuous form of causality. Cultural causality is promiscuous. Constructive processes always interfere with preservation processes. So we need to build models different from standard Darwinian models of selection, in order to arrive at the right way to draw on Darwinian inspiration with regard to culture, that is, we must generalize Darwin to the cultural case, rather than adjust it in a way which twists the data well beyond what is empirically plausible. ~~ The idea of God isn't a supernatural idea. If the idea of God were supernatural, then religion would be true. The idea of God, the idea, the representation of something supernatural is not itself supernatural. If it were, then we would be out of business. Precisely what we're trying to explain is, to quote the title of a book by Pascal Boyer, the "naturalness of religious ideas," explain, in other terms, how these ideas of the supernatural can occur in the natural beings we are, in human brains and minds and culture, and have the kind of success that they have, in spite of the fact that you can't explain them in the way that you explain so many human ideas, such as ideas that are acquired through experience of the things they are about. We humans have ideas about plants and animals because we experience plants and animals in a special way with the brain we have. We don't experience God, or goblins or witches, because there are no such things. Nevertheless, we have rich complex ideas about them, a richness in many ways comparable to the ideas we have about plants, animals and the natural things around them. How is that possible? The issue is what makes these kind of ideas psychologically, cognitively attractive -- "catching", such that they stay with you in your head and you may want to communicate them and to guide your behavior on their basis. And also: which of them, among all the unrealistic unsupported ideas that are possible in infinite variety, are going to be so "catching" as to achieve cultural success, in the manner of the many religious ideas that has been around for centuries? It's not like any blatantly false idea will somehow make it to a cultural success -- far from it. Most of them don't stand a chance. What's special about ideas of the supernatural? I argued long ago that it had to do with the fact that they are rooted in our cognitive dispositions, in the way we approach the natural world. Instead of departing from our commonsense ideas so to speak at random, they're like direct provocation -- they have always an aspect of going directly against what should be the most intuitively obvious. So for instance it's part of our common sense knowledge of of living forms, that an animal can't be both a dog and a cat, but the supernatural is full of creatures like dragons that typically belong to several species simultaneously. It's part of our common sense knowledge of the physical world that an entity cannot be in two places simultaneously, but ubiquity is a distinctive trait of supernatural beings. It's kind of again commonsense, in our commonsense psychology which we deploy in everyday interaction with one another, that one's visual perceptions are limited to what's present in front of one's eyes. Supernatural beings typically can see the past, the future, and things on the other side of earth. So supernatural beings are kind of provocations to commonsense. They are really deeply counterintuitive. That's an idea I suggested a long time ago and that Pascal Boyer has developed and enriched in a remarkable fashion, and which I think is one of the cognitive ingredients that helps explain the success of religious ideas. Of course, it's only one little fragment of a kind of complex picture. ~~ I started as an anthropologist. Precisely because they were more cognitive, more naturalist, more linked also to evolution than most, for a long time, my ideas were not very well received among anthropologists. They've been discussed a lot, but I found myself spending too much time with my fellow anthropologists arguing the basics of the field rather than moving forward in research. I got involved in linguistics, experimental psychology, philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, and lots of fascinating topics--and continuing also the conversation with anthropologists. Anthropology is a discipline that has been in crisis all my life. When I started the crisis was linked to the end of the colonization. Anthropology had developed during the period of colonization, as a kind of ancillary science for colonial enterprise. At the same time so many anthropologists were actually active in anti-colonialist movement, and that was also one of the reasons I came to anthropology. But, the decolonisation, anthropology lost this kind of historical and sociological context. Anthropologists in the 60s, 70s, were asking about their political role, about whether or not we were on the right side. Anthropologists started studying themselves and trying to reflect on their own situation. It was a kind of reflective anthropology, which had a number of interesting aspects. I certainly don't think it was useless although it became a bit obsessive. Parallel to these developments, were the post-structuralist and then post-modernist movements in the humanities and the social sciences, the development of "cultural studies," and many anthropologists felt at ease in these movements. This produced a new kind of discourse, taking the study of other cultures as much as a pretext as a subject matter to be investigated in a standard scholarly manner. Again, some of the products of this appraoch are of genuine interest, but on the whole more harm has been done than good. While this was happening, others, in part in reaction against this turn toward the literary in anthropology, moved on the contrary toward a more naturalistic anthropology. They became interested in social biology, in biological anthropology. What you find now in anthropology departments is that people can't talk to each other. Some universities have now had two anthropology departments. So anthropology is stilll in crisis, even if it is not the same crisis. You can look at such a crisis from an institutional or from an intellectual point of view. Universities as we know them emerged in the nineteenth century and unerwent major changes, in particular after World War II. It does not make sense to project this short past into an indefinite future. In fact, universities are evolving, transforming themselves beyond recognition. The biggest changes are will be due to new communication technology. There is also now a big and blatant gap between the structure of departments in universities, which have to do with institution of transmission of knowledge, and which seem to define stable domains such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the real ongoing research which is structured in new ways -- in the form of creative, or dynamic, research programs, that may fall within a traditional discipline, or, more often, across several traditional disciplines. Depending on the productivity of such dynamic programs, they are can go on for ten years, 20 years, 30 years, or more. It is these dynamic research programs that interest me; I've been involved in several, and that's what I find to be intellectually exciting. When we say anthropology is in crisis we're talking about anthropology as defined by academic institutions. And it doesn't matter. It deserves to be in crisis; it deserves to explode, let it do so. References 10. http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/sperber.html 11. http://www.edge.org/video/56k/sperber.html 12. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html 13. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sperber.html 14. http://www.edge.org/documents/summerbooks2005/books.html 15. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html 16. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/weinberger.html 17. mailto:editor at edge.org 18. http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html 19. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sperber05/sperber05_index.html#top From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:08:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:08:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Old Design: Amillennials, Premillennials, Postmillennials, Historists, Praeterists, and Spiritualists Message-ID: Amillennials, Premillennials, Postmillennials, Historists, Praeterists, and Spiritualists http://www.olddesign.com/Literal%20or%20Spiritual.html [This looks like a good rundown of the various major viewpoints.] There is a great debate that has constantly raged among theologians upon the subject of what they call eschatology, which is a term that they have developed to refer to the study of the "end times" or the last age of time of humanity upon the earth. Many, if not most Amills, Premills and Historists are to some degree futurists, as they see most or some degree of prophecy to be yet fulfilled, which fulfillment may also include the final dissolution of the natural or physical universe or cosmos. There are two main groups of Millennialists, The Pre and the Post, with the Premills being the largest; but with many variations of ideas, and many subdivisions exist among them . The Postmillennials believe that there will be a period of great tribulation for the saints AFTER the Milliennium, while the Premillennials believe that this period of tribulation will take place BEFORE the Milliennium (a literal 1000 year personal reign of Christ upon earth.) The Premillennials and the Amillennials: The Amillennialists The Amillennials generally hold that the Kingdom of Christ on earth is NOW, Amills believe that the kingdom is physical and spiritual in nature, (though they disagree greatly as to the extent of the spirituality and physicalness of the Kingdom;) That the kingdom is now spiritually present within those He deems to be His people, and this kingdom will literally, spiritually and chronologically continue until Christ bodily returns in a great cosmological event, when He will destroy the physical earth by fire, (and many believe that He will dissolve the entire universe or cosmos at this same time also, and that Time will cease to exist as a creation of God; but again, there are some variations of their views on this.) That He will reassemble the biological bodies of all the human race from the elements of the earth, and perhaps from beyond, into the original of their former earthly state, change their earthly physical bodies into "spiritual" bodies, then raise them into the atmosphere or some other place, where Christ will then hold a Great Tribunal, while seated upon a literal Great White Throne - That He will resurrect the righteous first, and then the remainder of those who are alive upon the earth; That He will separate the "sheep from the goats", judge all according to their past deeds, whether good or bad, and those who are judged wicked, to an everlasting or eternal punishment for their wickedness, cast these wicked into a literal burning lake of fire, where they will eternally suffer punishment for their sins against God and the light of nature. Some Amills believe that the wicked and righteous will all be literally resurrected from their physical graves at the same time, but the righteous will be judged not quilty, Some hold that the righteous only will be resurrected, while the wicked are directly consigned to everlasting punishment. Those, (after their bodies have been changed) will be judged righteous in Christ in God's sight, and will be exonerated from all punishment by the judgment of Christ, and then carried to the Eternal Heaven to live with God forever. -But again, there are many more variations of the above, and this is only a general representation of the ideas that Amills hold on eschatology. Some Amills and other schools are regarded by most Millennialists as taking excessive liberty in allegorizing and "spiritualizing" the Scriptures, while Premills claim they hold a more "literal", chronological interpretation which is more consistent with the "time frames" of prophecy. (Whether this claim is really true or not, can be critically examined in the opinion of the present writer.) This is just a general sketch that represents the common view of Amills. Of course there are many variations of specific details within the Amillennial scenario. "The third generic view of the interpretation of the facts of Scripture relating to eschatology, is called Amillennialism. The name itself is unfortunate in that it would seem to indicate that its advocates do not believe in the thousand year period of Revelation 20. The name literally means `no millennium,' while as a matter of fact, its advocates believe that the Millennium is a spiritual or heavenly Millennium, rather than an earthly one of a literal reign of Christ on earth before the final judgment. From one point of view, it might be called a variety of Postmillennialism, since it believes that the spiritual or heavenly Millennium precedes the second coming of Christ." Floyd E. Hamilton The Premillennialists Futurists, of whom are the Milliannists, according to some writers, were very small or nearly non-existent during the last half of the nineteenth century, but there has been quite a resurgence of those who hold this view of eschatology during the 20th Century, though at the present time seems to be again losing some ground. (beginning of the 21st Century) Premillennialists (or dispensationalists as they are usually called) generally hold that the present Kingdom of Christ, or the gospel dispensation exists, but it exists only as an interim period, and that it was instituted because the Jews rejected Jesus as The true Messiah. Many, if not most of them believe that His coming in the flesh to the Jews was based upon a conditional "offer" of salvation to the Jews, in order that He might establish a literal political kingdom among them; that this was God's "original intention for Christ's Kingdom on earth; but since they rejected this "offer", He then postponed the establishment of this same type of kingdom until a later period, which will then comprise their Millennium under consideration. Some Premills that are Arminian in sentiment hold that the actual and final fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant was conditional to the natural Jew under the Law, but wll be unconditional to the future establishment of the coming millenium (which will be headed up by natural Jews) and the present gospel (church) kingdom is a conditional covenant to believers in Christ! Millennialists generally hold that the prophecies and promises of the O.T. Scriptures applied to (or were exclusively for) the natural Jews only, and will finally be fullfilled to these as such in their coming millianium; That Christ made another covenant with those called under the Gospel Dispensation, and that this covenant is only to be temporary; but His main covenant is and has always been with the original Israelites as a nation, and He will finally restore them and give them life again when He reverts again to this covenant, and when they will again be recognized as the main body of His favor, and graft them again into their own Tree of original promises made to them. - But again there are quite a few variations within this general scenario. Many Milliannists claim that Amillennialism (kingdom is NOW present) is not founded upon the Scriptures, or the general doctrine of the "end-times" as generally believed by the early church fathers, and that according to the writings of the fathers and other secular historians of that age, the doctrines of Amillennialism were largely invented by Augustine, Origen and other church fathers, and that the political actions of that age, especially those of Constantine, greatly attributed to the process of establishing Amillennialism as the leading doctrine of the Catholic Church. To quote from some authors: "The Premillennial school of interpreters are electionists in doctrine, holding that God has foretold that not everyone, in this present age, will be saved, but rather that, through a world-wide preaching of the Gospel there will be gathered from the Jews and Gentiles a people for His name. Such interpreters further hold that when this promise has been fulfilled, the Lord will gather His people to Himself and then, personally, bodily, literally and visibly return to earth and that following this, He will set up a Kingdom upon earth with its center at Jerusalem which will be particularly related to the Jews but world-wide in its influence and beneficence. They also hold that this kingdom will endure for exactly one thousand years. That after this time, the new heavens and earth will be brought into view and then, that eternity, with its rewards for the saved and punishment for the lost, will follow." Henry W. Frost (The Second Coming of Christ, p.152) (The Basis of Millennial Faith, p.35) "In ecclesiology, the main doctrine of the Church, Premillenarianism has a firm basis. The main point in question is whether or not the Church is a distinct body in this present age. If the Church is not a subject of Old Testament prophecy, then the Church is not fulfilling Israel's promises but instead Israel herself must fulfill them and that in the future. In brief, Premillennialism with a dispensational view recognizes the Church as a distinct entity, distinct from Israel in her beginning, in her relation to this age and her promises. If the Church is not a distinct body, then the door is open wide for Amillennialism to enter with its ideas that the Church is some sort of full-bloomed development of Judaism and the fulfiller of Israel's promise of blessing (but not of judgment). Thus Premillenialism and ecclesiology are inseparably related." Charles C. Ryrie (The Basis of Premillennial faith, p.126) Historicism While the Praeterists hold that most, if not all Scripture prophecy was fulfilled in 70 A.D. and shortly following, the Historists believe that Divine prophecy is gradually being fulfilled throughout the succeeding ages of time, and especially that the Revelation to John described these unfolding events in prophecy. One argument that Historists use to support this and to mitigate the statements in Revelation concerning the things that must shortly be done is that they contend that Revelation was written in 96 A.D. (which is the traditional view held by most Futurists,) instead of BEFORE the destruction of ancient Jerusalem, or around 64-68 A.D, which date most Praeterists contend for - Historists attempt to leave much room in their eschatology for prophecy to yet be fulfilled. Many of them along with the Amills, (many of whom are of the Historist school) say that Daniels seventy weeks did not actually end in 70 AD, but rather in the middle of the last week of Daniels prophecy. (Dan 9) Many say that revelations to man from God did not end at the time of the appearance of Christ with His propitiation for sin, but will continue until the "end of time" or until the dissolution of all things. In contrast with the Praeterists, Most Historists believe that although Christ finished His redemptive work at the cross, yet God's revelation to man was not complete in Christ at that time, but must be gradually fulfilled throughout succeeding ages of time : We have demonstrated in our short discourse that for the "seventy weeks" to have ended at the fall of Jerusalem would have required another "break" in time, similar to how the Futurists view this prophecy. This was proved by applying the "Day for a Year" principle, which is firmly grounded in Scripture. The subject of the Day for a Year is so rich that it deserves a thorough study of its own. The "seventy weeks" concerned itself not with announcing the end of God's revelations to man but rather with the appearance of Jesus Christ, His ministry and the call of the Gentiles or Nations into Salvation. Again, why were the "seventy weeks" determined? To finish the transgression; to make an end of sins; to make reconciliation for iniquity; to bring in everlasting righteousness; to seal up the vision and prophecy; and to anoint the most Holy! Bill and Sandy Kalivas (But when Philip Mauro, Anstey and other "seventy week" writers apply the day for a year principle they get 70 AD as the fulfillment of the predicted 490 years of Daniel.) Historicism is a satisfying and godly view of Revelation. It allows for God's hand to be seen in our past, present and future. Events which have been considered political in nature are shown to be fulfillment of His recorded word. No other interpretation offers this. Praeterism, placing Revelation behind us and Futurism, placing Revelation before us, put these revealing prophecies out of our present lives. Bill and Sandy Kalivas The Preterists There are two general groups of Preterists, The Full Preterists, and the Partial Preterists. The Amills and Preterists are actually in more general agreement than are the Amills and Premills, though many Premills and Amills would deny this, largely because many Amills charge most Preterists, (especially Full Preterists) with denying a resurrection of the physical (bodies of) the saints, because most Amills, along with futurists in general, look upon the resurrection in a physical way or as a great event that will transpire with great literal glory and display that may be perceived by human physical faculties. A Full Preterist, or one who holds to what is commonly called "fullfilled eschatology" emphasizes along with some hybrid Preterist-Amills, that the prophecies and promises made by God through the Old Testament Prophets were fullfilled in their entirety by the Advent of Christ and during the succeeding Apostolic Age, sometimes including a resurrection of the O. T. saints along with that of the then present age saints and transpired at the end of the Apostolic Age) and that since many of them believe that Christ destroyed death itself in His Death and Resurrection, (including the power of physical death over their soul,) death has no more power over the saints to hold them captive in literal and biological graves (which Amills generally deny, for they believe that the resurrection of saints is yet in the future.) Amills and Premills alike often interject the resurrection issue into their controversy with Preterists for support of their own eschatology. Therefore, many Amills seem to think that all Preterists deny a bodily resurrection, but that all Preterists hold to mere spiritualism; (This does not seem to be the case in my researches so far. It seems that most Preterists view only the nature of the resurrection in a different way from the traditional or catholic view.) Praeterists especially emphasize that the predictions of judgment upon the Jews as contained in the words of Christ and found in such passages as Matt Chapters 23-25, and many other passages in the Old and New Testament, which many other interpreters choose to apply to various other scenarios and events in history - that have either already transpired, or are merely speculative in these interpreters imaginations. (see Farrar below) but to Preterists, these prophecies refer specifically to those horrific events that climaxed with the total destruction of the Jewish nation, and did not in any way refer to a far-off futuristic period. Many Amills agree with this history up to this point, but there they pretty much part company with the Praeterists,, because most Amills believe that the kingdom of Christ was fully established at or shortly after Christs Intercession. Praeterists believe the events referred to in His Olivet Discourse were the near-approching calamities (35-40 years distant) that would finally and literally consumate and terminate the Law Dispensation, and would be the attending sign that would hearld this. In some things the Amills, Historists and Praeterists can agree, but the average Preterist runs head-on with the Premills, because Premills put all of this prophetic history in the far future from Christ and the Apostles time.- Although some Amills would be of a different opinion, and say that the Amills and Premills really have more in common in their beliefs, because Preterists believe that the Old Economy was not ushered out at the actual time of the redemptive work of Christ, therefore some futurists are revolted at the notion that it took the actions of Titus in 70 AD to finally accomplish all that was written concerning Christ; and so they say that this idea demeans Christ and His work, and leaves the final accomplishment of establishing His Spiritual Kingdom in the hands of a Roman general. Here are some quotes from a Praeterist of the past: (Frederic W. Farrar - 1882) There have been three great schools of Apocalyptic interpretation :- 1. The Pr?terists, who regard the book as having been mainly fulfilled. 2. The Futurists, who refer it to events which are still wholly future. 3. The Continuous-Historical Interpreters, who see in it an outline of Christian history from the days of St. John down to the End of all things. The second of these schools -- the Futurists -- has always been numerically small, and at present may be said to be non-existent. The school of Historical Interpreters was founded by the Abbot Joachim early in the 13th century, and was specially flourishing in the first fifty years of the present century. [There are two schools of the interpreters who make the Apocalypse a prophecy of all Christian history. The school of Bengel, Vitringo, Elliott, &c., make it mainly a history of the Church. Another school regards it more generally, and less specifically, as an outline of Epochs of the History of the world and the great forces which shape it into a Kingdom of God. To this latter school belong Hengstenberg, Ebrard, Auberlen, &c.] The views of the Pr?terists have been adopted, with various shades of modification, by Grotius, Hammond, Le Clerc, Bousset, Eichorn, Hug, Wetstein, Ewald, Herder, Zullig, Bleek, DeWette, Lucke, Moses Stuart, Davidson, Volkmar, Krenkel, Dusterdieck, Renan, and almost the whole school of modern German critics and interpreters. It has been usual to say that the Spanish Jesuit Alcasar, in his Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalpysi (1614), was the founder of the Pr?terist School, and it certainly seems as if to him must be assigned the credit of having first clearly enunciated the natural view that the Apocalypse, like all other known Apocalypses of the time, describes events nearly contemporaneous, and is meant to shadow forth the triumph of the Church in the struggle first with Judaism and then with Heathendom. But to me it seems that the founder of the Pr?terist School is none other than St. John himself. For he records the Christ as saying to him when he was in the Spirit, "Write the things which thou sawest, and THE THINGS WHICH ARE, and the things which are about to happen after these things." No language surely could more clearly define the bearing of the Apocalypse. It is meant to describe the contemporary state of things in the Church and the world, and the events which were to follow in immediate sequence. If the Historical School can strain the latter words into an indication that we are (contrary to all analogy) to have a symbolic and unintelligible sketch of many centuries, the Pr?terist School may at any rate apply these words, "THE THINGS WHICH ARE," to vindicate the application of a large part of the Apocalypse to events nearly contemporary, while they also give the natural meaning to the subsequent clause by understanding it of events which were then on the horizon. The Seer emphatically says that the future events which he has to foreshadow will occur speedily [Compare Tachu (Rev. 22. 5,16 ; iii.11; xi.14 ; xxii.20). It is curious to see with what extraordinary ease commentators explain the perfect simple and ambiguous expression "speedily" to mean any length of time which they may choose to demand. The word "immediately," in Matt. xxiv.29, has been subject to similar handling, in which indeed all Scripture exegesis abounds. The failure to see that the Fall of Jerusalem and the end of the Mosaic Dispensation was a "Second Advent" -- and THE Second Advent contemplated in many of the New Testament prophecies -- has led to a multitude of errors..] and the recurrent burden of his whole book is the nearness of the Advent. Language is simply meaningless if it is to be so manipulated by every successive commentator as to make the words "speedily" and "near" to imply any number of centuries of delay. The Pr?terist method of interpretation does not, however, interfere with that view of prophecy which was so well defined by Dr. Arnold. This is the view of those who have been called the "spiritual" interpreters. It admits of the analogical application of prophecy to conditions which, in the cycles of history, bear a close resemblance to each other. It applies to all times the principles originally laid down with reference to events which were being then enacted, and starts with the axiom of Bacon, that divine prophecies have steps and grades of fulfillment through divers ages. [De Augment. Scient. ii.11.] All that is really valuable in the works of the Historical Interpreters may thus be retained. No importance can be attached to their limitation of particular symbols, but the better part of their labours may be accepted as an illustration of the manner in which the Apocalyptic symbols convey moral lessons which are applicable to the conditions of later times. But, apart from St. John's own words, it cannot be conceded that the central conception of the Pr?terist exegesis is a mere novelty of the 17th century. On the contrary, we can trace from very early days the application of various visions to the early emperors of Pagan Rome. Thus Justin Martyr believed that the Antichrist would be a person who was close at hand, who would reign three and a half years. [Dial. c. Tryph. p. 250] Irenaeus also thought that Antichrist, as foreshadowed by the Wild Beast, would be a man ; and that "the number of the Beast" represented Lateinos, "a Latin," [Iren. Haer. v. 25] Hippolytus compares the action of the False Prophet giving life to the Beast's image, to Augustus inspiring fresh force into the Roman Empire. [De Antichristo, p.6] Later on, I shall furnish abundant evidence that a tradition of the ancient Church identified Nero with the Antichrist, and expected his literal return, just as the Jews expected the literal return of the Prophet Elijah. St. Victorinus (about A.D.303) counts the five dead emperors from Galba, and supposes that, after Nerva, the Beast (whom he identifies with Nero) will be recalled to life. ["Bestia de septem est quoniam ante ipsos reges Nero regnavit."] St. Augustine mentions a similar opinion. [De Civ. Dei, xx.19] The Pseudo-Prochorus, writing on Rev. xvii. 10, says that the "one which is" is meant for Domition. Bishop Andreas, in the fifth century, applies Rev. vi.12 to the siege of Jerusalem, and considers that Antichrist will be "as a king of the Romans." Bishop Arethas, on Rev. vii., implies that the Apocalypse was written before the Jewish War. The fragments of ancient comment which we possess cannot be said to have much intrinsic value ; but such as they are they suffice to prove that the tendency of modern exegesis approaches quite as nearly to the earliest traditions as that of the Historical School. It is a specially important fact that St. Augustine, as well as many others, recognized the partially retrogressive and iterative character of the later visions, and thereby sanctioned one of the most important principles of modern interpretation. [Id. ib. 17.] The internal evidence that the book was written before the Fall of Jerusalem has satisfied not only many Christian commentators, who are invidiously stigmatised as "rationalistic," but even such writers as Wetstein, Lucke, Neander, Stier, Auberlen, Ewald, Bleek, Gebhardt, Immer, Davidson, Dusterdieck, Moses Stuart, F.D. Maurice, the author of "The Parousia," Dean Plumptree, the authors of the Protestanten-Bibel and multitudes of others no less entitled to the respect of all Christians. If, however, the reader still looks with prejudice and suspicion on the only school of Apocalyptic exegesis with unites the suffrages of the most learned recent commentators in Germany, France, and England, I hardly know where he is to turn. The reason why the early date and mainly contemporary explanation of the book is daily winning fresh adherents among unbiased thinkers of every Church and school, is partly because it rests on so simple and secure a basis, and partly because no other can compete with it. It is indeed the only system which is built on the plain and repeated statements and indications of the Seer himself, and the corresponding events are so closely accordant with the symbols as to make it certain that this scheme of interpretation is the only one that can survive. A few specimens may suffice to show how completely other systems float in the air. Let us suppose that the student has found out that in viii.13 the true reading is "a single eagle," not an angel ; but, whether eagle or angel, he wants to know what the symbol means. He turns to the commentators, and finds that it is explained to be the Holy Spirit (Victorinus); or Pope Gregory the Great (Elliott); or St. John himself (DeLyra); or St. Paul (Zeger); or Christ himself (Wordsworth). The Pr?terists mostly take it to be simply an eagle, as the Scriptural type of carnage--the figure being suggested not by the resemblance of the word "woe!" ("ouai") to the eagle's screams, but by the use of the same symbol for the same purpose by our Lord in His discourse about the things to come. [Matt. xxiv.28.] But this is nothing! The student wishes to learn what is meant by the star fallen from heaven, in ix.1. The Historical school will leave him to choose between an evil spirit (Alford); a Christian heretic (Wordsworth); the Emperor Valens (DeLyra); Mohammed (Elliott); and, among others, Napoleon (Hengstenberg) ! The confusion deepens as we advance. The locusts are "heretics" (Bede); or Goths (Vitringa); or Vandals (Aureolus); or Saracens (Mede); or the mendicant orders (Brightman); or the Jesuits (Scherzer); or Protestants (Bellarmine). The same endless and aimless diversity reigns throughout the entire works of the Historical interpreters ; none of them seems to satisfy any one but himself. The elaborate anti-papal interpretation of Elliott--of which (to show that I am far from prejudiced) I may mention, in passing, that I made a careful study and a full abstract when I was seventeen years old-- is all but forgotten. Mr. Faber admits that there is not the least agreement as to the first four trumpets among writers of his school, and he rightly says that "so curious a circumstance may well be deemed the opprobrium of Apocalyptic interpretation, and may naturally lead us to suspect that the true key to the distinct application of the first four trumpets has never yet been found." Not that this school leave us any better off when we come to the seven thunders. They are seven unknown oracles (Mede); or events (Ebrard); or the seven crusades (Vitringa); or the seven Protestant kingdoms (Dunbar); or the Papal Bull against Luther (Elliott). The two wings of the great eagle in xii.14 are the two Testaments (Wordsworth); or the eastern and western divisions of the empire (Mede, Auberlen); or the Emperor Theodosius (Elliott). The number of the Beast -- which may be now regarded as certainly intended to stand for Nero -- has been made to serve for Genseric, Benedict, Trajan, Paul V., Calvin, Luther, Mohammed, Napoleon -- not to mention a host of other interpretations which no one has ever accepted except their authors. [The majority of guesses which have the least seriousness in them point to Rome, the Roman Empire, or the Roman Emperor.] It is needless to multiply further instances. They might be multiplied almost indefinitely, but their multiplicity is not so decisive of the futility of the principles on which they are selected, as is the diversity of results which are wider than the poles asunder. What are we to say of methods which leave us to choose between the applicability of a symbol to the Holy Spirit or to Pope Gregory, to the Two Testaments or to the Emperor Theodosius? Anyone, on the other hand, who accepts the Pr?terist system finds a wide and increasing consensus among competent enquirers of all nations, and can see an explanation of the book which is simple, natural, and noble -- one which closely follows its own indications, and accords with those to be found throughout the New Testament. He sees that events, mainly contemporary, provide an interpretation clear in its outlines, though necessarily uncertain in minor details. It he takes the view of the Spiritualists, he may at his pleasure make the symbols mean anything in general and nothing in particular. If he is of the Historical School he must let the currents of Gieseler or Gibbon sweep him hither and thither at the will of the particular commentator in whom he for the time may chance to confide. But if he follows the guidance of a more reasonable exegesis, he may advance with a sure step along a path which becomes clearer with every fresh discovery. Frederic W. Farrar, 1831 - 1903 D.D. , F.R,S, The Spiritualists As commented above by Farrar, Spiritualists feel, when at their own discretion they may make the symbols mean anything in general and nothing in particular, and thus it would seem that the Spirtualist interpreters may lose some, if sometimes not most context of the Scriptures; and indeed, it seems that they who follow this practice, many times do; while at the same time they may present many things that are very valuable within their specific subject- if it be in accordance with the general analogy of faith. But the danger of the straight Spiritualist approach is that these may rely upon this method to the extent that they are not then led to study and compare the historical and literal aspects of the Scriptures, so they may then drift entirely into the habit of excessively allegorizing the word of truth, so to make the Scriptures mean anything that may strike their fancy. To close with a bit of humor concerning eschatology: When asked to one, "What is your method of eschatology? They replied, "Pan-Milliannian". "What do you mean by ' "Pan" Milliannial ?' they replied. "I believe all things will "pan" out according to the will of God." With this all believers should be able to agree. [1]A PAN-MILLENNIAL VIEW: By Stanley Phillips OAB If any perceived errors are found here, I would appreciate any corrections. Please direct your comments to: Allen Bailey mountaintraveler at hotmail.com References 1. http://www.geocities.com/thepredestinarian/panmill.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:08:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:08:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economics as Religion by Robert Nelson Message-ID: Economics as Religion by Robert Nelson http://www.psupress.org/Justataste/samplechapters/justatasteRNelson.html [This is just an excerpt from this book. I had a proof copy of an earlier book of his, _Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Roots of Economics_, but never read it.] Chapter 1 Tenets of Economic Faith To the extent that any system of economic ideas offers an alternative vision of the "ultimate values," or "ultimate reality," that actually shapes the workings of history, economics is offering yet another grand prophesy in the biblical tradition. The Jewish and Christian bibles foretell one outcome of history. If economics foresees another, it is in effect offering a competing religious vision. The prophesies of economics would then be a substitute for the traditional messages of the Bible. Perhaps the biblical God has reconsidered. Perhaps, instead of Jesus, he has now chosen economists to be a new bearer of his message, replacing the word of the Old and New Testaments that has now become outdated for the modern age--as Islam advertised the Koran as a later and more accurate statement of God's real plans for the world. Perhaps God has decided that the underlying ordering forces of the world, the ultimate reality that will shape the future outcome of history, will truly be economic. To be sure, for many thinkers, such a message of economic prophesy has not depended on the necessary existence of any god in the hereafter. In this case their belief system results not in a Judeo-Christian heresy, but in an entirely new and secular religion--although one that draws many of its themes from the biblical tradition, now typically reworking them in a less direct and mostly implicit fashion.1 The Marxist Example No economic thinker, for example, was more outwardly antagonistic to religion than Karl Marx.2 Religion was for him the "opiate" of the masses. Yet, in retrospect, no social scientist better illustrates the power of underlying religious influences than Marx.* Beneath his confused economic analysis and grand pronouncements on the economic laws of history lies a simple biblical eschatology. Humankind has fallen into evil ways, corrupted by the workings of the forces of the class struggle. The resulting "alienation" for Marx has virtually the same meaning for the human situation as "original sin" in the biblical message. Human beings are today still living in a state of darkness, depravity, and corruption. The prospect of escape from this terrible condition, however, is close at hand. God (now replaced in Marx by the economic laws of history) has promised to deliver the world from sin (alienation). There will be a fierce struggle and a great cataclysm (a final war in history between the capitalist and the working classes), followed by the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth (the triumph of the proletariat and the arrival of pure communism). In Christian theology the twin coercive instruments of government and property are both products of the fallen condition of mankind in this world since the Garden of Eden, and in heaven neither will exist. In Marxist theology as well, the end of the class struggle, the end of alienation (sin), will bring about the abolition of government and property alike. Secular religion, as this example shows, can follow remarkably closely in the path of Judeo-Christian religion. (* The Encyclopedia of the World's Religions includes a chapter on Marxism, declaring that it meets all the essential requirements of a religion. See R. C. Zaehner, "Dialectical Materialism," in R. C. Zaehner, ed., Encyclopedia of the World's Religions (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1997).) Marx thus is best understood not fundamentally as an economist at all, but as another Jewish messiah--like Jesus--with another message of salvation for the world. If the message of Jesus had conquered the Mediterranean and European world, the Marxist gospel in the twentieth century would spread over Russia, China, and many other nations--to billions of people throughout the globe. As Paul Tillich said in his history of Christian religion, and however distorted the Marxist gospel, Marx was one of the most influential "theologians" who ever lived.3 To be sure, as D. McCloskey has said is true for of the value systems embodied in the work of many current economists as well, this value system of Marx with its roots in Judeo-Christian eschatology is never made explicit; instead, the religion is left buried under a large body of ostensibly "scientific" arguments.4 Thus, the libertarian and Austrian economist Murray Rothbard considered Marxism to be an "atheized variant of a venerable Christian heresy" that offered a "messianic goal" to be realized by the "apocalyptic creation" of a new world order. Joachim of Fiore and other Christian visionaries had preached messages of a communist "final state of mankind as one of perfect harmony and equality," inspiring among others the later Anabaptist revolutionaries of the Protestant Reformation. The greatest new element introduced by Marx and his followers in the modern age was that these ancient themes now assumed a "secular context."5 Aside from this, Rothbard saw Marxism as the application of an ancient formula: [For Marx] history is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, would put an end to history and establish a new Heaven and new Earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for . . . Christians, man, led by God's prophets and saints, would establish a Kingdom of God on Earth, . . . so for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.6 The success of Marxism in Russia, according to one leading interpreter, was attributable to its ability to draw on a long-standing "`religious conception of the czar's authority' and a deep belief that land belonged to God." The powerful religious faith of the Russian people was capable of "switching over and directing itself to purposes which are not merely religious, for example, to social objects," part of a process in which Russians "could very readily pass from one integrated faith to another" as found in the Marxist gospel. Indeed, as perceived by many Russians, "the world mission of the [Communist Party] Third International echoed Orthodox Christian messianism, which saw Moscow as the Third Rome." Under Stalin, the members of the communist party functioned "less as members of a political party than as clergy under an infallible pope."7 Marxist economics clearly met Tillich's requirement that a genuine religion must offer a vision of "ultimate reality." For Marx everything that happened in the history of the world was controlled by economic laws. Altogether blind to the obvious religious character of his own economic system, Marx said that every form of religious belief is merely a product of a particular economic stage of the class struggle. Echoing this tenet of Marxist faith, for example, in the bible of Chinese communism, the "red book," Mao Tse-Tung would say that "in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness."8 Religion for Marxism thus can have no objective content; it merely provides a convenient rationalization for the relations of economic power of the moment. If capitalists are the dominant economic class today, then the current religion of society will be determined by the objective needs of capitalism at this particular time. If capitalists actually believe in the truth of their religion, this grand self-delusion merely shows the warped and distorted quality of human thought in the current state of deep human alienation (a secular restatement of the sinfulness of fallen men and women). Marx regards everything else in society in the same perspective. Political organizations, social theories, the legal system, the role of universities, all the institutional features of society are designed to serve the existing relationships of economic power, as manifested in and determined by the current stage of the class struggle. As a new "ultimate reality," the laws of economics have literally taken the very place of the laws of God in ordering the world. The economic god of Marx is, moreover, a harsh god in the biblical tradition; he has condemned the present world to constant fighting and destruction and most human beings to lives of deception and depravity. To be sure, Marx may have offered an exaggerated version, but he was hardly alone in thinking in this religious way. Just as the biblical message was recorded by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in different versions, the god who works through economic history has also had multiple interpreters. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, according to one authority, believed that "it was property alone which induced crime and wars," corrupting the original happy state of nature by conflicts over material possessions.9 Also in the eighteenth century, David Hume had said: "Let us suppose that nature has bestowed on the human race such profuse abundance of all external conveniences, that . . . every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetite can want, or luxurious imagination wish or desire." If this state of affairs should ever be reached, Hume suggested, "it seems evident that, in such a happy state, every other social virtue would flourish, and receive tenfold increase." Property and the divisions in society it fosters would cease to have relevance in a world of perfect abundance; issues of social justice would no longer be a concern, because there would be little or no crime or conflict. It would be a world of "unlimited abundance" where "justice, in that case, being totally useless, would be an idle ceremonial."10 By the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, social scientists of all kinds and stripes were occupying themselves in showing how economic forces in the long run determine almost everything important that happens in history. A few have been grand synthesizers on the order of Marx, such as Herbert Spencer with his message of social Darwinism. Many others have focused on the illustration of one or another specific case of the controlling power of economic forces in history. In American history, for example, Charles Beard claimed to show that the American Constitution was not really the outcome of a battle of ideas about freedom but was the result of a clash of economic interests in the late eighteenth century.11 Others would argue that the Civil War was not about the morality of slavery or about preserving one union grounded in a common American civil religion but was actually the product of a conflict between powerful economic interests of the North and the South. Thorstein Veblen would contend that the entire economic system and the relationships of property ownership in this system were being driven by the exigencies of technological change in the newly industrializing United States, that the economic realities of modern industrial society entirely "shapes their habits of thought" for those directly involved in its workings.12 John Kenneth Galbraith would echo Veblen's vision when he claimed in the 1960s that the technological imperatives of modern government and industry had displaced the formal owners of capital and empowered a new "technostructure" of scientific and administrative experts to run the affairs of the nation.13 Outside the United States, the French Revolution was recast by leading intellectuals as an economic power struggle, the means by which the rising middle class finally displaced the old feudal order. Max Weber, while he found many of the economic details of Marxism inaccurate, nevertheless often looked at noneconomic aspects of society in terms of the workings of economic forces. The important thing about Calvinism for Weber was not the objective reality of its truth claims about the human condition. Rather, the more significant element was that Calvinism provided a powerful economic motive for and rationalized the existence of a new economic class--the emerging new commercial and other business groups in Europe, the very groups among whom Calvinism had first found favor.14 Much in the manner of Marx, Weber was seeming to agree that the form and character of religion was shaped by necessities to be found in the underlying workings of economic forces.* (* More recent reviewers, it should be noted, have found many aspects of Weber's argument to be deficient. See Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action:The Protestant Ethic, the Rise of Capitalism, and the Abuses of Scholarship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).) A Coming Age of Abundance The Marxist assumption that the working of the laws of economics will yield a new species of human being, the "new man" of the communist utopia, has often been derided as an example of the folly of Marx's overall scheme. However, the hope for a new human condition as a result of economic progress is not unique to Marxism; indeed, the same kind of thinking was manifested in western European socialism, American Progressivism, and other leading economic belief systems of the twentieth century. As Kate Soper has commented, the great attraction of socialism derives from the "satisfaction it permits to the ethical demand for justice and equity in the distribution of goods, as [much as] it has to do with the material gratification afforded by those goods."15 In the economic gospels, the existence of evil behavior in the world has reflected the severity of the competition for physical survival of the past. Human beings have often lied and cheated, murdered, and stolen, were filled with hatreds and prejudices, because they were driven to this condition by the material pressures of their existence.* If the choice was to live or die in the struggle for control over resources, few people were likely to choose to sacrifice themselves in order to save others. Thus, the state of material deprivation is the original sin of economic theology./- Then, if this diagnosis is correct, the cure for evil in the world follows directly enough. If sin results from destructive forces brought into existence by material scarcity, a world without scarcity, a world of complete material abundance, will be a world without sin.16 (* Although there are many fewer people today who believe that economic influences are so important, such views that conflicts are stirred by material deprivation are still widely expressed.Among many examples that could be cited, one 1995 report in Washington Post finds that "South Korean President Kim Young Sam and other officials have warned that hunger and economic desperation could tempt North Korea's leaders to consider a military strike against South Korea." See Kevin Sullivan, "Food Shortages Fuel Alarm over N.Korea, "Washington Post, December 23, 1995, A11.) (/- Another way of putting this is to say that it is material deprivation that gives rise to the "craving for belongings" and that evil behavior arises because human beings have been "thoroughly warped" by this intense desire for possessions. The secularization of the idea of original sin in this manner became a principal theme of Rousseau and other French intellectuals in the eighteenth century. One of them, writing anonymously, declares: "The only vice which I know in the universe is avarice; all the others, whatever name one gives them, are merely forms, degrees of it: it is the Proteus, the Mercury, the base, the vehicle of all the other vices. Analyze vanity, conceit, pride, ambition, deceitfulness, hypocrisy, villainy; break down the majority of our sophisticated virtues themselves, all dissolve in this subtle and pernicious element, the desire to possess." See Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 41. Then, if evil in the world could be traced to material causes, it followed logically enough that the remaking of the material world by human effort had the potential to abolish evil. Humankind could refashion social and economic circumstances to perfect the condition of the world--to achieve a new heaven on earth. Inspired by their hopes for such a secular salvation, the first to make the effort were the French during the French Revolution. It was a new species of religious revolution where God was now dropped from the essential vocabulary. Many others would come later in the modern age, following one or another economic theory of the elimination of scarcity and thus the elimination of the very grounds for the existence of material cravings and for evil behavior on earth.) The contemporary philosopher Will Kymlicka thus comments that in Marxism "it is material abundance which allows communist society to overcome the need for justice." It is not because "individuals cease to have conflicting goals in life, or when a `more developed form of altruism' arises." Rather, evil currently exists in the world because the economic relations of production create a material circumstance in which "the social creations of an individual take on an alien independence, `enslaving him instead of being controlled by him.' These include the imperatives of capitalist competition, role requirements of the division of labor, rigours of the labour market, and what Marx calls the `fetishism' of money, capital and commodities." Thus, "material scarcity" is the "crucial circumstance," but it also creates the possibility that the present state of alienation "can be eliminated." The perfection of the world for Marx "is impossible without abundance" but following the triumph of the proletariat "is guaranteed by abundance."17 As Marx himself stated: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor . . . has vanished; after labour has become not only a means to life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly--only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!18 Engels had written as early as 1847 that "private property can be abolished only when the economy is capable of producing the volume of goods needed to satisfy everyone's requirements. . . . The new rate of industrial growth will produce enough goods to satisfy all the demands of society. . . . Society will achieve an output sufficient for the needs of all members."19 Marxism thus has an ambivalence that some might find surprising with respect to the existence of the capitalist economic system based on competition in the marketplace. Although the workings of this system may degrade the laboring classes today, without the marvelous advances in economic productivity due to the profit incentive and other elements of the market system, the future salvation of the world would not be possible. Capitalism is thus a necessary economic stage on the road to heaven on earth. If the date of its arrival could not be precisely fixed, Marx would "hail each important new invention as the magical `material productive force' that would inevitably bring about the socialist revolution."20 The scientific development of electricity with its amazing and transformative economic capabilities, Marx was sure, had significantly advanced the timetable for the arrival of his new heaven on earth. The Keynesian God It would be hard to imagine a temperament more the opposite of Marx's than that of John Maynard Keynes. If Marx was prophetic and bombastic, Keynes had the manner of the worldly wise. If Marx was a social misfit and bohemian, the urbane Keynes designed economic blueprints for the British Treasury, and yet at the next moment might be consorting with the artistic elite of Bloomsbury.21 Keynes also differed sharply from Marx in his prescription for solving unemployment and other economic problems. Yet in terms of ultimate values, Keynesianism was only a modest variation on Marx--on the recent revelation of God's actual plan for the world, that the Christian Bible is apparently mistaken, that God actually works in history through economic forces and is planning a glorious ending to the world based on the workings of rapidly advancing material productivity. In his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes agreed with Marx (and Jesus) that capitalism--necessarily grounded in the desire for money and the competitive workings of self-interest in the market--is a "disgusting" system, characterized by motives unworthy of human beings. Christianity, and later Marxism, were right to believe that "avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable." Keynes also agreed that it was the force of economic pressures--the result of material scarcity in the world and the resulting fierce struggle for mere physical survival--that had separated human beings from their inner better selves. Marx was right to say that the economic workings of capitalism (and feudalism and other economic systems before that) had alienated human beings from their true natures (as the Fall in the Garden had previously been thought to be the true cause of this separation). As Keynes himself put it, the economic individual had been required to suppress a natural instinct to "pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well," to be able to take spontaneous and "direct enjoyment in things," as was possible for the "lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."22 The modern god of Keynes who spoke to humankind through the workings of economic forces in history had the same basic plan for a secular salvation as had the god of Marx. Both relied on the marvelous productive powers of capitalism to bring on a final stage of history.* It will be an era of abundance, ending the corrosive and corrupting influence of economic scarcity, thus bringing on a time of great human virtue, equality, and contentment. Keynes, like Marx, sees a new man and woman being born: "All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard." It will all come about, Keynes writes, as a result of "the greatest change that has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate." After this happens, we will finally be "able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us" for centuries.23 (* While economists have often been blind to the underlying values in their economic messages, Christians theologians--lamenting the substitution of secular beliefs for traditional Christian teachings-- have often been more perceptive in seeing the core religious quality of these beliefs.Thus,Richard Niebuhr in the 1930s came to think that "the Social Gospel, with its focus on human striving,was insufficiently centered on God."The Christian churches of America were located in a "culture caught up in idolatrous faiths which take partial human communities, activities and desires as cherished objects. Nationalism focuses on one's country, capitalism on economic production and racism on a particular group.The church has been infiltrated by these social faiths"but must now seek a future "emancipation from cultural bondage" with its pervasive "idols" such as "economic production." See Douglas F. Ottati," God and Ourselves:The Witness of H.Richard Niebuhr,"Christian Century, April 2,1997,346.) Keynes's timetable was hardly less optimistic than that of Marx. Like the early followers of Jesus in biblical times, Keynes thought that the arrival of the kingdom of heaven on earth was near at hand, to occur in perhaps one hundred years or so. The continued rapid advance of economic progress in the world would soon "lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."24 In terms of the path to heaven on earth, there was one key difference between Keynes and Marx. Marx was what in Christianity is called a "premillennial" prophet; Keynes was instead a "postmillennial."25 The premillennials, like Marx, see humankind as mired today in such fundamental depravity that the only hope--which God (or the economic forces of history) fortunately has predestined--is an apocalyptic transformation of the human condition. This transformation will often be prefigured by catastrophes of the worst kind. For postmillennials, in contrast, the millennium has already begun; human progress toward heaven on earth is already taking place at this very moment; humankind has an important continuing role to play within the divine plan for bringing about the salvation of the world. As Keynes said, being careful to distinguishing himself from Marx in this regard, the coming era of economic abundance would not be experienced initially "as a catastrophe." Instead, like a good Christian postmillennial, Keynes writes that "I look forward, therefore, in the days not so very remote" to great changes in the human condition for the better. "But, of course, it will all happen gradually. . . . Indeed, it has already begun."26 Keynes included his essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" as the closing chapter in Essays in Persuasion. This was not the only time that Keynes chose to wrap up on important book in this manner--to indicate that the details of his prior economic theorizing were designed in the end to serve a grand moral purpose. In the concluding chapter of The General Theory, Keynes repeats similar themes, if in a somewhat more subdued and cautious language, also reflecting the different conventions of the academic audience to which this work was directed. Moreover, by the mid-1930s Hitler was already becoming a threat to the world, and Keynes's assessment of the human condition was shifting accordingly. Thus, Keynes writes at the end of The General Theory that there are "dangerous human proclivities" at work in a sinful world that pose the prospect of "cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement." Capitalism could serve an important short-run function because "it is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than his fellow citizens." Moreover, there were "valuable human activities" that depended on the "motive of money-making and the environment of private wealth-ownership for their full fruition."27 Yet, in the longer run, if society would heed the prescriptions of The General Theory, the resulting steady economic growth would mean--much as Marx had prophesied--"the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist class to exploit the scarcity value of capital." The current capitalist system was merely a "transitional phase" after which the world would experience a "sea-change."28 If Keynes did not give many details concerning the consequences of this change in The General Theory, one can assume that he meant something of the kind that he had already described in Essays in Persuasion. Keynes of course did not advertise The General Theory as a work of theology. Instead, as the title reflected, he seemed to suggest that readers should see his efforts more as following in the footsteps of Albert Einstein. Einstein had discovered a general theory of time and space; Keynes had now discovered a general theory of economic interactions. Einstein's theory of relativity had shown that dynamic factors could fundamentally alter the conclusions of Newtonian physics; Keynesian economics would now show that dynamic factors could yield new and unexpected laws fundamentally altering the behavior of a market economy. Thus, like Marx, Keynes presented himself in the role of a true scientist of society--an essential element in the enormous influence both would have on the history of the twentieth century. D. McCloskey may be right, however. Despite the scientific aspirations of The General Theory (which have not held up well over time), the more important content may have been an implicit theological message. Contrary to Marx, Keynes was saying, the salvation of the world would take time, it would require patience. Both agreed that capitalism was a debased form of existence, yet Marx no less than Keynes now thought that capitalism at present was indispensable to the economic growth that would end economic scarcity and bring on a new stage of abundance in history. However, as Keynes now thought, attempts to accelerate the schedule for the end of capitalism, acted out under the duress of the economic conditions of the depression years, would be disastrous in the long run. The millennium had already begun; the human condition was steadily improving already. With patience and trust in the economic forces in history, the underlying moral theology of The General Theory was that the capitalist stage of economic history would soon enough be ended (in one hundred years or so), and no great economic cataclysm or other great disaster would be necessary to fulfill the looming material and spiritual perfection of the world.* No dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary or desirable; it was necessary only to use the instrument of existing democratic government to make further incremental adjustments in the workings of the current market system. (* As a postmillennial, Keynes was following closely in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, more so than of the premillennial, apocalyptic Marx. Mill in his Principles of Political Economy offered a view of the future strikingly similar to that later developed by Keynes in "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." Agreeing with Keynes, Mill describes the current stage of industrial development, characterized by the "trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels" of the competitive process, as impossible to consider "anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress." Mill also agrees with Keynes (and Marx) that capitalism may be a "necessary stage"; it would be important for some time to come that "the energies of mankind should be kept in employment by the struggle for riches," especially because in the present material circumstances of mankind the alternative might be (as Keynes would also warn) "the struggle of war." But capitalism should be regarded, Mill says, as a "very early stage of human improvement" that will eventually be superceded by a much better "ultimate type." In the current stage it is necessary to exalt degraded values such as the "increase of production and accumulation."However, in the longer run such economic motives will be of "little importance." The current environment, with its prevailing motive "to grow as rich as possible," will be replaced by a world in which "no one desires to be richer." This "steady state," as Mill's characterizes it,"would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition." It would be,as Marx and Keynes also emphasized, the transforming power of material progress that would lead to this new world in which "a much larger body of persons than atpresent,[would be] not only exempt from the coarser toils, but with sufficient leisure, both physical and mental, to cultivate freely the graces of life." Progress would no longer be conceived in economic terms, but in the steady state, as Mill believes, "there would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of . . . moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being im-proved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on" economically. If any further economi growth did occur, it would not be used to increase levels of consumption that would already be ample to meet any real needs but with "abridging labour" and thus opening the way for greater leisure and personal development. In short, Mill is yet another of the leading economists of the past two hundred years who sees material progress not as the end in itself but as the short-run means of reaching for a long-run future heaven on earth. See John Stuart Mill, "The Stationary State," chap. 6 in bk. 4 of Principles of Political Economy (1871; reprint, Fairfield,N.J.: Augustus M.Kelley, 1987), 746-51.) This secular Keynesian theology would become "the new gospel" for the economics profession in the years following World War II.29 As Milton Friedman has commented, it was "tremendously effective" in the United States in influencing the direction of public policy. Friedman recalled how a whole generation of "economists, myself included, have sought to discover how to manipulate the levers of power effectively, and to persuade--or educate--government officials regarded as seeking to serve the public interest."30 The most important form of manipulation would be that of the "market mechanism." Keynes sought especially to ward off the ideas of Marxists, doctrinaire socialists, and other potentially harmful influences on public opinion, the kinds of people whom Keynes himself characterized as most likely in practice actually "to serve not God but the devil."31 If false religions were at work in the land, Keynes found it necessary to fight fire with fire. As Joseph Schumpeter would relate, Keynes's own efforts inspired a band of followers who exhibited a new religious fervor: A Keynesian school formed itself, not a school in that loose sense in which some historians of economics speak of a French, German, Italian school, but a genuine one which is a sociological entity, namely, a group that professes allegiance to One Master and One Doctrine, and has its inner circle, its propagandists, its watchwords, its esoteric and its popular doctrine. Nor is this all. Beyond the pale of orthodox Keynesianism there is a broad fringe of sympathizers and beyond this again are the many who have absorbed, in one form or another, readily or grudgingly, some of the spirit or some individual items of Keynesian analysis. There are but two analogous cases in the whole history of economics--the Physiocrats and the Marxists.32 Samuelson's Economics would be the means by which the Keynesian gospel was communicated to millions of American college students in the postwar years. Samuelson was an unabashed admirer not only of the Keynesian economic theories but also of Keynes himself, whom he declared to be a true "many-sided genius" of our time who was eminent not only in economics but also in "the field of mathematics and philosophy."33 Samuelson's mission in Economics was to communicate persuasively not only the technical details but also the moral philosophy--the implicit secular religion--of Keynesianism. Samuelson's great accomplishment was to devise a way of accomplishing this task ideally suited to his specific time and place in American history. _________________________________________________________________ 1. See Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); J. L.Talmon, Politican Messianism:The Romantic Phase (Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, 1985; 1st ed., 1960). 2. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (New York: Time Books, 1963; 1st ed., 1939). 3. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 476. 4. See G.N. Kitching, Marxism and Science:Analysis of an Obsession (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994). 5. Murray N. Rothbard, Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Brookfield, Vt.:Edward Elgar, 1995), 433, 299, 301. 6. Ibid., 317. 7. Mitchell Cohen, "Theories of Stalinism," Dissent 39 (Spring 1992): 180-82, 184. 8. Quotations from Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1966), 222. This publication was widely known as the red book. 9. J.W. Harris, Property and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 292. 10. Charles W. Hendel, Jr., ed., Hume Selections (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), 203-4. 11. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1913). 12. Thorstein Veblen, "The Preconceptions of Economic Science, I," Quarterly Journal of Economics (January 1899): 143. See also Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965; 1st ed., 1921). 13. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979; 1st ed., 1967). 14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner,1958; 1st ed., 1905). 15. Kate Soper, "Socialism and Personal Morality," in David McLellan and Sean Sayers, eds., Socialism and Morality (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 111. 16. See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Eugene Kamenka, Marxism and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1969). 17. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York:Oxford University Press, 1989), 114, 119, 114-15, 119. 18. Karl Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), quoted in Kymlicka, Liberalism,Community, and Culture, 119. 19. Quoted in Rothbard, Classical Economics, 327. 20. Ibid., 374. 21. For the life history of Keynes, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (New York: Viking, 1986); and, John Maynard Keynes:The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937 (New York: Viking, 1994). 22. John Maynard Keynes,"Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,"(1930) in Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York:W.W.Norton, 1963), 369, 371-72. 23. Ibid., 369-372. 24. Ibid., 372. 25. See Robert G. Clouse, ed., The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1977), 7-9. 26. Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," 369-73. 27. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965; 1st ed., 1936), 374. 28. Ibid., 376. 29. David C. Colander and Harry Landreth, introduction to Colander and Landreth, eds., The Coming of Keynesianism to America: Conversations with the Founders of Keynesian Economics (Brookfield, Vt.:Edward Elgar, 1996), 9. 344 Notes to Pages 23-33 30. Milton Friedman, "John Maynard Keynes," Economic Quarterly (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) 83 (Spring 1997): 22. 31. Letter from Keynes to Friedrich Hayek praising his The Road to Serfdom, quoted in Friedman, "John Maynard Keynes," 22. 32. Joseph A.Schumeter, Ten Great Economists from Marx to Keynes (1951),quoted in Colander and Landreth's introduction to The Coming of Keynesianism, 9-10. 33. Paul A.Samuelson, Economics (New York:McGraw Hill, 1948), 253. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 4 22:08:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 18:08:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] God the Liberal Message-ID: God the Liberal God, at least the one in the Bible, is a liberal. He had too high expectations of human nature. Timeline (all from the Scofield Reference Bible, which uses the King James Version, but using, not the original 1611 spelling, but that of 1769, which continues to this day): 4004 BC: On the sixth day, God makes the first, or Edenic, Covenant (Gen. 1:26-3:13) 4004 BC: On the eighth day, God kicks Adam and Eve out of Paradise. 4004 BC: Later that day, God makes the Second, or Adamic, Covenant (Gen. 3:14-19). 2353 BC: God floods the earth (Gen. 6). 2348 BC: God makes the Third, or Noahic, Covenant (Gen. 8:20-11:9). 2247 BC: Tower of Babel: "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth" (Gen. 11:7-8). 1913 BC: God makes the Fourth, or Abrahamic, Covenant (Gen. 15:18). 1491 BC: God makes the Fifth, or Mosaic, Covenant (Ex. 20, which includes the Ten Commandments). 1451 BC: God makes the Sixth, or Palestinian, Covenant (Deu. 30). 1042 BC: God makes the Seventh, or David, Covenant (II Sam. 7). I am not sure what crashed expectations of the Lord necessitated all the additional covenants, but God got so fed up with man that he decided to end his entire creation. 4 BC: God, just but nevertheless merciful, sends his son to forgive individuals (all of them) that fail to live up to his various commandments, provided they will accept the offer. This constitutes the Eighth, or New, Covenant (Heb. 8:8). 26 AD: John the Baptist is fed up with the whole lot of the Jews, not just those in the religious establishment: "Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Luke 3:7). 31 AD: Jesus repeats the charge: "O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the of abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." (Mat. 12:34), though later he restricts the charges to "scribes and Pharisees" (Mat. 23:29-33). 33 AD: In a familiar act of rent-seeking, the Jewish religious establishment induces the government (the Romans) to get rid of the competition (all four Gospels). This is, of course, highly controversial, but as a Public Choice economist, I know rent-seeking when I see it. You would think that by this time, God would have offered a covenant more in keeping with human nature as it is, not what a liberal would like it to be. before 70 AD (I accept John A.T. Robinson's _Redating the New Testament_ here, while Scofield assigns 96 AD), God reveals to St. John the Divine that, nevertheless, "And I saw a new heaven an a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away: and there was no more sea (Rev. 21:1). Fri Sep 24, 2004 12:18 pm From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Oct 5 02:37:55 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:37:55 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] God the Liberal In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43433C83.6030706@solution-consulting.com> Frank is in rare form here, thoroughly enjoyable essay. Thanks, and a humble bow to his scholarship. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > God the Liberal > > God, at least the one in the Bible, is a liberal. He had too high > expectations of human nature. > > Timeline (all from the Scofield Reference Bible, which uses the King > James Version, but using, not the original 1611 spelling, but that of > 1769, which continues to this day): > > 4004 BC: On the sixth day, God makes the first, or Edenic, Covenant > (Gen. 1:26-3:13) > > 4004 BC: On the eighth day, God kicks Adam and Eve out of Paradise. > > 4004 BC: Later that day, God makes the Second, or Adamic, Covenant > (Gen. 3:14-19). > > 2353 BC: God floods the earth (Gen. 6). > > 2348 BC: God makes the Third, or Noahic, Covenant (Gen. 8:20-11:9). > > 2247 BC: Tower of Babel: "Go to, let us go down, and there confound > their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So > the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth" > (Gen. 11:7-8). > > 1913 BC: God makes the Fourth, or Abrahamic, Covenant (Gen. 15:18). > > 1491 BC: God makes the Fifth, or Mosaic, Covenant (Ex. 20, which > includes the Ten Commandments). > > 1451 BC: God makes the Sixth, or Palestinian, Covenant (Deu. 30). > > 1042 BC: God makes the Seventh, or David, Covenant (II Sam. 7). I am > not sure what crashed expectations of the Lord necessitated all the > additional covenants, but God got so fed up with man that he decided > to end his entire creation. > > 4 BC: God, just but nevertheless merciful, sends his son to forgive > individuals (all of them) that fail to live up to his various > commandments, provided they will accept the offer. This constitutes > the Eighth, or New, Covenant (Heb. 8:8). > > 26 AD: John the Baptist is fed up with the whole lot of the Jews, not > just those in the religious establishment: "Then said he to the > multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of > vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Luke 3:7). > > 31 AD: Jesus repeats the charge: "O generation of vipers, how can ye, > being evil, speak good things? for out of the of abundance of the > heart the mouth speaketh." (Mat. 12:34), though later he restricts the > charges to "scribes and Pharisees" (Mat. 23:29-33). > > 33 AD: In a familiar act of rent-seeking, the Jewish religious > establishment induces the government (the Romans) to get rid of the > competition (all four Gospels). This is, of course, highly > controversial, but as a Public Choice economist, I know rent-seeking > when I see it. > > You would think that by this time, God would have offered a covenant > more in keeping with human nature as it is, not what a liberal would > like it to be. before 70 AD (I accept John A.T. Robinson's _Redating > the New Testament_ here, while Scofield assigns 96 AD), God reveals to > St. John the Divine that, nevertheless, "And I saw a new heaven an a > new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away: > and there was no more sea (Rev. 21:1). > > Fri Sep 24, 2004 12:18 pm > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:15:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:15:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] HBES: Evolutionary psychology and "peak oil:" A Malthus inspired "heads up" for humanity. Message-ID: Evolutionary psychology and "peak oil:" A Malthus inspired "heads up" for humanity. http://www.hbes.com/Hbes/PeakOil.htm Human Behavior and Evolution Society Evolutionary biologists are aware of the concept of ecological "carrying capacity," and Malthus' application of these ideas to human populations. Malthus wrote: "It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer that the Author recollects has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected..." -- Thomas Malthus, 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html And more recently, Dawkins echoed Malthus' concerns: "If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored." -- Richard Dawkins This is exemplified in a well known paper by David Klein, "The Introduction, Increase and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island" (see: http://dieoff.org/page80.htm ) Humans on Easter Island suffered a similar fate when the population/consumption overshot the island carrying capacity (see Jared Diamond's recent book, "[5]Collapse," as well as "[6]Overshoot" by William Catton). Of course, the entire earth can also be viewed as an "island" with some resources that are finite and that are being rapidly depleted by a human population explosion.One of the most critical finite resources are fossil fuels, which provide a cheap source of energy to power technological/industrial civilization. "Peak oil" is the point when 1/2 of extractable world oil has been extracted. A similar concept is "oil demand/production cross-over" -- when the growing demand for oil crosses above the production capacity, causing oil prices to increase. We are close to, or at, these inflection points now.What most people do not realize is that there is no energy-equivalent substitute for oil, in terms of its energy density, transportability, safety, range, and cost. Oil is to modern industrial/technological civilization what trees were to the Easter Islanders. When critical resources are decreasing, game theorists call this situation a "negative sum game." Such "shrinking overall pie" situations can often lead to conflict over critical resources, unless social structures are developed to help to enable cooperation. Evolutionary psychology researchers may help us to better understand the genesis of the problem, and what potential solutions might be developed to help to facilitate a "soft landing" for our species as oil supplies dwindle and oil based products become progressively more scarce and expensive. -- [7]Dr. Michael E. Mills (HBES website editor) For more information about Peak Oil: Slideshows: >From Powerswitch.org.uk http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/portal/images/stories/animoil.swf (Brief overview) Peak Oil and the Fate of Humanity, by Borbert Beriault. PowerPoint book -- excellent. http://www.peakoilandhumanity.com/ Online Videos: Congressman Bartlett's Peak Oil Presentation to the US Congress (March 14, 2005): http://www.energybulletin.net/5080.html Also see his interview on E&E TV: http://www.eande.tv/main/?date=041805 Kenneth Deffeyes, author of "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak," explains his theories and looks at oil alternatives. http://www.eande.tv/main/?date=072705 Lecture by physics professor David Goodstein, author of "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil." Lecture given at Caltech on 10/13/2004: http://today.caltech.edu/theater/list?subset=science (search in list for lecture) Lecture by chemistry professor Nathan Lewis: "Powering the Planet: Where in the World Will Our Energy Come From?" Lecture given at Caltech on 5/25/2005. http://today.caltech.edu/theater/list?subset=all&story%5fcount=end (search in list for lecture) Lecture by Robert Kaufmann "Oil and the American Way of Life: Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Fermilab Colloquium Lectures, June 1, 2005. http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/050601Kaufmann/index.htm Interview with 'Twilight in the Desert' author Matt Simmons. Are the Saudis running out of oil, and are their reserve estimates accurate? What other sources might help fill the gap? (Originally aired: 06/15/2005) http://www.eande.tv/main/?date=061505 Chevron Oil -- television (and print) advertisements warning about peak oil: http://www.eande.tv/main/?date=072705Also see their "Issues in Brief:" http://www.willyoujoinus.com/issues/ The myths, and pros and cons, of [20]hydrogen fuel cells (PBS - Nova) DVDs: [21]Peak Oil: Imposed by Nature (2005) -- DVD. [22]The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004) -- DVD Online articles: [23]What Can Replace Cheap Oil -- and When? Richard A. Kerr and Robert F. Service, Science, Vol 309, Issue 5731, 101, 1 July 2005. [24]Brief summary of Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management (study led by led by Dr. Robert Hirsch and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy) Wall Street Journal article (8/3/05): [25]Drilling for Broke? Experts Debate 'Peak Oil' [26]Experts: Petroleum May Be Nearing a Peak. Associated Press / Forbes, 5/28/05 List of online articles: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Articles.html Websites: www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net www.powerswitch.org.uk/ www.oilscenarios.info www.culturechange.org www.peakoil.net www.odac-info.org/ www.willyoujoinus.com/ - Chevron Oil website on peak oil. A few relevant books: Recommended: [35]The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, by James Howard Kunstler (2005). Also see a review of this book in [36]American Scientist. Others (in order of publication date): [37]An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus (1798) [38]Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William Catton (1982) [39]Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge by Lester R. Brown, Gary Gardner, Brian Halweil (1999) [40]Hubbert's Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage, by Kenneth S. Deffeyes (2003) [41]Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, by David Goodstein (2004) [42]Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (2004) [43]Powerdown : Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg (2004) and [44]The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg (2003). [45]Beyond Oil : The View from Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth S. Deffeyes (2005) [46]Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, by Matthew R. Simmons (2005) [47]Over a Barrel: A Simple Guide to the Oil Shortage by Tom Mast (2005) References 5. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033375/humanbehaviorand 6. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0252009886/humanbehaviorand 21. http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/PeakOilImposed.html 22. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009231TG/humanbehaviorand 23. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5731/101?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=Kerr&author2=service&searchid=1123265775957_5908&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&fdate=10/1/1995&tdate=8/31/2005 24. http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=11748 25. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112298166483102477-6gMLCLIoOfpd7t41Ueb0M3Vxgr4_20060802,00.html?mod=mktw 26. http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/ap/2005/05/28/ap2063077.html 35. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0871138883/humanbehaviorand 36. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/45924 37. http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html 38. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0252009886/humanbehaviorand 39. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393319067/humanbehaviorand 40. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691116253/humanbehaviorand 41. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393058573/humanbehaviorand 42. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033375/humanbehaviorand 43. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865715106/humanbehaviorand 44. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865714827/humanbehaviorand 45. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0809029561/humanbehaviorand 46. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/047173876X/humanbehaviorand 47. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0976444003/humanbehaviorand From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:15:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:15:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Larry Samuelson: Foundations of Human Sociality: A Review Essay Message-ID: Larry Samuelson: Foundations of Human Sociality: A Review Essay Journal of Economic Literature Vol. XLIII (June 2005), pp. 488?497 1. Introduction The scientists and engineers at the University of Wisconsin have periodic open houses. Thousands of visitors "ooh" and "aah" at the gleaming equipment--nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, electron microscopes, wind tunnels--and sophisticated experiments--cloning, fusion reactions, artificial hearts, and so on. It is no wonder that people walk away anxious to give money. Economists could surely benefit from putting on a similar display, but what would we show? Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies provides one answer. 1 It reports on a research program involving coordinated experiments in fifteen societies scattered around the world. This is a project as sophisticated as anything the scientists can produce. The fifteen societies are described in the title as "small-scale," but this is an * Samuelson: University of Wisconsin. I thank the National Science Foundation (SES-0241506) and Russell Sage Foundation (82-02-04) for financial support. 1Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Edited by Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis. Oxford University Press, 2004. understatement. They are remote, they speak a variety of uncommon languages, and they live in circumstances that make even basic data collection difficult. They fit the stereotype of societies that would be studied by anthropologists, and the editors are joined in the project by a team of (primarily) anthropologists. Three questions lie behind this book. First, experimental economists have amassed a wealth of data in recent years, featuring considerable consensus in some respects. The bulk of the subjects in these data are university students, often American university students. Could the relatively consistent data be an artifact of a homogeneous subject pool, with a world of unexplored variety lurking beyond? Second, a growing number of economists have explored models in which people are concerned with more than simply their own material well-being. How might we model such "social" preferences, and how might we use experimental data to bring some discipline to what otherwise looks like a game with no rules? Finally, having designed such a research program, what do the data have to say? Reflecting these questions, the book splits into two parts. One of these is chapter 3, written by Colin Camerer and Ernst Fehr. This chapter lays out a program for the experimental investigation of social preferences, centered around a series of games that allows one to evaluate and refine hypotheses about preferences and their induced behavior. The second part, comprising the bulk of the book, includes chapter 2, written by the six coeditors and Richard McElreath, and chapters 4?14. The latter report the field work done with the fifteen small-scale societies, emphasizing the economic experiments. Chapter 2 ties the field work together with a description of the common elements as well as the inevitable differences. 2. Social Preferences: A Research Program It will help organize the subsequent discussion to begin with the research program for studying social preferences outlined in chapter 3. Some terms will be helpful. Let us say that an agent?s preferences are personal if they depend only on the amount of money the agent receives.2 If not, then they are social. An agent?s social preferences can in turn be substantive, in which case they depend only upon the final allocation of (perhaps everyone?s) monetary payoffs, or can be procedural, in which case they also depend upon aspects of the process by which these payoffs were determined.3 The book offers a useful example of substantive social preferences, taken from Fehr and Klaus M. Schmidt (1999) (see Gary E. 2 More generally, an agent?s preferences are personal if they depend only upon the agent?s own consumption, but it suffices here to consider preferences over amounts of money. 3 The authors refer to procedural preferences as "reciprocal" preferences, carrying the connotation that agent i?s attitude toward payoffs may depend upon choices j has made, so that i?s behavior may reciprocate j's. This term fits well, but I prefer an alternative because reciprocal is used in the literature with a variety of different meanings. For example, the chapter in question refers to players "reciprocating cooperation" and "reciprocating defection" in the prisoners' dilemma, while explaining how the substantive preferences given by (1) (below) can explain such behavior, thus using the word in its common form in a setting where its technical meaning is inappropriate. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels 2000 for a similar model). The utility ui(pi,pj) derived by player i from i's monetary payoff pi and j's monetary payoff pj is given by .p ap ( -p if p=p (1) i (i, j )..i - ij i ) ij upp = .p ?p p if p= -p .ii (i - j ) ij i =1. The special case =0 gives personal preferences. are positive, player i still likes high monetary payoffs, but now is also averse to inequality, being especially unhappy with inequality in which she receives the short end of the stick. Chapter 3 notes that either substantive or procedural preferences are consistent with behavior observed in the experiments discussed in the chapter. However, the authors suggest that procedural preferences provide better descriptions of behavior in other experiments.4 In light of these remarks, it would have been helpful for the chapter to present an example of procedural preferences analogous to (1), and to have the experimental results discussed in this chapter explained in terms of this model.5 The research described in this chapter is centered around a series of five games that have played prominent roles in the experimental literature:6 The prisoners' dilemma. The point of departure is the prisoners' dilemma.7 4 For example, they refer (p. 83) to an "increasing number of experiments that compare predictions of competing theories," providing "clear evidence for reciprocity beyond inequality aversion . . . " 5 The chapter refers the reader to Matthew Rabin (1993) as well as other models. 6 The authors include two additional games, a public goods game that gives rise to incentives analogous to those of the prisoners' dilemma, and a gift exchange game that gives rise to incentives analogous to those of the trust game. 7 An example of a prisoners' dilemma is: 2 CD C 1 D 2, 2 3, ?1 ?1, 3 0, 0 The key characteristics are that defection (D) is a dominant strategy, while mutual cooperation (C) yields a superior outcome. Personal preferences yield an unambiguous prediction, namely that players should invariably defect. Instead, laboratory experiments routinely find that some agents defect but others cooperate.8 There are manipulations of the experimental environment that make cooperation less frequent, but there is no experimental treatment that reliably produces universal defection. If we are to account for this behavior while retaining the organizing principle of economics, namely that rational players make optimal choices guided by well- defined and stable preferences, then we must admit the possibility of social preferences: some people prefer to cooperate in the prisoners' dilemma. In terms of (1), we thus have evidence that for at least some > 0.9 For cooperation to be optimal, however, an individual must not only , but must also think the opponent is sufficiently likely , or are they simply pessimistic about the prospects that their opponents will cooperate, while standing ready to cooperate against sufficiently cooperative opponents? The ultimatum game. In response, attention turns to the ultimatum game.10 Personal preferences, coupled with sub- game perfection, call for player 1 to offer player 2 nothing (or at most the smallest possible positive amount) and for player 2 to accept. Conditional on player 2 always accepting, player 1's choices should provide . Larger values of correspond to larger offers to player 2. 8 See John O. Ledyard 1995 for a survey. > 0 is necessary for C to be preferred to D. The interpretation is that such an agent prefers the more equal (but personally less lucrative) outcome of mutual cooperation to the more asymmetric payoffs produced by defecting against a cooperator. 10 Player 1 proposes a division of a sum of money to player 2, who either accepts the division, in which case it is implemented, or rejects it, in which case both receive nothing. In experiments, player 1 often offers a substantial portion of the money to player 2, while player 2 often rejects smaller offers.11 The latter behavior provides evidence that > 0 for some players, so that an equal outcome of no money for both is preferred to receiving a relatively small amount of money. However, this player-2 behavior obscures the lessons concerning player 1's . Does player 1 offer money to player 2 because 1 prefers not to have too unequally large a share, or because player 2 rejects small offers? The dictator game. To answer this question, the authors direct attention to the dictator game.12 Personal preferences call for player 1 to retain all of the money. However, player 1 typically offers some money to player 2, but less than in the ultimatum game (Roth 1995). The positive offers again provide evidence for positive , but the comparison suggests that 1's behavior in the ultimatum game is a mixture of concerns for player 2's payoff and concerns about being rejected. The trust game. Attention next turns to the trust game.13 Personal preferences, again coupled with subgame perfection, call for player1 to retain everything, sacrificing the efficiency gains of making a contribution to player 2. Experimental findings, with significant variation, are that player1 typically contributes about halfof1'sendowmentto2, who returns a sum leaving player 1 slightly worse off than if1had contributed nothing. Given that player 1's behavior reflects a mixture of preferences and expectations about 2's behavior, as in the ultimatum game, the clearest implications for preferences 11 See Werner G?th, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze (1982) for the initial study and Alvin E. Roth (1995) for a survey. 12 Player 1 divides a sum of money between player 1 and 2. 13 Player 1 and 2 each receive an endowment of S. Player 1 first decides how much of S to give to player 2, retaining the rest. The money given to player 2 is tripled, at which point player 2 decides how much money to return to player 1. 14 The preferences given by (1) are linear in payoffs, as is the feasible set facing player 2. Taken literally, (1) then implies that player 2 should (generically) either return none of the money or equalize payoffs, but generalizations give interior solutions. come from player 2's behavior. The fact that player 2 returns anything at all provides > 0. However, the data pose puzzles for both substantive and procedural preferences. Player 2 fills the position of a dictator, with the amount to be divided depending upon player 1's first move. In this dictator portion of the trust game, the final payoff typically allocated to player 1 does not increase as the amount to be divided increases. One might have expected preferences such as those captured by (1) to call for the player 1's payoff to increase.14 Perhaps the answer is that procedural considerations are important here. The second move in a trust game is not a de novo dictator game, but a game that follows a choice on the part of player 1 that affects player 2's preferences. The difficulty here is that as player 1 contributes more, and hence acts so as to enhance the welfare of player 2, player 2 "reciprocates" with actions that decrease player 1's relative payoff, leaving player 1 no better off and appearing to put increasing emphasis on player 2's payoffs. This is an unusual brand of reciprocity. The trust game illustrates how subtle the match between experimental results and simple economic models can be. In light of this, a more detailed discussion would have been helpful, including a demonstration of how the substantive model given by (1) and an analogous procedural model might match behavior. Punishment games. People may have social preferences, but are the departures from personal preferences large enough to have real effects on behavior? The point behind the punishment games described briefly in this chapter is that seemingly small effects in preferences can be leveraged into large effects in behavior. Suppose that there is an accepted standard of behavior, and that people have the opportunity to sanction those who stray from this standard. These sanctions may have a large cumulative effect on their target while imposing relatively small costs on those doing the sanctioning. Experiments show that people will impose such sanctions, even against those whose actions have no direct payoff consequences for the sanctioner, and that the sanctions can have significant effects on behavior (Fehr and Urs Fischbacher 2004, Fehr and Simon G?chter 2000, 2000, 2002). 3. The Experiments Chapter 3 offers a template for the study of social preferences. The second and larger part of the book pursues this program, reporting on experiments with fifteen groups of people. The following table identifies the groups with whom the experiments were done, their location, and the researchers who did the experiments and wrote the relevant chapters. Every study involved the ultimatum game. In some cases, experiments with one or more of the public-goods game, the trust game, or the dictator game were also performed. The most striking aspect of the experimental work is the chance to compare ultimatum-game behavior across a wide range of settings, and I'll concentrate on the ultimatum game. The authors organize their results around five themes. Variability. The behavior observed in the fifteen societies exhibits more variation than found in the familiar experimental literature based on university students. Mean offers in ultimatum-game experiments with university students tend to lie between 40 and 50 percent. Among the fifteen societies studied here, the means range from 25 to 57 percent. Most existing experiments have produced modes at 50 percent, while modal offers here range from 15 to 50. Rejection behavior is similarly varied. Four groups (Kazakhs, Ache, Quichua, and Chapter Group Country Researcher 4 Achuar Ecuador John Q. Patton 4 Quichua Ecuador John Q. Patton 5 Machiguenga Peru Joseph Henrich and Natalie Smith 5 Mapuche/Huinca Chile Joseph Henrich and Natalie Smith 6 Hadza Tanzania Frank Marlowe 7 Tsimane' Bolivia Michael Gurven 8 Au Papua New Guinea David P. Tracer 8 Gnau Papua New Guinea David P. Tracer 9 Kazakhs Mongolia Franciso J. Gil-White 9 Torguuds Mongolia Franciso J. Gil-White 10 Shona Zimbabwe Abigail Barr 11 Sangu Tanzania Richard McElreath 12 Orma Kenya Jean Ensminger 13 Ache Paraguay Kim Hill and Michael Gurven 14 Lamalera Indonesia Michael S. Alvard Tsimane') rejected no offers (with sample sizes from 10 to 70), even though in two of these cases about half of the offers were for less than 30 percent of the surplus. Another group (Machiguenga) rejected only one offer (out of 21), though 75 percent of the offers were for less than 30 percent of the surplus. Two of the groups (Au and Gnau) often rejected offers of more than fifty percent, and appeared to be just as likely to reject high as low offers. In other groups, rejections were relatively frequent, especially of low offers. Preferences. The prediction of subgame perfection with personal preferences, that the proposer offers virtually nothing and the responder accepts, does not provide a good match for the data. As one might expect, given the variability in behavior, there are aspects of the data that appear to be both closer to and further from this benchmark than the bulk of the existing literature. Intergroup differences. The authors construct measures of two characteristics for each group. A group is deemed to have higher potential gains from cooperation if productive activities in the group are more likely to require interaction with nonrelatives. A group is deemed to have higher aggregate market integration the more often its people engage in market exchange, the larger its settlements, and the more complex its political structure. A regression suggests that mean ultimatum-game offers are higher for those groups exhibiting a higher potential benefit from cooperation and higher aggregate market interaction.15 These results nicely exploit the strength of the research design and data, namely the variability in groups and behavior. At this point, it would be helpful to have more attention devoted to how one might interpret the link between aggregate market integration and ultimatum-game behavior. If asked for the direction of this link before seeing this book, I'm not sure which I would have predicted. I can imagine market 15 A standard deviation increase in either variable gives about half a standard deviation increase in mean offer. integration making people more likely to treat others "fairly" or more likely to induce them to drive and sometimes accept hard bargains.16 Some additional scrutiny and perhaps modeling would be helpful in interpreting the correlation. Intragroup differences. A variety of individual characteristics, such as sex, age, wealth, education, market participation, and others, showed little relationship to behavior in the experiments. Everyday life. The authors note that one can find parallels between the behavior of various groups in the experiments and their everyday life. For example, foragers who routinely share the meat they catch (the Ache), to the point that a successful hunter often takes none of the catch, sometimes declining even the credit for making the catch by leaving it outside the village to be found anonymously, made quite generous offers in the ultimatum game and generated no rejections. Foragers who appear to share only under duress (the Hadza), often attempting to sneak their catch into camp unseen, made smaller offers that often generated rejections. The links between everyday and experimental behavior are especially intriguing. First, they suggest a view of preferences as being shaped by one's culture and way of life, a suggestion that runs throughout the book.17 Among the clearer examples, John Patton (pp. 121?22) suggests that the Achuar tend to be involved in more stable interactions in their daily lives than do the Quichua, which may be reflected in different perceptions of what behavior is fair or acceptable, and hence different behavior in the ultimatum game. Richard McElreath (pp. 350?51) offers a similar explanation for 16 Jean Ensminger's contribution (pp. 356?357) provides a brief discussion of ideas suggesting that market participation may either enhance or attenuate tendencies to be fair. 17 Henrich (2004) presents a model in which cultural evolutional shapes social preferences. behavioral differences between Sangu herders and farmers. Michael Gurven (p. 227) closes his discussion with a call for further investigation of such cultural foundations of social preferences. At the same time, this link raises issues in interpreting the experimental results. For example, the Orma are said (pp. 38?41) to have readily recognized the public goods game as a "harambee" game, referring to the contributions they make when constructing public goods such as roads or schools. However, the harambee itself appears to be best modeled as a repeated relationship, unlike the one-shot nature of the experiment. If subjects responded to the experiment with behavior appropriate for the repeated environment of the harambee, then their behavior may tell us little about their preferences. We return to this issue in the following section. The experiments provide a wealth of material for those interested in studying experimental methods. How does one attempt standardized experiments when dealing with twelve researchers in fifteen societies spread across the globe in challenging settings? As the authors note, a variety of compromises had to be made. Some actual ultimatum-game offers were supplemented with sham offers to generate more variation. Some sample sizes were small. The game was typically presented in the abstract, but sometimes with the help of analogies to concrete situations. Subjects were typically paid in money,but not always. How does one control the variation inevitable in oral presentations? How does one ensure that the various settings have not introduced framing effects that swamp other considerations? How does one work, not only without the sophisticated computer interfaces typical of experimental laboratories, but with subjects who may not be able to do even simple arithmetic? The authors are aware of these difficulties. I think it a sensible response to note that if one waited for perfect procedures and perfect answers to all of these questions, no study of this type would ever get off the ground. It is clear from the recurring discussions of method in the book that the authors worked hard in quest of the best experimental practice they could achieve, and worked hard to control and standardize their procedures. This is as much as one can ask. 4. Discussion The book provides clear answers, sketched in the previous two sections, to the first two motivating questions raised in section 1. There are ways to systematically use experiments in investigating social preferences. There is more variety in behavior than previous experiments might lead us to believe. The third question is more challenging. What do the results tell us about the nature of people's social preferences? Using (1) to organize the discussion, what do the ? In particular, do the experimental observations imply that we should rethink our economic models, in which personal preferences currently play a prominent role, to allow more room for social preferences? The answer appears to be yes, if the games played by the subjects are a good match for the ultimatum game that appears in our theoretical models. This qualification, however, is important. A key feature of the ultimatum game is that it involves anonymous opponents with no future interaction. If the participants are concerned with the implications of current play for future behavior, perhaps in the form of an effect of current play on their reputation, then the simple link between behavior in the ultimatum game and preferences is broken. How might such a concern with the future or a feeling of nonanonymity arise? The subjects in the experiments reported here are typically drawn from small societies, with whom they know they will have subsequent interactions, often while living with virtually no privacy. Despite the best attempts of the experimenter to make experimental play 18 Notice that this possibility differs from a maladaption account, in which evolution is said to have neglected to equip us even with an understanding of one-shot interactions (because we purportedly evolved in an environment in which the norm was repeated interactions with small groups of primarily relatives). Fehr and Henrich (2003) and Henrich (2004) argue that such maladaption does not provide an adequate model of social preferences. Instead, we are considering here the possibility that subjects may understand the implications of one-shot interactions, but not view the experiments as such interactions. anonymous, the subjects may have perceived, perhaps correctly, that their current play would have future repercussions.18 This possibility is raised several times in the book. Gurven (p. 221) suggests that rejections in the ultimatum game may have been relatively rare because subjects viewed rejection as giving rise to costs or punishments in subsequent interactions. Ensminger (p. 358) notes that anonymity may be impossible to achieve in small-scale societies. Hill and Gurven suggest (p. 403) that their subjects live in a sufficiently small community that aggressive behavior in the game could be deterred by the attendant negative impact on subsequent community relations, and note (pp. 406-07) that subjects appeared to treat the public goods games as part of an iterated sequence of social interactions. These difficulties are exacerbated by the challenges of getting the experimental subjects to understand the abstract experimental environment. Patton (p. 105) indicates that the experiment was described to the potential subjects as a minga, or cooperative labor exchange. This may have helped in many respects, but a minga entails future obligations (p. 101), potentially introducing the ideas of repetition or lack of anonymity into subjects' views of the experiment. As we have noted, Ensminger (p. 376) reports that her subjects immediately recognized the public goods game as a harambee, a village-level pubic goods contribution process that again potentially introduces elements of repetition or the lack of anonymity. It does not appear as if one can explain all of the data by simply muttering "they acted Samuelson: Foundations of Human Sociality: A Review Essay 495 19 Ensminger follows her comment with the observation that something more appears to be at work. Hill and Gurven note that the shadow of the future was most pronounced in a version of the public goods game in which contributions were made publicly, an indication that subjects understand that the future is sometimes more important than others. as if the game was repeated."19 However, as various of the authors' comments indicate, the possibility that such considerations played a role in shaping play is heightened by the nature of the subject populations, and makes it difficult to identify the games and the forces that shaped the subjects' behavior. This in turn makes it difficult to draw inferences from the observed behavior. Why is this a problem? Everyone recognizes that people sometimes do things-- make anonymous contributions, render aid to strangers, chastise transgressors--that are most readily modeled with social preferences. Differences of opinion arise in assessing the importance of social preferences in explaining economic behavior, and it is here that experiments can be especially valuable. But if the behavior in the experiments depends importantly on features beyond the experimental design, then conclusions concerning the nature and importance of social preferences are difficult to draw. This difficulty becomes more pronounced if we consider procedural preferences rather than the substantive preferences of (1). Not only are outcomes now important, but so is the process by which these outcomes are achieved. In addition, we cannot expect the experiment to control all of the details of this process. For example, Gurven (p. 226) notes that preferences for how resources are to be allocated may depend importantly on how the resources are made available--whether as the result of a windfall, for example, or as a result of having been earned. How do the experimental subjects perceive the surplus, and what effect does it have on their behavior? Preferences now depend upon the game and the context in which the game is played. The experiment can control the former, but we can expect much of the latter to be supplied by the subjects. A recurring theme throughout this book is that behavior in the experiments reflects the subjects' behavior in their everyday lives, as one would hope if the experiments are to tell us about the preferences that guide the subjects' lives. However, running along with this is the theme that the experimental behavior may be borrowed from a variety of real-life situations, not all of them an appropriate match for the setting one typically hopes to capture with the ultimatum game. Henrich and Smith (p. 164) suggest that behavior in the ultimatum game depends upon which of a diverse set of behavioral rules is triggered by the experimental implementation. McElreath (p. 344) suggests that different players may map the ultimatum game into different social experiences and hence effectively play different games. Patton (p. 98) suggests that ultimatum-game behavior reflects a logic of reciprocal fairness that is not well suited for the ultimatum game, but also not easily overruled by a conscious understanding of the game. Tracer (p. 255) suggests that his players "inescapably brought the understandings, beliefs, expectations, and values that they apply to daily life into the experiment," including a belief that current actions would incur future obligations. Hill and Gurven (p. 403) offer a similar interpretation. Gurven (p. 226) notes that people can be more or less likely to cooperate depending upon the type of cooperation required--a group may readily cooperate in hunting or fishing, but not in conservation--making it difficult to make the link from experimental behavior to any particular real-life behavior. We thus have two related obstacles standing between the observed behavior and conclusions about social preferences. First, the subjects may have viewed their behavior as having future implications. If so, then subjects with personal preferences could exhibit behavior that could only be rationalized by social preferences in a literal implementation of the ultimatum game. Second, social preferences, especially procedural social preferences, may call into play a variety of factors beyond those captured by the ultimatum game model and the surrounding experimental design. Distinguishing between personal and social preferences is thus not straightforward. These difficulties are not new. The existing experimental literature is full of experiments that are interpreted by some as being consistent with social preferences and others as reflecting personal preferences, with the differences frequently revolving around the connection between the experimenter's model of the strategic interaction and the subjects' model of the interaction. Indeed, this diversity of interpretations and conclusions is reflected in miniature in the studies in this volume.20 One can conclude that the experimental findings in this volume are consistent witha modelin which social elements play an important role in people's preferences and behavior, but also that they are consistent with a model in which behavior is guided primarily by personal preferences. Further work is required to distinguish these alternatives. Work that moves us outside the traditional experimental economics laboratory, like the experiments reported here, is likely to be especially useful. In this respect, perhaps the most valuable part of this book is its analysis linking experimental play to group characteristics such as the importance of cooperation and degree of market integration. Once again, the results lend themselves to multiple interpretations. It could be that cultural evolution has led different groups to different configurations of social preferences that reflect differences in their ways of life. It could also be that subjects from different groups associate the experiment with different experiences from 20 As the editors note in their introduction to this volume (p. 7), they made no attempt to force a party line on the studies. their contrasting ways of life, prompting different behavior from personal preferences. Comparative static studies of this kind are likely to hold the key to separating the various hypotheses and getting a better idea of preferences.21 A single study cannot be expected to resolve every question, even a study as large as this one. But it has enriched the discussion and opened new directions for research, directions that hold great promise and that one hopes become standard. 5. Conclusion This is a fascinating book to read on many levels. It provides a captivating window into the world of anthropologists.22 It is impressive both in the goals the authors are willing to set for an experimental study and in the lengths they are willing to go in pursuit of these goals. We have much to learn from these experiments, most notably that humans exhibit a richer variety of behavior than many of us have imagined. The authors indicate they are working on additional experiments that will allow them to make use of what they have learned in this study and to fill in some more pieces of the puzzle. Readers of this book will surely look forward to the next. REFERENCES Bewley,TrumanF. 1999. Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bolton, Gary E., and Axel Ockenfels. 2000. "ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition." American Economic Review, 90(1): 166-93. Fehr, Ernst, and Urs Fischbacher. 2004. "Third Party 21Truman F. Bewley (1999) offers another promising direction for such work, seeking evidence that considerations such as fairness and morale play a role in workplace behavior, as does the growing body of work with field experiments (cf. Glenn W. Harrison and John A. List 2004). It may be useful to pursue experiments analogous to those of this book with larger societies in which anonymity may be more readily obtained. 22 The introduction briefly mentions a dinner in which the anthropologists on this project entertained the economists with stories of what the former had eaten in the field. The book is less graphic, but no less interesting in describing how work in economics and anthropology can be combined. Punishment and Social Norms." Evolution and Human Behavior, 25(2): 63-87. Fehr, Ernst, and Simon G?chter. 2000. "Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments." American Economic Review, 90(4): 980-94. Fehr, Ernst, and Simon G?chter. 2000. "Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(3): 159-81. Fehr, Ernst, and Simon G?chter. 2002. "Altruistic Punishment in Humans." Nature, 415(6868): 137-40. Fehr, Ernst, and Joseph Henrich. 2003. "Is Strong Reciprocity a Maladaptation? On the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Altruism," in The Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation. Peter Hammerstein, ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 55-82. Fehr, Ernst, and Klaus M. Schmidt. 1999. "A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(3): 817-68. G?th, Werner, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze. 1982. "An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 3(4): 367-88. Harrison, Glenn W., and John A. List. 2004. "Field Experiments," Mimeo. University of Central Florida and University of Maryland. Henrich, Joseph. 2004. "Cultural Group Selection, Coevolutionary Processes and Large-Scale Cooperation." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 53(1): 3-35. Ledyard, John O. "Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research," in Handbook of Experimental Economics. John Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 111-94. Rabin, Matthew. 1993. "Incorporating Fairness into Game Theory and Economics." American Economic Review, 83(5): 1281-1302. Roth, Alvin E. 1995. "Bargaining Experiments," in Handbook of Experimental Economics. John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 253-348. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:15:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:15:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] LAT: Study: Adept Liars' Brains Are Built Differently Message-ID: Study: Adept Liars' Brains Are Built Differently http://www.latimes.com/la-093005liar_lat,0,7350923.story?track=hpmostemailedlink [Thanks to Laird for this.] Robert Lee Hotz Times Staff Writer 10:47 AM PDT, September 30, 2005 In the lexicon of lying, there are white lies and bare-faced lies. Facts can be fudged, forged or shaded. There are fibbers, fabricators and feckless fabulists. By whatever clinical term, the truth simply is not in some people. Now scientists have an anatomical inkling why. A new study from the University of Southern California, published in the October issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that the talent for compulsive deception is embedded in the structure of the brain itself. People who habitually lie and cheat ??? pathological liars ??? appear to have much more white matter, which speeds communication between neurons, in the prefrontal cortex than normal people, the researchers found. They also have fewer actual neurons. The differences affect a portion of the brain, located just behind the forehead, that enables people to feel remorse, learn moral behavior and plan complex strategies. The surplus of connections between neurons might enable these people to be more adept at the complex neural networking that underlies deceit. Lying is hard work and these brains may be better equipped to handle it, the researchers said. "Lying is cognitively complex," said USC psychologist Adrian Raine, the senior scientist on the research project. "It is not easy to lie. It is certainly more difficult than telling the truth. Some people have a biological advantage in lying. It gives them a slight edge." The researchers recruited 108 volunteers, then sorted them into groups based on psychological tests designed to determine how often they lied. The volunteers were then scanned using magnetic structural imaging to obtain detailed anatomical images of their brain tissue. The group of compulsive liars had 25.7% more white matter in the prefrontal cortex and 14.2% less gray matter than the normal control group. "To our knowledge, it is the first imaging study on people who lie, cheat and deceive as a group," Raine said. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:15:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:15:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Journal of Bioethics: Review of Citizen Cyborg Message-ID: Review of Citizen Cyborg American Journal of Bioethics Volume 5 Number 5 | September-October 2005 Book Review Of "James Hughes. 2004. Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future" Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. 294 pages, $26.95, hardcover Reviewed by Linda MacDonald Glenn I love technology; it promises so much. Then, when it doesn't work, I find it infuriating and frustrating. Transhumanists (short for "transitional humans") have a reputation for embracing technology with unbridled passion. Conservative social theorist Francis Fukuyama claims that transhumanism is the "world's most dangerous idea." Some conservative groups have described transhumanists as extreme militant libertarians, who advocate anarchy and pure capitalism. Given that context, I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised when I finished reading Citizen Cyborg. Author James Hughes does not advocate any sort of extreme militant libertarianism; he advocates a more balanced democratic socialism. 1 James Hughes teaches health policy at Trinity College in Connecticut, and is the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA). He describes Citizen Cyborg as a book "about the conflict between [J.S.] Haldane's optimism that we could overcome our squeamishness about technology to build a better world and [Aldous] Huxley's pessimism that biotechnologies will dehumanize and enslave us." As a self-described Buddhist, he attempts to find the "middle way" between Haldane and Huxley. The first section of the book is a comprehensive review of the latest advances in the field of converging technologies: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive technologies (NBIC). Hughes draws much of his information from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which convened a series of workshops and commissioned a series of papers on the consequences of the convergence of NBIC for "improving human performance." The NBIC report concludes: "With proper attention to ethical issues and societal needs, converging technologies could achieve a tremendous improvement in human abilities, societal outcomes, the nation's productivity, and quality of life." Hughes contends that these new technologies can help end violence, war, and torture; repair bodies and brains; help us be happier and smarter; and live longer. Despite his ample optimism for the potential good, Hughes recognizes the importance of monitoring and regulating the development and use of this technology. The second section of the book describes "the new biopolitical landscape," in terms of extremist groups including defenders of natural law, left-wing bioLuddites, "upwingers" (as opposed to left-wing, right-wing, or any other wing), "extropians" (techno-libertarians) and run-of-the-mill transhumanists. Such a perspective is rather contrary to Buddhist philosophy. (Buddhism tends to focus on the "oneness," rather than categorization, and "right speech"-speaking in ways that are trustworthy, harmonious, comforting, and worth taking to heart). Hughes spends too much time arguing with and bashing those who are leery of the technology; the focus on the potential good is persuasive enough. Also, as he agrees that the development and application of this technology needs to be monitored and regulated, he has more common ground with the moderately cautious bioLuddites than the reader is otherwise led to believe. On the other hand, considering Fukuyama's comment about the "dangerousness" of transhumanism, Hughes' defensive tone is understandable. Hughes emphasizes the position of the WTA that "Racism, sexism, speciesism, belligerent nationalism, and religious intolerance are unacceptable," and explains that the WTA formally denounces "Any and all doctrines of racial or ethnic supremacy/inferiority [as] incompatible with the fundamental tolerance and humanist roots of transhumanism". Hughes also lays out an argument for rights based on the notion of personhood, and argues that the minimal criterion for personhood is self-awareness. The difficulty with using self-awareness as a criterion is that it is terribly subjective, and therefore not objectively verifiable. Hughes appreciably attempts to find a path for moral and legal status between traditional Kantianism and traditional utilitarianism; his arguments are similar to philosopher Peter Singer of Princeton. However, many in the bioethics community will find his classification of brain-dead persons, embryos, and fetuses as property (albeit, sentient property for fetuses), troublesome. His statement that "things that are not citizens are necessarily property" (xx) reveals the difficulty in a dualistic, dichotomized traditional property versus personhood approach; it doesn't recognize that new categories have been and are being recognized in developing law (for example, the law recognizes corporations as persons and at least one court has recognized that frozen embryos are quasi-property, as opposed to mere property. Also, other legal scholars have argued for the recognition of categories in between persons and property.) Interestingly, and to his credit, Hughes acknowledges that when it comes to the issue of cybernetic intelligence, the issue of self-awareness and rights becomes much more complicated. He states that "organic people will likely face more significant threats from machine minds that achieve self-awareness than they do from enhanced chimpanzees.. Machine minds are far less certain of having capacities for empathy and morality.. Our obligation to acknowledge self-aware machines will need to be balanced by our obligation to protect the interests of already existing organic citizens" (xi). In the third section, Hughes argues that, like the democratic humanism of the French and American revolutions, diverse threads of humanity "can be united in a radically democratic form of techno-optimism, a democratic transhumanism" (xx). He further states, "If libertarians want enhancement technologies to be safe, widely available and unhampered by Luddite bans, they need to support legitimate regulation and universal provision" (xx). He attempts to assuage the fears of those who worry that transhumanism would create a culture of eugenics by emphasizing the careful balancing of liberty against the public good; he stresses the need for open debate and education, as well as (dare I say Buddhist) policies that encourage empathy and compassion. In summary, anyone interested in enhancement technologies, whether pro or con, should read Citizen Cyborg. Time will tell if we are beneficiaries or victims of our own devices. Hughes makes a cogent argument that, through democratic processes, we can and will control technologies and that technologies will not control us. I love technology; it promises so much. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 The online free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, describes democratic socialism as a political movement that can gradually establish socialist reform by modifying capitalism from within, via democracy and trade unions and reform, rather than by violent revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism (Accessed 6/8/2005) From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:15:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:15:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Corante: DARPA's Radical Neurowar Technologies Message-ID: DARPA's Radical Neurowar Technologies http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/2005/09/30/darpas_radical_neurowar_technologies.php September 30, 2005 Posted by Zack Lynch All technologies are double-edged swords. While advances in neuroscience are making possible more effective treatments for mental illness, the same technology is also going to be used for other purposes. For example, the U.S. Defense Science Office recently announced (http://www.darpa.mil/dso/future/faoi.htm) that it is creating a future in which our warfighters instantaneously assimilate all available information through advances in neurotechnology. One program promises a future in which warfighters can maintain their peak physical and cognitive performance, despite battlefield stressors such as sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme environments. The DSO envisions a future where severe pain is eliminated for weeks with a single dose and no adverse cognitive effects. Remarkable, they state, this pain therapy is already in clinical trials. Another program that has come out of the DSO's long investment in understanding language of the brain has led to the possibility of the developing an upper limb prosthetic that responds to brain control, a prosthetic that has all the motor and sensory capabilities of a natural limb. While this program might have alternative uses, it is currently targeted to help returning soldiers who have lost a limb to participate more fully in their return to society. These are just a few of the programs that are beginning to give rise to the scary neurowar scenario I have previously written about. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:15:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:15:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'The Darwin Conspiracy': Survival of the Baddest Message-ID: 'The Darwin Conspiracy': Survival of the Baddest http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/books/review/02gutin.html [First chapter appended.] THE DARWIN CONSPIRACY By John Darnton. 309 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95. By JOANN C. GUTIN For a guy who's been in the news practically every day of this administration, Charles Darwin led a pretty dull life. He was married to the same woman for 43 years, loved dogs, orchids and children, and thought a great time meant lying on the sofa smoking a cigarette while his wife read Jane Austen out loud. His friends unanimously described him as the kindest, best-natured man they knew. Apart from a five-year voyage around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin spent most of his time alone in his study, reading, experimenting and fretting about how the world would react to his theory of evolution by natural selection. All this makes him lousy villain material. But that doesn't stop John Darnton, a longtime editor at The New York Times, from giving it his best shot in "The Darwin Conspiracy," an elaborately plotted but unconvincing historical thriller in which two young researchers comb musty archives and crumbling manor houses for hidden documents that will reveal a secret side to Darwin's personality. Alternating chapters, set in the 19th century, tell Darnton's version of what really happened on the Beagle voyage, not the supposedly sanitized account accepted by scholars for the past 150 years. If all this reminds you of [60]A. S. Byatt's "Possession," you're not far wrong. Of course, there's nothing wrong with homage, if that's what this is. In theory. The story begins with Darnton's hero, the aimless American graduate student Hugh Kellem, alone in the Galapagos studying the birds called Darwin's finches. For natural history buffs, this is a promising start: the real finch project on the Galapagos, run for 30-odd years by two Princeton professors, is legendary among evolutionary biologists for producing some of the best evidence for the effects of natural selection in real time. So far, so good. Soon a beautiful young biologist with an interesting background arrives on the island. "There're these rumors that she's related to him somehow, somewhere way back there, a great-great something or other," another new colleague tells Hugh. The "him" would be Darwin, but the lovely Beth, strangely, doesn't like to talk about her relative. In the real world, capitalizing on one's Darwin family connections is a hoary tradition, but O.K., this is fiction. Whatever. But when the smitten Hugh abandons finches and fieldwork, telling his adviser he plans to do "some kind of research, maybe on Darwin," I, too, jumped ship. Some kind of research? Don't these people write grant proposals? No, Hugh just reads a few biographies, and next thing we know, the weedy lad with a B.A. is permitted to paw through the archives of Darwin's London publisher. There he finds . . . a secret diary kept by Darwin's daughter Elizabeth! "And just think, it had been lying there unread all those years." This bit of serendipity puts the two investigators on the trail of plagiarism, blackmail and murder most foul. "Hugh couldn't believe his luck." Me neither. We bought the long-lost document trick in "Possession" because Byatt immersed us in the kind of detail that made us care about people and places: the light in the Reading Room of the London Library, the Victorian dust on the unopened book, the smell of cat urine in the basement flat of her dweeby postdoc hero. Darnton's characters and their motivation, though, are as thin as the case for intelligent design. Besides which, it takes four long-lost documents to bring "The Darwin Conspiracy" to an end. As Hugh exclaims, unnecessarily, "The whole thing is so unbelievable." Clearly, Darnton is a demon researcher. The Galapagos setting is accurate; the layout of Darwin's home in Kent is perfect; the story of the Beagle invitation is exactly as Janet Browne tells it in her riveting biography. Darnton nails nearly every fact, from the length of the Galapagos drought in 1977 to the name of Darwin's butler. What defeats him is the impossibility of making a bad guy out of a great man. JoAnn C. Gutin, a science writer in New York, writes frequently for Newsday and Salon. First chapter of 'The Darwin Conspiracy' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/books/chapters/1002-1st-darnt.html By JOHN DARNTON Hugh spotted the boat while it was still a dot on the horizon and watched it approach the island, making a wide, white arc. He shaded his eyes but still he had to squint against the shards of reflected light. Already the morning sun had cut through the haze to lay a shimmering sword on the water. All around him the birds swooped and darted in the cacophonous morning feeding-hundreds of them, screaming swallow-tailed gulls, brown noddies, boobies homing in with fish dangling in their beaks. A frigate circled behind a gull, yanked its tail feathers to open the gullet, then made a corkscrew dive to grab the catch-a flash of acrobatic violence that had long since ceased to amaze him. The boat appeared to be a panga, but that was odd: supplies weren't due for days. Hugh fixed his stare on the dark silhouette of the driver. He looked like Raoul, the way he leaned into the wind, one arm trailing back on the throttle. Hugh dropped his canvas tool bag near the mist net and started down. The black rocks were streaked white and gray with guano, which stank in the windless air and made the lava slippery, but he knew the footholds perfectly. The heat pressed down on him. When he reached the bottom of the cliffside, Raoul was already there. He idled the swaying panga a few feet from the landing rock, a narrow ledge that was washed by an ankle-deep wave every few seconds. "Amigo," shouted Raoul, grinning behind dark glasses. "Hey, Cowboy," said Hugh. He coughed to clear his throat-it had been a long time since he had talked to anybody. Raoul was wearing pressed khaki shorts, a Yankees cap over his thick black hair at a jaunty angle, and a dark blue jersey with the insignia of the Galapagos National Park on the left breast pocket. "Just stopping by," he said. "What's new?" "Not much." "I thought you will be totally crazy by now." His English was almost perfect but sometimes an odd phrasing gave him away. "No, not totally. But I'm working on it." "So, how's the ermitano?" "The what?" "Ermitano," Raoul repeated. "How do you say that?" "Hermit." Raoul nodded and regarded him closely. "So, how're you doing?" "Fine," lied Hugh. Raoul looked away. "I brought two chimbuzos." He gestured with his chin to two water barrels strapped to the mid-seat. "Help me to deliver them." Hugh leapt into the boat, unstrapped a barrel, and hoisted it over his right shoulder. The weight threw off his balance and he tottered like a drunken sailor and almost fell into the water. "Not like that," said Raoul. "Put them overboard and shove them to the mat. Then you climb up and pick them up." The mat, short for "welcome mat," was the nickname the researchers called the rocky ledge. Raoul had hung around them so long, helping out now and then because he admired what they were doing, that he was picking up their lingo. Hugh finally got both barrels ashore and lugged them up to the beginning of the path. He was dripping with sweat by the time he returned. "Want to come on shore, stay a while?" he asked. The offer was disingenuous. The water was too deep to anchor-more than eighty feet straight down-and if the panga docked, the waves would smash it against the rocks. "I can't stay. I just wanted to say hello. How're your crazy birds-getting thirsty, no?" "The heat's rough on them. Some are dying." Raoul shook his head. "How many days without rain?" he asked. "Today is two hundred something, two hundred twenty-five, I think." Raoul whistled and shook his head again, a fatalistic gesture, and lit a cigarette. They talked for a while about the study. Raoul was always eager to hear how it was going. He had once said that if he came back to earth a second time that was what he wanted to do-camp out and study birds. Hugh thought that Raoul had no idea what it was really like-the solitude, the fatigue and boredom and endless repetition of extremes, boiling during the day and then at night when the temperature dropped forty degrees, lying in your sleeping bag and shivering so violently you can't go to sleep even though you're exhausted. Anything can sound glamorous until you do it. "Say," Raoul said lightly, "I hear you're getting company. Two more guys coming out." "Yeah-so I'm told." Raoul looked quizzical. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 5 17:18:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 13:18:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Race vs. Genes as Risk Factors in Health Message-ID: Public Health: Race vs. Genes as Risk Factors in Health http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051007-4.htm The following points are made by Mike Bamshad (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 2005 294:937): 1) An important goal of 21st-century medicine is to predict an individual's medical future -- that is, to identify the set of risk factors for disease and predictors of treatment response that influence a person's health, with the goal of more effectively treating and preventing disease. Throughout much of the world, race -- using its historical meaning as a descriptor of Africans, Asians, Europeans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders -- is often considered one key determinant of health.[1,2] 2) Race might influence an individual's health in several ways. It might covary with different environmental or genetic factors that underlie risk, different interactions between genetic and environmental factors, or different combinations thereof. Many environmental factors that influence health are known, but most of the genetic factors, much less interactions between the two, remain to be discovered. Nevertheless, there is widespread speculation that genetic factors influencing health differ among racial groups because many health-related traits vary among racial groups.[3] This speculation has revived a long-standing debate in medical and scientific communities about the validity and necessity of using race to make inferences about an individual's genetic ancestry, some scientists embracing this idea and others dismissing it.[4,5] 3) In this debate, one issue that is commonly confused is the difference between race and ancestry. Ancestry refers to objective genetic relationships between individuals and among populations, whereas race has always been a somewhat arbitrary definition of population boundaries. For example, while an individual might have ancestors from Europe, Africa, and North America, he or she still might be categorized as an African American. Therefore, race captures some biological information about ancestry, but it is not equivalent to ancestry. 4) Yet clinicians often want to know whether it is valid and reliable to use race as a proxy to infer an individual's genetic risk for disease and treatment response. Whether race matters is, however, complicated because it depends on the relationship between the genetic risk factor, ancestry, and race. For example, beta-blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors for hypertension treatment may not work as well, on average, in African Americans compared with European Americans, but both types of drugs appear to work perfectly well in a large fraction of African Americans and poorly in some European Americans. 5) The observation might be explained by a hypothetical genetic predictor of positive response to ACE inhibitors that is common in European Americans but that is also present in some African Americans because of admixture and absent in some European Americans. In such a case, the best predictor of treatment response might be the presence of the variant (ie, direct testing); the next best might be an accurate estimator of genetic ancestry, and race might be only a poor predictor of genetic risk and therefore treatment response. References (abridged): 1. Osborne NG, Feit MD. The use of race in medical research. JAMA. 1992;267:275-279. 2. Oppenheimer G. Paradigm lost: race, ethnicity, and the search for a new population taxonomy. Am J Public Health. 2001;91:1049-1055. 3. Institute of Medicine. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2003 4. Risch N, Burchard E, Ziv E, Tang H. Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race, and disease. Genome Biol. 2002;3:1-12 5. Burchard EG, Ziv E, Coyle N, et al. The importance of race and ethnic background in biomedical research and clinical practice. N Engl J Med. 2003;348:1170-1175 J. Am. Med. Assoc. http://www.jama.com -------------------------------- Related Material: ANTHROPOLOGY: ON HUMANS AND RACE The following points are made by D.A. Hughes et al (Current Biology 2004 14:R367): 1) Systematists have not defined a "type specimen" for humans, in contrast to other species. Recent attempts to provide a definition for our species, so-called "anatomically modern humans", have suffered from the embarrassment that exceptions to such definitions inevitably arise -- so are these exceptional people then not "human"? Anyway, in comparison with our closest-living relatives, chimpanzees, and in light of the fossil record, the following trends have been discerned in the evolution of modern humans: increase in brain size; decrease in skeletal robusticity; decrease in size of dentition; a shift to bipedal locomotion; a longer period of childhood growth and dependency; increase in lifespan; and increase in reliance on culture and technology. 2) The traditional classification of humans as Homo sapiens, with our very own separate family (Hominidae) goes back to Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). Recently, the controversial suggestion has been made of lumping humans and chimpanzees together into at least the same family, if not the same genus, based on the fact that they are 98-99% identical at the nucleotide sequence level. DNA sequence similarity is not the only basis for classification, however: it has also been proposed that, in a classification based on cognitive/mental abilities, humans would merit their own separate kingdom, the Psychozoa (which does have a nice ring to it). 3) As for sub-categories, or "races", of humans, in his Systema Naturae of 1758 Linnaeus recognized four principal geographic varieties or subspecies of humans: Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Afer (Africans). He defined two other categories: Monstrosus, mostly hairy men with tails and other fanciful creatures, but also including some existing groups such as Patagonians; and Ferus, or "wild boys", thought to be raised by animals, but actually retarded or mentally ill children that had been abandoned by their parents. In his scheme of 1795, Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840) added a fifth category, Malay, including Polynesians, Melanesians and Australians. 4) Blumenbach is also responsible for using the term "Caucasian" to refer in general to Europeans, which he chose on the basis of physical appearance. He thought Europeans had the greatest physical beauty of all humans -- not surprising, as he was of course European himself -- and amongst Europeans he thought those from around Mount Caucasus the most beautiful. Hence, he named the "most beautiful race" of people after their supposedly most beautiful variety -- a good reason to avoid using the term "Caucasian" to refer to people of generic European origin (another is to avoid confusion with the specific meaning of "Caucasian", namely people from the Caucasus). 5) The extent to which racial classifications of humans reflect any underlying biological reality is highly controversial; proponents of racial classification schemes have been unable to agree on the number of races (proposals range from 3 to more than 100), let alone how specific populations should be classified, which would seem to greatly undermine the utility of any such racial classification. Moreover, the apparent goal of investigating human biological diversity is to ask how such diversity is patterned and how it came to be the way that it is, rather than how to classify populations into discrete "races".(1-4) References: 1. Nature Encyclopedia of the Human Genome. (2003). Cooper, D. ed. (Nature Publishing Group), 2. Fowler, C.W. and Hobbs, L. (2003). Is humanity sustainable?. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 270, 2579-2583 3. Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory. (1988). Tattersall, I., Delson, E., and Van Couvering, J. eds. (Garland Publishing) 4. World Health Organization Website http://www.who.int Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: PUBLIC HEALTH: ON RACE-BASED THERAPEUTICS The following points are made by M. Gregg Bloche (New Engl. J. Med. 2004 351:2035): 1) Are we moving into a new era of race-based therapeutics? The recent publication of the African-American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT), a clinical trial of a medication intended for a single racial group, poses this awkward question. The study's most striking finding -- that the addition of isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine to conventional therapy for heart failure reduced relative one-year mortality by 43 percent among blacks -- has provoked wide discussion. The trial's sponsor, NitroMed, which holds a patent on the fixed-dose combination of isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine that was used, posits that heart failure has a different pathophysiology in blacks than in whites, necessitating different treatment strategies.(1) 2) The reported 43 percent relative decrease in the rate of death due to heart failure among blacks is cause for celebration. There is wide agreement that blacks die from heart failure at rates disproportionate to those among whites. But to assess A-HeFT's larger implications for the role of race in therapeutic design, it is important to be clear about what the study has not shown. 3) First, A-HeFT has not established that adding isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine to conventional therapy for heart failure yields greater benefits for blacks than for other racial or ethnic groups. The study, which enrolled only self-identified blacks, did not test this hypothesis. The clinical and economic logic behind A-HeFT's design has its roots in previous, multiracial studies that compared isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine with other investigational drugs, administered in combination with different conventional therapies. These therapies were standard in their day but are inferior to the conventional therapy used today, which typically includes an angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitor. Indeed, one of these previous studies helped to establish ACE inhibitors as standard treatment. This trial compared isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine with the ACE inhibitor enalapril and demonstrated that enalapril resulted in a greater overall reduction in mortality.(2) 4) An ill-defined subgroup of patients, though, did well when treated with isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine and fared poorly with enalapril. Seizing on this opportunity, a biotechnology firm obtained intellectual-property rights to a fixed-dose combination of isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine and sought approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1996 to market this formulation as a new drug. The FDA declined, citing statistical uncertainties in the trial data.(1) That is when race entered the picture. A group of investigators (including the holder of the patent on the combination treatment) reanalyzed the previous clinical-trial data according to race and concluded in 1999 that the combination treatment did as well as enalapril at prolonging the lives of black patients with heart failure.(3) Other work suggested that ACE inhibitors were less effective in blacks than in whites. 5) At this point, it might have made clinical and scientific sense to add isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine to conventional therapy (which by now typically included an ACE inhibitor) and to compare this combination to conventional therapy alone -- for all patients with heart failure, regardless of race. Such a trial had not been performed, since the standard therapies used in earlier trials did not include ACE inhibitors. But race consciousness offered a faster way through the FDA's regulatory maze. In 1999, NitroMed obtained intellectual-property rights to fixed-dose isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine and said it would seek FDA approval to market the formulation as a therapy for heart failure in blacks. Two years later, the FDA indicated to NitroMed that successful completion of a clinical trial in black patients with heart failure would probably result in approval.(1) This commitment gave rise to A-HeFT, and the publication of this trial's results virtually ensures FDA approval. 6) We need not shy away from the potential benefits of race-conscious therapeutics, but we should manage its downside risks. Greater awareness among physicians and the public that race is at best a placeholder for other predispositions, and not a biologic verity, would be a first step. Beyond such awareness, companies -- such as NitroMed -- that stand to gain from taking account of race could commit a substantial portion of their profits to research on genetic, psychosocial, and other mechanisms that might underlie racial gaps in clinical response.(3-5) References (abridged): 1. Kahn J. How a drug becomes "ethnic": law, commerce, and the production of racial categories in medicine. Yale J Health Policy Law Ethics 2004;4:1-46 2. Cohn JN, Archibald DG, Ziesche S, et al. A comparison of enalapril with hydralazine-isosorbide dinitrate in the treatment of chronic congestive heart failure. N Engl J Med 1991;325:303-310 3. Carson P, Ziesche S, Johnson G, Cohn JN. Racial differences in response to therapy for heart failure: analysis of the vasodilator-heart failure trials. J Card Fail 1999;5:178-187 4. Lifton RJ. The Nazi doctors: medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986 5. Cacioppo JT, Hawkley LC. Social isolation and health, with an emphasis on underlying mechanisms. Perspect Biol Med 2003;46:Suppl:S39-S52 New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 4 13:46:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 06:46:46 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Anyone can be a terrorist Message-ID: <13032346.1128433607247.JavaMail.root@mswamui-swiss.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: AnyoneTerrorist.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 140662 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 5 14:00:52 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 07:00:52 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re-Education Center #1 Message-ID: <30508001.1128520853259.JavaMail.root@mswamui-thinleaf.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ReEducation1.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 150663 bytes Desc: not available URL: From guavaberry at earthlink.net Thu Oct 6 16:49:49 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 12:49:49 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Culture Maker Music Legend Harold Leventhal Passes Away Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20051006124904.01d8a2e8@mail.edu-cyberpg.com> Hi, I haven't written to the list in a while but . . I'm sorry to tell you that Harold Leventhal, world wide culture maker, music legend, and manager of many, many great folk artists has passed away. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/Bob_Dylan.html FOLK MUSIC http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/folkmusic.html started before there was a music industry when the role of music was about your life - about the life and times that most of us don't experience anymore and originally folk music was sung because it helped the people get through life and tell stories about their life and work. INTEGRATE FOLKLORE, MUSIC, & TRADITIONAL CULTURE INTO K - 12 http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/folk.html High School Curriculum for Traditional Music Learn about Folk Music history and the Origins of Nursery Rhymes How do you turn children into American citizens? FOLK MUSIC SONG LYRICS, story telling and folk tales best, Karen Ellis Educational CyberPlayGround <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> 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 checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 00:55:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 20:55:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: NEJM: Abstract: On Chronic Insomnia Message-ID: Abstract: On Chronic Insomnia ScienceWeek Message Board http://scienceweek.com/swbb/messages/bb208.htm Abstract: On Chronic Insomnia - NEJM 09/29/05 11:30 AM [Bibliography on chronic insomnia appended.] Insomnia is defined as difficulty with the initiation, maintenance, duration, or quality of sleep that results in the impairment of daytime functioning, despite adequate opportunity and circumstances for sleep. (Difficulty with sleep maintenance implies waking after sleep has been initiated but before a desired wake time.) Most research studies adopt an arbitrary definition of a delay of more than 30 minutes in sleep onset or a sleep efficiency (the ratio of time asleep to time in bed) of less than 85 percent. However, in clinical practice, a patient's subjective judgment of sleep quality and quantity is a more important factor. Transient insomnia lasts less than one week, and short-term insomnia one to four weeks. Chronic insomnia -- insomnia lasting more than one month -- has a prevalence of 10 to 15 percent and occurs more frequently in women, older adults, and patients with chronic medical and psychiatric disorders. It may follow episodes of acute insomnia in patients who are predisposed to having the condition and may be perpetuated by behavioral and cognitive factors, such as worrying in bed and holding unreasonable expectations of sleep duration. Consequences include fatigue, mood disturbances, problems with interpersonal relationships, occupational difficulties, and a reduced quality of life. Full text: Michael H. Silber (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:803): ---------------- Bibliography: Chronic Insomnia - JH 09/29/05 11:57 AM http://scienceweek.com/swbb/messages/bb209.htm 1. Michael H. Silber. Chronic Insomnia. New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:803-810 2. Costa e Silva JA, Chase M, Sartorius M, Roth T. Special report from a symposium held by the World Health Organization and the World Federation of Sleep Research Societies: an overview of insomnias and related disorders -- recognition, epidemiology, and rational management. Sleep 1996;19:412-416. 3. The international classification of sleep disorders, revised: diagnostic and coding manual. Rochester, Minn.: American Sleep Disorders Association, 1997. 4. Morin CM, Culbert JP, Schwartz SM. Nonpharmacological interventions for insomnia: a meta-analysis of treatment efficacy. Am J Psychiatry 1994;151:1172-1180. 5. Spielman AJ, Caruso LS, Glovinsky PB. A behavioral perspective on insomnia treatment. Psychiatr Clin North Am 1987;10:541-553. 6. Littner M, Hirshkowitz M, Kramer M, et al. Practice parameters for using polysomnography to evaluate insomnia: an update. Sleep 2003;26:754-760. 7. The international classification of sleep disorders: diagnostic & coding manual, ICDS-2. 2nd ed. Westchester, Ill.: American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2005. 8. Perlis ML, Smith MT, Pigeon WR. Etiology and pathophysiology of insomnia. In: Kryger MH, Roth T, Dement WC, eds. Principles and practice of sleep medicine. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Elsevier/Saunders, 2005:714-25. 9. Bootzin RR, Epstein D, Wood JM. Stimulus control instructions. In: Hauri PJ, ed. Case studies in insomnia. New York: Plenum Medical Book, 1991:19-28. 10. Spielman AJ, Saskin P, Thorpy MJ. Treatment of chronic insomnia by restriction of time in bed. Sleep 1987;10:45-56. 11. Hauri PJ. Sleep hygiene, relaxation therapy, and cognitive interventions. In: Hauri PJ, ed. Case studies in insomnia. New York: Plenum Medical Book, 1991:65-84. 12. Murtagh DRR, Greenwood KM. Identifying effective psychological treatments for insomnia: a meta-analysis. J Consult Clin Psychol 1995;63:79-89. 13. Espie CA, Inglis SJ, Tessier S, Harvey L. The clinical effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy for chronic insomnia: implementation and evaluation of a sleep clinic in general medical practice. Behav Res Ther 2001;39:45-60. 14. Edinger JD, Wohlgemuth WK, Radtke RA, Marsh GR, Quillian RE. Cognitive behavioral therapy for treatment of chronic primary insomnia: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA 2001;285:1856-1864. 15. Turner RM, Ascher LM. Therapist factor in the treatment of insomnia. Behav Res Ther 1982;20:33-40. 16. Morgan K, Dixon S, Mather N, Thompson J, Tomeny M. Psychological treatment for insomnia in the management of long-term hypnotic drug use: a pragmatic randomised controlled trial. Br J Gen Pract 2003;53:923-928. 17. Baillargeon L, Demers L, Ladouceur R. Stimulus-control: nonpharmacologic treatment for insomnia. Can Fam Physician 1998;44:73-79. 18. Edinger JD, Sampson WS. A primary care "friendly" cognitive behavioral insomnia therapy. Sleep 2003;26:177-182. 19. Riedel BW, Lichstein KL, Dwyer WO. Sleep compression and sleep education for older insomniacs: self-help versus therapist guidance. Psychol Aging 1995;10:54-63. 20. Mimeault V, Morin CM. Self-help treatment for insomnia: bibliotherapy with and without professional guidance. J Consult Clin Psychol 1999;67:511-519. 21. Meoli AL, Rosen CL, Kristo D, et al. Oral nonprescription treatment for insomnia: an evaluation of products with limited evidence. J Clin Sleep Med 2005;1:173-87. 22. Rogers NL, Dinges DF, Kennaway DJ, Dawson D. Potential action of melatonin in insomnia. Sleep 2003;26:1058-1059. 23. Nowell PD, Mazumdar S, Buysse DJ, Dew MA, Reynolds CF III, Kupfer DJ. Benzodiazepines and zolpidem for chronic insomnia: a meta-analysis of treatment efficacy. JAMA 1997;278:2170-2177. 24. Holbrook AM, Crowther R, Lotter A, Cheng C, King D. Meta-analysis of benzodiazepine use in the treatment of insomnia. CMAJ 2000;162:225-233. 25. Elie R, Ruther E, Farr I, Elilien G, Salinas E. Sleep latency is shortened during 4 weeks of treatment with zaleplon, a novel nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic. J Clin Psychiatry 1999;60:536-544. 26. Walsh JK, Vogel GW, Scharf M, et al. A five week, polysomnographic assessment of zaleplon 10 mg for the treatment of primary insomnia. Sleep Med 2000;1:41-49. 27. Walsh JK, Pollak CP, Scharf MB, Schweitzer PK, Vogel GW. Lack of residual sedation following middle-of-the-night zaleplon administration in sleep maintenance insomnia. Clin Neuropharmacol 2000;23:17-21. 28. Krystal AD, Walsh JK, Laska E, et al. Sustained efficacy of eszopiclone over 6 months of nightly treatment: results of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of adults with chronic insomnia. Sleep 2003;26:793-799. 29. Walsh JK, Roth T, Randazzo A, et al. Eight weeks of non-nightly use of zolpidem for primary insomnia. Sleep 2000;23:1087-1096. 30. Perlis ML, McCall WV, Krystal AD, Walsh JK. Long-term, non-nightly administration of zolpidem in the treatment of patients with primary insomnia. J Clin Psychiatry 2004;65:1128-1137. 31. Voshaar RC, van Balkom AJ, Zitman FG. Zolpidem is not superior to temazepam with respect to rebound insomnia: a controlled study. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol 2004;14:301-306. 32. Vogel GW, Morris D. The effects of estazolam on sleep, performance, and memory: a long-term sleep laboratory study of elderly insomniacs. J Clin Pharmacol 1992;32:647-651. 33. Roth T, Roehrs TA. A review of the safety profiles of benzodiazepine hypnotics. J Clin Psychiatry 1991;52:Suppl:38-41. 34. Monti JM, Attali P, Monti D, Zipfel A, de la Giclais B, Morselli PL. Zolpidem and rebound insomnia -- a double-blind, controlled polysomnographic study in chronic insomniac patients. Pharmacopsychiatry 1994;27:166-175. 35. Soldatos CR, Dikeos DG, Whitehead A. Tolerance and rebound insomnia with rapidly eliminated hypnotics: a meta-analysis of sleep laboratory studies. Int Clin Psychopharmacol 1999;14:287-303. 36. Greenblatt DJ, Harmatz JS, Zinny MA, Shader RI. Effect of gradual withdrawal on the rebound sleep disorder after discontinuation of triazolam. N Engl J Med 1987;317:722-728. 37. Scharf MB, Roth T, Vogel GW, Walsh JK. A multicenter, placebo-controlled study evaluating zolpidem in the treatment of chronic insomnia. J Clin Psychiatry 1994;55:192-199. 38. Rothschild AJ. Disinhibition, amnestic reactions, and other adverse reactions secondary to triazolam: a review of the literature. J Clin Psychiatry 1992;53:Suppl:69-79. 39. Roth T, Hartse KM, Saab PG, Piccione PM, Kramer M. The effects of flurazepam, lorazepam, and triazolam on sleep and memory. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 1980;70:231-237. 40. Canaday BR. Amnesia possibly associated with zolpidem administration. Pharmacotherapy 1996;16:687-689. 41. Morgenthaler TI, Silber MH. Amnestic sleep-related eating disorder associated with zolpidem. Sleep Med 2002;3:323-327. 42. Mendelson WB. Clinical distinctions between long-acting and short-acting benzodiazepines. J Clin Psychiatry 1992;53:Suppl:4-7. 43. Morin CM, Colecchi C, Stone J, Sood R, Brink D. Behavioral and pharmacological therapies for late-life insomnia: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA 1999;281:991-999. 44. Walsh JK, Schweitzer PK. Ten-year trends in the pharmacological treatment of insomnia. Sleep 1999;22:371-375. 45. Kaynak H, Kaynak D, Gozukirmizi E, Guilleminault C. The effects of trazodone on sleep in patients treated with stimulant antidepressants. Sleep Med 2004;5:15-20. 46. Nierenberg AA, Adler LA, Peselow E, Zornberg G, Rosenthal M. Trazodone for antidepressant-associated insomnia. Am J Psychiatry 1994;151:1069-1072. 47. Walsh JK, Erman M, Erwin CW, et al. Subjective hypnotic efficacy of trazodone in DSM3-R primary insomnia. Hum Psychopharmacol 1998;13:191-198. 48. Hajak G, Rodenbeck A, Voderholzer U, et al. Doxepin in the treatment of primary insomnia: a placebo-controlled, double-blind, polysomnographic study. J Clin Psychiatry 2001;62:453-463. 49. Aslan S, Isik E, Cosar B. The effects of mirtazapine on sleep: a placebo controlled, double-blind study in young healthy volunteers. Sleep 2002;25:677-679. 50. McClusky HY, Milby JB, Switzer PK, Williams V, Wooten V. Efficacy of behavioral versus triazolam treatment in persistent sleep-onset insomnia. Am J Psychiatry 1991;148:121-126. 51. Jacobs GD, Pace-Schott EF, Stickgold R, Otto MW. Cognitive behavior therapy and pharmacotherapy for insomnia: a randomized controlled trial and direct comparison. Arch Intern Med 2004;164:1888-1896. 52. Smith MT, Perlis ML, Park A, et al. Comparative meta-analysis of pharmacotherapy and behavior therapy for persistent insomnia. Am J Psychiatry 2002;159:5-11. 53. Hauri PJ. Can we mix behavioral therapy with hypnotics when treating insomniacs? Sleep 1997;20:1111-1118. 54. Baillargeon L, Landreville P, Verreault R, Beauchemin JP, Gregoire JP, Morin CM. Discontinuation of benzodiazepines among older insomniac adults treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy combined with gradual tapering: a randomized trial. CMAJ 2003;169:1015-1020. 55. Morin CM, Bastien C, Guay B, Radouco-Thomas M, Leblanc J, Vallieres A. Randomized clinical trial of supervised tapering and cognitive behavior therapy to facilitate benzodiazepine discontinuation in older adults with chronic insomnia. Am J Psychiatry 2004;161:332-342. 56. Zammit G, Roth T, Erman M, et al. Double-blind, placebo-controlled polysomnography and outpatient trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of ramelteon in adult patients with chronic insomnia. Sleep 2005;28:A228-A229. 57. Zemlan FP, Mulchahey JJ, Scharf MB, Mayleben DW, Rosenberg R, Lankford A. The efficacy and safety of the melatonin agonist beta-methyl-6-chloromelatonin in primary insomnia: a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover clinical trial. J Clin Psychiatry 2005;66:384-390. 58. Chesson AL Jr, Anderson WM, Littner M, et al. Practice parameters for the nonpharmacologic treatment of chronic insomnia: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine report: Standards of Practice Committee of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Sleep 1999;22:1128-1133. 59. Morin CM, Hauri PJ, Espie CA, Spielman AJ, Buysse DJ, Bootzin RR. Nonpharmacologic treatment of chronic insomnia: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine review. Sleep 1999;22:1134-1156. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 00:55:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 20:55:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For Mormons in Harlem, a Bigger Space Beckons Message-ID: For Mormons in Harlem, a Bigger Space Beckons http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/nyregion/02mormon.html [Christianity as a whole became non-White about 1980. I don't know if it's true for LDS yet.] By [3]ANDY NEWMAN The pilgrims' progress began in a back dining room at Sylvia's. In 1997, a handful of members of the Mormon Church began meeting on Sundays in a mirror-lined banquet hall at Sylvia's restaurant, the venerable cathedral of soul food in Harlem. Now, after seven transitional and increasingly cramped years in a windowless brick shoebox on West 129th Street, the congregation is moving around the corner to a gleaming new five-story structure on Malcolm X Boulevard, one of Harlem's main arteries. Never again will the members have to cut services short to make way for Sylvia's overflow brunch crowd. There is only one problem with the new building, in the view of Herbert Steed, whose title with the newly established Harlem First Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is first counselor. "I think it's going to be too small soon," he said. As they have across the world, the Mormons continue to multiply in the New York City region, from one congregation in 1965 to several dozen in 1985, to 129 today, serving more than 41,000 members. Last year the church opened a temple - a place where high rituals are performed - across from Lincoln Center. It is the only Mormon temple between Washington and Boston. But church leaders point with special pride to their expansion in Harlem. They say they hope it dispels any lingering misconceptions that the church, which until 1978 barred blacks from full membership, remains a bastion of whiteness. A 1998 survey by a Mormon and amateur sociologist, James W. Lucas, found that about 20 percent of Mormons in New York City were black. "We're not in Harlem because of affirmative action," said Ahmad S. Corbitt, the church's Northeastern public affairs director, who is black. "We're in Harlem because we love people." The new building, a bright red-brick haven scheduled to open by month's end, looks a bit like a schoolhouse topped by a 50-foot steeple. The resemblance is apt: Much of the space is filled with classrooms for religious education and a gymnasium that the church promises to open to the neighborhood. The sanctuary seats 350, and the baptismal font accommodates full-body immersions. The soon-to-be-former place of worship, in contrast, recalls nothing so much as the waiting room of a government office, with dingy industrial carpeting, folding chairs, fluorescent lights and a dropped ceiling. As at most Mormon churches, the walls are bare. The only visual clue to the room's function is the list of hymn numbers posted at the front. But last Sunday, as usual, the 150 chairs were filled and people stood at the back. Also as usual, the room was one of the most racially integrated in Harlem, with about equal numbers of white and black worshipers. (The Mormons have separate congregations for Spanish speakers.) The members approved a formal upgrade of the congregation from a branch, the smallest worship unit, to a ward, which must have at least 300 members. Then, after sharing a sacrament of white bread and water, they took turns speaking. (The Mormon church does not have specialized clergy, and preaching duties rotate among its members. Most adult males are ordained priests, which entitles them to perform marriages and baptisms. While women cannot be priests, they do preach and teach.) "Because we stood strong together, this is what happened," a founding member of the congregation, Polly Dickey, 59, testified through tears. "This is what this church is about. As long as we stay together, we can accomplish anything." The Mormon Church, founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr., is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, with more than 12 million members; half are in the [4]United States, mostly in Western states. It is based on what Smith said were transcriptions of gold tablets he had found hidden in a mountain in upstate New York, which told the story of a lost tribe of [5]Israel that fled to the New World and was eventually wiped out. Many members of the Harlem church said they had tried several other religions before being converted by Mormon missionaries who came to their doors. "It's the common sense of it," said Wilbertine Thomas, 53, a Baptist-turned-Catholic who was baptized in February. "At Our Lady of Lourdes they don't tell you the details of how to live your life." The "details" part of the service came when partitions went up and the congregation broke into study groups. A dozen of the newest members, mostly black, gathered in a back room to learn Gospel essentials from three well-scrubbed young white teachers in short-sleeved white shirts and ties. One teacher, Blake Carter, a graduate student at Columbia University, narrated a lesson in obedience, using the other two as actors. The young man who did as his parents instructed was rewarded with car keys and an extended curfew. The one who rebelled and stayed out late was arrested. Mr. Carter deployed his tie as a makeshift set of handcuffs. "We have the obedient one who has freedom," Mr. Carter said. "Then we have the disobedient one - what's his situation?" "He really has no freedom now," Ms. Thomas said. Exactly, Mr. Carter said: "You gain freedom by obedience to God's commandments and obedience to man's commandments: the local laws. Commandments are just blessings waiting to happen." The newest member, Bruce Rochester, who works restoring tires and who was attending only his fourth service, said that though he had been looking for a religious home after his wife died last year, he never pictured himself as a Mormon. "When the missionaries came, I thought when I saw the church it was going to be a one-sided race thing," said Mr. Rochester, 55, who was wearing an electric-blue dress shirt and tie. But he said he quickly learned otherwise. "I've been to churches that have different races, but this is different," Mr. Rochester said. "There's more love. I felt like I belong here. I hardly ever felt that at other churches." From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 00:55:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 20:55:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: On the Well-Traveled Road of Self Help Message-ID: On the Well-Traveled Road of Self Help http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/weekinreview/02word.html By MARY JO MURPHY SELF-HELP." The author regretted the title even after the book became an international best seller. Judged by it, he feared, the book might be seen as "a eulogy of selfishness," as he wrote in the preface to the revised edition in 1866, when in fact its chief object had been "to stimulate youths to apply themselves diligently to right pursuits, - sparing neither labour, pains, nor self-denial in prosecuting them, - and to rely upon their own efforts in life, rather than depend upon the help or patronage of others." Over the next century and a half, counseling people to "rely upon their own efforts," as Samuel Smiles had put it, became a well-rewarded effort indeed. "The Road Less Traveled," whose author, M. Scott Peck, died last week, was among a handful of books to lead the way. If some critics scorn the self-help pantheon as so much snake oil for the soul and psyche, readers scorn the scorners, drawn by the tens of millions in search of practical advice served up in slim volumes. Here, a sampling, taken cheerfully out of context and without discipline or diligence from those considered to be classics of the genre. Help yourself. In "Self-Help" in 1859, Samuel Smiles sketched biographies of successful men for Victorian Britons to emulate: Indeed, "how NOT to do it" is of all things the easiest learnt: it needs neither teaching, effort, self-denial, industry, patience, perseverance nor judgment. Besides, readers do not care to know about the general who lost his battles, the engineer whose engines blew up, the architect who designed only deformities, the painter who never got beyond daubs, the schemer who did not invent his machine.... We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. It was 1936 before the next blockbuster, Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People": Why read this book to find out how to win friends? Why not study the technique of the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known? Who is he? You may meet him tomorrow coming down the street. When you get within 10 feet of him, he will begin to wag his tail. If you stop and pat him, he will almost jump out of his skin to show you how much he likes you. And you know that behind this show of affection on his part, there are no ulterior motives: he doesn't want to sell you any real estate, and he doesn't want to marry you. Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn't have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love. Metaphor is the well-milked cow of the genre. Carnegie writes of a disappointed woman who has gone mad: Life once wrecked all her dream ships on the sharp rocks of reality; but in the sunny, fantasy isles of insanity, all her barkentines race into port with canvas billowing and winds singing through the masts. Tragic? Oh, I don't know. Her physician said to me: "If I could stretch out my hand and restore her sanity, I wouldn't do it. She's much happier as she is." In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale took his metaphorical turn in "The Power of Positive Thinking": The vast tree of worry which over long years has grown up in your personality can best be handled by making it as small as possible. Thus it is advisable to snip off the little worries and expressions of worry. ... As you snip off these small worries you will gradually cut back to the main trunk of worry. Then with your developed greater power you will be able to eliminate basic worry; i.e., the worry habit, from your life. Peale, a minister, was a master of pop pulpitry: Have you ever considered the importance of having the peace of God in your muscles, in your joints? Perhaps your joints will not pain so much when they have the peace of God in them. Your muscles will work with correlations when the peace of God who created them governs their action. Speak to your muscles every day and to your joints and to your nerves, saying, "Fret not thyself." Eastern and Western spiritual traditions both are represented in the literature. In 1983, Benjamin Hoff borrowed from A. A. Milne for "The Tao of Pooh": As anyone who doesn't have it can see, the Eeyore Attitude gets in the way of things like wisdom and happiness, and pretty much prevents any sort of real Accomplishment to life. Like metaphor, allegory serves the self-help author. From "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," in 1992, by John Gray: Never go into a man's cave or you will be burned by the dragon! Much unnecessary conflict has resulted from a woman following a man into his cave. And from "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success," in 1994, by Deepak Chopra: Imagine throwing a little stone into a still pond and watching it ripple. Then, after a while, when the ripples settle down, perhaps you throw another little stone. That's exactly what you do when you go into the field of pure silence and introduce your intention. In this silence, even the faintest intention will ripple across the underlying ground of universal consciousness, which connects everything with everything else. But, if you do not experience stillness in consciousness, if your mind is like a turbulent ocean, you could throw the Empire State Building into it, and you wouldn't notice a thing. Dr. Peck's perennial, "The Road," first published in 1978, opens with the line "Life is difficult." But the road winds on before it winds up: The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing. ... Balancing is the discipline that gives us flexibility. Extraordinary flexibility is required for successful living in all spheres of activity. ... A final word on the discipline of balancing and its essence of giving up: you must have something in order to give it up. You cannot give up anything you have not already gotten. If you give up winning without ever having won, you are where you were at the beginning: a loser. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 00:56:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 20:56:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: (Kurzweil) Here It Comes Message-ID: Here It Comes: Technology's progress will soon accelerate--exponentially. You have no idea how much. Ray Kurzweil does. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112811088248757062-nXscMNuHx_ypalA6uV0oWWUNuxQ_20060930,00.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 1, 2005; Page P8 The Singularity Is Near By Ray Kurzweil Viking, 652 pages, $29.95 The bearded fellow with a sign reading "The End Is Nigh" is a staple of editorial cartoons. The title-phrase of "The Singularity Is Near" is obviously meant to evoke that image, and for any reader who is slow to catch on Ray Kurzweil makes the allusion clear in Chapter 7 ("Ich bin ein Singularitarian") with an amusing photo of himself holding up a sign announcing the imminence of the Singularity. But Mr. Kurzweil's book is about beginnings, not endings. The Singularity is a term coined by futurists to describe that point in time when technological progress has so transformed society that predictions made in the present day, already a hit-and-miss affair, are likely to be very, very wide of the mark. Much of Mr. Kurzweil's book consists of a closely argued analysis suggesting that the Singularity is, well, near: poised to appear in a mere three or four decades. People's thoughts of the future tend to follow a linear extrapolation -- steadily more of the same, only better -- while most technological progress is exponential, happening by giant leaps and thus moving farther and faster than the mind can easily grasp. Mr. Kurzweil himself, thinking exponentially, imagines a plausible future, not so far away, with extended life-spans (living to 300 will not be unusual), vastly more powerful computers (imagine more computing power in a head-sized device than exists in all the human brains alive today), other miraculous machines (nanotechnology assemblers that can make most anything out of sunlight and dirt) and, thanks to these technologies, enormous increases in wealth (the average person will be capable of feats, like traveling in space, only available to nation-states today). Naturally, Mr. Kurzweil has little time for techno-skeptics like the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley, who in September 2001 published a notorious piece in Scientific American debunking the claims of nanotechnologists, in particular the possibility of nano-robots (nanobots) capable of assembling molecules and substances to order. Mr. Kurzweil's arguments countering Dr. Smalley and his allies are a pleasure to read -- Mr. Kurzweil clearly thinks that nanobots are possible -- but in truth he is fighting a battle that is already won. These days skeptics worry that advanced technologies, far from failing to deliver on their promises, will deliver on them only too well -- ushering in a dystopia of, say, destructive self-replication in which the world is covered by nanobots that convert everything into copies of themselves (known in the trade as the "gray goo" problem). Mr. Kurzweil's sense of things isn't nearly so bleak as that -- he is an optimist, after all, an enthusiast for the techno-future -- but he does sound a surprisingly somber note. Indeed, "The Singularity Is Near" is partly a cautionary tale. Having established that we're going to face a very different world in the second half of the 21st century -- and face it healthier, wealthier and more artificially intelligent if not precisely wiser -- Mr. Kurzweil concedes that so-called GNR technologies (genetics, nanotech and robotics) may present problems. We may find ourselves battling genetically enhanced super pathogens, deadly military nanobots and powerful "unfriendly" artificial intelligences scheming against those of us with mere natural intelligence. Though Mr. Kurzweil regards these threats as manageable, he does not minimize them and offers chilling scenarios of what could go wrong. These scenarios are all the more credible because they come from Mr. Kurzweil and not from one of the usual gang of scaremongering Luddites. Unlike the Luddites, Mr. Kurzweil argues that the best way of curbing technology's potential harm is ... more technology. He notes that to pull back on forward-looking research, or to abandon various machine-marvels, will only make things worse by driving research underground and into irresponsible hands. Instead we should start thinking now about how to safeguard society from technology gone wrong. Mr. Kurzweil advocates prophylactic measures like the Asilomar guidelines for recombinant DNA research, which require special precautions for dangerous pathogens and restrict the most serious meddling. He also calls for much more research into antiviral drugs, rapid vaccines, defensive nanotech and artificial intelligence designed to remain friendly. It is a persuasive plea, but will anyone listen in time? The political system tends to lag behind technological change, which is often a good thing. I remember attending a House subcommittee hearing in the 1980s on whether the U.S. should create a phone-computer system modeled on the state-funded French Minitel, a text-only network being promoted as the wave of the future. Fortunately, the Internet exploded -- making Minitel obsolete -- before Congress could fund such a project. But when it comes to the dangers that Mr. Kurzweil worries about, the slow approach is a problem. The government is so often behind the curve -- think of how sluggishly it adapts to changes in employment patterns, shifts in international trade or attacks of new diseases like avian flu. What happens when the curve is an exponential one? Perhaps it won't matter. As Mr. Kurzweil notes, private entrepreneurs seem to have pushed back the threat of computer viruses, for instance, moving more rapidly and more effectively than any government agency ever could. And certainly free-marketeers reading Mr. Kurzweil's book will see opportunities for profit: Imagine the billions to be made from rapid vaccine-production technologies in a world where genetic engineering is common. But I would feel more comfortable if more people started following Mr. Kurzweil's advice in the near future, before the Singularity gets here. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 01:07:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 21:07:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ottawa Citizen: Rushton Revisited Message-ID: Andrew Duffy The Ottawa Citizen October 1, 2005 http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=6c9fe76b-f1bd-4cfb-baa8-5d006efdf650&page=1 et seq. Research that supports Philippe Rushton includes the work of anthropologist Henry Harpending. Mr. Harpending led a study that suggested Ashkenazi Jews -- Jews of European descent -- have evolved an enhanced intellectual ability. Albert Einstein, above, for example, is part of the Ashkenazim bloodline, as are half of the world's chess champions. The research points to a millennium of discrimination in Europe that forced Jews into intellectual occupations and the fact that they consistently married within their own community. Controversial Canadian professor Philippe Rushton, best known for shocking the world in 1989 with a paper arguing some races were smarter than others, is back with another study saying blacks are not as genetically gifted as whites or East Asians. Sixteen years ago, his theory was incendiary. This time around, it was greeted with a shrug. What's changed? Has he softened his views? Have we grown tired of him? Or have advances in science made him more palatable? Andrew Duffy investigates. - - - In January 1989, when University of Western Ontario psychologist Philippe Rushton presented a research paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, it triggered an academic maelstrom. His paper, which argued that genetic evolution has created identifiable IQ gaps among groups of East Asians, whites and blacks, was denounced by scientists on the conference floor. Why would he launch such an inquiry? How, they demanded, could he draw findings from intelligence tests that were culturally biased? Then-premier David Peterson called him a racist and demanded that he be fired by the university. The police launched a hate crimes investigation. Security concerns forced him to deliver lectures by videotape. Mr. Rushton became part of the Canadian lexicon, an epithet. He also became the most famous university professor in the country, a guest on The Geraldo Rivera Show. All of which makes the muted reaction to Mr. Rushton's latest academic paper so curious. In June, Mr. Rushton and University of California psychology professor Arthur Jensen published a 60-page study in Psychology, Public Policy and Law, a journal of the American Psychological Association. In it, the scholars presented 10 categories of evidence, including military and academic tests, brain size and adoption studies, to support their contention that East Asians as a group enjoy an evolutionary advantage over whites, and whites over blacks, that has contributed to measurable intelligence gaps between them. "Neither the existence nor the size of race differences in IQ are a matter of dispute, only their cause," the authors wrote. The cause of that difference is contentious. Some blame the tests, arguing that they measure a narrow, western notion of intelligence. Others say intelligence is primarily determined not by genetics but by environmental factors: poverty, nutrition, parental education, discrimination, the quality of local schools. But Mr. Rushton and Mr. Jensen posit that 50 to 80 per cent of the IQ gaps between racial groups can be explained by genetics, by the gift of inherited intelligence. That theory, they contend, holds important policy implications since it suggests that society must accept that group differences will repeatedly reveal themselves in scholastic achievement and other important measurements of "success." "Ultimately," they wrote, "the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be over-represented and other groups under-represented in various socially valued outcomes." In other words, those who design social policy should not seek to create equality between racial groups -- an impossible outcome in Mr. Rushton's mind -- but learn to live with the statistical differences. "You absolutely have to accept that Chinese people are going to be under-represented on the basketball team, and that black people are going to be under-represented in high school graduates," Mr. Rushton said in a recent interview. "That is just a fact of life. And it really doesn't matter how much lower you will place the bar, you will never equalize those outcomes, it is impossible." The findings, Mr. Rushton notes, do not apply to individuals, but to groups. It's an idea that he believes must be taught in schools. "Even kindergarten children are capable of learning that although boys are typically taller than girls, many girls are taller than the average boy," he says. Although seemingly as incendiary as ever, Mr. Rushton's latest ideas have generated little response from scientists or politicians, police or protesters. It has led even Mr. Rushton to ask: What has changed? Why were his ideas so controversial 15 years ago but not now? Has Canada grown tired of him? Or have advances in genetic science pulled his theories into the mainstream? Mr. Rushton says he would like to believe that his erstwhile critics have been silenced by the scientific force of his latest publication. But he's not that naive. "In fact, I think the opposite is the case," he says. "It is just bad news to many people. So the best thing to do is just to avert the eyes and carry on, keep their heads in the sand." There's no doubt that Mr. Rushton suddenly finds himself in an increasingly crowded field of inquiry. In the 1980s, Mr. Rushton was viewed as a rogue academic. But today, a small army of scientists is exploring the genetic foundation of intelligence, and the genetic differences between people of African, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and European descent. Their work flows from the landmark Human Genome Project, which found slight differences in the pattern of DNA among ethnic groups. In June, for instance, the Journal of Biosocial Science published a paper by a team of University of Utah scientists who suggested that Ashkenazi Jews -- Jews of European descent -- have evolved an enhanced intellectual ability through natural selection. The researchers, led by anthropologist Henry Harpending, found that Ashkenazim score higher on IQ tests than any other ethnic group to which they can be reliably compared. Six times as many Ashkenazim as Europeans score in the "genius range" above 140 on IQ tests. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler are part of the Ashkenazim bloodline, as are half of the world's chess champions. In the U.S., Ashkenazim have won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans, while making up just three per cent of the population. Mr. Harpending and his colleagues concluded that natural selection has played a role in boosting the group's brain power. According to their theory, a millennium of discrimination in Europe forced Jews into intellectually challenging occupations as bankers and merchants -- jobs then considered distasteful for Christians. Since European Jews married consistently within their own community, and since successful merchants tended to have larger families than less successful ones, a process of natural selection took place whereby genes that enhanced intelligence became more common. (The researchers went on to hypothesize that the same genes that enhance intelligence may trigger neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick, that have an unusually high incidence among Ashkenazim.) "Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial," Mr. Harpending has said in defending his study. Earlier this month, another study made news in Mr. Rushton's once-isolated universe. Published in the magazine Science, the University of Chicago study suggested that the brain continues to evolve rapidly because of the influence of two genes that help determine its size. What's more, the study said, the genes are more readily found in some populations, such as in Europe and East Asia, than others, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa. Again, the report's conclusions held nettlesome social implications. Mr. Rushton, however, said he was "delighted" with the University of Chicago study, which identified, for the first time, a gene related to brain size. "This is exactly what all theory has to predict," he says. Mr. Rushton says that study, much like the work on the Ashkenazim, has lent respectability to his own work. "Here is another ethnic group (the Ashkenazim) that has been identified, genetically, as possessing a higher IQ," he says. "So if nature has not made every population group in the world exactly equal in mean IQ, if there is one somewhat above, then it's quite possible to find one or two somewhat below?" Mr. Rushton believes that he has always been a mainstream psychologist. The only difference now, he argues, is that the mainstream has been enlarged by the work of other scientists exploring the genetic basis of race, intelligence and disease. Still, many of his colleagues continue to regard Mr. Rushton as academic nitro: a volatile and destructive force best left on the shelf. The journal, Psychology, Public Policy and Law, took the unusual step of including three rebuttal essays when it published his most recent study. "What good is research of the kind done by Rushton and Jensen supposed to achieve?" asks one of the critics, Yale University psychologist Robert Sternberg. Mr. Sternberg suggests the question to which Mr. Rushton has devoted himself has no value except to those cynics who would use it to justify discrimination. "Does science," he asks, "really want to provide that ammunition?" Mr. Rushton and Mr. Jensen offer an explosive response to that question. They argue that their research is important because "we will never make progress in race relations if we operate on the belief that one segment of society is responsible for the plight of another segment and that belief is false." They suggest that policy-makers and judges have mistakenly ascribed "the underachievement of black people to prejudice and discrimination by white people," rather than to genetic disadvantages. Mr. Rushton and Mr. Jensen then cite the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which outlawed racial segregation in schools, as an example of a decision based on just such a wrong-headed assumption. Mr. Rushton claims to be interested only in truth and in the dissemination of science, even when it's politically unpopular. Yet there's no denying that Mr. Rushton also has a nose for controversy that even Geraldo Rivera would envy. He has written that Asians, as a group, have larger brains and exhibit more intelligence, family stability and sexual restraint than whites, and whites more than blacks. He has conducted a mass mailout of a book that propounds that theory to social scientists across North America. Then, three years ago, he became president of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation incorporated in 1937 with the goal of "race betterment, with special reference to the United States." Among other things, it funds scientific studies that examine the differences between human beings based on gender, race and class. The Pioneer Fund has a checkered history. One of its first funding grants in 1937 paid for the U.S. distribution of a Nazi Party film on eugenics. The fund's primary benefactor, Wickliffe Draper, was interested in the idea of repatriating U.S. blacks to Africa and later offered significant financial support for legal battles to oppose the racial desegregation of schools in the U.S. That activity has led critics to charge that the Pioneer Fund hides an ugly political agenda behind its veil of science. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit advocacy organization, bluntly calls it a hate group. Soon after accepting the job of Pioneer Fund president, Mr. Rushton authored a detailed defence of the foundation. He characterized it as a ground-breaking scientific enterprise inspired by the spirit of Charles Darwin. "The directors of Pioneer Fund have always believed it is important to investigate the biological basis of traits like intelligence, the causes of racial and other group differences and the factors affecting demographic change," he wrote. "Because some Pioneer grants have reached what some believe are politically unpalatable conclusions on these topics, they, and Pioneer, have become unpopular in some circles. We in no way apologize for supporting supporting this research... "We also believe it is unscientific and counterproductive to tag any and all such research as 'Nazi' or 'racist.' " Geneticists once seemed poised to eliminate race entirely from the field of science, to make Mr. Rushton obsolete. In the early 1970s, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin argued that the genetic differences between races were so infinitesimal that researchers would have no reason to sort people into classifications such as black, white and Asian. His belief that race is "biologically meaningless" became an article of faith for many academics. Then, in 2000, a seismic scientific event, the Human Genome Project, reordered the world of biology and made scientists take a fresh, new look at our genetic heritage. At first, the DNA research seemed to affirm Mr. Lewontin's message of equality and brotherhood. The 13-year project found that humans share with each other 99.9 per cent of their genetic heritage. All people possess the same basic set of genes, the researchers announced. The differences between individuals and races, they said, owe themselves to variations in a tiny fraction of the three billion letter sequence in the human genome. Rather than explore what unites us, however, scientists have seized upon discovering exactly what separates us. That's because scientists believe the variation between people holds the answer to the genetic riddle of diabetes, heart disease, strokes and cancer. It's widely acknowledged that diseases are not evenly distributed among ethnic groups and races. Sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder, is considerably more common among those with African ancestry. Hemochromatosis, an inherited disorder that causes the body to absorb too much iron, is not found among Indians or Chinese, yet more than seven per cent of Swedes suffer it. The incidence of hypertension, prostate cancer and kidney failure is higher among blacks than whites (although some of that variability can be tied to diet and lifestyle). Scientists believe that mapping the DNA variability between races and ethnic groups may lead them to the genetic triggers of disease, which in turn, could produce important drug breakthroughs and treatments. Canadian scientists are now part of a $185-million international effort to produce a detailed map of human genetic variation. The International Haplotype Project will chart the common DNA sequence variations between major ethnic groups based on the DNA of Han Chinese in Beijing, Japanese in Tokyo, Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria, and Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe. As more researchers explore the relationship between genetics and race, more have come to the conclusion that Mr. Lewontin was wrong. Neil Risch, widely regarded as one of the world's leading geneticists, has been a key figure in the still emotion-charged debate. Mr. Risch has argued that small genetic differences have evolved between races because of the geographic isolation of generations of sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, Asians, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. Mr. Risch has shown that researchers, by analyzing DNA, can correctly match an individual's self-described race in 99.9 per cent of cases. There was a greater chance, he said, that researchers would incorrectly guess an individual's self-described gender. "There is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from research and public policy points of view," Mr. Risch, now director of the Center for Human Genetics at the University of California, concluded in a 2002 paper in Nature Genetics. Even Francis Collins, the former director of the Genome Project, conceded as much last year when he told Nature Genetics that the project's researchers probably overstated their case about the insignificance of biology's connection to race. "It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection," he said. "It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry." The focus of the debate has now shifted to how scientists should properly categorize their findings about genetic variation. Those like Mr. Risch believe that race is a legitimate method, but others argue that using race is unnecessary and sensational. The second school of thought holds that differences between people would more properly be expressed in terms of group "genetic markers" that correspond with different parts of the globe. Most scientists today accept that genetics plays some role in human variation and that some combination of hereditary and environmental factors determine intelligence. That point is conceded by two of the three critics who respond to Mr. Rushton's latest publication in Psychology, Public Policy and Law. The more challenging question is whether the IQ gap that has been identified between Asians, whites and blacks is fixed or changeable. What can be done to raise group IQs and, more importantly, academic achievement levels among specific race and ethnic groups? Charles Murray, co-author of the bestselling 1994 book The Bell Curve, recently published an essay in Commentary magazine in which he argued that, at the very least, educational outcomes can be improved. "Dropout rates, literacy and numeracy are all tractable. School discipline, teacher performance and the quality of the curriculum are tractable. Academic performance within a given IQ range is tractable," he wrote. "The existence of group differences need not and should not discourage attempts to improve schooling for millions of American children who are now getting bad educations." New York University psychology professors Lisa Suzuki and Joshua Aronson argue the danger of Mr. Rushton's theory flows from the implication that IQ gaps are largely immutable. It's an idea, they say, that could diminish support for affirmative action hiring and pre-school educational programs aimed mostly at impoverished, black Americans. For his part, Mr. Rusthon said that while black academic achievement can be improved, and while the IQ gap can be somewhat narrowed, there will never be equality. Parents, he said, easily accept the idea that some of their children are more gifted intellectually or physically than other ones. As a society, he argued, we have to accept the same notion. "It's very harmful, this philosophy we currently have, which is that anybody, all of us, we can just reinvent ourselves. We can grow and change and develop into something very different, that somehow we're not constrained genetically. "The more you can realize who you are earlier, and that includes race and IQ, then personally the more you can accept it, the easier it will be." Mr. Rushton contends his ideas are controversial today only because they do not dovetail with popular religious and political dogmas about everyone being born equal. "It's not happy news for a lot of people, so in that sense it is controversial," he said. He takes particular offence to the suggestion that his work is unnecessary and offers no meaningful social insight. Indeed, his response to that criticism is made of more Rushton nitrogylcerin, the kind that no amount of science is ever likely to defuse. "If it really was a colour blind society, and nobody even noticed race, maybe there would be some more justification for it (the criticism)," he told the Citizen. "But people are pulling their hair out and are saying, 'What about Toronto the Good? Where did it go to?' What about Ottawa? I'm sure it is the same? What about Montreal? I'll bet you it's the same. I'll bet it's the same in every bloody city in Canada where you have black people. It's inevitable that it won't be. So there you go." From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 01:07:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 21:07:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Kurzweil) Will the Future Be a Trillion Times Better? Message-ID: Will the Future Be a Trillion Times Better? New York Times Daily Book Review, 5.10.3 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/books/03masl.html Books of the Times | 'The Singularity Is Near' The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology By Ray Kurzweil 652 pages. Viking. $29.95. By [57]JANET MASLIN In "The Singularity Is Near," the inventor and prognosticator Ray Kurzweil postulates that we are fast approaching a time when humankind melds with technology to produce mind-boggling advances in intelligence. We will be able to play quidditch as Harry Potter does. We will control the aging process. We will be smarter by a factor of trillions. We will be so smart that we understand what Ray Kurzweil is talking about. Qubits, foglets, gigaflops, haptic interfaces, probabilistic fractals: Mr. Kurzweil is not writing science for sissies. He is envisioning precise details about how and when the Singularity - a fusion of symbiotic advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology that creates "a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" - will be upon us. Mark the calendar for big doings in 2045 in case he's right. Most science books at this level of sophistication leave the armchair quantum-mechanics buff in the dust. But "The Singularity Is Near" works simultaneously on different levels. Anyone can grasp Mr. Kurzweil's main idea: that mankind's technological knowledge has been snowballing, with dizzying prospects for the future. The basics are clearly expressed. But for those more knowledgeable and inquisitive, the author argues his case in fascinating detail. As evidence that the concept of Singularity is as grandiose as it is controversial, Mr. Kurzweil deals almost offhandedly with prospects like "a cool, zero-energy-consuming computer with a memory of about a thousand trillion trillion bits and a processing capacity of 1042 operations a second, which is abut 10 trillion times more powerful than all human brains on Earth." And all he's talking about is reconfiguring the atomic structure of a rock. The book gets much headier when it looks at the reverse engineering and replication of the human brain. Where Mr. Kurzweil's thinking turns quidditch-wizardly is with concepts like virtual reality created by tiny computers in eyeglasses and clothing, or cell-size devices that can operate within the bloodstream. These innovations and their far-reaching effects, he says, exist not only within the province of science fiction (they sneak into audacious roller-coaster rides like "Minority Report" and "Being John Malkovich") but are also already in the works. Others (most recently Joel Garreau in "Radical Evolution") have argued about the Singularity's imminence and consequences. But Mr. Kurzweil approaches the subject with the glee of a businessman-inventor as well as the expertise of a scientist. The fact that a dollar bought one transistor in 1968 and about 10 million transistors in 2002 has not escaped his notice. "The Singularity Is Near" is startling in scope and bravado. Mr. Kurzweil envisions breathtakingly exponential progress, and he is merely extrapolating from established data. To his way of thinking, "when scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today's terms)." The underpinnings of this logic go beyond the familiar to suggest that the pace of evolution (he has no doubts about Darwin) is logarithmic - another indication that the future is almost here. Like string theory's concept of an 11-dimensional universe, Mr. Kurzweil's projections are as abstract and largely untested as they are alluring. Predictions from his earlier books (including "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "The Age of Intelligent Machines") have been borne out, but much of his thinking tends to be pie in the sky. He promotes buoyant optimism more readily than he contemplates the darker aspects of progress. He is more eager to think about the life-enhancing powers of nanotechnology than to wonder what happens if cell-size computers within the human body run amok. In the last part of the book, he engages in one-sided batting practice with his critics. He introduces each complaint only to swat it into oblivion. By and large he is a blinkered optimist, disinclined to contemplate the dangers of what he imagines. The Manhattan Project model of pure science without ethical constraints still looms over the Singularity and its would-be miracles. "What if not everyone wants to go along with this?" a straw man asks Mr. Kurzweil. For purposes of simulated debate, the book drums up an assortment of colorful naysayers. This voice is that of Ned Ludd, the opponent of technological advances who gave Luddites their name, but Charles Darwin and Timothy Leary also chime in. Mr. Kurzweil also gives a speaking part to George 2048, a mid-21st-century machine with a reassuring personality. His boldest move is to let bacteria from two billion years ago argue among themselves about the wisdom of banding together to form multicellular life-forms. If the author is right, Singularity-phobes will look no less shortsighted when the dividing line between humans and machines erodes. "This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today," he writes, "but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond." In other words, "technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution." Mr. Kurzweil ultimately describes himself as a Singularitarian in a religious sense. Not for him the "deathist rationalization" (that is, "rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing") of traditional religion: his own vision of eternal life is expressed in these pages. He underscores his conviction by putting on a cardboard "The Singularity Is Near" sign and posing for a crazy-man photo. He won't look crazy if the Singularity arrives on cue. References 57. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=JANET%20MASLIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=JANET%20MASLIN&inline=nyt-per From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 01:07:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 21:07:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The Economist as Biologist Message-ID: The Economist as Biologist The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i07/07b00501.htm By PHILIP N. JEFFERSON That feeling of being inauthentic hit me in the small hours of the night, early this year. It comes on me every now and then, when the gap between what I truly know and what I teach gets too large. Redesigning my econometrics course to incorporate experimental concepts and methods had pushed me over the precipice this time. I knew I could read more about how to interpret particular social events as quasi-experiments. There are hundreds of papers in economics on that. But further scholastic scrutiny was not the remedy to what ailed me. The problem, while not deep, was fundamental: The precise understanding of what an experiment is had faded from my mind. How was I to get out of that bind? The answer to my problem came at a faculty lunch in March, when the biologist Amy Cheng Vollmer discussed her concern about the Balkanization of disciplines that often takes place at colleges and universities. She felt that at our institution, Swarthmore College, the natural sciences were seen as somehow different from the humanities or social sciences. She worried that faculty members outside of the natural sciences believed that almost all natural-science majors were headed for medical or graduate school, and thus humanists and social scientists might be advising some students not to take natural-science courses. How could the faculty eliminate the incorrect perceptions that could limit the range of students' intellectual experience at Swarthmore? Amy concluded her talk with a startling proposal. She would open her microbiology laboratory to any faculty member outside the natural sciences who was willing to spend some time over the summer actually doing biology. The idea was to break down a perceived barrier by having nonscientists do what they would normally keep at a distance. My first thought upon hearing Amy's proposal was that she was way off the farm. It was easy to understand her concern, but academics are who we are: specialists. We can and probably do read across disciplines, but why would we want to work across disciplines? But after ruminating on my own conundrum for a couple of days, I thought of Amy and her daring idea. Perhaps working in her microbiology lab was a way to close my authenticity gap. I met her for lunch, and we clarified our objectives, defined parameters, and set timelines. Luckily for me, another colleague, Cheryl Grood of the mathematics department, was already working in the lab. Cheryl was refreshing her knowledge of biology from courses taken long ago. She and I would form a mini-team. A great advantage of having a mathematician as a partner is that all of your measurements and calculations are likely to be precise -- even if the conclusions are precisely wrong! I could not have wished for a better partner. Amy explained that our project was to use established methods of genetic engineering to see if we could make bacteria that were sensitive to ampicillin, an antibiotic, resistant to it instead. We would isolate a plasmid -- a small, self-reproducing element containing DNA but outside the chromosome -- from ampicillin-resistant bacteria. Subsequently, we would manipulate an ampicillin-sensitive strain of the same bacteria so that it would absorb the plasmid. The hope was that the plasmid would transform the recipient's DNA so the bacteria would exhibit resistance to ampicillin. Was she serious? First, how do you pronounce DNA's full name, deoxyribonucleic acid? Second, what is to prevent me from combining the DNA of the ampicillin-resistant bacteria with my own DNA, thereby rendering me resistant to antibiotics -- and likely to catch all kinds of ailments from my students, who sometimes come into class coughing and wheezing? Third, given that the plasmids, cytoplasm, chromosomes, genes, and all the other stuff inside the bacteria cells are too small for me to see with the naked eye, how will I know if any transformation has taken place? And fourth, don't you need some kind of license to engage in genetic engineering? Obviously I had some reservations about actually doing microbiology. But it took me only three days of continuous practice to solve the pronunciation problem: dee-ox-ee-RYE-bo-new-clay-ick (the "acid" part was easier). Because no known pathogens are handled in Amy's lab, the odds of contamination are extremely low. My qualms about absorbing bacterial DNA were thus unwarranted. Although the transformation we were trying to accomplish could not be seen by the naked eye, the result -- the expression of a gene or trait -- can be confirmed by experimentation. And as a novice, I needed only a mentor, not a license, to make sure that my work in the lab was well within ethical bounds. The return from doing science hands-on is high. The experiments required care and precision. How do you set up a control? Are you sure that the background conditions -- the medium used to suspend the plasmids, the settings on the spectrophotometer, the size of the pipettes, the agar, etc. -- are exactly the same for the control and the experimental specimens? How do you measure, assess, and interpret your results? Can an amateur possibly get all that right? More important, can an amateur steeped in a foreign intellectual tradition -- in my case, social science -- possibly comprehend or appreciate the elegance and power of the scientific methods employed? Amy made everything possible. Taking more time than I could have imagined, explaining every concept, showing how every piece of equipment worked, answering every question (many of them more than once), enduring every mistake, she led Cheryl and me through the processes of plasmid isolation and gel electrophoresis. Not only did we succeed in those feats of genetic engineering, but we also confirmed that the ampicillin-resistant trait was due to the presence of the added plasmid DNA, given that we were able to re-isolate the plasmid from the newly transformed bacteria. My econometrics course will be different from now on. Not because the material or the text or the statistical software will be new, but because my understanding of one small slice of applied science has been refreshed. I now have new comparisons, examples, interpretations, exercises, and thought experiments to use with my students in the social sciences. Experiments in the social sciences will never be as clean as they are in the natural sciences. But I feel much better about teaching quasi-experimental concepts now that I have worked in a real laboratory. If my professional life allowed it, I would like to spend more time in a lab. That may sound strange coming from a social scientist, and I realize that many faculty members in the humanities and social sciences would not agree with me. Before the desire to refresh my memory of what an experiment was became a pressing matter for me, I thought the idea of my doing science was impractical. Now, however, I have joined Amy off the farm on the issue of communication and collaboration among the disciplines. You know, the air out here is fresh, the sky is clear, and the company is very good. Philip N. Jefferson is a professor of economics at Swarthmore College. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Oct 7 04:10:00 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:10:00 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For Mormons in Harlem, a Bigger Space Beckons In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4345F518.8020703@solution-consulting.com> There are now somewhat more members of the LDS faith in South America and Central America than in North America. The church is growing rapidly in Africa. Europe - well, nothing is happening in Europe except with immigrants. So the church becomes ever more brown and black. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > For Mormons in Harlem, a Bigger Space Beckons > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/nyregion/02mormon.html > [Christianity as a whole became non-White about 1980. I don't know if > it's true for LDS yet.] > > By [3]ANDY NEWMAN > > The pilgrims' progress began in a back dining room at Sylvia's. > > In 1997, a handful of members of the Mormon Church began meeting on > Sundays in a mirror-lined banquet hall at Sylvia's restaurant, the > venerable cathedral of soul food in Harlem. > > Now, after seven transitional and increasingly cramped years in a > windowless brick shoebox on West 129th Street, the congregation is > moving around the corner to a gleaming new five-story structure on > Malcolm X Boulevard, one of Harlem's main arteries. Never again will > the members have to cut services short to make way for Sylvia's > overflow brunch crowd. > > There is only one problem with the new building, in the view of > Herbert Steed, whose title with the newly established Harlem First > Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is first > counselor. "I think it's going to be too small soon," he said. > > As they have across the world, the Mormons continue to multiply in the > New York City region, from one congregation in 1965 to several dozen > in 1985, to 129 today, serving more than 41,000 members. > > Last year the church opened a temple - a place where high rituals are > performed - across from Lincoln Center. It is the only Mormon temple > between Washington and Boston. > > But church leaders point with special pride to their expansion in > Harlem. They say they hope it dispels any lingering misconceptions > that the church, which until 1978 barred blacks from full membership, > remains a bastion of whiteness. > > A 1998 survey by a Mormon and amateur sociologist, James W. Lucas, > found that about 20 percent of Mormons in New York City were black. > "We're not in Harlem because of affirmative action," said Ahmad S. > Corbitt, the church's Northeastern public affairs director, who is > black. "We're in Harlem because we love people." > > The new building, a bright red-brick haven scheduled to open by > month's end, looks a bit like a schoolhouse topped by a 50-foot > steeple. The resemblance is apt: Much of the space is filled with > classrooms for religious education and a gymnasium that the church > promises to open to the neighborhood. The sanctuary seats 350, and the > baptismal font accommodates full-body immersions. > > The soon-to-be-former place of worship, in contrast, recalls nothing > so much as the waiting room of a government office, with dingy > industrial carpeting, folding chairs, fluorescent lights and a dropped > ceiling. As at most Mormon churches, the walls are bare. The only > visual clue to the room's function is the list of hymn numbers posted > at the front. > > But last Sunday, as usual, the 150 chairs were filled and people stood > at the back. Also as usual, the room was one of the most racially > integrated in Harlem, with about equal numbers of white and black > worshipers. (The Mormons have separate congregations for Spanish > speakers.) > > The members approved a formal upgrade of the congregation from a > branch, the smallest worship unit, to a ward, which must have at least > 300 members. > > Then, after sharing a sacrament of white bread and water, they took > turns speaking. (The Mormon church does not have specialized clergy, > and preaching duties rotate among its members. Most adult males are > ordained priests, which entitles them to perform marriages and > baptisms. While women cannot be priests, they do preach and teach.) > > "Because we stood strong together, this is what happened," a founding > member of the congregation, Polly Dickey, 59, testified through tears. > "This is what this church is about. As long as we stay together, we > can accomplish anything." The Mormon Church, founded in 1830 by Joseph > Smith Jr., is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, with > more than 12 million members; half are in the [4]United States, mostly > in Western states. It is based on what Smith said were transcriptions > of gold tablets he had found hidden in a mountain in upstate New York, > which told the story of a lost tribe of [5]Israel that fled to the New > World and was eventually wiped out. > > Many members of the Harlem church said they had tried several other > religions before being converted by Mormon missionaries who came to > their doors. > > "It's the common sense of it," said Wilbertine Thomas, 53, a > Baptist-turned-Catholic who was baptized in February. "At Our Lady of > Lourdes they don't tell you the details of how to live your life." > > The "details" part of the service came when partitions went up and the > congregation broke into study groups. A dozen of the newest members, > mostly black, gathered in a back room to learn Gospel essentials from > three well-scrubbed young white teachers in short-sleeved white shirts > and ties. > > One teacher, Blake Carter, a graduate student at Columbia University, > narrated a lesson in obedience, using the other two as actors. The > young man who did as his parents instructed was rewarded with car keys > and an extended curfew. The one who rebelled and stayed out late was > arrested. Mr. Carter deployed his tie as a makeshift set of handcuffs. > > "We have the obedient one who has freedom," Mr. Carter said. "Then we > have the disobedient one - what's his situation?" > > "He really has no freedom now," Ms. Thomas said. > > Exactly, Mr. Carter said: "You gain freedom by obedience to God's > commandments and obedience to man's commandments: the local laws. > Commandments are just blessings waiting to happen." > > The newest member, Bruce Rochester, who works restoring tires and who > was attending only his fourth service, said that though he had been > looking for a religious home after his wife died last year, he never > pictured himself as a Mormon. > > "When the missionaries came, I thought when I saw the church it was > going to be a one-sided race thing," said Mr. Rochester, 55, who was > wearing an electric-blue dress shirt and tie. But he said he quickly > learned otherwise. > > "I've been to churches that have different races, but this is > different," Mr. Rochester said. "There's more love. I felt like I > belong here. I hardly ever felt that at other churches." > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Oct 7 19:24:07 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 15:24:07 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] scale invariance and Ur patterns Message-ID: <29.7d3a6ba4.30782557@aol.com> If we could get Eshel on our panel at HBES, it would be terrific. I can go after him once you get at OK from HBES on moving forward. Make scale-invariance the topic, and I suspect we'll pull some very, very interesting insights from Eshel. Howard ps in Bloomspeak, scale invariance is reflected in "Ur patterns", basic patterns that are parts of the "deep structure" of the cosmos and that show up on level after level of emergence. It's the persistence of these patterns that makes it possible for humans to use poetry, religion, metaphor, and math to model the world at levels from the microscopic to the galactic. These Ur patterns can be captured in math, metaphor, and in metaphoric systems like poetry, religion, and science. Why? Because like other forms of emergence, symbolic systems used by humans carry those Ur patterns within them. Human symbolic systems share something in common with bacteria, food plants, and the stars. All are descendents of the basic patterns with which the universe kicked itself into being. All are children of the big bang. And it's the big bang's "genome", its underlying rules, its Ur patterns that show up over and over again in stair-step after stair-step of evolution. The big bang's underlying rules are, in fact, the "deep structures" implied by Noam Chomsky's use of the term. Howard ps I owe the use of the term "deep structures" to Pavel Kurakin, who demonstrated the relevance of Chomsky's phrase in our joint paper, ?Conversation (dialog) model of quantum transitions?. ---------- 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 Fri Oct 7 19:26:27 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 15:26:27 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws Message-ID: <20a.b04d498.307825e3@aol.com> In a message dated 10/7/2005 3:13:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, Howl Bloom writes: All thanks, Jim. I just gave a presentation related to this subject to an international quantum physics conference in Moscow--Quantum Informatics 2005. I wish I'd seen the article before giving the talk. It would have come in handy. Meanwhile I tracked down a copy of the full article. It's downloadable for free at _http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/neubiomol/ARTICLES/Gisiger2001.pdf_ (http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/neubiomol/ARTICLES/Gisiger2001.pdf) Better yet, enclosed is a file with the full article and with another article that relates. I may not have the time to read these, so if you digest anything interesting from them and get the time, please jot me an email and give me your summary of what these articles are getting at. Since Eshel Ben-Jacob has been trying to point out for years why such concepts as scale-free power laws and fractals fail to get at the creative twists evolution comes up with as it moves from one level of emergence to another, anything in these pieces that indicates how newness enters the repetition of the old would be of particular interest. Again, all thanks. Onward--Howard In a message dated 10/5/2005 5:12:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, JBJbrody at cs.com writes: _Biological Reviews_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) (2001), 76: 161-209 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1464793101005607 Published Online 17May2001 *This article is available in a PDF that may contain more than one articles. Therefore the PDF file's first page may not match this article's first page. _Login_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Subscribe to journal_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Email abstract_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/acti on/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Save citation_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Content alerts_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) Review Article Scale invariance in biology: coincidence or footprint of a universal mechanism? T. GISIGER a1 _p1_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#p1) a1 Groupe de Physique des Particules, Universit? de Montr?al, C.P. 6128, succ. centre-ville, Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada, H3C 3J7 (e-mail: _gisiger at pasteur.fr_ (mailto:gisiger at pasteur.fr) ) Abstract In this article, we present a self-contained review of recent work on complex biological systems which exhibit no characteristic scale. This property can manifest itself with fractals (spatial scale invariance), flicker noise or 1/f-noise where f denotes the frequency of a signal (temporal scale invariance) and power laws (scale invariance in the size and duration of events in the dynamics of the system). A hypothesis recently put forward to explain these scale-free phenomomena is criticality, a notion introduced by physicists while studying phase transitions in materials, where systems spontaneously arrange themselves in an unstable manner similar, for instance, to a row of dominoes. Here, we review in a critical manner work which investigates to what extent this idea can be generalized to biology. More precisely, we start with a brief introduction to the concepts of absence of characteristic scale (power-law distributions, fractals and 1/f- noise) and of critical phenomena. We then review typical mathematical models exhibiting such properties: edge of chaos, cellular automata and self-organized critical models. These notions are then brought together to see to what extent they can account for the scale invariance observed in ecology, evolution of species, type III epidemics and some aspects of the central nervous system. This article also discusses how the notion of scale invariance can give important insights into the workings of biological systems. (Received October 4 1999) (Revised July 14 2000) (Accepted July 24 2000) Key Words: Scale invariance; complex systems; models; criticality; fractals; chaos; ecology; evolution; epidemics; neurobiology. Correspondence: p1 Present address: Unit? de Neurobiologie Mol?culaire, Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Dr Roux, 75724 Paris, Cedex 15, France. Retrieved February 16, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp Week of Feb. 12, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 7 , p. 106 Life on the Scales Simple mathematical relationships underpin much of biology and ecology Erica Klarreich A mouse lives just a few years, while an elephant can make it to age 70. In a sense, however, both animals fit in the same amount of life experience. In its brief life, a mouse squeezes in, on average, as many heartbeats and breaths as an elephant does. Compared with those of an elephant, many aspects of a mouse's life?such as the rate at which its cells burn energy, the speed at which its muscles twitch, its gestation time, and the age at which it reaches maturity?are sped up by the same factor as its life span is. It's as if in designing a mouse, someone had simply pressed the fast-forward button on an elephant's life. This pattern relating life's speed to its length also holds for a sparrow, a gazelle, and a person? virtually any of the birds and mammals, in fact. Small animals live fast and die young, while big animals plod through much longer lives. "It appears as if we've been gifted with just so much life," says Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "You can spend it all at once or slowly dribble it out over a long time." a5850_1358.jpg Dean MacAdam Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal's size: They are proportional to the animal's mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the ?1/4 power. The reasons behind these laws were a mystery until 8 years ago, when Enquist, together with ecologist James Brown of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory proposed a model to explain quarter-power scaling in mammals (SN: 10/16/99, p. 249). They and their collaborators have since extended the model to encompass plants, birds, fish and other creatures. In 2001, Brown, West, and several of their colleagues distilled their model to a single formula, which they call the master equation, that predicts a species' metabolic rate in terms of its body size and temperature. "They have identified the basic rate at which life proceeds," says Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. In the July 2004 Ecology, Brown, West, and their colleagues proposed that their equation can shed light not just on individual animals' life processes but on every biological scale, from subcellular molecules to global ecosystems. In recent months, the investigators have applied their equation to a host of phenomena, from the mutation rate in cellular DNA to Earth's carbon cycle. Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, hails the team's work as a major step forward. "I think they have provided us with a unified theory for ecology," he says. The biological clock In 1883, German physiologist Max Rubner proposed that an animal's metabolic rate is proportional to its mass raised to the 2/3 power. This idea was rooted in simple geometry. If one animal is, say, twice as big as another animal in each linear dimension, then its total volume, or mass, is 23 times as large, but its skin surface is only 22 times as large. Since an animal must dissipate metabolic heat through its skin, Rubner reasoned that its metabolic rate should be proportional to its skin surface, which works out to mass to the 2/3 power. a5850_2473.jpg Dean MacAdam In 1932, however, animal scientist Max Kleiber of the University of California, Davis looked at a broad range of data and concluded that the correct exponent is 3/4, not 2/3. In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude. For most of the past 70 years, ecologists had no explanation for the 3/4 exponent. "One colleague told me in the early '90s that he took 3/4-scaling as 'given by God,'" Brown recalls. The beginnings of an explanation came in 1997, when Brown, West, and Enquist described metabolic scaling in mammals and birds in terms of the geometry of their circulatory systems. It turns out, West says, that Rubner was on the right track in comparing surface area with volume, but that an animal's metabolic rate is determined not by how efficiently it dissipates heat through its skin but by how efficiently it delivers fuel to its cells. Rubner should have considered an animal's "effective surface area," which consists of all the inner surfaces across which energy and nutrients pass from blood vessels to cells, says West. These surfaces fill the animal's entire body, like linens stuffed into a laundry machine. The idea, West says, is that a space-filling surface scales as if it were a volume, not an area. If you double each of the dimensions of your laundry machine, he observes, then the amount of linens you can fit into it scales up by 23, not 22. Thus, an animal's effective surface area scales as if it were a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure. This creates a challenge for the network of blood vessels that must supply all these surfaces. In general, a network has one more dimension than the surfaces it supplies, since the network's tubes add one linear dimension. But an animal's circulatory system isn't four dimensional, so its supply can't keep up with the effective surfaces' demands. Consequently, the animal has to compensate by scaling back its metabolism according to a 3/4 exponent. Though the original 1997 model applied only to mammals and birds, researchers have refined it to encompass plants, crustaceans, fish, and other organisms. The key to analyzing many of these organisms was to add a new parameter: temperature. Mammals and birds maintain body temperatures between about 36?C and 40?C, regardless of their environment. By contrast, creatures such as fish, which align their body temperatures with those of their environments, are often considerably colder. Temperature has a direct effect on metabolism?the hotter a cell, the faster its chemical reactions run. In 2001, after James Gillooly, a specialist in body temperature, joined Brown at the University of New Mexico, the researchers and their collaborators presented their master equation, which incorporates the effects of size and temperature. An organism's metabolism, they proposed, is proportional to its mass to the 3/4 power times a function in which body temperature appears in the exponent. The team found that its equation accurately predicted the metabolic rates of more than 250 species of microbes, plants, and animals. These species inhabit many different habitats, including marine, freshwater, temperate, and tropical ecosystems. The equation gave the researchers a way to compare organisms with different body temperatures?a person and a crab, or a lizard and a sycamore tree? and thereby enabled the team not just to confirm previously known scaling laws but also to discover new ones. For instance, in 2002, Gillooly and his colleagues found that hatching times for eggs in birds, fish, amphibians, and plankton follow a scaling law with a 1/4 exponent. When the researchers filter out the effects of body temperature, most species adhere closely to quarter-power laws for a wide range of properties, including not only life span but also population growth rates. The team is now applying its master equation to more life processes?such as cancer growth rates and the amount of time animals sleep. "We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar," says Gillooly. A single equation predicts so much, the researchers contend, because metabolism sets the pace for myriad biological processes. An animal with a high metabolic rate processes energy quickly, so it can pump its heart quickly, grow quickly, and reach maturity quickly. Unfortunately, that animal also ages and dies quickly, since the biochemical reactions involved in metabolism produce harmful by-products called free radicals, which gradually degrade cells. "Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate," Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, "but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time." Scaling up The researchers propose that their framework can illuminate not just properties of individual species, such as hours of sleep and hatching times, but also the structure of entire communities and ecosystems. Enquist, West, and Karl Niklas of Cornell University have been looking for scaling relationships in plant communities, where they have uncovered previously unnoticed patterns. a5850_3175.jpg REGULAR ON AVERAGE. Newly discovered scaling laws have revealed an unexpected relationship between the spacing of trees and their trunk diameters in a mature forest. PhotoDisc The researchers have found, for instance, that in a mature forest, the average distance between trees of the same mass follows a quarter-power scaling law, as does trunk diameter. These two scaling laws are proportional to each other, so that on average, the distance between trees of the same mass is simply proportional to the diameter of their trunks. "When you walk in a forest, it looks random, but it's actually quite regular on average," West says. "People have been measuring size and density of trees for 100 years, but no one had noticed these simple relationships." The researchers have also discovered that the number of trees of a given mass in a forest follows the same scaling law governing the number of branches of a given size on an individual tree. "The forest as a whole behaves as if it is a very large tree," West says. Gillooly, Brown, and their New Mexico colleague Andrew Allen have now used these scaling laws to estimate the amount of carbon that is stored and released by different plant ecosystems. Quantifying the role of plants in the carbon cycle is critical to understanding global warming, which is caused in large part by carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere when animals metabolize food or machines burn fossil fuels. Plants, by contrast, pull carbon dioxide out of the air for use in photosynthesis. Because of this trait, some ecologists have proposed planting more forests as one strategy for counteracting global warming. In a paper in an upcoming Functional Ecology, the researchers estimate carbon turnover and storage in ecosystems such as oceanic phytoplankton, grasslands, and old-growth forests. To do this, they apply their scaling laws to the mass distribution of plants and the metabolic rate of individual plants. The model predicts, for example, how much stored carbon is lost when a forest is cut down to make way for farmlands or development. Martinez del Rio cautions that ecologists making practical conservation decisions need more-detailed information than the scaling laws generally give. "The scaling laws are useful, but they're a blunt tool, not a scalpel," he says. Scaling down The team's master equation may resolve a longstanding controversy in evolutionary biology: Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different estimates of when certain species diverged? Geneticists calculate when two species branched apart in the phylogenetic tree by looking at how much their DNA differs and then estimating how long it would have taken for that many mutations to occur. For instance, genetic data put the divergence of rats and mice at 41 million years ago. Fossils, however, put it at just 12.5 million years ago. The problem is that there is no universal clock that determines the rate of genetic mutations in all organisms, Gillooly and his colleagues say. They propose in the Jan. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, instead, the mutation clock?like so many other life processes? ticks in proportion to metabolic rate rather than to time. The DNA of small, hot organisms should mutate faster than that of large, cold organisms, the researchers argue. An organism with a revved-up metabolism generates more mutation-causing free radicals, they observe, and it also produces offspring faster, so a mutation becomes lodged in the population more quickly. When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times?including those of rats and mice?line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper's coauthors. The team plans to use its metabolic framework to investigate why the tropics are so much more diverse than temperate zones are and why there are so many more small species than large ones. Most evolutionary biologists have tended to approach biodiversity questions in terms of historical events, such as landmasses separating, Kaspari says. The idea that size and temperature are the driving forces behind biodiversity is radical, he says. "I think if it holds up, it's going to rewrite our evolutionary-biology books," he says. Enthusiasm and skepticism While the metabolic-scaling theory has roused much enthusiasm, it has its limitations. Researchers agree, for instance, that while the theory produces good predictions when viewed on a scale from microbes to whales, the theory is rife with exceptions when it's applied to animals that are relatively close in temperature and size. For example, large animals generally have longer life spans than small animals, but small dogs live longer than large ones. a5850_4238.jpg Dean MacAdam Brown points out that the metabolic-scaling law may be useful by calling attention to such exceptions. "If you didn't have a general theory, you wouldn't know that big dogs are something interesting to look at," he observes. Many questions of particular interest to ecologists concern organisms that are close in size. Metabolic theory may not explain, for example, why certain species coexist or why particular species invade a given ecosystem, says John Harte, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Some scientists question the very underpinnings of the team's model. Raul Suarez, a comparative physiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara disputes the model's starting assumption that an animal's metabolic rate is determined by how efficiently it can transport resources from blood vessels to cells. Suarez argues that other factors are equally important, or even more so. For instance, whether the animal is resting or active determines which organs are using the most energy at a given time. "Metabolic scaling is a many-splendored thing," he says. Suarez' concern is valid, agrees Kaspari. However, he says, the master equation's accurate predictions about a huge range of phenomena are strong evidence in its favor. Ecologists, physiologists, and other biologists appear to be unanimous on one point: The team's model has sparked a renaissance for biological-scaling theory. "West and Brown deserve a great deal of credit for rekindling the interest of the scientific community in this phenomenon of metabolic scaling," Suarez says. "Their ideas have stimulated a great deal of discussion and debate, and that's a good thing." If you have a comment on this article that you would like considered for publication in Science News, send it to editors at sciencenews.org. Please include your name and location. To subscribe to Science News (print), go to https://www.kable.com/pub/scnw/ subServices.asp. To sign up for the free weekly e-LETTER from Science News, go to http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/subscribe_form.asp. References: Brown, J.H., J.F. Gillooly, A.P. Allen, V.M. Savage, and G.B. West. 2004. Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85(July):1771-1789. Abstract. Gillooly, J.F., A.P. Allen, G.B. West, and J.H. Brown. 2005. The rate of DNA evolution: Effects of body size and temperature on the molecular clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(Jan. 4):140-145. Abstract available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/1/140. Gillooly, J.F. . . . G.B. West . . . and J.H. Brown. 2002. Effects of size and temperature on developmental time. Nature 417(May 2):70-73. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417070a. Gillooly, J.F., J.H. Brown, G.B. West, et al. 2001. Effects of size and temperature on metabolic rate. Science 293(Sept. 21):2248-2251. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5538/2248. Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, J.H. Brown, G.B. West, and E.L. Charnov. 2004. Effects of body size and temperature on population growth. American Naturalist 163(March):429-441. Available at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/ journal/issues/v163n3/20308/20308.html. Suarez, R.K., C.A. Darveau, and J.J. Childress. 2004. Metabolic scaling: A many-splendoured thing. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part B 139(November):531-541. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpc.2004.05.001. West, G.B., J.H. Brown, and B.J. Enquist. 1997. A general model for the origin of allometric scaling models in biology. Science 276(April 4):122-126. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/276/5309/122. Further Readings: Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, . . . A.P. Allen . . . and J.H. Brown. 2004. The predominance of quarter-power scaling in biology. Functional Ecology 18(April):257-282. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0269-8463.2004.00856.x. Weiss, P. 1999. Built to scale. Science News 156(Oct. 16):249-251. References and sources available at http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/10_16_99/bob1ref.htm. Sources: Anurag Agrawal Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Andrew Allen Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 James H. Brown Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 Steven Buskirk Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming 1000 E. University Avenue Laramie, WY 82071 Brian Enquist Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 James Gillooly Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 John Harte Energy and Resources Group 310 Barrows Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Michael Kaspari Department of Zoology University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019 Carlos Mart?nez del Rio Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming Laramie, WY 82071 Karl Niklas Department of Plant Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Raul Suarez Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93016 Geoffrey B. West Theoretical Physics Division Los Alamos National Laboratory MS B285 Los Alamos, NM 87545 From Science News, Vol. 167, No. 7, Feb. 12, 2005, p. 106. Home | Table of Contents | Feedback | Subscribe | Help/About | Archives | Search Copyright ?2005 Science Service. All rights reserved. 1719 N St., NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202-785-2255 | scinews at sciserv.org Subscribe Subscribe to Science News. Click OR call 1-800-552-4412. Google Search WWW Search Science News Free E-mail Alert Science News e-LETTER. Click here to find resources for enjoying our planet and the universe. Science Mall sells science posters, gifts, teaching tools, and collector items. Finally a store for science enthusiasts, professionals, and kids alike! Shop at the Science Mall. Science News Logo Wear Science News Logo Wear Copyright Clearance Center Photo Archive Browse a Science News photo collection. ---------- 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 -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: HowlBloom at aol.com Subject: Re: Universal Footprint: Power Laws Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 15:13:06 EDT Size: 951922 URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Oct 7 22:05:12 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom) Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 23:05:12 +0100 Subject: [Paleopsych] Forum notify Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Details.exe Type: application/octet-stream Size: 21232 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 22:17:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:17:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Forum notify In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hey, this attachment is an .exe file. I dare not open it! On 2005-10-07, HowlBloom opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 23:05:12 +0100 > From: HowlBloom > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: Paleopsych > Subject: [Paleopsych] Forum notify > > Message is in attach > > > > From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:27:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:27:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: 'The Authoritarian Personality' Revisited Message-ID: 'The Authoritarian Personality' Revisited The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i07/07b01201.htm By ALAN WOLFE When it first appeared in 1950, The Authoritarian Personality was primed for classic status. It ran to just under 1,000 pages. Its publisher, Harper & Brothers, had brought out Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma six years earlier and drew explicit parallels between the one book and the other. Its authors were, or would soon become, famous. Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of "critical theory," a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism. R. Nevitt Sanford was a distinguished psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley who, in the year the book was published, would be dismissed from his professorship for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. Else Frenkel-Brunswick had been trained at Freud's University of Vienna and was a practicing lay analyst in Northern California. Twenty-three years old at the time the study began, Daniel J. Levinson would become famous for his 1978 The Seasons of a Man's Life (Knopf), which popularized the notion of a "midlife crisis." Then there was the subject matter. The Authoritarian Personality addressed itself to the question of whether the United States might harbor significant numbers of people with a "potentially fascistic" disposition. It did so with methods that claimed to represent the cutting edge in social science -- and that's where the book got in trouble with scholars of its day. But in today's political climate, it might be time to revisit its thesis. Before anyone was talking about the radical right in America -- the John Birch Society, the most notorious of the new conservative groups to develop in the postwar period, wasn't founded until 1958 -- The Authoritarian Personality seemed to anticipate the fervent crusades against communism and the attacks on Chief Justice Earl Warren, the United Nations, and even fluoridation that would characterize postwar politics in the United States. The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book's choice of subject matter all the more prescient. Finally, the book was filled with data, including its famous "F scale." Based on how respondents answered a series of questions, the F scale identified nine key dimensions of a protofascist personality: conventionality, submissiveness, aggression, subjectivity, superstitiousness, toughness, cynicism, the tendency to project unconscious emotional responses onto the world, and heightened concerns about sex. For example, subjects were asked how much they disagreed or agreed with such statements as: "Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn." (Submissiveness.) "Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished." (Aggression and sex.) "No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished." (Toughness and aggression.) "No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason." (Sex and cynicism.) The F scale was only one of the research methods featured in The Authoritarian Personality. The authors also measured ethnocentrism; administered Thematic Appreciation Tests, presenting subjects with pictures and asking them to tell a story about them; and relied upon clinical interviews resembling psychoanalytic sessions. Rarely, if ever, have social scientists probed ordinary human beings in as much detail as did the book's authors. Indeed, participating in this study was so demanding for subjects that the authors made no effort to engage in random sampling. They first tried their methods out on college students, the usual captive audience, before getting the cooperation of the leaders of various organizations to survey their groups -- unions, the merchant marine, employment-service veterans, prison inmates, psychology-clinic patients, and PTA's. Unlike much postwar social science, The Authoritarian Personality did not present data showing the correlations between authoritarianism and a variety of variables such as social class, religion, or political affiliation. Instead the authors tried to draw a composite picture of people with authoritarian leanings: Perhaps their most interesting finding was that such people identify with the strong and are contemptuous of the weak. Extensive case studies of particular individuals were meant to convey the message that people who seemed exceptionally conventional on the outside could be harboring radically intolerant thoughts on the inside. D espite its bulk, prestigious authors, and seeming relevance, however, The Authoritarian Personality never did achieve its status as a classic. Four years after its publication, it was subject to strong criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (Free Press, 1954), edited by the psychologists Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda. Two criticisms were especially devastating, one political, the other methodological. How, the University of Chicago sociologist Edward A. Shils wanted to know, could one write about authoritarianism by focusing only on the political right? In line with other works of the 1950s, such as Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951), Shils pointed out that "Fascism and Bolshevism, only a few decades ago thought of as worlds apart, have now been recognized increasingly as sharing many very important features." The United States had its fair share of fellow travelers and Stalinists, Shils argued, and they too worshiped power and denigrated weakness. Any analysis that did not recognize that the extremes of left and right were similar in their authoritarianism was inherently flawed. Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, survey-research specialists, scrutinized every aspect of The Authoritarian Personality's methodology and found each wanting. Sampling was all but nonexistent. The wording of the questionnaire was flawed. The long, open-ended interviews were coded too subjectively. No method existed for determining what caused what. Whatever the subjects said about themselves could not be verified. The F scale lacked coherence. It is true that, social science being what it is, fault can be found with any methodology. But the critique by Hyman and Sheatsley in some ways became more famous than the study it analyzed; when I attended graduate school in the 1960s, The Authoritarian Personality was treated as a social-science version of the Edsel, a case study of how to do everything wrong. Perhaps Adorno had all that coming. Along with Max Horkheimer, who played an instrumental role in the research that went into the book, Adorno had published Dialektik der Aufkl?rung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) in Amsterdam in 1947. Among its other attacks on the technical rationality of advanced capitalism, that book dismissed "positivism," the effort to model the social sciences on the natural ones. The significant flaws of The Authoritarian Personality allowed quantitative social scientists to return the favor and dismiss critical theory. Yet despite its flaws, The Authoritarian Personality deserves a re-evaluation. In many ways, it is more relevant now than it was in 1950. Certainly the criticisms of Edward Shils seem misplaced 50 years on. Communism really did have some of the authoritarian characteristics of fascism, yet Communism is gone from the Soviet Union and without any influence in the United States. Many writers inspired by Shils, like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who would become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, held that totalitarian regimes, unlike authoritarian ones, were not reformable from within. Yet the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of domestic upheaval. Totalitarianism still exists in a country like North Korea, but in the U.S.S.R. it never was quite as "total" in its control over most of its populations as many postwar scholars maintained. When it collapsed, so did many of the theories that once sought to explain it. Even more significant than the collapse of left-wing authoritarianism has been the success of right-wing authoritarianism. Perhaps the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were on to something when they made questions about sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, so central to diagnosing authoritarianism. In the June 19, 2005, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the journalist Russell Shorto interviewed activists against gay marriage and concluded that they were motivated not by a defense of traditional marriage, but by hatred of homosexuality itself. "Their passion," Shorto wrote, "comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: It seeks to spread itself." It is not difficult to conclude where those people would have stood on the F scale. Not all opponents of gay marriage, of course, are incipient fascists; the left, to its discredit, frequently dismisses the views of conservative opponents on, for example, abortion, church-state separation, or feminism as irrational bigotry, when the conclusions of most people who hold such views stem from deeply held, and morally reasoned, religious convictions. At the same time, many of the prominent politicians successful in today's conservative political environment adhere to a distinct style of politics that the authors of The Authoritarian Personality anticipated. Public figures, in fact, make good subjects for the kinds of analysis upon which the book relied; visible, talkative, passionate, they reveal their personalities to us, allowing us to evaluate them. Consider the case of John R. Bolton, now our ambassador to the United Nations. While testifying about Bolton's often contentious personality, Carl Ford Jr., a former head of intelligence within the U.S. State Department, called him a "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy." Surely, in one pithy sentence, that perfectly summarizes the characteristics of those who identify with strength and disparage weakness. Everything Americans have learned about Bolton -- his temper tantrums, intolerance of dissent, and black-and-white view of the world -- step right out of the clinical material assembled by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality. And Bolton is by no means alone. Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, last spring said that violent attacks on judges, who cannot be held accountable, were understandable. He might well have scored highly on his response to this item from the F scale: "There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the law into his own hands." House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is in difficulty for his close ties to lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Would those men agree with the statement, "When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit"? One item on the F scale, in particular, seems to capture in just a few words the way that many Christian-right politicians view the world in an age of terror: "Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life." If one could find contemporary "authoritarians of the left" to match those on the right, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality could rightly be criticized for their exclusive focus on fascism. Yet there are few, if any, such examples; while Republicans have been moving toward the right, Democrats are shifting to the center. No liberal close to the leaders of the Democratic Party has called for the assassination of a foreign head of state; only a true authoritarian like Pat Robertson, who has helped the Republicans achieve power, has done that. The authors of The Authoritarian Personality hoped that a clinical account of the tendency would enable democracy to protect itself better against political extremism. That could not be done, they concluded, by changing the personality structure of incipient authoritarians, since their beliefs were too ingrained to be altered and the techniques of psychology, in any case, were too weak to alter them. Authoritarian tendencies, they concluded, "are products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed." The United States did change in the years after their book was published, but those changes revealed what might have been the biggest mistake the authors made: They looked for subjects among students and union members when they should have been looking in the corridors of power. Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College. He is writing a book on whether democracy in America still works. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:27:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:27:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: Nassim Taleb: The Opiates of the Middle Classes Message-ID: Nassim Taleb: The Opiates of the Middle Classes http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb05/taleb05_index.html We humans are naturally gullible -- disbelieving requires an extraordinary expenditure of energy. It is a limited resource. I suggest ranking the skepticism by its consequences on our lives. True, the dangers of organized religion used to be there -- but they have been gradually replaced with considerably ruthless and unintrospective social-science ideology. THE OPIATES OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES [9.26.05] By Nassim Taleb NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, an essayist and mathematical trader, is the author of Fooled By Randomness. [10]Nassim Taleb's Edge Bio Page _________________________________________________________________ THE OPIATES OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES [NASSIM TALEB:] As a practitioner of science, I am opposed to teaching religious ideas in schools. But, it seems to me somewhat misplaced energy -- more of a fight for principles than for any bottom line. As an empirical skeptic, I would like to introduce a dimension to the debates: relevance, consequence, and our ability to correct a situation -- in other words the impact on our daily lives. My portrait of the perfect fool of randomness is as follows: he does not believe in religion, providing entirely rational reasons for such disbelief. He opposes scientific method to superstition and blind faith. But alas, human skepticism appears to be quite domain-specific and relegated to the classroom. Somehow the skepticism of my fool undergoes a severe atrophy outside of these intellectual debates: 1) He believes in the stock market because he is told to do so. -- automatically allocating a portion of his retirement money. And he does not realize that the manager of his mutual fund does not fare better than chance -- actually a bit worse, after the (generous) fees. Nor does he realize that markets are far more random and far riskier that he is being made to believe by the high priests of the brokerage industry. He disbelieves the bishops (on grounds of scientific method), but replaces him with the security analyst. He listens to the projections by security analysts and "experts"-- not checking their past accuracy and track record. Had he checked them he would have discovered that these are no better than random -- often worse. 2) He believes in the government's ability to "forecast" economic variables, oil prices, GNP growth, or inflation. Economics provide very complicated equations -- but our historical track record in predicting is pitiful. It does not take long to verify these claims; simple empiricism would suffice. Yet we have confident forecasts of social security deficits by both sides (democrats and republicans) twenty and thirty years ahead! This Scandal of Prediction (which I capitalize) is far more severe than religion, simply because it determines policy making. Last time I checked no religious figure was consulted for long-term business and economic projections. 3) He believes in the "skills" of the chairmen of large corporations and pays them huge bonuses for their "performance". He forgets that theirs are the least observable contributions. This skills attribution is flimsy at best -- there is no account of the possible role of luck in his success. 4) His scientific integrity makes him reject religion but he believes the economist because "economic science" has the word "science" in it. 5) He believes in the news media providing an accurate representation of the risks in the world. They don't. By what I call the narrative fallacy, the media distorts our mental map of the world by feeding us what can be made into a story that can be squeezed into our minds. For instance (preventable) cancer, not terrorism remains the greatest danger. The number of persons killed by hurricanes, while consequential, is dwarfed by that of the thousands of isolated daily victims dying in hospital beds. These are not story-worthy, implying; the absence of attention on the part of the press maps into disproportionately reduced resources allocated to their welfare. The difference between actual, actuarially defined risks and the perception of dangers is enormous -- and, sadly, growing with the globalization and the media, and our increased vulnerability to visual stimuli. Now I am not arguing that one should ignore the side effects of religion -- given the accounts of past intolerance. But it was in these columns that Richard Dawkins, echoing the great Peter Medawar, recommended bright students to find something worthwhile "to be smart about". Likewise, I suggest exerting our skepticism "where it matters". Why? Because, alas, cognitively, our resource to doubt is rather limited. We humans are naturally gullible -- disbelieving requires an extraordinary expenditure of energy. It is a limited resource. I suggest ranking the skepticism by its consequences on our lives. True, the dangers of organized religion used to be there -- but they have been gradually replaced with considerably ruthless and unintrospective social-science ideology. Religion gives many people solace. On a personal note I have to admit that I feel more elevated in cathedrals than in stock markets -- be it only on aesthetic grounds. If I were going to be gullible about a subject, I would rather pick one that is the least harmful to my future -- and one that is rewarding to my thirst for aesthetics. It is high time to worry about the opiates of the middle class. References 10. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/taleb.html From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:27:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:27:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] William Easterly: The Utopian Nightmare Message-ID: William Easterly: The Utopian Nightmare http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3193&print=1 September/October 2005 This year, economists, politicians, and rock stars in rich countries have pleaded for debt relief and aid for the worlds poorest countries. It certainly sounds like the right thing to do. But utopian dreams of alleviating poverty overlook some hard facts. By promising so much, rich-world activists prolong the true nightmare of poverty. The past has prepared all the materials and means in superabundance to well-feed, clothe, lodge, train, educate, employ, amuse, and govern the human race in perpetual progressive prosperitywithout war, conflict, or competition between nations or individuals. These words were not uttered by a hopeful world leader at the most recent Group of 8 (G-8) summit, or by Bono at a rock concertbut they certainly sound familiar. They were written in 1857, when British reformer Robert Owen called upon rich countries, who could easily induce all the other governments and people to unite with them in practical measures for the general good all through futurity. Owen was laughed out of town as a utopian. How comforted Owen would be if he were alive in 2005, when some of the most powerful and influential people seem to believe that utopia is back. American President George W. Bush has dispatched the U.S. military to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, G-8 leaders strive to end poverty and disease sometime soon, the World Bank promises development as the path to world peace, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to save the environment. In a world where billions of people still suffer, these are certainly appealing dreams. But is this surprising new fondness for utopia just harmless, inspirational rhetoric? Are utopian ambitions the best way to help the poor-world majority? Unfortunately, no. In reality, they hurt efforts to help the worlds poor. What is utopianism? It is promising more than you can deliver. It is seeing an easy and sudden answer to long-standing, complex problems. It is trying to solve everything at once through an administrative apparatus headed by world leaders. It places too much faith in altruistic cooperation and underestimates self-seeking behavior and conflict. It is expecting great things from schemes designed at the top, but doing nothing to solve the bigger problems at the bottom. The Year of Living Utopianly At the dawn of the new millennium, the United Nations realized Robert Owens dream of bringing together the Potentates of the Earth in what the global organization called a Millennium Assembly. These potentates set Millennium Development Goals for 2015, calling for, among other things, dramatic reductions in poverty, child mortality, illiteracy, environmental degradation, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, unsafe drinking water, and discrimination against women. But it is in 2005 that utopia seems to have made its big breakthrough into mainstream discourse. In March, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, celebrity economist and intellectual leader of the utopians, published a book called The End of Poverty, in which he called for a big push of increased foreign aid to meet the Millennium Development Goals and end the miseries of the poor. Sachs proposes everything from nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility to antiretroviral AIDS therapy, cell phones that provide up-to-date market information to health planners, rainwater harvesting, and battery-charging stations. His U.N. Millennium Project proposed a total of 449 interventions. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown likewise called in January for a major increase in aid, a Marshall Plan for Africa. Brown was so confident he knew how to save the worlds poor that he even called for borrowing against future aid commitments to finance massive increases in aid today. At the World Economic Forum in January, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for a big, big push to meet the goals for 2015, and his administration issued a fat report on saving Africa in March. The World Bank and the IMF issued their own weighty document in April about meeting these goals and endorsing the call for a big push, and utopians of the world will reconvene at the U.N. World Summit in September to evaluate progress on the Millennium Development Goals. The G-8 leaders agreed on a plan in June to cancel $40 billion worth of poor-country debt to help facilitate the push. The IMF might even tap its gold reserves to bolster the effort. The least likely utopian is George W. Bush, who has shown less interest in vanquishing poverty, but has sought to portray the Iraq misadventure as a step toward universal democracy and world peace. As he modestly put it in his Second Inaugural Address in January 2005, America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. These leaders frequently talk about how easy it is to help the poor. According to Brown, medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only 12 cents per person. A bed net to prevent a child from contracting malaria costs only $4. Preventing 5 million child deaths over the next 10 years would cost just an extra $3 for each new mother, says Brown. The emphasis on these easy solutions emerged as worry about terrorist havens in poor states intersected with the campaigning on the part of Sachs, Bono, rocker Bob Geldof, and the British Labourites. All these factions didnt seem to realize aid workers had been trying for years to end poverty. All Talk, No Traction We have already seen the failure of comprehensive utopian packages in the last two decades: the failure of shock therapy to convert the former Soviet Union from communism to capitalism and the failure of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment to transform nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America into free-market paragons. All of these regions have suffered from poor economic growth since utopian efforts began. In the new millennium, apparently unchastened, the IMF and World Bank are trying something even more ambitioussocial, political, economic, and environmental transformation of the poorest nations through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. These reports, which the IMF and World Bank require that governments design in consultation with the poor, are comprehensive plans to make poverty vanish in each nation. It is a little unclear how a bureaucratic document can make often undemocratic governments yield some of their power to the poor, or how it will be more successful than previous comprehensive plans that seem modest by comparison. Indeed, we have seen the failure of what was already a big push of foreign aid to Africa. After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. With all the political and popular support for such ambitious programs, why then do comprehensive packages almost always fail to accomplish much good, much less attain Utopia? They get the political and economic incentives all wrong. The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they dont. A more subtle problem is that if all of us are collectively responsible for a big world goal, then no single agency or politician is held accountable if the goal is not met. Collective responsibility for world goals works about as well as collective farms in agriculture, and for the same reason. To make things worse, utopian-driven aid packages have so many different goals that it weakens the accountability and probability of meeting any one goal. The conditional aid loans of the IMF and World Bank (structural adjustment loans) were notorious for their onerous policy and outcome targets, which often numbered in the hundreds. The eight Millennium Development Goals actually have 18 target indicators. The U.N. Millennium Project released a 3,751-page report in January 2005 listing the 449 intermediate steps necessary to meet those 18 final targets. Working for multiple bosses (or goals) doesnt usually work out so well; the bosses each try to get you to work on their goal and not the other bosss goal. Such employees get overworked, overwhelmed, and demoralizednot a bad description of todays working-level staff at the World Bank and other aid agencies. Top-down strategies such as those envisioned by President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Bono also suffer from complex information problems, even when the incentive problems are solved. Planners at the global top simply dont know what, when, and where to give to poor people at the global bottom. That is not to say that it is impossible to meet multiple goals for multiple customers with multiple agents. The various needs of the rich are met easily enough by a system of decentralized markets and democracy, which utilize feedback from the customers and accountability of the suppliers. Rich, middle-aged men can buy Rogaine to grow hair on their heads, while women can buy Nair to get rid of hair on their legs. No Millennium Development Goal on Body Hair was necessary. The Rogaine and Nair corporations are accountable to their customers for satisfaction. If the customers dont care for the product, the corporations go out of business; if the customers do like the product, corporations have a profit incentive to supply it. Similarly, men and women in wealthy countries can complain to democratically accountable bureaucrats and politicians if garbage collectors do not pick up their discarded Rogaine and Nair bottles. Private markets also specialize; there is no payoff for them to produce a comprehensive product that both removes hair from womens legs and transfers it to mens heads. The irony of the situation is tragically obvious: The cosmetic needs of the rich are met easily, while the much more desperate needs of the poor get lost in centralized, utopian, comprehensive planning. Poverty Starts at Home Free markets and democracy are far from an overnight solution to povertythey require among many other things the bottom-up evolution of the rules of the game, including contract enforcement and fair political competition. Nor can democratic capitalism be imposed by outsiders (as the World Bank, IMF, and U.S. Army should now have learned). The evolution of markets and democracy took many decades in rich countries, and it did not happen through big pushes by outsiders, Millennium Development Goals, or Assemblies of World Leaders. Progress in wealthy countries arrived through piecemeal steps, gradual reforms, incremental improvements, and experimental probing, accompanied by gradually accelerating economic growth, rather than through crash programs. The problems of the poor nations have deep institutional roots at home, where markets dont work well and politicians and civil servants arent accountable to their citizens. That makes utopian plans even more starry-eyed, as the big push must ultimately rely on dysfunctional local institutions. For example, there are many weak links in the chain that leads from Gordon Browns 12-cent malaria drug to actual health outcomes in poor countries. According to research by Deon Filmer, Jeffrey Hammer, and Lant Pritchett at the World Bank, anywhere from 30 percent to as much as 70 percent of the drugs destined for rural health clinics in several African countries disappear before reaching the clinics. According to one survey in Zimbabwe, pregnant women were reluctant to use public health clinics to give birth because nurses ridiculed them for not having better baby clothes, forced them to wash bed linens soon after delivery, and even hit them to encourage them to push the baby out faster during delivery. And Africa is not alonenearly all poor countries have problems of corrupt and often unfriendly civil servants, as todays rich countries did earlier in their history. Researchers find that many people in poor countries bypass public health services altogether, in favor of private doctors or folk remedies. The poor have neither the income nor political power to hold anyone accountable for meeting their needsthey are political and economic orphans. The rich-country public knows little about what is happening to the poor on the ground in struggling countries. The wealthy population mainly just wants to know that something is being done about such a tragic problem as world poverty. The utopian plans satisfy the something-is-being-done needs of the rich-country public, even if they dont serve the needs of the poor. Likewise, the Bush Doctrine soothes the fears of Americans concerned about evil tyrants, without consulting the poor-country publics on whether they wish to be conquered or democratized. The something-is-being-done syndrome also explains the fixation on money spent on world poverty, rather than how to meet the needs of the poor. True, doubling the relatively trivial proportion of their income that rich Westerners give to poor Africans is a worthy enough cause. But lets not kid ourselves that spending more money on foreign aid accomplishes anything by itself. Letting total aid money stand for accomplishment is like the Hollywood producers of Catwoman, recently voted the worst movie of 2004, bragging about their impressive accomplishment of spending $100 million on its production. The Way Out Certainly not all aid efforts are futile. Instead of setting utopian goals such as ending world poverty, global leaders should simply concentrate on finding particular interventions that work. Anecdotal and some systematic evidence suggests piecemeal approaches to aid can be successful. Routine childhood immunization combined with measles vaccination in seven southern African nations cut reported measles cases from 60,000 in 1996 to 117 in 2000. Another partnership among aid donors contributed to the near eradication of guinea worm in 20 African and Asian countries where it was endemic. Abhijit Banerjee and Ruimin He at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology list examples of successful aid programs that passed rigorous evaluation: subsidies to families for education and health costs for their children, remedial teaching, uniforms and textbooks, school vouchers, deworming drugs and nutritional supplements, vaccination, HIV prevention, indoor spraying for malaria, bed nets, fertilizer, and clean water. Of course, finding and maintaining piecemeal approaches that work well requires improving incentives for aid agencies. Better incentives might come from placing more emphasis on the independent evaluation of aid projects. Given the vast sums that are being spent, reliable evaluations remain surprisingly rare. Better incentives could also come from devising means to get more feedback from the poor people that the programs are trying to help, and holding aid agencies accountable when the feedback is negative. It seems more productive to focus on such critical problems in foreign aid rather than simply promising the rich-country public the end of world poverty. If an aid-financed big push will not generate society-wide development, are things hopeless for poor countries? Fortunately, poor countries are making progress on their own, without waiting for the West to save them. The steady improvement in health and education in poor countries (except for the AIDS crisis), the market-driven growth of China and India, the movement toward democracy in Latin America and Africa (even amid continued disappointing economic growth), not to mention earlier successes such as Botswana and the East Asian Tiger economies, offer hope for homegrown and gradual development. The outpouring of donations for last Decembers tsunami victims shows that Europeans and Americans have genuine compassion for those in need. Can the rich-country public call their politicians bluff and refuse to let them get away with utopian dreams as a substitute for the hard slogging of delivering benefits to the poor? Will they hold the aid agencies accountable for getting money to those in need? Will they figure out new ways to give voice to the voiceless? If they asked, they would likely find that the poor are unmoved by utopian dreams. They probably just want those 12-cent medicines. William Easterly is professor of economics at New York University, nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development, and author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:27:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:27:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: Women bypass sex in favour of 'instant pregnancies' Message-ID: Women bypass sex in favour of 'instant pregnancies' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/25/nivf25.xml By Charlotte Edwardes and Andrew Alderson (Filed: 25/09/2005) Women are increasingly seeking inappropriate IVF treatment because they do not have the time or inclination for a sex life and want to "diarise" their busy lives. Wealthy career women in their 30s and early 40s, some of whom have given up regular sex altogether, are turning to "medicalised conception" - despite being fertile and long before they have exhausted the possibility of a natural conception. They are prepared to pay thousands of pounds for private IVF treatments - even though they have unpleasant and potentially harmful side effects - because they believe it offers them the best chance of "instant" pregnancy. Many fertility experts believe that IVF offers women the best chance of pregnancy - a one in three chance of success or better in one cycle if the woman is under 35, whereas natural conception has no better than a one in four chance for a woman of the same age even if a couple have an active sex life. An active sex life aimed at pregnancy is considered to be unprotected sex at least once every three days. Each year about 43,000 women receive IVF treatment, most of them privately. The cost of a single treatment - and often several are needed - is at least ?2,500. Government guidelines on when women should receive treatment (on the NHS) say IVF should be given only to those aged between 23 and 39 who have an identified cause for the fertility problem or who have suffered unexplained fertility problems for at least three years." Michael Dooley, a gynaecologist, obstetrician and fertility expert, said that in the past five years he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of patients seeking "inappropriate or premature" IVF treatment. "Many of these couples are simply not having sex or not having enough sex," he said. "Conception has become medicalised. It's too clinical. There has been a trend away from having sex and loving relationships towards medicalised conception." Mr Dooley practises at Westover House clinic and the Lister Hospital, both in south-west London, and a clinic in Poundbury, Dorset. He said: "I have people who come to me for IVF who haven't got time for sex. Those people don't care about looking for a lifestyle or maximising their natural potential." Emma Cannon, who runs the fertility programme at Westover House, said: "I have patients who diary sex in. When the they don't fall pregnant they panic and think they need IVF. "People want everything now. If they can't have a baby now, they want IVF. They think it's no different from putting your name down for a handbag. Some people are horrified by the idea that they have to have sex two to three times a week. About 10 per cent of people I see don't have time to have sex. It's usually when you have two professionals who are based in the city and are very busy. "Mothers might be working or their children sleep in their bed. I told one of my patients who is going through IVF that another IVF patient had just conceived naturally. She said: 'What? She's having sex? Bloody Luddite'." Dr Tim Evans, the founder of Westover House and the Queen's GP, said: "People are increasingly trying to control it [conception]. They are testing, testing, testing when they should just have sex." Prof Gedis Grudzinskas, the medical director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre, said: "If a woman over the age of 40 says she has been trying to conceive for six to 12 months and wants IVF, it would be a silly person who said 'no'. In my view, it's wise to go straight to IVF even though it's not without its complications. "Many people in their late 30s or early 40s without children are completely absorbed in their professional lives and have less opportunities to conceive. Many couples I see have one of them working abroad and the most they see each other is at weekends." Prof Bill Ledger, a specialist in fertility problems at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, in Sheffield, said that the number of women seeking a "fast track" to IVF was increasing rapidly. He estimates one woman of about 40 seeks urgent IVF treatment each week from the hospital. "I am reluctant to put anyone on an IVF programme unless they have tried for at least six months to conceive naturally," he said. "But the older a woman is the less is the window of opportunity and fast tracking [to an IVF programme] has to be an option." From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:34:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:34:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Heartland: Top 10 Myths about No Child Left Behind ... and Why You Shouldn't Believe Them Message-ID: Top 10 Myths about No Child Left Behind ... and Why You Shouldn't Believe Them The Heartland Institute http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16829 Written By: Lori Drummer Published In: New Coalition News & Views Publication Date: January 1, 2005 Publisher: The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change If you listen to media reports on the implementation and costs associated with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), youve been bombarded by a slew of misinformation. Below are 10 common myths about NCLB ... and the facts to debunk them. Myth 1 -- NCLB is an unfunded mandate that imposes a one-size-fits-all education system. Fact: The president and Congress have funded NCLB, and states have been given a great deal of flexibility as they implement the programs goals. NCLB not only increased standards for public elementary and secondary education--it brought an additional $6.4 billion in federal education funding, a 28.5 percent increase. Instead of binding funding to specific programs not proven effective to increase academic achievement, federal funding is now correlated to several broad areas, such as academic achievement, high-quality teachers, parental choice, and accountability, for states to find methods that best suit them. Myth 2 -- NCLB is nothing more than new federal mandates states have to follow. Fact: Accountability measures were already in place prior to NCLB. Under the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which preceded NCLBs enactment by eight years, each state was required to develop comprehensive academic standards and correlate those standards with a curriculum-based exam. Math and reading exams, at the very least, were to be administered at three grade levels. But states were never held accountable for compliance with the 1994 law. Myth 3 -- NCLB requires a national standardized test. Fact: NCLB in fact forbids a national test. States are free to choose the testing vehicles that best fit their students needs. Myth 4 -- The federal government has imposed unrealistic requirements on teachers seeking highly qualified status. Fact: In order to be certified as a highly qualified teacher, an instructor must be fully certified, have a bachelors degree, and have demonstrated knowledge in the teachers subject area. Every state already mandates the first two requirements. With respect to the third requirement, NCLB allows each state education agency to choose how it will determine if a teacher has demonstrated subject-specific mastery. NCLB gives states the flexibility to establish their own highly qualified standards, and states may determine who is highly qualified by administering a test or using some other objective evaluation system developed or approved by the state. Myth 5 -- Teachers who choose to seek advanced certification will bear an unfair financial burden under NCLB. Fact: NCLB includes new flexibility and increased funding for teachers. States have been allocated $2.9 billion for teacher quality programs to help districts train, recruit, and retain quality teachers. Myth 6 -- School administrators dont have the flexibility to recruit and retain teachers. Fact: Well aware of the need for exemplary teachers in fields such as math, science, and special education, NCLBs authors gave states several options for attracting uniquely qualified professionals to the teaching field. Under NCLB, states are authorized to implement recruitment and retention programs that can include professional development opportunities, differential pay, signing bonuses, performance bonuses, and more. Myth 7 -- Schools in need of improvement will lose federal funding. Fact: No financial penalties are imposed on schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress under NCLB. In fact, states are required by the law to set aside a portion of their Title I funds specifically to provide additional assistance to schools in need of improvement. Myth 8 -- Schools are required by NCLB to pay for tutors, instead of using money on general school improvements. Fact: If a school is deemed in need of improvement for three consecutive years, the school district must provide a supplemental education service option for parents. That service can be paid for with Title I funds the states will have set aside explicitly for schools in need of improvement. States are authorized by NCLB to choose from a variety of supplemental service options. In addition to offering students tutoring, states may turn to public- or private-sector educational service providers, additional classes, or individualized education assistance. If children trapped in failing school systems are to have a chance at a successful education, these new options are key. Myth 9 -- NCLB reduces local control of schools. Fact: After almost four decades of federal government involvement in public schools, achieving at best stagnant academic results, NCLB directly ties federal education spending to student achievement and school success. Such accountability empowers local school officials. Under NCLB, for the first time, states and individual school districts may transfer to any Title I program they choose up to 50 percent of the federal formula grant funds they receive under the Improving Teacher Quality State Grants, Educational Technology, Innovative Programs, and Safe and Drug-Free Schools programs. NCLB gives states and school districts the authority to determine which programs are most important and most deserving of funding. Myth 10 -- More money will fix the nations education problems. Fact: The problem with Americas education system has not been a lack of funding, but a lack of accountability for the money our schools spend. Despite Americas multi-billion-dollar investments in public education, U.S. students continue to achieve poorly compared to their foreign counterparts, and the achievement gap between rich, poor, white, and minority students remains wide. Over the past 20 years, inflation-adjusted per-pupil funding has increased by an average of $2,269 in the U.S., but Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have declined, and 74 percent of public school eighth-graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress in mathematics failed to reach the proficiency level. In response to this disconnect between funding and achievement, NCLB creates a partnership among school district, state, and federal government officials to develop higher standards, increase accountability, and improve student academic achievement. _________________________________________________________________ Lori Drummer (drummer at alec.org) is director of the Education Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:34:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:34:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Economists' Voice: Does College Still Pay Message-ID: Does College Still Pay? The Economists' Voice Volume 2, Issue 4 2005 Article 3 Lisa Barrow and Elena Rouse Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Princeton University First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.3 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005100301j.htm A glance at the current issue of The Economist's Voice: The value of a college degree The hourly-wage gap between people with college degrees and those with only a high-school education has been growing for decades, but the rate of increase slowed in the 1990s. At the same time, tuition prices rose, leading people to ask whether college was still worth it. But after studying the financial risks and rewards of higher education, two economists have concluded that continuing one's education definitely still pays off. "In fact, there are no signs that the value of a college education has peaked or is on a downward trend," say Lisa Barrow, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Cecilia Elena Rouse, a professor of economics at Princeton University. For the average student who entered college in 2003, the authors calculate, the cost of earning a bachelor's degree would be worthwhile if it raised the value of the student's lifetime earnings by $107,277. That figure represents the sum of average tuition and fees for a four-year degree program and the amount someone with just a high-school diploma could earn in the same span of time. Ms. Rouse and Ms. Barrow write that a college diploma would raise such a student's lifetime earnings by as much as $402,959 -- nearly $300,000 more than the total cost. That increase is important to focus on, in contrast to the rising cost of tuition, which the authors say has almost no effect on the value of a college education. In fact, despite the growth in the number of graduates, the wages of degree-holders continue to rise, indicating "an increasing -- not a decreasing -- demand for their skills," they write. The article, "Does College Still Pay?," is available at [54]http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol2/iss4/art3/ --Jason M. Breslow _________________________________________________________________ Background article from The Chronicle: * [55]Data Show Value of College Degree (4/8/2005) References 54. http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol2/iss4/art3/ 55. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i31/31a02203.htm ------------------ Summary Since the mid-1990s college tuition costs have risen quickly while the rate of increase in the value of education has slowed considerably. Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow explore the reasons and ask if college remains a good investment. In the 1980s the value of a college education grew significantly. According to Census data, in 1979 those with a bachelor?s degree or higherearned roughly 45 percent more per hour than workers with only a high schooldiploma. By 1989 wages for college graduates were more than 70 percent higherthan those of high school graduates.1 This dramatic change revived arguments over the cause and effect relationship between education and higher income. Inother words, was education driving income levels or was the education trend abyproduct of rising income levels? This debate spawned a very large literature tying increasing income inequality to a decrease in demand for workers withoutmarketable skills. A key reason for the increasing value of a college educationwas the increasing cost of not having one: Real earnings of workers without somecollege education fell during the 1980s, as earnings of the more highly educatedincreased. Politicians and policymakers tried to enact policies to improve educational attainment, for as President Clinton stated: "Today, more than everbefore in our history, education is the fault line between those who will prosper inthe new economy and those who will not."2 But the labor market changed in the mid-1990s. The hourly wage gapbetween those with college education and those without, which had grown by 25percentage points in the 1980s, grew by only 10 percentage points in the 1990s. At the same time, college tuition rates increased extremely rapidly. The wage-gapslowdown has led some to wonder: Has college ceased being the better deal overthe past few years? Do rising tuition levels mean that the value of a collegeeducation has peaked? And even, is attending college still worth the costs? Our answer to the final question is yes. College is definitely still worth theinvestment. In fact, there are no signs that the value of a college education haspeaked or is on a downward trend. Also, the rapid annual percentage rise in thecost of tuition has had little effect on the value of a college education, largelybecause tuition is a relatively small part of the true total economic cost of attending college. Most of the true economic cost of college is the wages students forego while they attend--and those have not risen by very much at all. 1 All levels of education have become more valuable since the late 1970s. The return on each yearof schooling was 6.6 percent (in terms of hourly wages) in 1979, compared with 9.8 percent in 1989 and 10.9 percent in 2000. We focus on college education here due to space limitations. "President Clinton?s Call to Action for American Education in the 21st Century" (February 1997) available at www.ed.gov/updates/PresEDPlan/part9.html, accessed on April 4, 2005. The Changing Value of Education To make sense of trends in the economic value of education, one must first understand what economists see as the "return to education." The return to education is the capitalized present value of the extra income an individual wouldearn with additional schooling, after taking into account all of the costs of obtaining the additional schooling.3 This return to education may change becauseof a shift in the income for individuals who obtain more schooling or a shift in theincome of those who do not. Also, a change in the economic costs of educationcan affect the return to education. Figure 1 shows the average hourly real wages (relative to hourly wages in 1980) for four sets of workers between 1980 and 2004. The four categoriesinclude: those who did not complete high school; those who only earned a high school diploma; those who have some college education but did not earn a bachelor?s degree; and those who earned at least a bachelor?s degree. Through themid-1990s average hourly wages increase fairly steadily among those with at leasta bachelor?s degree, while the real wages of high school dropouts and of thosewith only a high school diploma decline. These trends account for the largeincreases in the return to schooling through the mid-1990s. Since the mid-1990s the average wages of college graduates have skyrocketed, increasing by 18 percent by 2004. However, the wages of highschool dropouts have also risen, climbing by 10 percent in the second half of the1990s from their lowest levels in 1994. Because of this turnaround in the wagesof high school dropouts, the college wage premium has risen at a much slowerrate of increase than before. And rapidly rising tuition costs must be set againstthis slower rate of increase. 3 Ideally, one would observe a worker?s income were she to obtain the additional schooling, andthen compare this to her income were she to obtain no further schooling. Because an individual either obtains more schooling or does not, this ideal is impossible to measure. Therefore, economists typically compute the return to schooling by comparing the average income of workerswho have obtained the additional schooling to those who did not. The main conceptual issue with this observed return to schooling is a concern that workers who obtained the additional schoolingmay also differ from those that did not along unobserved dimensions (such as they were moremotivated or hard working). Further discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper; however, we refer the interested reader to Card (1999). Figure 1 Hourly Wages by Education Group Relative to 1980 Hourly Wages Source: Authors? calculations from the 1980-2004 (even years only) Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group files available from Unicon. We limit the sample to individualsbetween ages of 25 and 65 years, and drop observations with wages < 1/2 of the minimum wage orabove the 99th percentile of the distribution. Why Is the Premium No Longer Rising as Rapidly? Many economists in the 1990s thought the major source of increasing wage inequality was "skill-biased technological change" (see Bound and Johnson [1992] and Katz and Murphy [1992]). Changes in technology increased theproductivity of high-skilled workers relative to low-skilled workers, raising therelative demand for the former. Therefore, relative wages for high-skilled workersrose, while those for the less-skilled declined. An end to this skill bias in technological change could account for the leveling off of the return to education. While possible, we do not believe this is a likely explanation. The relativewages of college graduates have risen at the same time as the supply of high- skilled workers has increased, due to higher enrollment at colleges and greaterimmigration of high-skilled workers. Between 1996 and 2000 college enrollmentrose by nearly 7 percent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Since1999, 36 percent of immigrants entering the U.S. had at least a bachelor?s degreecompared with 24 percent of immigrants arriving in the 1980s (CurrentPopulation Survey, 2003). The share of the population aged 25 to 65 years old with at least a bachelor?s degree rose from 26 percent in 1996 to 30 percent in 2004.4. Despite the growth in the relative supply of college graduates, the wages of college graduates have continued to rise dramatically, which indicates an increasing--not a decreasing--demand for their skills. Moreover, average wagesof workers with lower levels of education have also increased since 1995; it is this turnaround in the trend which accounts for the slowing growth in the return to schooling. Thus the relevant question is: Why have the wages of these lower-skilled workers increased in the past decade? Minimum wage increases in the late 1990s helped increase the wages ofthe lowest-skilled workers, but it is unlikely to account fully for the turnaround. First, the last increase in the federal minimum wage came in late 1997, two yearsafter average wages of the lowest-skilled workers began to increase. It cannot account for subsequent increases in the wages of low-skilled workers. The statesthat have raised their minimum wages since 1997 make up only about one-third of U.S. payroll employment: It is unlikely that state minimum wages can fullyaccount for changes in average wages across the entire country.5 Moreover, there is an anomaly in the time-series relationship between minimum wages and inequality: In the data, the level of the minimum wage is correlated with 4 Authors? calculations based on March CPS data. Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2004) also find thatthe relative supply of college-equivalent labor continued to increase throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. States that raised their minimum wages include Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The District of Columbia also raised its minimum wage. inequality at both the bottom (where it should be) and the top (where it shouldn?tbe, if a low minimum wage is a cause and not a consequence of high inequality) of the wage distribution.6 The booming economy of the late 1990s is the most likely explanation for the turnaround, as it raised the average wages of all workers, including those with the lowest skills.7 Why College Education Is Still Worth It How good an investment finishing college is depends on both earningsand costs--the earnings of college graduates relative to high school graduates andthe costs of attending college (both tuition and foregone earnings). Tuition andfees for a four-year college for the 2003-2004 academic year averaged $7,091; the average net price--tuition and fees net of grants--was $5,558 (both amountsin 2003 dollars).8 If we assume that tuition and fees continue to rise as they didbetween the 1999-2000 and 2003-2004 school years, and conservatively look atsticker rather than net prices, the average full-time student entering a program inthe fall of 2003 who completes a bachelor?s degree in four years will pay $30,325 in tuition and fees. If we assume an opportunity cost equal to the average annualearnings of a high school graduate (from the March 2004 Current PopulationSurvey) and a 5 percent discount rate for time preference, the total cost of attending college rises to $107,277. In other words, college is worthwhile for an average student if getting a bachelor?s degree boosts the present value of herlifetime earnings by at least $107,277. What is the boost to the present value of wages? At a 5 percent annualdiscount rate, it is $402,959. The net present value of a four-year degree to anaverage student entering college in the fall of 2003 is roughly $295,682--the 6 Lee (1999) finds that in the 1980s the fall in the real value of the minimum wage can account forincreasing inequality at the bottom of the wage distribution, suggesting that minimum wageincreases of the mid-1990s also propped up wages at the bottom of the wage distribution, althoughAutor, Katz, and Kearney (2004) raise some caution about this interpretation. Namely, theyhighlight that much of the decline in the real value of the minimum wage during the 1980soccurred during an economic downturn, whereas the minimum wage increases in the 1990s were legislated during economic expansions. 7 Studies of labor market cyclicality, e.g., Hoynes (2000) and Hines, Hoynes, and Krueger (2001), show that earnings and (especially) employment are procyclical and that less educated individualsexperience greater cyclical variation than more educated individuals. 8 U.S. Department of Education, 2005, based on data from the National Postsecondary StudentAid Study. difference between $402,959 in earnings and $107,277 in total costs.9 A student entering college today can expect to recoup her investment within 10 years ofgraduation. It still pays to go to college--very much so, at least as much as ever before.10 Lisa Barrow is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and CeciliaRouse is a professor at Princeton. Letters commenting on this piece or others may be submitted at http://www.bepress.com/cgi/submit.cgi?context=ev References and Further Reading Autor, David H., Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney. 2004. "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Re-Assessing the Revisionists," Unpublished manuscript. Bound, John and George Johnson. 1992. "Changes in the Structure of Wages in the 1980?s: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations," The American EconomicReview, 82(3), pp. 371-392. Card, David. 1999. "The Causal Effect of Education on Earnings" in Handbook of Labor Economics, Vol. 3A (Orley C. Ashenfelter and David Card, editors). (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 1801-1863. 9 Assuming that the college graduate-high school graduate earnings gap is constant over thelifecycle and equals the difference in average annual earnings for these two education groups asmeasured in the 2004 March Current Population Survey, a college graduate earns $27,800 more in inflation adjusted dollars per year. Alternatively, if we assume annual earnings will follow averageearnings by age, the net present value to a first year student in the fall of 2003 is roughly $246,923 ($354,200 in earnings minus $107,277 in tuition, fees, and lost wages). Note that by using annualearnings we take into account the higher rates of unemployment among high school graduates. This may not be correct, to the extent that lower unemployment is not the result of completing thebachelor?s degree; rather, it may be result of having the personal factors that made it likely that anindividual would complete the degree in the first place. 10 Note, however, that future changes in the U.S. labor market might affect relative compensation. If many more people who otherwise would not have attended college decide to do so, a dramatically increased supply of college graduates would compete in the labor market, and hence, the net benefits of college might be significantly smaller than we calculate. Current Population Survey. 2003. "Table 2.5: Educational Attainment of the Foreign-Born Population 25 Years and Over by Sex and Year of Entry: 2003," The Foreign-Born Population in the United States: March 2003. (P20-539). Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/foreign/ppl174/tab02-05.xls on April 1, 2005. Hines Jr., James R., Hilary W. Hoynes, and Alan B. Krueger. 2001. "Another Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats," in The Roaring Nineties: CanFull Employment Be Sustained? (Alan B. Krueger and Robert M. Solow, editors) (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation), pp. 493-537. Hoynes, Hilary W. 2000. "The Employment and Earnings of Less Skilled Workers Over the Business Cycle," in Finding Jobs: Work and Welfare Reform. (Rebecca Blank and David Card, editors) (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation), pp. 23-71. Katz, Lawrence F. and Kevin M. Murphy. 1992. "Changes in Relative Wages, 1963-1987: Supply and Demand Factors," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107(1) (February), pp. 35-78. Lee, David S. 1999. "Wage Inequality in the United States During the 1980s: Rising Dispersion or Falling Minimum Wage?" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(3) (August), pp. 977-1023. Pierce, Brooks. 2001. "Compensation Inequality," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(4) (November), pp. 1493-1525. Snyder, T. D., A.G. Tan, and C. M. Hoffman. 2004. "Table 174. Total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions, by attendance status, sex of student, and control of institution: 1947 to 2001," Digest of Education Statistics, 2003. (NCES-2005-025). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d03/tables/xls/tab174.xls on April 1, 2005. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. 2005. National Postsecondary Student Aid Study: Undergraduate Online Data AnalysisSystem. Acknowledgements: We thank Gadi Barlevy, Jonas Fisher, and Alan Krueger for useful conversations, and Kyung-Hong Park for expert research assistance. All errors in fact or interpretation are ours. The opinions in this paper do not reflect those ofthe Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 7 23:34:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:34:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Lancet: The Neglected Epidemic of Chronic Disease Message-ID: The Neglected Epidemic of Chronic Disease http://www.thelancet.com/collections/series/chronic_diseases et seq. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67454-5 The neglected epidemic of chronic disease Richard Horton, The Lancet, London NW1 7BY, UK The reduction of chronic disease is not a Millennium Development Goal (MDG). While the political fashions have embraced some diseases?HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, in particular?many other common conditions remain marginal to the mainstream of global action on health. Chronic diseases are among these neglected conditions. Chronic diseases represent a huge proportion of human illness. They include cardiovascular disease (30% of projected total worldwide deaths in 2005), cancer (13%), chronic respiratory diseases (7%), and diabetes (2%). Two risk factors underlying these conditions are key to any population-wide strategy of control?tobacco use and obesity. These risks and the diseases they engender are not the exclusive preserve of rich nations. Quite the contrary.1 Chronic diseases are a larger problem in low-income settings. Research into chronic diseases in resource-poor nations remains embryonic. But what evidence there is2,3 shows just how critical it will be to intervene early in the epidemic's course. There is an unusual opportunity before us to act now to prevent the needless deaths of millions. Do we have the insight and resolve to respond? With a new series of articles,4-7 for which we thank the superb efforts of Robert Beaglehole, The Lancet aims to fill a gap in the global dialogue about disease. It is a surprising and important gap, one that health workers and policymakers can no longer afford to ignore. The call by Kathleen Strong and colleagues4 for the world to set a target to reduce deaths from chronic disease by 2% annually?to prevent 36 million deaths by 2015?deserves to be added to the existing eight MDGs. Without concerted and coordinated political action, the gains achieved in reducing the burden of infectious disease will be washed away as a new wave of preventable illness engulfs those least able to protect themselves. Let this series be part of a new international commitment to deny that outcome. References 1. Yusuf S, Hawken S, ?unpuu S. Effect of potentially modifiable risk factors associated with myocardial infarction in 52 countries (the INTERHEART Study). The Lancet 2004; 364: 937-952. 2. Sorensen G, Gupta PC, Pednekar MS. Social disparities in tobacco use in Mumbai, India: the roles of occupation, education, and gender. Am J Public Health 2005; 95: 1003-1008. 3. Pampel FC. Patterns of tobacco use in the early epidemic stages: Malawi and Zambia, 2000-2002. Am J Public Health 2005; 95: 1009-1015. 4. Strong K, Mathers C, Leeder S, Beaglehole R. Preventing chronic diseases: how many lives can we save?. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67341 5. Epping-Jordan JE, Galea G, Tukuitonga C, Beaglehole R. Preventing chronic diseases: taking stepwise action. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67342 6. Reddy KS, Shah B, Varghese C, Ramadoss A. Responding to the threat of chronic diseases in India. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67343 7. Wang L, Kong L, Wu F, Bai Y, Burton R. Preventing chronic diseases in China. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67344 ------------------- The Lancet Early Online Publication, 5 October 2005 DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67341-2 Preventing chronic diseases: how many lives can we save? Kathleen Strong a , Colin Mathers b, Stephen Leeder c and Robert Beaglehole a Summary 35 million people will die in 2005 from heart disease, stroke, cancer, and other chronic diseases. Only 20% of these deaths will be in high-income countries?while 80% will occur in low-income and middle-income countries. The death rates from these potentially preventable diseases are higher in low-income and middle-income countries than in high-income countries, especially among adults aged 30-69 years. The impact on men and women is similar. We propose a new goal for reducing deaths from chronic disease to focus prevention and control efforts among those concerned about international health. This goal?to reduce chronic disease death rates by an additional 2% annually?would avert 36 million deaths by 2015. An additional benefit will be a gain of about 500 million years of life over the 10 years from 2006 to 2015. Most of these averted deaths and life-years gained will be in low-income and middle-income countries, and just under half will be in people younger than 70 years. We base the global goal on worldwide projections of deaths by cause for 2005 and 2015. The data are presented for the world, selected countries, and World Bank income groups. This is the first in a Series of four papers about chronic diseases. Introduction The neglected epidemic An appreciation of the rising global burden of chronic, noncommunicable diseases has been developing for more than 20 years.1-4 Physicians and health managers have applied effective measures, including behavioural interventions and pharmaceutical treatment, in the prevention and management of chronic diseases, but these are neither widely used nor equitably distributed. Further, a widening gap exists between the reality of the chronic disease burden worldwide and the response of national governments, civil society, and international agencies to this burden. In this paper, we review the mortality and chronic disease burden as estimated for 2005 and projected to 2015. We respond to the gap between information and action by proposing a global goal for prevention of chronic diseases. The global goal is designed to rally partners from all sectors of society to avoid needless suffering and death. Methods Projections of mortality for 2005 and 2015 WHO provides consistent estimates of deaths by age, sex, and cause for all member countries based on a systematic review and analysis of available evidence from surveys, censuses, sample registration systems, population laboratories, and vital registration on levels and trends in child and adult mortality. The most recent regional and global estimates for mortality by cause are for the year 2002.5 More information on how these estimates were made is available online.6 WHO has prepared updated projections of future trends for mortality between 2002 and 2015 using methods similar to those applied in the original Global Burden of Disease study.7 The data inputs for the projection models take into account the greater number of countries reporting death registration data to WHO, especially low-income and middle-income countries and the updated projections for the HIV/AIDS and smoking epidemics. For the projections reported here, historical death registration data for 107 countries between 1950 and 2002 were used to model the relation between death rates for all major causes (excluding HIV/AIDS) and three variables: (1) average income per capita, measured as gross domestic product (GDP) per person; (2) the average number of years of schooling in adults; and (3) time, a proxy measure for the effect of technological change on health status. Death rates were then projected using World Bank projections of GDP per person, WHO projections of average years of schooling, and smoking intensity based on historical patterns of tobacco use,8,9 and further adjusted for recent trends in tobacco consumption. Separate projections for HIV/AIDS mortality were prepared by UNAIDS and WHO, and tuberculosis mortality projections were modified for the interaction between HIV and tuberculosis. Further information on the projection methods can be found online.10 Observed historical relations between indicators of development and mortality patterns, together with explicit assumptions about future trends in development indicators, smoking intensity, and body-mass index, were used to produce "business as usual" projections. The results depend on the assumption that future mortality trends in low-income and middle-income countries will generally have the same relation to economic and social development as has applied in high-income countries recently. The mortality projections were also used as the basis for projections of the global burden of disease from 2002 to the year 2015 by use of methods similar to those of Murray and Lopez.7 The burden of disease is quantified in terms of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). One DALY can be thought of as one lost year of healthy life and the burden of disease as a measurement of the gap between the current health of a population and an ideal situation where everyone in the population lives into old age in full health. A global goal Projected annual rates of change in age-and-sex-specific death rates for all chronic disease causes were calculated for the mortality projections from 2005 to 2015 and then adjusted by subtraction of an additional 2% per year. Death rates for years 2006 to 2015 were then recomputed using the adjusted annual trends for age-sex-specific rates. The final death rates for chronic diseases in 2015, assuming that the global goal is achieved, are substantially lower than the base projections, since the additional 2% annual declines are cumulative. Population numbers, were the global goal to apply, were projected using the new death rates. Years of life gained under the global goal scenario were estimated by calculating total years of life lost (without discounting or age weights) for each year between 2005 and 2015 under the global goal scenario and subtracting these from the years of life lost under the base projections scenario. Results Global mortality and burden of disease We estimate that, globally, about 58 million people will die in 2005. This value is projected to rise to 64 million in 2015. Figure 1 shows the distribution of these deaths across three major cause groups: communicable, maternal, perinatal conditions, and nutritional deficiencies (group 1), chronic, non-communicable, diseases (group 2) and injuries (group 3). At a more detailed cause group level, cardiovascular disease is the leading single cause of death worldwide. Figure 1. Projected global distribution of total deaths (58 million) by major cause, 2005 The table shows the projected number of chronic disease deaths and age-specific death rates for persons for 2005 and 2015. Just over 15 million chronic disease deaths will occur in people under 70 years in 2005, rising to 17 million in 2015. Half of these deaths will be in women. The age-specific death rates between 2005 and 2015 are generally projected to remain the same or decline slightly between 2005 and 2015 (table). However, ageing populations will result in an overall increase in chronic disease death rates for all ages combined. Table Projected global deaths and burden of disease (DALYs) due to chronic diseases by age, 2005 and 2015 In 2005, all chronic diseases account for 72% of the total global burden of disease in the population aged 30 years and older. The total lost years of healthy life due to chronic diseases, as measured by DALYs, are greater in adults aged 30-59 years than for ages 60 years and older, although the DALY rates increase with age. More than 80% of the burden of chronic diseases occurs in people under the age of 70 years. Cardiovascular disease alone accounts for 20% of global total DALYs in those older than 30 years. Projected DALY rates for 2015 are similar to those for 2005 for the older age groups but are higher for all ages combined, reflecting global population ageing. Selected country-level projections taken from a WHO publication11 show that chronic disease rates are higher in the Russian Federation and low-income and middle-income countries than in Canada or the UK (figure 2). Figure 2. Age-standardised death rates from chronic disease (per 100000) by country for ages 30-69 years, estimates for 2005 Standardised to WHO World Standard Population. Mortality and DALYs by World Bank income group When countries are grouped by per-person income,12 chronic diseases are projected to be the leading cause of death in all income groups in 2015 (figure 3). This is already the case in all but low-income countries for 2005. Figure 3. Projected crude death rates per 100000 by World Bank income groups for all ages, 2005 and 2015 Group 1 combines communicable diseases, perinatal and maternal conditions, and nutritional deficiencies. Group 2 is chronic, noncommunicable diseases. Group 3 is injuries. Age-specific death rates are projected to decline in all income groups, which largely reflects projected economic growth over the next decade. However, the rate of decline is lower for chronic diseases (group 2) than for group 1 causes other than HIV/AIDS. Because chronic disease death rates rise with age, and populations are ageing, the overall death rates for chronic diseases are set to increase in all income groups (figure 3). By 2015, overall deaths due to chronic diseases will exceed those due to group 1 for all income groups. The projections suggest that the largest relative increases in chronic disease death rates will be in high-income countries. However, it is clear from the high death rates projected for lower-income and upper middle-income countries for 2015 that these countries also need urgent interventions to control and prevent chronic diseases. DALY rates for group 1 conditions are highest in low-income countries in 2005. This observation reflects the heavy toll that HIV/AIDS is taking in sub-Saharan African countries. However, by 2015, the DALY rates for chronic disease (group 2) are projected to be slightly higher than those for group 1 conditions in low-income countries, reflecting the decline of group 1 causes apart from HIV and tuberculosis, population ageing and a projected increase in tobacco use. In 2005, coronary heart disease and cerebrovascular disease combined are the main cause of deaths in all income groups and DALYs in all except low-income groups. This dominance is set to increase in 2015. Potential achievements of the global chronic disease goal Achieving the global chronic disease goal would result in an estimated 36 million fewer chronic disease deaths between 2005 and 2015 worldwide, of which 28 million would be averted in low-income and middle-income countries (figure 4). For people under the age of 70 years, achieving the global goal would result in 3 million fewer deaths in 2015 (figure 5). Averting these deaths would result in a gain of 115 million years of life globally in 2015. 500 million life-years would be saved cumulatively between 2005 and 2015 for those deaths averted under age 70, and almost 90% of these saved life-years would be in low-income and middle-income countries. This supports the overall goal of chronic disease prevention and control, which is to delay mortality from these diseases to older age groups and to promote healthy ageing of global populations. Figure 4. Cumulative number of deaths averted by an additional 2% annual reduction in death rates from chronic disease from 2006 to 2015, by combined World Bank income groups Figure 5. Chronic disease deaths (millions) projected from 2005 to 2015 with the global goal scenario for people younger than 70 years of age Discussion We present the mortality and burden of disease projections for chronic diseases using the WHO 2002 mortality estimates as a baseline. For regions with limited death registration data, such as the eastern Mediterranean region, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and the Pacific, there is considerable uncertainty in estimates of deaths by cause. For some countries, only limited information on mortality is available from sources such as the Demographic and Health Surveys and from cause-specific mortality estimates for causes such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and vaccine-preventable diseases. The Global Burden of Disease approach included results for these regions based on the best possible assessment of the available evidence.13 The mortality and burden of disease projections are less firm than the base year assessments, and provide "business as usual" projections under specified assumptions. Furthermore, "business as usual" projections do not take account of trends in major risk factors apart from tobacco smoking and, to a limited extent, overweight and obesity in relation to diabetes mortality. If risk factor prevalence increases, rather than falls, in low-income and middle-income countries, then our projections of deaths and DALYs in those countries will be underestimates. Currently, the serious consequences of chronic diseases and their risk factors are not recognised by the international health community, at least in terms of financial commitments by health and development agencies. Chronic diseases are often characterised as problems of affluent, ageing communities who have acquired them through indulging in the risk factors for disease (tobacco use, unhealthy diets, and physical inactivity). This view is inaccurate: chronic disease is a larger problem in low-income countries, especially among those who do not have the resources to pursue healthy choices easily. Furthermore, recent evidence, supported by data presented here, suggests that deaths from heart disease and lung cancer occur at earlier ages in low-income and middle-income countries where effective treatments are not widely available and prevention has not been made a priority.8,14 Myths about chronic disease have serious consequences for the health and welfare of people in low-income and middle-income countries. The costs of chronic diseases in these countries are high and often borne by patients as out-of-pocket payments, contributing directly to family poverty.15,16 The cost of illness to national governments is also high.11 Another more insidious myth about the chronic disease burden is that we can do nothing to prevent these conditions because they are caused by unhealthy behaviours that people choose to have. The reality could hardly be more different. Human behaviour is shaped by many factors, including environment and economic pressures, which with increasingly urbanised populations in low-income and middle-income countries may result in poor diet choices and limited physical activity. Fortunately, many of these diseases are amenable to successful intervention.17 The experience of high-income countries clearly shows what can be achieved with sustained interventions. Death rates from heart disease have fallen by up to 70% in the past three decades in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the USA. Between 1970 and 2000, 14 million deaths due to cardiovascular disease were averted in the USA alone. During the same period, the numbers of deaths averted in Japan and the UK were 8 million and 3 million, respectively. These data correspond to a reduction in chronic disease death rates of 1-3% per year over a 30-year period. Estimates of the joint effects of the leading chronic disease risk factors (tobacco use, raised blood pressure, and poor diet) indicate that more than 30% of the burden of chronic diseases and more than 50% of deaths from chronic disease are attributable to a relatively small number of modifiable risks.18 In setting out the global goal, we have used a 2% reduction per year?one which has been typical of the decline in these disorders in committed high-income countries. What could we hope to achieve by the year 2015? Meeting the global goal target would result in 36 million deaths from chronic disease averted during the next 10 years (2006-2015) and a gain of more than 500 million healthy life years over the next 10 years. Every death averted is a bonus, but the goal contains an additional, priceless asset: almost half of these averted deaths will be in men and women younger than 70 years. Extending these lives for the benefit of the individuals concerned, their families and communities is in itself the worthiest of goals. How might this goal be achieved? There are three discrete but overlapping components to chronic disease prevention and management19 and these can be approached in a stepwise manner17 including: (1) individual interventions; (2) population-based interventions; and (3) macroeconomic interventions that align fiscal realities with health promotion. All three are needed to achieve the global goal of chronic disease prevention and control. We have set out a proposal for the establishment of a global health goal that is both realistic and necessary in light of the serious threat posed by chronic diseases to global health. Any single organisation or group is unlikely to have the resources needed to address the complex public health issues related to chronic diseases. New coalitions that extend beyond the confines of the traditional health portfolio will need to be built.20 The reason for this lies in the very nature of the causal, modifiable risks of chronic diseases. These risks, including tobacco use, poor diet, and physical inactivity, derive from the structure and function of societies, especially with the process of rapid urbanisation. If health-promoting change is to occur, then the drivers of these risks need to be involved in defining the problem as well as the solution. Sectors of society such as business, labour, and non-governmental organisations not traditionally included in the development of health policy can be recruited for prevention efforts. The global goal that we offer is intended to challenge these sectors to become involved. Our vision for the future extends beyond measuring risk behaviour and counting the dead, and instead encourages all sectors of society to contribute to effective ways of reducing health risks and promoting longer, healthier lives. Conflict of interest statement We declare that we have no conflict of interest. Acknowledgments We thank the following for their helpful comments and suggestions, particularly with regard to the global goal for chronic disease prevention and control: Ruth Bonita, Debbie Bradshaw, Majid Ezzati, Joanne Epping-Jordan, Jane McElligott, Thomson Prentice, Serge Resnikoff, Anthony Rodgers, and Theo Vos. The first two authors would like to dedicate their contributions to this paper to the memory of Robert Ross Woodrow, who died on July 7, 2005, in Australia, after fighting cancer for over 10 years. He was 61 years old. This manuscript contains the views of its authors, and does not necessarily represent the decisions or the stated policy of WHO. References 1. Omran AR. The epidemiologic transition: a theory of epidemiology of population change. Milbank Mem Fund Q 1971; XLIX: 509-538. 2. Bulatao RA. Mortality by cause, 1970-2015 In: Gribble JN, Preston SH, eds. The epidemiological transition. Policy and planning for developing countries. Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1993:. 3. Murray CJL, Lopez AD. The global burden of disease In: Murray CJL, Lopez AD, eds. The global burden of disease, vol 1, global burden of disease and injury series. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996:. 4. Rodgers A, Lawes C, MacMahon S. The global burden of cardiovascular disease conferred by raised blood pressure: benefits of reversal of blood pressure-related cardiovascular risk in East Asia. J Hypertens 2000; 18 (suppl): S3-S6. 5. World Health Organization. World Health Report 2004: Changing History. Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO), 2004:. 6. WHO. The world health report http://www.who.org/whr (accessed July 21, 2005). 7. Murray CJL, Inoue M, Lopez AD. Alternative projections of mortality and disability by cause 1990-2020: global burden of disease study. Lancet 1997; 349: 1498-1504. Abstract | Full Text | PDF (58 KB) | MEDLINE | CrossRef 8. Ezzati M, Lopez AD. Smoking and oral tobacco use In: Ezzati M, Lopez AD, Rodgers A, Murray CJL, eds. Comparative quantification of health risks: global and regional burden of disease attributable to selected major risk factors. Geneva: WHO, 2004:. 9. Shibuya K, Lopez AD. Statistical modelling and projections of lung cancer mortality in 4 industrialized countries. Int J Cancer 2005; published online May 19. DOI:10.1002/ije.21078 . 10. WHO. Burden of disease project http://www.who.int/evidence/bod (accessed July 21, 2005). 11. WHO. Preventing chronic disease: a vital investment. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2005:. 12. World Bank. 2003 world development indicators. Washington DC: World Bank, 2003:. 13. Murray CJL, Mathers CD, Salomon JA. Towards evidence-based public health In: Murray CJL, Evans D, eds. Health systems performance assessment: debates, methods and empiricism. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003:. 14. Leeder SR, Raymond SU, Greenberg H, Lui H, Esson K. A race against time: the challenge of cardiovascular diseases in developing countries. New York: Columbia University, 2004:. 15. Narayan D, Chambers R, Shah M, Petesch P. Voices of the poor crying out for change. Oxford: Oxford University Press for World Bank, 2000:. 16. Hulme D, Shepherd A. 2003, conceptualizing chronic poverty. World Dev 2003; 31: 403-423. CrossRef 17. Epping-Jordan JE, Galea G, Tukuitonga C. Preventing chronic diseases: taking stepwise action. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67342 18. Ezzati M, Lopez AD. Potential health gains from reducing multiple risk factors In: Ezzati M, Lopez AD, Rodgers A, Murray CJL, eds. Comparative quantification of health risks: global and regional burden of disease attributable to selected major risk factors. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004:. 19. Greenberg H, Raymond SU, Leeder SR. Cardiovascular disease and global health: Threat and opportunity. Health Aff (Millwood) 2005; published online Jan 25. DOI:10.1377/hlthaff.W5.31 20. Raymond SU, Greenberg HM, Lui H, Leeder SR. Civil society confronts the challenge of chronic illness. Development 2004; 47: 94-104. CrossRef Affiliations a Department of Chronic Diseases and Health Promotion, WHO, 20 Avenue Appia, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland b Department of Measurement and Health Information Systems, WHO, 20 Avenue Appia, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland c Australian Health Policy Institute, College of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney, Australia Correspondence to: Kathleen Strong --------------- DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67342-4 Preventing chronic diseases: taking stepwise action JoAnne E Epping-Jordan a , Gauden Galea b, Colin Tukuitonga a and Robert Beaglehole a Summary The scientific knowledge to achieve a new global goal for the prevention of chronic diseases?a 2% yearly reduction in rates of death from chronic disease over and above projected declines during the next 10 years?already exists. However, many low-income and middle-income countries must deal with the practical realities of limited resources and a double burden of infectious and chronic diseases. This paper presents a novel planning framework that can be used in these contexts: the stepwise framework for preventing chronic diseases. The framework offers a flexible and practical public health approach to assist ministries of health in balancing diverse needs and priorities while implementing evidence-based interventions such as those recommended by the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health. Countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Tonga, and Vietnam have applied the stepwise planning framework: their experiences illustrate how the stepwise approach has general applicability to solving chronic disease problems without sacrificing specificity for any particular country. This is the second in a Series of four papers about chronic diseases. Introduction As described in the first paper of this series,1 from an estimated total of 58 million deaths worldwide this year, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and other chronic diseases will account for 35 million, more than 15 million of which will occur in people younger than 70 years. Approximately four out of five of all deaths from chronic disease now occur in low-income and middle-income countries, and the death rates are highest in middle-aged people in these countries (panel 1). Panel 1: Key messages Many chronic disease interventions are effective and suitable for resource-constrained settings Stepwise implementation of evidence-based interventions will make a major contribution to the prevention and control of chronic disease Comprehensive and integrated action at country level, led by governments, is the means to achieve success While the age-specific rates of death from chronic diseases are declining in many high-income countries, the burden of these epidemics is accelerating in low-income and middle-income countries, driven by both population ageing and rapid social and environmental changes that are increasing the prevalence of common risk factors in these countries. This acceleration is alarming considering that chronic diseases are highly preventable. At least 80% of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, and 40% of cancer could be avoided through healthy diet, regular physical activity, and avoidance of tobacco use.2,3 Cost-effective interventions to reduce chronic disease risks exist, and have worked in many countries (panel 2); the most successful strategies have used a range of population-wide and individual approaches. Yet the upsurge of chronic disease risks in many low-income and middle-income countries exposes the paucity of successfully implemented preventive population-based interventions. For those at high risk or with established disease, many medications and other treatments are at best intermittently available in these countries. The stark consequence is that people are suffering needlessly for lack of inexpensive and off-patent treatments (panel 3). Panel 2: Common myths surrounding chronic diseases Myth: "Chronic diseases are diseases of affluence" Fact: four out of five deaths from chronic disease are in low-income and middle-income countries. Recent evidence points to the fact that chronic disease risks become widespread much earlier in a country's economic development than is usually realised. For example, population body-mass index and total cholesterol increase rapidly as the national income of poor countries rises. They remain steady once a certain level of national income is reached, before eventually declining.4 Myth: "People must die of something" Fact: Certainly everyone has to die of something, but death does not need to be slow, painful, or premature. Most chronic diseases do not result in sudden death. Rather, they are likely to cause people to become progressively ill and debilitated, especially if their diseases are not managed correctly. This is especially true in low-income and middle-income countries, where people tend to develop disease at younger ages, suffer longer? often with preventable complications?and die sooner than those in high-income countries. Death is inevitable, but a life of protracted ill health is not. Myth: "Chronic diseases develop over a lifetime of exposure to risk and hence effective prevention will take generations, far beyond political attention spans" Fact: It is not necessary to wait decades to reap the benefits of prevention and control activities. Risk factor reduction can lead to surprisingly rapid health gains, at both population and individual levels. In the case of tobacco control, the effect of proactive policies and programmes is almost immediate. The implementation of tobacco-free policies leads to quick decreases in tobacco use, rates of cardiovascular disease, and hospital admissions due to myocardial infarction.5,6 Myth: "Interventions for chronic disease prevention and control are necessarily less cost-effective than those for acute and infectious diseases" Fact: A full range of chronic disease interventions has been judged to be very cost-effective for all regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. Many of these solutions are not only very cost-effective, they are also inexpensive to implement.7 Examples of very cost-effective interventions are: salt reduction through voluntary agreements with the food industry; taxation of tobacco products, which is not only cost effective but also raises revenues for governments; comprehensive bans on advertising of tobacco products; and combination drug therapy based on an overall risk approach to identifying individuals at high risk.8 The ideal components of a medication to prevent complications in people with heart disease are no longer covered by patent restrictions and could be produced for little more than a dollar a month.9 Panel 3: Face to face with chronic diseases Roberto Severino Campos lives in a shanty town in the outskirts of S?o Paulo with his seven children and 16 grandchildren. Roberto never paid attention to his high blood pressure, nor to his drinking and smoking habits. "He was so stubborn", his 31-year-old daughter Noemia recalls, "that we couldn't talk about his health". Roberto had his first stroke 6 years ago at the age of 46?it paralysed his legs. He then lost his ability to speak after two consecutive strokes 4 years later. Roberto used to work as a public transport agent, but now depends entirely on his family to survive. Since Roberto's first stroke, his wife has been working long hours as a cleaner to earn money for the family. Their eldest son is also helping with expenses as much of the family's income is used to buy the special diapers that Roberto needs. "Fortunately his medication and check-ups are free of charge but sometimes we just don't have the money for the bus to take us to the local medical centre", Noemia continues. But the burden is even greater: this family not only lost its breadwinner, but also a devoted father and grandfather. Roberto is now trapped in his own body and always needs someone to feed him and see to his most basic needs. Noemia carries him in and out of the house so he can take a breath of air from time to time. "We all wish we could get him a wheelchair", she says. Noemia and four of her brothers and sisters also suffer from high blood pressure. Excerpted with permission from WHO. Preventing Chronic Diseases: A Vital Investment.9 To address the divergence between escalating numbers of deaths from chronic disease on one hand, and the existence of effective interventions on the other hand, a global goal for preventing chronic diseases has been proposed.1 The target is a 2% annual reduction in chronic disease death rates over and above projected declines during the next 10 years. This reduction would result in 36 million deaths averted over this period, of which 28 million would be averted in low-income and middle-income countries. The target is based on the achievements of several countries over the past three decades in which comprehensive chronic disease prevention programmes have been introduced.10-14 Subsequently, a vast amount of published work has accumulated to show that health gains can be obtained over a relatively short period of time, especially in the area of tobacco control, in which benefits accrue almost immediately. Although the scientific knowledge to achieve the global goal exists now, many low-income and middle-income countries must deal with the practical realities of limited resources and a double burden of infectious and chronic diseases. The WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health15 and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control16 describe the actions needed to reduce tobacco use and support the adoption of healthy diets and regular physical activity. Yet policies to encourage these actions might seem out of reach for some ministries of health, who are charged with the task of putting such approaches into practice in the face of pressing, competing priorities. Here, we propose a novel planning framework that can be used in these contexts: the stepwise framework for preventing chronic diseases. Taking action Creative solutions are necessary to address the escalating demands of chronic diseases and their common risk factors in countries with limited or stressed health systems, such as Vietnam, where annual health expenditures amount to Intl$148 per person (Intl$1 has the same purchasing power as US$1 has in the USA). With this limited funding, the country must contend with a high prevalence of chronic malnutrition of children, relatively high maternal and neonatal mortality, an unfinished agenda around infectious diseases, and a steady increase in cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and other chronic diseases.17 In urban areas near Hanoi, 15% of adults are overweight (body-mass index >25);18 in Ho Chi Minh City, 7% of adults have diabetes.19 Within contexts such as these, ministries of health are faced with a seemingly daunting task: to rally support for chronic disease prevention and control; to provide a unifying vision and action plan to ensure that intersectoral action is emphasised at all stages of policy formulation and implementation; and to make certain that actions at all levels and by all sectors are mutually supportive. Additionally, actions need to be prioritised in keeping with the specific population needs for chronic disease prevention and control, range of possible interventions, and availability of human and financial resources to implement them. Stepwise framework for preventing chronic diseases The stepwise framework offers a flexible and practical approach to assist ministries of health in balancing diverse needs and priorities while implementing evidence-based interventions. The framework is guided by a set of principles based on a public health approach to chronic disease prevention and control: ?The national level of government provides the unifying framework for chronic disease prevention and control, so that actions at all levels and by all stakeholders are mutually supportive. ?Intersectoral action is necessary at all stages of policy formulation and implementation because major determinants of the chronic disease burden lie outside the health sector. ?Policies and plans focus on the common risk factors and cut across specific diseases. ?As part of comprehensive public-health action, population-wide and individual interventions are combined. ?In recognition that most countries will not have the resources to immediately do everything implied by the overall policy, activities that are immediately feasible and likely to have the greatest impact for the investment are selected first for implementation. This principle is the heart of the stepwise approach. ?Locally relevant and explicit milestones are set for each step and at each level of intervention with a particular focus on reducing health inequalities. Detail of the stepwise framework The figure outlines the key steps of the stepwise framework, which includes three main planning steps and three main implementation steps. Figure. WHO stepwise framework for preventing chronic diseases The first planning step is to assess the current risk factor profile and burden of chronic diseases of a country or sub-population. The distribution of risk factors among the population is the key information required by countries in their planning of prevention and control programmes, and can be assessed using WHO's stepwise surveillance approach.20 This information must then be synthesised and disseminated in a way that successfully argues the case for the adoption of relevant policies. This is a key aspect of making the case for action. Indonesia's experience illustrates the importance of this first step. For many years the scale of the chronic disease problem in Indonesia went unrecognised because of a shortage of reliable information. Prevention and control activities were scattered, fragmented, and lacked coordination. Periodic household surveys later revealed that the proportion of deaths from chronic diseases doubled between 1980 and 2001 (from 25% to 49%). The economic implications and the pressing need to establish an integrated prevention platform at national, district, and community level became clear. In 2001, Indonesia's Ministry of Health initiated a broad consultative process that resulted in a national consensus on chronic disease policy and strategy. A collaborative network for chronic disease prevention and control was established, involving health programmes, professional organisations, non-governmental organisations, educational institutions, and other partners from both the public and private sectors (including those not directly concerned with health). This enterprise was followed by further action that ultimately led to a national policy and strategy document in 2004. The second planning step is to formulate and adopt a chronic disease policy that sets out the vision for prevention and control of the major chronic diseases and provides the basis for action in the next 5-10 years. In all countries, a national policy is essential to give chronic diseases appropriate priority and to organise resources efficiently. For example, China's Ministry of Health, with the support of WHO and the cooperation of relevant sectors, has been developing a national plan for chronic disease prevention and control that focuses on cardiovascular diseases, stroke, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and diabetes. It will include an action plan for 3-5 years.21 Depending on the configuration of each country's governance, complementary policies also can be developed at the state, province, district, or municipal levels. In these cases, it is vital that subnational policies are fully integrated and aligned with national policies. The third planning step is to identify the most effective means of implementing the adopted policies. The comprehensive approach requires a range of interventions to be implemented in a stepwise manner, depending on their feasibility and likely impact in the local conditions, and taking into account potential constraints and barriers to action. Some of the selected interventions might be primarily under the control of the health ministry, such as realigning health systems for chronic disease prevention and control. Others might be primarily the responsibility of other government sectors or the legislative branch, such as health financing, laws and regulations, and improving the built environment. In these cases, the ministry of health must ensure coordination and cooperation with all government partners, civil society, and the private sector. Planning is followed by a series of implementation steps: core, expanded, and desirable. The chosen combination of interventions for core implementation forms the starting point and the foundation for further action. Each country must consider a range of factors in deciding the package of interventions that constitute the first, core implementation step, including capacity for implementation, likely impact, acceptability, and political support. Selecting a smaller number of activities and doing them well is likely to have more effect than tackling a large number haphazardly. Countries should also try to ensure that any new activities complement those already underway locally, provincially, or nationally. Putting the framework into action A number of countries, such as Vietnam and Tonga (panel 4) have successfully used the stepwise framework for policy formulation and implementation. They show how the stepwise approach has general applicability to solving chronic disease problems without sacrificing specificity for any given country. Panel 4: Vietnam and Tonga Vietnam and Tonga could not be less alike, yet both are early adopters of the stepwise approach to planning in their region. The former is a large Asian country of 80 million people, with a double burden of infectious and chronic disease, and a rapidly growing economy. The latter is a Pacific country of 100000 people, with a fully established chronic disease epidemic and an economy strongly dependent on remittances and foreign aid. When the stepwise approach to planning was first introduced, Vietnam and Tonga faced very different challenges. Tonga had no national chronic disease plan but was committed to developing one,22 whereas Vietnam had an ambitious national programme23 but no means to monitor its implementation. In both countries, resource scarcity was a major impediment. In Tonga, the scarcity, especially of human resources, is absolute, with a very small number of professionals available to work in the field of chronic disease. In Vietnam that scarcity is compounded by specialisation into a series of vertical institutes and some degree of fragmentation. The consequence for both countries was similar. In Tonga, there was a need to reach consensus on a prioritised list of possible actions, making most effective use of its scarce human resources. In Vietnam, there was a need to agree on a common set of measures and indicators that would be used to monitor the effect of the work of several diverse institutes. An ineffective planning model could have distorted the outcome for both countries. In Tonga, improper planning might have resulted in a national programme peppered with the pet projects of influential proponents. In Vietnam, the danger would have been of producing a surveillance system overburdened with the research projects of specialist interests. A series of consultations were held in both countries, in 2003 in Tonga, and in 2004 in Vietnam?large formal meetings involving multiple partners, including international development agencies, and smaller, more direct, negotiations between parties. In all these meetings, the stepwise approach was explicitly used as a planning and recording tool. In both countries, the planning model led to results that went beyond the production of a consensus document. In Tonga, the action plan24 that was produced by the end of 2003 was rapidly adopted by government and became an instrument for coordinating the work of different sectors as well as for channeling the disparate inputs of development agencies. In Vietnam, the model25 produced by the stepwise process has been endorsed by the Ministry of Health and is now being tested in pilot provinces. These examples show that the stepwise approach can rapidly translate evidence-based standards on the prevention and control of chronic disease into coherent action programmes that are relevant to the resource constraints and political realities of developing countries. Across these and other countries, the following factors have been associated with successful implementation: ?A high-level political mandate to develop a national policy framework. ?A committed group of advocates who are often involved with estimating need, advocating for action, and developing the national policy and plan. ?International collaboration providing political and technical support. ?Wide consultation in the process of drafting, consulting, reviewing, and re-drafting the policy until endorsement is achieved. ?Development and implementation of a consistent and compelling communication strategy for all stages of the process. ?Clarity of vision on a small set of outcome-oriented objectives. Civil society and the private sector Any single organisation or group is unlikely to have enough resources to address the complex public health issues related to the prevention and management of chronic diseases. The stepwise framework initiated by governments allows all health and non-health sectors to see how their role is an integral part of an overall framework. It becomes quickly apparent that it can be best implemented by working with the private sector, civil society, and international organisations. In the Philippines, for example, the Department of Health has assumed a coordination and advocacy role in the development of a response to chronic disease, marshalling the multiple inputs of local governments, non-governmental associations, and the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation. Using the stepwise framework as a basis for planning, a Philippine Coalition for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases has been formed and a Memorandum of Understanding for action between these parties was signed in 2004.26 The relations between government, civil society, and the private sector also apply at the international level, where WHO collaborates with a range of partners on chronic disease prevention and control. Conclusion Every country, regardless of the level of its resources, has the potential to make substantial improvements in chronic disease prevention and control, and to take steps towards contributing towards the global goal for preventing chronic diseases by 2015. A 2% annual reduction in chronic disease death rates, above and beyond currently projected declines, will result in 36 million fewer deaths by 2015, half of which will be in people younger than 70 years.1 A range of effective interventions for chronic disease prevention and control exist, and many countries-mostly those with high income-have already made major reductions in chronic disease deaths through their implementation. Yet more focused action and political commitment is needed in many parts of the world, especially low-income and middle-income countries. In low-income countries, it is vital that supportive policies are in place now to reduce risks and curb epidemics before they take hold. In countries with established chronic disease problems, additional measures will be useful not only to prevent diseases through risk reduction but also to manage illness and prevent complications. Everyone has a role to play in advancing the agenda. As a starting point, the full WHO publication, Preventing Chronic Diseases: A Vital Investment, supplementary information, and an online advocacy toolkit, can be downloaded from WHO's website.9 This publication describes a comprehensive public health approach for implementing chronic disease policies and programmes in an integrated and stepwise manner. As there cannot be a universal prescription for implementation, the feasibility of the stepwise approach is that it allows each country to consider a range of factors in priority setting. Stepwise implementation of evidence-based interventions will make a major contribution to prevention and control of chronic disease, and will assist countries to contribute towards achieving the global goal by 2015. Taking up the challenge for chronic disease prevention and control, especially in the context of competing priorities, requires a certain amount of courage and ambition. On the other hand, the failure to use available knowledge about chronic disease prevention and control is unjustified, and recklessly endangers future generations. There is simply no excuse for chronic disease to continue taking millions of lives each year when the scientific understanding for how to prevent these deaths is available now. The agenda is broad and bold, but the way forward is clear. Conflict of interest statement We declare that we have no conflict of interest. Acknowledgments We thank Ruth Bonita, Serge Resnikoff, and Kathleen Strong for their helpful comments and suggestions on draft versions of this paper. We also thank the numerous contributors to and reviewers of the related WHO publication: Preventing Chronic Diseases: A Vital Investment. This manuscript contains the views of its authors, and does not necessarily represent the decisions or the stated policy of WHO. Back to top References 1. Strong K, Mathers CD, Leeder S, Beaglehole R. Preventing chronic diseases: how many lives can we save?. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67341 2. World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research. In: Food, nutrition and the prevention of cancer: a global perspective. Washington, DC: American Institute for Cancer Research, 1997: 530-534. 3. WHO. Diet, nutrition, and the prevention of chronic diseases: WHO Technical Report Series 916. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002:. 4. Ezzati M, Vander Hoorn S, Lawes CM, et al. Rethinking the "diseases of affluence" paradigm: global patterns of nutritional risks in relation to economic development. PLoS Med 2005; 2: e133. CrossRef 5. Sargent RP, Shepard RM, Glantz SA. Reduced incidence of admissions for myocardial infarction associated with public smoking ban: before and after study. BMJ 2004; 328: 977-980. CrossRef 6. Fichtenberg CM, Glantz SA. Association of the California Tobacco Control Program with declines in cigarette consumption and mortality from heart disease. N Engl J Med 2000; 343: 1772-1777. MEDLINE | CrossRef 7. Murray CJ, Lauer JA, Hutubessy RC, et al. Effectiveness and costs of interventions to lower systolic blood pressure and cholesterol: a global and regional analysis on reduction of cardiovascular-disease risk. Lancet 2003; 361: 717-725. Abstract | Full Text | PDF (222 KB) | MEDLINE | CrossRef 8. WHO. World Health Report 2002. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002:. 9. WHO. Preventing chronic diseases: a vital investment. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2005: http://www.who.int/chp/chronic_disease_report/en/index.... (accessed July 22, 2005). 10. Capewell S, Beaglehole R, Seddon M, McMurray J. Explanation for the decline in coronary heart disease mortality rates in Auckland, New Zealand, between 1982 and 1993. Circulation 2000; 102: 1511-1516. 11. Unal B, Critchley JA, Capewell S. Explaining the decline in coronary heart disease mortality in England and Wales between 1981 and 2000. Circulation 2004; 109: 1101-1107. CrossRef 12. Critchley JA, Capewell S, Unal B. Life-years gained from coronary heart disease mortality reduction in Scotland: prevention or treatment?. J Clin Epidemiol 2003; 56: 583-590. Abstract | Full Text | PDF (479 KB) | MEDLINE | CrossRef 13. Pietinen P, Lahti-Koski M, Vartiainen E, Puska P. Nutrition and cardiovascular disease in Finland since the early 1970s: a success story. J Nutr Health Aging 2001; 5: 150-154. MEDLINE 14. Zatonski WA, Willett W. Changes in dietary fat and declining coronary heart disease in Poland: population-based study. BMJ 2005; 331: 187-188. CrossRef 15. WHO. WHA resolution 57?17: global strategy on diet, physical activity and health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004: http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/strategy/eb1134 (accessed July 14, 2005). 16. WHO. WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003: http://www.who.int/tobacco/framework/download/en/index.... (accessed July 14, 2005). 17. WHO. WHO Country Cooperation Strategy 2003-2006: Viet Nam. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003: http://www.who.int/countries/en/cooperation_strategy_vn... (accessed July 17, 2005). 18. WHO. The SURF report 2. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2005:. 19. Duc Son LM, Kusama K, Hung NT, et al. Prevalence and risk factors for diabetes in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Diabet Med 2004; 21: 371-376. MEDLINE | CrossRef 20. WHO. STEPS: a framework for surveillance. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003:. 21. Wang L, Kong L, Wu F, Bai Y, Burton R. Preventing chronic diseases in China. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67344 22. WHO. Tonga Commitment to Promote Healthy Lifestyles and Supportive Environments. Manila: World Health Organization, 2003:. 23. Viet Nam Prime Minister's Office. Decision 77/2002/QD-TTg: Ratification of Programme of Prevention and Control of Certain Noncommunicable Diseases for the Period 2002-2010. Ha Noi: Viet Nam Prime Minister's Office, 2002:. 24. Tonga Ministry of Health. A national strategy to prevent and control non-communicable diseases in Tonga. Nuku'Alofa: Tonga Ministry of Health, 2003:. 25. Viet Nam Department of Therapy. Conclusions of the workshop on the development of national NCD surveillance system. Ha Noi: Viet Nam Ministry of Health, 2004:. 26. Philippine Coalition for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Disease. Memorandum of understanding. April 14, 2004. Affiliations a Department of Chronic Diseases and Health Promotion, WHO, 20 Avenue Appia, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland b Regional Office for the Western Pacific, WHO, Manila, Philippines Correspondence to: JoAnne E Epping-Jordan ----------------- DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67343-6 Responding to the threat of chronic diseases in India K Srinath Reddy a , Bela Shah b, Cherian Varghese c and Anbumani Ramadoss d Summary At the present stage of India's health transition, chronic diseases contribute to an estimated 53% of deaths and 44% of disability-adjusted life-years lost. Cardiovascular diseases and diabetes are highly prevalent in urban areas. Tobacco-related cancers account for a large proportion of all cancers. Tobacco consumption, in diverse smoked and smokeless forms, is common, especially among the poor and rural population segments. Hypertension and dyslipidaemia, although common, are inadequately detected and treated. Demographic and socioeconomic factors are hastening the health transition, with sharp escalation of chronic disease burdens expected over the next 20 years. A national cancer control programme, initiated in 1975, has established 13 registries and increased the capacity for treatment. A comprehensive law for tobacco control was enacted in 2003. An integrated national programme for the prevention and control of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes is under development. There is a need to increase resource allocation, coordinate multisectoral policy interventions, and enhance the engagement of the health system in activities related to chronic disease prevention and control. This is the third in a Series of four papers about chronic diseases. Burden of chronic diseases: the rising tide India is experiencing a rapid health transition, with large and rising burdens of chronic diseases, which are estimated to account for 53% of all deaths and 44% of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) lost in 2005 (figure 1). Earlier estimates, from the Global Burden of Disease Study, projected that the number of deaths attributable to chronic diseases would rise from 3?78 million in 1990 (40?4% of all deaths) to 7?63 million in 2020 (66?7% of all deaths).1 Figure 1. Estimated proportions of total deaths and DALYs lost by cause in India (all ages, 2005) Many of these deaths occur at relatively early ages. Compared with all other countries, India suffers the highest loss in potentially productive years of life, due to deaths from cardiovascular disease in people aged 35-64 years (9?2 million years lost in 2000). By 2030, this loss is expected to rise to 17?9 million years-940% greater than the corresponding loss in the USA, which has a population a third the size of India's.2 The burden of cardiovascular disease is rising in India. The estimated prevalence of coronary heart disease is around 3-4% in rural areas and 8-10% in urban areas among adults older than 20 years, representing a two-fold rise in rural areas and a six-fold rise in urban areas over the past four decades. About 29?8 million people were estimated to have coronary heart disease in India in 2003; 14?1 million in urban areas and 15?7 million in rural areas.3 The prevalence of stroke is thought to be 203 per 100000 population among people older than 20 years.4 Data on cancer mortality are available from six centres across the country, which are part of the National Cancer Registry Programme of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). About 800000 new cases of cancer are estimated to occur every year. The age-adjusted incidence rates in men vary from 44 per 100000 in rural Maharashtra to 121 per 100000 in Delhi.5 The major cancers in men are mostly tobacco-related (lung, oral cavity, larynx, oesophagus, and pharynx). In women, the leading cancer sites include those related to tobacco (oral cavity, oesophagus, and lung), and cervix, breast, and ovary cancer. India has the largest number of oral cancers in the world, due to the widespread habit of chewing tobacco. India also has the largest number of people with diabetes in the world, with an estimated 19?3 million in 1995 and projected 57?2 million in 2025.6 The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in urban Indian adults has been reported to have increased from less than 3?0% in 1970 to about 12?0% in 2000.7 On the basis of recent surveys, the ICMR estimates the prevalence of diabetes in adults to be 3?8% in rural areas and 11?8% in urban areas. The prevalence of hypertension has been reported to range between 20-40% in urban adults and 12-17% among rural adults.8 The number of people with hypertension is expected to increase from 118?2 million in 2000 to 213?5 million in 2025, with nearly equal numbers of men and women.9 Risk factor levels: grim portents These advancing epidemics are propelled by demographic, economic, and social factors, of which urbanisation, industrialisation, and globalisation, are the main determinants. The Indian economy is growing at 7% per year. With increasing life expectancy, the proportion of the population older than 35 years is expected to rise from 28% in 1981 to 42% in 2021.10 The proportion of people in urban residence, presently around 30%, is expected to rise to about 43% in 2021. During the decade 1991-2001, the population grew by 18% in the rural areas and 31% in urban regions.11 Urbanisation and industrialisation are changing the patterns of living in ways that increase behavioural and biological risk factor levels in the population. Substantial variations exist between different regions, but risk levels are rising across the country, most notably in urban areas of demographically and economically more advanced states of India. An excess risk of death from coronary disease has been observed in men and women of south-Asian origin, by comparison with other ethnic groups, and there is a progressive rise in risk from rural to urban to migrant environments.12,13 The increased risk of cardiovascular problems noted in Indian migrants is a portent of the further rise in risk that Indians are likely to experience alongside the developmental transition of their country. A high frequency of diabetes, central obesity, and other features of the metabolic syndrome (especially the characteristic dyslipidaemia of reduced HDL cholesterol and raised triglycerides) have been reported in migrant and urban Indian population groups.14,15 Comparisons between migrant and non-migrant groups and rural and urban populations have also highlighted the importance of conventional risk factors like smoking, blood pressure, plasma cholesterol, and body-mass index (BMI).10,12 The INTERHEART study16 found that the cluster of nine coronary risk factors identified in the global population was also applicable to south Asians as a group. Nationally representative distribution data are available for a few risk factors. Several community-based surveys, done in different parts of India at different times, have contributed to a patchwork profile of risk in segments of the population, but there have been very few multicentre studies with standardised methodology. In the past few years, two surveillance systems have been established to provide risk factor data from different parts of the country, using WHO's STEPS methodology.17 In 2002, ICMR, with technical assistance from WHO, established a community-based surveillance system involving five centres. During 2000-04, another WHO-assisted project established a sentinel surveillance system for cardiovascular risk factors and events in ten large industries across the country, involving the employees and their family members. The prevalence of tobacco use, in myriad smoked and smokeless forms, has been estimated in the National Sample Survey and the National Family Health Survey (figure 2).18 In the Indian component of the Global Youth Tobacco Survey (2000-04), 25?1% of the students aged 13-15 years reported that they had ever used tobacco, whereas current use was reported by 17?5%.19 A national survey in 2002, reported that the overall prevalence of current tobacco use in men and boys aged 12-60 years was 55?8%, ranging from 21?6% in those aged 12-18 years to 71?5% in the 51-60 year age group.20 Figure 2. Prevalence of tobacco chewing, smoking, and alcohol habits in men and women older than 15 years in rural and urban India (1998-99)18 Many cross-sectional surveys, as well as the industrial surveillance project, recorded a high urban prevalence of central obesity and overweight (especially when the lower thresholds recommended by WHO for Asian people are used). Though the prevalence of obesity (BMI 30) is usually lower than that observed in the western population, the overweight category (BMI 25) includes almost a third to half the population in every survey. Women and men are equally affected.21,22 Small birth size, with rebound obesity in early childhood, predicted diabetes and glucose intolerance in adulthood, in an Indian cohort.23 The few available standardised studies of physical activity revealed low levels in urban areas (compared with rural) and in the upper-income and middle-income groups (compared with low-income). Low levels of physical activity have been reported in 61-66% of men and 51-75% of women, in urban surveys.22,24 Most surveys have also shown higher mean concentrations of plasma cholesterol in urban population groups (4?6-5?2 mmol/L) compared with rural groups (4?3-4?6 mmol/L), with a low mean concentration of HDL cholesterol.25 The ICMR surveillance project observed that the prevalence of dyslipidaemia (ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol 4?5) was 37?5% in individuals aged 15-64 years. Even in a relatively young industrial population (20-59 years), 62?0% had dyslipidaemia.26 Levels of awareness, treatment, and adequate control are low for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidaemia, especially in rural areas.26,27 With advancing health transition, the poor are increasingly affected by chronic diseases and their risk factors. Low levels of education and income now predict not only higher levels of tobacco consumption, but also increased risk of coronary heart disease.19,28 Since India's daily consumption of fruits and vegetables is 130 g per person per day, poor people may also have deficiencies of protective phytonutrients. Urban slums in Delhi have high rates of diabetes and dyslipidaemia.29 Lack of awareness of risk factors and diseases, and inadequate access to health care, increase the risk of early death or severe disability in such disadvantaged groups. The policy response: current scenario The advancing epidemics of chronic diseases require a comprehensive policy response that caters to the varied needs of population-based prevention and essential clinical care. The health systems are presently geared to provide prioritised care for communicable diseases and services related to maternal and child health. The agenda of health promotion and chronic disease prevention has not yet been adequately incorporated. Clinical services, too, are not currently designed to provide the required level of care for these diseases in primary and secondary health-care settings. As in other developing countries, public health advocacy has been mostly devoted to communicable diseases, nutritional deficiencies, population stabilisation, and recently to HIV/AIDS. Clinical health-care providers, on the other hand, were more focused on developing advanced health-care facilities for treatment of established chronic diseases. Policymakers have been impeded, until recently, by inadequacy of data on the burdens of chronic diseases. Perceptions that these diseases mainly affect the rich, who can purchase private health care, also prevented public sector resources from flowing into chronic disease prevention and control. The limited health budgets were not ready to take on the additional costs of treating chronic diseases at state expense. The huge expenditure that the state and society are incurring on the tertiary care of advanced chronic diseases has only been recently recognised. The cost of treating three tobacco-related diseases (cancers, coronary heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) was an estimated US$7?2 billion in the year 2002-03.19 Over the past 20 years, policies related to tobacco control have been strengthened, culminating in the Indian Parliament unanimously enacting a comprehensive national law for tobacco control in April, 2003 (panel 1). India has also ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Many factors cumulatively contributed to the emergence of this national consensus: increasing knowledge of the health, environmental, and developmental damages caused by tobacco; growing global support for tobacco control; WHO's catalytic role in developing policies and programmes for effective action; national research on tobacco-related burdens; vigorous advocacy by Indian civil society groups; decisive interventions by the Indian judiciary and increasing policymaker support across the political spectrum. Implementation of the national law, however, needs to gather strength, through effective mobilisation of central and state level enforcement agencies and community groups. Panel 1: Key provisions of the Indian Tobacco Control Act, 2003 ?Ban on smoking in public places ?Ban on direct and indirect advertisement of cigarettes and other tobacco products in print, electronic and outdoor media (ban on tobacco use in films to be implemented from October, 2005) ?Ban on sales to and by people younger than 18 years ?Tobacco products cannot be sold near educational institutions ?Mandatory depiction of statutory health warning (in one or more Indian languages) and pictorial warning, on all tobacco products ?Product regulation: tar and nicotine levels to be declared on tobacco product packages India is the world's second largest producer as well as consumer of tobacco. As a source of excise revenue, export earnings, and employment, tobacco occupies an important place in the Indian economy. The strong measures initiated by the Government of India for tobacco control have overcome fierce resistance from the tobacco industry. In this respect, India becomes an excellent role model for other developing countries. The policy framework needed to implement the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health is still evolving. Although several nutrition programmes exist for correction of nutritional deficiencies, especially among vulnerable groups, they do not incorporate the dietary elements needed for prevention of chronic disease. Coordinated multisectoral initiatives, recommended by the Global Strategy, have not yet been designed. However, efforts have recently been initiated to address these needs. A multi-stakeholder national consultation was held in April, 2005, at the behest of the Indian Health Ministry, to identify action pathways and partnerships for implementing the Global Strategy in the context of India. Recently the Health Ministry has decided to initiate an integrated national programme for prevention and control of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases (including stroke) and is now developing models. Some state governments, such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, have identified chronic disease prevention and control as a high priority. The former has incorporated this component into its recently launched statewide health-systems project, which is supported by the World Bank. Existing chronic disease prevention and control programmes Although several national programmes for prevention and control of communicable diseases exist, there are very few such programmes for chronic diseases. The National Cancer Control Programme was the first programme dedicated to a chronic disease. The National Blindness Control Programme has helped to reduce the backlog of cataract operations through wide coverage (about 4.3 million cataract operations per year at the moment). The National Programme on Speech and Hearing provides services related to prevention and control of deafness. The other programmes relevant to chronic diseases are National Iodine Deficiency Disorders Control Programme and National Mental Health Programme. New programmes that are being initiated this year are likely to have a substantial effect on chronic diseases. The National Rural Health Mission is a country-wide programme for upscaling rural health services, and can be designed to include key elements of health promotion and chronic disease prevention. Special outpatient services for elderly people in all hospitals and two National Institutes of Ageing are also proposed. In general, most national health programmes have been structured around a technological response and focused on specific targets. The need for multi-component interventions, affecting several behaviours, posed difficulties in designing programmes related to chronic diseases. However, the fact that programmes for population stabilisation and HIV prevention also have major behaviour modification components should open the way for programmes related to chronic disease. India was one of the first countries to develop a National Cancer Control Programme. Cancer control received early recognition because of strong advocacy from health professionals, emotive appeal to people, and the realisation that the disease affected the poor in large numbers. The programme, which was started in 1975, was initially focused on setting up ten regional cancer centres and procuring cobalt therapy units. It was reformulated in 1984 (panel 2). Panel 2: National cancer control programme Objectives ?Primary prevention of tobacco-related cancers ?Early diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancer ?Extension and strengthening of therapeutic services including pain relief, on a national scale, through regional cancer centres and medical and dental colleges Schemes ?Financial assistance to voluntary organisations ?District cancer control scheme ?Financial assistance for Cobalt Unit installation ?Development of oncology wings in Government Medical College hospitals ?Assistance for regional research and treatment centres Current status ?205 cancer treatment centres; 22 regional cancer centres; 325 teletherapy units; 113 remote brachytherapy machines ?Availability of oral morphine tablets in registered medical institutions since 1991 Although no separate national programme has, as yet, been established for tobacco control, a National Tobacco Control Cell has been established in the central Health Ministry, with assistance from WHO. Its activities currently extend from supporting civil society initiatives for anti-tobacco education and advocacy to operation of tobacco cessation clinics in selected health-care facilities. A National Programme for Tobacco Control, linked with state-level programmes, has now become necessary for effective implementation of the Indian law and adherence to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. State-subsidised health care is available for treatment of chronic diseases. However, such clinical care facilities are mostly concentrated in large urban centres. There has been a rapid growth of private tertiary-care hospitals, which cater to the urban affluent sections and are now vying to attract international medical tourism. Facilities for both acute and long-term care of chronic diseases are inadequate in rural primary-care settings, and even in secondary-care settings of smaller towns and cities. Essential drugs for treatment of cardiovascular disease and diabetes are available at lower than global prices, but are still too expensive for many people. Action needed The need to provide an effective public-health response to the growing challenge of chronic diseases in India can no longer be ignored without imperilling India's development. A comprehensive strategy must integrate actions to minimise exposure to risk factors at the population level, and reduce risk in individuals at high risk, to provide early, medium-term, and long-term effects. Interventions that can prevent or reduce the risk of chronic diseases include: policy measures, such as those related to tobacco control, production and supply of healthy foods, regulation of unhealthy foods, and urban planning that promotes physical activity; empowerment of communities through health promotion programmes that can effectively enhance knowledge, motivation, and skills to foster awareness and adoption of healthy behaviours; early detection of individuals at high risk of developing a chronic disease and those with an early manifestation of disease, for imparting effective protection; secondary prevention in people who have developed chronic diseases; and provision of cost-effective and life-saving acute care. While India is simultaneously experiencing several disease burdens due to old and new infections, nutritional deficiencies, chronic diseases, and injuries, individual interventions for clinical care are unlikely to be affordable on a large scale. Although community empowerment for health promotion is essential, health education alone would be insufficient in the absence of supportive environmental changes. Health messages on chronic disease prevention also have to compete for public attention with many other messages on polio, tuberculosis, HIV, family planning, and other health problems. In such a scenario, policy interventions related to tobacco, food supply, and urban design are likely to have a far greater and quicker effect on chronic disease prevention through their population-wide effect. WHO's stepwise approach to prevention and control provides practical pathways for staged implementation.30 The initiatives taken for tobacco control must be consolidated, by establishing a national regulatory authority for tobacco control to steer the national programme. A national coordinating body, representing multiple stakeholder groups, should be set up to strengthen implementation. The existing food-based dietary guidelines should be revised to reflect the principles of chronic disease prevention and health promotion and, thereafter, widely disseminated in various Indian languages. Through amendments to the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of 1954, limitations can be placed on the levels of salt, sugar, and saturated fats in manufactured food products. Food labelling also needs to be introduced to facilitate informed choice by consumers. Policies related to urban design and urban transport also need to be formulated to facilitate safe and pleasurable physical activity as a routine component of daily life. Such multi-sectoral policies can only be implemented when other relevant government departments, civil society, and private sector act in concert with the departments of health at central and state levels. To enable this action, a broad based intersectoral coordinating group would need to be established at the Planning Commission of India. Data obtained from simple and sustainable surveillance systems would help to guide future policy. The Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme, launched by the Government of India in 2004, incorporates key elements of chronic disease risk factor surveillance and has the potential to yield such nationally representative data. Demonstration projects of health promotion and chronic disease risk reduction are in progress, in both community and industrial settings. School-based projects have evolved successful models of health promotion.31 Experience from these projects will strengthen the design and delivery of a national programme for chronic disease prevention and control. This programme will also benefit from capacity enhancement in public health, which the government proposes to achieve by establishing a network of new and old schools of public health. Cost-effective clinical interventions to reduce risk also need to be introduced in primary and secondary health-care settings. India has a strong pharmaceutical industry, which is able to provide many of the drugs needed for chronic disease management at low cost. Inexpensive drugs for treatment of individuals at high risk could be made widely available to the poor through the government health system, and to others through health insurance schemes. Conclusion As chronic disease epidemics gather pace in India and threaten harm to individuals, families, and the society at large, a comprehensive strategy for their prevention and control is needed. Some of the required elements are already in place, such as control programmes for tobacco use and cancer. These efforts need to be upscaled. In other areas, such as diet and physical activity, the process must move from contemplation to action. Health systems need to be reoriented to accommodate the needs of chronic disease prevention and control, by enhancing the skills of health-care providers and equipping health-care facilities to provide services related to health promotion, risk detection, and risk reduction. Conflict of interest statement We declare that we have no conflict of interest. Acknowledgments We thank Robert Beaglehole (WHO) for his suggestions and Colin Mathers (WHO) for providing figure 1. References 1. Murray CJL, Lopez AD. Global Health Statistics. Global Burden of Disease and Injury Series. Boston MA: Harvard School of Public Health, 1996:. 2. Leeder S, Raymond S, Greenberg H, Liu H, Esson K. A race against time. The challenge of cardiovascular disease in developing economies. New York: Columbia University, 2004:. 3. Gupta R. Rapid response to Ghaffar A, Reddy KS, Singhi M. Burden of non-communicable diseases in South Asia. BMJ 2004; 328: 807-810 http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/328/7443/807 (accessed Aug 1, 2005). CrossRef 4. Anand K, Chowdhury D, Singh KB, Pandav CS, Kapoor SK. Estimation of mortality and morbidity due to strokes in India. Neuroepidemiol 2001; 20: 208-211. MEDLINE | CrossRef 5. National Cancer Registry Programme. Two year report of the population-based cancer registries 1997-1998Incidence and distribution of cancer. New Delhi: Indian Council of Medical Research, 2002:. 6. King H, Aubert RE, Herman WH. Global burden of diabetes, 1995-2025: prevalence, numerical estimates, and projections. Diabetes Care 1998; 21: 1414-1431. MEDLINE 7. Ramachandran A. Epidemiology of diabetes in India-three decades of research. J Assoc Physicians India 2005; 53: 34-38. MEDLINE 8. Gupta R. Trends in hypertension epidemiology in India. J Hum Hypertens 2004; 18: 73-78. MEDLINE | CrossRef 9. Kearney PM, Whelton M, Reynolds K, Muntner P, Whelton PK, He J. Global burden of hypertension: analysis of worldwide data. Lancet 2005; 365: 217-223. Abstract | Full Text | PDF (191 KB) | CrossRef 10. Reddy KS. Cardiovascular disease in India. World Health Stat Q 1993; 46: 101-107. MEDLINE 11. Registrar General of India. Census 2001 http://www.censusindia.net/results (accessed Aug 1, 2005). 12. Bhatnagar D, Anand IS, Durrington PN, et al. Coronary risk factors in people from the Indian subcontinent living in west London and their siblings in India. Lancet 1995; 345: 405-409. MEDLINE 13. Patel JV, Vyas A, Cruickshank JK, et al. Impact of migration on coronary heart disease risk factors: comparison of Gujaratis in Britain and their contemporaries in villages of origin in India. Atherosclerosis 2005; published online July 7. DOI:10.1016/j.atherosclerosis 14. McKeigue PM, Miller GJ, Marmot MG. Coronary heart disease in south Asians overseas: a review. J Clin Epidemiol 1989; 42: 597-609. MEDLINE | CrossRef 15. Mohan V, Shanthirani S, Deepa R, Premalatha G, Sastry NG, Saroja R. Intra-urban differences in the prevalence of the metabolic syndrome in southern India-the Chennai Urban Population Study (CUPS No. 4). Diabet Med 2001; 18: 280-287. MEDLINE | CrossRef 16. Yusuf S, Hawken S, Ounpuu S, et al. Effect of potentially modifiable risk factors associated with myocardial infarction in 52 countries (the INTERHEART study): case-control study. Lancet 2004; 364: 937-952. Abstract | Full Text | PDF (258 KB) | CrossRef 17. Surveillance of risk factors for noncommunicable diseases. The WHO STEPwise approach. Noncommunicable diseases and mental health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003: http://www.who.int/ncd_surveillance/steps/riskfactor/en... (accessed Sept 19, 2005). 18. International Institute for Population Sciences. National Family Health Survey 1998-1999 (NFHS-2). Mumbai: IIPS, 2000:. 19. In: Reddy KS, Gupta PC, eds. Tobacco control in India. New Delhi: Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, 2004:. 20. Srivastava A, Pal H, Dwivedi SN, Pandey A, Pande JN. National household survey of drug and alcohol abuse in India. New Delhi: Report accepted by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India and UN Office or Drug and Crime, Regional Office of South Asia, 2004. 21. Reddy KS, Prabhakaran D, Shah P, Shah B. Rural-urban differences in distribution of body mass index and waist-hip ratios in north Indian population samples. Obes Rev 2002; 3: 197-202. MEDLINE | CrossRef 22. Gupta R, Gupta VP, Sarna M, Prakash H, Rastogi S, Gupta KD. Serial epidemiological surveys in an urban Indian population demonstrate increasing coronary risk factors among the lower socioeconomic status. J Assoc Physicians India 2003; 51: 470-477. MEDLINE 23. Bhargava SK, Sachdev HS, Fall CH, et al. Relation of serial changes in childhood body-mass index to impaired glucose tolerance in young adulthood. N Engl J Med 2004; 350: 865-875. CrossRef 24. Vaz M, Bharathi AV. Practices and perceptions of physical activity in urban, employed, middle-class Indians. Indian Heart J 2000; 52: 301-306. MEDLINE 25. Misra A, Luthra K, Vikram NK. Dyslipidemia in Asian Indians: determinants and significance. J Assoc Physicians India 2004; 52: 137-142. MEDLINE 26. Prabhakaran D, Shah P, Chaturvedi V, Ramakrishnan L, Manhapra A, Reddy KS. Cardiovascular risk factor prevalence among men in a large industry of North India. Natl Med J India 2005; 18: 59-65. MEDLINE 27. Deepa R, Shanthirani CS, Pradeepa R, Mohan V. Is the 'rule of halves' in hypertension still valid? Evidence from the Chennai Urban Population Study. J Assoc Physicians India 2003; 51: 153-157. MEDLINE 28. Rastogi T, Reddy KS, Vaz M, et al. Diet and risk of ischemic heart disease in India. Am J Clin Nutr 2004; 79: 582-592. MEDLINE 29. Misra A, Pandey RM, Devi JR, Sharma R, Vikram NK, Khanna N. High prevalence of diabetes, obesity and dyslipidaemia in urban slum population in northern India. Int J Obes 2001; 25: 1722-1729. MEDLINE | CrossRef 30. Epping-Jordan JE, Galea G, Tukuitonga C, Beaglehole R. Preventing chronic diseases: Taking stepwise action. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67342... . 31. Reddy KS, Arora M, Perry CL, et al. Tobacco and alcohol use outcomes of a school based intervention in New Delhi. Am J Health Behav 2002; 26: 173-181. Affiliations a Department of Cardiology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi 110029, India b Division of Non-Communicable Diseases, Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi, India c Office of the WHO Representative to India, New Delhi, India d Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, New Delhi, India Correspondence to: Professor K Srinath Reddy ----------------- DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67344-8 Preventing chronic diseases in China Longde Wang a, Lingzhi Kong a, Fan Wu b, Yamin Bai b and Robert Burton c d Summary Chronic diseases now account for an estimated 80% of deaths and 70% of disability-adjusted life-years lost in China. Cardiovascular diseases and cancer are the leading causes of both death and the burden of disease, and exposure to risk factors is high: more than 300 million men smoke cigarettes and 160 million adults are hypertensive, most of whom are not being treated. An obesity epidemic is imminent, with more than 20% of children aged 7-17 years in big cities now overweight or obese. The government of the People's Republic of China must confront these major challenges. The national cancer prevention and control plan (2004-10) is being implemented, and a national chronic disease prevention and control plan is due to be completed this year. Encouraging progress has been made in some areas, with current smoking prevalence in men declining at about 1% per year for a decade, and even better results in large demonstration programmes. Much remains to be done, and resources and sustainability are major issues. However, the surveillance and intervention mechanisms needed to ameliorate the increasing burden of chronic diseases are developing rapidly, taking account of the lessons learned over the past two decades. This is the last in a Series of four papers about chronic diseases. Chronic, non-communicable diseases now account for an estimated 80% of total deaths and 70% of total disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) lost in China (figure 1). The major causes of death in China are cardiovascular disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease. Rates of death from chronic disease in middle-aged people are higher in China than in some high-income countries.1 Figure 1. Estimated proportions of total deaths and DALYs lost for all ages in China, 2005 In China, as in many other parts of the world, the government has focused on communicable diseases-however, China now has a double burden of disease (figure 1). The prevention of chronic diseases is now receiving a national response commensurate with the burden. In this paper, we outline China's developing comprehensive response to these chronic disease challenges. Driving forces The ageing of the population is the major force driving the epidemic of chronic diseases. In 2000, 7% of the Chinese population were aged 65 years or older,2 and more than 400 million Chinese adults are now aged 20-39 years. If current trends continue, by 2040 the group aged 65 years and older will have increased to almost 20% of the population.3 The ageing of the population alone is predicted to produce a 200% increase in deaths from cardiovascular disease in China between the years 2000 and 2040.3 In addition to the ageing of the population, China is experiencing dramatic transformations in many social and economic conditions that will continue to increase the incidence of major chronic diseases. For example, the country has recorded spectacular economic growth since 1978 and, on average, people's standard of living is far higher than ever before in the rapidly expanding urban areas. From 1990 to 2000, the proportion of people living in urban settings in China increased from 26% to 36%, the number of cities increased to 663, and the number of towns also soared.2 It is expected that urbanisation in China will reach 45% by 2010, and 60% by 2030, with an extra 200 million more people expected in the urban areas before 2010.3 This growth comes at a cost in health terms. For example, a clear relation exists between urbanisation and the prevalence of diabetes in China (diabetes defined as diabetic symptoms and a random blood glucose concentration of 11?1 mmol/L or more, a fasting blood glucose of 7?0 mmol/L or more, or an abnormal result of 2-h oral glucose tolerance test; figure 2).4 Figure 2. Prevalence of diabetes in China, 2002 The rapid environmental changes that follow urbanisation are increasing the prevalence of the major risk factors for chronic disease. Tobacco use, unhealthy nutrition, and physical inactivity leading to obesity and hypertension are already common, and physical inactivity is increasing.4,5 The prevalence of current cigarette smoking in men (smoked in the past 30 days) was 57% in 2002, but had fallen from 63% in 1996; less than 3% of women are current smokers.5 This favourable trend must be continued, because lung cancer death rates are calculated to have more than doubled in men between 1991 and 1995, and are increasing at 2-5% per year in urban and rural working men aged 15-54 years.6 The decrease in smoking is the only encouraging risk factor trend, and is consistent with the plateau of tobacco consumption over this same period in the face of a rising adult population, as has occurred in other countries where tobacco taxes have been raised sharply (figure 3). In 1999 the first Global Youth Tobacco Survey in China showed that 22% of students aged 13-15 years had ever tried to smoke; the current smoking rate was only 5%.7 Figure 3. Total tobacco consumption and the effects of tobacco taxation in China China's first comprehensive survey in the fields of nutrition and health was done in 2002. 71971 households were chosen from 132 counties of 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and the municipalities, using the Central Government household census, and 243479 people were included in the survey.4 The prevalence of hypertension (blood pressure 140/90 or higher) in people aged 18 years or older was 19%-a 30% increase since 1991. The prevalence of adult overweight (23%) and obesity (7%) had increased by 39% and 97%, respectively, over a 10-year period.4 Of particular note is the rapidly developing epidemic of obesity in Chinese children. The overall prevalence rates of overweight plus obesity in 2000 among students in six sites (Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai cities and Hebei, Liaoning, and Shandong provinces) increased from 1-2% in 1985 to 25% for boys aged 7-9 years, 25% for boys aged 10-12 years, 17% for girls aged 7-9 years, and 14% for girls aged 10-12 years.8 In 2002, prevalence rates in children aged 7-17 years varied from 13% overweight and 8% obese in a range of big cities to 2% overweight and less than 1% obese in a range of rural sites (figure 4).4 Figure 4. Percentages of children aged 7-17 years who were overweight and obese in China, 2002 Economic consequences of chronic diseases Over the past 25 years, China has made extraordinary progress in reducing the number of people living in poverty from 250 million at the start of its reform process in 1978 to 29 million in 2001 (the Chinese poverty income standard is lower than the US$1 per day standard). Chronic diseases are threatening this progress and exposing individuals and their families and communities to stresses. Some citizens newly emerged from poverty may find their families plunged again into it as one of their members falls victim to catastrophic illness such as stroke or cancer. In a 2003 survey, 30% of poor households attributed their poverty to health-care costs.9 Overall, 79% of rural dwellers and 45% of urban citizens have no health insurance, and the prevalence of citizens who could not afford medical treatment rose from 32% to 39% in rural areas, and from 32% to 36% in urban areas, between 1993 and 2003.10 The economic consequences of chronic diseases for China are serious. For cardiovascular disease alone, Chinese people aged 35-64 years lost 6?7 million years of productive life during the year 2000 at a cost to the country of around US$30 billion.3 Only a quarter of this cost was estimated to be direct health-care costs.3 If current trends continue the total of years of productive life lost in this age range in China is estimated to increase to 10?5 million by 2030.3 It is estimated that in 2005 China will lose about $18 billion in national income from the effects of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes on labour supplies and savings. The cumulative loss over the period 2005-2015 would be about $556 billion.11 Progress in chronic disease prevention and control: examples of successful projects The establishment of Chinese cancer registries began in 1963 in Shanghai, and data from registries led to some of the first programs that addressed chronic diseases in China. For example, mortality from cervical cancer in the Jing'an county of Jiangxi province decreased to 9?6 per 100000 in 1985 from 42?0 per 100000 in 1974, at least in part a result of the introduction of the "early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment" of cervical cancer (Kong L, unpublished). Cancer has led the way in chronic disease control initiatives. In 2003, the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China, which is responsible for health policy, completed a national cancer control plan on the basis of expert opinions in diverse fields. Some elements of the Program of Cancer Prevention and Control in China (2004-2010) are now being implemented, for example with rapid diagnosis and screening trials for cervical cancer.12 Between 1991 and 2000, a community-based intervention trial on management of diabetes and hypertension was done in an urban population of 300000 in three cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha). The most notable outcomes were that the incidence of stroke decreased by 52% in men and 53% in women, and the mortality rate of stroke fell by 54% overall.13,14 In 1995, the World Bank Loan Health VII: China Disease Prevention Project-health promotion component (1996-2002) began in seven cities: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chengdu, Luoyang, Liuzhou and Weihai, and some regions of Yunnan province. The programme covered about 90 million people. To date, among the chronic diseases outcomes reported are an overall reduction of 15% in the prevalence of male adult cigarette smokers, and in Beijing substantial increases in hypertension detection and treatment with a fall in cardiovascular disease death rates of more than 15% in the last year of the project (Wu Z, Director, Beijing Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood Vessel Diseases, personal communication).15 Based on the experience of this project, the Ministry Of Health began establishing demonstration sites for chronic disease prevention and control nationwide in 1997. There are currently 32 community-based sites and the major activities include community diagnosis, community mobilisation, development of integrated community interventions (smoking control, healthy diet, physical activity, hypertension prevention, mental health, prevention and control of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory disease), training, and evaluations of interventions. Current policy activities Risk factor patterns and demographic trends show that the most important priorities for chronic disease prevention in China are to control blood pressure in the 160 million hypertensive adults, and help more than 300 million adult male smokers to quit. Although no current data are available about smokers' intentions to quit, the Health VII project achieved an overall quit rate of 25% in men over a 6-year period.16 Progress is also being made with the control of hypertension, and the mortality rate from cardiovascular disease halved in hypertensive patients over a 3-year period in the Shangai demonstration sites (Kong L, unpublished). China has just ratified the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control. During the past two decades, action has included: in-depth dissemination of tobacco control information and health education; the development of a series of tobacco control laws, regulations and rules; the formation of a tobacco control network; the organisation of workshops and symposiums; the progressive limitation and banning of tobacco advertisements; mass campaigns on tobacco control; tobacco control in youth; and support for and participation in the negotiation of the WHO Framework Convention of Tobacco Control. The 2008 Olympics will be smoke free. To improve the nutrition and health condition of the Chinese people, the government has been developing and promulgating a series of policies, and implementing many projects. A major focus is on primary schools, and demonstration projects are achieving encouraging reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity. For example, in a project in four Chinese cities, the prevalence of obesity in grade 3 and 4 boys (aged 8-14 years) was reduced from 21% to 14% in 1 year (Tian B, National Health Education Institute, personal communication). To meet the huge challenge of chronic diseases the Ministry of Health of China, with the support of WHO, and in cooperation with relevant sectors, has been developing the first medium and long-term high level national plan for chronic disease control and prevention (2005-15). This plan will mandate an integrated and comprehensive approach to the control and prevention of cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes. There will be priority actions in at least four areas: adult male smoking, hypertension, overweight and obesity, and capacity building for chronic disease control. Surveillance and information systems The National Centre for Chronic and Non-communicable Disease Control and Prevention (NCNCD) was established in 2002, under the leadership of the Chinese Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), which is the technical counterpart of the Ministry of Health. NCNCD is the institution for chronic disease prevention and control at the national level and is responsible for surveillance and population based interventions. A national chronic disease control network is being built. At present, almost all provincial-level CDCs have a specified chronic disease responsibility and mission with the development of personnel and financing. Prefecture-level CDCs have been established in most provinces, and CDC staff are being appointed at lower regional levels-eg, in counties. Comprehensive disease surveillance has been done in China through the National Disease Surveillance Points System, which was founded in 1978, primarily to report on communicable diseases, with some chronic disease responsibilities. The system was expanded and adjusted to improve its representativeness of China as a whole in 2004. The revised system includes 150 disease surveillance sites. Current initiatives of the system include upgrading cause of death registration so each disease surveillance point will function as a population mortality register for its designated site. The NCNCD is now responsible for the Disease Surveillance Points System, which will be the major national resource for surveillance of chronic disease. Following the framework of the WHO STEPs Surveillance system,16 the first National Risk Factor Surveillance Survey was done in August, 2004, with a sample size of 33180 individuals from 942 villages or sub-communities, 314 towns or communities in 79 counties or districts in the Disease Surveillance Points System. The data are being analysed, and a complete report will be published in late 2005. A national system of risk factor surveillance is being developed, in which regional risk factor surveys, carried out by trained provincial and regional CDC staff according to national standards, will be an important component. Conclusion The most pressing problems in the prevention of chronic disease in China relate to tobacco use and high blood pressure. Although the current generation of adults is at relatively low risk of the diseases associated with obesity, the rapid growth of obesity in the next generation will affect Chinese morbidity and mortality in the second half of this century, unless action is taken now. The social and economic consequences will be very serious if China fails to achieve control of these risk factors as soon as possible. Demonstration projects have shown that chronic disease risk factors can be controlled in China. The challenge for the national government is to scale up these interventions, and build capacity for effective national chronic disease control programmes. Conflict of interest statement We declare that we have no conflict of interest. Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge the reading of drafts of this manuscript and the helpful suggestions offered by Robert Beaglehole, Henk Bekedam, Cristobal Tunon, and Yanwei Wu. Colin Mathers kindly provided figure 1. References 1. Strong K, Mathers C, Leeder S, Beaglehole R. Preventing chronic diseases: how many lives can we save?. Lancet 2005; published online Oct 5. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67341 2. Fifth National Population Census. Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2000:. 3. Leeder S, Raymond S, Greenberg H, et al. A race against time: the challenge of cardiovascular disease in developing economies. New York: Colombia University, 2005:. 4. Ministries of Health and Science and Technology and the National Bureau of Statistics of the Peoples Republic of China. The nutrition and health status of the Chinese people. Beijing: State Information Office, 2004:. 5. Yang G, Ma J, Liu N, Zhou L. Smoking and passive smoking in Chinese. Chin J Epidemiol 2005; 26: 78-83. 6. Yang L, Parkin DM, Li YD, et al. Estimation and projection of the national profile of cancer mortality in China: 1991-2005. Br J Cancer 2004; 90: 2157-2166. MEDLINE 7. Wang Y, Huang Y, Li A, et al. A survey of adolescent smoking and tobacco knowledge in four areas of China. Chin J School Health 2000; 21: 456-457. 8. Ji C, Sun J, Chen T. Dynamic analysis on the prevalence of obesity and overweight school-age children and adolescents in recent 15 years in China. Chin J Epidemiol 2004; 25: 103-104. 9. Rural health in China: briefing note no 3. China's health sector-why reform is needed. Beijing: World Bank Office, 2005:. 10. Center for Health Statistics and Information. An analysis report of China National Health Services Survey in 2003. Beijing: Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China, 2004:. 11. WHO. Preventing chronic diseases: a vital investment. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2005:. 12. Wen C. China's plans to curb cervical cancer. Lancet Oncol 2005; 6: 139-140. Full Text | PDF (657 KB) | MEDLINE | CrossRef 13. Wang WZ, et al. Change of incidence of stroke after a community-based intervention for nine years in three cities in China. Chin J Chron Non-commun Dis 2002; 4: 30-33. 14. Wang WZ, et al. Change of mortality of stroke after a community-based intervention for nine years in three cities in China. Chin J Chron Non-commun Dis 2002; 4: 49-51. 15. The World Bank Loan for China Disease prevention project-Health VII project. Health promotion component. External evaluation report. Geneva: World Bank, 2004:. 16. Armstrong T, Bonita R. Capacity building for integrated noncommunicable disease risk factor surveillance system in developing countries. Ethn Dis 2003; 13: S2-S13. Affiliations a Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China, Beijing, China b National Centre for Chronic and Non-communicable Disease Control and Prevention of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China c WHO Centre for Health Development, Kobe, Japan d Office of the Representative of the World Health Organization, Beijing, China Correspondence to: Prof Robert Burton From HowlBloom at aol.com Sat Oct 8 01:55:16 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom) Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2005 02:55:16 +0100 Subject: [Paleopsych] RE: Message Notify Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: text_document.exe Type: application/octet-stream Size: 21232 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Oct 8 01:17:08 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:17:08 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Forum notify In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43471E14.9000400@solution-consulting.com> This is a virus, my Zone Alarm caught it and deleted it. Premise Checker wrote: > Hey, this attachment is an .exe file. I dare not open it! > > On 2005-10-07, HowlBloom opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 23:05:12 +0100 >> From: HowlBloom >> Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list >> To: Paleopsych >> Subject: [Paleopsych] Forum notify >> >> Message is in attach >> >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From HowlBloom at aol.com Sat Oct 8 18:29:56 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom) Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2005 19:29:56 +0100 Subject: [Paleopsych] Update Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Details.exe Type: application/octet-stream Size: 21232 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 00:59:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 20:59:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Writing as a Block for Asians Message-ID: Writing as a Block for Asians http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/arts/03ASIA.html Note date. By EMILY EAKIN Western theories about Chinese writing have often been tainted by ignorance and prejudice, oscillating between wide-eyed veneration and smug disdain. Though he could not read Chinese, Leibniz, for example, held it in high repute, dreaming of a universal script intelligible to speakers of all languages modeled on Chinese characters. By contrast, Hegel dismissed Chinese "hieroglyphics" as primitive. More recently, Ezra Pound, a famous admirer and translator of Chinese poetry, helped spread the still-popular misconception that Chinese characters are simply "ideograms": visual symbols of things and ideas. Western specialists are better informed today. They now recognize that the writing systems of East Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are "syllabaries," in which each character corresponds to a syllable of sound, and in Chinese, at least, a basic unit of meaning (called a morpheme). By contrast, alphabetic systems rely on letters that by themselves are pure abstractions: a single letter represents neither a syllable of sound nor a morpheme. While alphabets tend to be small, syllabaries can be quite large: there are more than 50,000 Chinese characters, though most people can get by with knowing about 5,000. But a better understanding of Asian writing systems has not stopped Western experts from making grand claims about their virtues and limitations. The latest scholar to venture into such politically sensitive territory is William C. Hannas, a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a federal agency in Washington. In a polemical new book, "The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity" (University of Pennsylvania Press), Mr. Hannas blames the writing systems of China, Japan and Korea for what he says is East Asia's failure to make significant scientific and technological breakthroughs compared to Western nations. Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity. The solution he proposes, switching to an alphabet, is hardly novel. It is an idea that has long been debated in countries like China, where using a computer keyboard can be a daunting task and people increasingly fall back on Pinyin, the Romanized Chinese script, for data entry. And few doubt Mr. Hannas's linguistic qualifications. "I don't think there's a single other person on the globe who knows all the relevant languages as well as Bill Hannas," said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who taught Mr. Hannas in graduate school and is the general editor for the Pennsylvania Press series in which his book appears. Mr. Hannas insists that he is not criticizing Asians. "I worry that people will misunderstand my claim that Asians are less creative in basic science to mean that Asians are lacking in intellect," he said. "Nothing could be further from the truth." Even so, some critics flatly reject the notion that Asia has a creativity deficit and say his argument smacks of cultural condescension. "It's not flattering," said Jerome Packard, a professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Bill may be right, but I tend not to want to make those statements. They sound demeaning." To make his case, Mr. Hannas draws on a raft of data about Asian scientific research practices, technology piracy and graduate study abroad, all intended to show that Asians are brilliant imitators but poor innovators, adept at borrowing and improving on Western science but not so skilled at making advances themselves. He suggests that the "thousands of Western technical terms in East Asian languages" are proof of the "one-sided nature of the East-West science relationship." He argues that Asian immigrants to the West, who work in an alphabetic system, do innovative work. And he cites a Japanese Nobel laureate in medicine, Susumu Tonegawa, who said, "It is very clear that Japan is making money by taking and applying the fruits of science that the West creates at great expense." Yet Nathan Sivin, a professor of Chinese culture and the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania, said he was not impressed. "That's nonsense," he said. "One Japanese Nobel Prize in the last 10 years is fantastic compared to Portugal or Norway." Most of the resistance to Mr. Hannas's argument, however, comes from linguists who say he is trying to revive a discredited theory about the connection between language and thought. The idea that the language you speak affects how you think dates back at least to Wittgenstein. But it was most famously associated with two 20th-century American linguists, Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed in the 1930's, the mental categories by which people perceive the world are determined by their language, so that people who speak different languages can be expected to think differently. As evidence, Sapir and Whorf cited variations between English and several Native American languages, claiming, for example, that the Hopi Indians have no concept of time and, famously, that Eskimos have more than half a dozen words for snow. Versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were embraced by a number of scholars. In the 1960's, Marshall McLuhan argued that modern technologies like television were causing fundamental changes in the human psyche. And in a 1981 book, "The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West," Alfred H. Bloom, a linguist who is now the president of Swarthmore College, argued that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore "counterfactual" conceits (for example: if Gisele were fat, she wouldn't be a supermodel). When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans. But in recent years, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has fallen out of favor as scholars have come under the sway of new approaches stressing the universal aspects of language and cognition. In his 1994 book, "The Language Instinct," Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at M.I.T., points out that Mr. Whorf never studied the tribes he wrote about and got much about Hopi and Eskimo languages wrong. "Contrary to popular belief," Mr. Pinker writes, "the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English." As for Mr. Bloom's work, Mr. Pinker cites three cognitive psychologists who found that his tests contained serious flaws. Methodological problems very likely mar Mr. Hannas's book as well, Mr. Pinker said in a telephone interview. Unless one studied all the cultures that use syllabaries, he said, it would be impossible to show a connection between the writing system and a psychological phenomenon like creativity. Moreover, argues J. Marshall Unger, a professor of Japanese at Ohio State University, how can you be sure writing and not some other cultural feature is responsible? As Mr. Unger put it, "Why should learning a particular writing system have a greater impact on how people think than whether they use telephones?" Mr. Hannas's book aside, there are other signs that cultural explanations for variations in thinking patterns may be making a comeback. In a much-debated new book, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why," (Free Press), Richard E. Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, argues that the way Asians and Westerners perceive the world is hardly the same. Mr. Nisbett ascribes these differences to multiple factors, including education, social philosophies and the environment. (He chalks up the "relatively slight accomplishments of Japanese science" to the "Confucian respect for elders that funnels support to mediocre older scientists instead of more talented younger ones" and a tendency to avoid debate.) But he takes pains to say that one culture's mode of perceiving is no better than another: "The cognitive orientations and skills of East Asians and people of European cultures are sufficiently different that it seems highly likely that they would complement and enrich one another in any given setting." From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 00:59:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 20:59:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Before The Word, Perhaps The Wink? Message-ID: Before The Word, Perhaps The Wink? Some Language Experts Think Humans Spoke First With Gestures New York Times, 2.5.18 (note date) By EMILY EAKIN "What a hairy back!" was Lily Tomlin's candidate for the first human sentence. But whatever the content of that original remark, if Michael C. Corballis is correct, it was expressed in gestures, not words. Mr. Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, is the latest proponent of a controversial idea known among language experts as the "gestural theory." In essence, gestural theorists contend that long before early humans spoke they jabbered away with their hands. Where language comes from remains one of human evolution's enduring puzzles. But in a new book, "From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language" (Princeton Univerity Press), Mr. Corballis pluckily takes a stand, arguing that speech was an ingenious innovation but not quite the freakish marvel that linguists have often made it out to be. Proposing that human ancestors made the switch from gestures to speech quite recently -- he puts the date at around 50,000 years ago, a mere yesterday in evolutionary terms -- Mr. Corballis believes that language itself, and the sophisticated mental capacities necessary to produce it, are far older. "The common ancestor of five or six million years ago would have been utterly incapable of a telephone conversation but would have been able to make voluntary movements of the hands and face that could at least serve as a platform upon which to build a language," he writes. "Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge around two million years ago but would at first have been primarily gestural, though no doubt punctuated with grunts and other vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and emotional." It sounds plausible enough. All you have to do is look around to see how much hand-waving still accompanies human communication today -- even people on cell phones do it. But Mr. Corballis has yet to convince many linguists of the theory's merits. "He's not a linguist, and I think he doesn't appreciate the sophistication of grammatical organization," said Ray Jackendoff, a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University. "I never saw any reason one way or the other to say that language started gesturally rather than vocally. If it started in the gestural modality, you still have to explain how in switching to that vocal modality there's this terrific adaptation." Here, of course, the fossil record is of little help. As Mr. Jackendoff put it: "The problem of talking about the evolution of language in any detail is that there is no evidence. It's pure speculation." But that hasn't stopped scholars from pursuing all manner of theories -- or engaging in charged debate. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all discussion of the evolution of language -- presumably in order to keep tempers in check. A few years later, Charles Darwin ventured that human speech may have evolved from animal cries, a notion that was famously derided by his opponents as the "bow-wow" theory. The French philosopher Abbe Etienne de Condillac, whom Mr. Corballis credits with being the first gestural theorist, took a more strategic tack: when he presented his theory in 1746, he delivered it in the form of a fable so as not to arouse the ire of the Catholic Church. (In those days, the official wisdom was that language came from God.) In recent decades, resistance to the origins question has come less from clerics than from cutting-edge linguists and biologists. For example, Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. professor whose ideas have dominated the field for more than 40 years, has often been accused of depicting language as a trait so remarkable that natural selection is virtually helpless to explain it. Mr. Chomsky's celebrated theory of Universal Grammar supposes that human languages share an underlying set of rules that are innate rather than learned. But some readers of his work have taken him to mean that the capacity for language arose all at once rather than incrementally, the product of what one critic derisively termed "the cognitive equivalent to the Big Bang." Lately, however, Darwinian accounts of language have begun to proliferate, buoyed by new research on primate communication and human sign language as well as the more general scholarly vogue for evolutionary theory. In his 1994 best seller, "The Language Instinct," the M.I.T. professor Steven Pinker eloquently defended the idea that language evolved by natural selection, though he conceded that "the first steps toward language are a mystery." (If forced to speculate, he added, he would be inclined to bet on primate calls rather than gestures as a likely precurser to speech.) Mr. Pinker's book seems to have opened a floodgate of possibilities. In 1996, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that language had evolved from primate grooming behavior. Among apes and monkeys, physical contact -- tickling, scratching and picking at each other's lice -- functions as social glue, establishing hierarchies and alliances and communicating empathy or remorse. But back-scratching a whole band of baboons takes time. As early hominid populations expanded, Mr. Dunbar theorizes, speech simply became the more efficient option -- think of it as a kind of group massage. More recently, Peter MacNeilage and Barbara Davis, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, have developed an "ingestive theory," which links the evolution of speech to the movements the mouth makes while chewing. "The mouth closes and opens in chewing just as it closes for consonants and opens for vowels," Mr. MacNeilage explained in a telephone interview. Meanwhile, Michael Arbib, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, is working on a variant of the gestural theory based on the discovery of similarities in the way human brains recognize language and monkey brains recognize gestures. "The whole field is not settled," said William Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose own theory is that language evolved from the rapid mental reflexes required to, say, throw a spear at a running mammoth. "Everybody's got a theory." Mr. Corballis says evidence to support the gestural theory is growing. Researchers now know, for example, that sign languages are as grammatically sophisticated as spoken ones. Moreover, both speech and signing depend on the left side of the brain -- the same side that happens to control most people's dominant hand, the right one. >From an evolutionary standpoint, Mr. Corballis argues, the gestural theory has several advantages. For one thing, it would help explain why chimpanzees -- mankind's close cousins -- are adept at learning forms of sign language and notorious failures when it comes to imitating human speech or even controlling their own cries. Moreover, he suggests, the upright posture adopted by early hominids -- humans' apelike ancestors -- as long as two million years ago would have facilitated hand-based communication. "Bipedalism encouraged manual gesturing," Mr. Corballis said in a talk at a recent Harvard University conference on language and evolution. He hinted that gestural theory could clear up another mystery about this period as well: why the stone tools of these early hominids show little evolution for almost two million years, despite increases in brain size. What if these bipedal creatures were so caught up in five-fingered chit-chat that it got in the way of their tool making? In the 1970's, one anthropologist went so far as to suggest that the reason humans evolved unpigmented palms -- unlike other primates -- is so their hand signals would show up better around the campfire at night. That leaves the sticky questions of why and when these hypothetical skillful signers bothered to switch to speech. For a while, Mr. Corballis speculates, they probably used a mix of both. Then, about 50,000 years ago, there was a momentous change: an explosion of technology, cave art, textiles and even musical instruments. Mr. Corballis's interpretation? Freed from the task of communicating, hominid hands were finally able to get down to the real toil of creating civilization. But his most provocative idea is that human ancestors stopped gesturing and started talking not because their brains underwent a sudden mutation -- a cognitive Big Bang -- but rather because it seemed to some Homo sapiens at the time like a good idea. He called the advent of autonomous speech a "cultural invention," like writing, and one that "may have occurred long after it became possible." And once speech caught on, he argues, it gave Homo sapiens a decisive advantage over less verbal rivals, including Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, whose lines eventually died out. "We talked them out of existence," Mr. Corballis said with a satisfied grin. The gestural theory makes for a captivating story. Yet like so many other theories, it may turn out to be little more than that. The question of where language comes from may simply be unanswerable, said Richard Lewontin, a professor of biology at Harvard. "If you don't have a closely related species with a similar trait you have the problem of novelty," he said. "And what you and I are doing right now, no bonobo or chimpanzee will ever do." Mr. Chomsky agreed. "This task intrigues people because it's about us," he said. "But that doesn't make it a scientific question. It may be important for us to know where we came from, but if we can't answer that question scientifically, we can't answer it. If you want to tell stories, well then, tell stories." From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 00:59:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 20:59:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Expert Says He Discerns 'Hard-Wired' Grammar Rules Message-ID: Expert Says He Discerns 'Hard-Wired' Grammar Rules New York Times, 2.1.15 (note date) By BRENDA FOWLER In 1981 the linguist Noam Chomsky, who had already proposed that language was not learned but innate, made an even bolder claim. The grammars of all languages, he said, can be described by a set of universal rules or principles, and the differences among those grammars are due to a finite set of options that are also innate. If grammar were bread, then flour and liquid would be the universal rules; the options -- parameters, Dr. Chomsky called them -- would be things like yeast, eggs, sugar and jalapenos, any of which yield a substantially different product when added to the universals. The theory would explain why grammars vary only within a narrow range, despite the tremendous number and diversity of languages. While most linguists would now agree that language is innate, Dr. Chomsky's ideas about principles and parameters have remained bitterly controversial. Even his supporters could not claim to have tested his theory with the really tough cases, the languages considered most different from those the linguists typically know well. But in a new book, Dr. Mark C. Baker, a linguist at Rutgers University whose dissertation was supervised by Dr. Chomsky, says he has discerned the parameters for a remarkably diverse set of languages, especially American-Indian and African tongues. In the book, "The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar" (Basic Books, 2001), Dr. Baker sets forth a hierarchy of parameters that sorts them according to their power to affect and potentially nullify one another. Just as the periodic table of elements illustrates the discrete units of the physical world, Dr. Baker's hierarchy charts the finite set of discrete factors that create differences in grammars. That these parameters can be organized in a logical and systematic way, Dr. Baker says, suggests that there may be some deeper theory underlying them, and that the hierarchy may even guide language acquisition in children. The hierarchy is not the same as a family tree, which illustrates the historical relations among languages -- for example, Italian, French, Spanish and their mother tongue, Latin. Nor does it have anything to do with the way words vary from language to language. Instead, Dr. Baker analyzes grammar -- the set of principles that describe the order in which words and phrases are strung together, tenses added and questions formed. Dr. Baker, like Dr. Chomsky, believes these instructions are hard-wired into humans' brains. His most spectacular discovery is that the grammars of English and Mohawk, which appear radically different, are distinguished by just a single powerful parameter whose position at the top of the hierarchy creates an enormous effect. Mohawk is a polysynthetic language: its verbs may be long and complicated, made up of many different parts. It can express in one word what English must express in many words. For example, "Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se' " means, "He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her" -- meaning, he uglified her dress. In that statement, "hetkv" is the root of the verb "to be ugly." Many of the other bits are prefixes that specify the pronouns of the subject and object. Every verb includes "each of the main participants in the event described by the verb," Dr. Baker writes. In all, Mohawk has 58 prefixes, one for each possible combination of subject, object and indirect object. Dr. Baker says the polysynthesis parameter is the most fundamental difference that languages can have, and it cleaves off Mohawk and a few other languages -- for example, Mayali, spoken in northern Australia -- from all others. That two such far-flung languages operate in the same way is more evidence for the idea that languages do not simply evolve in a gradual or unconstrained fashion, Dr. Baker says. At the next junction in the hierarchy, two parameters are at work: "optional polysynthesis" (in which polysynthetic prefixes are possible, but not required) and "head directionality," which dictates whether modifiers and other new words are added before or after existing phrases. In English, new words are at the front. For example, to make a prepositional phrase "with her sister," the preposition goes before the noun. In Lakota, a Sioux language, the reverse is true. The English sentence "I will put the book on the table" reads like this in Lakota: "I table the on book the put will." Japanese, Turkish and Greenlandic are other languages that opt for new words at the end of phrases, while Khmer and Welsh have the same setting as English. In all, Dr. Baker and others have identified about 14 parameters, and he believes that there may be 16 more. Dr. Baker's work is by no means universally accepted. Dr. Robert Van Valin, a professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says the findings rest on a questionable assumption: that there is a universal grammar. "What they're doing in that whole program is taking English-like structures and putting the words or parts of words of other languages in those structures and then discovering that they're just like English," he said. Dr. Karin E. Michelson, an associate professor of linguistics at SUNY Buffalo, who also disagrees with the Chomskyan approach, said after reviewing Dr. Baker's Mohawk work that some of the sentences he selected seemed artificial. Dr. Baker acknowledged that some of the longer words in his study were "carefully engineered," but he said the parameter still held up using more common examples of Mohawk. He said using only examples from real discourse restricted the kind of analysis that linguists could do. "It would be like constraining a physicist to learn about gravity without ever building a vacuum tube," Dr. Baker said. Other linguists, however, say they are excited by Dr. Baker's work. "He's a very influential linguist, and my guess is that this will provide insights and will spawn research for the next few years," said Dr. Stephen Crain, a professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland. If Dr. Baker's theory is correct, a further question is how the parameters of grammar are set as a child learns language. Does a child in an English-speaking environment start at the top of the hierarchy, somehow grasp that polysynthesis is not at work, and then move on to the next level in the hierarchy? Dr. Baker also wonders why, if the brain is hard-wired for grammar, it leaves the parameter settings unspecified. Why aren't they hard-wired, too? Humans are assumed to have language in the first place because it allows them to communicate useful information to others. But perhaps, Dr. Baker speculates, language is also a tool of cryptography -- a way of concealing information from competitors. In that case, he went on, "the parameters would be the scrambling procedures." From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 00:59:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 20:59:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Net National Happiness Message-ID: Net National Happiness http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/opinion/06thu4.html Does the United States strike you as a happy country? July 1776, when Thomas Jefferson claimed the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right, might have been the last time that happiness was officially proposed as a national objective. But in Bhutan - as reported in the Science Times on Tuesday - the question of national happiness is still up for discussion, thanks to a monarch who insisted, nearly a generation ago, that gross national happiness is more important than gross national product. An economic cynic may argue that a country with a gross national product as small as Bhutan's can well afford to worry about its gross national happiness, and that the best way to increase G.N.H. is by increasing G.N.P. But that is essentially an untested assertion, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it isn't necessarily true. Our sense of happiness is created by many things that are not easily measured in purely economic terms, including a sense of community and purpose, the amount and content of our leisure and even our sense of the environmental and ecological stability of the world around us. To talk about gross national happiness may sound purely pie in the sky, partly because we have been taught to believe that happiness is essentially a personal emotion, not an attribute of a community or a country. But thinking of happiness as a quotient of cultural and environmental factors might help us understand the growing disconnect between America's prosperity and Americans' sense of well-being. Some sociologists worry that the effort to quantify happiness may actually impair the pursuit of happiness. But there's another way to consider it. The world looks the way it does - as if it is being devoured by some grievous species - partly because of narrow economic assumptions that govern the behavior of corporations and nations. Those assumptions usually exclude, for instance, the costs of environmental, social or cultural damage. A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy - not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers - might help begin to reshape those assumptions in a way that has a measurable and meliorating outcome on the lives we lead and the world we live in. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 01:01:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 21:01:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] =?iso-8859-1?q?NYT=3A_When_S=E9ances_and_Science_Bo?= =?iso-8859-1?q?ggle_Equally?= Message-ID: When S?ances and Science Boggle Equally http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/books/06masl.html Books of The Times | 'Spook' Mary Roach. SPOOK Science Tackles the Afterlife. By Mary Roach. Illustrated. 311 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95. By [58]JANET MASLIN Mary Roach's journey into the occult takes her to as many strange places as she can scare up. Having written a humorous book about corpses ("Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers"), Ms. Roach has now ventured one step further into the unknown. On this new journey, she is supposedly searching for answers to life's great questions about the migration of the soul. But readers of "Stiff" know what to expect: the author is looking for quacks. Those quacks are sitting ducks for Ms. Roach's fine-tuned sense of the absurd. So Ms. Roach studies ectoplasm, notes that it looks like woven material and learns of a researcher who in 1921 asked of disembodied spirits: "Have you a loom in your world?" She visits India to look for firsthand evidence that spirits return. (This trip was worth it for the chapter title alone. It is called "You Again: A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation.") She finds scientists who have identified the weight lost by a dying person and notes that a recent movie title used the metric version of that figure, "21 Grams." ("Who's going to go see a movie called 'Point Seven Five Ounces'?" she asks.) She cites two Dutch physicists, J. L. W. P. Matla and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst, and notes that one worked with a Ouija board. She hopes that "the question 'What is my full name and that of my partner?' was never posed." And she digs up the fact that [61]Elizabeth Taylor claimed to have had a near-death experience but was sent back to the land of the living by one of her husbands, Mike Todd, then adds: "Whether this was done for her benefit or his is not clear." How serious is Ms. Roach in wondering about life after death? Not very. She appears more concerned with comic effects than cosmic ones, and she is constantly on the lookout for entertainingly bizarre details and turns of phrase. In the index to a 17th-century medical text by a Paduan physiologist named Sanctorius, she finds "Phlebotomy, why best in autumn" and "Leaping, its consequences." In "The Ordinances of Manu," a legal text based on Vedic scripture that dates to A.D. 500, she finds that a rogue Brahman may be forced to reincarnate as "the ghost Ulkamukha, an eater of vomit." Her survey of early homeopathic medicine yields the fact that chamomile was said to cause this symptom: "Cannot be civil to the doctor." Ms. Roach also finds out about a medium who relayed this news from the next world: "It's Florida without the humidity." Obviously, Ms. Roach's gift for facetiousness serves her well here. "Spook" is dependably witty, especially when it ventures far into the ether (a zone that Ms. Roach describes as "a sort of floating reunion hall" for those who are - to use a favorite term in this field of research - discarnate). And it is populated by vividly evoked oddballs, like Duncan Macdougall, an early-20th-century theorist who supposed that the departing soul would be separated from its body with rapid speed. Macdougall's unpleasant wife survived him by 35 years. "Depending on whether Macdougall was right or wrong about gravity's hold on souls, this could mean that when the missus' soul finally shed its earthly shell, Duncan's own soul would be 38 billion miles away," Ms. Roach writes. "To every cloud, a silver lining." "Spook" has great appeal on the basis of Ms. Roach's droll research. But it is afflicted with the same problem common to its spirit-world subjects: insubstantiality. Although she does her best to avoid what the book calls "the Big Shrug," she is not always able to learn much from the string of research outings described here. And though it would be unreasonable to expect Ms. Roach to settle all mysteries connected with the afterlife, it's fair to hope that her stories come to some kind of conclusion. Sometimes she simply reaches a dead end. After its prologue in India (a place of "glittery jackets and curly-uppy-toed slippers"), "Spook" proceeds more or less chronologically. It devotes separate chapters to the various fads and theories that have dominated ideas about life after death. And it points out that those who are most powerfully drawn to the subject have often lost loved ones and are eager to re-establish contact for personal reasons. A poignant footnote to this material is the great attention paid to the afterlife in the wake of World War I. Ms. Roach makes herself a wry, enjoyable character throughout the book's escapades, whether doing research at a Cambridge library (where "the youth to my left is sacrificing his vision and social life to medieval land transfers") or attending an English school for mediums (where "spirits" is pronounced "spit-its") or actually asking questions. "Remember," she warns one scientist, "in replying to me, pretend you are talking to a seventh-grader." Not quite. In "Spook," she makes a clever investigator and a thoroughly entertaining, if skeptical, tour guide. But in the end, despite her doubts, she winds up on the occultists' side. "The debunkers are probably right," she concludes, "but they're no fun to visit a graveyard with." 57. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/books/06masl.html 58. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=JANET%20MASLIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=JANET%20MASLIN&inline=nyt-per 59. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/books/06masl.html#secondParagraph 60. http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/booknewsandreviews/index.html?page=recent 61. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=70015&inline=nyt-per 62. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/books/06kepl.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 01:01:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 21:01:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon Message-ID: Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/sciencespecial2/06canyon.html [This is a great article. Click the URL to get some excellent graphics.] By JODI WILGOREN GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead. Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin. "You see any cracks in that?" he asked. "Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked." The material "had to be soft" to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, "That's just a theory." "It's all theory, right?" asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. "Except what's in the Good Book." For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says. That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations - but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls "biblical glasses." Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion. "Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces," Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. "To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual." Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues. Science unequivocally dates the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the canyon's layers at some two billion years. Even the intelligent design movement, which argues that evolution alone cannot explain life's complexity, does not challenge the long history of the earth. But a core of creationists like Mr. Vail continue to champion a Bible-based theory of the canyon's carving. And polls show many Americans are unconvinced by scientific knowledge. Though it did not ask specifically about the global flood or six-day creation, a November 2004 Gallup survey found that a third of the public believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally and that 45 percent think God created human beings "pretty much in their present form" within the last 10,000 years. Gallup found in another poll that 5 percent of scientists, and fewer than 1 percent of earth and life scientists, adopted the "Young Earth" view. The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people. Indeed, all the American adults on Mr. Vail's boats voted for President Bush last fall, while all but two on the evolutionists' rafts cast ballots for Senator John Kerry. When not running the rapids, Mr. Vail's group, which included three pastors, sat in makeshift sanctuaries of sand and stone to offer psalms and prayers of praise for their surroundings. Some were committed creationists and others were still asking questions. But all began with a literal interpretation of the Bible, seeking examples in the rocks to support its story that God did it all in less than a week. When they made camp, Dr. Scott's rafters, nearly half with Ph.D.'s in science, had evening discussions of tidal patterns and plateau shifts, as well as tutorials on tactics in the evolution debate. Most of them ardently secular, a few practicing believers, they started with what they see as unchallengeable facts about the Earth's age, and dismissed creationism as unscientific. After each "geology moment," Dr. Scott play-acted the creationists, saying sarcastically of their evidence, "My part of the lesson is always a lot shorter and less detailed." Mr. Vail, whose book on the Grand Canyon scientists tried to ban from park stores last year, describes this natural wonder as "Exhibit A" for Young Earth creationists. Dr. Scott calls it a scientists' Louvre. To Kathryn Crotts, 56, a pastor's wife from Greensboro, N.C. , touching the canyon's basement rock was a spiritual moment. "In the book of Genesis, it talks about God walking the face of the earth," Mrs. Crotts explained. "Maybe His footprints are there." But to Charlie Webb, 58, an emergency-room doctor in Colorado Springs, it is evolution that answers "the great philosophical questions why are we here, where did we come from." "Evolution is the basis of biology, biology is the basis of medicine," said Dr. Webb, dismissing the flood explanation as childish and pathetic. "You're messing with something important when you mess with evolution." For eight days and 280 miles, with a reporter along for half of each journey, the groups relaxed on motorized rafts, hiked the hills, dined on Dutch-oven delicacies, frolicked in waterfalls and admired rainbows, each awed by what they see as truth. Origins of Two Journeys About 4.5 million people visit the Grand Canyon each year, peering over the rim and perhaps popping into a gift shop, where Mr. Vail's book, "The Grand Canyon: A Different View," ranked 17th among 800 products sold last year. Some 22,000 hardy souls raft its river. Mr. Vail, 57, a former corporate computer manager, took his first trip in 1980, and soon "turned in my three-piece suit for a pair of flip-flops." He had been guiding full time a dozen years when a pilot celebrating her 40th birthday rode on his raft and whispered the Gospel in his ear. That fall, in a tent in the Himalayas, he recited the Sinner's Prayer in the Bible she had sent with him, and, he said, "I came home a child of Christ." Back on the river, Mr. Vail said, "I started asking, 'How does what I see here in the canyon relate to what I read in God's word?' " He attended creationist seminars, married the airline pilot, and in 1997 founded Canyon Ministries, which brings some 200 Christians to the river each year. His 2003 book, a coffee-table-quality photo gallery with quotations from Scripture, has sold 40,000 copies, despite science organizations' protests of its sale in park shops. Dr. Scott, 59, first chartered a canyon expedition in 1999. A former professor of physical anthropology, she has run the National Center for Science Education, a 3,800-member advocacy group based in Oakland, Calif., for 17 years. Among the rafters on this year's trip were Susan Epperson, 64, a former high school biology teacher who was the plaintiff in the 1967 Supreme Court case that found Arkansas' law banning the teaching of evolution unconstitutional, and Ken Saladin, 56, a professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville who has been protesting any mix of church and state for 30 years. "I won't defend evolution," Dr. Scott said in exasperation one evening. "We don't defend the spherical Earth. We need to stop defending, as they put it, Darwinism, and just make them show they have a scientific view." At orientation, when the rafters wrote their names on mugs, Libbi Hendley, 52, who owns a newsstand in Boone, N.C., with her husband, marked hers with the Christian fish symbol. In the other group, Eric Hildeman, 34, a Milwaukee seminarian turned atheist accountant, wore a cap with the same symbol, filled with the word "Darwin." Worship in a Glorious Cathedral "Isn't this a wonderful cathedral to meet in?" the Rev. Stephen Crotts, a pastor in Greensboro, N.C., asked the congregation encircling him on a Sunday morning. The worshipers sat on the ground, many of them barefoot. The rushing river and canyon wrens accompanied the impromptu choir along with Mr. Vail's wife, Paula, on flute and 17-year-old Andrew Panes, who brought a guitar from England. The preacher had three days' growth. "What is this place that God created saying to you and me?" asked Mr. Crotts, 55. "One of the things it says to me is I'm small and God and the world He created is huge. This is a man-dwarfing place." Religion permeated Mr. Vail's trip, the group bowing heads before meals and hikes. At lunch one day, four women clustered in a tight hug, praying for one who had multiple sclerosis. "We just need to talk to the only person who can do anything about it," said Linda Lomax, 58. When Lucy Panes, 20, shouted, "Oh my God!" after a guide doused her with river water, she immediately covered her mouth, only to be admonished by her mother, Diana, "Please don't shout that." Diana Panes began questioning evolution, which she had studied in school like most everyone else, seven years ago when Andrew came home from school asking whether Genesis was fable or history, and about dinosaurs dating back millions of years. "I was gobsmacked," Mrs. Panes recalled. So she started reading, attending lectures, watching creationist videos. "I don't want to believe in fairy tales. I'm interested in truth," Mrs. Panes said. Convinced that Jesus himself believed the global flood and genealogy of Genesis were true historical accounts, "the whole thing becomes his reputation at stake," Mrs. Panes, 54, said of why she felt compelled to come to the canyon to see for herself. "For years there were huge areas I couldn't answer. My faith was devotional." Of the explanations offered by Mr. Vail and other creationists, she said, "For me it was just the most immense relief that it didn't have to remain a mystery forever." Questions and More Questions But Brenda Melvin, 46, a nurse practitioner, was not so sure. "My Christian heart wanted to believe, but my scientific mind had questions," Ms. Melvin said. "I believe totally that God created heaven and Earth - I don't know how he did it, I don't know exactly when he did it. I don't know that we're ever going to learn the answers here." Her pastor, Paul Phillips, also did not accept Mr. Vail's explanations of rock layers and fossil remnants without question. "Whatever he says, I'm just trying to think: There's a really smart person, there's tons of really smart people, that think the other side," he said. For Mr. Phillips, 42, the most profound revelation came not about when the canyon was carved, but why: Genesis recounts the great flood as God's harsh judgment on a world filled with sin. "If I'm a sinner, and this is the punishment for sin, then I might want to rethink my position before God," he said. "If you acknowledge a creator and a designer, then you have to deal with that entity. If it just happened, then I don't have to worry about an entity that ripped apart the earth." Faith in Science "I've always believed in evolution," Irene Rosenthal, 71, a semiretired psychologist, said over soup one night. "Accepted evolution," interjected George H. Griffin, 58, a retired law enforcement officer in Colorado. "That's what Genie wants us to say," he said, referring to Dr. Scott. "Genie said anyone who said 'believed' would have to walk home." Dr. Scott and others cringe at creationists' charge that Darwin's theories have become dogmatic faith, that creationism and evolution are just two parallel belief systems, equally plausible and unprovable. "We have faith in science, but it's not a religion," said Herb Masters, a retired firefighter. "It's a faith in a body of knowledge." While the creationists sang hymns, Dr. Scott taught her crew a biologist's ditty about the amphioxus, a fishlike invertebrate in the human evolutionary line, to the tune of "It's a Long Way From Tipperary": It's a long way from amphioxus - it's a long way to us. It's a long way from amphioxus to the meanest human cuss. Goodbye fins and gill slits, Hello lungs and hair! It's a long, long way from amphioxus, But we come from there. Most on the science trip were atheists or agnostics, dismissive and at times disrespectful of religion. Standing under a gushing waterfall, they joked about baptism. When a white dove appeared after a harrowing hike, Dr. Scott teased, "It's a sign!" But six of the rafters said they belonged to churches or synagogues, four attending weekly. Alan Gishlick, with silver-painted toenails sticking out of his Tevas and a shoulder tattoo of a Buddhist word puzzle meaning "Knowledge makes me content," said he was a "devout Christian." "Ultimately, creationism is not just bad science to me, it's bad Christianity, it's Bible worship," said Mr. Gishlick, 32, a paleontology Ph.D. "There's just no reason to look at these patterns of layered sediment, or in the fossil record, or at the stars, and think that what you're seeing isn't what you're seeing. God doesn't require you to be stupid, to deny what you see, to deny what you know." Ms. Epperson, who sings in the choir at her Presbyterian church and brought her Bible along on the trip, said, "The more you learn about science, the more magnificent God is. "I can look at a rainbow, and I know that white light can hit water droplets and it gets dispersed and the light spreads out and has lots of different colors," she said, "and I also say, 'Thank you, God, for the rainbow.' " She said she asked God whether her role as an evolution advocate was meant to be her mission. "I say, 'God, if this is wrong, if I'm wrong, please strike me with lightning, because I don't want to be walking down the wrong path.' " Same Object, Different Views Walking along a path in the Redwall limestone, Mr. Vail splashed water on fossilized outlines of nautiloids, large aquatic critters that present one of creationists' chief complaints about standard canyon geology. Mr. Vail said fossils preserved death without decay, suggesting catastrophe, and that huge numbers of nautiloids in a six-foot layer spreading some 5,700 square miles could only be the result of a massive flood. Examining a vertical outline of a nautiloid, Mr. Vail ridiculed the geology explanation, saying it would have had to "stand there like that for tens of thousands of years while it got buried." "Anybody want to buy that one?" he added. A similar question came to the science group from a creationist student of Professor Saladin who had sent him a long e-mail message to ponder on his trip. Mr. Gishlick said scientists had not documented the billions of nautiloids creationists cite and had found no stunning pattern in their orientation, citing the very vertical fossil Mr. Vail had mentioned. "These guys don't look like they were buried in something chaotic," he said. "They look like they floated down to the bottom." Some around the circle complained about the credence being given to the creationist argument in order to answer it. "I don't really care how they reconcile Noah's flood with scientific things - it's about religion," protested Mary Murray, 54, an artist from Laguna Beach, Calif., who came with her biology-professor husband. "We shouldn't be talking about religion at all in the public schools." Through four days, Mr. Vail mentioned public schools only once, saying that 80 percent of Christians walked away from their faith when studying science that confounded the creation story. "It's foundational to our faith," he said, throwing a stick into the sand in frustration. "We're raising a generation of confused children, and it's the public schools that are doing it!" That morning, Mr. Vail led his troops up a rocky overlook to scout Hance Rapid before running through its 30-foot drop. "As you look at the rapid from up here, you can see the run," he pointed out. "You can see where the rocks are. You can see the bump - that's obviously somewhere you don't want to go. You can pick your way through the waves. "When you're back on the boat, look at the rapid as you're coming into it and see how much you can see," he continued. "We can read God's word and we know what we're supposed to do. It's real clear up here what we're supposed to do." From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 9 01:01:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 21:01:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Disasters and What They Show Us About America's Values Message-ID: Disasters and What They Show Us About America's Values http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i07/07b01001.htm By LYNNE M. ADRIAN There has always been a contradiction at the heart of America -- even before it became the United States. Two sets of warring principles have always pulled at our psyche. These contradictory impulses cross all the other lines -- rich and poor, female and male, left and right, and all the different permutations of politics, class, color, and culture that have been present in this large place for these 500 years. Maybe this argument is present in other countries, but I know that the division between these two sets of beliefs cleaves the country as surely as the Mississippi divides the continent, and that our best and worst showed all too well in the streets of New Orleans. On one side are the two principles that show the best in us. I will state the first bluntly: No one is expendable. Everyone is worthwhile, and there are no disposable human beings. This belief comes out both in an insistence that we protect the children and elderly, and in the Marine injunction to leave no comrade behind -- alive or dead. It is an essential element of democracy -- each vote counts because each person counts. The second of these positive principles is that what happens to you could as easily happen to me. We are all interdependent because there is no inherent reason for our outcomes to be different in life. Hurricane, terrorist attack, battle -- what determines outcome is fate, chance, the hand of God, however you choose to define it, but not our own worth. It is the part of us that understands that the question "Why me?" when something awful happens could as easily be phrased as "Why not me?" I am particularly aware of that principle as I watch the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. My daughter graduated from Tulane University Law School last year. As a graduation gift we rented a French Quarter condo for her and her roommates during graduation week. On Friday, September 2, CNN ran a story on a group of tourists stuck in a New Orleans condo, with seven people down to the last half gallon of water and no help yet in sight. Two young lawyers at opposite ends of the country saw the story and suddenly realized they had celebrated in that same building. What was different between the groups? Fundamentally -- nothing. The tourists had wanted to leave but couldn't, in part because the airline industry declined a government request before the hurricane for empty planes to help with evacuation as "economically infeasible." Even with money and somewhere to go, there was no way to leave. This example, far from the worst suffering on the Gulf Coast, leads me to the two principles that what became America has had to struggle against since at least 1492. They are the evil underside of our national psyche; much of the suffering on the Gulf Coast can be traced to the ascendancy of these beliefs for the past quarter-century. The first mistaken American notion is that "I can do it myself, so you don't matter." A more frequently heard slang version is "I've got mine, so screw you, Jack." At root is the idea that if I become strong enough, rich enough, or mean enough (or all three), I can control what happens to me and those I love. In this view, the problem of those tourists in the French Quarter was that they weren't rich or powerful enough to get out of town. A direct result of this belief is that anything that takes from me and my ability to accumulate wealth and power is bad and endangers me. Why pave the potholes when you can afford shock absorbers? The bumps are someone else's problem. Individualism is not, of course, inherently a bad thing. Many of the stories emerging from the Gulf Coast are positive examples of individualism. Neighbors helped rescue neighbors rather than wait for help; medical personnel volunteered; even the most poor and vulnerable at the convention center created a toilet by cutting a hole in a chair and placing a bucket under it in an attempt to keep their space bearable. But such individualism has traditionally been tempered by a communal sense that some things made more sense not to do individually. Individual initiative constructing a toilet is good, but a sewer system is better. Barn raisings, wagon trains, and mutual help and burial associations all worked on the principle that giving time, money, or effort to the group produced greater personal return than individual accumulation or effort could. Why the change? Over the past 25 years many Americans have been persuaded by some very effective marketing campaigns that not only can government never do anything right, it is also too expensive. The cost of government, particularly the federal government, has become more expensive for individuals and families because the cost of financing the government has been systematically transferred to individual taxpayers, with corporate taxes shrinking at a remarkable rate. Legally, corporations in the United States are constituted as "persons" under the law. In the 1950s, when corporations were at their most productive, they paid 39 percent of the tax revenue collected by the federal government. By 2004 corporations paid only 11.4 percent of the taxes collected. Even that may be an overestimate. Common Dreams, a Web site for the "progressive community," noted: "In 2003, corporate revenues represented only 7.4 percent of federal tax receipts, the second-lowest level on record, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Sixty years ago, corporations paid half of the U.S. tax bill." Eighty-two of the Fortune 500 companies paid no income tax at all in one of the past three years. At the same time the functional tax rate for citizens has risen. We have allowed, even encouraged, our corporate "citizens" to become tax evaders on a grand scale. The second of our weaknesses also explains too much about the tragedy we see in New Orleans and surrounding areas. I can best phrase it as "Only those like me count as fully human." This belief has stalked the continent since the first explorers captured native peoples to take back to Europe as trophies, through a civil war, to a mine owner saying of striking immigrant miners, "They don't suffer, they can't suffer, they don't even speak English," to a refusal to allow a ship full of Jewish refugees from Hitler's murderous intents to land, and down to the present day. The people of New Orleans are predominantly African-American, and nearly one-third live below the poverty line. For all too many Americans they are the "other," unlike us. When CNN interviews a young black man in baggy pants and a do-rag, most Americans expect a gangbanger, not a hero who escorted 18 children under 10 out of a flooding housing project when their mothers could not fit on the boat. It is a false sense of division that makes it all too easy for Americans to erupt into violence or threats of violence -- whether it is people firing at rescue helicopters or Lt. Gen. Russel Honore having to order National Guard troops not to point loaded M-16s at the unarmed civilians they are there to help. That same politics of race extends into the daily life of most Americans, often at their workplaces. One of the most frequently leveled criticisms of affirmative action is that it will keep the most qualified individual from being hired, which will cause financial loss or danger. It is often posed as the opposite of American values of expertise and professionalism, in which individuals are valued both for what they know and for their commitment to a set of practices such as those held by doctors, lawyers, and engineers. In our increasingly specialized world, those professional categories expand to include an ever-greater number of things -- including disaster response. As they should. Anyone who has ever opposed affirmative action needs to look long and hard at the case of Michael D. Brown's appointment as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Before moving into a senior command rank in 2003, he had only one very brief experience in a flood in Oklahoma. His previous position was running an Arabian horse association, and he left that under a cloud of recriminations. So how did he get the job? He was hired as FEMA's general counsel by his old college friend, Joe Allbaugh, the agency's head; he became director of FEMA when Allbaugh left to set up a consulting firm on getting government contracts. And what had Allbaugh done before FEMA? He had been in charge of George Bush's 2000 election campaign. I defy any critic of affirmative action to demonstrate that nowhere in the United States was there a female or minority candidate with more objectively valid professional qualifications to run FEMA than Michael D. Brown. I understand the frustration of white male Americans who have felt that their economic chances have decreased in the past 25 years. They have. But it has not been because of affirmative action -- that notion has been a tremendously effective wedge used to drive Americans apart. In the last three decades virtually every man I have spoken with in higher education who inquired why he did not get a particular job has been told it was because the department was under pressure to increase diversity because of affirmative action. If all those stories were true, the current faculties of our colleges and universities would look like the faculties of big-city elementary schools -- overwhelmingly female and minority. Clearly that is not the case. The real victors in the campaign against affirmative action are not women or minorities; they are well-connected men like Brown, who can use who they know to trump what they ought to know to do their jobs well. And again, people paid with their lives for a wrongheaded commitment to the comfort of "people who are like me." The current tragedy reveals an additional problem -- a reluctance to face and fix the hard issues. As early as 1998 Louisiana scientists and politicians created a plan called Coastal 2050 for preserving the wetland environment, strengthening the levees, and avoiding much of the result we see today. But the moment of consensus was allowed to slip away; there was "no money," and none of the plan was financed. In the drill last year for the fictitious "Hurricane Pam," FEMA officials became well aware of more than 100,000 people who did not own or have access to cars and who could not evacuate without government-provided transportation, but again the problem was considered "too hard" to solve. Both problems could have been avoided -- but we lacked the will to do the work. These are not "traditional American values," but their opposite. One of the most noted creations of American thinkers is pragmatism, a school of thought that arose in the 1890s that insisted on judging ideas by the effect of following them. In other words, if a distinction between two ideas doesn't make any difference it is useless to talk about it. If an idea does not work, it should fade away. Hurricane Katrina has tragically demonstrated that the underfinancing of government, particularly by allowing corporations to receive subsidies while avoiding tax responsibilities, is quite literally and directly a recipe for disaster, as is a desire to focus only on those "like me." These are ideas that need to fade away for us to move forward. The philosopher William James talked about the "marketplace of ideas" -- extreme individuality, a focus on those "like me," and underfinanced infrastructure are ideas that need to be remaindered, not purchased. Both the positive and negative sets of beliefs are equally part of America. Neither one is un-American in the sense of being an outside imposition. The "Greatest Generation" was great because its members saw themselves as in it together. In the 1960s both the antiwar movement and the GI's in Vietnam operated in part from a deeply felt sense about death and destruction that "it could have been me, but instead it was you." If many voices sounded negative, that was because it was as necessary to fight error as it was to stand for values. Those we now call Americans have spent the last 500 years demonstrating that we are both the best and the worst that human beings can be. Certainly the news from New Orleans has shown some of the best -- whether in the form of military rescue units, medical personnel, or just ordinary civilians who did the right thing because they could not see others suffer. But the scale and magnitude of suffering could, and I believe would, have been much smaller if we reasserted those positive values -- no one is expendable, and it could have been me -- and rein in our worse selves. Those truly are traditional American values. Lynne M. Adrian is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:07:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:07:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Experts Give Scientists Roadmap on Nanotechnology Research Message-ID: Experts Give Scientists Roadmap on Nanotechnology Research http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/technology/07nano.ready.html By BARNABY FEDER Little is known so far about whether materials being invented by nanotechnology researchers can be hazardous to humans and if so, under what conditions. But at least toxicologists studying such questions now have a broad roadmap from a government-sponsored panel of experts on how to proceed. Formally titled Principles for characterizing the potential human health effects from exposure to nanomaterials: elements of a screening strategy, the 85 page report, along with supporting documents, was published yesterday on the website of Particle and Fibre Toxicology, an online scientific journal. This is just looking at the human health effects, not how to test the impact on the broader environment, said Barbara Karn, an environmental scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency, the sponsor of the study. Thats also very important but eco-toxicity involves different types of tests. Nanotechnology is a collection of processing skills and products in which crucial dimensions are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter, a scale so tiny that molecular forces affect behavior. The report is concerned with materials, either natural or manmade, with at least one dimension smaller than 100 nanometers that is crucial to their behavior. Nanoscale materials often behave differently than the same materials in larger sizes. That gives them valuable new attributes like unusual strength or electrical characteristics, but it also raises questions about whether new products incorporating them might be unexpectedly hazardous. Hundreds of products embodying nanotechnology, including consumer items like invisible sunscreens and stain-resistant clothing are already in use. But exploitation of the technology is still in its early stages and the quantities of nanomaterials in production are small. The lead author on the toxicology report is G?nter Oberd?rster, a toxicologist at the University of Rochester whose research has demonstrated that some nanoscale materials can migrate from the nose into the brain. He, Ms. Karn and the other 13 authors of the report cited a wide range of studies suggesting that nanoscale products may pose new health hazards. The report focuses primarily on just one half of the risk the likely toxic impact of nanoparticles in the body. There is little comment on how to study the second crucial issue, the actual risk of exposure, because there are currently few instances where people are directly exposed to the new materials. The report emphasizes the need to characterize the particles in numerous ways, including shape, surface area, electrical characteristics and how likely they are to quickly form clumps that interact with the body differently than separate particles. It also describes a variety of tests for studying the impact of the materials on different organs and to test the different impacts of eating, breathing or touching the particles. The detail in the report highlights why toxicology research generally moves at a glacial pace compared to new product development. That discrepancy has led some critics of nanotechnology to call for strict government regulation or moratoriums on the introduction of products based on the technology. But advocates for the technology say that the report released yesterday is one of many signs that development is moving along with reasonable caution. Its extraordinary that so much attention is being paid to health and safety risks at this early stage of development, said Michael R. Pontrelli, a lawyer in Boston who has been studying potential liability issues with the technology. The report does not propose any kinds of tests that are not already familiar to toxicologists, according to Ms. Karn. This is the way to identify health impacts on humans, she said. We were not looking for methods that would show why the particles had those effects. You might need nanoscale tests for that. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:07:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:07:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Inside the secretive Bilderberg Group Message-ID: Inside the secretive Bilderberg Group http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4290944.stm 2005/09/29 07:42:52 GMT How much influence do private networks of the rich and powerful have on government policies and international relations? One group, the Bilderberg, has often attracted speculation that it forms a shadowy global government. As part of the BBC's Who Runs Your World? series, Bill Hayton tries to find out more. The chairman of the secretive - he prefers the word private - Bilderberg Group is 73-year-old Viscount Etienne Davignon, corporate director and former European Commissioner. In his office, on a private floor above the Brussels office of the Suez conglomerate lined with political cartoons of himself, he told me what he thought of allegations that Bilderberg is a global conspiracy secretly ruling the world. "It is unavoidable and it doesn't matter," he says. "There will always be people who believe in conspiracies but things happen in a much more incoherent fashion." Lack of publicity In an extremely rare interview, he played down the importance of Bilderberg in setting the international agenda. "What can come out of our meetings is that it is wrong not to try to deal with a problem. But a real consensus, an action plan containing points 1, 2 and 3? The answer is no. People are much too sensible to believe they can do that." There need to be places where these people can think about the main challenges ahead, co-ordinate where policies should be going, and find out where there could be a consensus Professor Kees van der Pijl Every year since 1954, a small network of rich and powerful people have held a discussion meeting about the state of the trans-Atlantic alliance and the problems facing Europe and the US. Organised by a steering committee of two people from each of about 18 countries, the Bilderberg Group (named after the Dutch hotel in which it held its first meeting) brings together about 120 leading business people and politicians. At this year's meeting in Germany, the audience included the heads of the World Bank and European Central Bank, Chairmen or Chief Executives from Nokia, BP, Unilever, DaimlerChrysler and Pepsi - among other multi-national corporations, editors from five major newspapers, members of parliament, ministers, European commissioners, the crown prince of Belgium and the queen of the Netherlands. "I don't think (we are) a global ruling class because I don't think a global ruling class exists. I simply think it's people who have influence interested to speak to other people who have influence," Viscount Davignon says. "Bilderberg does not try to reach conclusions - it does not try to say 'what we should do'. Everyone goes away with their own feeling and that allows the debate to be completely open, quite frank - and to see what the differences are. "Business influences society and politics influences society - that's purely common sense. It's not that business contests the right of democratically-elected leaders to lead". For Bilderberg's critics the fact that there is almost no publicity about the annual meetings is proof that they are up to no good. Jim Tucker, editor of a right-wing newspaper, the American Free Press for example, alleges they organise wars and elect and depose political leaders. He describes the group as simply 'evil'. So where does the truth lie? Professor Kees van der Pijl of Sussex University in Britain says such private networks of corporate and political leaders play an informal but crucial role in the modern world. "There need to be places where these people can think about the main challenges ahead, co-ordinate where policies should be going, and find out where there could be a consensus." 'Common sense' Will Hutton, an economic analyst and former newspaper editor who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1997, says people take part in these networks in order to influence the way the world works, to create what he calls "the international common sense" about policy. Business influences society and politics influences society - that's purely common sense "On every issue that might influence your business you will hear at first-hand the people who are actually making those decisions and you will play a part in helping them to make those decisions and formulating the common sense," he says. And that "common sense" is one which supports the interests of Bilderberg's main participants - in particular free trade. Viscount Davignon says that at the annual meetings, "automatically around the table you have internationalists" - people who support the work of the World Trade Organisation, trans-Atlantic co-operation and European integration. Bilderberg meetings often feature future political leaders shortly before they become household names. Bill Clinton went in 1991 while still governor of Arkansas, Tony Blair was there two years later while still an opposition MP. All the recent presidents of the European Commission attended Bilderberg meetings before they were appointed. 'Secret Government' This has led to accusations that the group pushes its favoured politicians into high office. But Viscount Davignon says his steering committee are simply excellent talent spotters. The steering committee "does its best assessment of who are the bright new boys or girls in the beginning phase of their career who would like to get known." "It's not a total accident, but it's not a forecast and if they go places it's not because of Bilderberg, it's because of themselves," Viscount Davignon says. But its critics say Bilderberg's selection process gives an extra boost to aspiring politicians whose views are friendly to big business. None of this, however, is easy to prove - or disprove. Observers like Will Hutton argue that such private networks have both good and bad sides. They are unaccountable to voters but, at the same time, they do keep the international system functioning. And there are limits to their power - a point which Bilderberg chairman was keen to stress, "When people say this is a secret government of the world I say that if we were a secret government of the world we should be bloody ashamed of ourselves." Informal and private networks like Bilderberg have helped to oil the wheels of global politics and globalisation for the past half a century. In the eyes of critics they have undermined democracy, but their supporters believe they are crucial to modern democracy's success. And so long as business and politics remain mutually dependent, they will continue to thrive. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:07:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:07:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Algore: The dumbing down of democracy Message-ID: Remarks by Algore as prepared Associated Press / The Media Center October 5, 2005 http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/05/10/ale05154.html [Thanks to Pen Name Withheld for this.] I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions. How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered " an alternate universe"? I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack. At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time. Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens? On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?" The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history." But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace? Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TVcommercials for their next re-election campaign. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded. In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason. Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge. The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason." Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason." Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others -- but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press. Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books. Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that America's public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print. And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television. Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day -- 90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher. The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get to that in a few minutes. Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar. But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist." But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines. And the most prominent casualty has been the " marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists. It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition. And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation. Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades. In fact, our first self-expression as a nation - "We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government. The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were: 1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all; 2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them; 3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about. What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power. The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become. And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all. And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self-government was understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under-girded and strengthened the rule of law. But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this - including especially the ability of the American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders' design -- depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print. Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today. Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers. Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens. Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation. The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America. Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television. So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that - at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television. It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen. The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance. It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free." As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves. And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie " Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates. The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do. The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President. For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me. Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up." The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.") In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don't trust the news media anymore. Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on. And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people. One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news. This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment. And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both. One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads. That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy. Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power. And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that. Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad. The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed. The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America's marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters. Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy, but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique. Under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy." Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical dismissal of America's gift to human history. But in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum and create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. I don't know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi-way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel. We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network. The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network. I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America's ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success. I want to close with the two things I've learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today. First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video. Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day. It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet's capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk. The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen. We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:08:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:08:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] RxPG: Complex work" protects against dementia Message-ID: "Complex work" protects against dementia http://www.rxpgnews.com/research/aging/dementia/article_2329.shtml [My mistake, apparently the series began to be copyrighted in 2004. This is from the bottom: [Chief Medical Editors: Dr Sanjukta Acharya and Dr Ankush Vidyarthi [Copyright 2004 by rxpgnews.com. Sep 9, 2005 Dementia Channel "Occupations with high mental demands may provide a form of 'mental exercise' that supports brain function into older adulthood" By University of South Florida School of Aging Studies, Publishing in the September issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, University of South Florida School of Aging Studies researcher Ross Andel and James Mortimer, professor, USF College of Public Health, examined the relationship between complexity of main lifetime occupation and risk for Alzheimer's disease and dementia in general. He and co-researchers discovered that people engaging in "complex work" had a reduced risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. "Occupations with high mental demands may provide a form of 'mental exercise' that supports brain function into older adulthood," said Andel. Recent research has focused on lifestyle issues, such as smoking, drinking, exercise and leisure activities and the roles they may play in the risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Occupation as an intellectual stimulus, said Andel, is yet another factor that needs consideration, particularly given the amount of time people spend at work. While occupational classification has been a previously studied variable, and occupations with low social status have been found to be a risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, occupational complexity as a source of intellectual stimulation has not been looked at sufficiently. Andel and his co-researchers studied risk of dementia in cases and controls and in complete twin pairs using data from a Swedish Twin Registry, through which sets of twins were followed for more than 40 years and whose main occupations were recently recorded. Within the twin pairs, one twin was diagnosed with dementia and the co-twin was dementia-free. The sample included 10,079 members of a subset of the Swedish Twin Registry called the Study of Dementia in Swedish Twins (HARMONY), a study led by Margaret Gatz from the University of Southern California. The authors found that those who performed complex work with data or people had lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. "Those performing complex work with people, such as speaking to, instructing or negotiating with people, appeared particularly protected in this sample," Andel said. Results were adjusted for gender, level of education and, in case-control analyses, for age. "Our results suggest that intellectually demanding activity at work may facilitate brain health in old age," concluded Andel. "However, further research is needed to understand why complex work appears to offer a buffer against dementia and whether occupational complexity is protective independent of occupational status." From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:09:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:09:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: What If Gene Were a Genius?: Oh, never mind . . . Message-ID: What If Gene Were a Genius?: Oh, never mind . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/29/AR2005092901881_pf.html By Gene Weingarten Sunday, October 2, 2005; W32 Critics sometimes complain that my columns lack intellectual depth. So today I thought I would examine fundamental epistemological questions of life in a contextual fashion, by postulating alternative realities and extrapolating likely results. What if Freud had been a woman? Sex would not be considered the primary force that drives human behavior. Instead, it would be Fear of Having a Large Behind. All men would be haunted by a condition known as "penis shame." The mind would not be divided into the Id, the Ego and the Superego but the Shoe-Desire Region, the Weeping Center, and the If-You-Don't-Know-What-You-Did-Wrong-I'm-Not-Going-to-Tell-You Lobe. Also, sometimes a dried apricot is just a dried apricot. What if wishes were horses? Then beggars would ride. But so would everyone else. We would each have, like, 7,000 horses. They would completely paralyze civilization, consuming all vegetable matter in a week or less. Continents would rise several feet, just from accumulated poo. And anytime anyone wished for no more horses, another horse would appear. The world would end in a terrifying, thundering apocalypse of horses, is what would happen. What if Hitler had beaten us to the bomb? Humor w?re heutzutage verboten, und Humoristen w?rde man in der ?ffentlichkeit erschiessen.* What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973? He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love. Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks. What if our thoughts scrolled across our foreheads, like a TV news crawl? All men would be incarcerated for public lewdness, conspiracy, fraud and crimes against humanity. What if, as originally predicted, heavier-than-air flight had actually been impossible? Rocket-propelled blimps. Travel would take a little longer, but the 9/11 plot would have failed, comically. What if celebrities were punished by God every time they took money to endorse a product they don't use? It's happening already! Consider Rafael Palmeiro, who did those obnoxious ads for Viagra even though he claimed he didn't need it and hadn't used it. Now he's ruined. Is this, finally, empirical evidence for the existence of the deity? It is hard to deny. What if all snowmen could walk and talk, like Frosty? They'd be gone as soon as we made them. You think snowmen would sit around here just to entertain kids, waiting until the first warm spell melted them? No way. Responding to some primitive instinct for survival, they'd hoof it for Antarctica, or climb Kilimanjaro. The only time anyone would ever see a snowman is by climbing a mountain. We'd expect them to be gurus, and ask them about the meaning of life. But they would just say things like, "Me want toy." Snowmen are idiots. What if you could smell air? And it smelled like B.O.? That would be real bad. What if the wheel had never been invented? Even worse mileage for SUVs. What if the U.S. Constitution required presidential candidates to campaign wearing only a sombrero and a cummerbund? The only people who would run for president would be shameless, contemptible, power-mad, ego-crazed, narcissistic exhibitionists. So, basically, this one's a wash. What if dogs were as dumb as chickens, but chickens were as smart as chimpanzees? No one would notice the difference in dogs, but we'd feel a lot worse about continuing to eat all those plump, delicious chickens. What if there were a doomsday Web site, where if any-one logged on, it would instantly annihilate the world in a fiery inferno? And what if the url were published in a news-paper? You know, something like "Log on to [2]www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/endofworld.html and the world will end?" How long would it take some irresponsible jackass to do that? Probably no more than three sec *Humor would be illegal today, and humor writers would be taken out back and shot. Gene Weingarten's e-mail address is weingarten at washpost.com. Chat with him online Tuesdays at noon at www.washingtonpost.com. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:11:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:11:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Book Forum: Ron Aronson reviews books on atheism Message-ID: Ron Aronson reviews books on atheism BOOKFORUM | Oct/Nov 2005 http://www.bookforum.com/aronson.html THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM: THE RISE AND FALL OF DISBELIEF IN THE MODERN WORLD BY ALISTER MCGRATH. NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY. 320 PAGES. $24. THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN RELIGION: HOW WE ACTUALLY LIVE OUR FAITH BY ALAN WOLFE. CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. 320 PAGES. $16. THE END OF FAITH: RELIGION, TERROR, AND THE FUTURE OF REASON BY SAM HARRIS. NEW YORK: NORTON. 256 PAGES. $14. ATHEISM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION BY JULIAN BAGGINI. NEW YORK: OXFORD VALUE AND VIRTUE IN A GODLESS UNIVERSE BY ERIK J. WIELENBERG. NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE. 202 PAGES. $21. TRAIT? D'ATH?OLOGIE BY MICHEL ONFRAY. PARIS: GRASSET. 281 PAGES. $23. AN INTELLIGENT PERSON'S GUIDE TO ATHEISM BY DANIEL HARBOUR. LONDON: DUCKWORTH. 160 PAGES. $15. At the sight of Stephen Colbert the studio audience begins cheering with anticipation: It's time for "This Week in God." Colbert calls up the "God machine" and gives it a tap, and a window begins spinning to the most unholy sound as a panoply of religious symbols and images--the pope, believers in the shroud of turin, assorted rabbis, imams, ministers, priests, creationists, spiritualists, even those those professing secular humanism and atheism ("The religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority")--flash on the screen. Finally the machine comes to rest on a particular target. We see a Jerusalem rabbi, imam, and priest set aside their mutual hatred long enough to denounce that city's gay-pride parade. Or we watch Colbert conduct a blind taste test to see whether he can tell the difference between holy water and Pepsi. Through it all he pokes fun at faith itself, sparing no religion and no holy man (in Blasphe "Me!!!" he takes on deities themselves, challenging, say, Quetzalc?atl to strike him dead by the count of five). Watching "This Week in God" on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, we are, it might seem, witnessing the culmination of a historical progression, from Robert Ingersoll, the great nineteenth-century public unbeliever, to Clarence Darrow, who in the 1920s and '30s would debate a rabbi, priest, and minister during a single evening. No wonder, then, that it is a bit jarring, after Colbert's polished irreverence and his audience's unforced delight, to return to the real world and be reminded that it is irreligion, and not religion, that is on the defensive today. It is this weakening that Alister McGrath sets out to explain. In his telling formulation, we are living in the "twilight" of the great modern era of disbelief. In 1960, he points out, "half the population of the world was nominally atheist," but by now the "sun has begun to set" on this "great empire of the mind." Telling the story of the rise and fall of disbelief in God, McGrath claims to be giving us a postmortem on the worldview reflected by Colbert. Looking ahead, can we perhaps foresee a time not far distant when atheism itself gives up the ghost? By proclaiming that atheism is on its last legs, McGrath turns one of the most burning questions in American culture on its head. When everyone is asking about the growing strength of religion and its political ramifications, we might instead ask, Why is disbelief on the wane? Today's commonsense answer is that atheists, agnostics, and secularists are less and less relevant to the needs of Americans (and, McGrath adds, the rest of the world). Whether true or not, this is an amazing commentary on the self-confidence that once made atheism the modern creed, which McGrath summarizes as "the religion of the autonomous and rational human being, who believes that reason is able to uncover and express the deepest truths of the universe, from the mechanics of the rising of the sun to the nature and final destiny of humanity." Why, after predictions that religion had fallen into irreversible decline (in 1966, Time magazine famously asked, "Is God dead?"), does a recent Newsweek poll indicate that 64 percent of Americans call themselves religious and an equal number pray daily? The Twilight of Atheism's story of the rise of disbelief contains a key argument about its eventual decline. McGrath accounts for the fact that England "did not see a major erosion of faith" in the eighteenth century owing to the Toleration Act (1689), marking as it did a truce after a half-century of social, political, and religious conflict, and he explains the intensity of the contemporary French anticlericalism by "the corruption of Christian institutions" in prerevolutionary France. In other words, "Atheism thrives when the church is seen to be privileged, out of touch with the people, and powerful." Twilight thus points to the modern history of the idea that God does not exist, beginning from the most radical phase of the French Revolution and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. McGrath focuses on Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity as well as the writings of Freud and Marx in order to set out atheism's intellectual foundations. In a detailed chapter on the so-called warfare between the natural sciences and religion, McGrath shows how the notion arose in Victorian England that the two were inevitably hostile to each other, despite much evidence to the contrary (including the more recent fact that a significant percentage of scientists continue to espouse belief in God). Then, in a subtle and original discussion, he explores why religious belief waned and atheism grew among a key group of poets and novelists in nineteenth-century England. Compared to the dour, dismal, and pallid religion on offer, atheism focused on the transcendent, took pleasure in the beautiful, and nourished the imagination. In contrast, Christians were much taken by the translations of the works of David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan that presented Jesus's life as an actual historical narrative, which could not but diminish his religious appeal. And so the stage was set for atheism's high tide in the twentieth century, hailed by Nietzsche's declaration that God was dead. By the 1960s American liberal Christianity seemed bent on committing suicide. "Ideas such as eternal life, Resurrection, a `God out there,' and any sense of the mysterious," McGrath writes, "were unceremoniously junked as decrepit embarrassments." The combined surrender of sophisticated theologians like Harvey Cox or former Episcopal bishop John Spong, the campaigns against religion by the Soviets and Chinese, and the tendency to pit science against faith proved that "by 1970 many had come to the view that religion was on its way out." But today it is atheism that seems in irreparable decline. What happened? Here, to introduce its ebb, McGrath interposes his personal story. A teenage atheist and Marxist, he headed from Northern Ireland to Oxford in 1971 armed with an existentialist's sense of life's bleakness, and Marxism's secular messianic "hope of a better future and the possibility of being involved in bringing this future about." Yet this was, he soon discovered, an "imaginatively impoverished and emotionally deficient substitute" for "a dimension of life that I had hitherto suppressed." And Alister McGrath reconverted and became part of history's next wave. The works of atheism's golden age lost their aura of historical inevitability and now came to seem distant, redolent of "a social order that had long since vanished." If he has not already been doing so, McGrath now speaks both in his own voice and for history's judgment of his teenage atheism. Its arguments have increasingly been recognized as circular, its intellectual battle with religion has been stalemated, the age of "humanity-turned-divinity" (by this he means that the worst features of Communism were encouraged by humans determined to act free from the limits generated by a belief in God) has been a disaster, and our spiritual longings and interest in religious faith have reemerged as significant features of our cultural landscape. One example of the latter is the striking spread of Pentecostal religions around the world, stressing as they do the "immediacy of God's presence through the Holy Spirit." Sloughing off the spare and abstract intellectualism of the Protestant Reformation within which McGrath himself was raised, the new currents demonstrate that "Christianity is perfectly capable of reinventing itself" to satisfy the spirit, feed the imagination, and satisfy the longing for transcendence. On the other hand, atheism's "embarrassing intolerance" is demonstrated by the millions of people sacrificed to Russian Communism, which confirmed the fact that modernity was as much an oppressive as a liberating force. McGrath here links Marx's liberating vision to violent "social engineering" and Freud's to "manipulating mental processes." And so he endorses the verdict of postmodernism on this ultimately uninhabitable universe: "Far from providing eternal and universal truths of reason, by which humanity might live in peace and stability, modernity found itself implicated as the perhaps unwitting accomplice of Nazism and Stalinism." Thus occurred "the decline, then the death, of modernity" and with it its partner, atheism. Atheism is now adrift in a newly respiritualized world, "uncertain of its own values," its record of violence and bigotry exposed. Thus "the established religion of modernity suddenly found itself relegated to the sidelines, increasingly to be viewed more as a curiosity than as a serious cultural option." How are we to evaluate McGrath's take on the fate of the secular worldview? First, one ought to be wary of end-of-an-era books written by former zealots! I say this myself having written After Marxism as a former Marxist--I know the temptation to coax the Owl of Minerva off her perch prematurely, of claiming to depict a movement in its true colors when its existence is still being contested. Reasonable observations about atheism's weaknesses get mingled with frequent "end-of-an-era" pronouncements that form the book's real substance and float on their own steam rather than issue from a disciplined and careful historical study. Just like the postmodernist claim that modernity is over, the retrospective stance implied by terms like twilight is the book's main idea and does double duty as a weapon in the battle against atheism. The "rise and fall" metaphors are tools of a brilliantly clever religious writer against the movement he seeks to undermine. Two decisive structural problems give away the game. First, McGrath's chapters are historically arranged and at times admirably detailed but at points sophomorically sweeping. There is little effort to trace atheism's evolution, logic, vicissitudes, and connections with other movements (such as socialism). The first two-thirds of the book are a more or less chronologically organized critique in the guise of telling a story--which, when the author chooses, leaps back and forth in time or argues with support drawn from whatever historical period best makes the case. So Stephen Jay Gould appears in the nineteenth century, and then under the "Death of God" we find Aldous Huxley in response to Nietzsche, followed by Milosz, Wallace Stevens, and Camus, the "Death of God" theology, and the Soviet Union. The "account" disappears behind the argument. And then in the last hundred pages McGrath abandons any pretense of telling atheism's story. In the one convincing chapter of the last five, grouped under the heading "Twilight," he presents an interesting analysis of the Protestant Reformation's "disconnection from the sacred." But for the most part he argues broadly that the rational argument between religion and atheism can never be resolved, comments on the rise of interest in spirituality and the growth of Pentecostalism, and brings out as uncontested fact the postmodern verdict on modernity, grafting it onto his case against atheism, including a page or two on the persecution of religion in the Soviet Union. Having used virtually every conceivable argument on every level--atheism's intellectual incoherence, historical obsolescence, moral obtuseness, arrogance, violence, and lack of imagination--McGrath now tosses in the kitchen sink, and the book's structure collapses. * * * A less ideologically driven book would have inquired into other reasons for the rise of secular attitudes and habits than the corruption of religion. It would have explored J?rgen Habermas's thesis concerning the disenchantment of the world not as a fault of the Reformation but as a concomitant of aspects of modernity potentially in conflict with religion, such as life becoming de-traditionalized, the growth of science and technology, and the rise of capitalism. McGrath says much about religion in general but never probes the problems of comparison between places where faith is flourishing (such as the United States) and those where it is not (such as Great Britain). A more self-conscious theology professor might have explored the paradox of a proclaimed "reinvented" Christianity in league with postmodernism, at least to consider the potential conflicts between the two worldviews on issues of authority and truth. And in laying blame for the world's ills on irreligion, McGrath might have at least considered the persistence of religious themes under Stalin and asked about the central role of Christianity during the previous two millennia of religious wars, slaughter, and enslavement. There is no denying that religion has revitalized itself or that the secular outlook is in retreat. But the actual historical process is far more complex and interesting than McGrath suggests. It focuses less on the respective strengths and weaknesses of religion and atheism than on the development of the modern world. Classical atheists tended to be optimistic about the world's future, and their imaginations were indeed stirred by science and technology and the potential for human progress. Rejecting religion often coincided with placing hope in reason, education, democracy, and/or socialism, and those who did so were stirred by visions of a more humane, happier world organized according to human needs. Looking expectantly to the secular and social future meant rejecting the religious counsel of pessimism about our lot on earth. It's safe to say that the future didn't turn out as anyone expected. Scientific and technological progress has been relentless, but its promises of liberation have gone flat. Few still believe that their children's world will be better than theirs. We live after Marxism, after progress, after the Holocaust--and few imaginations are stirred, few hopes raised by our world's long-range tendencies. Indeed, the opposite is happening as terrorism becomes the West's main preoccupation. In countries like the United States, Britain, and France, there has been a turning away from improving societies and toward improving the self. On this terrain, it is no surprise that belief in God has been revived, although it is most curious that among industrialized societies the renewed religious energy centers on the United States and is far less widespread in equally developed Europe. I suspect that even Marx or Freud would see little reason to conclude that religion's consoling force might be dispensed with anytime soon. At stake, then, is far more than a conflict between belief and disbelief, but the kind of world in which a religious or a secular worldview flourishes. Where secular hope is in the ascendancy, as during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seems as if the belief in human capacity and the here and now will be strong; where fear and pessimism increase, as they have so far in the twenty-first century, humans may increasingly look to God, to their souls, and to a future beyond this life. The pendulum may well swing back toward secular and social concerns, and people may well regain confidence in their powers and their collective future. For this to be accompanied and supported by a renewal of the belief that life can best be lived without God, then atheists, agnostics, and secularists have major tasks ahead. As McGrath suggests and Alan Wolfe has shown in detail in The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, over the past generation religion has become closer to people's needs, more positive and personal, and more tolerant and less authoritarian. In 2004 Wolfe pointed out that atheists seemed not to understand how religion had changed. There is a paucity of "serious treatments of why Americans might be better off intellectually, and perhaps even emotionally, if they relied more on themselves and less on powers greater than themselves, and our cultural and political life is poorer as a result." What would it look like if this were to change? A number of writers--the "new atheists"--are responding. The oldest among them is Michel Onfray, 46; the others are considerably younger. Not part of a movement, they also lack the sense that history is going their way. At the same time, these writers are refreshingly free from the hidden theology of history-as-progress that inspired past atheist writers. Unlike McGrath, they cannot appeal to self-evident trends, and this gives each of their works a refreshing quality of standing on its own. Accordingly, in these books the argument is everything. And they are contemporary, having had to respond to September 11, to Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity, and to modern science. They have had to rethink atheism in terms of its historical possibility, its reputation for negativity, and the ways in which it might become more appealing. Of the works under review, only Michel Onfray's Trait? d'ath?ologie presents atheism in old-fashioned terms, as part of a world-historical process of social emancipation. Onfray's philosophical goal is to renew the modern radical project by integrating the insights of atheism with utilitarianism, hedonism, psychoanalysis, and anarchism, for the first time allowing humanity to "look reality in the face." To prepare the ground for this he seeks to lay bare the many ways in which pathological and death-oriented religious attitudes permeate our world (thus the need for an "a-theology"--to demonstrate the structure, commitments, and suppressed past of religion in its full destructiveness). In the spirit of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, Onfray is determined to reveal how the creation of a world beyond this world leads to "forgetting the real" with disastrous consequences. His book has a sweep, an energy and intensity, that seems all but forgotten on either side of the Atlantic; for this reason alone it deserves to be translated. Onfray is arguing, contra McGrath, that religion has always been, and remains, at the core of our civilization. "We speak, think, live, act, we dream, we imagine, we eat, suffer, sleep, and conceive in Judeo-Christian terms, constructed during two thousand years of development from biblical monotheism. Later, secularism struggles to permit everyone to think what he or she wants, to believe in his or her own god, provided that they don't take note of this publicly. But publicly, the secularized religion of Christ leads the way." It is absurd, then, to suggest that there has ever been a genuinely irreligious moment. Worse, Onfray argues, planetary colonialism, slavery, twentieth-century fascisms and genocides have all been carried out only with the silent or tacit approval of religion. With a penchant for list making, he details the Bible's calls to slaughter and oppression as well as the Christian history of giving them its blessing. Even today, he argues, France's official secularism remains underpinned by the same Christian values and ethics that have made hell of the world. The alternative would be a truly democratic and post-Christian morality that would fully free people from religion by beginning from the fact that this is our only world. A secular ethics, pragmatic and utilitarian, would truly pursue what he calls the "hedonist contract"--the greatest good of the greatest number. "Nihilism," Onfray writes, "stems from the turbulence registered in the transitional zone" between a decaying Judeo-Christian world and a post-Christian universe still waiting in the wings. What will bring it about? Certainly not any developments in religion itself. Onfray writes as if the essence of religion is unchanging, and he often focuses on the Bible as giving us the essence of Christianity. Accordingly, we have little to hope for from the kinds of evolutions so prized by McGrath. Onfray would no doubt see the changes described in The Transformation of American Religion as surface alterations that disguise religion's fundamental hatred of life. Yet, unlike McGrath, Onfray does not identify a social process leading to strengthening secular attitudes. Perhaps this is why he takes refuge in a sweeping dialectic: "A Christian era having followed a pagan era, a post-Christian era will follow, inevitably." But how? He demurs discussing the agents who might bring this about, speaking only of the philosopher's tasks: the labor of reason and reflection, a "return to the spirit of the Enlightenment." Onfray's "inevitably" is the sole touch of such historical optimism among any of the new atheists. In sharp contrast, Sam Harris is motivated by an urgent effort to avoid the worst: in a post-September 11 world where "our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons" and are motivated by "mad," unverifiable, and exclusivist core beliefs, Harris writes to avert catastrophe. His book is an all-out attack on faith-based beliefs as well as on those moderates for whom "criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo." Harris has raised eyebrows more than any atheist since Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design--for his fervent belief in progress, hostility to Islam, approval of nuclear war and torture, dismissal of pacifism as "flagrantly immoral," and his slap at the "leftist unreason" of Noam Chomsky. Harris's key political sources and positions clearly lean to the Right. For our purposes, however, what matters most is what the book tells us about some of atheism's continuing problems today. If Onfray has remained true to atheism as an emancipatory project at war with religion, Harris has kept alive its image as dogmatic, fanatically rationalistic, and at war to religion. * * * The best way to view Harris's intolerance is through the lenses provided by Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Baggini's excellent little book is intended not as an attack on religion but to give a positive explanation of a word, atheism, that conjures "dark images of something sinister, evil, and threatening." His point is that atheism need be neither "happy-clappy" nor "pessimistic or depressive." It is rather a kind of growing up, a turning away from "the innocence of supernatural world views" and an acceptance "that we have to make our way in the world." In a highly accessible style, Baggini (who writes for The Guardian and is editor of The Philosophers' Magazine) covers what have become familiar themes: the argument for an understanding of the world based on natural laws and according to evidence; the centrality in human life of moral choice about what is right and wrong; the "view that life's ultimate purpose must be something which is good in itself and not just something that serves as a link in a never-ending series of purposes"; and the cautionary lessons about zealotry to be learned from the history of both religion and atheism. Baggini asks whether atheism is necessarily against religion. The concluding picture he gives is of a secure and positive outlook, without hostility, combating harmful consequences of religion to be sure but no less critical of militant atheism. His final chapter is a masterpiece in trying to understand the impulse behind religion, the inevitable gulf between believers and nonbelievers, and the fact that since both will continue to share the world for a long time to come, the wisest path to coexistence is through genuine openness and the willingness to be proven wrong. Which returns us to The End of Faith. What is most striking after reading Baggini is Harris's own zealotry. Harris makes no effort to understand believers, be they moderate or fundamentalist; most serious in a book claiming a practical political mission of uniting "us" against "them" is his total lack of interest in any historical understanding. Why is it that Islamist movements have emerged with such ferocity? Why is it that suicide bombers have become widespread? And what explains the revival of religion in the United States? For Harris what matters is what people believe and whether it is verifiable--not when, how, and under what conditions they came to believe it. In his dogmatic view, beliefs motivate people--not circumstances, events, or history. Like Baggini, Erik J. Wielenberg in Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe and Daniel Harbour in An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism respond to the current malaise in atheism by engaging in respectful and serious debate with their opponents. Wielenberg presents an analytical philosopher's argument, beautifully restrained and precise. He is responding to a major theme in contemporary thinking about religion, namely, that in a naturalistic universe--one in which there are "no supernatural beings of any sort"--life would have no meaning and there would be no reason to behave ethically. Indeed, the strong selling point of religion recently has been its utility--in providing individual and collective moral grounding, national purpose, and personal hope. In response, Wielenberg, uninterested in the question of God's actual existence, seeks to show that living without God can be both meaningful and moral. Like McGrath and Onfray, Wielenberg focuses on the idea articulated in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov: If God does not exist, everything is permissible. Wielenberg's carefully developed main argument is that a moral framework totally dependent on God's will "is not a moral framework at all." Plato's Euthyphro provides the key question: Does God endorse acts that are already moral or do these become moral because God commands them? Even among Christians, he points out, morality turns out to be objective and independent--it is "part of the furniture of the universe" and does not require God to make it right. Wielenberg's major problem appears when he takes up the question that preoccupies most discussions of God's existence: How do we explain and minimize evil in the world? Constrained by the limits of analytic philosophy, Wielenberg's discussion of "factors beyond our control" and obligations toward others has an unconvincingly individualist cast. He needs to take on board the deep social belonging that makes us who we are but is absent from his argument--only then can helping others become something other than Christian charity. Harbour's recently reissued Guide to Atheism aspires to show the intellectual and practical superiority of a secular, scientific worldview to a religious one. At stake is not simply the question "Does God exist?" but rather "the whole worldview to which we subscribe." He chooses cumbersome terms for describing the opposing outlooks (the "Spartan meritocracy" and the "Baroque monarchy"), but his focus on worldviews has the potential for shifting the usual debate over God's existence in an important direction--to the varying ways people live their lives. In practice, however, Harbour limits himself to a rather narrow worldview. Above all, he is concerned with what and how we know questions of truth and understanding. He leaves out a vast array of attitudes, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs that fall outside of knowledge--what we live by concerning love, relationships, our connections with the wider universe, death, what is right and wrong. Much of life is not ruled by knowledge, of course, and insofar as our worldview includes all this, Harbour misses it. The first worldview he considers, based on the scientific paradigm of rational inquiry, operates by constant "reexamination, reevaluation and rejection" of its assumptions and results, which continually must prove themselves, while the second introduces starting points that are elaborate and are not subject to question or testing. Religion falls under the second category because "all attempts to explain observations about the nature of the world must be consistent with, or subservient to, the unrevisable starting assumptions." Harbour presents a close argument for the greater plausibility of the Spartan meritocracy, concluding that "anyone who cares about truth . . . must be an atheist." And then he tackles the pragmatic question of religion's function: Has it really made life happier, more moral, and more meaningful? In a sustained sketch of the terrain covered each in his own way by the other writers, Harbour shrewdly cashes in on his initial definitions. The rational and constantly self-questioning and self-correcting worldview is essential to democracy and its ongoing public discussion about everything under the sun. Those disasters of history not explicitly tied to religion in fact still reflect starting points of authority and unquestionable dogma. Democracy, after all, is congruent with freedom, which is in turn congruent with the worldview that presupposes little and questions everything. "Democracy proceeds by one set of principles. Religion by the opposite." Atheism is "one of the natural allies" of democratic societies. Taken collectively, the writing of the new atheists offers a set of promising ideas. Harris, for all his negative energy, provides a potentially rich idea about mysticism, as cultivated in Eastern religions, as a "rational enterprise." In Buddhism, he argues, reaching beyond the self has been carefully and closely described and need not be left to faith but may be empirically studied. Baggini's rejection of dogma and militancy on all sides is not only refreshing but intellectually important; Wielenberg talks about the possible contribution of neuroscience to a future secular ethics. But by far the most important idea contained in these books is Harbour's effort to cast the discussion as a matter of worldviews. As Alan Wolfe points out, the newly revitalized religions have made next to no changes on the doctrinal level. But they have modified their practices, appeals, and attitudes in a more accepting and nurturing direction, creating a new sense of community. This is more than a matter of marketing; it involves living one's faith and meeting people's needs. Atheists have much to learn from this. If the appeal of atheism relies on arguments or it casts itself as a messenger bearing cold hard truths, it will continue to fare poorly in today's world. For secularists, the most urgent need is for a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one's life. As McGrath points out, classical atheists were able to provide this, but no more. A new atheism must absorb the experience of the twentieth century and the issues of the twenty-first. It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death, and explore what hope might mean today. The new atheists have made a beginning, but much remains to be done. Ronald Aronson is Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. A contributor to The Nation and the Times Literary Supplement, he is the author, most recently, of Camus and Sarte: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (University of Chicago Press, 2004). From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 01:11:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 21:11:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Mary Roach) 'Spook': Ghost Trusters Message-ID: 'Spook': Ghost Trusters http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09zernike.html SPOOK Science Tackles the Afterlife. By Mary Roach. Illustrated. 311 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95. Readers By [61]KATE ZERNIKE A PROFESSOR of obstetrics at an esteemed university explains to Mary Roach his quantum-theory equation to measure the energy lost when the soul departs the body. He wants to test it by putting a live organism in a box with electromagnetic sensors and watching it die. But he can't find collaborators - a predicament Roach has trouble believing. "Most people don't listen nearly as long as you have," the forlorn professor tells her. Roach has endless patience with people whose ideas are most charitably described as unconventional. In "Spook," she sets off on a skeptic's scavenger hunt to find out if there's any scientific way of proving there is life after death, listening to a whole range of people who have doubtless grown used to people's eyes glazing over - or worse. Describing her undertaking as a "giggly, random, utterly earthbound assault on our most ponderous unanswered question," Roach gives all her subjects their due. The guy who says he's determined the weight of a dog's soul. Researchers who interview children claiming to be reincarnated. Mediums who transcribe their conversations with the dead. She takes a "Fundamentals of Mediumship" course in England, and heads out with the International Ghost Hunters Society (14,000 members in 78 countries) to tape-record so-called spirit voices in a national forest in California. Later, ignoring the locals' warnings that a Canadian professor keeps rats and mows his lawn in a three-piece suit, she allows him to lock her in a soundproof chamber and expose her brain to electromagnetic fields in an attempt to pick up ghost "presences" in the atmosphere. "It is interesting," she writes in a perfectly deadpan style, "to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less far-fetched than a software glitch." Reading "Spook" is a bit like listening to the weekend programming on NPR - "This American Afterlife"? - intellectual, assiduously attentive, but the obvious undercurrent is "People do the wackiest things!" And depending on your frame of mind, you find yourself either oddly entranced or wondering, "Why am I listening to this?" "Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about," Roach writes about her time with the mediums. "Such as: Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?" You occasionally wonder if you should feel sorry for her subjects, take them aside and whisper, "Do you know what you're in for?" Just as they are at their most earnest in explaining their thankless and usually fruitless research, she'll toss in a question like a whoopee cushion. But if Roach teases, she never mocks. Ultimately, she exhibits great sympathy for her characters. Death has been good to Roach - her first book, "Stiff," which peered into the many uses of human cadavers, was a surprise best seller. There is less to work with here; dead bodies have many legitimate uses, but many of the people she tells us about in "Spook" are more likely, as she says, "nutters." She draws on everything from the works of Descartes to an episode of "The Partridge Family" (the one in which Susan Dey hears the Rolling Stones through her braces) in outlining the long history of the scientific exploration of the possibility of life after death. The third-century-B.C. physician Herophilus opened up cadavers and declared that the soul was located in the fourth chamber of the brain. Leonardo da Vinci believed it was in the top of the spinal column. And Aristotle claimed that semen supplied the soul of a new individual. In the 1920's, ectoplasm, spat up by mediums and believed to be the physical manifestation of the soul, was all the rage; in 1989, Cambridge University acquired the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, including the ectoplasm of a medium, Kathleen Goligher. In 2000, a sheep rancher in Bend, Ore., became, as Roach declares him, "the second man in history to set up a soul-weighing operation in his barn." Roach is a wonderfully vivid writer and most fun when she is exploring the world of the modern soul-searchers. "Spook," like "Stiff," is a "who knew?" kind of book, and it's fascinating to discover that a researcher in the 21st century would be, say, trying to weigh the consciousness of a leech. And as a reporter, Roach has a keen eye for the perfect detail, an ear for the zinging quotation and a finely tuned sense of the preposterous. She excerpts this exchange from a medium's conversation with the great beyond: "What type of 'body' do you have?" "She says fat people are thin here. . . ." "How is the weather?" "It's Florida without the humidity." Roach is also relentlessly curious. For her, "Google" is definitely a verb: while looking up devices related to the Suggestometer, a gadget used by mediums, she discovers a Launder-Ometer, a Crackometer and Gary Ometer, a former director of debt management for the United States Treasury, and calls him up. (He cheerfully plays along.) There is one maddening lapse in her reporting, however. At the end of a chapter on cardiologists studying near-death experiences, she confesses in a footnote that she did not see the experiment she described pages earlier because she could not get permission from the hospital (she watched a similar one in California). In a book that attempts to apply scientific rigor, this seems a glaring shortcut. But "Spook" is less about figuring out what science says about the afterlife than it is a celebration of the wide, occasionally crazy spectrum of human pursuit. When we talk about the afterlife, Roach concludes, facts may be less meaningful than belief - an Indian boy probably wasn't reincarnated, but there's no denying the happiness of the father who believes that the boy in his lap is his dead son returned to him. "I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science," Roach writes. What she celebrates is the passion that drives the inquiry, that keeps people at their research despite the loneliness - and mockery. She may have a skeptic's mind, but she writes with a believer's heart. Kate Zernike is a national correspondent for The Times. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Oct 10 04:15:24 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:15:24 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Book Forum: Ron Aronson reviews books on atheism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4349EADB.2070809@solution-consulting.com> Thanks to Frank. It seems to me that until atheism can deal realistically with the pragmatic advantages of religion (longer, healthier life, fewer divorces, less illegal activity, lower interest in smoking, excessive drinking, lower drugging, and so on) that have been demonstrated in the past ten years by the new research, it cannot deal with anything. Based on that research (if a Good Life is the goal), might I humbly suggest that being an atheist is irrational? What do the atheist apologists say to this? Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Ron Aronson reviews books on atheism > BOOKFORUM | Oct/Nov 2005 > http://www.bookforum.com/aronson.html > > THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM: THE RISE AND FALL OF DISBELIEF IN THE MODERN > WORLD BY ALISTER MCGRATH. NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY. 320 PAGES. $24. > > THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN RELIGION: HOW WE ACTUALLY LIVE OUR > FAITH BY > ALAN WOLFE. CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. 320 PAGES. $16. > > THE END OF FAITH: RELIGION, TERROR, AND THE FUTURE OF REASON BY SAM > HARRIS. NEW YORK: NORTON. 256 PAGES. $14. > > ATHEISM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION BY JULIAN BAGGINI. NEW YORK: OXFORD > > VALUE AND VIRTUE IN A GODLESS UNIVERSE BY ERIK J. WIELENBERG. NEW > YORK: CAMBRIDGE. 202 PAGES. $21. > > TRAIT? D'ATH?OLOGIE BY MICHEL ONFRAY. PARIS: GRASSET. 281 PAGES. $23. > > AN INTELLIGENT PERSON'S GUIDE TO ATHEISM BY DANIEL HARBOUR. LONDON: > DUCKWORTH. 160 PAGES. $15. > > At the sight of Stephen Colbert the studio audience begins cheering > with anticipation: It's time for "This Week in God." Colbert calls up > the "God machine" and gives it a tap, and a window begins spinning to > the most unholy sound as a panoply of religious symbols and > images--the pope, believers in the shroud of turin, assorted rabbis, > imams, ministers, > priests, creationists, spiritualists, even those those professing > secular humanism and atheism ("The religion devoted to the worship of > one's own smug sense of superiority")--flash on the screen. Finally > the machine comes to rest on a particular target. We see a Jerusalem > rabbi, imam, and priest set aside their mutual hatred long enough to > denounce that city's gay-pride parade. Or we watch Colbert conduct a > blind taste test to see whether he can tell the difference between > holy water and Pepsi. Through it all he pokes fun at faith itself, > sparing no religion and no holy man (in Blasphe "Me!!!" he takes on > deities themselves, challenging, say, Quetzalc?atl to strike him dead > by the count of five). Watching "This Week in God" on Jon Stewart's > Daily Show, we are, it might seem, witnessing the culmination of a > historical progression, from Robert Ingersoll, the great > nineteenth-century public unbeliever, to Clarence Darrow, who in the > 1920s and '30s would debate a rabbi, priest, and minister during a > single evening. > > No wonder, then, that it is a bit jarring, after Colbert's polished > irreverence and his audience's unforced delight, to return to the real > world and be reminded that it is irreligion, and not religion, that is > on the defensive today. > > It is this weakening that Alister McGrath sets out to explain. In his > telling formulation, we are living in the "twilight" of the great > modern era of disbelief. In 1960, he points out, "half the population > of the world was nominally atheist," but by now the "sun has begun to > set" on this "great empire of the mind." Telling the story of the rise > and fall of disbelief in God, McGrath claims to be giving us a > postmortem on the worldview reflected by Colbert. Looking ahead, can > we perhaps foresee a time not far distant when atheism itself gives up > the ghost? > > By proclaiming that atheism is on its last legs, McGrath turns one of > the most burning questions in American culture on its head. When > everyone is asking about the growing strength of religion and its > political ramifications, we might instead ask, Why is disbelief on the > wane? Today's commonsense answer is that atheists, agnostics, and > secularists are less and less relevant to the needs of Americans (and, > McGrath adds, the rest of the world). Whether true or not, this is an > amazing commentary on the self-confidence that once made atheism the > modern creed, which McGrath summarizes as "the religion of the > autonomous and rational human being, who believes that reason is able > to uncover and express the deepest truths of the universe, from the > mechanics of the rising of the sun to the nature and final destiny of > humanity." Why, after predictions that religion had fallen into > irreversible decline (in 1966, Time magazine famously asked, "Is God > dead?"), does a recent Newsweek poll indicate that 64 percent of > Americans call themselves religious and an equal number pray daily? > > The Twilight of Atheism's story of the rise of disbelief contains a > key argument about its eventual decline. McGrath accounts for the fact > that England "did not see a major erosion of faith" in the eighteenth > century owing to the Toleration Act (1689), marking as it did a truce > after a half-century of social, political, and religious conflict, and > he explains the intensity of the contemporary French anticlericalism > by "the corruption of Christian institutions" in prerevolutionary > France. In other words, "Atheism thrives when the church is seen to be > privileged, out of touch with the people, and powerful." > > Twilight thus points to the modern history of the idea that God does > not exist, beginning from the most radical phase of the French > Revolution and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. McGrath focuses on > Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity as well as the writings of > Freud and Marx in order to set out atheism's intellectual foundations. > In a detailed chapter on the so-called warfare between the natural > sciences and religion, McGrath shows how the notion arose in Victorian > England that the two were inevitably hostile to each other, despite > much evidence to the contrary (including the more recent fact that a > significant percentage of scientists continue to espouse belief in > God). Then, in a subtle and original discussion, he explores why > religious belief waned and atheism grew among a key group of poets and > novelists in nineteenth-century England. Compared to the dour, dismal, > and pallid religion on offer, atheism focused on the transcendent, > took pleasure in the beautiful, and nourished the imagination. In > contrast, Christians were much taken by the translations of the works > of David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan that presented Jesus's > life as an actual historical narrative, which could not but diminish > his religious appeal. > > And so the stage was set for atheism's high tide in the twentieth > century, hailed by Nietzsche's declaration that God was dead. By the > 1960s American liberal Christianity seemed bent on committing suicide. > "Ideas such as eternal life, Resurrection, a `God out there,' and any > sense of the mysterious," McGrath writes, "were unceremoniously junked > as decrepit embarrassments." The combined surrender of sophisticated > theologians like Harvey Cox or former Episcopal bishop John Spong, the > campaigns against religion by the Soviets and Chinese, and the > tendency to pit science against faith proved that "by 1970 many had > come to the view that religion was on its way out." > > But today it is atheism that seems in irreparable decline. What > happened? Here, to introduce its ebb, McGrath interposes his personal > story. A teenage atheist and Marxist, he headed from Northern Ireland > to Oxford in 1971 armed with an existentialist's sense of life's > bleakness, and Marxism's secular messianic "hope of a better future > and the possibility of being involved in bringing this future about." > Yet this was, he soon discovered, an "imaginatively impoverished and > emotionally deficient substitute" for "a dimension of life that I had > hitherto suppressed." And Alister McGrath reconverted and became part > of history's next wave. The works of atheism's golden age lost their > aura of historical inevitability and now came to seem distant, > redolent of "a social order that had long since vanished." > > If he has not already been doing so, McGrath now speaks both in his > own voice and for history's judgment of his teenage atheism. Its > arguments have increasingly been recognized as circular, its > intellectual battle with religion has been stalemated, the age of > "humanity-turned-divinity" (by this he means that the worst features > of Communism were encouraged by humans determined to act free from the > limits generated by a belief in God) has been a disaster, and our > spiritual longings and interest in religious faith have reemerged as > significant features of our cultural landscape. One example of the > latter is the striking spread of Pentecostal religions around the > world, stressing as they do the "immediacy of God's presence through > the Holy Spirit." > > Sloughing off the spare and abstract intellectualism of the Protestant > Reformation within which McGrath himself was raised, the new currents > demonstrate that "Christianity is perfectly capable of reinventing > itself" to satisfy the spirit, feed the imagination, and satisfy the > longing for transcendence. On the other hand, atheism's "embarrassing > intolerance" is demonstrated by the millions of people sacrificed to > Russian Communism, which confirmed the fact that modernity was as much > an oppressive as a liberating force. McGrath here links Marx's > liberating vision to violent "social engineering" and Freud's to > "manipulating mental processes." And so he endorses the verdict of > postmodernism on this ultimately uninhabitable universe: "Far from > providing eternal and universal truths of reason, by which humanity > might live in peace and stability, modernity found itself implicated > as the perhaps unwitting accomplice of Nazism and Stalinism." Thus > occurred "the decline, then the death, of modernity" and with it its > partner, atheism. Atheism is now adrift in a newly respiritualized > world, "uncertain of its own values," its record of violence and > bigotry exposed. Thus "the established religion of modernity suddenly > found itself relegated to the sidelines, increasingly to be viewed > more as a curiosity than as a serious cultural option." > > How are we to evaluate McGrath's take on the fate of the secular > worldview? First, one ought to be wary of end-of-an-era books written > by former zealots! I say this myself having written After Marxism as a > former Marxist--I know the temptation to coax the Owl of Minerva off > her perch prematurely, of claiming to depict a movement in its true > colors when its existence is still being contested. Reasonable > observations about atheism's weaknesses get mingled with frequent > "end-of-an-era" pronouncements that form the book's real substance and > float on their own steam rather than issue from a disciplined and > careful historical study. > > Just like the postmodernist claim that modernity is over, the > retrospective stance implied by terms like twilight is the book's main > idea and does double duty as a weapon in the battle against atheism. > The "rise and fall" metaphors are tools of a brilliantly clever > religious writer against the movement he seeks to undermine. Two > decisive structural problems give away the game. First, McGrath's > chapters are historically arranged and at times admirably detailed but > at points sophomorically sweeping. There is little effort to trace > atheism's evolution, logic, vicissitudes, and connections with other > movements (such as socialism). The first two-thirds of the book are a > more or less chronologically organized critique in the guise of > telling a story--which, when the author chooses, leaps back and forth > in time or argues with support drawn from whatever historical period > best makes the case. So Stephen Jay Gould appears in the nineteenth > century, and then under the "Death of God" we find Aldous Huxley in > response to Nietzsche, followed by Milosz, Wallace Stevens, and Camus, > the "Death of God" theology, and the Soviet Union. The "account" > disappears behind the argument. > > And then in the last hundred pages McGrath abandons any pretense of > telling atheism's story. In the one convincing chapter of the last > five, grouped under the heading "Twilight," he presents an interesting > analysis of the Protestant Reformation's "disconnection from the > sacred." But for the most part he argues broadly that the rational > argument between religion and atheism can never be resolved, comments > on the rise of interest in spirituality and the growth of > Pentecostalism, and brings out as uncontested fact the postmodern > verdict on modernity, grafting it onto his case against atheism, > including a page or two on the persecution of religion in the Soviet > Union. Having used virtually every conceivable argument on every > level--atheism's intellectual incoherence, historical obsolescence, > moral obtuseness, arrogance, violence, and lack of > imagination--McGrath now tosses in the kitchen sink, and the book's > structure collapses. > > * * * > > A less ideologically driven book would have inquired into other > reasons for the rise of secular attitudes and habits than the > corruption of religion. It would have explored J?rgen Habermas's > thesis concerning the disenchantment of the world not as a fault of > the Reformation but as a concomitant of aspects of modernity > potentially in conflict with religion, such as life becoming > de-traditionalized, the growth of science and technology, and the rise > of capitalism. McGrath says much about religion in general but never > probes the problems of comparison between places where faith is > flourishing (such as the United States) and those where it is not > (such as Great Britain). A more self-conscious theology professor > might have explored the paradox of a proclaimed "reinvented" > Christianity in league with postmodernism, at least to consider the > potential conflicts between the two worldviews on issues of authority > and truth. And in laying blame for the world's ills on irreligion, > McGrath might have at least considered the persistence of religious > themes under Stalin and asked about the central role of Christianity > during the previous two millennia of religious wars, slaughter, and > enslavement. > > There is no denying that religion has revitalized itself or that the > secular outlook is in retreat. But the actual historical process is > far more complex and interesting than McGrath suggests. It focuses > less on the respective strengths and weaknesses of religion and > atheism than on the development of the modern world. Classical > atheists tended to be optimistic about the world's future, and their > imaginations were indeed stirred by science and technology and the > potential for human progress. Rejecting religion often coincided with > placing hope in reason, education, democracy, and/or socialism, and > those who did so were stirred by visions of a more humane, happier > world organized according to human needs. Looking expectantly to the > secular and social future meant rejecting the religious counsel of > pessimism about our lot on earth. > > It's safe to say that the future didn't turn out as anyone expected. > Scientific and technological progress has been relentless, but its > promises of liberation have gone flat. Few still believe that their > children's world will be better than theirs. We live after Marxism, > after progress, after the Holocaust--and few imaginations are stirred, > few hopes raised by our world's long-range tendencies. Indeed, the > opposite is happening as terrorism becomes the West's main > preoccupation. In countries like the United States, Britain, and > France, there has been a turning away from improving societies and > toward improving the self. > > On this terrain, it is no surprise that belief in God has been > revived, although it is most curious that among industrialized > societies the renewed religious energy centers on the United States > and is far less widespread in equally developed Europe. I suspect that > even Marx or Freud would see little reason to conclude that religion's > consoling force might be dispensed with anytime soon. At stake, then, > is far more than a conflict between belief and disbelief, but the kind > of world in which a religious or a secular worldview flourishes. Where > secular hope is in the ascendancy, as during most of the nineteenth > and twentieth centuries, it seems as if the belief in human capacity > and the here and now will be strong; where fear and pessimism > increase, as they have so far in the twenty-first century, humans may > increasingly look to God, to their souls, and to a future beyond this > life. > > The pendulum may well swing back toward secular and social concerns, > and people may well regain confidence in their powers and their > collective future. For this to be accompanied and supported by a > renewal of the belief that life can best be lived without God, then > atheists, agnostics, and secularists have major tasks ahead. As > McGrath suggests and Alan Wolfe has shown in detail in The > Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, > over the past generation religion has become closer to people's needs, > more positive and personal, and more tolerant and less authoritarian. > In 2004 Wolfe pointed out that atheists seemed not to understand how > religion had changed. There is a paucity of "serious treatments of why > Americans might be better off intellectually, and perhaps even > emotionally, if they relied more on themselves and less on powers > greater than themselves, and our cultural and political life is poorer > as a result." What would it look like if this were to change? > > A number of writers--the "new atheists"--are responding. The oldest > among them is Michel Onfray, 46; the others are considerably younger. > Not part of a movement, they also lack the sense that history is going > their way. At the same time, these writers are refreshingly free from > the hidden theology of history-as-progress that inspired past atheist > writers. Unlike McGrath, they cannot appeal to self-evident trends, > and this gives each of their works a refreshing quality of standing on > its own. Accordingly, in these books the argument is everything. And > they are contemporary, having had to respond to September 11, to Islam > as well as Judaism and Christianity, and to modern science. They have > had to rethink atheism in terms of its historical possibility, its > reputation for negativity, and the ways in which it might become more > appealing. > > Of the works under review, only Michel Onfray's Trait? d'ath?ologie > presents atheism in old-fashioned terms, as part of a world-historical > process of social emancipation. Onfray's philosophical goal is to > renew the modern radical project by integrating the insights of > atheism with utilitarianism, hedonism, psychoanalysis, and anarchism, > for the first time allowing humanity to "look reality in the face." To > prepare the ground for this he seeks to lay bare the many ways in > which pathological and death-oriented religious attitudes permeate our > world (thus the need for an "a-theology"--to demonstrate the > structure, commitments, and suppressed past of religion in its full > destructiveness). In the spirit of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and > Nietzsche, Onfray is determined to reveal how the creation of a world > beyond this world leads to "forgetting the real" with disastrous > consequences. > > His book has a sweep, an energy and intensity, that seems all but > forgotten on either side of the Atlantic; for this reason alone it > deserves to be translated. Onfray is arguing, contra McGrath, that > religion has always been, and remains, at the core of our > civilization. "We speak, think, live, act, we dream, we imagine, we > eat, suffer, sleep, and conceive in Judeo-Christian terms, constructed > during two thousand years of development from biblical monotheism. > Later, secularism struggles to permit everyone to think what he or she > wants, to believe in his or her own god, provided that they don't take > note of this publicly. But publicly, the secularized religion of > Christ leads the way." It is absurd, then, to suggest that there has > ever been a genuinely irreligious moment. > > Worse, Onfray argues, planetary colonialism, slavery, > twentieth-century fascisms and genocides have all been carried out > only with the silent or tacit approval of religion. With a penchant > for list making, he details the Bible's calls to slaughter and > oppression as well as the Christian history of giving them its > blessing. Even today, he argues, France's official secularism remains > underpinned by the same Christian values and ethics that have made > hell of the world. The alternative would be a truly democratic and > post-Christian morality that would fully free people from religion by > beginning from the fact that this is our only world. A secular ethics, > pragmatic and utilitarian, would truly pursue what he calls the > "hedonist contract"--the greatest good of the greatest number. > > "Nihilism," Onfray writes, "stems from the turbulence registered in > the transitional zone" between a decaying Judeo-Christian world and a > post-Christian universe still waiting in the wings. What will bring it > about? Certainly not any developments in religion itself. Onfray > writes as if the essence of religion is unchanging, and he often > focuses on the Bible as giving us the essence of Christianity. > Accordingly, we have little to hope for from the kinds of evolutions > so prized by McGrath. Onfray would no doubt see the changes described > in The Transformation of American Religion as surface alterations that > disguise religion's fundamental hatred of life. Yet, unlike McGrath, > Onfray does not identify a social process leading to strengthening > secular attitudes. Perhaps this is why he takes refuge in a sweeping > dialectic: "A Christian era having followed a pagan era, a > post-Christian era will follow, inevitably." But how? He demurs > discussing the agents who might bring this about, speaking only of the > philosopher's tasks: the labor of reason and reflection, a "return to > the spirit of the Enlightenment." > > Onfray's "inevitably" is the sole touch of such historical optimism > among any of the new atheists. In sharp contrast, Sam Harris is > motivated by an urgent effort to avoid the worst: in a post-September > 11 world where "our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, > and nuclear weapons" and are motivated by "mad," unverifiable, and > exclusivist core beliefs, Harris writes to avert catastrophe. His book > is an all-out attack on faith-based beliefs as well as on those > moderates for whom "criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo." > Harris has raised eyebrows more than any atheist since Richard > Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a > Universe Without Design--for his fervent belief in progress, hostility > to Islam, approval of nuclear war and torture, dismissal of pacifism > as "flagrantly immoral," and his slap at the "leftist unreason" of > Noam Chomsky. Harris's key political sources and positions clearly > lean to the Right. For our purposes, however, what matters most is > what the book tells us about some of atheism's continuing problems > today. If Onfray has remained true to atheism as an emancipatory > project at war with religion, Harris has kept alive its image as > dogmatic, fanatically rationalistic, and at war to religion. > > * * * > > The best way to view Harris's intolerance is through the lenses > provided by Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. > Baggini's excellent little book is intended not as an attack on > religion but to give a positive explanation of a word, atheism, that > conjures "dark images of something sinister, evil, and threatening." > His point is that atheism need be neither "happy-clappy" nor > "pessimistic or depressive." It is rather a kind of growing up, a > turning away from "the innocence of supernatural world views" and an > acceptance "that we have to make our way in the world." In a highly > accessible style, Baggini (who writes for The Guardian and is editor > of The Philosophers' Magazine) covers what have become familiar > themes: the argument for an understanding of the world based on > natural laws and according to evidence; the centrality in human life > of moral choice about what is right and wrong; the "view that life's > ultimate purpose must be something which is good in itself and not > just something that serves as a link in a never-ending series of > purposes"; and the cautionary lessons about zealotry to be learned > from the history of both religion and atheism. > > Baggini asks whether atheism is necessarily against religion. The > concluding picture he gives is of a secure and positive outlook, > without hostility, combating harmful consequences of religion to be > sure but no less critical of militant atheism. His final chapter is a > masterpiece in trying to understand the impulse behind religion, the > inevitable gulf between believers and nonbelievers, and the fact that > since both will continue to share the world for a long time to come, > the wisest path to coexistence is through genuine openness and the > willingness to be proven wrong. > > Which returns us to The End of Faith. What is most striking after > reading Baggini is Harris's own zealotry. Harris makes no effort to > understand believers, be they moderate or fundamentalist; most serious > in a book claiming a practical political mission of uniting "us" > against "them" is his total lack of interest in any historical > understanding. Why is it that Islamist movements have emerged with > such ferocity? Why is it that suicide bombers have become widespread? > And what explains the revival of religion in the United States? For > Harris what matters is what people believe and whether it is > verifiable--not when, how, and under what conditions they came to > believe it. In his dogmatic view, beliefs motivate people--not > circumstances, events, or history. > > Like Baggini, Erik J. Wielenberg in Value and Virtue in a Godless > Universe and Daniel Harbour in An Intelligent Person's Guide to > Atheism respond to the current malaise in atheism by engaging in > respectful and serious debate with their opponents. Wielenberg > presents an analytical philosopher's argument, beautifully restrained > and precise. He is responding to a major theme in contemporary > thinking about religion, namely, that in a naturalistic universe--one > in which there are "no supernatural beings of any sort"--life would > have no meaning and there would be no reason to behave ethically. > Indeed, the strong selling point of religion recently has been its > utility--in providing individual and collective moral grounding, > national purpose, and personal hope. In response, Wielenberg, > uninterested in the question of God's actual existence, seeks to show > that living without God can be both meaningful and moral. Like McGrath > and Onfray, Wielenberg focuses on the idea articulated in Dostoevsky's > Brothers Karamazov: If God does not exist, everything is permissible. > > Wielenberg's carefully developed main argument is that a moral > framework totally dependent on God's will "is not a moral framework at > all." Plato's Euthyphro provides the key question: Does God endorse > acts that are already moral or do these become moral because God > commands them? Even among Christians, he points out, morality turns > out to be objective and independent--it is "part of the furniture of > the universe" and does not require God to make it right. > > Wielenberg's major problem appears when he takes up the question that > preoccupies most discussions of God's existence: How do we explain and > minimize evil in the world? Constrained by the limits of analytic > philosophy, Wielenberg's discussion of "factors beyond our control" > and obligations toward others has an unconvincingly individualist > cast. He needs to take on board the deep social belonging that makes > us who we are but is absent from his argument--only then can helping > others become something other than Christian charity. > > Harbour's recently reissued Guide to Atheism aspires to show the > intellectual and practical superiority of a secular, scientific > worldview to a religious one. At stake is not simply the question > "Does God exist?" but rather "the whole worldview to which we > subscribe." He chooses cumbersome terms for describing the opposing > outlooks (the "Spartan meritocracy" and the "Baroque monarchy"), but > his focus on worldviews has the potential for shifting the usual > debate over God's existence in an important direction--to the varying > ways people live their lives. In practice, however, Harbour limits > himself to a rather narrow worldview. Above all, he is concerned with > what and how we know questions of truth and understanding. He leaves > out a vast array of attitudes, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs that > fall outside of knowledge--what we live by concerning love, > relationships, our connections with the wider universe, death, what is > right and wrong. Much of life is not ruled by knowledge, of course, > and insofar as our worldview includes all this, Harbour misses it. > > The first worldview he considers, based on the scientific paradigm of > rational inquiry, operates by constant "reexamination, reevaluation > and rejection" of its assumptions and results, which continually must > prove themselves, while the second introduces starting points that are > elaborate and are not subject to question or testing. Religion falls > under the second category because "all attempts to explain > observations about the nature of the world must be consistent with, or > subservient to, the unrevisable starting assumptions." > > Harbour presents a close argument for the greater plausibility of the > Spartan meritocracy, concluding that "anyone who cares about truth . . > . must be an atheist." And then he tackles the pragmatic question of > religion's function: Has it really made life happier, more moral, and > more meaningful? In a sustained sketch of the terrain covered each in > his own way by the other writers, Harbour shrewdly cashes in on his > initial definitions. The rational and constantly self-questioning and > self-correcting worldview is essential to democracy and its ongoing > public discussion about everything under the sun. Those disasters of > history not explicitly tied to religion in fact still reflect starting > points of authority and unquestionable dogma. Democracy, after all, is > congruent with freedom, which is in turn congruent with the worldview > that presupposes little and questions everything. "Democracy proceeds > by one set of principles. Religion by the opposite." Atheism is "one > of the natural allies" of democratic societies. > > Taken collectively, the writing of the new atheists offers a set of > promising ideas. Harris, for all his negative energy, provides a > potentially rich idea about mysticism, as cultivated in Eastern > religions, as a "rational enterprise." In Buddhism, he argues, > reaching beyond the self has been carefully and closely described and > need not be left to faith but may be empirically studied. Baggini's > rejection of dogma and militancy on all sides is not only refreshing > but intellectually important; Wielenberg talks about the possible > contribution of neuroscience to a future secular ethics. But by far > the most important idea contained in these books is Harbour's effort > to cast the discussion as a matter of worldviews. > > As Alan Wolfe points out, the newly revitalized religions have made > next to no changes on the doctrinal level. But they have modified > their practices, appeals, and attitudes in a more accepting and > nurturing direction, creating a new sense of community. This is more > than a matter of marketing; it involves living one's faith and meeting > people's needs. Atheists have much to learn from this. If the appeal > of atheism relies on arguments or it casts itself as a messenger > bearing cold hard truths, it will continue to fare poorly in today's > world. For secularists, the most urgent need is for a coherent popular > philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one's life. > As McGrath points out, classical atheists were able to provide this, > but no more. A new atheism must absorb the experience of the twentieth > century and the issues of the twenty-first. It must answer questions > about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our > control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of > thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a > secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with > death, and explore what hope might mean today. The new atheists have > made a beginning, but much remains to be done. > > > Ronald Aronson is Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies > at Wayne State University. A contributor to The Nation and the Times > Literary Supplement, he is the author, most recently, of Camus and > Sarte: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It > (University of Chicago Press, 2004 > ). > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 6 00:21:06 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 17:21:06 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bush Health Camp Message-ID: <13820650.1128558066931.JavaMail.root@mswamui-thinleaf.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BushHealthCamp.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 157021 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 6 12:51:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 05:51:28 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re-Education Center #2 Message-ID: <9900636.1128603088538.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ReEducation2.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 175198 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 7 14:03:12 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 07:03:12 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re-Education Center #3 Message-ID: <28089101.1128693792528.JavaMail.root@mswamui-bichon.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ReEducation3.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 105012 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 8 15:48:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 08:48:51 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bird flu BS Message-ID: <4064546.1128786531539.JavaMail.root@mswamui-swiss.atl.sa.earthlink.net> There is a large ongoing effort to frighten us about a bird flu pandemic. It's easy to see the gleam in the eyes of the greedy and the power-hungry. The greedy see huge profits in getting hundreds of millions of people to take Tamiflu for an extended period of time at a cost of $8 per day. The power-hungry see a chance to promote further erosions of freedom in the name of safety. At the moment bird flu passes from birds to humans only with difficulty, and not at all from human to human. This strain may mutate to human transmission capability, but when it does it will probably be less virulent. In the meantime, let's all try to be a little more cynical about what we hear on the news. That doesn't take much these days, does it? From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 9 19:01:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 12:01:31 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] A House in Murano Message-ID: <17242820.1128884491841.JavaMail.root@mswamui-swiss.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: MuranoHouse.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 160769 bytes Desc: not available URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Oct 10 15:25:12 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 11:25:12 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Book Forum: Ron Aronson reviews books on atheism In-Reply-To: <4349EADB.2070809@solution-consulting.com> References: <4349EADB.2070809@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <434A87D8.20502@aol.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kendulf at shaw.ca Mon Oct 10 23:29:49 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:29:49 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws References: <20a.b04d498.307825e3@aol.com> Message-ID: <002a01c5cdf2$8265da60$413e4346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Dear Howard, The essay on power functions struck a cord within for a number of reasons. (a) Biologists are ? finally ? waking up to utility of power functions, which, since the 1920?s have been one of the major tools of the agricultural discipline of Animal Science. These scientists ? totally innocent of biology ? developed great mastery in the study of body growth and production in agricultural animals. Their goals were strictly utilitarian (how to produce bigger haunches in cattle and sheep, or longer bodies in pigs so as to get longer slabs of beacon etc. because that?s where the money led), however, when I took Animal Science in the late 1950?s I became quickly aware of the applicability of both, their insights and methods, in the study of evolution and ecology of large mammals. That included anthropology, us, as I shall illustrate for the fun of it, below. And then there is the Bible of Animal Science, the genial summary work of Samuel Brody (1945) Bioenergetics and Growth, (mine is a Hafner reprint). An utterly timeless, brilliant work if there ever was one! So, that?s my first source of happiness! (b) Might I raise the hope that, finally, after decades of working with power functions - in splendid isolation - I just might be able to discuss insights about human biology and evolution using power functions? The closest I ever got was explaining to colleagues how to use their hand calculator to pull logs and anti-logs! So, the essay raised my hopes - and there is nothing like hope! And that?s my second source of happiness. (c) In over 40 years of reading and reviewing papers I have caught only one out and out fraud! And this gentleman had the gift of creatively misusing power functions. The paper I got was based on the second half of a PhD Thesis for which Harvard had awarded him a doctorate. He had bamboozled four eminent scientists into signing off that piece of fraud. By one of those co incidents I was just working on something very similar to him and became suspicious because his theoretical predictions fitted his data too well, and the raw data in that are never looked that good. I managed to recreate all his calculations and discovered that he had misused his own data, had falsely attributed data to existing authors (whom I called on the phone), that he had invented not only data ? his own and under the names of reputable scholars, but that he had created fictitious references as well. Then a buddy in mathematics looked at some of his mathematical discussions and declared them as invalid on multiple counts. I returned with my friend a stinging review promising we would expose him next time. The fellow had a most undistinguished career in several degree mills subsequently and the only other paper of his I subsequently refereed was OK, but mediocre. I refused to read the published first half of his thesis, but some buddies who did shook their head and wondered out loud that there is something eerie about that paper! Yes indeed! However, I kept my mouth shut and a fraud was able to acquire a university position. So much for happiness! Power functions are absolutely basic to understanding life processes, and they do a sterling job of relieving the theory of evolution of unnecessary ad hoc explanations. If you have it handy, please see ?Primary rules of reproductive fitness? pp.2-13 of my 1978 ?Life Strategies?? book. Some of the insights in the essay presented as new are actually discussed in D?Arcy Thompsons (1917) On Growth and Form. To my embarrassment I discovered that his book by a zoologist is known better in Architecture and the Design disciplines than among current zoologists. Thompson uses real mathematics, where as current life scientists focus on statistics. It is he who discusses that globular cells merely take advantage of the fee shape-forming energy of surface tension and that it costs real energy for a cell to deviate from this shape. In principle life scavenges free energy from physics and chemistry to function as cheaply as possible, for power functions drive home mercilessly just how costly it is to live and how supremely important to life is the law of least effort, or Zipf?s (1949) Law. Thje beauty of power functions is that they state rules with precision and that such are essential to comparisons. Let?s look at an amusing example that suddenly becomes relevant to understanding humans. As I detailed in my 1998 Deer of the World (next most important magnum opus) the deer family is marvelously rich in examples essential to the understanding of evolutionary processes in large mammals, humans included. They show several times a pattern of speciation from the Tropics to the Arctic, that among primates only the human lineage followed. In several deer lineages there is a progressive increase in antler ? those spectacular organs beloved by trophy hunters. There is a steady, but step-wise, increase in size and complexity from equator to pole! The further north, the larger the antlers! However, antlers do not increase in proportion to body mass (weight in Kg raised to the power of 1), nor to metabolic mass (weight in Kg raised to the power of 0.75), rather, antler growth follows a positive power function, which, between species is 1.35. So, to compare the relative antler mass of small and large deer one generates for each species y(antler mass in grams) = f (weight in kg)1.35 . First of I can readily compare the amount of antler mass produced by species despite differences in body size. The largest antler mass is found in cursors (high speed runners) the smallest in forest hiders. However, in high speed runners, antler mass grows with body mass - within a lineage - even faster than suggested above. The huge antlers of the Irish elk, 14 feet of spread turn out to be of exactly the same relative mass as those of his last living relative the fallow deer. A small fallow deer, scaled up to the size of an irish elk would have 14 foot of antler spread! Are antlers incresing in size passively with body size? Yes, but only under luxury conditions. Note luxury! I a moment you will see why! Antler mass is determined in above deer from small to large by y(antler mass in grams) = 2.6 (wtKg) 1.50. Horn mass in wild sheep happens to be y=2.32 (wtKg)1.49. And increase in relative brain volume from Australopithecus gracilis to Homo sapiens is y(cm3 of brain) = 1.56 (wtkg)1.575. Cute, isn?t it? The human brain is (a) disassociated from body growth following positive allometry. (b) Provided the environment allows individuals a significant vacation from shortages and want, that is, body growth under luxury conditions, human brains expand with (lean!) body mass ? period! If humans fall below the expected value, then you have some explaining to do! Smaller than expected brain size will therefore be a function of poor nutritional environments. (c) Natural luxury environments are periglacial and North Temperate ones ? up to about 60oN, above and below that conditions deteriorate. That is, up to about 60oN the annual productivity pulse has a length and height to facilitates maximum growth. Therefore, periglacial Ice Age giants are brainy, tropical ones are not! That certainly applies to the huge brains of Neanderthal and Cro-magnids. As we invaded the cold, but rich periglacial environments, getting a large brain to deal with the increased diversity of demands (initially due to ever sharper seasonality) was filling out an already available growth function! Our brains expanded at he same rate in (exponent about 1.5) evolution as did the antlers of giant deer and horns of giant sheep! Awesome organs all! Why? There is no ready explanation. One would need to compare the growth exponents of other organs. I have written enough! Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 12:26 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws In a message dated 10/7/2005 3:13:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, Howl Bloom writes: All thanks, Jim. I just gave a presentation related to this subject to an international quantum physics conference in Moscow--Quantum Informatics 2005. I wish I'd seen the article before giving the talk. It would have come in handy. Meanwhile I tracked down a copy of the full article. It's downloadable for free at http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/neubiomol/ARTICLES/Gisiger2001.pdf Better yet, enclosed is a file with the full article and with another article that relates. I may not have the time to read these, so if you digest anything interesting from them and get the time, please jot me an email and give me your summary of what these articles are getting at. Since Eshel Ben-Jacob has been trying to point out for years why such concepts as scale-free power laws and fractals fail to get at the creative twists evolution comes up with as it moves from one level of emergence to another, anything in these pieces that indicates how newness enters the repetition of the old would be of particular interest. Again, all thanks. Onward--Howard In a message dated 10/5/2005 5:12:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, JBJbrody at cs.com writes: Biological Reviews (2001), 76: 161-209 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1464793101005607 Published Online 17May2001 *This article is available in a PDF that may contain more than one articles. Therefore the PDF file's first page may not match this article's first page. Login Subscribe to journal Email abstract Save citation Content alerts Review Article Scale invariance in biology: coincidence or footprint of a universal mechanism? T. GISIGER a1 p1 a1 Groupe de Physique des Particules, Universit? de Montr?al, C.P. 6128, succ. centre-ville, Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada, H3C 3J7 (e-mail: gisiger at pasteur.fr) Abstract In this article, we present a self-contained review of recent work on complex biological systems which exhibit no characteristic scale. This property can manifest itself with fractals (spatial scale invariance), flicker noise or 1/f-noise where f denotes the frequency of a signal (temporal scale invariance) and power laws (scale invariance in the size and duration of events in the dynamics of the system). A hypothesis recently put forward to explain these scale-free phenomomena is criticality, a notion introduced by physicists while studying phase transitions in materials, where systems spontaneously arrange themselves in an unstable manner similar, for instance, to a row of dominoes. Here, we review in a critical manner work which investigates to what extent this idea can be generalized to biology. More precisely, we start with a brief introduction to the concepts of absence of characteristic scale (power-law distributions, fractals and 1/f- noise) and of critical phenomena. We then review typical mathematical models exhibiting such properties: edge of chaos, cellular automata and self-organized critical models. These notions are then brought together to see to what extent they can account for the scale invariance observed in ecology, evolution of species, type III epidemics and some aspects of the central nervous system. This article also discusses how the notion of scale invariance can give important insights into the workings of biological systems. (Received October 4 1999) (Revised July 14 2000) (Accepted July 24 2000) Key Words: Scale invariance; complex systems; models; criticality; fractals; chaos; ecology; evolution; epidemics; neurobiology. Correspondence: p1 Present address: Unit? de Neurobiologie Mol?culaire, Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Dr Roux, 75724 Paris, Cedex 15, France. Retrieved February 16, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp Week of Feb. 12, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 7 , p. 106 Life on the Scales Simple mathematical relationships underpin much of biology and ecology Erica Klarreich A mouse lives just a few years, while an elephant can make it to age 70. In a sense, however, both animals fit in the same amount of life experience. In its brief life, a mouse squeezes in, on average, as many heartbeats and breaths as an elephant does. Compared with those of an elephant, many aspects of a mouse's life?such as the rate at which its cells burn energy, the speed at which its muscles twitch, its gestation time, and the age at which it reaches maturity?are sped up by the same factor as its life span is. It's as if in designing a mouse, someone had simply pressed the fast-forward button on an elephant's life. This pattern relating life's speed to its length also holds for a sparrow, a gazelle, and a person?virtually any of the birds and mammals, in fact. Small animals live fast and die young, while big animals plod through much longer lives. "It appears as if we've been gifted with just so much life," says Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "You can spend it all at once or slowly dribble it out over a long time." a5850_1358.jpg Dean MacAdam Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal's size: They are proportional to the animal's mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the ?1/4 power. The reasons behind these laws were a mystery until 8 years ago, when Enquist, together with ecologist James Brown of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory proposed a model to explain quarter-power scaling in mammals (SN: 10/16/99, p. 249). They and their collaborators have since extended the model to encompass plants, birds, fish and other creatures. In 2001, Brown, West, and several of their colleagues distilled their model to a single formula, which they call the master equation, that predicts a species' metabolic rate in terms of its body size and temperature. "They have identified the basic rate at which life proceeds," says Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. In the July 2004 Ecology, Brown, West, and their colleagues proposed that their equation can shed light not just on individual animals' life processes but on every biological scale, from subcellular molecules to global ecosystems. In recent months, the investigators have applied their equation to a host of phenomena, from the mutation rate in cellular DNA to Earth's carbon cycle. Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, hails the team's work as a major step forward. "I think they have provided us with a unified theory for ecology," he says. The biological clock In 1883, German physiologist Max Rubner proposed that an animal's metabolic rate is proportional to its mass raised to the 2/3 power. This idea was rooted in simple geometry. If one animal is, say, twice as big as another animal in each linear dimension, then its total volume, or mass, is 23 times as large, but its skin surface is only 22 times as large. Since an animal must dissipate metabolic heat through its skin, Rubner reasoned that its metabolic rate should be proportional to its skin surface, which works out to mass to the 2/3 power. a5850_2473.jpg Dean MacAdam In 1932, however, animal scientist Max Kleiber of the University of California, Davis looked at a broad range of data and concluded that the correct exponent is 3/4, not 2/3. In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude. For most of the past 70 years, ecologists had no explanation for the 3/4 exponent. "One colleague told me in the early '90s that he took 3/4-scaling as 'given by God,'" Brown recalls. The beginnings of an explanation came in 1997, when Brown, West, and Enquist described metabolic scaling in mammals and birds in terms of the geometry of their circulatory systems. It turns out, West says, that Rubner was on the right track in comparing surface area with volume, but that an animal's metabolic rate is determined not by how efficiently it dissipates heat through its skin but by how efficiently it delivers fuel to its cells. Rubner should have considered an animal's "effective surface area," which consists of all the inner surfaces across which energy and nutrients pass from blood vessels to cells, says West. These surfaces fill the animal's entire body, like linens stuffed into a laundry machine. The idea, West says, is that a space-filling surface scales as if it were a volume, not an area. If you double each of the dimensions of your laundry machine, he observes, then the amount of linens you can fit into it scales up by 23, not 22. Thus, an animal's effective surface area scales as if it were a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure. This creates a challenge for the network of blood vessels that must supply all these surfaces. In general, a network has one more dimension than the surfaces it supplies, since the network's tubes add one linear dimension. But an animal's circulatory system isn't four dimensional, so its supply can't keep up with the effective surfaces' demands. Consequently, the animal has to compensate by scaling back its metabolism according to a 3/4 exponent. Though the original 1997 model applied only to mammals and birds, researchers have refined it to encompass plants, crustaceans, fish, and other organisms. The key to analyzing many of these organisms was to add a new parameter: temperature. Mammals and birds maintain body temperatures between about 36?C and 40?C, regardless of their environment. By contrast, creatures such as fish, which align their body temperatures with those of their environments, are often considerably colder. Temperature has a direct effect on metabolism?the hotter a cell, the faster its chemical reactions run. In 2001, after James Gillooly, a specialist in body temperature, joined Brown at the University of New Mexico, the researchers and their collaborators presented their master equation, which incorporates the effects of size and temperature. An organism's metabolism, they proposed, is proportional to its mass to the 3/4 power times a function in which body temperature appears in the exponent. The team found that its equation accurately predicted the metabolic rates of more than 250 species of microbes, plants, and animals. These species inhabit many different habitats, including marine, freshwater, temperate, and tropical ecosystems. The equation gave the researchers a way to compare organisms with different body temperatures?a person and a crab, or a lizard and a sycamore tree? and thereby enabled the team not just to confirm previously known scaling laws but also to discover new ones. For instance, in 2002, Gillooly and his colleagues found that hatching times for eggs in birds, fish, amphibians, and plankton follow a scaling law with a 1/4 exponent. When the researchers filter out the effects of body temperature, most species adhere closely to quarter-power laws for a wide range of properties, including not only life span but also population growth rates. The team is now applying its master equation to more life processes?such as cancer growth rates and the amount of time animals sleep. "We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar," says Gillooly. A single equation predicts so much, the researchers contend, because metabolism sets the pace for myriad biological processes. An animal with a high metabolic rate processes energy quickly, so it can pump its heart quickly, grow quickly, and reach maturity quickly. Unfortunately, that animal also ages and dies quickly, since the biochemical reactions involved in metabolism produce harmful by-products called free radicals, which gradually degrade cells. "Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate," Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, "but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time." Scaling up The researchers propose that their framework can illuminate not just properties of individual species, such as hours of sleep and hatching times, but also the structure of entire communities and ecosystems. Enquist, West, and Karl Niklas of Cornell University have been looking for scaling relationships in plant communities, where they have uncovered previously unnoticed patterns. a5850_3175.jpg REGULAR ON AVERAGE. Newly discovered scaling laws have revealed an unexpected relationship between the spacing of trees and their trunk diameters in a mature forest. PhotoDisc The researchers have found, for instance, that in a mature forest, the average distance between trees of the same mass follows a quarter-power scaling law, as does trunk diameter. These two scaling laws are proportional to each other, so that on average, the distance between trees of the same mass is simply proportional to the diameter of their trunks. "When you walk in a forest, it looks random, but it's actually quite regular on average," West says. "People have been measuring size and density of trees for 100 years, but no one had noticed these simple relationships." The researchers have also discovered that the number of trees of a given mass in a forest follows the same scaling law governing the number of branches of a given size on an individual tree. "The forest as a whole behaves as if it is a very large tree," West says. Gillooly, Brown, and their New Mexico colleague Andrew Allen have now used these scaling laws to estimate the amount of carbon that is stored and released by different plant ecosystems. Quantifying the role of plants in the carbon cycle is critical to understanding global warming, which is caused in large part by carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere when animals metabolize food or machines burn fossil fuels. Plants, by contrast, pull carbon dioxide out of the air for use in photosynthesis. Because of this trait, some ecologists have proposed planting more forests as one strategy for counteracting global warming. In a paper in an upcoming Functional Ecology, the researchers estimate carbon turnover and storage in ecosystems such as oceanic phytoplankton, grasslands, and old-growth forests. To do this, they apply their scaling laws to the mass distribution of plants and the metabolic rate of individual plants. The model predicts, for example, how much stored carbon is lost when a forest is cut down to make way for farmlands or development. Martinez del Rio cautions that ecologists making practical conservation decisions need more-detailed information than the scaling laws generally give. "The scaling laws are useful, but they're a blunt tool, not a scalpel," he says. Scaling down The team's master equation may resolve a longstanding controversy in evolutionary biology: Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different estimates of when certain species diverged? Geneticists calculate when two species branched apart in the phylogenetic tree by looking at how much their DNA differs and then estimating how long it would have taken for that many mutations to occur. For instance, genetic data put the divergence of rats and mice at 41 million years ago. Fossils, however, put it at just 12.5 million years ago. The problem is that there is no universal clock that determines the rate of genetic mutations in all organisms, Gillooly and his colleagues say. They propose in the Jan. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, instead, the mutation clock?like so many other life processes?ticks in proportion to metabolic rate rather than to time. The DNA of small, hot organisms should mutate faster than that of large, cold organisms, the researchers argue. An organism with a revved-up metabolism generates more mutation-causing free radicals, they observe, and it also produces offspring faster, so a mutation becomes lodged in the population more quickly. When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times?including those of rats and mice?line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper's coauthors. The team plans to use its metabolic framework to investigate why the tropics are so much more diverse than temperate zones are and why there are so many more small species than large ones. Most evolutionary biologists have tended to approach biodiversity questions in terms of historical events, such as landmasses separating, Kaspari says. The idea that size and temperature are the driving forces behind biodiversity is radical, he says. "I think if it holds up, it's going to rewrite our evolutionary-biology books," he says. Enthusiasm and skepticism While the metabolic-scaling theory has roused much enthusiasm, it has its limitations. Researchers agree, for instance, that while the theory produces good predictions when viewed on a scale from microbes to whales, the theory is rife with exceptions when it's applied to animals that are relatively close in temperature and size. For example, large animals generally have longer life spans than small animals, but small dogs live longer than large ones. a5850_4238.jpg Dean MacAdam Brown points out that the metabolic-scaling law may be useful by calling attention to such exceptions. "If you didn't have a general theory, you wouldn't know that big dogs are something interesting to look at," he observes. Many questions of particular interest to ecologists concern organisms that are close in size. Metabolic theory may not explain, for example, why certain species coexist or why particular species invade a given ecosystem, says John Harte, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Some scientists question the very underpinnings of the team's model. Raul Suarez, a comparative physiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara disputes the model's starting assumption that an animal's metabolic rate is determined by how efficiently it can transport resources from blood vessels to cells. Suarez argues that other factors are equally important, or even more so. For instance, whether the animal is resting or active determines which organs are using the most energy at a given time. "Metabolic scaling is a many-splendored thing," he says. Suarez' concern is valid, agrees Kaspari. However, he says, the master equation's accurate predictions about a huge range of phenomena are strong evidence in its favor. Ecologists, physiologists, and other biologists appear to be unanimous on one point: The team's model has sparked a renaissance for biological-scaling theory. "West and Brown deserve a great deal of credit for rekindling the interest of the scientific community in this phenomenon of metabolic scaling," Suarez says. "Their ideas have stimulated a great deal of discussion and debate, and that's a good thing." If you have a comment on this article that you would like considered for publication in Science News, send it to editors at sciencenews.org. Please include your name and location. To subscribe to Science News (print), go to https://www.kable.com/pub/scnw/ subServices.asp. To sign up for the free weekly e-LETTER from Science News, go to http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/subscribe_form.asp. References: Brown, J.H., J.F. Gillooly, A.P. Allen, V.M. Savage, and G.B. West. 2004. Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85(July):1771-1789. Abstract. Gillooly, J.F., A.P. Allen, G.B. West, and J.H. Brown. 2005. The rate of DNA evolution: Effects of body size and temperature on the molecular clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(Jan. 4):140-145. Abstract available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/1/140. Gillooly, J.F. . . . G.B. West . . . and J.H. Brown. 2002. Effects of size and temperature on developmental time. Nature 417(May 2):70-73. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417070a. Gillooly, J.F., J.H. Brown, G.B. West, et al. 2001. Effects of size and temperature on metabolic rate. Science 293(Sept. 21):2248-2251. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5538/2248. Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, J.H. Brown, G.B. West, and E.L. Charnov. 2004. Effects of body size and temperature on population growth. American Naturalist 163(March):429-441. Available at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/ journal/issues/v163n3/20308/20308.html. Suarez, R.K., C.A. Darveau, and J.J. Childress. 2004. Metabolic scaling: A many-splendoured thing. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part B 139(November):531-541. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpc.2004.05.001. West, G.B., J.H. Brown, and B.J. Enquist. 1997. A general model for the origin of allometric scaling models in biology. Science 276(April 4):122-126. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/276/5309/122. Further Readings: Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, . . . A.P. Allen . . . and J.H. Brown. 2004. The predominance of quarter-power scaling in biology. Functional Ecology 18(April):257-282. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0269-8463.2004.00856.x. Weiss, P. 1999. Built to scale. Science News 156(Oct. 16):249-251. References and sources available at http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/10_16_99/bob1ref.htm. Sources: Anurag Agrawal Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Andrew Allen Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 James H. Brown Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 Steven Buskirk Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming 1000 E. University Avenue Laramie, WY 82071 Brian Enquist Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 James Gillooly Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 John Harte Energy and Resources Group 310 Barrows Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Michael Kaspari Department of Zoology University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019 Carlos Mart?nez del Rio Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming Laramie, WY 82071 Karl Niklas Department of Plant Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Raul Suarez Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93016 Geoffrey B. West Theoretical Physics Division Los Alamos National Laboratory MS B285 Los Alamos, NM 87545 From Science News, Vol. 167, No. 7, Feb. 12, 2005, p. 106. Home | Table of Contents | Feedback | Subscribe | Help/About | Archives | Search Copyright ?2005 Science Service. All rights reserved. 1719 N St., NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202-785-2255 | scinews at sciserv.org Subscribe Subscribe to Science News. Click OR call 1-800-552-4412. Google Search WWW Search Science News Free E-mail Alert Science News e-LETTER. Click here to find resources for enjoying our planet and the universe. Science Mall sells science posters, gifts, teaching tools, and collector items. Finally a store for science enthusiasts, professionals, and kids alike! Shop at the Science Mall. Science News Logo Wear Science News Logo Wear Copyright Clearance Center Photo Archive Browse a Science News photo collection. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.13/124 - Release Date: 10/7/2005 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:43:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:43:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edmonton Sun: India: 150 Women Slay Barber for Black Magic Message-ID: India: 150 Women Slay Barber for Black Magic Edmonton Sun (Canada), Oct. 6 HYDERABAD, India???Indian police arrested 67 women yesterday after a mob killed a barber suspected of practising black magic, an official said. Dozens more women were being sought by authorities. The arrests came after the mob of about 150 women from the south Indian village of Muddireddypalli attacked the shop of a barber named Parvathalu on Tuesday, beating him and locking him inside before setting the building on fire, said C. Satyanarayana, a district official. The villagers suspected he was practising black magic and held him responsible for the large number of deaths in the village in the past year, he said. The attack was prompted by the death of another woman earlier this week, the official said. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:43:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:43:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science: Multiscaling properties of large-scale structure in the universe Message-ID: Multiscaling properties of large-scale structure in the universe Martinez, V J, Paredes, S, Borgani, S, Coles, P. Science. Washington: Science. Washington: Sep 1, 1995. Vol. 269, Iss. 5228; pg. 1245, 3 pgs [This is a terrifically important article. I had stated in my book that evidence for a created universe would be that the large-scale structure of the universe would *not* look like the result of random fractal processes. Benoit Mandelbrot, in _The Fractal Geometry of Nature_, had a computer-generated picture of large-scale clustering, but he did not fit it to any data. The article below shows the result of getting at the parameters of such a process. [The fit was good. Had the authors not been able to do so, one of my three most cherished hypotheses, that of non-creation, would have been put into serious jeopardy. [It would similarly have been put into jeopardy if the size distribution of species in a genus did not fit the outcome of a birth and death process, whereby new species come into being as a result of splitting at a certain random rate and go extinct at another random rate. That the two rates can be measured and get a good fit with the data was shown long ago by Yule, G. Udny 1924. "A Mathematical Theory of Evolution, Based upon the Conclusions of Dr. J.C. Willis, F.R.S." _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London_, ser. B, 213: 21-87. [Anyone who cherishes a hypothesis should try hard and honestly to think of what it would take for him to abandon his hypothesis. "Convincing proof" is cheating, since he gets to decide what will convince him! [My other two are that the co-evolution of genes and culture is crucial to understanding the evolution of human societies and that our root basic concepts (cost in economics, infinity in mathematics--I need to make a list) are at bottom intuitive KNOW-HOW concepts and cannot be nailed down into precise, Aristotelian KNOW-THAT genus-species definitions.] Abstract (Document Summary) The large-scale distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters in the universe can be described in the mathematical language of multifractal sets. A particularly significant aspect of this description is that it furnishes a natural explanation for the observed differences in clustering properties of objects of different density in terms of multiscaling. ------------- One of the key problems in modern cosmology is understanding how the spatial clustering of objects such as galaxies and galaxy clusters can provide clues about the evolution of primordial density inhomogeneities under the action of gravitational instability. The traditional tool for quantifying the spatial correlations of cosmological objects is the two-point correlation function xi(r), defined in terms of the probability delta-P of finding a pointlike object of a given type, such as a galaxy, in a small volume delta-V at a distance r from a given object of the same type delta-P = n[1 + xi(r)]delta-V (1) where n is the mean number density of objects. The two-point correlation function for galaxies, xi sub gg (r), is well fitted by a power law in the range r = 0.1h sup -1 to 10h sub -1 Mpc (1, 2): xi sub gg (r) = (r/r sub 0 ) sup -gamma , with an exponent gamma == 1.8 +/- 0.1 and a correlation length r sub O == (5 +/- 1)h sup -1 Mpc (h is the Hubble constant in units of 100 km s sup -1 Mpc sup -1 .) Analyses of samples of galaxy clusters, however, have yielded power-law fits to the cluster-cluster correlation function, xi sub gg (r), of a form similar to that of xi sub gg (r) but with exponents (3-10) varying in the range gamma = 1.6 to 2.6 and correlation lengths from 13h sup -1 to 30h sup -1 Mpc, with a strong dependence of r sub 0 on the richness class of the clusters selected (11, 12) Szalay and Schramm (13) noted that the clustering correlation lengths r sub 0,i for different classes of objects i can be described in terms of a unified scheme in which r sub 0,i scales with mean separation: (equation omitted) where n sub i is the mean number density of the objects. If the two-point correlation functions of different classes of objects all have a power-law shape with almost the same exponent gamma == 1.8, then xi(r) can be expressed in a universal dimensionless form (14, 15) (Equation 2 omitted) where beta = 0.2 to 0.3 (14, 15). This relation is remarkably well fitted by optical clusters, x-ray clusters, groups of galaxies, quasi-stellar objects, and radio galaxies, and although there are still significant uncertainties in the power-law fits for clusters, the general trend of increasing r sub 0 with richness seems to be well established observationally and is reproduced in numerical simulations of cluster clustering (16, 17). On the other hand, optical galaxies and IRAS galaxies (those first observed with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite), the objects for which most data are available, do not appear to fit into this scheme (14, 15, 18), because they are characterized by larger values of beta == 1.1 (15). This could be because small-scale (<5h sup -1 Mpc) galaxy clustering is principally determined by nonlinear gravitational effects and is therefore enhanced with respect to the weakly nonlinear clustering displayed by clusters on large scales (>20h sup -1 Mpc). In this report we shall show how these observational trends--in particular, the apparent difference in clustering behavior between clusters of galaxies and galaxies themselves--can be explained in terms of the multiscaling phenomenon, which is associated with the application of density thresholds to multifractal sets. Scaling is said to occur in a geometrical pattern whenever some quantity describing the spatial distribution has a power-law dependence on scale. For example, fractal models of coastlines have a length L that depends on the resolution d used to measure it according to L(d) oc d sup 1-D for some noninteger D: in this case, D is the Hausdorff dimension of the coastline structure. In contrast to simple fractals like this, which are described by a single scaling dimension (D), multifractal sets involve a spectrum of scaling indices: the density around different points is characterized by different (local) fractal dimensions. A particularly important signature of multifractal scaling is the fact that moments of the distribution of differing order q scale in a manner described by different dimensions D sub q (for a simple fractal, D sub q = D for all q). Such objects have proven extremely useful in describing a variety of nonlinear phenomena in turbulence, chaotic dynamics, and disordered systems (19), and there is now considerable evidence that galaxy clustering is intrinsically multifractal in character, perhaps connected with the supposed self-similarity of gravitational evolution (20). In the context of galaxy clustering, the important exponent is the correlation dimension D sub 2 , which is defined in terms of scaling of the correlation integral C(r) over a distance s (Equation 3 omitted) where A is a constant. The index D sub 2 is a clean and easy to interpret measure of clustering strength: the larger the value of D sub 2 . the weaker the large-scale clustering. Note that power-law scaling of C(r) implies power-law scaling of xi(r) only if xi(r) >>1. If this is the case, then Eq. 3 yields D sub 2 == 3 - gamma. However, this equality is not expected to hold in the range of scales where the correlation function is of order unity. Consequently, if the correlation integral behaves as a power-law when xi(r) == 1, the function xi(r) itself does not. By differentiating Eq. 3 with respect to r and putting r = r sub 0 , we obtain (Equation 4 omitted) which furnishes a useful estimator of r sub 0 . Multiscaling (21) is the general term given to scaling behavior in which the characteristic exponent (in this case D sub 2 ) is a slowly varying function of scale or of the threshold density used to select objects of different richness from an underlying distribution. This form of scaling is a general consequence of applying a density cutoff to a multifractal set. Regions of higher density in multifractal sets have smaller values of the scaling indices. If, for example, such a set is "censored" by removing all of the points where the local density is less than some given value epsilon, then the correlation dimension of the surviving set will be smaller than that of the uncensored set: D sub 2 (epsilon) < D sub 2 . This kind of thresholding is reminiscent of the idea of "biasing" (22), in which regions of high primordial density are identified with observable objects. Our philosophy is, however, quite different from this in that we apply our thresholding to the nonlinear density field modeled as a multifractal, rather than the initial (Gaussian) density perturbations. In this respect, our approach improves considerably on the standard approach to biasing. To demonstrate the applicability of this description to a realistic example, we first analyzed a series of numerical simulations of the distribution of rich clusters (17). In these simulations, clusters are identified as the highest peaks in the evolved density field. Consequently, cluster populations characterized by progressively larger mean separations d sub 1 are selected by applying progressively higher density thresholds. A plane projection of the three-dimensional density field of one of these simulations is shown in Fig. 1 for a so-called CHDM model, in which 30% of the critical density of the universe is provided by one flavor of massive neutrinos and the remainder is made up mainly of cold relic particles (23). (Fig. 1 omitted) This model has been shown to be reasonably successful at accounting for observed large-scale structure. The morphology corresponds to that of a multifractal distribution, rather than a simple fractal. Figure 2 shows the correlation integral results for such simulated universes. (Figure 2 omitted) Multiscaling behavior is clearly present in these simulations: D sub 2 varies with the characteristic interparticle distance of each sample d sub i . We have also analyzed the variation of the correlation length r sub 0 as a function of d sub i calculated by means of Eq. 4. Results are given in Table 1 and correspond to fitting C(r) over the scale range 10h sup -1 to 50h sup -1 Mpc. (Table 1 omitted) As expected on the basis of our multiscaling hypothesis, richer clusters (that is, with larger d sub i ) generate less steep C(r) and larger r sub 0 . The remarkably small errors in the fitting parameters (especially on D sub 2 ) show that there is an excellent power-law fit to C(r) over the entire range of scales considered. A similar qualitative behavior is manifested by the observed distribution of cosmic objects. If galaxies and galaxy systems with increasing richness are considered to be selected by applying a density threshold in the mass distribution, the multiscaling argument implies that the corresponding values of the correlation dimension D sub 2 must decrease with increasing density. We show here the results of a correlation integral analysis of different galaxy and cluster samples. For galaxies we use the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) sample (2), the Perseus-Pisces sample (24), and the QDOT (Queen Mary, Durham, Oxford, and Toronto)-IRAS redshift survey (25). The cluster samples used are the Abell and ACO (Abell-Corwin-Olowin) catalogs (26), the Edinburgh-Durham Cluster Catalog (EDCC) redshift survey (8), the ROSAT x-ray-selected cluster sample (10), and the APM (Automated Plate Measuring) cluster catalog (9). We have performed the calculation of C(r) directly on the CfA and QDOT galaxy surveys and Abell and ACO catalogs; in the other cases we just have integrated the published values of xi(r). Although this latter procedure is straightforward, the numerical integration does tend to exaggerate errors: direct calculations of C(r) are generally better. The x-ray, Abell, ACO, and APM cluster correlation integrals are all well-fit by a power law with exponent D sub 2 == 2.1 (Fig. 3). (Fig. 3 omitted) The EDCC sample yields a value of D sub 2 == 1.8 over the same scaling range. A value of D sub 2 == 2.5 applies to the optical galaxy catalogs (CfA and Perseus-Pisces), and a value of D sub 2 = 2.8 is obtained for the QDOT-IRAS galaxies. These values for D sub 2 are quite different from those obtained with gamma == 1.8 for the slope of xi(r) and in the relation D sub 2 = 3 - gamma. This is essentially because the range of scales for which we obtain the various estimates of D sub 2 in Fig. 2 does not coincide with the range where xi sub gg (r) behaves as a power law; clusters of galaxies sample this range of scales particularly poorly. Because the smaller D sub 2 is, the larger is the departure from a uniform space-filling distribution, these results mean that clusters of galaxies have stronger correlations than optical galaxies, which, in turn, have stronger correlations than IRAS galaxies. It is natural to interpret these trends in terms of multiscaling of objects identified in terms of different richness thresholds. A self-consistent picture emerges in which clusters correspond to higher matter densities than typical optical galaxies, which are themselves located (on average) in denser environments than IRAS galaxies. Even the apparently anomalous behavior of EDCC is consistent with this trend: clusters from this sample are, on average, richer than in the other cluster samples, so its behavior confirms the multiscaling of clusters of different density seen in the simulations we have already described. An important point to emerge from this analysis is that the most natural and effective way to characterize scaling properties of the clustering of objects of different intrinsic richness is through the correlation integral C(r) rather than the two-point correlation function xi(r). Although differences in the two descriptions are small if xi(r) >> 1, in the regime where xi == 1, no distribution can simultaneously display scaling of both xi(r) and C(r). The correlation integral description allows a wide range of empirical clustering data to be unified into a single coherent framework within which multiscaling is a natural consequence. For example, the fact that D sub 2 for IRAS galaxies is larger than that for optical samples indicates that IRAS galaxies are less correlated than optical galaxies, or in other words, that optical galaxies correspond to higher peaks of the density distribution. Using Eq. 4, we can obtain clean estimates of r sub 0 for these data sets. For the ACO sample, we get r sub 0 == 23h sup -1 Mpc, and for the Abell sample, r sub 0 == 26h sup -1 Mpc in the range 10h sup -1 to 50h sup -1 Mpc, whereas for the APM cluster catalog, we get r sub 0 16.7 sup h-1 Mpc in the range 1 sup h-1 to 40 sup h-1 Mpc, in agreement with the value reported by Dalton et al. fitting xi(r) directly to a power law (9). What is missing at the moment from this approach is a detailed understanding of the way initial conditions and dynamics interact to produce the observed scaling properties. Nevertheless, the ability to incorporate the dependence of clustering strength on richness into a unified multifractal scaling paradigm through the multiscaling hypothesis is a considerable benefit of this approach. Moreover, the robustness of C(r) scaling compared to that of xi(r) strongly motivates the use of C(r) as a diagnostic of clustering pattern and dynamics. Only by the use of appropriate statistical tools such as this will the new generation of galaxy redshift surveys lead to a theoretical understanding of the origin of large-scale structure in the universe. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. M. Davis, A. Meiksin, M. A. Strauss, L. N. da Costa, A. Yahil, Astrophys. J. 333, L9 (1988). 2. V. J. Martinez, M. Portilla, B. J. T. Jones, S. Paredes, Astron. Astrophys. 280, 5 (1993). 3. M. Postman, M. J. Geller, J. P. Huchra, Astrophys. J. 384, 404 (1992). 4. W. Sutherland and G. Efstathiou, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 248, 159 (1991). 5. Y. P. Jing, M. Plionis, R. Valdarnini, Astrophys. J. 389, 499 (1992). 6. G. Efstathiou, G. B. Dalton, W. J. Sutherland, S. J. Maddox, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 257, 125 (1992). 7. N. A. Bahcall, R. M. Soneira, W. S. Burgett, Astrophys. J. 311, 15 (1986). 8. R. C. Nichol, C. A. Collins, L. Guzzo, S. L. Lumsden, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 255, 21P (1992). 9. G. B. Dalton et al., ibid. 271, L47 (1994). 10. A. K. Romer et al., Nature 372, 75 (1994). 11. J. A. Peacock and M. J. West, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 259, 494 (1992). 12. M. Plionis and S. Borgani, ibid. 254, 306 (1992). 13. A. S. Szalay and D. N. Schramm, Nature 314, 718 (1985). 14. N. A. Bahcall and M. J. West, Astrophys. J. 392, 419 (1992). 15. X. Luo and D. N. Schramm, Science 256, 513 (1992). 16. R. A. Croft and G. Efstathiou, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 267, 390 (1994). 17. S. Borgani, M. Plionis, P. Coles, L. Moscardini, ibid., in press. 18. P. J. E. Peebles, Physical Cosmology (Princeton, NJ, 1993). 19. G. Paladin and A. Vulpiani, Phys. Rep. 156, 147 (1987). 20. S. Borgani, ibid. 251, 1 (1995); B. J. T. Jones, V. J. Martinez, E. Saar, J. Einasto, Astrophys. J. 332, L1 (1988); V. J. Martinez, B. J. T. Jones, R. Dominguez-Tenreiro, R. Van de Weygaert, ibid. 357, 90 (1990); B. J. T. Jones, P. Coles, V. J. Martinez, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 259, 146 (1992); R. Valdarnini, S. Borgani, A. Provenzale, Astrophys. J. 394, 422 (1992). 21. M. H. Jensen, G. Paladin, A. Vulpiani, Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 208 (1991); G. Paladin, M. Vergassola, A. Vulpiani, Physica A 185, 174 (1992). 22. N. Kaiser, Astrophys. J. 284, L9 (1984); J. M. Bardeen, J. R. Bond, N. Kaiser, A. S. Szalay, ibid. 304. 15 (1986). 23. A. Klypin, J. Holtzman, J. Primack, E. Regoes, ibid. 476, 1 (1993). 24. L. Guzzo, A. Iovino, G. Chincarini, R. Giovanelli, M. P. Haynes, ibid. 382. L5 (1992). 25. V. J. Martinez and P. Coles, bid. 437, 550 (1994). 26. S. Borgani, V. J. Martinez, M. A. Perez, R. Valdarnini, ibid. 435, 37 (1994). 27. We thank L. Guzzo, K. Romer, and G. Dalton for making their xi(r) results available to us. We are also grateful to L. Moscardini and M. Plionis for permission to use cluster simulations done by them together with P.C. and S.B. The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council provides P.C. with an Advanced Research Fellowship. S.P. is supported by a fellowship of the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia. This research was partially supported by a European Community Human Capital and Mobility Programme network (contract ERB CHRX-CT93-0129) and by the project GV-2207/94 of the Generalitat Valenciana. 13 April 7995; accepted 13 July 1995. [It took almost minus 6000 years for this paper to get accepted.] From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:43:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:43:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guido Tabellini: Democracy Comes Second Message-ID: Guido Tabellini: Democracy Comes Second http://www.project-syndicate.org/print_commentary/tabellini8/English Democracy is slowly spreading around the world. From the Middle East to Latin America and Asia, many autocracies are taking gradual steps towards more democratic and accountable forms of government, or have become fully-fledged and well functioning democracies. The US administration is determined to consolidate political freedoms in many developing countries under its sphere of influence; indeed, expansion of democracy has become a cornerstone of American foreign policy. There are many reasons to celebrate the current democratic wave. Democracy is associated with less injustice and abuse, with basic civic and political freedoms, and with greater sensitivity by governments for the true priorities of its citizens. But how important is democracy for economic success? Not much, the empirical evidence suggests. This might appear surprising. After all, is it not true that virtually all rich countries have democratic forms of government, while the poorest countries (mainly in Africa) are non-democracies? Indeed, throughout the world, democracy is strongly correlated with higher per capita income. But this correlation goes missing when one looks at the dimension of time rather than space. Countries that become democracies do not, on average, achieve faster economic growth after their political transition; and, vice versa, democracies that fail and relapse into autocracy do not, on average, do worse than before. The positive correlation between income and democracy that one sees across countries could be due to reverse causation: democracy is more likely to persist as a country grows richer. It could also be due to special historical or cultural circumstances: some societies are just more successful than others, both in terms of economic development and with regard to their ability to develop and maintain democratic political institutions. Whatever the reason for the observed positive cross-country correlation between income and democracy, it should not be confused with causality. Being democratic does not seem important in securing economic success. Of course, there are many different kinds of democratic transitions, and lumping them all together might be misleading. An important distinction in practice concerns the interaction between the economic and the political system. A democracy born in an open economic environment, with a well functioning market system, widespread foreign direct investment, and sizeable international trade, is likely to consolidate economic liberalism, stabilize expectations, and hence lead to more investment and faster growth. Conversely, if an economy is tightly controlled by the state, has protectionist barriers against foreign imports and capital movements, or relies on rents from exhaustible resources to obtain foreign currency, transition to democracy can be plagued by populism and struggles for redistribution, hurting economic growth. Empirical evidence supports the idea that the success of a democracy depends on the openness of the underlying economic system at the time of political transition. In the post-WWII period, the more successful episodes of democratic transitions have been preceded by widespread economic reforms that extended the scope of the market and facilitated international integration. Examples include Chile and South Korea in the late 1980's and Mexico in the mid-1990's. Conversely, when democratic transition was attempted in a fragile and closed economic environment, the outcome was much worse. This applies to the episodes of democratization in Latin America and the Philippines in the mid-1980's, but also to Turkey in the early 1980's and Nepal in 1990. The contrast between China and Russia also fits this pattern very well. China first opened its economic system to the rest of the world, and only now is it thinking (a bit too slowly) about political reform. Russia instead jumped into democracy, and only then worried about replacing socialism with a market system. There was probably no other way to do it in Russia, but the Chinese path seems much more likely to lead to lasting economic success. This does not mean that democracy is unimportant. But the sequence of reforms is critical for successful economic development, with economic reforms coming first. When an open and well functioning market system is in place, democracy has a much better chance to lead to lasting prosperity. An important reason for this is that, in order to create a successful market system, the state must respect basic individual rights: the rule of law, private property, and the enforcement of justice. These fundamental rights are part and parcel of democratic government. But when it comes to economic development, these fundamental rights are more important than other purely political aspects of democracy, such as universal suffrage and genuine political competition. This is how the Western world became democratic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Economic liberalism came first, political liberalism later. But today's young democracies have to do everything much faster. They don't have the luxury of restricting suffrage to property owners, or to more educated citizens. Nevertheless, we should remember the lessons of history. Political reforms are more likely to be successful if they are preceded by economic reforms. We should insist that Egypt or Pakistan improve their market system, apply the rule of law, and open their economies to international trade and capital movements. Allowing free elections and true political competition is also critically important, but this should follow economic reforms, not precede them. Guido Tabellini is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, Milan. References 2. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/tabellini8 3. http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributor/199 From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:43:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:43:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prospect (UK) Michael Lind: In defence of mandarins Message-ID: Michael Lind: In defence of mandarins http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7043 No. 115 / Oct 2005 The meritocratic mandarinate and its humanist culture cushioned mass democracy from the excesses feared by 19th-century liberals. Now the mandarins are in retreat will the nightmare of mobocracy come true? Michael Lind is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of "What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President" Pity the poor mandarin in a modern western democracy. In Britain, the senior civil servant is a figure of fun; the idea that the man in Whitehall might know best is regarded across the political spectrum as an absurd anachronism. In France, economic stagnation is sometimes blamed on the once-mighty ?narchie, with the implication that France would be better off under the leadership of US-style MBAs. In the US, "mandarin" is a term of abuse reserved for members of the nation's once-powerful northeastern establishment. Is the democratic mandarinate of the modern west going the way of the premodern Chinese version? If so, this should be a cause for alarm, for one of the main reasons that the experiment with large-scale democracy has worked is because it was accompanied by the creation of a modern mandarinate. From the American founders, Macaulay, Acton, and Mill to de Tocqueville, Guizot, Weber and Ortega y Gasset, the conservative liberals of western Europe and North America feared that universal suffrage would produce "mobocracy." But the nightmare of mass democracy never fully materialised, in large part because of the political and cultural role of the mandarinate--the "new class" of Marxist and neoconservative social theory, the Bildungsb?rgertum (cultured middle class) as opposed to the Besitzb?rgertum (propertied middle class). The strategists of this group, including Wilhelm von Humboldt and Matthew Arnold, proposed that a meritocratic elite, based in the middle class but not limited to it, provided the natural leadership for a modern society. The historical alliance of the hereditary aristocracy and the church would be replaced, in the west, by an alliance between a meritocratic mandarinate and the university. In addition to providing the education of the mandarins, the university, liberated from religion, would be the home of a secular but traditional pan-western high culture that would replace the Christian religion as the shared civilisation of Europe and its offshoots. In constitutional politics, the meritocratic mandarinate would moderate tendencies toward demagogy, plutocracy and special-interest corruption by supplying the leaders of the career services within government and the informal establishment outside of it. [Essay_Lind2.gif]-SubmitIt worked. Mobocracy was averted in universal-suffrage democracies by a version of the Polybian "mixed constitution." For Polybius, Cicero and many later political thinkers, the ideal constitution was a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The mixed constitution is not to be confused with the separation of powers advocated by Montesquieu and found in the US federal and state constitutions. The purpose of the mixed constitution was to balance social forces, not to separate government functions. The modern mixed constitution is a blend of democracy and meritocracy. In it, the mandarinate--in government and out of it--plays the role of the aristocracy in the Polybian system, checking the elective "monarchy" of democratic executives and the majority "tyranny" of democratic legislatures. But this unofficial system has been breaking down for some time, as the elected executive has overpowered the mandarinate as well as the legislature. In parliamentary democracies like Britain, the separation of the roles of head of government and head of state helped to restrain plebiscitary populism for several generations after universal suffrage was adopted, as did the strict rules and conventions on government behaviour guarded by senior civil servants. However, by the late 20th century, as many have observed, prime ministers like Thatcher and Blair were behaving like presidents, while US presidents were behaving like kings. The increasingly powerful mass media, instead of acting as constraints on plebiscitary populism, have tended to act as cheerleaders for it, even while savaging particular governments and political leaders. In both parliamentary and presidential democracies, the chief executive has been elevated from first among equals, in a parliamentary cabinet or a US-style departmental cabinet, to the status of a monarch. The demotion of cabinet ministers and, indeed, the cabinet itself has been accompanied by the aggrandisement of the presidential or prime ministerial court. In Britain senior mandarins who tried to fight this trend--Ian Bancroft under Margaret Thatcher, Robin Butler under Tony Blair--were sidelined. Meanwhile, informal political advisers are treated by the media as more powerful than government ministers, and they often are, in the same way that the most powerful people in a monarchical regime were often favourites, mistresses, stable-boys, henchmen, and astrologers. (The total number of special advisers has risen from 39 to 80 under Tony Blair.) The decline of the informal constitutional role of the meritocratic mandarinate has been accompanied by a crisis in the source of its legitimacy, the secular tradition of western high culture that until recently provided the basis of an education in the liberal arts. The idea of the liberal arts was an innovation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The debate between classicists and modernists in the Victorian era ended in a synthesis, in which Greek and Latin, the earlier basis for the education of clergymen and aristocrats, were replaced by a more flexible pattern of instruction, including modern classics, modern history and modern languages. The middle-class mandarins educated in this new tradition in turn served as patrons, and sometimes producers, of contemporary art, literature and scholarship, and set standards emulated by upwardly-mobile members of the working class. All of this now lies in ruins. Four sources of authority are invoked to fill the vacuum left by the decline of the modern humanism that legitimated the mandarinate: pro-fessionalism, positivism, populism and religion. Professionalism is the opposite of mandarinism, in the sense in which I am using the latter term. It was not always so. In the Anglo-American countries, more than in continental Europe, the professions have in the past served as the basis of democratic mandarinism. In the US, for example, the great law firms and investment banks that would allow their members to serve in the government for years on end sometimes compensated for the absence of a high civil service. Nevertheless, over time professionalism and mandarinism have diverged. While the mandarin is a generalist, the professional is a specialist. The mandarin's claim to social authority rests on a liberal education, which is assumed to be the best preparation for public and private service. The professional's claim to authority rests on mastery of a complex body of technical or scientific knowledge. The needs of professional accreditation have tended to make professional education increasingly technocratic. Legal education in the English-speaking world, for example, once consisted chiefly of a gentleman's liberal education plus Blackstone's Commentaries. Now a liberal education is at best an optional preliminary to a legal education. In higher education as a whole, the trend since the 19th century has been away from general education towards the balkanisation of universities into various self-contained intellectual disciplines, each with its own, often pseudo-scientific, methodology and self-contained body of knowledge. The professional ideal, among academic professionals as well as other professionals, is a world of vertical careers, with entry at the bottom but no lateral mobility. In the view of specialised professionals and academics, the mandarin is an incompetent dilettante, a despised amateur--why, mandarin humanism does not even have a methodology of its own! In Britain and the US, where professionalism has all but obliterated mandarinism and the humanist culture that supports it, French politicians like Dominique de Villepin who write poetry, novels and literary criticism are treated as figures of fun. In Britain, a senior civil servant who spends his leisure construing H?lderlin, like John le Carr?'s spy George Smiley, is acceptable if increasingly anachronistic. But British and American politicians who publish fiction are expected to publish light fare, like detective novels or tales of suspense. Playwright-politicians like V?clav Havel, novelist-statesmen like Mario Vargas Llosa and poet-statesmen like Octavio Paz are more common in continental Europe and Latin America, where the professional ideal of the technocratic specialist has not yet completely displaced the mandarin ideal. Unfortunately, the major contemporary critique of the professions comes not from defenders of the mandarin ideal but from free-market utopians. As William L Sullivan points out in a recent symposium on the professions in the journal Daedalus, "The prevalence of the notion that the market is self-regulating and morally self-sufficient has cast doubt on the public value of an individual's lengthy and expensive induction into a professional guild." The second enemy of mandarin humanism is positivism of left and right. John Gray has described positivism as the Enlightenment project of restructuring society on the basis of a pseudo-scientific ideology. Born in the 18th century, positivism in this sense is older than modern mandarin humanism, which arose in the 19th century in part as a reaction against it. In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold dismisses Jeremy Bentham and "the fanaticism of his adherents," declaring: "Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a school; with men like Comte, or the late Mr Buckle, or Mr Mill." Culture and ideology are secular sibling rivals, battling it out in the ruins of revealed religion in a struggle to define modernity. Each is a worldview and a political programme. What ideology is to positivism, culture is to mandarin democracy. Arnold connected the lack of respect for high culture in Britain with the lack of a meritocratic administrative elite: "We have not the notion, so familiar on the continent and to antiquity, of the state--the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals." From the 19th century to the 21st, the positivist ideology that has challenged the modern humanism of the democratic mandarinate most consistently has been not Marxism or some other form of left-wing positivism, but rather classical liberalism and libertarianism. From Herbert Spencer to Milton Friedman, proponents of laissez-faire capitalism have denounced the career public service in which meritocratic mandarins are most likely to be found as plugs in the mouth of the market's cornucopia. In the contemporary US, President George W Bush has endorsed legislation that would destroy all career government services outside of the military and foreign policy branches, by giving department heads the right to set their own rules for hiring and dismissal. Needless to say, instead of producing the libertarian utopia of limited government, this will simply lead to the further colonisation of the US federal bureaucracy by self-serving interest groups. Democratic mandarinism is rejected by populists as well as by professionals and positivist ideologues. Whatever their views of particular economic policies, populists share with free-market economists the premise that preferences and values are given and not to be questioned, much less shaped, by a cultivated elite. The idea that the well educated have an obligation to set an example in manners and taste for the less educated, a notion inherited by the meritocratic mandarinate from aristocrats, patricians and the Christian clergy, is rejected with equal vehemence by the egalitarian left and the populist right. Both sides of the culture wars are populist. The anti-elitism of the populist right is directed not at a self-conscious mandarin establishment, which does not exist any more, but rather at the counterculture, which now makes its home in university departments from which most mandarin humanists have been purged. The counterculture hates elitism as much as the populist right, its members pride themselves on the rejection not only of traditional norms but of the very idea of norms. For both sides, cultural authority bubbles up spontaneously from below. The multicultural left and populist right differ only in preferring different "authentic" folk cultures--those of immigrants and minorities for the left, those of the native working class for the right. In the mid-20th century, the restrictive nature of the broadcast media gave mandarin humanism an artificial advantage. Because even commercial television and radio stations were natural oligopolies with guaranteed profits, mandarin programmers could include a substantial amount of sophisticated material without fearing the loss of advertising revenue. It is startling to read that US television viewers in the 1950s were treated to on-air discussions with WH Auden and Lionel Trilling. But market forces put a stop to that even before cable television forced programmers to compete with a large number of rival channels by giving the people the "masscult" dreaded by thinkers in the early 20th century: reality television, soft porn, stock-car racing and robot gladiators. To the extent that the mandarin idea of a high culture survives, it is among traditional conservatives, whose conception of culture, unfortunately, is that of museum curators. After professionalism, positivism and populism, revealed religion provides the final alternative to the authority that the high culture of the west bestowed upon the modern democratic mandarinate. The secular idea of high culture always competed with the religious idea of divine truth as the basis of social authority. It was only to be expected that the clergy, having been dislodged by the clerisy, would seek to regain cultural authority. The cultural politics of the contemporary US can hardly be understood apart from the resurgence of Christian clericalism, even if this is not a factor in post-Christian Europe. Of the four sources of social authority other than humanist high culture, three--professionalism, positivism, and populism--throw the individual seeking guidance back on his own resources. All three are relativist. The professional, the economic libertarian and the populist politician or pollster, asked "How should I live?" can only reply: "What do you think?" One thinks of the New Yorker cartoon in which a child asks a teacher: "Do I have to do what I want to do?" But the traditional preacher, priest or mullah does not treat what economists call "preferences" as innate attributes of a person that cannot be questioned. On the contrary, in orthodox religions, individual behaviour and the social order are expected to conform to a divine order of some kind. In this respect, the cleric and the mandarin have much in common. While the mandarin and the cleric may disagree on the identity of the community and the nature of its standards, they agree in their rejection of the relativism that provides the basis of contemporary culture. The virtuous mandarin unites Bildung or strenuous self-cultivation with active citizenship in the same way that the devout believer unites self-examination with the performance of communal duties. But the community of the mandarin is worldly, the nation and the larger civilisation to which the nation belongs, rather than a religious congregation and the larger community of human beings and supernatural beings of which the congregation is believed to be a part. The mandarin thus is a scapegoat for all of the major forces in contemporary society. The humanist programme of mandarin education is rejected alike by the professional (for whom education is vocational), the positivist (whose task is to expose the power relations that works of literature or history conceal, in preparation for doctrinal instruction in an ideological system), the populist (whose goal is either to replace the classics with a contemporary canon or to reinterpret them to make them "relevant" for today) and the religious believer (for whom the substitution of mandarin humanism for revealed religion was always an enormity). The mandarin is an amateur, to the professional; a statist, to the libertarian; an elitist, to the populist; and a heathen, to the religious believer. What possibly could be worse than a society run by such people? The answer is a society without them. The contemporary US, and to a lesser extent Britain, shows the consequences of turning a modern democracy into a mandarin-free zone. In continental European countries, the existence of mandarin-dominated civil services has retarded the development of a "court" around prime ministers and chancellors. In the US, however, the kind of political patronage system abolished in other democracies generations ago means that every time the White House changes hands, thousands of appointees are given positions throughout the government. These appointees are loyal not to the government institutions in which they serve, nor even to the party of the president, but to the president himself--they are "Bushies" or "Clintonites" or "Reaganites." When a president of their party is out of power, many of these "in-and-outers" serve as lobbyists in Washington or spend their exile in think tanks or universities. The mentality of the in-and-outer appointee is that of an opportunistic courtier, not a principled and civic-minded mandarin. It is in the interest of job-seeking courtiers to magnify differences between the parties on policy, as much as it is the duty of the mandarin to seek the common ground of the public interest. To the extent that the mandarin ideal of duty to the public survives in the US, it is found among America's career public servants in the national security executive: the military, the foreign service and the intelligence agencies (America's domestic bureaucracy being weak and patronage-ridden). The most damaging opposition to George W Bush and the neoconservative clique has come from soldiers like Anthony Zinni, career civilian experts like Richard Clarke, the former "terrorism tsar" and diplomats like Joseph Wilson, whose wife Valerie Plame was "outed" as a CIA operative by Bush's chief adviser, Karl Rove, as part of a campaign to punish Wilson for rejecting the president's claim that Saddam was importing nuclear material from Niger. These and other career public servants have been models of Ciceronian rectitude--a fact that is more than a little troubling, because Cicero was one of the few leaders of Republican Rome who was a civilian. It is not a good sign that in the American republic the officer corps has become the mandarinate by default. America's unofficial mandarinate, the northeastern establishment, crumbled in the last quarter of the 20th century. The result is a social experiment in today's US as audacious, in its own way, as that of Soviet collectivism: an attempt to have a government without a governing elite. The US ship of state veers now in one direction, now the other. From a distance, one might conclude that the captain is a maniac. But a spyglass reveals that there is no captain or crew at all, only rival gangs of technocrats, ideologues, populists and zealots devoted to Jesus Christ or Adam Smith, each boarding the derelict vessel and capturing the wheel briefly before being tossed overboard. The decline of mandarinism in modern democracies has profound implications for political power and cultural authority. If I am right, the informal "mixed constitution" of mandarin democracy averted the formation of the mass society that liberal thinkers dreaded. But even though it failed to materialise in the liberal democracies of the 20th century, the nightmare of mobocracy may come to be in the 21st. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:59:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:59:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] InCharacter: James Q. Wilson: The Ties That Do Not Bind: The Decline of Marriage and Loyalty Message-ID: James Q. Wilson: The Ties That Do Not Bind: The Decline of Marriage and Loyalty http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=46 Man is a social animal utterly dependent on forming and maintaining relationships with other people. A person who has always been truly alone is one who will be emotionally dead. Of all of the relationships into which people enter, the family is the most important. We are raised by parents, confronted with siblings, and introduced to peers through our familial roots. Indeed, human character arises out of the very commitments people make to others in their family or outside of it. Marriage, of course, is the supreme form of that commitment. When we make marriage less important, character suffers. In addition to the fact that married people are happier, wealthier, and sexually more satisfied than are unmarried persons or those cohabiting, it turns out that married people and their children are less likely to commit crimes. The problem our society, and indeed any society, faces today is to reconcile character and freedom. The Western world is the proud beneficiary of the Enlightenment, that cultural and intellectual movement that espoused freedom, endorsed scientific inquiry, and facilitated trade. But for a good life, mere freedom is not sufficient. It must work with and support commitment, for out of commitment arises the human character that will guide the footsteps of people navigating the tantalizing opportunities that freedom offers. Freedom and character are not incompatible, but keeping them in balance is a profound challenge for any culture. One aspect of character that appears connected with marriage and is even included in the marriage vows of many religious traditions is loyalty. But what sort of loyalty is meant here? The word comes from the French loyaut?, which in turn derives from the Latin legalis. In feudal times, it meant fidelity to ones oath to a master. The nineteenth-century American philosopher Josiah Royce said that loyalty was the supreme moral good, but surely that cannot be right. As critics have pointed out, a Nazi is not regarded as a moral person because he is loyal to Nazism. Even being loyal to the state in which one lives can be destructive if the state is headed by an evil ruler or is constitutionally illegitimate. Let me distinguish, therefore, between two meanings of the term. Loyalty can mean doing ones duty (obeying the law, honoring promises, paying taxes, serving faithfully in the military) or it can mean a commitment to valued friends and family. In this second sense almost everyone is loyal to someone because they partake of the necessary sociability of mankind. No one can exist without being sociable to some degree; a human who lives life without any contact with other people will not be able to speak or perhaps even to think in some meaningful way. In this essay I use loyalty to mean the natural sociability of people. A loyal person is someone who is attached to other people for the long term based on a deep sense of what is due to them. It is hard to imagine a person who utterly lacks any sense of loyalty; that trait, after all, is the basis for friendship and the duties that friendship and moral obligations imply. Even people without married parents, or possibly without knowing any parent at all, will invest somebody a friend, a teammate, a gang member with loyalty. One can imagine a person who is part of society but, because he or she trusts no one in that society, lives a life of anxiety and calculation. And we can find people who appear to enjoy the company of others but who nevertheless lack any sense of obligation to them. We call them sociopaths because they will cheerfully cheat or attack others without compunction. The fundamental social institution that encourages loyalty is the family. An infant is raised by one or two parents and acquires an attachment, usually a strong one, to these people. If raised with brothers and sisters, a child will become attached to them. These siblings are ordinarily loyal to one another even when they are not fond of one another or live in widely separated locations. A family also instills some concern about the future, teaching people that they must pay taxes, service mortgages, and arrange for the education of their children in ways that suggest a commitment to manage whatever events may bring. The evidence of the centrality of the family is all about us. We care more about our children than about the children of others; we run greater risks to save a threatened child or parent than we do to help someone elses child or parent; when we go home we expect to be taken in; when football players appear between plays on television, they routinely say, Hi Mom. ..... Some countries, and some people in almost every country, recognize the benefits of social commitments but seek to obtain them from nonfamily sources. In Sweden, public officials have made it clear that the laws of that country should give no advantage to marriage over unmarried cohabitation. In France, a law is now in force that allows any couple to appear before a court clerk where they sign a paper that recognizes their union, one that can be ended at will with no divorce proceeding. Here in America, Emory Law School professor Martha Fineman has urged that marriage should be abolished as a legal category and replaced by an arrangement in which society will pay for children to be raised by caretakers. Her views were matched by a conservative federal judge, Richard Posner, who, after arguing that conventional marriages foster puritanical attitudes, went on to propose the Swedish system in which marriage offers so few advantages over cohabitation that the latter is preferable to the former. To see what is wrong with the view that commitment based on cohabitation is preferable to commitment based on marriage, one need only apply the implications of cohabitation to business partnerships. Suppose two people wish to sell bread. They can have an oral agreement to do that, or they can enter into an enforceable contract. If they rely on an oral agreement, then whenever one gets bored, greedy, or distrustful, he or she can walk away from the partnership with whatever that person can carry. But if they insist on a written and enforceable contract, ending the partnership will require the agreement of the other person and the sanction of the law. As a result of the power of contracts, most businesses use them. So also with living together. Men and women who cohabit have only a weak incentive to pool their resources and to put up with the inevitable emotional bumps that come from sharing an apartment and a bed. In this country each member of a cohabiting couple tends to keep a separate bank account. This means that they keep personal wealth apart from shared wealth. When the two members of a cohabiting couple have unequal incomes, they are likely to split apart, whereas when two members of a married family have unequal incomes they are likely to stay together. In a marriage, we merge not only our feelings but our wealth. We know that we not only share our love, we share our dependency. Cohabitation merely means living together; marriage means making an investment in one another. Why does marriage beget loyalty when cohabitation does not? The difference is that marriage follows a public, legally recognized ceremony in which each person swears before friends and witnesses to love, honor, and cherish the other until death parts them. Cohabitation merely means shacking up. Of course, many marriages end in an easily arranged divorce, but even in this new era of no-fault divorces, they still must be done before a magistrate and be accompanied by a careful allocation of property and children. Perhaps because of the acknowledged impermanence of their condition, cohabiting couples, compared to married ones, are more vulnerable to depression, have lower levels of happiness, experience more cases of physical abuse, are more likely to be murdered, are more likely to be sexually unfaithful, and more likely to be poor. Children living with cohabiting parents are, compared to those living with married ones, much more likely to witness their parents relationships end, to have emotional and behavioral problems, to experience educational problems, and to be poor. Some of the disadvantages of cohabitation result from the fact that in this country men and women who live together without being married are likely to be poor and erratic even before they formed their relationship. So the effects that are ascribed to cohabitation may result in part from prior disadvantages. In this country 60 percent of high school dropouts have cohabited compared to 37 percent of college graduates. In other countries, especially in Scandinavia, cohabitation is common among affluent people who have, in growing numbers, rejected conventional marriage. Because of these differences, the children of unwed American mothers are much poorer than those of unwed mothers in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. There is no easy way to sort out the different effects of cohabitation itself from the traits of those who choose to cohabit. It is possible that even if people who now cohabit were to marry, their lives, and those of their children, would be as bad as they are when they simply live together. The defects of cohabitation and the benefits of marriage are lost on many young Americans. Six out of ten high school seniors think it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married because by cohabiting they will find out whether they really get along. In 1985 about half of all Americans said that there is no reason why single women shouldnt have children. But in the same poll, people were asked whether it was acceptable for their daughter to have a child outside of wedlock. Only one out of eight respondents agreed. Apparently half of us think it is all right for other peoples daughters to have illegitimate children but hardly any of us want it for our daughters. As sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead put it, cohabitation is not to marriage what spring training is to baseball. This tension between our libertarian views about other people and our conventional views about ourselves has made it hard for this country to think seriously about marriage. Almost everybody believes that marriage is a good idea, but over one-fourth of all children (and over half of black ones) are now being raised in single-parent families. There is one large exception to this confusion in the publics mind: Among Americans who attend church weekly, only one-fourth said that it is morally acceptable to have a child out of wedlock, whereas among people who seldom or never attend church nearly three-fourths held that view. Religious communities are unabashed about wanting to breed the kind of cohesion and loyalty that results from a strong family unit. ..... The problem of single-parent families is, of course, much worse than that of cohabiting ones. This fact is by now so well-known that most sociologists believe it. Though single-parent families are poorer than two-parent ones, the best research shows that, even after controlling for income, growing up in a single-parent (typically, female-headed) family makes matters worse for a child, and that this is true in every ethnic group. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur have done the most careful research on this matter and have concluded that poverty by itself accounts for about half of the problems of children in single-parent families, with the absence of the father explaining the rest. These problems are not trivial. After holding income constant, boys in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail and girls in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in married families to have an out-of-wedlock birth. What all of this means for the rest of society is evident on the evening news programs. Boys without married fathers populate our street gangs, and these gangs are responsible for an inordinately high level of violence. We rely on the police to control gangs, but the important, and often absent, control is that exercised by fathers. A boy growing up without a father has no personal conception of what it means to acquire skills, find a job, support a family, and be loyal to ones wife and children. Research on the link between unemployment rates and crime has shown that the connection is very weak. The connection between crime and father absence is much higher. Boys in single-parent families are also more likely to be idle rather than in school or unemployed and to drop out of high school. These differences are as great for white families as for black and Hispanic ones and as large for advantaged children as for disadvantaged ones. In Europe as well as in America the proportion of children who live with a single, usually female parent has risen dramatically. In 1960 less than one out of every ten of the families in Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, or the United Kingdom was headed by a single parent, and many of these were families where the father had died. By 1988 that percentage had roughly doubled. There are several explanations for these changes. One is that women have entered the workforce and become economically more independent than they once were so that more of them can survive (and in a few cases do rather well) with a child and without a husband. These are the Murphy Brown mothers, but they are relatively rare. Only about 4 percent of white unmarried mothers are college graduates; the rest have, at best, finished high school. A second is that when women outnumber men, as they do here and in some other countries, they face tougher statistical odds against getting married. A third reason for single-parent families is that, at least in this country, welfare payments have enabled poor women to choose children and government checks over children and a husband. Indeed, evidence now suggests that the availability of welfare payments is associated with out-of-wedlock births. The fourth reason, in my view the most important one, is that cohabiting without being married and having a child out of wedlock have lost their stigma. We have a lot of single-parent families because the shame once attached to having a child out of wedlock has largely disappeared. In my book, The Marriage Problem, I devote many pages to explaining why this stigma has vanished. A full account requires one to understand how the way we conceive of our relationships to one another has changed in Western society. At one time, a couple living together without being married was regarded as shameful. This stigma was reinforced by labeling any child emerging from this improper union as a bastard. The word bastardy referred to children born to unmarried parents. It did not refer to children conceived by their parents before marriage but born after they were married. Pregnant brides were common in England from its earliest history on; they produced about one-third of all births. They were not viewed as a social problem. But children born to unmarried parents faced very high costs. Such children could not inherit property, and so if they were abandoned by either parent they had no one to whom they could turn. To survive at all they usually had to be taken in by a kindly aunt or adult friend. Scholars have studied bastardy in England using data that goes back to the sixteenth century. Until roughly the beginning of the eighteenth century, the illegitimacy ratio (that is, the proportion of all births that were out of wedlock) was 4 percent or less. In the nineteenth century it crept up to around 5 percent. By the 1970s it was well over 8 percent. Today it is nearly 30 percent. That increase came about because the state abandoned the penalties it once enforced on bastards, developed programs to take care of single-parent families, and had its policies shaped by new sentiments about marriage. In this country those sentiments are easily captured by comparing opinions of the United States Supreme Court. In the late nineteenth century it spoke of marriage as a sacred obligation and a holy estate that was the source of civilization itself. By 1972 it had abandoned any such reference and said instead that marriage is an association of two individuals, each with a separate emotional and intellectual makeup. Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a sacred obligation, and now it is a private contract. Friedrich Nietzsche would not have been surprised. He predicted that the family would be ground into a random collection of individuals bound together by the common pursuit of selfish ends, in other words, family loyalty would slowly disappear. John Stuart Mill would have been pleased by these developments; he had long argued that marriage should be a private, bargained-for arrangement. For many women the change has been a disaster. They may prefer cohabitation and shun marriage as a trivial inconvenience, but then they discover that cohabitation will not last and their children will be disadvantaged. They may marry, but they will quickly discover that husbands often want new trophy wives and, in order to get them, will find it easy to end marriages. And when the marriage ends, the women will discover that, though the courts try to be fair, they will often be left with too little money with which to support themselves and their children. Today the war between Western freedom and the radicalized critique of that freedom we find among many Muslims is a war about how well we manage the challenge between freedom and character. Our freedom has made the West wealthy; the lack of freedom in most Muslim nations has left that part of the world poor. Radical Muslims rejoin that Western freedom was purchased at too high a price because European and North American nations are awash in a sea of crime, drug abuse, pornography, illegitimate children, wanton women, and licentious television programs. Only by living in close devotion to the teachings of Allah as revealed in the Quran do these critics think that a culture can be holy. ..... There are some small signs that American culture is regaining a grip on itself in this regard. The crime rate has dropped dramatically for reasons that have nothing to do with economic success. The sharp increase in the percentage of children living with single parents that began around 1960 has leveled off and was about the same in 2003 as it had been in 1990. The rate at which children are born to teenage mothers has declined since 1991, the year at which it hit its peak. In 2000, teenage pregnancy rates for girls ages fifteen to nineteen were about one-fourth lower than they had been in 1991. Some of this reduction may well result from increased use of contraceptive devices rather than from sexual abstinence. In 2002, the use of condoms had increased by over one-third since 1988. Though there has been a decline in teenage birthrates and an increase in the use of contraceptives, the leveling off in the proportion of children living in single-parent families is at best a modest gain. It may be the result of either a revived culture or the exhaustion of further victims. The cultural explanation would be this: women are more willing to avoid becoming unwed mothers. The exhaustion argument is this: perhaps there are no more people at risk, and so the rates of children living in single-parent homes have reached a natural apogee. We cannot choose between these two explanations with any precision, but there are some signs that a cultural change has occurred. Bill Cosby made headlines when in June 2004 he called on parents to take charge of their children and for black men to stop beating their women. A survey done in 2001 jointly by CBS News and Black Entertainment Television found 92 percent of black respondents agreeing that absent fathers are a major problem. Many rap and hip-hop musicians, to a degree not appreciated by most of us, sing lyrics that call attention to fatherless families and child abandonment, albeit in words that offend practically everyone. It must be one of the supreme ironies of the modern age that the most vulgar, foul-mouthed musicians sing words that call attention to our gravest social problem. It surely is paradoxical that the worst features of our commitment to freedom endorse an appeal to the greatest threats to our character. At this point in an essay, one expects to find set forth the correct solution to our problem. That will not happen here. There is no magic bullet that can revive marriage and enhance its character-forming properties. Even our boldest measures have so far had little visible impact. Welfare reform reduced the proportion of women on welfare and increased the fraction who are working, but it has done next to nothing about increasing the likelihood that welfare recipients marry before having more children. It is easy to see why. If you run a welfare agency, you can urge your frontline employees to be tough about women seeking welfare payments. If you do that, your success is immediately evident, you save the state money, and you act in accordance with public opinion that has always regarded the old welfare system as a disaster. But now imagine that you want to tell these employees to increase marriage rates. Your effect will not be measurable or even visible for many years, you will not save the state any money, and you will not have public opinion strongly behind you. In fact, there is a tendency in American politics to shy away from any discussion of these matters because they lack the obvious pain of an airplane crash or the dramatic appeal of an isolated case. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against homosexual conduct many people have been preoccupied with either encouraging or resisting homosexual marriage. Whatever your views about homosexual marriage, were it adopted nationally it would affect only about 2 or 3 percent of the population. Cohabitation, divorce, and single-parent families are problems that affect roughly half of the population. Still, we find it more interesting to discuss homosexual marriage than to discuss marriage itself. But talking about marriage is essential to the future of our society. Marriage shapes our commitments and builds our character. No one is quite certain what will restore marriage to its once privileged position, but many private groups and some state governments are trying to find out. Our task ought to be to encourage and to evaluate these efforts. If we are successful in revitalizing marriage, we shall have dramatically improved loyalty and the benefits that flow from this commitment. Marriage, it is true, is a lasting restriction on human freedom; indeed, some young people resist marriage because by accepting it they lose some of their freedom. But every human freedom has its limits: we cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theater nor knowingly print libelous stories about another person. In every aspect of our lives we accept limits to freedom, but in the case of the limits set by marriage we gain a great deal in return: longer, healthier lives; better sex; and decent children. Loyalty to spouse and children and relatives enhances our capacity to enjoy the freedom we have. ..... James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books, the most recent of which are The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, Moral Judgment, and The Moral Sense. Many of his writings on morality and human character have been collected in On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:59:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:59:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ANSA: Birth of consciousness in brain Message-ID: Birth of consciousness in brain http://ansa.it/main/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2005-09-29_1421910.html Rome, September 29 - Italian researchers have discovered the "birthplace" of consciousness, a breakthrough that could eventually help cure a variety of medical conditions . While it has long been accepted that consciousness develops in a certain part of the brain, Marcello Massimini and Giulio Tononi have located its precise point of origin . In a study to be published in the next issue of the international weekly Science, the two experts claim that it is "formed" by rapid, mutual communication between the upper, cortical areas of the brain. "We've known for some time that certain areas of the brain are fundamental for generating consciousness, while others are not," explained Massimini, who works at Milan University . Together with Tononi, an Italian psychiatrist at the American University of Wisconsin-Madison, he embarked on a series of experiments based on Tononi's theory that consciousness is dependent on the brain's ability to integrate information . In practical terms, this means that certain parts of the brain must be able to "talk" to each other . For example, individuals with injuries to the spinal chord or cerebellum do not lose consciousness. On the other hand, damage to the outer part of the thalamus, a central region in the brain, can induce a loss of consciousness that is sometimes permanent, as in the case of comas . In a bid to understand what goes on in the brain when people lose consciousness, Tononi and Massimini looked at a reversible form of unconsciousness: sleep "At the start of the night, when we fall into a deep sleep, we and the universe around us 'cease to exist'," explained Massimini . "Yet the paradoxical element is that while our consciousness vanishes, the brain remains alert and very active." Using a new technique developed in Finland, the pair proved that consciousness is lost during sleep owing to a lack of communication between various different parts of the cerebral cortex . They first applied continual, low-grade stimulation to awake, healthy individuals in a very tiny section of the brain, using a technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) . The next stage involved measuring the spread of the stimulus with a high-resolution electroencephalogram (hr-EEG). "The result was crystal clear and absolutely extraordinary," said Massimini . When the subjects were awake, the stimulus lasted as long as 300 milliseconds, while it spread for just 100-150 milliseconds during deep sleep, showing that the brain is incapable of transmitting stimuli to other sections while in this state . This lack of connection between different cortical areas during sleep is vital in explaining the transition from consciousness to unconsciousness, according to Massimini . The combination of TMS and hr-EEG could eventually be used to create a kind of "index of consciousness", helping doctors make critical decisions in controversial "vegetable" cases, he said . While such developments are still some time in the future, he and Tononi believe their discovery could have more immediate applications in a variety of fields . Testing has already started on schizophrenic subjects, in the hope it could eventually help treat the condition, but it could also be used to evaluate comas or even maintain closer checks on patients under anaesthesia, he said. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 10 23:59:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:59:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Pravda: Nazi Propaganda Is a New Fashion Message-ID: Nazi Propaganda Is a New Fashion http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64363.html [Hitler is the most popular man in the world, living or dead, excluding religious figures, with the lone exception of Mr. Jefferson. This will strike many readers here as ridiculous or appalling, but the world's people as a whole have even less intelligence than Mr. Mencken attributed to Americans, of whom he famously stated (approx.) that no one ever went broke underestimating their intelligence. [Hitler is mostly admired as some one who stuck it to the Establishment, as a high-school dropout who made it good and dissed his enemies. He is especially admired in the Third World.] [Who would be Hitler's competitors as the most admired man in the world? [Stalin is admired in Russia as someone who would not brook nonsense and would restored discipline. He may edge out Hitler in Russia, but there aren't that many Russians. [Mao has few admirers, even in Red China. [Kennedy is still admired in Latin America, and you'll still find photographs of him on the walls of hovels there. He meant hope for many Latin Americans. I recall a large photograph of Roosevelt II in the back of a furniture store in Charlottesville. This was around 1965, long after FDR died. He meant to the owner of the store hope also. [Certain religious figures, such as Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha top Hitler in being admired, but what the historical figures were actually like is, of course, the subject of endless dispute. [Perhaps there are others as widely admired as Mr. Jefferson, but not as much as Hitler, but none come to mind. Washington, I don't think so, since he's not all that well-known in the Third World, which contains the bulk of humanity. [I welcome discussion.] 05:05 2005-10-04 Russia has caught World War II fever 60 years after the war's end, but the books and DVDs flying off store shelves are far from patriotic. They contain Nazi themes and often offer Nazi ideology. "It's already a fashion," said Sergei Stepanich, an expert on fascist literature at the Center for Human Rights. Nestled among pornographic DVDs at kiosks at Leningradsky Station are numerous discs offering original [18]Nazi propaganda from the 1940s. The DVDs carry the original newsreels that were shown in German cinemas. A DVD on the Nazi SS has a blurb on the back of the box that talks about the troops' "genuine professionalism." "The DVDs are very popular," said one merchant, who refused to give his name. The propaganda is not only on sale at Moscow's railway stations. At a central Moscow outlet of Soyuz Records, one of the capital's biggest music and video chains, a series of DVDs on the actresses of the Third Reich shares a shelf with Audrey Hepburn box sets. A few hundred meters away from the Kremlin monument to the victims of World War II, an ordinary kiosk in a metro underpass sells a pirated nine-disc DVD collection called "A Chronicle of the Third Reich." The series is a compilation of serious documentary films on the Nazi regime but wrapped in a sensational cover. Buyers may just be interested in history, but Jewish and human rights organizations believe it is a sign of an increased fascination with fascist ideology. "It is probably not simply interest, but either young radicalism or a xenophobic-chauvinistic viewpoint," said Yevgeny Altman, the head of the Holocaust Fund in Russia. There has been an interest in fascist and specifically Nazi ideology since the early 1990s, but now the interest has taken on a commercial aspect, said Stepanich, who helped organize a campaign titled "The City Without Fascist Literature" over the summer. Among books, perhaps the most popular are a series written by Yury Mukhin, the editor of the newspaper Duel, that argues the Holocaust did not happen. The books are published by Yauza-Eksmo Press. It was unclear who was behind the publishing house, with a spokesman for Eksmo, one of the country's largest book publishers and the publisher of the Russian translation of the Harry Potter books, saying his company had no connection with Yauza-Eksmo Press. When a reporter telephoned the Eksmo bookstore, however, a sales clerk offered a 20-page catalog of books published by Yauza-Eksmo Press. It is the literature that most worries human rights campaigners. Stepanich said respectable publishing houses were now publishing books that embrace fascist ideology. "It was marginal in the 1990s," he said. "Russia is becoming one of the world centers for Holocaust denial," Altman added. "We're worried that you can now find it in bookshops like Biblio Globus." Biblio Globus, a leading Moscow bookstore, had no immediate comment. When human rights activists discovered a series of books that espouse fascist ideology at a recent book fair, their protests were ignored, Altman said. The problem, he said, is that bookstores have difficulty singling out the books with fascist propaganda. He said booksellers sometimes call him to ask whether they could sell a certain book. The country has seen an increase in attacks on minorities in recent years, and rights activists link it to an increase in nationalist sentiment. A suspect held in the recent stabbing death of a Congolese student in St. Petersburg reportedly had a swastika on his cell phone, The Moscow Times reported. [Here are some links to other articles in "News from Russia," which is put out by Pravda. Pravda is the Russian word for truth. As the main newspaper under Communism, it published anything but truth, as all commentators not controlled by the Soviets widely remarked. "Pravda" was a joke.] 03:51 Luzhkov's Rocker Set to Join City Hall Exodus [34]Moscow politician and part-time rock musician Mikhail Men could become the third key ally of Mayor Yury Luzhkov's to be appointed a governor this year after being picked as one of three candidates to run the Ivanovo region. [35]More details... 00:02 Lenin's last wish should be fulfilled - Sliska and Krasheninnikov [36]MOSCOW. State Duma First vice-speaker for United Russia Lyubov Sliska believes that it would be correct to bury Lenin according to Christian traditions. [37]More details... 03:33 Putin welcomes 'good dynamics' at Russian Railways [38]MOSCOW. President Vladimir Putin welcomed the 'good dynamics' in the development of Russian Railways as he met with its head, Vladimir Yakunin, on Saturday. [39]More details... 01:49 Sakhalin-1 project to produce first oil, gas on weekend [40]The Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project operated by Exxon Neftegaz Limited (ENL) will start producing the first crude and gas over the weekend. [41]More details... 00:31 Spacecraft carrying three to ISS put into orbit [42]OSCOW Oct 1 A Soyuz-TMA-7 spacecraft carrying Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev, NASA astronaut William McArthur, and U.S. space tourist Gregory Olsen successfully reached a pre-calculated orbit at 8:03 a.m. on Saturday, a spokesman for the Russian space mission control in Korolyov outside Moscow. [43]More details... 17:10 Two police officers wounded in Russia's restive Dagestan region [44]Two police officers wounded as unknown assailants opened fire on a police patrol car in the Dagestani city of Khasavyurt early Thursday, the regional Interior Ministry said [45]More details... 07:03 Anthrax pesthole liquidated at Prigorodny District of South Ossetia [46]Anthrax pesthole has been localized and completely liquidated in Prigodniy District of South Ossetia. Life of two citizens of the village of Chermen, who are now in hospital, is out of danger, REGNUM was told in the Republican Emergency Hospital. [47]More details... 06:24 Liquid gas storage facility to be built at Sverdlovsk Region [48]Major French Company 'Air Liquid' has signed a deal with the Sverdlovsk 'Uraltehgaz' plant to build a large liquid oxygen and nitrogen production plant and a liquid gas storage facility, a spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Governor said. [49]More details... 05:29 Gazprom, Sibneft stock quotations drop after deal announcement [50]MOSCOW, Sept. 28 Stock quotations of Russia's natural gas monopoly Gazprom and Sibneft oil company that have been the leaders of growth on the Russian market in previous days have begun to decline after the announcement about a deal concluded by the companies. [51]More details... 02:24 South Siberian Region Tries to Tax Baptisms and Funerals [52]The regional legislature in southern Siberia's Kurgan has approved amendments to the imputed tax law that will introduce taxation for religious rituals such as funerals and baptisms, the Vedomosti business daily reported on Tuesday. The move has already caused protests from the Orthodox Church and the Finance Ministry. [53]More details... 02:49 Two Muscovites steal audio system from Swedish embassy [54]RUSSIA. Sept 25 Police have detained two Muscovites suspected of stealing an audio system from the Swedish embassy. [55]More details... 02:25 Dagestan gas pipeline blast was of technogenic nature-experts [56]The explosion at a gas pipeline in Dagestan Republic was caused by a "technogenic situation," believe specialists of the Kaspiigazprom company citing preliminary data. [57]More details... 04:23 Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov criticises situation in aircraft building industry [58]MOSCOW, September 22. Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov criticised on Thursday the development level of the Russian aircraft building industry. 'I cannot say Russia is doing its best for occupying a proper place in the competitive world,' he said at a meeting of the cabinet of ministers, which is discussing the development strategy of the aircraft building industry. [59]More details... 03:21 Putin says Northern Dimension prgrm of interest to all Europeans [60]St PETERSBURG, September 22. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Finnish President Tarya Halonen had a meeting here Thursday. [61]More details... 01:51 Russian shipwreck death toll rises to 13 [62]KRASNOYARSK. The death toll in a September 16 accident in which a sea liner sank while approaching Russia's Dudinka seaport rose to 13 on Thursday, as five more bodies were found inside the ship. [63]More details... 14:55 Mike Tyson visits Chechnya to attend boxing tournament [64]Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson arrived to Chechnya to be the honored guest at a boxing tournament in Gudermes, the republic's second largest city [65]More details... 13:10 Roadside bomb killed one and wounding five in Grozny [66]A roadside bomb blew up a car in the Chechen capital Grozny on Monday, killing one person and wounding five others, emergency response officials said [67]More details... 11:33 Two criminals liquidated in Russia's Dagestan region [68]Two suspected criminals were killed in a clash with police in Russia's restive southern province of Dagestan [69]More details... 17:42 Military truck exploded in Dagestan killing two serviceman [70]Two servicemen had been killed and three others wounded in explosion, in Dagestan, Friday, Dagestani Interior Ministry, said to The ITAR-Tass news agency [71]More details... 14:06 Russia marked year since Beslan Siege [72]More than 500 children, teachers and parents gathered at Beslan's School No. 1 in southern Russia to mark the first anniversary of Russia's worst terrorist attack, which claimed 331 lives [73]More details... 10:46 Beslan teachers send letter to Putin one year after school siege looking for truth [74]Teachers of Beslan school No. 1, destroyed in last September's siege, have sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of the first anniversary, Ekho Moskvy radio station reported [75]More details... 18:00 Kids slayer lynched by mob in Dagestan [76]A man suspected of murdering two eight-year-old girls was killed by a mob in the southern Russian province of Dagestan, police said Monday [77]More details... 18:55 Uzbek Senators vote for eviction of US troops [78]The Uzbek Senate (the upper chamber of the Republic of Uzbekistan) will discuss the problem of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Khanabad military base, near Karshi, on August 26 [79]More details... 18:27 Council of Europe official to investigate mysterious disappearance of babies in Ukraine [80]A delegate from the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly is expected to visit Ukraine next week to investigate the alleged disappearance of newborn babies in mysterious circumstances, the assembly said Friday [81]More details... 15:55 Ingushetia premier wounded after assassination attempt [82]The head of the government of a southern Russian region bordering Chechnya was wounded on Thursday in a blast, a spokeswoman for emergencies service said [83]More details... 15:08 Ukraine celebrated Independence Day foregoing military parade [84]Ukraine marked its 14th anniversary of independence on Wednesday, foregoing the traditional military parade for the first time to underline what the new leadership wants to celebrate as a peaceful holiday [85]More details... 19:30 Chehens started mass riots in Yandiky, one man killed [86]Citizens of town Yandiky, Astrahanski region, voted for expulsion of Chechens from the settlement, on the last Council of the Elders. People believe that Chechens guilty for mass racial troubles [87]More details... 17:40 Bird flu outbreak spreads in Russia [88]Russian officials said that Ural bird flu outbreak is spreading despite the efforts to localize the decease. The H5N1 strain of bird flu that kills poultry in Russian Siberian regions is not dangerous to citizens as no cases among humans have been confirmed, the Emergencies Ministry said in a statement [89]More details... 20:30 Bird flu spreads west to Urals [90]Bird flu is going west. It has emerged in Chelyabinsk, the southern Urals region, a local official said Monday. The region is a big industrial center where all the previously hit by disease regions - Altai, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tyumen and Kurgan are mostly rural [91]More details... China [104]China's culture minister calls U.S. concerns of "China threat" a misunderstanding [go.gif] USA [105]Sun Micro up on planned Google collaboration [go.gif] World [106]LUKoil Bids $2Bln for Fields in Kazakhstan [go.gif] [107]Putin greets Russian Jews on occasion of Rosh Hashanah [go.gif] [108]Denikin, Ilyin remains re-buried in Donskoy Monastery [go.gif] References 34. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64362.html 35. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64362.html 36. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64353.html 37. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64353.html 38. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64210.html 39. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64210.html 40. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64209.html 41. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64209.html 42. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64206.html 43. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64206.html 44. 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http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/29/61906.html 78. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/26/61799.html 79. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/26/61799.html 80. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/26/61810.html 81. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/26/61810.html 82. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/25/61729.html 83. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/25/61729.html 84. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/24/61652.html 85. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/24/61652.html 86. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/19/61476.html 87. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/19/61476.html 88. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/16/61341.html 89. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/16/61341.html 90. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/15/61310.html 91. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/08/15/61310.html 92. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/01 93. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02 94. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/03 95. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04 96. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/05 97. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/06 98. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/07 99. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/08 100. http://newsfromrussia.com/politics/2005/09/30 101. http://images.pravda.ru/header.en.html 102. http://english.pravda.ru/sitemap_en.htmld 103. http://www.google.com/search 104. http://newsfromrussia.com/china/2005/10/04/64359.html 105. http://newsfromrussia.com/usa/2005/10/04/64357.html 106. http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/04/64361.html 107. http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/04/64360.html 108. http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/04/64358.html From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 11 00:45:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 17:45:07 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Pravda: Nazi Propaganda Is a New Fashion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Over here we are having more of a problem with applied corporatism, by people who may have learned from the Nazi mistakes. I say "may" because there are some things that suggest they did not learn- about front men who take themselves too seriously, about starting wars, about being too obviously predatory. Steve Hovland -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Premise Checker Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 5:00 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Pravda: Nazi Propaganda Is a New Fashion Nazi Propaganda Is a New Fashion http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64363.html [Hitler is the most popular man in the world, living or dead, excluding religious figures, with the lone exception of Mr. Jefferson. This will strike many readers here as ridiculous or appalling, but the world's people as a whole have even less intelligence than Mr. Mencken attributed to Americans, of whom he famously stated (approx.) that no one ever went broke underestimating their intelligence. [Hitler is mostly admired as some one who stuck it to the Establishment, as a high-school dropout who made it good and dissed his enemies. He is especially admired in the Third World.] [Who would be Hitler's competitors as the most admired man in the world? [Stalin is admired in Russia as someone who would not brook nonsense and would restored discipline. He may edge out Hitler in Russia, but there aren't that many Russians. [Mao has few admirers, even in Red China. [Kennedy is still admired in Latin America, and you'll still find photographs of him on the walls of hovels there. He meant hope for many Latin Americans. I recall a large photograph of Roosevelt II in the back of a furniture store in Charlottesville. This was around 1965, long after FDR died. He meant to the owner of the store hope also. [Certain religious figures, such as Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha top Hitler in being admired, but what the historical figures were actually like is, of course, the subject of endless dispute. [Perhaps there are others as widely admired as Mr. Jefferson, but not as much as Hitler, but none come to mind. Washington, I don't think so, since he's not all that well-known in the Third World, which contains the bulk of humanity. [I welcome discussion.] 05:05 2005-10-04 Russia has caught World War II fever 60 years after the war's end, but the books and DVDs flying off store shelves are far from patriotic. They contain Nazi themes and often offer Nazi ideology. "It's already a fashion," said Sergei Stepanich, an expert on fascist literature at the Center for Human Rights. Nestled among pornographic DVDs at kiosks at Leningradsky Station are numerous discs offering original [18]Nazi propaganda from the 1940s. The DVDs carry the original newsreels that were shown in German cinemas. A DVD on the Nazi SS has a blurb on the back of the box that talks about the troops' "genuine professionalism." "The DVDs are very popular," said one merchant, who refused to give his name. The propaganda is not only on sale at Moscow's railway stations. At a central Moscow outlet of Soyuz Records, one of the capital's biggest music and video chains, a series of DVDs on the actresses of the Third Reich shares a shelf with Audrey Hepburn box sets. A few hundred meters away from the Kremlin monument to the victims of World War II, an ordinary kiosk in a metro underpass sells a pirated nine-disc DVD collection called "A Chronicle of the Third Reich." The series is a compilation of serious documentary films on the Nazi regime but wrapped in a sensational cover. Buyers may just be interested in history, but Jewish and human rights organizations believe it is a sign of an increased fascination with fascist ideology. "It is probably not simply interest, but either young radicalism or a xenophobic-chauvinistic viewpoint," said Yevgeny Altman, the head of the Holocaust Fund in Russia. There has been an interest in fascist and specifically Nazi ideology since the early 1990s, but now the interest has taken on a commercial aspect, said Stepanich, who helped organize a campaign titled "The City Without Fascist Literature" over the summer. Among books, perhaps the most popular are a series written by Yury Mukhin, the editor of the newspaper Duel, that argues the Holocaust did not happen. The books are published by Yauza-Eksmo Press. It was unclear who was behind the publishing house, with a spokesman for Eksmo, one of the country's largest book publishers and the publisher of the Russian translation of the Harry Potter books, saying his company had no connection with Yauza-Eksmo Press. When a reporter telephoned the Eksmo bookstore, however, a sales clerk offered a 20-page catalog of books published by Yauza-Eksmo Press. It is the literature that most worries human rights campaigners. Stepanich said respectable publishing houses were now publishing books that embrace fascist ideology. "It was marginal in the 1990s," he said. "Russia is becoming one of the world centers for Holocaust denial," Altman added. "We're worried that you can now find it in bookshops like Biblio Globus." Biblio Globus, a leading Moscow bookstore, had no immediate comment. When human rights activists discovered a series of books that espouse fascist ideology at a recent book fair, their protests were ignored, Altman said. The problem, he said, is that bookstores have difficulty singling out the books with fascist propaganda. He said booksellers sometimes call him to ask whether they could sell a certain book. The country has seen an increase in attacks on minorities in recent years, and rights activists link it to an increase in nationalist sentiment. A suspect held in the recent stabbing death of a Congolese student in St. Petersburg reportedly had a swastika on his cell phone, The Moscow Times reported. [Here are some links to other articles in "News from Russia," which is put out by Pravda. Pravda is the Russian word for truth. As the main newspaper under Communism, it published anything but truth, as all commentators not controlled by the Soviets widely remarked. "Pravda" was a joke.] 03:51 Luzhkov's Rocker Set to Join City Hall Exodus [34]Moscow politician and part-time rock musician Mikhail Men could become the third key ally of Mayor Yury Luzhkov's to be appointed a governor this year after being picked as one of three candidates to run the Ivanovo region. [35]More details... 00:02 Lenin's last wish should be fulfilled - Sliska and Krasheninnikov [36]MOSCOW. State Duma First vice-speaker for United Russia Lyubov Sliska believes that it would be correct to bury Lenin according to Christian traditions. [37]More details... 03:33 Putin welcomes 'good dynamics' at Russian Railways [38]MOSCOW. President Vladimir Putin welcomed the 'good dynamics' in the development of Russian Railways as he met with its head, Vladimir Yakunin, on Saturday. [39]More details... 01:49 Sakhalin-1 project to produce first oil, gas on weekend [40]The Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project operated by Exxon Neftegaz Limited (ENL) will start producing the first crude and gas over the weekend. [41]More details... 00:31 Spacecraft carrying three to ISS put into orbit [42]OSCOW Oct 1 A Soyuz-TMA-7 spacecraft carrying Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev, NASA astronaut William McArthur, and U.S. space tourist Gregory Olsen successfully reached a pre-calculated orbit at 8:03 a.m. on Saturday, a spokesman for the Russian space mission control in Korolyov outside Moscow. [43]More details... 17:10 Two police officers wounded in Russia's restive Dagestan region [44]Two police officers wounded as unknown assailants opened fire on a police patrol car in the Dagestani city of Khasavyurt early Thursday, the regional Interior Ministry said [45]More details... 07:03 Anthrax pesthole liquidated at Prigorodny District of South Ossetia [46]Anthrax pesthole has been localized and completely liquidated in Prigodniy District of South Ossetia. Life of two citizens of the village of Chermen, who are now in hospital, is out of danger, REGNUM was told in the Republican Emergency Hospital. [47]More details... 06:24 Liquid gas storage facility to be built at Sverdlovsk Region [48]Major French Company 'Air Liquid' has signed a deal with the Sverdlovsk 'Uraltehgaz' plant to build a large liquid oxygen and nitrogen production plant and a liquid gas storage facility, a spokesperson for Sverdlovsk Governor said. [49]More details... 05:29 Gazprom, Sibneft stock quotations drop after deal announcement [50]MOSCOW, Sept. 28 Stock quotations of Russia's natural gas monopoly Gazprom and Sibneft oil company that have been the leaders of growth on the Russian market in previous days have begun to decline after the announcement about a deal concluded by the companies. [51]More details... 02:24 South Siberian Region Tries to Tax Baptisms and Funerals [52]The regional legislature in southern Siberia's Kurgan has approved amendments to the imputed tax law that will introduce taxation for religious rituals such as funerals and baptisms, the Vedomosti business daily reported on Tuesday. The move has already caused protests from the Orthodox Church and the Finance Ministry. [53]More details... 02:49 Two Muscovites steal audio system from Swedish embassy [54]RUSSIA. Sept 25 Police have detained two Muscovites suspected of stealing an audio system from the Swedish embassy. [55]More details... 02:25 Dagestan gas pipeline blast was of technogenic nature-experts [56]The explosion at a gas pipeline in Dagestan Republic was caused by a "technogenic situation," believe specialists of the Kaspiigazprom company citing preliminary data. [57]More details... 04:23 Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov criticises situation in aircraft building industry [58]MOSCOW, September 22. Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov criticised on Thursday the development level of the Russian aircraft building industry. 'I cannot say Russia is doing its best for occupying a proper place in the competitive world,' he said at a meeting of the cabinet of ministers, which is discussing the development strategy of the aircraft building industry. [59]More details... 03:21 Putin says Northern Dimension prgrm of interest to all Europeans [60]St PETERSBURG, September 22. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Finnish President Tarya Halonen had a meeting here Thursday. [61]More details... 01:51 Russian shipwreck death toll rises to 13 [62]KRASNOYARSK. The death toll in a September 16 accident in which a sea liner sank while approaching Russia's Dudinka seaport rose to 13 on Thursday, as five more bodies were found inside the ship. [63]More details... 14:55 Mike Tyson visits Chechnya to attend boxing tournament [64]Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson arrived to Chechnya to be the honored guest at a boxing tournament in Gudermes, the republic's second largest city [65]More details... 13:10 Roadside bomb killed one and wounding five in Grozny [66]A roadside bomb blew up a car in the Chechen capital Grozny on Monday, killing one person and wounding five others, emergency response officials said [67]More details... 11:33 Two criminals liquidated in Russia's Dagestan region [68]Two suspected criminals were killed in a clash with police in Russia's restive southern province of Dagestan [69]More details... 17:42 Military truck exploded in Dagestan killing two serviceman [70]Two servicemen had been killed and three others wounded in explosion, in Dagestan, Friday, Dagestani Interior Ministry, said to The ITAR-Tass news agency [71]More details... 14:06 Russia marked year since Beslan Siege [72]More than 500 children, teachers and parents gathered at Beslan's School No. 1 in southern Russia to mark the first anniversary of Russia's worst terrorist attack, which claimed 331 lives [73]More details... 10:46 Beslan teachers send letter to Putin one year after school siege looking for truth [74]Teachers of Beslan school No. 1, destroyed in last September's siege, have sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of the first anniversary, Ekho Moskvy radio station reported [75]More details... 18:00 Kids slayer lynched by mob in Dagestan [76]A man suspected of murdering two eight-year-old girls was killed by a mob in the southern Russian province of Dagestan, police said Monday [77]More details... 18:55 Uzbek Senators vote for eviction of US troops [78]The Uzbek Senate (the upper chamber of the Republic of Uzbekistan) will discuss the problem of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Khanabad military base, near Karshi, on August 26 [79]More details... 18:27 Council of Europe official to investigate mysterious disappearance of babies in Ukraine [80]A delegate from the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly is expected to visit Ukraine next week to investigate the alleged disappearance of newborn babies in mysterious circumstances, the assembly said Friday [81]More details... 15:55 Ingushetia premier wounded after assassination attempt [82]The head of the government of a southern Russian region bordering Chechnya was wounded on Thursday in a blast, a spokeswoman for emergencies service said [83]More details... 15:08 Ukraine celebrated Independence Day foregoing military parade [84]Ukraine marked its 14th anniversary of independence on Wednesday, foregoing the traditional military parade for the first time to underline what the new leadership wants to celebrate as a peaceful holiday [85]More details... 19:30 Chehens started mass riots in Yandiky, one man killed [86]Citizens of town Yandiky, Astrahanski region, voted for expulsion of Chechens from the settlement, on the last Council of the Elders. People believe that Chechens guilty for mass racial troubles [87]More details... 17:40 Bird flu outbreak spreads in Russia [88]Russian officials said that Ural bird flu outbreak is spreading despite the efforts to localize the decease. The H5N1 strain of bird flu that kills poultry in Russian Siberian regions is not dangerous to citizens as no cases among humans have been confirmed, the Emergencies Ministry said in a statement [89]More details... 20:30 Bird flu spreads west to Urals [90]Bird flu is going west. It has emerged in Chelyabinsk, the southern Urals region, a local official said Monday. The region is a big industrial center where all the previously hit by disease regions - Altai, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tyumen and Kurgan are mostly rural [91]More details... China [104]China's culture minister calls U.S. concerns of "China threat" a misunderstanding [go.gif] USA [105]Sun Micro up on planned Google collaboration [go.gif] World [106]LUKoil Bids $2Bln for Fields in Kazakhstan [go.gif] [107]Putin greets Russian Jews on occasion of Rosh Hashanah [go.gif] [108]Denikin, Ilyin remains re-buried in Donskoy Monastery [go.gif] References 34. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64362.html 35. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64362.html 36. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64353.html 37. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04/64353.html 38. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64210.html 39. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64210.html 40. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64209.html 41. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64209.html 42. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64206.html 43. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/02/64206.html 44. 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http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/03 95. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/04 96. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/05 97. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/06 98. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/07 99. http://newsfromrussia.com/region/2005/10/08 100. http://newsfromrussia.com/politics/2005/09/30 101. http://images.pravda.ru/header.en.html 102. http://english.pravda.ru/sitemap_en.htmld 103. http://www.google.com/search 104. http://newsfromrussia.com/china/2005/10/04/64359.html 105. http://newsfromrussia.com/usa/2005/10/04/64357.html 106. http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/04/64361.html 107. http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/04/64360.html 108. http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/10/04/64358.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From HowlBloom at aol.com Tue Oct 11 05:52:20 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 01:52:20 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws Message-ID: <1f7.13faec06.307cad14@aol.com> Fascinating. But you have me hooked. What in the world could the answer be to the following question: "Our brains expanded at he same rate in (exponent about 1.5) evolution as did the antlers of giant deer and horns of giant sheep! ... Why?" And why are periglacial environments, environments poor to the naked eye, richer than tropical environments, which seem very, very rich? How does the PERCEPTION of what's trash and what's treasure, of what's a resource and what's not, feed into the equation? Seemingly the bigger the brain, the more likely its owner is to see resources where smaller brained creatures obstacles and emptiness. But is this true? Deer presumably inherit the strategies that tell them what is trash and what is treasure--what is food and what is not. They don't make discoveries that turn yesterday's waste into tomorrow's resource, the way human inventors do. And deer don't have the repository of solutions inventors draw from, then add their discoveries to--culture. So why do the same formulae apply in the case of deer and of humans? Why do deer find the north, with its eight months of scarcity, richer than the south, with its twelve months of lushness? Where does the technology that produces clothing, shelter, and tools for hunting and harvesting fit? What analog of this technology is available to the deer? Are deer antlers useful for anything--for scraping lichen and moss off of rocks, for example? Or are they simply what most of us have always thought--gaudy displays of excess evolved to appeal to the females of the species? And why does the gaudy display of excess show up so often in a cosmos that we think obeys strict laws of frugality? How does this extravagance fit into the notions of economy that underlie Paul Werbos' Laplaceian math? And how does this excess production of new form fit into a universe that many think is ruled by the form-destroying processes of entropy? A lot of questions, Val, but you've provided food for a lot of thought. Howard In a message dated 10/10/2005 7:31:47 PM Eastern Standard Time, kendulf at shaw.ca writes: Dear Howard, The essay on power functions struck a cord within for a number of reasons. (a) Biologists are ? finally ? waking up to utility of power functions, which, since the 1920?s have been one of the major tools of the agricultural discipline of Animal Science. These scientists ? totally innocent of biology ? developed great mastery in the study of body growth and production in agricultural animals. Their goals were strictly utilitarian (how to produce bigger haunches in cattle and sheep, or longer bodies in pigs so as to get longer slabs of beacon etc. because that?s where the money led), however, when I took Animal Science in the late 1950?s I became quickly aware of the applicability of both, their insights and methods, in the study of evolution and ecology of large mammals. That included anthropology, us, as I shall illustrate for the fun of it, below. And then there is the Bible of Animal Science, the genial summary work of Samuel Brody (1945) Bioenergetics and Growth, (mine is a Hafner reprint). An utterly timeless, brilliant work if there ever was one! So, that?s my first source of happiness! (b) Might I raise the hope that, finally, after decades of working with power functions - in splendid isolation - I just might be able to discuss insights about human biology and evolution using power functions? The closest I ever got was explaining to colleagues how to use their hand calculator to pull logs and anti-logs! So, the essay raised my hopes - and there is nothing like hope! And that?s my second source of happiness. (c) In over 40 years of reading and reviewing papers I have caught only one out and out fraud! And this gentleman had the gift of creatively misusing power functions. The paper I got was based on the second half of a PhD Thesis for which Harvard had awarded him a doctorate. He had bamboozled four eminent scientists into signing off that piece of fraud. By one of those co incidents I was just working on something very similar to him and became suspicious because his theoretical predictions fitted his data too well, and the raw data in that are never looked that good. I managed to recreate all his calculations and discovered that he had misused his own data, had falsely attributed data to existing authors (whom I called on the phone), that he had invented not only data ? his own and under the names of reputable scholars, but that he had created fictitious references as well. Then a buddy in mathematics looked at some of his mathematical discussions and declared them as invalid on multiple counts. I returned with my friend a stinging review promising we would expose him next time. The fellow had a most undistinguished career in several degree mills subsequently and the only other paper of his I subsequently refereed was OK, but mediocre. I refused to read the published first half of his thesis, but some buddies who did shook their head and wondered out loud that there is something eerie about that paper! Yes indeed! However, I kept my mouth shut and a fraud was able to acquire a university position. So much for happiness! Power functions are absolutely basic to understanding life processes, and they do a sterling job of relieving the theory of evolution of unnecessary ad hoc explanations. If you have it handy, please see ?Primary rules of reproductive fitness? pp.2-13 of my 1978 ?Life Strategies?? book. Some of the insights in the essay presented as new are actually discussed in D?Arcy Thompsons (1917) On Growth and Form. To my embarrassment I discovered that his book by a zoologist is known better in Architecture and the Design disciplines than among current zoologists. Thompson uses real mathematics, where as current life scientists focus on statistics. It is he who discusses that globular cells merely take advantage of the fee shape-forming energy of surface tension and that it costs real energy for a cell to deviate from this shape. In principle life scavenges free energy from physics and chemistry to function as cheaply as possible, for power functions drive home mercilessly just how costly it is to live and how supremely important to life is the law of least effort, or Zipf?s (1949) Law. Thje beauty of power functions is that they state rules with precision and that such are essential to comparisons. Let?s look at an amusing example that suddenly becomes relevant to understanding humans. As I detailed in my 1998 Deer of the World (next most important magnum opus) the deer family is marvelously rich in examples essential to the understanding of evolutionary processes in large mammals, humans included. They show several times a pattern of speciation from the Tropics to the Arctic, that among primates only the human lineage followed. In several deer lineages there is a progressive increase in antler ? those spectacular organs beloved by trophy hunters. There is a steady, but step-wise, increase in size and complexity from equator to pole! The further north, the larger the antlers! However, antlers do not increase in proportion to body mass (weight in Kg raised to the power of 1), nor to metabolic mass (weight in Kg raised to the power of 0.75), rather, antler growth follows a positive power function, which, between species is 1.35. So, to compare the relative antler mass of small and large deer one generates for each species y(antler mass in grams) = f (weight in kg)1.35 . First of I can readily compare the amount of antler mass produced by species despite differences in body size. The largest antler mass is found in cursors (high speed runners) the smallest in forest hiders. However, in high speed runners, antler mass grows with body mass - within a lineage - even faster than suggested above. The huge antlers of the Irish elk, 14 feet of spread turn out to be of exactly the same relative mass as those of his last living relative the fallow deer. A small fallow deer, scaled up to the size of an irish elk would have 14 foot of antler spread! Are antlers incresing in size passively with body size? Yes, but only under luxury conditions. Note luxury! I a moment you will see why! Antler mass is determined in above deer from small to large by y(antler mass in grams) = 2.6 (wtKg) 1.50. Horn mass in wild sheep happens to be y=2.32 (wtKg)1.49. And increase in relative brain volume from Australopithecus gracilis to Homo sapiens is y(cm3 of brain) = 1.56 (wtkg)1.575. Cute, isn?t it? The human brain is (a) disassociated from body growth following positive allometry. (b) Provided the environment allows individuals a significant vacation from shortages and want, that is, body growth under luxury conditions, human brains expand with (lean!) body mass ? period! If humans fall below the expected value, then you have some explaining to do! Smaller than expected brain size will therefore be a function of poor nutritional environments. (c) Natural luxury environments are periglacial and North Temperate ones ? up to about 60oN, above and below that conditions deteriorate. That is, up to about 60oN the annual productivity pulse has a length and height to facilitates maximum growth. Therefore, periglacial Ice Age giants are brainy, tropical ones are not! That certainly applies to the huge brains of Neanderthal and Cro-magnids. As we invaded the cold, but rich periglacial environments, getting a large brain to deal with the increased diversity of demands (initially due to ever sharper seasonality) was filling out an already available growth function! Our brains expanded at he same rate in (exponent about 1.5) evolution as did the antlers of giant deer and horns of giant sheep! Awesome organs all! Why? There is no ready explanation. One would need to compare the growth exponents of other organs. I have written enough! Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: _HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com) To: _paleopsych at paleopsych.org_ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org) Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 12:26 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws In a message dated 10/7/2005 3:13:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, Howl Bloom writes: All thanks, Jim. I just gave a presentation related to this subject to an international quantum physics conference in Moscow--Quantum Informatics 2005. I wish I'd seen the article before giving the talk. It would have come in handy. Meanwhile I tracked down a copy of the full article. It's downloadable for free at _http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/neubiomol/ARTICLES/Gisiger2001.pdf_ (http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/neubiomol/ARTICLES/Gisiger2001.pdf) Better yet, enclosed is a file with the full article and with another article that relates. I may not have the time to read these, so if you digest anything interesting from them and get the time, please jot me an email and give me your summary of what these articles are getting at. Since Eshel Ben-Jacob has been trying to point out for years why such concepts as scale-free power laws and fractals fail to get at the creative twists evolution comes up with as it moves from one level of emergence to another, anything in these pieces that indicates how newness enters the repetition of the old would be of particular interest. Again, all thanks. Onward--Howard In a message dated 10/5/2005 5:12:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, JBJbrody at cs.com writes: _Biological Reviews_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) (2001), 76: 161-209 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1464793101005607 Published Online 17May2001 *This article is available in a PDF that may contain more than one articles. Therefore the PDF file's first page may not match this article's first page. _Login_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Subscribe to journal_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Email abstract_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Save citation_ (http://journals.cam bridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) _Content alerts_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#) Review Article Scale invariance in biology: coincidence or footprint of a universal mechanism? T. GISIGER a1 _p1_ (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=74595#p1) a1 Groupe de Physique des Particules, Universit? de Montr?al, C.P. 6128, succ. centre-ville, Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada, H3C 3J7 (e-mail: _gisiger at pasteur.fr_ (mailto:gisiger at pasteur.fr) ) Abstract In this article, we present a self-contained review of recent work on complex biological systems which exhibit no characteristic scale. This property can manifest itself with fractals (spatial scale invariance), flicker noise or 1/f-noise where f denotes the frequency of a signal (temporal scale invariance) and power laws (scale invariance in the size and duration of events in the dynamics of the system). A hypothesis recently put forward to explain these scale-free phenomomena is criticality, a notion introduced by physicists while studying phase transitions in materials, where systems spontaneously arrange themselves in an unstable manner similar, for instance, to a row of dominoes. Here, we review in a critical manner work which investigates to what extent this idea can be generalized to biology. More precisely, we start with a brief introduction to the concepts of absence of characteristic scale (power-law distributions, fractals and 1/f- noise) and of critical phenomena. We then review typical mathematical models exhibiting such properties: edge of chaos, cellular automata and self-organized critical models. These notions are then brought together to see to what extent they can account for the scale invariance observed in ecology, evolution of species, type III epidemics and some aspects of the central nervous system. This article also discusses how the notion of scale invariance can give important insights into the workings of biological systems. (Received October 4 1999) (Revised July 14 2000) (Accepted July 24 2000) Key Words: Scale invariance; complex systems; models; criticality; fractals; chaos; ecology; evolution; epidemics; neurobiology. Correspondence: p1 Present address: Unit? de Neurobiologie Mol?culaire, Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Dr Roux, 75724 Paris, Cedex 15, France. Retrieved February 16, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp Week of Feb. 12, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 7 , p. 106 Life on the Scales Simple mathematical relationships underpin much of biology and ecology Erica Klarreich A mouse lives just a few years, while an elephant can make it to age 70. In a sense, however, both animals fit in the same amount of life experience. In its brief life, a mouse squeezes in, on average, as many heartbeats and breaths as an elephant does. Compared with those of an elephant, many aspects of a mouse's life?such as the rate at which its cells burn energy, the speed at which its muscles twitch, its gestation time, and the age at which it reaches maturity?are sped up by the same factor as its life span is. It's as if in designing a mouse, someone had simply pressed the fast-forward button on an elephant's life. This pattern relating life's speed to its length also holds for a sparrow, a gazelle, and a person? virtually any of the birds and mammals, in fact. Small animals live fast and die young, while big animals plod through much longer lives. "It appears as if we've been gifted with just so much life," says Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "You can spend it all at once or slowly dribble it out over a long time." a5850_1358.jpg Dean MacAdam Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal's size: They are proportional to the animal's mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the ?1/4 power. The reasons behind these laws were a mystery until 8 years ago, when Enquist, together with ecologist James Brown of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory proposed a model to explain quarter-power scaling in mammals (SN: 10/16/99, p. 249). They and their collaborators have since extended the model to encompass plants, birds, fish and other creatures. In 2001, Brown, West, and several of their colleagues distilled their model to a single formula, which they call the master equation, that predicts a species' metabolic rate in terms of its body size and temperature. "They have identified the basic rate at which life proceeds," says Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. In the July 2004 Ecology, Brown, West, and their colleagues proposed that their equation can shed light not just on individual animals' life processes but on every biological scale, from subcellular molecules to global ecosystems. In recent months, the investigators have applied their equation to a host of phenomena, from the mutation rate in cellular DNA to Earth's carbon cycle. Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, hails the team's work as a major step forward. "I think they have provided us with a unified theory for ecology," he says. The biological clock In 1883, German physiologist Max Rubner proposed that an animal's metabolic rate is proportional to its mass raised to the 2/3 power. This idea was rooted in simple geometry. If one animal is, say, twice as big as another animal in each linear dimension, then its total volume, or mass, is 23 times as large, but its skin surface is only 22 times as large. Since an animal must dissipate metabolic heat through its skin, Rubner reasoned that its metabolic rate should be proportional to its skin surface, which works out to mass to the 2/3 power. a5850_2473.jpg Dean MacAdam In 1932, however, animal scientist Max Kleiber of the University of California, Davis looked at a broad range of data and concluded that the correct exponent is 3/4, not 2/3. In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude. For most of the past 70 years, ecologists had no explanation for the 3/4 exponent. "One colleague told me in the early '90s that he took 3/4-scaling as 'given by God,'" Brown recalls. The beginnings of an explanation came in 1997, when Brown, West, and Enquist described metabolic scaling in mammals and birds in terms of the geometry of their circulatory systems. It turns out, West says, that Rubner was on the right track in comparing surface area with volume, but that an animal's metabolic rate is determined not by how efficiently it dissipates heat through its skin but by how efficiently it delivers fuel to its cells. Rubner should have considered an animal's "effective surface area," which consists of all the inner surfaces across which energy and nutrients pass from blood vessels to cells, says West. These surfaces fill the animal's entire body, like linens stuffed into a laundry machine. The idea, West says, is that a space-filling surface scales as if it were a volume, not an area. If you double each of the dimensions of your laundry machine, he observes, then the amount of linens you can fit into it scales up by 23, not 22. Thus, an animal's effective surface area scales as if it were a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure. This creates a challenge for the network of blood vessels that must supply all these surfaces. In general, a network has one more dimension than the surfaces it supplies, since the network's tubes add one linear dimension. But an animal's circulatory system isn't four dimensional, so its supply can't keep up with the effective surfaces' demands. Consequently, the animal has to compensate by scaling back its metabolism according to a 3/4 exponent. Though the original 1997 model applied only to mammals and birds, researchers have refined it to encompass plants, crustaceans, fish, and other organisms. The key to analyzing many of these organisms was to add a new parameter: temperature. Mammals and birds maintain body temperatures between about 36?C and 40?C, regardless of their environment. By contrast, creatures such as fish, which align their body temperatures with those of their environments, are often considerably colder. Temperature has a direct effect on metabolism?the hotter a cell, the faster its chemical reactions run. In 2001, after James Gillooly, a specialist in body temperature, joined Brown at the University of New Mexico, the researchers and their collaborators presented their master equation, which incorporates the effects of size and temperature. An organism's metabolism, they proposed, is proportional to its mass to the 3/4 power times a function in which body temperature appears in the exponent. The team found that its equation accurately predicted the metabolic rates of more than 250 species of microbes, plants, and animals. These species inhabit many different habitats, including marine, freshwater, temperate, and tropical ecosystems. The equation gave the researchers a way to compare organisms with different body temperatures?a person and a crab, or a lizard and a sycamore tree? and thereby enabled the team not just to confirm previously known scaling laws but also to discover new ones. For instance, in 2002, Gillooly and his colleagues found that hatching times for eggs in birds, fish, amphibians, and plankton follow a scaling law with a 1/4 exponent. When the researchers filter out the effects of body temperature, most species adhere closely to quarter-power laws for a wide range of properties, including not only life span but also population growth rates. The team is now applying its master equation to more life processes?such as cancer growth rates and the amount of time animals sleep. "We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar," says Gillooly. A single equation predicts so much, the researchers contend, because metabolism sets the pace for myriad biological processes. An animal with a high metabolic rate processes energy quickly, so it can pump its heart quickly, grow quickly, and reach maturity quickly. Unfortunately, that animal also ages and dies quickly, since the biochemical reactions involved in metabolism produce harmful by-products called free radicals, which gradually degrade cells. "Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate," Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, "but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time." Scaling up The researchers propose that their framework can illuminate not just properties of individual species, such as hours of sleep and hatching times, but also the structure of entire communities and ecosystems. Enquist, West, and Karl Niklas of Cornell University have been looking for scaling relationships in plant communities, where they have uncovered previously unnoticed patterns. a5850_3175.jpg REGULAR ON AVERAGE. Newly discovered scaling laws have revealed an unexpected relationship between the spacing of trees and their trunk diameters in a mature forest. PhotoDisc The researchers have found, for instance, that in a mature forest, the average distance between trees of the same mass follows a quarter-power scaling law, as does trunk diameter. These two scaling laws are proportional to each other, so that on average, the distance between trees of the same mass is simply proportional to the diameter of their trunks. "When you walk in a forest, it looks random, but it's actually quite regular on average," West says. "People have been measuring size and density of trees for 100 years, but no one had noticed these simple relationships." The researchers have also discovered that the number of trees of a given mass in a forest follows the same scaling law governing the number of branches of a given size on an individual tree. "The forest as a whole behaves as if it is a very large tree," West says. Gillooly, Brown, and their New Mexico colleague Andrew Allen have now used these scaling laws to estimate the amount of carbon that is stored and released by different plant ecosystems. Quantifying the role of plants in the carbon cycle is critical to understanding global warming, which is caused in large part by carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere when animals metabolize food or machines burn fossil fuels. Plants, by contrast, pull carbon dioxide out of the air for use in photosynthesis. Because of this trait, some ecologists have proposed planting more forests as one strategy for counteracting global warming. In a paper in an upcoming Functional Ecology, the researchers estimate carbon turnover and storage in ecosystems such as oceanic phytoplankton, grasslands, and old-growth forests. To do this, they apply their scaling laws to the mass distribution of plants and the metabolic rate of individual plants. The model predicts, for example, how much stored carbon is lost when a forest is cut down to make way for farmlands or development. Martinez del Rio cautions that ecologists making practical conservation decisions need more-detailed information than the scaling laws generally give. "The scaling laws are useful, but they're a blunt tool, not a scalpel," he says. Scaling down The team's master equation may resolve a longstanding controversy in evolutionary biology: Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different estimates of when certain species diverged? Geneticists calculate when two species branched apart in the phylogenetic tree by looking at how much their DNA differs and then estimating how long it would have taken for that many mutations to occur. For instance, genetic data put the divergence of rats and mice at 41 million years ago. Fossils, however, put it at just 12.5 million years ago. The problem is that there is no universal clock that determines the rate of genetic mutations in all organisms, Gillooly and his colleagues say. They propose in the Jan. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, instead, the mutation clock?like so many other life processes?ticks in proportion to metabolic rate rather than to time. The DNA of small, hot organisms should mutate faster than that of large, cold organisms, the researchers argue. An organism with a revved-up metabolism generates more mutation-causing free radicals, they observe, and it also produces offspring faster, so a mutation becomes lodged in the population more quickly. When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times? including those of rats and mice?line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper's coauthors. The team plans to use its metabolic framework to investigate why the tropics are so much more diverse than temperate zones are and why there are so many more small species than large ones. Most evolutionary biologists have tended to approach biodiversity questions in terms of historical events, such as landmasses separating, Kaspari says. The idea that size and temperature are the driving forces behind biodiversity is radical, he says. "I think if it holds up, it's going to rewrite our evolutionary-biology books," he says. Enthusiasm and skepticism While the metabolic-scaling theory has roused much enthusiasm, it has its limitations. Researchers agree, for instance, that while the theory produces good predictions when viewed on a scale from microbes to whales, the theory is rife with exceptions when it's applied to animals that are relatively close in temperature and size. For example, large animals generally have longer life spans than small animals, but small dogs live longer than large ones. a5850_4238.jpg Dean MacAdam Brown points out that the metabolic-scaling law may be useful by calling attention to such exceptions. "If you didn't have a general theory, you wouldn't know that big dogs are something interesting to look at," he observes. Many questions of particular interest to ecologists concern organisms that are close in size. Metabolic theory may not explain, for example, why certain species coexist or why particular species invade a given ecosystem, says John Harte, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Some scientists question the very underpinnings of the team's model. Raul Suarez, a comparative physiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara disputes the model's starting assumption that an animal's metabolic rate is determined by how efficiently it can transport resources from blood vessels to cells. Suarez argues that other factors are equally important, or even more so. For instance, whether the animal is resting or active determines which organs are using the most energy at a given time. "Metabolic scaling is a many-splendored thing," he says. Suarez' concern is valid, agrees Kaspari. However, he says, the master equation's accurate predictions about a huge range of phenomena are strong evidence in its favor. Ecologists, physiologists, and other biologists appear to be unanimous on one point: The team's model has sparked a renaissance for biological-scaling theory. "West and Brown deserve a great deal of credit for rekindling the interest of the scientific community in this phenomenon of metabolic scaling," Suarez says. "Their ideas have stimulated a great deal of discussion and debate, and that's a good thing." If you have a comment on this article that you would like considered for publication in Science News, send it to editors at sciencenews.org. Please include your name and location. To subscribe to Science News (print), go to https://www.kable.com/pub/scnw/ subServices.asp. To sign up for the free weekly e-LETTER from Science News, go to http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/subscribe_form.asp. References: Brown, J.H., J.F. Gillooly, A.P. Allen, V.M. Savage, and G.B. West. 2004. Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85(July):1771-1789. Abstract. Gillooly, J.F., A.P. Allen, G.B. West, and J.H. Brown. 2005. The rate of DNA evolution: Effects of body size and temperature on the molecular clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(Jan. 4):140-145. Abstract available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/1/140. Gillooly, J.F. . . . G.B. West . . . and J.H. Brown. 2002. Effects of size and temperature on developmental time. Nature 417(May 2):70-73. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417070a. Gillooly, J.F., J.H. Brown, G.B. West, et al. 2001. Effects of size and temperature on metabolic rate. Science 293(Sept. 21):2248-2251. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5538/2248. Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, J.H. Brown, G.B. West, and E.L. Charnov. 2004. Effects of body size and temperature on population growth. American Naturalist 163(March):429-441. Available at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/ journal/issues/v163n3/20308/20308.html. Suarez, R.K., C.A. Darveau, and J.J. Childress. 2004. Metabolic scaling: A many-splendoured thing. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part B 139(November):531-541. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpc.2004.05.001. West, G.B., J.H. Brown, and B.J. Enquist. 1997. A general model for the origin of allometric scaling models in biology. Science 276(April 4):122-126. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/276/5309/122. Further Readings: Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, . . . A.P. Allen . . . and J.H. Brown. 2004. The predominance of quarter-power scaling in biology. Functional Ecology 18(April):257-282. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0269-8463.2004.00856.x. Weiss, P. 1999. Built to scale. Science News 156(Oct. 16):249-251. References and sources available at http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/10_16_99/bob1ref.htm. Sources: Anurag Agrawal Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Andrew Allen Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 James H. Brown Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 Steven Buskirk Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming 1000 E. University Avenue Laramie, WY 82071 Brian Enquist Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 James Gillooly Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 John Harte Energy and Resources Group 310 Barrows Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Michael Kaspari Department of Zoology University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019 Carlos Mart?nez del Rio Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming Laramie, WY 82071 Karl Niklas Department of Plant Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Raul Suarez Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93016 Geoffrey B. West Theoretical Physics Division Los Alamos National Laboratory MS B285 Los Alamos, NM 87545 From Science News, Vol. 167, No. 7, Feb. 12, 2005, p. 106. Home | Table of Contents | Feedback | Subscribe | Help/About | Archives | Search Copyright ?2005 Science Service. 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Science News Logo Wear Science News Logo Wear Copyright Clearance Center Photo Archive Browse a Science News photo collection. ---------- 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, A cademy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net ____________________________________ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ____________________________________ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.13/124 - Release Date: 10/7/2005 _______________________________________________ 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 aandrews at hvc.rr.com Tue Oct 11 11:02:06 2005 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 07:02:06 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws References: <1f7.13faec06.307cad14@aol.com> Message-ID: <005801c5ce53$3a61e9f0$6401a8c0@callastudios> >How does this extravagance fit into >the notions of economy that underlie >Paul Werbos' Laplaceian math? And >how does this excess production of >new form fit into a universe that >many think is ruled by the >form-destroying processes of entropy? hi HB: Have you read Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind? I think he answers this question--and more! Here's a little bit: >From page 124 and 128: "Zahavi suggested that most sexual ornaments are "handicaps": they advertise true fitness by handicapping an individual with a survival cost . He also argued that handicaps should be the only evolutionary stable kinds of sexual ornament, because they are the only ones that convey the information about fitness that individuals really want when makig sexual choices. His paper unleashed a storm of protest. The handicap idea seemed absurd. Throughout the late 1970s the handicap principle was attacked by almost every eminent evolutionary theorist. Surely sexual selection could not have an intrinsic drive to produce wasteful displays that impair survival? Apparently, most biologists in the 1970s had not read Thorstein Veblen. They did not make the connection between conspicuous consumption to advertise wealth and costly sexual ornaments to advertise fitness. Without that connection it was hard to see how Zahavi's handicap principle could work....How could sexual selection favor fitness indicators that impaired an animal's survival prospects? How could mate choice favor a costly, useless ornament over a a cheaper, more beneficia ornament?........ As with Veblen's conspicuous consumption principle, the form of the cost does not matter much. What matters is the prodigious waste. The waste is what keeps the fitness indicators honest." Miller then goes on to talk re Rowe and Houle and their 1996 paper re 'genic capture'...which, from the description in TMM, might be of interest to you if you don't know it... e-Galley okay? lots of best wishes, aa -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From he at psychology.su.se Tue Oct 11 14:41:58 2005 From: he at psychology.su.se (Hannes Eisler) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:41:58 +0200 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws In-Reply-To: <002a01c5cdf2$8265da60$413e4346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> References: <20a.b04d498.307825e3@aol.com> <002a01c5cdf2$8265da60$413e4346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Message-ID: <11A8A9BC-3C77-49D9-A7F9-02089796B738@psychology.su.se> Dear Howard, After Val Geist's fascinating account I cannot refrain from a contribution of my own, having worked in psychology with power functions since the fifties. I usually describe myself as a mathematical psychologist, or as a psychophysicist, depending on circumstances. Most sensations (in the technical sense) or experiences do not agree with the corresponding physical measures. For instance, after lightning a second candle in a dark room it does not feel twice e as bright. The function describing the growth of the experienced magnitude with the physical is called the psychophysical function. Up to the fifties one considered the psychophysical function to be logarithmic; S. S. Stevens proposed a power function instead. It was part of my doctoral thesis to describe the experimental conditions for either. Note that the physical continuum need not be some kind of energy; it is for, e.g., sound or light; but length of line or duration (time) are examples of non-energy continua. The exponent varies greatly, between approximately .3 (sound and light) and 3 (electric shock). As one can expect is the exponent for length of lines close to unity and somewhat below (.9) for durations up to minutes. No agreed on theory exists. One hypothesis is that in order to be able to handle or cope with one's sensations a range between zero and about 200 would be suitable. That means expansion of the physical range for continua with high exponents and compression for those with low. So the huge natural range of sound?0 to 110 db, that is, 0 to several millions in energy units?is compressed into a manageable subjective range. Again, power functions! Bests Hannes From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 11 23:56:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:56:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Crackpots in Science Message-ID: On Crackpots in Science ScienceWeek Message Board http://scienceweek.com/swbb/messages/bb236.htm Name = Igor Crackpots in science are of interest to anyone who thinks about the sociology of the scientific enterprise. Crackpots usually have formal training in science but are often unattached to any university, college, or research institute, and they usually reach a point where their papers and commentaries are refused by standard scientific journals as of no interest to anyone. They form a "fringe" in any field, and it's often difficult to distinguish crackpots from bona fide scientists who hold minority views because the distinction is usually based primarily on behavior rather than on scientific contributions. The consequence is that a bona fide scientist with a minority view is unfortunately sometimes called a crackpot merely due to peculiar or disruptive behavior. Here are what I think are some of the distinguishing characteristics of crackpots in and around the struggle to understand the real world: 1. The crackpot has usually lost interest in new experiments and will defend to his death his theory or viewpoint that has been rejected by the scientific community as invalid or useless. Any objective view of reality is no longer important to the crackpot; the only possible view of reality is his personal view. 2. As a consequence of continuing rejection by his peers, the crackpot becomes more and more strident with advancing age, until eventually one finds him doing vigorous vocal battle in fringe arenas, open forums, anti-science mailing lists, and magazines devoted to fringe ideas and readers who thrive emotionally on fringe ideas. 3. In any serious discussion of a scientific issue, the crackpot will usually offer polemics rather than reason, invective rather than fact, and a harangue that he's a "revolutionary" against an "establishment". Sometimes he makes accusations of a conspiracy against him. At other times, the accusation is of "social control" of the minds of scientists. He appoints himself as the avant-garde of a "paradigm shift", when usually there is no "paradigm" in any Kuhnian sense, but merely a consensus view about a small scientific question. One basic philosophical failure of the crackpot is the failure to understand that "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts" are usually recognized after the fact by historians and almost never during the time of the shift, and secondly that paradigm shifts are almost always the work of younger scientists and not of older scientists. But of course all of this is beside the point to the crackpot, since the crackpot will hold his views until death no matter what the presentation by his critics. 4. Many crackpots, for one reason or another, have no physical access to the current scientific literature, and the result is a shutting out of any new input. New results are unimportant to the crackpot: he will say the case was closed years ago, or tell you the results are meaningless without his even reading the new paper, or tell you he knows of the group that did the work and he doesn't trust their laboratory. It's all settled, the crackpot says; I proved it years ago, and if you want to learn about this, you can dig up what I've said about it and find the truth! I don't think it's possible to have an enterprise such as science without fringes in various fields, and in the fringes there will always be some who slip over the line and get labeled by their peers as crackpots. It's all unfortunate; there's often a great deal of talent going to waste. But scientists, after all, are human beings, with every human foible that can be catalogued. The trick is to understand that when there's a public dispute about a scientific question, the foibles may smother reality. If several generations of scientists, spread out over a dozen or so different countries, hold what appears to be a consensus view of a scientific question, it's extremely rare that they are all wrong. Sometimes it happens. But the demonstration that they are all wrong must be experiment (or rigorous mathematical proof) and not argument, because that's the essence of science, and if we give that up we have nothing. (Caution: I make no accusations against any specific person living or dead here, and certainly none against anyone associated with this message board.) From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 11 23:56:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:56:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Battling Established Views in Science - Igor 10/04/05 9:38 AM Message-ID: Battling Established Views in Science - Igor 10/04/05 9:38 AM ScienceWeek Message Board http://scienceweek.com/swbb/messages/bb258.htm There has been much discussion on this board in the past few days about researchers with unpopular ideas battling the established views of other scientists. The recent award of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine to Marshall and Warren is just such a case, and it illustrates an important aspect of biomedical research. When Marshall and Warren first claimed H. pylori was involved in the pathology of stomach ulcers, they were derided and criticized by the medical community. But these two researchers persisted, not by argument, polemics, criticism of other research, etc., but by doing more experiments, more and more experiments, Marshall even doing dangerous experiments on himself -- until finally the biomedical community gradually began to support their ideas. As I've said before, biology (which means also biomedical science) is essentially at present an experimental and empirical science. For the most part, biologists are not persuaded by theory to shift their thinking. It was Darwin's observations that persuaded biologists, not his theory, which had already been anticipated by others. Controversies in biology are usually settled by experiment or careful observations -- and not by rational arguments. There may be some exceptions, but these exceptions do not define the science of biology, which at the present time is experimental and empirical. This does not mean there is no good theory in biology. There is plenty of it and much of it extremely valuable, but we got there by doing experiments, and not by arguing. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 11 23:56:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:56:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Animal Navigation Message-ID: Animal Behavior: On Animal Navigation http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051014-1.htm The following points are made by James L. Gould (Current Biology 2005 15:R653): 1) Juvenile birds regularly migrate thousands of kilometers. Most fly at night, without their parents to guide them. The mystery of how birds manage this apparent impossibility inspires ever-more-heroic attempts to defeat them at this crucial task. New work [1] reports a dramatic new way to confound south-bound sparrows: take them along or above the Arctic Circle aboard an icebreaker; fly them to experimental sites by helicopter; and see what directions they choose. Only time will tell whether, once again, the birds have another layer of yet-to-be-deciphered finesse in their navigation repertoire, or if they finally have been driven to the computational wall and are responding in a consistent "does-not-compute" manner. 2) Exactly what does a migrating species require? First, the birds need a compass to know which direction they are going, and they come supplied with several: the earth's magnetic field (indicating magnetic north); the celestial pole (indicating true north, about which the stars appear to rotate at night); and the Sun's location (as inferred from patterns of sun-centered polarization which, with a suitable time sense, also specifies true north). Second, they need to know at least roughly -- and in some instances quite precisely -- where they are relative to their goal. In the case of homing pigeons, this ability is known as a map sense, and has a resolution of a very few kilometers [2]. 3) The map sounds quite mysterious compared to the compass, but they are both daunting challenges. Consider the problem from the bird's point of view. First of all, it is cloudy a lot, so much of the time you can forget about using celestial cues. But then, why not just use magnetic north? If you are born at a high latitude -- where large numbers of species breed -- there is often a large discrepancy between magnetic and true north -- the declination error, which arises in part from the 1400 kilometer separation of this point from the geographic pole. Worse, declination generally changes as you fly south. And even if the evening is clear, the stars and patterns of polarized light change with both latitude and date. 4) Birds dispose of these problems by periodically calibrating one compass against the other [3;4]. Recent evidence has shown that when the sky is clear, the recalibration occurs daily, and takes only about an hour [5]. The accuracy and sensitivity of this system is astonishing: in tests performed near the conventional north magnetic pole -- where the earth's field lines plunge vertically into the planet, providing no directional information at all -- birds are well oriented just a few dozen kilometers away, where there is only a 1.1 deg deviation from vertical. (There is another "pole", one of magnetic intensity, located about 2000 kilometers farther south near the western edge of Hudson's Bay, which is critically important in magnetic-map theories.) 5) But how do the birds know which way to fly in the first place. Most species have an innate starting direction: put them as juveniles or adults in a cage during migration season, and they will all try to escape in roughly the direction they ought to fly to get to their wintering grounds. But there is a danger here in assuming that the birds know only as much as their behavior suggests: some species display accurate departure directions in cages, while others select a consistent but quite incorrect one (west into the sunset). But release the same "misguided" birds with tracking beacons, and they set off in the direction they ought to have chosen in the cage. The results of ?kesson et al. [1] take on more meaning in this light. They found that sparrows moved gradually east above the Arctic Circle completely altered their migration strategy after encountering the massive natural change in declination near the magnetic pole. References (abridged): 1. ?kesson, S., Morin, J., Muheim, R., and Ottosson, U. (2005). Dramatic orientation shift of White-crowned Sparrows displaced across longitudes in the high arctic. Curr. Biol. 15:1591 2. Gould, J.L. (1980). The case for magnetic sensitivity in birds and bees (such as it is). Am. Sci. 68, 256-267 3. Able, K.P. and Able, M.A. (1990). Calibration of the magnetic compass of a migratory bird by celestial rotation. Nature 347, 378-380 4. Able, K.P. and Able, M.A. (1995). Interactions in the flexible orientation system of a migratory bird. Nature 375, 230-232 5. ?kesson, S., Morin, J., Muheim, R., and Ottosson, U. (2002). Avian orientation: effects of cue-conflict experiments with young migratory songbirds in the high Arctic. Anim. Behav. 64, 469-475 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: NATURAL HISTORY: ON THE MAGNETIC COMPASS OF SONGBIRDS The following points are made by W.W. Cochran et al (Science 2004 304:405): 1) Billions of songbirds migrate between continents twice each year, but their orientation capabilities are almost exclusively studied in the laboratory. The authors presented birds with experimentally altered orientation cues and followed their subsequent migratory flights in the wild. Avian navigation capabilities are very precise (1), with many individuals returning to the same breeding sites year after year (1-3) after a voyage of up to 25,000 km (4, ). 2) Migratory songbirds can orient on the basis of compass information from the sun and its associated polarized light patterns, the stars, the earth's magnetic field, and the memorization of spatial cues en route. However, the interactions and relative importance of these cues remain unclear and a source of much debate. Our knowledge about the orientation mechanisms of songbirds relies almost exclusively on data from cue-manipulated captive migrants tested in various orientation cages, on vanishing bearings based on the first few hundred meters of flight, and to a much lesser degree on field data (ringing and radar and visual observations) from unmanipulated natural migrants. 3) On clear evenings, the authors fitted Catharus thrushes with radio transmitters and placed them in outdoor cages in an artificial eastward-turned magnetic field from about sunset until the sun was 11 deg or more below the horizon when they were set free. The authors then radio-tracked the birds in flight to obtain heading data. Because Catharus thrushes do not compensate for wind drift but individuals maintain nearly constant preferred headings from night to night, the authors used measured headings for orientation analyses. 4) In summary: Night migratory songbirds can use stars, sun, geomagnetic field, and polarized light for orientation when tested in captivity. The authors studied the interaction of magnetic, stellar, and twilight orientation cues in free-flying songbirds. The authors exposed Catharus thrushes to eastward-turned magnetic fields during the twilight period before takeoff and then followed them for up to 1100 kilometers. Instead of heading north, experimental birds flew westward. On subsequent nights, the same individuals migrated northward again. The authors suggest that birds orient with a magnetic compass calibrated daily from twilight cues, and that this could explain how birds cross the magnetic equator and deal with declination. References (abridged): 1. P. Berthold, E. Gwinner, E. Sonnenschein, Eds., Avian Migration (Springer, Berlin, 2003) 2. J. P. Hoover, Ecology 84, 416 (2003) 3. P. O. Dunn, D. W. Winkler, Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. B. 266, 2487 (1999) 4. D. C. Outlaw, et al., Auk 120, 299 (2003) 5. W. L. Engels, Biol. Bull. 123, 94 (1962) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: ZOOLOGY: ON ANIMAL NAVIGATION The following points are made by James L. Gould (Current Biology 2004 14:R221): 1) Nearly all animals move in an oriented way, but navigation is something more: the directed movement toward a goal, as opposed to steering toward or away from, say, light or gravity. Navigation involves the neural processing of sensory inputs to determine a direction and perhaps distance. For instance, if a honey bee were to seek food south of its hive, it would depart from home with the sun to its left in the morning, but to its right in the afternoon. 2) Several trends reflecting favorably on natural selection and poorly on human imagination characterized early studies of navigation. One tendency was the assumption that animals sense at most the same cues as we do. Thus, being blind to our own blindness, it came as a total surprise when honey bees and many other species were found to be able to see UV light. As navigation depends on the processing of such cues, the number of "new" senses uncovered in the past fifty years has greatly expanded our thinking about what may be going on in the minds of animals -- and there is no reason to assume the list is complete. To UV must be added polarized light, infra-red light, special odors (pheromones), magnetic fields, electric fields, ultrasonic sounds and infrasonic sounds. 3) The second crippling propensity is what navigation pioneer Donald Griffin called our innate "simplicity filter": the desire to believe that animals do things in the least complex way possible. Experience, however, tells us that animals whose lives depend on accurate navigation are uniformly overengineered. Not only do they frequently wring more information out of the cues that surround them than we can, or use more exotic or weaker cues than we find conceivable, they usually come equipped with alternative strategies -- a series of backups between which they switch depending on which is providing the most reliable information. 4) A honey bee, for instance, may set off for a goal using its time-compensated sun compass. When a cloud covers the sun, it may change to inferring the sun's position from UV patterns in the sky and opt a minute later for a map-like strategy when it encounters a distinctive landmark. Lastly, it may ignore all of these cues as it gets close enough to its goal to detect the odors or visual cues provided by the flowers. This is not to say that animals do not often rely on approximations and neural shortcuts to simplify these daunting tasks. 5) A third stumbling block has been our presumption that because the earliest cases studied involved "imprinting" (irreversible one-trial learning), animals must have simple navigation programs, which need merely to be calibrated to the local contingencies. This is just what at least some relatively short-lived animals do -- like honey bees for instance, who rarely forage for more than three weeks. But most animals live longer, and in consequence many need to recalibrate themselves. 6) Finally, most researchers deliberately ignored or denigrated the evidence for cognitive processing in navigating animals. This legacy of behaviorism (the school of psychology that denied instinct) puts a ceiling on the maximum level of mental activity subject to legitimate investigation. There are many navigating animals whose behavior lacks any hint of cognitive intervention. However, the obvious abilities of hunting spiders and honey bees to plan novel routes make it equally clear that phylogenetic distance to humans is no sure guide to the sophistication of a species' orientation strategies.(1-3) References: Able, K.P. and Able, M.A. (1995). Interactions in the flexible orientation system of a migratory bird. Nature 375, 230-232 Gould, J.L. (1980). The case for magnetic-field sensitivity in birds and bees. Am. Sci. 68, 256-267 Walker, M.M. (1998). On a wing and a vector. J. Theor. Biol. 192, 341-349 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 11 23:56:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:56:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Jerry Coyne: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name Message-ID: Jerry Coyne: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050822&s=coyne082205 THE CASE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN. Post date: 08.11.05 Issue date: 08.22.05 Of Pandas and People By Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon (Haughton Publishing Company, 170 pp., $24.95) I. Exactly eighty years after the Scopes "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, history is about to repeat itself. In a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in late September, scientists and creationists will square off about whether and how high school students in Dover, Pennsylvania will learn about biological evolution. One would have assumed that these battles were over, but that is to underestimate the fury (and the ingenuity) of creationists scorned. The Scopes trial of our day--Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District et al--began innocuously. In the spring of 2004, the district's textbook review committee recommended that a new commercial text replace the outdated biology book. At a school board meeting in June, William Buckingham, the chair of the board's curriculum committee, complained that the proposed replacement book was "laced with Darwinism." After challenging the audience to trace its roots back to a monkey, he suggested that a more suitable textbook would include biblical theories of creation. When asked whether this might offend those of other faiths, Buckingham replied, "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such." Defending his views a week later, Buckingham reportedly pleaded: "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?" And he added: "Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state." After a summer of heated but inconclusive wrangling, on October 18, 2004 the Dover school board passed, by a vote of six to three, a resolution that read: "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of Life is not taught." A month later, the Dover school district issued a press release revealing how the alternative of "intelligent design" was to be presented. Before starting to teach evolution, biology teachers were to read their ninth-grade students a statement, which included the following language: The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence.... Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The results were dramatic but predictable. Two school board members resigned. All eight science teachers at Dover High School sent a letter to the school superintendent pointing out that "intelligent design is not science. It is not biology. It is not an accepted scientific theory." The biology teachers asked to be excused from reading the statement, claiming that to do so would "knowingly and intentionally misrepresent subject matter or curriculum," a violation of their code of professional standards. And so, in January of this year, all ninth-grade biology classes were visited by the assistant superintendent himself, who read the mandated disclaimer while the teachers and a few students left the room. Inevitably, the controversy went to the courts. Eleven Dover parents filed suit against the school district and its board of directors, asking that the "intelligent design" policy be rescinded for fostering "excessive entanglement of government and religion, coerced religious instruction, and an endorsement by the state of religion over non-religion and of one religious viewpoint over others." The plaintiffs are represented by the Philadelphia law firm of Pepper Hamilton, the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State; the defendants, by the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Christian organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan. W hy all the fuss about a seemingly inoffensive statement? Who could possibly object to students "keep[ing] an open mind" and examining a respectable-sounding alternative to evolution? Isn't science about testing theories against each other? The furor makes sense only in light of the tortuous history of creationism in America. Since it arose after World War I, Christianfundamentalist creationism has undergone its own evolution, taking on newer forms after absorbing repeated blows from the courts. "Intelligent design," as I will show, is merely the latest incarnation of the biblical creationism espoused by William Jennings Bryan in Dayton. Far from a respectable scientific alternative to evolution, it is a clever attempt to sneak religion, cloaked in the guise of science, into the public schools. The journey from Dayton to Dover was marked by a series of legal verdicts, only one of which, the Scopes trial, favored creationism. In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher, was convicted of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of "any theory that denies the Story of Divine Creation of Man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal." The verdict was reversed on a technicality (the judge, instead of the jury, levied the $100 fine), so the case was never appealed. In the wake of Scopes, anti-evolution laws were passed in Mississippi and Arkansas, adding to those passed by Florida and Oklahoma in 1923. Although these laws were rarely enforced, evolution nonetheless quickly disappeared from most high school biology textbooks because publishers feared losing sales in the South, where anti-evolution sentiment ran high. In 1957, the situation changed. With the launch of Sputnik, Americans awoke to find that a scientifically advanced Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space. This spurred rapid revisions of science textbooks, some emphasizing biological evolution. But the anti-evolution statutes were still in force, and so some teachers using newer books were violating the law. One of these teachers, Susan Epperson, brought suit against the state of Arkansas for violating the Establishment Clause. She won the right to teach evolution, and Epperson v. Arkansas was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1968, only a year after Tennessee finally rescinded the Butler Act. Finally it was legal to teach evolution everywhere in America. T he opponents of evolution proceeded to re-think their strategy, deciding that if they could not beat scientists, they would join them. They thus recast themselves as "scientific creationists," proposing an ostensibly non-religious alternative to the theory of evolution that might be acceptable in the classroom. But the empirical claims of scientific creationism--that the Earth is young (6,000 to 10,000 years old), that all species were created suddenly and simultaneously, that mass extinctions were caused by a great worldwide flood--bore a suspicious resemblance to creation stories in the Bible. This strategy was devised largely by Henry Morris, an engineering professor who headed the influential Institute for Creation Research in San Diego and helped to write the textbook Scientific Creationism. The book came in two versions: one purged of religious references for the public schools, the other containing a scriptural appendix explaining that the science came from interpreting the Bible literally. Scientific creationism proved a bust for two reasons. First, the "science" was ludicrously wrong. We have known for a long time that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old (the 6,000- to 10,000-year claim comes from biblical statements, including toting up the number of "begats") and that species were not created suddenly or simultaneously (not only do most species go extinct, but various groups appear at different times in the fossil record), and we have ample evidence for species' changing over time, as well as for fossils that illustrate large morphological transformations. Most risible was Scientific Creationism's struggle to explain the geological record as a result of a great flood: according to its account, "primitive" organisms such as fish would be found in the lowest layers, while mammals and more "advanced" species appeared in higher layers because they climbed hills and mountains to escape the rising waters. Why dolphins are found in the upper strata with other mammals is one of many facts that this ludicrous fantasy fails to explain. Scientific creationism also came to grief because its advocates did not adequately hide its religious underpinnings. In 1981, the Arkansas legislature passed an "equal time" bill mandating balanced treatment for "evolution science" and "creation science" in the classroom. The bill was quickly challenged in federal court by a group of religious and scientific plaintiffs led by a Methodist minister named William McLean. The defense was easily outgunned, with Judge William Overton quickly spotting biblical literalism underlying the scientific-creationist arguments. In a landmark opinion (and a masterpiece of legal argument), Overton ruled in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education that the balanced-treatment act was unconstitutional, asserting that it violated the Establishment Clause in three ways: it lacked a secular legislative purpose, its primary effect was to advance religion, and it fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education began a string of legal setbacks for scientific creationists. Five years later, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court held that Louisiana's "Creationism Act"--an act that required the teaching of evolution in public schools to be balanced by instruction in "creation science"--was unconstitutional. In the last two decades, federal courts have also used the First Amendment to allow schools to prohibit teaching creationism and to ban school districts from requiring teachers to read evolution disclaimers similar to the one used in Dover, Pennsylvania. To get around these rulings, schools in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia began pasting warning stickers in biology textbooks, as if learning about evolution could endanger one's mental health. A recent specimen from Cobb County, Georgia reads: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." To laypeople--particularly those unfamiliar with the scientific status of evolution, which is actually a theory and a fact--the phrasing may seem harmless. But in 2005 a federal judge ordered the stickers removed. By singling out evolution as uniquely controversial among scientific theories, the stickers catered to religious biases and thus violated the First Amendment. But the creationists did not despair. They are animated, after all, by faith. And they are very resourceful. They came up with intelligent design. II. I ntelligent design, or ID, is the latest pseudoscientific incarnation of religious creationism, cleverly crafted by a new group of enthusiasts to circumvent recent legal restrictions. ID comes in two parts. The first is a simple critique of evolutionary theory, to the effect that Darwinism, as an explanation of the origin, the development, and the diversity of life, is fatally flawed. The second is the assertion that the major features of life are best understood as the result of creation by a supernatural intelligent designer. To understand ID, then, we must first understand modern evolutionary theory (often called "neo-Darwinism" to take into account post-Darwinian modifications). It is important to realize at the outset that evolution is not "just a theory." It is, again, a theory and a fact. Although non-scientists often equate "theory" with "hunch" or "wild guess," the Oxford English Dictionary defines a scientific theory as "a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts." In science, a theory is a convincing explanation for a diversity of data from nature. Thus scientists speak of "atomic theory" and "gravitational theory" as explanations for the properties of matter and the mutual attraction of physical bodies. It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity. Neo-Darwinian theory is not one proposition but several. The first proposition is that populations of organisms have evolved. (Darwin, who used the word "evolved" only once in On the Origin of Species, called this principle "descent with modification.") That is, the species on earth today are the descendants of other species that lived earlier, and the change in these lineages has been gradual, taking thousands to millions of years. Humans, for example, evolved from distinctly different organisms that had smaller brains and probably lived in trees. The second proposition is that new forms of life are continually generated by the splitting of a single lineage into two or more lineages. This is known as "speciation." About five million years ago, a species of primates split into two distinct lineages: one leading to modern chimpanzees and the other to modern humans. And this ancestral primate itself shared a common ancestor with earlier primates, which in turn shared a common ancestor with other mammals. The earlier ancestor of all mammals shared an even earlier ancestor with reptiles, and so on back to the origin of life. Such successive splitting yields the common metaphor of an evolutionary "tree of life," whose root was the first species to arise and whose twigs are the millions of living species. Any two extant species share a common ancestor, which can in principle be found by tracing that pair of twigs back through the branches to the node where they meet. (Extinction, of course, has pruned some branches--pterodactyls, for example--which represent groups that died off without descendants.) We are more closely related to chimpanzees than to orangutans because our common ancestor with these primates lived five million versus ten million years ago, respectively. (It is important to note that although we share a common ancestor with apes, we did not evolve from living apes, but from apelike species that no longer exist. Similarly, I am related to my cousin, but the ancestors we share are two extinct grandparents.) The third proposition is that most (though not all) of evolutionary change is probably driven by natural selection: individuals carrying genes that better suit them to the current environment leave more offspring than individuals carrying genes that make them less adapted. Over time, the genetic composition of a population changes, improving its "fit" to the environment. This increasing fit is what gives organisms the appearance of design, although, as we shall see, the "design" can be flawed. These three propositions were first articulated in 1859 by Darwin in On the Origin of Species, and they have not changed substantially, although they have been refined and supplemented by modern work. But Darwin did not propose these ideas as pure "theory"; he also provided voluminous and convincing evidence for them. The weight of this evidence was so overwhelming that it crushed creationism. Within fifteen years, nearly all biologists, previously adherents of "natural theology," abandoned that view and accepted Darwin's first two propositions. Broad acceptance of natural selection came much later, around 1930. The overwhelming evidence for evolution can be found in many books (and on many websites). Here I wish to present just a few observations that not only support the neo-Darwinist account, but in so doing refute the alternative theory of creationism--that God specially created organisms and their attributes. Given the similarity between the claims of intelligent design and creationism, it is not surprising that these observations also refute the major tenets of ID. T he fossil record is the most obvious place to search for evidence of evolution. Although the record was sparse in Darwin's time, there were already findings that suggested evolution. The living armadillos of South America bore a striking resemblance to fossil glyptodonts, extinct armored mammals whose fossils occurred in the same area. This suggested that glyptodonts and armadillos shared a common South American ancestry. And the record clearly displayed changes in the forms of life existing over large spans of time, with the deepest and oldest sediments showing marine invertebrates, with fishes appearing much later, and still later amphibians, reptiles, and mammals (along with the persistence of some groups found in earlier stages). This sequence of change was in fact established by creationist geologists long before Darwin, and was often thought to reflect hundreds of acts of divine creation. (This does not exactly comport with the account given in Genesis.) Yet evolution predicts not just successions of forms, but also genetic lineages from ancestors to descendants. The absence of such transitional series in the fossil record bothered Darwin, who called this "the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against the theory." (He attributed the missing links, quite reasonably, to the imperfection of the fossil record and the dearth of paleontological collections.) But this objection is no longer valid. Since 1859, paleontologists have turned up Darwin's missing evidence: fossils in profusion, with many sequences showing evolutionary change. In large and small organisms, we can trace, through successive layers of the fossil record, evolutionary changes occurring in lineages. Diatoms get bigger, clamshells get ribbier, horses get larger and toothier, and the human lineage evolves bigger brains, smaller teeth, and increased efficiency at bipedal walking. Moreover, we now have transitional forms connecting major groups of organisms, including fish with tetrapods, dinosaurs with birds, reptiles with mammals, and land mammals with whales. Darwin predicted that such forms would be found, and their discovery vindicated him fully. It also destroys the creationist notion that species were created in their present form and thereafter remained unchanged. D arwin's second line of evidence comprised the developmental and structural remnants of past ancestry that we find in living species--those features that Stephen Jay Gould called "the senseless signs of history." Examples are numerous. Both birds and toothless anteaters develop tooth buds as embryos, but the teeth are aborted and never erupt; the buds are the remnants of the teeth of the reptilian ancestor of birds and the toothed ancestor of anteaters. The flightless kiwi bird of New Zealand, familiar from shoe-polish cans, has tiny vestigial wings hidden under its feathers; they are completely useless, but they attest to the fact that kiwis, like all flightless birds, evolved from flying ancestors. Some cave animals, descended from sighted ancestors that invaded caves, have rudimentary eyes that cannot see; the eyes degenerated after they were no longer needed. A creator, especially an intelligent one, would not bestow useless tooth buds, wings, or eyes on large numbers of species. The human body is also a palimpsest of our ancestry. Our appendix is the vestigial remnant of an intestinal pouch used to ferment the hard-to-digest plant diets of our ancestors. (Orangutans and grazing animals have a large hollow appendix instead of the tiny, wormlike one that we possess.) An appendix is simply a bad thing to have. It is certainly not the product of intelligent design: how many humans died of appendicitis before surgery was invented? And consider also lanugo. Five months after conception, human fetuses grow a thin coat of hair, called lanugo, all over their bodies. It does not seem useful--after all, it is a comfortable 98.6 degrees in utero--and the hair is usually shed shortly before birth. The feature makes sense only as an evolutionary remnant of our primate ancestry; fetal apes also grow such a coat, but they do not shed it. Recent studies of the human genome provide more evidence that we were not created ex nihilo. Our genome is a veritable Gemisch of non-functional DNA, including many inactive "pseudogenes" that were functional in our ancestors. Why do humans, unlike most mammals, require vitamin C in our diet? Because primates cannot synthesize this essential nutrient from simpler chemicals. Yet we still carry all the genes for synthesizing vitamin C. The gene used for the last step in this pathway was inactivated by mutations forty million years ago, probably because it was unnecessary in fruit-eating primates. But it still sits in our DNA, one of many useless remnants testifying to our evolutionary ancestry. D arwin's third line of evidence came from biogeography, the study of the geographic distribution of plants and animals. I have already mentioned what Darwin called his "Law of Succession": living organisms in an area most closely resemble fossils found in the same location. This implies that the former evolved from the latter. But Darwin found his strongest evidence on "oceanic islands"--those islands, such as Hawaii and the Gal?pagos, that were never connected to continents but arose, bereft of life, from beneath the sea. What struck Darwin about oceanic islands--as opposed to continents or "continental islands" such as Great Britain, which were once connected to continents--was the bizarre nature of their flora and fauna. Oceanic islands are simply missing or impoverished in many types of animals. Hawaii has no native mammals, reptiles, or amphibians. These animals, as well as freshwater fish, are also missing on St. Helena, a remote oceanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. It seems that the intelligent designer forgot to stock oceanic (but not continental!) islands with a sufficient variety of animals. One might respond that this was a strategy of the creator, as those organisms might not survive on islands. But this objection fails, because such animals often do spectacularly well when introduced by humans. Hawaii has been overrun by the introduced cane toad and mongoose, to the detriment of its native fauna. Strikingly, the native groups that are present on these islands--mainly plants, insects, and birds--are present in profusion, consisting of clusters of numerous similar species. The Gal?pagos archipelago harbors twenty-three species of land birds, of which fourteen species are finches. Nowhere else in the world will you find an area in which two-thirds of the birds are finches. Hawaii has similar "radiations" of fruit flies and silversword plants, while St. Helena is overloaded with ferns and weevils. Compared with continents or continental islands, then, oceanic islands have unbalanced flora and fauna, lacking many familiar groups but having an over-representation of some species. Moreover, the animals and the plants inhabiting oceanic islands bear the greatest similarity to species found on the nearest mainland. As Darwin noted when describing the species of the Gal?pagos, this similarity occurs despite a great difference in habitat, a fact militating against creationism: Why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Gal?pagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plainly the stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast: in fact there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects. As the final peg in Darwin's biogeographic argument, he noted that the kinds of organisms commonly found on oceanic islands--birds, plants, and insects--are those that can easily get there. Insects and birds can fly to islands (or be blown there by winds), and the seeds of plants can be transported by winds or ocean currents, or in the stomachs of birds. Hawaii may have no native terrestrial mammals, but the islands do harbor one native aquatic mammal, the monk seal, and one native flying mammal, the hoary bat. In a direct challenge to creationists (and now also to advocates of ID), Darwin posed this rhetorical question: Though terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, aerial mammals do occur on almost every island. New Zealand possesses two bats found nowhere else in the world: Norfolk Island, the Viti Archipelago, the Bonin Islands, the Caroline and Marianne Archipelagoes, and Mauritius, all possess their peculiar bats. Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? The answer is that the creative force did not produce bats, or any other creatures, on oceanic islands. All of Darwin's observations about island biogeography point to one explanation: species on islands descend from individuals who successfully colonized from the mainland and subsequently evolved into new species. Only the theory of evolution explains the paucity of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and freshwater fish on oceanic islands (they cannot get there), the radiation of some groups into many species (the few species that make it to islands find empty niches and speciate profusely), and the resemblance of island species to those from the nearest mainland (an island colonist is most likely to have come from the closest source). I n the last 150 years, immense amounts of new evidence have been collected about biogeography, embryology, and, especially, the fossil record. All of it supports evolution. But support for the idea of natural selection was not so strong, and Darwin had no direct evidence for it. He relied instead on two arguments. The first was logical. If individuals in a population varied genetically (which they do), and some of this variation affected the individual's chance of leaving descendants (which seems likely), then natural selection would work automatically, enriching the population in genes that better adapted individuals to their environment. The second argument was analogical. Artificial selection used by breeders had wrought immense changes in plants and animals, a fact familiar to everyone. From the ancestral wolf, humans selected forms as diverse as Chihuahuas, St. Bernards, poodles, and bulldogs. Starting with wild cabbage, breeders produced domestic cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi, kale, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. Artificial selection is nearly identical to natural selection, except that humans rather than the environment determine which variants leave offspring. And if artificial selection can produce such a diversity of domesticated plants and animals in a thousand-odd years, natural selection could obviously do much more over millions of years. But we no longer need to buttress natural selection solely with analogy and logic. Biologists have now observed hundreds of cases of natural selection, beginning with the well-known examples of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, insect resistance to DDT, and HIV resistance to antiviral drugs. Natural selection accounts for the resistance of fish and mice to predators by making them more camouflaged, and for the adaptation of plants to toxic minerals in the soil. (A long list of examples may be found in Natural Selection in the Wild, by John Endler.) Moreover, the strength of selection observed in the wild, when extrapolated over long periods, is more than adequate to explain the diversification of life on Earth. Since 1859, Darwin's theories have been expanded, and we now know that some evolutionary change can be caused by forces other than natural selection. For example, random and non-adaptive changes in the frequencies of different genetic variants--the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing--have produced evolutionary changes in DNA sequences. Yet selection is still the only known evolutionary force that can produce the fit between organism and environment (or between organism and organism) that makes nature seem "designed." As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky remarked, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." And so evolution has graduated from theory to fact. We know that species on earth today descended from earlier, different species, and that every pair of species had a common ancestor that existed in the past. Most evolutionary change in the features of organisms, moreover, is almost certainly the result of natural selection. But we must also remember that, like all scientific truths, the truth of evolution is provisional: it could conceivably be overturned by future investigations. It is possible (but unlikely!) that we could find human fossils co-existing with dinosaurs, or fossils of birds living alongside those of the earliest invertebrates 600 million years ago. Either observation would sink neo-Darwinism for good. When applied to evolution, the erroneous distinction between theory and fact shows why tactics such as the Dover disclaimer and the Cobb County textbook sticker are doubly pernicious. To teach that a scientific theory is equivalent to a "guess" or a "hunch" is deeply misleading, and to assert that "evolution is a theory, not a fact" is simply false. And why should evolution, alone among scientific theories, be singled out with the caveat "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered"? Why haven't school boards put similar warnings in physics textbooks, noting that gravity and electrons are only theories, not facts, and should be critically considered? After all, nobody has ever seen gravity or an electron. The reason that evolution stands alone is clear: other scientific theories do not offend religious sensibilities. III. G iven the copious evidence for evolution, it seems unlikely that it will be replaced by an alternative theory. But that is exactly what intelligent-design creationists are demanding. Is there some dramatic new evidence, then, or some insufficiency of neo-Darwinism, that warrants overturning the theory of evolution? The question is worth asking, but the answer is no. Intelligent design is simply the third attempt of creationists to proselytize our children at the expense of good science and clear thinking. Having failed to ban evolution from schools, and later to get equal classroom time for scientific creationism, they have made a few adjustments designed to sneak Christian cosmogony past the First Amendment. And these adjustments have given ID a popularity never enjoyed by earlier forms of creationism. Even the president of the United States has lent a sympathetic ear: George W. Bush recently told reporters in Texas that intelligent design should be taught in public schools alongside evolution because "part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." Articles by IDers, or about their "theory," regularly appear in mainstream publications such as The New York Times. Why have the new image and the new approach been more successful? For a start, IDers have duped many people by further removing God from the picture, or at least hiding him behind the frame. No longer do creationists mention a deity, or even a creator, but simply a neutral-sounding "intelligent designer," as if it were not the same thing. This designer could in principle be Brahma, or the Taoist P'an Ku, or even a space alien; but ID creationists, as will be evident to anybody who attends to all that they say, mean only one entity: the biblical God. Their problem is that invoking this deity in science classes in public schools is unconstitutional. So IDers never refer openly to God, and people unfamiliar with the history of their creationist doctrine might believe that there is a real scientific theory afoot. They use imposing new terms such as "irreducible complexity," which make their arguments seem more sophisticated than those of earlier creationists. In addition, many IDers have more impressive academic credentials than did earlier scientific creationists, whose talks and antics always bore a whiff of the revival meeting. Unlike scientific creationists, many IDers work at secular institutions rather than at Bible schools. IDers work, speak, and write like trained academics; they do not come off as barely repressed evangelists. Their ranks include Phillip Johnson, the most prominent spokesperson for ID, and a retired professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University; William Dembski, a mathematician-philosopher and the director of the Center for Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Jonathan Wells, who has a doctorate in biology from Berkeley. All of these proponents, save Johnson, are senior fellows at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), a division of the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. (Johnson is the "program advisor" to the CSC.) The CSC is the nerve center of the intelligentdesign movement. Its origins are demonstrably religious: as described by the Discovery Institute, the CSC was designed explicitly "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." Between them, these IDers have published more than a dozen books about intelligent design (Johnson alone has produced eight), which in turn have provoked numerous responses by scientists. Let us examine one of their most influential volumes, the textbook called Of Pandas and People. This is the book recommended by the Dover school district as a "reference book" for students interested in learning about intelligent design. O f Pandas and People is a textbook designed as an antidote to the evolution segment of high school biology classes. It was first published in 1989. By repackaging and updating a subset of traditional young-earth creationist arguments while avoiding taking a stand on any issues that might divide creationists (such as the age of the Earth), it marked the beginning of the modern intelligentdesign movement. By presenting the case for ID, it is supposedly designed to give students a "balanced perspective" on evolution. Although the second edition of Pandas is now twelve years old (a third edition, called Design of Life, is in the works), it accurately presents to students the major arguments for ID. Pandas carefully avoids mentioning God (except under aliases such as "intelligent designer," "master intellect," and so on); but a little digging reveals the book's deep religious roots. One of its authors, Percival Davis, wrote explicitly about his religious beliefs in his book A Case for Creation, co-authored with Wayne Frair: "Truth as God sees it is revealed in the pages of Scripture, and that revelation is therefore more certainly true than any human rationalism. For the creationist, revealed truth controls his view of the universe to at least as great a degree as anything that has been advanced using the scientific method." Its other author, Dean Kenyon, has written approvingly of scientific creationism. Pandas is published by the Haughton Publishing Company of Dallas, a publisher of agricultural books, but the copyright is held by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Richardson, Texas. Although the FTE website scrupulously avoids mentioning religion, its articles of incorporation note with stark clarity that its "primary purpose is both religious and educational, which includes, but is not limited to, proclaiming, preaching, teaching, promoting, broadcasting, disseminating, and otherwise making known the Christian gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of our day." In a fund-raising letter for the proposed third edition of Pandas, Jon Buell, president of the FTE, is equally frank about his goals: We will energetically continue to publish and propel these strategic tools in the battle for the minds and hearts of the young.... Yes, most young Americans are exposed to numerous gospel presentations. But the fog of the alien world view deadens their responses. This is why we have to inundate them with a rational, defensible, wellargued Judeo-Christian world view. FTE's carefully-researched books do just that. Charles Thaxton, the "academic editor" of Pandas, is the director of curriculum research for FTE and a fellow of the CSC. In a proto-ID book on the origin of life, Thaxton argued that "Special Creation by a Creator beyond the cosmos is a plausible view of origin science." Given Pandas' pedigree and the affiliations of its authors, it is not surprising that the book is nothing more than disguised creationism. What is surprising is the transparency of this disguise. Despite the efforts of IDers to come up with new anti-Darwinian arguments, Pandas turns out to be nothing more than recycled scientific creationism, with most of the old arguments buffed up and proffered as new. (Unlike scientific creationism, however, Pandas adopts a studied neutrality toward the facts of astronomy and geology, instead of denying them outright.) P andas' discussion of the Earth's age is a prime example of the book's creationist roots, and of its anti-scientific attitude. If the Earth were young--say, the 6,000 to 10,000 years old posited by "young earth" biblical creationists--then evolution would be false. Life simply could not have originated, evolved, and diversified in such a short time. But we now know from several independent and mutually corroborating lines of evidence that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. All geologists agree on this. So what is Pandas' stance on this critical issue? The book merely notes that design proponents "are divided on the issue of the earth's age. Some take the view that the earth's history can be compressed into a framework of thousands of years, while others adhere to the standard old earth chronology." Well, what's the truth? This equivocation is an attempt to paper over a strong disagreement between young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists, both of whom have marched under the banner of ID. It is typical of creationists to exploit disagreements between evolutionists as proof that neo-Darwinism is dead while at the same time hiding their own disagreements from the public. This equivocation about the fundamental fact of Earth's age does not bode well for the textbook's treatment of the fossil record. Indeed, in this area the authors continue their misrepresentations. Their basic premise is the old creationist argument that organisms appeared simultaneously and have remained largely unchanged ever since. Pandas says of the fossil record that "fully formed organisms appear all at once, separated by distinct gaps." That's not exactly true. Different types of organisms appear in a distinct sequence supporting evolution. The first fossils of living organisms, bacteria, appear 3.5 billion years ago, followed two billion years later by algae, the first organisms having true cells with a nucleus containing distinct chromosomes. Then, 600 million years ago, we see the appearance of rudimentary animals with shells, and many soft-bodied marine organisms. Later, in the Cambrian period, about 543 million years ago, a number of groups arose in a relatively short period of time, the so-called "Cambrian explosion." ("Short period" here means geologically short, in this case 10 million to 30 million years). The Cambrian groups include mollusks, starfish, arthropods, worms, and chordates (including vertebrates). And in some cases, such as worms, modern groups do not just spring into being, but increase in complexity over millions of years. Creationists have always made much of the "Cambrian explosion," and IDers are no exception. The relatively sudden appearance of many groups seems to support the Genesis view of creation. But IDers--and Pandas--fail to emphasize several facts. First, the Cambrian explosion was not "sudden"; it took many millions of years. (We still do not understand why many groups originated in even this relatively short time, although it may reflect an artifact: the evolution of easily fossilized hard parts suddenly made organisms capable of being fossilized.) Moreover, the species of the Cambrian are no longer with us, though their descendants are. But over time, nearly every species that ever lived (more than 99 percent of them) has gone extinct without leaving descendants. Finally, many animals and plants do not show up as fossils until well after the Cambrian explosion: bony fishes and land plants first appeared around 440 million years ago, reptiles around 350 million years ago, mammals around 250 million years ago, flowering plants around 210 million years ago, and human ancestors around 5 million years ago. The staggered appearance of groups that become very different over the next 500 million years gives no support to the notion of instantaneously created species that thereafter remain largely unchanged. If this record does reflect the exertions of an intelligent designer, he was apparently dissatisfied with nearly all of his creations, repeatedly destroying them and creating a new set of species that just happened to resemble descendants of those that he had destroyed. P andas also makes much of the supposed absence of transitional forms: the "missing" links between major forms of life that, according to evolutionary theory, must have existed as common ancestors. Their absence, claim creationists, is a major embarrassment for evolutionary biology. Phillip Johnson's influential book Darwin on Trial, which appeared in 1993, particularly emphasizes these gaps, which, IDers believe, reflect the designer's creation of major forms ex nihilo. And there are indeed some animals, such as bats, that appear in the fossil record suddenly, without obvious ancestors. Yet in most cases these gaps are certainly due to the imperfection of the fossil record. (Most organisms do not get buried in aquatic sediments, which is a prerequisite for fossilization.) And species that are soft-bodied or have fragile bones, such as bats, degrade before they can fossilize. Paleontologists estimate that we have fossils representing only about one in a thousand of all the species that ever lived. In its treatment of evolutionary transitions, Pandas is again guilty of distortion. Paleontologists have uncovered many transitional forms between major groups, almost more than we have a right to expect. Pandas simply ignores--or waves away--these "non-missing links," stating that "we cannot form a smooth, unambiguous transitional series linking, let's say, the first small horse to today's horse, fishes to amphibians, or reptiles to mammals." This is flatly wrong. All three cited transitions (and others) are well documented with fossils. Moreover, the transitional forms appear at exactly the right time in the fossil record: after the ancestral forms already existed, but before the "linked" later group had evolved. Take one example: the link between early reptiles and later mammals, the so-called mammal-like reptiles. Three hundred fifty million years ago, the world was full of reptiles, but there were no mammals. By 250 million years ago, mammals had appeared on the scene. (Fossil reptiles are easily distinguished from fossil mammals by a complex of skeletal traits including features of the teeth and skull.) Around 275 million years ago, forms appear that are intermediate in skeletal traits between reptiles and mammals, in some cases so intermediate that the animals cannot be unambiguously classified as either reptiles or mammals. These mammal-like reptiles, which become less reptilian and more mammalian with time, are the no-longer-missing links between the two forms, important not only because they have the traits of both forms, but also because they occur at exactly the right time. O ne of these traits is worth examining in detail because it is among the finest examples of an evolutionary transition. This trait is the "chewing" hinge where the jaw meets the skull. In early reptiles (and their modern reptilian descendants), the lower jaw comprises several bones, and the hinge is formed by the quadrate bone of the skull and the articular bone of the jaw. As mammal-like reptiles become more mammalian, these hinge bones become smaller, and ultimately the jaw hinge shifts to a different pair of bones: the dentary (our "jawbone") and the squamosal, another bone of the skull. (The quadrate and articular, much reduced, moved into the middle ear of mammals, forming two of the bones that transmit sounds from the eardrum to the middle ear.) The dentary-squamosal articulation occurs in all modern mammals, the quadrate-articular in modern reptiles; and this difference is often used as the defining feature of these groups. Like earlier creationist tracts, Pandas simply denies that this evolution of the jaw hinge occurred. It asserts that "there is no fossil record of such an amazing process," and further notes that such a migration would be "extraordinary." This echoes the old creationist argument that an adaptive transition from one type of hinge to another by means of natural selection would be impossible: members of a species could not eat during the evolutionary period when their jaws were being unhinged and then rehinged. (The implication is that the intelligent designer must have done this job instantaneously and miraculously.) But we have long known how this transition happened. It was easily accomplished by natural selection. In 1958, Alfred Crompton described the critical fossil: the mammal-like reptile Diarthrognathus broomi. D. broomi has, in fact, a double jaw joint with two hinges--the reptilian one and the mammalian one! Obviously, this animal could chew. What better "missing link" could we find? I t should embarrass IDers that so many of the missing links cited by Pandas as evidence for supernatural intervention are no longer missing. Creationists make a serious mistake when using the absence of transitional forms as evidence for an intelligent designer. In the last decade, paleontologists have uncovered a fairly complete evolutionary series of whales, beginning with fully terrestrial animals that became more and more aquatic over time, with their front limbs evolving into flippers and their hind limbs and pelvis gradually reduced to tiny vestiges. When such fossils are found, as they often are, creationists must then punt and change their emphasis to other missing links, continually retreating before the advance of science. As for other transitional forms, IDers simply dismiss them as aberrant fossils. Pandas characterizes Homo erectus and other probable human ancestors as "little more than apes." But this is false. While H. erectus has a skull with large brow ridges and a braincase much smaller than ours, the rest of its skeleton is nearly identical to that of modern humans.The famous fossil Archaeopteryx, a small dinosaur-like creature with teeth and a basically reptilian skeleton but also with wings and feathers, is probably on or closely related to the line of dinosaurs that evolved into birds. But Pandas dismisses this fossil as just an "odd-ball" type, and laments instead the lack of the unfossilizable: "If only we could find a fossil showing scales developing the properties of feathers, or lungs that were intermediate between the very different reptilian and avian lungs, then we would have more to go on." It is again a typical creationist strategy that when skeletons of missing links turn up, creationists ignore them and insist that evidence of intermediacy be sought instead in the soft parts that rarely fossilize. In sum, the treatment of the fossil evidence for evolution in Pandas is shoddy and deceptive, and offers no advance over the discredited arguments of scientific creationism. I n contrast to its long treatment and dismissal of the fossil record, Pandas barely deals with evidence for evolution from development and vestigial traits. The best it can do is note that vestigial features can have a function, and therefore are not really vestigial. The vestigial pelvic bones and legs of the transitional whale Basilosaurus, which were not connected to the skeleton, may have functioned as a guide for the penis during mating. Such a use, according to the authors of Pandas, means that the legs and pelvis "were not vestigial as originally thought." But this argument is wrong: no evolutionist denies that the remnants of ancestral traits can retain some functionality or be co-opted for other uses. The "penis guide" has every bone in the mammalian pelvis and rear leg in reduced form--femur, tibia, fibula, and digits. In Basilosaurus, nearly all of these structures lay within the body wall, and most parts were immobile. Apparently the intelligent designer had a whimsical streak, choosing to construct a sex aid that looked exactly like a degenerate pelvis and set of hind limbs. And what about the strong evidence for evolution from biogeography? About this Pandas, like all creationist books, says nothing. The omission is strategic. It would be very hard for IDers to give plausible reasons why an "intelligent" designer stocked oceanic islands with only a few types of animals and plants--and just those types with the ability to disperse from the nearest mainland. Biogeography has always been the Achilles' heel of creationists, so they just ignore it. IV. Although intelligent design rejects much of the evidence for evolution, it still admits that some evolutionary change occurs through natural selection. This change is what Pandas calls "microevolution," or "small scale genetic changes, observable in organisms." Such microevolutionary changes include the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, changes in the proportion of different-colored moths due to predation by birds, and all changes wrought by artificial selection. But Pandas hastens to add that microevolution gives no evidence for the origin of diverse types of organisms, because "these limited changes do not accumulate the way Darwinian evolutionary theory requires in order to produce macro changes. The process that produces macroevolutionary changes [defined here as "large scale changes, leading to new levels of complexity"] must be different from any that geneticists have studied so far." So, though one can use selection to transform a wolf into either a Chihuahua or a St. Bernard, that is merely microevolution: they are all still dogs. And a DDT-resistant fly is still a fly. Pandas thus echoes the ID assertion that natural selection cannot do more than create microevolutionary changes: "It cannot produce new characteristics. It only acts on traits that already exist." But this is specious reasoning. As we have noted, fossils already show that "macro change," as defined by Pandas, has occurred in the fossil record (the evolution of fish into amphibians, and so on). And if breeders have not turned a dog into another kind of animal, it is because dog breeding has been going on for only a few thousand years, while the differences between dogs and cats, for example, have evolved over more than ten million years. No principle of evolution dictates that evolutionary changes observed during a human lifetime cannot be extrapolated to much longer periods. In fact, Pandas admits that the fruit flies of Hawaii--a diverse group of more than 300 species--have all evolved from a common ancestor. We now know that this common ancestor lived about 20 million years ago. The species of Hawaiian flies differ in many traits, including size, shape, ecology, color pattern, mating behavior, and so on. One can in fact make a good case that some of the fly species differ more from each other than humans differ from chimps. Why, then, do IDers assert that chimps and humans (whose ancestor lived only 5 million years ago) must have resulted from separate acts of creation by the intelligent designer, while admitting that fruit flies evolved from a common ancestor that lived 20 million years ago? The answer is that humans must at all costs not be lumped in with other species, so as to protect the biblical status of humans as uniquely created in God's image. A ccording to Pandas, the theory of "limits to evolution" is a scientific one: "The idea of intelligent design does not preclude the possibility that variation within species occurs, or that new species are formed from existing populations . . . the theory of intelligent design does suggest that there are limits to the amount of variation that natural selection and random change mechanisms can produce." But there is nothing in the theory of intelligent design that tells us how far evolution can go. This "thus far and no further" view of evolution comes not from any scientific findings of ID; it comes from ID's ancestor, scientific creationism. Scientific Creationism notes that "the creation model . . . recognizes only the kind as the basic created unit, in this case, mankind," and a chart contrasting evolution with the "creation model" says that the former predicts "new kinds appearing," while the latter says "no new kinds appearing." But what is a "kind"? No creationist has ever defined it, though they are all very sure that humans and apes are different "kinds." In fact, the notion that evolution and creation have operated together, with the latter creating distinct "kinds," was nicely rebutted by Darwin in On the Origin of Species: Several eminent naturalists . . . admit that they [evolved species] have been produced by variation, but they refuse to extend the same view to other and very slightly different forms. Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases. The day will come when this will be given as a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as egg or seed, or as full grown? and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence. In fact, the biblical appendix of Scientific Creationism shows that the term "kind" derives from the biblical notion of created kinds: The Scriptures are very clear in their teaching that God created all things as He wanted them to be, each with its own particular structure, according to His own sovereign purposes. The account of Genesis 1, for example, indicates that at least ten major categories of organic life were specially created "after his kind." . . . Finally, man "kind" was created as another completely separate category. The phrase "after his kind" occurs ten times in this first chapter of Genesis. There is thus a clear line of descent from the story of Genesis to the ID notion of evolutionary limits, a line charted by what Darwin called "the blindness of preconceived opinion." Until IDers tell us what the limits to evolution are, how they can be ascertained, and what evidence supports these limits, this notion cannot be regarded as a genuinely scientific claim. V. I Ders make one claim that they tout as truly novel, a claim that has become quite popular. It is the idea that organisms show some adaptations that could not be built by natural selection, thus implying the need for a supernatural creative force such as an intelligent designer. These adaptations share a property called "irreducible complexity," a characteristic discussed in Pandas but defined more explicitly by Michael Behe in 1996 in his book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution: "By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." Many man-made objects show this property: Behe cites the mousetrap, which would not work if even one part were removed, such as the catch, the spring, the base, and so on. Pandas mentions a car engine, which will not work if one removes the fan belt, spark plugs, distributor cap, or any of numerous individual parts. A famous example of an irreducibly complex system in the biological realm is the "camera" eye of humans and other vertebrates. The eye has many parts whose individual removal would render the organ useless, including the lens, retina, and optic nerve. The reason IDers love "irreducibly complex" features of organisms is that natural selection is powerless (or so they claim) to create such features. As Behe notes: An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly ... by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.... Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on. "One fell swoop," of course, implies that the feature must have been produced by the miraculous intervention of the intelligent designer. But this argument for intelligent design has a fatal flaw. We have realized for decades that natural selection can indeed produce systems that, over time, become integrated to the point where they appear to be irreducibly complex. But these features do not evolve by the sequential addition of parts to a feature that becomes functional only at the end. They evolve by adding, via natural selection, more and more parts into an originally rudimentary but functional system, with these parts sometimes co-opted from other structures. Every step of this process improves the organism's survival, and so is evolutionarily possible via natural selection. C onsider the eye. Creationists have long maintained that it could not have resulted from natural selection, citing a sentence from On the Origin of Species: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." But in the next passage, invariably omitted by creationists, Darwin ingeniously answers his own objection: Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. Thus our eyes did not suddenly appear as full-fledged camera eyes, but evolved from simpler eyes, having fewer components, in ancestral species. Darwin brilliantly addressed this argument by surveying existing species to see if one could find functional but less complex eyes that not only were useful, but also could be strung together into a hypothetical sequence showing how a camera eye might evolve. If this could be done--and it can--then the argument for irreducible complexity vanishes, for the eyes of existing species are obviously useful, and each step in the hypothetical sequence could thus evolve by natural selection. A possible sequence of such changes begins with pigmented eye spots (as seen in flatworms), followed by an invagination of the skin to form a cup protecting the eyespot and allowing it to better localize the image (as in limpets), followed by a further narrowing of the cup's opening to produce an improved image (the nautilus), followed by the evolution of a protective transparent cover to protect the opening (ragworms), followed by coagulation of part of the fluid in the eyeball into a lens to help focus the light (abalones), followed by the co-opting of nearby muscles to move the lens and vary the focus (mammals). The evolution of a retina, an optic nerve, and so on would follow by natural selection. Each step of this transitional "series" confers increased adaptation on its possessor, because it enables the animal to gather more light or to form better images, both of which aid survival. And each step of this process is exemplified by the eye of a different living species. At the end of the sequence we have the camera eye, which seems irreducibly complex. But the complexity is reducible to a series of small, adaptive steps. N ow, we do not know the precise order in which the components of the camera eye evolved--but the point is that the appearance of "irreducible complexity" cannot be an argument against neo-Darwinism if we can document a plausible sequence in which the complexity can arise from a series of adaptive steps. The "irreducible complexity" argument is not, in fact, completely novel. It descends, with modification, from the British theologian William Paley, who in 1802 raised the famous "argument from design" in his book Natural Theology. Paley argued that just as finding a watch on the ground implies a conscious designer (the watchmaker), so finding an equally complex organism implies a cosmic designer (God). But the eye is not a watch. The human eye, though eminently functional, is imperfect--certainly not the sort of eye an engineer would create from scratch. Its imperfection arises precisely because our eye evolved using whatever components were at hand, or produced by mutation. Since our retina evolved from an everted part of the brain, for example, the nerves and blood vessels that attach to our photoreceptor cells are on the inside rather than the outside of the eye, running over the surface of the retina. Leakage of these blood vessels can occlude vision, a problem that would not occur if the vessels fed the retina from behind. Likewise, to get the nerve impulses from the photocells to the brain, the different nerves must join together and dive back through the eye, forming the optic nerve. This hole in the retina creates a blind spot in the eye, a flaw that again would be avoidable with a priori design. The whole system is like a car in which all the wires to the dashboard hang inside the driver's compartment instead of being tucked safely out of sight. Evolution differs from a priori design because it is constrained to operate by modifying whatever features have evolved previously. Thus evolution yields fitter types that often have flaws. These flaws violate reasonable principles of intelligent design. IDers tend to concentrate more on biochemistry than on organs such as the eye, citing "irreducibly complex" molecular systems such as the mechanism for blood-clotting and the immune system. Like the eye, these systems supposedly could not have evolved, since removal of any step in these pathways would render the entire pathway non-functional. (This biochemical complexity is the subject of Behe's book Darwin's Black Box.) Discussing the blood-clotting system in its sixth chapter (partially written by Behe), Pandas asserts that "like a car engine, biological systems can only work after they have been assembled by someone who knows what the final result will be." This is nonsense. As we have seen in the case of the eye, biological systems are not useful only at the end of a long evolutionary process, but during every step of that process. And biochemical systems--like all adaptations created by natural selection--are not assembled with foresight. Whatever useful mutations happen to arise get folded into the system. There is no doubt that many biochemical systems are dauntingly complex. A diagram of the blood-clotting pathway looks like a complicated circuit board, with dozens of proteins interacting with one another to one end: healing a wound. And the system seems irreducibly complex, because without any of several key proteins, the blood would not clot. Yet such biochemical systems evolved in the same way that the eye evolved, by adding parts successively and adaptively to simpler, functioning systems. It is more difficult to trace the evolution of biochemical pathways than of anatomical structures because the ancestral metabolic pathways are no longer present. But biologists are beginning to provide plausible scenarios for how "irreducibly complex" biochemical pathways might have evolved. As expected, these systems involve using bits co-opted from other pathways originally having different functions. (Thus, one of the enzymes in the blood-clotting system also plays a role in digestion and cell division.) In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance "God." VI. Insofar as intelligent-design theory can be tested scientifically, it has been falsified. Organisms simply do not look as if they had been intelligently designed. Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? Would an intelligent designer produce animals having a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, at exactly the time when reptiles are thought to have been evolving into mammals? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus? Or an appendix, an injurious organ that just happens to resemble a vestigial version of a digestive pouch in related organisms? Why would the designer give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes? Why didn't the intelligent designer stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species? And why would he make the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different? Why, about a million years ago, would the designer produce creatures that have an apelike cranium perched atop a humanlike skeleton? And why would he then successively replace these creatures with others having an ever-closer resemblance to modern humans? There are only two answers to these questions: either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved. Few people, religious or otherwise, will find the second alternative palatable. It is the modern version of the old argument that God put fossils in the rocks to test our faith. The final blow to the claim that intelligent design is scientific is its proponents' admission that we cannot understand the designer's goals or methods. Behe owns up to this in Darwin's Black Box: "Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason--for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yetundetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason--or they might not." And, discussing skeletal differences between placental and marsupial mammals, Pandas notes: Why were not the North American placentals given the same bones? Would an intelligent designer withhold these structures from placentals if they were superior to the placental system? At present we do not know; however, we all recognize that an engineer can choose any of several different engineering solutions to overcome a single design problem. An intelligent designer might reasonably be expected to use a variety (if a limited variety) of design approaches to produce a single engineering solution, also. Even if it is assumed that an intelligent designer did indeed have a good reason for every decision that was made, and for including every trait in each organism, it does not follow that such reasons will be obvious to us. Well, if we admit that the designer had a number of means and motives, which can be self-contradictory, arbitrary, improvisatory, and "unguessable," then we are left with a theory that cannot be rejected. Every conceivable observation of nature, including those that support evolution, becomes compatible with ID, for the ways of the designer are unfathomable. And a theory that cannot be rejected is not a scientific theory. If IDers want to have a genuinely scientific theory, let them propose a model that can be rigorously tested. G iven its lack of rigor, one might expect that ID theory would not inspire much scientific research. And there is virtually none. Despite the claims of ID to be a program of research, its adherents have published only one refereed paper supporting ID in a scientific journal: a review of ID by Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. This paper merely rehashes ID arguments for why natural selection and evolution cannot explain the diversity of life and then asserts that intelligent design is the only alternative. It distorts the evolutionary literature it purports to review, and it neither advances new scientific arguments nor suggests any way that ID better explains patterns in nature. Not surprisingly, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington later disowned the paper because it did "not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings." The gold standard for modern scientific achievement is the publication of new results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. By that standard, IDers have failed miserably. As William Dembski himself noted, "There are good and bad reasons to be skeptical of intelligent design. Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program." IDers desperately crave scientific respectability, but it is their own theory that prevents them from attaining it. Thus, while IDers demand that evolutionists produce thousands of transitional fossils and hundreds of detailed scenarios about the evolution of biochemical pathways, they put forth no observations supporting the plausibility of a supernatural designer, nor do they show how appeal to such a designer could explain the fossil record, embryology, and biogeography better than neo-Darwinism. Herbert Spencer could have been describing ID when he declared that "those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none." Finally, the reliance of ID on supernatural intervention means that the enterprise cannot be seen, strictly speaking, as scientific. In his rejection of scientific creationism in McLean v. Arkansas, Judge Overton described the characteristics of good science: (1) It is guided by natural law; (2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) It is testable against the empirical world; (4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and (5) It is falsifiable. By invoking the repeated occurrence of supernatural intervention by an intelligent designer to create new species and new traits, ID violates criteria 1 and 2; and in its ultimate reliance on Christian dogma and God, it violates criteria 3, 4, and 5. In candid moments, usually when writing for or speaking to a religious audience, IDers admit the existence not only of supernatural acts as a part of their theory, but also of Christian supernatural acts. In a foreword to a book on creationism, Johnson wrote: "The intelligent design movement starts with the recognition that 'In the beginning was the Word,' and 'In the beginning God created.' Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message." And here is Dembski writing in Touchstone, a Christian magazine: "The world is a mirror representing the divine life.... Intelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." Indeed, in the manuscript draft of the first edition of Pandas, the terms "creationism," "creationist," and "creation" are used repeatedly instead of the equivalent ID terms, and "creationism" is defined identically to "intelligent design" in the published version. Nothing gives a clearer indication that one ancestor of this textbook was the Bible. I t is clear, then, that intelligent design did not arise because of some long-standing problems with evolutionary theory, or because new facts have called neoDarwinism into question. ID is here for only one reason--to act as a Trojan horse poised before the public schools: a seemingly secular vessel ready to inject its religious message into the science curriculum. The contents of Pandas, and of the other writings of IDers, are simply a cunning pedagogical ploy to circumvent legal restrictions against religious creationism. (With any luck, though, the publicity will backfire. Last month The York Dispatch in Pennsylvania reported that the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the group that publishes this textbook and others designed to present "a Christian perspective," wanted to intervene in the Dover lawsuit. According to John Buell, the foundation's president, the association of ID with creationism "would make the book radioactive," and his outfit could lose as much as $525,000 in sales.) ID is part of what Johnson candidly calls the "wedge strategy," a carefully crafted scheme that begins with the adoption of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution, after which ID will edge out evolution until it is the only view left, after which it will become full-blown biblical creationism. The ultimate goal is to replace naturalist science with spiritualist thinking, and the method is to hammer the wedge of ID into science at its most vulnerable point: public education. In Johnson's own words: So the question is: "How to win?" That's when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "stick with the most important thing," the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do. Johnson was even more explicit in 1999 in remarks to a conference on "Reclaiming America for Christ." Rob Boston reported Johnson's remarks in Church & State magazine: Johnson calls his movement "The Wedge." The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism v. evolution to the existence of God v. the nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to "the truth" of the Bible and then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus." Other major figures in the ID movement have been equally clear about their religious motivations. Here is Dembski: But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed. And here is Jonathan Wells, a member of Reverend Moon's Unification Church: Father's [Reverend Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle. D o these people really believe in intelligent design? There is no reason to think otherwise. They are not lying for their cause, but sincerely hold that life on earth reflects a succession of miracles worked by a supernatural agent. In fact, they view evolutionists as the duplicitous ones. In an interview in The Sacramento Bee in 1991, Johnson proclaimed that "scientists have long known that Darwinism is false. They have adhered to the myth out of self-interest and a zealous desire to put down God." Never mind that many scientists, including evolutionists, are religious. Given the overwhelming evidence for evolution and the lack of evidence for ID, how can intelligent people hold such views? Is their faith so strong that it blinds them to all evidence? It is a bit more complicated than that. After all, many theologians and religious people accept evolution. The real issues behind intelligent design--and much of creationism--are purpose and morality: specifically, the fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God's creation but a contingent product of natural selection, and so we lack real purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle. Tom DeLay furnished a colorful example of this view on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 16, 1999. Explaining the causes of the massacre at Columbine High School, he read a sarcastic letter in a Texas newspaper that suggested that "it couldn't have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud." The notion that naturalism and materialism are the enemies of morality and a sense of human purpose, and that religion is their only ally, is pervasive in the writings of IDers. As Johnson noted, "Once God is culturally determined to be imaginary, then God's morality loses its foundation and withers away." Nancy Pearcey, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, summarizes why evolution disturbs so many Americans: Why does the public care so passionately about a theory of biology? Because people sense intuitively that there's much more at stake than a scientific theory. They know that when naturalistic evolution is taught in the science classroom, then a naturalistic view of ethics will be taught down the hallway in the history classroom, the sociology classroom, the family life classroom, and in all areas of the curriculum. Even some parents in Dover, though opposed to teaching ID in school, worry that learning evolution will erode the Christian values that they are trying to instill in their children. But the acceptance of evolution need not efface morality or purpose. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life's diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. Philosophers have argued for years about whether ethics should have a basis in nature. There is certainly no logical connection between evolution and immorality. Nor is there a causal connection: in Europe, religion is far less pervasive than in America, and belief in evolution is more widespread, but somehow the continent remains civilized. Most religious scientists, laymen, and theologians have not found the acceptance of evolution to impede living an upright, meaningful life. And the idea that religion provides the sole foundation for meaning and morality also cannot be right: the world is full of skeptics, agnostics, and atheists who live good and meaningful lives. B arring a miracle, the Dover Area School District will lose its case. Anyone who bothers to study ID and its evolution from earlier and more overtly religious forms of creationism will find it an unscientific, faith-based theory ultimately resting on the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity. Its presentation in schools thus violates both the Constitution and the principles of good education. There is no secular reason why evolutionary biology, among all the sciences, should be singled out for a school-mandated disclaimer. But the real losers will be the people of Dover, who will likely be saddled with huge legal bills and either a substantial cut in the school budget or a substantial hike in property taxes. We can also expect that, if they lose, the IDers will re-group and return in a new disguise even less obviously religious. I await the formation of the Right to Teach Problems with Evolution Movement. IDers have been helped by Americans' continuing doubts about the truth of evolution. According to a Gallup poll taken last year, 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement, "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." Asked if evolution is well supported by evidence, 35 percent of Americans said yes, 35 percent said no, and 29 percent said they lack the knowledge to reply. As a rationalist, I cannot help but believe that the first group would swell were Americans to be thoroughly taught the evidence for evolution, which is rarely done in public high schools. I have seen creationist students become evolutionists when they learn about biogeography or examine the skulls of mammal-like reptiles. What we need in the schools is not less teaching of evolution but more. In the end, many Americans may still reject evolution, finding the creationist alternative psychologically more comfortable. But emotion should be distinguished from thought, and a "comfort level" should not affect what is taught in the science classroom. As Judge Overton wrote in his magisterial decision striking down Arkansas Act 590, which mandated equal classroom time for "scientific creationism": The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others. [3]Jerry Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. RELATED LINKS [4]Creations Intelligent design is an expression of sentiment, not an exercise of reason. [5]Majority Rules What the religious right and radical multiculturalists have in common. [tnrd_blurb_logo.gif] web only [6]Evolutionary War Do leading conservative pundits and thinkers believe in evolution? We asked them. web only References 4. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050822&s=diarist082205 5. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050808&s=reifowitz081005 6. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050704&s=adler070705 From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 12 00:07:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:07:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Commentary: Emotional Correctness Message-ID: Emotional Correctness http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12003074_1 Book Review One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel St. Martin's Press. 310 pp. $23.95 Reviewed by Bruce S. Thornton In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 9,000 "grief counselors" descended on New York City. Their mission was to provide the treatment and psychological guidance considered necessary to help both survivors and families of victims in coping with their trauma. So ubiquitous has this sort of intervention become after every disaster in America that we no longer stop to think about it. Yet, according to Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel in One Nation Under Therapy, it is just one manifestation of a much larger and in their view highly detrimental set of assumptions about how to deal with the vicissitudes of life--assumptions that now permeate many of our public institutions. Christina Hoff Sommers is the author of Who Stole Feminism (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000), two trenchant analyses of the baleful impact of extreme feminist theory on the education of both boys and girls. Sally Satel, like Sommers a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a practicing psychiatrist and the author of PC MD (2002), an account of how "identity politics," in the form of theories about race, gender, and poverty, has compromised the practice of medicine. The book they have now co-authored is a biting expos? of "therapism"--not the same thing as therapy per se, which can often provide real benefits, but a damaging mindset that, in their words, "pathologizes normal human emotion, promoting the illusion that we are very fragile beings and urging grand emotional displays as the prescription for coping." One Nation Under Therapy is organized around specific practices that have been promoted by the mental-health establishment and are now widely institutionalized. In many schools, for instance, certain games, including dodge ball and tag, have been eliminated, on the grounds that they inflict an esteem-killing competitiveness and sense of exclusion on the "fragile child"--a helpless creature of the therapists' imagination who wilts at the slightest breath of criticism, judgment, or failure. Despite the fact that (as the authors put it) "the prevalence of depression among children and adolescents has not significantly changed in the past 30 years," and that no scientific evidence links elevated self-esteem to success or happiness, a belief in children's psychic vulnerability has become enshrined in school programs and curricula. Sommers and Satel turn next to the so-called "human-potential movement," a mid-20th-century offspring of the psychologists Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and the parent, in turn, of the self-esteem craze. This school of thought posits the existence inside each of us of an ideal self, "buried under a lot of wreckage put there by a judgmental, emotionally withholding, unforgiving, and oppressive society." In this reading, persons we might once have considered sinners or wrongdoers are instead reconceived as the victims of malign social forces, and entitled as such to our empathy and compassion and, frequently, our tax dollars. They can be restored to health only through the ministrations of professionals who have been trained to guide them on the path of personal fulfillment "through a regimen of self-preoccupation, self-expression, and psychic release." From this medicalizing of moral failure, write Sommers and Satel, have come such latter-day spectacles as the "treatment" accorded to some pedophiliac Catholic priests who, once "cured" of their "sickness," were released to prey again on children in their parishes. Still another expression of therapism is the doctrine of "emotional correctness." According to its dictates, people who have suffered a tragedy are virtually required to dwell publicly on what they have undergone lest they be considered humanly inadequate. The idea here is that sudden or deep loss can leave a hidden dysfunction in the psyche, often in the form of "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD)--a term invented by antiwar activists in the late 1960's to pathologize Vietnam veterans, now extended into an all-purpose "archetype for the experience of adversity in our culture." For Sommers and Satel, PTSD, like emotional correctness, "confuse[s] pathos with pathology." Worse, it ignores "how frequently survivors find sustaining meaning in heartbreak and how often they persevere nobly" in the face of it, especially if they have the support of family, friends, or religious faith. By contrast, "when people are distraught, ruminating about their pain may only intensify the pain." This brings us back to 9/11 and its aftermath. As it turned out, the 9,000 counselors and therapists who gathered in New York ended up with very little to do. Most people, drawing on their own resources of resilience and inner strength, were quite able to deal with that life-shattering disaster. Indeed, as Sommers and Satel conclude, many victims of trauma "can point to ways they have benefited [emphasis added] from their struggle to cope" with catastrophe. What they need most from the helping arms of society is a reduction in the "disorder, uncertainty, and economic devastation" that accompany such events. Mental-health professionals unable to strike "a balance between offering [their] services and promoting them too eagerly" too often constitute only another source of disorder, and a hindrance to healing. One Nation Under Therapy is a salutary book, one that not only provides convincing evidence of the harm done by therapism but also reminds us of the appropriateness--indeed, the necessity--of indignation and censoriousness in the face of destructive behavior. Beyond this, it seeks to recover the connection between such old-fashioned virtues and the preservation of a democratic culture founded on the ideals of autonomy and freedom. As Sommers and Satel rightly point out, "Only a society that treats its members as ethically responsible and personally accountable can achieve and sustain a democratic civil order." The American creed, in particular, emphasizes "self-reliance, stoicism, courage in the face of adversity, and the valorization of excellence." Therapism, unfortunately, "is at odds with them all." If I have a reservation about the authors' argument, it has to do with their insistence on confining themselves to the realm of social science and social psychology. Given their perspective, this was perhaps unavoidable, but it leaves open the question of whether there is such a thing as a "science" of human identity and behavior in the first place. Sommers and Satel answer one deeply flawed conception of human well-being with another that is presumably more accurate and assuredly more mature. But, from the scientific point of view, psychological states are in general notoriously difficult to define, measure, and assess, and most efforts to do so are inevitably compromised by the subjectivity and fuzziness of terms like "happy," "anxious," and so forth. In the end one wonders whether we might not be better served simply by relying on our common moral sense, aided by the millennial teachings of literature and religion. Within its own social-scientific framework, however, One Nation Under Therapy does an impressive job of documenting the shaky assumptions, bad science, and simplistic nostrums of therapism. It also offers powerful empirical reasons for resisting an ideology whose proponents seem bent on turning us not into free and responsible adults but into children dependent on their advice and treatment, if not subject to their control. Bruce S. Thornton is a professor of classics at California State University at Fresno and the author of, among other books, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 12 00:07:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:07:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: I.B.M. to Put Genetic Data of Workers Off Limits Message-ID: I.B.M. to Put Genetic Data of Workers Off Limits http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/10/business/10gene.html By STEVE LOHR As concerns grow that genetic information could become a modern tool of discrimination, I.B.M. plans to announce a new work force privacy policy today. I.B.M., the world's largest technology company by revenue, is promising not to use genetic information in hiring or in determining eligibility for its health care or benefits plans. Genetics policy specialists and privacy rights groups say that the I.B.M. pledge to its more than 300,000 employees worldwide appears to be the first such move by a major corporation. The new policy, which comes as Congress is considering legislation on genetic privacy, is a response to the growing trend in medical research to focus on a person's genetic propensity for disease in hopes of tailoring treatments to specific medical needs. Gene tests are not yet widespread, but start-up companies are already intent on developing a market for genetic testing and counseling. I.B.M. has a business stake in promoting genetic data gathering and processing, as a leading information technology company with a growing presence in the medical industry. Research on genetics is already beginning to lead to improvements in health care. But polls have shown that Americans worry that gene tests and genetic profiling could be used to keep people deemed at genetic risk of certain diseases or conditions from getting jobs and health insurance. And there have already been instances of employers trying to use genetic data to workers' detriment. "What I.B.M. is doing is significant because you have a big, leadership company that is saying to its workers, 'We aren't going to use genetic testing against you,' " said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. "If you want a genomic revolution," Mr. Caplan added, "then you better have policies, practices and safeguards that give people comfort and trust." In a handful of publicly disclosed cases, genetic data has been used without workers' knowledge. Perhaps the best known involved a $2.2 million settlement in 2002 that the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached with the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company. The government had sued, saying the railroad tested, or sought to test, 36 of its employees, using blood samples, without their knowledge or consent. According to testimony, the company performed the tests in the hopes of claiming that the workers' arm injuries stemmed from a rare genetic condition instead of from work-related stress on muscles and nerves. The railroad denied that it violated the law, but agreed not to use genetic tests in future medical examinations. The Genetic Alliance, a Washington coalition of patient advocacy groups, receives a few inquiries a week, said Sharon F. Terry, president and chief executive of the alliance. Some are complaints from people who have had trouble getting health insurance after they disclosed a genetic condition, while others come from people concerned about how employers might use any genetic information they might reveal in health forms. "It is a problem already, and the prospect is that the problem will only grow," Ms. Terry said. "That is why we need rules and practices from government and the private sector to prevent abuses." Congress has certainly taken notice of the issue. This year, the Senate passed a genetic information nondiscrimination bill, by a vote of 98 to 0, and the House is now considering similar legislation. Two years ago, after the Senate passed a genetic privacy act, the House never voted on the legislation. But House sponsors are more optimistic this time. Also, about 40 states have laws that address some aspect of genetic privacy and discrimination. To some extent, the privacy provisions in existing statutes like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and disability and civil rights laws already address the issue. They include prohibitions against using personal medical information to discriminate against people in hiring and in providing health insurance. But the current laws tend to deal with the diseases or disabilities that people already have. Some critics say the genetic privacy bill would deny insurers a means of measuring risk that would be available to the people they insure, allowing some people to take advantage of that information. For example, there is a strong genetic marker for the early onset of Alzheimer's disease. A person could test for it privately, and then take out long-term care insurance. Health insurers have expressed skepticism about the need for federal legislation to protect genetic privacy. They say that current federal and state laws are adequate, and that a new law could have the unintended effect of, say, preventing insurers from providing disease management programs to people who have tested positive for a genetic risk. But the industry's big trade association, America's Health Insurance Plans, has not lobbied against the Senate bill, according to Congressional staff members. I.B.M. has become a big player in what is called information-based medicine, which relies on genetic information. The company's involvement goes beyond the hardware and software often employed in such work. I.B.M. scientists and technology consultants are engaged in projects including research at the Mayo Clinic and a venture with the National Geographic Society to trace the genealogy of the world's population. The trends in scientific research and medicine, along with the questions I.B.M. has heard from outsiders and some of its employees about its handling of genetic information, all contributed to the decision to adopt a formal genetic privacy policy. "The time is right," explained Harriet Pearson, I.B.M.'s chief privacy officer. "The market and medical practice is moving in this direction - to gather and use genetic information." In an e-mail message to be sent to all I.B.M. employees today, Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s chief executive, writes that the spread of gene-testing and genomic research is "enormously promising - but it also raises very significant issues, especially in the areas of privacy and security." Opinion polls have repeatedly showed that workers are leery of companies using genetic test information against them. For example, a poll in 2000 by the National Center for Genome Resources, a research group, found that 63 percent of workers would not take genetic tests if employers could get access to the results. Genetic specialists regard I.B.M.'s move as a positive step and one that could help prod policy forward. But many also insist that a federal law would be the best protection. In an article last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher, the deputy director, wrote that "potential discrimination in health insurance or employment based on the results of genetic testing has been apparent for years and requires a national legislative solution." From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 12 00:07:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 20:07:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The High Price of Gasoline Sends Shoppers to the Web Message-ID: The High Price of Gasoline Sends Shoppers to the Web http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/10/technology/10ecom.html [Further evidence that individuals will make their own adjustments to the energy "crisis."] By BOB TEDESCHI THERE'S nothing like an energy squeeze to buoy the spirits of Internet merchants. Online shopping sites, already on a roll, are getting help from the high price of gasoline, which is prompting untold numbers of consumers to boot up their PC's instead of driving their S.U.V.'s to the mall. And while oil prices have fallen from their summer peak, prices at the pump remain at more than $3 a gallon in much of the country, with tight supplies likely to keep them high through the holiday season. "There's going to be a lot of talk about Christmas shopping being hammered because of higher fuel prices, but we're saying, 'On the contrary,' " said Shmuel Gniwisch, chief executive of the online jewelry store Ice.com. "Our sales will increase." Mr. Gniwisch said he expected sales on his site this holiday season to jump by more than 40 percent over 2004, partly because Ice.com has extended free shipping to all purchases instead of just orders exceeding $150. The new policy, he said, is aimed at snaring "the fence-sitters: people who've been coming to the site and looking around without buying, and there are a lot of them out there." A lot of them are getting off the fence and going online to escape the $100 fill-up, analysts say. In a recent survey by Shopzilla, a unit of E. W. Scripps that compares Web prices, 40 percent of Internet shoppers said they had increased their Web purchases to save on gas. Over all, online sales are expected to rise about 22 percent in the final three months of this year, to roughly $26 billion, according to eMarketer, a research firm. That compares with a 24 percent increase in the fourth quarter of 2004, to $21.5 billion. Store sales, by contrast, are expected to increase by 5 percent, according to the National Retail Federation, though at $435 billion, they will still dwarf Internet buying. Though the divergence in the rates of increase isn't surprising, high gas prices are accelerating the trend, said Donna L. Hoffman, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. "It won't necessarily bring in more people to shop online, but it will bring in people more often," she said. Even Web sites that charge $5 for all shipments are unlikely to discourage shoppers, she said. "People will do the mental math, and say, 'If I go to the store, how much will it cost me, and how much is my time worth?' " she said. "Five dollars isn't much to pay." To be sure, Web merchants that offer free shipping will have to bear the extra cost, which is considerable. U.P.S. and FedEx currently impose a 3.5 percent fuel surcharge on ground shipments, and plan to raise it to 4.5 percent next month and perhaps bump it up again in December. But Ms. Hoffman said she believed that merchants can easily swallow the extra expense, either by raising prices in categories like apparel and home furnishings where consumers will not notice or by increasing volume for products like electronics and music where buyers can use shopping-comparison engines to resist price increases. Besides, she said, with 10 years of experience behind them, Internet retailers are running their operations more efficiently and more profitably than ever. Now is the time to put that business savvy to good use. In years past, some merchants who got behind on their holiday shipments resorted to free expedited shipping in the final days before Christmas, in an effort to stay on the good side of customers (not to mention the Federal Trade Commission). If they find themselves playing catch-up this year, it will cost them dearly. The U.P.S. fuel surcharge for expedited deliveries is 12.5 percent, while FedEx charges 15.5 percent. At the very least, consumers can expect to hear lots of noise from Web merchants in the weeks ahead about how much more sense it makes to shop online than at stores. "I'm sure you'll see us weave this into our promotional copy," said Lauren Marrus, chief executive of ChelseaPaper.com, a New York seller of paper products. As the holidays approach, Ms. Marrus said, ChelseaPaper's e-mail advertisements will promote free shipping, an annual tradition. Even so, prices will hold firm, she predicted. "The fourth quarter is a time when we don't like to do anything new," she said. Although Shopzilla and Shop.org, an industry group, said last week that 79 percent of Internet retailers would offer some form of free shipping this year, some executives are not sure they will join in. Matt Hyde, the senior vice president for merchandising and logistics at Recreational Equipment Inc., says that if competing sites do, REI.com could follow their lead, but otherwise the company would prefer not to incur the extra expense. In any case, REI.com plans to save millions of dollars a year in shipping costs when it opens a new distribution center in either Pennsylvania, Virginia or West Virginia in early 2006, Mr. Hyde said. Then, instead of driving packages for three days to Eastern states from REI's warehouse in Sumner, Wash., the company's trucks will make the trip in an average of 36 hours. Higher fuel prices, meanwhile, are showing up in other unexpected places on REI.com. Plastic kayaks, which are made using a petroleum byproduct, have gone up in price compared with last year, Mr. Hyde said, "And synthetic fabrics are seeing some price pressure, but because the fabric is such a small component of the overall price of the product consumers won't see that much increase." The recent shift in attitudes about gas guzzling is also having an effect on REI.com's fortunes. "Bike sales have been so strong this year that it's hard to see the additional spike, but all our bike accessories that are related to commuting are up about 30 percent above the trend," Mr. Hyde said. That is probably a good omen for all online merchants. Even if the new biking commuters stop off at the mall on their way home from work, there is only so much they will be able to load into a wire-mesh basket. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Oct 12 16:31:21 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 10:31:21 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Inherent cognitive differences Message-ID: <434D3A59.3060003@solution-consulting.com> Charles Murray has surfaced again (after ten years) with a lengthy essay on Opinionjournal.com. For those interested in the topic, it is a fair and balanced Fox News review, with technical stuff on another site linked in the article. http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007391 Technical issues: the same article with footnotes and references located at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html#Charles%20Murray Too long to post, too interesting to ignore. Lynn From kendulf at shaw.ca Wed Oct 12 18:42:01 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:42:01 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws References: <1f7.13faec06.307cad14@aol.com> Message-ID: <002601c5cf5c$a2965830$413e4346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Dear Howard, You asked two questions: What in the world could the answer be to the following question: "Our brains expanded at he same rate in (exponent about 1.5) evolution as did the antlers of giant deer and horns of giant sheep! ... Why?" And why are periglacial environments, environments poor to the naked eye, richer than tropical environments, which seem very, very rich? They are good questions, which I think I can answer. In the first, the similarity extends much beyond the fact that both, horns and brains, grow within or from skull bones! Large antlers/horns as well as brains stand, in an odd way, for supreme, highly adaptive all-round ability, for supreme competence and confidence. However, let me start at the real beginning. Antlers as well as the cerebral cortex (the largest part of the brain) are both tissues of low growth priority. That is, they only grow when the blood stream has supplied all other tissues with their required energy and nutrients. Antlers and brains thus both depend for maximum growth on superabundant food of the highest quality. The brain in addititon to that superlative nutrition requires hard, but diverse exercise in order to grow. It?s like a muscle: no exercise, no growth! The broader the range of abilities mastered the larger the brain! Brain size is not related to excellence in a task, but in many tasks. Therefore, very large brains can only occur together with an athletic body and large body size. And that is the very picture of our wild, ice age ancestors from the upper Paleolithic in the cold, but productive periglacial zones. (It also applies to Neanderthal). The average Cro-magnid, athetic, six-foot plus, and with a brain 20% larger than moderns was a superior human specimen to Val Geist on every count! As to antlers, they also grow only if there is lots and lots of excellent food. However, here is the rub! In deer societies the females occupy the most secure ground and graze the daylights out of it. For females and young the primary goal is security from predators, and they will gladly accept second rate food to achieve that. Consequently, males cannot thrive on the land occupied by the females. If they want to eat well, as they are driven to do as only large males are successful breeders so chosen by females, they must seek superior feeding grounds. However superior feeding areas are insecure. That is, to eat well is associated with much greater danger from predators and, consequently, more males get killed than females. Therefore, the larger the antlers of the male, the better he has succeeded feeding in very dangerous areas while outwitting and outrunning predators. Since antlers are tissues of low growth priority their size is directly related to superior competence of the male ? precisely the male the female will choose for mating. There is no escape from this: to grow into a superior specimen the young male deer must leave the poor feeding grounds of mother where he was born and raised and seek ? boldly, cleverly, persistently - the best food in the most insecure, dangerous localities. His antler size proves his success as a hero! The bigger the more heroic and smart his conduct. That?s within a species. Big antlers turn on deer fames and big intelligence in human males turns on females. So big antlers and big brains are probably organs of sexual seelction, formed by ladies choice! Now antler size in deer and brain size in humans progress in size, stepwise from the equator outward towards the poles. Each step away from the Equatorial Forests towards the poles increases the climates seasonality and severity as shown by Savannah, Steppe, Deserts, Temerate zones, Periglacial, Arctic/Alpine. Ungulates and omnivores many times, but Primates only once, bud off discrete ?species? or ?forms? from the tropic to the Arctic. Note: in this progression of new ?forms? each has to del with the consequences of increased seasonality, with increasing extremes in climate, with ever wider fluctuations temporally and geographically ? of resource abundance. Food availability and security demands are totally different in spring, than in summer, than in fall, than in winter. The further from the equator, the greater the demand on the diversity of skills and information to be mastered ? and brain size keeps pace with that. Another important point: as poulations are limited by the scarce food supplies of winter, they are increasingly overwhelmed by the abundance of foods during the productivity pulse of summer. So, no productivity pulse in tropical moist forests, some pulse in Savannah, good pulse in steppe, better pulse in temperate zones good, large pulse in cold temperate, sharp but tall productivity spike in the Arctic/Alpine. During the productivity spike individuals enjoy freedome from want or luxury. The further north the greter the luxury ? except for time! Towards the Arctic the spike becomes shorter and shorter ? not enough Time to grow! Summer in the Arctic is very productive, but too short to allow luxurious body growth. And another factor: in the tropics leaching drains fertility form the land making it nutrient poor except where nutrients are washed into soils deposited by rivers ? alluvial soils. In the north glaciatons have liberated fertility from ground up rock. Ergo, our glaciated north is filthy rich in fertility. Filthy rich! Therefore the progression of species adapts each species to incasing seasonal luxury ? totally missing in the moist tropics. In the tropics ferocious competition for nutrients drives species into narrow specialization increasing biodiversity. Each species, though is of minimum design and struggling to make ends meet. In the north, one species does what several species do in the tropics, lowering biodiversity. Also, logically, each northern species grows during the productivity pulse and stores fat for the bad times ahead in winter ? lacking in tropical forms. Ergo, we are filthy fat and chimps and gorillas are not! Now lets quickly go through the species progression south top north in the only primate lineage ? anthropoids - which was able to achieve this, what has been achieved many, many times by ungulates. Note the rogression inro climatic severity and its ecological repercussions. 1.. primitive tropical moist forest ancestor ? with chimp/bonobo adaptations holding the genetic foundations for human evolution. 2.. the Savannah-adapted gracile Australopithecus form, breaking free from territoriality by adapting to the ?selfish herd?. Surface forager in the most productive tropical ecosystems. Climbs trees and builds nests for security at night. 3.. The first advance into the dry, seasonal step braking radically with the anthropoid adaptation by (a) being able to survive predators on the ground at night, (b) discovers underground feeding for stored plant foods (tubers, corms, bulbs, roots) which are only accessible through digging sticks which in turn need to be sculptured with stone tools from tough branches covered densely with sharp spines (tools to make tools) (c) begin to tap into the huge protein stores as represented by the ungulate biomass of the steppe. (d) almost certainly: begin to explore the fat and protein rich foods hidden! in the inter-tidal zones along ocean shores ? as are steppe plant foods. All this generates additional profound changes away from the chimp ancestor. This is the Homo habilis/erectus form, the first true humans. 4.. With the first major glacitation about 1.9 m y ago, the beginning of the Pleistocene, this new form hardens its steppe adaptations and ? bypassing the desert ? begins to invade progressively the temperate zones. About a dozen or more major glaciations follow, desiccating Africa merciless and exterminating all human advances north of the Eurasian mountain chains ? again and again. Still spread to Europe and Asia persist. This is the 1.5 my progression of our parent species Homo erectus. 5.. Huge penultimate glaciation 225 000 y ago desiccates Africa crisp and our parent species cannot make it and dies out. Two branches of it however transform to supreme desert conditions, a gracile form (us) and a robust form (Neanderthal). Jump in brain size! 6.. Neanderthal first and the gracile form later, invade the herbivore-rich periglacial zones in Eurasia, develop advanced technology and soon culture as we know it. Both are biologically grotesque and fat Ice Age giants within a fauna of grotesque and fat Ice Age giants (its all dreadfully ?biologica!?). Superlative luxury body and brain development in both forms till Neanderthal fades away, and the superlatively developed European specimen fade away with the end of the last glaciation, being replaced by a small-brained starvation culture (Mesolithic) followed by agriculture (followed by genetic decay, and loss of brain size etc). 7.. Meanwhile, one late-glacial branch of the graciles branches out into inner Asia and develops even more brain in a process of neotinization. The supremely cold adapted mongoloid people evolve that colonize the Arctic/Alpine and north America, but only with and after mega-faunal extinctions (earlier attempts by ur-caucasoids and Ainu failed!). So much for the thumb-nail sketch! Note: no other primate went past the horrific barriers of the African dry steppe! In crashing through we became humans. So, antlers and brains both depend on ecological riches, and such are found increasingly the closer one gets to the fertile soils formed by glacial actions and warm, moist summers. However, the price to pay is acquisition of competence to deal with increasingly more complex ecological demands. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 10:52 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws Fascinating. But you have me hooked. What in the world could the answer be to the following question: "Our brains expanded at he same rate in (exponent about 1.5) evolution as did the antlers of giant deer and horns of giant sheep! ... Why?" And why are periglacial environments, environments poor to the naked eye, richer than tropical environments, which seem very, very rich? How does the PERCEPTION of what's trash and what's treasure, of what's a resource and what's not, feed into the equation? Seemingly the bigger the brain, the more likely its owner is to see resources where smaller brained creatures obstacles and emptiness. But is this true? Deer presumably inherit the strategies that tell them what is trash and what is treasure--what is food and what is not. They don't make discoveries that turn yesterday's waste into tomorrow's resource, the way human inventors do. And deer don't have the repository of solutions inventors draw from, then add their discoveries to--culture. So why do the same formulae apply in the case of deer and of humans? Why do deer find the north, with its eight months of scarcity, richer than the south, with its twelve months of lushness? Where does the technology that produces clothing, shelter, and tools for hunting and harvesting fit? What analog of this technology is available to the deer? Are deer antlers useful for anything--for scraping lichen and moss off of rocks, for example? Or are they simply what most of us have always thought--gaudy displays of excess evolved to appeal to the females of the species? And why does the gaudy display of excess show up so often in a cosmos that we think obeys strict laws of frugality? How does this extravagance fit into the notions of economy that underlie Paul Werbos' Laplaceian math? And how does this excess production of new form fit into a universe that many think is ruled by the form-destroying processes of entropy? A lot of questions, Val, but you've provided food for a lot of thought. Howard In a message dated 10/10/2005 7:31:47 PM Eastern Standard Time, kendulf at shaw.ca writes: Dear Howard, The essay on power functions struck a cord within for a number of reasons. (a) Biologists are ? finally ? waking up to utility of power functions, which, since the 1920?s have been one of the major tools of the agricultural discipline of Animal Science. These scientists ? totally innocent of biology ? developed great mastery in the study of body growth and production in agricultural animals. Their goals were strictly utilitarian (how to produce bigger haunches in cattle and sheep, or longer bodies in pigs so as to get longer slabs of beacon etc. because that?s where the money led), however, when I took Animal Science in the late 1950?s I became quickly aware of the applicability of both, their insights and methods, in the study of evolution and ecology of large mammals. That included anthropology, us, as I shall illustrate for the fun of it, below. And then there is the Bible of Animal Science, the genial summary work of Samuel Brody (1945) Bioenergetics and Growth, (mine is a Hafner reprint). An utterly timeless, brilliant work if there ever was one! So, that?s my first source of happiness! (b) Might I raise the hope that, finally, after decades of working with power functions - in splendid isolation - I just might be able to discuss insights about human biology and evolution using power functions? The closest I ever got was explaining to colleagues how to use their hand calculator to pull logs and anti-logs! So, the essay raised my hopes - and there is nothing like hope! And that?s my second source of happiness. (c) In over 40 years of reading and reviewing papers I have caught only one out and out fraud! And this gentleman had the gift of creatively misusing power functions. The paper I got was based on the second half of a PhD Thesis for which Harvard had awarded him a doctorate. He had bamboozled four eminent scientists into signing off that piece of fraud. By one of those co incidents I was just working on something very similar to him and became suspicious because his theoretical predictions fitted his data too well, and the raw data in that are never looked that good. I managed to recreate all his calculations and discovered that he had misused his own data, had falsely attributed data to existing authors (whom I called on the phone), that he had invented not only data ? his own and under the names of reputable scholars, but that he had created fictitious references as well. Then a buddy in mathematics looked at some of his mathematical discussions and declared them as invalid on multiple counts. I returned with my friend a stinging review promising we would expose him next time. The fellow had a most undistinguished career in several degree mills subsequently and the only other paper of his I subsequently refereed was OK, but mediocre. I refused to read the published first half of his thesis, but some buddies who did shook their head and wondered out loud that there is something eerie about that paper! Yes indeed! However, I kept my mouth shut and a fraud was able to acquire a university position. So much for happiness! Power functions are absolutely basic to understanding life processes, and they do a sterling job of relieving the theory of evolution of unnecessary ad hoc explanations. If you have it handy, please see ?Primary rules of reproductive fitness? pp.2-13 of my 1978 ?Life Strategies?? book. Some of the insights in the essay presented as new are actually discussed in D?Arcy Thompsons (1917) On Growth and Form. To my embarrassment I discovered that his book by a zoologist is known better in Architecture and the Design disciplines than among current zoologists. Thompson uses real mathematics, where as current life scientists focus on statistics. It is he who discusses that globular cells merely take advantage of the fee shape-forming energy of surface tension and that it costs real energy for a cell to deviate from this shape. In principle life scavenges free energy from physics and chemistry to function as cheaply as possible, for power functions drive home mercilessly just how costly it is to live and how supremely important to life is the law of least effort, or Zipf?s (1949) Law. Thje beauty of power functions is that they state rules with precision and that such are essential to comparisons. Let?s look at an amusing example that suddenly becomes relevant to understanding humans. As I detailed in my 1998 Deer of the World (next most important magnum opus) the deer family is marvelously rich in examples essential to the understanding of evolutionary processes in large mammals, humans included. They show several times a pattern of speciation from the Tropics to the Arctic, that among primates only the human lineage followed. In several deer lineages there is a progressive increase in antler ? those spectacular organs beloved by trophy hunters. There is a steady, but step-wise, increase in size and complexity from equator to pole! The further north, the larger the antlers! However, antlers do not increase in proportion to body mass (weight in Kg raised to the power of 1), nor to metabolic mass (weight in Kg raised to the power of 0.75), rather, antler growth follows a positive power function, which, between species is 1.35. So, to compare the relative antler mass of small and large deer one generates for each species y(antler mass in grams) = f (weight in kg)1.35 . First of I can readily compare the amount of antler mass produced by species despite differences in body size. The largest antler mass is found in cursors (high speed runners) the smallest in forest hiders. However, in high speed runners, antler mass grows with body mass - within a lineage - even faster than suggested above. The huge antlers of the Irish elk, 14 feet of spread turn out to be of exactly the same relative mass as those of his last living relative the fallow deer. A small fallow deer, scaled up to the size of an irish elk would have 14 foot of antler spread! Are antlers incresing in size passively with body size? Yes, but only under luxury conditions. Note luxury! I a moment you will see why! Antler mass is determined in above deer from small to large by y(antler mass in grams) = 2.6 (wtKg) 1.50. Horn mass in wild sheep happens to be y=2.32 (wtKg)1.49. And increase in relative brain volume from Australopithecus gracilis to Homo sapiens is y(cm3 of brain) = 1.56 (wtkg)1.575. Cute, isn?t it? The human brain is (a) disassociated from body growth following positive allometry. (b) Provided the environment allows individuals a significant vacation from shortages and want, that is, body growth under luxury conditions, human brains expand with (lean!) body mass ? period! If humans fall below the expected value, then you have some explaining to do! Smaller than expected brain size will therefore be a function of poor nutritional environments. (c) Natural luxury environments are periglacial and North Temperate ones ? up to about 60oN, above and below that conditions deteriorate. That is, up to about 60oN the annual productivity pulse has a length and height to facilitates maximum growth. Therefore, periglacial Ice Age giants are brainy, tropical ones are not! That certainly applies to the huge brains of Neanderthal and Cro-magnids. As we invaded the cold, but rich periglacial environments, getting a large brain to deal with the increased diversity of demands (initially due to ever sharper seasonality) was filling out an already available growth function! Our brains expanded at he same rate in (exponent about 1.5) evolution as did the antlers of giant deer and horns of giant sheep! Awesome organs all! Why? There is no ready explanation. One would need to compare the growth exponents of other organs. I have written enough! Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 12:26 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Universal Footprint: Power Laws In a message dated 10/7/2005 3:13:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, Howl Bloom writes: All thanks, Jim. I just gave a presentation related to this subject to an international quantum physics conference in Moscow--Quantum Informatics 2005. I wish I'd seen the article before giving the talk. It would have come in handy. Meanwhile I tracked down a copy of the full article. It's downloadable for free at http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/neubiomol/ARTICLES/Gisiger2001.pdf Better yet, enclosed is a file with the full article and with another article that relates. I may not have the time to read these, so if you digest anything interesting from them and get the time, please jot me an email and give me your summary of what these articles are getting at. Since Eshel Ben-Jacob has been trying to point out for years why such concepts as scale-free power laws and fractals fail to get at the creative twists evolution comes up with as it moves from one level of emergence to another, anything in these pieces that indicates how newness enters the repetition of the old would be of particular interest. Again, all thanks. Onward--Howard In a message dated 10/5/2005 5:12:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, JBJbrody at cs.com writes: Biological Reviews (2001), 76: 161-209 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1464793101005607 Published Online 17May2001 *This article is available in a PDF that may contain more than one articles. Therefore the PDF file's first page may not match this article's first page. Login Subscribe to journal Email abstract Save citation Content alerts Review Article Scale invariance in biology: coincidence or footprint of a universal mechanism? T. GISIGER a1 p1 a1 Groupe de Physique des Particules, Universit? de Montr?al, C.P. 6128, succ. centre-ville, Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada, H3C 3J7 (e-mail: gisiger at pasteur.fr) Abstract In this article, we present a self-contained review of recent work on complex biological systems which exhibit no characteristic scale. This property can manifest itself with fractals (spatial scale invariance), flicker noise or 1/f-noise where f denotes the frequency of a signal (temporal scale invariance) and power laws (scale invariance in the size and duration of events in the dynamics of the system). A hypothesis recently put forward to explain these scale-free phenomomena is criticality, a notion introduced by physicists while studying phase transitions in materials, where systems spontaneously arrange themselves in an unstable manner similar, for instance, to a row of dominoes. Here, we review in a critical manner work which investigates to what extent this idea can be generalized to biology. More precisely, we start with a brief introduction to the concepts of absence of characteristic scale (power-law distributions, fractals and 1/f- noise) and of critical phenomena. We then review typical mathematical models exhibiting such properties: edge of chaos, cellular automata and self-organized critical models. These notions are then brought together to see to what extent they can account for the scale invariance observed in ecology, evolution of species, type III epidemics and some aspects of the central nervous system. This article also discusses how the notion of scale invariance can give important insights into the workings of biological systems. (Received October 4 1999) (Revised July 14 2000) (Accepted July 24 2000) Key Words: Scale invariance; complex systems; models; criticality; fractals; chaos; ecology; evolution; epidemics; neurobiology. Correspondence: p1 Present address: Unit? de Neurobiologie Mol?culaire, Institut Pasteur, 25 rue du Dr Roux, 75724 Paris, Cedex 15, France. Retrieved February 16, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050212/bob9.asp Week of Feb. 12, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 7 , p. 106 Life on the Scales Simple mathematical relationships underpin much of biology and ecology Erica Klarreich A mouse lives just a few years, while an elephant can make it to age 70. In a sense, however, both animals fit in the same amount of life experience. In its brief life, a mouse squeezes in, on average, as many heartbeats and breaths as an elephant does. Compared with those of an elephant, many aspects of a mouse's life?such as the rate at which its cells burn energy, the speed at which its muscles twitch, its gestation time, and the age at which it reaches maturity?are sped up by the same factor as its life span is. It's as if in designing a mouse, someone had simply pressed the fast-forward button on an elephant's life. This pattern relating life's speed to its length also holds for a sparrow, a gazelle, and a person?virtually any of the birds and mammals, in fact. Small animals live fast and die young, while big animals plod through much longer lives. "It appears as if we've been gifted with just so much life," says Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "You can spend it all at once or slowly dribble it out over a long time." a5850_1358.jpg Dean MacAdam Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal's size: They are proportional to the animal's mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal's metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the ?1/4 power. The reasons behind these laws were a mystery until 8 years ago, when Enquist, together with ecologist James Brown of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and physicist Geoffrey West of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory proposed a model to explain quarter-power scaling in mammals (SN: 10/16/99, p. 249). They and their collaborators have since extended the model to encompass plants, birds, fish and other creatures. In 2001, Brown, West, and several of their colleagues distilled their model to a single formula, which they call the master equation, that predicts a species' metabolic rate in terms of its body size and temperature. "They have identified the basic rate at which life proceeds," says Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. In the July 2004 Ecology, Brown, West, and their colleagues proposed that their equation can shed light not just on individual animals' life processes but on every biological scale, from subcellular molecules to global ecosystems. In recent months, the investigators have applied their equation to a host of phenomena, from the mutation rate in cellular DNA to Earth's carbon cycle. Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, hails the team's work as a major step forward. "I think they have provided us with a unified theory for ecology," he says. The biological clock In 1883, German physiologist Max Rubner proposed that an animal's metabolic rate is proportional to its mass raised to the 2/3 power. This idea was rooted in simple geometry. If one animal is, say, twice as big as another animal in each linear dimension, then its total volume, or mass, is 23 times as large, but its skin surface is only 22 times as large. Since an animal must dissipate metabolic heat through its skin, Rubner reasoned that its metabolic rate should be proportional to its skin surface, which works out to mass to the 2/3 power. a5850_2473.jpg Dean MacAdam In 1932, however, animal scientist Max Kleiber of the University of California, Davis looked at a broad range of data and concluded that the correct exponent is 3/4, not 2/3. In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude. For most of the past 70 years, ecologists had no explanation for the 3/4 exponent. "One colleague told me in the early '90s that he took 3/4-scaling as 'given by God,'" Brown recalls. The beginnings of an explanation came in 1997, when Brown, West, and Enquist described metabolic scaling in mammals and birds in terms of the geometry of their circulatory systems. It turns out, West says, that Rubner was on the right track in comparing surface area with volume, but that an animal's metabolic rate is determined not by how efficiently it dissipates heat through its skin but by how efficiently it delivers fuel to its cells. Rubner should have considered an animal's "effective surface area," which consists of all the inner surfaces across which energy and nutrients pass from blood vessels to cells, says West. These surfaces fill the animal's entire body, like linens stuffed into a laundry machine. The idea, West says, is that a space-filling surface scales as if it were a volume, not an area. If you double each of the dimensions of your laundry machine, he observes, then the amount of linens you can fit into it scales up by 23, not 22. Thus, an animal's effective surface area scales as if it were a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, structure. This creates a challenge for the network of blood vessels that must supply all these surfaces. In general, a network has one more dimension than the surfaces it supplies, since the network's tubes add one linear dimension. But an animal's circulatory system isn't four dimensional, so its supply can't keep up with the effective surfaces' demands. Consequently, the animal has to compensate by scaling back its metabolism according to a 3/4 exponent. Though the original 1997 model applied only to mammals and birds, researchers have refined it to encompass plants, crustaceans, fish, and other organisms. The key to analyzing many of these organisms was to add a new parameter: temperature. Mammals and birds maintain body temperatures between about 36?C and 40?C, regardless of their environment. By contrast, creatures such as fish, which align their body temperatures with those of their environments, are often considerably colder. Temperature has a direct effect on metabolism?the hotter a cell, the faster its chemical reactions run. In 2001, after James Gillooly, a specialist in body temperature, joined Brown at the University of New Mexico, the researchers and their collaborators presented their master equation, which incorporates the effects of size and temperature. An organism's metabolism, they proposed, is proportional to its mass to the 3/4 power times a function in which body temperature appears in the exponent. The team found that its equation accurately predicted the metabolic rates of more than 250 species of microbes, plants, and animals. These species inhabit many different habitats, including marine, freshwater, temperate, and tropical ecosystems. The equation gave the researchers a way to compare organisms with different body temperatures?a person and a crab, or a lizard and a sycamore tree? and thereby enabled the team not just to confirm previously known scaling laws but also to discover new ones. For instance, in 2002, Gillooly and his colleagues found that hatching times for eggs in birds, fish, amphibians, and plankton follow a scaling law with a 1/4 exponent. When the researchers filter out the effects of body temperature, most species adhere closely to quarter-power laws for a wide range of properties, including not only life span but also population growth rates. The team is now applying its master equation to more life processes?such as cancer growth rates and the amount of time animals sleep. "We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar," says Gillooly. A single equation predicts so much, the researchers contend, because metabolism sets the pace for myriad biological processes. An animal with a high metabolic rate processes energy quickly, so it can pump its heart quickly, grow quickly, and reach maturity quickly. Unfortunately, that animal also ages and dies quickly, since the biochemical reactions involved in metabolism produce harmful by-products called free radicals, which gradually degrade cells. "Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate," Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, "but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time." Scaling up The researchers propose that their framework can illuminate not just properties of individual species, such as hours of sleep and hatching times, but also the structure of entire communities and ecosystems. Enquist, West, and Karl Niklas of Cornell University have been looking for scaling relationships in plant communities, where they have uncovered previously unnoticed patterns. a5850_3175.jpg REGULAR ON AVERAGE. Newly discovered scaling laws have revealed an unexpected relationship between the spacing of trees and their trunk diameters in a mature forest. PhotoDisc The researchers have found, for instance, that in a mature forest, the average distance between trees of the same mass follows a quarter-power scaling law, as does trunk diameter. These two scaling laws are proportional to each other, so that on average, the distance between trees of the same mass is simply proportional to the diameter of their trunks. "When you walk in a forest, it looks random, but it's actually quite regular on average," West says. "People have been measuring size and density of trees for 100 years, but no one had noticed these simple relationships." The researchers have also discovered that the number of trees of a given mass in a forest follows the same scaling law governing the number of branches of a given size on an individual tree. "The forest as a whole behaves as if it is a very large tree," West says. Gillooly, Brown, and their New Mexico colleague Andrew Allen have now used these scaling laws to estimate the amount of carbon that is stored and released by different plant ecosystems. Quantifying the role of plants in the carbon cycle is critical to understanding global warming, which is caused in large part by carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere when animals metabolize food or machines burn fossil fuels. Plants, by contrast, pull carbon dioxide out of the air for use in photosynthesis. Because of this trait, some ecologists have proposed planting more forests as one strategy for counteracting global warming. In a paper in an upcoming Functional Ecology, the researchers estimate carbon turnover and storage in ecosystems such as oceanic phytoplankton, grasslands, and old-growth forests. To do this, they apply their scaling laws to the mass distribution of plants and the metabolic rate of individual plants. The model predicts, for example, how much stored carbon is lost when a forest is cut down to make way for farmlands or development. Martinez del Rio cautions that ecologists making practical conservation decisions need more-detailed information than the scaling laws generally give. "The scaling laws are useful, but they're a blunt tool, not a scalpel," he says. Scaling down The team's master equation may resolve a longstanding controversy in evolutionary biology: Why do the fossil record and genetic data often give different estimates of when certain species diverged? Geneticists calculate when two species branched apart in the phylogenetic tree by looking at how much their DNA differs and then estimating how long it would have taken for that many mutations to occur. For instance, genetic data put the divergence of rats and mice at 41 million years ago. Fossils, however, put it at just 12.5 million years ago. The problem is that there is no universal clock that determines the rate of genetic mutations in all organisms, Gillooly and his colleagues say. They propose in the Jan. 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, instead, the mutation clock?like so many other life processes?ticks in proportion to metabolic rate rather than to time. The DNA of small, hot organisms should mutate faster than that of large, cold organisms, the researchers argue. An organism with a revved-up metabolism generates more mutation-causing free radicals, they observe, and it also produces offspring faster, so a mutation becomes lodged in the population more quickly. When the researchers use their master equation to correct for the effects of size and temperature, the genetic estimates of divergence times?including those of rats and mice?line up well with the fossil record, says Allen, one of the paper's coauthors. The team plans to use its metabolic framework to investigate why the tropics are so much more diverse than temperate zones are and why there are so many more small species than large ones. Most evolutionary biologists have tended to approach biodiversity questions in terms of historical events, such as landmasses separating, Kaspari says. The idea that size and temperature are the driving forces behind biodiversity is radical, he says. "I think if it holds up, it's going to rewrite our evolutionary-biology books," he says. Enthusiasm and skepticism While the metabolic-scaling theory has roused much enthusiasm, it has its limitations. Researchers agree, for instance, that while the theory produces good predictions when viewed on a scale from microbes to whales, the theory is rife with exceptions when it's applied to animals that are relatively close in temperature and size. For example, large animals generally have longer life spans than small animals, but small dogs live longer than large ones. a5850_4238.jpg Dean MacAdam Brown points out that the metabolic-scaling law may be useful by calling attention to such exceptions. "If you didn't have a general theory, you wouldn't know that big dogs are something interesting to look at," he observes. Many questions of particular interest to ecologists concern organisms that are close in size. Metabolic theory may not explain, for example, why certain species coexist or why particular species invade a given ecosystem, says John Harte, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Some scientists question the very underpinnings of the team's model. Raul Suarez, a comparative physiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara disputes the model's starting assumption that an animal's metabolic rate is determined by how efficiently it can transport resources from blood vessels to cells. Suarez argues that other factors are equally important, or even more so. For instance, whether the animal is resting or active determines which organs are using the most energy at a given time. "Metabolic scaling is a many-splendored thing," he says. Suarez' concern is valid, agrees Kaspari. However, he says, the master equation's accurate predictions about a huge range of phenomena are strong evidence in its favor. Ecologists, physiologists, and other biologists appear to be unanimous on one point: The team's model has sparked a renaissance for biological-scaling theory. "West and Brown deserve a great deal of credit for rekindling the interest of the scientific community in this phenomenon of metabolic scaling," Suarez says. "Their ideas have stimulated a great deal of discussion and debate, and that's a good thing." If you have a comment on this article that you would like considered for publication in Science News, send it to editors at sciencenews.org. Please include your name and location. To subscribe to Science News (print), go to https://www.kable.com/pub/scnw/ subServices.asp. To sign up for the free weekly e-LETTER from Science News, go to http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/subscribe_form.asp. References: Brown, J.H., J.F. Gillooly, A.P. Allen, V.M. Savage, and G.B. West. 2004. Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85(July):1771-1789. Abstract. Gillooly, J.F., A.P. Allen, G.B. West, and J.H. Brown. 2005. The rate of DNA evolution: Effects of body size and temperature on the molecular clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(Jan. 4):140-145. Abstract available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/1/140. Gillooly, J.F. . . . G.B. West . . . and J.H. Brown. 2002. Effects of size and temperature on developmental time. Nature 417(May 2):70-73. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417070a. Gillooly, J.F., J.H. Brown, G.B. West, et al. 2001. Effects of size and temperature on metabolic rate. Science 293(Sept. 21):2248-2251. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5538/2248. Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, J.H. Brown, G.B. West, and E.L. Charnov. 2004. Effects of body size and temperature on population growth. American Naturalist 163(March):429-441. Available at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/ journal/issues/v163n3/20308/20308.html. Suarez, R.K., C.A. Darveau, and J.J. Childress. 2004. Metabolic scaling: A many-splendoured thing. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part B 139(November):531-541. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpc.2004.05.001. West, G.B., J.H. Brown, and B.J. Enquist. 1997. A general model for the origin of allometric scaling models in biology. Science 276(April 4):122-126. Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/276/5309/122. Further Readings: Savage, V.M., J.F. Gillooly, . . . A.P. Allen . . . and J.H. Brown. 2004. The predominance of quarter-power scaling in biology. Functional Ecology 18(April):257-282. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0269-8463.2004.00856.x. Weiss, P. 1999. Built to scale. Science News 156(Oct. 16):249-251. References and sources available at http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/10_16_99/bob1ref.htm. Sources: Anurag Agrawal Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Andrew Allen Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 James H. Brown Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 Steven Buskirk Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming 1000 E. University Avenue Laramie, WY 82071 Brian Enquist Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 James Gillooly Biology Department University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 John Harte Energy and Resources Group 310 Barrows Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Michael Kaspari Department of Zoology University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019 Carlos Mart?nez del Rio Department of Zoology and Physiology University of Wyoming Laramie, WY 82071 Karl Niklas Department of Plant Biology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Raul Suarez Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93016 Geoffrey B. West Theoretical Physics Division Los Alamos National Laboratory MS B285 Los Alamos, NM 87545 From Science News, Vol. 167, No. 7, Feb. 12, 2005, p. 106. Home | Table of Contents | Feedback | Subscribe | Help/About | Archives | Search Copyright ?2005 Science Service. All rights reserved. 1719 N St., NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202-785-2255 | scinews at sciserv.org Subscribe Subscribe to Science News. Click OR call 1-800-552-4412. Google Search WWW Search Science News Free E-mail Alert Science News e-LETTER. Click here to find resources for enjoying our planet and the universe. Science Mall sells science posters, gifts, teaching tools, and collector items. Finally a store for science enthusiasts, professionals, and kids alike! Shop at the Science Mall. Science News Logo Wear Science News Logo Wear Copyright Clearance Center Photo Archive Browse a Science News photo collection. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.13/124 - Release Date: 10/7/2005 _______________________________________________ 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.14/128 - Release Date: 10/10/2005 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 13 02:40:40 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 19:40:40 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Inherent cognitive differences In-Reply-To: <434D3A59.3060003@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: In a world where beliefs have more status than facts it is no surprise that this kind of science gets into trouble. If he could demonstrate that he was belief-free he might get a better hearing. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 9:31 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Inherent cognitive differences Charles Murray has surfaced again (after ten years) with a lengthy essay on Opinionjournal.com. For those interested in the topic, it is a fair and balanced Fox News review, with technical stuff on another site linked in the article. http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007391 Technical issues: the same article with footnotes and references located at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html#Charles%2 0Murray Too long to post, too interesting to ignore. Lynn _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 13 03:16:53 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:16:53 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] 2000 dead in Iraq Message-ID: <1732380.1129173414131.JavaMail.root@mswamui-swiss.atl.sa.earthlink.net> See their faces: http://theunitedamerican.blogs.com/Movies/2000A/2000.html From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 13 05:02:01 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:02:01 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Building an Iraq War Memorial Message-ID: <23761088.1129179722192.JavaMail.root@mswamui-thinleaf.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Start by demolishing the White House to create a suitable site. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:13:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:13:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Fundamentalism: Descent into the new Dark Ages Message-ID: New Scientist: Fundamentalism: Descent into the new Dark Ages 5.10.8 (four articles) Reality Wars After two centuries in the ascendancy, the Enlightenment project is under threat. Religious movements are sweeping the globe preaching unreason, intolerance and dogma, and challenging the idea that rational, secular enquiry is the best way to understand the world. Over the next 12 pages, we report from the front line of this conflict. We investigate the roots, the aims and the capabilities of the religious fundamentalists and examine the likely consequences for science, culture and the environment. And we ask what can be done to halt the slide into a new age of unreason End of the Enlightenment With new, radical religious movements on the rise globally, why is so much of the world bent on rejecting reason? Fundamentalists are just like us We are all capable of thinking fundamentalist thoughts. It's when like-minded people get together that the trouble starts. Enemy at the Gates The campaign against science is well funded and meticulously organized. No wonder it is already winning battles. Blind Faith in Science Scientific fundamentalism is the belief that the world is accessible to and ultimately controllable by human reason...a profoundly unscientific view. ------------ End of the Enlightenment http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825201.200 by Debora Mackenzie ACROSS the world, millions of people feel threatened. They sense a dangerous enemy at the gates, committed to values and beliefs they fear and despise, and ready to impose its alien ideology on their government, their life and their children's futures. Is that a threat you recognise? If so, then you know how religious fundamentalists feel. To them, the secular world of the early 21st century is a threat to all they hold most dear. In response, increasing numbers are joining militant religious groups and living, voting and battling for their beliefs. Like it or not, they already outnumber the secular rationalists whose thinking underpins today's western urban societies. And their numbers are growing by the day. What will that mean for the world as the 21st century unfolds? Much of the past century was characterised by a widespread belief, at least in the west, that as the world developed materially, religion would dwindle in importance - what sociologists called "secularisation theory". But the opposite has happened. Fundamentalist Islamic movements are gaining strength across the Muslim world and beyond. In the US, Christian fundamentalism holds more political and cultural power than ever before. Fundamentalist movements have also arisen within Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Almost everywhere you look - with the possible exception of western Europe - fundamentalist religions are on the march. The world, in short, is witnessing an explosion of movements that reject rational enquiry as the best way to explain the world, and empirical evidence as the best way to formulate policy. On the face of it these various movements would seem to have little in common. Indeed, Islamic and Christian fundamentalism are often portrayed as being on opposite sides in a "cosmic struggle" of good against evil. But they are the same. Fundamentalist religions are driven by a desire to get "back to basics", to turn the clock back to a supposed golden age when their religion was untainted by secular influences. They fervently believe that they alone are in possession of the truth - usually an overtly literal interpretation of a sacred text - and an equally fervent desire to impose that truth on others. And, unlike mainstream religion, they cannot tolerate dissent. As cultural theorist Stuart Sim of the University of Sunderland in the UK puts it: "You're either in the charmed circle of believers or you're the enemy". Mortal threat What is driving the growth of such intolerant belief systems? And what does it mean for "Enlightenment values" - reason, pluralism, democracy and freedom of thought? There is palpable unease that fundamentalism represents a mortal threat to the accomplishments of modern society; that the achievements of the Enlightenment are in danger of being rolled back. Does religious fundamentalism really pose a threat to the scientific world view? It was in the 1990s that secular society started noticing a strange and unexpected religious phenomenon that seemed to be replacing Communism as a threat to western civilisation. In 1995, Scott Appleby of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and dozens of collaborators completed the Fundamentalism Project, an exhaustive five-volume study of these religious movements across the world. One of its goals was to discover the root causes of fundamentalism. The conclusion was that the very force that was once expected to render religion obsolete was in fact causing it to mutate and gather strength. That force is modernity, a mode of thinking that is exemplified by science. It focuses on change and progress, empirical evidence rather than "revealed" truth, and scepticism of traditional (including religious) authority. And it has proved enormously powerful. The success of scientific explanations has replaced religious ones in many people's minds. It is nothing new, of course, to assert that modernity poses a direct challenge to traditional religion. What came as a surprise was the ability of religion not only to fight back but to spawn an entirely new way of looking at the world. What characterises traditional religions, says Karen Armstrong, a British writer on religious affairs who is an expert on fundamentalism, is that they are geared to the needs of people in traditional agrarian societies. They focus on the permanence of mythical truths behind superficial reality, and the divine will behind apparent injustice. They see life as cyclical, not progressive, and offer an understanding of the cosmos and a system of morals which provide rules, reassurance and meaning people in such societies need. Against this background, modernity can be deeply unsettling. It "undermines all the old certainties," writes Peter Berger, a sociologist of religion at Boston University. It also confronts people with new and alien ideas: what Malise Ruthven, a British writer on Islam, calls "the scandal of difference". Traditional societies are culturally uniform, but as people from this background are drawn into industrialised urban life, they come up against others who believe different things. This was a widespread experience as recently as the 1950s for many in the west, especially in North America. In other parts of the world it is happening right now as millions make the leap to modernity. What scandalises people is startlingly similar across countries and cultures: pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God. (Even in the US, Christian fundamentalists struggle with the concept of democracy, calling, for example, for the separation of church and state to be abolished and for the constitution to declare the US a "Christian country"). When God is dead... Many people faced by such an assault are terrified, for themselves and their children, by what they see as the social and moral chaos that has followed the rejection of religious authority. Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, quotes Dostoyevsky: "When God is dead, anything is permissible." According to Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, people from a traditional background go one of two ways when confronted with modernity: they either embrace reason and progress, or make faith the focus of their world view. The latter reaction often entails reasserting aspects of traditional religion that modernity explicitly rejects: the infallibility of the sacred text, the superiority of one belief system (their own) over all others, the inadequacy of reason, and the subjugation of human freedom to God, or his followers. In other words, a retreat into fundamentalism. Another common reaction is to see rationalism as a competing and opposed faith. "Every individual is a person of some faith, even if that faith is secular," says Mohler. "All persons operate out of some basic framework of beliefs and understanding of reality." In an uncertain world, such ideas find a steady stream of adherents. "Uncertainty is a condition that many people find very hard to bear," Berger says. "Any movement that promises to provide or to renew certainty has a ready market." It is this that makes fundamentalism more than simply a return to old-time religion, Armstrong argues. To fight the secular enemy, she says, fundamentalists reduce complex faiths to streamlined ideologies and, above all, try to recast old mythical tales as modern, literal truths. In the process, they can lose the compassion Armstrong believes is the mark of balanced religion. "It is important that we understand the dread and anxiety that lie at the heart of the fundamentalist vision," Armstrong adds. "Only then will we begin to comprehend its passionate rage, its frantic desire to fill the void with certainty, and its conviction of ever-encroaching evil." Fundamentalists feel they are on the defensive, but the fear of secularism's cultural dominance leads fundamentalist movements to go onto the attack and call for the imposition of their vision of morality and law on society at large - believer and non-believer alike. Hence, for example, Islamic fundamentalists demand the imposition of sharia law in place of secular legislation. In the US, Christian fundamentalists seek to change the abortion laws, promote sexual abstinence, ban gay marriage, force doctors to keep terminally ill people alive against their wishes and impose the teaching of creationism. No wonder it is now secularists who feel under attack. But should those who embrace modernity really feel threatened? The answer, it seems, is both yes and no. Not everyone who holds fundamentalist religious views can necessarily be characterised as anti-science or anti-progress. Last year the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a politically neutral think tank based in Washington DC, found nearly half of Christian fundamentalists in the US (although they would describe themselves as "evangelicals" - see "What's in a name") opposed banning stem cell research; what's more, their views on abortion and homosexuality differed little from those of the general population. But that's not to say that those who hold to secular values have nothing to fear. In the US, evangelical Christians have successfully fostered a belief that science, is somehow anti-religious, and that this imbalance must be redressed. Only 26 per cent of Americans are evangelicals, but in a survey in November 2004, 37 per cent of Americans, fewer than half of them evangelicals, wanted creationism taught in schools - not just alongside evolution but in place of it. Erosion of popular support for scientific research has other ramifications, for example, by making it easier to sell politically motivated denial of scientific discoveries such as global warming. George W. Bush has talked openly of running a "faith-based presidency", and a member of his inner circle has been quoted referring disdainfully to the "reality based community" - that is, people who believe that policy should be based on empirical evidence rather than faith. One senior US politician even went as far as to say "George Bush was not elected by a majority of voters in the United States. He was appointed by God." What is more, as political commentator Thomas Frank has argued, by allying itself with evangelical beliefs, the US Republican party has managed to dupe poor people into voting for economic policies that damage their interests, such as tax cuts for the rich. More subtly, people conditioned to accept a religious ideology unquestioningly, and to believe the universe is founded on simple truths, lose the critical habits of thought considered indispensable for science. Fundamentalist Islam poses no less of a threat to science. Ziauddin Sardar, a British writer on Islam, says a rise in literalist religious thinking in the 1990s devastated science in the Islamic world by promoting the idea that all knowledge could be found in the Koran. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist at Quaid-e-Islam University in Pakistan, who also writes on religion, describes a prominent Pakistani physicist who used a verse in the Koran to calculate that heaven is receding from Earth at 1 centimetre per second less than the speed of light. A similar forcing together of religious literalism and "science" underpins creationism. Not everyone, however, sees fundamentalism as inherently damaging. Some scholars believe that, by offering psychological security and social identity to people otherwise adrift, it offers the best hope for a stable future. "A case can be made that someone with a strong, confident religious identity is better qualified to survive in a globalising world of shifting and collapsing identities," says historian Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University. Some scholars even argue that fundamentalism is religion's last hurrah. Jenkins says the history of movements such as Calvinism suggests that fundamentalist movements eventually become secular. Fundamentalism, he suggests, may be a "necessary way station on the road to enlightenment". Whether or not that turns out to be true, it is clear that in the short term at least, the secular world is going to have to come to terms with fundamentalism. If fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity, then we can expect a lot more of it. "The 21st century will be religious," says sociologist Grace Davie of the University of Exeter in the UK. In the US the process may have stabilised, and Europe seems relatively immune. But fundamentalisms of all kinds are exploding in the fast-urbanising developing world. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, fundamentalist Christian churches are enjoying explosive growth. Around 10 per cent of the traditionally Catholic population of Latin American now belong to home-grown fundamentalist Pentecostal churches, and in Chile and Guatemala the figure is as high as 25 per cent. Even in communist-ruled China, fundamentalist movements are gaining adherents fast. "China is the one we're all watching," says Davie. Miikka Ruokanen, professor of dogmatics at the University of Helsinki in Finland, estimates that 2 million Chinese a year convert to evangelical Christianity. Estimates of the eventual number of Chinese Christians run to 300 million - a fifth of the population. Fundamentalist strains of Buddhism are growing too. The converts, like those throughout the developing world - the 9/11 attackers are a good examples - are mainly young, affluent, educated and urban. These people are just the kind to feel the spiritual impact of modernity most keenly. The challenge for the secular inheritors of the Enlightenment is to remain true to their values and be tolerant and pluralistic - even in the face of an opponent that can never reciprocate. That means understanding fundamentalist mentality, and at least not adding to the alienation that inspires the more extreme among them. "We must accept seriously held public belief as a normal part of modern living," says Davie. "The more you deny and attack it, the more defensive it gets." What's in a name? Every scholarly work on fundamentalism starts out by admitting that the term itself is a problem. It can imply uniformity among vastly different movements - or, worse, be adopted simply as a pejorative word for any religious movement the user dislikes. But most authors conclude that there are "family resemblances" among beliefs labelled fundamentalist, and use the term anyway, for want of a better one. Its origins can be traced back to 1910, when a group of Presbyterians at Princeton University decided to speak out against the modernist drift of some churches, especially efforts to understand the Bible as a historical document. They wrote a series of pamphlets called "The Fundamentals" and sent them to Christian officials worldwide. The fundamentals they espoused were the inerrancy of the Bible - that it represents the literal and infallible truth - the direct creation of the world and humanity by God from nothing, miracles, and the life of Jesus: his virgin birth, his death to atone for human sin, his resurrection and imminent return. In 1920, a US Baptist editor coined the term "fundamentalist" to describe those beliefs. Nowadays, Christians who hold such beliefs prefer the label "evangelical". The term was first applied to Islam in 1937, when a British official described the king of Saudi Arabia as a "fundamentalist" for condemning women who mixed with men. Then as now, it described the rejection of modern notions of progress. Fundamentalists are just like us http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825206.000 by Michael Brooks SCOTT ATRAN knows a thing or two about fundamentalists, and as far as he's concerned, they are nice people. "I certainly find very little hatred; they act out of love," he says. "These people are very compassionate." Atran, who studies group dynamics at the University of Michigan, is talking about suicide bombers, extremists by anyone's standards and not representative of fundamentalist ideology in general (New Scientist, 23 July, page 18). But surprisingly, much of what Atran has discovered about suicide bombers helps to explain the psychology of all fundamentalist movements. Ideas about the nature of fundamentalist belief initially drew heavily on work from the 1950s, when psychologists were trying to explain why some people were drawn to authoritarian ideologies such as Nazism. Guided by that research, psychologists focused on individuals, looking for personality traits, modes of thinking and even psychological flaws that might mark fundamentalists out from other people. The conclusion they came to was that there is no real difference between fundamentalists and everybody else. "The fundamentalist mentality is part of human nature," writes Stuart Sim, a cultural theorist at the University of Sunderland in the UK. "All of us are capable of exhibiting this kind of behaviour." Attention has now turned away from individual psychology to focus on the power of the group. "We evolved to have close and intimate group contacts: we cooperate to compete," says Atran. The psychology of fundamentalism is, literally, more than the sum of its parts; taken individually, fundamentalists are rather unremarkable. "The notion that you might be able to find something in a fundamentalist's brain scan is a non-starter," says John Brooke, a professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford. Much of the research in this area has been done on Christian fundamentalists in North America. A study by Daniel Batson of the University of Kansas and Larry Ventis of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, for example, showed that fundamentalists do not have an abnormally high regard for, or willingness to acquiesce to, authority figures. Studies also show no general inclination towards prejudice, at least in areas where people's behaviour does not conflict with their moral values. Racist they are not; homophobic is a different matter. And despite the fact that fundamentalist thinking is often portrayed as simplistic, this too is not borne out by research. Measures of cognitive complexity, which describes how an individual combines, classifies and processes information, show that fundamentalists are no different from the wider population. In general they operate solid, logical and sophisticated chains of thinking, albeit thinking that is based on non-negotiable articles of faith. "There are some very sophisticated attempts to defend what to most of our eyes are very unsophisticated positions," says Brooke. "They have a world view that, within its own frame of reference, has a degree of rationality." In general, fundamentalists seem to be well-balanced people. They score highly on subjective measures of marital happiness, optimism and self-control, and have a low incidence of depression and anxiety. An obvious explanation for this is that fundamentalist belief is fulfilling some hard-wired psychological need for certainty and security in a world where such comforts are hard to come by. But this cannot be the whole story, because fundamentalists do not choose to become ardent believers simply because of the psychological benefits this brings. They belong to the much larger group of people that psychologists class as "intrinsically" religious: they absorb a creed, believe it is the right thing to believe, and do their utmost to work out its implications in their lives. "Extrinsically" religious people, who join a faith movement for the spin-off benefits, are different, and tend to be more racially intolerant, for example. Sense of identity Fundamentalists, then - at least those of the Christian variety - tend to be happy, sincere and healthy. According to Sara Savage, who researches the psychology of religion at the University of Cambridge, that may be because they believe they are playing a role in the greatest story ever told. "Story is probably the biggest form of security we have as humans. It's very powerful in giving you identity." Secular western culture, on the other hand, doesn't provide a "grand narrative" to participate in, Savage points out. It offers multiple options for making sense of the world around us - a mess that most human minds struggle to deal with. In evolutionary terms, it's really new to us. "I don't think we're that comfortable with it," Savage says. This, she says, is why the kind of world view contained in a religious text resonates with people, and why they are inclined to stick with it at all costs. Savage suggests that humanity's ways of thinking, of organising, recording and processing information, matured during a period of history when people only had to deal with one world view: a theistic one. This is reflected in most sacred texts, which were written during this period. "Having one world view feels quite natural to human beings," she says. But while a rigid adherence to a religious world view may be psychologically unremarkable, when a few of those minds get together in a group, things start to happen. "It's mostly small group dynamics rather than personal psychology or indoctrination," Atran says. He portrays human psychology as having evolved an array of buttons just waiting to be pressed by environmental conditions. Group psychology, Atran thinks, is a particularly responsive set of buttons because group activity, especially in the family, has been so important in our evolutionary development. However, the group response can be triggered by things that have nothing to do with the evolutionary pressures that formed them: a shared ideology, for example. The group's activities push the "family" button, Atran says, and loyalty to the new group becomes paramount. "By the time the group is formed, they are emotionally felt to be family," he says. "Somehow the same wiring is triggered." In the end, members of the group do anything to maintain the bond and to reinforce the centrality of their group's beliefs. So what happens next? Because fundamentalist groups are at odds the dominant culture, maintaining the group's fundamentalist world view demands isolation from that culture. The first casualty is tolerance of diversity. But even then it is hard to make the isolation total, with the result that Christian fundamentalists living in the US, for example, compartmentalise their experiences of the world. And that inevitably leads to inner conflict. "All humans do it, but the more we do it, the worse the psychological outcomes," Savage says. But how does this kind of conflict translate into a social war, like that being waged over the role of science? Part of the answer lies in fundamentalists' need to bolster group identity by reframing their beliefs in the terms of the dominant culture. In a secular, scientific culture, Savage points out, a certain level of evidence is generally required in order for knowledge to count and for individuals to act on it. Fundamentalists respond by attempting to "prove" their core beliefs: they "science-up" their faith, framing it in a way that they think ought to make sense to a scientific culture. Their claims then become, in their eyes at least, as valid as science's claims. No wonder scientists find fundamentalists' claims so infuriating: they are operating on patently false credentials. However, this tactic has backfired, with damaging consequences. According to James Barr, professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and author of a number of books critical of Christian fundamentalism, these false credentials have produced a "deep intellectual self-distrust" that shows itself in an insatiable craving for intellectual credibility. That is why creationists strive to have a debate with scientists, and why they trumpet any academic qualifications they might possess. It may also explain why, for instance, George Gilder, a senior fellow of the fundamentalist Discovery Institute in Seattle, invokes the uncertainty principle of quantum theory to shore up a faith-based philosophy. But to no avail. According to Barr, fundamentalists have failed to gain intellectual acceptance even within mainstream Christian scholarship. Because the fundamentalists come to the Bible with a partisan agenda, they are unable to offer any striking insights. As a result, fundamentalist biblical scholarship is "sterile", he says. Fundamentalist Christianity is widely considered as irrelevant to modern theology as it is to modern science. And that, for the fundamentalists, is a terrible blow. Irrelevance is not something that people with this group psychology can tolerate. A movement that considers itself a key player in the greatest story ever told can't afford to be perceived as peripheral. At this point, the desperation sets in. Today's struggles are only the latest manifestation of this psychology. A glance at the history books shows it is not difficult to make a link between fundamentalist Christian groups' sense of participating in a story of cosmic significance and the rise of Islamic extremism. In fact, Atran says, it can be argued that the group psychology of fundamentalist Christians, their struggle to fulfil the prophecies of the Bible and thus to validate their cherished beliefs, has ignited a global holy war. "People attribute Islamic fundamentalism to Islam, but I think it has as much - or more - to do with Christian fundamentalism," Atran says. "You'll find no apocalyptic visions in Islam; it comes from the book of Revelation. That's what is being played out today." Enemy at the gates http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825201.300 by Mike Holderness THEIR aim is to destroy science. They seek "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies". Who are they? The words come from a think tank called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CSC) in Seattle. But they reflect the ideology of a much wider network of funding foundations and lobby groups dedicated to overthrowing "scientific materialism". Science has always been good at making enemies; it's an occupational hazard of success. But never before has the enemy been so devious and dangerous. These plans to reverse the march of science come not from a group of backwoods zealots, but from an orchestrated, clever and well-funded campaign. Whether or not scientists relish the prospect, they have a fight on their hands. Any serious attempt to understand the campaign against science starts with a manifesto entitled "The Wedge Strategy", which was leaked from CSC's parent organisation, the Discovery Institute, when CSC was founded in 1996. The document sets out a method for undermining secular scientific thinking. "If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree," the document says, "our strategy is intended to function as a 'wedge' that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points." One of the leading exponents of the strategy is William Dembski, a professor of theology and science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. In 2003 he gave a series of lectures decrying the power of science over faith. Science, he said, "has a track record of taking young Christians and derailing them when they go to the academy and they lose their faith". He has vowed that the undermining of faith "is going to stop". The weak point in the trunk, according to Dembski, is Darwinian evolution, and the wedge that will split it asunder is the concept known as intelligent design. ID is founded on the proposition that the evolution of complex structures, from the flagellum that propels many bacteria to the human eye, is mathematically impossible and can only be explained by invoking a designer. Cunningly, this opening gambit in the battle for minds doesn't even play by the rules of fundamentalism: no holy book explicitly mentions the mathematics of complexity, let alone rules on its correct application. Indeed, the strategic value of ID is its claim to be rooted in the straightforward scientific process of a free exchange of ideas. Dembski is working to dismantle science's foundations block by block, starting with evolution. "ID is going to clear the ground of this suffocating naturalistic theology," he says, and it has already made huge headway in the US. Dembski gleefully points to opinion polls which he claims show that just 7 to 10 per cent of Americans hold with Darwinism. New world order If ID is just the thin end of the wedge, what's coming next? According to the document, nothing less than a new world order in science, built around a faith-based form of reasoning. "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," it says. No one should be in any doubt that this is a serious goal. At least one of the Discovery Institute's senior fellows thinks progress is impossible without a new, faith-based science. In a 1999 article in The Wall Street Journal, George Gilder wrote that belief is "entirely essential to human achievement". And he left no doubt about where he was coming from. "What the nation needs is a renewal of the faith that sustained our forefathers at a similar time of change and opportunity on the frontiers of 19th-century America...Our previous accomplishments as a nation were based on faith, the faith of our fathers, the belief in things hoped for and unseen." Therefore, he suggests, faith must be put in charge. "An economy of ideas and innovations ultimately means an economy ruled by spirit and faith," Gilder concluded. One of the fruits of a faith-based approach to science will be a dismissal of what Gilder calls the "chimeras of popular 'science'": ideas such as global warming, pollution problems and ozone depletion. And that, unsurprisingly, has political ramifications, including climate-change denial and the pursuit of ruthless free-market economics. Gilder claims credit for formulating the "supply-side economics" embraced by the Reagan administration. The Discovery Institute is not alone in aggressively promoting such views. It is backed by organisations that also support many other think tanks with fundamentalist ideologies. The institute would not divulge information about its funding sources to New Scientist, but it is possible to trace some of them through watchdog websites such as [12]www.mediatransparency.org and [13]www.sourcewatch.org. In 2003, for instance, the Pittsburgh-based Carthage Foundation made a donation of $40,000 for "project support", according to mediatransparency.org. Other recipients of Carthage money include the Free Congress Foundation (FCF), a Washington-based institution with the mission of returning the US to a Judaeo-Christian culture. The FCF, which received $10 million from the Carthage Foundation between 1985 and 2003, argues that the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools and courtrooms as "a reminder...to act responsibly and morally". In 2003 the Carthage Foundation also gave $35,000 to the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, which seeks to apply free-market principles to environmental protection. The most generous of the Discovery Institute's donors to date is philanthropist Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, who in 1999 pledged $1.5 million over five years. Ahmanson also funds the Washington-based American Anglican Council, whose vice-president is Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute. The AAC's most visible recent campaign was against the ordination of homosexual clergy in the wake of the controversy surrounding the appointment of openly gay canon Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. Ahmanson has also made donations to the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose focus is on socially conservative intervention in the influential and rich Episcopalian Church, and in the United Methodists, to which George W. Bush belongs. Ahmanson's wife Roberta, who sits on the IRD board, believes that the church should be giving equal weight to the views of dead Christians when it makes policy decisions. "If you take the weight of Christianity for 2000 years, all that weight is on the orthodox side," she told The New York Times last year. Discrediting Kyoto An internal strategy document leaked in 2003 from the IRD to a church activist (who prefers not to be named) identifies its third priority, after issues of sexuality and the plight of Christians in Cuba and elsewhere, as discrediting "liberal legislation that relies on the Kyoto accords and unproven apocalyptic suppositions". Ahmanson has other fingers in the climate-change-denial pie. He has also donated to the George C. Marshall Institute, which shares many of its board of directors with the Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP). Founded with the support of the Korean cult leader Syung Moon, SEPP is one of the most vociferous campaigners against climate action in the US. And his influence now extends to the UK: in January, Robert May, president of the Royal Society, warned that the George C. Marshall Institute had teamed up with a climate-change sceptic group in the UK, The Scientific Alliance, to publish a document entitled "Climate Issues & Questions", which serves as an important information source for many lay climate-change deniers. It is clear that the anti-secular movement has science in its sights. But should reasoning people fear for the future? So far, their victories have been modest. With a diverse range of allies, they obtained a ban on US federal funding for most stem-cell research. But they wasted about $400,000 - nearly half contributed by Ahmanson - on a failed bid to oppose California's support for such science. They have also failed in their attempts to get ID formally taught in US public schools. David King, chief scientific adviser to the British government, says he is not overly worried. "What influence do they really have?" he asks. Barbara Forrest, professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and a vocal critic of creationism, concurs. "They're no threat to science at all," she says. "They've had no effect on the way science is done - they don't do any science themselves." But Forrest and King may have misunderstood the enemy strategy. Dembski talks not of political or scientific successes; he is under no illusion that he can change mainstream scientific opinion. He talks only of "cultural engagement" and claims that the fact that science is biting back - as in Forrest's book Creationism's Trojan Horse - "is itself confirmation that something important is going on". Indeed, almost all the debates that Dembski's people have stirred up use the "no smoke without fire" principle and raise the idea that science has something to hide. And, for its slow-burning campaign against science, that's all the "wedge" strategists need. Sometime in the past few years, those who question the findings of mainstream science ceased to be laughable luddites and, to a significant number of people, became an accepted voice in public debate about science. And when that voice's opinion is not only accepted, but also suits voters' prejudices, Dembski's work is done. As veteran liberal broadcaster Bill Moyers said when accepting the Global Environmental Citizen Award at Harvard Medical School: "The delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress." The campaign to stop science has scored significant successes. If you're a fan of reason, you have good reason to be concerned. Blind faith in science http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825201.400 by Bryan Appleyard RELIGIOUS fundamentalists frequently inspire mockery or fear in the secular-minded for their reliance on faith and rejection of reason. In response, the fundamentalists argue that secularism is underpinned by a faith or world view far more groundless or arbitrary than their own. That faith may be said to be liberalism, democracy or progress, but, most commonly and most correctly, it is identified as science. Science is indeed the faith, system, theory, methodology - choose your own term - that sustains liberal democratic secularism. There are two primary reasons for this. The first is the effectiveness of science, specifically as expressed through technology. Nobody prayed their way to the Pentium 4 chip or the Boeing 747. The second is the uniquely cumulative nature of scientific knowledge. Ethically we have not moved beyond Jesus Christ, artistically we have not moved beyond Titian, and politically we have not moved beyond Jefferson. Scientifically, however, we are moving forward all the time. Newton may be the greatest of all scientists but Einstein is more important now for the simple and unarguable reason that he knew more. So the secularist may reply to the fundamentalist: "I do indeed have a faith but, unlike yours, it works and gets better all the time." The fundamentalist may retort: "We did pray our way to Pentium 4s; you were just deluded in thinking you could make them yourself." You may find his argument implausible, but it is at least complete. If God really does work in mysterious ways, then guiding us to the fabrication of silicon chips may well be one of them. He doesn't necessarily have to restrict Himself to parting the Red Sea. At this point the secularist/scientist would be well advised to shut up, because almost anything he says to strengthen his position will topple him over into a fundamentalism of his own. For there is a scientific fundamentalism, too, and it is, in its way, just as dangerous as the religious version. The secularist is on solid ground only when he says that science works - at least in achieving the aims to which it reasonably limits itself - and that it accumulates. The fatal extrapolation to make from this position is that it must, therefore, potentially be omnicompetent and omniscient. Scientific fundamentalism is the belief that the world is accessible to and ultimately controllable by human reason. This is a profoundly unscientific idea. It is neither provable nor refutable. Obviously it is a leap of faith to insist that human reason is capable of fully understanding the world. We seem to have some access to its workings, but it would be wildly premature to believe that the human brain is capable of comprehending all reality. The idea that it is up to such a task is an arguable hypothesis based on a very optimistic view of human rationality, but that is all. Yet the belief in the possibility of human omniscience has been as strong in recent years as it was in the 1930s, when scientistic fantasists dreamed of a world run by a collection of hard-headed scientist-oligarchs. This is, in large part, a result of the successes of biology. Genetics offers the possibility of direct effects on our species in terms of disease, behaviour, life choices and so on. It offers, in short, precisely what previous disciplines like psychology and sociology have failed to deliver: an effective scientific analysis and intervention in the human world. Thus, via biology, the dream of omniscience has become the fantasy of omnicompetence. We could control the world and make people better, perhaps even perfect. Philosophy and magic Now obviously I know - and I need to make this very clear - that most scientists do not hold this view. Indeed, the majority would see that it is a view that gets in the way of good science and offends against one of the most obvious characteristics of all science, its provisionality. We know - or should know - that all contemporary science will be modified or overthrown by the science of the future. This is not to take the postmodern view that science is just one interpretation of the world among many others. Rather, it is simply to say that the scientific truth of one era may later come to be seen as no more than a rough approximation. So there is a clear logical and equally clear practical and historical objection to what I have called scientific fundamentalism. Neither objection demeans science in any way, yet both tend to inspire apoplexy in the hard scientistic thinkers who have dominated recent discourse. Scientific fundamentalism is alive and well. That scientific fundamentalism is dangerous should be evident to any serious thinker looking back on the 20th century. Fascism was an anti-Enlightenment creed, but its most lethal expression in Nazism was founded on science. Hitler's Mein Kampf leaned on the biology of Ernst Haeckel, which, at the time, was perfectly respectable. Communism, an ideology that sprang directly from the scientific Enlightenment, was based on Marx's conviction that a science of history had been discovered. The slaughter of the Jews, Stalin's massacres and Mao's deliberate starving of millions were all executed by people persuaded they were justified by scientific insights. Of course, it might be said this was bad science. But that is no more of an excuse than saying the Spanish Inquisition was bad religion. In that case, people twisted benignly intended human value systems to evil ends. There is nothing whatsoever in science - and this should be shouted daily from the rooftops of every scientific institution - that makes it immune from such abuses. Some scientists will dispute this, claiming that the values of open, objective enquiry, mutual criticism and protection of learning in the accumulated wisdom of science amount to an ethical system which, if applied to the world, would make it a better place, potentially protected from future horrors. This is not wrong, it is just fantastically utopian. Such values are not exclusive to science; they preceded it. Science sprang from philosophy, theology and even magic. The reason it became modern science at all was because of the direction these disciplines took in the course of the Renaissance. That these values worked so triumphantly in science is unarguable; that they have failed to work anywhere else is equally unarguable. The brief period of calm we currently enjoy in the west floats on the usual sea of war and genocide. The human world is very different from the one seen through the telescope or in the test tube. To say it would be nice if it wasn't is to say nothing. To say it should be and we can make it so is downright sinister - fundamentalist, in fact. But that is precisely what many scientistic thinkers, dazzled by the success of science, have been saying. The human world is perverse, complex, violent and utterly indecipherable. There is no science of history and no technology that will save us from the future. Scientific fundamentalism deludes us with dreams of competence; it expects too much of this world, just as religious fundamentalism expects too much of the next. For the moment, the tide of hard scientism is ebbing, perhaps because people have grown bored with the frantic marketing of implausible claims and moved on. It will return, though. Human delusions are nothing if not robust. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:13:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:13:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Solids that can pass through solids Message-ID: Solids that can pass through solids http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825201.100 * 08 October 2005 * Catherine Zandonella IS it possible to walk through walls? Can solid objects really pass through each other? Moses Chan thinks they can, and he says he has the proof. Chan and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University have created the world's first "supersolids", bizarre crystals that slide through each other like ghosts. It is a finding that promises to revolutionise the way we think about matter. "It really changes one's concept of solids," says Jason Ho, a solid-state theorist at Ohio State University in Columbus. The idea that one solid object can flow through another contradicts all our everyday experiences: no one has ever seen a teacup dissolve through a saucer. And when you prop up the bar on Friday nights there is no danger of you slowly melting into the surface and falling out the other side. Solids get their reassuring rigidness from the orderly way their atoms are arranged. Unlike liquids and gases, the atoms in a crystal are fixed, a bit like the squares on a chequerboard. While they may quiver a little due to their thermal energy, this normally isn't enough to dislodge the atoms and cause them to flow over each other. However, physicists have long suspected that this rule could be broken. In 1969, Russian theorists Alexander Andreev and Ilya Lifshitz were studying the properties of solids and found that there was indeed a way for them to flow. In certain crystals, the bonds between atoms are so weak that you can squeeze the solids like a sponge. Such weak bonds give a crystal another property. Close to absolute zero its atoms have barely enough thermal energy to shiver. But for some crystals, even this tiny movement is thought to be enough for an atom to break free. This leaves the crystal latticework full of gaps called "zero-point vacancies" and these vacancies are mobile, even at absolute zero. It might sound odd that a gap in a crystal can have any physical properties. But physicists think of these vacancies as having energy and mass just as atoms do. And they can even move around the crystal. Andreev and Lifshitz predicted even more bizarre behaviour: the vacancies can move through the solid in synchrony as if one solid were flowing through another. This happens because of the peculiar nature of quantum mechanics. Close to absolute zero, quantum theory says that groups of atoms can lose their individual identities and start behaving like a single, giant atom. Instead of dancing around randomly in a gas or liquid, these atoms can condense into a single quantum state and start moving in perfect lock-step. This happens because their quantum wave function, the region of space in which a particle is found, spreads out and grows larger than the distance between the atoms. The details of the process depend on a basic property of particles called spin. Atoms divide into two families called bosons and fermions depending on the nature of their spin. Quantum mechanics dictates that no two identical fermions can share the same quantum state, so they cannot move as a single entity. But there is no such restriction on bosons. They can crowd together in the same energy state when the wave functions begin to overlap. It is at this point, they start behaving like one massive atom, dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensate. In principle at least, this means that solids made of bosons can flow through each other. In many solids this cannot happen because the atoms are locked in their individual fixed positions like people sitting in their assigned seats in a theatre. But Andreev and Lifshitz recognised that atoms have more freedom in crystals that have weak bonds. And they realised that the same thing should apply to vacancies, so they would have the freedom to move around too and condense into one, giant vacancy. Like a ghost walking through a wall, they predicted that this "supersolid" made of vacancies would pass eerily though the rest of the crystal. Andreev and Lifshitz were thinking of solid helium-4 when they did their calculations because helium-4 atoms are bosons and the bonds between them are so weak. Helium is also the second lightest element in the periodic table, so its quantum behaviour should become more apparent when it cools than with heavier elements. Supersolids should therefore show up in helium and hydrogen first. But they could form in any solid under the right conditions. "If this is what quantum mechanics tells us about the ground state of solid hydrogen and solid helium, it is true of every solid in the universe," says Philip Anderson of Princeton University, an expert on the quantum theory of solids and winner of the 1977 Nobel prize for physics. Since Andreev and Lifshitz made their prediction, however, many researchers have looked in vain for supersolids. Yet there are some tantalising hints that supersolids do indeed exist. In the late 1990s, John Goodkind of the University of California in San Diego and his colleagues saw something strange in experiments with crystals made from helium's isotopes helium-3 and helium-4. Creating helium crystals is not easy. You need more than just freezing temperatures to transform liquid helium-4 into a solid: you also have to crush it to at least 25 times normal atmospheric pressure. Goodkind's team was bombarding a solid helium-4 crystal with ultrasound. As they cooled the crystal close to absolute zero, the researchers noticed the ultrasound waves speeding up. This could have been down to the formation of a supersolid. When sound travels through a solid, it causes the atoms to vibrate. If part of the crystal had turned into a supersolid, it would have decoupled from the rest of the crystal and allowed the sound waves to travel faster. But the team needed to do more experiments to be sure. Enter Chan and his graduate student Eunseong Kim. Inspired by Goodkind's results, they decided to take a look for themselves in 2001. They began by putting some solid helium-4 in a bucket, hanging it from a string, and spinning it first clockwise then counter clockwise at 1000 times a second while freezing it. This experiment would enable them to see what happens to solid helium as it oscillates rapidly at very low temperatures. In reality the device is more complicated, surrounded by tubes and wires that deliver helium and record measurements. The "bucket" is actually smaller than a sewing thimble and rotates on a shaft rather than a string. To compress the helium into a crystal Chan and Kim ratcheted up the pressure to 60 times atmospheric pressure. Success finally came last year. As they cooled the crystal down below 2 K, the experimenters carefully monitored the rate at which the thimble oscillated. The frequency of this oscillation is governed by the shaft's stiffness and the thimble's inertia, which is determined by the mass of helium inside. Supersolid debut At about 0.2 K, the thimble began to oscillate faster, as if some of the helium had escaped from the bucket. Except that no escape was possible since Chan and Kim had already checked for leaks in the system. They concluded that roughly 1 per cent of the solid had stopped moving with the rest of the helium crystal and was standing stock still. The rest of the crystal appeared to be passing through it. It was an electrifying moment, but Chan and Kim had to make sure that what they were seeing wasn't the result of a flaw in their set-up. So they replaced helium-4 with helium-3, whose atoms are fermions and should not form a supersolid. If they saw no effect with helium-3, they could be confident that the original result was real. Sure enough, there was no sign of supersolid flow with helium-3. But still the researchers weren't completely sure of what they saw. They published the results in Nature (vol 427, p 225) under the rather hesitant title "Probable observations of a supersolid helium phase". Chan's fellow physicists were intrigued. "It is hard to believe that a solid can behave that way," says Wayne Saslow, a condensed matter physicist at Texas A&M University in College Station. "If it is right, it means that this particular solid is like a localised fluid rather than a solid." While their fellow physicists scratched their heads, Kim and Chan did more experiments to check their results. They published their later findings in Science (vol 305, p 1941) but this time they dropped "probable" from the title. The most logical explanation for his results, thinks Chan, is that 1 per cent of the atoms or vacancies condensed into a single unit that then played by the rules of quantum mechanics while the rest of it continued to live in the classical world. "You think of solids as very reliable and boring, with all the atoms fixed in their expected positions," says Chan. "We are saying no, there is actually flow within a solid." Yet Chan's results are proving controversial. While everyone agrees that the experiment was carried out carefully, other groups of researchers are still trying to replicate it. A Japanese group led by Masaru Suzuki of the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and Keiya Shirahama at Keio University in Yokohama, has recently conducted a similar experiment to Goodkind's, using sound waves to study solid helium-4. So far they have found no evidence of supersolid-like behaviour. Meanwhile theorists are arguing about what Chan has really seen. Nikolai Prokof'ev, a theorist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and his colleague Boris Svistunov think what Chan spotted were myriad microscopic crystals slipping around in a sea of liquid helium, rather than a supersolid passing through a single crystal. "Think of chunks of packed ice with water in between," says Prokof'ev. Yet Chan argues that such behaviour would have shown up in his experiments. Theorists are also going back to basics and re-examining Andreev and Lifshitz's theory. Some, like David Ceperley, a theorist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, thinks vacancies cannot be present at the high pressures in Chan's experiment. He argues that rising pressure would squeeze the vacancies out of the crystal. He expects them to migrate to the end of the crystal and disappear like bubbles escaping from a fizzy drink. Others, including Tony Leggett, also at Illinois and winner of the 2003 physics Nobel for his work on superfluid helium, argue that vacancies might not even be needed for supersolid behaviour. Leggett says it might be down to atoms switching places like in a game of musical chairs. Chan is convinced vacancies and other types of crystal defects are involved, but he is leaving it to the theorists to work out the details. "The explanation is probably a bit more subtle than what was proposed by Andreev and Lifshitz," he says. But many researchers simply want to skip the controversy and go straight to the question of how the stuff would act if it really was a supersolid. One reason they are so keen is that if Chan is correct, that means that quantum mechanics can operate on large scales in all three states of matter - solids, liquids, and gases. "Quantum mechanics is supposedly the theory that explains nature, yet we don't see it existing in our environment," says Seamus Davis, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "We know of liquids and gases that can be macroscopic quantum systems. It would be very exciting if we now have an example in a solid." Towards absolute zero It is too early to say what supersolids could be used for. But the very fact that Chan may have uncovered an entirely new state of matter is reason enough to get excited. So could supersolids turn up in any other elements? In March, Chan and his students Anthony Clark and Xi Lin reported similar behaviour in solid hydrogen at even lower temperatures. Hydrogen molecules are bosons, so the result ties in nicely with their previous experiments. And Chan is confident that other elements could follow. Researchers have already coaxed over half a dozen different gases into Bose-Einstein condensates using special traps that employ magnetic fields and lasers to hold and cool the atoms. And it is possible to make superfluids from fermions, such as helium-3. Here the atoms first pair up to form bosons before crowding into the same quantum state. So who knows what elements might follow next. But don't get too excited just yet: other supersolids may be hard to detect. As you move down the periodic table, the atoms act less like quantum particles because they are more massive and bond more strongly to neighbouring atoms. So the supersolid effect is likely to be smaller. To see it, you would need extremely low temperatures, perhaps as low as a few thousandths or a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Yet it is still possible. "It is just that the supersolid fraction will be smaller and we will have a difficult time measuring it," says Anderson. So it is unlikely that the supersolid phase will help you walk through walls, at least not yet. But studying supersolid behaviour could usher in a new way of thinking about solids, says Anderson. The textbook picture of a solid as a chequerboard array of atoms with one atom per space could be replaced by something a whole lot weirder. "It really shakes your confidence in what a solid is," says Anderson. Go with the flow Helium is strange stuff by anyone's standards. At temperatures where most other elements just freeze into lumps, liquid helium can flow straight up and over the side of a cup on its own. Stir some chilled helium in a coffee cup and it will continue to swirl around effortlessly forever; it is not slowed by viscosity the way ordinary liquids are. Such renegade liquids are called superfluids. Both of helium's isotopes, helium-3 and helium-4, morph into superfluids when the thermometer dips within a few degrees of absolute zero. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:13:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:13:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked-life: More than just a SHAM Message-ID: More than just a SHAM http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CAD3F.htm 7 September 2005 More than just a SHAM Self-help gurus might be fakes - but why do so many people fall for them? by Josie Appleton In SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless, Steve Salerno exposes the pretensions of the Self-Help and Actualisation Movement. Gurus' degrees are often fake, their personal lives a disaster, their advice wacky. John Gray, of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus fame, offers instruction on the hidden meaning of women's underwear: '[when] she wears silky pink or lace, she is ready to surrender to sex as a romantic expression of loving vulnerability', while a 'cotton t-shirt with matching pantiesmay mean she doesn't need a lot of foreplay'. One 'life coach', Hale Dwoskin, instructs his clients to drop pens and throw chairs as '"symbolic" ways of letting go of impediments to happiness and power'. Self-help gurus become famous by hitting on a catchphrase and running with it. Richard Carlson started with Don't Sweat the Small Stuffand It's All Small Stuff, and graduated to Don't Sweat the Small Stuff For Women, At Work, For Teens, The Don't Sweat Guide for Couples. Once a guru makes it, they can diversify into pretty much anything: weight-loss products, relationship counselling, business start-ups, moon landings. They pose as messiahs, as if everything they touched turned to gold. Indeed, it often does: self-improvement is an $8.5billion industry in America. Gurus charge thousands of dollars for a seminar, and hundreds to answer an email. The self-help industry is smaller in the UK, but is making steady headway. All this could be dismissed as empty guff. Tony Robbins is a walking clich?: his seminars have titles like Life Mastery, Date With Destiny, Unleash the Power Within, and he offers such homilies as 'The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment', or 'All personal breakthroughs begin with a change of beliefs'. However, as Salerno argues, it's more serious than that. SHAM is based on two different philosophies - victimisation and empowerment - which can only make people's problems worse. Victimisation preaches that everybody's life is fucked up - and if you don't know it, you're really fucked up. Everything bad that happens to you is somebody else's fault, generally your parents'. This tends to spawn suspicious individuals, who are permanently in recovery. They 'believe nothing and believe in nothing'. Empowerment, by contrast, is about mind over matter. If you believe that you will be a 'winner', you will be. This sets people up for a fall, when they discover that self-belief alone cannot move mountains. Salerno does a good job at exposing the self-help industry, but he accords too much power to these modern-day snake-oil salesmen. He argues that 'American society has largely remade itself in SHAM's bipolar image' - or, as the subtitle claims, they 'made us helpless'. Apparently, gurus have cunningly manipulated their audiences, and forced their ideas on institutions from medicine to education. Esteemed doctors have allowed aromatherapists into their hospitals, while teachers teach self-esteem rather than ABCs. Why has everybody fallen for these fakes? In truth, it's less that we were made in Tony Robbins' image than that he was made in ours. These guys have the classic shady biographies of opportunists. They are just capitalising on the weaknesses of our age. The doctrines of victimisation and empowerment weren't concocted by John Gray and his ilk. Way back in 1979, US sociologist Christopher Lasch argued that a 'culture of narcissism' was infecting family, work, sport and education. Lasch described people's uncertainty about the boundaries between the self and the world - which results in delusions of omnipotence (empowerment) as well as paralysis (victimisation). Today we are even more confused about where the boundaries of responsibility lie. We've seen the decline of traditional moral codes and motivational frameworks. American capitalism's old ethos of hard work and self-control had been fraying for years before it was pointed out in 1976 by Daniel Bell, in his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. When businessmen lacked an ethic, they were suckers for the motivational mumbo-jumbo of gurus. The self-help industry offers answers to two questions: 'How should I live?' and 'How do I motivate myself?' Its answers are crass and often deleterious. The fact that people drink them up merely shows the weakness of other sources of social authority. This is an industry built on desperation - why else would anybody call a stranger on prime time TV to ask whether they should leave their boyfriend? People seem not to know where to start in dealing with their problems. That is why they plead to life coaches: 'Sort me out!', 'Just get me where I want to be!'. It's only a society that has lost its moorings that can be seized by charlatans. Rasputin preyed on the decadence of the Tsarist regime in early twentieth century Russia, using his mystic cures to work his way into the elite's courtrooms and bedrooms. Self-help gurus are really just parasites, preying on the weakness of the social organism. Exposing gurus as shams won't make them vanish. They will only be out of a job when we get our heads straight. SHAM could perhaps have benefited from less on why Robbins and co are wrong, and more on how we got here and what the alternative might be. The book's chapter on relationships is the most satisfying, because it counters the cynical formulas of relationship gurus with another idea of attachment: that 'glorious alchemy between one single man and one single woman'. Salerno might then have avoided his downbeat conclusion - that we need to stop hoping for happiness and accept 'what real life is about'. The desire for happiness is a good thing. We just need to stop trying to hitch a lift with mystics, and work out a real way to move forward. SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless is published by Nicholas Brealey, 273pp, priced ?10.99 (buy this book from [2]Amazon UK or [3]Amazon USA). From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:14:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:14:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked-essays: The market in fear Message-ID: The market in fear http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CAD7B.htm 5.9.26 [Before you read this, which I have not done, recall that "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" (H.L. Mencken, _In Defence of Women_).] Politics has become a contest between different brands of doom-mongering. by Frank Furedi Fear is fast becoming a caricature of itself. It is no longer simply an emotion or a response to the perception of threat. It has become a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of unease about our place in the world. Popular culture encourages an expansive, alarmist imagination through providing the public with a steady diet of fearful programmes about impending calamities - man-made and natural. Now even so-called high culture cannot resist the temptation of promoting fear: a new exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York has the theme of 'The perils of modern living'. Fear is also the theme that dominates the Eighth Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon. Natasha Edwards writes about the 'art of fear' that haunts this important exhibition of contemporary European art. But the more we cultivate a twenty-first century sensibility of anxiety, the more we can lose sight of the fact that fear today is very different to the experience of the past. Throughout history human beings have had to deal with the emotion of fear. But the way we fear and what we fear changes all the time. During the past 2,000 years we mainly feared supernatural forces. In medieval times volcanic eruptions and solar eclipses were a special focus of fear since they were interpreted as symptoms of divine retribution. In Victorian times many people's fears were focused on unemployment. Today, however, we appear to fear just about everything. One reason why we fear so much is because life is dominated by competing groups of fear entrepreneurs who promote their cause, stake their claims, or sell their products through fear. Politicians, the media, businesses, environmental organisations, public health officials and advocacy groups are continually warning us about something new to fear. The activities of these fear entrepreneurs serves to transform our anxieties about life into tangible fears. Every major event becomes the focus for competing claims about what you need to fear. Take the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It is not bad enough that we have to worry about the destructive consequence of this terrible catastrophe: according to some fear entrepreneurs, there is more to come. They claim that global warming will turn disasters like Katrina into normal events. Free-market ideologues blame 'Big Bureaucracy' for the mismanagement of the rescue operation. Critics of President George W Bush point the finger at the war in Iraq. And Bush blames local government. In the meantime, some contend that New Orleans represents God's punishment for human sin, while others suggest that the whole event is driven by a hidden conspiracy against the black race. The fierce competition between alarmist fear entrepreneurs helps consolidate a climate of intense mistrust. Is it any surprise that many African Americans believe that the Bush administration sought to save New Orleans' white districts by flooding black neighbourhoods, through deliberately engineering the levee breaks? The catastrophe that wreaked havoc in Louisiana was also a test of our humanity. But sadly we were encouraged to interpret the event in the worst possible terms. Most of the stories about rape, looting, gang killings and other forms of anti-social behaviour turned out to be just that - stories. But for a while we became distracted from empathising with our fellow human beings as we feared for the breakdown of civilisation. It is not simply the big events like Katrina that are subjected to competing claims on the fear market. Imagine that you are a parent. For years you have been told that sunshine represents a mortal danger to your child, and that you must protect them from skin cancer by minimising their exposure to the sun. Then, this summer, a report is published that raises concerns about the rise of vitamin E deficiency among children who have been far too protected from the sun. So what do you do? The fact is that a growing range of human experience - from natural disasters to children's lives in the outdoors - is now interpreted through competing claims about fear. Our misanthropic reaction to the catastrophe in New Orleans is reproduced daily in response to far more mundane events. That is why society cannot discuss a problem facing children without going into panic mode. Research shows that when viewers see an image of a child on a TV news item, they automatically anticipate a negative story. So a majority of people who were asked to give their interpretation of a photo of a man cuddling a child responded by stating that this was a picture of a paedophile instead of an act of a loving father. A brief history of fear In one sense, competing claims about what to fear is not a phenomenon unique to current times. During the Cold War, ideological conflicts were often conducted through the medium of fear. While some politicians argued for expanding arms expenditure by raising alarm about the threat of communism, others demanded disarmament and appealed to the public's fear of nuclear weapons. However, the promotion of competing alarmist claims is very different to the situation in the past. Fear has lost its relationship to experience. When confronted with a specific threat such as the plague or an act of war, fear can serve as an emotion that guides us in a sensible direction. However, when fear is promoted as promiscuously as it is today, it breeds an unfocused sense of anxiety that can attach itself to anything. In such circumstances fear can disorient and distract us from our very own experiences. That is why fear has acquired connotations that are entirely negative. It is worth recalling that, historically, fear did not always have negative connotations. The sixteenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes regarded fear as essential for the realisation of the individual and of a civilised society. For Hobbes and others, fear constituted a dimension of a reasonable response to new events. Nor does fear always signify a negative emotional response. As late as the nineteenth century, the sentiment of fear was frequently associated with an expression of 'respect' and 'reverence' or 'veneration'. From this standpoint, the act of 'fearing the Lord' could have connotations that were culturally valued and affirmed. Today, by contrast, the act of fearing God is far less consistent with cultural norms. One important reason for this shift is that fearing has tended to become disassociated from any positive attributes. One of the distinguishing features of fear today is that it appears to have an independent existence. It is frequently cited as a problem that exists in its own right, disassociated from any specific object. Classically, societies associate fear with a clearly formulated threat - the fear of plague or the fear of hunger. In such formulations, the threat was defined as the object of such fears: the problem was death, illness or hunger. Today, we frequently represent the act of fearing as a threat itself. A striking illustration of this development is the fear of crime. Today, fear of crime is conceptualised as a serious problem that is to some extent distinct from the problem of crime. That is why politicians and police forces often appear to be more concerned about reducing the public's fear of crime than reducing crime itself. Yet the emergence of the fear of crime as a problem in its own right cannot be understood as simply a response to the breakdown of law and order. It is important to note that fear as a discrete stand-alone problem is not confined to the problem of crime. The fear of terrorism is also treated as a problem that is independent of, and distinct from, the actual physical threat faced by people in society. That is why so many of the measures undertaken in the name of fighting terrorism are actually oriented towards managing the public's fear of this phenomenon. The generalised fear about the health effects of mobile phones has been interpreted as a risk in itself. In Britain, the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones, which was set up in 1999 by the then health minister Tessa Jowell, concluded that public anxiety itself could lead to ill health. The report of this committee noted that such anxieties 'can in themselves affect' the public's wellbeing. In the same way, anxiety about health risks is now considered to be a material consideration in determining planning application. Fear is treated as an independent variable by public bodies. The legal system has also internalised this trend. In the USA, there is a discernible tendency on the part of courts to compensate fear, even in the absence of a perceptible physical threat. This marks an important departure from the practices of the past, when 'fright' - a reaction to an actual event - was compensated. Now, the fear that something negative could happen is also seen as grounds for making a claim. For example, it has been argued that people who feel anxious about their health because an incinerator is to be sited near their homes ought to be compensated. A market in fear Political debate is often reduced to competing claims about what to fear. Claims about the threat of terrorism or child obesity or asylum seekers compete for the attention of the public. In this way, our anxieties become politicised and turned into a politics of fear. Health activists, environmentalists and advocacy groups are no less involved in using scare stories to pursue their agenda than politicians devoted to getting the public's attention through inciting anxieties about crime and law and order. The narrative of fear has become so widely assimilated that it is now self-consciously expressed in a personalised and privatised way. In previous eras where the politics of fear had a powerful grasp - in Latin American dictatorships, fascist Italy or Stalin's Soviet Union - people rarely saw fear as an issue in its own right. Rather, they were frightened that what happened to a friend or a neighbour might also happen to them. Today, however, public fears are rarely expressed in response to any specific event. Rather, the politics of fear captures a sensibility towards life in general. The statement 'I am frightened' tends to express a diffuse sense of powerlessness. Fears are often expressed in the form of a complaint about an individual, such as 'Bush really scares me' or 'he's a scary president'. Ironically, in the very act of denouncing Bush's politics of fear, the complainant advances his own version of the same perspective by pointing out how terrifying the president apparently is. And yet, the politics of fear could not flourish if it did not resonate so powerfully with today's cultural climate. Politicians cannot simply create fear from thin air. Nor do they monopolise the deployment of fear: panics about health or security can just as easily begin on the internet or through the efforts of an advocacy group as from the efforts of government spindoctors. Paradoxically, governments spend as much time trying to contain the effects of spontaneously generated scare stories as they do pursuing their own fear campaigns. The reason why the politics of fear has such a powerful resonance is because of the way that personhood has been redefined in mental health terms. Increasingly, people are presented as individuals who lack the emotional resources to cope with the challenges of life. Take the recent report on the legacy of the Chernobyl disaster. You have to read this three-volume, 600-page report very carefully to discover the good news that the number of deaths caused by the accident at the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl is under 50. Despite claims that thousands will eventually die and that even more could suffer terrible physical pain, the news is reassuring. The study found no evidence of decreased fertility among the affected population, nor an increase in congenital malformations. However, in line with the temper of our times the report concluded that the big problem posed by Chernobyl is the mental health of the affected people. The belief that people are unable to cope with misfortune and pain underpins our perception of the problems we face. There is nothing novel about claim-making activities based on fear. Throughout history claim-makers have sought to focus people's anxiety towards what they perceived to be the problem. However, the activities of fear entrepreneurs today do not represent simply a quantitative increase over the past. In the absence of a consensus over meaning, competitive claims-making intrudes into all aspects of life. In the private sector, numerous industries have become devoted to promoting their business through the fear market. In some cases, entrepreneurs seek to scare the public into purchasing their products. Appeals to personal security constitute the point of departure for the marketing strategy of the insurance, personal security and health industries. Fear is used by the IT industry and its army of consultants to sell goods and services. In certain instances it is difficult to clearly delineate the line that divides the fear economy from the promotion of anxiety and the anticipation of a disaster. It is worth recalling that for a considerable period of time the Y2K problem, also known as the millennium bug, was regarded as the harbinger of a major disaster. The scale of this major internationally coordinated effort and the massive expenditure of billions of dollars to deal with possible technologically induced crisis was unprecedented. Only a tiny minority of IT experts was prepared to question those devoted to constructing the 'millennium bug problem'. Even social scientists, who usually make an effort to interrogate claims about an impending disaster, failed to raise any questions about the threat. One IT industry commentator, Larry Seltzer, noted that 'looking back on the scale of the exaggeration, I have to think that there was a lot of deception going on'. He added that the 'motivation - mostly consulting fees - was all too obvious'. But nevertheless it was not simply about money. Seltzer believes that there were also 'a lot of experienced people with no financial interest who deeply believed it was a real problem'. Despite the growth of the fear economy, the exploitation of anxieties about potential catastrophes, the promotion of fear is primarily driven by cultural concerns rather than financial expediency. One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture of fear is that any problem or new challenge is liable to be transformed into an issue of survival. So instead of representing the need to overhaul and update our computer systems as a technical problem, contemporary culture preferred to revel in scaring itself about various doomsday scenarios. The millennium bug was the product of human imagination that symbolised society's formidable capacity to scare itself. But who needs a millennium bug when you have global warming? Today global warming provides the drama for the fear-script. Virtually every unexpected natural phenomenon can be recast as a warning signal for the impending ecological catastrophe. Nothing less than a complete reorganisation of economic and social life can, we are led to believe, save the human species from extinction. Contemporary language reflects the tendency to transform problems and adverse events into questions of human survival. Terms like 'plague', 'epidemic' or 'syndrome' are used promiscuously to underline the precarious character of human existence. The word plague has acquired everyday usage. The adoption of an apocalyptic vocabulary helps turn exceptional events into a normal risk. This process can be seen in the way that the occurrence of child abduction, which is fortunately very rare, has been transformed into a routine risk facing all children. In the same way, threats to human survival are increasingly represented as normal. As the sociologist Krishnan Kumar argues, the apocalyptic imagination has become almost banal and transmits a sense of 'millennial belief without a sense of the future'. The fear market thrives in an environment where society has internalised the belief that since people are too powerless to cope with the risks they face, we are continually confronted with the problem of survival. This mood of powerlessness has encouraged a market where different fears compete with one another in order to capture the public imagination. Since September 2001, claim-makers have sought to use the public's fear of terrorism to promote their own interests. Politicians, businesses, advocacy organisations and special interest groups have sought to further their selfish agendas by manipulating public anxiety about terror. All seem to take the view that they are more likely to gain a hearing if they pursue their arguments or claims through the prism of security. Businesses have systematically used concern with homeland security to win public subsidies and handouts. And paradoxically, the critics of big business use similar tactics - many environmental activists have started linking their traditional alarmist campaigns to the public's fear of terror attacks. The politicisation of fear Although the politics of fear reflects a wider cultural mood, it did not emerge spontaneously. Fear has been consciously politicised. Throughout history fear has been deployed as a political weapon by the ruling elites. Machiavelli's advice to rulers that they will find 'greater security in being feared than in being loved' has been heeded by successive generations of authoritarian governments. Fear can be employed to coerce and terrorise and to maintain public order. Through provoking a common reaction to a perceived threat it can also provide focus for gaining consensus and unity. Today, the objective of the politics of fear is to gain consensus and to forge a measure of unity around an otherwise disconnected elite. But whatever the intentions of its authors, its main effect is to enforce the idea that there is no alternative. The promotion of fear is not confined to right-wing hawks banging on the war drums. Fear has turned into a perspective that citizens share across the political divide. Indeed, the main distinguishing feature of different parties and movements is what they fear the most: the degradation of the environment, irresponsible corporations, immigrants, paedophiles, crimes, global warming, or weapons of mass destruction. In contemporary times, fear migrates freely from one problem to the next without there being a necessity for causal or logical connection. When the Southern Baptist leader Reverend Jerry Vines in June 2002 declared that Mohammed was a 'demon-possessed paedophile' and that Allah leads Muslim to terrorism, he was simply taking advantage of the logical leaps permitted by the free-floating character of our fear narratives. This arbitrary association of terrorism and paedophilia can have the effect of amplifying the fear of both. The same outcome is achieved when every unexpected climatic event or natural disaster is associated with global warming. Politics seems to only come alive in the caricatured form of a panic. In one sense, the term politics of fear is a misnomer. Although promoted by parties and advocacy groups, it expresses the renunciation of politics. Unlike the politics of fear pursued by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, today's politics of fear has no clearly focused objective other than to express claims in a language that enjoys a wider cultural resonance. The distinct feature of our time is not the cultivation of fear but the cultivation of our sense of vulnerability. While it lacks a clearly formulated objective, the cumulative impact of the politics of fear is to reinforce society's consciousness of vulnerability. And the more powerless we feel the more we are likely to find it difficult to resist the siren call of fear. The precondition for effectively countering the politics of fear is to challenge the association of personhood with the state of vulnerability. Anxieties about uncertainty become magnified and overwhelm us when we regard ourselves as essentially vulnerable. Yet the human imagination possesses a formidable capacity to engage and learn from the risks it faces. Throughout history humanity has learned from its setbacks and losses and has developed ways of systematically identifying, evaluating, selecting and implementing options for reducing risks. There is always an alternative. Whether or not we are aware of the choices confronting us depends upon whether we regard ourselves as defined by our vulnerability or by our capacity to be resilient. Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent. His new book, The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, is published by Continuum. He is speaking at the free public debate 'Reflections on the Future: Thinking Politically in the Twenty-First Century' at the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue in New York, at 6.30pm this Friday, 30 September 2005, alongside Russell Jacoby and Richard Sennett. For more information on the debate, visit the New York Salon website [2]here or email [3]info at nysalon.org. References 2. http://www.nysalon.org/recent-events/index.html 3. mailto:info at nysalon.org From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:15:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:15:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] City Journal: (Foucault) Theodore Dalrymple: In the Asylum Message-ID: Theodore Dalrymple: In the Asylum http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_oh_to_be.html 2005 Summer The Victorian lunatic asylums of my city were magnificent, from the purely architectural point of view. Municipal pride, manifested by artistic embellishment without utilitarian purpose, shone out from them. They were built on generous grounds in what were then rural areas, outside the city bounds, on the theory that rustic peace had a healing effect upon fractured minds--and also that remoteness would protect the sane of the city from distressing contact with the insane. The city expanded and soon engulfed the asylums, but the grounds remained, often the only islands of green in a sea of soot and red brick. These grounds, right up until the asylums closed, were tended with a care that spoke of love and devotion. For all who worked in them, the asylums provided a genuine sense of community. Indeed, by the time of their closure, they were the only real communities for miles around, the surrounding society having been smashed into atoms. They held annual cricket matches and other sporting contests on their spacious lawns, and hosted summer and Christmas balls. The staff were often second- or third-generation employees, and the institution was central to their lives. The patients benefited from the stability; the asylum was a little world in which they could behave as strangely as they pleased without anyone caring too much. They were free of the mockery and disdain with which people elsewhere would greet their strange demeanor, gestures, and ideas: for in the asylum, the strange was normal. Within its bounds, there was no stigma. But of course, there was a very dark side as well. Physical conditions, especially for those patients so chronically ill that the wards were in effect their homes, were appalling. There was no privacy, with beds sometimes packed so closely together that no one could walk between them. The smell of urine so deeply impregnated the furnishings and floors of the dayrooms that it seemed ineradicable (not that anyone tried to eradicate it). The stodgy food and physical inactivity meant that chronic constipation was universal; and most patients looked as if they had filtered their food through their shirts, blouses, and sweaters. Aimless wandering in the corridors was the principal recreation for many patients, who rarely saw a doctor, therapeutic impotence being more or less taken for granted. Individuals had lived in these conditions for more than half a century; and it was possible until the late 1980s to find women who had been committed to the asylums in the 1920s merely for having borne illegitimate children. As in the Soviet Union (though to a far less sinister degree), deviance was sometimes labeled madness and treated accordingly. Most of the staff were kindly and well-meaning, but, as in any situation in which some human beings have unsupervised care of and power over others, opportunities for sadism abounded. Usually these were minor: I often saw nurses denying cigarettes to patients, telling them to come back in a few minutes, for no other reason than the pleasure of exerting power over a fellow being. But from time to time, far worse cruelty would surface, always hushed up in the name of institutional morale. This was easily done, since very few outside the asylum concerned themselves with what went on inside. For most of their existence, the asylums were custodial rather than therapeutic institutions. Their methods now strike us as laughably crude. One asylum doctor published a memoir just after World War I in which he described how he and his colleagues treated suicidal melancholics and agitated paranoiacs. They sat the melancholics against a wall, placing a bench in front of them to prevent them from moving, while an attendant watched them to ensure that they did not do away with themselves. Croton oil, a very powerful laxative, subdued the agitation of the paranoiacs, who became so preoccupied with the movement of their bowels that they had no time or energy left to act upon the content of their delusions. Attempts at cures were often more desperate than well-advised. One of the asylums of my city had the best-equipped operating theater of its time, where an enthusiastic psychiatrist partially eviscerated his patients and also removed all their teeth, on the theory that madness was caused by a chronic but undetected and subclinical infection (called "focal sepsis") in the organs that he removed. Later, a visiting neurosurgeon used the theater to perform lobotomies on patients who were scarcely aware of what was being done to them. Doctors also tried more "advanced" treatments, such as insulin coma therapy, in which they gave schizophrenic patients insulin to lower their blood sugars to the point at which they became unconscious, sometimes with fatal effect. It was not difficult, then, to present asylums as chambers of horrors, where bizarre sadistic rituals were carried out for reasons unconnected with beneficent medical endeavor. And it so happened that one of the most powerful critics of both the asylum system and psychiatry as a whole--powerful in the sense of having had the greatest overall effect--published his attack in 1961, not long after the introduction of medications so efficacious in the treatment of psychosis that the asylum populations had already begun to decline, as patients were discharged back into the outside world. The name of the critic was Michel Foucault, and within a few years his Madness and Civilization had spawned an entire movement, though of somewhat disparate elements. Foucault was not so much concerned by the cases of abuse or the poor conditions in asylums, as a mere reformer might have been. In the tortuous prose then typical of French intellectuals, he was concerned to assert that the separation of the mad from the sane, both physically and as a matter of classification, was neither intellectually justified nor motivated by beneficence. Instead, it was an instance of the exertion of power by the rising bourgeoisie, which needed a disciplined and compliant workforce to fuel its economic system and was therefore increasingly intolerant of deviance--not only of conduct but of thought. It therefore locked deviants away in what Foucault called "the great incarceration" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of which the asylums of the Victorian era were a late manifestation. In Foucault's Nietzschean vision, all human institutions--even, or especially, those of avowedly beneficent intent--are expressions of the will to power, because such a will underlies all human activity. It is not really surprising, then, if asylums had turned into nothing but chambers of horrors: for psychiatry, and indeed the whole of medicine, to the rest of which Foucault soon turned his undermining attention, were not enterprises to liberate mankind from some of its travails--enterprises that inevitably committed errors en route to knowledge and enlightenment--but expressions of the will to power of the medical profession. The fact that this will was cloaked under an official ideology of benevolence made it only the more dangerous and sinister. This will needed to be unmasked, so that mankind could liberate itself and live in the anarchic Dionysian mode that Foucault favored. (A sadomasochistic homosexual, the French philosopher later lived out his fantasies in San Francisco, and died of AIDS as a result.) Foucault inspired subsequent critics of psychiatry, of varying degrees of scholarliness, rationality, and clarity of exposition. Among the best was the influential historian Andrew Scull, whose history of the origins of asylums, Museums of Madness, nevertheless implied that the arrogation of insanity to the purview of doctors in the eighteenth century did not grow out of any natural connection between the phenomena of madness and the endeavor of medicine--still less out of the practical ability of doctors of the time to cure madness (witness their failure in the case of George III)--but on the medical profession's entrepreneurial drive to increase its influence and income. The fact that the mad eventually came under the care of the medical profession was thus an historical accident, the result of the shrewd maneuvering of the doctors: some other group--the clergymen, for example, or the tailors--might have occupied the same position had they maneuvered as successfully. Founded on so illegitimate a basis, psychiatry was by implication a totally false undertaking. This argument overlooks a few obvious facts, however. What could have been said of madness could have been said of dysentery and pneumonia--that the doctors of the time had no power to cure them and that therefore these diseases were not properly the province of physicians and might just as well have been handled by tinkers or topographers. If the Foucauldian style of thought had prevailed at earlier times, with that mind-set's failure to understand imaginatively what is required to go from a state of complete ignorance to one of partial knowledge, and how it is often necessary to act in a state of ignorance, no one would ever have discovered anything about the cause or treatment of disease. Moreover, the connection between madness and medicine is not entirely arbitrary and unfounded, as Scull suggested (though in my opinion the scope of psychiatry has since expanded illegitimately, especially in the grotesque overprescription of psychotropic medication). The eighteenth-century doctors had in this respect a better grasp of reality than Professor Scull, for organic conditions leading to madness and dementia must have been very common at the time. It has been plausibly suggested (though not conclusively proved) that George III was suffering from porphyria, possibly exacerbated by lead poisoning, for instance, and at the end of the nineteenth century, up to a quarter of the population of the asylums was suffering from general paralysis of the insane, the last stage of syphilis. Dare I mention that were it not for modern medicine, I myself would long ago have ended up in an asylum, one of those apathetic creatures that the physiognomists of madness in the nineteenth century so eloquently portrayed in their drawings, because I suffer from hypothyroidism, which is the most common of all endocrine diseases and which untreated can lead to madness and finally to dementia? Another rhetorically powerful critic of psychiatry, also influenced by Foucault, was R. D. Laing, himself a psychiatrist. It was he who, in the 1960s and 1970s, gave currency to the idea that madness was an alternative, and in some ways superior, way of being in the world: that madness was in fact true sanity, and sanity true madness, insofar as the world itself was quite mad in its political, social, and domestic arrangements. According to Laing, it was the unequal power within families, and the distorted communications to which this inequality gave rise, that caused the condition in young people known as schizophrenia. To hospitalize them and treat them against their will was thus to punish them for the sins of their parents and to maintain an unjust social order at the same time. This view became extremely popular in an era that uncritically criticized all institutions. The psychotic came to be viewed by right-thinking people as victims of injustice rather than as sufferers from illness (an attitude reinforced when it was discovered that young men of Jamaican origin living in Britain had a rate of schizophrenia six, seven, or eight times that of young white men). What was required was not treatment but restitution. These ideas paved the way for an ill-conceived and hasty deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Thanks to effective treatments, the numbers requiring to be institutionalized were declining anyway; politicians hoped to save money by deinstitutionalization and were all too willing to believe that the mentally ill could be managed almost without any institutions whatever; and finally, criticisms of the Foucauldian mold--that society had no right to impose restraint upon the mad--entered common consciousness. Madmen had a right to wander the streets, and other citizens had the duty to put up with it. The asylums of my city closed within a few short years. The patients were sent to live in what bureaucrats insisted upon calling "the community," because of that term's connotations of warmth and welcome. With varying degrees of assistance and supervision, they were expected to live independently; they were given their autonomy, whether they wanted it or not. Many coped adequately with their newfound freedom, but many did not. And meanwhile, hospital provision for the mentally ill declined to such an extent, both for budgetary and ideological reasons (hospital admission was to be avoided at all costs, in a fetishistic kind of way, irrespective of the logic of the individual case), that every time it became imperatively necessary to admit a psychiatric patient, the entire system experienced a crisis. Madmen were left in police cells for days on end while hospital beds were found for them; sometimes, not a single such bed could be found in an area with a population of 4 or 5 million. Every day in my work as a prison doctor, I witnessed the effect of this lack of provision. Ironically, the splendid new hospital wing of the prison, built with few expenses spared, rose on the grounds of an asylum that had just been closed down; but inside the hospital, we were re-creating the conditions of eighteenth-century Bedlam. Modern walls do not a modern hospital make. Unearthly screams rent the air; foul smells offended the nostrils. Madmen threw their clothes through the windows, started fires in their cells, tore up their sheets, wrapped towels around their heads, angrily addressed their hallucinatory interlocutors while standing stark naked on their beds, refused all food as poisoned, and spat at passersby. All that was lacking were visitors from the outside world who had paid their pennies to laugh at the lunatics; I suggested that we re-institute this great tradition to improve the prison's finances. The cases would go like this: a madman would commit an offense--say, a completely unprovoked assault on a person in the street (unprovoked, that is, from the victim's point of view; the perpetrator would believe that the victim had been threatening or insulting him). The police would arrest him and take him to the police station. They would recognize that he was mad--his speech would be rambling and incoherent, he spoke of things that were not, and his behavior was completely beyond the bounds of reason. They would call a doctor, who would say that yes, the man was mad, but that no, he could not be admitted to a hospital to be treated, because there were no beds available. The police then faced a dilemma. They could either release the man back into the community, whose sense of social solidarity he had so reinforced by his unprovoked attack on a random stranger, or they could charge him and put him before the courts. Sometimes they would do the one, sometimes the other. I have known lunatics released from police custody who clearly had intended to kill their victims in the street (and were handed back the weapons with which they intended to do it), because a policeman did not want to charge a man who was so obviously not responsible for his actions. At other times, depending on who knows what factors, the police would bring the man before the courts, where a system of psychiatric screening had been set up. Theoretically, the accused found to be psychiatrically unwell by the examining nurse would be diverted from the criminal justice system into the psychiatric system. But the nurse, knowing that no hospital beds would be available were she to declare the accused mentally ill, and not wishing to accept the labor of Hercules involved in trying to find such a bed, declares the madman (so mad that it requires no expertise at all to detect his madness) to be fully sane, or a malingerer, or to be currently under the influence of marijuana, so that his madness will pass within a short time and results from voluntary intoxication, which is no excuse under the law for his crime. Thus the madman is remanded into custody; and the nurse calms her conscience with the hope that the prison doctor will recognize the man's madness and will try to find a hospital bed for him. Unfortunately, things do not go smoothly in the prison. The doctor cannot find a hospital bed for his mad patient; the psychiatrists outside the prison consider that the patient is now in a place of safety--the prison--where he will not be deprived of medical attention, and he is therefore of lower priority for a hospital bed than a lunatic still at large in the community. He is thus kept, often for months, in the prison on remand. As the law now stands in Britain, prison doctors are not permitted to give treatment against a patient's will, except under the direst emergency, for fear that they might abuse such power and forcibly sedate whomever they choose contrary to the patient's human rights. Hence psychotic patients are now kept in prison hospitals for months without any treatment whatsoever, thus taking part in an interesting if not altogether pleasing experiment in the natural history of psychosis, such as has not been conducted for many years. Recently, for example, I observed a psychotic patient for several weeks, who addressed the world night and day through his prison window in words of muddled religious exaltation, who refused all food on the grounds that it was poisoned, his flesh melting away before my eyes, who attacked anyone who came within reach, and who painted religious slogans on the walls of his cell with his own excrement, thus imparting a nauseating feculent smell to the entire hospital. It might, of course, be alleged that he behaved in so disturbed a fashion because he was incarcerated, and that his conduct was (in the opinion of R. D. Laing) a meaningful and enlightened response to his terrible social situation, and that he, of all the 1,400 prisoners in the prison, was acting in the most appropriate way under the circumstances. But this would be not only to ignore his medical history but also the fact that he was incarcerated in the first place because he had viciously and without provocation attacked a 79-year-old woman in a church, injuring her badly while reciting verses from the Bible, which suggests that his disturbed mental state preceded his incarceration and was not a consequence of it. I checked the situation with lawyers. Although he had a fully documented history of psychosis and an entirely favorable response to treatment, attested to by both doctors and relatives (who said that when treated he was a pleasant and intelligent man), I was not entitled, in the name of human rights, to treat him against his will. In the name of human rights, therefore, the prison officers and the other prisoners had to endure weeks of revolting air, as well as disturbed nights in which sleep was all but impossible, while he lived in conditions that Hogarth might well have painted with justified moral fury. The doctors to whom I proposed to send the patient accepted the conditions in which he lived with Buddha-like calm that would have been admirable had the suffering been theirs. Only the prison officers, among the most despised of all public servants, seemed to be moved by the scandal of the situation. The doctors, by contrast, were now so inured to such situations that they accepted it as normal and nothing to get excited about. The shortage of beds and the administrative difficulties that this shortage caused had steadily eroded their common humanity. It was only when I threatened to expose the scandal publicly and had taken photographs of the man's cell and said I would send them to the government minister responsible for prisons (a proceeding completely against the rules, but supported by the prison warden, who did not want his prison turned into a surrogate lunatic asylum) that the man was finally found a place in a hospital, where he could be treated. Of course, Foucault might have put a completely different construction on the outrage of the prison officers and the desire of the man's relatives for him to be treated and returned to normality. He might have interpreted all this as an intolerant refusal to accept the man's alternative way of life, a refusal even to try to interpret the meaning of the communications that he coded in his own excrement. For Foucault, their concern, couched in the terms of humanity, concealed a drive for power and domination, used to produce conformity to debilitating and dehumanizing bourgeois standards. But such an interpretation would surely mean that common humanity and a feeling for others are qualities whose very possibility he would radically deny: that the only relations that could exist between men are those of power, and that all else is illusion. I am aware that hard cases make bad law, but I could cite many such cases as the one above; of cases, for example, where doctors have changed their diagnoses in order to avoid the responsibility of finding hospital beds for their patients, and where they have even perjured themselves in court to evade that responsibility, to the great detriment of the patient and the safety of society alike. These are now part of everyday practice. The shortage of beds, brought about by the desire to make financial savings in the context of an ideological assault on the notion of psychiatric illness, has corrupted doctors and nurses by slow but inexorable steps. I am also aware that many horror stories could be told of doctors who have been overzealous (to put it mildly) in their attempts to cure their patients or to spread their fields of operations to their own material and social advantage. There is no simple formula for avoiding the Scylla of zealotry on the one hand and the Charybdis of abandonment of responsibility on the other. The art is long, life is short, the occasion fleeting, and judgment difficult. But the difficulty must be faced. One thing is certain: that Foucault and his ilk are no guides to how to treat a man like the one I have described (and such as I have come across every day). Should he have been let free, to continue his Dionysian assaults on defenseless old ladies, on the grounds that they were life-enhancing? I cannot see that this represents anything but a preference for barbarism. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:15:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:15:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Nobel Came After Years of Battling the System-Helicobacter story Message-ID: Re: Nobel Came After Years of Battling the System-Helicobacter story From: "Norman Vickers" Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 08:59:34 -0500 To: Pensacola Mencken Group and some friends From: Norman Vickers Here's a nice summary of the bacterial genesis of (some) peptic ulcer disease. See Frank Forman's comments below. Certainly J. Robin Warren (pathologist) and Barry Marshall (gastroenterologist) from Perth, Australia are deserving of this landmark discovery. Marshall's self-experimentation by giving himself a serious case of gastritis when he drank the H. pylori is one of a long series of physicians and self-experimentation. The first cardiac cath was done by a physician on himself, with the help of his nurse. In medical practice, however, the problem with H. pylori is not nearly as straightforward. The Helicobacter pylori surrounds itself in an "antacid" capsule so that it can live in the stomach. In older populations, it's found in about 50%. Obviously not all these persons have peptic ulcer. It seems to be more prevalent in societies where sanitation is poor. Treatment to eradicate Helicobacter pylori with antibiotics is expensive and not without risk--allergic reactions, antibiotics induced diarrhea etc. And if patients with symptoms-- heartburn, abdominal pain-- but no ulcer are found to have H. pylori, there's a less than 50% chance that they'll improve with antibiotic treatment. So, this discovery didn't put the pharmaceutical people out of business. To make this more complex: much peptic ulcer disease and symptoms relate to the use of anti-inflammatory drugs-- All the NSAIDs ( non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) such as Ibuprofen, Aleve and others and aspirin can cause peptic ulcer and gastrointestinal bleeding. The COX-II inhibitors Vioxx ( now removed from the market) and Celebrex are no more effective as anti-inflammatories, they just have less irritating effects on the stomach. I did some work with colleagues in the early 1960s documenting the effect of aspirin on the stomach lining and published the first photographs of the aspirin induced lesion. ( This wasn't a new discovery as an English observe in 1937 had published similar findings and documented with an artist's drawing, as photography through the gastroscope wasn't available at that time. Now, the fact that aspirin can cause ulcers and GI bleeding is an accepted fact both by physicians and laymen. You can read it on the labels which come with the medicine. When we published our work we had similar reactions to that of the Australian workers with H. pylori. Here's the progression of acceptance of new knowledge: * It doesn't happen * If it does happen, it doesn't happen very often * It does happen often, but it isn't very important * Yes, it happens often, but it's not new! For some really good information on H. pylori and ulcer disease, search Google. Put in H. Pylori + patient information. You will be referred to the National Library of Medicine and get some solid information which is in clear understandable English. ______________________________________________________ After all that preamble-here's the article Nobel Came After Years of Battling the System http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/health/11docs.html Frank Forman write:[William Weedon taught a terrific course called "The Concepts of Order and Disorder in Science and Literature" (we didn't get into literature at all. Too bad!) in the tool school at UVa, which I took in 1965-6. He remarked that the phlogiston theory of heat was "abandonded much too quickly," meaning, I took it, that the caloric theory of heat was far from being adequately established. This doesn't seem to be the case here. [I cannot help but be reminded that Galileo implored the Roman Catholic priests to look into his telescope. They refused. A replica of that telescope is in the Air and Space Museum, across the street from where I work. It has been rigged to show the moons of Jupiter. The telescope wobbles so badly and the image is so small that the priests very well might not have been convinced. I can't say for sure I could see the moons myself!] ____________________________________________________________________ NYTimes Oct 11, 2005 By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. When two Australian scientists set out in the early 1980's to prove that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, caused stomach inflammation [snip] From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 01:16:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:16:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Big Girls Don't Cry Message-ID: Big Girls Don't Cry http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/13/fashion/thursdaystyles/13crying.html By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM WHEN women first joined the executive ranks of corporate America a generation ago, they donned sober slacks and button-down shirts. They carried standard-issue briefcases and adopted their male colleagues' stoicism. More than two decades later, women have stopped trying to behave like men, trading in drab briefcases for handbags and embracing men's wear only if it is tailored to their curves. Yet there is one taboo from the earlier, prefeminist workplace that endures: women are not allowed to cry at the office. It is a potentially career-marring mistake that continues to be seen as a sign of weakness or irrationality, no less by women themselves than by men. For evidence consider a recent episode of NBC's "Apprentice: Martha Stewart," in which a young woman whose team had just lost a flower-selling contest told Ms. Stewart that she felt like crying. Her admission elicited no sympathy from her prospective employer, only blunt career advice. "Cry and you are out of here," Ms. Stewart said. "Women in business don't cry, my dear." Women in politics don't either, judging by Geena Davis's performance as the steely Mackenzie Allen on ABC's "Commander in Chief." Discussing the pilot episode, in which Allen navigates a political minefield to ascend to the office of president of the United States, Ms. Davis told a reporter from The Chicago Sun-Times, "I did not cry in my pilot - no!" For reasons both biological and social, scientists and sociologists say, women are more inclined than men to feel the urge to cry when they are frustrated. Yet Martha Stewart is not the only woman executive who expects her underlings to remain dry-eyed. Many other workplace veterans also impose the rule and through seminars, books, Web sites and private conversations, recommend tricks for how to follow it. "I hear women being called crybaby all the time, even by other women," said Lori Majewski, the managing editor of Teen People. The judgment can be unfair, she said, because sometimes women cry for good reason. Nevertheless, she said, "women need to be vigilant, to hold it in." Ms. Majewski, 34, knows what it is like to cry at work because she has done so herself - once. She was in her early 20's and had a scare about a magazine cover photo shoot falling through. Her boss took her aside and told her she needed to remain composed in front of her colleagues. She has since handed down the lesson to her own employees, suggesting that they leave the office and take a walk if they feel the need to cry. "Don't even go into the bathroom," she said. "If you go into the bathroom, someone's going to see you and the gossip gets around." When a woman does cry at work, she should address her superior about it directly, Ms. Majewski said. "Go to your boss and say, 'I was quite overtaken with emotion, it's so not me, I hope you understand,' " she said. "Just don't blame it on your period." Some women pinch their skin, bite their lips or breathe deeply to stem tears while at work. Advice on the Society for Women Engineers' Web site, swe.org, suggests anticipating and rehearsing difficult situations. An article about crying on Womensmedia.com, advises emotional detachment: "Compartmentalizing feelings is also a good skill to learn. Practice not acting on a feeling you have." Crying at work is different from crying at a wedding, a sappy movie or at someone's hospital bed because it is typically triggered not by compassion or even sadness but by frustration or anger. And at work people are expected to react rationally to such feelings. "When people show emotionalism in the workplace, they are not taken as seriously," said Mary Gatta, the director of work force policy and research at the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University. Men learned this lesson back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the Industrial Revolution structured the workplace and the workday, and required a disciplined work force, said Tom Lutz, the director of the M.F.A. writing program at the California Institute of the Arts and the author of "Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears." Factory managers trained their workers to be calm and rational, the better to be productive. "You don't want emotions interfering with the smooth running of things," Mr. Lutz said. Women for the most part did not receive this particular kind of on-the-job training. Nor did they usually learn, as boys did, that it was acceptable to express frustration in other ways. "Men are allowed to be more direct," said Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale University. "They can pound table tops and yell and throw something against walls and do various kinds of physical acting out. Women's mode of expression is supposed to be more passive, more childlike." She continued, "If women could act out like men, there would probably be less tears." Temper tantrums are typically frowned upon at the office, too, but they are still considered more acceptable than crying, said William H. Frey II, the director of the Alzheimer's Research Center at Regions Hospital in St. Paul and the author of "Crying: The Mystery of Tears." Nature may also make women more prone to tears than men, he said, explaining that both boys and girls cry about the same amount until the age of 12. But by the time women reach 18, they are crying four times as much as men, said Dr. Frey, who has conducted research on behavioral, personality and genetic aspects of crying and who has also studied the chemistry of tears. Scientists do not know exactly why women tend to cry more easily, but Dr. Frey said several factors may be at work. One is the hormone prolactin, he said, which is present in mammary glands and induces lactation but is also found in the blood and in tear glands. Boys and girls have about equal levels of prolactin levels in their blood during childhood. But from ages of 12 to 18, the levels in girls gradually rise, and that may have something to do with why women cry more than men. Tear glands in men and women also differ anatomically, and that, too, may lead women to cry more easily, Dr. Frey said. Many women remember crying or wanting to cry at some point in their careers, especially when they were starting out. Jenny Oz LeRoy, the chief executive of LeRoy Ventures, which operates Tavern on the Green, recalled her first difficult days in the kitchen at the restaurant her father owned: "I was the only girl in the kitchen, and there are these guys being testosterone-driven egomaniacs. They were like, 'Get out, let the guys handle it.' " She ran out of the kitchen crying, but returned minutes later and pressed on. "I thought, 'I'm not going to let some guy in a jacket make me feel stupid,' " she said. "You're so watched as a woman for everything you do." Ms. LeRoy has since learned control. "Nobody wants to see the boss fall apart," she said. "Or, on the other hand, everybody wants to see the boss fall apart." While women have moved into managerial positions in droves, they account for less than 1 percent of the Fortune 500 chief executives. This fact - as well as persistent, if shrinking, gaps in pay and promotions between men and women - may make women all the more conscious of their own workplace behavior. "Women are still contending with being seen as doing the job," Dr. LaFrance said, "not as a woman doing the job." A recent study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University found evidence that men's tears are viewed more positively than women's. "It seems that because men are less frequently noticed crying, they're given the benefit of the doubt," said Stephanie Shields, a professor of psychology and women's studies, who led the study. "When a man cries, it leads people to think he's a sweet, sensitive, caring individual," Dr. LaFrance said, but when a woman cries, she is often seen as "emotionally labile." Jarrod Moses, the president and chief executive of Alliance, an entertainment marketing firm that is part of Grey Global Group, said he looks down on crying at work because he dislikes extreme behavior of any kind. "I am a true believer in keeping the game face when you're in the office setting," he said. "You have to manage your mind. I think a lot of people lose respect for people who can't. Frankly, I do." Dana Spain-Smith, the owner and chief operating officer of DLG Media Holdings, which owns Philadelphia Style and DC Style magazines, said: "I definitely have had times when I've had to step out of the office. There's a perception, not that I'm the woman, but that I'm the boss. It makes the employees nervous. There has to be certain type of 'we look up to her.' " Executives like Susan Lyne of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, were models for the president on "Commander in Chief," according to Rod Lurie, the executive producer of the series. And while his fictional president may be unlikely to break down in the Oval Office, would a real woman as president need to be as stoic? "Unfortunately," Mr. Lurie said, "she would have to be more stoic than a man." From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:47:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:47:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Hobbs: Cult Influence Tactics Message-ID: Cult Influence Tactics http://www1.chapman.edu/comm/comm/faculty/thobbs/com401/socialinfluence/cult.html [Click on the URL and back up the directory tree to get more stuff, if you like this. There are too many theories about cults, and I have no idea whether this one is any better than any of the others. Thanks to Laird for this. He follows cults as well as political extemists.] Since cults make liberal use of many influence techniques, I find them fascinating and study them whenever the chance arises. The following [30]page discusses cult influence tactics, but I think it's important to first define what I mean when I use the word "cult," and examine some important issues surrounding the topic before diving in. "What exactly is a cult, anyway?" A cult is a group of people who organize around a strong authority figure. Cults, like many other groups, attempt to expand their influence for the purposes of power or money. However, to achieve these ends, destructive cults employ a potent mixture of influence techniques and deception to attain psychological control over members and new recruits. This fundamental level of control is known alternatively as 'brainwashing,' 'thought reform,' or 'mind control.' A successful induction by a destructive cult displaces a person's former identity and replaces it with a new one. That new identity may not be one that the person would have freely chosen under her own volition (Hassan, 1990). There are over 3,000 destructive cults in the US, with approximately 4 million members. They fall into 4 basic types: * Religious -- the type we hear about most frequently; * Psychological/Enlightenment -- offering expensive "enlightenment" workshops; * Commercial -- including certain pyramid and multi-level marketing organizations; * Political -- which are organized around a political dogma. Nazism was originally a cult, and cults can still be found lurking in the left and right wings of American politics. Question "What's the difference between a cult. . . and my church, my service club, or, say, Alcoholics Anonymous?" There are lots of differences, but the major difference is that of ultimate goal. Established religions and altruistic movements are focused outward--they attempt to better the lives of members and often, nonmembers. They make altruistic contributions. Cults serve their own purposes, which are the purposes of the cult leader; their energies are focused inward rather than outward (Singer, 1995). Also, religions and altruistic movements typically lack the distinguishing characteristics of overbearing authoritarian control, the use of deception in recruitment, the use of coercive influence techniques, and the replacement of one identity with another which would not have been freely chosen by the individual before joining the group (Hassan, 1990). Upon hearing about cult influence techniques, some of my students reason thus: if cults use influence tactics A, B, and C, and my church (or health club or debate team) also uses influence tactics A, B, & C, then my church (or other group) is no different from a cult. This sort of reasoning represents the logical fallacy called "affirming the consequent." Here's the same type of argument using a different example. Fact 1: When it rains, the sidewalk gets wet. Fact 2: The sidewalk is wet. Conclusion: It must have rained. You can see that there are a myriad of other reasons that might have caused a wet sidewalk, including the neighbor's garden hose, your leaky can of soda, the neighbor's dog (yuk!), or a universe of other wetting agents. Similarly, there are a number of other defining characteristics that make a cult a cult, aside from the influence tactics they use. Question "What kinds of people join cults? What's wrong with them?" In the wake of the UFO/Heaven's Gate cult suicide, I have heard several media personalities ask these questions of former and current cult members. The questions make me laugh, because they're a perfect example of how the wrong questions can frame and obscure an issue. Even when cult experts correctly point to the powerful environmental constraints generated by cults, rather than to the personalities and backgrounds of individual cult members, these media personalities single-mindedly press the question, "But what's wrong with cult members?" The answer, for the vast majority of inductees, is that there was nothing "wrong" with them--at least, not until they were persuaded to join a cult. Cult Frequencies For the most part, normal, average people join cults--people like you and me. Research indicates that approximately two-thirds of cult members are psychologically healthy people that come from normal families. The remaining third are likely to have depressive symptoms, usually related to a personal loss--perhaps a death in the family, a failed romantic relationship, or career troubles. Only 5 to 6 percent of cult members demonstrate major psychological problems prior to joining a cult (Singer, 1995). Cults don't want, and don't recruit, people with psychological problems or physical handicaps--they represent a loss rather than a gain of cult-oriented productivity. Cults prefer intelligent, productive individuals who are able to contribute money and talent to "the cause," whatever it may be (Hassan, 198-). Lewin's formula Here's some psychological background that can provide insight regarding cult induction--it's somewhat dense, so buckle in and hang on. Behavior is a function of both a person's personality and her situation (those of you who've taken psychology may recall the classic Lewinian formulation B=f[P,E] which indicates that behavior is a function of, or an interaction of, both the personality and the environment). One of social psychology's great discoveries has been the overwhelming influence that the environment--the immediate situation--exerts on people's behavior. Yet, when assigning cause, observers will usually attribute cause to a person's personality, not the constraints of the environment. This is such a persistent and reliable human bias--to assign cause to the person rather than to the environment--that it has been given the name of "the fundamental attribution error." The fact is, the environment can easily dominate personality-based differences among people, making person differences a relatively minor variable in the equation. In other words, given a powerful and engaging situation, people often react to it in a uniformly similar fashion, regardless of personality differences. This truism has been demonstrated numerous times in the laboratory (Sharif, Asch, Milgram. . .) and more frighteningly, in real life (Nazism, Bolshevism, Jim Jones . . .). Enviro vs. Personality True to this discovery, there appears to be no reliable personality factor that predicts cult membership. However, certain situational elements make people more vulnerable to cult recruitment, and they include: loneliness (as experienced by someone who has recently moved to a new location); depression (as we feel after a failed relationship); and uncertainty about how to proceed (as I felt when I first went to college). These situations create the desire for quick, simple solutions. Cults provide a myriad of "solutions," which are more importantly accompanied by structure, authority, and close social contacts--elements that people want, need, and which most of us take for granted in the course of our everyday lives. According to psychologist and cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer, cults flourish during periods of social and political turbulence and "during breakdowns in the structure and rules of the prevailing society." Cults were prevalent after the fall of Rome, during the French Revolution, and in England during the Industrial Revolution. Cults arose in Japan after World War II, and in Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Communist regime. Here in America, cults flourished during the rule of the 1960s counterculture. Civil unrest, the drug culture, the sexual revolution, and the weakening of the family left people looking for answers and assurance--which cults enthusiastically provided. Question "OK, so how do they do it? How do cults recruit an keep members, and then get them to behave in irrational and sometimes immoral ways?" References 30. http://www.chapman.edu/comm/comm/faculty/thobbs/com401/socialinfluence/cult2.html From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:47:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:47:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Scientific American Mind: Smarter on Drugs Message-ID: Scientific American Mind: Smarter on Drugs http://www.sciammind.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0000E503-E27C-1329-A27C83414B7F0000 October 2005 Issue We recoil at the idea of people taking drugs to enhance their intelligence. But why? By Michael S. Gazzaniga Any child can tell you that some people are smarter than others. But what is the difference between the brain of a Ph.D. student and the brain of the average Joe? If we can figure that out, then a bigger question follows: Is it ethical to turn average Joes into geniuses? Evolutionary theory suggests that if we are smart enough to invent technology that can increase our brain capacity, we should be able to use that advantage. It is the next step in the survival of the fittest. As noted psychologist Corneliu Giurgea stated in the 1970s, "Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain." That said, gnawing concerns persist when it comes to artificially enhancing intelligence. Geneticists and neuroscientists have made great strides in understanding which genes, brain structures and neurochemicals might be altered artificially to increase intelligence. The fear this prospect brings is that a nation of achievers will discard hard work and turn to prescriptions to get ahead. Enhancing intelligence is not science fiction. Many "smart" drugs are in clinical trials and could be on the market in less than five years. Some medications currently available to patients with memory disorders may also increase intelligence in the healthy population. Likewise, few people would lament the use of such aids to ameliorate the forgetfulness that aging brings. Drugs that counter these deficits would be adopted gratefully by millions of people. Drugs designed for psychotherapy can also be used to enhance certain regular mental functions. Just as Ritalin can improve the academic performance of hyperactive children, it can do the same for normal children. It is commonly thought to boost SAT scores by more than 100 points, for both the hyperactive and the normal user. Many healthy young people now use it that way for that purpose, and quite frankly, there is no stopping this abuse. In a way, with these new compounds, we are reliving the stories associated with better-known illegal psychoactive drugs. Morphine is a terrific help with pain produced by burns and other somatic ills; it is also a mind-altering substance that in some areas of society causes tremendous social and psychological problems. Do we stop developing such painkillers just because they might be misused? Even when the issue is simple memory enhancement, we profess great social concern. Why do we resist changes in our cognitive skills through drugs? The reason, it seems to me, is that we think cognitive enhancement is cheating. If, somehow, someone gets ahead through hard work, that's okay. But popping a pill and mastering information after having read it only once seems unfair. This position makes no sense. Among the normal population are men and women with incredible memories, fast learners of language and music, and those with enhanced capabilities of all kinds. Something in their brains allows them to encode new information at lightning speed. We accept the fact that they must have some chemical system that is superior to ours or some neural circuitry that is more efficient. So why should we be upset if the same thing can be achieved with a pill? In some way, we were cheated by Mother Nature if we didn't get the superior neural system, so for us to cheat her back through our own inventiveness seems like a smart thing to do. In my opinion, it is exactly what we should do. Memory Enhancers Already available, or making their way through the Federal Drug Administration's approval process, are several cognitive enhancers that reportedly improve memory. These are also being called smart drugs, or nootropes, from the Greek noos, for "mind," and tropein, for "toward." Whenever a study shows that a certain chemical produces even a moderate increase in memory in an animal population (be it fruit flies, mice or humans), one of two things happens. If the compound is not on the market, a pharmaceutical company quickly jumps in to exploit the finding. If the drug is already on the market but is used to treat a known ailment--for instance, Alzheimer's or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder--a surge takes place in off-label use, for a purpose other than the intended application. Some regulated smart drugs are currently on the market, as are unregulated herbal medications. Entire stores called smart bars have popped up along the West Coast to sell these items. Work on memory enhancers may be furthest along. Eric R. Kandel of Columbia University, who won a Nobel Prize for his research on learning and memory in the sea slug Aplysia, is one proponent. He found that learning occurs at the synapse (the junction between two neurons) by several means. The synapse is enhanced when a protein called CREB is activated, and CREB plays a role in memory formation in fruit flies and in mice. With these discoveries came the 1998 birth of Memory Pharmaceuticals, Kandel's Montvale, N.J.-based company, which hopes to formulate a drug that will raise the amount of CREB in the human neural system and thus facilitate the formation of long-term memories. One of the most promising chemicals is called MEM 1414. If clinical trials go well, MEM 1414 could be on the market after 2008. At least one other company, Helicon Therapeutics in Farmingdale, N.Y., is also investigating CREB to improve human memory formation. Alternative drugs are also in the works based on other brain mechanisms. Before a neuron naturally increases CREB, certain channels on its membrane must open to allow positive ions to flow into the cell. The ions then trigger a cascade of events leading to the activation of CREB. One channel of interest is known as NMDA. In 1999 Joseph Z. Tsein, Ya-Ping Tang and their colleagues, then at Princeton University, discovered that increasing the number of NMDA receptors in the mouse hippocampus led to better performance on a spatial-memory task. Now researchers and pharmaceutical companies are pursuing NMDA receptor agonists (they combine with the receptors) as nootropes. At least a dozen new drugs of this kind are making their way toward clinical trials. Scientists have known for years that more commonplace chemicals such as adrenaline, glucose and caffeine increase memory and performance. We all know it, too: procrastinators find clarity of mind in the adrenaline rush to meet a deadline; we try not to work "on an empty stomach"; and we are willing to pay a premium for a vente latte--all testimony to our appreciation of these legal activities. Self-medicating with Starbucks is one thing. But consider the following. In July 2002 Jerome Yesavage and his colleagues at Stanford University discovered that donepezil, a drug approved by the FDA to slow the memory loss of Alzheimer's patients, improves the memory of the normal population. The researchers trained pilots in a flight simulator to perform specific maneuvers and to respond to emergencies that developed during their mock flight, after giving half the pilots donepezil and half a placebo. One month later they retested the pilots and found that those who had taken the donepezil remembered their training better, as shown by improved performance. The possibility exists that donepezil could become a Ritalin for college students. I believe nothing can stop this trend, either. This anecdote reminds us that the unintended use and misuse of drugs is a constant. Trying to manage it, control it and legislate it will bring nothing but failure and duplicity. This fact of life needs to be aired, and our culture needs to reach a consensus about it. Aricept (the commercial name for donepezil) works, caffeine works, Ritalin works. Individuals will use such drugs or not use them, depending on their personal philosophy about enhancement. Some people like to alter their mental states; others do not. My guess is that, on average, adults will choose not to use memory enhancers or the theoretically more obscure IQ or cognitive enhancers. Why? Because when memory is in the normal range, we adapt to its level and set our personal psychological life in that context. Increasing our memory capacity might send a ripple effect across the landscape of our daily lives. After all, we spend a good part of each evening trying to forget many of the day's memories. Over a lifetime we have built up our personal narrative based on the efficiency of our memory and our capacity to forget. Any significant or even slight change in these capacities will have to be integrated into the backbone of that narrative, changing the mental life of a person. For a society that spends significant time and money trying to be liberated from past experiences and memories, the arrival of new memory enhancers has a certain irony. Why do people drink, smoke marijuana and engage in other activities that cause them to take leave of their senses? Why are psychiatry offices full of patients with unhappy memories they would like to lose? And why do victims of horrendous emotional events such as trauma, abuse or stressful relationships suffer from their vivid recollections? A pill that enhances memory may lead to a whole new set of disorders. Maybe the haunting memories of a bad experience will become ever present in consciousness after taking an enhancing pill. This problem and dozens of others may well be the outcome. Of course, many steps precede success in drug development, and some critics doubt we will see these newer memory enhancers in our lifetime. Although studies on animal models find that certain drugs improve memory or performance on specific tasks, it is not clear that they would help humans. Many nootropes that were promising in lab animals have failed miserably in human clinical trials. Is this because millions of years of evolution have led to a human brain whose neurochemical concentrations are at optimal levels? Another hurdle for drugs is their potential to cause deleterious effects. Some accounts of mice with altered "smart" brains, for instance, show that the mice are not only more receptive to learning but are also more sensitive to pain. Superintelligence Enhancing memory is one issue. Making people smarter--more able to contemplate complex ideas with greater ease and facility--somehow seems more problematic. Do we want a nation full of Harvard graduates? On the surface it seems insane. But the basic science suggests that superintelligence is not far-fetched. Defining what it means to be "smart" has frustrated psychologists for years. IQ and SAT tests, though long-standing indicators of academic success, are far from perfect indicators of success in the "real world." Intelligence tests, especially the IQ test, measure people's analytical skills, verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory and processing speed. This type of intelligence is called psychometric intelligence, and although it is not the only type (some researchers believe in "multiple intelligences," even including athletic ability), it is testable and so remains one of our primary gauges. In 1904 Charles Spearman, an English psychologist, reviewed the literature of the 19th century on intelligence and found that people who performed well on one test of intelligence seemed to perform well on all others. Spearman theorized the existence of a "general intelligence," which he termed g, that is used to process many domains and thus makes some people good at nearly all intelligence challenges. Many investigations since 1904 have supported Spearman's idea, and the current consensus among scientists and psychologists is that a g factor accounts for a great deal of the variance in intelligence test scores. Recently geneticists have discovered that even such abstract qualities as personality and intelligence are coded for in our genetic blueprint. Studies of the genetic basis of g are just beginning, and because g most likely arises from the influence of many genes, the hunt will be a long one. Yet one study has already found that a gene on chromosome 6 is linked to intelligence. So-called genetic brain mapping could help the search. Scientists are looking at the structural features (size, volume, and so on) of the brains of many individuals, including twins, familial relatives and unrelated individuals. By scanning all these brains in magnetic resonance imaging machines and looking at the differences, researchers have been able to determine which areas of the brain are most under the control of genes. These studies have emerged only in the past three to four years. Geneticists hope that once they know which brain areas are most affected by heredity, they can figure out which genes are responsible for those regions. With this kind of reverse mapping, the experts should be able to learn more about the genetics of intelligence. Geneticists and neuroscientists seem to be in agreement: the genes that affect intelligence may be coding for the structure and functions of specific brain areas that underlie Spearman's g. When researchers combine brain mapping with IQ tests, they can begin to tease out the correlations between the size, structure, and volume of brains and intelligence. Neuroscientists have determined that overall brain size has a statistically significant correlation with IQ. More detailed investigations show that the amount of gray matter--consisting mainly of the cell bodies of neurons--in the frontal lobes varies significantly with differences in intelligence scores. That suggests the frontal lobe may be the location of g. Indeed, John Duncan and his colleagues at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who put smart volunteers through a multitude of mentally demanding tasks, found that the lateral part of the frontal lobe on both the left and right sides may be the resting place of general intelligence. While undergoing positron-emission tomography (PET) scans, Duncan's subjects selectively activated the lateral frontal cortex during several intelligence tests. Some researchers are skeptical of the importance of Duncan's study, saying it is "suggestive" at best because we do not yet fully understand what the frontal lobes do. But his findings solidify the fact that we have entered a new age in scientific history--an era that allows neuroscientists to investigate individual differences in intelligence, previously a field only for psychology. Accordingly, a robust literature concerning neural differences in intelligence has arisen. Further support for the frontal lobe's role comes from the observation that people with frontal lobe damage usually score 20 to 60 points lower on IQ tests than others. These people also have deficits in what is called fluid intelligence, which decreases with age and includes abstract reasoning, processing speed, accurate responses during time constraints and use of novel materials. Smarter or Just Faster? The future is here. We have isolated one gene involved in intelligence, and others will follow. We know which parts of the brain are influenced by particular genes and which parts correlate with high IQ. We also know some of the neurochemicals involved in learning and memory. With such knowledge, we will gain understanding of what needs to be manipulated to increase intelligence in people who were not blessed with brilliance in their genomes or further increase the intelligence of those who were. Gene therapy could insert, delete, turn on or turn off genes that we find to be associated with intelligence. My own belief is that none of this threatens our sense of self. The opportunities to enhance one's mental state abound. "Smart" describes how well one processes information and figures out tasks. Once something has been figured out, much work must then be applied to the solution, and the smartest people in the world rarely say that the task is easy. They have worked hard to achieve insight and solutions. So we may all get faster at figuring out new problems, but it is not clear what it would mean to get smarter. "Smarter" is frequently just another word for "faster." Whatever happens, we can be sure that cognitive enhancement drugs will be developed and that they will be used and misused. But just as most people do not choose to alter their mood with Prozac and just as we all reorient our lives in the face of unending opportunities to change our sense of normal, our society will absorb new memory drugs according to each individual's underlying philosophy and sense of self. Self-regulation will occur. The few people who desire altered states will find the means, and those who do not want to alter their sense of who they are will ignore the drug potions. The government should stay out of it, letting our own ethical and moral sense guide us through the new enhancement landscape. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:47:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:47:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Roman Empire: The Paradox of Power Message-ID: Roman Empire: The Paradox of Power Published on BBCi History: 2001-06-01 (note date) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/empire_01.shtml By Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill The Roman Empire set up many of the structures on which the civilisation of modern Europe depends. It's no wonder the Romans can fire our imaginations, but what values did they hold, to help them to such success? Changing views of the Roman model A gap of 2,000 years may seem to have put the Romans at a safe distance from our own lives and experience, but modern Europe with its Union is unthinkable without the Roman Empire. It is part of the story of how we came to be what we are. The Romans are important as a conscious model, for good or ill, to successive generations. Why do they have such a powerful hold on our imaginations? What attracts us to them, or repulses us? What do they have in common with us, and what makes them different? 'A century ago, for imperialist Britain... the Roman Empire represented a success story.' A century ago, for imperialist Britain (and for other European states with imperial ambitions), the Roman Empire represented a success story. Rome's story of conquest, at least in Europe and around the Mediterranean, was imitated, but never matched, by leaders from Charlemagne to Napoleon. The dream that one could not only conquer, but in so doing create a Pax Romana, a vast area of peace, prosperity and unity of ideas, was a genuine inspiration. '...the efforts of 20th-century dictators... left Europe disillusioned with the Roman model.' But the efforts of 20th-century dictators such as Mussolini, peculiarly obsessed with the dream of reviving an empire centred on Rome, left Europe disillusioned with the Roman model. The dream of peace, prosperity and unity survives, but Roman style conquest now seems not the solution but the problem. Centralised control, the suppression of local identities, the imposition of a unified system of beliefs and values - let alone the enslavement of conquered populations, the attribution of sub-human status to a large part of the workforce, and the deprivation of women of political power - all now spell for us not a dream but a nightmare. Fascination in the emperors So is the Roman Empire a legacy of mistakes? That depends on what we want to make of it. One image of the imperial system is of strong, effective central control. The figure of the emperor himself, as defined by Julius Caesar and Augustus, stands for good order in contrast to the chaos of pluralism - squabbling city-states or competing aristocrats. Historians have underlined the benefits of provincial government restrained by imperial control and the development of a sophisticated and complex law code which still underlies continental legal systems. They have pointed to the benefits of the central bureaucracy built up by the early emperors, especially Claudius, which provided a structure for long-term continuity amid changing dynasties. That bureaucratic mentality, you could say, transmitted from late antiquity through the papacy to modern nation states, is what makes contemporary Brussels possible. But look at the figures of the Caesars themselves and what fascinates us now is their arbitrary nature. We see not an efficient system of fair and sober government, but a gamble at work. From Augustus's ruthless intelligence, to Caligula's scary insanity, or Nero's misplaced parade of rockstar popularity, we seem to be dealing with a system which throws the individual and his personal foibles into excessive prominence. 'The 'mad' and 'bad' Caesars seem more interesting than the good, sober ones...' The 'mad' and 'bad' Caesars seem more interesting than the good, sober ones - certainly, from Quo Vadis to I Claudius to Gladiator, they are the ones who have fired the popular imagination. It is as if we do not want to learn the secret of Roman success, but scare ourselves by looking deep into the irrationality of an apparently successful system. In that sense, the Caesars now serve us not as a model of how people ought to rule but a mythology through which we reflect on the terrifying power of the systems in which we may happen to find ourselves entrapped. A slave society One element, which perhaps more than others seems to separate our world from that of the Roman Empire, is the prevalence of slavery which conditioned most aspects of Roman society and economy. Unlike American plantation slavery, it did not divide populations of different race and colour but was a prime outcome of conquest. '...slavery required the systematic use of physical punishment, judicial torture and spectacular execution.' Again, we find ourselves gazing back at the Roman world not as a model, but as an alien and terrifying alternative. No concept here of human rights: slavery required the systematic use of physical punishment, judicial torture and spectacular execution. From the crucifixion of rebel slaves in their thousands to the use of theatrical enactments of gruesome deaths in the arena as a form of entertainment, we see a world in which brutality was not only normal, but a necessary part of the system. And since the Roman economy was so deeply dependent on slave labour, whether in chained gangs in the fields, or in craft and production in the cities, we cannot wonder that modern technological revolutions driven by reduction of labour costs had no place in their world. But while this offends against the core values on which the modern world is based, brutality and human rights abuses are not limited to the past. Enough to think of the stream of refugees struggling to break into the fortunate zones of Europe, and recall that the Roman empire collapsed in the West because of the relatively deprived struggling to get in, not out. The system that seems to us manifestly intolerable was in fact tolerated for centuries, provoking only isolated instances of rebellion in slave wars and no significant literature of protest. What made it tolerable to them? One key answer is that Roman slavery legally allowed freedom and the transfer of status to full citizen rights at the moment of manumission. 'Roman society was acutely aware of its own paradoxes...' Serried ranks of tombstones belonging to liberti (freed slaves, promoted to the master class), who flourished (only the lucky ones put up such tombs) in the world of commerce and business, indicate the power of the incentive to work with the system, not rebel against it. Trimalchio, the memorable creation of Petronius's Satyricon, is the caricature of this phenomenon. Roman society was acutely aware of its own paradoxes: the freedmen and slaves who served the emperors became figures of exceptional power and influence to whom even the grandees had to pay court. Pulling together diverse cultures One of the most astonishing features of the Roman Empire is the sheer diversity of the geographical and cultural landscapes it controlled. It was a European empire in the sense that it controlled most of the territory of the member states of the present EU, except part of Germany and Scandinavia. 'The planting of cities... was a sign and instrument of the advance to 'first-world' status.' But it was above all a Mediterranean empire, and pulled together diverse cultures, in Asia (the Near East), Egypt and North Africa that have not been reunited since the spread of Islam. This represented a vast diversity, including language (two 'international' languages were still needed for communication, Greek as well as Latin, let alone local languages) and relative development - they spoke of 'barbarians' versus Romans/Greeks, where we would speak of first and third world. The planting of cities, with their familiar apparatus of public services and entertainment, was a sign and instrument of the advance to 'first-world' status. But while we can still admire the effectiveness of this city-based 'civilisation' in producing unity and common cultural values in diverse societies, what we might look for from a contemporary perspective, and look for in vain, is some conscious encouragement of the 'biodiversity' of the different societies that composed the empire. Vast regional contrasts did indeed continue, but there is little sense that the emperors felt an obligation to promote or protect them. The unity of the empire lay in a combination of factors. The central machine was astonishingly light compared to modern states - neither the imperial bureaucracy nor even the military forces were large by modern standards. The central state in that sense weighed less heavily on its component parts, which were largely self-governing. But above all the unity lay in the reality of participation in central power by those from the surrounding regions. Just as the emperors themselves came not just from Rome and Italy, but Spain, Gaul, North Africa, the Danubian provinces, and the Near East, so the waves of economic prosperity spread over time outwards in ripples. Common values unifying the empire The unified empire depended on common values, many of which could be described as 'cultural', affecting both the elite and the masses. Popular aspects of Graeco-Roman literary culture spread well beyond the elite, at least in the cities. Baths and amphitheatres also reached the masses. It has been observed that the amphitheatre dominated the townscape of a Roman town as the cathedral dominated the medieval town. 'Christians were persecuted because their religion was an alternative and incompatible system...' The underlying brutality of the amphitheatre was compatible with their own system of values and the vision of the empire as an endless struggle against forces of disorder and barbarism. The victims, whether nature's wild animals, or the human wild animals - bandits, criminals, and the Christians who seemed intent on provoking the wrath of the gods - gave pleasure in dying because they needed to be exorcised. There was also a vital religious element which exposed the limits of tolerance of the system. The pagan gods were pluralistic, and a variety of local cults presented no problem. The only cult, in any sense imposed, was that of the emperor. To embrace it was as sufficient a symbol of loyalty as saluting the flag, and rejecting it was to reject the welfare of all fellow citizens. Christians were persecuted because their religion was an alternative and incompatible system (on their own declaration) which rejected all the pagan gods. Constantine, in substituting the Christian god for the old pagan gods, established a far more demanding system of unity. We are left with a paradox. The Roman Empire set up and spread many of the structures on which the civilisation of modern Europe depends; and through history it provided a continuous model to imitate. Yet many of the values on which it depended are the antithesis of contemporary value-systems. It retains its hold on our imaginations now, not because it was admirable, but because despite all its failings, it held together such diverse landscape for so long. Find out more Books The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, abridged by David Womersley (Penguin, 2000) Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire edited by Ray Laurence and Joanne Berry (Routledge, 2001) Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire by Michael Kerrigan (BBC Consumer Publishing, 2001) The Roman Empire by Colin Wells (Fontana Press, 1992) Links The Roman Empire in the first century [http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/] Meet the emperors of Rome, read the words of poets and learn about life in the first century AD at the PBS website. Internet Ancient History sourcebook [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbook09.html] Read ancient sources dealing with a range of subjects on Ancient Rome, including slavery, everyday life, law and education. Place to visit Colchester Castle Museum [http://www.colchestermuseums.org.uk/] Once the capital of Roman Britain, Colchester experienced devastation during the Boudiccan rebellion. Beneath the castle are the remains of the Temple of Claudius, which can still be seen. About the author Image of author Andrew Wallace-Hadrill Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. He is currently on secondment as the Director of the British School at Rome. His publications include Suetonius: The Scholar and his Caesars, Augustan Rome, and Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. _________________________________________________________________ Related Links Articles * Vindolanda: A Roman Army Camp - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/vindolanda_01.shtml * Malaria and the Fall of Rome - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/malaria_01.shtml * After the Romans - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/late_01.shtml Multimedia Zone * Hadrian's Wall Gallery - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/hadrian_gallery.shtml * 3d Reconstruction of Housesteads Fort - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/launch_vr_housesteads. shtml Historic Figures * Julius Caesar - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/caesar.shtml * Caligula - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/caligula.shtml * Augustus - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/augustus.shtml Timelines * Ancient Rome Timeline - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/rome_timeline.shtml * British Timeline - Romano Britain - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/rom_invasion.shtml BBCi Links * Radio 4: The Roman Way - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/romanway.shtml * BBC Schools: The Romans - http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/romans/ External Web Links * Roman fort and museum: Vindolanda - http://www.vindolanda.com * British Museum: Rome - http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/world/rome/rome.html * Britannia: Roman Britain - http://www.britannia.com/history/h30.html * The Roman Empire in the first century - http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/ From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:47:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:47:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Berkeley Daily Planet: Marxist Library Keeps the Struggle Alive Message-ID: Marxist Library Keeps the Struggle Alive By MATTHEW ARTZ http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=09-30-05&storyID=22417 Edition Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 While the world-wide proletariat struggle may have seen better days, there is a museum in Oakland making sure socialism's bygone era will never be forgotten. Stepping inside the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library at 6501 Telegraph Ave. is like entering an alternate universe. Gone are any notions of the red menace, axis of evil, or heroic entrepreneurs blazing a trail to prosperity. At Niebyl-Proctor, Brezhnev is presented as a matinee idol, North Korea has the makings of a utopian society and heroes carry union cards and always fight for the working man. "We're preserving the history of people who led valiant struggles and have just been erased," said the library's Executive Director Bob Patenaude. "We keep their memory alive." Niebyl-Proctor's holdings include about 15,000 books, more than 20,000 pamphlets and dozens of cardboard boxes filled with oral histories of progressive activists from the early 20th century. The bulk of the collection was donated by the estate of Karl Niebyl, a Marxist economics professor who escaped from Nazi Germany and came to the Bay Area late in life to teach at San Jose State. After his death in 1985, Niebyl's friends stored his 253 cartons of books and pamphlets in the basement of a San Jose bookstore while they searched for a showplace, said Edith Laub, an early museum volunteer and now, along with Patenaude, one of its two paid staffers. With donations from supporters and technical assistance from UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, the collection moved into Berkeley's Finnish Hall in 1987. Shortly thereafter, the library inherited the papers of Roscoe Proctor, a Berkeley labor organizer, and the Niebyl-Proctor library was born. Space and money constraints keep the library from updating its collection, but when it comes to materials on progressive and Marxist causes up to the 1980s, Niebyl-Proctor is loaded. Inside the library's 58 file drawers full of pamphlets, one can find the 1933 Manifesto of the Young Communist League of the United States, urging America's youth to "Fight for a Soviet U.S.A.", or a 1948 report on North Korea, heralding the "People's Revolution" there and forecasting a peaceful reunification after the inevitable financial ruin for the American-dominated south. Pamphlets were a common tool of communist governments and their allies abroad to promote Marxist views across the globe, Patenaude said. "Sure this is pure communist propaganda, but it was to counter U.S. propaganda, which is just as misleading and sometimes even more vile," he said. The library is also home to an extensive archive. Inside the drawers are original Black Panther street posters decrying the "kidnapping" of its leader Bobby Seale by "FBI Pigs With Drawn Guns." Also available are first-hand accounts of a 1947 riot in Peekskill, New York, when the left-wing African American entertainer Paul Robeson tried to give an outdoor concert, and the original speech recited in 1945 by Russian diplomat Nikolai Novikov before a packed house at Madison Square Garden honoring those who had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. "What people don't often realize is that these were huge mass movements," Patenaude said. "They might seem a little hokey now, but these ideas drive the world for decades." The library is constantly receiving book donations and updating its collection. Besides the collected works of Marx and Engels, Niebyl-Proctor contains sections unfathomable in most libraries, like psychology in the former Soviet Union. Laub said the library gets the occasional visit from UC Berkeley researchers, but most of the patrons are locals who just want to browse. On a recent Tuesday, the only visitor from noon until 2 p.m. was Chris Kavanagh, a middle school teacher and Berkeley Rent Board Commissioner. "As a Green Party activist, I'm fascinated by the mass movements on the left and what led to their demise," said Kavanagh, as he was reading a copy of Socialism and the Great War. The only drawback, Kavanagh said, is that the library doesn't allow patrons to check out materials. "It isn't easy for a Marxist library to survive in a capitalist county," said Patenaude, who made his living as a purchasing manager for several local businesses before taking over the library. In 2002, the library received $61,204 in contributions, but spent over $74,320, according to state records. "Fundraising is always front and center," he said. "We lose a lot of time we could spend on political work just trying to keep the place afloat." The library's biggest asset is its two-story building on Telegraph Avenue, a gift from an anonymous supporter. To increase its cash flow and raise its profile, the library has recently begun renting space to local left-leaning political groups like the Alameda County Green Party, the Communist Party USA and the Peace and Freedom Party. Although Marxism might not be the potent political force it once was, its adherents across the country are organizing to save relics of past glories in hopes that a new golden era might not be far away. There is a Marxist reading room in New York City, Patenaude said, and Marxist libraries were being planned in Sacramento and Chicago. "I'm cautiously optimistic," said Patenaude. He argues that U.S. policies aren't sustainable and if the political tide turns, Niebyl-Proctor will be around to let people know about library's its roots. "We're maintaining the history of our class," he said. "The working class and their fight against the bad guys." The Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday or by appointment. 6501 Telegraph Ave. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:56:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:56:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] People's Weekly World: CPUSA in thick of antiwar actions Message-ID: CPUSA in thick of antiwar actions http://www.pww.org/article/articleprint/7832/ [I am very glad the old fight keeps going. It must take incredible character to persist.] Author: [2]Dan Margolis People's Weekly World Newspaper, 09/29/05 12:26 WASHINGTON The Communist Party USA played an important role in the Sept. 24 demonstration against Bushs Iraq war, bringing its own members and mobilizing others to come, as well as forming a large contingent in the march. We had a wonderful delegation in Washington, said Sam Webb, CPUSA national chair. We joined with hundreds of thousands of others in calling for ending the occupation, bringing the troops home and rebuilding our country. On Sept. 26, 11 members and friends of the Communist Party were arrested in a planned act of civil disobedience to protest the war in front of the White House, along with more than 350 others, including Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan. The protesters began attaching the names of Iraqi and U.S. war victims to the fence in front of the White House when police ordered them to disperse. When they refused, the police made mass arrests. Those arrested were issued tickets and later released. Still other party activists participated in visits to congresspeople on the same day to lobby for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The CPUSA has been involved in all of the major antiwar demonstrations. This time the party organized itself to have an even greater public presence in the actions. In New York City, for the first time in years, the party organized its own bus. With the party still maintaining a focus on working with other organizations, and therefore a large percentage of its membership traveling on buses organized under the banners of other groups. As it turned out, one bus was not enough. We had to turn people away, said Gabe Falsetta, who helped organize the New York bus. The phone kept ringing, and I had to tell so many people there was no more room. Its too bad we didnt have two or three buses. The ages of people on the bus ranged from 15 to 89. Besides the bus, the CPUSA organized a contingent that marched behind a huge red banner reading, U.S. Out of Iraq! Rebuild America! No Money for War! The diverse, multiracial contingent was made up of hundreds of members and friends, some of whom came from far away, carrying signs and American flags. I feel great! said Matt Parker of Dallas. This is my first national march to come to, and its really a positive and inspiring thing to see all these Communists united here behind our banner. I think people will notice and it might undo some of the stereotypes that have damaged our reputation. Its a real positive effort. The CPUSA and the Young Communist League had tables at the event, and both received warm responses. In addition, party members and supporters of the Peoples Weekly World distributed nearly 10,000 sample issues of the newspaper to those attending the actions. [3]dmargolis at pww.org References 2. http://www.pww.org/article/author/view/397 3. mailto:dmargolis at pww.org?subject= From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:56:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:56:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Free Inquiry: Laurence W. Britt: Fascism Anyone? Message-ID: Laurence W. Britt: Fascism Anyone? Council for Secular Humanism http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=britt_23_2 October 15, 2005 _________________________________________________________________ The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. _________________________________________________________________ Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the "Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles" on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism's principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The clich? that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm. We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities. Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances. For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible. Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity. 1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia. 2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation. 3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people's attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice--relentless propaganda and disinformation--were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite "spontaneous" acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and "terrorists." Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly. 4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite. 5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses. 6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes' excesses. 7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting "national security," and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous. 8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the "godless." A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion. 9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of "have-not" citizens. 10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice. 11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist. 12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. "Normal" and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or "traitors" was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power. 13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population. 14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite. Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not. Note 1. Defined as a "political movement or regime tending toward or imitating Fascism"--Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. References Andrews, Kevin. Greece in the Dark. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1980. Chabod, Frederico. A History of Italian Fascism. London: Weidenfeld, 1963. Cooper, Marc. Pinochet and Me. New York: Verso, 2001. Cornwell, John. Hitler as Pope. New York: Viking, 1999. de Figuerio, Antonio. Portugal--Fifty Years of Dictatorship. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976. Eatwell, Roger. Fascism, A History. New York: Penguin, 1995. Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Gallo, Max. Mussolini's Italy. New York: MacMillan, 1973. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler (two volumes). New York: Norton, 1999. Laqueur, Walter. Fascism, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Oxford, 1996. Papandreau, Andreas. Democracy at Gunpoint. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. Phillips, Peter. Censored 2001: 25 Years of Censored News. New York: Seven Stories. 2001. Sharp, M.E. Indonesia Beyond Suharto. Armonk, 1999. Verdugo, Patricia. Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. Coral Gables, Florida: North-South Center Press, 2001. Yglesias, Jose. The Franco Years. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977. _________________________________________________________________ Laurence Britt's novel, June, 2004, depicts a future America dominated by right-wing extremists. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 15 15:56:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:56:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: (Schelling and Aumann) Economics focus: War games Message-ID: Economics focus: War games http://economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5019736&tranMode=none Oct 13th 2005 A big pay-off for two game theorists THIS year's Nobel prize for economics might almost have doubled as the prize for peace. On October 10th, three days after the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, won their laurels for monitoring the misuse of nuclear power, the economics prize was bestowed on two scholars whose best work was also done in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Robert Aumann, of Hebrew University, and Thomas Schelling, of the University of Maryland, are both game theorists. Game theory is now part of every economist's toolkit and has been recognised by the Nobel award before, when John Harsanyi, John Nash and Reinhard Selten shared the honour in 1994. It is the study of what happens when the calculating, self-interested protagonist of economic fable meets another member of his kind. In such encounters, neither party can decide what to do without taking into account the actions of the other. During the cold war, two protagonists that captured game theorists' imaginations were the United States and the Soviet Union. How each of these nuclear adversaries might successfully deter the other was the most pressing question hanging over Mr Schelling's classic work, "The Strategy of Conflict", published in 1960. The book ranged freely and widely in search of an answer, finding inspiration in gun duels in the Old West, a child's game of brinkmanship with its parents, or the safety precautions of ancient despots, who made a habit of drinking from the same cup as any rival who might want to poison them. Mr Schelling's back-of-the-envelope logic reached many striking conclusions that appeared obvious only after he had made them clear. He argued that a country's best safeguard against nuclear war was to protect its weapons, not its people. A country that thinks it can withstand a nuclear war is more likely to start one. Better to show your enemy you can hit back after a strike, than to show him you can survive one. Mr Schelling invested his hopes for peace not in arms reductions or fall-out shelters but in preserving the ability to retaliate, for example by putting missiles into submarines. All-out thermonuclear warfare is the kind of game you get to play only once. Other games, however, are replayed again and again. It is these that fascinate Mr Aumann. In a repeated encounter, one player can always punish the other for something he did in the past. The prospect of vengeful retaliation, Mr Aumann showed, opens up many opportunities for amicable co-operation. One player will collaborate with another only because he knows that if he is cheated today, he can punish the cheat tomorrow. Mutually assured co-operation According to this view, co-operation need not rely on goodwill, good faith, or an outside referee. It can emerge out of nothing more than the cold calculation of self-interest. This is in many ways a hopeful result: opportunists can hold each other in check. Mr Aumann named this insight the "folk theorem" (like many folk songs, the theorem has no original author, though many have embellished it). In 1959, he generalised it to games between many players, some of whom might gang up on the rest. Mr Aumann is loyal to a method--game theory--not to the subject matter of economics per se. His primary affiliation is to his university's delightfully named Centre for Rationality, not its economics department. Trained as a mathematician, he started out as a purist--pursuing maths for maths' sake--but soon found his work pressed into practical use. Between 1965 and 1968, for example, he co-wrote a series of reports for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The Russians and Americans were pursuing gradual, step-by-step disarmament. But the military capabilities of each superpower were so shrouded in mystery that neither side knew precisely what game they were playing: they did not know what their opponents were prepared to sacrifice, nor what they themselves stood to gain. Without knowing how many missiles the Russians had, for example, the Americans could not know whether an agreement to scrap 100 of them was meaningful or not. In such games, Mr Aumann pointed out, how a player acts can reveal what he knows. If Russia were quick to agree to cut 100 missiles, it might suggest its missile stocks were larger than the Americans had guessed. Or perhaps the Russians just wanted the Americans to think that. Examples of such deception are not limited to the cold war. Some have speculated that Saddam Hussein pursued a similar strategy in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Despite apparently having no actual weapons of mass destruction left, he offered only the most grudging co-operation to weapons inspectors. The Iraqi dictator perhaps wanted to conceal the humiliating fact that he had nothing much to hide. Messrs Aumann and Schelling have never worked together, perhaps because the division of labour between them is so clear. Mr Aumann is happiest proving theorems; Mr Schelling delights in applying them. Mr Aumann operates at the highest levels of abstraction, where the air is thin but the views are panoramic. Mr Schelling tills the lower-lying valleys, discovering the most fertile fields of application and plucking the juiciest examples. In one of his more unusual papers, Mr Aumann uses game theory to shed light on an obscure passage in the Talmud, which explains how to divide an asset, such as a fine garment, between competing claimants. You should give three-quarters to the person who claims all of it, and the remaining quarter to the person who claims half of it, the text instructs, somewhat inscrutably. Fortunately, the Nobel committee had no need for such a complicated rule in dividing up its prize. Between its two equally deserving laureates, it split the SKr10m ($1.3m) fifty-fifty. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Oct 15 18:19:45 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:19:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] fundamentalism In-Reply-To: <200510151800.j9FI0Te04668@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051015181946.64656.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>ACROSS the world, millions of people feel threatened. They sense a dangerous enemy at the gates, committed to values and beliefs they fear and despise, and ready to impose its alien ideology on their government, their life and their children's futures.<< --No doubt this is something that's happened many times before. I think it has something to do with the perception that one's own group is the center of the world, and the sudden realization that one doesn't appear quite so important when seen from the outside. Other groups, which want to be the center as much as we do, do not see us the way we see ourselves, so we become fundamentalist in resisting their worldview. Anything that knocks people off a pedestal is viewed as a threat, so even conscience can be projected onto an enemy. That pushes enemies to fight even when it's not in their interest -- each has to fight off the "outside" perception of itself, by attacking an enemy. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! Music Unlimited Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/ From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 15 17:02:30 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 10:02:30 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] George & Harriet & Karl & Karen Message-ID: <11883184.1129395751147.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: George&Harriet.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 95955 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:05:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:05:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Cosmology: A braney theory Message-ID: Cosmology: A braney theory http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=4484326 Oct 6th 2005 An explanation for the anthropic principle comes a little closer DID God have a choice? Or, to put the matter less theologically, does the universe have to be the way that it is? The answer to this question, posed by Einstein among others, remains elusive. But it is important, not least because a universe with laws only slightly different from those actually observed would be one in which life--and therefore human life--could never have come into existence. That observation, known as the anthropic principle, disturbs many physicists because they cannot see any fundamental reason why things could not be different. In particular, they cannot see why space has to have three dimensions. But a paper due to be published this month in Physical Review Letters by Andreas Karch of the University of Washington and Lisa Randall of Harvard University suggests that the laws of physics may, indeed, be biased towards three-dimensions. Curiously, though, they have a similar bias towards seven-dimensions. The idea that there may be more dimensions than the familiar ones of length, breadth and height (and also, to be strictly accurate, the fourth dimension of time) is a consequence of attempts to solve an old problem in physics. Ever since Einstein developed his theories of space, time and gravity, physicists have sought a "theory of everything" that would unite those theories with quantum mechanics--the part of physics that describes electromagnetism and the forces that hold atomic nuclei together. Such a theory would, it is hoped, describe how the universe developed from the Big Bang. It would explain why there appears to be more matter than anti-matter. It would even indicate the nature of the dark energy and dark matter that lurk at the edge of perception. To date, the best candidates for a theory of everything are various versions of a branch of mathematics called string theory. Unfortunately for common sense, these theories require the universe to have ten or even 11 dimensions rather than the familiar three of space and one of time. To get round this anomaly, some physicists propose that the familiar dimensions are "unfurled", while the other six or seven are rolled up so tightly that they cannot be seen, even with the most powerful instruments available. For an everyday analogy, think of a thread of cotton. This appears one-dimensional for most purposes. Only under a magnifying glass are the other two dimensions perceptible. A second interpretation of multidimensionality, however, is that the extra dimensions are not always rolled up, but that even when they are not humans cannot readily observe them because they are not free to move in them. In this version, the space inhabited by humans is a three-dimensional "surface" embedded in a higher dimensional landscape. The particles of which people are composed, and the non-gravitational forces acting on them, are strictly confined to this surface--called a brane (short for membrane)--and, as such, have no direct knowledge of the higher dimensional space around them. Only gravity is free to pervade all parts of the universe, which is one of the reasons why it obeys a different set of rules from the other forces. It is this second interpretation that is invoked by Dr Karch and Dr Randall. They assume that, initially, the universe was filled with equal numbers of branes and anti-branes (the antimatter equivalent of a brane). These branes and anti-branes could take any number of up to ten different dimensions. Dr Karch and Dr Randall then demonstrated, mathematically, that a universe filled with equal numbers of branes and anti-branes will naturally come to be dominated by 3-branes and 7-branes because these are the least likely to run into their anti-brane counterparts and thus be annihilated. This result is interesting for two reasons. It is the first piece of work to show that branes alone can explain the existence of hidden dimensions. They do not have to be rolled up to be inaccessible. It is also the first to suggest an underlying preference in the laws of physics for certain sorts of universe, and thus perhaps provide a solution to the anthropic principle. Yet it is not a total solution. Other realities, whether three- or seven-dimensional, could be hidden elsewhere in the landscape. And life in seven-dimensional space would look very different from life on Earth--if, indeed, it existed at all. That is because the force of gravity would diminish far more quickly with distance than it does in this world. As a result, seven-dimensional space could not have planets in stable orbits around stars. Like dark matter and dark energy, therefore, the anthropic principle is still grinning from the sidelines, taunting physicists to explain it. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:05:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:05:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Psychiatric disorders and immunity: Molecular self-loathing Message-ID: Psychiatric disorders and immunity: Molecular self-loathing http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=4455455 Sep 29th 2005 Anorexia and bulimia may be autoimmune diseases--and so may several other psychiatric illnesses SOMETIMES, the immune system works in mysterious ways. During an infection one of its roles is to produce antibodies designed to attack and eliminate the invading bugs. However, in certain unlucky individuals the body also develops so-called autoantibodies which attack its own tissue, sometimes with devastating effects. The result is known as an autoimmune disease, two well-known examples of which are type-1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. But there is a widespread suspicion among researchers in the field that a lot more diseases than these have an autoimmune component. In particular, they think, a number of illnesses usually labelled as "psychiatric" are actually, at bottom, the result of autoimmunity. Until now, that suspicion has been based on correlations between certain sorts of infection and certain sets of psychiatric symptoms. But work just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Serguei Fetissov of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and his colleagues has tied the connection more tightly for two psychiatric eating disorders--anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Dr Fetissov's work suggests that abnormal levels of autoantibodies against hormones called melanocortins are a crucial part of the cause of these two diseases. Melanocortins are small protein molecules that carry messages between nerve cells in the brain. They are involved in regulating a variety of complex behaviours, including social interactions, stress responses and--most importantly in this context--food intake. So it is easy to see how interfering with them could cause anorexia and bulimia. Shooting the messenger To test this idea, Dr Fetissov and his colleagues analysed blood serum from three groups of women (both anorexia and bulimia are more common in women than in men). One of these groups consisted of people diagnosed as anorexic. The second was composed of individuals diagnosed as bulimic. The third contained people with no eating disorder. The researchers looked to see whether there was any relationship between the levels of autoantibodies to melanocortins in these women and their expression of particular psychological traits--such as "Drive for thinness", "Body dissatisfaction" and "Perfectionism"--which are associated with eating disorders and which can be measured using a specially designed scoring system. What they found was intriguing. There was not one relationship, but two. The level of autoantibodies to melanocortins was positively correlated with anorexia, but it was inversely correlated with bulimia. These opposite correlations make sense. Although both disorders are associated with depression and self-doubt, anorexia involves a constant refusal to eat, whereas bulimia is a "diet-binge-purge disorder" that includes periods of excessive consumption. The molecular triggers of the two could thus easily be opposites. The ultimate cause of the altered levels of autoantibody in anorexics and bulimics is unresolved as yet. However, according to the researchers, a clue may lie in the fact that micro-organisms, too, work in mysterious ways. In the world of bacteria and viruses, a strategy called molecular mimicry is common. In this, pathogens evolve to produce pieces of protein similar to those of their hosts, as a way of confusing that host's immune system. But the immune system is not always fooled, and in making antibodies to the "camouflage" proteins it sometimes turns out weapons that also attack the useful proteins that are being mimicked. Two common gut bacteria, Escherichia coli and Helicobacter pylori, and also the influenza-A virus, are particularly adept at playing the evasive game of molecular mimicry, and the team is now looking at possible connections between different gut bacteria and autoantibodies against melanocortins to see if they can pin down which, if any, of these bugs might be responsible. That is not to say, even if Dr Fetissov's idea is correct, that autoimmunity is the whole story. Both anorexia and bulimia are known to go hand in glove with particular personality characteristics which are not directly related to the disease. In anorexics, striving for perfection and conscientiousness are common non-pathological traits. In bulimics, such traits include risk-taking behaviour and problems with impulse control. So there appear to be predisposing factors at work, as well as the triggering effect of the autoantibodies. Nevertheless, given the range of behaviours regulated by melanocortins and other, similar, messenger molecules, the suspicions that other psychiatric disorders--in particular, obsessive-compulsive disorder--are partly or wholly the product of a similar process seem entirely plausible. Dr Fetissov's work also adds weight to the idea that two other neurological diseases, schizophrenia and Tourette's syndrome, have an autoimmune component. In the case of these diseases, the damage seems to be caused irreversibly in the womb, suggesting that any autoantibodies involved are attacking structural molecules rather than messengers (attacks on structural molecules are the cause of multiple sclerosis, though they involve a different part of the immune system). That gives little hope for treatment. But in the case of anorexia, bulimia and, possibly, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Dr Fetissov's work opens a new line of thinking about how these diseases might be treated. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:05:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:05:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Why time keeps going forwards Message-ID: Why time keeps going forwards http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825210.100&print=true * 13 October 2005 * Amanda Gefter YOU wake up one morning and head into your kitchen, where you get the distinct feeling that something strange is going on. A swirl of milk separates itself from your coffee, which seems to be growing hotter by the minute. Scrambled eggs are unscrambling and leaping out of the pan back into their cracked shells, which proceed to reassemble. And the warm sunlight that had flooded the room seems to be headed straight for the window. Apparently, you conclude, time is flowing in reverse. You can deduce this because it is obvious that time has an arrow, which, this morning aside, always points in the same direction. We take the unchanging arrow of time for granted. Yet there is nothing in the laws of physics as we know them that says it can't point the other way. So the riddle is: where does time's arrow come from? Our perception of the direction of time is linked to the fact that the world's entropy, or disorder, tends to increase. When you pour milk into your coffee, the concoction, at first, is highly ordered, with all the milk molecules entering the coffee in a neat stream. But as time passes, the milk loses its organisation and mixes randomly with the coffee. Keep watching and you will see it become thoroughly mixed, but you won't see the milk suddenly regroup. Strange as it may seem, it's not that such a scenario is impossible. It's just incredibly unlikely. That's because there are vastly more ways for the molecules to arrange themselves in a random, spread out, high-entropy fashion than in the tight formation in which they began. It's a matter of probability: as the molecules perpetually rearrange, they almost always find themselves in high-entropy arrangements. Of course, if they start off in a high-entropy arrangement, we won't notice any change. But if entropy is low at the start, it's bound to increase. Therein lies the origin of the arrow of time as we perceive it. It has two essential ingredients. The first is a low-entropy beginning, like the milk starting out in an ordered arrangement. The second is mixing: the constant rearrangement of the milk and coffee molecules. Mixing is necessary for the system to evolve and rearrange from a low-entropy to a higher-entropy state. And exactly the same must be true on much grander scales. The cosmological arrow of time - the process that started with the big bang - requires the universe to have started off with low entropy, and the contents of the cosmos to have mixed ever since. First evidence So can we find these ingredients for time's arrow in our universe? Cosmologists already have evidence for the first one. They see that the universe had a low-entropy beginning by looking at the arrangement of the photons in the cosmic microwave background radiation that provides a snapshot of the universe near the beginning of time. The CMB photons are uniformly spread out, with variations in density and temperature detectable at a mere 1 part in 100,000. If the spread of the CMB photons is uniform, we can assume that the other contents of the nascent universe - such as the atoms - were also spread uniformly at that time. At first glance, that seems like the very definition of a disordered, high-entropy state, but it's not. The universe is governed by gravity, which always clumps things together, so a spread-out state is incredibly unlikely. Although no one knows exactly why, it seems the universe was born in a low-entropy state. So what provides the second ingredient? What mixes and rearranges the contents of the universe? According to Vahe Gurzadyan, a physicist at the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and La Sapienza University in Rome, the answer is the shape of space itself. In 1992, Gurzadyan and his student Armen Kocharyan were looking at what a universe with "negative curvature" would do to the CMB. Negative curvature - the exact opposite of the curvature of a sphere - means that every point in space would be curved both up and down, like the mid-point of a saddle or a Pringle chip. Physicists have long considered this to be a possible geometry for the universe. The temperature of the CMB varies slightly from point to point in the sky, and maps of this variation reveal a multitude of hot and cold spots. These maps have enabled cosmologists to infer many things about the universe: its age and composition, for example. In their theoretical work, Gurzadyan and Kocharyan found that negative curvature would stretch the CMB spots into ellipses. That's because the CMB photons we observe today have been travelling through the universe for nearly 14 billion years. If that journey took them through negatively curved space, each little patch of light would appear as if it has been through a distorting lens. Five years later, Gurzadyan was looking at data from NASA's COBE satellite, one of the first to map the CMB, and saw exactly what he and Kocharyan had predicted: all the spots appeared elongated (Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol 321, p 19). The observation was exciting but inconclusive because COBE did not provide sufficiently fine resolution to measure the shape of the spots precisely. Perhaps, Gurzadyan and Kocharyan reasoned, this apparent elongation was just an illusion created by the low-quality images. But when vastly more detailed CMB maps arrived from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in 2003, Gurzadyan and colleagues ran the data through their programs, removing all irrelevant distortion effects - and there it was (Modern Physics Letters A, vol 20, p 813). "All the spots have the same constant elongation, independent of temperature and the size of the spots," Gurzadyan says. Because spots of all sizes are distorted in exactly the same manner, this effect can't be due to something that happened at the time the radiation was created. Some of the spots are so big that their extremities were already out of causal contact at the time of their creation: light from one side could never reach the other. Just as there is no way for us to communicate with a region that has slipped beyond our causal horizon (New Scientist, 20 October 2001, p 36), there is no way a distortion effect at that point in time could have produced the symmetry of the ellipse. So it must have happened some time later, during the photons' journey through the universe. And if that's the case, Gurzadyan says, we have all the ingredients we need for the arrow of time. The universe starts out in an unlikely, low-entropy arrangement, with all of its contents almost perfectly spread out. But as particles travel through the universe, their paths follow the curves of space. In a negatively curved space, any two particles that start off next to one another quickly diverge, which means all the particles dramatically rearrange: the geometry of space mixes the cosmos. Since most particle arrangements correspond to high entropy, the negative curvature inevitably guides matter into higher-entropy states. In the case of the universe, that means states with gravitational clumping: as entropy increases, things like stars and galaxies form and with them heavy elements and, eventually, us. Evidence of this process is encoded in the CMB. The elliptical shape of the CMB spots reveals that the photons' paths diverged in precisely the way Gurzadyan expected for a negatively curved universe. If spatial geometry mixed the photons, then it also mixed everything else. And low-entropy beginnings plus mixing equals the arrow of time. Although Gurzadyan has published his ideas and his data in various places, the work remains controversial: the traditional view is that the universe is flat, not negatively curved. The usual interpretation of the WMAP results, which comes not from looking at the shape of the temperature spots but instead from what's called the power spectrum, is that the universe is flat. And most cosmologists believe this flatness supports the cherished theory of inflation, the idea that the universe underwent a fleeting moment of faster-than-light expansion shortly after its birth. The trouble with that objection is that a different aspect of WMAP's findings goes against inflation's predictions. When astronomers plot the power spectrum of the data, they see a big problem - hints of which had also been seen with COBE. The power spectrum compares the amount of temperature variation at different scales in the sky. When close regions of the sky are being compared, the temperature variations of the CMB fit with the predictions of inflation. But on very large angular scales the variation conflicts with inflation's prediction. The anomaly, for which there is no accepted explanation, suggests that there is something strange going on in the large-scale geometry of the cosmos, perhaps because it is not flat. "This anomaly is very curious," says Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford. "It seems to be out of kilter with the inflation model, and it could be due to negative curvature." Gurzadyan regards the elongation of the hot and cold spots as powerful evidence that the universe is negatively curved, and Penrose agrees. Negative curvature would distort the CMB far more than a flat universe could, Penrose explains, squashing the light in one direction and stretching it in another. "If the geometry of space is negative, then you expect the ellipses to stretch much more than they would in positively curved or flat space," he says. "And this is exactly what Gurzadyan sees." Nonetheless, most cosmologists are still not ready to abandon the flat universe or inflation. Although no one has actually shown or even suggested that there is anything wrong with Gurzadyan's elliptical spots, they are hesitant to accept its implications. "At the moment, I don't feel that we have any compelling evidence against space being flat," says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Princeton University's Lyman Page, a member of the WMAP team, is similarly reluctant. "Though I'm a strong believer in alternative analyses of data, it is too early to put much stock into the interpretation of Gurzadyan's result," Page says. Penrose, however, is excited by the result, and says there is much more to be gained from the CMB than physicists so far seem to realise. "There's vastly more information in the data than people look at normally. So far we've seen an infinitesimal amount, and people tend to look at the same things that everyone else is looking at. Gurzadyan is only using a tiny bit, but it's a different tiny bit. I think the analysis has to be taken very seriously." Elliptical time Of course, directly linking the ellipses to the flow of time is even more controversial, but we don't have any other satisfactory explanation. The flow of time we observe is certainly not compulsory: it is perfectly possible for the time-symmetry of relativity, quantum theory and our other descriptions of the universe to produce a universe where time doesn't flow - or even one where time flows in the opposite direction to the one we experience. In 1999 Lawrence Schulman of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, showed that in principle regions of the universe where time flows in the normal direction can coexist with regions where it flows backwards (New Scientist, 6 February 2000, p 26). But in our universe a negative curvature would stop this by imposing a global condition for the increase of disorder. This may even be what allows life to exist in the universe, Gurzadyan suggests: a new kind of anthropic principle (see "Life and time"). Of course, if the saddle-shaped universe provides us with a mechanism for the increasing cosmic disorder, it still doesn't explain the arrow's ultimate origin: it doesn't explain the first ingredient, why the universe began with low-entropy conditions. "Of course you need mixing," explains University of Chicago physicist Sean Carroll, "but that's the easy part. The hard part is getting the initial entropy to be low." That remains a mystery, perhaps only to be resolved by the "theory of everything" that physicists are avidly searching for. And we do have hints that this final theory might address the problem. For example, Rafael Sorkin of Syracuse University in New York state has proposed "causal set theory", which attempts to unite quantum theory and relativity. It supposes that the fabric of the universe grows as effects follow causal events - giving a sense of time's flow (New Scientist, 4 October 2003, p 36). Although Sorkin and his colleagues admit it is not yet a complete theory of quantum gravity, it does at least install a one-way arrow of time and a low-entropy beginning. Of course, all these attempts to understand the irrepressible passage of time assume that time's arrow is a "real" phenomenon to do with the physical universe - and that is not entirely certain. Some think it might arise from the strange metaphysics of the quantum world; others see it as a purely psychological phenomenon, an artefact of our consciousness. But Gurzadyan is now convinced that the passage of time is a cosmological process. The hands on the cosmic clock are driven round by the chaotic movements of photons through the negatively curved universe, he says. Though that may be a little beyond what most cosmologists are willing to accept for now, the idea must be worth exploring: the search for answers to the flow of time goes to the heart of physics, Penrose believes. "The problem of the arrow of time is absolutely fundamental," he says. "It's telling us something very deep about the universe." Life and time Vahe Gurzadyan's idea has a startling implication: if the geometry of space were different, there would be no "arrow" of time. Could life exist in a universe without an arrow? If not, would that help explain why the geometry of our universe is as we observe? Gurzadyan has dubbed this idea the "curvature anthropic principle". The standard anthropic principle says that certain aspects of the universe - like the values of physical constants - are the way they are because otherwise we wouldn't be here to wonder about them. For instance, if the mass of the electron were different, the universe would be unable to support human life, so we shouldn't be surprised by its value, given our very existence. Some scientists consider this common sense, while others see it as a sorry stand-in for a real explanation. The curvature anthropic principle applies this logic to the shape of space: without this negative curvature, we wouldn't have evolved as we did, Gurzadyan suggests. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:05:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:05:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Prof. Nietzsche Dead Message-ID: Prof. Nietzsche Dead http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1015.html August 26, 1900 OBITUARY By THE NEW YORK TIMES Weimar, Aug. 25.--Prof. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the philosopher, died here today of apoplexy. Prof. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent of modern German philosophers, and he is considered the apostle of extreme modern rationalism and one of the founders of the socialistic school, whose ideas have had such a profound influence on the growth of political and social life throughout the civilized world. Nietzsche was largely influenced by the pessimism of Schopenhauer and his writings, full of revolutionary opinions, were fired with a fearless iconoclasm which surpassed the wildest dreams of contemporary free thought. His doctrines however, were inspired by lofty aspirations, while the brilliancy of his thought and diction and the epigrammatic force of his writings commanded even the admiration of his most pronounced enemies, of which he had many. Of Slavonic ancestry Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the village of Rocken, on the historic battlefield of Lutzen. He lost his parents early in life, but received a fine education at the Latin School at Pforta, concluding his studies at Bonn and Leipsic. Although educated for the ministry, Nietzsche soon renounced all faith and Christianity on the ground that it impeded the free expansion of life. He then devoted his attention to the study of Oriental languages and accepted in 1869 a professorship at the University of Basel, Switzerland. This position he held until 1876, when overwork induced an affection of the brain and eyes, and he had to travel for his health. During these years of suffering and while in distressed circumstances he wrote most of his works. Since 1889 Nietzsche had been hopelessly insane, living in Weimar, at the home of his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who has edited his works. For many years he was a close friend of Richard Wagner, the composer. His principal publications are "The Old Faith and the New," "The Overman," "The Dawn of Day," "Twilight of the Gods," and "So Spake Zrathustra," which is perhaps the most remarkable of his works. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:05:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:05:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last Message-ID: Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/weekinreview/16luo.html By MICHAEL LUO WORD spread quickly in some conservative Christian circles when Israeli troops captured the Old City of Jerusalem from Arab forces in June 1967. This was it: Jesus was coming. But Jesus did not return that day, and the world did not end with the culmination of that Arab-Israeli war. Neither did it end in 1260, when Joachim of Fiore, an influential 12th-century Italian monk calculated it would, nor in February 1420, as predicted by the Taborites of Bohemia, nor in 1988, 40 years after the formation of Israel, nor after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But after last week's devastating earthquake in Pakistan, coming as it did after a succession of recent disasters, the apocalyptic speculation, bubbled up again with impressive fervor on many Christian blogs, in some pews and among some evangelical Christian leaders. Combined with fears of a global pandemic of avian flu, the calamitous flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina and last year's tsunami in Asia, the predictions of the end of the world are to be expected, religious historians said. After all, Christians have been predicting the end of history since the beginning of theirs. "The doomsday scenarios are fairly cyclical," said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College. "The theology they are based on is a very linear view of history. They believe we are now ramping up to the end of time." While these predictions have been around for thousands of years, the fixation on the so-called end times may be greater than ever on the American religious landscape, said Timothy P. Weber, a church historian and the author of "On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend." Fascination with the end of days is seemingly everywhere, in popular television ministries (like Pat Robertson's), on best-seller lists (the "Left Behind" series) and even on bumper stickers ("In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned"). What could be behind this fascination? Many church leaders and theologians, including evangelicals, give little effort to trying to interpret natural disasters and other events that might portend the end of history. The preoccupation these days stems mainly from the outsized influence of a specific, literalistic approach to biblical prophecy, called dispensationalism, which only came to occupy a dominant place in American evangelicalism relatively recently. "Dispensationalists have never had the kind of public exposure and the kind of political power that they have now," Mr. Weber said. As a whole, evangelical Christians are united in their belief that Jesus will come back in human form at some point in history. Where they, as well as members of other Christian groups, have differed is precisely how this will occur, depending on how each interprets a single verse in the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelation and its allusion to a 1,000-year reign by Christ. This difference, in large part, Mr. Weber said, shapes how much they are "players in the end-time game." Some theologians read the passage and Revelation less literally. Drawing on references elsewhere in the Bible, they say the verse means that Christian influence will grow in the world until it is completely evangelized, leading to a millennial period of universal peace and prosperity. Because they believe Christ will return after the millennium, they are called post-millennialists. Others, called amillennialists, believe that the millennial age is unfolding now, through the church, but that evil continues to exist and will only be eradicated when Christ returns. It is those who read the passage most literally - the so-called pre-millennialists - who hold the most pessimistic views. They believe history is irrevocably deteriorating, on its way toward a period of terrible suffering, called the tribulation, which will only be broken when Jesus returns and rules for a thousand years. Dispensationalism emerged as an offshoot of this last school, owing its spread in large part to the work of a 19th-century British evangelist, John Nelson Darby. Darby taught that history unfolds in various stages, or dispensations, and introduced several innovations to pre-millennialism, most prominently, the concept of the Rapture - that before the tribulation, true believers will suddenly be whisked away to heaven. This belief is the basis for the popular "Left Behind" series of novels. Darby also emphasized the role of the nation of Israel in the end of history; the Israelites' return to the promised land, he said, was a requirement of the Second Coming. Until the mid-19th century, most American Christians were actually post-millennialists. Their fervor for hastening Jesus' return animated many of the era's social movements, like the abolitionist movement. But the Civil War and the succeeding waves of industrialization, urbanization and immigration - and the social problems that came with them - helped cripple post-millenial optimism. Darby, however, won some important converts, including the evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, and his ideas began to catch on. Dispensationalism's tenets were eventually memorialized in the Scofield Reference Bible, which became a best-seller. Even as American Christianity changed over time, with the ascendance of Billy Graham and a new breed of evangelicals, many of dispensationalism's fingerprints remained. And dispensationalism came back to the fore in the 1980's and onward, with the rise of the religious right and the growing television ministries of many dispensationalists, including Jerry Falwell, Jack Van Impe and John Hagee. Today, only about a third of evangelicals are truly dispensationalists, estimated Richard Cizik, vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, although he said he thought most evangelicals are generally pre-millennial, harboring a more pessimistic outlook on history. But the dispensationalists remain the most vocal segment, Mr. Cizik said. Aided by books, television and the Internet, they have shaped a fascination in evangelical culture on the end of days, said Craig C. Hill, a professor of New Testament theology at Wesley Theological Seminar in Washington and the author of "In God's Time: the Bible and the Future," about biblical prophecy. Preaching on the end times is an obvious way to draw an audience, Mr. Hill said. "It's inherently interesting," he said. "If you have a sign out for the sermon, 'Our obligation to the poor,' you won't get anybody. If you have a sign out for, 'The Internet and the Antichrist,' you'll bring them in." Dispensationalism offers believers a road map to deal with uncertainty in the world at large. "When somebody says there's a pattern here, and let me tell you what the pattern means, this is what gets a lot of people's attention," said Mr. Weber, the church historian. At this point, dispensationalism's tenets have become so popular that many evangelicals who are in denominations or churches that might not necessarily adhere to dispensationalism have, nevertheless, adopted bits and pieces of it. But the theology has drawn fire from other evangelicals for its narrow reading of the Bible and its tendency to ignore social problems. "It's still considered by many theologians to be somewhat ahistorical and theologically suspect," said Mr. Cizik, who criticized anyone who would interpret the recent calamities as a sign of the end. "History has taught us not to predict," he said. "I think it's sheer speculation for anyone to place a whole lot of stock in any one particular earthquake or pestilence." Not that that will stop the prognostications. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:06:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:06:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: The Fear Contagion Message-ID: The Fear Contagion http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/15/AR2005101500102_pf.html A Flu Quarantine? No, Sir By Wendy Orent Sunday, October 16, 2005; B01 For two years, a deadly strain of chicken flu known as H5N1 has been killing birds in Asia. While slightly more than 100 people are known to have contracted the disease, and 60 of them have died, there is still no sign that the flu has begun to spread from person to person. That hasn't prevented a recent outbreak of apocalyptic warnings from health officials and experts about the specter of a worldwide pandemic. In Hurricane Katrina's wake, health officials in the United States are talking more and more about pandemic preparation. Some of these ideas -- such as stockpiling vaccines -- are sensible, whether or not bird flu turns into a human disease and begins to spread rapidly. But other ideas aren't. A few scientists have suggested "priming" people with a dose of the new vaccine against H5N1 before we even know whether a pandemic is coming. Vaccinating large numbers of people against a disease that may never appear carries its own risks. Remember the swine flu debacle of 1976? At least 25 people died from vaccine complications and no epidemic ever erupted. That should be warning enough. Another dangerous idea for pandemic preparation has come from President Bush. Earlier this month, he suggested using the military to enforce a quarantine. "Who [is] best to be able to effect a quarantine?" he asked rhetorically at a press conference. "One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move." The very term quarantine can be misunderstood (not to mention the military's role). Did the president mean gathering those exposed to flu in a single location and forcing them to stay there? Did he mean isolating them in their homes? Cordoning off whole communities where cases crop up? Not all quarantines are alike; each carries its own risks and benefits. If this were idle presidential speculation, it wouldn't be worrisome. But he isn't the only one talking about quarantines and calling in the troops. In an Oct. 5 interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also wondered whether the government would need to turn to "containment" or "quarantine the people who are exposed." She too remarked that the military or the National Guard might be summoned "to maintain civil order, in the context of scarce resources or an overwhelming epidemic. . . . It would be foolish not to at least consider it and plan for that as a possibility." This is an example of a cure that is as frightening as the disease. It is hard to imagine how the military would oversee a quarantined area. If a health worker, drug addict or teenager attempted to break the quarantine, what would soldiers do? Shoot on sight? Teenagers and health workers were the people who most often violated quarantine rules in Toronto during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) scare in 2003. Moreover, the use of a quarantine to control a flu pandemic isn't only a potential threat to life and civil liberties; it's also a waste of money, resources and time. The reason: There isn't any kind of quarantine that will do any good -- at least not for a pandemic influenza. Quarantine, from the Italian "quarantina," which means "space of 40 days," dates from 15th-century regulations devised in certain Italian cities to control the spread of plague by sequestering those thought to have been exposed to the disease. Along with isolation -- secluding those who are clearly sick -- it can be an effective tool for controlling outbreaks of certain types of disease. In 1910 and 1920, before antibiotics, plague experts in Manchuria controlled several deadly outbreaks of pneumonic plague using quarantine and isolation alone. But pneumonic plague, now rare, spreads in a very different way than flu does. Pneumonic plague germs are coughed out in large droplets that quickly fall to the ground. If you are more than six feet away from a plague patient, you're unlikely to catch the disease. Also, plague patients are typically very ill before they can transmit the germ to others. "There is no disease more susceptible to quarantine than plague," wrote the physician Wu Lien-teh, who helped break the Manchurian epidemics. Influenza is entirely different. The virus spreads explosively. Coughing, sneezing, or even speaking launches flu particles in an aerosol cloud of tiny droplets, which can drift in the air for some distance. Physician and flu researcher Edwin Kilbourne, who worked with flu patients during the pandemic of 1957-58, points out that people with flu may shed the virus even before they know they're sick -- not much, but enough to transmit the disease. Worse, some 10 to 20 percent of flu patients have subclinical infections; they never look sick at all. Yet they can still spread infection. Faced with a flu pandemic, you'd hardly know where the disease was coming from. How can you quarantine a disease like that? According to Kilbourne, you can't. "I think it is totally unreasonable on the basis of every pandemic we've had," says Kilbourne. "Every earlier pandemic seeded in multiple foci at the same time. Quarantine simply will not work." Indeed, a strictly enforced quarantine could do more harm than good. Herding large numbers of possibly infected people together makes it likely that any influenza strain passed among them would actually increase in virulence. Usually, in order to spread, human flu germs need hosts mobile enough to walk around and sneeze on other people. Those flu strains so deadly that they kill or disable their hosts won't get the chance to spread and will die off. This keeps human flu virulence within bounds. The signal exception is the 1918 flu, which acquired its extreme lethality, according to University of Louisville evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald, in the crowded and terrible conditions on the Western Front during World War I. Troops by the train and truckload were constantly being moved in and out of this petri dish, meaning a severely flu-stricken soldier didn't have to move much to infect others. Suppose that a government official today decided to round up exposed people and move them to a space like the Superdome in New Orleans. It's unlikely that even a crowded Superdome could replicate the conditions on the Western Front. But, depending on how densely packed people were, you could expect the flu strain trapped among them to increase in virulence. You'd be breeding a deadlier flu. If you let people walk around freely, only those strains mild enough to allow people to stay on their feet would spread easily. If quarantine won't work, what would? What about medication? Kilbourne is not optimistic about the vaunted (and expensive) antiviral drug Tamiflu, which can be taken to prevent or treat flu. "The problem with antivirals is that they are untried on any mass basis," says Kilbourne. "How long are you going to keep people on antivirals? Also, we don't know about any side effects of the newer antivirals. Older antivirals cause neurological problems in older people." Kilbourne thinks that preventive vaccines are our best, and only, strategy for combating a pandemic flu threat. The new vaccine, developed with National Institutes of Health sponsorship, shows some ability to protect. But Kilbourne, who in 1969 developed the first reassortant flu vaccine (one made by combining snippets of genetic material from different flu strains), isn't enthusiastic. First, the new vaccine must be given in two doses, at very high concentrations. And it's hard to grow. Kilbourne adds, "We don't have enough if a pandemic happened tomorrow." Still, vaccination is the gold standard for pandemic preparation -- once we know that a contagious human disease is emerging and the risk of vaccination becomes less than the risk of disease. That's a long way from now. Despite all the hysteria, there isn't a shred of evidence that a pandemic is actually on the way. Developing new flu vaccines is a useful thing to do. Pandemic or not, flu kills thousands every year. But devising quarantine plans is useless. Author's e-mail: [2]orentw at mindspring.com Wendy Orent, an Atlanta-based writer, is the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease" (Free Press). From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 17 02:08:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:08:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Laird Wilcox: Conspiracy Theory links (Lots of nutty & occasionally serious conspiracy links) Message-ID: Conspiracy Theory links (Lots of nutty & occasionally serious conspiracy links) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:23:53 EDT From: LWilcox3 at aol.com To: LWilcox3 at aol.com This site has many, many links to nutty conspiracy theories. I find this stuff tedious but occasionally take a look to see what's come along lately. If I were actually running a bona fide conspiracy one of the first things I would do is populate the media (web, etc.) with thousands of utterly ridiculous conspiracy theories to draw attention away from mine and to discredit investigators and watchdogs as "one of those conspiracy theorists." If anyone has done this, it's working spectacularly. LW http://www.obscurious.co.uk/html/html.pages/conspiracy_links.htm From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Oct 17 04:15:28 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:15:28 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Cosmology: A braney theory In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43532560.3030903@solution-consulting.com> Here is a nice illustration of the anthropic principle I thought you might enjoy. Premise Checker wrote: > Oct 6th 2005 > > An explanation for the anthropic principle comes a little closer > > DID God have a choice? Or, to put the matter less theologically, does > the universe have to be the way that it is? The answer to this > question, posed by Einstein among others, remains elusive. But it is > important, not least because a universe with laws only slightly > different from those actually observed would be one in which life--and > therefore human life--could never have come into existence. > > That observation, known as the anthropic principle, disturbs many > physicists because they cannot see any fundamental reason why things > could not be different. In particular, they cannot see why space has > to have three dimensions. But a paper due to be published this month > in Physical Review Letters by Andreas Karch of the University of > Washington and Lisa Randall of Harvard University suggests that the > laws of physics may, indeed, be biased towards three-dimensions. > Curiously, though, they have a similar bias towards seven-dimensions. > > The idea that there may be more dimensions than the familiar ones of > length, breadth and height (and also, to be strictly accurate, the > fourth dimension of time) is a consequence of attempts to solve an old > problem in physics. Ever since Einstein developed his theories of > space, time and gravity, physicists have sought a "theory of > everything" that would unite those theories with quantum > mechanics--the part of physics that describes electromagnetism and the > forces that hold atomic nuclei together. Such a theory would, it is > hoped, describe how the universe developed from the Big Bang. It would > explain why there appears to be more matter than anti-matter. It would > even indicate the nature of the dark energy and dark matter that lurk > at the edge of perception. > > To date, the best candidates for a theory of everything are various > versions of a branch of mathematics called string theory. > Unfortunately for common sense, these theories require the universe to > have ten or even 11 dimensions rather than the familiar three of space > and one of time. To get round this anomaly, some physicists propose > that the familiar dimensions are "unfurled", while the other six or > seven are rolled up so tightly that they cannot be seen, even with the > most powerful instruments available. For an everyday analogy, think of > a thread of cotton. This appears one-dimensional for most purposes. > Only under a magnifying glass are the other two dimensions > perceptible. > > A second interpretation of multidimensionality, however, is that the > extra dimensions are not always rolled up, but that even when they are > not humans cannot readily observe them because they are not free to > move in them. In this version, the space inhabited by humans is a > three-dimensional "surface" embedded in a higher dimensional > landscape. The particles of which people are composed, and the > non-gravitational forces acting on them, are strictly confined to this > surface--called a brane (short for membrane)--and, as such, have no > direct knowledge of the higher dimensional space around them. Only > gravity is free to pervade all parts of the universe, which is one of > the reasons why it obeys a different set of rules from the other > forces. > > It is this second interpretation that is invoked by Dr Karch and Dr > Randall. They assume that, initially, the universe was filled with > equal numbers of branes and anti-branes (the antimatter equivalent of > a brane). These branes and anti-branes could take any number of up to > ten different dimensions. Dr Karch and Dr Randall then demonstrated, > mathematically, that a universe filled with equal numbers of branes > and anti-branes will naturally come to be dominated by 3-branes and > 7-branes because these are the least likely to run into their > anti-brane counterparts and thus be annihilated. > > This result is interesting for two reasons. It is the first piece of > work to show that branes alone can explain the existence of hidden > dimensions. They do not have to be rolled up to be inaccessible. It is > also the first to suggest an underlying preference in the laws of > physics for certain sorts of universe, and thus perhaps provide a > solution to the anthropic principle. Yet it is not a total solution. > Other realities, whether three- or seven-dimensional, could be hidden > elsewhere in the landscape. And life in seven-dimensional space would > look very different from life on Earth--if, indeed, it existed at all. > That is because the force of gravity would diminish far more quickly > with distance than it does in this world. As a result, > seven-dimensional space could not have planets in stable orbits around > stars. Like dark matter and dark energy, therefore, the anthropic > principle is still grinning from the sidelines, taunting physicists to > explain it. > _______________________________________________ > 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: anthropic universe.jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 68319 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: anthropic universe.jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 68319 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 17 14:10:59 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 07:10:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: The Fear Contagion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The H5N1 virus first appears 8 years ago, and has not mutated since then. It may be 5 mutations or more away from having an envelope that allows human transmission. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Premise Checker Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2005 7:06 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: The Fear Contagion The Fear Contagion http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/15/AR2005101500 102_pf.html A Flu Quarantine? No, Sir By Wendy Orent Sunday, October 16, 2005; B01 For two years, a deadly strain of chicken flu known as H5N1 has been killing birds in Asia. While slightly more than 100 people are known to have contracted the disease, and 60 of them have died, there is still no sign that the flu has begun to spread from person to person. That hasn't prevented a recent outbreak of apocalyptic warnings from health officials and experts about the specter of a worldwide pandemic. In Hurricane Katrina's wake, health officials in the United States are talking more and more about pandemic preparation. Some of these ideas -- such as stockpiling vaccines -- are sensible, whether or not bird flu turns into a human disease and begins to spread rapidly. But other ideas aren't. A few scientists have suggested "priming" people with a dose of the new vaccine against H5N1 before we even know whether a pandemic is coming. Vaccinating large numbers of people against a disease that may never appear carries its own risks. Remember the swine flu debacle of 1976? At least 25 people died from vaccine complications and no epidemic ever erupted. That should be warning enough. Another dangerous idea for pandemic preparation has come from President Bush. Earlier this month, he suggested using the military to enforce a quarantine. "Who [is] best to be able to effect a quarantine?" he asked rhetorically at a press conference. "One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move." The very term quarantine can be misunderstood (not to mention the military's role). Did the president mean gathering those exposed to flu in a single location and forcing them to stay there? Did he mean isolating them in their homes? Cordoning off whole communities where cases crop up? Not all quarantines are alike; each carries its own risks and benefits. If this were idle presidential speculation, it wouldn't be worrisome. But he isn't the only one talking about quarantines and calling in the troops. In an Oct. 5 interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also wondered whether the government would need to turn to "containment" or "quarantine the people who are exposed." She too remarked that the military or the National Guard might be summoned "to maintain civil order, in the context of scarce resources or an overwhelming epidemic. . . . It would be foolish not to at least consider it and plan for that as a possibility." This is an example of a cure that is as frightening as the disease. It is hard to imagine how the military would oversee a quarantined area. If a health worker, drug addict or teenager attempted to break the quarantine, what would soldiers do? Shoot on sight? Teenagers and health workers were the people who most often violated quarantine rules in Toronto during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) scare in 2003. Moreover, the use of a quarantine to control a flu pandemic isn't only a potential threat to life and civil liberties; it's also a waste of money, resources and time. The reason: There isn't any kind of quarantine that will do any good -- at least not for a pandemic influenza. Quarantine, from the Italian "quarantina," which means "space of 40 days," dates from 15th-century regulations devised in certain Italian cities to control the spread of plague by sequestering those thought to have been exposed to the disease. Along with isolation -- secluding those who are clearly sick -- it can be an effective tool for controlling outbreaks of certain types of disease. In 1910 and 1920, before antibiotics, plague experts in Manchuria controlled several deadly outbreaks of pneumonic plague using quarantine and isolation alone. But pneumonic plague, now rare, spreads in a very different way than flu does. Pneumonic plague germs are coughed out in large droplets that quickly fall to the ground. If you are more than six feet away from a plague patient, you're unlikely to catch the disease. Also, plague patients are typically very ill before they can transmit the germ to others. "There is no disease more susceptible to quarantine than plague," wrote the physician Wu Lien-teh, who helped break the Manchurian epidemics. Influenza is entirely different. The virus spreads explosively. Coughing, sneezing, or even speaking launches flu particles in an aerosol cloud of tiny droplets, which can drift in the air for some distance. Physician and flu researcher Edwin Kilbourne, who worked with flu patients during the pandemic of 1957-58, points out that people with flu may shed the virus even before they know they're sick -- not much, but enough to transmit the disease. Worse, some 10 to 20 percent of flu patients have subclinical infections; they never look sick at all. Yet they can still spread infection. Faced with a flu pandemic, you'd hardly know where the disease was coming from. How can you quarantine a disease like that? According to Kilbourne, you can't. "I think it is totally unreasonable on the basis of every pandemic we've had," says Kilbourne. "Every earlier pandemic seeded in multiple foci at the same time. Quarantine simply will not work." Indeed, a strictly enforced quarantine could do more harm than good. Herding large numbers of possibly infected people together makes it likely that any influenza strain passed among them would actually increase in virulence. Usually, in order to spread, human flu germs need hosts mobile enough to walk around and sneeze on other people. Those flu strains so deadly that they kill or disable their hosts won't get the chance to spread and will die off. This keeps human flu virulence within bounds. The signal exception is the 1918 flu, which acquired its extreme lethality, according to University of Louisville evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald, in the crowded and terrible conditions on the Western Front during World War I. Troops by the train and truckload were constantly being moved in and out of this petri dish, meaning a severely flu-stricken soldier didn't have to move much to infect others. Suppose that a government official today decided to round up exposed people and move them to a space like the Superdome in New Orleans. It's unlikely that even a crowded Superdome could replicate the conditions on the Western Front. But, depending on how densely packed people were, you could expect the flu strain trapped among them to increase in virulence. You'd be breeding a deadlier flu. If you let people walk around freely, only those strains mild enough to allow people to stay on their feet would spread easily. If quarantine won't work, what would? What about medication? Kilbourne is not optimistic about the vaunted (and expensive) antiviral drug Tamiflu, which can be taken to prevent or treat flu. "The problem with antivirals is that they are untried on any mass basis," says Kilbourne. "How long are you going to keep people on antivirals? Also, we don't know about any side effects of the newer antivirals. Older antivirals cause neurological problems in older people." Kilbourne thinks that preventive vaccines are our best, and only, strategy for combating a pandemic flu threat. The new vaccine, developed with National Institutes of Health sponsorship, shows some ability to protect. But Kilbourne, who in 1969 developed the first reassortant flu vaccine (one made by combining snippets of genetic material from different flu strains), isn't enthusiastic. First, the new vaccine must be given in two doses, at very high concentrations. And it's hard to grow. Kilbourne adds, "We don't have enough if a pandemic happened tomorrow." Still, vaccination is the gold standard for pandemic preparation -- once we know that a contagious human disease is emerging and the risk of vaccination becomes less than the risk of disease. That's a long way from now. Despite all the hysteria, there isn't a shred of evidence that a pandemic is actually on the way. Developing new flu vaccines is a useful thing to do. Pandemic or not, flu kills thousands every year. But devising quarantine plans is useless. Author's e-mail: [2]orentw at mindspring.com Wendy Orent, an Atlanta-based writer, is the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease" (Free Press). _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Tue Oct 18 17:38:34 2005 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 13:38:34 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Entelechy: Mind & Culture; issue #6 Message-ID: <02cc01c5d40a$c4313d90$6401a8c0@callastudios> Just wanted to let y'all know that the latest issue of Entelechy is out and features people (at least four that I know of) from this very list! It's a good one! www.entelechyjournal.com cheerys! Alice ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Alice Andrews Department of Psychology State University of New York at New Paltz 75 S. Manheim Boulevard New Paltz, New York 12561 www.newpaltz.edu/~andrewsa andrewsa at newpaltz.edu (845) 257-3602 Publisher/Editor, Entelechy: Mind & Culture www.entelechyjournal.com alice at entelechyjournal.com http://tightgenes.blogspot.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:49:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:49:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Impact of Human Activities Message-ID: Science Policy: On the Impact of Human Activities http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051021-3.htm The following points are made by P.R. Ehrlich and D. Kennedy (Science 2005 309:562): 1) A growing scientific consensus says that global society is under increasing threat from the impact of human activities: Climate change, loss of biological diversity and ecosystem services, and changes in patterns of land use and land cover are among the more troublesome problems [1-3]. Some of these problems require attention from governments and other social institutions. But it is the collective actions of individuals that lie at the heart of the dilemma. Analysis of individual motives and values should be critical to a solution. Yet society has no prominent international forum in which such issues (like how we should treat our environment and each other) are publicly discussed. 2) In some countries, quite different views have surfaced recently about the ethics of governmental restrictions on the rights of landowners designed to protect endangered species and about legal provisions that permit "open space" set-asides of long duration. Even in nations with cultures as similar as those of the United States and the United Kingdom, issues of land care, debates over related subsidies, and the responsibilities of private citizens versus their governments can take very different shapes. In approaching sustainability, one needs to determine how the rights of people in the current generation to consume natural capital should be balanced against the rights of future generations. Preservation of animal life and the ethics of various kinds of human interference with "natural" systems are viewed differently by those whose cultural traditions differ. The steps that most members of the relevant scientific community believe are necessary (e.g., reduction of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, establishment of marine reserves, limiting human population growth and per capita consumption) are disconnected from those measures the rest of society, and especially politicians, are willing to undertake. 3) The authors propose to promote the establishment of an ongoing global discussion of key ethical issues related to the human predicament -- a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB). The time seems ripe, with the experience gained from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), to start discussing what to do. In the IPCC and the MEA, sociopolitical issues and policy changes that might lessen the chances of catastrophic consequences are considered. But the authors suggest we need an institution to conduct an ongoing examination and public airing of what is known about how human cultures (especially their ethics) evolve, and about what kinds of changes might permit transition to an ecologically sustainable, peaceful, and equitable global society.[4,5] References (abridged): 1. "World scientists' warning to humanity" (Union of Concerned Scientists, Cambridge, MA, 1993) 2. "Population Summit of the World's Scientific Academies: A joint statement by 58 of the world's scientific academies," New Delhi, India, 24 to 27 October 1993 (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1993) 3. P. R. Ehrlich, A. H. Ehrlich, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2004) 4. G. H. W. Bush, speech at 1992 Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, Argentina 5. H. E. Brady, J. S. Fishkin, R. C. Luskin, Brookings Rev. 21, 16 (Summer 2003) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: SCIENCE POLICY: BIODIVERSITY AND THE ERADICATION OF POVERTY The following points are made by W.M. Adams et al (Science 2004 306:1146): 1) Biodiversity conservation scientists face a dilemma. There is increasing concern that global efforts to maintain biodiversity are in conflict with efforts to reduce poverty (1). The decline of populations, extinction of species, and habitat transformation demand urgent action (2). The leading response to these threats since the late 19th century has been the creation of protected areas (3). Technical capacity to design effective protected-area systems is increasing (4), allowing the identification of coverage and remaining gaps in the international protected-area system (5). This, combined with positive assessments of the effectiveness of protected areas is encouraging the consolidation and expansion of the network of protected areas. The 2004 World Database on Protected Areas includes over 105,000 sites covering an area of 19.7 million km (2). The problem with this strategy is that its impacts on poverty are often negative. 2) The creation of protected areas causes the foreclosure of future land use options, with potentially significant economic opportunity costs. The creation of protected areas can have substantial negative impacts on local people. The eviction of former occupiers or right holders in land or resources can cause the exacerbation of poverty, as well as contravention of legal or human rights. Globally, it is recognized that the costs of biodiversity conservation are not distributed in proportion to their benefits. Typically, many of the costs of protected areas in poor biodiverse countries are paid by local people. 3) The meaning of poverty may be intuitively obvious, but its measurement is complex. Common definitions are based on monetary (such as per-capita income) or nonmonetary (such as health or mortality) criteria, although broader approaches have been suggested. In 1999, 1.2 billion people worldwide had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.8 billion lived on less than $2 a day. Poverty is not a static condition, but it is estimated that between 300 and 420 million people live in a state of chronic poverty (always or usually poor). 4) In summary: It is widely accepted that biodiversity loss and poverty are linked problems and that conservation and poverty reduction should be tackled together. However, success with integrated strategies is elusive. There is sharp debate about the social impacts of conservation programs and the success of community-based approaches to conservation. Clear conceptual frameworks are needed if policies in these two areas are to be combined. References (abridged): 1. S. E. Sanderson, K. H. Redford, Oryx 37, 1 (2003) 2. S. Palumbi, Science 293, 1786 (2001) 3. W. M. Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (Earthscan, London, 2004) 4. C. R. Margules, R. L. Pressey, Nature 405, 243 (2000) 5. A. S. Rodrigues et al., Nature 428, 640 (2004) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: CLIMATE: SOLAR VARIATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE The following points are made by Peter Foukal et al (Science 2004 306:68): 1) The global warming observed over the past century has been attributed to both natural and human forcings [1]. One of the natural forcings may be variations in solar activity, which appear to be correlated with climate change [2]. Climate models have used reconstructions of solar irradiance to reproduce important aspects of past global warming [3]. However, recent studies of Sun-like stars call for a reevaluation of the influence of solar activity variations on climate. 2) Analyses of space-borne solar radiometry since 1978 [4] confirm that the Sun brightens during periods of high activity, when bright magnetic structures more than compensate for the dimming caused by sunspots. However, over an 11-year sunspot cycle, the irradiance varies by only about 0.08% -- probably too little for a meaningful influence on climate. The question, then, is whether the sunspot cycle is superimposed on irradiance variations of similar or greater magnitude that take place over periods longer than 11 years. 3) The apparent identification of a solar component in past climate variations in recent model studies rests on the assumption that such variations over longer periods exist. The solar forcing used in these models includes both the sunspot cycle and a more speculative long-term component. The amplitude of this second component is roughly five times that of the magnetic modulation during sunspot cycles. It is based on evidence for luminosity variations in Sun-like stars (5) and on a hypothesized long-term relationship between the Sun's magnetic field and its luminosity. However, the scientific basis for this component is much less robust than for the sunspot-cycle component. 4) Stellar observations (5) have suggested that Sun-like stars have low-activity phases during which the magnetic activity is even lower than during minima in the sunspot cycle. Extrapolation of the Sun's radiometrically observed irradiance to this low-activity level suggests that solar irradiance in the 17th century may have been 0.25% lower than today. Reconstructions of irradiance variations based directly or indirectly on the stellar evidence have been used in numerous climate studies, some of which form the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusions on the relative roles of different external climate forcings (1). References (abridged): 1. J. T. Houghton et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001) 2. T. Crowley, Science 289, 270 (2000) 3. P. A. Stott et al., Clim. Dyn. 17, 1 (2001) 4. C. Froehlich, J. Lean, Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 4377 (1998) 5. S. Baliunas, R. Jastrow, Nature 348, 520 (1990) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:49:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:49:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy: Recipe for Destruction Message-ID: New York Times Op-Ed, 5.10.17 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/17/opinion/17kurzweiljoy.html AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database. This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous. First, it would be easier to create and release this highly destructive virus from the genetic data than it would be to build and detonate an atomic bomb given only its design, as you don't need rare raw materials like plutonium or enriched uranium. Synthesizing the virus from scratch would be difficult, but far from impossible. An easier approach would be to modify a conventional flu virus with the eight unique and now published genes of the 1918 killer virus. Second, release of the virus would be far worse than an atomic bomb. Analyses have shown that the detonation of an atomic bomb in an American city could kill as many as one million people. Release of a highly communicable and deadly biological virus could kill tens of millions, with some estimates in the hundreds of millions. A Science staff writer, Jocelyn Kaiser, said, "Both the authors and Science's editors acknowledge concerns that terrorists could, in theory, use the information to reconstruct the 1918 flu virus." And yet the journal required that the full genome sequence be made available on the GenBank database as a condition for publishing the paper. Proponents of publishing this data point out that valuable insights have been gained from the virus's recreation. These insights could help scientists across the world detect and defend against future pandemics, including avian flu. There are other approaches, however, to sharing the scientifically useful information. Specific insights - for example, that a key mutation noted in one gene may in part explain the virus's unusual virulence - could be published without disclosing the complete genetic recipe. The precise genome could potentially be shared with scientists with suitable security assurances. We urgently need international agreements by scientific organizations to limit such publications and an international dialogue on the best approach to preventing recipes for weapons of mass destruction from falling into the wrong hands. Part of that discussion should concern the appropriate role of governments, scientists and their scientific societies, and industry. We also need a new Manhattan Project to develop specific defenses against new biological viral threats, natural or human made. There are promising new technologies, like RNA interference, that could be harnessed. We need to put more stones on the defensive side of the scale. We realize that calling for this genome to be "un-published" is a bit like trying to gather the horses back into the barn. Perhaps we will be lucky this time, and we will indeed succeed in developing defenses for these killer flu viruses before they are needed. We should, however, treat the genetic sequences of pathological biological viruses with no less care than designs for nuclear weapons. Ray Kurzweil,an inventor, is theauthor of "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." Bill Joy, founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, is a partner at a venture-capital firm. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:49:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:49:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Ant Navigation Message-ID: Animal Behavior: On Ant Navigation http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw051021-6.htm The following points are made by Francis Ratnieks (Nature 2005 436:465): 1) There are probably 20,000 ant species and they do not all use the same navigational methods or have equal navigational abilities. Many can reorient on trails by using external cues, including landmarks and the position of the Sun. Leafcutter ants are even thought to use the Earth's magnetic field. But recent research has shown that one common ant, the pharaoh's ant, Monomorium pharaonis, has a sense of geometry, and other species probably do as well. 2) A pharaoh's ant colony forms a foraging-trail network leading from the nest entrance into the surrounding environment. These trails form Y-shaped branches with an internal angle of approximately 60 degrees as they lead away from the entrance. Ants walking the wrong way along a trail are unable to reorient at a trail bifurcation if the angle is 120 degrees. But if the angle is less, then they can. Angles less than 120 degrees give the "Y" bifurcation a nest-environment polarity, whereas at 120 degrees there is only symmetry. The ability to reorient is maximized at the natural bifurcation angle of 60 degrees. 3) Natural selection has made insect societies good at solving a problem that is simple to state but hard to solve -- to send foragers to where the food is. Because social insects have been solving this complex dynamic problem for millions of years, they have probably evolved some simple and elegant solutions. We should care about these solutions because human life depends more and more on engineering systems that must solve similar problems to function efficiently -- electronic messaging, grid computing, transmitting electricity and traffic regulation to name a few. One obvious lesson we might learn is how to make our systems more reliable and robust. If there is one thing that natural selection should be good at, it is eliminating solutions that are not robust. The colony or organism that "crashes" will soon be a dead one. 4) When a physicist plays ants at their own game -- trying to understand a problem fundamental to colony survival that ants have been working on, by means of natural selection, for millions of years -- ants can come out ahead. It is no disgrace to be outsmarted by ants. But are we smart enough to learn from them?[1-3] References: 1. Feynman, R. P. Don't You Have Time To Think? (ed. Feynman, M.) (Allen Lane, 2005). 2. Feynman, R. P. Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman! (Norton, New York, 1985). 3. Jackson, D. E., Holcombe, M., Ratnieks, F. L. W. Nature 432, 907-909; 2004. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: ZOOLOGY: ON ANIMAL NAVIGATION The following points are made by James L. Gould (Current Biology 2004 14:R221): 1) Nearly all animals move in an oriented way, but navigation is something more: the directed movement toward a goal, as opposed to steering toward or away from, say, light or gravity. Navigation involves the neural processing of sensory inputs to determine a direction and perhaps distance. For instance, if a honey bee were to seek food south of its hive, it would depart from home with the sun to its left in the morning, but to its right in the afternoon. 2) Several trends reflecting favorably on natural selection and poorly on human imagination characterized early studies of navigation. One tendency was the assumption that animals sense at most the same cues as we do. Thus, being blind to our own blindness, it came as a total surprise when honey bees and many other species were found to be able to see UV light. As navigation depends on the processing of such cues, the number of "new" senses uncovered in the past fifty years has greatly expanded our thinking about what may be going on in the minds of animals -- and there is no reason to assume the list is complete. To UV must be added polarized light, infra-red light, special odors (pheromones), magnetic fields, electric fields, ultrasonic sounds and infrasonic sounds. 3) The second crippling propensity is what navigation pioneer Donald Griffin called our innate "simplicity filter": the desire to believe that animals do things in the least complex way possible. Experience, however, tells us that animals whose lives depend on accurate navigation are uniformly overengineered. Not only do they frequently wring more information out of the cues that surround them than we can, or use more exotic or weaker cues than we find conceivable, they usually come equipped with alternative strategies -- a series of backups between which they switch depending on which is providing the most reliable information. 4) A honey bee, for instance, may set off for a goal using its time-compensated sun compass. When a cloud covers the sun, it may change to inferring the sun's position from UV patterns in the sky and opt a minute later for a map-like strategy when it encounters a distinctive landmark. Lastly, it may ignore all of these cues as it gets close enough to its goal to detect the odors or visual cues provided by the flowers. This is not to say that animals do not often rely on approximations and neural shortcuts to simplify these daunting tasks. 5) A third stumbling block has been our presumption that because the earliest cases studied involved "imprinting" (irreversible one-trial learning), animals must have simple navigation programs, which need merely to be calibrated to the local contingencies. This is just what at least some relatively short-lived animals do -- like honey bees for instance, who rarely forage for more than three weeks. But most animals live longer, and in consequence many need to recalibrate themselves. 6) Finally, most researchers deliberately ignored or denigrated the evidence for cognitive processing in navigating animals. This legacy of behaviorism (the school of psychology that denied instinct) puts a ceiling on the maximum level of mental activity subject to legitimate investigation. There are many navigating animals whose behavior lacks any hint of cognitive intervention. However, the obvious abilities of hunting spiders and honey bees to plan novel routes make it equally clear that phylogenetic distance to humans is no sure guide to the sophistication of a species' orientation strategies.(1-3) References: Able, K.P. and Able, M.A. (1995). Interactions in the flexible orientation system of a migratory bird. Nature 375, 230-232 Gould, J.L. (1980). The case for magnetic-field sensitivity in birds and bees. Am. Sci. 68, 256-267 Walker, M.M. (1998). On a wing and a vector. J. Theor. Biol. 192, 341-349 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: ENTOMOLOGY: ON HONEYBEE NAVIGATION The following points are made by M.V. Srinivasan (Current Biology 2003 13:R894): 1) Many of us have marvelled at the ability of honeybees to find an attractive flower patch, miles away from their hive, and to return to it repeatedly with unerring accuracy. How do they do this with a brain smaller than a sesame seed? We don't know all the answers yet, but bees seem to be able to estimate the distance to a food source, gauge the direction in which to fly to reach it, and convey this information to their nestmates, so that they can forage from it, too, and thus collectively build up the colony's food reserves. 2) It appears that bees use one or both of the following cues. The first comes from measuring the amount of energy consumed when they fly to the destination by the reduction in the volume of their nectar-laden stomachs; the greater the energy consumed, the further the distance. And the second comes from measuring how much the image of the world appears to move in the eye as they fly to the destination; the greater the extent of image motion, the further the distance. 3) Bees use the Sun as a compass. Even if the Sun is hidden by a cloud, bees can continue to steer correctly by inferring the Sun's position from the pattern of polarized light that it creates in a patch of clear sky. This polarized-light pattern is visible to them but not to us, unless we view the sky through polaroid sunglasses. Bees are also able to compensate for the daily movement of the Sun across the sky by using information from an internal biological clock. 4) A "scout" bee recruits her nestmates to visit a newly discovered flower patch. Upon returning to the hive, the scout performs a "waggle" dance on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. This dance consists of a series of alternating left-hand and right-hand loops, interspersed by a segment in which she waggles her abdomen from side to side. The duration of this waggle phase is a measure of the distance to the food, and the angle between the axis of this waggle segment and the vertical represents the azimuthal angle between the sun and the direction in which the recruit should fly to find the target. Thus, the dance conveys the position of the food source relative to the hive in polar coordinates. 5) A bee that has visited a promising flower patch a few times will rapidly learn the color, shape and fragrance of the flowers, and use these cues to home in on them on return visits. Bees have excellent trichromatic color vision, featuring three types of photoreceptor which are maximally sensitive to the ultraviolet, blue and green wavelengths of light, respectively. Honeybees rival humans in their ability to discriminate subtle color differences. Bees that repeatedly visit a given flower patch also learn to use prominent landmarks, if there are any present, as navigational aids. For example, a landmark could be used as a beacon that guides that bee toward her destination. Landmarks can also function as checkpoints along the route. Thus a bee can learn, for example, that the shortest route to the goal is to fly to the left of landmark A, and to the right of landmark B. There is also some evidence that bees can "count" prominent landmarks that they encounter en route to the food. Finally, honeybees probably use memorized visual "snapshots" of the surrounding environment at the destination to help them to return to the same spot repeatedly and reliably. References: 1. Collett, T.S. and Zeil, J. (1998). In Spatial representation in animals. In Healy, S. ed. (Oxford University Press), pp. 18-53 2. Srinivasan, M.V., Zhang, S.W., Altwein, M., and Tautz, J. (2000). Honeybee navigation: nature and calibration of the "odometer". Science 287, 851-853 3. von Frisch, K. (1993). The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. (London: Harvard Univ. Press) 4. Wehner, R., Michel, B., and Antonsen, P. (1996). Visual navigation in insects: Coupling of egocentric and geocentric information. J. Exp. Biol 199, 129-140 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:50:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:50:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Can Brain Scans See Depression? Message-ID: Can Brain Scans See Depression? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/health/psychology/18imag.html By BENEDICT CAREY They seem almost alive: snapshots of the living human brain. Not long ago, scientists predicted that these images, produced by sophisticated brain-scanning techniques, would help cut through the mystery of mental illness, revealing clear brain abnormalities and allowing doctors to better diagnose and treat a wide variety of disorders. And nearly every week, it seems, imaging researchers announce another finding, a potential key to understanding depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety. Yet for a variety of reasons, the hopes and claims for brain imaging in psychiatry have far outpaced the science, experts say. After almost 30 years, researchers have not developed any standardized tool for diagnosing or treating psychiatric disorders based on imaging studies. Several promising lines of research are under way. But imaging technology has not lived up to the hopes invested in it in the 1990's - labeled the "Decade of the Brain" by the American Psychiatric Association - when many scientists believed that brain scans would turn on the lights in what had been a locked black box. Now, with imaging studies being published at a rate of more than 500 a year, and commercial imaging clinics opening in some parts of the country, some experts say that the technology has been oversold as a psychiatric tool. Other researchers remain optimistic, but they wonder what the data add up to, and whether it is time for the field to rethink its approach and its expectations. "I have been waiting for my work in the lab to affect my job on the weekend, when I practice as a child psychiatrist," said Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, who has done M.R.I. scans in children Monday through Friday for 14 years. "It hasn't happened. In this field, every year you hear, 'Oh, it's more complicated than we thought.' Well, you hear that for 10 years, and you start to see a pattern." Psychiatrists still consider imaging technologies like M.R.I., for magnetic resonance imaging, and PET, for positron emission topography, to be crucial research tools. And the scanning technologies are invaluable as a way to detect physical problems like head trauma, seizure activity or tumors. Moreover, the experts point out, progress in psychiatry is by its nature painstakingly slow, and decades of groundwork typically precede any real advances. But there is a growing sense that brain scan research is still years away from providing psychiatry with anything like the kind of clear tests for mental illness that were hoped for. "I think that, with some notable exceptions, the community of scientists was excessively optimistic about how quickly imaging would have an impact on psychiatry," said Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "In their enthusiasm, people forgot that the human brain is the most complex object in the history of human inquiry, and it's not at all easy to see what's going wrong." For one thing, brains are as variable as personalities. In a range of studies, researchers have found that people with schizophrenia suffer a progressive loss of their brain cells: a 20-year-old who develops the disorder, for example, might lose 5 percent to 10 percent of overall brain volume over the next decade, studies suggest. Ten percent is a lot, and losses of volume in the frontal lobes are associated with measurable impairment in schizophrenia, psychiatrists have found. But brain volume varies by at least 10 percent from person to person, so volume scans of patients by themselves cannot tell who is sick, the experts say. Studies using brain scans to measure levels of brain activity often suffer from the same problem: what looks like a "hot spot" of activity change in one person's brain may be a normal change in someone else's. "The differences observed are not in and of themselves outside the range of variation seen in the normal population," said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University Medical Center and director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. To make matters even more complicated, many findings are disputed. In people with severe depression, for instance, researchers have found apparent shrinkage of a part of the temporal lobe called the hippocampus, which is critical for memory. But other investigators have not been able to replicate this finding, and people with injuries to the hippocampus typically suffer amnesia, not depression, psychiatrists say. For problems like attention-deficit disorder and bipolar disorder, the experts say, psychiatrists have much less research on which to base their theories. Most fundamentally, imaging research has not answered the underlying question that the technology itself has raised: which comes first, the disease or the apparent difference in brain structure or function that is being observed? For a definitive answer, researchers would need to follow thousands of people from childhood through adulthood, taking brain scans regularly, and matching them with scans from peers who did not develop a disorder, experts say. Given the expense and difficulty, such a study may never be done, Dr. Hyman said. One investigator has used imaging research to fashion a small, experimental psychiatric treatment. In a series of studies of people with severe depression, Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, found a baffling pattern of activity. Using PET scanning technology, Dr. Mayberg found sharp dips and spikes of activity in about a half-dozen areas of these patients' brains as their moods improved while they were taking either antidepressant drugs or placebos. The changes were similar in all patients, but it was difficult to tell how the scattering of the dips and spikes were related. By analyzing the peaks and valleys on the scans as part of a circuit - networked together, like a string of Christmas lights - Dr. Mayberg found that one spot in particular seemed to modulate the entire system, like a transformer or a dimmer. She confirmed the importance of this spot, called Brodmann area 25, by scanning the brains of mentally healthy people while they remembered painful episodes from their lives: while sad they, too, showed increased activity in this area. In March, Dr. Mayberg and a team based at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto reported on six patients who had had electrodes implanted in their brains next to Brodmann area 25. All had been severely depressed for at least a year, and they had responded poorly to available therapies. The implanted electrodes, often used to treat Parkinson's disease, produce a current that slows neural activity, for reasons scientists do not yet understand. So far, the researchers reported in the journal Neuron, four of the six people have shown significant and lasting recovery; all four are still on antidepressant drugs but at reduced doses. And all four have returned to work or their usual routines, Dr. Mayberg said. The widely reported experiment has generated more than 300 requests from people to be considered for the operation, she added. "It's very important to understand that this is experimental, and the next step is to replicate what we did, with a placebo, and that could send us right back to the drawing board," Dr. Mayberg said in an interview. The findings so far are encouraging, she said, "but the idea that this is something for every severely depressed patient - well, shame on us if we suggest that. The brain is a very big place and we had better have a very good idea of what we're doing before holding this out as a treatment." Many people would rather not wait for the science of imaging to mature, however. At clinics in California, Washington, Illinois, Texas and elsewhere, doctors offer brain scans to people with a variety of conditions, from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, often called A.D.H.D., to depression and aggressive behavior. Dr. Daniel Amen, an adult and child psychiatrist based in Newport Beach, Calif., said he performed 28,000 scans on adults and children over the past 14 years, using a technique called Spect, or single photon emission computed tomography. In an interview, Dr. Amen said that it was unconscionable that the profession of psychiatry was not making more use of brain scans. "Here we are, giving five or six different medications to children without even looking at the organ we're changing," he said. He said the scans had helped him to distinguish between children with attention deficit problems who respond well to stimulants like Ritalin and those who do poorly on the drugs. In a series of books and medical articles, Dr. Amen argued that the images helped convince people that the behavior problems had a biological basis and needed treatment, with drugs or other therapies. "They increase compliance with treatment and decrease the shame and guilt" associated with the disorders, he said. At the Brainwaves Neuroimaging Clinic in Houston, doctors use the scans to diagnose and choose treatment for a range of psychiatric problems, according to a clinic spokeswoman. And a variety of doctors advertise the imaging services, particularly for attention-deficit disorder, on the Internet. But the experts who study imaging and psychiatry say there is no evidence that a brain scan, which can cost more than $1,000, adds significantly to standard individual psychiatric exams. "The thing for people to understand is that right now, the only thing imaging can tell you is whether you have a brain tumor," or some other neurological damage, said Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. He added, "This imaging technology is so far from prime time that to spend thousands of dollars on it doesn't make any sense." The big payoff from imaging technology, some experts say, may come as researchers combine the scans with other techniques, like genetic or biochemical tests. By radioactively marking specific receptors in the brain, for example, researchers are using brain scans to measure how brain chemicals known to affect mood, like dopamine, behave in people with schizophrenia, compared with mentally healthy peers. Imaging researchers are also studying depression-related circuits to see how they may arise from genetic variations known to put people at risk for depression. And as always, the technology itself is improving: a new generation of M.R.I. scanners, with double the resolution power of the current machines, is becoming more widely available, Dr. Lieberman said. "With increased resolution, we'll be able to do more sensitive and more precise work, and I would not be surprised if anatomy alone based on volume will be a diagnostic feature," he said. "We have gained an enormous amount knowledge from thousands of imaging studies, we are on the threshold of applying that knowledge, and now it's a matter of getting over the threshold." But for now, neither he nor anyone else can say when that will happen. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:50:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:50:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Spiked: Norman Levitt: Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond Message-ID: Norman Levitt: Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CADAC.htm 5.10.12 Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond By preaching the virtues of 'cultural competence', the academy betrays its lack of confidence. by Norman Levitt First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.18 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101801j.htm A glance at the current issue of spiked: The problems of cultural competence The hot new term in higher education is "cultural competence," says Norman Levitt, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. But, he warns, the phrase is little more than a euphemism that cloaks "problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments." "Cultural competence" means an individual can work across cultural lines, can value and adapt to diversity, and can demonstrate such abilities in leadership and policy-making roles. However, when you shed the happy talk, Mr. Levitt says, "cultural competence" means "deference, even servility, toward the norms and values espoused by fervent multiculturalists." It also does not allow people to raise ideas that might make certain groups uncomfortable: Suggesting that affirmative action is unfair, for instance, would be a culturally incompetent offense, he says. The practice of cultural competence also further fragments professors and university administrators, he writes. When administrators at the University of Oregon proposed cultural-competency standards in May, professors balked at terms that would have, among other things, made hirings, promotions, and salaries dependent upon an evaluation of cultural competence. "The message to faculty was this: You're going to adopt our sociopolitical point of view (or pretend to) or pay the price," writes Mr. Levitt. The Oregon example, he says, illustrates the staying power of the left-wing ethos of political correctness. Such PC-sponsored initiatives as cultural competence, he says, work only to make their sponsors unpopular, while "doing virtually nothing concrete to ameliorate the painful real-world situations that provoke these projects in the first place." "There is good reason to remain aware of the dangers of cultural chauvinism," writes Mr. Levitt, "but the point is to cleanse our standards of judgment of narrow and local prejudices, not to abandon the very notion of standards of judgment." The article, "Academic Strife: The American University in the Slough of Despond," is available at [54]http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm --Jason M. Breslow _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [55]U. of Oregon Backs Off Plan Linking Tenure and 'Cultural Competency' After Faculty Members Balk (5/27/2005) * [56]Verbatim: an interview with Mr. Levitt (12/17/1999) * [57]2 Scholars Examine the 'Bizarre War' Against Science They Say Is Being Waged by the Academic Left (4/27/1994) Opinion: * [58]Why Science and Scientists Are Under Fire (9/29/1995) * [59]The Perils of Democratizing Science (10/5/1994) References 54. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm 55. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/05/2005052702n.htm 56. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i17/17a02601.htm 57. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/articles-40.dir/issue-34.dir/34a01501.htm 58. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-42.dir/issue-05.dir/05b00101.htm 59. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/articles-41.dir/issue-06.dir/06b00101.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. --------------------- A new buzzword has entered the lexicon of academic fashion in the USA, threatening to drown poor professors like me in yet another wave of coy euphemism. The term is 'cultural competence'. Like its predecessors 'affirmative action,' 'diversity,' and 'multiculturalism', it attempts to cloak problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments that suggest that no right-minded person could possibly demur. A 'culturally competent' academic, one might naively surmise, would be one who has absorbed and is able to propound some of the deep values - ethical, aesthetic or epistemological - that embody the stellar achievements of Western culture, one who could explain, for instance, why Dante or Kant or Ingres is present, at least subtly, in the assumptions under which we all live. Or something like that. This, alas, would be a comical error. 'Cultural competence' is, in essence, a bureaucratic weapon. 'Cultural competence', or rather, your presumed lack thereof, is what you will be clobbered with if you are imprudent enough to challenge or merely to have qualms about 'affirmative action', 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism', as those principles are now espoused by their most fervent academic advocates. Cultural competence, like the UK's proposed new identity card, is something a professor is supposed to keep handy at all times, and to display with a straight face whenever confronted with a socially or ethnically charged situation, in order to dispel any suspicion of racism, sexism or Eurocentrism that might arise in the minds of the professionally suspicious. What is 'cultural competence'? The term has been around for a couple of years, drastically mutating as it puts down deeper roots. Originally, it was fairly innocuous. It was largely restricted to the healthcare professions, and referred to the ability to function effectively with members of ethnic minorities and immigrant groups by dint of insights into the local community's idiosyncratic prejudices, fears and assumptions, insofar as these differed from the norms of middle-class white society. It seems obvious that such knowledge could be helpful to a doctor, nurse or social worker hoping to convince patients or clients from these groups to keep medical appointments, complete a course of antibiotics or have their children vaccinated. Though cultural competence, in this sense, presumes a degree of open-mindedness and empathy, it seems only vaguely political, at most. Now, however, cast loose from its original moorings, the phrase has become emphatically political. I offer the reader, with some trepidation, the formal definition as jargonistically set out by some purported educators: Cultural competence requires that individuals and organisations: a) Have a defined set of values and principles, demonstrated behaviours, attitudes, policies and structures that enable them to work effectively in a cross-cultural manner; b) Demonstrate the capacity to 1) value diversity, 2) engage in self-reflection, 3) manage the dynamics of difference, 4) acquire and institutionalise cultural knowledge, and 5) adapt to the diversity and the cultural contexts of the communities they serve; c) Incorporate and advocate the above in all aspects of leadership, policymaking, administration, practice and service delivery while systematically involving staff, students, families, key stakeholders and communities. If we divest this of its thick integument of happy talk and explore the details, we find that in practice it means deference, even servility, toward the norms and values espoused by fervent multiculturalists, along with tame assent to whatever measures they propose to achieve their aims. Attempts to explicate the idea occasionally slip into language that reveals the underlying political programme: [C]ultural competence entails actively challenging the status quo and advocating for equity and social justice. In the context of higher education, cultural competence necessitates abject refusal to articulate or defend ideas that might make certain protected groups uncomfortable. Professors can only be deemed 'culturally competent' if they openly profess the approved corpus of received values. Here is an illustrative if fragmentary list of transgressions that would likely strip an academic of any chance of being designated culturally competent: ? Suggesting that affirmative action might conflict with other standards of justice and equity, or that opponents of affirmative action are not ipso facto Klansmen waiting for their white sheets to come back from the laundry; ? Taking issue with the claim that Malcolm X was a paragon of humanitarianism and political genius; ? Disputing the wisdom of feminist theory as regards the social constructedness of gender; ? Asserting that the early demographic history of the Americas is more accurately revealed by scientific anthropology than by the Native American folklore and myth celebrated by tribal militants; ? Expressing doubts that 'queer theory' should be made the epicenter of literary studies. Likewise, to maintain that hiring, retention and promotion within the university should focus on the traditional academic virtues of the scholar, rather than assigning enormous importance to the candidate's race, ethnicity, sex or sexuality, would banish one permanently from the culturally competent elect. To deny that feminist theorists should call all the shots on matters having to do with sexual harassment would be an act of self-immolation. The University of Oregon: a cautionary tale Where has this orthodoxy come from? The State of Oregon on the West Coast seems to have been the seedbed of the cultural competence movement in American education (1). Why this should be so is not at all clear. Oregon is scenically glorious and politically moderate, and its colleges and universities have not notably suffered from racial or ethnic tensions. Nonetheless, it was at the state's flagship university, the University of Oregon, that advocates of cultural competence recently grew so rash as to provoke an enormous uproar that will doubtless make the term into a new red flag in the Culture Wars and set off endless rounds of vituperation. The trigger was the emergence of a concrete proposal to implement cultural competence standards on campus. This long, turgid document called for more of the things you would expect such a declaration to call for more of - 'diversity' admissions, multicultural courses, programmes to enhance cross-cultural sensitivity, and, of course, an assortment of administrators and committees to effectuate all this righteousness. But this much was predictable boiler-plate; the real fireworks showed up in the section mandating development of cultural competence among the faculty. Here the authors, obviously feeling their oats, launched a serious power play. They prescribed a draconian regime of attitude adjustment aimed at professors and instructors. They proposed that all faculty be required to 'participate in ongoing cultural competence professional development' under their tutelage. But this was just the beginning. The drafters further called for academic departments, across the board, to reconstruct their hiring policies so as to make affirmative action the central factor in generating job offers. They insisted that every course in the school be scrutinised for its consistency with multicultural doctrine. Above all, in hiring, promotion and determination of salary, they called for a formal evaluation of the candidate's cultural competence! Stripping it down to its essence, the message to faculty was this: you're going to adopt our sociopolitical point of view (or pretend to) or pay the price; so far as hiring and retention is concerned, your professional standards shall be modified or overruled to insure the predominance of people of whom we approve because of their race, sex, sexuality or doctrinal purity; if you give us any trouble, lacking tenure you'll be out on your ear, and even with tenure you'll be out a lot of money. The faculty, not being particularly obtuse, certainly got the message - and promptly began to raise considerable hell. The upshot was that the higher-ups in the university administration, who had been primed to endorse the report, did a prompt volte-face and downgraded it to a preliminary draft slated to be drastically amended before implementation. Its principal author, like some misbegotten super-hero, slunk off to a new job far away. The ultimate fate of these proposals thus seems pretty clear. The bureaucracy will masticate them over and over in an interminable cycle of revisions and re-revisions. In the end, a diluted and attenuated version will finally emerge. It will render some lip-service to cultural competence in the abstract and grant some funds to its proponents. But it will leave the faculty to continue largely unmolested in its well-worn paths. On this somewhat hopeful note, this particular Political Correctness horror story now ends, for the time being. But why is it especially salient, given the long line of PC horror stories of which it constitutes just one more episode? Perhaps it isn't all that consequential; yet it is instructive for a number of reasons. Faction fighting My tale demonstrates the staying power of the ethos of (left-wing) Political Correctness (or whatever you choose to call it) in the face of many years of scorn and ridicule. It shows how little its proponents have adjusted to discouraging realities, most notably the fact that the chief effect of PC-sponsored initiatives has been to make the sponsors unpopular while doing virtually nothing concrete to ameliorate the painful real-world situations that provoke these projects in the first place. Most folks on a typical US campus think of PC as tiresome and even silly, and regard its advocates as self-righteous and censorious to the point of nastiness. The chief beneficiaries of PC antics, indeed, are the right-wing talk show hosts, bloggers and columnists who gleefully decry them at every opportunity. Even more, the story tends to underline the fragmentation of university culture in a much wider context. Why, one might ask, are university administrators, largely bureaucrats rather than ideologues, still willing to accommodate PC enthusiasts? Perhaps because to be an American university administrator these days entails being all things to all men, women and transgendered persons, the servant of all masters (yet master of them all). Each constituency exacts its own tribute, and the shrewd administrator is one who knows how to render it up without sparking the ire of another faction whose view of the world might be markedly different. A list of these groups, at least roughly representative of the implicit infrastructure of most American universities, might be helpful here, if we allow for the fact that boundaries are sometimes blurry. First of all, there is Profland, the traditional faculty, oriented, presumably, to serious scholarship and its code of values. But Profland lacks real cohesion. Its postmodern wing, for instance, usually doubles as a faction of the PC Mafia. This is even more true of the Myrmidons of the Downtrodden, who staff the various 'oppression studies' programmes - Women's Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and so forth. Collectively, they are the consiglieri of the PC Mafia. The most self-satisfied subtribe, on the other hand, is They Who Could Make a MUCH Better Living in the Real World and Often Do - that is to say, the faculty of the Law School, the Medical School and the Business School. They are in Profland but not of it; unlike professors of English or archaeology, they have enough worldly clout that they needn't seek solace by anointing themselves intellectual holy men. At the other end of the self-esteem spectrum, we find the SubAcademic Wannabes who teach in not-quite-intellectually-respectable programmes: Education, Social Work, Journalism, and so forth. They seem to be part of Profland, but are haunted by the knowledge that in that enchanted realm, they will always be placed below the salt, mere squires rather than cavaliers. The Entrepreneurs should be singled out as well, scientists and engineers whose research is directly translatable into technology, patents and royalties accruing (if they're shrewd) to themselves as well as to the university. Beyond Profland, the Undergraduate Eloi predominate, drenching the campus in booze, sex, downloaded music cuts and annoying ring-tones. They are only distant cousins of the less-numerous Grad Student Helotry, essentially passive and resigned creatures who can occasionally be rousted from their library carrels long enough to make a bit of a fuss - but not for long. The latter, however, are not so forlorn as the Academic Gypsies who constitute the provisional or part-time instructional staff. These grossly underpaid wretches are doomed to aspire to Profland without much chance of ever getting there. Most anomalous and therefore most surprising to those not long immersed in American tribal culture is the Jockocracy, a faction of immense power at most public and many private universities despite being utterly alien to education, scholarship or learning in any form. This consists of the administrators and chief functionaries of the athletic programme, most notably the coaches heading the school's football and basketball teams. Such programmes are run for the economic benefit of these worthies while also enriching media outlets, purveyors of jock-related trinkets, and manufacturers of athletic shoes. Their viability depends, ultimately, on the eagerness of young athletes, typically profoundly deficient in academic skills, to be ruthlessly exploited while largely surrendering their personal autonomy. The underlying looniness of the situation is epitomised by the fact, no doubt mind-boggling to most non-Americans, that at a university with a 'big-time' team, the football coach will earn eight or nine times as much as the most distinguished professor. Athletics is the most hypocritical, corrupt, cynical, vicious and depraved aspect of university culture and, therefore, it is the one aspect of university culture unreservedly approved of by politicians, businessmen and the general public. Public universities must take special notice of the Pols, the state governors and legislators, along with the appointees thereof, who ultimately run the place, de juro. These touchy people require periodic jollying-up and, on dire occasions, fervent propitiation. The amorphous mass of Alums can also be a powerful, if unseen, force, though it's not easy to give a categorical description of what will antagonise or please them. Pols and Alums are the clans most likely to sympathise with a relatively new formation, the Dark Side, political and religious conservatives who have been organising recently to demand greater representation in Profland, a club that has welcomed very few of their prot?g?s heretofore. Dark Siders are characterised not only by their expressed loathing for the PC Mafia, but for their cynical habit of counting as PC anyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh. Oddly enough, however, they align with the PC Mafia on some crucial matters. There are certain texts they are obligated to deplore - JS Mill's On Liberty and The Origin of Species, for instance - that rank high on the PC shitlist as well. Though they are frantic to abjure the term, Dark Siders also strongly favour affirmative action for certain under-represented minorities - in this instance, free marketers, born-again Christians, Intelligent Design theorists and Bushmen in general. The last and, in some sense, most significant faction is the Ringmasters - that is to say, the administrators who try to keep the whole circus going. The most notable thing about this clan is that, in recent years, its traditional roots in Profland have withered. These functionaries - in American parlance usually called Presidents, Provosts and Deans, in descending order of majesty - have become a tribe unto themselves. Fewer and fewer, at least at the highest level, are primus inter pares professors raised to the seat of power from within the faculty (a practice much more common years ago). More and more of them are drawn from a distinct professional mandarinate, people who cut their ties to teaching and research fairly early in the game (if, indeed, they ever spent time in Profland), and who readily move from one institution to another as they climb the career ladder. Over the past decade or so, the tone of academic administration has changed considerably. It has become 'managerial' rather than strictly academic. Budgetary and financial matters predominate at the highest administrative level. Perhaps this has always been so, but today's preoccupation with money seems single-minded and intense to an unprecedented degree. This attitude is reflected in policy towards faculty and curriculum. Narrow or esoteric disciplines that draw few paying students are luxury items that have disappeared from many campuses. Increasingly, especially in technical areas, a professor is judged by his ability to support his own financial weight through research grants or even by fecundity in coming up with marketable inventions. The typical university now relies to an unprecedented extent on Academic Gypsies, along with Grad Student Helots, to handle teaching responsibilities. Regular faculty with tenure or serious prospects thereof form an ever-shrinking proportion of the teaching staff, simply because they cost so much in terms of pay and benefits. For fear of losing paying customers, schools cater more and more to the shallow tastes of the Undergraduate Eloi, providing courses that are long on entertainment value and generous in their grading standards. At most schools, the president is above all the fundraiser-in-chief, and endures or is cast aside depending on whether the revenue stream he generates is munificent or meager. Most schools now have elaborate fundraising machinery staffed by specialists in this field. Inevitably, institutional plans and ambitions are increasingly shaped by the enthusiasms of large donors. Additionally, at publicly supported institutions, presidents must continually dance attendance on Pols and the politically well-connected to ensure that appropriations are not choked off. Management through diversity In consequence of all this, universities must increasingly play to public opinion. The prominence of athletic programmes is one result. Another is the emphasis on 'diversity', though this policy has repeatedly turned into a public relations minefield. Most faculty and student supporters of diversity - in blunter terms, preferences accorded to certain racial and ethnic minorities - see their position as arising from the quest for social justice. Most administrators, however, see it as a way of buying social peace or at least deflecting nasty social conflict from the university's doorstep. Diversity policies play, obviously, to the liberal sentiments of most of the faculty, and to those of many students as well. But, under ideal circumstances, they play to a certain strain of conservative opinion, too. Despite the reputation of conservative activists and intellectuals as adamant opponents of affirmative action, racial preferences, quotas and the like, much of the business community, conservative or Republican in its general outlook, views affirmative action programmes and diversity goals as a way of mollifying the black and Latino populations. They help to ease the tension of day-to-day life in communities where different ethnicities continually interact. This is why anti-affirmative action politics has received only lukewarm support even in conservative states and cities. For pragmatic conservatives, social placidity is more important than ideological consistency. So it is no surprise that even somewhat conservative university administrators will advocate and defend their school's affirmative action programmes. Affirmative action is, from one point of view, a way of co-opting the brightest and most ambitious minority youth, bringing them to identify, in the long run, with conventional bourgeois values rather than oppositional doctrines. Conservatives are likewise content with speech codes, broad anti-harassment regulations and the like, on the theory that these will eliminate or dampen the flashpoints that set off militant protests and even violence. In fact, when these statutes are applied to some kinds of 'sexual harassment' cases - the current definition of sexual harassment is both broad and vague - it is hard to tell whether the ideology being served is radical feminism or the conservative prudery of traditional religion. But above all, administrators are fearful of rekindling the militant passions of the 1960s, to which nostalgic faculty are as susceptible as ardent young students. Race is the one issue that has the potential to set this off. Therefore, it is an issue that impels pragmatic rightists to find rationalisations for ignoring their individualistic principles. But this is only part of the long, unremitting balancing act that university administrations must perform. Like a music-hall juggler keeping a dozen plates spinning precariously on as many twirling sticks, an American university president, along with his subalterns, is continually on the run between one touchy faction and another, trying to keep them all functioning without smashing into one another's egos. It is not a task that is well suited to anyone obsessed with ideological or even intellectual consistency. There are too many Meccas to bow to at too many different points of the compass. Under the circumstances, it would be absurd to expect the leader of a school to personify the sense of scholarly mission and the thirst for knowledge that universities are supposed to embody. The academic who actually admits to having been inspired or encouraged by the eloquence, the philosophy or the deeds of his president must be the rarest creature on Earth. A president simply doesn't expect to be admired for incarnating the academic ethos. The best he can hope for is to be thought well of for his cleverness in bringing in donations and his prudence in keeping his nose out of things that don't concern him, which covers everything from the drill-sergeant methods of the overpaid football coach to the double-talk of the overpaid literary theorist. Enforced diffidence So where, then, do the values of the university repose? Where have they taken firm enough root to guide and inspire the thoughts and words of faculty and students? Profland, by and large, flatters itself that the ancient virtues flourish in its soil, that mercenary or hypocritical though the university may be in many respects, its professors, at least, incarnate these ideals. There may be a little truth to this; professors honestly dedicated to advancing knowledge and to nurturing students are really not all that rare. The trouble is, however, that Profland isn't really a community built on shared values and assumptions. It is, rather, a loose assemblage of Anchorites, most of them dedicated in their own way, but each functioning in isolation from the others, apart from such affinities as might exist among scholars in the same sub-specialty of the same discipline. If, by some strange chance, a student should honestly inquire what a university is really supposed to represent, what its core values are, what it offers him by way of a mode of thought and life, what it requires of him beyond classroom routine, there is no place for him to seek an answer. All he ever gets is an 'orientation' at the beginning of freshman year, which tells him where the library is, what the penalty for plagiarism is, and why he should be thrilled to be part of such a diverse community. There is no authority who can go beyond clich?s to point to actual practice or to other evidence of a genuinely shared ethos. The worst of it is that this deficiency is not a matter of institutional structure, nor of misplaced priorities, nor of temporary inattention. It arises from the hollowing out of Western culture as a whole. This a sententious, even grandiose, way of putting it, perhaps, but if we avoid thinking about the malaise of our larger society, across decades rather than years, I doubt we'll be able to plumb the morass into which American higher education - and, probably, the community of scholars throughout the world - has fallen. We not only lack guidelines and precepts to conduct us through the life of the mind, we lack the sense that such principles are even possible. The needed vocabulary hasn't vanished from our language, but it is sodden with irony, rotten from years of coarse abuse. Consider words like 'justice', 'objectivity', 'beauty', 'integrity', 'nobility', 'progress', 'honour', 'virtue', 'fairness' and 'righteousness': it's not only the postmodernists among us who reflexively snicker at these terms; all of us do so, automatically. To be asked to respond to any of them with a straight face as denoting an actual realm of human experience is like being touched up for a loan. You feel like you've been placed in the awkward position of having to play the sucker if you're to comply. The cultural demons lodged in all our psyches tell us that these words are the well-worn tools of an ancient con-game, that they are names of phantoms, weapons that the cynical wield to dominate the gullible. If ever we try to use them without a sneer, shame washes over us. This kind of resigned cynicism is not just a casual attribute of our culture. It is ingrained in the zeitgeist of our wounded and distempered civilisation. We have experienced a century marked not only by butchery on an inconceivable scale but by the chilling fact that a good deal of that butchery emerged from the triumphs of what first looked to be forces of redemption. There are words we can't use without sneer quotes because their degradation is our way of burying the dead hopes they once reflected. Therefore, if I tell you that a university is, above all, an institution for the preservation and extension of learning and for its dissemination to the emerging generation, for the winnowing of truth from falsehood and imposture, for the conservation of the highest values our civilisation can conceive, for the emulation, insofar as we are capable, of the finest and deepest minds our civilisation has produced, for the hoarding and protection of what must survive of our civilisation even after all the dross has fallen away; if I tell you all this without satiric intent, and with the purpose of describing an ideal that is at least approximable if not perfectly realisable, then I will have committed an enormous gaffe, by the standards that our culture inflicts on us all. I will have tried to sell you a bill of goods, swamp real-estate, pump-and-dump stock, the Brooklyn Bridge. We cannot deal with the concept I have just formulated as if it really meant something because the cultural confidence to do so has utterly atrophied. We live in an era of enforced diffidence which makes it positively painful to assert that there are better ideas and worse, better minds and worse, superior and inferior ways of knowing, differences between the enduring and the ephemeral, ways of viewing the world worth preserving and along with those worth discarding. We have been conditioned to believe that to credit such distinctions, or at least to claim special value for particular ideas, minds and ways of knowing, is hopelessly parochial, culturally arrogant, and ultimately oppressive. There is good reason to remain aware of the dangers of cultural chauvinism, but the point is to cleanse our standards of judgment of narrow and local prejudices, not to abandon the very notion of standards of judgment. Nobody can sincerely propound a vision of what a university is supposed to be, of what actual universities should strive to be, because it is so hard to assemble that vision, or even to contemplate its components, without blushing at one's lapse into unsophistication. Neither pride nor aspiration can really hold a university community together because our culture instructs us to reject the kind of solidarity that enables collective pride and aspiration. We are content to let the university define itself in terms of the aggregation of functions the larger community and the economy wish it to perform: babysitting our youth in their protracted adolescence, staging gladiatorial exhibitions for TV, conducting product research for chip makers and drug makers, sending forth a reliable supply of doctors and lawyers, trying to ameliorate America's racial mess (albeit in a half-assed way), and delving into arcane knowledge here and there just in case the stuff is ever really needed. The task of forging a definition based on deep respect for verities, wisdom and genius (hear how strangely those words ring!), promulgating it, assembling a consensus around it, and functioning in accordance with its values - that's something for which we utterly lack the confidence, the sense of a painful but deservedly abiding past, of an uncertain but still hopeful future. And so our American institutions of higher learning drift along, fat, dumb and happy, or lean, dumb and anxious, according to the size of their endowment. 'Total Depravity', as the sociologist Thorstein Veblen labeled it a century ago - but he didn't know the half. It is foreordained that episodes of extreme silliness shall burst forth therein from time to time. The cult of 'cultural competence' is now beginning to afflict universities because they lack the immune system necessary to suppress such inane crap before it gets a foothold. It is distinctly possible that the even more inane crap called Intelligent Design theory might also afflict them before too long, especially if the power of the PC Mafia starts to slip while that of the Dark Side waxes. Recurrent inanity, in one form or another, seems to be the fate of universities as now constituted. At the risk of sounding nostalgic for what never was, I say that it needn't have been thus. But avoiding this abyss would have required prescience and courage that is quite rare in individuals, let alone in institutions. Norman Levitt is Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is the co-author (with PR Gross) of Higher Superstition From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:50:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:50:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] IDSA: Wall Street Methods Used to Predict Flu Outbreaks Message-ID: IDSA: Wall Street Methods Used to Predict Flu Outbreaks http://www.medpagetoday.com/tbprint.cfm?tbid=1890 By Rabiya Tuma, Ph.D. , MedPage Today Staff Writer SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7 - Using Wall Street traders' techniques, healthcare workers predicted flu outbreaks two weeks before the actual events, according to a pilot study. The CDC tracks influenza data but lacks a method of predicting future trends, the researchers reported here. In the business world, so-called "prediction markets" have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of a variety of chance events, including political elections, the number of tickets sold on the day a movie opens, and equipment sales. To test whether such market methods would be useful for prediction of infectious diseases, researchers at the University of Iowa recruited 60 healthcare workers from their state and organized a stock-market scenario. They described their methods and results at a meeting here of the Infectious Disease Society of America. All the "traders" were given 100 flu dollars at the start and were asked to buy and sell "stock" according to how much influenza activity they thought would occur in a given future week. The goal was to try to predict the level of an outbreak ultimately recorded by the CDC, which is reported by a five-stage color code. If they saw hints of flu in their patients, for example, they might want to sell any shares they owned that predicted a low-level week in the near future and buy stocks that predicted many cases. With 52 traders actively participating on the website, market predictions were able to hit the right color for the state of Iowa 80% of the time, two to three weeks ahead of the actual cases. That means they were three to four weeks ahead of the CDC's announcement of the actual data, which comes out the week following the outbreak week in question. "Ninety-percent of the time, the market was able to get within one color four weeks ahead of the event," said Forrest D. Nelson, Ph.D., an economist at the university who has developed prediction markets and is a member of the research team. At the end of the study, the flu dollars were converted into U.S. dollars, and each participant won a grant of that amount. The most successful trader's grant was worth $213. "There is currently no method for forecasting influenza activity, but the information needed is out there," said Philip M. Polgreen, M.D., the infectious disease specialist who led the study. "But it's spread out." The prediction market aggregates individual experiences into collectively useful data, he added. Two weeks of advance warning about an influenza outbreak would permit significant preparation, including immunization of the most vulnerable population, making sure pharmacies have adequate antivirals in stock, and increasing staffing at hospitals. The team plans to expand the "market" to include 100 traders in Iowa this year, and then to cover the U.S. within a year after that. It is not yet clear how many traders will be needed to cover the whole country. "We hope to be posting prediction data next year," Dr. Polgreen said. The researchers also plan to open a "strain market" to predict the prevalence of individual flu strains. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 19 01:50:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:50:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: (Lous Andreas-Salome) A New Translation Shows There's More to a Muse Than Relationships With Famous Men Message-ID: A New Translation Shows There's More to a Muse Than Relationships With Famous Men The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.21 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i09/09a01402.htm VERBATIM By RICHARD BYRNE Raleigh G. Whitinger, professor of German at the University of Alberta Lou Andreas-Salom? is best known for the company she kept: Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud. But Mr. Whitinger argues that Andreas-Salom?'s prominent roles as muse, lover, and collaborator overshadowed her own creative and critical work, much of it concerned with feminism and its discontents. His new translation of a cycle of novellas by Andreas-Salom?, The Human Family: Stories (University of Nebraska Press), opens a door into this oft-neglected aspect of her life. Q. Why have Andreas-Salom?'s own writings been ignored by many scholars? A. She became known mainly due to her relationships to important men. As a result of that ... the interest in her writings more or less fell under the table. First of all, there is the whole sensation of it. People in the more male-centered intellectual circles find it to be a rather sensational sequence of relationships and affairs, and focus merely on that. That brought with it among many male critics, on the one hand, a deprecatory attitude. She was perceived as an intellectual groupie. In other males, it brought more of a possessive, desirous interest. A sort of idea of captivation. It's surprising, though, that her fictional work -- her stories, her writing -- was positively received among the general reading public at the time. Until the First World War, she was included in and still discussed in major comprehensive histories of literature of the time and seemed to fall out after that. Q. What is the gradual excavation of her literary works adding to our knowledge of Andreas-Salom? and her intellectual milieu? A. There is greater interest in her writings, whether they are critical writings like her book on Ibsen, or some of theoretical writings on early feminism. ... In addition to those, the rediscovery of her fiction has given us an array of her documents that describe the nature of the 1890s second wave of the women's liberation movement -- some of the complexities of it, of course, but also the general thrust of it. ... It's adding to our historical picture to see how the women's movement progressed and how it was mirrored in fiction. Q. Do we know what some of the intellectual figures of her time thought about her work? A. I was surprised to find that her book on Nietzsche was received at the time (1894) by male critics as a psychological masterpiece. ... I have the distinct feeling that her works were known by and alluded to, even, by some of the big guns: Thomas Mann, and later, Robert Musil. I detect distinct echoes. They both mention her. Especially Thomas Mann ... There are aspects of Tonio Kr?ger, that canonical novella that everybody reads in German class, that, to me, distinctly echo a Andreas-Salom? story. From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 19 02:45:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 19:45:51 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] A Very Supreme Court Message-ID: <23868179.1129689951596.JavaMail.root@mswamui-thinleaf.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: VerySupreme.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 118654 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:07:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:07:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bookslut: The Singing Neanderthal Message-ID: I got a new computer, so I may be sending things I already sent before. Please be patient. The Singing Neanderthal http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_10_006832.php October 2005 [9]Barbara J. King The Singing Neanderthal Music moves the human body (our feet tap, our bodies sway) and the human heart (our emotions beat in time to a song's pulse). Every child in every society creates music, defined to include song and dance: it's a fundamental activity of Homo sapiens. And it's a mystery too, full of questions in major and minor keys. Major: Why and when did music evolve? Why is music of all kinds capable of stirring our emotions, transporting us into our past after a few chords? Minor, but not unrelated: Why some days, rifling through my CDs, do I pass Vivaldi, Satie, even Springsteen, in a craving for (wait for it....) Hall and Oates? Yes, some fortunate persons' memories are triggered by the taste of madeleines, whereas others' get saddled with Hall and Oates songs. Just one snippet -- She's deadly man, and she could really rip your world apart/ Mind over matter/ The beauty is there but a beast is in the heart -- transports me two decades back in time and halfway across the country, ancient feelings bestirred. Given its emotional power, it's odd to discover that music's evolutionary history has been neglected. Theories about the origins of technology and language crowd anthropologists' shelves, but most evolutionists fall silent about music. In The Singing Neanderthal: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, British archaeologist Steven Mithen sets out to redress this gap. On page five, Mithen commands attention by announcing a dual intention to take on academic superstar Steve Pinker's (The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct) views on the evolution of music and to atone for his own "embarrassing" past neglect of music (The Prehistory of the Mind). I was hooked; Pinker-worthy, non-ego-driven scientists don't grow on trees. Happily, this initial promise of provocation is fulfilled, for Mithen offers a fascinating argument about the evolutionary relationship between music and language. To be precise, it is provocative, fascinating and, I think, quite wrong on multiple points. But how much fun is it, really, to curl up with a book that lulls you into placid agreement? Somewhat convoluted, Mithen's argument depends on three key moves. First, he starkly splits apart language and music: language tells us about the world, music manipulates our emotions. Second, he proposes a single evolutionary precursor to both language and music. This is the communication system he calls "Hmmmm" for holistic, multi-modal, manipulative, and musical: "Its essence would have been a large number of holistic utterances, each functioning as a complete message in itself rather than as words that could be combined to generate new meanings." Though elements of Hmmmm are present in the communication of modern day apes (and thus, probably, our apelike ancestors), this system really took off once bipedalism evolved in the human lineage. Walking on two legs changed much in our ancestors' anatomy and behavior, and promoted the use of Hmmmm in specific ways. Mithen liberally credits linguist Alison Wray, who wrote that a holistic prehistoric utterance such as "tebima" could have a meaning along the lines of "he gave it to her." Mithen himself thinks that such holism, supplemented by varying pitch, melody, loudness, repetition, rhythm, and gesture, all adding shades of meaning, would have sufficed for millions of years as our ancestors communicated with each other on the African savanna. Then -- and this is key move number three -- late in evolutionary history, as pressures for complex social living increased, our own true, compositional language emerged from Hmmmm. Sentences were now made up of words, which in turn were comprised of infinitely-recombinable segments. Once this transition was completed, what was left of Hmmmm? Primarily, music. No longer needed for daily Hmmmm communication, music developed for others uses, first and foremost in the supernatural realm: "With the emergence of religious belief, music became the principal means of communicating with the gods." Mithen's argument has a lot going for it. First, it recognizes gradual evolution of both language and music. As anthropologists find out more and more about the sophisticated language- and culture-related behavior of African apes, our closest living relatives, we realize that the evolutionary platform represented by our ancient ancestors was probably fairly sophisticated too. Indeed, Mithen might be surprised to know that two bonobo apes living in an enriched environment are decidedly musical. In the new book Kanzi's Primal Language, we learn that "The bonobos listen to music every night and enjoy the sound of musical instruments. Kanzi plays the drums and the xylophone, and Panbanisha the synthesizer and the harmonica. It might not satisfy a music teacher, but they enjoy it just as children enjoy creating sounds with musical instruments." Second, because he sees Hmmmm as manipulative, Mithen isn't afraid to ascribe emotions to prehistoric humans. As the book's title hints, he is most enthralled with the role of Hmmmm in the lives of Neanderthals, and he rescues these creatures from a hackneyed caveman image: "They were `singing Neanderthals' -- although their songs lacked any words -- and were also intensely emotional beings: happy Neanderthals, sad Neanderthals, angry Neanderthals, disgusted Neanderthals, envious Neanderthals, guilty Neanderthals, grief-stricken Neanderthals, and Neanderthals in love." Sometimes Mithen strays into bizarre territory, as when he claims (not in quite these words, admittedly) that ancestral females got most hot and bothered by those males able to make the most symmetrical hand-axe tools (because symmetry is favored in nature). And he persists in referring to the australopithecines, an important kind of early ancestor, as "partially bipedal." By September's end, no student in my Intro-to-Anthro class will make this mistake; that australopithecines retained adaptations for tree-climbing and walked differently than we do doesn't alter the fact that they were bipedal -- no qualifiers -- before four million years ago. Most worrying, though, is Mithen's penchant for dichotomy when what's needed is nuance. Only music, but not language, is a medium for participatory interaction and collective engagement? Read some cutting-edge social linguistics -- or listen in as a group of friends creates emotional resonance with each other as they discuss a favorite book. Apes (and thus early ancestors), compared to modern humans, are fairly clueless about resolving "their social dilemmas over whom to trust and whom to exploit"? Spend a day watching a group of gesturing chimpanzees or gorillas sometime. No creatures before Homo sapiens needed compositional language, since they had only quotidian stuff to talk about, nothing too novel or exciting? Try to square this supposition with our ancestors' trekking out of Africa to new lands over a million years ago, or burying their loved ones in emotion- laced ritual at 90,000 years ago. In the main, though, Mithen succeeds in his goals. His central thesis is far more convincing than Pinker's dismissal of music as a mere byproduct of language, with no evolutionary value in itself. So, read Mithen; when you next visit an anthropology museum, or watch a documentary on human evolution, your mind's eye will see the Neanderthals dancing in rhythm. And when you fire up your IPOD to listen to Bach or Bjork-- or Hall and Oates--you may hear in your favorite songs the faint and haunting echoes of our singing ancestors. -- Barbara J. King is an anthropologist and author at the College of William and Mary. References 9. http://www.bookslut.com/authors.php?author=Barbara%20J.%20King 10. http://www.bookslut.com/features.php 11. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0297643177/artandlies-20 12. http://www.bookslut.com/features.php From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:08:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:08:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WkStd: The Culture of Celebrity Message-ID: The Culture of Celebrity http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=6187&R=C746320F0 [I have not read this article but pass it along, as it may be of intererst. This just takes me a few seconds. If it's really good, let me know. I'm trying to cut back on my reading.] Let us now praise famous airheads. by Joseph Epstein 10/17/2005, Volume 011, Issue 05 CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it's spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary American life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity. The word "culture" no longer, I suspect, stands in most people's minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings. An icon, as we shall see, doesn't stay a small picture of a religious personage but usually turns out nowadays to be someone with spectacular grosses. "The language," as Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress Louise Colet how much he loved her, "is inept." Today, when people glibly refer to "the corporate culture," "the culture of poverty," "the culture of journalism," "the culture of the intelligence community"--and "community" has, of course, itself become another of those hopelessly baggy-pants words, so that one hears talk even of "the homeless community"--what I think is meant by "culture" is the general emotional atmosphere and institutional character surrounding the word to which "culture" is attached. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breed selfishness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty, hopelessness and despair; the culture of journalism, a taste for the sensational combined with a short attention span; the culture of the intelligence community, covering-one's-own-behind viperishness; and so on. Culture used in this way is also brought in to explain unpleasant or at least dreary behavior. "The culture of NASA has to be changed," is a sample of its current usage. The comedian Flip Wilson, after saying something outrageous, would revert to the refrain line, "The debbil made me do it." So, today, when admitting to unethical or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say, "The culture made me do it." As for "celebrity," the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but rather closer to the one that Daniel Boorstin gave in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream: "The celebrity," Boorstin wrote, "is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness," which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as "a celebrity is someone famous for being famous." The other standard quotation on this subject is Andy Warhol's "In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," which also frequently turns up in an improved misquotation as "everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame." But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn't quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their well-knownness. What do a couple named Sid and Mercedes Bass do, except appear in bold-face in the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section and other such venues (as we now call them) of equally shimmering insignificance, often standing next to Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, also well-known for being well-known? Many moons ago, journalists used to refer to royalty as "face cards"; today celebrities are perhaps best thought of as bold faces, for as such do their names often appear in the press (and in a New York Times column with that very name, Bold Face). The distinction between celebrity and fame is one most dictionaries tend to fudge. I suspect everyone has, or prefers to make, his own. The one I like derives not from Aristotle, who didn't have to trouble with celebrities, but from the career of Ted Williams. A sportswriter once said that he, Williams, wished to be famous but had no interest in being a celebrity. What Ted Williams wanted to be famous for was his hitting. He wanted everyone who cared about baseball to know that he was--as he believed and may well have been--the greatest pure hitter who ever lived. What he didn't want to do was to take on any of the effort off the baseball field involved in making this known. As an active player, Williams gave no interviews, signed no baseballs or photographs, chose not to be obliging in any way to journalists or fans. A rebarbative character, not to mention often a slightly menacing s.o.b., Williams, if you had asked him, would have said that it was enough that he was the last man to hit .400; he did it on the field, and therefore didn't have to sell himself off the field. As for his duty to his fans, he didn't see that he had any. Whether Ted Williams was right or wrong to feel as he did is of less interest than the distinction his example provides, which suggests that fame is something one earns--through talent or achievement of one kind or another--while celebrity is something one cultivates or, possibly, has thrust upon one. The two are not, of course, entirely exclusive. One can be immensely talented and full of achievement and yet wish to broadcast one's fame further through the careful cultivation of celebrity; and one can have the thinnest of achievements and be talentless and yet be made to seem otherwise through the mechanics and dynamics of celebrity-creation, in our day a whole mini-(or maybe not so mini) industry of its own. Or, another possibility, one can become a celebrity with scarcely any pretense to talent or achievement whatsoever. Much modern celebrity seems the result of careful promotion or great good luck or something besides talent and achievement: Mr. Donald Trump, Ms. Paris Hilton, Mr. Regis Philbin, take a bow. The ultimate celebrity of our time may have been John F. Kennedy Jr., notable only for being his parents' very handsome son--both his birth and good looks factors beyond his control--and, alas, known for nothing else whatsoever now, except for the sad, dying-young-Adonis end to his life. Fame, then, at least as I prefer to think of it, is based on true achievement; celebrity on the broadcasting of that achievement, or the inventing of something that, if not scrutinized too closely, might pass for achievement. Celebrity suggests ephemerality, while fame has a chance of lasting, a shot at reaching the happy shores of posterity. Oliver Goldsmith, in his poem "The Deserted Village," refers to "good fame," which implies that there is also a bad or false fame. Bad fame is sometimes thought to be fame in the present, or fame on earth, while good fame is that bestowed by posterity--those happy shores again. (Which doesn't eliminate the desire of most of us, at least nowadays, to have our fame here and hereafter, too.) Not false but wretched fame is covered by the word "infamy"--"Infamy, infamy, infamy," remarked the English wit Frank Muir, "they all have it in for me"--while the lower, or pejorative, order of celebrity is covered by the word "notoriety," also frequently misused to mean noteworthiness. Leo Braudy's magnificent book on the history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, illustrates how the means of broadcasting fame have changed over the centuries: from having one's head engraved on coins, to purchasing statuary of oneself, to (for the really high rollers--Alexander the Great, the Caesar boys) naming cities or even months after oneself, to commissioning painted portraits, to writing books or having books written about one, and so on into our day of the publicity or press agent, the media blitz, the public relations expert, and the egomaniacal blogger. One of the most successful of public-relations experts, Ben Sonnenberg Sr., used to say that he saw it as his job to construct very high pedestals for very small men. Which leads one to a very proper suspicion of celebrity. As George Orwell said about saints, so it seems only sensible to say about celebrities: They should all be judged guilty until proven innocent. Guilty of what, precisely? I'd say of the fraudulence (however minor) of inflating their brilliance, accomplishments, worth, of passing themselves off as something they aren't, or at least are not quite. If fraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper is brought off. IS THE CURRENT HEIGHTENED INTEREST in the celebrated sufficient to form a culture--a culture of a kind worthy of study? The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber defined culture, in part, as embodying "values which may be formulated (overtly as mores) or felt (implicitly as in folkways) by the society carrying the culture, and which it is part of the business of the anthropologist to characterize and define." What are the values of celebrity culture? They are the values, almost exclusively, of publicity. Did they spell one's name right? What was the size and composition of the audience? Did you check the receipts? Was the timing right? Publicity is concerned solely with effects and does not investigate causes or intrinsic value too closely. For example, a few years ago a book of mine called Snobbery: The American Version received what I thought was a too greatly mixed review in the New York Times Book Review. I remarked on my disappointment to the publicity man at my publisher's, who promptly told me not to worry: It was a full-page review, on page 11, right-hand side. That, he said, "is very good real estate," which was quite as important as, perhaps more important than, the reviewer's actual words and final judgment. Better to be tepidly considered on page 11 than extravagantly praised on page 27, left-hand side. Real estate, man, it's the name of the game. We must have new names, Marcel Proust presciently noted--in fashion, in medicine, in art, there must always be new names. It's a very smart remark, and the fields Proust chose seem smart, too, at least for his time. (Now there must also be new names, at a minimum, among movie stars and athletes and politicians.) Implicit in Proust's remark is the notion that if the names don't really exist, if the quality isn't there to sustain them, it doesn't matter; new names we shall have in any case. And every sophisticated society somehow, more or less implicitly, contrives to supply them. I happen to think that we haven't had a major poet writing in English since perhaps the death of W.H. Auden or, to lower the bar a little, Philip Larkin. But new names are put forth nevertheless--high among them in recent years has been that of Seamus Heaney--because, after all, what kind of a time could we be living in if we didn't have a major poet? And besides there are all those prizes that, year after year, must be given out, even if so many of the recipients don't seem quite worthy of them. Considered as a culture, celebrity does have its institutions. We now have an elaborate celebrity-creating machinery well in place--all those short-attention-span television shows (Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous); all those magazines (beginning with People and far from ending with the National Enquirer). We have high-priced celebrity-mongers--Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Oprah--who not only live off others' celebrity but also, through their publicity-making power, confer it and have in time become very considerable celebrities each in his or her own right. Without the taste for celebrity, they would have to close down the whole Style section of every newspaper in the country. Then there is the celebrity profile (in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly; these are nowadays usually orchestrated by a press agent, with all touchy questions declared out-of-bounds), or the television talk-show interview with a star, which is beyond parody. Well, almost beyond: Martin Short in his parody of a talk-show host remarked to the actor Kiefer Sutherland, "You're Canadian, aren't you? What's that all about?" Yet we still seem never to have enough celebrities, so we drag in so-called "It Girls" (Paris Hilton, Cindy Crawford, other supermodels), tired television hacks (Regis Philbin, Ed McMahon), back-achingly boring but somehow sacrosanct news anchors (Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw). Toss in what I think of as the lower-class punditi, who await calls from various television news and chat shows to demonstrate their locked-in political views and meager expertise on major and cable stations alike: Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Mark Shields, Robert Novak, Michael Beschloss, and the rest. Ah, if only Lenny Bruce were alive today, he could do a scorchingly cruel bit about Dr. Joyce Brothers sitting by the phone wondering why Jerry Springer never calls. MANY OF OUR CURRENT-DAY CELEBRITIES float upon "hype," which is really a publicist's gas used to pump up and set aloft something that doesn't really quite exist. Hype has also given us a new breakdown, or hierarchical categorization, of celebrities. Until twenty-five or so years ago great celebrities were called "stars," a term first used in the movies and entertainment and then taken up by sports, politics, and other fields. Stars proving a bit drab, "super-stars" were called in to play, this term beginning in sports but fairly quickly branching outward. Apparently too many superstars were about, so the trope was switched from astronomy to religion, and we now have "icons." All this takes Proust's original observation a step further: the need for new names to call the new names. This new ranking--stars, superstars, icons--helps us believe that we live in interesting times. One of the things celebrities do for us is suggest that in their lives they are fulfilling our fantasies. Modern celebrities, along with their fame, tend to be wealthy or, if not themselves beautiful, able to acquire beautiful lovers. Their celebrity makes them, in the view of many, worthy of worship. "So long as man remains free," Dostoyevsky writes in the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov, "he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship." If contemporary celebrities are the best thing on offer as living gods for us to worship, this is not good news. But the worshipping of celebrities by the public tends to be thin, and not uncommonly it is nicely mixed with loathing. We also, after all, at least partially, like to see our celebrities as frail, ready at all times to crash and burn. Cary Grant once warned the then-young director Peter Bogdanovich, who was at the time living with Cybill Sheppard, to stop telling people he was in love. "And above all," Grant warned, "stop telling them you're happy." When Bogdanovich asked why, Cary Grant answered, "Because they're not in love and they're not happy. . . . Just remember, Peter, people do not like beautiful people." Grant's assertion is borne out by our grocery press, the National Enquirer, the Star, the Globe, and other variants of the English gutter press. All these tabloids could as easily travel under the generic title of the National Schadenfreude, for more than half the stories they contain come under the category of "See How the Mighty Have Fallen": Oh, my, I see where that bright young television sitcom star, on a drug binge again, had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance! To think that the handsome movie star has been cheating on his wife all these years--snakes loose in the Garden of Eden, evidently! Did you note that the powerful senator's drinking has caused him to embarrass himself yet again in public? I see where that immensely successful Hollywood couple turn out to have had a child who died of anorexia! Who'd've thought? How pleasing to learn that our own simpler, less moneyed, unglamorous lives are, in the end, much to be preferred to those of these beautiful, rich, and powerful people, whose vast publicity has diverted us for so long and whose fall proves even more diverting now. "As would become a lifelong habit for most of us," Thomas McGuane writes in a recent short story in the New Yorker called "Ice," "we longed to witness spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek." Along with trying to avoid falling victim to schadenfreude, celebrities, if they are clever, do well to regulate the amount of publicity they allow to cluster around them. And not celebrities alone. Edith Wharton, having published too many stories and essays in a great single rush in various magazines during a concentrated period, feared, as she put it, the danger of becoming "a magazine bore." Celebrities, in the same way, are in danger of becoming publicity bores, though few among them seem to sense it. Because of improperly rationed publicity, along with a substantial helping of self-importance, the comedian Bill Cosby will never again be funny. The actress Elizabeth McGovern said of Sean Penn that he "is brilliant, brilliant at being the kind of reluctant celebrity." At the level of high culture, Saul Bellow used to work this bit quite well on the literary front, making every interview (and there have been hundreds of them) feel as if given only with the greatest reluctance, if not under actual duress. Others are brilliant at regulating their publicity. Johnny Carson was very intelligent about carefully husbanding his celebrity, choosing not to come out of retirement, except at exactly the right time or when the perfect occasion presented itself. Apparently it never did. Given the universally generous obituary tributes he received, dying now looks, for him, to have been an excellent career move. Careful readers will have noticed that I referred above to "the actress Elizabeth McGovern" and felt no need to write anything before or after the name Sean Penn. True celebrities need nothing said of them in apposition, fore or aft. The greatest celebrities are those who don't even require their full names mentioned: Marilyn, Johnny, Liz, Liza, Oprah, Michael (could be Jordan or Jackson--context usually clears this up fairly quickly), Kobe, Martha (Stewart, not Washington), Britney, Shaq, J-Lo, Frank (Sinatra, not Perdue), O.J., and, with the quickest recognition and shortest name of all--trumpets here, please--W. ONE HAS THE IMPRESSION that being a celebrity was easier at any earlier time than it is now, when celebrity-creating institutions, from paparazzi to gutter-press expos?s to television talk-shows, weren't as intense, as full-court press, as they are today. In the Times Literary Supplement, a reviewer of a biography of Margot Fonteyn noted that Miss Fonteyn "was a star from a more respectful age of celebrity, when keeping one's distance was still possible." My own candidate for the perfect celebrity in the twentieth century would be No?l Coward, a man in whom talent combined with elegance to give off the glow of glamour--and also a man who would have known how to fend off anyone wishing to investigate his private life. Today, instead of elegant celebrities, we have celebrity criminal trials: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, Winona Ryder, and O.J. Simpson. Schadenfreude is in the saddle again. American society in the twenty-first century, received opinion has it, values only two things: money and celebrity. Whether or not this is true, vast quantities of money, we know, will buy celebrity. The very rich--John D. Rockefeller and powerful people of his era--used to pay press agents to keep their names out of the papers. But today one of the things money buys is a place at the table beside the celebrated, with the celebrities generally delighted to accommodate, there to share some of the glaring light. An example is Mort Zuckerman, who made an early fortune in real estate, has bought magazines and newspapers, and is now himself among the punditi, offering his largely unexceptional political views on the McLaughlin Group and other television chat shows. Which is merely another way of saying that, whether or not celebrity in and of itself constitutes a culture, it has certainly penetrated and permeated much of American culture generally. Such has been the reach of celebrity culture in our time that it has long ago entered into academic life. The celebrity professor has been on the scene for more than three decades. As long ago as 1962, in fact, I recall hearing that Oscar Cargill, in those days a name of some note in the English Department of NYU, had tried to lure the then-young Robert Brustein, a professor of theater and the drama critic for the New Republic, away from Columbia. Cargill had said to Brustein, "I'm not going to bulls--t you, Bob, we're looking for a star, and you're it." Brustein apparently wasn't looking to be placed in a new constellation, and remained at Columbia, at least for a while longer, before moving on to Yale and thence to Harvard. The academic star, who is really the academic celebrity, is now a fairly common figure in what the world, that ignorant ninny, reckons the Great American Universities. Richard Rorty is such a star; so is Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who as "Skip" even has some celebrity nickname-recognition); and, at a slightly lower level, there are Marjorie Garber, Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and perhaps now Stephen Greenblatt. Stanley Fish doesn't even seem to mind that much of his celebrity is owed to his being portrayed in novels by David Lodge as an indefatigable, grubby little operator (though Lodge claims to admire Fish's happy vulgarity). Professors Garber and Sedgwick seem to have acquired their celebrity through the outrageousness of the topics they've chosen to write about. By measure of pure celebrity, Cornel West is, at the moment, the star of all academic stars, a man called by Newsweek "an eloquent prophet with attitude." (A bit difficult, I think, to imagine Newsweek or any other publication writing something similar of Lionel Trilling, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, or John Hope Franklin.) He records rap CDs and appears at benefits with movie stars and famous athletes. When the president of Harvard spoke critically to West about his work not constituting serious scholarship (as if that had anything to do with anything), it made front-page news in the New York Times. When West left Harvard in indignation, he was instantly welcomed by Princeton. If West had been a few kilowatts more the celebrity than he is, he might have been able to arrange for the firing of the president of the university, the way certain superstars in the National Basketball Association--Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan--were able, if it pleased them, to have their coaches fired. Genuine scholarship, power of ratiocination glowing brightly in the classroom, is distinctly not what makes an academic celebrity or, if you prefer, superstar. What makes an academic celebrity, for the most part, is exposure, which is ultimately publicity. Exposure can mean appearing in the right extra-academic magazines or journals: the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly; Harper's and the New Republic possibly qualify, as do occasional cameo performances on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Having one's face pop up on the right television and radio programs--PBS and NPR certainly, and enough of the right kinds of appearances on C-SPAN--does not hurt. A commercially successful, much-discussed book helps hugely. So does strong public alignment with the correct political causes. Harvey Mansfield, the political philosopher at Harvard, is a secondary academic celebrity of sorts, but not much in demand, owing to his conservatism; Shelby Steele, a black professor of English who has been critical of various aspects of African-American politics, was always overlooked during the days when universities knocked themselves out to get black professors. Both men have been judged politically incorrect. The underlying and overarching point is, to become an academic celebrity you have to promote yourself outside the academy, but in careful and subtle ways. ONE MIGHT ONCE HAVE ASSUMED that the culture of celebrity was chiefly about show business and the outer edges of the arts, occasionally touching on the academy (there cannot be more than twenty or so academic superstars). But it has also much altered intellectual life generally. The past ten years or so have seen the advent of the "public intellectual." There are good reasons to feel uncomfortable with that adjective "public," which drains away much of the traditional meaning of intellectual. An intellectual is someone who is excited by and lives off and in ideas. An intellectual has traditionally been a person unaffiliated, which is to say someone unbeholden to anything but the power of his or her ideas. Intellectuals used to be freelance, until fifty or so years ago, when jobs in the universities and in journalism began to open up to some among them. Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art for art's sake, the so-called public intellectual of our day is usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting policy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn't necessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastered a style, a jargon, and a maven's authoritative tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line. But even when the public intellectual isn't purely tied to the news, or isn't thoroughly political, what he or she really is, or ought to be called, is a "publicity intellectual." In Richard A. Posner's interesting book Public Intellectuals, intellectuals are in one place ranked by the number of media mentions they or their work have garnered, which, if I am correct about publicity being at the heart of the enterprise of the public intellectual, may be crude but is not foolish. Not knowledge, it turns out, but publicity is power. The most celebrated intellectuals of our day have been those most skillful at gaining publicity for their writing and their pronouncements. Take, as a case very much in point, Susan Sontag. When Susan Sontag died at the end of last year, her obituary was front-page news in the New York Times, and on the inside of the paper it ran to a full page with five photographs, most of them carefully posed--a variety, it does not seem unfair to call it, of intellectual cheesecake. Will the current prime ministers of England and France when they peg out receive equal space or pictorial coverage? Unlikely, I think. Why did Ms. Sontag, who was, let it be said, in many ways the pure type of the old intellectual--unattached to any institution, earning her living (apart from MacArthur Foundation and other grants) entirely from her ideas as she put them in writing--why did she attract the attention she did? I don't believe Susan Sontag's celebrity finally had much to do with the power or cogency of her ideas. Her most noteworthy idea was not so much an idea at all but a description of a style, a kind of reverse or anti-style, that went by the name of Camp and that was gay in its impulse. Might it have been her politics? Yes, politics had a lot to do with it, even though when she expressed herself on political subjects, she frequently got things mightily askew: During the Vietnam war she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history." As late as the 1980s, much too late for anyone in the know, she called communism "fascism with a friendly face" (what do you suppose she found so friendly about it?). To cheer up the besieged people of Sarajevo, she brought them a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She announced in the New Yorker that the killing of 3,000 innocent people on 9/11 was an act that America had brought on itself. As for the writing that originally brought her celebrity, she later came to apologize for Against Interpretation, her most influential single book. I do not know any people who claim to have derived keen pleasure from her fiction. If all this is roughly so, why, then, do you suppose that Susan Sontag was easily the single most celebrated--the greatest celebrity--intellectual of our time? With the ordinary female professor's face and body, I don't think Ms. Sontag would quite have achieved the same celebrity. Her attractiveness as a young woman had a great deal to do with the extent of her celebrity; and she and her publisher took that (early) physical attractiveness all the way out. From reading Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, one gets a sense of how carefully and relentlessly she was promoted by her publisher, Roger Straus. I do not mean to say that Sontag was unintelligent, or talentless, but Straus, through having her always dramatically photographed, by sending angry letters to the editors of journals where she was ill-reviewed, by bringing out her books with the most careful accompanying orchestration, promoted this often difficult and unrewarding writer into something close to a household name with a face that was ready, so to say, to be Warholed. That Sontag spent her last years with Annie Leibowitz, herself the most successful magazine photographer of our day, seems somehow the most natural thing in the world. Even in the realm of the intellect, celebrities are not born but made, usually very carefully made--as was, indubitably, the celebrity of Susan Sontag. ONE OF THE MAJOR THEMES in Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown is the fame and celebrity of artists, and above all writers. To sketch in a few bare strokes the richly complex story Braudy tells, writers went from serving power (in Rome) to serving God (in early Christendom) to serving patrons (in the eighteenth century) to serving themselves, with a careful eye cocked toward both the contemporary public and posterity (under Romanticism), to serving mammon, to a state of interesting confusion, which is where we are today, with celebrity affecting literature in more and more significant ways. Writers are supposed to be aristocrats of the spirit, not promoters, hustlers, salesmen for their own work. Securing a larger audience for their work was not thought to be their problem. "Fit audience, though few," in John Milton's phrase, was all right, so long as the few were the most artistically alert, or aesthetically fittest. Picture Lord Byron, Count Tolstoy, or Charles Baudelaire at a lectern at Barnes & Noble, C-SPAN camera turned on, flogging (wonderful word!) his own most recent books. Not possible! Some superior writers have been very careful caretakers of their careers. In a letter to one of his philosophy professors at Harvard, T.S. Eliot wrote that there were two ways to achieve literary celebrity in London: One was to appear often in a variety of publications; the other to appear seldom but always to make certain to dazzle when one did. Eliot, of course, chose the latter, and it worked smashingly. But he was still counting on gaining his reputation through his actual writing. Now good work alone doesn't quite seem to make it; the publicity catapults need to be hauled into place, the walls of indifference stormed. Some writers have decided to steer shy from publicity altogether: Thomas Pynchon for one, J.D. Salinger for another (if he is actually still writing or yet considers himself a writer). But actively seeking publicity was thought for a writer, somehow, vulgar--at least it was until the last few decades. Edmund Wilson, the famous American literary critic, used to answer requests with a postcard that read: Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Make statements for publicity purposes, Do any kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conduct educational courses, Deliver lectures, Give talks or make speeches, Take part in writers congresses, Answer questionnaires, Contribute or take part in symposiums or "panels" of any kind, Contribute manuscripts for sale, Donate copies of his books to Libraries, Autograph books for strangers, Allow his name to be used on letterheads, Supply personal information about himself, Supply photographs of himself, Supply opinions on literary or other subjects. A fairly impressive list, I'd say. When I was young, Edmund Wilson supplied for me the model of how a literary man ought to carry himself. One of the things I personally found most impressive about his list is that everything Edmund Wilson clearly states he will not do, Joseph Epstein has now done, and more than once, and, like the young woman in the H?agen-Dazs commercial sitting on her couch with an empty carton of ice cream, is likely to do again and again. I tell myself that I do these various things in the effort to acquire more readers. After all, one of the reasons I write, apart from pleasure in working out the aesthetic problems and moral questions presented by my subjects and in my stories, is to find the best readers. I also want to sell books, to make a few shekels, to please my publisher, to continue to be published in the future in a proper way. Having a high threshold for praise, I also don't in the least mind meeting strangers who tell me that they take some delight in my writing. But, more than all this, I have now come to think that writing away quietly, producing (the hope is) good work, isn't any longer quite sufficient in a culture dominated by the boisterous spirit of celebrity. In an increasingly noisy cultural scene, with many voices and media competing for attention, one feels--perhaps incorrectly but nonetheless insistently--the need to make one's own small stir, however pathetic. So, on occasion, I have gone about tooting my own little paper horn, doing book tours, submitting to the comically pompous self-importance of interviews, and doing so many of the other things that Edmund Wilson didn't think twice about refusing to do. "You're slightly famous, aren't you, Grandpa?" my then eight-year-old granddaughter once said to me. "I am slightly famous, Annabelle," I replied, "except no one quite knows who I am." This hasn't changed much over the years. But of course seeking celebrity in our culture is a mug's game, one you cannot finally hope to win. The only large, lumpy kind of big-time celebrity available, outside movie celebrity, is to be had through appearing fairly regularly on television. I had the merest inkling of this fame when I was walking along one sunny morning in downtown Baltimore, and a red Mazda convertible screeched to a halt, the driver lowered his window, pointed a long index finger at me, hesitated, and finally, the shock of recognition lighting up his face, yelled, "C-SPAN!" I was recently asked, through email, to write a short piece for a high price for a volume about the city of Chicago. When I agreed to do it, the editor of the volume, who is (I take it) young, told me how very pleased she was to have someone as distinguished as I among the volume's contributors. But she did have just one request. Before making things final, she wondered if she might see a sample of my writing. More than forty years in the business, I thought, echoing the character played by Zero Mostel in The Producers, and I'm still wearing the celebrity equivalent of a cardboard belt. "Every time I think I'm famous," Virgil Thomson said, "I have only to go out into the world." So it is, and so ought it probably to remain for writers, musicians, and visual artists who prefer to consider themselves serious. The comedian Richard Pryor once said that he would deem himself famous when people recognized him, as they recognized Bob Hope and Muhammad Ali, by his captionless caricature. That is certainly one clear criterion for celebrity. But the best criterion I've yet come across holds that you are celebrated, indeed famous, only when a crazy person imagines he is you. It's especially pleasing that the penetrating and prolific author of this remark happens to go by the name of Anonymous. Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. This essay is adapted from a lecture he gave earlier this year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:08:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:08:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: (Lous Andreas-Salome) A New Translation Shows There's More to a Muse Than Relationships With Famous Men Message-ID: A New Translation Shows There's More to a Muse Than Relationships With Famous Men The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.21 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i09/09a01402.htm VERBATIM By RICHARD BYRNE Raleigh G. Whitinger, professor of German at the University of Alberta Lou Andreas-Salom? is best known for the company she kept: Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud. But Mr. Whitinger argues that Andreas-Salom?'s prominent roles as muse, lover, and collaborator overshadowed her own creative and critical work, much of it concerned with feminism and its discontents. His new translation of a cycle of novellas by Andreas-Salom?, The Human Family: Stories (University of Nebraska Press), opens a door into this oft-neglected aspect of her life. Q. Why have Andreas-Salom?'s own writings been ignored by many scholars? A. She became known mainly due to her relationships to important men. As a result of that ... the interest in her writings more or less fell under the table. First of all, there is the whole sensation of it. People in the more male-centered intellectual circles find it to be a rather sensational sequence of relationships and affairs, and focus merely on that. That brought with it among many male critics, on the one hand, a deprecatory attitude. She was perceived as an intellectual groupie. In other males, it brought more of a possessive, desirous interest. A sort of idea of captivation. It's surprising, though, that her fictional work -- her stories, her writing -- was positively received among the general reading public at the time. Until the First World War, she was included in and still discussed in major comprehensive histories of literature of the time and seemed to fall out after that. Q. What is the gradual excavation of her literary works adding to our knowledge of Andreas-Salom? and her intellectual milieu? A. There is greater interest in her writings, whether they are critical writings like her book on Ibsen, or some of theoretical writings on early feminism. ... In addition to those, the rediscovery of her fiction has given us an array of her documents that describe the nature of the 1890s second wave of the women's liberation movement -- some of the complexities of it, of course, but also the general thrust of it. ... It's adding to our historical picture to see how the women's movement progressed and how it was mirrored in fiction. Q. Do we know what some of the intellectual figures of her time thought about her work? A. I was surprised to find that her book on Nietzsche was received at the time (1894) by male critics as a psychological masterpiece. ... I have the distinct feeling that her works were known by and alluded to, even, by some of the big guns: Thomas Mann, and later, Robert Musil. I detect distinct echoes. They both mention her. Especially Thomas Mann ... There are aspects of Tonio Kr?ger, that canonical novella that everybody reads in German class, that, to me, distinctly echo a Andreas-Salom? story. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:08:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:08:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WkStd: The Culture of Celebrity Message-ID: The Culture of Celebrity http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=6187&R=C746320F0 [I have not read this article but pass it along, as it may be of intererst. This just takes me a few seconds. If it's really good, let me know. I'm trying to cut back on my reading.] Let us now praise famous airheads. by Joseph Epstein 10/17/2005, Volume 011, Issue 05 CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it's spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary American life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity. The word "culture" no longer, I suspect, stands in most people's minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings. An icon, as we shall see, doesn't stay a small picture of a religious personage but usually turns out nowadays to be someone with spectacular grosses. "The language," as Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress Louise Colet how much he loved her, "is inept." Today, when people glibly refer to "the corporate culture," "the culture of poverty," "the culture of journalism," "the culture of the intelligence community"--and "community" has, of course, itself become another of those hopelessly baggy-pants words, so that one hears talk even of "the homeless community"--what I think is meant by "culture" is the general emotional atmosphere and institutional character surrounding the word to which "culture" is attached. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breed selfishness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty, hopelessness and despair; the culture of journalism, a taste for the sensational combined with a short attention span; the culture of the intelligence community, covering-one's-own-behind viperishness; and so on. Culture used in this way is also brought in to explain unpleasant or at least dreary behavior. "The culture of NASA has to be changed," is a sample of its current usage. The comedian Flip Wilson, after saying something outrageous, would revert to the refrain line, "The debbil made me do it." So, today, when admitting to unethical or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say, "The culture made me do it." As for "celebrity," the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but rather closer to the one that Daniel Boorstin gave in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream: "The celebrity," Boorstin wrote, "is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness," which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as "a celebrity is someone famous for being famous." The other standard quotation on this subject is Andy Warhol's "In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," which also frequently turns up in an improved misquotation as "everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame." But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn't quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their well-knownness. What do a couple named Sid and Mercedes Bass do, except appear in bold-face in the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section and other such venues (as we now call them) of equally shimmering insignificance, often standing next to Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, also well-known for being well-known? Many moons ago, journalists used to refer to royalty as "face cards"; today celebrities are perhaps best thought of as bold faces, for as such do their names often appear in the press (and in a New York Times column with that very name, Bold Face). The distinction between celebrity and fame is one most dictionaries tend to fudge. I suspect everyone has, or prefers to make, his own. The one I like derives not from Aristotle, who didn't have to trouble with celebrities, but from the career of Ted Williams. A sportswriter once said that he, Williams, wished to be famous but had no interest in being a celebrity. What Ted Williams wanted to be famous for was his hitting. He wanted everyone who cared about baseball to know that he was--as he believed and may well have been--the greatest pure hitter who ever lived. What he didn't want to do was to take on any of the effort off the baseball field involved in making this known. As an active player, Williams gave no interviews, signed no baseballs or photographs, chose not to be obliging in any way to journalists or fans. A rebarbative character, not to mention often a slightly menacing s.o.b., Williams, if you had asked him, would have said that it was enough that he was the last man to hit .400; he did it on the field, and therefore didn't have to sell himself off the field. As for his duty to his fans, he didn't see that he had any. Whether Ted Williams was right or wrong to feel as he did is of less interest than the distinction his example provides, which suggests that fame is something one earns--through talent or achievement of one kind or another--while celebrity is something one cultivates or, possibly, has thrust upon one. The two are not, of course, entirely exclusive. One can be immensely talented and full of achievement and yet wish to broadcast one's fame further through the careful cultivation of celebrity; and one can have the thinnest of achievements and be talentless and yet be made to seem otherwise through the mechanics and dynamics of celebrity-creation, in our day a whole mini-(or maybe not so mini) industry of its own. Or, another possibility, one can become a celebrity with scarcely any pretense to talent or achievement whatsoever. Much modern celebrity seems the result of careful promotion or great good luck or something besides talent and achievement: Mr. Donald Trump, Ms. Paris Hilton, Mr. Regis Philbin, take a bow. The ultimate celebrity of our time may have been John F. Kennedy Jr., notable only for being his parents' very handsome son--both his birth and good looks factors beyond his control--and, alas, known for nothing else whatsoever now, except for the sad, dying-young-Adonis end to his life. Fame, then, at least as I prefer to think of it, is based on true achievement; celebrity on the broadcasting of that achievement, or the inventing of something that, if not scrutinized too closely, might pass for achievement. Celebrity suggests ephemerality, while fame has a chance of lasting, a shot at reaching the happy shores of posterity. Oliver Goldsmith, in his poem "The Deserted Village," refers to "good fame," which implies that there is also a bad or false fame. Bad fame is sometimes thought to be fame in the present, or fame on earth, while good fame is that bestowed by posterity--those happy shores again. (Which doesn't eliminate the desire of most of us, at least nowadays, to have our fame here and hereafter, too.) Not false but wretched fame is covered by the word "infamy"--"Infamy, infamy, infamy," remarked the English wit Frank Muir, "they all have it in for me"--while the lower, or pejorative, order of celebrity is covered by the word "notoriety," also frequently misused to mean noteworthiness. Leo Braudy's magnificent book on the history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, illustrates how the means of broadcasting fame have changed over the centuries: from having one's head engraved on coins, to purchasing statuary of oneself, to (for the really high rollers--Alexander the Great, the Caesar boys) naming cities or even months after oneself, to commissioning painted portraits, to writing books or having books written about one, and so on into our day of the publicity or press agent, the media blitz, the public relations expert, and the egomaniacal blogger. One of the most successful of public-relations experts, Ben Sonnenberg Sr., used to say that he saw it as his job to construct very high pedestals for very small men. Which leads one to a very proper suspicion of celebrity. As George Orwell said about saints, so it seems only sensible to say about celebrities: They should all be judged guilty until proven innocent. Guilty of what, precisely? I'd say of the fraudulence (however minor) of inflating their brilliance, accomplishments, worth, of passing themselves off as something they aren't, or at least are not quite. If fraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper is brought off. IS THE CURRENT HEIGHTENED INTEREST in the celebrated sufficient to form a culture--a culture of a kind worthy of study? The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber defined culture, in part, as embodying "values which may be formulated (overtly as mores) or felt (implicitly as in folkways) by the society carrying the culture, and which it is part of the business of the anthropologist to characterize and define." What are the values of celebrity culture? They are the values, almost exclusively, of publicity. Did they spell one's name right? What was the size and composition of the audience? Did you check the receipts? Was the timing right? Publicity is concerned solely with effects and does not investigate causes or intrinsic value too closely. For example, a few years ago a book of mine called Snobbery: The American Version received what I thought was a too greatly mixed review in the New York Times Book Review. I remarked on my disappointment to the publicity man at my publisher's, who promptly told me not to worry: It was a full-page review, on page 11, right-hand side. That, he said, "is very good real estate," which was quite as important as, perhaps more important than, the reviewer's actual words and final judgment. Better to be tepidly considered on page 11 than extravagantly praised on page 27, left-hand side. Real estate, man, it's the name of the game. We must have new names, Marcel Proust presciently noted--in fashion, in medicine, in art, there must always be new names. It's a very smart remark, and the fields Proust chose seem smart, too, at least for his time. (Now there must also be new names, at a minimum, among movie stars and athletes and politicians.) Implicit in Proust's remark is the notion that if the names don't really exist, if the quality isn't there to sustain them, it doesn't matter; new names we shall have in any case. And every sophisticated society somehow, more or less implicitly, contrives to supply them. I happen to think that we haven't had a major poet writing in English since perhaps the death of W.H. Auden or, to lower the bar a little, Philip Larkin. But new names are put forth nevertheless--high among them in recent years has been that of Seamus Heaney--because, after all, what kind of a time could we be living in if we didn't have a major poet? And besides there are all those prizes that, year after year, must be given out, even if so many of the recipients don't seem quite worthy of them. Considered as a culture, celebrity does have its institutions. We now have an elaborate celebrity-creating machinery well in place--all those short-attention-span television shows (Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous); all those magazines (beginning with People and far from ending with the National Enquirer). We have high-priced celebrity-mongers--Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Oprah--who not only live off others' celebrity but also, through their publicity-making power, confer it and have in time become very considerable celebrities each in his or her own right. Without the taste for celebrity, they would have to close down the whole Style section of every newspaper in the country. Then there is the celebrity profile (in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Gentlemen's Quarterly; these are nowadays usually orchestrated by a press agent, with all touchy questions declared out-of-bounds), or the television talk-show interview with a star, which is beyond parody. Well, almost beyond: Martin Short in his parody of a talk-show host remarked to the actor Kiefer Sutherland, "You're Canadian, aren't you? What's that all about?" Yet we still seem never to have enough celebrities, so we drag in so-called "It Girls" (Paris Hilton, Cindy Crawford, other supermodels), tired television hacks (Regis Philbin, Ed McMahon), back-achingly boring but somehow sacrosanct news anchors (Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw). Toss in what I think of as the lower-class punditi, who await calls from various television news and chat shows to demonstrate their locked-in political views and meager expertise on major and cable stations alike: Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Mark Shields, Robert Novak, Michael Beschloss, and the rest. Ah, if only Lenny Bruce were alive today, he could do a scorchingly cruel bit about Dr. Joyce Brothers sitting by the phone wondering why Jerry Springer never calls. MANY OF OUR CURRENT-DAY CELEBRITIES float upon "hype," which is really a publicist's gas used to pump up and set aloft something that doesn't really quite exist. Hype has also given us a new breakdown, or hierarchical categorization, of celebrities. Until twenty-five or so years ago great celebrities were called "stars," a term first used in the movies and entertainment and then taken up by sports, politics, and other fields. Stars proving a bit drab, "super-stars" were called in to play, this term beginning in sports but fairly quickly branching outward. Apparently too many superstars were about, so the trope was switched from astronomy to religion, and we now have "icons." All this takes Proust's original observation a step further: the need for new names to call the new names. This new ranking--stars, superstars, icons--helps us believe that we live in interesting times. One of the things celebrities do for us is suggest that in their lives they are fulfilling our fantasies. Modern celebrities, along with their fame, tend to be wealthy or, if not themselves beautiful, able to acquire beautiful lovers. Their celebrity makes them, in the view of many, worthy of worship. "So long as man remains free," Dostoyevsky writes in the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov, "he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship." If contemporary celebrities are the best thing on offer as living gods for us to worship, this is not good news. But the worshipping of celebrities by the public tends to be thin, and not uncommonly it is nicely mixed with loathing. We also, after all, at least partially, like to see our celebrities as frail, ready at all times to crash and burn. Cary Grant once warned the then-young director Peter Bogdanovich, who was at the time living with Cybill Sheppard, to stop telling people he was in love. "And above all," Grant warned, "stop telling them you're happy." When Bogdanovich asked why, Cary Grant answered, "Because they're not in love and they're not happy. . . . Just remember, Peter, people do not like beautiful people." Grant's assertion is borne out by our grocery press, the National Enquirer, the Star, the Globe, and other variants of the English gutter press. All these tabloids could as easily travel under the generic title of the National Schadenfreude, for more than half the stories they contain come under the category of "See How the Mighty Have Fallen": Oh, my, I see where that bright young television sitcom star, on a drug binge again, had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance! To think that the handsome movie star has been cheating on his wife all these years--snakes loose in the Garden of Eden, evidently! Did you note that the powerful senator's drinking has caused him to embarrass himself yet again in public? I see where that immensely successful Hollywood couple turn out to have had a child who died of anorexia! Who'd've thought? How pleasing to learn that our own simpler, less moneyed, unglamorous lives are, in the end, much to be preferred to those of these beautiful, rich, and powerful people, whose vast publicity has diverted us for so long and whose fall proves even more diverting now. "As would become a lifelong habit for most of us," Thomas McGuane writes in a recent short story in the New Yorker called "Ice," "we longed to witness spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek." Along with trying to avoid falling victim to schadenfreude, celebrities, if they are clever, do well to regulate the amount of publicity they allow to cluster around them. And not celebrities alone. Edith Wharton, having published too many stories and essays in a great single rush in various magazines during a concentrated period, feared, as she put it, the danger of becoming "a magazine bore." Celebrities, in the same way, are in danger of becoming publicity bores, though few among them seem to sense it. Because of improperly rationed publicity, along with a substantial helping of self-importance, the comedian Bill Cosby will never again be funny. The actress Elizabeth McGovern said of Sean Penn that he "is brilliant, brilliant at being the kind of reluctant celebrity." At the level of high culture, Saul Bellow used to work this bit quite well on the literary front, making every interview (and there have been hundreds of them) feel as if given only with the greatest reluctance, if not under actual duress. Others are brilliant at regulating their publicity. Johnny Carson was very intelligent about carefully husbanding his celebrity, choosing not to come out of retirement, except at exactly the right time or when the perfect occasion presented itself. Apparently it never did. Given the universally generous obituary tributes he received, dying now looks, for him, to have been an excellent career move. Careful readers will have noticed that I referred above to "the actress Elizabeth McGovern" and felt no need to write anything before or after the name Sean Penn. True celebrities need nothing said of them in apposition, fore or aft. The greatest celebrities are those who don't even require their full names mentioned: Marilyn, Johnny, Liz, Liza, Oprah, Michael (could be Jordan or Jackson--context usually clears this up fairly quickly), Kobe, Martha (Stewart, not Washington), Britney, Shaq, J-Lo, Frank (Sinatra, not Perdue), O.J., and, with the quickest recognition and shortest name of all--trumpets here, please--W. ONE HAS THE IMPRESSION that being a celebrity was easier at any earlier time than it is now, when celebrity-creating institutions, from paparazzi to gutter-press expos?s to television talk-shows, weren't as intense, as full-court press, as they are today. In the Times Literary Supplement, a reviewer of a biography of Margot Fonteyn noted that Miss Fonteyn "was a star from a more respectful age of celebrity, when keeping one's distance was still possible." My own candidate for the perfect celebrity in the twentieth century would be No?l Coward, a man in whom talent combined with elegance to give off the glow of glamour--and also a man who would have known how to fend off anyone wishing to investigate his private life. Today, instead of elegant celebrities, we have celebrity criminal trials: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, Winona Ryder, and O.J. Simpson. Schadenfreude is in the saddle again. American society in the twenty-first century, received opinion has it, values only two things: money and celebrity. Whether or not this is true, vast quantities of money, we know, will buy celebrity. The very rich--John D. Rockefeller and powerful people of his era--used to pay press agents to keep their names out of the papers. But today one of the things money buys is a place at the table beside the celebrated, with the celebrities generally delighted to accommodate, there to share some of the glaring light. An example is Mort Zuckerman, who made an early fortune in real estate, has bought magazines and newspapers, and is now himself among the punditi, offering his largely unexceptional political views on the McLaughlin Group and other television chat shows. Which is merely another way of saying that, whether or not celebrity in and of itself constitutes a culture, it has certainly penetrated and permeated much of American culture generally. Such has been the reach of celebrity culture in our time that it has long ago entered into academic life. The celebrity professor has been on the scene for more than three decades. As long ago as 1962, in fact, I recall hearing that Oscar Cargill, in those days a name of some note in the English Department of NYU, had tried to lure the then-young Robert Brustein, a professor of theater and the drama critic for the New Republic, away from Columbia. Cargill had said to Brustein, "I'm not going to bulls--t you, Bob, we're looking for a star, and you're it." Brustein apparently wasn't looking to be placed in a new constellation, and remained at Columbia, at least for a while longer, before moving on to Yale and thence to Harvard. The academic star, who is really the academic celebrity, is now a fairly common figure in what the world, that ignorant ninny, reckons the Great American Universities. Richard Rorty is such a star; so is Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who as "Skip" even has some celebrity nickname-recognition); and, at a slightly lower level, there are Marjorie Garber, Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and perhaps now Stephen Greenblatt. Stanley Fish doesn't even seem to mind that much of his celebrity is owed to his being portrayed in novels by David Lodge as an indefatigable, grubby little operator (though Lodge claims to admire Fish's happy vulgarity). Professors Garber and Sedgwick seem to have acquired their celebrity through the outrageousness of the topics they've chosen to write about. By measure of pure celebrity, Cornel West is, at the moment, the star of all academic stars, a man called by Newsweek "an eloquent prophet with attitude." (A bit difficult, I think, to imagine Newsweek or any other publication writing something similar of Lionel Trilling, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, or John Hope Franklin.) He records rap CDs and appears at benefits with movie stars and famous athletes. When the president of Harvard spoke critically to West about his work not constituting serious scholarship (as if that had anything to do with anything), it made front-page news in the New York Times. When West left Harvard in indignation, he was instantly welcomed by Princeton. If West had been a few kilowatts more the celebrity than he is, he might have been able to arrange for the firing of the president of the university, the way certain superstars in the National Basketball Association--Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan--were able, if it pleased them, to have their coaches fired. Genuine scholarship, power of ratiocination glowing brightly in the classroom, is distinctly not what makes an academic celebrity or, if you prefer, superstar. What makes an academic celebrity, for the most part, is exposure, which is ultimately publicity. Exposure can mean appearing in the right extra-academic magazines or journals: the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly; Harper's and the New Republic possibly qualify, as do occasional cameo performances on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Having one's face pop up on the right television and radio programs--PBS and NPR certainly, and enough of the right kinds of appearances on C-SPAN--does not hurt. A commercially successful, much-discussed book helps hugely. So does strong public alignment with the correct political causes. Harvey Mansfield, the political philosopher at Harvard, is a secondary academic celebrity of sorts, but not much in demand, owing to his conservatism; Shelby Steele, a black professor of English who has been critical of various aspects of African-American politics, was always overlooked during the days when universities knocked themselves out to get black professors. Both men have been judged politically incorrect. The underlying and overarching point is, to become an academic celebrity you have to promote yourself outside the academy, but in careful and subtle ways. ONE MIGHT ONCE HAVE ASSUMED that the culture of celebrity was chiefly about show business and the outer edges of the arts, occasionally touching on the academy (there cannot be more than twenty or so academic superstars). But it has also much altered intellectual life generally. The past ten years or so have seen the advent of the "public intellectual." There are good reasons to feel uncomfortable with that adjective "public," which drains away much of the traditional meaning of intellectual. An intellectual is someone who is excited by and lives off and in ideas. An intellectual has traditionally been a person unaffiliated, which is to say someone unbeholden to anything but the power of his or her ideas. Intellectuals used to be freelance, until fifty or so years ago, when jobs in the universities and in journalism began to open up to some among them. Far from being devoted to ideas for their own sake, the intellectual equivalent of art for art's sake, the so-called public intellectual of our day is usually someone who comments on what is in the news, in the hope of affecting policy, or events, or opinion in line with his own political position, or orientation. He isn't necessarily an intellectual at all, but merely someone who has read a few books, mastered a style, a jargon, and a maven's authoritative tone, and has a clearly demarcated political line. But even when the public intellectual isn't purely tied to the news, or isn't thoroughly political, what he or she really is, or ought to be called, is a "publicity intellectual." In Richard A. Posner's interesting book Public Intellectuals, intellectuals are in one place ranked by the number of media mentions they or their work have garnered, which, if I am correct about publicity being at the heart of the enterprise of the public intellectual, may be crude but is not foolish. Not knowledge, it turns out, but publicity is power. The most celebrated intellectuals of our day have been those most skillful at gaining publicity for their writing and their pronouncements. Take, as a case very much in point, Susan Sontag. When Susan Sontag died at the end of last year, her obituary was front-page news in the New York Times, and on the inside of the paper it ran to a full page with five photographs, most of them carefully posed--a variety, it does not seem unfair to call it, of intellectual cheesecake. Will the current prime ministers of England and France when they peg out receive equal space or pictorial coverage? Unlikely, I think. Why did Ms. Sontag, who was, let it be said, in many ways the pure type of the old intellectual--unattached to any institution, earning her living (apart from MacArthur Foundation and other grants) entirely from her ideas as she put them in writing--why did she attract the attention she did? I don't believe Susan Sontag's celebrity finally had much to do with the power or cogency of her ideas. Her most noteworthy idea was not so much an idea at all but a description of a style, a kind of reverse or anti-style, that went by the name of Camp and that was gay in its impulse. Might it have been her politics? Yes, politics had a lot to do with it, even though when she expressed herself on political subjects, she frequently got things mightily askew: During the Vietnam war she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history." As late as the 1980s, much too late for anyone in the know, she called communism "fascism with a friendly face" (what do you suppose she found so friendly about it?). To cheer up the besieged people of Sarajevo, she brought them a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She announced in the New Yorker that the killing of 3,000 innocent people on 9/11 was an act that America had brought on itself. As for the writing that originally brought her celebrity, she later came to apologize for Against Interpretation, her most influential single book. I do not know any people who claim to have derived keen pleasure from her fiction. If all this is roughly so, why, then, do you suppose that Susan Sontag was easily the single most celebrated--the greatest celebrity--intellectual of our time? With the ordinary female professor's face and body, I don't think Ms. Sontag would quite have achieved the same celebrity. Her attractiveness as a young woman had a great deal to do with the extent of her celebrity; and she and her publisher took that (early) physical attractiveness all the way out. From reading Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, one gets a sense of how carefully and relentlessly she was promoted by her publisher, Roger Straus. I do not mean to say that Sontag was unintelligent, or talentless, but Straus, through having her always dramatically photographed, by sending angry letters to the editors of journals where she was ill-reviewed, by bringing out her books with the most careful accompanying orchestration, promoted this often difficult and unrewarding writer into something close to a household name with a face that was ready, so to say, to be Warholed. That Sontag spent her last years with Annie Leibowitz, herself the most successful magazine photographer of our day, seems somehow the most natural thing in the world. Even in the realm of the intellect, celebrities are not born but made, usually very carefully made--as was, indubitably, the celebrity of Susan Sontag. ONE OF THE MAJOR THEMES in Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown is the fame and celebrity of artists, and above all writers. To sketch in a few bare strokes the richly complex story Braudy tells, writers went from serving power (in Rome) to serving God (in early Christendom) to serving patrons (in the eighteenth century) to serving themselves, with a careful eye cocked toward both the contemporary public and posterity (under Romanticism), to serving mammon, to a state of interesting confusion, which is where we are today, with celebrity affecting literature in more and more significant ways. Writers are supposed to be aristocrats of the spirit, not promoters, hustlers, salesmen for their own work. Securing a larger audience for their work was not thought to be their problem. "Fit audience, though few," in John Milton's phrase, was all right, so long as the few were the most artistically alert, or aesthetically fittest. Picture Lord Byron, Count Tolstoy, or Charles Baudelaire at a lectern at Barnes & Noble, C-SPAN camera turned on, flogging (wonderful word!) his own most recent books. Not possible! Some superior writers have been very careful caretakers of their careers. In a letter to one of his philosophy professors at Harvard, T.S. Eliot wrote that there were two ways to achieve literary celebrity in London: One was to appear often in a variety of publications; the other to appear seldom but always to make certain to dazzle when one did. Eliot, of course, chose the latter, and it worked smashingly. But he was still counting on gaining his reputation through his actual writing. Now good work alone doesn't quite seem to make it; the publicity catapults need to be hauled into place, the walls of indifference stormed. Some writers have decided to steer shy from publicity altogether: Thomas Pynchon for one, J.D. Salinger for another (if he is actually still writing or yet considers himself a writer). But actively seeking publicity was thought for a writer, somehow, vulgar--at least it was until the last few decades. Edmund Wilson, the famous American literary critic, used to answer requests with a postcard that read: Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to: Read manuscripts, Write articles or books to order, Make statements for publicity purposes, Do any kind of editorial work, Judge literary contests, Give interviews, Conduct educational courses, Deliver lectures, Give talks or make speeches, Take part in writers congresses, Answer questionnaires, Contribute or take part in symposiums or "panels" of any kind, Contribute manuscripts for sale, Donate copies of his books to Libraries, Autograph books for strangers, Allow his name to be used on letterheads, Supply personal information about himself, Supply photographs of himself, Supply opinions on literary or other subjects. A fairly impressive list, I'd say. When I was young, Edmund Wilson supplied for me the model of how a literary man ought to carry himself. One of the things I personally found most impressive about his list is that everything Edmund Wilson clearly states he will not do, Joseph Epstein has now done, and more than once, and, like the young woman in the H?agen-Dazs commercial sitting on her couch with an empty carton of ice cream, is likely to do again and again. I tell myself that I do these various things in the effort to acquire more readers. After all, one of the reasons I write, apart from pleasure in working out the aesthetic problems and moral questions presented by my subjects and in my stories, is to find the best readers. I also want to sell books, to make a few shekels, to please my publisher, to continue to be published in the future in a proper way. Having a high threshold for praise, I also don't in the least mind meeting strangers who tell me that they take some delight in my writing. But, more than all this, I have now come to think that writing away quietly, producing (the hope is) good work, isn't any longer quite sufficient in a culture dominated by the boisterous spirit of celebrity. In an increasingly noisy cultural scene, with many voices and media competing for attention, one feels--perhaps incorrectly but nonetheless insistently--the need to make one's own small stir, however pathetic. So, on occasion, I have gone about tooting my own little paper horn, doing book tours, submitting to the comically pompous self-importance of interviews, and doing so many of the other things that Edmund Wilson didn't think twice about refusing to do. "You're slightly famous, aren't you, Grandpa?" my then eight-year-old granddaughter once said to me. "I am slightly famous, Annabelle," I replied, "except no one quite knows who I am." This hasn't changed much over the years. But of course seeking celebrity in our culture is a mug's game, one you cannot finally hope to win. The only large, lumpy kind of big-time celebrity available, outside movie celebrity, is to be had through appearing fairly regularly on television. I had the merest inkling of this fame when I was walking along one sunny morning in downtown Baltimore, and a red Mazda convertible screeched to a halt, the driver lowered his window, pointed a long index finger at me, hesitated, and finally, the shock of recognition lighting up his face, yelled, "C-SPAN!" I was recently asked, through email, to write a short piece for a high price for a volume about the city of Chicago. When I agreed to do it, the editor of the volume, who is (I take it) young, told me how very pleased she was to have someone as distinguished as I among the volume's contributors. But she did have just one request. Before making things final, she wondered if she might see a sample of my writing. More than forty years in the business, I thought, echoing the character played by Zero Mostel in The Producers, and I'm still wearing the celebrity equivalent of a cardboard belt. "Every time I think I'm famous," Virgil Thomson said, "I have only to go out into the world." So it is, and so ought it probably to remain for writers, musicians, and visual artists who prefer to consider themselves serious. The comedian Richard Pryor once said that he would deem himself famous when people recognized him, as they recognized Bob Hope and Muhammad Ali, by his captionless caricature. That is certainly one clear criterion for celebrity. But the best criterion I've yet come across holds that you are celebrated, indeed famous, only when a crazy person imagines he is you. It's especially pleasing that the penetrating and prolific author of this remark happens to go by the name of Anonymous. Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. This essay is adapted from a lecture he gave earlier this year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:08:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:08:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo Message-ID: Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html Prevention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998 [I read something similar in Science, maybe twenty years ago, about the placebo effect being proportionate to the medical effect, and I think it deal with a much larger categories of illnesses. Does anyone know anything further about these anomalies?] by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT and Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D., Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA ABSTRACT Mean effect sizes for changes in depression were calculated for 2,318 patients who had been randomly assigned to either antidepressant medication or placebo in 19 double-blind clinical trials. As a proportion of the drug response, the placebo response was constant across different types of medication (75%), and the correlation between placebo effect and drug effect was .90. These data indicate that virtually all of the variation in drug effect size was due to the placebo characteristics of the studies. The effect size for active medications that are not regarded to be antidepressants was as large as that for those classified as antidepressants, and in both cases, the inactive placebos produced improvement that was 75% of the effect of the active drug. These data raise the possibility that the apparent drug effect (25% of the drug response) is actually an active placebo effect. Examination of pre-post effect sizes among depressed individuals assigned to no-treatment or wait-list control groups suggest that approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors. _________________________________________________________________ EDITORS' NOTE The article that follows is a controversial one. It reaches a controversial conclusion--that much of the therapeutic benefit of antidepressant medications actually derives from placebo responding. The article reaches this conclusion by utilizing a controversial statistical approach--meta-analysis. And it employs meta-analysis controversially--by meta-analyzing studies that are very heterogeneous in subject selection criteria, treatments employed, and statistical methods used. Nonetheless, we have chosen to publish the article. We have done so because a number of the colleagues who originally reviewed the manuscript believed it had considerable merit, even while they recognized the clearly contentious conclusions it reached and the clearly arguable statistical methods it employed. We are convinced that one of the principal aims of an electronic journal ought to be to bring our readers information on a variety of current topics in prevention and treatment, even though much of it will be subject to heated differences of opinion about worth and ultimate significance. This is to be expected, of course, when one is publishing material at the cutting-edge, in a cutting-edge medium. We also believe, however, that soliciting expert commentary to accompany particularly controversial articles facilitates the fullest possible airing of the issues most germane to appreciating both the strengths and the weaknesses of target articles. In the same vein, we welcome comments on the article from readers as well, though for obvious reasons, we cannot promise to publish all of them. Feel free to submit a comment by emailing admin at apa.org. Peter Nathan, Associate Editor (Treatment) Martin E. P. Seligman, Editor _________________________________________________________________ We thank R. B. Lydiard and Smith-Kline Beecham Pharaceuticals for supplying additional data. We thank David Kenny for his assistance with the statistical analyses. We thank Roger P. Greenberg and Daniel E. Moerman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Irving Kirsch, Department of Psychology, U-20, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road Storrs, CT 06269-1020. E-mail: Irvingk at uconnvm.uconn.edu _________________________________________________________________ More placebos have been administered to research participants than any single experimental drug. Thus, one would expect sufficient data to have accumulated for the acquisition of substantial knowledge of the parameters of placebo effects. However, although almost everyone controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them. With this in mind, we set about the task of using meta-analytic procedures for evaluating the magnitude of the placebo response to antidepressant medication. Meta-analysis provides a means of mathematically combining results from different studies, even when these studies have used different measures to assess the dependent variable. Most often, this is done by using the statistic d, which is a standardized difference score. This effect size is generally calculated as the mean of the experimental group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled standard deviation. Less frequently, the mean difference is divided by standard deviation of the control group (Smith, Glass, & Miller, 1980). Ideally, to calculate the effect size of placebos, we would want to subtract the effects of a no-placebo control group. However, placebos are used as controls against which the effects of physical interventions can be gauged. It is rare for an experimental condition to be included against which the effects of the placebo can be evaluated. To circumvent this problem, we decided to calculate within-cell or pre-post effect sizes, which are the posttreatment mean depression score minus the pretreatment mean depression score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (cf. Smith et al., 1980). By doing this for both placebo groups and medication groups, we can estimate the proportion of the response to antidepressant medication that is duplicated by placebo administration, a response that would be due to such factors as expectancy for improvement and the natural course of the disorder (i.e., spontaneous remission). Later in this article, we also separate expectancy from natural history and provide estimates of each of these effects. Although our approach is unusual, in most cases it should provide results that are comparable to conventional methods. If there are no significant pretreatment differences between the treatment and control groups, then the subtraction of mean standardized pre-post difference scores should result in a mean effect size that is just about the same as that produced by subtracting mean standardized posttreatment scores. Suppose, for example, we have a study with the data displayed in Table 1. The conventionally calculated effect size would be would be 1.00. The pre-post effect sizes would be 3.00 for the treatment group and 2.00 for the control group. The difference between them is 1.00, which is exactly the same effect calculated from posttreatment scores alone. However, calculating the effect size in this manner also provides us with the information that the effect of the control procedure was 2/3 that of the treatment procedure, information that we do not have when we only consider posttreatment scores. Of course, it is rare for two groups to have identical mean pretreatment scores, and to the extent that those scores are different, our two methods of calculation would provide different results. However, by controlling for baseline differences, our method should provide the more accurate estimate of differential outcome. CAPTION: Table 1 Hypothetical Means and Standard Deviations for a Treatment Group and a Control Group Treatment Control Pretreatment Posttreatment Pretreatment Posttreatment M 25.00 10.00 25.00 15.00 SD 5.50 4.50 4.50 5.50 The Effects of Medication and Placebo Study Characteristics Studies assessing the efficacy of antidepressant medication were obtained through previous reviews (Davis, Janicak, & Bruninga, 1987; Free & Oei, 1989; Greenberg & Fisher, 1989; Greenberg, Bornstein, Greenberg, & Fisher, 1992; Workman & Short, 1993), supplemented by a computer search of PsycLit and MEDLINE databases from 1974 to 1995 using the search terms drug-therapy or pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy or placebo and depression or affective disorders. Psychotherapy was included as a search term for the purpose of obtaining articles that would allow estimation of changes occurring in no-treatment and wait-list control groups, a topic to which we return later in this article. Approximately 1,500 publications were produced by this literature search. These were examined by the second author, and those meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were studies in which the description of the patient population was vague (e.g., "neurotic"). 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate within-condition effect sizes. This resulted in the exclusion of studies for which neither pre-post statistical tests nor pretreatment means were available. 3. Data were reported for a placebo control group. 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. Of the approximately 1,500 studies examined, 20 met the inclusion criteria. Of these, all but one were studies of the acute phase of therapy, with treatment durations ranging from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82). The one exception (Doogan & Caillard, 1992) was a maintenance study, with a duration of treatment of 44 weeks. Because of this difference, Doogan and Caillard's study was excluded from the meta-analysis. Thus, the analysis was conducted on 19 studies containing 2,318 participants, of whom 1,460 received medication and 858 received placebo. Medications studied were amitriptyline, amylobarbitone, fluoxetine, imipramine, paroxetine, isocarboxazid, trazodone, lithium, liothyronine, adinazolam, amoxapine, phenelzine, venlafaxine, maprotiline, tranylcypromine, and bupropion. The Calculation of Effect Sizes In most cases, effect sizes (d) were calculated for measures of depression as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (SD). Pretreatment SDs were used in place of pooled SDs in calculating effect sizes for four studies in which posttreatment SDs were not reported (Ravaris, Nies, Robinson, et al., 1976; Rickels & Case, 1982; Rickels, Case, Weberlowsky, et al., 1981; Robinson, Nies, & Ravaris, 1973). The methods described by Smith et al. (1980) were used to estimate effect sizes for two studies in which means and SDs were not reported. One of these studies (Goldberg, Rickels, & Finnerty, 1981) reported the t value for the pre-post comparisons. The effect size for this study was estimated using the formula: d= t (2/n)^1/2 where t is the reported t value for the pre-post comparison, and n is the number of subjects in the condition. The other study (Kiev & Okerson, 1979) reported only that there was a significant difference between pre- and posttreatment scores. As suggested by Smith et al. (1980), the following formula for estimating the effect size was used: d= 1.96 (2/n)^ 1/2 , where 1.96 is used as the most conservative estimation of the t value at the .05 significance level used by Kiev and Okerson. These two two effect sizes were also corrected for pre-post correlation by multiplying the estimated effect size by (1 - r)^ 1/2 , r being the estimate of the test-retest correlation (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). Bailey and Coppen (1976) reported test-retest correlations of .65 for the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961) and .50 for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRS-D; Hamilton, 1960) . Therefore, in order to arrive at an estimated effect size, corrected for the pre-post correlation, the estimated effect sizes of the HRS-D were multiplied by 0.707 and the effect sizes of the BDI were multiplied by 0.59. In studies reporting multiple measures of depression, an effect size was calculated for each measure and these were then averaged. In studies reporting the effects of two drugs, a single mean effect size for both was calculated for the primary analysis. In a subsequent analysis, the effect for each drug was examined separately. In both analyses, we calculated mean effect sizes weighted for sample size (D; Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). Effect Sizes Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients receiving medication or placebo are presented in Table 2. Mean effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.55 SDs for the medication response and 1.16 for the placebo response. Because effect sizes are obtained by dividing both treatment means by a constant (i.e., the pooled SD), they can be treated mathematically like the scores from which they are derived. ^1 In particular, we have shown that, barring pretreatment between-group differences, subtracting the mean pre-post effect size of the control groups from the mean pre-post effect size of the experimental groups is equivalent to calculating an effect size by conventional means. Subtracting mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates reveals a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs. This indicates that 75% of the response to the medications examined in these studies was a placebo response, and at most, 25% might be a true drug effect. This does not mean that only 25% of patients are likely to respond to the pharmacological properties of the drug. Rather, it means that for a typical patient, 75% of the benefit obtained from the active drug would also have obtained from an inactive placebo. CAPTION: Table 2 Studies Including Placebo Control Groups Drug Placebo Study n d n d Blashki et al. (1971) 43 1.75 18 1.02 Byerly et al. (1988) 44 2.30 16 1.37 Claghorn et al. (1992) 113 1.91 95 1.49 Davidson & Turnbull (1983) 11 4.77 8 2.28 Elkin et al. (1989) 36 2.35 34 2.01 Goldberg et al. (1981) 179 0.44 93 0.44 Joffe et al. (1993) 34 1.43 16 0.61 Kahn et al. (1991) 66 2.25 80 1.48 Kiev & Okerson (1979) 39 0.44 22 0.42 Lydiard (1989) 30 2.59 15 1.93 Ravaris et al. (1976) 14 1.42 19 0.91 Rickels et al. (1981) 75 1.86 23 1.45 Rickels & Case (1982) 100 1.71 54 1.17 Robinson et al. (1973) 33 1.13 27 0.76 Schweizer et al. (1994) 87 3.13 57 2.13 Stark & Hardison (1985) 370 1.40 169 1.03 van der Velde (1981) 52 0.66 27 0.10 White et al. (1984) 77 1.50 45 1.14 Zung (1983) 57 .88 40 0.95 Inspection of Table 2 reveals considerable variability in drug and placebo response effect sizes. As a first step toward clarifying the reason for this variability, we calculated the correlation between drug response and placebo response, which was found to be exceptionally high, r = .90, p < .001 (see Figure 1). This indicates that the placebo response was proportionate to the drug response, with remaining variability most likely due to measurement error. [pre0010002afig1a.gif] Figure 1. The placebo response as a predictor of the drug response. Our next question was the source of the common variability. One possibility is that the correlation between placebo and drug response rates are due to between-study differences in sample characteristics (e.g., inpatients vs. outpatients, volunteers vs. referrals, etc.). Our analysis of psychotherapy studies later in this article provides a test of this hypothesis. If the correlation is due to between-study differences in sample characteristics, a similar correlation should be found between the psychotherapy and no-treatment response rates. In fact, the correlation between the psychotherapy response and the no-treatment response was nonsignificant and in the opposite direction. This indicates that common sample characteristics account for little if any of the relation between treatment and control group response rates. Another possibility is that the close correspondence between placebo and drug response is due to differences in so-called nonspecific variables (e.g., provision of a supportive relationship, color of the medication, patients' expectations for change, biases in clinician's ratings, etc.), which might vary from study to study, but which would be common to recipients of both treatments in a given study. Alternately, the correlation might be associated with differences in the effectiveness of the various medications included in the meta-analysis. This could happen if more effective medications inspired greater expectations of improvement among patients or prescribing physicians (Frank, 1973; Kirsch, 1990). Evans (1974), for example, reported that placebo morphine was substantially more effective than placebo aspirin. Finally, both factors might be operative. We further investigated this issue by examining the magnitude of drug and placebo responses as a function of type of medication. We subdivided medication into four types: (a) tricyclics and tetracyclics, (b) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), (c) other antidepressants, and (d) other medications. This last category consisted of four medications (amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam) that are not considered antidepressants. Weighted (for sample size) mean effect sizes of the drug response as a function of type of medication are shown in Table 3, along with corresponding effect sizes of the placebo response and the mean effect sizes of placebo responses as a proportion of drug responses. These data reveal relatively little variability in drug response and even less variability in the ratio of placebo response to drug response, as a function of drug type. For each type of medication, the effect size for the active drug response was between 1.43 and 1.69, and the inactive placebo response was between 74% and 76% of the active drug response. These data suggest that the between-drug variability in drug and placebo response was due entirely to differences in the placebo component of the studies. CAPTION: Table 3 Effect Sizes as a Function of Drug Type Statistic Type of drug Antidepressant Other drugs Tri- and tetracyclic SSRI Other N 1,353 626 683 203 K 13 4 8 3 D--Drug 1.52 1.68 1.43 1.69 D--Placebo 1.15 1.24 1.08 1.29 Placebo/drug .76 .74 .76 .76 N = number of subjects; K = number of studies; D = mean weighted effect size; placebo/drug = placebo response as a proportion of active drug response. Differences between active drug responses and inactive placebo responses are typically interpreted as indications of specific pharmacologic effects for the condition being treated. However, this conclusion is thrown into question by the data derived from active medications that are not considered effective for depression. It is possible that these drugs affect depression indirectly, perhaps by improving sleep or lowering anxiety. But if this were the case and if antidepressants have a specific effect on depression, then the effect of these other medications ought to have been less than the effect of antidepressants, whereas our data indicate that the response to these nonantidepressant drugs is at least as great as that to conventional antidepressants. A second possibility is that amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam are in fact antidepressants. This conclusion is rendered plausible by the lack of understanding of the mechanism of clinical action of common antidepressants (e.g., tricyclics). If the classification of a drug as an antidepressant is established by its efficacy, rather than by knowledge of the mechanism underlying its effects, then amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam might be considered specifics for depression. A third possibility is that these medications function as active placebos (i.e., active medications without specific activity for the condition being treated). Greenberg and Fisher (1989) summarized data indicating that the effect of antidepressant medication is smaller when it is compared to an active placebo than when it is compared to an inert placebo (also see Greenberg & Fisher, 1997). By definition, the only difference between active and inactive placebos is the presence of pharmacologically induced side effects. Therefore, differences in responses to active and inert placebos could be due to the presence of those side effects. Data from other studies indicate that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition or the placebo condition (Blashki, Mowbray, & Davies, 1971; Margraf, Ehlers, Roth, Clark, Sheikh, Agras, & Taylor, 1991; Ney, Collins, & Spensor, 1986).^ This is likely to be associated with their previous experience with antidepressant medication and with differences between drug and placebo in the magnitude of side effects. Experiencing more side effects, patients in active drug conditions conclude that they are in the drug group; experiencing fewer side effects, patients in placebo groups conclude that they are in the placebo condition. This can be expected to produce an enhanced placebo effect in drug conditions and a diminished placebo effect in placebo groups. Thus, the apparent drug effect of antidepressants may in fact be a placebo effect, magnified by differences in experienced side effects and the patient's subsequent recognition of the condition to which he or she has been assigned. Support for this interpretation of data is provided by a meta-analysis of fluoxetine (Prozac), in which a correlation of .85 was reported between the therapeutic effect of the drug and the percentage of patients reporting side effects (Greenberg, Bornstein, Zborowski, Fisher, & Greenberg, 1994). Natural History Effects Just as it is important to distinguish between a drug response and a drug effect, so too is it worthwhile to distinguish between a placebo response and a placebo effect (Fisher, Lipman, Uhlenhuth, Rickels, & Park, 1965). A drug response is the change that occurs after administration of the drug. The effect of the drug is that portion of the response that is due to the drug's chemical composition; it is the difference between the drug response and the response to placebo administration. A similar distinction can be made between placebo responses and placebo effects. The placebo response is the change that occurs following administration of a placebo. However, change might also occur without administration of a placebo. It may be due to spontaneous remission, regression toward the mean, life changes, the passage of time, or other factors. The placebo effect is the difference between the placebo response and changes that occur without the administration of a placebo (Kirsch, 1985, 1997). In the preceding section, we evaluated the placebo response as a proportion of the response to antidepressant medication. The data suggest that at least 75% of the drug response is a placebo response, but it does not tell us the magnitude of the placebo effect. What proportion of the placebo response is due to expectancies generated by placebo administration, and what proportion would have occurred even without placebo administration? That is a much more difficult question to answer. We have not been able to locate any studies in which pre- and posttreatment assessments of depression were reported for both a placebo group and a no-treatment or wait-list control group. For that reason, we turned to psychotherapy outcome studies, in which the inclusion of untreated control groups is much more common. We acknowledge that the use of data from psychotherapy studies as a comparison with those from drug studies is far less than ideal. Participants in psychotherapy studies are likely to differ from those in drug studies on any number of variables. Furthermore, the assignment of participants to a no-treatment or wait-list control group might also effect the course of their disorder. For example, Frank (1973) has argued that the promise of future treatment is sufficient to trigger a placebo response, and a wait-list control group has been conceputalized as a placebo control group in at least one well-known outcome study (Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, & Whipple, 1975). Conversely, one could argue that being assigned to a no-treatment control group might strengthen feelings of hopelessness and thereby increase depression. Despite these problems, the no-treatment and wait-list control data from psychotherapy outcome studies may be the best data currently available for estimating the natural course of untreated depression. Furthermore, the presence of both types of untreated control groups permits evaluation of Frank's (1973) hypothesis about the curative effects of the promise of treatment. Study Characteristics Studies assessing changes in depression among participants assigned to wait-list or no-treatment control groups were obtained from the computer search described earlier, supplemented by an examination of previous reviews (Dobson, 1989; Free, & Oei, 1989; Robinson, Berman, & Neimeyer, 1990). The publications that were produced by this literature search were examined by the second author, and those meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were studies in which the description of the patient population was vague (e.g., "neurotic"). 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate within-condition effect sizes. 3. Data were reported for a wait-list or no-treatment control group. 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. Nineteen studies were found to meet these inclusion criteria, and in all cases, sufficient data had been reported to allow direct calculation of effect sizes as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled SD. Although they are incidental to the main purposes of this review, we examined effect sizes for psychotherapy as well as those for no-treatment and wait-list control groups. Effect Sizes Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients assigned to psychotherapy, wait-list, and no-treatment are presented in Table 4. Mean pre-post effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.60 for the psychotherapy response and 0.37 for wait-list and no-treatment control groups. Participants given the promise of subsequent treatment (i.e., those in wait-list groups) did not improve more than those not promised treatment. Mean effect sizes for these two conditions were 0.36 and 0.39, respectively. The correlation between effect sizes (r = -.29) was not significant. CAPTION: Table 4 Studies Including Wait-List or No-Treatment Control Groups Study Psychotherapy Control n d n d Beach & O'Leary (1992) 15 2.37 15 0.97 Beck & Strong (1982) 20 2.87 10 -0.28 Catanese et al. (1979) 99 1.39 21 0.16 Comas-Diaz (1981) 16 1.87 10 -0.12 Conoley & Garber (1985) 38 1.10 19 0.21 Feldman et al. (1982) 38 2.00 10 0.42 Graff et al. (1986) 24 2.03 11 -0.03 Jarvinen & Gold (1981) 46 0.76 18 0.34 Maynard (1993) 16 1.06 14 0.36 Nezu (1986) 23 2.39 9 0.16 Rehm et al. (1981) 42 1.23 15 0.48 Rude (1986) 8 1.75 16 0.74 Schmidt & Miller (1983) 34 1.25 10 0.11 Shaw (1977) 16 2.17 8 0.41 Shipley & Fazio (1973) 11 2.12 11 1.00 Taylor & Marshall (1977) 21 1.94 7 0.27 Tyson & Range (1981) 22 0.67 11 1.45 Wierzbicki & Bartlett (1987) 18 1.17 20 0.21 Wilson et al. (1983) 16 2.17 9 -0.02 Comparison of Participants in the Two Groups of Studies Comparisons of effect sizes from different sets of studies is common in meta-analysis. Nevertheless, we examined the characteristics of the samples in the two types of studies to assess their comparability. Eighty-six percent of the participants in the psychotherapy studies were women, as were 65% of participants in the drug studies. The age range of participants was 18 to 75 years (M = 30.1) in the psychotherapy studies and 18 to 70 years (M = 40.6) in the drug studies. Duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82) in psychotherapy studies and from 2 to 15 weeks (M = 5.95) in pharmacotherapy studies. The HRS-D was used in 15 drug studies involving 2,016 patients and 5 psychotherapy studies with 191 participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any significant differences in pretreatment HRS-D scores between patients in the drug studies (M = 23.93, SD = 5.20) and participants in the psychotherapy studies (M = 21.34, SD = 5.03). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used in 4 drug studies involving 261 patients and in 17 psychotherapy studies with 677 participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any significant differences in pretreatment BDI scores between participants in drug studies (M = 21.58, SD = 8.23) and those in psychotherapy studies (M = 21.63, SD = 6.97). Thus, participants in the two types of studies were comparable in initial levels of depression. These analyses also failed to reveal any pretreatment differences as a function of group assignment (treatment or control) or the interaction between type of study and group assignment. Estimating the Placebo Effect Just as drug effects can be estimated as the drug response minus the placebo response, placebo effects can be estimated as the placebo response minus the no-treatment response. Using the effect sizes obtained from the two meta-analyses reported above, this would be 0.79 (1.16 - 0.37). Figure 2 displays the estimated drug, placebo, and no-treatment effect sizes as proportions of the drug response (i.e., 1.55 SDs). These data indicate that approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors. [pre0010002afig2a.gif] Figure 2. Drug effect, placebo effect, and natural history effect as proportions of the response to antidepressant medication. Discussion No-treatment effect sizes and effect sizes for the placebo response were calculated from different sets of studies. Comparison across different samples is common in meta-analyses. For example, effect sizes derived from studies of psychodynamic therapy are often compared to those derived from studies of behavior therapy (e.g., Andrews & Harvey, 1981; Smith et al., 1980). Nevertheless, comparisons of this sort should be interpreted cautiously. Participants volunteering for different treatments might come from a different populations, and when data for different conditions are drawn from different sets of studies, participants have not been assigned randomly to these conditions. Also, assignment to a no-treatment or wait-list control group is not the same as no intervention at all. Therefore, our estimates of the placebo effect and natural history component of the response to antidepressant medication should be considered tentative. Nevertheless, when direct comparisons are not available, these comparisons provide the best available estimates of comparative effectiveness. Furthermore, in at least some cases, these estimates have been found to yield results that are comparable to those derived from direct comparisons of groups that have been randomly assigned to condition (Kirsch, 1990; Shapiro & Shapiro, 1982). Unlike our estimate of the effect of natural history as a component of the drug response, our estimate of the placebo response as a proportion of the drug response was derived from studies in which participants from the same population were assigned randomly to drug and placebo conditions. Therefore, the estimate that only 25% of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication can be considered reliable. Confidence in the reliability of this estimate is enhanced by the exceptionally high correlation between the drug response and the placebo response. This association is high enough to suggest that any remaining variance in drug response is error variance associated with imperfect reliability of measurement. Examining estimates of active drug and inactive placebo responses as a function of drug type further enhances confidence in the reliability of these estimates. Regardless of drug type, the inactive placebo response was approximately 75% of the active drug response. We used very stringent criteria in selecting studies for inclusion in this meta-analysis, and it is possible that data from a broader range of studies would have produced a different outcome. However, the effect size we have calculated for the medication effect (D = .39) is comparable to those reported in other meta-analyses of antidepressant medication (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992, 1994; Joffe, Sokolov, & Streiner, 1996; Quality Assurance Project, 1983; Smith et al., 1980; Steinbrueck, Maxwell, & Howard, 1983). Comparison with the Joffe et al. (1996) meta-analysis is particularly instructive, because that study, like ours, included estimates of pre-post effect sizes for both drug and placebo. Although only two studies were included in both of these meta-analyses and somewhat different calculation methods were used, ^2 their results were remarkably similar to ours. They reported mean pre-post effect sizes of 1.57 for medication and 1.02 for placebo and a medication versus placebo effect size of .50. Our results are in agreement with those of other meta-analyses in revealing a substantial placebo effect in antidepressant medication and also a considerable benefit of medication over placebo. They also indicate that the placebo component of the response to medication is considerably greater than the pharmacological effect. However, there are two aspects of the data that have not been examined in other meta-analyses of antidepressant medication. These are (a) the exceptionally high correlation between the placebo response and the drug response and (b) the effect on depression of active drugs that are not antidepressants. Taken together, these two findings suggest the possibility that antidepressants might function as active placebos, in which the side-effects amplify the placebo effect by convincing patients of that they are receiving a potent drug. In summary, the data reviewed in this meta-analysis lead to a confident estimate that the response to inert placebos is approximately 75% of the response to active antidepressant medication. Whether the remaining 25% of the drug response is a true pharmacologic effect or an enhanced placebo effect cannot yet be determined, because of the relatively small number of studies in which active and inactive placebos have been compared (Fisher & Greenberg, 1993). Definitive estimates of placebo component of antidepressant medication will require four arm studies, in which the effects of active placebos, inactive placebos, active medication, and natural history (e.g., wait-list controls) are examined. 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Double blind: Double talk or are there ways to do better research? Medical Hypotheses, 21, 119-126. Nezu, A. M. (1986). Efficacy of a social problem solving therapy approach for unipolar depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54(2), 196-202. Quality Assurance Project. (1983). A treatment outline for depressive disorders. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 17, 129-146. Ravaris, C. L., Nies, A., Robinson, D. S., et al. (1976). A multiple-dose, controlled study of phenelzine in depression-anxiety states. Archives of General Psychiatry, 33, 347-350. Rehm, L. P., Kornblith, S. J., O'Hara, M. W., et al. (1981). An evaluation of major components in a self control therapy program for depression. Behavior Modification, 5(4), 459-489. Rickels, K., & Case, G. W. (1982). Trazodone in depressed outpatients. American Journal of Psychiatry, 139, 803-806. Rickels, K., Case, G. W., Weberlowsky, J., et al. (1981). Amoxapine and imipramine in the treatment of depressed outpatients: A controlled study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 138(1), 20-24. Robinson, L. A., Berman, J. S., & Neimeyer, R. A. (1990). Psychotherapy for the treatment of depression: A comprehensive review of controlled outcome research. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 30-49. Robinson, D. S., Nies, A., & Ravaris, C. L. (1973). The MAOI phenelzine in the treatment of depressive-anxiety states. Archives of General Psychiatry, 29, 407-413. Rude, S. (1986). Relative benefits of assertion or cognitive self-control treatment for depression as a function of proficiency in each domain. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54, 390-394. Schmidt, M. M., & Miller, W. R. (1983). Amount of therapist contact and outcome in a multidimentional depression treatment program. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 67, 319-332. Schweizer, E., Feighner, J., Mandos, L. A., & Rickels, K. (1994). Comparison of venlafaxine and imipramine in the acute treatment of major depression in outpatients. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 55(3), 104-108. Shapiro, D. A., & Shapiro, D. (1982). Meta-analysis of comparative therapy outcome studies: A replication and refinement. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 581-604. Shaw, B. F. (1977). Comparison of cognitive therapy and behavior therapy in the treatment of depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 45, 543-551. Shipley, C. R., & Fazio, A. F. (1973). Pilot study of a treatment for psychological depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 82, 372-376. Sloane, R. B., Staples, F. R., Cristol, A. H., Yorkston, N. J., & Whipple, K. (1975). Psychotherapy versus behavior therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, M. L., Glass, G. V., & Miller, T. I. (1980). The benefits of psychotherapy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stark, P., & Hardison, C. D. (1985). A review of multicenter controlled studies of fluoxetine vs. imipramine and placebo in outpatients with major depressive disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 46, 53-58. Steinbrueck, S.M., Maxwell, S.E., & Howard, G.S. (1983). A meta-analysis of psychotherapy and drug therapy in the treatment of unipolar depression with adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51, 856-863. Taylor, F. G., & Marshall, W. L. (1977). Experimental analysis of a cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1(1), 59-72. Tyson, G. M., & Range, L. M. (1987). Gestalt dialogues as a treatment for depression: Time works just as well. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 43, 227-230. van der Velde, C. D. (1981). Maprotiline versus imipramine and placebo in neurotic depression. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 42, 138-141. White, K., Razani, J., Cadow, B., et al. (1984). Tranylcypromine vs. nortriptyline vs. placebo in depressed outpatients: a controlled trial. Psychopharmacology, 82, 258-262. Wierzbicki, M., & Bartlett, T. S. (1987). The efficacy of group and individual cognitive therapy for mild depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 11(3), 337-342. Wilson, P. H., Goldin, J. C., & Charboneau-Powis, M. (1983). Comparative efficacy of behavioral and cognitive treatments of depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 7(2), 111-124. Workman, E. A., & Short, D. D. (1993). Atypical antidepressants versus imipramine in the treatment of major depression: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 54(1), 5-12. Zung, W. W. K. (1983). Review of placebo-controlled trials with bupropion. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 44(5), 104-114. _________________________________________________________________ ^1 A reviewer suggested that because effect sizes are essentially z-scores in a hypothetically normal distribution, one might use percentile equivalents when examining the proportion of the drug response duplicated by the placebo response. As an example of why this should not be done, consider a treatment that improves intelligence by 1.55 SDs (which is approximately at the 6^th percentile) and another that improves it by 1.16 SDs (which is approximately at the 12^th percentile). Our method indicates that the second is 75% as effective as the first. The reviewer's method suggests that it is only 50% as effective. Now let's convert this to actual IQ changes and see what happens. If the IQ estimates were done on conventional scales (SD = 15), this would be equivalent to a change of 23.25 points by the first treatment and 17.4 points by the second. Note that the percentage relation is identical whether using z-scores or raw scores, because the z-score method simply divides both numbers by a constant. ^2 Instead of dividing mean differences by the pooled SDs, Joffe et al. (1996) used baseline SDs, when these were available, in calculating effect sizes. When baseline SDs were not available, which they reported to be the case for most of the studies they included, they used estimates taken from other studies. Also, they used a procedure derived from Hedges and Olkin (1995) to weight for differences in sample size, whereas we used the more straightforward method recommended by Hunter and Schmidt (1990). From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:08:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:08:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Skeptic's Dictionary: Placebo Effect Message-ID: Placebo Effect http://skepdic.com/placebo.html [5]Scientists See How Placebo Effect Eases Pain - Scientific American February 20, 2004 [6]Power of the placebo: Simply expecting relief from pain can help, study shows, February 19, 2004 [7]"Against Depression, a Sugar Pill Is Hard to Beat Placebos Improve Mood, Change Brain Chemistry in Majority of Trials of Antidepressants" by Shankar Vedantam Washington Post vertline.gif (1078 bytes) placebo effect "The physician's belief in the treatment and the patient's faith in the physician exert a mutually reinforcing effect; the result is a powerful remedy that is almost guaranteed to produce an improvement and sometimes a cure." -- Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick, Follies and Fallacies in Medicine, p. 13. The placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health not attributable to treatment. This effect is believed by many people to be due to the placebo itself in some mysterious way. A placebo (Latin for I shall please) is a medication or treatment believed by the administrator of the treatment to be inert or innocuous. Placebos may be sugar pills or starch pills. Even fake surgery and fake psychotherapy are considered placebos. Researchers and medical doctors sometimes give placebos to patients. Anecdotal evidence for the placebo effect is garnered in this way. Those who believe there is scientific evidence for the placebo effect point to clinical studies, many of which use a [8]control group treated with a placebo. Why an inert substance, or a fake surgery or therapy, would be effective is not known. the psychological theory: it's all in your mind Some believe the placebo effect is psychological, due to a belief in the treatment or to a subjective feeling of improvement. Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, believes that the effectiveness of Prozac and similar drugs may be attributed almost entirely to the placebo effect. He and Guy Sapirstein analyzed 19 clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that the expectation of improvement, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 percent of the drugs' effectiveness ([9]Kirsch 1998). "The critical factor," says Kirsch, "is our beliefs about what's going to happen to us. You don't have to rely on drugs to see profound transformation." In an earlier study, Sapirstein analyzed 39 studies, done between 1974 and 1995, of depressed patients treated with drugs, psychotherapy, or a combination of both. He found that 50 percent of the drug effect is due to the placebo response. A person's beliefs and hopes about a treatment, combined with their suggestibility, may have a significant biochemical effect. Sensory experience and thoughts can affect neurochemistry. The body's neurochemical system affects and is affected by other biochemical systems, including the hormonal and immune systems. Thus, it is consistent with current knowledge that a person's hopeful attitude and beliefs may be very important to their physical well-being and recovery from injury or illness. However, it may be that much of the placebo effect is not a matter of mind over molecules, but of mind over behavior. A part of the behavior of a "sick" person is learned. So is part of the behavior of a person in pain. In short, there is a certain amount of role-playing by ill or hurt people. Role-playing is not the same as faking or malingering. The behavior of sick or injured persons is socially and culturally based to some extent. The placebo effect may be a measurement of changed behavior affected by a belief in the treatment. The changed behavior includes a change in attitude, in what one says about how one feels, and how one acts. It may also affect one's body chemistry. The psychological explanation seems to be the one most commonly believed. Perhaps this is why many people are dismayed when they are told that the effective drug they are taking is a placebo. This makes them think that their problem is "all in their mind" and that there is really nothing wrong with them. Yet, there are too many studies which have found objective improvements in health from placebos to support the notion that the placebo effect is entirely psychological. Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchiodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).[10]* It is unlikely that such effects are purely psychological. But it is not necessarily the case that the placebo is actually effective in such cases. the nature-taking-its-course theory Some believe that at least part of the placebo effect is due to an illness or injury taking its natural course. We often heal spontaneously if we do nothing at all to treat an illness or injury. Furthermore, many disorders, pains and illnesses, wax and wane. What is measured as the placebo effect could be, in many cases, the measurement of natural [11]regression. In short, the placebo may be given credit that is due to nature. However, spontaneous healing and spontaneous remission of disease cannot explain all the healing or improvement that takes place because of placebos. People who are given no treatment at all often do not do as well as those given placebos or real medicine and treatment. the process-of-treatment theory Another theory gaining popularity is that a process of treatment that involves showing attention, care, affection, etc., to the patient/subject, a process that is encouraging and hopeful, may itself trigger physical reactions in the body which promote healing. According to Dr. Walter A. Brown, a psychiatrist at Brown University, there is certainly data that suggest that just being in the healing situation accomplishes something. Depressed patients who are merely put on a waiting list for treatment do not do as well as those given placebos. And -- this is very telling, I think -- when placebos are given for pain management, the course of pain relief follows what you would get with an active drug. The peak relief comes about an hour after it's administered, as it does with the real drug, and so on. If placebo analgesia was the equivalent of giving nothing, you'd expect a more random pattern ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).[12]* Dr. Brown and others believe that the placebo effect is mainly or purely physical and due to physical changes which promote healing or feeling better. It is assumed that the physical changes are not caused by the placebo itself. So, what is the explanatory mechanism for the placebo effect? Some think it is the process of administering it. It is thought that the touching, the caring, the attention, and other interpersonal communication that is part of the controlled study process (or the therapeutic setting), along with the hopefulness and encouragement provided by the experimenter/healer, affect the mood of the subject, which in turn triggers physical changes such as release of endorphins. The process reduces stress by providing hope or reducing uncertainty about what treatment to take or what the outcome will be. The reduction in stress prevents or slows down further harmful physical changes from occurring. The process-of-treatment hypothesis would explain how inert [13]homeopathic remedies and the questionable therapies of many "alternative" health practitioners are often effective or thought to be effective. It would also explain why pills or procedures used by conventional medicine work until they are shown to be worthless. Forty years ago, a young Seattle cardiologist named Leonard Cobb conducted a unique trial of a procedure then commonly used for angina, in which doctors made small incisions in the chest and tied knots in two arteries to try to increase blood flow to the heart. It was a popular technique -- 90 percent of patients reported that it helped -- but when Cobb compared it with placebo surgery in which he made incisions but did not tie off the arteries, the sham operations proved just as successful. The procedure, known as internal mammary ligation, was soon abandoned ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).[14]* Of course, spontaneous healing or [15]regression can also adequately explain why homeopathic remedies might appear to be effective. Whether the placebo effect is mainly psychological, misunderstood spontaneous healing, due to showing care and attention, or due to some combination of all three may not be known with complete confidence. the powerful placebo challenged The powerful effect of the placebo is not in doubt. [16]It should be, however, according to Danish researchers Asbj?rn Hr?bjartsson and Peter C. G?tzsche. Their meta-study of 114 studies involving placebos found "little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects...[and]...compared with no treatment, placebo had no significant effect on binary outcomes, regardless of whether these outcomes were subjective or objective. For the trials with continuous outcomes, placebo had a beneficial effect, but the effect decreased with increasing sample size, indicating a possible bias related to the effects of small trials ("Is the Placebo Powerless? An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment," The New England Journal of Medicine, May 24, 2001 (Vol. 344, No. 21)." According to Dr. Hr?bjartsson, professor of medical philosophy and research methodology at University of Copenhagen, "The high levels of placebo effect which have been repeatedly reported in many articles, in our mind are the result of flawed research methodology."[17]* This claim flies in the face of more than fifty years of research. At the very least, we can expect to see more rigorously designed research projects trying to disprove Hr?bjartsson and G?tzsche. the origin of the idea The idea of the powerful placebo in modern times originated with H. K. Beecher. He evaluated over two dozen studies and calculated that about one-third of those in the studies improved due to the placebo effect ("The Powerful Placebo," 1955). Other studies calculate the placebo effect as being even greater than Beecher claimed. For example, studies have shown that placebos are effective in 50 or 60 percent of subjects with certain conditions, e.g., "pain, depression, some heart ailments, gastric ulcers and other stomach complaints."[18]* And, as effective as the new psychotropic drugs seem to be in the treatment of various brain disorders, [19]some researchers maintain that there is not adequate evidence from studies to prove that the new drugs are more effective than placebos. Placebos have even been shown to cause unpleasant side effects. Dermatitis medicamentosa and angioneurotic edema have resulted from placebo therapy, according to [20]Dodes. There are even reports of people becoming [21]addicted to placebos. the ethical dilemma The power of the placebo effect has led to an ethical dilemma. One should not deceive other people, but one should relieve the pain and suffering of one's patients. Should one use deception to benefit one's patients? Is it unethical for a doctor to knowingly prescribe a placebo without informing the patient? If informing the patient reduces the effectiveness of the placebo, is some sort of deception warranted in order to benefit the patient? Some doctors think it is justified to use a placebo in those types of cases where a strong placebo effect has been shown and where distress is an aggravating factor.[22]* Others think it is always wrong to deceive the patient and that informed consent requires that the patient be told that a treatment is a placebo treatment. Others, especially "alternative" medicine practitioners, don't even want to know whether a treatment is a placebo or not. Their attitude is that as long as the treatment is effective, who cares if it a placebo? Of course, if the placebo effect is an illusion, then another ethical dilemma arises: should placebos be given if it is known that deception does not really reduce pain or aid in the cure of anything? are placebos dangerous? While skeptics may reject faith, prayer and "alternative" medical practices such as [23]bioharmonics, [24]chiropractic and [25]homeopathy, such practices may not be without their salutary effects. Clearly, they can't cure cancer or repair a punctured lung, and they might not even prolong life by giving hope and relieving distress as is sometimes thought. But administering useless therapies does involve interacting with the patient in a caring, attentive way, and this can provide some measure of comfort. However, to those who say "what difference does it make why something works, as long as it seems to work" I reply that it is likely that there is something which works even better, something for the other two-thirds or one-half of humanity who, for whatever reason, cannot be cured or helped by placebos or spontaneous healing or natural regression of their pain. Furthermore, placebos may not always be beneficial or harmless. In addition to adverse side effects, mentioned above, John Dodes notes that Patients can become dependent on nonscientific practitioners who employ placebo therapies. Such patients may be led to believe they're suffering from imagined "reactive" hypoglycemia, nonexistent allergies and yeast infections, dental filling amalgam "toxicity," or that they're under the power of Qi or extraterrestrials. And patients can be led to believe that diseases are only amenable to a specific type of treatment from a specific practitioner ([26]The Mysterious Placebo by John E. Dodes, Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb 1997). In other words, the placebo can be an open door to quackery. See also [27]confirmation bias, [28]control study, [29]communal reinforcement, [30]magical thinking, [31]nocebo, [32]Occam's razor, [33]post hoc fallacy, [34]regressive fallacy, [35]selective thinking, [36]self-deception, [37]subjective validation,[38] testimonials, and [39]wishful thinking. For examples of beliefs deeply affected by the placebo effect see the following: [40]acupuncture [41]"alternative" health practices [42]aromatherapy[43] bioharmonics [44]crystal power [45]homeopathy and [46]reflexology _________________ [47]further reading * [48]The Mysterious Placebo by John E. Dodes * [49]The placebo effect is the healing force of nature by G. Zajicek * [50]The Mysterious Placebo Effect by Carol Hart Modern Drug Discovery July/August 1999 * Kirsch, Irving , Ph.D. and Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D. [51]"Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication" Prevention & Treatment, Volume 1, June 1998. * [52]The Placebo Prescription - New York Times Magazine 1/09/2000 * [53]Sham Surgery Returns as a Research Tool by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times 4/25/1999 * [54]"Placebo Effect Accounts For Fifty Percent Of Improvement In Depressed Patients Taking Antidepressants" by the American Psychological Association * [55]"Placebo Effects Prove the Value of Suggestion" by Charles Henderson, Ph.D. (Interesting experiment on subliminal advertising.) * [56]Is Prescribing Placebos Ethical? experts argue the pros and cons [57]Engel, Linda W. et al. The Science of the Placebo - Toward an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda ( BMJ Books, 2002). [58]Fisher, Seymour and Roger P. Greenberg. eds. From Placebo to Panacea: Putting Psychiatric Drugs to the Test (John Wiley and Sons, 1997). Hr?bjartsson, Asb?jrn and Peter C. G?tzsche. "Is the Placebo Powerless? An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment," The New England Journal of Medicine, May 24, 2001 (Vol. 344, No. 21). [59]Harrington, Anne. ed. The Placebo Effect : An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Harvard University Press, 1999). Hartwick, Joseph J. Placebo Effects in health and Disease: Index of new Information with Authors, Subjects, and References (Washington, D.C.: ABBE Publications Association, 1996). [60]Jerome, Lawrence E. Crystal Power - The Ultimate Placebo Effect (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1996). [61]Skrabanek, Petr, Ph.D. and James McCormick, M.D. (1990). Follies & Fallacies in Medicine. Prometheus. [62]Ogelsby, Dr. Paul. The Caring Physician : The Life of Dr. Francis W. Peabody (Harvard University Press, 1991). [63]Shapiro, Arthur K. and Elaine. The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). [64]Stanovich, Keith E. How to Think Straight About Psychology, 3rd ed., (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). Sternberg, Esther M. and Philip W. Gold. "The Mind-Body Interaction in Disease," Scientific American," special issue "Mysteries of the Mind," (January 1997). [65]White, Leonard, Bernard Tursky and Gary Schwartz. Placebo: Theory Research, and Mechanisms, ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 1985). ?copyright 2005 Robert Todd Carroll [66]larrow.gif (1051 bytes) pious fraud [67]plant perception[68] rarrow.gif (1048 bytes) References 5. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000B6140-F61E-1034-B61E83414B7F0000 6. http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/02/19/brain.power.ap/ 7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42930-2002May6.html 8. http://skepdic.com/control.html 9. http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html 10. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html 11. http://skepdic.com/regressive.html 12. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html 13. http://skepdic.com/homeo.html 14. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html 15. http://skepdic.com/regressive.html 16. http://skepdic.com/refuge/funk21.html#placebo 17. http://search.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH?d=dmtICNNews&c=322238&p= 18. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html 19. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471148482/roberttoddcarrolA/ 20. http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/placebo.html 21. http://home.comcast.net/~bkrentzman/meds/placebo.html 22. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html 23. http://skepdic.com/bioharmonics.html 24. http://skepdic.com/chiro.html 25. http://skepdic.com/homeo.html 26. http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/placebo.html 27. http://skepdic.com/confirmbias.html 28. http://skepdic.com/control.html 29. http://skepdic.com/comreinf.html 30. http://skepdic.com/magicalthinking.html 31. http://skepdic.com/nocebo.html 32. http://skepdic.com/occam.html 33. http://skepdic.com/posthoc.html 34. http://skepdic.com/regressive.html 35. http://skepdic.com/selectiv.html 36. http://skepdic.com/selfdeception.html 37. http://skepdic.com/subjectivevalidation.html 38. http://skepdic.com/testimon.html 39. http://skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html 40. http://skepdic.com/acupunc.html 41. http://skepdic.com/althelth.html 42. http://skepdic.com/aroma.html 43. http://skepdic.com/bioharmonics.html 44. http://skepdic.com/crystals.html 45. http://skepdic.com/homeo.html 46. http://skepdic.com/reflex.html 47. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471272426/roberttoddcarrolA/ 48. http://www.csicop.org/si/9701/placebo.html 49. http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/edito/8-2z.htm 50. http://www.pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/mdd/99/aug/mysterious.html 51. http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html 52. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000109mag-talbot7.html 53. http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/042599surgery-ethics-review.html 54. http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/1996-APA-placebo-vs-SSRI.htm 55. http://www.bcx.net/hypnosis/placebo.htm 56. http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.678/healthissue_detail.asp 57. http://www.bmjbookshop.com/shop/product_display.asp?SiteLanguage=ENG&productid=0727915940 58. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471148482/roberttoddcarrolA/ 59. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=067466986X/roberttoddcarrolA/ 60. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0879755326/roberttoddcarrolA/ 61. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0879756306/roberttoddcarrolA/ 62. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0674097386/roberttoddcarrolA/ 63. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0801855691/roberttoddcarrolA/ 64. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321012461/roberttoddcarrolA/ 65. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0898626498/roberttoddcarrolA/ 66. http://skepdic.com/piousfraud.html 67. http://skepdic.com/plants.html From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 22 02:15:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:15:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: William Strauss and Neil Howe: The High Cost of College: an Increasingly Hard Sell Message-ID: William Strauss and Neil Howe: The High Cost of College: an Increasingly Hard Sell The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.21 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i09/09b02401.htm [Their book, Generations, has influenced my thinking more than but a handful of others. The basic idea is that America is such a country of change that parent of each generation are free to react to the mistakes of their own parents. This takes the form of a four-generational cycle: civic (GI and Millennial), adaptive (Silent), idealist (Boomers), and reactive (Lost and Gen-X). Their book shows how all of American history fits into this pattern, with one exception. The war was so devastating that a whole generation was skipped. To find a civic generation before the GI, you have to go back to Mr. Jefferson's generation. [These patterns illustrate, once again, that most change is "the result of human action but not of human design" (Hayek quoting Ferguson). It also means that, much as I (Boomer) may detest the coming civic generation, there's not much I can do about it. And it means that if I'm stuck in a particularly bad time, all I have to do is wait. [What to look for: if the rest of the world either doesn't have a cycle of generations or one at odds with the American one, this will show American exceptionalism. (I forget what Strauss and Howe said about Europe. In the Stone Age, change was much too slow for anything like this to have happened.) If the rest of the world moves in sync with the American cycle, this will be proof of American domination at an especially deep level.] Last spring's television season of The Apprentice featured a competition between the "Net Worth" and "Magna" teams (alias "Street Smarts" and "Book Smarts"). It was a battle between people who spent their early 20s outside of college -- and who have profited nicely from that decision -- and academic achievers who spent that same time in college. Even though a college graduate ultimately won, throughout the program the Street Smarts more than held their own. If Donald Trump had intended to tweak colleges, he made his point -- and raised the question of whether the high cost of traditional higher education is worth the money. The answer that you often hear, that it nearly always is worth the money, may soon come under fire from a new generation of students and their parents. Getting their diplomas has paid off financially in the past for most graduates, but how long will it continue to do so? Since the early 1980s, tuition and fees at private and public colleges have grown faster than inflation each year -- often more than two or three times as fast. To obtain a four-year private-college diploma, a typical family sending off a freshman this fall is looking at a price tag close to $120,000, not counting books, transportation, and other expenses. Meanwhile, the amounts that today's students are borrowing are clearly rising. According to a report by the American Council on Education, the number of student loans made annually has more than doubled since 1993. As of 2004, 70 percent of private-college students receiving B.A.'s had taken out student loans, with a median amount of $17,125. Just over 80 percent of all students receiving professional degrees at private institutions (in fields such as law, medicine, and dentistry) had student loans, with a median amount of $71,317. Many have debts way above those medians, of course, and the report confirmed that students from the lowest-income families are borrowing the most. Yet even those numbers fall short because they don't account for off-the-books borrowing. Banks extended $11-billion in loans to students in 2004. Many families are also taking out home-equity loans to pay college expenses, tethering future income to the vagaries of the housing market. Many of today's recent graduates begin work life with total debt-repayment obligations that leave them with monthly interest burdens higher than what banks consider responsible. Young people who start out with such burdens, especially from low-income families, may have trouble establishing households, buying homes, and reaching the earnings they expect. The common assumption is that a college education "always pays," but that assumption is based on retrospective data from the late 90s and earlier on the relative earnings of adults now in their mid-20s, 30s, and 40s. According to census data, when adjusted for inflation, the median earnings of workers age 25 and older with only a bachelor's degree have fallen for four straight years. Today's heavily indebted college graduate does not necessarily have an edge over someone of the same age who spent those same four years building a r?sum?, gaining experience, establishing connections, and earning and saving money. Imagine what would happen to colleges if word starts to spread, over the next 5 to 10 years, that many of those who chose to forgo higher education are more successful at age 30measured by incomes, homes, savings -- than their better-educated but heavily indebted peers. We have long studied the patterns of different generations and see two significant factors at work today as well. The first is the arrival of a "Millennial generation" of college students, those born in 1982 and after. They are quite ambitious, on the whole, and more focused on the long-term future than students were a decade or two ago. According to a survey by Teenage Research Unlimited, three-quarters of today's teenagers plan to attend college for the purpose of helping them launch careers, while less than one-quarter seek what has mattered most to many of their parents: college as an escape and a meaningful experience. As long as a college degree remains a necessary credential for a career, demand will remain strong. But if that perception starts weakening -- if Millennials perceive professors as being so stuck in the last century on matters of ideology, attitude, and technology that they can no longer teach the knowledge and skills necessary for financial success -- then colleges should watch out. Many will see their admissions pools shrink, their acceptance yields decline, and their dropout rates rise -- perhaps sharply. The second, and more decisive, generational change involves parents. In recent years administrators have had to deal with pushier-than-ever parents, who demand to know how a college will help their 22-year-old "child" land that prestigious, highly paid position at the end of the long K-16 path in which those moms and dads have invested so much love, time, energy, and money. The good news for colleges is that most of those parents have a deep faith in the value of a college education. Many are boomers who attended college during the late 1960s and early 70s. Despite -- or maybe because of -- those tumultuous times, people who went to college back then retain a positive attitude toward the traditional college experience, which they have yearned to relive through their children. The result has been a relative lack of attention to questions of cost and value. As increases in tuition have outpaced inflation year after year, boomer parents have offered little objection. That all may change very soon. Over the next few years, more parents accompanying high-school seniors on campus tours will be Gen Xers, born in 1961 and after. By 2015 they will be the overwhelming majority of campus parents. That first batch of Gen-X moms and dads will be those who attended college in the 80s and early 90s. Between the late 60s and then, the annual survey by the University of California at Los Angeles of college freshmen showed a steep decline -- from nearly 80 percent to about 40 percent -- in the proportion who felt that "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" was an important goal of college, and a steep rise, almost exactly in reverse of those numbers, in the proportion who felt that "being very well off financially" was an important goal. Gen Xers also were told by one academic report after another how poorly educated they were as a generation, what a "rising tide of mediocrity" they and their schools represented. Married Gen Xers with children are among America's most conservative voting blocs. They are fiercely protective of their children, in school and elsewhere. On their own and through PTA's, they are doing all they can to make sure that schools don't fail their own sons and daughters the way (they were told) their schools had failed them. Hence, at the grass roots, Gen Xers have propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, and the standards-and-accountability movement. And now they are coming, with their children, to college. When we have raised the issue, we have found that, far more than boomers, Gen Xers are likely to recall college in hindsight as a waste of time and money. Their recollection of their own college years has morphed into a profound skepticism bordering on cynicism, a demand for standards and accountability, and a keen interest in the bottom line. Considering what they have done as school parents, it's not hard to predict how they will behave as college parents. This get-real generation will focus on standards, transparency, measurable results, accountability, and (especially) cost. They will ask, perhaps very pointedly, whether courses and the professors who teach them are worth the money. After carefully checking out the college dorms, food, gyms, and career-counseling services, they will ask about "ROI" (return on investment). Some will wonder whether class discussions focusing on issues of the 60s and 70s, still so intriguing to many boomer professors, teach anything their kids need in the workplace. Many will ask why, in recent decades, whatever the economic climate, higher education has relentlessly risen in cost relative to inflation. At colleges with large endowments, many will ask why, especially in those years that endowments have grown significantly, keeping tuition low hasn't been given a high priority in the use of endowment funds. Many will ask whether student loans are, in fact, "financial aid" or rather just an inducement to enroll -- much as car loans are not "car aid" but a mere inducement to buy a car. If you are a boomer administrator, you might want to assemble a meeting of staff members in their late 30s or early 40s who have kids in middle or high school. Ask them those questions, and you might be startled by the answers. When we speak at colleges, we find that such questions resonate with Gen-X administrative-staff members, who readily acknowledge that they and their peers will be a hard sell when their own kids are ready for campus tours. Perhaps those Gen-X staff members can help you find ways to prove to Millennial students and Gen-X parents that your educational product is worth the money. Perhaps they can help you provide measurable standards comparable to what Gen-X parents expect from their public schools. That might include solid data on what recent graduates do, what they earn, how large their loans have been, and how quickly they pay the loans off. They might help you update your marketing strategies. That might include new ways to convince students and parents of the importance of learning what your college teaches and about the quality of the experience -- and student body -- you offer. Finally, and most important, you should do whatever it takes to hold the line on tuition. Today's colleges are walking a tightrope on tuition, and the rope is getting thinner every year. The longstanding assumption about the collegiate earnings premium is due for a high-stakes reassessment in this new era of high tuition, high debt, and parents with a keen eye on the bottom line. William Strauss and Neil Howe are co-authors of Millennials Rising (Vintage Books, 2000), Millennials Go to College (LifeCourse Books, 2003), Generations (Morrow/Quill, 1991), and other books about American generations. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Oct 22 19:56:35 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:56:35 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <435A9973.8090203@solution-consulting.com> Recent reviews of effect size of antidepresants is around 0.2, indicating 2/10s of a standard deviation difference between placebo and active drug. Active placebos (with side effects) have a bigger effect size. Note than there is little placebo response seen in anti-psychotic and ADHD drugs, presumably because of the difference in the patient population. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of > Antidepressant Medication > http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html > Prevention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998 > > [I read something similar in Science, maybe twenty years ago, about > the placebo effect being proportionate to the medical effect, and I > think it deal with a much larger categories of illnesses. Does anyone > know anything further about these anomalies?] > > by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT > and Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D., Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA > > ABSTRACT > > Mean effect sizes for changes in depression were calculated for > 2,318 patients who had been randomly assigned to either > antidepressant medication or placebo in 19 double-blind clinical > trials. As a proportion of the drug response, the placebo response > was constant across different types of medication (75%), and the > correlation between placebo effect and drug effect was .90. These > data indicate that virtually all of the variation in drug effect > size was due to the placebo characteristics of the studies. The > effect size for active medications that are not regarded to be > antidepressants was as large as that for those classified as > antidepressants, and in both cases, the inactive placebos produced > improvement that was 75% of the effect of the active drug. These > data raise the possibility that the apparent drug effect (25% of > the drug response) is actually an active placebo effect. > Examination of pre-post effect sizes among depressed individuals > assigned to no-treatment or wait-list control groups suggest that > approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the > administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo > effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific > factors. > _________________________________________________________________ > > EDITORS' NOTE > > The article that follows is a controversial one. It reaches a > controversial conclusion--that much of the therapeutic benefit of > antidepressant medications actually derives from placebo > responding. The article reaches this conclusion by utilizing a > controversial statistical approach--meta-analysis. And it employs > meta-analysis controversially--by meta-analyzing studies that are > very heterogeneous in subject selection criteria, treatments > employed, and statistical methods used. Nonetheless, we have chosen > to publish the article. We have done so because a number of the > colleagues who originally reviewed the manuscript believed it had > considerable merit, even while they recognized the clearly > contentious conclusions it reached and the clearly arguable > statistical methods it employed. > > We are convinced that one of the principal aims of an electronic > journal ought to be to bring our readers information on a variety > of current topics in prevention and treatment, even though much of > it will be subject to heated differences of opinion about worth and > ultimate significance. This is to be expected, of course, when one > is publishing material at the cutting-edge, in a cutting-edge > medium. > > We also believe, however, that soliciting expert commentary to > accompany particularly controversial articles facilitates the > fullest possible airing of the issues most germane to appreciating > both the strengths and the weaknesses of target articles. In the > same vein, we welcome comments on the article from readers as well, > though for obvious reasons, we cannot promise to publish all of > them. > > Feel free to submit a comment by emailing admin at apa.org. > > Peter Nathan, Associate Editor (Treatment) > Martin E. P. Seligman, Editor > _________________________________________________________________ > > We thank R. B. Lydiard and Smith-Kline Beecham Pharaceuticals for > supplying additional data. We thank David Kenny for his assistance > with the statistical analyses. We thank Roger P. Greenberg and > Daniel E. Moerman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of > this paper. > > Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to > Irving Kirsch, Department of Psychology, U-20, University of > Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road Storrs, CT 06269-1020. > E-mail: Irvingk at uconnvm.uconn.edu > _________________________________________________________________ > > More placebos have been administered to research participants than any > single experimental drug. Thus, one would expect sufficient data to > have accumulated for the acquisition of substantial knowledge of the > parameters of placebo effects. However, although almost everyone > controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them. With this > in mind, we set about the task of using meta-analytic procedures for > evaluating the magnitude of the placebo response to antidepressant > medication. > > Meta-analysis provides a means of mathematically combining results > from different studies, even when these studies have used different > measures to assess the dependent variable. Most often, this is done by > using the statistic d, which is a standardized difference score. This > effect size is generally calculated as the mean of the experimental > group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled > standard deviation. Less frequently, the mean difference is divided by > standard deviation of the control group (Smith, Glass, & Miller, > 1980). > > Ideally, to calculate the effect size of placebos, we would want to > subtract the effects of a no-placebo control group. However, placebos > are used as controls against which the effects of physical > interventions can be gauged. It is rare for an experimental condition > to be included against which the effects of the placebo can be > evaluated. To circumvent this problem, we decided to calculate > within-cell or pre-post effect sizes, which are the posttreatment mean > depression score minus the pretreatment mean depression score, divided > by the pooled standard deviation (cf. Smith et al., 1980). By doing > this for both placebo groups and medication groups, we can estimate > the proportion of the response to antidepressant medication that is > duplicated by placebo administration, a response that would be due to > such factors as expectancy for improvement and the natural course of > the disorder (i.e., spontaneous remission). Later in this article, we > also separate expectancy from natural history and provide estimates of > each of these effects. > > Although our approach is unusual, in most cases it should provide > results that are comparable to conventional methods. If there are no > significant pretreatment differences between the treatment and control > groups, then the subtraction of mean standardized pre-post difference > scores should result in a mean effect size that is just about the same > as that produced by subtracting mean standardized posttreatment > scores. Suppose, for example, we have a study with the data displayed > in Table 1. The conventionally calculated effect size would be would > be 1.00. The pre-post effect sizes would be 3.00 for the treatment > group and 2.00 for the control group. The difference between them is > 1.00, which is exactly the same effect calculated from posttreatment > scores alone. However, calculating the effect size in this manner also > provides us with the information that the effect of the control > procedure was 2/3 that of the treatment procedure, information that we > do not have when we only consider posttreatment scores. Of course, it > is rare for two groups to have identical mean pretreatment scores, and > to the extent that those scores are different, our two methods of > calculation would provide different results. However, by controlling > for baseline differences, our method should provide the more accurate > estimate of differential outcome. > > CAPTION: Table 1 > Hypothetical Means and Standard Deviations for a Treatment Group and a > Control Group > > Treatment Control > Pretreatment Posttreatment Pretreatment Posttreatment > M 25.00 10.00 25.00 15.00 > SD 5.50 4.50 4.50 5.50 > > The Effects of Medication and Placebo > > Study Characteristics > > Studies assessing the efficacy of antidepressant medication were > obtained through previous reviews (Davis, Janicak, & Bruninga, 1987; > Free & Oei, 1989; Greenberg & Fisher, 1989; Greenberg, Bornstein, > Greenberg, & Fisher, 1992; Workman & Short, 1993), supplemented by a > computer search of PsycLit and MEDLINE databases from 1974 to 1995 > using the search terms drug-therapy or pharmacotherapy or > psychotherapy or placebo and depression or affective disorders. > Psychotherapy was included as a search term for the purpose of > obtaining articles that would allow estimation of changes occurring in > no-treatment and wait-list control groups, a topic to which we return > later in this article. Approximately 1,500 publications were produced > by this literature search. These were examined by the second author, > and those meeting the following criteria were included in the > meta-analysis: > > 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of > depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected > because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, > physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were > studies in which the description of the patient population was > vague (e.g., "neurotic"). > 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate > within-condition effect sizes. This resulted in the exclusion of > studies for which neither pre-post statistical tests nor > pretreatment means were available. > 3. Data were reported for a placebo control group. > 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. > 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. > > Of the approximately 1,500 studies examined, 20 met the inclusion > criteria. Of these, all but one were studies of the acute phase of > therapy, with treatment durations ranging from 1 to 20 weeks (M = > 4.82). The one exception (Doogan & Caillard, 1992) was a maintenance > study, with a duration of treatment of 44 weeks. Because of this > difference, Doogan and Caillard's study was excluded from the > meta-analysis. Thus, the analysis was conducted on 19 studies > containing 2,318 participants, of whom 1,460 received medication and > 858 received placebo. Medications studied were amitriptyline, > amylobarbitone, fluoxetine, imipramine, paroxetine, isocarboxazid, > trazodone, lithium, liothyronine, adinazolam, amoxapine, phenelzine, > venlafaxine, maprotiline, tranylcypromine, and bupropion. > > The Calculation of Effect Sizes > > In most cases, effect sizes (d) were calculated for measures of > depression as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment > score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (SD). Pretreatment SDs > were used in place of pooled SDs in calculating effect sizes for four > studies in which posttreatment SDs were not reported (Ravaris, Nies, > Robinson, et al., 1976; Rickels & Case, 1982; Rickels, Case, > Weberlowsky, et al., 1981; Robinson, Nies, & Ravaris, 1973). The > methods described by Smith et al. (1980) were used to estimate effect > sizes for two studies in which means and SDs were not reported. One of > these studies (Goldberg, Rickels, & Finnerty, 1981) reported the t > value for the pre-post comparisons. The effect size for this study was > estimated using the formula: > > d= t (2/n)^1/2 > > where t is the reported t value for the pre-post comparison, and n is > the number of subjects in the condition. The other study (Kiev & > Okerson, 1979) reported only that there was a significant difference > between pre- and posttreatment scores. As suggested by Smith et al. > (1980), the following formula for estimating the effect size was used: > > d= 1.96 (2/n)^ 1/2 , > > where 1.96 is used as the most conservative estimation of the t value > at the .05 significance level used by Kiev and Okerson. These two two > effect sizes were also corrected for pre-post correlation by > multiplying the estimated effect size by (1 - r)^ 1/2 , r being the > estimate of the test-retest correlation (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). > Bailey and Coppen (1976) reported test-retest correlations of .65 for > the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & > Erbaugh, 1961) and .50 for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression > (HRS-D; Hamilton, 1960) . Therefore, in order to arrive at an > estimated effect size, corrected for the pre-post correlation, the > estimated effect sizes of the HRS-D were multiplied by 0.707 and the > effect sizes of the BDI were multiplied by 0.59. > > In studies reporting multiple measures of depression, an effect size > was calculated for each measure and these were then averaged. In > studies reporting the effects of two drugs, a single mean effect size > for both was calculated for the primary analysis. In a subsequent > analysis, the effect for each drug was examined separately. In both > analyses, we calculated mean effect sizes weighted for sample size (D; > Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). > > Effect Sizes > > Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients receiving medication or > placebo are presented in Table 2. Mean effect sizes, weighted for > sample size, were 1.55 SDs for the medication response and 1.16 for > the placebo response. Because effect sizes are obtained by dividing > both treatment means by a constant (i.e., the pooled SD), they can be > treated mathematically like the scores from which they are derived. ^1 > In particular, we have shown that, barring pretreatment between-group > differences, subtracting the mean pre-post effect size of the control > groups from the mean pre-post effect size of the experimental groups > is equivalent to calculating an effect size by conventional means. > Subtracting mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates > reveals a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs. This indicates that 75% > of the response to the medications examined in these studies was a > placebo response, and at most, 25% might be a true drug effect. This > does not mean that only 25% of patients are likely to respond to the > pharmacological properties of the drug. Rather, it means that for a > typical patient, 75% of the benefit obtained from the active drug > would also have obtained from an inactive placebo. > > CAPTION: Table 2 > Studies Including Placebo Control Groups > > Drug Placebo > Study n d n d > Blashki et al. (1971) 43 1.75 18 1.02 > Byerly et al. (1988) 44 2.30 16 1.37 > Claghorn et al. (1992) 113 1.91 95 1.49 > Davidson & Turnbull (1983) 11 4.77 8 2.28 > Elkin et al. (1989) 36 2.35 34 2.01 > Goldberg et al. (1981) 179 0.44 93 0.44 > Joffe et al. (1993) 34 1.43 16 0.61 > Kahn et al. (1991) 66 2.25 80 1.48 > Kiev & Okerson (1979) 39 0.44 22 0.42 > Lydiard (1989) 30 2.59 15 1.93 > Ravaris et al. (1976) 14 1.42 19 0.91 > Rickels et al. (1981) 75 1.86 23 1.45 > Rickels & Case (1982) 100 1.71 54 1.17 > Robinson et al. (1973) 33 1.13 27 0.76 > Schweizer et al. (1994) 87 3.13 57 2.13 > Stark & Hardison (1985) 370 1.40 169 1.03 > van der Velde (1981) 52 0.66 27 0.10 > White et al. (1984) 77 1.50 45 1.14 > Zung (1983) 57 .88 40 0.95 > > Inspection of Table 2 reveals considerable variability in drug and > placebo response effect sizes. As a first step toward clarifying the > reason for this variability, we calculated the correlation between > drug response and placebo response, which was found to be > exceptionally high, r = .90, p < .001 (see Figure 1). This indicates > that the placebo response was proportionate to the drug response, with > remaining variability most likely due to measurement error. > > [pre0010002afig1a.gif] > > Figure 1. The placebo response as a predictor of the drug response. > > Our next question was the source of the common variability. One > possibility is that the correlation between placebo and drug response > rates are due to between-study differences in sample characteristics > (e.g., inpatients vs. outpatients, volunteers vs. referrals, etc.). > Our analysis of psychotherapy studies later in this article provides a > test of this hypothesis. If the correlation is due to between-study > differences in sample characteristics, a similar correlation should be > found between the psychotherapy and no-treatment response rates. In > fact, the correlation between the psychotherapy response and the > no-treatment response was nonsignificant and in the opposite > direction. This indicates that common sample characteristics account > for little if any of the relation between treatment and control group > response rates. > > Another possibility is that the close correspondence between placebo > and drug response is due to differences in so-called nonspecific > variables (e.g., provision of a supportive relationship, color of the > medication, patients' expectations for change, biases in clinician's > ratings, etc.), which might vary from study to study, but which would > be common to recipients of both treatments in a given study. > Alternately, the correlation might be associated with differences in > the effectiveness of the various medications included in the > meta-analysis. This could happen if more effective medications > inspired greater expectations of improvement among patients or > prescribing physicians (Frank, 1973; Kirsch, 1990). Evans (1974), for > example, reported that placebo morphine was substantially more > effective than placebo aspirin. Finally, both factors might be > operative. > > We further investigated this issue by examining the magnitude of drug > and placebo responses as a function of type of medication. We > subdivided medication into four types: (a) tricyclics and > tetracyclics, (b) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), (c) > other antidepressants, and (d) other medications. This last category > consisted of four medications (amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, > and adinazolam) that are not considered antidepressants. > > Weighted (for sample size) mean effect sizes of the drug response as a > function of type of medication are shown in Table 3, along with > corresponding effect sizes of the placebo response and the mean effect > sizes of placebo responses as a proportion of drug responses. These > data reveal relatively little variability in drug response and even > less variability in the ratio of placebo response to drug response, as > a function of drug type. For each type of medication, the effect size > for the active drug response was between 1.43 and 1.69, and the > inactive placebo response was between 74% and 76% of the active drug > response. These data suggest that the between-drug variability in drug > and placebo response was due entirely to differences in the placebo > component of the studies. > > CAPTION: Table 3 > Effect Sizes as a Function of Drug Type > > Statistic Type of drug > Antidepressant Other > drugs > Tri- and > tetracyclic SSRI Other > N 1,353 626 683 203 > K 13 4 8 3 > D--Drug 1.52 1.68 1.43 1.69 > D--Placebo 1.15 1.24 1.08 1.29 > Placebo/drug .76 .74 .76 .76 > N = number of subjects; K = number of studies; D = mean weighted > effect size; placebo/drug = placebo response as a proportion of active > drug response. > > Differences between active drug responses and inactive placebo > responses are typically interpreted as indications of specific > pharmacologic effects for the condition being treated. However, this > conclusion is thrown into question by the data derived from active > medications that are not considered effective for depression. It is > possible that these drugs affect depression indirectly, perhaps by > improving sleep or lowering anxiety. But if this were the case and if > antidepressants have a specific effect on depression, then the effect > of these other medications ought to have been less than the effect of > antidepressants, whereas our data indicate that the response to these > nonantidepressant drugs is at least as great as that to conventional > antidepressants. > > A second possibility is that amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, > and adinazolam are in fact antidepressants. This conclusion is > rendered plausible by the lack of understanding of the mechanism of > clinical action of common antidepressants (e.g., tricyclics). If the > classification of a drug as an antidepressant is established by its > efficacy, rather than by knowledge of the mechanism underlying its > effects, then amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam > might be considered specifics for depression. > > A third possibility is that these medications function as active > placebos (i.e., active medications without specific activity for the > condition being treated). Greenberg and Fisher (1989) summarized data > indicating that the effect of antidepressant medication is smaller > when it is compared to an active placebo than when it is compared to > an inert placebo (also see Greenberg & Fisher, 1997). By definition, > the only difference between active and inactive placebos is the > presence of pharmacologically induced side effects. Therefore, > differences in responses to active and inert placebos could be due to > the presence of those side effects. Data from other studies indicate > that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are > able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition > or the placebo condition (Blashki, Mowbray, & Davies, 1971; Margraf, > Ehlers, Roth, Clark, Sheikh, Agras, & Taylor, 1991; Ney, Collins, & > Spensor, 1986).^ This is likely to be associated with their previous > experience with antidepressant medication and with differences between > drug and placebo in the magnitude of side effects. Experiencing more > side effects, patients in active drug conditions conclude that they > are in the drug group; experiencing fewer side effects, patients in > placebo groups conclude that they are in the placebo condition. This > can be expected to produce an enhanced placebo effect in drug > conditions and a diminished placebo effect in placebo groups. Thus, > the apparent drug effect of antidepressants may in fact be a placebo > effect, magnified by differences in experienced side effects and the > patient's subsequent recognition of the condition to which he or she > has been assigned. Support for this interpretation of data is provided > by a meta-analysis of fluoxetine (Prozac), in which a correlation of > .85 was reported between the therapeutic effect of the drug and the > percentage of patients reporting side effects (Greenberg, Bornstein, > Zborowski, Fisher, & Greenberg, 1994). > > Natural History Effects > > Just as it is important to distinguish between a drug response and a > drug effect, so too is it worthwhile to distinguish between a placebo > response and a placebo effect (Fisher, Lipman, Uhlenhuth, Rickels, & > Park, 1965). A drug response is the change that occurs after > administration of the drug. The effect of the drug is that portion of > the response that is due to the drug's chemical composition; it is the > difference between the drug response and the response to placebo > administration. A similar distinction can be made between placebo > responses and placebo effects. The placebo response is the change that > occurs following administration of a placebo. However, change might > also occur without administration of a placebo. It may be due to > spontaneous remission, regression toward the mean, life changes, the > passage of time, or other factors. The placebo effect is the > difference between the placebo response and changes that occur without > the administration of a placebo (Kirsch, 1985, 1997). > > In the preceding section, we evaluated the placebo response as a > proportion of the response to antidepressant medication. The data > suggest that at least 75% of the drug response is a placebo response, > but it does not tell us the magnitude of the placebo effect. What > proportion of the placebo response is due to expectancies generated by > placebo administration, and what proportion would have occurred even > without placebo administration? That is a much more difficult question > to answer. We have not been able to locate any studies in which pre- > and posttreatment assessments of depression were reported for both a > placebo group and a no-treatment or wait-list control group. For that > reason, we turned to psychotherapy outcome studies, in which the > inclusion of untreated control groups is much more common. > > We acknowledge that the use of data from psychotherapy studies as a > comparison with those from drug studies is far less than ideal. > Participants in psychotherapy studies are likely to differ from those > in drug studies on any number of variables. Furthermore, the > assignment of participants to a no-treatment or wait-list control > group might also effect the course of their disorder. For example, > Frank (1973) has argued that the promise of future treatment is > sufficient to trigger a placebo response, and a wait-list control > group has been conceputalized as a placebo control group in at least > one well-known outcome study (Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, & > Whipple, 1975). Conversely, one could argue that being assigned to a > no-treatment control group might strengthen feelings of hopelessness > and thereby increase depression. Despite these problems, the > no-treatment and wait-list control data from psychotherapy outcome > studies may be the best data currently available for estimating the > natural course of untreated depression. Furthermore, the presence of > both types of untreated control groups permits evaluation of Frank's > (1973) hypothesis about the curative effects of the promise of > treatment. > > Study Characteristics > > Studies assessing changes in depression among participants assigned to > wait-list or no-treatment control groups were obtained from the > computer search described earlier, supplemented by an examination of > previous reviews (Dobson, 1989; Free, & Oei, 1989; Robinson, Berman, & > Neimeyer, 1990). The publications that were produced by this > literature search were examined by the second author, and those > meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: > > 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of > depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected > because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, > physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were > studies in which the description of the patient population was > vague (e.g., "neurotic"). > 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate > within-condition effect sizes. > 3. Data were reported for a wait-list or no-treatment control group. > 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. > 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. > > Nineteen studies were found to meet these inclusion criteria, and in > all cases, sufficient data had been reported to allow direct > calculation of effect sizes as the mean posttreatment score minus the > mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled SD. Although they are > incidental to the main purposes of this review, we examined effect > sizes for psychotherapy as well as those for no-treatment and > wait-list control groups. > > Effect Sizes > > Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients assigned to psychotherapy, > wait-list, and no-treatment are presented in Table 4. Mean pre-post > effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.60 for the > psychotherapy response and 0.37 for wait-list and no-treatment control > groups. Participants given the promise of subsequent treatment (i.e., > those in wait-list groups) did not improve more than those not > promised treatment. Mean effect sizes for these two conditions were > 0.36 and 0.39, respectively. The correlation between effect sizes (r = > -.29) was not significant. > > CAPTION: Table 4 > Studies Including Wait-List or No-Treatment > Control Groups > > Study Psychotherapy Control > n d n d > Beach & O'Leary (1992) 15 2.37 15 0.97 > Beck & Strong (1982) 20 2.87 10 -0.28 > Catanese et al. (1979) 99 1.39 21 0.16 > Comas-Diaz (1981) 16 1.87 10 -0.12 > Conoley & Garber (1985) 38 1.10 19 0.21 > Feldman et al. (1982) 38 2.00 10 0.42 > Graff et al. (1986) 24 2.03 11 -0.03 > Jarvinen & Gold (1981) 46 0.76 18 0.34 > Maynard (1993) 16 1.06 14 0.36 > Nezu (1986) 23 2.39 9 0.16 > Rehm et al. (1981) 42 1.23 15 0.48 > Rude (1986) 8 1.75 16 0.74 > Schmidt & Miller (1983) 34 1.25 10 0.11 > Shaw (1977) 16 2.17 8 0.41 > Shipley & Fazio (1973) 11 2.12 11 1.00 > Taylor & Marshall (1977) 21 1.94 7 0.27 > Tyson & Range (1981) 22 0.67 11 1.45 > Wierzbicki & Bartlett (1987) 18 1.17 20 0.21 > Wilson et al. (1983) 16 2.17 9 -0.02 > > Comparison of Participants in the Two Groups of Studies > > Comparisons of effect sizes from different sets of studies is common > in meta-analysis. Nevertheless, we examined the characteristics of the > samples in the two types of studies to assess their comparability. > Eighty-six percent of the participants in the psychotherapy studies > were women, as were 65% of participants in the drug studies. The age > range of participants was 18 to 75 years (M = 30.1) in the > psychotherapy studies and 18 to 70 years (M = 40.6) in the drug > studies. Duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82) in > psychotherapy studies and from 2 to 15 weeks (M = 5.95) in > pharmacotherapy studies. The HRS-D was used in 15 drug studies > involving 2,016 patients and 5 psychotherapy studies with 191 > participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not > reveal any significant differences in pretreatment HRS-D scores > between patients in the drug studies (M = 23.93, SD = 5.20) and > participants in the psychotherapy studies (M = 21.34, SD = 5.03). The > Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used in 4 drug studies involving > 261 patients and in 17 psychotherapy studies with 677 participants. > Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any > significant differences in pretreatment BDI scores between > participants in drug studies (M = 21.58, SD = 8.23) and those in > psychotherapy studies (M = 21.63, SD = 6.97). Thus, participants in > the two types of studies were comparable in initial levels of > depression. These analyses also failed to reveal any pretreatment > differences as a function of group assignment (treatment or control) > or the interaction between type of study and group assignment. > > Estimating the Placebo Effect > > Just as drug effects can be estimated as the drug response minus the > placebo response, placebo effects can be estimated as the placebo > response minus the no-treatment response. Using the effect sizes > obtained from the two meta-analyses reported above, this would be 0.79 > (1.16 - 0.37). Figure 2 displays the estimated drug, placebo, and > no-treatment effect sizes as proportions of the drug response (i.e., > 1.55 SDs). These data indicate that approximately one quarter of the > drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, > one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to > other nonspecific factors. > > [pre0010002afig2a.gif] > > Figure 2. Drug effect, placebo effect, and natural history effect > as proportions of the response to antidepressant medication. > > Discussion > > No-treatment effect sizes and effect sizes for the placebo response > were calculated from different sets of studies. Comparison across > different samples is common in meta-analyses. For example, effect > sizes derived from studies of psychodynamic therapy are often compared > to those derived from studies of behavior therapy (e.g., Andrews & > Harvey, 1981; Smith et al., 1980). Nevertheless, comparisons of this > sort should be interpreted cautiously. Participants volunteering for > different treatments might come from a different populations, and when > data for different conditions are drawn from different sets of > studies, participants have not been assigned randomly to these > conditions. Also, assignment to a no-treatment or wait-list control > group is not the same as no intervention at all. Therefore, our > estimates of the placebo effect and natural history component of the > response to antidepressant medication should be considered tentative. > Nevertheless, when direct comparisons are not available, these > comparisons provide the best available estimates of comparative > effectiveness. Furthermore, in at least some cases, these estimates > have been found to yield results that are comparable to those derived > from direct comparisons of groups that have been randomly assigned to > condition (Kirsch, 1990; Shapiro & Shapiro, 1982). > > Unlike our estimate of the effect of natural history as a component of > the drug response, our estimate of the placebo response as a > proportion of the drug response was derived from studies in which > participants from the same population were assigned randomly to drug > and placebo conditions. Therefore, the estimate that only 25% of the > drug response is due to the administration of an active medication can > be considered reliable. Confidence in the reliability of this estimate > is enhanced by the exceptionally high correlation between the drug > response and the placebo response. This association is high enough to > suggest that any remaining variance in drug response is error variance > associated with imperfect reliability of measurement. Examining > estimates of active drug and inactive placebo responses as a function > of drug type further enhances confidence in the reliability of these > estimates. Regardless of drug type, the inactive placebo response was > approximately 75% of the active drug response. > > We used very stringent criteria in selecting studies for inclusion in > this meta-analysis, and it is possible that data from a broader range > of studies would have produced a different outcome. However, the > effect size we have calculated for the medication effect (D = .39) is > comparable to those reported in other meta-analyses of antidepressant > medication (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992, 1994; Joffe, Sokolov, & > Streiner, 1996; Quality Assurance Project, 1983; Smith et al., 1980; > Steinbrueck, Maxwell, & Howard, 1983). Comparison with the Joffe et > al. (1996) meta-analysis is particularly instructive, because that > study, like ours, included estimates of pre-post effect sizes for both > drug and placebo. Although only two studies were included in both of > these meta-analyses and somewhat different calculation methods were > used, ^2 their results were remarkably similar to ours. They reported > mean pre-post effect sizes of 1.57 for medication and 1.02 for placebo > and a medication versus placebo effect size of .50. > > Our results are in agreement with those of other meta-analyses in > revealing a substantial placebo effect in antidepressant medication > and also a considerable benefit of medication over placebo. They also > indicate that the placebo component of the response to medication is > considerably greater than the pharmacological effect. However, there > are two aspects of the data that have not been examined in other > meta-analyses of antidepressant medication. These are (a) the > exceptionally high correlation between the placebo response and the > drug response and (b) the effect on depression of active drugs that > are not antidepressants. Taken together, these two findings suggest > the possibility that antidepressants might function as active > placebos, in which the side-effects amplify the placebo effect by > convincing patients of that they are receiving a potent drug. > > In summary, the data reviewed in this meta-analysis lead to a > confident estimate that the response to inert placebos is > approximately 75% of the response to active antidepressant medication. > Whether the remaining 25% of the drug response is a true pharmacologic > effect or an enhanced placebo effect cannot yet be determined, because > of the relatively small number of studies in which active and inactive > placebos have been compared (Fisher & Greenberg, 1993). Definitive > estimates of placebo component of antidepressant medication will > require four arm studies, in which the effects of active placebos, > inactive placebos, active medication, and natural history (e.g., > wait-list controls) are examined. 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D. (1993). Atypical antidepressants versus > imipramine in the treatment of major depression: A meta-analysis. > Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 54(1), 5-12. > Zung, W. W. K. (1983). Review of placebo-controlled trials with > bupropion. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 44(5), 104-114. > _________________________________________________________________ > > ^1 A reviewer suggested that because effect sizes are essentially > z-scores in a hypothetically normal distribution, one might use > percentile equivalents when examining the proportion of the drug > response duplicated by the placebo response. As an example of why this > should not be done, consider a treatment that improves intelligence by > 1.55 SDs (which is approximately at the 6^th percentile) and another > that improves it by 1.16 SDs (which is approximately at the 12^th > percentile). Our method indicates that the second is 75% as effective > as the first. The reviewer's method suggests that it is only 50% as > effective. Now let's convert this to actual IQ changes and see what > happens. If the IQ estimates were done on conventional scales (SD = > 15), this would be equivalent to a change of 23.25 points by the first > treatment and 17.4 points by the second. Note that the percentage > relation is identical whether using z-scores or raw scores, because > the z-score method simply divides both numbers by a constant. > > ^2 Instead of dividing mean differences by the pooled SDs, Joffe et > al. (1996) used baseline SDs, when these were available, in > calculating effect sizes. When baseline SDs were not available, which > they reported to be the case for most of the studies they included, > they used estimates taken from other studies. Also, they used a > procedure derived from Hedges and Olkin (1995) to weight for > differences in sample size, whereas we used the more straightforward > method recommended by Hunter and Schmidt (1990). > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 22 21:07:27 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:07:27 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac butHearing Placebo In-Reply-To: <435A9973.8090203@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: There was a studyin Britain not so long ago where Zoloft, placebo, and St. John's Wort produced similar results. I have heard that St. Johns is the most common prescription for depression in Germany. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:57 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac butHearing Placebo Recent reviews of effect size of antidepresants is around 0.2, indicating 2/10s of a standard deviation difference between placebo and active drug. Active placebos (with side effects) have a bigger effect size. Note than there is little placebo response seen in anti-psychotic and ADHD drugs, presumably because of the difference in the patient population. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of > Antidepressant Medication > http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html > Prevention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998 > > [I read something similar in Science, maybe twenty years ago, about > the placebo effect being proportionate to the medical effect, and I > think it deal with a much larger categories of illnesses. Does anyone > know anything further about these anomalies?] > > by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT > and Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D., Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA > > ABSTRACT > > Mean effect sizes for changes in depression were calculated for > 2,318 patients who had been randomly assigned to either > antidepressant medication or placebo in 19 double-blind clinical > trials. As a proportion of the drug response, the placebo response > was constant across different types of medication (75%), and the > correlation between placebo effect and drug effect was .90. These > data indicate that virtually all of the variation in drug effect > size was due to the placebo characteristics of the studies. The > effect size for active medications that are not regarded to be > antidepressants was as large as that for those classified as > antidepressants, and in both cases, the inactive placebos produced > improvement that was 75% of the effect of the active drug. These > data raise the possibility that the apparent drug effect (25% of > the drug response) is actually an active placebo effect. > Examination of pre-post effect sizes among depressed individuals > assigned to no-treatment or wait-list control groups suggest that > approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the > administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo > effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific > factors. > _________________________________________________________________ > > EDITORS' NOTE > > The article that follows is a controversial one. It reaches a > controversial conclusion--that much of the therapeutic benefit of > antidepressant medications actually derives from placebo > responding. The article reaches this conclusion by utilizing a > controversial statistical approach--meta-analysis. And it employs > meta-analysis controversially--by meta-analyzing studies that are > very heterogeneous in subject selection criteria, treatments > employed, and statistical methods used. Nonetheless, we have chosen > to publish the article. We have done so because a number of the > colleagues who originally reviewed the manuscript believed it had > considerable merit, even while they recognized the clearly > contentious conclusions it reached and the clearly arguable > statistical methods it employed. > > We are convinced that one of the principal aims of an electronic > journal ought to be to bring our readers information on a variety > of current topics in prevention and treatment, even though much of > it will be subject to heated differences of opinion about worth and > ultimate significance. This is to be expected, of course, when one > is publishing material at the cutting-edge, in a cutting-edge > medium. > > We also believe, however, that soliciting expert commentary to > accompany particularly controversial articles facilitates the > fullest possible airing of the issues most germane to appreciating > both the strengths and the weaknesses of target articles. In the > same vein, we welcome comments on the article from readers as well, > though for obvious reasons, we cannot promise to publish all of > them. > > Feel free to submit a comment by emailing admin at apa.org. > > Peter Nathan, Associate Editor (Treatment) > Martin E. P. Seligman, Editor > _________________________________________________________________ > > We thank R. B. Lydiard and Smith-Kline Beecham Pharaceuticals for > supplying additional data. We thank David Kenny for his assistance > with the statistical analyses. We thank Roger P. Greenberg and > Daniel E. Moerman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of > this paper. > > Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to > Irving Kirsch, Department of Psychology, U-20, University of > Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road Storrs, CT 06269-1020. > E-mail: Irvingk at uconnvm.uconn.edu > _________________________________________________________________ > > More placebos have been administered to research participants than any > single experimental drug. Thus, one would expect sufficient data to > have accumulated for the acquisition of substantial knowledge of the > parameters of placebo effects. However, although almost everyone > controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them. With this > in mind, we set about the task of using meta-analytic procedures for > evaluating the magnitude of the placebo response to antidepressant > medication. > > Meta-analysis provides a means of mathematically combining results > from different studies, even when these studies have used different > measures to assess the dependent variable. Most often, this is done by > using the statistic d, which is a standardized difference score. This > effect size is generally calculated as the mean of the experimental > group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled > standard deviation. Less frequently, the mean difference is divided by > standard deviation of the control group (Smith, Glass, & Miller, > 1980). > > Ideally, to calculate the effect size of placebos, we would want to > subtract the effects of a no-placebo control group. However, placebos > are used as controls against which the effects of physical > interventions can be gauged. It is rare for an experimental condition > to be included against which the effects of the placebo can be > evaluated. To circumvent this problem, we decided to calculate > within-cell or pre-post effect sizes, which are the posttreatment mean > depression score minus the pretreatment mean depression score, divided > by the pooled standard deviation (cf. Smith et al., 1980). By doing > this for both placebo groups and medication groups, we can estimate > the proportion of the response to antidepressant medication that is > duplicated by placebo administration, a response that would be due to > such factors as expectancy for improvement and the natural course of > the disorder (i.e., spontaneous remission). Later in this article, we > also separate expectancy from natural history and provide estimates of > each of these effects. > > Although our approach is unusual, in most cases it should provide > results that are comparable to conventional methods. If there are no > significant pretreatment differences between the treatment and control > groups, then the subtraction of mean standardized pre-post difference > scores should result in a mean effect size that is just about the same > as that produced by subtracting mean standardized posttreatment > scores. Suppose, for example, we have a study with the data displayed > in Table 1. The conventionally calculated effect size would be would > be 1.00. The pre-post effect sizes would be 3.00 for the treatment > group and 2.00 for the control group. The difference between them is > 1.00, which is exactly the same effect calculated from posttreatment > scores alone. However, calculating the effect size in this manner also > provides us with the information that the effect of the control > procedure was 2/3 that of the treatment procedure, information that we > do not have when we only consider posttreatment scores. Of course, it > is rare for two groups to have identical mean pretreatment scores, and > to the extent that those scores are different, our two methods of > calculation would provide different results. However, by controlling > for baseline differences, our method should provide the more accurate > estimate of differential outcome. > > CAPTION: Table 1 > Hypothetical Means and Standard Deviations for a Treatment Group and a > Control Group > > Treatment Control > Pretreatment Posttreatment Pretreatment Posttreatment > M 25.00 10.00 25.00 15.00 > SD 5.50 4.50 4.50 5.50 > > The Effects of Medication and Placebo > > Study Characteristics > > Studies assessing the efficacy of antidepressant medication were > obtained through previous reviews (Davis, Janicak, & Bruninga, 1987; > Free & Oei, 1989; Greenberg & Fisher, 1989; Greenberg, Bornstein, > Greenberg, & Fisher, 1992; Workman & Short, 1993), supplemented by a > computer search of PsycLit and MEDLINE databases from 1974 to 1995 > using the search terms drug-therapy or pharmacotherapy or > psychotherapy or placebo and depression or affective disorders. > Psychotherapy was included as a search term for the purpose of > obtaining articles that would allow estimation of changes occurring in > no-treatment and wait-list control groups, a topic to which we return > later in this article. Approximately 1,500 publications were produced > by this literature search. These were examined by the second author, > and those meeting the following criteria were included in the > meta-analysis: > > 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of > depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected > because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, > physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were > studies in which the description of the patient population was > vague (e.g., "neurotic"). > 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate > within-condition effect sizes. This resulted in the exclusion of > studies for which neither pre-post statistical tests nor > pretreatment means were available. > 3. Data were reported for a placebo control group. > 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. > 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. > > Of the approximately 1,500 studies examined, 20 met the inclusion > criteria. Of these, all but one were studies of the acute phase of > therapy, with treatment durations ranging from 1 to 20 weeks (M = > 4.82). The one exception (Doogan & Caillard, 1992) was a maintenance > study, with a duration of treatment of 44 weeks. Because of this > difference, Doogan and Caillard's study was excluded from the > meta-analysis. Thus, the analysis was conducted on 19 studies > containing 2,318 participants, of whom 1,460 received medication and > 858 received placebo. Medications studied were amitriptyline, > amylobarbitone, fluoxetine, imipramine, paroxetine, isocarboxazid, > trazodone, lithium, liothyronine, adinazolam, amoxapine, phenelzine, > venlafaxine, maprotiline, tranylcypromine, and bupropion. > > The Calculation of Effect Sizes > > In most cases, effect sizes (d) were calculated for measures of > depression as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment > score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (SD). Pretreatment SDs > were used in place of pooled SDs in calculating effect sizes for four > studies in which posttreatment SDs were not reported (Ravaris, Nies, > Robinson, et al., 1976; Rickels & Case, 1982; Rickels, Case, > Weberlowsky, et al., 1981; Robinson, Nies, & Ravaris, 1973). The > methods described by Smith et al. (1980) were used to estimate effect > sizes for two studies in which means and SDs were not reported. One of > these studies (Goldberg, Rickels, & Finnerty, 1981) reported the t > value for the pre-post comparisons. The effect size for this study was > estimated using the formula: > > d= t (2/n)^1/2 > > where t is the reported t value for the pre-post comparison, and n is > the number of subjects in the condition. The other study (Kiev & > Okerson, 1979) reported only that there was a significant difference > between pre- and posttreatment scores. As suggested by Smith et al. > (1980), the following formula for estimating the effect size was used: > > d= 1.96 (2/n)^ 1/2 , > > where 1.96 is used as the most conservative estimation of the t value > at the .05 significance level used by Kiev and Okerson. These two two > effect sizes were also corrected for pre-post correlation by > multiplying the estimated effect size by (1 - r)^ 1/2 , r being the > estimate of the test-retest correlation (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). > Bailey and Coppen (1976) reported test-retest correlations of .65 for > the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & > Erbaugh, 1961) and .50 for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression > (HRS-D; Hamilton, 1960) . Therefore, in order to arrive at an > estimated effect size, corrected for the pre-post correlation, the > estimated effect sizes of the HRS-D were multiplied by 0.707 and the > effect sizes of the BDI were multiplied by 0.59. > > In studies reporting multiple measures of depression, an effect size > was calculated for each measure and these were then averaged. In > studies reporting the effects of two drugs, a single mean effect size > for both was calculated for the primary analysis. In a subsequent > analysis, the effect for each drug was examined separately. In both > analyses, we calculated mean effect sizes weighted for sample size (D; > Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). > > Effect Sizes > > Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients receiving medication or > placebo are presented in Table 2. Mean effect sizes, weighted for > sample size, were 1.55 SDs for the medication response and 1.16 for > the placebo response. Because effect sizes are obtained by dividing > both treatment means by a constant (i.e., the pooled SD), they can be > treated mathematically like the scores from which they are derived. ^1 > In particular, we have shown that, barring pretreatment between-group > differences, subtracting the mean pre-post effect size of the control > groups from the mean pre-post effect size of the experimental groups > is equivalent to calculating an effect size by conventional means. > Subtracting mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates > reveals a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs. This indicates that 75% > of the response to the medications examined in these studies was a > placebo response, and at most, 25% might be a true drug effect. This > does not mean that only 25% of patients are likely to respond to the > pharmacological properties of the drug. Rather, it means that for a > typical patient, 75% of the benefit obtained from the active drug > would also have obtained from an inactive placebo. > > CAPTION: Table 2 > Studies Including Placebo Control Groups > > Drug Placebo > Study n d n d > Blashki et al. (1971) 43 1.75 18 1.02 > Byerly et al. (1988) 44 2.30 16 1.37 > Claghorn et al. (1992) 113 1.91 95 1.49 > Davidson & Turnbull (1983) 11 4.77 8 2.28 > Elkin et al. (1989) 36 2.35 34 2.01 > Goldberg et al. (1981) 179 0.44 93 0.44 > Joffe et al. (1993) 34 1.43 16 0.61 > Kahn et al. (1991) 66 2.25 80 1.48 > Kiev & Okerson (1979) 39 0.44 22 0.42 > Lydiard (1989) 30 2.59 15 1.93 > Ravaris et al. (1976) 14 1.42 19 0.91 > Rickels et al. (1981) 75 1.86 23 1.45 > Rickels & Case (1982) 100 1.71 54 1.17 > Robinson et al. (1973) 33 1.13 27 0.76 > Schweizer et al. (1994) 87 3.13 57 2.13 > Stark & Hardison (1985) 370 1.40 169 1.03 > van der Velde (1981) 52 0.66 27 0.10 > White et al. (1984) 77 1.50 45 1.14 > Zung (1983) 57 .88 40 0.95 > > Inspection of Table 2 reveals considerable variability in drug and > placebo response effect sizes. As a first step toward clarifying the > reason for this variability, we calculated the correlation between > drug response and placebo response, which was found to be > exceptionally high, r = .90, p < .001 (see Figure 1). This indicates > that the placebo response was proportionate to the drug response, with > remaining variability most likely due to measurement error. > > [pre0010002afig1a.gif] > > Figure 1. The placebo response as a predictor of the drug response. > > Our next question was the source of the common variability. One > possibility is that the correlation between placebo and drug response > rates are due to between-study differences in sample characteristics > (e.g., inpatients vs. outpatients, volunteers vs. referrals, etc.). > Our analysis of psychotherapy studies later in this article provides a > test of this hypothesis. If the correlation is due to between-study > differences in sample characteristics, a similar correlation should be > found between the psychotherapy and no-treatment response rates. In > fact, the correlation between the psychotherapy response and the > no-treatment response was nonsignificant and in the opposite > direction. This indicates that common sample characteristics account > for little if any of the relation between treatment and control group > response rates. > > Another possibility is that the close correspondence between placebo > and drug response is due to differences in so-called nonspecific > variables (e.g., provision of a supportive relationship, color of the > medication, patients' expectations for change, biases in clinician's > ratings, etc.), which might vary from study to study, but which would > be common to recipients of both treatments in a given study. > Alternately, the correlation might be associated with differences in > the effectiveness of the various medications included in the > meta-analysis. This could happen if more effective medications > inspired greater expectations of improvement among patients or > prescribing physicians (Frank, 1973; Kirsch, 1990). Evans (1974), for > example, reported that placebo morphine was substantially more > effective than placebo aspirin. Finally, both factors might be > operative. > > We further investigated this issue by examining the magnitude of drug > and placebo responses as a function of type of medication. We > subdivided medication into four types: (a) tricyclics and > tetracyclics, (b) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), (c) > other antidepressants, and (d) other medications. This last category > consisted of four medications (amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, > and adinazolam) that are not considered antidepressants. > > Weighted (for sample size) mean effect sizes of the drug response as a > function of type of medication are shown in Table 3, along with > corresponding effect sizes of the placebo response and the mean effect > sizes of placebo responses as a proportion of drug responses. These > data reveal relatively little variability in drug response and even > less variability in the ratio of placebo response to drug response, as > a function of drug type. For each type of medication, the effect size > for the active drug response was between 1.43 and 1.69, and the > inactive placebo response was between 74% and 76% of the active drug > response. These data suggest that the between-drug variability in drug > and placebo response was due entirely to differences in the placebo > component of the studies. > > CAPTION: Table 3 > Effect Sizes as a Function of Drug Type > > Statistic Type of drug > Antidepressant Other > drugs > Tri- and > tetracyclic SSRI Other > N 1,353 626 683 203 > K 13 4 8 3 > D--Drug 1.52 1.68 1.43 1.69 > D--Placebo 1.15 1.24 1.08 1.29 > Placebo/drug .76 .74 .76 .76 > N = number of subjects; K = number of studies; D = mean weighted > effect size; placebo/drug = placebo response as a proportion of active > drug response. > > Differences between active drug responses and inactive placebo > responses are typically interpreted as indications of specific > pharmacologic effects for the condition being treated. However, this > conclusion is thrown into question by the data derived from active > medications that are not considered effective for depression. It is > possible that these drugs affect depression indirectly, perhaps by > improving sleep or lowering anxiety. But if this were the case and if > antidepressants have a specific effect on depression, then the effect > of these other medications ought to have been less than the effect of > antidepressants, whereas our data indicate that the response to these > nonantidepressant drugs is at least as great as that to conventional > antidepressants. > > A second possibility is that amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, > and adinazolam are in fact antidepressants. This conclusion is > rendered plausible by the lack of understanding of the mechanism of > clinical action of common antidepressants (e.g., tricyclics). If the > classification of a drug as an antidepressant is established by its > efficacy, rather than by knowledge of the mechanism underlying its > effects, then amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam > might be considered specifics for depression. > > A third possibility is that these medications function as active > placebos (i.e., active medications without specific activity for the > condition being treated). Greenberg and Fisher (1989) summarized data > indicating that the effect of antidepressant medication is smaller > when it is compared to an active placebo than when it is compared to > an inert placebo (also see Greenberg & Fisher, 1997). By definition, > the only difference between active and inactive placebos is the > presence of pharmacologically induced side effects. Therefore, > differences in responses to active and inert placebos could be due to > the presence of those side effects. Data from other studies indicate > that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are > able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition > or the placebo condition (Blashki, Mowbray, & Davies, 1971; Margraf, > Ehlers, Roth, Clark, Sheikh, Agras, & Taylor, 1991; Ney, Collins, & > Spensor, 1986).^ This is likely to be associated with their previous > experience with antidepressant medication and with differences between > drug and placebo in the magnitude of side effects. Experiencing more > side effects, patients in active drug conditions conclude that they > are in the drug group; experiencing fewer side effects, patients in > placebo groups conclude that they are in the placebo condition. This > can be expected to produce an enhanced placebo effect in drug > conditions and a diminished placebo effect in placebo groups. Thus, > the apparent drug effect of antidepressants may in fact be a placebo > effect, magnified by differences in experienced side effects and the > patient's subsequent recognition of the condition to which he or she > has been assigned. Support for this interpretation of data is provided > by a meta-analysis of fluoxetine (Prozac), in which a correlation of > .85 was reported between the therapeutic effect of the drug and the > percentage of patients reporting side effects (Greenberg, Bornstein, > Zborowski, Fisher, & Greenberg, 1994). > > Natural History Effects > > Just as it is important to distinguish between a drug response and a > drug effect, so too is it worthwhile to distinguish between a placebo > response and a placebo effect (Fisher, Lipman, Uhlenhuth, Rickels, & > Park, 1965). A drug response is the change that occurs after > administration of the drug. The effect of the drug is that portion of > the response that is due to the drug's chemical composition; it is the > difference between the drug response and the response to placebo > administration. A similar distinction can be made between placebo > responses and placebo effects. The placebo response is the change that > occurs following administration of a placebo. However, change might > also occur without administration of a placebo. It may be due to > spontaneous remission, regression toward the mean, life changes, the > passage of time, or other factors. The placebo effect is the > difference between the placebo response and changes that occur without > the administration of a placebo (Kirsch, 1985, 1997). > > In the preceding section, we evaluated the placebo response as a > proportion of the response to antidepressant medication. The data > suggest that at least 75% of the drug response is a placebo response, > but it does not tell us the magnitude of the placebo effect. What > proportion of the placebo response is due to expectancies generated by > placebo administration, and what proportion would have occurred even > without placebo administration? That is a much more difficult question > to answer. We have not been able to locate any studies in which pre- > and posttreatment assessments of depression were reported for both a > placebo group and a no-treatment or wait-list control group. For that > reason, we turned to psychotherapy outcome studies, in which the > inclusion of untreated control groups is much more common. > > We acknowledge that the use of data from psychotherapy studies as a > comparison with those from drug studies is far less than ideal. > Participants in psychotherapy studies are likely to differ from those > in drug studies on any number of variables. Furthermore, the > assignment of participants to a no-treatment or wait-list control > group might also effect the course of their disorder. For example, > Frank (1973) has argued that the promise of future treatment is > sufficient to trigger a placebo response, and a wait-list control > group has been conceputalized as a placebo control group in at least > one well-known outcome study (Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, & > Whipple, 1975). Conversely, one could argue that being assigned to a > no-treatment control group might strengthen feelings of hopelessness > and thereby increase depression. Despite these problems, the > no-treatment and wait-list control data from psychotherapy outcome > studies may be the best data currently available for estimating the > natural course of untreated depression. Furthermore, the presence of > both types of untreated control groups permits evaluation of Frank's > (1973) hypothesis about the curative effects of the promise of > treatment. > > Study Characteristics > > Studies assessing changes in depression among participants assigned to > wait-list or no-treatment control groups were obtained from the > computer search described earlier, supplemented by an examination of > previous reviews (Dobson, 1989; Free, & Oei, 1989; Robinson, Berman, & > Neimeyer, 1990). The publications that were produced by this > literature search were examined by the second author, and those > meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: > > 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of > depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected > because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, > physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were > studies in which the description of the patient population was > vague (e.g., "neurotic"). > 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate > within-condition effect sizes. > 3. Data were reported for a wait-list or no-treatment control group. > 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. > 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. > > Nineteen studies were found to meet these inclusion criteria, and in > all cases, sufficient data had been reported to allow direct > calculation of effect sizes as the mean posttreatment score minus the > mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled SD. Although they are > incidental to the main purposes of this review, we examined effect > sizes for psychotherapy as well as those for no-treatment and > wait-list control groups. > > Effect Sizes > > Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients assigned to psychotherapy, > wait-list, and no-treatment are presented in Table 4. Mean pre-post > effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.60 for the > psychotherapy response and 0.37 for wait-list and no-treatment control > groups. Participants given the promise of subsequent treatment (i.e., > those in wait-list groups) did not improve more than those not > promised treatment. Mean effect sizes for these two conditions were > 0.36 and 0.39, respectively. The correlation between effect sizes (r = > -.29) was not significant. > > CAPTION: Table 4 > Studies Including Wait-List or No-Treatment > Control Groups > > Study Psychotherapy Control > n d n d > Beach & O'Leary (1992) 15 2.37 15 0.97 > Beck & Strong (1982) 20 2.87 10 -0.28 > Catanese et al. (1979) 99 1.39 21 0.16 > Comas-Diaz (1981) 16 1.87 10 -0.12 > Conoley & Garber (1985) 38 1.10 19 0.21 > Feldman et al. (1982) 38 2.00 10 0.42 > Graff et al. (1986) 24 2.03 11 -0.03 > Jarvinen & Gold (1981) 46 0.76 18 0.34 > Maynard (1993) 16 1.06 14 0.36 > Nezu (1986) 23 2.39 9 0.16 > Rehm et al. (1981) 42 1.23 15 0.48 > Rude (1986) 8 1.75 16 0.74 > Schmidt & Miller (1983) 34 1.25 10 0.11 > Shaw (1977) 16 2.17 8 0.41 > Shipley & Fazio (1973) 11 2.12 11 1.00 > Taylor & Marshall (1977) 21 1.94 7 0.27 > Tyson & Range (1981) 22 0.67 11 1.45 > Wierzbicki & Bartlett (1987) 18 1.17 20 0.21 > Wilson et al. (1983) 16 2.17 9 -0.02 > > Comparison of Participants in the Two Groups of Studies > > Comparisons of effect sizes from different sets of studies is common > in meta-analysis. Nevertheless, we examined the characteristics of the > samples in the two types of studies to assess their comparability. > Eighty-six percent of the participants in the psychotherapy studies > were women, as were 65% of participants in the drug studies. The age > range of participants was 18 to 75 years (M = 30.1) in the > psychotherapy studies and 18 to 70 years (M = 40.6) in the drug > studies. Duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82) in > psychotherapy studies and from 2 to 15 weeks (M = 5.95) in > pharmacotherapy studies. The HRS-D was used in 15 drug studies > involving 2,016 patients and 5 psychotherapy studies with 191 > participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not > reveal any significant differences in pretreatment HRS-D scores > between patients in the drug studies (M = 23.93, SD = 5.20) and > participants in the psychotherapy studies (M = 21.34, SD = 5.03). The > Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used in 4 drug studies involving > 261 patients and in 17 psychotherapy studies with 677 participants. > Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any > significant differences in pretreatment BDI scores between > participants in drug studies (M = 21.58, SD = 8.23) and those in > psychotherapy studies (M = 21.63, SD = 6.97). Thus, participants in > the two types of studies were comparable in initial levels of > depression. These analyses also failed to reveal any pretreatment > differences as a function of group assignment (treatment or control) > or the interaction between type of study and group assignment. > > Estimating the Placebo Effect > > Just as drug effects can be estimated as the drug response minus the > placebo response, placebo effects can be estimated as the placebo > response minus the no-treatment response. Using the effect sizes > obtained from the two meta-analyses reported above, this would be 0.79 > (1.16 - 0.37). Figure 2 displays the estimated drug, placebo, and > no-treatment effect sizes as proportions of the drug response (i.e., > 1.55 SDs). These data indicate that approximately one quarter of the > drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, > one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to > other nonspecific factors. > > [pre0010002afig2a.gif] > > Figure 2. Drug effect, placebo effect, and natural history effect > as proportions of the response to antidepressant medication. > > Discussion > > No-treatment effect sizes and effect sizes for the placebo response > were calculated from different sets of studies. Comparison across > different samples is common in meta-analyses. For example, effect > sizes derived from studies of psychodynamic therapy are often compared > to those derived from studies of behavior therapy (e.g., Andrews & > Harvey, 1981; Smith et al., 1980). Nevertheless, comparisons of this > sort should be interpreted cautiously. Participants volunteering for > different treatments might come from a different populations, and when > data for different conditions are drawn from different sets of > studies, participants have not been assigned randomly to these > conditions. Also, assignment to a no-treatment or wait-list control > group is not the same as no intervention at all. Therefore, our > estimates of the placebo effect and natural history component of the > response to antidepressant medication should be considered tentative. > Nevertheless, when direct comparisons are not available, these > comparisons provide the best available estimates of comparative > effectiveness. Furthermore, in at least some cases, these estimates > have been found to yield results that are comparable to those derived > from direct comparisons of groups that have been randomly assigned to > condition (Kirsch, 1990; Shapiro & Shapiro, 1982). > > Unlike our estimate of the effect of natural history as a component of > the drug response, our estimate of the placebo response as a > proportion of the drug response was derived from studies in which > participants from the same population were assigned randomly to drug > and placebo conditions. Therefore, the estimate that only 25% of the > drug response is due to the administration of an active medication can > be considered reliable. Confidence in the reliability of this estimate > is enhanced by the exceptionally high correlation between the drug > response and the placebo response. This association is high enough to > suggest that any remaining variance in drug response is error variance > associated with imperfect reliability of measurement. Examining > estimates of active drug and inactive placebo responses as a function > of drug type further enhances confidence in the reliability of these > estimates. Regardless of drug type, the inactive placebo response was > approximately 75% of the active drug response. > > We used very stringent criteria in selecting studies for inclusion in > this meta-analysis, and it is possible that data from a broader range > of studies would have produced a different outcome. However, the > effect size we have calculated for the medication effect (D = .39) is > comparable to those reported in other meta-analyses of antidepressant > medication (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992, 1994; Joffe, Sokolov, & > Streiner, 1996; Quality Assurance Project, 1983; Smith et al., 1980; > Steinbrueck, Maxwell, & Howard, 1983). Comparison with the Joffe et > al. (1996) meta-analysis is particularly instructive, because that > study, like ours, included estimates of pre-post effect sizes for both > drug and placebo. Although only two studies were included in both of > these meta-analyses and somewhat different calculation methods were > used, ^2 their results were remarkably similar to ours. They reported > mean pre-post effect sizes of 1.57 for medication and 1.02 for placebo > and a medication versus placebo effect size of .50. > > Our results are in agreement with those of other meta-analyses in > revealing a substantial placebo effect in antidepressant medication > and also a considerable benefit of medication over placebo. They also > indicate that the placebo component of the response to medication is > considerably greater than the pharmacological effect. However, there > are two aspects of the data that have not been examined in other > meta-analyses of antidepressant medication. These are (a) the > exceptionally high correlation between the placebo response and the > drug response and (b) the effect on depression of active drugs that > are not antidepressants. Taken together, these two findings suggest > the possibility that antidepressants might function as active > placebos, in which the side-effects amplify the placebo effect by > convincing patients of that they are receiving a potent drug. > > In summary, the data reviewed in this meta-analysis lead to a > confident estimate that the response to inert placebos is > approximately 75% of the response to active antidepressant medication. > Whether the remaining 25% of the drug response is a true pharmacologic > effect or an enhanced placebo effect cannot yet be determined, because > of the relatively small number of studies in which active and inactive > placebos have been compared (Fisher & Greenberg, 1993). Definitive > estimates of placebo component of antidepressant medication will > require four arm studies, in which the effects of active placebos, > inactive placebos, active medication, and natural history (e.g., > wait-list controls) are examined. In addition, studies using the > balanced placebo design would be of help, as these have been shown to > diminish the ability of subjects to discover the condition to which > they have been assigned (Kirsch & Rosadino, 1993). > > References > > Andrews, G., & Harvey, R. (1981). Does psychotherapy benefit neurotic > patients? A reanalysis of the Smith, Glass, and Miller data. Archives > of General Psychiatry, 36, 1203-1208. > Bailey, J., & Coppen, A. (1976). A comparison between the Hamilton > Rating Scale and the Beck Depression Inventory in the measurement of > depression . British Journal of Psychiatry, 128, 486-489. > Beach, S. R. H., & O'Leary, K. D. (1992). Treating depression in the > context of marital discord: Outcome and predictors of response of > marital therapy versus cognitive therapy. Behavior Therapy, 23, > 507-528. > Beck, J. T., & Strong, S. R. (1982). Stimulating therapeutic change > with interpretations: A comparison of positive and negative > connotation. 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Journal of Consulting and > Clinical Psychology, 45, 543-551. > Shipley, C. R., & Fazio, A. F. (1973). Pilot study of a treatment for > psychological depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 82, 372-376. > Sloane, R. B., Staples, F. R., Cristol, A. H., Yorkston, N. J., & > Whipple, K. (1975). Psychotherapy versus behavior therapy. Cambridge, > MA: Harvard University Press. > Smith, M. L., Glass, G. V., & Miller, T. I. (1980). The benefits of > psychotherapy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. > Stark, P., & Hardison, C. D. (1985). A review of multicenter > controlled studies of fluoxetine vs. imipramine and placebo in > outpatients with major depressive disorder. Journal of Clinical > Psychiatry, 46, 53-58. > Steinbrueck, S.M., Maxwell, S.E., & Howard, G.S. (1983). A > meta-analysis of psychotherapy and drug therapy in the treatment of > unipolar depression with adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical > Psychology, 51, 856-863. > Taylor, F. G., & Marshall, W. L. (1977). Experimental analysis of a > cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression. Cognitive Therapy and > Research, 1(1), 59-72. > Tyson, G. M., & Range, L. M. (1987). Gestalt dialogues as a treatment > for depression: Time works just as well. Journal of Clinical > Psychology, 43, 227-230. > van der Velde, C. D. (1981). Maprotiline versus imipramine and placebo > in neurotic depression. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 42, 138-141. > White, K., Razani, J., Cadow, B., et al. (1984). Tranylcypromine vs. > nortriptyline vs. placebo in depressed outpatients: a controlled > trial. Psychopharmacology, 82, 258-262. > Wierzbicki, M., & Bartlett, T. S. (1987). The efficacy of group and > individual cognitive therapy for mild depression. Cognitive Therapy > and Research, 11(3), 337-342. > Wilson, P. H., Goldin, J. C., & Charboneau-Powis, M. (1983). > Comparative efficacy of behavioral and cognitive treatments of > depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 7(2), 111-124. > Workman, E. A., & Short, D. D. (1993). Atypical antidepressants versus > imipramine in the treatment of major depression: A meta-analysis. > Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 54(1), 5-12. > Zung, W. W. K. (1983). Review of placebo-controlled trials with > bupropion. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 44(5), 104-114. > _________________________________________________________________ > > ^1 A reviewer suggested that because effect sizes are essentially > z-scores in a hypothetically normal distribution, one might use > percentile equivalents when examining the proportion of the drug > response duplicated by the placebo response. As an example of why this > should not be done, consider a treatment that improves intelligence by > 1.55 SDs (which is approximately at the 6^th percentile) and another > that improves it by 1.16 SDs (which is approximately at the 12^th > percentile). Our method indicates that the second is 75% as effective > as the first. The reviewer's method suggests that it is only 50% as > effective. Now let's convert this to actual IQ changes and see what > happens. If the IQ estimates were done on conventional scales (SD = > 15), this would be equivalent to a change of 23.25 points by the first > treatment and 17.4 points by the second. Note that the percentage > relation is identical whether using z-scores or raw scores, because > the z-score method simply divides both numbers by a constant. > > ^2 Instead of dividing mean differences by the pooled SDs, Joffe et > al. (1996) used baseline SDs, when these were available, in > calculating effect sizes. When baseline SDs were not available, which > they reported to be the case for most of the studies they included, > they used estimates taken from other studies. Also, they used a > procedure derived from Hedges and Olkin (1995) to weight for > differences in sample size, whereas we used the more straightforward > method recommended by Hunter and Schmidt (1990). > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 20 03:37:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 20:37:46 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Genocide Trials Today and Tomorrow Message-ID: <4310102.1129779466893.JavaMail.root@mswamui-backed.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: GenocideTodayTomorrow.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 160363 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Oct 23 01:35:58 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 19:35:58 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac butHearing Placebo In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <435AE8FE.9050801@solution-consulting.com> The interesting thing about this is that the placebo effect for antidepressants has been consistently increasing since the 1980s when Prozac came out, and Kramer wrote Listening to Prozac.* This suggests that loss of hope is a key ingredient in depression; how that interfaces with the Omega-3 evidence, I wish someone would tell me. Lynn *The increasing placebo effect means it is steadily harder to show a statistically significant treatment effect for antidepressants. Discouraging for the drug houses. Steve Hovland wrote: >There was a studyin Britain not so long ago >where Zoloft, placebo, and St. John's Wort >produced similar results. I have heard >that St. Johns is the most common prescription >for depression in Germany. > >-----Original Message----- >From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >[mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, >Ph.D. >Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:57 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac >butHearing Placebo > > >Recent reviews of effect size of antidepresants is around 0.2, >indicating 2/10s of a standard deviation difference between placebo and >active drug. Active placebos (with side effects) have a bigger effect >size. Note than there is little placebo response seen in anti-psychotic >and ADHD drugs, presumably because of the difference in the patient >population. >Lynn > >Premise Checker wrote: > > > >>Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of >>Antidepressant Medication >>http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html >>Prevention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998 >> >>[I read something similar in Science, maybe twenty years ago, about >>the placebo effect being proportionate to the medical effect, and I >>think it deal with a much larger categories of illnesses. Does anyone >>know anything further about these anomalies?] >> >>by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT >>and Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D., Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA >> >> ABSTRACT >> >> Mean effect sizes for changes in depression were calculated for >> 2,318 patients who had been randomly assigned to either >> antidepressant medication or placebo in 19 double-blind clinical >> trials. As a proportion of the drug response, the placebo response >> was constant across different types of medication (75%), and the >> correlation between placebo effect and drug effect was .90. These >> data indicate that virtually all of the variation in drug effect >> size was due to the placebo characteristics of the studies. The >> effect size for active medications that are not regarded to be >> antidepressants was as large as that for those classified as >> antidepressants, and in both cases, the inactive placebos produced >> improvement that was 75% of the effect of the active drug. These >> data raise the possibility that the apparent drug effect (25% of >> the drug response) is actually an active placebo effect. >> Examination of pre-post effect sizes among depressed individuals >> assigned to no-treatment or wait-list control groups suggest that >> approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the >> administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo >> effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific >> factors. >> _________________________________________________________________ >> >> EDITORS' NOTE >> >> The article that follows is a controversial one. It reaches a >> controversial conclusion--that much of the therapeutic benefit of >> antidepressant medications actually derives from placebo >> responding. The article reaches this conclusion by utilizing a >> controversial statistical approach--meta-analysis. And it employs >> meta-analysis controversially--by meta-analyzing studies that are >> very heterogeneous in subject selection criteria, treatments >> employed, and statistical methods used. Nonetheless, we have chosen >> to publish the article. We have done so because a number of the >> colleagues who originally reviewed the manuscript believed it had >> considerable merit, even while they recognized the clearly >> contentious conclusions it reached and the clearly arguable >> statistical methods it employed. >> >> We are convinced that one of the principal aims of an electronic >> journal ought to be to bring our readers information on a variety >> of current topics in prevention and treatment, even though much of >> it will be subject to heated differences of opinion about worth and >> ultimate significance. This is to be expected, of course, when one >> is publishing material at the cutting-edge, in a cutting-edge >> medium. >> >> We also believe, however, that soliciting expert commentary to >> accompany particularly controversial articles facilitates the >> fullest possible airing of the issues most germane to appreciating >> both the strengths and the weaknesses of target articles. In the >> same vein, we welcome comments on the article from readers as well, >> though for obvious reasons, we cannot promise to publish all of >> them. >> >> Feel free to submit a comment by emailing admin at apa.org. >> >> Peter Nathan, Associate Editor (Treatment) >> Martin E. P. Seligman, Editor >> _________________________________________________________________ >> >> We thank R. B. Lydiard and Smith-Kline Beecham Pharaceuticals for >> supplying additional data. We thank David Kenny for his assistance >> with the statistical analyses. We thank Roger P. Greenberg and >> Daniel E. Moerman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of >> this paper. >> >> Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to >> Irving Kirsch, Department of Psychology, U-20, University of >> Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road Storrs, CT 06269-1020. >> E-mail: Irvingk at uconnvm.uconn.edu >> _________________________________________________________________ >> >> More placebos have been administered to research participants than any >> single experimental drug. Thus, one would expect sufficient data to >> have accumulated for the acquisition of substantial knowledge of the >> parameters of placebo effects. However, although almost everyone >> controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them. With this >> in mind, we set about the task of using meta-analytic procedures for >> evaluating the magnitude of the placebo response to antidepressant >> medication. >> >> Meta-analysis provides a means of mathematically combining results >> from different studies, even when these studies have used different >> measures to assess the dependent variable. Most often, this is done by >> using the statistic d, which is a standardized difference score. This >> effect size is generally calculated as the mean of the experimental >> group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled >> standard deviation. Less frequently, the mean difference is divided by >> standard deviation of the control group (Smith, Glass, & Miller, >> 1980). >> >> Ideally, to calculate the effect size of placebos, we would want to >> subtract the effects of a no-placebo control group. However, placebos >> are used as controls against which the effects of physical >> interventions can be gauged. It is rare for an experimental condition >> to be included against which the effects of the placebo can be >> evaluated. To circumvent this problem, we decided to calculate >> within-cell or pre-post effect sizes, which are the posttreatment mean >> depression score minus the pretreatment mean depression score, divided >> by the pooled standard deviation (cf. Smith et al., 1980). By doing >> this for both placebo groups and medication groups, we can estimate >> the proportion of the response to antidepressant medication that is >> duplicated by placebo administration, a response that would be due to >> such factors as expectancy for improvement and the natural course of >> the disorder (i.e., spontaneous remission). Later in this article, we >> also separate expectancy from natural history and provide estimates of >> each of these effects. >> >> Although our approach is unusual, in most cases it should provide >> results that are comparable to conventional methods. If there are no >> significant pretreatment differences between the treatment and control >> groups, then the subtraction of mean standardized pre-post difference >> scores should result in a mean effect size that is just about the same >> as that produced by subtracting mean standardized posttreatment >> scores. Suppose, for example, we have a study with the data displayed >> in Table 1. The conventionally calculated effect size would be would >> be 1.00. The pre-post effect sizes would be 3.00 for the treatment >> group and 2.00 for the control group. The difference between them is >> 1.00, which is exactly the same effect calculated from posttreatment >> scores alone. However, calculating the effect size in this manner also >> provides us with the information that the effect of the control >> procedure was 2/3 that of the treatment procedure, information that we >> do not have when we only consider posttreatment scores. Of course, it >> is rare for two groups to have identical mean pretreatment scores, and >> to the extent that those scores are different, our two methods of >> calculation would provide different results. However, by controlling >> for baseline differences, our method should provide the more accurate >> estimate of differential outcome. >> >> CAPTION: Table 1 >> Hypothetical Means and Standard Deviations for a Treatment Group and a >> Control Group >> >> Treatment Control >> Pretreatment Posttreatment Pretreatment Posttreatment >> M 25.00 10.00 25.00 15.00 >> SD 5.50 4.50 4.50 5.50 >> >> The Effects of Medication and Placebo >> >>Study Characteristics >> >> Studies assessing the efficacy of antidepressant medication were >> obtained through previous reviews (Davis, Janicak, & Bruninga, 1987; >> Free & Oei, 1989; Greenberg & Fisher, 1989; Greenberg, Bornstein, >> Greenberg, & Fisher, 1992; Workman & Short, 1993), supplemented by a >> computer search of PsycLit and MEDLINE databases from 1974 to 1995 >> using the search terms drug-therapy or pharmacotherapy or >> psychotherapy or placebo and depression or affective disorders. >> Psychotherapy was included as a search term for the purpose of >> obtaining articles that would allow estimation of changes occurring in >> no-treatment and wait-list control groups, a topic to which we return >> later in this article. Approximately 1,500 publications were produced >> by this literature search. These were examined by the second author, >> and those meeting the following criteria were included in the >> meta-analysis: >> >> 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of >> depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected >> because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, >> physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were >> studies in which the description of the patient population was >> vague (e.g., "neurotic"). >> 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate >> within-condition effect sizes. This resulted in the exclusion of >> studies for which neither pre-post statistical tests nor >> pretreatment means were available. >> 3. Data were reported for a placebo control group. >> 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. >> 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. >> >> Of the approximately 1,500 studies examined, 20 met the inclusion >> criteria. Of these, all but one were studies of the acute phase of >> therapy, with treatment durations ranging from 1 to 20 weeks (M = >> 4.82). The one exception (Doogan & Caillard, 1992) was a maintenance >> study, with a duration of treatment of 44 weeks. Because of this >> difference, Doogan and Caillard's study was excluded from the >> meta-analysis. Thus, the analysis was conducted on 19 studies >> containing 2,318 participants, of whom 1,460 received medication and >> 858 received placebo. Medications studied were amitriptyline, >> amylobarbitone, fluoxetine, imipramine, paroxetine, isocarboxazid, >> trazodone, lithium, liothyronine, adinazolam, amoxapine, phenelzine, >> venlafaxine, maprotiline, tranylcypromine, and bupropion. >> >> The Calculation of Effect Sizes >> >> In most cases, effect sizes (d) were calculated for measures of >> depression as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment >> score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (SD). Pretreatment SDs >> were used in place of pooled SDs in calculating effect sizes for four >> studies in which posttreatment SDs were not reported (Ravaris, Nies, >> Robinson, et al., 1976; Rickels & Case, 1982; Rickels, Case, >> Weberlowsky, et al., 1981; Robinson, Nies, & Ravaris, 1973). The >> methods described by Smith et al. (1980) were used to estimate effect >> sizes for two studies in which means and SDs were not reported. One of >> these studies (Goldberg, Rickels, & Finnerty, 1981) reported the t >> value for the pre-post comparisons. The effect size for this study was >> estimated using the formula: >> >> d= t (2/n)^1/2 >> >> where t is the reported t value for the pre-post comparison, and n is >> the number of subjects in the condition. The other study (Kiev & >> Okerson, 1979) reported only that there was a significant difference >> between pre- and posttreatment scores. As suggested by Smith et al. >> (1980), the following formula for estimating the effect size was used: >> >> d= 1.96 (2/n)^ 1/2 , >> >> where 1.96 is used as the most conservative estimation of the t value >> at the .05 significance level used by Kiev and Okerson. These two two >> effect sizes were also corrected for pre-post correlation by >> multiplying the estimated effect size by (1 - r)^ 1/2 , r being the >> estimate of the test-retest correlation (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). >> Bailey and Coppen (1976) reported test-retest correlations of .65 for >> the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & >> Erbaugh, 1961) and .50 for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression >> (HRS-D; Hamilton, 1960) . Therefore, in order to arrive at an >> estimated effect size, corrected for the pre-post correlation, the >> estimated effect sizes of the HRS-D were multiplied by 0.707 and the >> effect sizes of the BDI were multiplied by 0.59. >> >> In studies reporting multiple measures of depression, an effect size >> was calculated for each measure and these were then averaged. In >> studies reporting the effects of two drugs, a single mean effect size >> for both was calculated for the primary analysis. In a subsequent >> analysis, the effect for each drug was examined separately. In both >> analyses, we calculated mean effect sizes weighted for sample size (D; >> Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). >> >> Effect Sizes >> >> Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients receiving medication or >> placebo are presented in Table 2. Mean effect sizes, weighted for >> sample size, were 1.55 SDs for the medication response and 1.16 for >> the placebo response. Because effect sizes are obtained by dividing >> both treatment means by a constant (i.e., the pooled SD), they can be >> treated mathematically like the scores from which they are derived. ^1 >> In particular, we have shown that, barring pretreatment between-group >> differences, subtracting the mean pre-post effect size of the control >> groups from the mean pre-post effect size of the experimental groups >> is equivalent to calculating an effect size by conventional means. >> Subtracting mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates >> reveals a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs. This indicates that 75% >> of the response to the medications examined in these studies was a >> placebo response, and at most, 25% might be a true drug effect. This >> does not mean that only 25% of patients are likely to respond to the >> pharmacological properties of the drug. Rather, it means that for a >> typical patient, 75% of the benefit obtained from the active drug >> would also have obtained from an inactive placebo. >> >> CAPTION: Table 2 >> Studies Including Placebo Control Groups >> >> Drug Placebo >> Study n d n d >> Blashki et al. (1971) 43 1.75 18 1.02 >> Byerly et al. (1988) 44 2.30 16 1.37 >> Claghorn et al. (1992) 113 1.91 95 1.49 >> Davidson & Turnbull (1983) 11 4.77 8 2.28 >> Elkin et al. (1989) 36 2.35 34 2.01 >> Goldberg et al. (1981) 179 0.44 93 0.44 >> Joffe et al. (1993) 34 1.43 16 0.61 >> Kahn et al. (1991) 66 2.25 80 1.48 >> Kiev & Okerson (1979) 39 0.44 22 0.42 >> Lydiard (1989) 30 2.59 15 1.93 >> Ravaris et al. (1976) 14 1.42 19 0.91 >> Rickels et al. (1981) 75 1.86 23 1.45 >> Rickels & Case (1982) 100 1.71 54 1.17 >> Robinson et al. (1973) 33 1.13 27 0.76 >> Schweizer et al. (1994) 87 3.13 57 2.13 >> Stark & Hardison (1985) 370 1.40 169 1.03 >> van der Velde (1981) 52 0.66 27 0.10 >> White et al. (1984) 77 1.50 45 1.14 >> Zung (1983) 57 .88 40 0.95 >> >> Inspection of Table 2 reveals considerable variability in drug and >> placebo response effect sizes. As a first step toward clarifying the >> reason for this variability, we calculated the correlation between >> drug response and placebo response, which was found to be >> exceptionally high, r = .90, p < .001 (see Figure 1). This indicates >> that the placebo response was proportionate to the drug response, with >> remaining variability most likely due to measurement error. >> >> [pre0010002afig1a.gif] >> >> Figure 1. The placebo response as a predictor of the drug response. >> >> Our next question was the source of the common variability. One >> possibility is that the correlation between placebo and drug response >> rates are due to between-study differences in sample characteristics >> (e.g., inpatients vs. outpatients, volunteers vs. referrals, etc.). >> Our analysis of psychotherapy studies later in this article provides a >> test of this hypothesis. If the correlation is due to between-study >> differences in sample characteristics, a similar correlation should be >> found between the psychotherapy and no-treatment response rates. In >> fact, the correlation between the psychotherapy response and the >> no-treatment response was nonsignificant and in the opposite >> direction. This indicates that common sample characteristics account >> for little if any of the relation between treatment and control group >> response rates. >> >> Another possibility is that the close correspondence between placebo >> and drug response is due to differences in so-called nonspecific >> variables (e.g., provision of a supportive relationship, color of the >> medication, patients' expectations for change, biases in clinician's >> ratings, etc.), which might vary from study to study, but which would >> be common to recipients of both treatments in a given study. >> Alternately, the correlation might be associated with differences in >> the effectiveness of the various medications included in the >> meta-analysis. This could happen if more effective medications >> inspired greater expectations of improvement among patients or >> prescribing physicians (Frank, 1973; Kirsch, 1990). Evans (1974), for >> example, reported that placebo morphine was substantially more >> effective than placebo aspirin. Finally, both factors might be >> operative. >> >> We further investigated this issue by examining the magnitude of drug >> and placebo responses as a function of type of medication. We >> subdivided medication into four types: (a) tricyclics and >> tetracyclics, (b) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), (c) >> other antidepressants, and (d) other medications. This last category >> consisted of four medications (amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, >> and adinazolam) that are not considered antidepressants. >> >> Weighted (for sample size) mean effect sizes of the drug response as a >> function of type of medication are shown in Table 3, along with >> corresponding effect sizes of the placebo response and the mean effect >> sizes of placebo responses as a proportion of drug responses. These >> data reveal relatively little variability in drug response and even >> less variability in the ratio of placebo response to drug response, as >> a function of drug type. For each type of medication, the effect size >> for the active drug response was between 1.43 and 1.69, and the >> inactive placebo response was between 74% and 76% of the active drug >> response. These data suggest that the between-drug variability in drug >> and placebo response was due entirely to differences in the placebo >> component of the studies. >> >> CAPTION: Table 3 >> Effect Sizes as a Function of Drug Type >> >> Statistic Type of drug >> Antidepressant Other >> drugs >> Tri- and >> tetracyclic SSRI Other >> N 1,353 626 683 203 >> K 13 4 8 3 >> D--Drug 1.52 1.68 1.43 1.69 >> D--Placebo 1.15 1.24 1.08 1.29 >> Placebo/drug .76 .74 .76 .76 >> N = number of subjects; K = number of studies; D = mean weighted >> effect size; placebo/drug = placebo response as a proportion of active >> drug response. >> >> Differences between active drug responses and inactive placebo >> responses are typically interpreted as indications of specific >> pharmacologic effects for the condition being treated. However, this >> conclusion is thrown into question by the data derived from active >> medications that are not considered effective for depression. It is >> possible that these drugs affect depression indirectly, perhaps by >> improving sleep or lowering anxiety. But if this were the case and if >> antidepressants have a specific effect on depression, then the effect >> of these other medications ought to have been less than the effect of >> antidepressants, whereas our data indicate that the response to these >> nonantidepressant drugs is at least as great as that to conventional >> antidepressants. >> >> A second possibility is that amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, >> and adinazolam are in fact antidepressants. This conclusion is >> rendered plausible by the lack of understanding of the mechanism of >> clinical action of common antidepressants (e.g., tricyclics). If the >> classification of a drug as an antidepressant is established by its >> efficacy, rather than by knowledge of the mechanism underlying its >> effects, then amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam >> might be considered specifics for depression. >> >> A third possibility is that these medications function as active >> placebos (i.e., active medications without specific activity for the >> condition being treated). Greenberg and Fisher (1989) summarized data >> indicating that the effect of antidepressant medication is smaller >> when it is compared to an active placebo than when it is compared to >> an inert placebo (also see Greenberg & Fisher, 1997). By definition, >> the only difference between active and inactive placebos is the >> presence of pharmacologically induced side effects. Therefore, >> differences in responses to active and inert placebos could be due to >> the presence of those side effects. Data from other studies indicate >> that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are >> able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition >> or the placebo condition (Blashki, Mowbray, & Davies, 1971; Margraf, >> Ehlers, Roth, Clark, Sheikh, Agras, & Taylor, 1991; Ney, Collins, & >> Spensor, 1986).^ This is likely to be associated with their previous >> experience with antidepressant medication and with differences between >> drug and placebo in the magnitude of side effects. Experiencing more >> side effects, patients in active drug conditions conclude that they >> are in the drug group; experiencing fewer side effects, patients in >> placebo groups conclude that they are in the placebo condition. This >> can be expected to produce an enhanced placebo effect in drug >> conditions and a diminished placebo effect in placebo groups. Thus, >> the apparent drug effect of antidepressants may in fact be a placebo >> effect, magnified by differences in experienced side effects and the >> patient's subsequent recognition of the condition to which he or she >> has been assigned. Support for this interpretation of data is provided >> by a meta-analysis of fluoxetine (Prozac), in which a correlation of >> .85 was reported between the therapeutic effect of the drug and the >> percentage of patients reporting side effects (Greenberg, Bornstein, >> Zborowski, Fisher, & Greenberg, 1994). >> >> Natural History Effects >> >> Just as it is important to distinguish between a drug response and a >> drug effect, so too is it worthwhile to distinguish between a placebo >> response and a placebo effect (Fisher, Lipman, Uhlenhuth, Rickels, & >> Park, 1965). A drug response is the change that occurs after >> administration of the drug. The effect of the drug is that portion of >> the response that is due to the drug's chemical composition; it is the >> difference between the drug response and the response to placebo >> administration. A similar distinction can be made between placebo >> responses and placebo effects. The placebo response is the change that >> occurs following administration of a placebo. However, change might >> also occur without administration of a placebo. It may be due to >> spontaneous remission, regression toward the mean, life changes, the >> passage of time, or other factors. The placebo effect is the >> difference between the placebo response and changes that occur without >> the administration of a placebo (Kirsch, 1985, 1997). >> >> In the preceding section, we evaluated the placebo response as a >> proportion of the response to antidepressant medication. The data >> suggest that at least 75% of the drug response is a placebo response, >> but it does not tell us the magnitude of the placebo effect. What >> proportion of the placebo response is due to expectancies generated by >> placebo administration, and what proportion would have occurred even >> without placebo administration? That is a much more difficult question >> to answer. We have not been able to locate any studies in which pre- >> and posttreatment assessments of depression were reported for both a >> placebo group and a no-treatment or wait-list control group. For that >> reason, we turned to psychotherapy outcome studies, in which the >> inclusion of untreated control groups is much more common. >> >> We acknowledge that the use of data from psychotherapy studies as a >> comparison with those from drug studies is far less than ideal. >> Participants in psychotherapy studies are likely to differ from those >> in drug studies on any number of variables. Furthermore, the >> assignment of participants to a no-treatment or wait-list control >> group might also effect the course of their disorder. For example, >> Frank (1973) has argued that the promise of future treatment is >> sufficient to trigger a placebo response, and a wait-list control >> group has been conceputalized as a placebo control group in at least >> one well-known outcome study (Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, & >> Whipple, 1975). Conversely, one could argue that being assigned to a >> no-treatment control group might strengthen feelings of hopelessness >> and thereby increase depression. Despite these problems, the >> no-treatment and wait-list control data from psychotherapy outcome >> studies may be the best data currently available for estimating the >> natural course of untreated depression. Furthermore, the presence of >> both types of untreated control groups permits evaluation of Frank's >> (1973) hypothesis about the curative effects of the promise of >> treatment. >> >> Study Characteristics >> >> Studies assessing changes in depression among participants assigned to >> wait-list or no-treatment control groups were obtained from the >> computer search described earlier, supplemented by an examination of >> previous reviews (Dobson, 1989; Free, & Oei, 1989; Robinson, Berman, & >> Neimeyer, 1990). The publications that were produced by this >> literature search were examined by the second author, and those >> meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: >> >> 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of >> depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected >> because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, >> physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were >> studies in which the description of the patient population was >> vague (e.g., "neurotic"). >> 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate >> within-condition effect sizes. >> 3. Data were reported for a wait-list or no-treatment control group. >> 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. >> 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. >> >> Nineteen studies were found to meet these inclusion criteria, and in >> all cases, sufficient data had been reported to allow direct >> calculation of effect sizes as the mean posttreatment score minus the >> mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled SD. Although they are >> incidental to the main purposes of this review, we examined effect >> sizes for psychotherapy as well as those for no-treatment and >> wait-list control groups. >> >> Effect Sizes >> >> Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients assigned to psychotherapy, >> wait-list, and no-treatment are presented in Table 4. Mean pre-post >> effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.60 for the >> psychotherapy response and 0.37 for wait-list and no-treatment control >> groups. Participants given the promise of subsequent treatment (i.e., >> those in wait-list groups) did not improve more than those not >> promised treatment. Mean effect sizes for these two conditions were >> 0.36 and 0.39, respectively. The correlation between effect sizes (r = >> -.29) was not significant. >> >> CAPTION: Table 4 >> Studies Including Wait-List or No-Treatment >> Control Groups >> >> Study Psychotherapy Control >> n d n d >> Beach & O'Leary (1992) 15 2.37 15 0.97 >> Beck & Strong (1982) 20 2.87 10 -0.28 >> Catanese et al. (1979) 99 1.39 21 0.16 >> Comas-Diaz (1981) 16 1.87 10 -0.12 >> Conoley & Garber (1985) 38 1.10 19 0.21 >> Feldman et al. (1982) 38 2.00 10 0.42 >> Graff et al. (1986) 24 2.03 11 -0.03 >> Jarvinen & Gold (1981) 46 0.76 18 0.34 >> Maynard (1993) 16 1.06 14 0.36 >> Nezu (1986) 23 2.39 9 0.16 >> Rehm et al. (1981) 42 1.23 15 0.48 >> Rude (1986) 8 1.75 16 0.74 >> Schmidt & Miller (1983) 34 1.25 10 0.11 >> Shaw (1977) 16 2.17 8 0.41 >> Shipley & Fazio (1973) 11 2.12 11 1.00 >> Taylor & Marshall (1977) 21 1.94 7 0.27 >> Tyson & Range (1981) 22 0.67 11 1.45 >> Wierzbicki & Bartlett (1987) 18 1.17 20 0.21 >> Wilson et al. (1983) 16 2.17 9 -0.02 >> >> Comparison of Participants in the Two Groups of Studies >> >> Comparisons of effect sizes from different sets of studies is common >> in meta-analysis. Nevertheless, we examined the characteristics of the >> samples in the two types of studies to assess their comparability. >> Eighty-six percent of the participants in the psychotherapy studies >> were women, as were 65% of participants in the drug studies. The age >> range of participants was 18 to 75 years (M = 30.1) in the >> psychotherapy studies and 18 to 70 years (M = 40.6) in the drug >> studies. Duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82) in >> psychotherapy studies and from 2 to 15 weeks (M = 5.95) in >> pharmacotherapy studies. The HRS-D was used in 15 drug studies >> involving 2,016 patients and 5 psychotherapy studies with 191 >> participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not >> reveal any significant differences in pretreatment HRS-D scores >> between patients in the drug studies (M = 23.93, SD = 5.20) and >> participants in the psychotherapy studies (M = 21.34, SD = 5.03). The >> Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used in 4 drug studies involving >> 261 patients and in 17 psychotherapy studies with 677 participants. >> Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any >> significant differences in pretreatment BDI scores between >> participants in drug studies (M = 21.58, SD = 8.23) and those in >> psychotherapy studies (M = 21.63, SD = 6.97). Thus, participants in >> the two types of studies were comparable in initial levels of >> depression. These analyses also failed to reveal any pretreatment >> differences as a function of group assignment (treatment or control) >> or the interaction between type of study and group assignment. >> >> Estimating the Placebo Effect >> >> Just as drug effects can be estimated as the drug response minus the >> placebo response, placebo effects can be estimated as the placebo >> response minus the no-treatment response. Using the effect sizes >> obtained from the two meta-analyses reported above, this would be 0.79 >> (1.16 - 0.37). Figure 2 displays the estimated drug, placebo, and >> no-treatment effect sizes as proportions of the drug response (i.e., >> 1.55 SDs). These data indicate that approximately one quarter of the >> drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, >> one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to >> other nonspecific factors. >> >> [pre0010002afig2a.gif] >> >> Figure 2. Drug effect, placebo effect, and natural history effect >> as proportions of the response to antidepressant medication. >> >> Discussion >> >> No-treatment effect sizes and effect sizes for the placebo response >> were calculated from different sets of studies. Comparison across >> different samples is common in meta-analyses. For example, effect >> sizes derived from studies of psychodynamic therapy are often compared >> to those derived from studies of behavior therapy (e.g., Andrews & >> Harvey, 1981; Smith et al., 1980). Nevertheless, comparisons of this >> sort should be interpreted cautiously. Participants volunteering for >> different treatments might come from a different populations, and when >> data for different conditions are drawn from different sets of >> studies, participants have not been assigned randomly to these >> conditions. Also, assignment to a no-treatment or wait-list control >> group is not the same as no intervention at all. Therefore, our >> estimates of the placebo effect and natural history component of the >> response to antidepressant medication should be considered tentative. >> Nevertheless, when direct comparisons are not available, these >> comparisons provide the best available estimates of comparative >> effectiveness. Furthermore, in at least some cases, these estimates >> have been found to yield results that are comparable to those derived >> from direct comparisons of groups that have been randomly assigned to >> condition (Kirsch, 1990; Shapiro & Shapiro, 1982). >> >> Unlike our estimate of the effect of natural history as a component of >> the drug response, our estimate of the placebo response as a >> proportion of the drug response was derived from studies in which >> participants from the same population were assigned randomly to drug >> and placebo conditions. Therefore, the estimate that only 25% of the >> drug response is due to the administration of an active medication can >> be considered reliable. Confidence in the reliability of this estimate >> is enhanced by the exceptionally high correlation between the drug >> response and the placebo response. This association is high enough to >> suggest that any remaining variance in drug response is error variance >> associated with imperfect reliability of measurement. Examining >> estimates of active drug and inactive placebo responses as a function >> of drug type further enhances confidence in the reliability of these >> estimates. Regardless of drug type, the inactive placebo response was >> approximately 75% of the active drug response. >> >> We used very stringent criteria in selecting studies for inclusion in >> this meta-analysis, and it is possible that data from a broader range >> of studies would have produced a different outcome. However, the >> effect size we have calculated for the medication effect (D = .39) is >> comparable to those reported in other meta-analyses of antidepressant >> medication (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992, 1994; Joffe, Sokolov, & >> Streiner, 1996; Quality Assurance Project, 1983; Smith et al., 1980; >> Steinbrueck, Maxwell, & Howard, 1983). Comparison with the Joffe et >> al. (1996) meta-analysis is particularly instructive, because that >> study, like ours, included estimates of pre-post effect sizes for both >> drug and placebo. Although only two studies were included in both of >> these meta-analyses and somewhat different calculation methods were >> used, ^2 their results were remarkably similar to ours. They reported >> mean pre-post effect sizes of 1.57 for medication and 1.02 for placebo >> and a medication versus placebo effect size of .50. >> >> Our results are in agreement with those of other meta-analyses in >> revealing a substantial placebo effect in antidepressant medication >> and also a considerable benefit of medication over placebo. They also >> indicate that the placebo component of the response to medication is >> considerably greater than the pharmacological effect. However, there >> are two aspects of the data that have not been examined in other >> meta-analyses of antidepressant medication. These are (a) the >> exceptionally high correlation between the placebo response and the >> drug response and (b) the effect on depression of active drugs that >> are not antidepressants. Taken together, these two findings suggest >> the possibility that antidepressants might function as active >> placebos, in which the side-effects amplify the placebo effect by >> convincing patients of that they are receiving a potent drug. >> >> In summary, the data reviewed in this meta-analysis lead to a >> confident estimate that the response to inert placebos is >> approximately 75% of the response to active antidepressant medication. >> Whether the remaining 25% of the drug response is a true pharmacologic >> effect or an enhanced placebo effect cannot yet be determined, because >> of the relatively small number of studies in which active and inactive >> placebos have been compared (Fisher & Greenberg, 1993). Definitive >> estimates of placebo component of antidepressant medication will >> require four arm studies, in which the effects of active placebos, >> inactive placebos, active medication, and natural history (e.g., >> wait-list controls) are examined. 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S., Nies, A., & Ravaris, C. L. (1973). The MAOI >> phenelzine in the treatment of depressive-anxiety states. Archives of >> General Psychiatry, 29, 407-413. >> Rude, S. (1986). Relative benefits of assertion or cognitive >> self-control treatment for depression as a function of proficiency in >> each domain. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54, >> 390-394. >> Schmidt, M. M., & Miller, W. R. (1983). Amount of therapist contact >> and outcome in a multidimentional depression treatment program. Acta >> Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 67, 319-332. >> Schweizer, E., Feighner, J., Mandos, L. A., & Rickels, K. (1994). >> Comparison of venlafaxine and imipramine in the acute treatment of >> major depression in outpatients. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, >> 55(3), 104-108. >> Shapiro, D. A., & Shapiro, D. (1982). Meta-analysis of comparative >> therapy outcome studies: A replication and refinement. Psychological >> Bulletin, 92, 581-604. >> Shaw, B. F. (1977). Comparison of cognitive therapy and behavior >> therapy in the treatment of depression. Journal of Consulting and >> Clinical Psychology, 45, 543-551. >> Shipley, C. R., & Fazio, A. F. (1973). Pilot study of a treatment for >> psychological depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 82, 372-376. >> Sloane, R. B., Staples, F. R., Cristol, A. H., Yorkston, N. J., & >> Whipple, K. (1975). Psychotherapy versus behavior therapy. Cambridge, >> MA: Harvard University Press. >> Smith, M. L., Glass, G. V., & Miller, T. I. (1980). The benefits of >> psychotherapy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. >> Stark, P., & Hardison, C. D. (1985). A review of multicenter >> controlled studies of fluoxetine vs. imipramine and placebo in >> outpatients with major depressive disorder. Journal of Clinical >> Psychiatry, 46, 53-58. >> Steinbrueck, S.M., Maxwell, S.E., & Howard, G.S. (1983). A >> meta-analysis of psychotherapy and drug therapy in the treatment of >> unipolar depression with adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical >> Psychology, 51, 856-863. >> Taylor, F. G., & Marshall, W. L. (1977). Experimental analysis of a >> cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression. Cognitive Therapy and >> Research, 1(1), 59-72. >> Tyson, G. M., & Range, L. M. (1987). Gestalt dialogues as a treatment >> for depression: Time works just as well. Journal of Clinical >> Psychology, 43, 227-230. >> van der Velde, C. D. (1981). Maprotiline versus imipramine and placebo >> in neurotic depression. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 42, 138-141. >> White, K., Razani, J., Cadow, B., et al. (1984). Tranylcypromine vs. >> nortriptyline vs. placebo in depressed outpatients: a controlled >> trial. Psychopharmacology, 82, 258-262. >> Wierzbicki, M., & Bartlett, T. S. (1987). The efficacy of group and >> individual cognitive therapy for mild depression. Cognitive Therapy >> and Research, 11(3), 337-342. >> Wilson, P. H., Goldin, J. C., & Charboneau-Powis, M. (1983). >> Comparative efficacy of behavioral and cognitive treatments of >> depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 7(2), 111-124. >> Workman, E. A., & Short, D. D. (1993). Atypical antidepressants versus >> imipramine in the treatment of major depression: A meta-analysis. >> Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 54(1), 5-12. >> Zung, W. W. K. (1983). Review of placebo-controlled trials with >> bupropion. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 44(5), 104-114. >> _________________________________________________________________ >> >> ^1 A reviewer suggested that because effect sizes are essentially >> z-scores in a hypothetically normal distribution, one might use >> percentile equivalents when examining the proportion of the drug >> response duplicated by the placebo response. As an example of why this >> should not be done, consider a treatment that improves intelligence by >> 1.55 SDs (which is approximately at the 6^th percentile) and another >> that improves it by 1.16 SDs (which is approximately at the 12^th >> percentile). Our method indicates that the second is 75% as effective >> as the first. The reviewer's method suggests that it is only 50% as >> effective. Now let's convert this to actual IQ changes and see what >> happens. If the IQ estimates were done on conventional scales (SD = >> 15), this would be equivalent to a change of 23.25 points by the first >> treatment and 17.4 points by the second. Note that the percentage >> relation is identical whether using z-scores or raw scores, because >> the z-score method simply divides both numbers by a constant. >> >> ^2 Instead of dividing mean differences by the pooled SDs, Joffe et >> al. (1996) used baseline SDs, when these were available, in >> calculating effect sizes. When baseline SDs were not available, which >> they reported to be the case for most of the studies they included, >> they used estimates taken from other studies. Also, they used a >> procedure derived from Hedges and Olkin (1995) to weight for >> differences in sample size, whereas we used the more straightforward >> method recommended by Hunter and Schmidt (1990). >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Sun Oct 23 14:18:33 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 10:18:33 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to Prozac butHearing Placebo In-Reply-To: <435AE8FE.9050801@solution-consulting.com> References: <435AE8FE.9050801@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <435B9BB9.7050100@aol.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 23 15:19:08 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 08:19:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing Placebo In-Reply-To: <435B9BB9.7050100@aol.com> Message-ID: By the way, does anyone have a source for the original science indicating a relationship between seratonin and depression? -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Todd I. Stark Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 7:19 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing Placebo Kirsch and Sapirstein (1998) was actually the lead article for a whole series of articles in Prevention and Treatment. If you read the rest of the series, you'll see that there is good evidence that the placebo effect and the drug effect are largely independent. That is, the effect of SSRIs and the effect of expectancy both contribute to the clinical outcome, but neither depends entirely upon the other. The common interpretation that evidence of expectancy effects is also evidence against the efficacy of SSRIs is inaccurate, or at least very misleading. In my opinion, a more consistent interpretation would be that expectancy effects and drug effects are both important factors in clinical outcome for depression, and that the investigative goal should probably focus on the conditions facilitating each, and the tradeoffs for each. kind regards, Todd Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote on 10/22/2005, 9:35 PM: The interesting thing about this is that the placebo effect for antidepressants has been consistently increasing since the 1980s when Prozac came out, and Kramer wrote Listening to Prozac.* This suggests that loss of hope is a key ingredient in depression; how that interfaces with the Omega-3 evidence, I wish someone would tell me. Lynn *The increasing placebo effect means it is steadily harder to show a statistically significant treatment effect for antidepressants. Discouraging for the drug houses. Steve Hovland wrote: There was a studyin Britain not so long agowhere Zoloft, placebo, and St. John's Wortproduced similar results. I have heardthat St. Johns is the most common prescriptionfor depression in Germany.-----Original Message-----From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org[mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]O n Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson,Ph.D.Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:57 PMTo: The new improved paleopsych listSubject: Re: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing PlaceboRecent reviews of effect size of antidepresants is around 0.2, indicating 2/10s of a standard deviation difference between placebo and active drug. Active placebos (with side effects) have a bigger effect size. Not! e than there is little placebo response seen in anti-psychotic and ADHD drugs, presumably because of the difference in the patient population.LynnPremise Checker wrote: Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medicationhttp://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.htmlPre vention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998[I read something similar in Science, maybe twenty years ago, about the placebo effect being proportionate to the medical effect, and I think it deal with a much larger categories of illnesses. Does anyone know anything further about these anomalies?]by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CTand Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D., Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA ABSTRACT Mean effect sizes for changes in depression were calculated for 2,318 patients who had been randomly assigned to either antidepressant medication or placebo in 19 double! -blind clinical trials. As a proportion of the drug response, the placebo response was constant across different types of medication (75%), and the correlation between placebo effect and drug effect was .90. These data indicate that virtually all of the variation in drug effect size was due to the placebo characteristics of the studies. The effect size for active medications that are not regarded to be antidepressants was as large as that for those classified as antidepressants, and in both cases, the inactive placebos produced improvement that was 75% of the effect of the active drug. These data raise the possibility that the apparent drug effect (25% of the drug response) is actually an active placebo effect. Examination of pre-post effect sizes among depressed individuals assigned to no-treatment or wait-list control groups suggest that approximately one quarter! of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors. _________________________________________________________________ EDITORS' NOTE The article that follows is a controversial one. It reaches a controversial conclusion--that much of the therapeutic benefit of antidepressant medications actually derives from placebo responding. The article reaches this conclusion by utilizing a controversial statistical approach--meta-analysis. And it employs meta-analysis controversially--by meta-analyzing studies that are very heterogeneous in subject selection criteria, treatments employed, and statistical methods used. Nonetheless, we have chosen to publish the article. We have done so because a number of the colleagues who originally reviewed the ! manuscript believed it had considerable merit, even while they recognized the clearly contentious conclusions it reached and the clearly arguable statistical methods it employed. We are convinced that one of the principal aims of an electronic journal ought to be to bring our readers information on a variety of current topics in prevention and treatment, even though much of it will be subject to heated differences of opinion about worth and ultimate significance. This is to be expected, of course, when one is publishing material at the cutting-edge, in a cutting-edge medium. We also believe, however, that soliciting expert commentary to accompany particularly controversial articles facilitates the fullest possible airing of the issues most germane to appreciating both the strengths and the weaknesses of target articles. In the same vein, we welcome ! comments on the article from readers as well, though for obvious reasons, we cannot promise to publish all of them. Feel free to submit a comment by emailing admin at apa.org. Peter Nathan, Associate Editor (Treatment) Martin E. P. Seligman, Editor _________________________________________________________________ We thank R. B. Lydiard and Smith-Kline Beecham Pharaceuticals for supplying additional data. We thank David Kenny for his assistance with the statistical analyses. We thank Roger P. Greenberg and Daniel E. Moerman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Irving Kirsch, Department of Psychology, U-20, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road Storrs, CT 06269-1020. E-mail: Irvingk at uconnvm.uconn.edu _________________________________________________________________ More placebos have been administered to research participants than any single experimental drug. Thus, one would expect sufficient data to have accumulated for the acquisition of substantial knowledge of the parameters of placebo effects. However, although almost everyone controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them. With this in mind, we set about the task of using meta-analytic procedures for evaluating the magnitude of the placebo response to antidepressant medication. Meta-analysis provides a means of mathematically combining results from different studies, even when these studies have used different measures to assess the dependent variable. Most often, this is done by using the statistic d, which is a standar! dized difference score. This effect size is generally calculated as the mean of the experimental group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled standard deviation. Less frequently, the mean difference is divided by standard deviation of the control group (Smith, Glass, & Miller, 1980). Ideally, to calculate the effect size of placebos, we would want to subtract the effects of a no-placebo control group. However, placebos are used as controls against which the effects of physical interventions can be gauged. It is rare for an experimental condition to be included against which the effects of the placebo can be evaluated. To circumvent this problem, we decided to calculate within-cell or pre-post effect sizes, which are the posttreatment mean depression score minus the pretreatment mean depression score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (cf. Smith et al., 1980)! . By doing this for both placebo groups and medication groups, we can estimate the proportion of the response to antidepressant medication that is duplicated by placebo administration, a response that would be due to such factors as expectancy for improvement and the natural course of the disorder (i.e., spontaneous remission). Later in this article, we also separate expectancy from natural history and provide estimates of each of these effects. Although our approach is unusual, in most cases it should provide results that are comparable to conventional methods. If there are no significant pretreatment differences between the treatment and control groups, then the subtraction of mean standardized pre-post difference scores should result in a mean effect size that is just about the same as that produced by subtracting mean standardized posttreatment scores. Suppose, for example, we have a ! study with the data displayed in Table 1. The conventionally calculated effect size would be would be 1.00. The pre-post effect sizes would be 3.00 for the treatment group and 2.00 for the control group. The difference between them is 1.00, which is exactly the same effect calculated from posttreatment scores alone. However, calculating the effect size in this manner also provides us with the information that the effect of the control procedure was 2/3 that of the treatment procedure, information that we do not have when we only consider posttreatment scores. Of course, it is rare for two groups to have identical mean pretreatment scores, and to the extent that those scores are different, our two methods of calculation would provide different results. However, by controlling for baseline differences, our method should provide the more accurate estimate of differential outcome. CAPTION: Ta! ble 1 Hypothetical Means and Standard Deviations for a Treatment Group and a Control Group Treatment Control Pretreatment Posttreatment Pretreatment Posttreatment M 25.00 10.00 25.00 15.00 SD 5.50 4.50 4.50 5.50 The Effects of Medication and PlaceboStudy Characteristics Studies assessing the efficacy of antidepressant medication were obtained through previous reviews (Davis, Janicak, & Bruninga, 1987; Free & Oei, 1989; Greenberg & Fisher, 1989; Greenberg, Bornstein, Greenberg, & Fisher, 1992; Workman & Short, 1993), supplemented by a computer search of PsycLit and MEDLINE databases from 1974 to 1995 using the search terms drug-therapy or pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy or placebo and depression or affective disord! ers. Psychotherapy was included as a search term for the purpose of obtaining articles that would allow estimation of changes occurring in no-treatment and wait-list control groups, a topic to which we return later in this article. Approximately 1,500 publications were produced by this literature search. These were examined by the second author, and those meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were studies in which the description of the patient population was vague (e.g., "neurotic"). 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate within-condition effect sizes. This re! sulted in the exclusion of studies for which neither pre-post statistical tests nor pretreatment means were available. 3. Data were reported for a placebo control group. 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. Of the approximately 1,500 studies examined, 20 met the inclusion criteria. Of these, all but one were studies of the acute phase of therapy, with treatment durations ranging from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82). The one exception (Doogan & Caillard, 1992) was a maintenance study, with a duration of treatment of 44 weeks. Because of this difference, Doogan and Caillard's study was excluded from the meta-analysis. Thus, the analysis was conducted on 19 studies containing 2,318 participants, of whom 1,460 received medication and 858 received placebo. Medications studied were amitriptyline, amy! lobarbitone, fluoxetine, imipramine, paroxetine, isocarboxazid, trazodone, lithium, liothyronine, adinazolam, amoxapine, phenelzine, venlafaxine, maprotiline, tranylcypromine, and bupropion. The Calculation of Effect Sizes In most cases, effect sizes (d) were calculated for measures of depression as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (SD). Pretreatment SDs were used in place of pooled SDs in calculating effect sizes for four studies in which posttreatment SDs were not reported (Ravaris, Nies, Robinson, et al., 1976; Rickels & Case, 1982; Rickels, Case, Weberlowsky, et al., 1981; Robinson, Nies, & Ravaris, 1973). The methods described by Smith et al. (1980) were used to estimate effect sizes for two studies in which means and SDs were not reported. One of these studies (Goldberg, Rickels, & Finnerty, 1981) repor! ted the t value for the pre-post comparisons. The effect size for this study was estimated using the formula: d= t (2/n)^1/2 where t is the reported t value for the pre-post comparison, and n is the number of subjects in the condition. The other study (Kiev & Okerson, 1979) reported only that there was a significant difference between pre- and posttreatment scores. As suggested by Smith et al. (1980), the following formula for estimating the effect size was used: d= 1.96 (2/n)^ 1/2 , where 1.96 is used as the most conservative estimation of the t value at the .05 significance level used by Kiev and Okerson. These two two effect sizes were also corrected for pre-post correlation by multiplying the estimated effect size by (1 - r)^ 1/2 , r being the estimate of the test-retest correlation (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). Bailey and Coppen (1976) reported test-retest c! orrelations of .65 for the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961) and .50 for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRS-D; Hamilton, 1960) . Therefore, in order to arrive at an estimated effect size, corrected for the pre-post correlation, the estimated effect sizes of the HRS-D were multiplied by 0.707 and the effect sizes of the BDI were multiplied by 0.59. In studies reporting multiple measures of depression, an effect size was calculated for each measure and these were then averaged. In studies reporting the effects of two drugs, a single mean effect size for both was calculated for the primary analysis. In a subsequent analysis, the effect for each drug was examined separately. In both analyses, we calculated mean effect sizes weighted for sample size (D; Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). Effect Sizes Sample sizes and effect size! s for patients receiving medication or placebo are presented in Table 2. Mean effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.55 SDs for the medication response and 1.16 for the placebo response. Because effect sizes are obtained by dividing both treatment means by a constant (i.e., the pooled SD), they can be treated mathematically like the scores from which they are derived. ^1 In particular, we have shown that, barring pretreatment between-group differences, subtracting the mean pre-post effect size of the control groups from the mean pre-post effect size of the experimental groups is equivalent to calculating an effect size by conventional means. Subtracting mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates reveals a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs. This indicates that 75% of the response to the medications examined in these studies was a placebo response, and at most, 25% might be a ! true drug effect. This does not mean that only 25% of patients are likely to respond to the pharmacological properties of the drug. Rather, it means that for a typical patient, 75% of the benefit obtained from the active drug would also have obtained from an inactive placebo. CAPTION: Table 2 Studies Including Placebo Control Groups Drug Placebo Study n d n d Blashki et al. (1971) 43 1.75 18 1.02 Byerly et al. (1988) 44 2.30 16 1.37 Claghorn et al. (1992) 113 1.91 95 1.49 Davidson & Turnbull (1983) 11 4.77 8 2.28 Elkin et al. (1989) 36 2.35 34 2.01 Goldberg et al. (1981) 179 0.44 93 0.44 Joffe et al. (1993) 34 1.43 16 0.61 Kahn et al. (19! 91) 66 2.25 80 1.48 Kiev & Okerson (1979) 39 0.44 22 0.42 Lydiard (1989) 30 2.59 15 1.93 Ravaris et al. (1976) 14 1.42 19 0.91 Rickels et al. (1981) 75 1.86 23 1.45 Rickels & Case (1982) 100 1.71 54 1.17 Robinson et al. (1973) 33 1.13 27 0.76 Schweizer et al. (1994) 87 3.13 57 2.13 Stark & Hardison (1985) 370 1.40 169 1.03 van der Velde (1981) 52 0.66 27 0.10 White et al. (1984) 77 1.50 45 1.14 Zung (1983) 57 .88 40 0.95 Inspection of Table 2 reveals considerable variability in drug and placebo response effect sizes. As a first step toward clarifying the reason for this variability, we calculated the correlation between drug respon! se and placebo response, which was found to be exceptionally high, r = .90, p < .001 (see Figure 1). This indicates that the placebo response was proportionate to the drug response, with remaining variability most likely due to measurement error. [pre0010002afig1a.gif] Figure 1. The placebo response as a predictor of the drug response. Our next question was the source of the common variability. One possibility is that the correlation between placebo and drug response rates are due to between-study differences in sample characteristics (e.g., inpatients vs. outpatients, volunteers vs. referrals, etc.). Our analysis of psychotherapy studies later in this article provides a test of this hypothesis. If the correlation is due to between-study differences in sample characteristics, a similar correlation should be found between the psychotherapy and no-treatment response rates. In ! fact, the correlation between the psychotherapy response and the no-treatment response was nonsignificant and in the opposite direction. This indicates that common sample characteristics account for little if any of the relation between treatment and control group response rates. Another possibility is that the close correspondence between placebo and drug response is due to differences in so-called nonspecific variables (e.g., provision of a supportive relationship, color of the medication, patients' expectations for change, biases in clinician's ratings, etc.), which might vary from study to study, but which would be common to recipients of both treatments in a given study. Alternately, the correlation might be associated with differences in the effectiveness of the various medications included in the meta-analysis. This could happen if more effective medications inspired greater expec! tations of improvement among patients or prescribing physicians (Frank, 1973; Kirsch, 1990). Evans (1974), for example, reported that placebo morphine was substantially more effective than placebo aspirin. Finally, both factors might be operative. We further investigated this issue by examining the magnitude of drug and placebo responses as a function of type of medication. We subdivided medication into four types: (a) tricyclics and tetracyclics, (b) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), (c) other antidepressants, and (d) other medications. This last category consisted of four medications (amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam) that are not considered antidepressants. Weighted (for sample size) mean effect sizes of the drug response as a function of type of medication are shown in Table 3, along with corresponding effect sizes of the placebo response and the! mean effect sizes of placebo responses as a proportion of drug responses. These data reveal relatively little variability in drug response and even less variability in the ratio of placebo response to drug response, as a function of drug type. For each type of medication, the effect size for the active drug response was between 1.43 and 1.69, and the inactive placebo response was between 74% and 76% of the active drug response. These data suggest that the between-drug variability in drug and placebo response was due entirely to differences in the placebo component of the studies. CAPTION: Table 3 Effect Sizes as a Function of Drug Type Statistic Type of drug Antidepressant Other drugs Tri- and tetracyclic SSRI Other N 1,353 626 683 203 K 13 4 8 3 D--Drug 1.52 1.68 1.43 1.69 D--Placebo 1.15 1.24 1.08 1.29 Placebo/drug .76 .74 .76 .76 N =! number of subjects; K = number of studies; D = mean weighted effect size; placebo/drug = placebo response as a proportion of active drug response. Differences between active drug responses and inactive placebo responses are typically interpreted as indications of specific pharmacologic effects for the condition being treated. However, this conclusion is thrown into question by the data derived from active medications that are not considered effective for depression. It is possible that these drugs affect depression indirectly, perhaps by improving sleep or lowering anxiety. But if this were the case and if antidepressants have a specific effect on depression, then the effect of these other medications ought to have been less than the effect of antidepressants, whereas our data indicate that the response to these nonantidepressant drugs is at least as great as that to conventional antidep! ressants. A second possibility is that amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam are in fact antidepressants. This conclusion is rendered plausible by the lack of understanding of the mechanism of clinical action of common antidepressants (e.g., tricyclics). If the classification of a drug as an antidepressant is established by its efficacy, rather than by knowledge of the mechanism underlying its effects, then amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam might be considered specifics for depression. A third possibility is that these medications function as active placebos (i.e., active medications without specific activity for the condition being treated). Greenberg and Fisher (1989) summarized data indicating that the effect of antidepressant medication is smaller when it is compared to an active placebo than when it is compared to an inert placebo (also see Gre! enberg & Fisher, 1997). By definition, the only difference between active and inactive placebos is the presence of pharmacologically induced side effects. Therefore, differences in responses to active and inert placebos could be due to the presence of those side effects. Data from other studies indicate that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition or the placebo condition (Blashki, Mowbray, & Davies, 1971; Margraf, Ehlers, Roth, Clark, Sheikh, Agras, & Taylor, 1991; Ney, Collins, & Spensor, 1986).^ This is likely to be associated with their previous experience with antidepressant medication and with differences between drug and placebo in the magnitude of side effects. Experiencing more side effects, patients in active drug conditions conclude that they are in the drug group; experiencing fewe! r side effects, patients in placebo groups conclude that they are in the placebo condition. This can be expected to produce an enhanced placebo effect in drug conditions and a diminished placebo effect in placebo groups. Thus, the apparent drug effect of antidepressants may in fact be a placebo effect, magnified by differences in experienced side effects and the patient's subsequent recognition of the condition to which he or she has been assigned. Support for this interpretation of data is provided by a meta-analysis of fluoxetine (Prozac), in which a correlation of .85 was reported between the therapeutic effect of the drug and the percentage of patients reporting side effects (Greenberg, Bornstein, Zborowski, Fisher, & Greenberg, 1994). Natural History Effects Just as it is important to distinguish between a drug response and a drug effect, so too is it w! orthwhile to distinguish between a placebo response and a placebo effect (Fisher, Lipman, Uhlenhuth, Rickels, & Park, 1965). A drug response is the change that occurs after administration of the drug. The effect of the drug is that portion of the response that is due to the drug's chemical composition; it is the difference between the drug response and the response to placebo administration. A similar distinction can be made between placebo responses and placebo effects. The placebo response is the change that occurs following administration of a placebo. However, change might also occur without administration of a placebo. It may be due to spontaneous remission, regression toward the mean, life changes, the passage of time, or other factors. The placebo effect is the difference between the placebo response and changes that occur without the administration of a placebo (Kirsch, 1985, 1997).! In the preceding section, we evaluated the placebo response as a proportion of the response to antidepressant medication. The data suggest that at least 75% of the drug response is a placebo response, but it does not tell us the magnitude of the placebo effect. What proportion of the placebo response is due to expectancies generated by placebo administration, and what proportion would have occurred even without placebo administration? That is a much more difficult question to answer. We have not been able to locate any studies in which pre- and posttreatment assessments of depression were reported for both a placebo group and a no-treatment or wait-list control group. For that reason, we turned to psychotherapy outcome studies, in which the inclusion of untreated control groups is much more common. We acknowledge that the use of data from psychotherapy studies as a comparison with those ! from drug studies is far less than ideal. Participants in psychotherapy studies are likely to differ from those in drug studies on any number of variables. Furthermore, the assignment of participants to a no-treatment or wait-list control group might also effect the course of their disorder. For example, Frank (1973) has argued that the promise of future treatment is sufficient to trigger a placebo response, and a wait-list control group has been conceputalized as a placebo control group in at least one well-known outcome study (Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, & Whipple, 1975). Conversely, one could argue that being assigned to a no-treatment control group might strengthen feelings of hopelessness and thereby increase depression. Despite these problems, the no-treatment and wait-list control data from psychotherapy outcome studies may be the best data currently available for estimating the natural course of untreated depression. Furthermore, the presence of both types of untreated control groups permits evaluation of Frank's (1973) hypothesis about the curative effects of the promise of treatment. Study Characteristics Studies assessing changes in depression among participants assigned to wait-list or no-treatment control groups were obtained from the computer search described earlier, supplemented by an examination of previous reviews (Dobson, 1989; Free, & Oei, 1989; Robinson, Berman, & Neimeyer, 1990). The publications that were produced by this literature search were examined by the second author, and those meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected because of other criteria (eating dis! orders, substance abuse, physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were studies in which the description of the patient population was vague (e.g., "neurotic"). 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate within-condition effect sizes. 3. Data were reported for a wait-list or no-treatment control group. 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. Nineteen studies were found to meet these inclusion criteria, and in all cases, sufficient data had been reported to allow direct calculation of effect sizes as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled SD. Although they are incidental to the main purposes of this review, we examined effect sizes for psychotherapy as well as those for no-treatment and wait-list control grou! ps. Effect Sizes Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients assigned to psychotherapy, wait-list, and no-treatment are presented in Table 4. Mean pre-post effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.60 for the psychotherapy response and 0.37 for wait-list and no-treatment control groups. Participants given the promise of subsequent treatment (i.e., those in wait-list groups) did not improve more than those not promised treatment. Mean effect sizes for these two conditions were 0.36 and 0.39, respectively. The correlation between effect sizes (r = -.29) was not significant. CAPTION: Table 4 Studies Including Wait-List or No-Treatment Control Groups Study Psychotherapy Control n d n d Beach & O'Leary (1992) 15 2.37 15 0.97 Beck & Stro! ng (1982) 20 2.87 10 -0.28 Catanese et al. (1979) 99 1.39 21 0.16 Comas-Diaz (1981) 16 1.87 10 -0.12 Conoley & Garber (1985) 38 1.10 19 0.21 Feldman et al. (1982) 38 2.00 10 0.42 Graff et al. (1986) 24 2.03 11 -0.03 Jarvinen & Gold (1981) 46 0.76 18 0.34 Maynard (1993) 16 1.06 14 0.36 Nezu (1986) 23 2.39 9 0.16 Rehm et al. (1981) 42 1.23 15 0.48 Rude (1986) 8 1.75 16 0.74 Schmidt & Miller (1983) 34 1.25 10 0.11 Shaw (1977) 16 2.17 8 0.41 Shipley & Fazio (1973) 11 2.12 11 1.00 Taylor & Marsh! all (1977) 21 1.94 7 0.27 Tyson & Range (1981) 22 0.67 11 1.45 Wierzbicki & Bartlett (1987) 18 1.17 20 0.21 Wilson et al. (1983) 16 2.17 9 -0.02 Comparison of Participants in the Two Groups of Studies Comparisons of effect sizes from different sets of studies is common in meta-analysis. Nevertheless, we examined the characteristics of the samples in the two types of studies to assess their comparability. Eighty-six percent of the participants in the psychotherapy studies were women, as were 65% of participants in the drug studies. The age range of participants was 18 to 75 years (M = 30.1) in the psychotherapy studies and 18 to 70 years (M = 40.6) in the drug studies. Duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82) in psychotherapy studies and from 2 to 15 weeks (M = 5.95) in pharmac! otherapy studies. The HRS-D was used in 15 drug studies involving 2,016 patients and 5 psychotherapy studies with 191 participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any significant differences in pretreatment HRS-D scores between patients in the drug studies (M = 23.93, SD = 5.20) and participants in the psychotherapy studies (M = 21.34, SD = 5.03). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used in 4 drug studies involving 261 patients and in 17 psychotherapy studies with 677 participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any significant differences in pretreatment BDI scores between participants in drug studies (M = 21.58, SD = 8.23) and those in psychotherapy studies (M = 21.63, SD = 6.97). Thus, participants in the two types of studies were comparable in initial levels of depression. These analyses also failed to reveal any pretreatment d! ifferences as a function of group assignment (treatment or control) or the interaction between type of study and group assignment. Estimating the Placebo Effect Just as drug effects can be estimated as the drug response minus the placebo response, placebo effects can be estimated as the placebo response minus the no-treatment response. Using the effect sizes obtained from the two meta-analyses reported above, this would be 0.79 (1.16 - 0.37). Figure 2 displays the estimated drug, placebo, and no-treatment effect sizes as proportions of the drug response (i.e., 1.55 SDs). These data indicate that approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors. [pre0010002afig2a.gif] Figure 2. Drug effect, placebo effect, and natural history effect as proportions of the response to antidepressant medication. Discussion No-treatment effect sizes and effect sizes for the placebo response were calculated from different sets of studies. Comparison across different samples is common in meta-analyses. For example, effect sizes derived from studies of psychodynamic therapy are often compared to those derived from studies of behavior therapy (e.g., Andrews & Harvey, 1981; Smith et al., 1980). Nevertheless, comparisons of this sort should be interpreted cautiously. Participants volunteering for different treatments might come from a different populations, and when data for different conditions are drawn from different sets of studies, participants have not been assigned randomly to these conditions. Also, assignment to a no-treatment or wait-list control group is not the same as no intervention at all.! Therefore, our estimates of the placebo effect and natural history component of the response to antidepressant medication should be considered tentative. Nevertheless, when direct comparisons are not available, these comparisons provide the best available estimates of comparative effectiveness. Furthermore, in at least some cases, these estimates have been found to yield results that are comparable to those derived from direct comparisons of groups that have been randomly assigned to condition (Kirsch, 1990; Shapiro & Shapiro, 1982). Unlike our estimate of the effect of natural history as a component of the drug response, our estimate of the placebo response as a proportion of the drug response was derived from studies in which participants from the same population were assigned randomly to drug and placebo conditions. Therefore, the estimate that only 25% of the drug response is due! to the administration of an active medication can be considered reliable. Confidence in the reliability of this estimate is enhanced by the exceptionally high correlation between the drug response and the placebo response. This association is high enough to suggest that any remaining variance in drug response is error variance associated with imperfect reliability of measurement. Examining estimates of active drug and inactive placebo responses as a function of drug type further enhances confidence in the reliability of these estimates. Regardless of drug type, the inactive placebo response was approximately 75% of the active drug response. We used very stringent criteria in selecting studies for inclusion in this meta-analysis, and it is possible that data from a broader range of studies would have produced a different outcome. However, the effect size we have calculated for the medication ef! fect (D = .39) is comparable to those reported in other meta-analyses of antidepressant medication (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992, 1994; Joffe, Sokolov, & Streiner, 1996; Quality Assurance Project, 1983; Smith et al., 1980; Steinbrueck, Maxwell, & Howard, 1983). Comparison with the Joffe et al. (1996) meta-analysis is particularly instructive, because that study, like ours, included estimates of pre-post effect sizes for both drug and placebo. Although only two studies were included in both of these meta-analyses and somewhat different calculation methods were used, ^2 their results were remarkably similar to ours. They reported mean pre-post effect sizes of 1.57 for medication and 1.02 for placebo and a medication versus placebo effect size of .50. Our results are in agreement with those of other meta-analyses in revealing a substantial placebo effect in antidepressant medication ! and also a considerable benefit of medication over placebo. They also indicate that the placebo component of the response to medication is considerably greater than the pharmacological effect. However, there are two aspects of the data that have not been examined in other meta-analyses of antidepressant medication. These are (a) the exceptionally high correlation between the placebo response and the drug response and (b) the effect on depression of active drugs that are not antidepressants. Taken together, these two findings suggest the possibility that antidepressants might function as active placebos, in which the side-effects amplify the placebo effect by convincing patients of that they are receiving a potent drug. In summary, the data reviewed in this meta-analysis lead to a confident estimate that the response to inert placebos is approximately 75% of the response to active antidepressant! medication. Whether the remaining 25% of the drug response is a true pharmacologic effect or an enhanced placebo effect cannot yet be determined, because of the relatively small number of studies in which active and inactive placebos have been compared (Fisher & Greenberg, 1993). Definitive estimates of placebo component of antidepressant medication will require four arm studies, in which the effects of active placebos, inactive placebos, active medication, and natural history (e.g., wait-list controls) are examined. 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G., Collins, C., & Spensor, C. (1986). Double blind: Double talk or are there ways to do better research? Medical Hypotheses, 21, 119-126. Nezu, A. M. (1986). Efficacy of a social problem solving therapy approach for unipolar depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54(2), 196-202. Quality Assurance Project. (1983). A treatment outline for depressive disorders. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 17, 129-146. Ravari! s, C. L., Nies, A., Robinson, D. S., et al. (1976). A multiple-dose, controlled study of phenelzine in depression-anxiety states. Archives of General Psychiatry, 33, 347-350. Rehm, L. P., Kornblith, S. J., O'Hara, M. W., et al. (1981). An evaluation of major components in a self control therapy program for depression. Behavior Modification, 5(4), 459-489. Rickels, K., & Case, G. W. (1982). Trazodone in depressed outpatients. American Journal of Psychiatry, 139, 803-806. Rickels, K., Case, G. W., Weberlowsky, J., et al. (1981). Amoxapine and imipramine in the treatment of depressed outpatients: A controlled study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 138(1), 20-24. Robinson, L. A., Berman, J. S., & Neimeyer, R. A. (1990). Psychotherapy for the treatment of depression: A comprehensive review of controlled outcome research. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 30-49. Robinson, D. S., Nies, A., & ! Ravaris, C. L. (1973). The MAOI phenelzine in the treatment of depressive-anxiety states. Archives of General Psychiatry, 29, 407-413. Rude, S. (1986). Relative benefits of assertion or cognitive self-control treatment for depression as a function of proficiency in each domain. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54, 390-394. Schmidt, M. M., & Miller, W. R. (1983). Amount of therapist contact and outcome in a multidimentional depression treatment program. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 67, 319-332. Schweizer, E., Feighner, J., Mandos, L. A., & Rickels, K. (1994). Comparison of venlafaxine and imipramine in the acute treatment of major depression in outpatients. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 55(3), 104-108. Shapiro, D. A., & Shapiro, D. (1982). Meta-analysis of comparative therapy outcome studies: A replication and refinement. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 5! 81-604. Shaw, B. F. (1977). Comparison of cognitive therapy and behavior therapy in the treatment of depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 45, 543-551. Shipley, C. R., & Fazio, A. F. (1973). Pilot study of a treatment for psychological depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 82, 372-376. Sloane, R. B., Staples, F. R., Cristol, A. H., Yorkston, N. J., & Whipple, K. (1975). Psychotherapy versus behavior therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, M. L., Glass, G. V., & Miller, T. I. (1980). The benefits of psychotherapy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stark, P., & Hardison, C. D. (1985). A review of multicenter controlled studies of fluoxetine vs. imipramine and placebo in outpatients with major depressive disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 46, 53-58. Steinbrueck, S.M., Maxwell, S.E., & Howard, G.S. (1983). A! meta-analysis of psychotherapy and drug therapy in the treatment of unipolar depression with adults. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51, 856-863. Taylor, F. G., & Marshall, W. L. (1977). Experimental analysis of a cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1(1), 59-72. Tyson, G. M., & Range, L. M. (1987). Gestalt dialogues as a treatment for depression: Time works just as well. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 43, 227-230. van der Velde, C. D. (1981). Maprotiline versus imipramine and placebo in neurotic depression. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 42, 138-141. White, K., Razani, J., Cadow, B., et al. (1984). Tranylcypromine vs. nortriptyline vs. placebo in depressed outpatients: a controlled trial. Psychopharmacology, 82, 258-262. Wierzbicki, M., & Bartlett, T. S. (1987). The efficacy of group and individual cognitive therap! y for mild depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 11(3), 337-342. Wilson, P. H., Goldin, J. C., & Charboneau-Powis, M. (1983). Comparative efficacy of behavioral and cognitive treatments of depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 7(2), 111-124. Workman, E. A., & Short, D. D. (1993). Atypical antidepressants versus imipramine in the treatment of major depression: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 54(1), 5-12. Zung, W. W. K. (1983). Review of placebo-controlled trials with bupropion. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 44(5), 104-114. _________________________________________________________________ ^1 A reviewer suggested that because effect sizes are essentially z-scores in a hypothetically normal distribution, one might use percentile equivalents when examining the proportion of the drug response duplicated by the placebo response. As an example of why this should not be done, consider a treatment that improves intelligence by 1.55 SDs (which is approximately at the 6^th percentile) and another that improves it by 1.16 SDs (which is approximately at the 12^th percentile). Our method indicates that the second is 75% as effective as the first. The reviewer's method suggests that it is only 50% as effective. Now let's convert this to actual IQ changes and see what happens. If the IQ estimates were done on conventional scales (SD = 15), this would be equivalent to a change of 23.25 points by the first treatment and 17.4 points by the second. Note that the percentage relation is identical whether using z-scores or raw scores, because the z-score method simply divides both numbers by a constant. ^2 Instead of dividing mean differences by the pooled SDs, Joffe et al. (1996) used baseline SDs, when these were available, in calculating effect sizes. ! When baseline SDs were not available, which they reported to be the case for most of the studies they included, they used estimates taken from other studies. Also, they used a procedure derived from Hedges and Olkin (1995) to weight for differences in sample size, whereas we used the more straightforward method recommended by Hunter and Schmidt (1990)._______________________________________________paleopsych mailing listpaleopsych at paleopsych.orghttp://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/pa leopsych _______________________________________________paleopsych mailing listpaleopsych at paleopsych.orghttp://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/pa leopsych_______________________________________________paleopsych mailing listpaleopsych at paleopsych.orghttp://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/pa leopsych _______________________________________________ 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 Sun Oct 23 15:27:38 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 08:27:38 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing Placebo In-Reply-To: <435B9BB9.7050100@aol.com> Message-ID: Regarding Lynn's comments, I think you have to separate biochemical from circumstantial causes for depression. In the Bay Area, we are emerging from a period when it was reasonable for computer people to lose hope about finding employment because there simply were not enough job openings for the number of people who were unemployed. Depression was a realistic response to the situation. Now the number of job postings is up and we have reason to hope that we can find work. On the other hand, I have previously posted some information suggesting that dietary changes involving reduced consumption of fish, perhaps due to population pressure on marine reserves, has led to biochemical depression due to omega-3 deficiencies. It may also be interesting to look at mercury leaching out of tooth fillings as a biochemical cause of depression on a toxicity basis. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Todd I. Stark Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 7:19 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing Placebo Kirsch and Sapirstein (1998) was actually the lead article for a whole series of articles in Prevention and Treatment. If you read the rest of the series, you'll see that there is good evidence that the placebo effect and the drug effect are largely independent. That is, the effect of SSRIs and the effect of expectancy both contribute to the clinical outcome, but neither depends entirely upon the other. The common interpretation that evidence of expectancy effects is also evidence against the efficacy of SSRIs is inaccurate, or at least very misleading. In my opinion, a more consistent interpretation would be that expectancy effects and drug effects are both important factors in clinical outcome for depression, and that the investigative goal should probably focus on the conditions facilitating each, and the tradeoffs for each. kind regards, Todd Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote on 10/22/2005, 9:35 PM: The interesting thing about this is that the placebo effect for antidepressants has been consistently increasing since the 1980s when Prozac came out, and Kramer wrote Listening to Prozac.* This suggests that loss of hope is a key ingredient in depression; how that interfaces with the Omega-3 evidence, I wish someone would tell me. Lynn *The increasing placebo effect means it is steadily harder to show a statistically significant treatment effect for antidepressants. Discouraging for the drug houses. Steve Hovland wrote: There was a studyin Britain not so long agowhere Zoloft, placebo, and St. John's Wortproduced similar results. I have heardthat St. Johns is the most common prescriptionfor depression in Germany.-----Original Message-----From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org[mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]O n Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson,Ph.D.Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 12:57 PMTo: The new improved paleopsych listSubject: Re: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing PlaceboRecent reviews of effect size of antidepresants is around 0.2, indicating 2/10s of a standard deviation difference between placebo and active drug. Active placebos (with side effects) have a bigger effect size. Not! e than there is little placebo response seen in anti-psychotic and ADHD drugs, presumably because of the difference in the patient population.LynnPremise Checker wrote: Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medicationhttp://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.htmlPre vention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998[I read something similar in Science, maybe twenty years ago, about the placebo effect being proportionate to the medical effect, and I think it deal with a much larger categories of illnesses. Does anyone know anything further about these anomalies?]by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Storrs, CTand Guy Sapirstein, Ph.D., Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA ABSTRACT Mean effect sizes for changes in depression were calculated for 2,318 patients who had been randomly assigned to either antidepressant medication or placebo in 19 double! -blind clinical trials. As a proportion of the drug response, the placebo response was constant across different types of medication (75%), and the correlation between placebo effect and drug effect was .90. These data indicate that virtually all of the variation in drug effect size was due to the placebo characteristics of the studies. The effect size for active medications that are not regarded to be antidepressants was as large as that for those classified as antidepressants, and in both cases, the inactive placebos produced improvement that was 75% of the effect of the active drug. These data raise the possibility that the apparent drug effect (25% of the drug response) is actually an active placebo effect. Examination of pre-post effect sizes among depressed individuals assigned to no-treatment or wait-list control groups suggest that approximately one quarter! of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors. _________________________________________________________________ EDITORS' NOTE The article that follows is a controversial one. It reaches a controversial conclusion--that much of the therapeutic benefit of antidepressant medications actually derives from placebo responding. The article reaches this conclusion by utilizing a controversial statistical approach--meta-analysis. And it employs meta-analysis controversially--by meta-analyzing studies that are very heterogeneous in subject selection criteria, treatments employed, and statistical methods used. Nonetheless, we have chosen to publish the article. We have done so because a number of the colleagues who originally reviewed the ! manuscript believed it had considerable merit, even while they recognized the clearly contentious conclusions it reached and the clearly arguable statistical methods it employed. We are convinced that one of the principal aims of an electronic journal ought to be to bring our readers information on a variety of current topics in prevention and treatment, even though much of it will be subject to heated differences of opinion about worth and ultimate significance. This is to be expected, of course, when one is publishing material at the cutting-edge, in a cutting-edge medium. We also believe, however, that soliciting expert commentary to accompany particularly controversial articles facilitates the fullest possible airing of the issues most germane to appreciating both the strengths and the weaknesses of target articles. In the same vein, we welcome ! comments on the article from readers as well, though for obvious reasons, we cannot promise to publish all of them. Feel free to submit a comment by emailing admin at apa.org. Peter Nathan, Associate Editor (Treatment) Martin E. P. Seligman, Editor _________________________________________________________________ We thank R. B. Lydiard and Smith-Kline Beecham Pharaceuticals for supplying additional data. We thank David Kenny for his assistance with the statistical analyses. We thank Roger P. Greenberg and Daniel E. Moerman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Irving Kirsch, Department of Psychology, U-20, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road Storrs, CT 06269-1020. E-mail: Irvingk at uconnvm.uconn.edu _________________________________________________________________ More placebos have been administered to research participants than any single experimental drug. Thus, one would expect sufficient data to have accumulated for the acquisition of substantial knowledge of the parameters of placebo effects. However, although almost everyone controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them. With this in mind, we set about the task of using meta-analytic procedures for evaluating the magnitude of the placebo response to antidepressant medication. Meta-analysis provides a means of mathematically combining results from different studies, even when these studies have used different measures to assess the dependent variable. Most often, this is done by using the statistic d, which is a standar! dized difference score. This effect size is generally calculated as the mean of the experimental group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled standard deviation. Less frequently, the mean difference is divided by standard deviation of the control group (Smith, Glass, & Miller, 1980). Ideally, to calculate the effect size of placebos, we would want to subtract the effects of a no-placebo control group. However, placebos are used as controls against which the effects of physical interventions can be gauged. It is rare for an experimental condition to be included against which the effects of the placebo can be evaluated. To circumvent this problem, we decided to calculate within-cell or pre-post effect sizes, which are the posttreatment mean depression score minus the pretreatment mean depression score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (cf. Smith et al., 1980)! . By doing this for both placebo groups and medication groups, we can estimate the proportion of the response to antidepressant medication that is duplicated by placebo administration, a response that would be due to such factors as expectancy for improvement and the natural course of the disorder (i.e., spontaneous remission). Later in this article, we also separate expectancy from natural history and provide estimates of each of these effects. Although our approach is unusual, in most cases it should provide results that are comparable to conventional methods. If there are no significant pretreatment differences between the treatment and control groups, then the subtraction of mean standardized pre-post difference scores should result in a mean effect size that is just about the same as that produced by subtracting mean standardized posttreatment scores. Suppose, for example, we have a ! study with the data displayed in Table 1. The conventionally calculated effect size would be would be 1.00. The pre-post effect sizes would be 3.00 for the treatment group and 2.00 for the control group. The difference between them is 1.00, which is exactly the same effect calculated from posttreatment scores alone. However, calculating the effect size in this manner also provides us with the information that the effect of the control procedure was 2/3 that of the treatment procedure, information that we do not have when we only consider posttreatment scores. Of course, it is rare for two groups to have identical mean pretreatment scores, and to the extent that those scores are different, our two methods of calculation would provide different results. However, by controlling for baseline differences, our method should provide the more accurate estimate of differential outcome. CAPTION: Ta! ble 1 Hypothetical Means and Standard Deviations for a Treatment Group and a Control Group Treatment Control Pretreatment Posttreatment Pretreatment Posttreatment M 25.00 10.00 25.00 15.00 SD 5.50 4.50 4.50 5.50 The Effects of Medication and PlaceboStudy Characteristics Studies assessing the efficacy of antidepressant medication were obtained through previous reviews (Davis, Janicak, & Bruninga, 1987; Free & Oei, 1989; Greenberg & Fisher, 1989; Greenberg, Bornstein, Greenberg, & Fisher, 1992; Workman & Short, 1993), supplemented by a computer search of PsycLit and MEDLINE databases from 1974 to 1995 using the search terms drug-therapy or pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy or placebo and depression or affective disord! ers. Psychotherapy was included as a search term for the purpose of obtaining articles that would allow estimation of changes occurring in no-treatment and wait-list control groups, a topic to which we return later in this article. Approximately 1,500 publications were produced by this literature search. These were examined by the second author, and those meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected because of other criteria (eating disorders, substance abuse, physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were studies in which the description of the patient population was vague (e.g., "neurotic"). 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate within-condition effect sizes. This re! sulted in the exclusion of studies for which neither pre-post statistical tests nor pretreatment means were available. 3. Data were reported for a placebo control group. 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. Of the approximately 1,500 studies examined, 20 met the inclusion criteria. Of these, all but one were studies of the acute phase of therapy, with treatment durations ranging from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82). The one exception (Doogan & Caillard, 1992) was a maintenance study, with a duration of treatment of 44 weeks. Because of this difference, Doogan and Caillard's study was excluded from the meta-analysis. Thus, the analysis was conducted on 19 studies containing 2,318 participants, of whom 1,460 received medication and 858 received placebo. Medications studied were amitriptyline, amy! lobarbitone, fluoxetine, imipramine, paroxetine, isocarboxazid, trazodone, lithium, liothyronine, adinazolam, amoxapine, phenelzine, venlafaxine, maprotiline, tranylcypromine, and bupropion. The Calculation of Effect Sizes In most cases, effect sizes (d) were calculated for measures of depression as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled standard deviation (SD). Pretreatment SDs were used in place of pooled SDs in calculating effect sizes for four studies in which posttreatment SDs were not reported (Ravaris, Nies, Robinson, et al., 1976; Rickels & Case, 1982; Rickels, Case, Weberlowsky, et al., 1981; Robinson, Nies, & Ravaris, 1973). The methods described by Smith et al. (1980) were used to estimate effect sizes for two studies in which means and SDs were not reported. One of these studies (Goldberg, Rickels, & Finnerty, 1981) repor! ted the t value for the pre-post comparisons. The effect size for this study was estimated using the formula: d= t (2/n)^1/2 where t is the reported t value for the pre-post comparison, and n is the number of subjects in the condition. The other study (Kiev & Okerson, 1979) reported only that there was a significant difference between pre- and posttreatment scores. As suggested by Smith et al. (1980), the following formula for estimating the effect size was used: d= 1.96 (2/n)^ 1/2 , where 1.96 is used as the most conservative estimation of the t value at the .05 significance level used by Kiev and Okerson. These two two effect sizes were also corrected for pre-post correlation by multiplying the estimated effect size by (1 - r)^ 1/2 , r being the estimate of the test-retest correlation (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). Bailey and Coppen (1976) reported test-retest c! orrelations of .65 for the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961) and .50 for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRS-D; Hamilton, 1960) . Therefore, in order to arrive at an estimated effect size, corrected for the pre-post correlation, the estimated effect sizes of the HRS-D were multiplied by 0.707 and the effect sizes of the BDI were multiplied by 0.59. In studies reporting multiple measures of depression, an effect size was calculated for each measure and these were then averaged. In studies reporting the effects of two drugs, a single mean effect size for both was calculated for the primary analysis. In a subsequent analysis, the effect for each drug was examined separately. In both analyses, we calculated mean effect sizes weighted for sample size (D; Hunter & Schmidt, 1990). Effect Sizes Sample sizes and effect size! s for patients receiving medication or placebo are presented in Table 2. Mean effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.55 SDs for the medication response and 1.16 for the placebo response. Because effect sizes are obtained by dividing both treatment means by a constant (i.e., the pooled SD), they can be treated mathematically like the scores from which they are derived. ^1 In particular, we have shown that, barring pretreatment between-group differences, subtracting the mean pre-post effect size of the control groups from the mean pre-post effect size of the experimental groups is equivalent to calculating an effect size by conventional means. Subtracting mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates reveals a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs. This indicates that 75% of the response to the medications examined in these studies was a placebo response, and at most, 25% might be a ! true drug effect. This does not mean that only 25% of patients are likely to respond to the pharmacological properties of the drug. Rather, it means that for a typical patient, 75% of the benefit obtained from the active drug would also have obtained from an inactive placebo. CAPTION: Table 2 Studies Including Placebo Control Groups Drug Placebo Study n d n d Blashki et al. (1971) 43 1.75 18 1.02 Byerly et al. (1988) 44 2.30 16 1.37 Claghorn et al. (1992) 113 1.91 95 1.49 Davidson & Turnbull (1983) 11 4.77 8 2.28 Elkin et al. (1989) 36 2.35 34 2.01 Goldberg et al. (1981) 179 0.44 93 0.44 Joffe et al. (1993) 34 1.43 16 0.61 Kahn et al. (19! 91) 66 2.25 80 1.48 Kiev & Okerson (1979) 39 0.44 22 0.42 Lydiard (1989) 30 2.59 15 1.93 Ravaris et al. (1976) 14 1.42 19 0.91 Rickels et al. (1981) 75 1.86 23 1.45 Rickels & Case (1982) 100 1.71 54 1.17 Robinson et al. (1973) 33 1.13 27 0.76 Schweizer et al. (1994) 87 3.13 57 2.13 Stark & Hardison (1985) 370 1.40 169 1.03 van der Velde (1981) 52 0.66 27 0.10 White et al. (1984) 77 1.50 45 1.14 Zung (1983) 57 .88 40 0.95 Inspection of Table 2 reveals considerable variability in drug and placebo response effect sizes. As a first step toward clarifying the reason for this variability, we calculated the correlation between drug respon! se and placebo response, which was found to be exceptionally high, r = .90, p < .001 (see Figure 1). This indicates that the placebo response was proportionate to the drug response, with remaining variability most likely due to measurement error. [pre0010002afig1a.gif] Figure 1. The placebo response as a predictor of the drug response. Our next question was the source of the common variability. One possibility is that the correlation between placebo and drug response rates are due to between-study differences in sample characteristics (e.g., inpatients vs. outpatients, volunteers vs. referrals, etc.). Our analysis of psychotherapy studies later in this article provides a test of this hypothesis. If the correlation is due to between-study differences in sample characteristics, a similar correlation should be found between the psychotherapy and no-treatment response rates. In ! fact, the correlation between the psychotherapy response and the no-treatment response was nonsignificant and in the opposite direction. This indicates that common sample characteristics account for little if any of the relation between treatment and control group response rates. Another possibility is that the close correspondence between placebo and drug response is due to differences in so-called nonspecific variables (e.g., provision of a supportive relationship, color of the medication, patients' expectations for change, biases in clinician's ratings, etc.), which might vary from study to study, but which would be common to recipients of both treatments in a given study. Alternately, the correlation might be associated with differences in the effectiveness of the various medications included in the meta-analysis. This could happen if more effective medications inspired greater expec! tations of improvement among patients or prescribing physicians (Frank, 1973; Kirsch, 1990). Evans (1974), for example, reported that placebo morphine was substantially more effective than placebo aspirin. Finally, both factors might be operative. We further investigated this issue by examining the magnitude of drug and placebo responses as a function of type of medication. We subdivided medication into four types: (a) tricyclics and tetracyclics, (b) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), (c) other antidepressants, and (d) other medications. This last category consisted of four medications (amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam) that are not considered antidepressants. Weighted (for sample size) mean effect sizes of the drug response as a function of type of medication are shown in Table 3, along with corresponding effect sizes of the placebo response and the! mean effect sizes of placebo responses as a proportion of drug responses. These data reveal relatively little variability in drug response and even less variability in the ratio of placebo response to drug response, as a function of drug type. For each type of medication, the effect size for the active drug response was between 1.43 and 1.69, and the inactive placebo response was between 74% and 76% of the active drug response. These data suggest that the between-drug variability in drug and placebo response was due entirely to differences in the placebo component of the studies. CAPTION: Table 3 Effect Sizes as a Function of Drug Type Statistic Type of drug Antidepressant Other drugs Tri- and tetracyclic SSRI Other N 1,353 626 683 203 K 13 4 8 3 D--Drug 1.52 1.68 1.43 1.69 D--Placebo 1.15 1.24 1.08 1.29 Placebo/drug .76 .74 .76 .76 N =! number of subjects; K = number of studies; D = mean weighted effect size; placebo/drug = placebo response as a proportion of active drug response. Differences between active drug responses and inactive placebo responses are typically interpreted as indications of specific pharmacologic effects for the condition being treated. However, this conclusion is thrown into question by the data derived from active medications that are not considered effective for depression. It is possible that these drugs affect depression indirectly, perhaps by improving sleep or lowering anxiety. But if this were the case and if antidepressants have a specific effect on depression, then the effect of these other medications ought to have been less than the effect of antidepressants, whereas our data indicate that the response to these nonantidepressant drugs is at least as great as that to conventional antidep! ressants. A second possibility is that amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam are in fact antidepressants. This conclusion is rendered plausible by the lack of understanding of the mechanism of clinical action of common antidepressants (e.g., tricyclics). If the classification of a drug as an antidepressant is established by its efficacy, rather than by knowledge of the mechanism underlying its effects, then amylobarbitone, lithium, liothyronine, and adinazolam might be considered specifics for depression. A third possibility is that these medications function as active placebos (i.e., active medications without specific activity for the condition being treated). Greenberg and Fisher (1989) summarized data indicating that the effect of antidepressant medication is smaller when it is compared to an active placebo than when it is compared to an inert placebo (also see Gre! enberg & Fisher, 1997). By definition, the only difference between active and inactive placebos is the presence of pharmacologically induced side effects. Therefore, differences in responses to active and inert placebos could be due to the presence of those side effects. Data from other studies indicate that most participants in studies of antidepressant medication are able to deduce whether they have been assigned to the drug condition or the placebo condition (Blashki, Mowbray, & Davies, 1971; Margraf, Ehlers, Roth, Clark, Sheikh, Agras, & Taylor, 1991; Ney, Collins, & Spensor, 1986).^ This is likely to be associated with their previous experience with antidepressant medication and with differences between drug and placebo in the magnitude of side effects. Experiencing more side effects, patients in active drug conditions conclude that they are in the drug group; experiencing fewe! r side effects, patients in placebo groups conclude that they are in the placebo condition. This can be expected to produce an enhanced placebo effect in drug conditions and a diminished placebo effect in placebo groups. Thus, the apparent drug effect of antidepressants may in fact be a placebo effect, magnified by differences in experienced side effects and the patient's subsequent recognition of the condition to which he or she has been assigned. Support for this interpretation of data is provided by a meta-analysis of fluoxetine (Prozac), in which a correlation of .85 was reported between the therapeutic effect of the drug and the percentage of patients reporting side effects (Greenberg, Bornstein, Zborowski, Fisher, & Greenberg, 1994). Natural History Effects Just as it is important to distinguish between a drug response and a drug effect, so too is it w! orthwhile to distinguish between a placebo response and a placebo effect (Fisher, Lipman, Uhlenhuth, Rickels, & Park, 1965). A drug response is the change that occurs after administration of the drug. The effect of the drug is that portion of the response that is due to the drug's chemical composition; it is the difference between the drug response and the response to placebo administration. A similar distinction can be made between placebo responses and placebo effects. The placebo response is the change that occurs following administration of a placebo. However, change might also occur without administration of a placebo. It may be due to spontaneous remission, regression toward the mean, life changes, the passage of time, or other factors. The placebo effect is the difference between the placebo response and changes that occur without the administration of a placebo (Kirsch, 1985, 1997).! In the preceding section, we evaluated the placebo response as a proportion of the response to antidepressant medication. The data suggest that at least 75% of the drug response is a placebo response, but it does not tell us the magnitude of the placebo effect. What proportion of the placebo response is due to expectancies generated by placebo administration, and what proportion would have occurred even without placebo administration? That is a much more difficult question to answer. We have not been able to locate any studies in which pre- and posttreatment assessments of depression were reported for both a placebo group and a no-treatment or wait-list control group. For that reason, we turned to psychotherapy outcome studies, in which the inclusion of untreated control groups is much more common. We acknowledge that the use of data from psychotherapy studies as a comparison with those ! from drug studies is far less than ideal. Participants in psychotherapy studies are likely to differ from those in drug studies on any number of variables. Furthermore, the assignment of participants to a no-treatment or wait-list control group might also effect the course of their disorder. For example, Frank (1973) has argued that the promise of future treatment is sufficient to trigger a placebo response, and a wait-list control group has been conceputalized as a placebo control group in at least one well-known outcome study (Sloane, Staples, Cristol, Yorkston, & Whipple, 1975). Conversely, one could argue that being assigned to a no-treatment control group might strengthen feelings of hopelessness and thereby increase depression. Despite these problems, the no-treatment and wait-list control data from psychotherapy outcome studies may be the best data currently available for estimating the natural course of untreated depression. Furthermore, the presence of both types of untreated control groups permits evaluation of Frank's (1973) hypothesis about the curative effects of the promise of treatment. Study Characteristics Studies assessing changes in depression among participants assigned to wait-list or no-treatment control groups were obtained from the computer search described earlier, supplemented by an examination of previous reviews (Dobson, 1989; Free, & Oei, 1989; Robinson, Berman, & Neimeyer, 1990). The publications that were produced by this literature search were examined by the second author, and those meeting the following criteria were included in the meta-analysis: 1. The sample was restricted to patients with a primary diagnosis of depression. Studies were excluded if participants were selected because of other criteria (eating dis! orders, substance abuse, physical disabilities or chronic medical conditions), as were studies in which the description of the patient population was vague (e.g., "neurotic"). 2. Sufficient data were reported or obtainable to calculate within-condition effect sizes. 3. Data were reported for a wait-list or no-treatment control group. 4. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions randomly. 5. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 75. Nineteen studies were found to meet these inclusion criteria, and in all cases, sufficient data had been reported to allow direct calculation of effect sizes as the mean posttreatment score minus the mean pretreatment score, divided by the pooled SD. Although they are incidental to the main purposes of this review, we examined effect sizes for psychotherapy as well as those for no-treatment and wait-list control grou! ps. Effect Sizes Sample sizes and effect sizes for patients assigned to psychotherapy, wait-list, and no-treatment are presented in Table 4. Mean pre-post effect sizes, weighted for sample size, were 1.60 for the psychotherapy response and 0.37 for wait-list and no-treatment control groups. Participants given the promise of subsequent treatment (i.e., those in wait-list groups) did not improve more than those not promised treatment. Mean effect sizes for these two conditions were 0.36 and 0.39, respectively. The correlation between effect sizes (r = -.29) was not significant. CAPTION: Table 4 Studies Including Wait-List or No-Treatment Control Groups Study Psychotherapy Control n d n d Beach & O'Leary (1992) 15 2.37 15 0.97 Beck & Stro! ng (1982) 20 2.87 10 -0.28 Catanese et al. (1979) 99 1.39 21 0.16 Comas-Diaz (1981) 16 1.87 10 -0.12 Conoley & Garber (1985) 38 1.10 19 0.21 Feldman et al. (1982) 38 2.00 10 0.42 Graff et al. (1986) 24 2.03 11 -0.03 Jarvinen & Gold (1981) 46 0.76 18 0.34 Maynard (1993) 16 1.06 14 0.36 Nezu (1986) 23 2.39 9 0.16 Rehm et al. (1981) 42 1.23 15 0.48 Rude (1986) 8 1.75 16 0.74 Schmidt & Miller (1983) 34 1.25 10 0.11 Shaw (1977) 16 2.17 8 0.41 Shipley & Fazio (1973) 11 2.12 11 1.00 Taylor & Marsh! all (1977) 21 1.94 7 0.27 Tyson & Range (1981) 22 0.67 11 1.45 Wierzbicki & Bartlett (1987) 18 1.17 20 0.21 Wilson et al. (1983) 16 2.17 9 -0.02 Comparison of Participants in the Two Groups of Studies Comparisons of effect sizes from different sets of studies is common in meta-analysis. Nevertheless, we examined the characteristics of the samples in the two types of studies to assess their comparability. Eighty-six percent of the participants in the psychotherapy studies were women, as were 65% of participants in the drug studies. The age range of participants was 18 to 75 years (M = 30.1) in the psychotherapy studies and 18 to 70 years (M = 40.6) in the drug studies. Duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 20 weeks (M = 4.82) in psychotherapy studies and from 2 to 15 weeks (M = 5.95) in pharmac! otherapy studies. The HRS-D was used in 15 drug studies involving 2,016 patients and 5 psychotherapy studies with 191 participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any significant differences in pretreatment HRS-D scores between patients in the drug studies (M = 23.93, SD = 5.20) and participants in the psychotherapy studies (M = 21.34, SD = 5.03). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used in 4 drug studies involving 261 patients and in 17 psychotherapy studies with 677 participants. Analysis of variance weighted by sample size did not reveal any significant differences in pretreatment BDI scores between participants in drug studies (M = 21.58, SD = 8.23) and those in psychotherapy studies (M = 21.63, SD = 6.97). Thus, participants in the two types of studies were comparable in initial levels of depression. These analyses also failed to reveal any pretreatment d! ifferences as a function of group assignment (treatment or control) or the interaction between type of study and group assignment. Estimating the Placebo Effect Just as drug effects can be estimated as the drug response minus the placebo response, placebo effects can be estimated as the placebo response minus the no-treatment response. Using the effect sizes obtained from the two meta-analyses reported above, this would be 0.79 (1.16 - 0.37). Figure 2 displays the estimated drug, placebo, and no-treatment effect sizes as proportions of the drug response (i.e., 1.55 SDs). These data indicate that approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors. [pre0010002afig2a.gif] Figure 2. Drug effect, placebo effect, and natural history effect as proportions of the response to antidepressant medication. Discussion No-treatment effect sizes and effect sizes for the placebo response were calculated from different sets of studies. Comparison across different samples is common in meta-analyses. For example, effect sizes derived from studies of psychodynamic therapy are often compared to those derived from studies of behavior therapy (e.g., Andrews & Harvey, 1981; Smith et al., 1980). Nevertheless, comparisons of this sort should be interpreted cautiously. Participants volunteering for different treatments might come from a different populations, and when data for different conditions are drawn from different sets of studies, participants have not been assigned randomly to these conditions. Also, assignment to a no-treatment or wait-list control group is not the same as no intervention at all.! Therefore, our estimates of the placebo effect and natural history component of the response to antidepressant medication should be considered tentative. Nevertheless, when direct comparisons are not available, these comparisons provide the best available estimates of comparative effectiveness. Furthermore, in at least some cases, these estimates have been found to yield results that are comparable to those derived from direct comparisons of groups that have been randomly assigned to condition (Kirsch, 1990; Shapiro & Shapiro, 1982). Unlike our estimate of the effect of natural history as a component of the drug response, our estimate of the placebo response as a proportion of the drug response was derived from studies in which participants from the same population were assigned randomly to drug and placebo conditions. Therefore, the estimate that only 25% of the drug response is due! to the administration of an active medication can be considered reliable. Confidence in the reliability of this estimate is enhanced by the exceptionally high correlation between the drug response and the placebo response. This association is high enough to suggest that any remaining variance in drug response is error variance associated with imperfect reliability of measurement. Examining estimates of active drug and inactive placebo responses as a function of drug type further enhances confidence in the reliability of these estimates. Regardless of drug type, the inactive placebo response was approximately 75% of the active drug response. We used very stringent criteria in selecting studies for inclusion in this meta-analysis, and it is possible that data from a broader range of studies would have produced a different outcome. However, the effect size we have calculated for the medication ef! fect (D = .39) is comparable to those reported in other meta-analyses of antidepressant medication (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992, 1994; Joffe, Sokolov, & Streiner, 1996; Quality Assurance Project, 1983; Smith et al., 1980; Steinbrueck, Maxwell, & Howard, 1983). Comparison with the Joffe et al. (1996) meta-analysis is particularly instructive, because that study, like ours, included estimates of pre-post effect sizes for both drug and placebo. Although only two studies were included in both of these meta-analyses and somewhat different calculation methods were used, ^2 their results were remarkably similar to ours. They reported mean pre-post effect sizes of 1.57 for medication and 1.02 for placebo and a medication versus placebo effect size of .50. Our results are in agreement with those of other meta-analyses in revealing a substantial placebo effect in antidepressant medication ! and also a considerable benefit of medication over placebo. They also indicate that the placebo component of the response to medication is considerably greater than the pharmacological effect. However, there are two aspects of the data that have not been examined in other meta-analyses of antidepressant medication. These are (a) the exceptionally high correlation between the placebo response and the drug response and (b) the effect on depression of active drugs that are not antidepressants. Taken together, these two findings suggest the possibility that antidepressants might function as active placebos, in which the side-effects amplify the placebo effect by convincing patients of that they are receiving a potent drug. In summary, the data reviewed in this meta-analysis lead to a confident estimate that the response to inert placebos is approximately 75% of the response to active antidepressant! medication. Whether the remaining 25% of the drug response is a true pharmacologic effect or an enhanced placebo effect cannot yet be determined, because of the relatively small number of studies in which active and inactive placebos have been compared (Fisher & Greenberg, 1993). Definitive estimates of placebo component of antidepressant medication will require four arm studies, in which the effects of active placebos, inactive placebos, active medication, and natural history (e.g., wait-list controls) are examined. 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Psychopharmacology, 82, 258-262. Wierzbicki, M., & Bartlett, T. S. (1987). The efficacy of group and individual cognitive therap! y for mild depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 11(3), 337-342. Wilson, P. H., Goldin, J. C., & Charboneau-Powis, M. (1983). Comparative efficacy of behavioral and cognitive treatments of depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 7(2), 111-124. Workman, E. A., & Short, D. D. (1993). Atypical antidepressants versus imipramine in the treatment of major depression: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 54(1), 5-12. Zung, W. W. K. (1983). Review of placebo-controlled trials with bupropion. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 44(5), 104-114. _________________________________________________________________ ^1 A reviewer suggested that because effect sizes are essentially z-scores in a hypothetically normal distribution, one might use percentile equivalents when examining the proportion of the drug response duplicated by the placebo response. As an example of why this should not be done, consider a treatment that improves intelligence by 1.55 SDs (which is approximately at the 6^th percentile) and another that improves it by 1.16 SDs (which is approximately at the 12^th percentile). Our method indicates that the second is 75% as effective as the first. The reviewer's method suggests that it is only 50% as effective. Now let's convert this to actual IQ changes and see what happens. If the IQ estimates were done on conventional scales (SD = 15), this would be equivalent to a change of 23.25 points by the first treatment and 17.4 points by the second. Note that the percentage relation is identical whether using z-scores or raw scores, because the z-score method simply divides both numbers by a constant. ^2 Instead of dividing mean differences by the pooled SDs, Joffe et al. (1996) used baseline SDs, when these were available, in calculating effect sizes. ! When baseline SDs were not available, which they reported to be the case for most of the studies they included, they used estimates taken from other studies. Also, they used a procedure derived from Hedges and Olkin (1995) to weight for differences in sample size, whereas we used the more straightforward method recommended by Hunter and Schmidt (1990)._______________________________________________paleopsych mailing listpaleopsych at paleopsych.orghttp://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/pa leopsych _______________________________________________paleopsych mailing listpaleopsych at paleopsych.orghttp://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/pa leopsych_______________________________________________paleopsych mailing listpaleopsych at paleopsych.orghttp://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/pa leopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thrst4knw at aol.com Sun Oct 23 15:37:21 2005 From: thrst4knw at aol.com (Todd I. Stark) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:37:21 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Prevention & Treatment: Listening to ProzacbutHearing Placebo In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <435BAE31.30507@aol.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:43:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:43:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Beyond Human Message-ID: Beyond Human New York Times Magazine, 5.10.23 http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2005/10/23/magazine/1129625410505.html?8tpw=&emc=tpw&pagewanted=print The Way We Live Now By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Many of the fans milling into this year's postseason baseball games have been wearing authentic major league uniforms, with GUERRERO, say, or OSWALT, stitched on the back. True, society has traditionally encouraged kids to fantasize about what they'll be as adults. But most of the people I've seen in $200 regulation shirts are adults. What they're fantasizing about is an alternative adult identity for themselves. Why do they do this? The literary critic Paul Fussell once speculated that wearers of "legible clothing" like T-shirts were merely losers trying to associate themselves with a success, whether it be a product (Valvoline) or an institution (The New York Review of Books). A conservative view held that dressing like a child meant shirking the responsibilities of adulthood. It was a subset of dressing like a slob. But these explanations do not cover the ballpark people or (to take a similar phenomenon) those weekend bicyclists in their expensive pretend-racer costumes, with European team logos and company trademarks. The message in their clothing is aimed not at others but at themselves. It is a do-it-yourself virtual reality. Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever larger part of adult life. For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, this is only the beginning. According to his new book "The Singularity Is Near," we are approaching the age of "full-immersion virtual-reality." Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, you'll be able to design your own mental habitat. You'll be able to sleep with your favorite movie star - in your head. (It is not lost on Kurzweil that you can already do that, but he insists it will be really, really realistic.) Those same technologies will help us "overcome our genetic heritage," live longer and become smarter. We'll learn how brains operate and devise computers that function like them. Then the barrier between our minds and our computers will disappear. The part of our memory that is literally downloaded will grow until "the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate." But this raises questions: What will then be the point of unenhanced human beings? And what will become of our relations to one another? A willingness to run head-on at these moral-technological issues has made the French novelist Michel Houellebecq one of Europe's best-selling writers and arguably its most important. His "Elementary Particles" (2000), set in the year 2079, recounts the near-total extinction of ordinary human beings. His new novel, "The Possibility of an Island," due out in the United States next spring, describes the triumph of a cult that believes man was created by nondivine extraterrestrials and sees genetic engineering as a path to "immortality." The novel cuts between a sex-obsessed comedian, Daniel1, and two of his enhanced clones, Daniel24 and Daniel25. It would not surprise Houellebecq that Kurzweil, like other technological optimists, should use sex to sell his utopia. For Houellebecq, the important line the cult crosses is not a scientific but an anthropological one. By making credible promises of longevity and sex, it manages to elevate materialism (more specifically, consumerism) into a religion. Daniel1's girlfriend, the editor of a magazine called Lolita, explains, "What we're trying to create is an artificial humanity, a frivolous one, that will never again be capable of seriousness or humor, that will spend its life in an ever more desperate quest for fun and sex - a generation of absolute kids." But something gets left out of sex when it is idealized, marketed, venerated or souped up: other people. Regardless of whether your girlfriend can handle your sleeping (virtually) with Angelina Jolie, it is very likely you'll find the hard work of maintaining a relationship less rewarding when so many starlets beckon. Americans may be surprised that Houellebecq attributes the bon mot about masturbation being sex with someone you love not to [3]Woody Allen but to either Keith Richards or Jacques Lacan. But whatever its source, the narrator Daniel25 views it as one of the more profound insights of our time. Human interactions of all kinds, especially those that involve caring for others, appear less and less worth the trouble. Houellebecq is fascinated by young couples who have pets instead of children, and by the French heat wave of 2003, which killed thousands of senior citizens who were forgotten by their vacationing children and abandoned by their vacationing doctors. Daniel1 mocks the newspaper headline "Scenes Unworthy of a Modern Country." In his view, those scenes were proof that France was a modern country. "Only an authentically modern country," he insists, "was capable of treating old people like outright garbage." If we treat our fellow humans this way, why should we expect posthumans to care for us any better? We shouldn't. In the novel, when an acolyte witnesses a murder that, if revealed, could derail the cult's DNA experiments, the chief geneticist orders her thrown from a cliff. He feels no shame, nor does the narrator see any reason why he should. "What he was trying to do," Daniel1 writes, "was to create a new species, and this species wouldn't have any more moral obligation toward humans than humans have toward lizards." In his recent book, "Radical Evolution," Joel Garreau suggests a "Shakespeare test" to determine whether Prozac or cloning or full-immersion virtual reality robs us of our humanity: would the user of these innovations be recognizable to Shakespeare? Houellebecq suggests that the answer is tipping toward No. "Nothing was left now," Daniel25 notes, "of those literary and artistic works that humanity had been so proud of; the themes that gave rise to them had lost all relevance, their emotional power had evaporated." Many Westerners looking to the future think they're about to attain the prize of a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts until a ripe old age. Houellebecq warns that second prize may be a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts forever. Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Turkey. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:44:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:44:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: Marvin Minsky: The Emotion Universe (2002) Message-ID: Marvin Minsky: The Emotion Universe http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky02/minsky02_print.html 2.7.11 To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist? MARVIN MINSKY, mathematician and computer scientist, is considered one of the fathers of Artificial Intelligence. He is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; cofounder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the author of eight books, including The Society of Mind. [14]Marvin Minsky's Edge Bio Page 14. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/minsky.html _________________________________________________________________ THE EMOTION UNIVERSE MARVIN MINSKY: I was listening to this group talking about universes, and it seems to me there's one possibility that's so simple that people don't discuss it. Certainly a question that occurs in all religions is, "Who created the universe, and why? And what's it for?" But something is wrong with such questions because they make extra hypotheses that don't make sense. When you say that X exists, you're saying that X is in the Universe. It's all right to say, "this glass of water exists" because that's the same as "This glass is in the Universe." But to say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?" The only way I can see to make sense of this is to adopt the famous "many-worlds theory" which says that there are many "possible universes" and that there is nothing distinguished or unique about the one that we are in - except that it is the one we are in. In other words, there's no need to think that our world 'exists'; instead, think of it as like a computer game, and consider the following sequence of 'Theories of It": (1) Imagine that somewhere there is a computer that simulates a certain World, in which some simulated people evolve. Eventually, when these become smart, one of those persons asks the others, "What caused this particular World to exist, and why are we in it?" But of course that World doesn't 'really exist' because it is only a simulation. (2) Then it might occur to one of those people that, perhaps, they are part of a simulation. Then that person might go on to ask, "Who wrote the Program that simulates us, and who made the Computer that runs that Program?" (3) But then someone else could argue that, "Perhaps there is no Computer at all. Only the Program needs to exist - because once that Program is written, then this will determine everything that will happen in that simulation. After all, once the computer and program have been described (along with some set of initial conditions) this will explain the entire World, including all its inhabitants, and everything that will happen to them. So the only real question is what is that program and who wrote it, and why" (4) Finally another one of those 'people' observes, "No one needs to write it at all! It is just one of 'all possible computations!' No one has to write it down. No one even has to think of it! So long as it is 'possible in principle,' then people in that Universe will think and believe that they exist!' So we have to conclude that it doesn't make sense to ask about why this world exists. However, there still remain other good questions to ask, about how this particular Universe works. For example, we know a lot about ourselves - in particular, about how we evolved - and we can see that, for this to occur, the 'program' that produced us must have certain kinds of properties. For example, there cannot be structures that evolve (that is, in the Darwinian way) unless there can be some structures that can make mutated copies of themselves; this means that some things must be stable enough to have some persistent properties. Something like molecules that last long enough, etc. So this, in turn, tells us something about Physics: a universe that has people like us must obey some conservation-like laws; otherwise nothing would last long enough to support a process of evolution. We couldn't 'exist' in a universe in which things are too frequently vanishing, blowing up, or being created in too many places. In other words, we couldn't exist in a universe that has the wrong kinds of laws. (To be sure, this leaves some disturbing questions about worlds that have no laws at all. This is related to what is sometimes called the Anthropic Principle." That's the idea that the only worlds in which physicists can ask about what created the universe are the worlds that can support such physicists.) The Certainty Principle In older times, when physicists tried to explain Quantum Theory, to the public what they call the uncertainty principle, they'd say that the world isn't the way Newton described it; instead it. They emphasized 'uncertainty' - that everything is probabilistic and indeterminate. However, they rarely mentioned the fact that it's really just the opposite: it is only because of quantization that we can depend on anything! For example in classical Newtonian physics, complex systems can't be stable for long. Jerry Sussman and John Wisdom once simulated our Solar System, and showed that the large outer planets would stable for billions of years. But they did not simulate the inner planets - so we have no assurance that our planet is stable. It might be that enough of the energy of the big planets might be transferred to throw our Earth out into space. (They did show that the orbit of Pluto must be chaotic.) Yes, quantum theory shows that things are uncertain: if you have a DNA molecule there's a possibility that one of its carbon atoms will suddenly tunnel out and appear in Arcturus. However, at room temperature a molecule of DNA is almost certain to stay in its place for billions of years, - because of quantum mechanics - and that is one of the reasons that evolution is possible! For quantum mechanics is the reason why most things don't usually jump around! So this suggests that we should take the anthropic principle seriously, by asking. "Which possible universes could have things that are stable enough to support our kind of evolution?" Apparently, the first cells appeared quickly after the earth got cool enough; I've heard estimate that this took less than a hundred million years. But then it took another three billion years to get to the kinds of cells that could evolve into animals and plants. This could only happen in possible worlds whose laws support stability. It could not happen in a Newtonian Universe. So this is why the world that we're in needs something like quantum mechanics - to keep things in place! (I discussed this "Certainty Principle" in my chapter in the book Feynman and Computation, A.J.G. Hey, editor, Perseus Books, 1999.) Intelligence Why don't we yet have good theories about what our minds are and how they work? In my view this is because we're only now beginning to have the concepts that we'll need for this. The brain is a very complex machine, far more advanced that today's computers, yet it was not until the 1950s that we began to acquire such simple ideas about (for example) memory - such as the concepts of data structures, cache memories, priority interrupt systems, and such representations of knowledge as 'semantic networks.' Computer science now has many hundreds of such concepts that were simply not available before the 1960s. Psychology itself did not much develop before the twentieth century. A few thinkers like Aristotle had good ideas about psychology, but progress thereafter was slow; it seems to me that Aristotle's suggestions in the Rhetoric were about as good as those of other thinkers until around 1870. Then came the era of Galton, Wundt, William James and Freud - and we saw the first steps toward ideas about how minds work. But still, in my view, there was little more progress until the Cybernetics of the '40s, the Artificial Intelligence of the '50s and '60s, and the Cognitive Psychology that started to grow in the '70s and 80s. Why did psychology lag so far behind so many other sciences? In the late 1930s a botanist named Jean Piaget in Switzerland started to observe the behavior of his children. In the next ten years of watching these kids grow up he wrote down hundreds of little theories about the processes going on in their brains, and wrote about 20 books, all based on observing three children carefully. Although some researchers still nitpick about his conclusions, the general structure seems to have held up, and many of the developments he described seem to happen at about the same rate and the same ages in all the cultures that have been studied. The question isn't, "Was Piaget right or wrong?" but "Why wasn't there someone like Piaget 2000 years ago?" What was it about all previous cultures that no one thought to observe children and try to figure out how they worked? It certainly was not from lack of technology: Piaget didn't need cyclotrons, but only glasses of water and pieces of candy. Perhaps psychology lagged behind because it tried to imitate the more successful sciences. For example, in the early 20th century there were many attempts to make mathematical theories about psychological subjects - notable learning and pattern recognition. But there's a problem with mathematics. It works well for Physics, I think because fundamental physics has very few laws - and the kinds of mathematics that developed in the years before computers were good at describing systems based on just a few - say, 4, 5, or 6 laws - but doesn't work well for systems based on the order of a dozen laws. The physicist like Newton and Maxwell discovered ways to account for large classes of phenomena based on three or four laws; however, with 20 assumptions, mathematical reasoning becomes impractical. The beautiful subject called Theory of Groups begins with only five assumptions - yet this leads to systems so complex that people have spent their lifetimes on them. Similarly, you can write a computer program with just a few lines of code that no one can thoroughly understand; however, at least we can run the computer to see how it behaves - and sometimes see enough then to make a good theory. However, there's more to computer science than that. Many people think of computer science as the science of what computers do, but I think of it quite differently: Computer Science is a new way collection of ways to describe and think about complicated systems. It comes with a huge library of new, useful concepts about how mental processes might work. For example, most of the ancient theories of memory envisioned knowledge like facts in a box. Later theories began to distinguish ideas about short and long-term memories, and conjectured that skills are stored in other ways. However, Computer Science suggests dozens of plausible ways to store knowledge away - as items in a database, or sets of "if-then" reaction rules, or in the forms of semantic networks (in which little fragments of information are connected by links that themselves have properties), or program-like procedural scripts, or neural networks, etc. You can store things in what are called neural networks - which are wonderful for learning certain things, but almost useless for other kinds of knowledge, because few higher-level processes can 'reflect' on what's inside a neural network. This means that the rest of the brain cannot think and reason about what it's learned - that is, what was learned in that particular way. In artificial intelligence, we have learned many tricks that make programs faster - but in the long run lead to limitations because the results neural network type learning are too 'opaque' for other programs to understand. Yet even today, most brain scientists do not seem to know, for example, about cache-memory. If you buy a computer today you'll be told that it has a big memory on its slow hard disk, but it also has a much faster memory called cache, which remembers the last few things it did in case it needs them again, so it doesn't have to go and look somewhere else for them. And modern machines each use several such schemes - but I've not heard anyone talk about the hippocampus that way. All this suggests that brain scientists have been too conservative; they've not made enough hypotheses - and therefore, most experiments have been trying to distinguish between wrong alternatives. Reinforcement vs. Credit assignment. There have been several projects that were aimed toward making some sort of "Baby Machine" that would learn and develop by itself - to eventually become intelligent. However, all such projects, so far, have only progressed to a certain point, and then became weaker or even deteriorated. One problem has been finding adequate ways to represent the knowledge that they were acquiring. Another problem was not have good schemes for what we sometimes call 'credit assignment' - that us, how do you learning things that are relevant, that are essentials rather than accidents. For example, suppose that you find a new way to handle a screwdriver so that the screw remains in line and doesn't fall out. What is it that you learn? It certainly won't suffice merely to learn the exact sequence of motions (because the spatial relations will be different next time) - so you have to learn at some higher level of representation. How do you make the right abstractions? Also, when some experiment works, and you've done ten different things in that path toward success, which of those should you remember, and how should you represent them? How do you figure out which parts of your activity were relevant? Older psychology theories used the simple idea of 'reinforcing' what you did most recently. But that doesn't seem to work so well as the problems at hand get more complex. Clearly, one has to reinforce plans and not actions - which means that good Credit-Assignment has to involve some thinking about the things that you've done. But still, no one has designed and debugged a good architecture for doing such things. We need better programming languages and architectures. I find it strange how little progress we've seen in the design of problem solving programs - or languages for describing them, or machines for implementing those designs. The first experiments to get programs to simulate human problem-solving started in the early 1950s, just before computers became available to the general public; for example, the work of Newell, Simon, and Shaw using the early machine designed by John von Neumann's group. To do this, they developed the list-processing language IPL. Around 1960, John McCarthy developed a higher-level language LISP, which made it easier to do such things; now one could write programs that could modify themselves in real time. Unfortunately, the rest of the programming community did not recognize the importance of this, so the world is now dominated by clumsy languages like Fortran, C, and their successors - which describe programs that cannot change themselves. Modern operating systems suffered the same fate, so we see the industry turning to the 35-year-old system called Unix, a fossil retrieved from the ancient past because its competitors became so filled with stuff that no one cold understand and modify them. So now we're starting over again, most likely to make the same mistakes again. What's wrong with the computing community? Expertise vs. Common Sense In the early days of artificial intelligence, we wrote programs to do things that were very advanced. One of the first such programs was able to prove theorems in Euclidean geometry. This was easy because geometry depends only upon a few assumptions: Two points determine a unique line. If there are two lines then they are either parallel or they intersect min just one place. Or, two triangles are the same in all respects if the two sides and the angle between them are equivalent. This is a wonderful subject because you're in a world where assumptions are very simple, there are only a small number of them, and you use a logic that is very clear. It's a beautiful place, and you can discover wonderful things there. However, I think that, in retrospect, it may have been a mistake to do so much work on task that were so 'advanced.' The result was that - until today - no one paid much attention to the kinds of problems that any child can solve. That geometry program did about as well as a superior high school student could do. Then one of our graduate students wrote a program that solved symbolic problems in integral calculus. Jim Slagle's program did this well enough to get a grade of A in MIT's first-year calculus course. (However, it could only solve symbolic problems, and not the kinds that were expressed in words. Eventually, the descendants of that program evolved to be better than any human in the world, and this led to the successful commercial mathematical assistant programs called MACSYMA and Mathematica. It's an exciting story - but those programs could still not solve "word problems." However in the mid 1960s, graduate student Daniel Bobrow wrote a program that could solve problems like "Bill's father's uncle is twice as old as Bill's father. 2 years from now Bill's father will be three times as old as Bill. The sum of their ages is 92. Find Bill's age." Most high school students have considerable trouble with that. Bobrow's program was able to take convert those English sentences into linear equations, and then solve those equations - but it could not do anything at all with sentences that had other kinds of meanings. We tried to improve that kind of program, but this did not lead to anything good because those programs did not know enough about how people use commonsense language. By 1980 we had thousands of programs, each good at solving some specialized problems - but none of those program that could do the kinds of things that a typical five-year-old can do. A five-year-old can beat you in an argument if you're wrong enough and the kid is right enough. To make a long story short, we've regressed from calculus and geometry and high school algebra and so forth. Now, only in the past few years have a few researchers in AI started to work on the kinds of common sense problems that every normal child can solve. But although there are perhaps a hundred thousand people writing expert specialized programs, I've found only about a dozen people in the world who aim toward finding ways to make programs deal with the kinds of everyday, commonsense jobs of the sort that almost every child can do. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:44:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:44:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 046: Liberals and Conservatives in Practice Message-ID: Meme 046: Liberals and Conservatives in Practice sent 5.10.20 Unconventional Wisdom column http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47307-2004Aug7 (excerpt) By Richard Morin, morinr at washpost.com 2004.8.8 Forget what you've heard about bleeding heart liberals or compassionate conservatives. When it comes to trusting others and acting for the common good, neither political party or ideology has a corner on generosity. That's what Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri and his two co-authors found in a survey of college students, using two experimental "games" that are frequently used by economists and political scientists to test altruism and trust. The researchers also discovered that political liberals may talk the compassionate talk but don't walk the walk, at least any more than conservatives do. Self-described liberals were more likely to support increased public spending and redistributive programs. But when asked to put their faith in others or contribute money to the larger good, lefties were no more munificent or trusting than right-thinkers. "Some would argue that liberals are indeed generous, albeit with others' money," the researchers noted wryly in a just-published working paper provocatively titled "Do Liberals Play Nice?" Milyo and his co-authors, Lisa Anderson and Jennifer Mellor of the College of William & Mary, surveyed a total of 196 William and Mary students to determine, among other things, which political party they supported and how politically liberal or conservative they were. Then the researchers instructed the students to play the two games. In the "trust game," test subjects were paired up, and one person from each pair was given $10. This person could keep all the money, send only a portion of it to his or her partner, or send it all. Any amount that was sent was tripled -- an incentive to pass on the money. Then the second person could pass all, some or none of the money back. (The game was played repeatedly, and after the experiment was over, the actual dollar winnings from one of the rounds, chosen at random, were distributed to the pair. That kept the players trying hard each time to maximize their returns while keeping down the cost of the experiment, Milyo said.) So what has this got to do with trusting others? "The payoff was the greatest if players trusted each other to repeatedly send along the full amount," Milyo explained. The second game was called the "public goods experiment." The students were divided into teams of four. Each individual was given $10. Again, they could keep all or any portion of the money and contribute the rest to a pot that would be divided equally among all the players at the end of the game, whether or not they contributed anything to the pot. As an incentive for the participants to donate more to the group fund, the researchers upped the ante and increased the pot by 25 percent, meaning the four players would each earn more if they gave the full amount to the group fund than if they took the money. The game was repeated multiple times, and once again one play was chosen as the payoff round. What did they find? "Bottom line: There was absolutely no difference in either game between levels of trust or desire to put money into the public account between self-described liberals or conservatives, or whether you lean Republican [or] lean toward the Democratic Party," Milyo said. James Carville, Ann Coulter and other fire-breathing political partisans should take heed . "Partisans tend to explain differences in policy and partisanship as reflecting character flaws of their opponents: Republicans are mean-spirited while Democrats lack intelligence," Milyo said. "These results suggest that both groups really behave alike and something other than character explains these [partisan or ideological] differences." From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:44:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:44:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: The Disappointment Gene Message-ID: The Disappointment Gene http://slate.msn.com/id/2128292 Why genetics is so far a boondoggle. By Arthur Allen Updated Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 10:05 AM PT Celebrating the sequencing of the human genome five years ago, President Bill Clinton declared the decipherment of its 3 billion base pairs "the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by mankind." Enthusiasts promised that the genome project heralded an era of personalized medicine. By 2010, predicted Art Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, the "age of one-size-fits-all drugs" would be replaced by an era of "designer drugs" targeted to different biological groups. Soon we would all have records of our own DNA, enabling physicians and counselors to program what we ought to eat, where we should go to school, what kind of life insurance we should buy, and what antidepressants we might use. In five years, the genome has indeed transformed biological research. Thanks to vast quantities of new genetic information, scientists are revealing unimagined complexity in the molecular workings of the body. Precisely because of this complexity, though, much of the data have little immediately useful meaning, and the research has produced only a trickle of medicine. The drug industry submitted 50 percent fewer applications to the Food and Drug Administration in 2002 and 2003 than in 1997 and 1998, despite the fact that biotech research investment doubled between the two periods. But where the angels of established medical science fear to tread, a new industry has arisen. Several companies now offer genetic scans, some available at a supermarket near you, that claim to provide all you need to "take the guesswork" out of living. So, let's get started: In the words of Sciona, a leading "nutrigenetics" company, "It's time to discover The Science of You!" The Web site of Great Smokies Laboratory of Asheville, N.C., which sells its Genovation "profiles" through alternative practitioners, promises that "seeing the results of your Genovations test is like seeing the cards you've been dealt by Nature." Sciona, a British company that recently moved to the alternative-lifestyles mecca of Boulder, Colo., sells "nutrigenetics" kits, with information on heart, immune system, bone health, endocrinal, and "detoxification" genes. After sending in a cheek-swab sample of DNA, you receive a booklet describing several of your gene variations and their meanings. What can be divined from these double-helixed tea leaves? A 97-page mock-up of a model profile that Sciona showed me (cost: about $500) provided the following advice to "John Doe" based on Sciona's readouts of 34 DNA variants: Eat your vegetables, get exercise, take some vitamins, and lose a few pounds. This your mom also can tell you; Sciona co-founder Rosalynn Gill-Garrison admits as much. The difference, she says, is the magical aura surrounding genetic information, the sense of finality that comes with that knowledge-however partial and even distorted. Some of the offerings are more tailored, though certainly not more credible. GeneLink, of Margate, N.J., will do your "nutragenic and dermatagenic profile" and direct you to particular skin-care products. Another outfit, Imagene, founded by former University of Texas pharmacologist Kenneth Blum, offers DNA testing for children with "disruptive and addictive personalities." Once the $275 test kit has confirmed that your child has "dopaminergic related Reward Deficiency Syndrome," you can buy a month's supply of pills for $60, along with a $30 oral spray that provides up to two hours of relief from unspecified "cravings." As snake oil goes, these offerings are mild compared with the product that some biotech companies were putting out to investors a few years back. For a precautionary tale of genetic hype, it's hard to beat the story of Human Genome Sciences, created in the 1990s by William A. Haseltine, a Harvard AIDS researcher. Haseltine had a partnership for several years with Craig Venter, an erstwhile computer brainiac at the National Institutes of Health, to begin sequencing and submitting patents on thousands of pieces of DNA. To listen to Haseltine was to believe that he had discovered a gold mine. His work, he said in 2000, "speeds up biological discovery a hundredfold, easily. Easily." He talked of finding in genes "the fountain of youth" in the form of "cellular replacement" therapies. Investors rewarded Haseltine with more than $1 billion in 2000. The drugs bombed out early in clinical trials, the stock plummeted, and Haseltine decamped with his millions to become a philanthropist. Three other big genomics companies-Incyte, Celera, and Millenium Pharmaceuticals-also failed to spin genetic discoveries into drugs. To be fair, all four are still trying, and drug development takes time. But the failed promise thus far points to the hubris of a simplified view of genetics. Certain powerful genes cause disorders like cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sach's disease. But one-gene diseases are rare, as you may remember from high-school biology; in our primitive past, most humans who carried them died before child-rearing age. (Click here for an explanation of why some of these genes persist.) Assiduous readers of newspaper science columns will remember the stream of announcements in the 1990s of the discovery of genes "for" everything from impulsive behavior to schizophrenia to heart disease and cancer. (Not to mention the so-called gay gene.) In the fine print, the authors of those studies made clear that they thought the genes they'd located made only small contributions to the condition in question. But even those limited effects failed to hold up in most cases. A recent literature review by Joel Hirschhorn, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in Boston, found that only six of the 166 initially reported associations of genes with a disease or trait had been replicated consistently. It may turn out that many inherited diseases aren't connected to genes at all. The genome project itself showed why this is so. Some geneticists guessed, based on the number of RNA transcripts discovered by the late 1990s, that there were as many as 150,000 genes in the human genome. Genomic companies like Incyte patented many of those transcripts. But the number of genes has proved to be closer to 20,000. A lot of the RNA transcripts, it turns out, play other roles in the cell that are only partially understood. Genes, per se, don't provide the whole biological, and therefore medical, story of inheritance. New gene-hunting methods involve searching for DNA variations over the entire genome. Within a year or two, for example, scientists will have a catalog of 10 million single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, which are variations in DNA base pairs at particular stretches of the genome. The hope is that by mapping out these variations, scientists will find similar patterns in people who have predispositions to certain diseases. These variations will lead the way to more genes that make subtle contributions to disease. Few doubt that SNPs and other collections of biomarkers will help find some meaningful genetic links to illness. But their value for the utopian future of personalized medicine is far from clear. If genetic "errors" occur in common parts of DNA across the human species, then SNP collection will help us find those errors. But if each subgroup of humans-from Pima Indians to Mongolian shepherds to Icelanders-has a unique way, say, of becoming vulnerable to Alzheimer's, then no matter how many SNPs we collect, it will be difficult to find key genetic variants that we can test for-or treat. The optimistic view is that SNPs and other data collections will locate common genes that contribute to common sources of suffering. But it will be years, if ever, before a comprehensive genetic screen could tell you how specifically to stave off a particular condition. For the foreseeable future, environmental effects will swamp the visible genetic ones. That is, no matter what your genotype is, the best health advice is to eat well and not overmuch, get exercise, and stop smoking. And in general make love, not war. For this you should pay $500? From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:47:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:47:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] iSteve.com Blog Archives: Does Genghis Khan have a rival as History's Greatest Lover? Message-ID: Does Genghis Khan have a rival as History's Greatest Lover? http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/does-genghis-khan-have-rival-as.html Thursday, October 20, 2005 The only time I scooped Nicholas Wade, the NYT's ace genetics reporter, was on [9]the story that Y-chromosome analysis showed that Genghis Khan was the ancestor in the direct male line of one out of every 200 men on earth, making him roughly 800,000 times more fecund than the average man alive 800 years ago. Now, we have a new (collective) candidate: the Manchu kings that founded the last dynasty in China, the Qing. Yali Xue, Chris Tyler-Smith (whom I interviewed for the Genghis Khan story), et al, have a new paper entitled "Recent Spread of a Y-Chromosomal Lineage in Northern China and Mongolia" in the new American Journal of Human Genetics. Here's the [10]abstract: We have identified a Y-chromosomal lineage that is unusually frequent in northeastern China and Mongolia, in which a haplotype cluster defined by 15 Y short tandem repeats was carried by 3.3% of the males sampled from East Asia. The most recent common ancestor of this lineage lived 590 +- 340 years ago (mean = SD), and it was detected in Mongolians and six Chinese minority populations. We suggest that the lineage was spread by Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) nobility, who were a privileged elite sharing patrilineal descent from Giocangga (died 1582), the grandfather of Manchu leader Nurhaci, and whose documented members formed 0.4% of the minority population by the end of the dynasty. They argue: We reasoned that the events leading to the spread of this lineage might have been recorded in the historical record, as well as in the genetic record. The spread must have occurred after the cluster's TMRCA (~500 years ago, corresponding to about A.D. 1500) and, most likely, before the Xibe migration in 1764. Notable features are the occurrence of the lineage in seven different populations but its apparent absence from the most populous Chinese ethnic group, the Han. A major historical event took place in this part of the world during this period, namely, the Manchu conquest of China and the establishment of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912. This dynasty was founded by Nurhaci (1559 - 1626) and was dominated by the Qing imperial nobility, a hereditary class consisting of male-line descendants of Nurhaci's paternal grandfather, Giocangga (died 1582), with 180,000 official members by the end of the dynasty (Elliott 2001). The nobility were highly privileged; for example, a ninth-rank noble annually received ~11 kg of silver and 22,000 liters of rice and maintained many concubines. I've emailed Tyler-Smith to find out if he believes that this lineage is even more common today than Genghis Khan's. If his sample of 1,003 East Asian men is representative of China's population (which is 1/5th of the world's), then 1/150th of all the men on Earth have the Y-chromosome of Manchu kings. Looking at his paper, however, it appears that his sample of 1,0003 East Asian men is not representative of China as a whole, but is biased in favor of the less densely populated far north of China. If so, then [11]Genghis Khan is still the reigning heavyweight champion progenitor. UPDATE: Chris Tyler-Smith emails to confirm that the Mighty Manslayer is still #1: The Qing chromosome was not found at all in the Han samples we looked at, and this makes a big difference to predictions of its total number. If we make the assumption that its real frequency in the Minority populations is the same as our measurement (about 5%) and that it is really absent from the Han, the total number of carriers in the world would be a little over one and a half million, about one-tenth of the Genghis Khan chromosome. Still quite impressive for such a recent and relatively peaceful expansion. [12]My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer [15]View my complete profile Previous * [16]Bush's cronyism and nepotism * [17]Mysterious Andrew Sullivan Parenthetical Comment of the Day: * [18]Anti-immigration Maori new Foreign Secretary of New Zealand * [19]More on Muslims: * [20]Does Islam make its adherents violent? * [21]Top Public Intellectuals list turns out to be a dud * [22]Making Jennifer Senior of New York magazine look like an IQ expert * [23]New VDARE.com Column: Is the NFL discriminating against white players? * [24]The Cochran-Harpending theory is not good for the Jews, * [25]Does the NFL discriminate against white players? References 12. http://www.isteve.com/ 13. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/does-genghis-khan-have-rival-as.html 14. http://isteve.blogspot.com/ 15. http://www.blogger.com/profile/5622428 16. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/bushs-cronyism-and-nepotism.html 17. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/mysterious-andrew-sullivan.html 18. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/anti-immigration-maori-new-foreign.html 19. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/more-on-muslims.html 20. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/does-islam-make-its-adherents-violent.html 21. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/top-public-intellectuals-list-turns.html 22. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/making-jennifer-senior-of-new-york.html 23. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/new-vdarecom-column-is-nfl.html 24. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/cochran-harpending-theory-is-not-good.html 25. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/does-nfl-discriminate-against-white.html From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:47:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:47:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 047: Free Market Eugenics Message-ID: Meme 047: Free Market Eugenics sent 5.10.20 $50,000 Offered to Tall, Smart Egg Donor N.Y. Times, 1999 March 3 By GINA KOLATA The advertisements started appearing last week in newspapers at the nation's top schools -- Ivy League colleges, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology. "Egg Donor Needed," the advertisements said, adding, "Large Financial Incentive." The advertisements called for a 5-foot-10, athletic woman who had scored at least 1400 on her Scholastic Achievement Test and who had no major family medical problems. In return for providing eggs, she would receive $50,000. Already, more than 200 women have responded to what is believed to be the largest amount of money offered for a woman's eggs. Darlene Pinkerton, who with her lawyer-husband, Thomas Pinkerton, placed the advertisement on behalf of an infertile couple, said that most respondents were from Ivy League institutions and that she was starting to get calls from women in countries as far away as Finland and New Zealand. Women from state colleges and universities were calling, Ms. Pinkerton said, as were women who were too short or whose S.A.T. scores were too low. When she ran the same advertisement in October, without mentioning the price the couple would pay, Ms. Pinkerton said, she got only six responses. Until now, ethicists argued whether $5,000 was too much to pay for an egg donor. They debated whether it was coercive for couples to ask for S.A.T. scores or height or favorite books when they sought egg donors. But, some ethicists say, a $50,000 price, in a donor market that just a year ago was reeling from offers of $7,500 for donors, makes them wonder whether the business is getting out of control. The couple offering $50,000 wants to remain anonymous, Ms. Pinkerton said. But, she said, they decided to offer $50,000 "because they can." The couple also realized that it might be hard to find a donor who met their criteria. They are "highly educated," Ms. Pinkerton said, and want a child who can be highly educated as well. They are tall, so they want a child who is tall. "We have heard that only one percent of the college population is over 5-feet-10 inches with over 1400 S.A.T. scores," Ms. Pinkerton said. Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, is taken aback by the heights that payments are reaching. "I think we are moving to children as consumer products," Ms. Andrews said. "When prices for donors reach $50,000, it gets to be a meaningful, life-altering sum," she said. Dr. Mark Sauer, who directs the assisted-reproduction program at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, said he found women, even Ivy League women, who were willing to donate their eggs for $5,000. And so, Dr. Sauer asks, why would a couple want to pay $50,000? "I can understand the motive for the donor -- it's like winning the lottery," Dr. Sauer said. After all, he said, it takes just three to four weeks to produce eggs. The donor takes fertility drugs to stimulate her ovaries to produce more than a dozen eggs, has regular ultrasound exams so a doctor can follow the eggs' development, and then is anesthetized while a doctor aspirates the eggs from her ovaries through a needle. But, Dr. Sauer asked, what are the egg recipients thinking when they offer to pay so much for a donor with such specific traits? "What genetic textbook did they read," he asks, that would tell them that they could order up a tall, smart, athletic child by paying $50,000 for a donor? But other experts say they fail to see what is so wrong with looking for specific traits in a donor and paying $50,000 for them. Dr. Norman Fost, who directs the program in medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said it was not so crazy to ask for height and S.A.T. scores. Dr. Fost said he worried more about parents who tried to engineer their children after they were born, pushing them to get perfect grades and to take endless S.A.T. tutoring courses. "I don't think that genetic engineering is any more pernicious," he said. As for the $50,000 payment to the egg donor, why not? "It's like offering someone a million dollars to play professional football,"Dr. Fost said. "You are perfectly free to walk away from it. People make these choices all their lives." In the end, he said, "whether children are valued and how they are treated has very little to do with how they are conceived." --------------- Stanford Magazine: November/December 2001: Egg Donors http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2000/novdec/articles/eggdonor.html What Are the Costs? _________________________________________________________________ For infertile couples, a once inconceivable notion has become a possibility through egg donation. But now they're bidding up to six figures for blue-ribbon donors, and candidate-rich campuses make fertile breeding grounds for picky parents-to-be. The question is: what are the costs? _________________________________________________________________ by Joan O'C. Hamilton Lynn Westphal BABY STEPS: Lynn Westphal, director of stanford Medical Center's Oocyte Donation Program, has helped scores of infertile women become pregnant via egg donation. Patients praise her attentiveness and caring approach toward both egg donors and recipients. Mark Estes FOR EIGHT AGONIZING WEEKS agonizing weeks last fall, Calla Papademas, a 22-year-old Stanford graduate, slipped in and out of a coma in the intensive care unit at Stanford Hospital while her mother, Nancy, kept vigil. One day, seeking a distraction, Nancy began flipping through a copy of the Stanford Daily she had spied on a hospital lounge table. What she saw stopped her cold. The paper was peppered with advertisements from agencies representing infertile couples seeking egg donors, some promising $25,000 or more for candidates with the right combination of intelligence, good looks and athletic prowess. Seeing the ads seemed a cruel irony to Nancy, whose daughter fit the advertised profile for an egg donor all too well. Months earlier, Calla had answered just such an ad, eventually agreeing to donate her eggs for a fee of $15,000. Now she was lying in a hospital bed, fighting for her life. Calla had an extraordinarily rare reaction to Lupron, a synthetic hormone administered to prepare her body for egg donation. A few days after Calla began the drug regimen, a benign, undetected tumor on her pituitary gland--which Calla's doctors believe was stimulated by the Lupron--grew at a furious rate and ultimately ruptured, causing a massive stroke. Calla suffered brain damage and lasting weakness on her left side. Her academic and career plans were derailed, and she and her family incurred $100,000 in uninsured medical bills. Calla's ordeal, while unusual, casts a shadow on the emotionally charged, unregulated world of egg donation, where an influx of big money is exacerbating the ethical, religious and legal dilemmas associated with the practice. For years, the traditional donor fee range has been $1,500 to $5,000, and the clinics involved have been careful to characterize the money paid by recipients as "compensation" for the donor's time and discomfort. But as the pursuit of genetically select offspring has exploded, so have the fees--and concern that human eggs have become just another commodity in a market-driven economy. In the past year, couples have offered as much as $100,000 for eggs from bright, attractive donors like Calla--eggs that statistics say will result in a live birth less than 40 percent of the time and that may not convey the characteristics would-be parents desire. RESOLVE, a national association and support group for infertile couples, has called for a fee ceiling of $5,000 and a national body to oversee egg donation. And some ethicists are exasperated that the fertility industry continues to gallop ahead as fast as technology will take it. "When people want to [provide an egg] for altruistic reasons, it's a wonderful gift," says Ernl? Young, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford. "When donation becomes commercialized, it raises all sorts of deep, philosophical questions about using humans as a means to an end." Young and others note that paying big bucks for ?ber eggs goes well beyond injecting supply-and-demand dynamics into the intensely personal realm of fertility. The trend also complicates some of the most elemental aspects of life and human relations, such as parents' expectations of their children and the ethics of putting healthy, young women at risk as commodity purveyors. And advances in unraveling the human genome promise to increase debate about the issue of manufacturing humans. "Making babies" once was merely a euphemism for intercourse. But in the late 1970s, fertility specialists discovered that they could create a viable embryo by injecting sperm into an egg in the laboratory, a process commonly known as in vitro fertilization. Suddenly, couples with specific medical problems that prevented natural conception, such as a low sperm count or Fallopian tube damage, could hope to have a child. By the mid-1980s, doctors found a way to harvest eggs from one woman, fertilize them, and implant an embryo in a woman who could not conceive with her own eggs, but who could carry a child and give birth. There are now more than 6,000 egg-donation procedures each year in the United States, and several hundred babies at least are delivered to couples who could not have children any other way. For women who've successfully borne children via egg donation, the procedure's stickier issues are easily overshadowed by their own joy. "It's hard for many women to give up on their own ovaries, but my happiest patients now are those who've had egg donations," says fertility specialist Lynn Westphal, MD '87, who was recruited to set up the Oocyte Donation Program at Stanford Medical Center in 1998. One of Westphal's patients said that when she finally got pregnant and had a child thanks to egg donation, "it was a wonderful, humbling moment of healing. I had been so beaten up by miscarriages and treatments." Egg donation works like this: The donor begins 10 days of daily injections of a drug such as Lupron to suppress her own ovarian function and synchronize her menstrual cycle with the recipient's. Later, the donor is given another hormone to stimulate her egg production, which can result in 10 or more eggs during one ovulation cycle. The donor's eggs are extracted using a large needle inserted into the vagina while the patient is under light anesthesia. The eggs are then inseminated immediately, and within a couple of days, a doctor implants several embryos in a recipient to improve the chances of one embryo becoming viable. Recent statistics from 300 U.S. clinics that perform advanced reproductive-technology procedures indicate that live births result from about 39 percent of these procedures. Payment to the donor is made after the eggs are retrieved, however, and is not contingent on either a pregnancy or a live birth. How safe is this procedure for donors? As Calla Papademas's case shows, powerful medications, anesthesia and surgical procedures always carry some risk. However, Westphal--who did not work with Papademas, and whose patients give her high marks--says most doctors monitor donors closely throughout the process and she has "never seen any serious complications." She does warn donors that researchers are still studying the long-term safety of the procedure and that, in the short term, donors can expect discomforts ranging from mood swings and abdominal swelling to a very painful condition called "hyperstimulation" in which ovaries produce an unusually large number of eggs. This can force hospitalization of a donor to drain large amounts of fluid. But from the earliest days of in vitro fertilization, debate about the procedure has focused less on patient safety than on the implications of tinkering with life at so elemental a level. The Roman Catholic Church has long condemned all reproductive technologies that manipulate human embryos. It holds that life begins at conception and therefore the risks to any one engineered embryo--some are discarded, frozen or even ultimately aborted if multiple implantations occur--outweigh any benefits to an infertile couple. And then there is the specter of eugenics, about which the Stanford community has some first-hand knowledge. The University's controversial Nobel laureate, the late William Shockley, generated massive criticism in the early 1980s when he publicly supported--and donated to--a "genius" sperm bank in Southern California. Although Shockley's view that intelligence and other important characteristics were both inherited and race-linked was furiously condemned, there has been little public outcry about egg donor programs unabashedly seeking women with specific physical and intellectual characteristics. Moreover, medical and ethical experts are quick to point out that medicine cannot assure that any given trait will manifest itself in a baby. "[Eggs from] athletic supermodels with high sat scores . . . may produce dumpy kids who can't do math," notes Henry Greely, '74, a Stanford law professor and co-director of Stanford's Program on Genomics, Ethics and Society. "Most of us who are parents know that the environment makes a difference, chance makes a difference, the other parent makes a difference." Westphal agrees. Ordering up special characteristics and paying large sums to a select donor "creates unrealistic expectations for the couple," she says. "You never know what kind of child is going to develop from any egg or sperm. You can't guarantee that anyone will have any characteristic." To what degree could parental hopes backfire on the child? What if the parents felt they "bought" specific characteristics that didn't play out? "It scares me, putting these kinds of expectations on a child before it's born," says Rabbi Michael Gold, author of And Hannah Wept: Infertility, Adoption, and the Jewish Couple. "It's my opinion that a child has intrinsic value and is not here to meet the needs of a parent." Yet, several women who've borne children thanks to egg donation offer no apologies for searching out particular traits. "Mainly, I was looking for a good spirit," says Lillian, a San Francisco mother and eight-year veteran of infertility treatments. She recently had a baby girl, after paying a donor the "going rate" of $4,000. But she admits that she pored over donors' vital statistics in the binder her agency provided and interviewed the woman she eventually picked. "I may be the best mother in the world, but I'm still going to have some genetic code to deal with," she says, explaining why she looked for signs of an upbeat, appealing, generous nature in donor candidates. And she was eager to improve the odds that her child would share her own tall, blonde features, especially since she didn't tell everyone in her family about the egg donation. "It's just going to fly better at the mall than if my baby has a dark, Mediterranean look," she says of her fair-haired daughter. 'GIVE THE GIFT OF LIFE & Love' read a full-page ad placed in the Stanford Daily and in student newspapers at Harvard, Yale, ucla and other schools last spring. It promised $100,000 to a Caucasian woman under age 30 with "proven college-level athletic ability" willing to donate eggs. Numerous other ads have offered between $10,000 and $80,000. Many list highly specific requirements, ranging from sat scores to religious orientation to eye color. Others are less businesslike in their approach: "Bright, creative egg donor wanted by loving, playful Boston couple," read one April ad in the Daily. "We recycle, floss our teeth and respect our elders. . . . Anal personality a plus." Prospective parents occasionally take out their own ads, but the splashiest displays offering the biggest dollars often come from one of the hundreds of attorneys, agencies and fertility clinics that broker the transactions between donors and recipients. In some cases, those organizations amass profiles of donor candidates and post them on websites, which hopeful recipients can peruse like seed catalogs. STANFORD was unable to connect with any individuals or couples who paid sums higher than the $15,000 offered to Papademas. Citing privacy concerns, agencies refuse to discuss details about specific ads or couples. Some skeptics question the legitimacy of large payouts. "I'm a suspicious guy," says Greely. "But why would you pay those amounts when there are donors willing to do it for $3,000 or $4,000? If you're in the egg-donation business, what better way [than a sensational ad] to increase your rolls of donors?" The Southern California law firm of Thomas M. Pinkerton had several ads in the Daily offering donors as much as $50,000. Darlene Pinkerton, who runs the donor-search program, insists that those offers were real, sponsored by actual clients, and that several Stanford students who were chosen received between $10,000 and $25,000 each. "After the media hype following our [$50,000] ad, we did have other families calling us saying they were looking for the same type of donor but were not able to pay the same $50,000 that we advertised for," she says. "I contacted some of the [prospective donors] who said they were still interested, and made them an offer of dollars that the family could pay. Some said yes; some said no." There is no way of knowing exactly how many Stanford students are succumbing to the hard-sell pitch for eggs. Conversations with students and local physicians don't seem to indicate that undergrads are flocking to fertility clinics. However, it was not difficult to find a half-dozen students or recent grads who've donated within the past year (all for less than $5,000). Their experiences were mixed, but mostly positive. Calla Papademas, '99, acknowledges that in the spring of her senior year, when she first answered an ad that offered $50,000 for a donation, she had tens of thousands of dollars in student loans piling up, grad school looming and a clunker automobile that kept conking out. Her mother, who'd gone through several in vitro cycles herself when she tried to conceive a baby after Calla, was supportive. Although Calla wasn't picked for the $50,000 donation, the agency called her back and said someone else was interested--a gay man seeking a donor egg to be inseminated with his sperm, then implanted in a surrogate mother. Calla met the man, and they ultimately agreed on a fee of $15,000; but by then, Calla says, her primary motivation was not the money. "He came from a big family and he loved kids, and this was the only way he could do it," she says. "Michelle," a recent Stanford grad from Southern California, says she is thrilled with the $7,500 total she made from two egg donations, but she insists the money wasn't the only factor. "It's nice to have a little chunk of change in the bank from this, but it's not purely a capitalist venture," she says. "A friend of mine did it, and afterward she felt so good [about helping a couple have a child] that I decided to try it." Lauren Russell, '00, had quite a different experience. A veteran of the varsity crew team, tall, intelligent and attractive enough to have done some professional modeling, she answered a $50,000 ad that ran in 1999. When the candidates had been narrowed down to Russell and a Harvard student, Russell was flown to Boston, asked to take an iq test, interviewed and put right back on a plane home. After speaking at length with the donation agent during that visit, she began having second thoughts about participating. The agency focused on Russell's looks, her high iq and her experience on the crew team, she recalls. "That was all that was important to them and all they really wanted to know about," Russell says. "I told them I was curious about why they were looking for these specific qualities and they quickly changed the subject." Although the money was tempting, "my desire to help a family have a baby became darkened with the realization that the child would be brought into a world full of unfair expectations," says Russell. When the agency notified her that she'd not been chosen, they asked if she'd be willing to donate for a different family for $35,000. She declined: "I've developed negative feelings about the whole idea of paying for specific genes, and no amount of money could convince me to do it at this point," she now says. Berkeley artist Lisah Horner, one of Westphal's patients, has donated four times, explicitly for the money. She says she's never wanted children and feels no bond to the babies her eggs helped produce--even to the one she actually met. Yet Horner was startled at how empowering she found the process, and how she came away from it with much more empathy toward mothers who desperately wanted children. During her 10 days of hormone injections, she kept a journal that she has incorporated into a collage series. Reads one entry: "An interesting contrast. . . . This procedure--methodical, intimidating, empowering, and physically uncomfortable for myself as well as the other woman. My conception--New Year's Eve 1964--manhattans, champagne, and a little carelessness." These donors' feelings about the high fees are also mixed. Horner would have happily taken the higher amount had it been offered several years ago when she began donating. Michelle adamantly opposes exorbitant payment. "I know there's something wrong with those ads offering $50,000 or that kind of money. It smells bad to me. I wouldn't trust the kind of doctors in it for that kind of money," she says. Egg donation "is a classic example of how explicitly market-oriented we are, even though we deny it," notes Linda Hogle, an anthropologist and senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics. Despite attempts by the fertility industry to describe money paid for eggs as "compensation" for the donor's inconvenience, says Hogle, many Americans express a "yuck response" to the idea of selling human ova. The fact is, says Hogle, "it's a sale if you get $5,000 or $50,000 or $5." Many European and South American countries prohibit paying for human eggs and outlaw any kind of commerce in organs or blood. In the United States, blood, plasma and sperm have been harvested and sold for decades. However, the more invasive, more intimate nature of egg donation raises a fundamental moral issue that Young says is at the crux of why prostitution is prohibited--namely, that one should not be able to contract to "use" another person's body, devaluing that person's own humanity. Stanford law professor Margaret Jane Radin, '63, who studies commodification and the limits of the market, says the issues are extraordinarily complex. Some feminists say, "Let's not degrade ourselves by allowing parts of ourselves to be sold. On the other hand, some feminists say, 'I should be able to sell anything I want to. I don't want the state to tell me what I can sell or not.'" If one takes that reasoning a step or two further, Radin says, the implications escalate in entirely new directions. "Imagine, for example, a student being told, 'Well, you don't need housing assistance because you could just sell your eggs.'" Radin adds: "My parents scrimped and saved to put me through Stanford years ago. Well, what if I'm sitting on a $50,000 entitlement? Does that mean I should just sell my eggs?" And in a report issued in August, an ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said that while donors should receive some compensation--just as men receive money for donated sperm--the amounts should not be so high that "women will discount the physical and emotional risks of oocyte donation out of eagerness to address their financial situations or their infertility problems." The panel suggested a ceiling of $5,000 for one "donation." Donors aren't the only ones with financial incentives to consider. Increasingly, physicians whose incomes have been reduced by changes in managed health care are gravitating toward the lucrative practice of fertility treatment. "It's a cash business with affluent patients who pay up front," shrugs one Menlo Park doctor. But Palo Alto obstetrician/gynecologist Andrea Hutchinson cautions that although there are many top-notch fertility practitioners in the Stanford area, "some clinics have become factories, performing these treatments over and over on patients who medically should not even be trying to get pregnant." Lauren Russell JUST LOOKING: Lauren Russell, '00, was summoned to Boston for interviews by a prospective egg recipient but eventually turned down offers to donate: "I've developed negative feelings about the whole idea." IT'S NOT IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS upon meeting Calla Papademas, poised, attractive and articulate, that she suffered brain damage. She has made what her mother calls a "miraculous recovery," but she is still impaired. She has memory lapses. She had to leave school, at least temporarily. And doctors have warned that she will probably have difficulty conceiving her own children. Although Calla says she is angry at the egg-donation agency and about the quality of her medical care at the fertility clinic--(despite severe symptoms that included a high fever and raging headaches, she was advised to continue taking the Lupron, she says)--she is not sour on the procedure. "I wouldn't want this option taken away from someone. . . . I wish I had been better warned," she says. Shelley Smith of the Egg Donor Program, a respected Los Angeles agency, is concerned that "some of these doctors are treating donors like commodities who are only there to help them get their real patients pregnant." Smith says she has clients who've reported unsettling experiences in egg harvesting, for example. "There are about 20 offices doing this in Southern California, and I only work with two of them," she says, citing concerns about "shoddy" practices at the others. Ernl? Young believes the time has come for formal regulation of egg-donation procedures. Right now practitioners cannot even agree on basic standards, such as how many times a woman might safely donate eggs. He says even the risk disclaimers donors sign are suspect because of the inherent lure of big dollars. "One of the fundamental elements of 'informed consent' that people [sign in waivers] before a procedure is not only that it is fully informed, but also that it is voluntary," says Young. "You could argue that offering a college kid a sum of money that is excessive is really coercive." Clergy are grappling with how to advise people concerning egg donation. Rabbi Gold says that, while he would not oppose a couple's desire to use this method, the technology has created some important questions. To begin with, he says, rabbis have been debating just how to establish lineage. Conservative Judaism holds that one is Jewish only if one's mother is Jewish. So, what if an egg donor is not Jewish but the recipient--the birth mother--is? In Gold's opinion, it should be determined by the woman who gives birth to the child. Meanwhile, according to Smith, futuristic scenarios of parents-in-waiting "constructing" a child already have arrived. Scouring a website where they can select donors, hopeful couples can quickly get caught up in comparison shopping, where physical features are the stock in trade. "Couples who would have been looking for someone with a lovely character before [the Internet] now say, 'Well, we like No. 98, but haven't you got someone with a bluer eye?'" A bluer eye could be just the beginning. Soon genetic analysis may identify genes responsible for specific traits and make it possible to create embryos "loaded" with the desired genetic material. Step right up, folks. Here's an egg guaranteed to sidestep genetic illness, assure a foreign-language aptitude, produce red hair and freckles and that anal personality you requested. Now, what am I bid? _________________________________________________________________ Joan O'C. Hamilton, '83, a Stanford contributing writer, is a columnist on high technology for Business Week. ------------------ Detroit Free Press: Baby business http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050923/LIVING01/509230301/1083 Baby business Bright, attractive young women are sought as paid egg donors for infertile couples. By Robert Samuels Detroit Free Press Wanted: Healthy, athletic women. Under age of 29. 1300-plus SAT score. Compensation: $10,000. The ad above, from the University of Michigan newspaper, was placed by an agency seeking women willing to donate their eggs to an infertile woman. So-called donor agents are placing such ads across the country and online, courting smart, responsible, beautiful young women. One last hope: Rick Keehn of Rochester Hills, Mich., watches his wife, Susan, prepare to inject a drug to put her body on the same cycle as her egg donor's. The Keehns, both 44, have made many attempts to conceive a child, and implantation of a fertilized donor egg is their last resort. - Amy Leang / Gannett News Service Some donor firms Here is a sampling of egg donor agencies around the country and their donor compensation. All have agreed to the ethical guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine: Alternative Reproductive Resources Chicago http://www.arr1.com Average compensation: $4,000 Tiny Treasures Somerville, Mass. http://www.tinytreasuresagency .com Average compensation: $5,000 Egg Donation Inc. Encino, Calif. http://www.eggdonor.com Average compensation: $5,000 Fertility Futures International Los Angeles http://www.fertilityfutures.com Average compensation: $8,000 A Perfect Match La Mesa, Calif. http://www.aperfectmatch.com Average compensation: $10,000 Medical procedures are not the most difficult part of egg donation, says Dr. L. April Gago, who oversees a donor program at the university. Legal, business and ethical considerations must also be navigated. Tonight's premiere of NBC's fertility-clinic drama "Inconceivable" (10 p.m., WTHR ), is sure to draw attention to the procedure: Doctors give a fertile young woman hormones that cause her to produce multiple mature eggs. The eggs are surgically removed, fertilized -- most often with the would-be dad's sperm -- in a laboratory and implanted into the uterus of the recipient. Egg donation is generally safe, says Dr. Eric Surrey, a Denver, Colo., endocrinologist who is president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. About one in 100 donors suffers ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, causing abdominal bloating. In rare cases it temporarily shuts down her kidneys. A heightened risk of ovarian cancer has been reported, but no long-term studies have been done, he adds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, based on the most recent (1995) data, about 10 percent of U.S. women of childbearing age have fertility issues. Six years ago, San Diego, Calif., residents Tom and Darlene Pinkerton's A Perfect Match service, which placed the ad in the Michigan Daily -- was criticized as being too specific about donors and for paying them too much. The agency offered $50,000 to leggy, thin blond donors with high SAT scores. "We were one of few agencies then," Tom Pinkerton recalls. "We wouldn't even dream about charging that much now." Today, fees through A Perfect Match average $10,000, says Darlene Pinkerton. The infertile couple sets the price; the agency seeks women with the pair's desired characteristics. Couples also pay a fee, usually around $5,000, to the company that matches them to a donor. With the costs of doctor visits, medications and travel, the price can top $25,000. The donation process isn't easy. Potential donors at Alternative Reproductive Resources must fill out an 18-page application detailing their medical history, as well as a 500-question psychological test, and undergo counseling. Donors must inject themselves with hormones, take shots that get their menstrual cycle in sync with the recipient's and have ultrasound tests almost daily in the two weeks before surgery. Federal law prohibits selling body parts, so donors can be compensated only for their time and energy, but no one can agree on fees. A 2000 report from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (http://www.asrm.org) said donors should receive about $5,000. More than $10,000 is to be questioned, it said. --------------- AlterNet: The High Price of Donation By Jennifer Liss, WireTap Posted on October 7, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/26469/ The ad in Jessica's college newspaper said that she could make $80,000 donating her eggs. But "Jessica"[1]* isn't the tall blonde the ad called for. And her weight was a strike against her. A size 16, she weighs well over what most egg donation agencies will accept. What she did have going for her is that she is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. Jewish, Asian and Indian egg donors -- she would learn -- are in great demand. So at 21 she decided to ditch the agency route and try to sell her eggs on her own. She said she loved the idea of helping infertile couples fulfill their desire to become parents. And the money she made would help her pay off credit card debt. The first time she made $4,000 and had "the easiest donation of all time." But after the fourth donation she ended up in the emergency room with dehydration. It was her own fault, she says, and giggles over irresponsibly planning a road trip after the donation procedure. By the time she graduated, Jessica had earned $23,000 through egg donation. Do her parents know she donated eggs for cash? No. Does she plan on donating again? Yes, this winter. Jessica's story may be more common than we think, because little is known about college students who donate their eggs. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that they do not collect information on donors' age, race, income, or education levels. But we do know that one in six American couples [2]struggle with infertility, and the demand for viable eggs is increasing. Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART) procedures performed in the U.S. increased 78 percent from 1996 to 2002, [3]according to the CDC. Outdoing Nature "Caroline,"[4]* who used to model, earned a high G.P.A. at a reputable liberal arts college. A three-time egg donor, she pocketed over $20,000 for her efforts. Now 25 and living in New Jersey with her husband and young child, she doesn't regret a thing. In many ways, students like Caroline fit the description of a perfect egg donor. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) says that younger women respond more favorably to the hormone medication used during the donor procedure, and their eggs result in higher pregnancy rates. Caroline's good grades, hot looks, and spotless health history, combined with her young age made her a highly sought-after donor. Darlene Pinkerton of the egg donation agency A Perfect Match says that 80 percent of her donors are college students. And Dawn Hunt, owner of Fertility Alternatives, says that 90 percent of her donors are college students. Hunt used to advertise for egg donors in family and parenting publications. But dissatisfied with the lack of response, now she sticks almost exclusively with college publications. A typical classified ad in a college publication will call for a donor under 29, physically attractive, with an impressive S.A.T. score. It will list a high dollar figure, but usually won't mention the procedure or the legal, medical or ethical risks. (One ad awkwardly and inaccurately encourages students to "donate to infertile couples some of the many eggs your body disposes monthly.") For about five years the Stanford Daily has run a special classified section reserved for egg and sperm donation ads. Several years ago, a Stanford student suffered a stroke due to a rare reaction to one of the synthetic hormones used in egg donation. The current editor-in-chief does not know if the newspaper received any complaints about the classified section. How It Works How does egg donation work? First, a donor is screened for genetic diseases and H.I.V. She then undergoes a psychological evaluation. Once "approved," she is given synthetic hormones to self-administer over a series of weeks. During a normal ovulation, a woman releases one egg. But the hormonal medication stimulates the donor's ovaries to produce many eggs -- sometimes a few dozen. This is called "controlled super-ovulation." Once the eggs are mature the donor receives an injection that triggers ovulation. Thirty-six hours later, the eggs are retrieved through the vagina with an ultrasound-guided needle. The menstrual cycle of both the donor and the recipient have been synchronized. After the eggs are fertilized, the embryos are placed in the recipient's uterus. Hopefully, a pregnancy will stick. The sale of body parts in the United States is illegal, explains Lynn Westphal, director of the Oocyte Donation Program at the Stanford Medical Center and a professor. However, it is perfectly legal for people to donate body parts -- like blood, sperm, eggs or organs -- and be compensated for their time, effort and discomfort. Amy Turner also learned about egg donation through a school publication. Turner, who lives in Waxahachie, Texas, is a 22 year-old married mom putting herself through massage therapy school. She's donated once, and her $2,000 compensation is going toward college tuition. Compensation is a controversial issue. In some parts of the world, compensation for eggs is illegal. Typical compensation in California used to be $2,500, says Mary Cedarblade, an attorney who specializes in fertility issues. But as more people turned to egg donors to get pregnant it became harder to find donors, she explains. Cedarblade says that just last year the going rate in California was $5,000 per cycle. And now, she says, the average is about $5,500. "Because of how invasive the egg donation process is, it would be unreasonable for someone to go through the process and not be compensated," says Westphal. "But how to determine what is the right compensation is a difficult thing." "You have to look at it like you are helping someone who has tried thousands of times to get pregnant. I'm giving them the joy I had when I had my child," says Turner about her experience. As professionals and donors point out, altruistic intentions can run as strong as the financial motivations. "Infertile women do not choose to be infertile," Pinkerton writes in an email about her agency's work. "When they find a donor they relate to and who resembles them they are transformed into women of hope." Donor Risks The first egg donation took place in 1984, but egg donation was relatively rare until about 10 years ago. In the early years of egg donation, there were a handful of studies indicating a possible connection between the hormonal treatments given to egg donors and certain cancers. While it now appears that the risks are low, medical professionals are still uncertain if there will be long-term consequences for donors. Simply put, there is a lot we don't know. And compared to its male counterpart -- sperm donation -- that involves a cup and a willing hand, egg donation is much more invasive and risky. Westphal explains that the most common health risks she sees are bruising at the injection site and some bloating. Some women who "over respond" -- meaning they produce too many eggs -- may develop Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHS). If untreated, a donor with OHS will experience significant swelling, a sense of discomfort, dehydration, moodiness, or possibly difficulty breathing. In a worse case scenario, her ovaries, under great stress, could be damaged. "In general it should not affect the future fertility [of the donor]," she says. (There have been no documented cases.) Julia Derek lived an egg donation nightmare, documented in her self-published book "Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor." In four years, Derek donated 12 times -- six times over the limit recommended by the ASRM. She made between $40,000-$50,000. However, as a result of the hormones and lack of care, Derek sunk into a severe, almost suicidal, depression. A Swedish student in Los Angeles, Derek couldn't legally work because she didn't have a green card. She felt her only two choices to make a living as a student were egg donation or being a server under the table. She chose egg donation. At first, the compensation got her out of a jam, but soon egg donation was funding her "L.A. lifestyle." She describes in her book speeding on the 405 freeway on her way to a comedy open mic while shooting Lupron (hormone used to stimulate ovulation) into her bruised inner thigh. Derek found herself in a dependent relationship with her egg broker who encouraged her to continue donating despite the health risks. Her broker lied and misled her. "I'm lucky more things didn't happen to me," she says. How was Derek able to put herself at such a great medical risk? Weren't there precautions in place to protect her? Relying on "Good-faith" Regulation The ASRM advises that "a good-faith effort should be made to avoid accepting women who have already made a high number of donations elsewhere." But if a donor chooses to travel to another clinic, her donation history does not travel with her. It is up to her to disclose that information. There is a concern that the higher the payment, the more likely prospective donors -- like Derek -- will be tempted to conceal crucial medical information. And agencies, often referred to as brokers, play a controversial role in the play of egg donation. There is a concern that there is a conflict of interest if the broker is serving both the donor and the couple and collecting "finder's fees." An agency or a broker does not have to disclose all of the potential risks to a donor. And an inexperienced donor, who has not been properly advised or done her own research, could find herself in a vulnerable position. After Turner's egg extraction, she received a letter from her agency stating that she would not be able to continue donating. After the time she had committed to the first donation, she was shocked because she had counted on donating again. She also had learned that her agency's compensation was significantly less than other agencies in Texas. She called to inquire about the letter and voice her complaints. "They said it was basically none of my business. Thanks for your eggs. Screw you, bye," she says. (Her agency didn't respond to this writer's request for an interview.) But like the donors, many brokers are also driven by both the financial reward and the desire to help a couple desperate for a child. "I help facilitate everything. I'm there to remind the donor of her appointment and be her support system as well. I try to help out if she has questions," says Hunt, who was an egg donor before she started the agency. She typically charges a fee between $3,000-$5,000 on top of what the donor receives. Hunt says she makes a good faith effort to follow the majority of the egg donation guidelines set by the ASRM. But some of the guidelines, she says, are not up to date. Long-Term Consequences The donors interviewed for this article don't have ethical regrets. They all share a healthy curiosity about what their DNA will produce, but they are not preoccupied or haunted by the idea that there are young people growing up right now who share their DNA -- young people they will never meet. Jessica's seen pictures of "her" children, and she's "totally curious" how they will turn out. But she doesn't stay up at night thinking about it. Nevertheless, ethical concerns are still an issue in the world of egg donation. Westphal says, "You don't want people just doing this over and over, and you want to limit the number of children from any one donor." There are legal considerations too. "The most important consideration is that a donor is not going to be held responsible for the child," says Cedarblade. (She does not know of this ever happening.) It is also important, she says, that the donor not be held financially responsible for associated medical treatments or any complications that may arise. A 21-year-old woman is able to vote, drink and be drafted, but many people wonder if a young college student with pressing financial needs (or wants) is in a position to make a responsible decision about whether or not to donate her eggs. The considerations -- medical, ethical and legal -- are daunting, and the compensation is nothing short of seductive. But would a 30-year-old woman be prepared to make the same decision? In some ways, so little is known about the long-term consequences, that even the most cautious donor is still taking a risk. Egg donation is a more complicated decision than choosing second semester classes, securing an internship, or making Friday night plans. College women need to be their own advocates, do their homework and invest time and thought before they proceed with egg donation. Or as Jessica says, "I think my advice to college women is to not allow people to bully you through the process ... A lot of people get pressured into things they aren't comfortable with. The language of altruism ... resembles blood donation. It can lead vulnerable women into a bad place. It is your life. You have to live with it for the rest of your life. You don't want to be treated like equipment." * The names of two donors have been changed at their request. [5]Jennifer Liss is a writer living in San Francisco. References 1. http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/26469#note 2. http://www.4woman.gov/faq/infertility.htm 3. http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/ART02/section5.htm 4. http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/26469#note 5. mailto:jennifer_liss at sbcglobal.net From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 00:47:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:47:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Blog: Humans are governed by emotions -- literally Message-ID: Humans are governed by emotions -- literally http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/humans_are_governed_by_emotions_--_literally_9127 The emotional responses that guide much of human behavior have a tremendous impact on public policy and international affairs, prompting government officials to make decisions in response to a crisis--such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks--with little regard to the long-term consequences, according to a study by scholars at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. The paper, which appears in the Chicago-Kent Law Review, was written by Jules Lobel, a Pitt professor of law, and George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions. With regard to public policy, when people are angry, afraid or in other elevated emotional states, they tend to favor symbolic, viscerally satisfying solutions to problems over more substantive, complex, but ultimately more effective policies. Over the past 40 years, this has led the United States into two costly and controversial wars, in Vietnam and Iraq, when members of Congress gave the president broad powers in response to a perceived crisis that did not leave sufficient time for deliberation. "War is the quintessential issue where immediate emotions and passions hold sway, often at the expense of an evaluation of long-term consequences," Lobel said. The authors draw on recent research that demonstrates that human decision-making is governed by two neural systems--the deliberative and the affective, or emotional. The latter, which the authors dub emote control, is much older, and served an adaptive role in early humans by helping them meet basic needs and identify and respond quickly to danger. As humans evolved, however, they developed the ability to consider the long-term consequences of their behavior and to weigh the costs and benefits of their choices. The deliberative system appears to be located in the brain's prefrontal cortex, which grew on top of but did not replace older brain systems. "Human behavior is not under the sole control of emotion or deliberation but results from the interaction of these two processes," Loewenstein said. Emote control is fast, but can respond only to a limited amount of situations, while deliberation is far more flexible but relatively slow and laborious. Emote control is the default decision-making system. Deliberation kicks in when a person encounters a situation that is new or when the correct response is not evident. Emote control is highly attuned to vivid imagery, immediacy and novelty, meaning that the emotional system is more likely to respond to events that are associated with striking visual images, that occurred in the recent past, and that people are unfamiliar with and have not had time to adapt to. Emotion also is sensitive to the categories into which humans automatically place the people and things they encounter--from the perspective of law and social policy, the all-important distinction between "us" and "them." And emote control can activate deliberation, according to Loewenstein and Lobel. "Moderate levels of fear, anger or any almost any form of negative emotion warn the deliberative system that something is wrong and that its capabilities are required. Perversely, as emotion intensifies, however, it tends to assume control over behavior even as it triggers the deliberative system, so one may realize what the best course of action is, but find one's self doing the opposite," Loewenstein said. This means that the situations that most require a careful, well-reasoned response are those in which our emotions are most likely to sabotage our long-term interests. America's founding fathers understood that passion could trump principle and therefore vested Congress, a deliberative body in which power is dispersed among dozens of members, with the power to make war, rather than with the president. But that constitutional safeguard began to erode in the 20th century because of the sense of perpetual crisis that emerged during the Cold War and escalated as a result of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The calamitous nature of those attacks gave Americans a distorted sense of the true risk of being killed in a terrorist attack--which is quite low--and policy makers responded with an expansion of federal law enforcement powers, cumbersome security measures and a new war that may ultimately be self-defeating. If, for example, new airport screening procedures prompt more people to drive rather than fly, traffic fatalities will increase, and because driving is far more dangerous than flying, on balance more people will die, even assuming a steady rate of terrorist attacks. "The problem of vivid, emotional miscalculation of risk is particularly acute in the context of antiterrorism, since fear is a particularly strong emotion, impervious to reason," Lobel said. Lobel and Loewenstein do not, of course, suggest that emotions are always bad and point out that properly harnessed passions helped defeat Nazism, put a man on the moon and reduced air pollution. Yet political leaders can exploit emotions for their own ends, so as a society, we must recognize the havoc that emotions can play on public policy, and government should adopt legal safeguards that slow the pace of decision-making so that lawmakers have time to weigh the consequences of their choices. "Human psychology hasn't changed much, but politicians and marketers have become ever more sophisticated when it comes to manipulating people by manipulating their emotions. One of the functions of law should be to keep deliberative control in the picture, especially at times of high emotion when it is needed the most," Loewenstein said. >From Carnegie Melon University From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Oct 24 04:58:49 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:58:49 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] more lox for the big bagel Message-ID: For those of you who've been kind enough to remember the Bloom Toroidal Theory of the Universe--otherwise known as the Big Bagel--and who've been generous enough not to get nauseous when the subject comes up, here's more evidence for the theory. The key words are these: "It is possible that some feature of the big bang may have suppressed the quadrupole signal. One such scenario is that the universe is a peculiar shape like a flat slab or a doughnut." Howard _Home_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/home.ns) | _News_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/news.ns) | _Solar System_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/solar-system) | _Space Technology_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/space-tech) | _Human Spaceflight_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/ch annel/human-spaceflight) | _Astronomy_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/astronomy) | _Special Reports_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/specials.ns) 'Axis of evil' warps cosmic background * 10:00 22 October 2005 * From New Scientist Print Edition * Marcus Chown Axis of evil A MYSTERIOUS pattern seen in the cosmic microwave background - the faint afterglow of the big bang - has left some physicists wondering whether this central plank in the evidence for the big bang is somehow flawed. But now there may be a simpler explanation for the pattern: "It is being caused by the gravity of a tremendous concentration of galaxies in our cosmic backyard," says Chris Vale of Fermilab in Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. Dubbed the "axis of evil" by cosmologist Jo?o Magueijo of Imperial College London, the pattern appears in the map of the microwave backtround (CMB) built up by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). As part of their analysis, astronomers break up the subtle temperature variations in the CMB into components called the dipole, the quadrupole and the octupole (see Graphic), like breaking up an orchestral score into tunes played by different instruments. If the CMB really is the afterglow of the big bang, then the orientations of the hot and cold regions of the quadrupole and the octupole should be random. "But they are not," says Vale. "The big surprise is they are aligned - along the axis of evil." Magueijo and his colleagues have suggested there may be something wrong with the big bang model (New Scientist, 2 July, p 30), but Vale's idea is less radical. The axes of the quadrupole and the octupole lie in the same plane, he says, which is perpendicular to the direction of the dipole. "It hints at a connection." Vale suspects the alignment is being caused by an enormous group of galaxies known as the Shapley supercluster, which lies about 450 million light years away and spans an area of sky at least 1000 times the apparent size of the full moon. The gravity of this supercluster could warp the CMB in such a way that some of the temperature variation in the dipole could "spill over" into the quadrupole and the octupole. "The dipole variation is hundreds of times bigger than the quadrupole, so only a little need spill over," says Vale (_www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0509039_ (http://www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0509039) ). To test his hunch, Vale developed a computer simulation that modelled the supercluster as a gigantic spherical mass, and found that he could replicate the apparent alignment of the quadrupole and octupole. He says that better observations of the supercluster's mass distribution could help confirm the theory. WMAP scientist Gary Hinshaw of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is impressed with Vale's work. "His toy model generates a good match to our quadrupole and octupole signal, which I think is remarkable." Hinshaw's colleague and the principal investigator of WMAP, Charles Bennett, adds, "It is not a crazy idea." But if Vale's idea is correct, it raises a new question. The measured quadrupole signal is already much smaller than expected by theory, and Vale's mechanism would mean that some of that signal is actually spillover from the dipole. So the true quadrupole must be even smaller, and no one knows how that could have happened. "I might have solved one problem but created another," admits Vale. It is possible that some feature of the big bang may have suppressed the quadrupole signal. One such scenario is that the universe is a peculiar shape like a flat slab or a doughnut. "That way some of the sloshing motions of matter that caused the temperature variations in the cosmic background would not have been able to occur," says Vale. Related Articles * _Did the big bang really happen?_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18625061.800) * _http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625061.800_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18625061.800) * 02 July 2005 * _Ripples cause cosmic doubts over inflation_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18624975.500) * _http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624975.500_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18624975.500) * 30 April 2005 * _Fundamental physics constants stay put_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn6057) * _http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6057_ (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn6057) * 25 June 2004 Weblinks * _Wilkinson Anisotropy Microwave Probe, NASA_ (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/) * _http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/_ (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/) * _Fermilab_ (http://www.fnal.gov/) * _http://www.fnal.gov/_ (http://www.fnal.gov/) * _Imperial College London_ (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/) * _http://www.imperial.ac.uk/_ (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/) _Close this window_ (javascript:window.close();) ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 91477 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 23 16:32:59 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 09:32:59 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Traitors in High Places Message-ID: <25059747.1130085179987.JavaMail.root@mswamui-swiss.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: traitors.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 138363 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 23 18:10:36 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:10:36 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Rummy: Can't Feel Anything Message-ID: <27242821.1130091037202.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CantFeel.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 70786 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:28:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:28:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New York Magazine: The Master Race: Are Jews Smarter? Message-ID: The Master Race: Are Jews Smarter? http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/index.html et seq. Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe? That's the premise of a controversial new study that has some preening and others plotzing. What genetic science can tell us??"and what it can't. By Jennifer Senior New York Magazine This story begins, as it inevitably must, in the Old Country. At some point during the tenth century, a group of Jews abandoned the lush hills of Lucca, Italy, and--at the invitation of Charlemagne--headed for the severer climes of the Rhineland and Northern France. These Jews didn't have a name for themselves, at first. They were tied together mostly by kinship. But ultimately, they became known as Ashkenazim, a variation on the Hebrew word for one of Noah's grandsons. In some ways, life was good for the Jews in this strange new place. They'd been lured there on favorable terms, with promises of physical protection, peaceful travel, and the ability to adjudicate their own quarrels. (The charter of Henry IV, dated 1090, includes this assurance: "If anyone shall wound a Jew, but not mortally, he shall pay one pound of gold . . . If he is unable to pay the prescribed amount . . . his eyes will be put out and his right hand cut off.") But in other ways, life was difficult. The Ashkenazim couldn't own land. They were banned from the guilds. They were heavily taxed. Yet the Ashkenazim did very well, in spite of these constraints, because they found an ingenious way to adapt to their new environment that didn't rely on physical labor. What they noticed, as they set up their towns, located mainly at the crossroads of trade routes, was that there was no one around to lend money. So there it was: a demand and a new supplier. Because of the Christian prohibition against usury, Jews found themselves a financially indispensable place in their new home, extending loans to peasants, tradesmen, knights, courtiers, even the occasional monastery. The records from these days are scarce. But where they exist, they are often startling. In 1270, for example, 80 percent of the 228 adult Jewish males in Perpignan, France, made their living lending money to their Gentile neighbors, according to Marcus Arkin's Aspects of Jewish Economic History. One of the most prolific was a rabbi. Two others were identified, in the notarial records, as "poets." Success at money-lending required a different set of skills than farming or any of the traditional trades. Some, surely, were social: cultivating connections, winning over trust (or maybe bullying your way there, Shylock's awful pound of flesh). It probably required some aggression, because the field was competitive, with Jews suffering so few professional options. But it also required cognitive skills, or something my generation would call numeracy--a fluency in mathematics, a dexterity with numbers--and my grandmother's generation would call "a head for figures." If you were Jewish in Perpignan in 1270, and you didn't have a head for figures, you didn't stand much of a chance. Numeracy, literacy, critical reasoning: For millennia, these have been the currency of Jewish culture, the stuff of Talmudic study, immigrant success, and Borscht Belt punch lines. Two Jews, three opinions . . . Keep practicing, you'll thank me later . . . Q: When does a Jewish fetus become a human? A: When it graduates from medical school. Of course, there's another side to this shining coin. Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther said Jewish doctors were so smart they could develop a poison that could kill Christians in a single day--or any other time period of their choosing (and four centuries later, Pravda suggested Jewish doctors were spies sent to kill Stalin). After the calamities of September 11, one of the creepier conspiracy theories to whip through the Muslim world was the idea that only Jews were cunning enough to have pulled off the hijackings. Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar with a flair for controversy, skipped cheerfully into the center of this minefield. The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish a genetic argument for the fabled intelligence of Jews. It contended that the diseases most commonly found in Ashkenazim--particularly the lysosomal storage diseases, like Tay-Sachs--were likely connected to and, indeed, in some sense responsible for outsize intellectual achievement in Ashkenazi Jews. The paper contained references, but no footnotes. It was not written in the genteel, dispassionate voice common to scientific inquiries but as a polemic. Its science was mainly conjecture. Most American academics expected the thing to drop like a stone. It didn't. The Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press, posted it online and agreed to run it in its bi-monthly periodical sometime in 2006. The New York Times, The Economist, and several Jewish publications risked their reputations to legitimize it. Today, the paper has a lively presence on the Internet--type "Ashkenazi" into Google and the first hit is the Wikipedia entry, where the article gets pride of place. Ascribing an ethnic or racial explanation to any trait more ambiguous than skin color is by definition a dangerous idea, the kind of notion that can seep into the political arena with disastrous consequences. Institutionalized racism has always found sanction in the scientific community, from eminent biologist Louis Agassiz's racial typologies justifying slavery in the 1850s, to the Nazi scientists' depraved use of calipers to establish Jewish inferiority, to psychologist Arthur Jensen's call in the sixties to stop funding Head Start because most of its poor, black recipients were intrinsically uncoachable. We may consider ourselves the products of a new, more enlightened age, and scientists may carry on with more sensitivity than they did in the past. Yet to invoke the genome as an explanation for anything more complicated than illness or the most superficial traits (like skin color) is still considered taboo, as Harvard president Larry Summers discovered when he suggested the reason for so few female math and science professors might lurk in scribbles of feminine DNA (rather than, say, the hostile climes of the classroom, the diminished expectations of women's parents, or a curious cultural receptivity to Pamela Anderson's charms). For this reason, and the fact that it did not meet the standards of traditional scientific scholarship, Harpending and Cochran's paper attracted a barrage of criticism from mainstream geneticists, historians, and social scientists. "It's bad science--not because it's provocative, but because it's bad genetics and bad epidemiology," says Harry Ostrer, head of NYU's human-genetics program. "I see no positive impact from this," says Neil Risch, one of the few geneticists who's dipped his oar into the treacherous waters of race and genetics. "When the guys at the University of Utah said they'd discovered cold fusion, did that have a positive impact?" "I'd actually call the study bullshit," says Sander Gilman, a historian at Emory University, "if I didn't feel its idea were so insulting." Cochran mirthfully bats their complaints away. "I don't see what the big deal is here," he says when I reach him at his New Mexico home. "I haven't actually told people how to make a hydrogen bomb out of baking soda in their garages." But there's no question that Cochran and Harpending knew what they were doing. They were advancing a theory with a patina of sexiness and political incorrectness, one that would generate a good deal of discussion. And that it did. Some of that discussion was positive, and some was not, as one might expect. That's always the problem with theories that exploit stereotypes--they're titillating, sure, but also handy refuges for the intellectually lazy. The trick is not to harden and grow cold as we turn backward, as sure as Lot's wife. "Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that ???Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler,' " reads the first sentence of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. "The same principle must be invoked in explaining Einstein himself." The authors, clearly, have no fear of getting personal. Einstein, they seem to be saying. Need we say more? The man whose very name is a shorthand for genius was an Ashkenazi Jew. The world's proliferation of Einsteins--well, maybe not Einsteins exactly, but distinguished Jewish thinkers, particularly in math and the sciences--form the stark, quantifiable basis for Cochran and Harpending's hypothesis. Though Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world's population and a mere 3 percent of the United States', they account, according to their paper, for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe's chess champions. (What the paper doesn't say is that these numbers seem to be tallied for optimum Jewishness, counting as Jews those who have as few as one Jewish grandparent to claim; it also wrongly assumes these winners are all Ashkenazim. But still.) Cochran and Harpending also cite studies claiming that Ashkenazim have the highest IQ of any ethnic group for which there's reliable data, perhaps as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average, which means, at the far end of the spectrum, that 23 per thousand Ashkenazim have an IQ over 140, as opposed to 4 per thousand Northern Europeans. Reading these numbers, I was reminded of a story a friend once told me about a peer of his at Cambridge who wearily dismissed the intellect of another student with a five-word declaration: "Just your average Jewish genius." Most social scientists--and biological scientists, for that matter--would argue that a complex combination of culture, history, and religious tradition has been responsible for the steady, metronomic production of average Jewish geniuses. Cochran and Harpending make a different case. Their reasoning is straightforward enough: If the gene mutations responsible for diseases in Ashkenazim didn't confer some evolutionary selective advantage, they wouldn't persist. Cochran and Harpending liken these defective genes to the genes in Africans that often deform hemoglobin. Carrying one copy of the gene, most research suggests, helps ward off malaria--surely an adaptive advantage. Two copies, however, cause sickle-cell anemia. Cochran and Harpending reasoned the same must be true of the genes that cause illness among Ashkenazi Jews, particularly the four that cause mutations in the enzymes responsible for breaking down fats: Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher disease, and mucolipidosis type IV. Two copies cause devastating illness, but one, they speculate, mutely aids the carrier. How? By enhancing intelligence. Without this extra edge, they hypothesize, the Ashkenazim would never have survived. The Jews "experienced unusual selective pressures that were likely to have favored increased intelligence," they say. "Their jobs were cognitively demanding, since they were essentially restricted to entrepreneurial and managerial roles as financiers, estate managers, tax farmers, and merchants. These are jobs that people with an IQ below 100 essentially cannot do." "I have a stack of books, like four feet high, on all metabolic diseases," Cochran tells me. "And the four sphingolipid diseases affecting Ashkenazi Jews "--the ones he and Harpending believe enhance intelligence--"are all in the same chapter. That's like one in 100,000 odds. People could say it's chance, I suppose--in the same way it's chance that 27 percent of all of those guys go to Stockholm every year." There's scant physical evidence for this assumption. But what the authors found was intriguing. Among the papers they unearthed were studies by Steven Walkley, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, that showed growth of additional dendrites in the tissues of humans and cats with Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick. They also cite a 1995 study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that shows increased neural growth in the brains of rats with Gaucher disease. The authors decided to contact Ari Zimran, the head of the Gaucher Clinic at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. It turns out that 81 of his 255 working-age patients have jobs that require, by the author's estimates, an IQ of at least 120. Twenty-three are engineers, and fourteen are scientists--a number that, if it were consistent with the Israeli workforce, should be just six. Yet there are many who'd find a very different way of explaining the intelligence of these patients. They wouldn't invoke their extra dendrites. They'd invoke their mothers. To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core. Growing up, most children in Jewish households are at least vaguely aware of their intellectual aristocracy--who do you think was counting all those Nobel Prize winners? The Swedes?--and if it's not the intellectuals they're aware of, it's the high-achieving Jews, the ones who killed on Dick Cavett, played lead guitar, helmed the Starship Enterprise. (The one season I attended Sunday school, one of my first assignments was to find the name of a Jewish celebrity; when I returned the following week with the name of Beverly Sills, rather than Gene Simmons, my teacher didn't find it the least bit strange.) All minorities have their private halls of fame, of course, but it was a Jew, Adam Sandler, who took this obsessive curatorial tendency and set it to music. " David Lee Roth lights the menorah / So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas, and the late Dinah Shore-ah . . . " It's staggering what an emphasis on scholarship, both secular and religious, combined with a history of relentless displacement will do. One could argue it's a near-certain recipe for achievement. Just last month, Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die, wrote a meticulous, almost pointillist essay for The New Republic explaining why Jewish doctors have been held in high esteem for centuries. (The title of the article: "My Son, the Doctor.") He notes that physical healing has always been privileged by Jewish scripture, and therefore became the province of learned rabbis, the apotheosis of whom was Maimonides. If the Jews were expelled from a particular country, as they so often were, they could take their profession with them--medicine was divinely portable. From there, Nuland draws on the work of John Efron, a historian at the University of California at Berkeley, pointing out that once universities opened their doors to Jews, much of the Jewish emphasis on scholarship shifted from the religious to the secular, partly as a result of their tremendous desire for social respectability. At the fin de si??cle, for example, Jews made up a mere 1 percent of the German population, but they made up 50 percent of all the doctors in Berlin and 60 percent of all the doctors in Vienna. "It had to do with emerging from the ghetto," says Efron, author of Medicine and the German Jews: A History. "There were enormous social pressures to succeed--part of the emancipation process was to show that Jews were good Europeans, good Austrians, and medicine was a universal, non-parochial science, where the barriers to entry were low but the prestige was enormously high. It's the same pattern you're seeing in the United States today, if you have a look at medical-school acceptances: There are much larger numbers of Asian and Indian students." Numbers from the American Association of Medical Colleges bear this out: Today, 18 percent of all med students are Asian, as opposed to 6 percent just a dozen years ago. "I have always believed that the smartest people in the world are Asians," declares Ed Koch, former mayor of New York (and, let's face it, a pretty smart Ashkenazi Jew). "If you look at the special schools in New York City, they have so many. I think Stuyvesant's 40 percent Asian now, and Bronx Science is 50"--actually, 53 and 49 percent--"so this paper is something I question." Jews have long debated the origin and nature of intelligence. In Kaddish, his beautiful book of aphorisms and ruminations about the rite of mourning, Leon Wieseltier notes that Rabbi Akiva postulated in the second century that sons inherit not just wealth, beauty, and strength from their fathers, but wisdom. Centuries later, Maimonides came to the opposite conclusion: It's "great exertion" that makes us who we are. To attribute it to anything in our blood would trivialize our own agency, our hard work, our humanity. Wieseltier can' t even countenance another point of view. "The important question is, even if there is an Ashkenazi gene, what does it explain and what does it not explain?" he asks, when I reach him by phone. "The idea that it explains intellectuality seems empirically and philosophically spurious. The world is riddled-- riddled!--with dumb Ashkenazi Jews, so it's empirically false, and it's philosophically spurious because it flies in the face of human freedom and the belief in human freedom." He thinks. "We're living in a new golden age of scientism--the idea that there are scientific answers to all human questions," he says. "People are so rattled by the speed and complexity of their lives that they need rock-solid certainty. They cannot bear to live inconclusively. Religion provides one definitive answer; science provides another. The important thing for most people is to feel that the way they live is an inevitable outcome." "I probably have a lot to say about this," he concludes, "because I'm an Ashkenazi. So I must be really smart." Harpending and Cochran are hardly the first scientists to suggest that the diseases of the Ashkenazim are the product of genetic selection. Until fairly recently, many geneticists believed these mutations may have helped protect Jews from tuberculosis, because the disease so frequently surfaced in ghettos, though no one has been able to show how these mutations protected Jews--or why neighboring non-Jewish populations didn't develop the same immunity. If geneticists are disinclined to believe a trait is the result of natural selection, they attribute it instead to something called genetic drift, a process by which a mutation, for some random reason, evolves in one population but not in another. The smaller the population, the more glaring this mutation will seem. Geographic isolation, for instance, can explain radical genetic differences--if two groups evolve in separate places with little intermingling, different mutations are bound to pop up and spread in each. Natural disasters are another explanation--a rock slide could kill off a species of purple petunias, say. Or--in the case of Jews--one of the founders of a small settlement has a lot of children, and these children have lots of children. What the founder doesn't know is that he or she has a gene mutation, like the one for Tay-Sachs. It takes hold and spreads, like an epidemic. (Geneticists call this " the founder effect.") "Ashkenazi neurological diseases are hints of ways in which one could supercharge intelligence, so it seems likely we could develop pharmaceutical agents that had similar effects." The problem with this theory, as Cochran and Harpending rather forcefully argue using mathematical models and a long disquisition about medieval Jewish economic history (starting from the expulsion of the Jews by King Dagobert of the Franks in 629), is that Tay-Sachs is just one of four sphingolipid diseases common to Jews, which seems like a rather unlikely coincidence. It suggests they all evolved for a reason, a similar reason. How could random mutations account for such a closely related cluster of ailments? "That's one of the ways this paper is actually strong," says Sheila Rothman, a Columbia professor of public health who specializes in questions about genetics and group identity. "Geneticists don't have a great grasp of Jewish history. They often tend to cite each other. Sometimes they cite themselves." It's not just social scientists who concede this part of the paper is strong. So, too, do many mainstream geneticists, who've never been entirely comfortable with the theory of genetic drift to explain so many interrelated diseases among Jews. "If these genes were shuffling randomly," says Gregory Pastores, director of the neurogenetics unit at NYU, "then why is it that we see the clustering of four diseases in Jews--Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, mucolipidosis type IV, and Tay-Sachs--when the genes are in different chromosomes entirely? They're not even next to one another." But this doesn't mean that Pastores buys the message of the paper, and neither do most of his colleagues. Ostrer, from NYU, points out what he believes is a major flaw: The authors assume Jews are selected for sphingolipid diseases, and not for some other gene that may happen to be passed along with these diseases. "Blocks of the genome are inherited together," he explains. "They' re saying heterozygotes carrying these sphingolipid mutations are smarter. Fine. But who's to say it's that gene and not the gene next door? Or down the street?" Furthermore, the authors' hypothesis that what's being selected for is intelligence is a sexy guess, but it's based on almost nothing concrete--just a handful of smart Gaucher patients, some extra dendrites in cats, and a rat. " Jews have been accused of being frugal, cheap, aggressive," says Neil Risch. " There's a clear survival advantage to those traits too. Why not pick on those?" Risch is a big believer in genetic drift. He thinks the large number of mutations in Jews is random, coincidental, and has no causal relationship with the number of children they've had or why they've survived. He points out Ashkenazim are prone to other illnesses besides lysosomal storage diseases (such as clotting disorders and breast cancer). Anyway, what's so unique about Jews? Finns are prone to at least twenty diseases, as are French Canadians, Costa Ricans, Louisiana Acadians, the Amish, and European Gypsies. The Gypsies have interrelated diseases too, just like the Jews have interrelated sphingolipid disorders. Risch is underwhelmed. "This is like saying, ???Because Europeans have a high rate of cystic fibrosis, hemochromatosis, and Crohn's disease, the genes for those disorders must cause great ability to play tennis,' " he says. "And then the authors would come up with some elaborate theory about how those particular mutations are involved in hand-eye coordination, which allows for better retrieval of volleys." Yet here's the irony: During the past year, the taboos surrounding the genetics of race and ethnicity have been significantly eroded, in no small part because of the efforts of Risch. A population geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, a fiercely independent thinker, a fun gossip, and a liberal Jew, he published a paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics in February that rather boldly claimed that the races we claimed to be almost always corresponded with our continents of ancestry. It seemed to represent the consensus view that's slowly emerging among geneticists. Many have now stopped quarreling with the same vigor about whether race is or is not a genetic fact. "I am not sure that most geneticists have agreed to ???races' per se," says Ostrer. "But continental groups or clusters, yes." To deny these clusters, he says, would be folly; it tells us to willfully ignore what all of us can see --that people look different all over the world. He quotes me a line from Jews: A Study in Race and Environment, written by his NYU predecessor, Maurice Fishberg: "One can pick out a Jew from among a thousand non-Jews without difficulty." Ostrer is now writing a book himself, about genetics and Jewish history. He has decided to call the first chapter "Looking Jewish." "There's no doubt their paper is polemical," says David Goldstein, director of the Center for Population Genomics and Pharmacogenetics at Duke University. "But just because it's polemical doesn't mean I'd be dismissive of everything they had to say. I think their paper's interesting." Goldstein, in fact, seems to rather appreciate its Zeitgeist. "Until recently, most human geneticists almost . . . disalloweddiscussion about genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups," he says. "Really. So many awful things had been done with genetic research in this last century that they developed a policy of ???Just say no.' But there's actually a lot of difference between groups, when you consider there are 10 million polymorphic sites on the genome. So it's not scientifically sound to rule out the possibility of differences corresponding to our geographic and ethnic heritages. It overlooks the basic point: The genome is just a huge place." "If I had to choose between Jewish genes and Jewish mothers," Goldstein hastens to add, "I'd choose Jewish mothers." (He has both.) "But I would like us to carry out research in a way that doesn't imply that we have anything to be afraid of. That's what upsets me about the way this work has been approached in the past." Using the notion of race, for example, has proved highly useful in medicine. Today, if you're an ambitious young geneticist, the world's awash in money to study racial difference and disease. It's even encouraged by statute, thanks to the Minority Health Disparities Act of 2000. This summer, the National Institutes of Health announced it was exploring links between African-Americans and elevated rates of prostate cancer; this spring, NitroMed introduced BiDil to reduce heart disease in African-Americans. "Historically, in medicine, white males have been the subjects of study," says Risch. "But you can't always apply to women and minorities [lessons] from them. You need to be inclusive. So while I'm always afraid people will misuse information about genetic differences, this is a positive development." Just because pharmaceutical companies are developing race-specific drugs, however, doesn't mean race is the most useful way to parse genetic differences. The fact remains that there's more diversity within racial groups than between them. What does "black" mean when discussing the 11,700,000-square-mile expanse of Africa? There are Pygmies and Nigerians, Zulus and Ethiopians. What, precisely, is a Mexican? Or--for that matter--a Semite? "BiDil is more effective for some, rather than all, African-American hypertensives," says Ostrer. "Race, in this context, should always be used as an interim measure to see us through a period of ignorance," agrees Goldstein. " Once we know the underlying genetic or environmental factors that influence individual responses, you consider those directly and ignore race." Talk to most geneticists, and they'll say that it's a combination of genetics and environment that inevitably makes us who we are--attempts to link specific behaviors, aptitudes, and weaknesses to genes and genes alone almost always come up short. Lynn Jorde, professor of genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, gives but one example: For a while, it was assumed that a particular variant of monoamine oxidase caused antisocial behavior. Then several thousand children in New Zealand with this variant were followed for a period of more than twenty years. Researchers found that their subjects misbehaved only if they'd been abused as children--if they hadn't, there was none. "We'll probably find that there are genes that influence behavior," says Jorde. "But I'm quite certain we won't find genes that determine behavior." Risch noted something similar in Nature Genetics last year: Until recently, a famous study seemed to suggest that Asian children were more likely than Europeans to have absolute pitch. Then along came another study, this time showing that absolute pitch is most likely to manifest itself only if children take music lessons before the age of 6. No one in the first study had bothered to ask whether their Asian subjects were exposed earlier to music than their European counterparts. And that's just absolute pitch, easily measurable. Intelligence isn't even possible to define, except maybe in the sense that Justice Potter Stewart famously said of porn: He knew it when he saw it. Intelligence is almost impossible to model in animals. How do you create a brainy Jewish mouse? (Replicate Michael Eisner?) There's book-smart and street-smart; numbers-smart and letters-smart. Matisse dreamed in paint, and Nabokov did magic tricks with words, but could either of them do multivariable calculus? How about calculate the tip on a bar bill? "The problem is with phenotype," says David Rothman, a Columbia historian (and Sheila's husband). "Take schizophrenia. There's four kinds listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Or take alcoholism. The phenotypes are also varied--there's weekend bingers, hard drinkers, occasional bingers. Depression comes in many phenotypes. I don't know where to begin with shyness. So intelligence? I'm baffled." "More important," he adds, "I don't know where they get the idea that mercantile life and high IQs go together. I wouldn't mind IQ-testing the bulls of Wall Street to find this out." In the 1860s, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and father of eugenics, argued that Protestants were smarter than Catholics because they let their smart offspring reproduce, rather than shipping them off to monasteries. The idea didn't hold up too well over time. In the early part of the twentieth century, the mathematician Norbert Wiener suggested Jews were smarter because the daughters of wealthy Jewish men were married off to scholarly rabbis, who went on to have more children. Then Lewis S. Feuer, a sociologist, came along and showed that wealthy Jews married other wealthy Jews. "These were Fiddler on the Roof fantasies, a myth created by people in New York who romanticized the shtetl," says Sander Gilman. "The shtetls were horrible places. Do you think the man who wrote Tevye's story did it from a crummy little shtetl? No! He was sitting in the south of France on the Riviera. He's no fool." "This study is putting forward one of these arguments you hear regularly but with new window dressing," Gilman says. "Today, that dressing is genetics. A hundred years ago, it was vitamins--as soon as they were discovered, everything was explained by a vitamin deficiency. Cancer. Schizophrenia. Hair loss." He pauses. "Okay, not hair loss. I made that up. But you see my point." So who, exactly, are these people who've caused such a fuss? Harpending is certainly the more conventional of the two: a tenured professor, a respected population geneticist, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, an organization to which few slouches are accidentally admitted. When I speak to him on the phone, he sounds good-humored, cheerfully indifferent to academic niceties, and slightly bored. "I wouldn't think of letting a grad student work on this," he says. "I'm very senior. I don't live off grants. If I were running a lab, dependent on funding from the NIH, this would be the kiss of death." What do his colleagues think of his work? "They think it's probably right," he says. "But in public, their only reaction is a primate fear grimace." But is that really the case? I ask Jorde what his colleagues in the Utah genetics lab thought of Harpending's study. He answers with extreme tact. "Most of us work on very different kinds of things," he says. "It's really peripheral to our kinds of interests." Cochran, however, is another matter. He's a bit of a wild card, a fellow who has developed a knack for pushing unorthodox notions under the aegis of more mainstream intellectual patrons. In the late nineties, he teamed up with a biologist at Amherst, Paul Ewald, to explore the possibility that many of the diseases we consider intractable are mere germs, which ultimately made them the subjects of a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly in 1999. (Their idea is less crazy than one might think; for years, surgeons removed stomachs to get rid of ulcers, only to discover they were caused by . . . a germ.) Cochran's latest kick, though, is population genetics. Although Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is written with a modicum of academic restraint, his independent essays, posted online, are much more freewheeling, and they betray a much more unsettling agenda: "[I]f this is what I think it is," he writes, in an essay called "Overclocking," the term programmers use to describe supercharging a computer's brain capacity by weakening it, "all these Ashkenazi neurological diseases are hints of ways in which one could supercharge intelligence . . . so it seems likely that we could--if we wanted to-- develop pharmaceutical agents that had similar effects." To Cochran, in other words, Jews are the smart mice of history. The Times, The Economist, and every other media outlet somehow missed this when they first reported that Cochran and Harpending's paper had been accepted for publication. Or at least they chose not to report it. Nor did they choose to report another interesting fact: The Journal of Biosocial Science, though part of a family of Cambridge University Press publications, went by the name The Eugenics Review until 1968. "This guy is not some proto-Zionist," says David Rothman. It was Rothman's researcher, Nate Drummond, who shrewdly unearthed this information about Cochran. "What's driving him, as you read this, is bioengineering, not philo-Semitism." So the plot thickens. At one point, I ask Cochran if he's serious about studying Jews in order to create "pharmaceutical agents" for mankind's general intellectual enhancement. Has he thought about taking this idea to pharmaceutical companies? "I've thought about it halfway seriously," he says, hesitating a bit. "I'm probably not supposed to say. Because let's say it happens. Come patent time, I'll have told people." So. Is this study good for the Jews? I talk to Abe Foxman, legendary head of the Anti-Defamation League, whose life's mission is the pristine upkeep of the Jewish reputation. His answer surprises me. "If it's a genetic condition," he says, "it's not for us to embrace or reject. It is what it is, and that's the way the genetic cookie crumbles." I detect a note of pride in his voice. Of course, I recognize that tone. I've heard it in my own voice from time to time. When the site existed, I used to love poking around Jewhoo, a catalogue of prominent Jews in Western life. Then, in the middle of a Google search one day, I stumbled across jewwatch.com and discovered that under one if its many rubrics--Jewish Controlled Entertainment--was a nearly identical list. Freud and Marx, Einstein and Bohr, Mendelssohn and Mahler. The brothers Gershwin. The brothers Marx. Woody Allen. Bob Dylan. Franz Kafka. Claude L??vi-Strauss. Bobby Fischer. Jews may take tremendous pride in their aristocracy, but we fetishize it at our own peril; to suggest that we're chosen, rather than that we make our own choices, curdles quickly into a useful argument for anti-Semites who'd love to claim that the objects of their derision are immutable vermin. It can't be an accident that the most aggressive debunkers of Jewish essentialism, including the participants in this story, are generally Jews themselves. The arguments come in handy when the ugly stuff is trotted out, too. Personally, I'm always struck by how many Jews confess to a certain ambivalence about the volume and visibility of their accomplishments, as if there were something slightly vulgar or shameful about them. The friend who introduced me to Jewhoo confided that a friend of his, also Jewish, kept a list of Jews he wished were not. I realized I kept the same mental list. (Andy Fastow, the crook from Enron, is currently No. 1.) A few years ago, I myself lunged for the easy joke when a non-Jewish friend asked what I did the summer I attended--for one miserable season only, I'd like to stress--Jewish summer camp. Oh, I told him. More or less what you'd expect. Banking lessons rather than canoeing, moot court rather than color wars. Recently, I also found myself quoting--with relish--Sarah Silverman's reaction to being taken to task by a watchdog group for using the word chink in her stand-up: "As a Jew, I'm really, really nervous we're losing control of the media." Perhaps one of the most subtle, insidious things about Cochran and Harpending's study is how it plays off a bias privately held by many Jews themselves--that the Ashkenazim are in fact intellectual superiors, and the Sephardim, originally from the Iberian Peninsula, are the handlers, the shylocks, the merchants of 47th Street. Q: How do you tell the difference between an Ashkenazi and a Sephardi? A: Show him a chessboard. This, even though Maimonides, arguably the most influential Jewish thinker to ever live, was a Sephardi, and the Sephardim have a perfectly dazzling intellectual history of their own. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Spanish Jews served in the courts, served as doctors to the caliphs, and translated all manner of texts, converting Greek and Hebrew into Arabic, and Arabic into Romance languages. Yet in America, that sense of otherness, which for so long has served as a kind of incentive to strive and achieve, may be dissipating. "I'm no demographer, but I think what's happened in the U.S. is the normalization of the Jew," says Leon Botstein, who, as the president of Bard College, has seen all sorts of students cross his field of vision. "They've become as complacent and culturally undistinguished as the average, suburban, white middle-class American." And maybe that's the price we pay for our current freedoms. Not, as Seinfeld or Larry David might say, that there's anything wrong with that. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:28:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:28:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Can Brain Scans See Depression? Message-ID: Can Brain Scans See Depression? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/health/psychology/18imag.html By BENEDICT CAREY They seem almost alive: snapshots of the living human brain. Not long ago, scientists predicted that these images, produced by sophisticated brain-scanning techniques, would help cut through the mystery of mental illness, revealing clear brain abnormalities and allowing doctors to better diagnose and treat a wide variety of disorders. And nearly every week, it seems, imaging researchers announce another finding, a potential key to understanding depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety. Yet for a variety of reasons, the hopes and claims for brain imaging in psychiatry have far outpaced the science, experts say. After almost 30 years, researchers have not developed any standardized tool for diagnosing or treating psychiatric disorders based on imaging studies. Several promising lines of research are under way. But imaging technology has not lived up to the hopes invested in it in the 1990's - labeled the "Decade of the Brain" by the American Psychiatric Association - when many scientists believed that brain scans would turn on the lights in what had been a locked black box. Now, with imaging studies being published at a rate of more than 500 a year, and commercial imaging clinics opening in some parts of the country, some experts say that the technology has been oversold as a psychiatric tool. Other researchers remain optimistic, but they wonder what the data add up to, and whether it is time for the field to rethink its approach and its expectations. "I have been waiting for my work in the lab to affect my job on the weekend, when I practice as a child psychiatrist," said Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, who has done M.R.I. scans in children Monday through Friday for 14 years. "It hasn't happened. In this field, every year you hear, 'Oh, it's more complicated than we thought.' Well, you hear that for 10 years, and you start to see a pattern." Psychiatrists still consider imaging technologies like M.R.I., for magnetic resonance imaging, and PET, for positron emission topography, to be crucial research tools. And the scanning technologies are invaluable as a way to detect physical problems like head trauma, seizure activity or tumors. Moreover, the experts point out, progress in psychiatry is by its nature painstakingly slow, and decades of groundwork typically precede any real advances. But there is a growing sense that brain scan research is still years away from providing psychiatry with anything like the kind of clear tests for mental illness that were hoped for. "I think that, with some notable exceptions, the community of scientists was excessively optimistic about how quickly imaging would have an impact on psychiatry," said Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "In their enthusiasm, people forgot that the human brain is the most complex object in the history of human inquiry, and it's not at all easy to see what's going wrong." For one thing, brains are as variable as personalities. In a range of studies, researchers have found that people with schizophrenia suffer a progressive loss of their brain cells: a 20-year-old who develops the disorder, for example, might lose 5 percent to 10 percent of overall brain volume over the next decade, studies suggest. Ten percent is a lot, and losses of volume in the frontal lobes are associated with measurable impairment in schizophrenia, psychiatrists have found. But brain volume varies by at least 10 percent from person to person, so volume scans of patients by themselves cannot tell who is sick, the experts say. Studies using brain scans to measure levels of brain activity often suffer from the same problem: what looks like a "hot spot" of activity change in one person's brain may be a normal change in someone else's. "The differences observed are not in and of themselves outside the range of variation seen in the normal population," said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University Medical Center and director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. To make matters even more complicated, many findings are disputed. In people with severe depression, for instance, researchers have found apparent shrinkage of a part of the temporal lobe called the hippocampus, which is critical for memory. But other investigators have not been able to replicate this finding, and people with injuries to the hippocampus typically suffer amnesia, not depression, psychiatrists say. For problems like attention-deficit disorder and bipolar disorder, the experts say, psychiatrists have much less research on which to base their theories. Most fundamentally, imaging research has not answered the underlying question that the technology itself has raised: which comes first, the disease or the apparent difference in brain structure or function that is being observed? For a definitive answer, researchers would need to follow thousands of people from childhood through adulthood, taking brain scans regularly, and matching them with scans from peers who did not develop a disorder, experts say. Given the expense and difficulty, such a study may never be done, Dr. Hyman said. One investigator has used imaging research to fashion a small, experimental psychiatric treatment. In a series of studies of people with severe depression, Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, found a baffling pattern of activity. Using PET scanning technology, Dr. Mayberg found sharp dips and spikes of activity in about a half-dozen areas of these patients' brains as their moods improved while they were taking either antidepressant drugs or placebos. The changes were similar in all patients, but it was difficult to tell how the scattering of the dips and spikes were related. By analyzing the peaks and valleys on the scans as part of a circuit - networked together, like a string of Christmas lights - Dr. Mayberg found that one spot in particular seemed to modulate the entire system, like a transformer or a dimmer. She confirmed the importance of this spot, called Brodmann area 25, by scanning the brains of mentally healthy people while they remembered painful episodes from their lives: while sad they, too, showed increased activity in this area. In March, Dr. Mayberg and a team based at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto reported on six patients who had had electrodes implanted in their brains next to Brodmann area 25. All had been severely depressed for at least a year, and they had responded poorly to available therapies. The implanted electrodes, often used to treat Parkinson's disease, produce a current that slows neural activity, for reasons scientists do not yet understand. So far, the researchers reported in the journal Neuron, four of the six people have shown significant and lasting recovery; all four are still on antidepressant drugs but at reduced doses. And all four have returned to work or their usual routines, Dr. Mayberg said. The widely reported experiment has generated more than 300 requests from people to be considered for the operation, she added. "It's very important to understand that this is experimental, and the next step is to replicate what we did, with a placebo, and that could send us right back to the drawing board," Dr. Mayberg said in an interview. The findings so far are encouraging, she said, "but the idea that this is something for every severely depressed patient - well, shame on us if we suggest that. The brain is a very big place and we had better have a very good idea of what we're doing before holding this out as a treatment." Many people would rather not wait for the science of imaging to mature, however. At clinics in California, Washington, Illinois, Texas and elsewhere, doctors offer brain scans to people with a variety of conditions, from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, often called A.D.H.D., to depression and aggressive behavior. Dr. Daniel Amen, an adult and child psychiatrist based in Newport Beach, Calif., said he performed 28,000 scans on adults and children over the past 14 years, using a technique called Spect, or single photon emission computed tomography. In an interview, Dr. Amen said that it was unconscionable that the profession of psychiatry was not making more use of brain scans. "Here we are, giving five or six different medications to children without even looking at the organ we're changing," he said. He said the scans had helped him to distinguish between children with attention deficit problems who respond well to stimulants like Ritalin and those who do poorly on the drugs. In a series of books and medical articles, Dr. Amen argued that the images helped convince people that the behavior problems had a biological basis and needed treatment, with drugs or other therapies. "They increase compliance with treatment and decrease the shame and guilt" associated with the disorders, he said. At the Brainwaves Neuroimaging Clinic in Houston, doctors use the scans to diagnose and choose treatment for a range of psychiatric problems, according to a clinic spokeswoman. And a variety of doctors advertise the imaging services, particularly for attention-deficit disorder, on the Internet. But the experts who study imaging and psychiatry say there is no evidence that a brain scan, which can cost more than $1,000, adds significantly to standard individual psychiatric exams. "The thing for people to understand is that right now, the only thing imaging can tell you is whether you have a brain tumor," or some other neurological damage, said Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. He added, "This imaging technology is so far from prime time that to spend thousands of dollars on it doesn't make any sense." The big payoff from imaging technology, some experts say, may come as researchers combine the scans with other techniques, like genetic or biochemical tests. By radioactively marking specific receptors in the brain, for example, researchers are using brain scans to measure how brain chemicals known to affect mood, like dopamine, behave in people with schizophrenia, compared with mentally healthy peers. Imaging researchers are also studying depression-related circuits to see how they may arise from genetic variations known to put people at risk for depression. And as always, the technology itself is improving: a new generation of M.R.I. scanners, with double the resolution power of the current machines, is becoming more widely available, Dr. Lieberman said. "With increased resolution, we'll be able to do more sensitive and more precise work, and I would not be surprised if anatomy alone based on volume will be a diagnostic feature," he said. "We have gained an enormous amount knowledge from thousands of imaging studies, we are on the threshold of applying that knowledge, and now it's a matter of getting over the threshold." But for now, neither he nor anyone else can say when that will happen. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:29:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:29:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Spiked: Norman Levitt: Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond Message-ID: Norman Levitt: Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CADAC.htm 5.10.12 Academic strife: the American University in the slough of despond By preaching the virtues of 'cultural competence', the academy betrays its lack of confidence. by Norman Levitt First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.18 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101801j.htm A glance at the current issue of spiked: The problems of cultural competence The hot new term in higher education is "cultural competence," says Norman Levitt, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. But, he warns, the phrase is little more than a euphemism that cloaks "problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments." "Cultural competence" means an individual can work across cultural lines, can value and adapt to diversity, and can demonstrate such abilities in leadership and policy-making roles. However, when you shed the happy talk, Mr. Levitt says, "cultural competence" means "deference, even servility, toward the norms and values espoused by fervent multiculturalists." It also does not allow people to raise ideas that might make certain groups uncomfortable: Suggesting that affirmative action is unfair, for instance, would be a culturally incompetent offense, he says. The practice of cultural competence also further fragments professors and university administrators, he writes. When administrators at the University of Oregon proposed cultural-competency standards in May, professors balked at terms that would have, among other things, made hirings, promotions, and salaries dependent upon an evaluation of cultural competence. "The message to faculty was this: You're going to adopt our sociopolitical point of view (or pretend to) or pay the price," writes Mr. Levitt. The Oregon example, he says, illustrates the staying power of the left-wing ethos of political correctness. Such PC-sponsored initiatives as cultural competence, he says, work only to make their sponsors unpopular, while "doing virtually nothing concrete to ameliorate the painful real-world situations that provoke these projects in the first place." "There is good reason to remain aware of the dangers of cultural chauvinism," writes Mr. Levitt, "but the point is to cleanse our standards of judgment of narrow and local prejudices, not to abandon the very notion of standards of judgment." The article, "Academic Strife: The American University in the Slough of Despond," is available at [54]http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm --Jason M. Breslow _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [55]U. of Oregon Backs Off Plan Linking Tenure and 'Cultural Competency' After Faculty Members Balk (5/27/2005) * [56]Verbatim: an interview with Mr. Levitt (12/17/1999) * [57]2 Scholars Examine the 'Bizarre War' Against Science They Say Is Being Waged by the Academic Left (4/27/1994) Opinion: * [58]Why Science and Scientists Are Under Fire (9/29/1995) * [59]The Perils of Democratizing Science (10/5/1994) References 54. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CADAC.htm 55. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/05/2005052702n.htm 56. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i17/17a02601.htm 57. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/articles-40.dir/issue-34.dir/34a01501.htm 58. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/art-42.dir/issue-05.dir/05b00101.htm 59. http://chronicle.com/che-data/articles.dir/articles-41.dir/issue-06.dir/06b00101.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. --------------------- A new buzzword has entered the lexicon of academic fashion in the USA, threatening to drown poor professors like me in yet another wave of coy euphemism. The term is 'cultural competence'. Like its predecessors 'affirmative action,' 'diversity,' and 'multiculturalism', it attempts to cloak problematical and even disturbing policy initiatives in linguistic vestments that suggest that no right-minded person could possibly demur. A 'culturally competent' academic, one might naively surmise, would be one who has absorbed and is able to propound some of the deep values - ethical, aesthetic or epistemological - that embody the stellar achievements of Western culture, one who could explain, for instance, why Dante or Kant or Ingres is present, at least subtly, in the assumptions under which we all live. Or something like that. This, alas, would be a comical error. 'Cultural competence' is, in essence, a bureaucratic weapon. 'Cultural competence', or rather, your presumed lack thereof, is what you will be clobbered with if you are imprudent enough to challenge or merely to have qualms about 'affirmative action', 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism', as those principles are now espoused by their most fervent academic advocates. Cultural competence, like the UK's proposed new identity card, is something a professor is supposed to keep handy at all times, and to display with a straight face whenever confronted with a socially or ethnically charged situation, in order to dispel any suspicion of racism, sexism or Eurocentrism that might arise in the minds of the professionally suspicious. What is 'cultural competence'? The term has been around for a couple of years, drastically mutating as it puts down deeper roots. Originally, it was fairly innocuous. It was largely restricted to the healthcare professions, and referred to the ability to function effectively with members of ethnic minorities and immigrant groups by dint of insights into the local community's idiosyncratic prejudices, fears and assumptions, insofar as these differed from the norms of middle-class white society. It seems obvious that such knowledge could be helpful to a doctor, nurse or social worker hoping to convince patients or clients from these groups to keep medical appointments, complete a course of antibiotics or have their children vaccinated. Though cultural competence, in this sense, presumes a degree of open-mindedness and empathy, it seems only vaguely political, at most. Now, however, cast loose from its original moorings, the phrase has become emphatically political. I offer the reader, with some trepidation, the formal definition as jargonistically set out by some purported educators: Cultural competence requires that individuals and organisations: a) Have a defined set of values and principles, demonstrated behaviours, attitudes, policies and structures that enable them to work effectively in a cross-cultural manner; b) Demonstrate the capacity to 1) value diversity, 2) engage in self-reflection, 3) manage the dynamics of difference, 4) acquire and institutionalise cultural knowledge, and 5) adapt to the diversity and the cultural contexts of the communities they serve; c) Incorporate and advocate the above in all aspects of leadership, policymaking, administration, practice and service delivery while systematically involving staff, students, families, key stakeholders and communities. If we divest this of its thick integument of happy talk and explore the details, we find that in practice it means deference, even servility, toward the norms and values espoused by fervent multiculturalists, along with tame assent to whatever measures they propose to achieve their aims. Attempts to explicate the idea occasionally slip into language that reveals the underlying political programme: [C]ultural competence entails actively challenging the status quo and advocating for equity and social justice. In the context of higher education, cultural competence necessitates abject refusal to articulate or defend ideas that might make certain protected groups uncomfortable. Professors can only be deemed 'culturally competent' if they openly profess the approved corpus of received values. Here is an illustrative if fragmentary list of transgressions that would likely strip an academic of any chance of being designated culturally competent: ? Suggesting that affirmative action might conflict with other standards of justice and equity, or that opponents of affirmative action are not ipso facto Klansmen waiting for their white sheets to come back from the laundry; ? Taking issue with the claim that Malcolm X was a paragon of humanitarianism and political genius; ? Disputing the wisdom of feminist theory as regards the social constructedness of gender; ? Asserting that the early demographic history of the Americas is more accurately revealed by scientific anthropology than by the Native American folklore and myth celebrated by tribal militants; ? Expressing doubts that 'queer theory' should be made the epicenter of literary studies. Likewise, to maintain that hiring, retention and promotion within the university should focus on the traditional academic virtues of the scholar, rather than assigning enormous importance to the candidate's race, ethnicity, sex or sexuality, would banish one permanently from the culturally competent elect. To deny that feminist theorists should call all the shots on matters having to do with sexual harassment would be an act of self-immolation. The University of Oregon: a cautionary tale Where has this orthodoxy come from? The State of Oregon on the West Coast seems to have been the seedbed of the cultural competence movement in American education (1). Why this should be so is not at all clear. Oregon is scenically glorious and politically moderate, and its colleges and universities have not notably suffered from racial or ethnic tensions. Nonetheless, it was at the state's flagship university, the University of Oregon, that advocates of cultural competence recently grew so rash as to provoke an enormous uproar that will doubtless make the term into a new red flag in the Culture Wars and set off endless rounds of vituperation. The trigger was the emergence of a concrete proposal to implement cultural competence standards on campus. This long, turgid document called for more of the things you would expect such a declaration to call for more of - 'diversity' admissions, multicultural courses, programmes to enhance cross-cultural sensitivity, and, of course, an assortment of administrators and committees to effectuate all this righteousness. But this much was predictable boiler-plate; the real fireworks showed up in the section mandating development of cultural competence among the faculty. Here the authors, obviously feeling their oats, launched a serious power play. They prescribed a draconian regime of attitude adjustment aimed at professors and instructors. They proposed that all faculty be required to 'participate in ongoing cultural competence professional development' under their tutelage. But this was just the beginning. The drafters further called for academic departments, across the board, to reconstruct their hiring policies so as to make affirmative action the central factor in generating job offers. They insisted that every course in the school be scrutinised for its consistency with multicultural doctrine. Above all, in hiring, promotion and determination of salary, they called for a formal evaluation of the candidate's cultural competence! Stripping it down to its essence, the message to faculty was this: you're going to adopt our sociopolitical point of view (or pretend to) or pay the price; so far as hiring and retention is concerned, your professional standards shall be modified or overruled to insure the predominance of people of whom we approve because of their race, sex, sexuality or doctrinal purity; if you give us any trouble, lacking tenure you'll be out on your ear, and even with tenure you'll be out a lot of money. The faculty, not being particularly obtuse, certainly got the message - and promptly began to raise considerable hell. The upshot was that the higher-ups in the university administration, who had been primed to endorse the report, did a prompt volte-face and downgraded it to a preliminary draft slated to be drastically amended before implementation. Its principal author, like some misbegotten super-hero, slunk off to a new job far away. The ultimate fate of these proposals thus seems pretty clear. The bureaucracy will masticate them over and over in an interminable cycle of revisions and re-revisions. In the end, a diluted and attenuated version will finally emerge. It will render some lip-service to cultural competence in the abstract and grant some funds to its proponents. But it will leave the faculty to continue largely unmolested in its well-worn paths. On this somewhat hopeful note, this particular Political Correctness horror story now ends, for the time being. But why is it especially salient, given the long line of PC horror stories of which it constitutes just one more episode? Perhaps it isn't all that consequential; yet it is instructive for a number of reasons. Faction fighting My tale demonstrates the staying power of the ethos of (left-wing) Political Correctness (or whatever you choose to call it) in the face of many years of scorn and ridicule. It shows how little its proponents have adjusted to discouraging realities, most notably the fact that the chief effect of PC-sponsored initiatives has been to make the sponsors unpopular while doing virtually nothing concrete to ameliorate the painful real-world situations that provoke these projects in the first place. Most folks on a typical US campus think of PC as tiresome and even silly, and regard its advocates as self-righteous and censorious to the point of nastiness. The chief beneficiaries of PC antics, indeed, are the right-wing talk show hosts, bloggers and columnists who gleefully decry them at every opportunity. Even more, the story tends to underline the fragmentation of university culture in a much wider context. Why, one might ask, are university administrators, largely bureaucrats rather than ideologues, still willing to accommodate PC enthusiasts? Perhaps because to be an American university administrator these days entails being all things to all men, women and transgendered persons, the servant of all masters (yet master of them all). Each constituency exacts its own tribute, and the shrewd administrator is one who knows how to render it up without sparking the ire of another faction whose view of the world might be markedly different. A list of these groups, at least roughly representative of the implicit infrastructure of most American universities, might be helpful here, if we allow for the fact that boundaries are sometimes blurry. First of all, there is Profland, the traditional faculty, oriented, presumably, to serious scholarship and its code of values. But Profland lacks real cohesion. Its postmodern wing, for instance, usually doubles as a faction of the PC Mafia. This is even more true of the Myrmidons of the Downtrodden, who staff the various 'oppression studies' programmes - Women's Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and so forth. Collectively, they are the consiglieri of the PC Mafia. The most self-satisfied subtribe, on the other hand, is They Who Could Make a MUCH Better Living in the Real World and Often Do - that is to say, the faculty of the Law School, the Medical School and the Business School. They are in Profland but not of it; unlike professors of English or archaeology, they have enough worldly clout that they needn't seek solace by anointing themselves intellectual holy men. At the other end of the self-esteem spectrum, we find the SubAcademic Wannabes who teach in not-quite-intellectually-respectable programmes: Education, Social Work, Journalism, and so forth. They seem to be part of Profland, but are haunted by the knowledge that in that enchanted realm, they will always be placed below the salt, mere squires rather than cavaliers. The Entrepreneurs should be singled out as well, scientists and engineers whose research is directly translatable into technology, patents and royalties accruing (if they're shrewd) to themselves as well as to the university. Beyond Profland, the Undergraduate Eloi predominate, drenching the campus in booze, sex, downloaded music cuts and annoying ring-tones. They are only distant cousins of the less-numerous Grad Student Helotry, essentially passive and resigned creatures who can occasionally be rousted from their library carrels long enough to make a bit of a fuss - but not for long. The latter, however, are not so forlorn as the Academic Gypsies who constitute the provisional or part-time instructional staff. These grossly underpaid wretches are doomed to aspire to Profland without much chance of ever getting there. Most anomalous and therefore most surprising to those not long immersed in American tribal culture is the Jockocracy, a faction of immense power at most public and many private universities despite being utterly alien to education, scholarship or learning in any form. This consists of the administrators and chief functionaries of the athletic programme, most notably the coaches heading the school's football and basketball teams. Such programmes are run for the economic benefit of these worthies while also enriching media outlets, purveyors of jock-related trinkets, and manufacturers of athletic shoes. Their viability depends, ultimately, on the eagerness of young athletes, typically profoundly deficient in academic skills, to be ruthlessly exploited while largely surrendering their personal autonomy. The underlying looniness of the situation is epitomised by the fact, no doubt mind-boggling to most non-Americans, that at a university with a 'big-time' team, the football coach will earn eight or nine times as much as the most distinguished professor. Athletics is the most hypocritical, corrupt, cynical, vicious and depraved aspect of university culture and, therefore, it is the one aspect of university culture unreservedly approved of by politicians, businessmen and the general public. Public universities must take special notice of the Pols, the state governors and legislators, along with the appointees thereof, who ultimately run the place, de juro. These touchy people require periodic jollying-up and, on dire occasions, fervent propitiation. The amorphous mass of Alums can also be a powerful, if unseen, force, though it's not easy to give a categorical description of what will antagonise or please them. Pols and Alums are the clans most likely to sympathise with a relatively new formation, the Dark Side, political and religious conservatives who have been organising recently to demand greater representation in Profland, a club that has welcomed very few of their prot?g?s heretofore. Dark Siders are characterised not only by their expressed loathing for the PC Mafia, but for their cynical habit of counting as PC anyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh. Oddly enough, however, they align with the PC Mafia on some crucial matters. There are certain texts they are obligated to deplore - JS Mill's On Liberty and The Origin of Species, for instance - that rank high on the PC shitlist as well. Though they are frantic to abjure the term, Dark Siders also strongly favour affirmative action for certain under-represented minorities - in this instance, free marketers, born-again Christians, Intelligent Design theorists and Bushmen in general. The last and, in some sense, most significant faction is the Ringmasters - that is to say, the administrators who try to keep the whole circus going. The most notable thing about this clan is that, in recent years, its traditional roots in Profland have withered. These functionaries - in American parlance usually called Presidents, Provosts and Deans, in descending order of majesty - have become a tribe unto themselves. Fewer and fewer, at least at the highest level, are primus inter pares professors raised to the seat of power from within the faculty (a practice much more common years ago). More and more of them are drawn from a distinct professional mandarinate, people who cut their ties to teaching and research fairly early in the game (if, indeed, they ever spent time in Profland), and who readily move from one institution to another as they climb the career ladder. Over the past decade or so, the tone of academic administration has changed considerably. It has become 'managerial' rather than strictly academic. Budgetary and financial matters predominate at the highest administrative level. Perhaps this has always been so, but today's preoccupation with money seems single-minded and intense to an unprecedented degree. This attitude is reflected in policy towards faculty and curriculum. Narrow or esoteric disciplines that draw few paying students are luxury items that have disappeared from many campuses. Increasingly, especially in technical areas, a professor is judged by his ability to support his own financial weight through research grants or even by fecundity in coming up with marketable inventions. The typical university now relies to an unprecedented extent on Academic Gypsies, along with Grad Student Helots, to handle teaching responsibilities. Regular faculty with tenure or serious prospects thereof form an ever-shrinking proportion of the teaching staff, simply because they cost so much in terms of pay and benefits. For fear of losing paying customers, schools cater more and more to the shallow tastes of the Undergraduate Eloi, providing courses that are long on entertainment value and generous in their grading standards. At most schools, the president is above all the fundraiser-in-chief, and endures or is cast aside depending on whether the revenue stream he generates is munificent or meager. Most schools now have elaborate fundraising machinery staffed by specialists in this field. Inevitably, institutional plans and ambitions are increasingly shaped by the enthusiasms of large donors. Additionally, at publicly supported institutions, presidents must continually dance attendance on Pols and the politically well-connected to ensure that appropriations are not choked off. Management through diversity In consequence of all this, universities must increasingly play to public opinion. The prominence of athletic programmes is one result. Another is the emphasis on 'diversity', though this policy has repeatedly turned into a public relations minefield. Most faculty and student supporters of diversity - in blunter terms, preferences accorded to certain racial and ethnic minorities - see their position as arising from the quest for social justice. Most administrators, however, see it as a way of buying social peace or at least deflecting nasty social conflict from the university's doorstep. Diversity policies play, obviously, to the liberal sentiments of most of the faculty, and to those of many students as well. But, under ideal circumstances, they play to a certain strain of conservative opinion, too. Despite the reputation of conservative activists and intellectuals as adamant opponents of affirmative action, racial preferences, quotas and the like, much of the business community, conservative or Republican in its general outlook, views affirmative action programmes and diversity goals as a way of mollifying the black and Latino populations. They help to ease the tension of day-to-day life in communities where different ethnicities continually interact. This is why anti-affirmative action politics has received only lukewarm support even in conservative states and cities. For pragmatic conservatives, social placidity is more important than ideological consistency. So it is no surprise that even somewhat conservative university administrators will advocate and defend their school's affirmative action programmes. Affirmative action is, from one point of view, a way of co-opting the brightest and most ambitious minority youth, bringing them to identify, in the long run, with conventional bourgeois values rather than oppositional doctrines. Conservatives are likewise content with speech codes, broad anti-harassment regulations and the like, on the theory that these will eliminate or dampen the flashpoints that set off militant protests and even violence. In fact, when these statutes are applied to some kinds of 'sexual harassment' cases - the current definition of sexual harassment is both broad and vague - it is hard to tell whether the ideology being served is radical feminism or the conservative prudery of traditional religion. But above all, administrators are fearful of rekindling the militant passions of the 1960s, to which nostalgic faculty are as susceptible as ardent young students. Race is the one issue that has the potential to set this off. Therefore, it is an issue that impels pragmatic rightists to find rationalisations for ignoring their individualistic principles. But this is only part of the long, unremitting balancing act that university administrations must perform. Like a music-hall juggler keeping a dozen plates spinning precariously on as many twirling sticks, an American university president, along with his subalterns, is continually on the run between one touchy faction and another, trying to keep them all functioning without smashing into one another's egos. It is not a task that is well suited to anyone obsessed with ideological or even intellectual consistency. There are too many Meccas to bow to at too many different points of the compass. Under the circumstances, it would be absurd to expect the leader of a school to personify the sense of scholarly mission and the thirst for knowledge that universities are supposed to embody. The academic who actually admits to having been inspired or encouraged by the eloquence, the philosophy or the deeds of his president must be the rarest creature on Earth. A president simply doesn't expect to be admired for incarnating the academic ethos. The best he can hope for is to be thought well of for his cleverness in bringing in donations and his prudence in keeping his nose out of things that don't concern him, which covers everything from the drill-sergeant methods of the overpaid football coach to the double-talk of the overpaid literary theorist. Enforced diffidence So where, then, do the values of the university repose? Where have they taken firm enough root to guide and inspire the thoughts and words of faculty and students? Profland, by and large, flatters itself that the ancient virtues flourish in its soil, that mercenary or hypocritical though the university may be in many respects, its professors, at least, incarnate these ideals. There may be a little truth to this; professors honestly dedicated to advancing knowledge and to nurturing students are really not all that rare. The trouble is, however, that Profland isn't really a community built on shared values and assumptions. It is, rather, a loose assemblage of Anchorites, most of them dedicated in their own way, but each functioning in isolation from the others, apart from such affinities as might exist among scholars in the same sub-specialty of the same discipline. If, by some strange chance, a student should honestly inquire what a university is really supposed to represent, what its core values are, what it offers him by way of a mode of thought and life, what it requires of him beyond classroom routine, there is no place for him to seek an answer. All he ever gets is an 'orientation' at the beginning of freshman year, which tells him where the library is, what the penalty for plagiarism is, and why he should be thrilled to be part of such a diverse community. There is no authority who can go beyond clich?s to point to actual practice or to other evidence of a genuinely shared ethos. The worst of it is that this deficiency is not a matter of institutional structure, nor of misplaced priorities, nor of temporary inattention. It arises from the hollowing out of Western culture as a whole. This a sententious, even grandiose, way of putting it, perhaps, but if we avoid thinking about the malaise of our larger society, across decades rather than years, I doubt we'll be able to plumb the morass into which American higher education - and, probably, the community of scholars throughout the world - has fallen. We not only lack guidelines and precepts to conduct us through the life of the mind, we lack the sense that such principles are even possible. The needed vocabulary hasn't vanished from our language, but it is sodden with irony, rotten from years of coarse abuse. Consider words like 'justice', 'objectivity', 'beauty', 'integrity', 'nobility', 'progress', 'honour', 'virtue', 'fairness' and 'righteousness': it's not only the postmodernists among us who reflexively snicker at these terms; all of us do so, automatically. To be asked to respond to any of them with a straight face as denoting an actual realm of human experience is like being touched up for a loan. You feel like you've been placed in the awkward position of having to play the sucker if you're to comply. The cultural demons lodged in all our psyches tell us that these words are the well-worn tools of an ancient con-game, that they are names of phantoms, weapons that the cynical wield to dominate the gullible. If ever we try to use them without a sneer, shame washes over us. This kind of resigned cynicism is not just a casual attribute of our culture. It is ingrained in the zeitgeist of our wounded and distempered civilisation. We have experienced a century marked not only by butchery on an inconceivable scale but by the chilling fact that a good deal of that butchery emerged from the triumphs of what first looked to be forces of redemption. There are words we can't use without sneer quotes because their degradation is our way of burying the dead hopes they once reflected. Therefore, if I tell you that a university is, above all, an institution for the preservation and extension of learning and for its dissemination to the emerging generation, for the winnowing of truth from falsehood and imposture, for the conservation of the highest values our civilisation can conceive, for the emulation, insofar as we are capable, of the finest and deepest minds our civilisation has produced, for the hoarding and protection of what must survive of our civilisation even after all the dross has fallen away; if I tell you all this without satiric intent, and with the purpose of describing an ideal that is at least approximable if not perfectly realisable, then I will have committed an enormous gaffe, by the standards that our culture inflicts on us all. I will have tried to sell you a bill of goods, swamp real-estate, pump-and-dump stock, the Brooklyn Bridge. We cannot deal with the concept I have just formulated as if it really meant something because the cultural confidence to do so has utterly atrophied. We live in an era of enforced diffidence which makes it positively painful to assert that there are better ideas and worse, better minds and worse, superior and inferior ways of knowing, differences between the enduring and the ephemeral, ways of viewing the world worth preserving and along with those worth discarding. We have been conditioned to believe that to credit such distinctions, or at least to claim special value for particular ideas, minds and ways of knowing, is hopelessly parochial, culturally arrogant, and ultimately oppressive. There is good reason to remain aware of the dangers of cultural chauvinism, but the point is to cleanse our standards of judgment of narrow and local prejudices, not to abandon the very notion of standards of judgment. Nobody can sincerely propound a vision of what a university is supposed to be, of what actual universities should strive to be, because it is so hard to assemble that vision, or even to contemplate its components, without blushing at one's lapse into unsophistication. Neither pride nor aspiration can really hold a university community together because our culture instructs us to reject the kind of solidarity that enables collective pride and aspiration. We are content to let the university define itself in terms of the aggregation of functions the larger community and the economy wish it to perform: babysitting our youth in their protracted adolescence, staging gladiatorial exhibitions for TV, conducting product research for chip makers and drug makers, sending forth a reliable supply of doctors and lawyers, trying to ameliorate America's racial mess (albeit in a half-assed way), and delving into arcane knowledge here and there just in case the stuff is ever really needed. The task of forging a definition based on deep respect for verities, wisdom and genius (hear how strangely those words ring!), promulgating it, assembling a consensus around it, and functioning in accordance with its values - that's something for which we utterly lack the confidence, the sense of a painful but deservedly abiding past, of an uncertain but still hopeful future. And so our American institutions of higher learning drift along, fat, dumb and happy, or lean, dumb and anxious, according to the size of their endowment. 'Total Depravity', as the sociologist Thorstein Veblen labeled it a century ago - but he didn't know the half. It is foreordained that episodes of extreme silliness shall burst forth therein from time to time. The cult of 'cultural competence' is now beginning to afflict universities because they lack the immune system necessary to suppress such inane crap before it gets a foothold. It is distinctly possible that the even more inane crap called Intelligent Design theory might also afflict them before too long, especially if the power of the PC Mafia starts to slip while that of the Dark Side waxes. Recurrent inanity, in one form or another, seems to be the fate of universities as now constituted. At the risk of sounding nostalgic for what never was, I say that it needn't have been thus. But avoiding this abyss would have required prescience and courage that is quite rare in individuals, let alone in institutions. Norman Levitt is Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is the co-author (with PR Gross) of Higher Superstition From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:29:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:29:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Meditate on It Message-ID: Meditate on It The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.21 http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i09/09a01001.htm [Colloquy with Zajonc appended. I got in a question, on whether meditation is a progressive discipline (think Lakatos here). I went to a talk on acupuncture. I had to leave early but did ask if such and such was a new treatment. The promoter said it was not. [He also said chiropracty is a part of acupuncture. Chiropracty is a much more recent form of supposed therapy, but there may be something in acupuncture that looks enough like chiropracty for the claim to make some sort of sense. I confess to general ignorance on these matters, trusting neither the establishment nor the quacks and realizing that any evaluation I made would just be one more book to add to the heap. [The Enlightenment optimism that our brains are big enough and our personalities disinterested enough to solve all problems died in six seconds in Dallas.] Can adding contemplation to the classroom lead students to more eureka moments? By JOHN GRAVOIS Northampton, Mass. Arthur Zajonc is sitting on the edge of a chair with his back straight, his eyes closed, and his brow lightly furrowed in concentration. He is meditating, but he does not look especially beatific. He looks like someone dreaming of algebra. He sits in a circle of about 40 other people, some perched on chairs, others sitting cross-legged on plump, round floor cushions called zafus, many of their faces likewise knit with mild concern. After a time, Mr. Zajonc lifts his hands from his thighs and retrieves a bell from a table behind him. He strikes it, the air seems to wobble a little, and the meditators blink open their eyes. When the room has come back into focus -- dark wood paneling, clothbound books, old portraits on the walls -- Mr. Zajonc begins to speak, and the gears of a group discussion slowly start to turn. He is speaking to professors who have traveled from all over the country to Smith College for a weeklong seminar. Here in a region dubbed the "the Buddha Belt" for its preponderance of meditation centers, they are talking about adding meditation and other contemplative practices to the college curriculum. Mr. Zajonc (pronounced like "science," but with a "z") is a physics professor at Amherst College and the director of the academic program at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a Northampton nonprofit group that seeks to promote better living and a better society through meditation and yoga. This seminar is only the latest flowering of the center's efforts in higher education. Over the past seven years, it has paired up with the American Council of Learned Societies to give out a handful of fellowships annually to professors who want to build contemplative components into their curricula -- in subjects as varied as physics, business, and art history. The idea is that meditation doesn't just help stressed-out students find their happy place; rather, it actually deepens their engagement with subject matter -- and may even prompt moments of insight. The Northampton center's efforts are already bearing fruit. At the University of Michigan School of Music, students can receive bachelor's degrees in a program called jazz and contemplative studies. An economist at Emory University has drawn up a syllabus that requires his students to meditate on pictures of poor people. And at Brown, a religious-studies professor includes meditation "labs" among his course requirements. When the center advertised this curriculum-development seminar for paying customers, it received twice as many applications as it could accept. "We're not alone anymore," Mr. Zajonc tells the group of session attendees. "Science is being done, conferences are happening, communities are getting together locally, regionally, nationally. "It's a wave," he says. "It's a movement." Buoyed by Research There's no place for this in the academy. This is spirituality in the classroom. This is Buddhism Lite. Meditative silence is a home for the demonic. How can you grade inner experience? This is pseudoscience. You can do the same thing with Prozac. How do you justify having students pay all those tuition dollars to do ... nothing? Professors who want to introduce contemplation into the classroom take heat from all sides. But now isn't a bad time for them to make their case. Over the past decade, and particularly in the past year, neuroscientific research on the effects of meditation has flourished. In a much publicized study last November, Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, showed that Buddhist monks who have logged more than 10,000 hours in contemplation are able -- far better than novice meditators -- to activate "positive emotion" centers in their brains when concentrating on compassion. In fact, Mr. Davidson found that some of the most experienced monks registered higher brain activity in those regions than had ever been recorded in a healthy person. Another recent study, by Paul Ekman at the University of California at San Francisco, indicates that the monks' compassion is more than a mere head trip. When experienced monks were shown a rapid succession of video images of minutely different facial expressions, they were better at distinguishing among the emotional states registered than were all 5,000 of Mr. Ekman's other test subjects. Next month, in what is perhaps the most vivid sign of neuroscience's contemporary romance with Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to deliver the inaugural lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, fresh on the heels of the publication of his new book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. In it, he writes: "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims." It is as though Buddhism were saying to science: Let's play ball. Mr. Zajonc, who has coordinated some of the Dalai Lama's meetings with scientists, has much the same attitude about contemplation in higher education. "I think it's totally fair to be held to high standards in the academy," he says. "We just have to develop the responses." In the classroom, Mr. Zajonc believes that contemplative practice should function on multiple levels. The most basic is what he calls "mental hygiene" -- the therapeutic, relaxing, focusing effect that most people think of when they imagine someone tuned out in a half-lotus position. But beyond that, he says, there are more-specific exercises -- like free writing, for instance, in which a practitioner writes for a set interval of time without ever lifting her pen -- that can help students observe their emotional, intuitive, or physical responses to course material. At the highest level, Mr. Zajonc says, meditation can shade into something he calls "contemplative inquiry," where students try to create the mental circumstances for moments of insight -- minor versions of the "eureka moments" in the history of science. That's not to say that adducing evidence and crunching equations should ever go out the window. But truly original discoveries don't usually spring straight from logical proofs, he says: "The conditions required for intuitive insight are quite different from the subsequent dispassionate, logical testing of it." In his mind, the mental state behind such epiphanies is more akin to seeing than to deductive reasoning. Meditation, which builds skills of self-observation and trains the mind to mull contradictions without jumping to resolve them, he says, may be the best way to cultivate that special kind of vision. Curriculum Fight In 2000, three years after getting a contemplative-practice fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, Ed Sarath submitted a proposal for an entire degree program in jazz and contemplative studies to the curriculum committee at the University of Michigan School of Music. In addition to typical courses in music theory, performance, and improvisation, the major would require four semesters of a "contemplative-practice seminar" and a course called "Creativity and Consciousness," plus work in meditation-related fields like psychology and religion. To his surprise, the idea sailed through the committee with a unanimous vote. Then it went before the entire faculty of the school for consideration. Ten days went by before anyone weighed in. Then the exchange of a few e-mail messages started what is still known at the school as "the great debate." "Things got testy," says Mr. Sarath, a jazz professor. "I was getting tendonitis every night responding to challenges to it." Logan Skelton, an associate professor of piano at the school, was one of the curriculum's most vocal opponents -- though he took pains not to attack contemplative practice in its own right. "Not everything that's worth doing belongs in a classroom," he says, still maintaining the position he held five years ago. "How do you grade contemplative achievement? How do you assess anything to do with it? It seems to me that it is in a domain that is deeply personal." Mr. Skelton also took issue with the amount of class time the curriculum required students to spend in meditation. "If you were to add it up," he says, "you'd probably have something like an entire semester's class where they do nothing but sit in silence. That seems out of balance to me." What seems to divide Mr. Sarath and Mr. Skelton most is a disagreement over whether something akin to inquiry -- something substantive -- is happening when students meditate. "It's not just that the students are sitting in silence, it's that they're reflecting on related models, theoretical models of consciousness," says Mr. Sarath. Moreover, he says, "the quality of interaction that happens after that silent time can be very powerful." After weeks of debate, Mr. Sarath's curriculum passed by roughly a two-thirds majority. According to Stephen Shipps, an associate dean of the music school who supported the program from the beginning, it has thrived. "It's probably one of the three or four most difficult curricula in the school academically," he says. "And it has attracted some of the most intelligent and interesting students we have." 'Out of the Closet' Frank L. Maddox, an associate professor of economics at Oxford College of Emory University, is a big guy with a Southern drawl and a short goatee. An avid country two-stepper, he might not seem out of place at a monster-truck rally -- except that he is wearing a sea-green T-shirt emblazoned with a big Sanskrit "Om." Mr. Maddox is sitting with a handful of other professors in a bright and airy classroom at Smith. They've just come in from a "walking meditation," where they clocked a tortoiselike average of 20 steps per minute around the campus quad. Now they are sharing their plans to incorporate contemplation into their students' college experience. "I might have them look at an image of something to do with poverty or globalization," Mr. Maddox says, "then free write, then meditate, then look at the image again, then free write." He pauses. "And then watch all hell break loose with my course evaluations." (In fact, most professors at the seminar who have tried out contemplative exercises in the classroom report overwhelmingly positive reviews from students.) Like many of the professors attending the seminar here, Mr. Maddox has incorporated vaguely contemplative elements into his classes for years, without flagging them as such -- and he certainly didn't trumpet his meditative intentions when he was still an assistant professor. "I did not come out of the closet that much until I was tenured," he says, "and it was a good call." At times, the trepidation that the professors here feel about bringing contemplative practice into their classrooms shades all the way into skepticism and self-doubt. A constant anxiety in group discussions is "the flake factor," as in "we must minimize the flake factor." Aron Shlonsky, an associate professor of social work who recently left Columbia University to teach at the University of Toronto and is a dedicated meditator, makes repeated calls for measurable results. "If we're going to be doing this in the academy," he asks the group, "does this result in better knowing? Does this result in a student doing better on a physics test?" "Remember," he says, "people used to think phrenology was a real thing." Future Plans On the last day of the session, the group of 40 professors gathers in a circle one last time to discuss the future. One of the attendees, David Kahane, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta, in Canada, who only found his way to the session because he spent years doing Google searches for "Zen" and "pedagogy," volunteers to start a Web log so the group can keep trading ideas online. Another attendee proposes a "road show" that would take the session leaders to various campuses across the country. Others hatch plans for meetings on the West Coast. Still others make ardent last-minute suggestions for rhetorical strategies to convince administrators of the worth of contemplation in the classroom. (And sure enough, in the weeks after the August session, the blog will take off, new gatherings will land on the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society's calendar, attendees will set up their own workshops on contemplative pedagogy at their home universities, and one professor -- Fred Curtis, an economist at Drew University -- will deliver his institution's convocation address with a surprise emphasis on mindfulness.) If nothing else, the session confirms that contemplative practice in higher education is an idea on the march -- or at least an idea on a very slow walk. After about an hour of increasingly breathless brainstorming, Mr. Zajonc brings the discussion to a close, ushering everyone back into a final period of silence with the sound of a bell. The air wobbles. The room disappears. Putting the 'Om' in Higher Education The Chronicle of Higher Education: Colloquy Transcript http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/10/meditation/ Wednesday, October 19, at 12 p.m., U.S. Eastern time The topic With fellowships from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and the American Council of Learned Societies, professors in a wide range of disciplines are building meditation into their curricula. Students might participate in "meditation labs," spend time contemplating photographs related to the subject matter, or engage in stream-of-consciousness writing exercises to observe their emotional, intuitive, or physical responses to course material. Proponents say contemplative practice can deepen students' engagement with the subject matter. Recent neuroscientific research suggests that meditation promotes brain activity, leading to greater insights. But critics of the contemplative-practice movement say classroom meditation is watered-down Buddhism, pseudoscience, or simply not worth students' tuition dollars. Is there a place for meditation in the college classroom? If so, what are the most effective ways to incorporate it into the curriculum? Or will meditation always be tainted by the "flake factor"? The guest Arthur Zajonc, a professor of physics at Amherst College, runs the academic program at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a nonprofit organization based in Northampton, Mass., that aims to foster better living -- and better society -- through meditation and yoga. In addition to his work promoting ocontemplative curriculum developmento in higher education for the center, Mr. Zajonc has moderated several meetings between scientists and the Dalai Lama. He has been a visiting professor and researcher at the ?cole Normale Superieure, in Paris, and at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Garching, Germany. _________________________________________________________________ A transcript of the chat follows. _________________________________________________________________ John Gravois (Moderator): Hello, I'm John Gravois, the reporter who wrote this week's piece on Contemplation in Higher Education, and I'll be moderating today's chat. Let's go ahead and get started. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Elizabeth K. Best PhD, Shoah Education Project-Web: All ideas come from or are integrated with other ideas. "Meditation," while mentioned in most world religions, does not even remotely mean the same thing in each. Christian meditation focuses on Christ and the Word of God, Jewish Meditation, on the Torah and other commands, Buddhism and Hinduism have their own brand and I have spoken with TM people whose idea of meditation can involved trained 'dissociative' processes, which while they define spiritually, are found also in premorbid schizophrenia and other psychoses. Do you really think there is a value-less 'meditation'? Over years I have found in secular institutions that Eastern Mysticism and other eastern forms of meditation are almost always the ways the methods you suggest pattern themselves after, and they almost alway include a religious point of view and a fundamental dissociative process. Are physicists, chemists, literature professors, and secular psychologists really capable of teaching or integrating this and handling outcomes, both legal and emotional? I think there are also primary Civil Liberties issues which will disallow most practicing Christian and Jewish students from accessing this troubling part of a course. Arthur Zajonc: Most academics who use contemplative practice as part of their classroom pedagogy teach simple exercises such as stilling the mind, cultivating attention, practicing open awareness, reading slowly and reflectively, listening deeply... These are largely secular practices and have been successful with students at all types of institutions, large and small, public and private. In recent years increasing effort is being made to bring such practices into direct relationship with the course content. For example, when teaching classes on poetry, painting, medicine, ecology, philosophy, and even economics, professors are developing contemplative practices that assist students in establishing deeper and more insightful relationships to the course material itself. I should also say that in some cases, for example in religion departments, the content of the course may be the contemplative dimensions of a religious tradition such as Judaism or Buddhism. In such cases the contemplative methods taught are drawn from the particular tradition under study. Harold Roth at Brown University (Asian Studies and Religion) has taught such a course for several years, and students participate in "lab" sessions during which time the practices being studied formally in class are explored directly and freely. Larry Fine at Mt. Holyoke College is Professor of Jewish Studies, and he also uses contemplative methods in his course on Jewish Spirituality. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Doug Hanvey, Indiana University Bloomington: Are there success stories of instructors who have not only taught meditation as part of an academic class, but who have taught an entire class devoted to contemplative practice (i.e., not just thinking about it or studying it intellectually, but engaging in the practice for its own sake)? (Excepting, of course, physical education or medically-related classes that teach meditation for stress reduction, etc.) Arthur Zajonc: Yes, many of our 100 ACLS Contemplative Practice Fellows do include substantial practice with students. Hal Roth of Brown University offers an entire course with a "lab" component in which contemplative practices are taught. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Doug Hanvey, Indiana University Bloomington: What are the main issues with bringing the teaching of contemplative practices into publicly-funded universities? Arthur Zajonc: Many professors in our network are at state-funded, public universities or secular private universities. We have had much less difficulty with church-state issues than expected. Professors are clear in their course descriptions and syllabus, and always allow students to opt out if they care too (very few do). _________________________________________________________________ Question from Clifford Hill, Columbia University: What does Contemplative Mind in Society see as the most important next steps in strengthening the presence of contemplative practices in higher education? Arthur Zajonc: We see two directions as being especially important for the development of contemplative practices in higher education. The first is to broaden the availablity of such courses both by extending our network of academics and by involving more students in such courses. Our annual conferences and summer workshops, as well as the ACLS fellowship, are our means of doing so. Second, we believe it will be increasingly important to connect the practices with the specific content of the courses themselves. For example architect professor Peter Schneider at the University of Colorado asks student to meditate within different types of architectural spaces and then assigns design problems that rely, in part, on their contemplative experiences. Finally we are finding that academics are forming networks of support at their home institutions or within regions. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Scott Smallwood: You mentioned that few students opt out of such contemplative parts of the class when given a chance. What kind of reactions do students ususally have? Are they supportive? Do professors find that it changes the way students think about them? Or their relationships with the students? Arthur Zajonc: Very few students do opt out, and the vast majority are quite enthusiastic about their experiences. In a survey we made professors report that these courses are their most successful, and they have to limit enrollment. See our webiste www.contemplativemind.org and see The Contemplative Scholar survey of our fellows. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Cynthia Drake, Central Michigan University: Are there plans to research the impact of meditation on student performance? Arthur Zajonc: We are anxious to encourage much more research on the efficacy and benefits of meditation in both student life and in classroom performance. There have been relatively few studies of sufficient scope and methodological sophistication to make a clear scientific statement. Many studies of meditation in clinical settings or lab environments have been done and show quite positive effects. The time has come to extend these studies to this new area of the classroom. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jennifer K. Ruark, The Chronicle: John's article mentioned a few of the contemplative practices -- seated meditation, free writing -- that some professors have incorporated into the classroom. Could you give some more examples? What about long-distance running or fly-fishing as contemplative practices? Arthur Zajonc: There are a host of practices that have been used successfully. At our website www.contemplativemind.org we offer a introduction and description of many of these at the part of the site labelled "About Contemplative Practices." Tobin Hart's article in the site's bibliography is a good general resource as well. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Maya Talisman Frost, mindfulness trainer, Real-World MIndfulness Training: Why the focus on the university level? We know that there are some skills--music, foreign languages--that are more easily learned when we are younger. Why not focus on making mindfulness a part of the kindergarten curriculum? Notice I did not say meditation--as mentioned, this word has different meanings depending upon the individual's interpretation. I wonder why we don't shift toward "mindfulness"--the practice of nonjudgmental awareness. Seems we'd avoid several hurdles at once. In working with several hundred preschoolers (as as the mother of four myself) I know firsthand how powerful--and fun!--mindfulness exercises can be in the eyes of a typical five-year-old. Are college freshmen more likely to respond to teachings about meditation...or less? Arthur Zajonc: We have chosen to focus on higher education, but we are aware of the great interest in meditation in K-12. Others are working on this area. The Mindfulness in Education Network is one such group. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Constance Krosney, Vermont College of Union Institute and University: Would you elaborate on the assertion that contemplative practice deepens students' engagement with subject matter? Do you have evidence of this? Arthur Zajonc: In my own Amherst College course with art historian Joel Upton, we work slowly and reflectively with, for example, a single painting for over an hour. We alternate between lecturing and silent observation and reflection. Students do, in our experience, gradually come to a deeper level of engagement through such methods. We have developed a whole series of exercises and writing assignments that lead them through to such an engagement. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Doug Hanvey, Indiana University Bloomington: Arthur, you suggested in a previous answer that there have been fewer difficulties with church-state issues (i.e., especially in public universities) than expected. This is good to hear, but I sometimes feel that contemplative practices may be so watered down and secularized in order to "sell" them to academia (or medicine, or psychology, etc.) that they may lose their spiritual roots, which I feel is what they are really about. Yet if the spiritual aspects are emphasized, there does seem to be a potential problem with the church-state issue. Have you or others thought about how to redefine or reframe contemplative practices in such a way as to keep the connection with spirituality alive, but to de-emphasize their religious origins? (I am defining spirituality and religion differently here, and I realize that some may disagree.) Do you think this is even possible? Arthur Zajonc: We have focused on two areas of practice. One concerns the basic practices of attention and clarity of mind. The other practices are directed more toward the goal of contemplative inquiry and knowing. These usually raise few church-state issues. We also recognize that many of these practices have their roots in spiritual traditions, and we have granted fellowships to a number of professors studying these traditions, especially in the West where less his known. Of course, this is a large and important issue which many of us have thought about since the program's beginning. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Jennifer K. Ruark, The Chronicle of Higher Education: Meditation -- successfully "quieting" the mind -- takes years of practice, and I imagine is especially challenging for the current generation of college students, people not accustomed to spending time simply sitting in silence. How effective can a single semester's worth of meditative practice really be? Arthur Zajonc: Of course you are right. But we have found that students are grateful for being introduced to contemplative practice. We also support venues other than the classroom for practice, and hope that students will choose to continue to deepen their practice throughout their time at the university, and beyond. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Doug Hanvey, Indiana University Bloomington: Elizabeth Best brings up an interesting point. While I think she misinterprets contemplative practices as being dissociative (authentic contemplative practices are quite the opposite in my experience), certainly emotional challenges can arise when engaging in a contemplative practice. Do you share her concern that professors who may not be thoroughly trained or experienced in meditation may not know how to deal with such challenges in the classroom? Arthur Zajonc: By creating a contemplative space in the classroom, Mary Rose O'Reilley (St. Thomas) and others have found that they are better able to hold and respond to student contributions, even those that come from a deep emotional level. In our experience this has not been a great problem. Students do often seek out closer relationships with their professors as a consequence, which means more time commitment for academics. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Viviane Ephraimson-Abt,Colorado State University: Do you have any examples of meditation and contemplation being incorporated into student life programs beyond health, counseling, or recreation centers, such as residents halls or student leadership programs? Arthur Zajonc: Yes, we know other practice venues are quite widespread but we have not tracked them. _________________________________________________________________ Comment from Suzanne Montgomery College: I think this is a wonderful topic to consider adding to curricula. Arthur Chickering et al. just published a book on authenticity and spirituality in higher education. One of the points in the book is that authenticity cannot happen without real reflection on what we think, who we are, what our lives mean - the essential questions. I think that meditative practices can help students to focus on these issues - to help them develop in all areas of their lives - not just the intellectual. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Frank Forman, U.S. Department of Education: Is meditation, or any school of practice of meditation, a progressive discipline? I do not know of any progress in this field, just techniques that were perfected hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. If not, it doesn't mean medidation is useless, but why no advances? Arthur Zajonc: While many of the practices do indeed come from traditions of the past, many of our fellows are working with their own insight and initiative to develop or modify practices so they suit modern life and the academic context. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Constance Krosney, Vermont College of Union Institute and University: What is your goal for the incorporation of contemplative practice in higher education? Is there something specific you hope will be achieved? Arthur Zajonc: We feel that the academy excels at analytical and critical modes of thinking and writing. While we all fully recognize the importance of these modalities, we feel that they should be balanced by a curriculum that honors and supports a more integrative form of inquiry and insight. I have written on this in a forthcoming article for the Teachers College Record. See our website, Academic Program Report, Love and Knowledge, Recovering the Heart of Learning through Contemplation. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Guy Burneko, The Institute for Contemporary/Ancient Learning (Seattle): Do we know if the brainwave activity of mature contemplatives and meditators is regularly associated with a corresponding chemical signature? It would seem the interdisciplinary intersection of sciences, (chemistries, biologies, psychologies, anthropologies, etc.) and humanities (religious studies, literatures, hermeneutics, political studies, etc.) in the case of researching meditation would allow opportunity for an entirely new curriculum. Morevoer, doesn't it seem such inquiry would be especially suited to our present needs if, as Theodore Roszak has argued, the world population is getting older? What might we learn about the possibilites of human (self) understanding if education, (as Julian Huxley proposed, and Thomas Berry in his way) were reconceived as a significant agent of human evolution? Or do you suppose that is over-thinking the issue? Thanks Arthur Zajonc: Yes, there is now ample research that demonstrates the chemical and neural correlates of meditation. The best known research is that of Richard Davidson of the Keck Lab University of Wisconsin, Madison. Expert meditators have dramatically different prefrontal activity than a standard population. See the Mind and Life website for reseach results and new acitivity in this area. _________________________________________________________________ Comment from Ed Sarath, The University of Michigan: Comment: Someone mentioned the possibility of diluting contemplative disciplines in order to make them suitable for academic contexts. This is a valid concern. Another concern is integrity of practice. One way some of us are dealing with these issues is having students learn meditation at local meditation centers in conjunction with university coursework. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Maya Talisman Frost, Real-World Mindfulness Training: Do you find that most univerisities are more likely to embrace the notion of meditation being incorporated in an academic course (philosophy, religion, art) or are some opting to teach meditation as an activity credit course only? Arthur Zajonc: Nearly all of the courses we know of are academic in character. _________________________________________________________________ Comment from Elizabeth Kirkley Best PhD: I am aware deeply the nature of 'contemplative' practices across religions and those which some deem 'independent'. The truth is however, that some meditative practices do indeed involve a dissociative process: e.g in traditional transcendental meditation there is a process referred to a 'witnessing' [far from the Christian concept] in which one is trained to see oneself as a part of an oversoul or oversoul-like entity, and become a part of that viewing the natural life. Depersonalization phenomena [sometimes called derealization] is a psychological process entirely similar although usually involuntary, and can occur in normals, in intense situations, in drug use and in certain forms of mental illness and is often a 'symptom' of premorbid schizophrenia. It appears to be in the short run in normals a defensive cognitive-emotional reaction and in the long run a disintegration of the personality or self: there are elements of transcendental meditation in which this is literally trained. In Christian and Jewish meditation, there is form and substance to the meditation, i.e. the Scriptures, and not just a divorcing of one part of consciousness or an 'emptying' of self toward no other cause than what is defined as clear thinking. This is theory tainted with religion: it should be in the realm of individual choice outside the classroom in secular universities. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Cori Mar, University of Washington: Do you think that mindfulness meditation is potentially subversive with regards to the values of a consumerist society where more and faster is encouraged? Arthur Zajonc: Ethical issues naturally arise in the context of contemplation. One example is an economist who uses compassion as an important contemplative practice as we consider the distribution of wealth. David Levy (IT, Seattle) is working on contemplation and the speedup associated with our information society. These are but two examples. Alan Klima in teaching Anthopology at Bard explores violence and the media, and uses contemplationto help students deconstruct images of violence. _________________________________________________________________ Question from anonymous Gallaudet U.: Has anyone tried this with deaf education? Arthur Zajonc: Yes, there is an effort to work with deaf students. We have a fellow who is working especially with the disabled. _________________________________________________________________ Arthur Zajonc: Dan Holland at University of Arkansas is the person working with the disabled. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Viviane Ephraimson-Abt,Colorado State University: How important is it that faculty/ staff themselves have a strong contemplative practice as they are introducing it into their settings in classes or student life. Academia, with its competing demands, can make it difficult to build and maintain contemplative practices. In what ways have you seen faculty and administrators strengthen themselves in this area? Arthur Zajonc: While many of our fellows have strong practices of their own, others are inspired by the work to begin or strengthen their practices through retreats and other means. Some do not rely on their own expertise, but rather bring in local meditation or movement teachers. _________________________________________________________________ Question from Judith Simmer-Brown, Naropa University: This is such an important conversation. How do we continue it beyond today? Arthur Zajonc: We agree that this conversation is important for the future development of higher education. Please write to us at info at contemplativemind.org and we will do our best to respond and keep the dialogue going. Thanks for asking... _________________________________________________________________ John Gravois (Moderator): Sadly, we've come to the end of our allotted time. Feel free to take a moment of silence now that the conversation's over, and thanks for joining us. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:29:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:29:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Warped Passages': The Secret Universe Message-ID: 'Warped Passages': The Secret Universe http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/books/review/23folger.html WARPED PASSAGES Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. By Lisa Randall. Illustrated. 500 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95. By TIM FOLGER IN 1900, the British physicist Lord Kelvin assured a gathering of his colleagues, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now." What a difference a century makes. Physicists today are all too aware of the holes in their theories. Lordly smugness isn't an option, not when physicists readily concede that more than 95 percent of the mass of the universe apparently consists of an unknown substance that, lacking any better description, they simply call dark matter. And just a few years ago astronomers discovered that the expansion of the cosmos is accelerating, driven by who knows what. Most vexing of all, physicists know that the two masterpieces of their discipline, quantum mechanics and general relativity, are incompatible and cannot in themselves be the final word on the nature of reality. Lisa Randall's chronicle of physicists' latest efforts to make sense of a universe that gets stranger with every new discovery makes for mind-bending reading. In "Warped Passages," she gives an engaging and remarkably clear account of how the existence of dimensions beyond the familiar three (or four, if you include time) may resolve a host of cosmic quandaries. The discovery of extra dimensions - and Randall believes there's at least a fair chance that evidence for them might be found within the next few years - would utterly transform our view of the universe. Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, writes from the trenches: she's been working on higher-dimensional models of the universe for several years now. Her work is a departure from mainstream physics, in particular from string theory, which has its own take on extra dimensions. According to string theory, the most fundamental constituents of matter and energy are not particles, but infinitesimally small strings and loops that vibrate in 10 dimensions. The extra dimensions, string theorists contend, are so small and tightly curled that they are beyond the reach of any conceivable particle accelerator. Many physicists are willing to overlook the lack of experimental evidence because they believe that string theory will eventually reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs atoms and all other particles, with general relativity, which describes how matter and gravity interact on the very largest scales. Randall, though, argues that without any experimental feedback, string theorists may never reach their goal. She prefers a different strategy, called model building. Rather than seeking to create an all-encompassing theory, she develops models - mini-theories that target specific testable problems and that might then point the way to a more general theory. The models that Randall and her collaborator Raman Sundrum have been building may explain one of the greatest mysteries in physics: why is gravity so weak compared with the other forces in the universe? Gravity's weakness may not seem obvious, but as Randall writes, "A tiny magnet can lift a paper clip, even though all the mass of the earth is pulling it in the opposite direction." The electromagnetic force is a trillion trillion trillion times as powerful as gravity. To account for gravity's feebleness, Randall and Sundrum borrow some ideas from string theory but add their own twist. What if, they ask, higher dimensions are not small and curled up but large, perhaps infinite in size? Would there be any observable consequences? So they build models of what the universe might look like if it consisted of objects called branes (short for "membranes"). Branes, a creation of string theory, are surfaces that exist in higher-dimensional space. In Randall and Sundrum's various models, our universe is a four-dimensional brane (three dimensions of space and one of time) that exists on the surface of a five-dimensional space, much as a two-dimensional layer of water covers a three-dimensional sea. Their models, it turns out, produce a weakened gravitational force. But most important, they predict the existence of particles that may be detectable when a giant new particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, under construction near Geneva, begins smashing protons together in 2007. The expectation is that the collider will discover a group of new particles, and perhaps even miniature black holes. If Randall and Sundrum's predictions pan out, and the existence of extra dimensions is confirmed, it would be one of the biggest advances in physics in decades. To set the stage for all this, Randall has to recap nearly a century of physics, which she accomplishes with extraordinary clarity. Her explanation of the uncertainty principle, a central tenet of quantum mechanics, is the best I have ever read. Along the way she includes some surprising historical sidelights. Dal?'s "Crucifixion," she points out, depicts a four-dimensional cube. The full lyrics of "As Time Goes By" include a reference to Einstein and the fourth dimension. Einstein's calculus teacher, Hermann Minkowski, called his most famous pupil a "lazy dog." And Randall's perspective as a woman in a field where men hold 90 percent of all faculty positions makes for some wry comments. I doubt it would occur to most physicists to observe, "If, however, you lived inside a black hole, your travel opportunities would be far more severely constrained, more restricted even than those of women in Saudi Arabia." Some of her devices are a bit silly - for example, she opens each chapter with the adventures of time-and-interbranal-traveling characters named Athena and Ike Rushmore. Perhaps it's an occupational hazard: physicists who write for the general public often seem not to trust their own material. But a little silliness in a book that's freighted with discussions of gauge bosons, supersymmetry and D-branes is not necessarily a bad thing. In any case, none of her words are sillier than Lord Kelvin's. Tim Folger is a contributing editor at Discover magazine and the series editor for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," an annual anthology. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:29:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:29:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: This Man Wants to Bury You (and follow ups) Message-ID: This Man Wants to Bury You http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00612FE3B5F0C728CDDA10894DB494D81 [Times Select is fabulous! I found this article when going through my filing cabinet and then searched for more articles on the mortician. Undertakers do a great deal of sitting on local boards (art museum, charity, and so on) to act as good citizens (and to have local regulators not examine them too closely). As the final article shows, Mr. Waltrip has done quite well for himself indeed and his Service Corporation International was a heavy contributor at the national level to Bush's campaign. [So lobbying by the funeral business has indeed gone national. I don't how coffin makers split their contributions generally between Democrats and Republicans. I do know that trial lawyers and university professors give nearly all their money to Democrats. [And so there can be national movements to counteract the effects of national lobbying, even for such a local business as disposing of the dead. Indeed, one motive behind the No Child Left Behind Act was for the Federal government to counteract nation-wide lobbying of the teachers' unions. So also with tort reform, which got stalled in Congress. NCLB succeeded only because it promised more money, though sanctions will kick in starting 2013/14. [Mr. Mencken would have greatly appreciated knowing about this, not only because he had an interest in the matter of death but for its political ramifications.] FINANCIAL DESK By ALLEN R. MYERSON (NYT) 2869 words Published: August 1, 1993 Off in this city's industrial wasteland sits an unmarked building of corrugated steel, perpetually locked. Now and then, a wide door rises, a black Chevrolet Suburban truck backs in, and a whiff of formaldehyde escapes before the entry clanks shut. Here, 15 times a day, more than 5,000 times a year, the residents of Houston come to be embalmed. In any other business, Service Corporation International would call this site its regional processing and distribution center. Remains flow in from households and hospitals around the city, in trucks large enough for two cots. Twin walk-in coolers accommodate the center's backlog. Once embalmed -- or prepped, as they say -- the remains are delivered to the company's 15 funeral homes in the Houston area. By then, the dispatch desk at the central garage, with 13 hearses and 10 limousines, has assigned a funeral driver. On his way to the car, he takes the appropriate steel nameplates from a pegboard. Possibly a cursive "Waltrip" for a morning run to that funeral home, a bold "Geo. H. Lewis & Sons" in capital letters for the afternoon, one replacing the other in a slot on a side window. On the job, he identifies himself as an employee of one home or the other. As far as the mourners ever know, they are dealing with a local funeral home as personal, familiar and unchanging as the neighborhood church. In fact, they are dealing with the world's largest funeral home and cemetery chain by far. Approaching $1 billion in annual sales, S.C.I. handles 1 in every 11 funerals nationally at its 662 homes in 39 states. Manhattan's venerable Frank E. Campbell and Riverside Memorial chapels are among its 35 homes in the New York area. S.C.I. also owns 62 crematories, 44 flower shops and 174 cemeteries, providing deathbed-to-grave service. Of the nation's 21,000 homes it doesn't yet own, S.C.I. has its eye on more than 4,000. The company has dozens of homes in Canada, and the purchase of Australia's largest chain won official approval last month. Candidates for the company's next foreign invasion include Britain, France, Mexico, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Cluster Approach Guided by Robert L. Waltrip, its founder, chairman and chief executive, S.C.I. has quietly revolutionized funeral merchandising and production. The company assembles groups of homes with deep local roots in demographically correct turf. It then introduces centralized purchasing, training, finance, transportation and embalming to an extent the industry has never before known. At independent funeral homes, employees and hearses usually sit idle, waiting for the call. S.C.I., clustering from 2 to 51 homes in a region, keeps staff and equipment consistently busy. The company has also built scores of funeral homes on its cemeteries, erasing the line that long separated the funeral director's staid persuasion from the plot salesman's real estate hucksterism. S.C.I.'s growth has brought opposition from proudly independent funeral homes and consumer groups that want the company to share the savings from its efficiencies. The company, publicly traded, achieved a pretax profit margin of 18 percent in 1992, at least half again as much as the industry average -- enough to give Mr. Waltrip $4 million in compensation. S.C.I. has succeeded by standing the chain concept -- perfected by restaurants, retailers and hotels -- on its head. Instead of using a common name to vouch for consistency, its funeral homes keep the local names that promise distinction. A hamburger chain has much the simpler task. The same relentless efficiencies, the same standardization that have won the chains so many hungry, hurried customers, would, if presented so baldly, offend most patrons of a funeral home. Almost nobody wants a McFuneral. Least of all in New York City, a nation of ethnic and economic enclaves, each with its own funeral homes. Nowhere else is S.C.I.'s invisibility more visible. Under their own names, Campbell, the leading chiefly Christian home, on Manhattan's East Side, and Riverside, the leading Jewish home, on the West Side, proclaim their identities in bold lettering on sidewalk canopies and awnings. Plaques inside preserve the memory of their founders. Those carried through Campbell's doors have included Rudolph Valentino, Frank Costello, Judy Garland, John Lennon and Malcolm Forbes. Through Riverside's, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leonard Bernstein. At each home, Service Corporation International stays as anonymous as its very name. The only fleeting signs of its presence are fingernail-size lapel pins, with the company's linked initials, worn by regional executives. The company's New York operations have centralized purchasing, marketing and hearse service, but not embalming. The traffic's too bad. Scratching the Surface Most S.C.I. executives -- even the vice president who has managed a McDonald's and toured Burger U. -- resist comparisons to mass marketers. But not Mr. Waltrip. Now 62, he started out 40 years ago with a single funeral home inherited from his family in Houston. "The hamburger business used to be solely a Mom-and-Pop hamburger stand," he said, in the slow drawl of someone who knew that the other executives gathered around to talk strategy would hear him out, even when he sounded like a country music tape played at half-speed. "You used to sit down at the table. Mom would serve it to you. Dad's back there cooking it. Now you go to McDonald's or Burger King and everybody's in a uniform. All the cooking is computerized and all the order-taking is computerized. They're all trained to say the same things to you. "There is nothing amazing about trying to bring that to an industry that never had that before. And 90 percent still don't have it. But we have just started to scratch the surface." To plan acquisitions or new homes, executives consult with the team in the demographic room. There, an NEC Multisync 4FG computer monitor displays neighborhood-by-neighborhood data on incomes, shopping preferences, ethnic groups, religion and age. And, most important, actual and predicted death rates. Once the company has targeted an area, it tries to buy the premier home. Its acquisitions tend to come with client families (known as repeat customers) who have been delivering up their members for generations. Often, the owners of the home initiate the talks. But even when they don't, S.C.I.'s starting approach is always friendly, especially since the same clans have often owned these homes since their founding. "We try to be very, very diplomatic," said W. Blair Waltrip, the chairman's son and an executive vice president. He has a finance degree, not a funeral director's license, and the ways of a Wall Street merger baron. The younger Waltrip's first visit to a funeral home owner can seem like a mission of compassion -- for the complications of passing the business on to children, the cost of complying with regulations and all the other work, work, work. If, by the end of a second visit, the funeral director shows no desire to have S.C.I. lighten the burdens, then Mr. Waltrip might mention that he has also called on that home's leading competitor. Still no luck? "On the third contact we tell them we have property zoned and we are seriously considering building a funeral home," Blair Waltrip said. That might be on a cemetery that S.C.I. already owns, giving the new home a claim on everyone who has a plot. Targeting elderly plotholders has helped the company gather contracts for $1.3 billion in funeral arrangements, provoking rivals to demand tighter regulations. "Not that we are competing with you," Blair Waltrip continued, as if addressing a funeral home owner who was being unreasonable. "But we are interested in expanding." Sometimes, he explained, "that will motivate somebody to think more seriously about becoming affiliated with our company." After the acquisition comes the makeover. For $25,000, S.C.I. can install new carpeting, lighting, furniture and wallpaper, buying most items in bulk from manufacturers. The former owners, or their children and assistants, are usually asked to stick around, most often as managers but sometimes merely to maintain ties to churches and clubs. The new owners find ways to raise the average sale at least 5 percent, usually more. Major credit cards are accepted (and S.C.I. is thinking about issuing its own). The company also takes special care to freshen up the casket room, with market research and casket fashions coming into play. "It's getting to be more and more of a science," said John J. Roefaro, S.C.I.'s marketing chief for the New York region, as the sun penetrating his office at the Campbell home glinted off his chunky gold jewelry. Funeral homes make their biggest money on caskets, industry analysts say. They typically mark them up two-and-a-half to three times, figures that S.C.I. does not dispute. In training sessions, with employees playing the roles of funeral directors and customers, Mr. Roefaro recommends the understated approach. "I do not want anyone to feel this is a high-pressure sales organization," he said. "We're not selling autos." He strode into Campbell's selection room -- or, rather, rooms -- to demonstrate S.C.I.'s state of the art. "If there were no financial concerns raised, the funeral director would begin here," he said, halting at the entrance. On a wide carpeted ledge encircling the room was a procession of rare and antique caskets. Under stage-quality track lighting, not the slightest dust speck or scratch darkened their sheen. The Top of the Line For $85,000, a family could choose a seamless, cast bronze model from 1929, with a glass dome to keep viewers from making their farewells too personal. "We search the country for these," Mr. Roefaro said. He lingered. Then, shifting into a side room, he said that mahogany, the most popular finish for Campbell's clientele, could go as low as $6,295. "There is less wood used in the construction," he said with a shrug in the lower-cost casket's direction. "A very, very basic design. It's not as massive," he added, as a $13,700 mahogany casket nearby began to pull him away. That extra expense brings beefy cornices, a gracefully sculpted lid and Mr. Roefaro's full respect. "Much more massive, a lot more," he said, his voice dropping several notes. Lesser woods are crowded into a back room, on skeletal, wheeled bases. A birch casket with no railings, just notches in the side, for $5,295. Or poplar, at $2,995. With bronze hardware, however flimsy? "Probably not, probably just made to look that way," he said. "Probably steel." In the farthest corner sat a narrow, boxy casket in a grayish blue embossed fabric. Mr. Roefaro let a sign in the coffin do the talking. "Cloth Covered Flakeboard," it said. "Non-protective. $1,295." S.C.I. executives are discussing new ways to lure poorer families. "We want to have a Macy's type of operation, but we want to have a Wal-Mart too," Robert Waltrip said. His son suggests that S.C.I. could build some large, new homes that would advertise their prices, perhaps as low as $1,795 complete. Once inside the homes, customers would learn the virtues of a $4,000 funeral, the industry's average. "Pricing or advertising is basically a means to get people to come to our facility," Blair Waltrip said, adding that he is testing this approach in St. Louis. "Then by explaining the options, more times than not they buy up to our current average." Industry Opposition Regulators say that S.C.I. has scrupulously complied with price disclosure and worker safety codes. The company has settled two antitrust cases by selling several homes. Now it is fighting a proposed Federal Trade Commission rule banning funeral homes from charging handling fees that virtually prohibit customers from buying caskets elsewhere. S.C.I.'s growth has aroused the strongest opposition from rival chains and the independent homes that dominate the trade groups. Robert Waltrip, feeling slighted by the National Funeral Directors Association, halted company dues payments for several months last year. Critics, at the American Association of Retired Persons and even within the industry, say that the funeral buyer should see some of S.C.I.'s savings. "Who should benefit?" said John Eirkson, executive director of the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association. "The stockholder or the consumer?" Mr. Eirkson derides S.C.I. as "a multinational conglomerate," noting that state laws have kept the company from buying more than a single home in his state and others ("That's a shame."). In the next breath, however, he mentions owning a few hundred shares of S.C.I. himself. Rival chains are raising S.C.I.'s costs, adding to its already heavy debts, by bidding up funeral home prices. Executives of the Loewen Group, based near Vancouver but the second-largest owner of homes in the United States, boast that funeral directors fearing heavy-handed interlopers often sell to them. But S.C.I. is still more than twice Loewen's size. Robert Waltrip says that his company even owns Vancouver's prime funeral homes and cemeteries, burying the competition, or at least the competition's family, at one of its sites. With him, nobody else's graveyard will ever have a chance. Just inside the entrance to S.C.I.'s Memorial Oaks Cemetery in Houston lies a low brick wall. In the center, a bronze plaque says "Waltrip." All his funeral arrangements are made and paid for. A GUARANTEED CUSTOMER BASE PUBLICLY traded since 1969, Service Corporation International remains a lot like the small family businesses it so voraciously buys. W. Blair Waltrip, an executive vice president and the 39-year-old son of the company's founder, is the very apparent heir. He grew up next to a funeral home, used the parking lot as his playground and pursued his career in the family business. "He's never done but one job since he got out of college," grinned his father, Robert, who has no plans for retiring. Robert Waltrip's son-in-law runs an investment management unit. His mother, a director emeritus, receives all the rewards of a current director, amounting to $42,000 and 1,500 S.C.I. shares last year. To memorialize the living and the dead, Mr. Waltrip last year opened the tax-exempt American Funeral Service Museum in Houston. The Funerals of the Famous gallery has evidence, from an S.C.I. home in Memphis, that Elvis is dead. The several funerary settings include a 1920's embalming room, complete with shelves of colorful fluids, among them Decker Laboratories Blood Solvent in yellow and Pierce VX Cavity Chemical in orange. Behind a bronze bust of Robert Waltrip in the entrance hall, a chiseled inscription hails "his monumental and ongoing contributions to defining the funeral service industry." Admission $5, or $3 for children under 12 and adults over 54. Mr. Waltrip, however, had to bring in an outsider a few years ago to salvage his business. To become fully integrated, S.C.I. had bought or developed funeral insurance and casket companies. Insurance proved to be unfamiliar, and casket sales floundered because few funeral directors would order from a competitor. L. William Heiligbrot, who, as a brave Texas Commerce banker, had extended S.C.I. its first loan, became S.C.I.'s president in 1990. He unloaded the faltering businesses and dozens of small, isolated funeral homes. Even now, when Blair or Robert Waltrip trot out lofty goals for earnings growth or foreign empire-building, Mr. Heiligbrot hedges and cautions. Mr. Heiligbrot is very much a part of the S.C.I. team, a burly, former college football player like the chairman. In pay, he has become a part of the family as well, with compensation of more than $3 million last year. The elder Waltrip received more than $4 million -- an amount pegged to the company's size and performance, he said -- and his son, $1.6 million. Other advantages of S.C.I. family life include the Gulfstream III jet. For business trips, the jet sometimes swings by to pick up Mr. Waltrip from his 40,000-acre Colorado ranch, twice the size of Manhattan. Since the turnaround, the S.C.I. clan has earned its keep, many analysts say. Profits since 1988 have risen nearly four-fold to $86 million last year, and to $52 million for the first half of this year. But woe to anyone who would question how S.C.I. keeps its books. Early this year, after Ernst & Young balked at the accounting for advance sales of funeral services, S.C.I. turned to a more cooperative Coopers & Lybrand. Coopers had no comment but Mr. Waltrip did: "I still don't understand why Ernst & Young got their nose out of joint, with the exception of the fact that they were not rehired." The accounting flap caused just a momentary pause in the advance of S.C.I. stock from a low of $8.50 in 1989 to $23.825 on Friday, just off its $24 high. Mr. Waltrip is never shy about flogging his shares, or anything else. "People that don't buy our stock just don't like money," he said, shaking his head in wonderment. "It's the greatest buy I've ever seen. People are always going to die." Photos: Robert L. Waltrip in his company's mausoleum at the Memorial Oaks Cemetery in Houston. Workers at upper left are adding vaults. (F. Carter Smith for The New York Times) (pg. 1); Tools of the trade at American Funeral Service Museum. (Service Corporation International) (pg. 6) Graph/Map/Chart: Graph -- "The Invisible Giant in Funerals," tracks Service Corporation International cemeteries and funeral homes, 1983-July 15, 1993; Map of U.S. indicating number range of Service Corporation International funeral homes, by state; Chart -- lists Service Corporation International funeral homes in the New York City area, in New Jersey and in Connecticut (Source: Company reports) (pg. 6) Largest U.S. Funeral Chain to Acquire Europe's Biggest, in France http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60617FD3A540C728DDDAE0894DD494D81 BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK By ALLEN R. MYERSON (NYT) 453 words Published: July 11, 1995 Service Corporation Inc., the world's largest chain of funeral homes and cemeteries, announced an agreement yesterday to buy Europe's largest funeral business, based in France, for $423 million. The purchase would accelerate Service Corporation's conquest of a region where, last year, it agreed to buy the two largest publicly held funeral companies in Britain. In agreeing to buy the funeral operations of Lyonnaise des Eaux of France, Service Corporation is betting on potential, not current performance. It would hope to raise the business's current operating profit margin, a thin 7 percent before taxes, closer to its own 30 percent-plus by increasing efficiency, taking advantage of deregulation and persuading the French to spend more on funerals. Service Corporation, based in Houston, has assembled a chain of 1,561 funeral homes and 245 cemeteries by centralizing operations while leaving customers with the impression that each home is still locally managed and traditionally run. The Lyonnais des Eaux operations include 950 funeral homes in France, with others in Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Singapore. "The completion of this significant transaction will represent a substantial step in S.C.I.'s global growth plan," Robert L. Waltrip, Service Corporation's chief executive, said in a prepared statement. "We believe this new area of operations will open doors of opportunity in France and eventually throughout Europe." Lyonnaise des Eaux is a utility conglomerate that holds about 30 percent of the French funeral market, largely under contracts with French cities. Service Corporation executives count on deregulation to bring growth opportunities and the ability to charge higher prices. The French spend an average of $2,300 for a funeral, compared with $4,000 in the United States. Service Corporation said the acquisition would slightly improve per-share profit this year. But Susan R. Little, an analyst at Raymond James, noted the company would probably have to issue more shares to finance the purchase, and that most of the benefits would come only in the longer run. "But even with additional equity," she said, "the acquisition will be additive." The purchase is subject to the approval of French regulators and the ability of Service Corporation's offer to attract two-thirds of the funeral business's shares -- the 51 percent owned by Lyonnais des Eaux and the rest from other investors. The Lyonnais des Eaux's funeral business is a separate, publicly traded company -- the Omnium de Gestion et de Financement S.A., which in turn owns 65 percent of another funeral business, Pompes Funebres Generales S.A. Service Corporation would acquire both. Funeral Industry Leaders Clash Over an Unwelcome Bid http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00914FE3E580C748EDDA00894DE494D81 BUSINESS/FINANCIAL DESK By ALLEN R. MYERSON (NYT) 1981 words Published: September 27, 1996 Only in the funeral home industry or perhaps the pro wrestling arena -- could someone like Ray L. Loewen reasonably claim the role of Mr. Nice Guy. The founder, chairman and chief executive of Loewen Group -- the world's second-biggest funeral home chain, based here in the Vancouver suburbs -- boasts that when he took command of his family's mortuary in rural Manitoba 35 years ago, he immediately ousted his two brothers. Last year, a Mississippi jury, outraged at what was described as his company's campaign to drive a fifth-generation undertaker out of business, ordered Loewen Group to pay the local man hundreds of millions of dollars. But now it is Mr. Loewen who is on the defensive, fending off the advances of the Service Corporation International, a funeral home giant three times as large. At stake for Loewen is its independence. At stake for Service Corporation, known as S.C.I., is unchallenged leadership in making the American way of death as coolly efficient as the marketing of fast food. S.C.I's $3.1 billion takeover bid for Loewen, initiated on Sept. 17, caps a long, predatory struggle between two companies intent on turning a fragmented ma-and-pa business into a centralized fount of profits. For Robert L. Waltrip and L. William Heiligbrodt, the Texans who run S.C.I. from ornate Houston offices stuffed with bronze cowboys and Indians, buying out Mr. Loewen and his company could, analysts say, clear the largest obstacle toward more acquisitions at more affordable prices. But Mr. Loewen is digging his heels into the moist earth under the pine, apple and plum trees shading his headquarters. For him, selling out would mean giving up his dream of someday surpassing his larger rival. Though executives on both sides say the right things about synergies and shareholder value, their clash is also intensely personal. Almost every time leaders of the two companies have met over the last decade, they parted even greater antagonists than before. ''It is clear that our competitors out of Texas do not like competition,'' a shirt-sleeved Mr. Loewen said, with the booming delivery that once helped him win a seat in his province's legislature. ''They have been after us for 10 years.'' Mr. Waltrip, S.C.I.'s chief executive, formal as always in undertaker's navy at his own headquarters a few days later, said plenty of other competitors would remain if he acquired Loewen. ''This transaction has nothing to do with who is the sweetest and nicest personality,'' he said, in the laconic manner he might use to address the hands at his 40,000-acre ranch in Colorado. ''This has to do with value for our shareholders and the Loewen shareholders.'' Not that years of feuding would necessarily prevent a deal. Mr. Loewen controls about 15 percent of his company's shares, worth nearly a half-billion dollars at S.C.I.'s offer. Although Canadian law requires hostile bids to win 75 percent, shareholder pressure has driven the most resolute chiefs to the bargaining table. Analysts say the odds of a sale are roughly even. ''I don't think this is the end by any means,'' Susan R. Little of Raymond James & Associates said yesterday. S.C.I. executives say they will persist despite the refusal of Loewen's board this week to even negotiate. Two years ago, they note, their hostile bid for one of Britain's largest funeral home chains succeeded despite one family's majority control. The feuds, the efficiency drives -- in fact, the companies themselves -- have largely been invisible to everyone but investors. At the 3,310 funeral homes, crematoriums and cemeteries that S.C.I. has assembled, and at Loewen's 1,189 locations, mourners see the old familiar business names and premises. Consumer advocates say that the savings generated by the companies' purchasing power and centralized controls are seldom passed on to customers. Figures from some cities suggest that Loewen charges more for funerals than the national average of $4,624 and that S.C.I. charges still more -- findings the two companies dispute. S.C.I. often serves wealthy neighborhoods; Loewen says it aims for competitive costs and superior quality. In New York, Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco is conducting an antitrust inquiry into S.C.I.'s ownership of funeral homes, especially Jewish homes, in New York City, Marc Carey, his spokesman, said. The company says it has no antitrust or other legal problems there. S.C.I. says acquisition of Loewen would meet antitrust rules with the disposal of only a few homes. But Karen Leonard, consumer representative for the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, sees a monopoly in the making. ''This would be the equivalent to Pepsi and Coca-Cola merging,'' she said. As separate as their courses have been, the companies have similar origins. Mr. Loewen, 56, assumed control of his ailing father's funeral home in Steinbach, Manitoba, in 1961. One brother refused to get a haircut and another always wanted to borrow the station wagon that served as the hearse, so Mr. Loewen bid them goodbye. A Bible college graduate, he still often adopts a high moral tone. ''We aren't the oldest profession,'' Mr. Loewen said in an interview here, ''but we are the most honorable.'' Mr. Waltrip, 65, began managing his family's funeral home in Houston in 1952. He soon started buying other homes, favoring local market leaders, like Manhattan's venerable Frank E. Campbell and Riverside Memorial chapels. Gradually, he learned to apply relentless efficiencies -- hearse pools and even regional embalming centers -- while leaving the homes' identities intact. ''I was the first one who did this,'' Mr. Waltrip said. ''Mr. Loewen was way after.'' By the 1970's, the company's reach extended to Canada. But as Mr. Waltrip bought homes in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and later in Vancouver, Mr. Loewen was taken aback by what he saw as the Texans' heavy-handed management. ''We determined to design a culture and a company that would be dramatically opposed to their modus operandi,'' Mr. Loewen said. Mr. Loewen and his aides court the owners of funeral homes or smaller chains, largely in rural areas, by discussing ''succession planning,'' not acquisitions. In their pitches, the bogyman is often a drawling executive from Houston who promises the owners that they can keep their jobs, then dismisses ma, pa and the kids the day after closing. Inevitably, the two executives would find themselves at the same meetings and conventions. Mr. Waltrip often quarreled with industry groups that he said refused to give his company voting rights in proportion to its size and dues. Mr. Loewen decided that anyone fighting with Mr. Waltrip -- ''Bobbie,'' he calls him, as if referring to a wayward teen-ager -- was his friend. By the late 1980's, Service Corporation was staggering under the weight of other acquisitions, including coffin and insurance operations. Mr. Loewen saw his chance. ''I thought it was an opportune time to buy their Canadian properties and help them with their losses,'' he recalled. He met his counterpart in a conference room at Denver's airport. According to Mr. Waltrip, the meeting quickly ended when he named a price that provoked Mr. Loewen to indignantly leave the room. Other encounters were worse. A few years ago, when Mr. Waltrip was visiting Vancouver, Mr. Loewen invited him aboard his 55-foot Hatteras yacht. Only minutes out, before Mr. Loewen's select Alberta steaks had even begun sizzling, Mr. Waltrip demanded to be taken back to port. ''When you're captive on a boat and somebody insults you, you can't get up and walk away unless you want to get your feet wet,'' Mr. Waltrip said. Last year, when Mr., Loewen spotted an executive who was leaving his company having a snack at a hotel with Mr. Waltrip's son, an S.C.I. manager, Mr. Loewen obtained a court order barring the executive from further contact with S.C.I. Until now, the strongest resistance to Service Corporation's advances have come in Europe. In 1994, S.C.I. made a hostile offer for Great Southern Group, one of Britain's largest funeral home chains. The S.C.I. executives had skin as thick as the longhorn hides on Mr. Heiligbrodt's parquet office floor. ''They said some horrible things over there,'' Mr. Waltrip recalled, with a nod that gave Mr. Heiligbrodt, sitting nearby, his cue. ''They called us cowboys,'' Mr. Heiligbrodt, the company president, said. In the end, Great Southern agreed to sell, although Loewen Group tried to block the deal. In raw growth, S.C.I. has outdistanced Loewen, and its shares consistently beat stock market averages. But until late last year, Wall Street was more impressed by Loewen Group's earnings growth, awarding its shares a higher earnings multiple. Last September, Mr. Loewen threw a party at headquarters to celebrate his stock's rise to 20 times its 1987 offering price. No rival could even think of taking Loewen over at such a level. But two months later, the Mississippi jury verdict drove the Loewen Group to the brink of bankruptcy. A lawyer representing an Ocean Springs funeral home owner laid out a tale of how Loewen tried to monopolize local markets, drive out competitors and then raise prices, sometimes marking up coffins to triple their wholesale cost. In a case Mr. Loewen could have settled for a few million dollars, the jury delivered a $500 million judgment, including $400 million in punitive damages. The foreman described Mr. Loewen as ''a rich, dumb Canadian politician who thought he could come down and pull the wool over the eyes of a good ol' Mississippi boy.'' In the following weeks, Loewen Group's stock fell about 20 points, losing half its value. In January, a $175 million settlement staved off bankruptcy. But now S.C.I. saw its chance. On Sept. 11, Mr. Heiligbrodt began leaving messages at Mr. Loewen's office. He never heard back. ''I have more important things to do than to talk to my competitor every day,'' Mr. Loewen explained. On Sept. 17, with Loewen's stock rising on rumors, Mr. Heiligbrodt put his offer into a letter to Mr. Loewen that was released to the public. As it plots its defenses, Loewen is missing no opportunities to show that it can get along fine without Texan owners. Last week it agreed to buy the Rose Hills cemetery and funeral home near Los Angeles, the world's largest, for $277 million. Rose Hills employees, for their part, were watching what they said just in case they found themselves working not for Loewen but for S.C.I. As Michael A. Rogers, a funeral arrangements counselor, put it, ''I don't want to burn my bridges yet.'' Chart/Photos: ''Hardball on Hallow Grounds'' Service Corporation International, the worlds largest funeral home chain, owns the Memorial Oaks cemetary in Houston, where the company is based. LOEWEN GROUP HEADQUARTERS Burnaby, British Columbia CHIEF EXECUTIVE Ray L. Loewen, right ON S.C.I. ''It is clear that our competitors out of Texas do no like competition.'' SERVICE CORPORATION INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS Houston CHIEF EXECUTIVE RObert L. Waltrip, left ON LOEWEN ''This transaction has nothing to do with who is the sweetest and nicest personality. This has to do with value for our shareholders and the Loewen shareholders.'' Chart/Map shows the states where combined S.C.I-Loewen share of funeral homes would be 10%-20% and more than 20%. (Sources: Raymond James & Associates, Dun & Bradstreet) (pg. D1) Chart: ''Gold Plated'' The top two funeral chains aim at the high-end of the market. Surveys show that S.C.I. and Loewen Group provide the most expensive funeral services in several cities. (Sources: Interfaith Funeral Information Committee (Houston), Center for the Study of Services/Consumers Checkbook Magazine (San Francisco, Washington), local funeral homes) (pg. D1) Chart: ''The Comapnies at a Glance'' S.C.I. and Loewen are the two biggest funeral services companies in the United States, with a combined 15 percent of the market based on 1995 sales. Here are how the companies stack up. (Sources: Bloomberg Financial Markets, company reports) (pg. D4) Religion Journal; A Crab-Shaped Coffin? Funeral Museum Showcases Unusual Sendoff http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00B12FB345D0C778EDDA80894DC40 METROPOLITAN DESK By MAREK FUCHS (NYT) 946 words Published: January 24, 2004 >From Mass cards under glass to a cross-shaped coffin that was popular among undertakers in the 1800's because it had ample shoulder room, the National Museum of Funeral History, on Barren Springs Drive here, offers a wide survey of funeral articles in 20,000 square feet. There is a hearse with carved-wood window coverings, a Victorian-era mourning tableau complete with kneeler and foldable organ set to play ''In the Garden'' and an exhibit on Dr. Thomas Holmes, an embalming innovator in the Civil War who also, the display says, had quite a good hand at making root beer. Robert M. Boetticher is vice chairman and president of the museum, 20 minutes from George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Mr. Boetticher spent 40 years as a funeral director, starting when a natural fascination led him to spend time at a mortuary as a teenager. The mortuary eventually offered him work. When work began on the museum more than 10 years ago, Mr. Boetticher, similarly fascinated with the prospect of a central location for the display of so much funeral history, began to hang out at the museum and was again offered a position. ''Funerals are just so unpredictable,'' said Mr. Boetticher, walking between an exhibit on Egyptian mummification, which features a reproduction of King Tut's sarcophagus and an elongated hearse that caused a corpse several thousand years later to have a slightly less regal afterlife. Created to replace cumbersome and long-winding church-to-burial funeral processions, the 1916 Packard funeral bus, one of two dozen hearses in the museum's collection, was made by the Fifth Avenue Coach Company. Mounted on a truck chassis, the hearse-bus could fit almost two dozen mourners and pallbearers, not to mention the corpse. While climbing a San Francisco hill, however, the bus tipped backward, sending the mourners and coffin tumbling atop each other. That was the bus's last run from church to grave site. It served the next 40 years at a standstill, as the home of a California ranch hand. Most of the items in the museumwere donated by collectors and funeral homes, and Mr. Boetticher is constantly searching for castoffs in antiques stores, on e-Bay and through his connections in the field. The museum was started by Robert L. Waltrip, the founder and chairman of Service Corporation International, a national funeral, cremation and cemetery company. The museum, operated separately from the company, is a nonprofit with an annual budget of $200,000 and is connected physically but not financially to the Commonwealth Institute of Funeral Service, a college of mortuary science popularly known as Undertaker University. Aside from the physical trappings of funerals, one of Mr. Boetticher's biggest fascinations is the interplay between the consistency of religious funeral rites over the years and the comparatively faddish nature of the more secular customs surrounding death. ''The religion portion of funerals hasn't changed,'' Mr. Boetticher said. ''It's the everything before and afterward that has.'' A central current display is that of colorful and playfully ornate coffins designed by a Ghanaian sculptor named Kane Quaye, which resulted in tension between church authorities and families of the deceased, the exhibit says. The fanciful coffins are built in the form of everything from a crab to a Mercedes-Benz. They can cost a year's salary in Ghana and are designed to honor the dead by capturing the spirit of the person's life. A fisherman might be buried in a coffin shaped like a crab, a canoe or a lobster, someone powerful in a coffin resembling a leopard and a mother in one that looks like a hen. While the packaging of bodies in status symbols for eternity has caused debate between church members over Kane Quaye's ''fantasy coffins,'' such discussion is not limited to Ghana and colorful coffins, said Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, the general director of institutional advancement at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who also worked for six years at Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan. But such discussions, he said, most often end in the favor of the mourner. A funeral, unlike a wedding, has little lead time, so there is less room for a cleric to weigh in, he said, adding that the influence of funeral homes, which cater to many denominations, also breeds flexibility. Most importantly, said Rabbi Kirshner, the sensitivities involved in death usually lead to a wide berth for mourners, as long as it does not conflict with the letter of religious law. Rabbi Kirshner said that while Jews are frequently buried in plain wooden coffins, he recently presided at the funeral of a young boy whose schoolmates colored and drew on the coffin as if it were a cast -- something that seemed the most fitting tribute. Though the museum attracts its share of senior citizen and school groups, plus the occasional Goth, on a recent weekday a group of Japanese tourists wound their way around along with two sisters, Karen Solomon of Millburn, N.J., and Jill Cunningham of Houston. The sisters were milling about in the celebrity funeral section, where there was information on where and how notables were buried, like the football coach Vince Lombardi. He was first mourned by 2,000 at an ecumenical service in Green Bay then, a day later, by 3,000 at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, before a long funeral procession took his coffin to a gentle slope in Red Bank, N.J. STORM AND CRISIS: THE OVERVIEW; Owners of Nursing Home Charged in Deaths of 34 http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20F14FB3A550C778DDDA00894DD404482 NATIONAL DESK By SHAILA DEWAN AND AL BAKER; WILLIAM YARDLEY CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM NEW ORLEANS FOR THIS ARTICLE, AND ERIC LIPTON FROM BATON ROUGE, LA. (NYT) 1484 words Published: September 14, 2005 The owners of a nursing home where 34 people died in the floodwaters that inundated the New Orleans area were charged Tuesday with multiple counts of negligent homicide, shortly after a new dispute broke out between the State of Louisiana and the federal government over the retrieval of hundreds of other bodies. Mable B. Mangano and her husband, Salvatore A. Mangano Sr., owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home in Violet, just east of New Orleans, turned themselves in after the charges were filed, Attorney General Charles C. Foti Jr. said. He said the couple had not acted on several warnings to move the residents as Hurricane Katrina approached. ''They were warned repeatedly, both by the media and by the St. Bernard Parish emergency preparation people, that the storm was coming,'' Mr. Foti said at a news conference here. ''In effect, I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people.'' The charges represent the first major prosecution to emerge in the hurricane's aftermath. The legal action came as the pace of recovery of the storm's other casualties increased. Louisiana authorities said the number of confirmed dead in the state increased to 423, a substantial rise from the 279 reported on Monday. Bob Johannessen, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said the number of confirmations was expected to rise each day. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said the pace of recoveries should have been much faster, however, and accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of slowing the retrieval of the dead to the point where the contractor responsible for that work had threatened to pull out. After days of news reports of bodies in the streets of New Orleans, Ms. Blanco, with palpable frustration, said the state would bypass FEMA and sign its own contract with the company, Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management. ''In recent days, I have spoken with FEMA officials and administration officials to convey my absolute frustration regarding the lack of urgency and the lack of respect involving the recovery of our people whose lives were lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina,'' Ms. Blanco said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. ''We have pleaded for contract resolution. In death, as in life, our people deserve more respect than they have received.'' FEMA officials responded by saying that the recovery of bodies was a state responsibility, while the federal role was to assist state officials. ''The state has always maintained direct control over the mortuary process following this tragedy,'' Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who is directing FEMA efforts in the region, said in a written statement. ''We are committed to a process that treats the victims of Katrina with dignity and respect and accomplishes the mission as quickly as possible. We will work with state officials on what they believe to be the best solution for their constituents.'' Kenyon officials said they had been struggling under cumbersome conditions to execute a task that gets grislier by the day. The company, which has a contract with FEMA to respond when called, arrived Sept. 1 but was not asked to begin recovering bodies until Sept. 6, said Bill Berry, a company spokesman. The company's 100 or so workers have bunked in a funeral home in Baton Rouge, forcing them to drive four hours round-trip each day, and Kenyon officials said they had repeatedly asked for living quarters in New Orleans. On Sunday, Kenyon officials told FEMA that they would not enter into a contract with the agency and would pull out as soon as a replacement was found, Mr. Berry said. Mr. Berry said the company was already responding to Ms. Blanco's request that it increase its staffing even before the new contract was completed. ''We just keep moving the cots a little closer together,'' he said. Mr. Berry said he did not consider it appropriate to discuss why the company did not want to continue working under FEMA. But he had high praise for the state, which reached out to Kenyon after the company notified FEMA on Sunday that it would not accept a contract. ''I can't say enough about the Louisiana state people,'' Mr. Berry said. ''They heard our problems, and they simply fixed them. It's beautiful to see a general sitting there from the National Guard saying, 'I can do that,' and it's done.'' In an effort to explain why Kenyon may have walked away from a federal contract, a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security, who would not allow his name to be used because the department had already issued an official statement, said Tuesday that the state's proposed contract was ''less detailed than the plan we were negotiating'' and had four provisions compared with nine that FEMA had wanted. For example, the official said the federal proposal would have required that the Kenyon employees have specialized training and use personal protective gear and have appropriate security, provisions that the federal official said were not included in the state contract. Mr. Berry declined to respond, except to say that the company had 76 years of experience in disasters. It was hired in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and last year's tsunami. ''We will let our record speak for itself,'' he said. Kenyon -- a unit of Service Corporation International, a giant funeral company -- operates worldwide and handled preservation of remains after the World Trade Center attacks and the cleanup of mass graves in Iraq under government contracts. The company, which is based in Houston, has contributed heavily to President Bush's campaigns. The chairman and founder of the company is Robert L. Waltrip, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. In New Orleans, anger over the slow collection of bodies, which officials say has been hampered by floodwater and debris, still smoldered. Dr. Brobson Lutz, a former health director for the City of New Orleans, led an impromptu and morbid tour on Tuesday that he said reflected the extent to which those who perished had been neglected. It included a nursing home on Dauphine Street, where three bodies had stayed until Dr. Brobson had mentioned them on Fox News, and the kitchen area of his own office, where he wiped at blood from the body of Michael Lala, the owner of Old N'Awlins Cookery. Mr. Lala had died from heart failure a week after the storm, but the authorities did not respond to requests to pick up the body, Dr. Brobson said, so he stored it in his office for a week until it finally was collected on Tuesday morning. ''FEMA couldn't get the live people out in time and they can't get the dead people out in time,'' Dr. Brobson said. ''They failed the living and the dead.'' The residents of St. Rita's did not have to die, Attorney General said, and he warned that other nursing homes that failed to remove residents also faced prosecution. Local officials had ordered a mandatory evacuation amid news reports about the approach of the storm, Mr. Foti said. Because St. Rita's was licensed as a Medicaid facility, it had an evacuation plan in place, but it did not use it, he said. In addition to the mandatory evacuation order, officials offered to send two buses to the nursing home, but Mr. Foti said the Manganos declined that offer. Also, the owners had an agreement with an ambulance company, signed in April, to provide ambulances to evacuate special-needs patients, but ''they were never called,'' Mr. Foti said. At least two drowning victims at the home could have been family members who went to the scene or people who took refuge there, he said, adding that the remains were being identified. James A. Cobb, the lawyer for the Manganos, said that they were not guilty of the charges and that they were unaware a mandatory evacuation order had been issued. Mr. Cobb said that if the patients -- some on feeding tubes, oxygen and in need of medication -- had been put on a bus for 12 hours to evacuate, ''people are going to die.'' A deputy at the East Baton Rouge jail said the Manganos had posted a bond of $50,000 and were expected to be released. Photo: Medical personnel prepared to enter L.S.U. Medical Center in New Orleans yesterday to remove bodies. (Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times) From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 24 22:30:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:30:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Beyond Human Message-ID: Beyond Human New York Times Magazine, 5.10.23 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/magazine/23wwln.html The Way We Live Now By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Many of the fans milling into this year's postseason baseball games have been wearing authentic major league uniforms, with GUERRERO, say, or OSWALT, stitched on the back. True, society has traditionally encouraged kids to fantasize about what they'll be as adults. But most of the people I've seen in $200 regulation shirts are adults. What they're fantasizing about is an alternative adult identity for themselves. Why do they do this? The literary critic Paul Fussell once speculated that wearers of "legible clothing" like T-shirts were merely losers trying to associate themselves with a success, whether it be a product (Valvoline) or an institution (The New York Review of Books). A conservative view held that dressing like a child meant shirking the responsibilities of adulthood. It was a subset of dressing like a slob. But these explanations do not cover the ballpark people or (to take a similar phenomenon) those weekend bicyclists in their expensive pretend-racer costumes, with European team logos and company trademarks. The message in their clothing is aimed not at others but at themselves. It is a do-it-yourself virtual reality. Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever larger part of adult life. For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, this is only the beginning. According to his new book "The Singularity Is Near," we are approaching the age of "full-immersion virtual-reality." Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, you'll be able to design your own mental habitat. You'll be able to sleep with your favorite movie star - in your head. (It is not lost on Kurzweil that you can already do that, but he insists it will be really, really realistic.) Those same technologies will help us "overcome our genetic heritage," live longer and become smarter. We'll learn how brains operate and devise computers that function like them. Then the barrier between our minds and our computers will disappear. The part of our memory that is literally downloaded will grow until "the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate." But this raises questions: What will then be the point of unenhanced human beings? And what will become of our relations to one another? A willingness to run head-on at these moral-technological issues has made the French novelist Michel Houellebecq one of Europe's best-selling writers and arguably its most important. His "Elementary Particles" (2000), set in the year 2079, recounts the near-total extinction of ordinary human beings. His new novel, "The Possibility of an Island," due out in the United States next spring, describes the triumph of a cult that believes man was created by nondivine extraterrestrials and sees genetic engineering as a path to "immortality." The novel cuts between a sex-obsessed comedian, Daniel1, and two of his enhanced clones, Daniel24 and Daniel25. It would not surprise Houellebecq that Kurzweil, like other technological optimists, should use sex to sell his utopia. For Houellebecq, the important line the cult crosses is not a scientific but an anthropological one. By making credible promises of longevity and sex, it manages to elevate materialism (more specifically, consumerism) into a religion. Daniel1's girlfriend, the editor of a magazine called Lolita, explains, "What we're trying to create is an artificial humanity, a frivolous one, that will never again be capable of seriousness or humor, that will spend its life in an ever more desperate quest for fun and sex - a generation of absolute kids." But something gets left out of sex when it is idealized, marketed, venerated or souped up: other people. Regardless of whether your girlfriend can handle your sleeping (virtually) with Angelina Jolie, it is very likely you'll find the hard work of maintaining a relationship less rewarding when so many starlets beckon. Americans may be surprised that Houellebecq attributes the bon mot about masturbation being sex with someone you love not to Woody Allen but to either Keith Richards or Jacques Lacan. But whatever its source, the narrator Daniel25 views it as one of the more profound insights of our time. Human interactions of all kinds, especially those that involve caring for others, appear less and less worth the trouble. Houellebecq is fascinated by young couples who have pets instead of children, and by the French heat wave of 2003, which killed thousands of senior citizens who were forgotten by their vacationing children and abandoned by their vacationing doctors. Daniel1 mocks the newspaper headline "Scenes Unworthy of a Modern Country." In his view, those scenes were proof that France was a modern country. "Only an authentically modern country," he insists, "was capable of treating old people like outright garbage." If we treat our fellow humans this way, why should we expect posthumans to care for us any better? We shouldn't. In the novel, when an acolyte witnesses a murder that, if revealed, could derail the cult's DNA experiments, the chief geneticist orders her thrown from a cliff. He feels no shame, nor does the narrator see any reason why he should. "What he was trying to do," Daniel1 writes, "was to create a new species, and this species wouldn't have any more moral obligation toward humans than humans have toward lizards." In his recent book, "Radical Evolution," Joel Garreau suggests a "Shakespeare test" to determine whether Prozac or cloning or full-immersion virtual reality robs us of our humanity: would the user of these innovations be recognizable to Shakespeare? Houellebecq suggests that the answer is tipping toward No. "Nothing was left now," Daniel25 notes, "of those literary and artistic works that humanity had been so proud of; the themes that gave rise to them had lost all relevance, their emotional power had evaporated." Many Westerners looking to the future think they're about to attain the prize of a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts until a ripe old age. Houellebecq warns that second prize may be a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts forever. Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Turkey. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 25 03:33:52 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:33:52 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bush's Babe Message-ID: <18725124.1130211233498.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BushsBabe.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 105045 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 01:58:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 21:58:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Lessons From a Plague That Wasn't Message-ID: Lessons From a Plague That Wasn't http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/weekinreview/23pollack.html By ANDREW POLLACK PUBLIC health experts warn that the world might be close to a repeat of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed millions. But could it instead be close to a reprise of the 1976 pandemic that never happened? That is the year President Gerald R. Ford announced a crash program to "inoculate every man, woman and child in the United States" against swine flu. But the virus never became a killer, and vaccinations were halted two months after they began after reports that 500 people who received the shot developed a paralyzing nerve disease and more than 30 of them died. If scientists were wrong in 1976, could they be wrong now? Some arguments being made about why a pandemic is looming echo those made three decades ago. But many experts say the situation now is different enough that a false alarm is less likely. "We just know a lot more about the influenza virus than we did in 1976," said Ira M. Longini Jr., a professor at Emory University who is an expert on epidemics. Still, a lot can be learned both from what did and did not happen back then. The 1976 scare started in February when a handful of soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey got sick and one of them died. Scientists determined that the virus was one that infected pigs and was different from the human influenza viruses circulating then. On March 24, barely a month later, President Ford announced the vaccination plan. One reason for the concern was that scientists thought the 1918 pandemic had been caused by a swine virus and that the Fort Dix outbreak marked its second coming. Furthermore, experts warned that pandemics tended to be cyclical and that another one was about due. Today, thanks to genetic analysis - a technique not available in 1976 - scientists know the 1918 virus was a bird virus that mutated. So now there is concern that the H5N1 avian strain ravaging birds in Asia could in like fashion evolve into a form that can spread easily among people. The avian virus shows some mutations similar to those in the 1918 virus, said Jeffery K. Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. And experts are again warning that the world is overdue for a pandemic. Edwin M. Kilbourne, a professor emeritus at New York Medical College who argued for the vaccination program in 1976, said there was actually less reason to be concerned about a pandemic today. That is because the swine flu virus at Fort Dix clearly passed easily from person to person, while the current avian flu has not. Many experts disagree, however. In retrospect, they say, the 1976 decision to vaccinate was based on much less solid evidence than is available today. "Part of the problem was convictions outpacing evidence," said Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, and co-author of "The Epidemic That Never Was," a book about the 1976 experience. "I don't think that's happening today." Even in 1976 there seemed to be more doubt than there is today about the issue. The World Health Organization and many European nations, for instance, did not see what the fuss was about. Today, they are busily preparing for a pandemic. Doubts grew through the summer of 1976 when the virus was not detected outside Fort Dix. That first death turned out to be the only known one from the virus. Moreover, studies suggested that several hundred people at Fort Dix had been infected but most never got sick. "That's very different from 120 cases with half the humans dying," said Dr. Fineberg, referring to the approximate toll so far from the Asian bird flu. Perhaps the biggest mistake in 1976 was giving the vaccine to millions of people rather than just stockpiling it until clearer signs of an epidemic emerged. W. Paul Glezen, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said the prevailing belief was "we should use it because if it started spreading there wouldn't be time." The vaccination program had problems. Production was delayed after one company produced the wrong vaccine. Another delay occurred when manufacturers demanded that Congress protect them from liability. Mass inoculations did not start until October, which might have been too late had a pandemic begun. Still, by the time the program was halted in December, only 10 months after the virus was identified, about 150 million doses had been made and 45 million given. There are lessons from 1976 that might be applied to today's preparations. A 2004 draft of a government plan for a pandemic listed some. One is that "making clear what is not known is as important as stating what is known." Another is that a program should be re-evaluated periodically rather than left on autopilot. And this time, federal officials said, the vaccine won't be used until there are signs a pandemic is under way. Dr. Fineberg said another lesson is that Congress should provide liability protection for vaccine makers now, rather than waiting until the crisis occurs. He said the wrong lesson to draw from 1976 would be "the superficially obvious one" - that because it didn't happen then it won't happen now and preparations are not necessary. Still, repeated cries of wolf can make the public blas?. "There's so much expectation for it to develop into a pandemic that if it does not in the next year or two it's quite possible you would see a backlash like the 1976 experience," said Dr. Taubenberger. "What I fear is that people would make the conclusion, falsely, that influenza is not such an important public health problem." From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 02:09:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:09:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Unconventional Wisdom: Tough Bunnies Message-ID: Unconventional Wisdom: Tough Bunnies (and more) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102102270_pf.html [The article by Beggan and Allison itself will come in a moment.] Tough Bunnies By Richard Morin By Richard Morin Sunday, October 23, 2005; B05 First surprise: Playboy centerfolds are tough, say two social psychologists who did a content analysis of the biographical text that runs with the photographs of Playboy's playmates. Second surprise: There's text with those centerfold spreads? For the record, your Unconventional Wiz is shocked, shocked! that women are still being objectified in skin magazines. He has not personally looked at a Playboy in more than 20 years, and then only to confirm the barroom claim of a Miami Herald colleague who said she had posed as a centerfold in her wild and crazee youth. (An exhaustive search through back issues confirmed that she had.) Anyway, I have moved on. And I had hoped the world had as well. But apparently it has not. And that's one reason that James K. Beggan of the University of Louisville and Scott T. Allison of the University of Richmond decided to take a scholarly approach to the magazine's playmate prose. Even in this age of the Internet, with its easily accessible porn, Playboy claims more than 3 million subscribers, ranking it among the country's top-circulating magazines. To ferret out Playboy's message to its, um, readers, Beggan began in 1998 to assemble a database that contained all the photos and text from the 204 Playboy Playmate pictorials that appeared in the magazine between 1985 and 2001. Much of it was distilled from a cache of Playboys he found gathering dust in a Louisville bookstore. (And, of course, in the interest of scholarship, he just had to rescue them from oblivion.) Beggan and Allison, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Popular Culture, found a pattern to the way that Playboy's wordsmiths described the women who graced the magazine's centerfold. They were typically strong, career-oriented, aggressive and, in a surprising number of instances, downright "tough." Adjectives suggesting vulnerability, submissiveness or passivity appeared less frequently. But are these women really as they were described? Perhaps not, Beggan acknowledges. But it doesn't matter: "This is the image of them that is being presented to men. The Bible or Shakespeare teach important lessons; it doesn't matter who wrote them" or whether the story lines cleave tightly to historic fact. Beggan, who's been a subscriber to Playboy for a decade, has enraged some feminists by arguing that Playboy doesn't treat women merely as sex objects and "is not really about men getting laid, but about teaching men how to be better men." Rather than poised Hefneresque swingers, he argues, Playboy targets "uncertain guys who are trying to learn" how to be more sensitive to women's needs. After all, he says, the symbol of Playboy is a "furry bunny, not a tiger." ------------- Notice how gas prices shot up virtually overnight after Hurricane Katrina -- but are falling much more slowly now? We have only ourselves to blame, says an Ohio State University economist who studied how people shop for gasoline. Matthew Lewis found that the typical person hunts for the lowest possible prices when costs are rising -- but gets lazy and doesn't shop around when prices start to come down. As a consequence, gas station owners and other businesses have less incentive to lower prices when their wholesale costs drops. For the study, Lewis used data on prices charged at about 420 service stations in the San Diego area from January 2000 to December 2001. The data were collected by the San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action Network, which describes itself as a consumer watchdog group. Data on wholesale gas prices paid by the stations were obtained from the Energy Department, he writes in a working paper available on his Web site. Ironically, consumer buying patterns put more money in the pockets of gas station owners when prices are falling than when they are rising. Lewis found that profit margins were highest when the wholesale price of gas was dropping and consumers stopped bargain-hunting. That eases the pressure on station owners, which in turn allows them to keep prices high, thereby increasing their profit margins. ------------ Never mind about gas selling for $3 a gallon. It's when tomatoes top $2 a pound that we should really worry -- at least those of us who are concerned about the rate of obesity in children. A new study by two Rand Corp. researchers found that young children who live in communities where fruits and vegetables are expensive are more likely to gain excessive weight than children who live in areas with less costly produce. That finding helps explain the growing incidence of obesity in children over the past 20 years, a time when the cost of fruits and vegetables has increased faster than other food prices as well as the cost of living, asserts Roland Sturm, a senior Rand economist and lead author of the study published in the journal Public Health. The study by Sturm and economist Ashlesha Datar also was remarkable for what it didn't find. The researchers couldn't make any link between obese kids and the presence of many convenience stores, full-service restaurants, fast-food restaurants or grocery stores near their homes. Advocacy groups have suggested that such a link exists, they reported. The research team examined excessive weight changes in 6,918 children in kindergarten to third grade from 59 metropolitan areas around the United States. The researchers then compared the weight gain figures with the relative price of fruits and vegetables in each of the areas studied. The data was collected by the federal government as part of its Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Where do fruits and vegetables cost the most, relative to the price of other food and necessities? The winner: Mobile, Ala., where children gained about 50 percent more excess weight as measured by body mass index (a ratio of weight to height) than children nationally, Sturm reported. Fruits and vegetables were relative bargains in Visalia, Calif., where children's excess BMI gain was about half the national average. [2]morinr at washpost.com From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 02:09:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:09:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Beggan and Allison: Tough Women in the Unlikelies of Places Message-ID: Tough Women in the Unlikeliest of Places: The Unexpected Toughness of the Playboy Playmate Beggan, James K; Allison, Scott T Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 5 (Aug 2005): p. 796-818 ISSN: 0022-3840 Number: 872194991 [The PDF contains no graphics of bunnies or even tables, graphs, or equations. Just ASCII characters and "smart quotes."] IN JANUARY 1985, A MAGAZINE ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED ABOUT JOAN Bennett. According to the article, she was "raised in Glen Ellyn, a small town in the flatland outside Chicago. She is tough ('I can sing, dance and box. I hate a man who treats women as inferiors, who takes advantage. I'll stand up and rip his lips off, just pop 'im in the nose'). She is a street fighter" (134). In the article, Joan Bennett discussed her future. She said, "I thought there should be more to life than traditional sex, going to college, finding a rich husband and ending up in the driver's seat of a station wagon-waking up to the sounds of kids playing their Big Wheels every morning. I didn't want to let life go past" (134-35). Instead, she was "committed to her career" (142). How did Joan describe herself in the article? She said, "I like to argue. I like intensity" (138). She added, "I'm very independent and restless. . . . I like to party with people, but I don't want to become attached to, or dependent on, anyone or anything" (138). The article included pictures of Joan Bennett. From the pictures, it is clear to all that she is pretty. She is tall and slim, but with a well-proportioned figure. Her measurements are 36-24-35. The most striking thing about her, though, is that in many the pictures, she is naked, her pink nipples and brown pubic hair on display for all the world to see. In one picture, she wears only a pink garter belt and matching pink stockings. She is the January 1985 Playboy Playmate. In contrast to the nude pictures that present Joan Bennett adorned in pearls, nylons, and a camisole, the centerfold text creates a rather unexpected portrait. From what is contained in the centerfold text, there appears to be more to Joan Bennett than merely being a sex object for men and teenage boys. She seems to be a strong, competent, intelligent, and ambitious woman. Joan Bennett is only one of 204 Playmates who appeared in the pages of Playboy between 1985 and 2001. Is the depiction of her character typical or unusual for Playboy Playmates? The contradiction created by the juxtaposition of the nude imagery and "tough" background is the basis for the present article. Our analysis of centerfold pictorials for the past two decades suggests that it is a mistake to view Playboy Playmates exclusively through a lens of sexuality. Although our culture most often conceptualizes Playmates as highly sexualized, commercialized objects, they are not just busty pinup girlie-girls. Playmates have unexpected elements of toughness in their collective nature, and in reality, Playboy presents them as possessing much more complex characters than popular wisdom would allow. This richer characterization comes through the centerfold text and other pictures that comprise the Playmate's pictorial. The centerfold text, virtually ignored by social commentators, modifies the possible meanings construed from the nude pictorials and makes it difficult for the reader not to be struck by the personalities of Playmates. The present article interprets the icon of the Playboy Playmate in terms of the tough woman. In this analysis, we explore recurring themes in the collective identities of Playmates. What is interesting about Playmates is that they clearly exemplify the Western body ideal of femininity (large breasts and hips, small waist, a narrow range of facial features), yet simultaneously display nonfeminine-even masculine-personality attributes, interests, and occupations. By adopting attributes traditionally considered to be the domain of men, Playmates undermine gender stereotypes about femininity and the meaning of being a Playboy Playmate. The Concept of the Tough Woman In her book Tough Girls, Sherrie Inness (1999) examines the representation of "tough" women in popular culture. She identifies early instantiations of the tough girl in 1970s television, specifically Charlie's Angels, the bionic woman, and Emma Peel in The Avengers. Inness explores images of tough women in women's fashion magazines and other media, such as comic books and film. She also considers very recent characterizations of the tough woman, such as Xena, Warrior Princess, and Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. A theme of Inness's analysis is that media images of tough women are undercut by elements that reinforce traditional femininity. For example, in the movie Aliens, the lead character Ripley is presented as very tough-tougher, in fact, than both the male and female Marines assigned to protect her. At the same time, however, one of Ripley's strongest motivations is the desire to protect a child. Thus, Ripley's toughness is softened by the display of perhaps the most stereotypic attribute of women. In a similar manner, Inness argues that the images of tough women in women's fashion magazines are typically undermined by messages that reinforce more conventional, softer images of women. Inness cites, as an example, a magazine feature on leather jackets (an artifact typically associated with strength) with text that states, "The new leathers are coming through and they're miles from tough" (58). Another layout presents the sentiment, "Leather's new look is more tender than tough" (58). Ultimately, however, Inness asserts that "the containment of women's toughness is never absolute" (179). She suggests that even when images of toughness in women are accompanied by features that reduce their transgressive nature, "such figures still offer visions of female power and independence that help to challenge the gender status quo" (179). In the present article, we approach the Playboy Playmate in a similar fashion. We consider how the elements of toughness included as part of the Playmate's identity can help to modify the meaning of appearing nude, and contribute to a construction of femininity that is at odds with sexualized, stereotypic views of women. Attributes of the "New Tough Woman" According to Inness, one way to conceptualize toughness in women is through their ability to take on stereotypically masculine traits. For example, Inness refers to characters such as Calamity Jane as tough "because they adopt characteristics stereotypically associated with men. By doing so, they place themselves as outsiders in relation to a culture that assumes that women should strive to act and appear feminine" (19). In Tough Girls, Inness describes four domains of masculinity related to the construction of the "New Tough Woman": body, attitude, action, and authority. Body refers to the physical characteristics correlated with toughness, such as well-defined muscles and an athletic, fit physique. Masculine clothing is also a signifier of toughness. The attitude component of the new tough woman consists of the expression of little or no fear, competence and control, and the display of masculine emotions such as anger. A third aspect of the new tough woman concerns action-that is, the ability to act in a thoughtful and intelligent manner. Finally, the new tough woman has the authority to act as a leader. In the present article, we identify an intriguing instantiation of the tough woman in a space as far removed as might be considered possible from domains where images of tough women would be expected or even tolerated. Specifically, we consider attributes of toughness associated with a modern icon of sexualized femininity: the Playboy Playmate. In doing so, we assess the extent to which Playmates display traditionally masculine attributes, and in doing so, modify the meaning of posing nude. A Brief History of the Playboy Playmate A number of authors (e.g., Brady; Miller; Weyr) have reported, in what has become a classic version of the Horatio Alger story, how Hugh Hefner founded Playboy magazine in December 1953 with only a hope, a prayer, and a few thousand dollars of borrowed money. Within a few years, Playboy was selling more than a million copies a month. The key to Playboy's initial success was the Playmate of the Month, the full-page (which eventually became three pages, hence the term centerfold) picture of a nude or seminude woman. In the first few issues, the Playmate of the Month was an anonymous model, and no background information was provided about her. But the concept of the Playmate evolved rather quickly. Once Playboy began shooting its own Playmates rather than buying other photographers' stock shots, Playboy began to include additional pictures of each Playmate. Although some pictures were taken in the studio, others were candids that showed the Playmate entertaining friends, at work, shopping, or at school. In addition, Playboy began publishing background information about Playmates. The Playmate 38, no. 5 (Aug 2005): p. 796-818profiles and ancillary photographs worked together to establish the "girl next door" image of the Playboy Playmate. This concept of the girl next door was crystallized in July 1955 when Janet Pilgrim appeared as Playmate of the Month. What differentiated Janet Pilgrim's appearance from those of prior Playmates was that she was presented as a Playboy employee. The fateful centerfold text stated, "We suppose it's natural to think of pulchritudinous Playmates as existing in a world apart. Actually, potential Playmates are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday. . . . We found Miss July in our own circulation department." By providing this personalized background information, Playboy changed the nature of the nude model from a cynical, tough woman who probably lived in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, to a sweet hometown girl who might be living down the street from the reader in Anytown, Iowa, USA. Over time, the Playmate has evolved to the point where contemporary images of Playmates include a significant number of "tough" characteristics. The Playboy Playmate is an iconic figure that has consistently generated controversy across the more than 50 years that Playboy has been published. At first pass, it would seem hard to identify a figure as less representative of female toughness than the Playboy Playmate. Although conventional feminist thought would argue that Playmates are the embodiment of men's exploitation of women, our central thesis is that there is more than there appears to the nature of the Playboy Playmate. Prior Scholarship on the Playboy Playmate Most prior scholarship on the Playboy Playmate has adopted the position that the Playmate represents men's fantasies of the perfect woman because she is simultaneously highly sexed and submissive. To those who think that Playboy advocates this identity for women, Playboy naturally comes across as the villain. Past scholars have held Playmates in rather low esteem. Colin McDowell said that Playboy magazine presents a preferred image of women as "airbrushed," "antiseptic," and "dumb and available" (174). Rollo May described Playmates as "detached, mechanical, uninviting, vacuous-the typical schizoid personality" (57). May contrasted Playmates with "real women," and in the process, implied that somehow Playmates were less organic or natural than flesh-and-blood women. Scholars have also criticized Playmates for representing standards of beauty (especially with regard to thinness) that can be considered anorexic (e.g., Owen and Laurel-Seller). In addition to viewing the women who posed for Playboy in a harsh and negative light, critics have expressed unkind opinions of Playboy readers. Barbara Ehrenreich suggested that Playboy encouraged men to "shed the burdensome aspects of the adult male role" (45), and could be viewed as presenting a "coherent program for the male rebellion" (50) against marriage and the family. Gary Brooks borrowed a medical model to express the idea that looking at Playmates in Playboy could create a "centerfold syndrome" marked by an inability to form meaningful relations with women. The typical man, tainted by his exposure to perfect Playmates, loses his appetite for "real" women, according to Brooks. Recently, we (Beggan and Allison, "The Playboy Rabbit," "What Do Playboy"; Beggan, Gagn?, and Allison) have called for a reconsideration of how Playboy is conceptualized in scholarship on the media. Like Nancy Berns, we have suggested that it is essential to consider text in Playboy, and in the present case, how it may modify the meaning of the nude images. Our basic strategy was to examine text and other nonphotographic images in Playboy to understand what messages they send regarding the construction of masculine and feminine identities. Contrary to what might have been expected on the basis of prior analyses of Playboy, we found extensive evidence that much of the content contradicted, rather than reinforced, gender stereotypes. In Playboy, various forms of tenderness are advocated for men, whereas women are presented as strong, agentic, ambitious, and intelligent, traits typically more closely associated with cultural representations of men. This unconventional view of Playboy served as the basis for our analysis of contemporary tough Playmates. Contemporary Tough Playmates Playboy is a particularly intriguing context in which to consider the presentation of the tough woman because, as ostensibly a men's magazine with a rather simple and exploitative view of women and femininity, it represents an unlikely source to explore the complexity of the construction of gender in the media. At the same time, the potential importance of an understanding of Playboy in contributing to a better understanding of gender cannot be understated. As noted by John Shelton Reed in writing about Southern Culture, "Playboy magazine has seldom been taken seriously as a cultural force in American life. . . . Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Playboy provides fodder for anyone who wants to understand the attitudes of Americans-or at least those of many young American men" (92). In our analysis of Playboy Playmates, we examined the centerfold, ancillary pictures, and text of every Playmate in Playboy between 1985 and 2001. As such, we considered material related to 204 Playmates. In evaluating such a broad range of material, we were struck by several features. First, and not surprisingly, Playmates are young and possess a physical appearance that meshes well with conventional Western styles of beauty proselytized by both men's and women's lifestyle, fashion, and glamour magazines. second, Playmates are not as monolithic as critics of Playboy might suppose. Although most Playmates were in their early twenties when they posed, a few were in their late twenties and even early thirties. Several Playmates were married, and a number had children (e.g., Kathy Shower, May 1985; Susie Owens, March 1988; Eloise Broady, April 1988; Stacy Arthur, January 1991; Vickie Smith, May 1992; Kimber West, February 1997; and Shanna Moaker, December 2001). Within the restriction that Playmates' physical appearance mesh well with dominant Anglo-Western cultural representations of feminine beauty, there was some variation in Playmates' ethnicities. Although most were white, some were Asian or African American. Not all Playmates might earn the moniker "tough," but the great majority had attributes consistent with the identity of the tough women, as denned by Inness. Only a handful of Playmates seemed to lack any attributes of toughness. After exploring the characteristics of Playmates that could be considered consistent with a tough image, we identify five Playmates who are exemplars of different types of toughness. Traits of Toughness In her analysis of tough women and tough girls, Sherrie Inness identifies four broad characteristics that contribute to the "new tough woman." These characteristics are body, attitude, actions, and authority. In this section, we examine these traits and explore the extent to which Playmates appear to possess these traits. Body In men, the body is the source of toughness in several ways. Tough men tend to be physically strong. Tough men tend to have an imposing presence. Of course, both physical strength and a strong presence are correlated with size. Tough men tend to be taller and mote muscular than average men. Muscles According to Inness, body "refers to how a woman presents a physical body that signifies toughness" (24). Although Playmates do not possess a highly visible musculature, they are most often presented as being quite physically fit. Playmates also tend to be fairly tall, and a few Playmates are close to six feet in height. In addition to having the advantages of youth, they maintain their fitness through regular, sometimes intense, exercise. Very few Playmates indicated that they did not engage in regular workouts (one exception was Carrie Jean Yazel, May 1991). Lisa Marie Scott (February 1995) said that weight lifting was "her favorite daytime activity." Diana Lee (May 1988) was involved with track and gymnastics. Kimberly Donley (March 1993) was shown fencing. Alesha Marie Oreskovich (June 1993) reported working out for an hour and half a day. Monique Noel (May 1989) did 240 sit-ups each day. Jenny McCarthy (October 1993) was described as a "born jock." Julie Clarke (March 1991) was described as "famously fit," in part because of her "hundreds and hundreds of situps" each day. A number of Playmates indicated an interest in the martial arts. Tonja Christensen (November 1991) was pictured practicing karate. Karen Foster (October 1989) studied karate for seven years, fought in tournaments against boys, and never placed lower than third. She explained her success in terms of "concentration-and a lot of knuckle push-ups." Jennifer Walcott (August 2001) was pictured working out in a gi. Style The body's physical markers of toughness involve muscles. Well-defined biceps, a well-defined stomach, and broad shoulders all indicate physical toughness. To serve as indicators of toughness, these muscles must be on display (i.e., visible to observers). But Inness points out that clothing, which by its nature hides the body, "is an important element in the performance of toughness" (25). She suggests that clothing with a masculine flavor can signify toughness. Of course, the core concept of the Playmate involves an absence of clothing. Very rarely do Playmates appear completely devoid of clothing, but what garments do appear tend to be quite feminine in nature and reinforce conventional images of women and women's sexuality. Playmates are often posed in stockings, bras and panties, and sexy lingerie. Occasionally, Playmates are presented in more practical clothing, but given their state of partial undress, the clothing does little to reinforce toughness. Although clothing cannot be viewed as an indicator of toughness with Playmates, our examination of Playmates' centerfolds and centerfold texts did discern other stylistic elements related to toughness. One way in which Playmates incorporate signifiers of toughness into their identities involves a history of being tomboys. At least fourteen Playmates had tomboy elements in their pasts. For example, Suzi Simpson (January 1992) was described as "tomboy" tough when she lived in Alaska at the age of 11. Tiffany Sloan (October 1992) was described as "tall and strong for her age, she played tackle football with the boys." She said, "I beat them up." Pia Reyes (November 1988) said, "I was a jock-I never wore make-up until college." Kata K?rkk?inen (December 1988) was an excellent bowler as a teenager, and when she moved to the United States from Finland, she said, "They found me pretty wild ... I dressed punk . . . trounced all the guys [at bowling]." As adults, Playmates continued to display tomboy tendencies. Sharry Konopski (August 1987) "recently rebuilt her car's engine." Peggy Mclntaggart (January 1990) restored her own 1959 Ford Fairlane. Cindy Brown (May 1995) said, "I'm constantly looking for a way to do things that women aren't supposed to do." Ava Fabian (August 1986), who was also a tomboy, said, "I'm strong. I'm a survivor." Another signifier of a tough style that Playmates displayed concerned competitiveness. Alicia Rickter (Octobet 1995) described herself as "very competitive." Nicole Wood (April 1993) revealed a stereotypically masculine level of ambition when she said, "I'm real eager and ambitious, so whatever I can get out of life, I'm going to get." Attitude A second aspect of the modern tough woman concerns attitudes. Tough women, like tough men, possess attitudes that involve a willingness to take on risks and confront authorities. Little or No Fear One important aspect of a tough woman's attitude concerns the experience of fear. The tough woman, like the tough man, adheres to Shakespeare's dictum, "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once" (62). In a variety of ways, Playmates display a high degree of courage. Playmates directly address their unwillingness to experience fear. Samantha Torres (December 1995) explicitly said, "I'm not afraid of anything." Playboy added that "some men are put off by her independence and stubborn streak." Lynn Thomas (May 1997) said, "I have a daredevil side . . . I have to seek thrills." She also said, "You should live through things rather than be afraid of them." Fearlessness was also manifested in Playmates' willingness to seek adventure. Laurie Carr (December 1986) said that she was "adventurous, even daring." She continued, "I'm a person who is not afraid to accept responsibility for herself and her future." Rhonda Adams (June 1995) possessed "restless" and "adventurous" streaks. Sandy Greenberg's text (June 1987) cited empirical evidence of her courage. She took a 12-day 3,600-mile trip through Canada and the American Midwest on a motorcycle. Deborah Driggs (March 1990) described herself as "daring." She said, "I'm outgoing, edgy-an explorer. There's not a lot I haven't done, but if you have ideas, try me." Another way that Playmates display a lack of fear is in their willingness to confront authority. Carol Ficatier (December 1985) said, "I was in trouble in school . . . the class clown, always." Anna Clark (April 1987) was "booted out of three Catholic boatding schools." Perhaps a lack of fear and an unwillingness to accept authority combine to drive pre-Playmate women from their parents' homes. Tiffany Sloan (October 1992) left home when she was 15. Cristy Thorn (February 1991) dropped out of high school at 15 and went to work for her boyfriend, who owned an auto parts store. She said about being a teen, "I was a monster child" and a "wild child." Alexandria Karlsen (March 1999) was on her own at 15. Natalia Sokolova (Aptil 1999) was on her own since 16. Donna Smith (March 1985) left home at the age of 14 and led a peripatetic existence, traveling in Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, and Japan. She supported herself at various times as a model and cocktail waitress with a fake ID. Competent and in Control Another feature of the tough woman is the display of masculine traits of competency and self-efficacy. A large number of Playmates are presented as strong, agentic, and competent. At least ten Playmates were described as independent. Heidi Mark (July 1995) was termed "fiercely independent." Tiffany Taylor (November 1998) described herself as a "strong person because of what [she] went through." Melissa Holliday (January 1995) said that she was "hardheaded": "brought up to defend myself and stand up for what I believe." Tiffany Sloan (October 1992) was described as a "veteran achiever of impossible things." Rebecca Ferratti (June 1986) said, "I love to go for it and do it. . . . I love bringing people up to my energy level." Display Masculine Emotion-Anger Another element of the contemporary tough woman is a willingness to display typically masculine attributes, especially anger. One of the clearest examples of Playmates glorying in traditionally masculine displays of emotion involved Saskia Linssen (June 1991). She was called a "solitary, untamed spirit." In addition, Playboy wrote, "with obvious relish, she tells the story of an encounter with a rude German woman with whom she once fought over a parking space. She stormed the woman's car, calling her a 'Deutschland uber Alles-er!' We can probably rule out diplomacy from Saskia's career ambitions." In addition, she says, "I can be very stubborn with men. I have my own ideas and I won't shut up about them." Other Playmates displayed evidence of masculine patterns of emotion. Tylyn John (March 1992) admitted to being "not very patient." Angela Melini (June 1992) "can be really aggressive." Another form of masculine emotion is the absence of emotion; that is, especially in the romantic arena, Playmates, like the male stereotype, are often "not into making any serious commitments," according to Ashley Alien (August 1992). Priscilla Taylor (March 1996) said about getting married: "[it's the] furthest thing from my mind." Like men, a large percentage of Playmates are willing to put off marriage and children for the sake of a career or more short-term hedonistic goals of pleasure seeking. Actions Tough women are action-oriented. Like the stereotypic characteristics of men, tough women act in a manner that reflects rational, thoughtful analysis. Although tough women can be contemplative, they take action when necessary. Playmates are often described as being willing to take action as needed. One clear instance of this characteristic is the way in which Kim Morris (March 1986) was described: "She's quiet, she observes, then she moves." And regarding Cindy Brown (May 1995), "in another day and age, this extraordinary girl-next-door might have been an outlaw or a revolutionary." Authority A final characteristic of tough women is the degree of authority that they seem to possess. According to Richard Sennett, authority involves traits such as assurance and superior judgment. Devin DeVasquez (June 1985) "exudes confidence and poise" and had been living on her own since she was 16. She said that she "never wanted to be taken care of." Hope Marie Carlton (July 1985) had "self-assurance." Kelly Monaco (April 1997) worked as a lifeguard and talked about having once did three saves in one day. Summary Our examination of Playboy centerfold texts presented abundant evidence that Playmates possess many of the characteristics associated with the image of the tough woman. The Playmates in our sample were physically fit, tended to be tall, and had a number of attributes associated with tough men, such as ambition and self-efficacy. Although we found some material that supported the idea that Playmates were action-oriented and possessed authority, the majority of material related to Playmates' toughness seemed to involve physical elements and personality traits. Five (Especially) Tough Playmates Most critical examinations of Playmates focus on their physical appearance and the extent to which they seem to only reinforce stereotypic, patriarchal conceptualizations of women. As we have noted elsewhere (Beggan and Allison, "The Playboy Rabbit," "What Do Playboy"), a careful examination of the data reveals that Playboy has consistently shown Playmates as possessing attributes traditionally associated with stereotypes about masculinity. Playboy's, willingness to include masculine attributes in the collective personality of the Playmate provides the basis for the construction of the "tough Playmate." As noted by Inness, one of the key features of the "tough woman" is that she possesses character elements typically associated with men. We have explored the characteristics of Playmates in terms of how they relate to the concept of the tough woman. That a significant number of Playmates possess attributes in common with toughness has led us to posit the existence of the "tough Playmate." At the same time, we recognize that not all Playmates possess the same set of "tough" attributes. As such, we have identified five subtypes of tough Playmates. In this section, we would like to identify Playmates who might serve as exemplars of five different flavors of toughness. Donna Smith-Adventurous Playmate Donna Smith was the Playmate in March 1985. Blonde and 5'7", she was presented as possessing a rather wild pasr. The text states, "at the age of 14, she left home; traveling in Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii and, finally, Japan, sometimes working as a cocktail waitress with a fake ID; then going successfully into modeling, getting married, getting divorced, moving to Los Angeles-which is where we said, 'Whoaaa!'" The centerfold text presented Donna Smith in a very positive manner: "It's best to give Donna the benefit of any doubt. If you underestimate her, her attention drifts." In addition, she was described as being able to handle herself "like a PhD," and to have a "trigger-quick mind" that has been honed by "fending for herself." Donna Smith presented several elements that can be considered characteristic of the tough woman. Of herself, she said, "I like being independent. . . . I wouldn't have it any other way." She added, "I'm really easy to communicate with, because I get right to the point." Playboy says about her, "Donna's nothing if not candid. She finds the straight forward approach is best." Rebekka Armstrong-Bad Girl Playmate At 5'7'', with measurements of 34-23-32, Rebekka Armstrong (September 1986) possessed a less curvaceous figure than stereotypes about Playmates might suggest. She was the "quintessential tomboy" whose "favorite mode of dress was combat boots, T-shirts and Levi's." Of herself, she said, "I used to beat up the boys at school. . . . I even broke a kid's finger once." She had a penchant for masculine pastimes and started motocross racing at nine. By twelve, she was so good that officials would not let her compete against girls. She said that she started chewing tobacco at ten and quit at fifteen. She sleeps with a loaded deer rifle nearby. Recently, she had taken up drag racing. She attributed her interest in masculine activities to the influence of her mother. She said, "I take after my mom. . . . She's had some pretty masculine jobs . . . ironworker, construction, welding, roofing." Morgan Fox-Athletic Playmate At nearly six feet tall, Morgan Fox (December 1990) was presented as an extremely athletic woman, with interests in masculine sports. She worked out every day. In addition to skiing, she was experienced in the rodeo. She cited steer roping and barrel racing as her events. There was a picture of her "snake-wrangling in Mexico." Of herself, she said, "I like to push myself to the limit . . . just to see what I can do." Tylyn John-Macho Playmate Her March 1992 centerfold text opened with "a Harley Sportster 883 going west like a bat out of Hollywood, ridden by the finest redhead you've ever seen, a blur in black boots, a low-cut shirt and a cloud of exhaust." She was described as "still free to aim her bike wherever she wants to go, she is as uncommon as her name." Angela Little-Outsider Playmate Another theme in Playmates' profiles could be termed the "outsider." Just over 5'2" tall, Angela Little (August 1998) said, "I was an outcast. I couldn't wait to bolt out of town." She was from a small town in the South where "there wasn't enough to occupy my mind. People were into church and football. The girls got married right out of high school." Conclusions Playboy's main claim to fame was the way it popularized a new, more risqu? version of the pinup girl. What distinguished the Playboy centerfold from other "cheesecake" images of women (Meyerowitz) was the personal background information that Playboy provided about Playmates. The most unique quality of this personalizing material was the extent to which it challenged conventional, stereotypic representations of women. It might be argued that the nudity and individuating information work at cross-purposes. What is the relationship between nudity and toughness on the net impression that it creates of Playmates? Does the nudity undercut the images of toughness? That even a tough woman can still be made to strip for a camera may merely reinforce her domination by male patriarchy. Or does the combination of nudity and toughness make Playmates even tougher? If a strong, confident woman is willing to pose nude (and stand up to a potential backlash), then she must be very tough indeed. The seeming contradiction of the tough Playmate may rewrite the concept of male patriarchy. Jennifer Lavoie's August 1993 layout characterizes the mixed messages that connect masculinity to sexuality in Playmates' presentations. One picture shows Jennifer standing in a stream, fishing. But the clear masculine overtones are contradicted by the fact that she wears a tiny white bikini bottom. The bottom half of her left breast is visible. The thigh-high fisherman's wading boots are eroticized by her seminudity and bear a resemblance to nylon stockings. Her comment, "I don't take them off the hook-that's a man's job," only serves to reinforce gender differences. Within the male domain of fishing, her appearance is both feminized and sexualized. The same pictorial quotes her as saying, "I don't need a man in my life. I can be my own person." Does this stereotypically feminine sentiment contradict the masculine image or merely broaden it? Exploited or Exploiting The net toughness of Playmates lies in their ability to assert dominance even in a context (nude images) that would appear geared toward reducing their potency. We tend to view the combination of nudity and toughness in terms of an augmentation principle (Kelley). That Playmates are presented as dominant, even in a space that would appear to rob them of their dominance, can be viewed as a testimony of women's abilities to be agentic and self-determining even in situations that might at first appear fraught with the reinforcement of stereotypes. At the very least, our position echoes the sentiment presented by Inness: "the containment of women's toughness is never absolute ... it matters little how the popular media reduce the transgressive nature of tough women . . . such figures still offer visions of female power and independence that help to challenge the gender status quo" (179). In relation to our arguments about Playboy, Inness's sentiment suggests that, although Playboy is less than perfect in its representation of the tough woman, it fares better than other media-even media geared toward women, such as women's fashion magazines. In its depiction of the Playmate, Playboy can be seen as asserting an image of the tough woman in the most unlikely of places. The debate over whether Playmates are agentic individuals or exploited sex workers mirrors debate that has taken place regarding the Playboy Bunny. The Playboy clubs, which opened in I960, featured cocktail waitresses dressed in the uniform of the Playboy Bunny. The Playboy Bunny costume, an American classic that is part of the Smithsonian collection, is essentially a one-piece strapless satin bathing suit, cut high on the hip and accessorized with a bow tie and French cuffs. Gloria Steinem worked as a Playboy Bunny and wrote a two-part article about her experiences, originally published in Show in May and June 1963 and more recently published in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Titled "A Bunny's Tale," the story presented the clubs, Playboy, and the concept of a Playboy Bunny in a very negative light and was instrumental in establishing Gloria Steinem as a feminist writer with clout. In her book The Bunny Years, ex-Bunny Kathryn Leigh Scott presented an alternative interpretation of being a Playboy Bunny as a "deliciously empowering" (6) experience: "Now, suddenly, there was this opportunity for many of us to earn more money than our fathers, in what was essentially an interim job, while exploring a range of options that would otherwise have been beyond our financial means" (3). Scott positioned this opportunity against the backdrop of the preThe Feminine Mystique world for women. "But the social revolution that engulfed the 1960s had yet to trickle down to women . . . what was waiting in the real world was in reality not terribly different from what their mothers had faced" (2-3). Scott suggested that in Steinem's article, "The characterization of Bunnies as na?ve, hapless victims who spent all their time complaining was not only cliched and predictable, but also insultingly inaccurate" (5). In contrast, Scott conceptualized being a Bunny as "though we were perhaps only vaguely aware of it on a conscious level, we were part of the novelty and publicity of a revolutionary sexual change in post World War II society. But far more important than any such highfalutin concepts was the almost giddy realization that we had scored an unparalleled opportunity to earn great sums of money for what amounted to very basic waitressing work" (6). According to Scott, "thanks in part to Gloria Steinem's 'women-asvictim' mode, Bunnies are . . . forever young and dumb, the archetypical female sexual objects forced into positions of servitude toward men. My point of view: We willingly exploited our sexuality . . . intelligence, wit, upper arm strength, youthful exuberance and full range of survival instincts. We saw an opportunity and grabbed it" (275). Scott's analysis of the Playboy Bunny serves as a counterpoint to Steinem's and informs our interpretation of the toughness of the Playboy Playmate. In our prior interpretation of Playmates' collective identities (Beggan and Allison, "The Playboy Playmate Paradox") as presented in the centerfold text, we tried to consciously distinguish between their sexuality and their morality. By presenting Playmates as "nice girls" who just happened to be comfortable enough with their bodies and sexuality to pose nude, Playboy reconceptualized the meaning of posing nude as a healthy and agentic action. In the present article, by approaching nudity as a possible means to enhance a woman's toughness, we have argued in support of a view that orthogonalizes women and women's sexuality in a manner that contradicts the Madonna-whore dichotomy that seems to govern societal views of women. According to some feminists (e.g., Cathryn Bailey; Barbara Findlen; Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake; Rebecca Walker), feminism has entered a third wave, where women's sexuality has become reconceptualized as a means to hedonistic satisfaction and self-expression rather than as a form of patriarchal oppression. From this recent but evolving petspective, women who choose to capitalize on their own sexuality should not necessarily be automatically classified as possessing victim status (Chapkis; McElroy). In fact, the debate between women's exploitation and agency in the context of sexually explicit material has been recognized by feminists as potentially distracting from core issues. For example, Meyerowitz wrote, "On one side, antipornography feminists protest the subordination of women in pornography constructed by and for men. On the other side, anticensorship feminists defend freedom of speech and insist that sexual images might promise sexual pleasure to women as well as men . . . a long-standing ideological rift continues . . . to haunt the American women's movement" (26). Likewise, Jane Juffer writes, "In the two decades of debates around pornography since second-wave feminism raised it as a primary concern, we remain mired in a fruitless back and forth about the status of women in relation to the genre: hapless victims or transgressive agents? The question is no longer a useful one, if indeed it ever was" (2). Playboy as Change Agent We have wrestled with the question of whether the "tough Playmate" should be viewed as a challenge, from an unlikely source, to conventional definitions of femininity, or as a convoluted means of reinforcing male patriarchy at the expense of nontraditional feminine identities. In her initial analysis of the "tough girl," Inness also addressed this conundrum: "the toughness of even the toughest women is limited, confined, reduced, and regulated in a number of ways. In some cases, the femininity . . . of a tough woman is emphasized. . . . In other cases, the sexuality of a tough woman is stressed. In a society where a woman's sexuality is often associated with her subordination, this emphasis reduces the threat of her toughness" (178-79). Inness indicates that regulation of the tough girl took place in women's fashion magazines, which "perpetuate the notion that toughness in women is sexy, which assures the audience that women are not abandoning their traditional roles as sex objects for men just because they are tough" (51). As a result, women's magazines "often use [tough images of women] to affirm the desirability of femininity for women and to help maintain traditional gender divisions between men and women" (53). In contrast to this representation of tough women in women's magazines, Playboy takes an alternative route. Instead of undermining the representation of toughness by embedding even tough women in a feminine context, Playboy undermined the representation of stereotypic femininity by associating it with tough attributes. What is striking about the results of our analysis of Playboy is that the inclusion of tough Playmates helped dispel gender divisions between men and women. Thus, our work illuminates an amusing paradox. It is in the pages of the penultimate men's magazine that one can view images of tough women that are tougher than the images of tough women in women's magazines. In the centerfold texts, we see images that affirm the desirability of women by contradicting gender divisions between men and women. For cultural representations of women to develop and accept the tough woman subtype, it is necessary that this different definition of femininity be accommodated by two groups. The first group, of course, is the women who will potentially occupy the tough niche. The second group, however, is men. Because men and masculinity as a cultural character dominate society, the ability of women to advance a tough image will depend, at least in part, on the willingness of men to accept alternative representations of femininity. As counterintuitive as it might seem, Playboy magazine represents a unique means of socializing within the collective psyche of men, a new definition of femininity that includes, as a subtype, the tough woman. Playboy is an especially effective change agent because it appears embedded in an ideology consistent with dominant male patriarchy. As such, it is seen as representing the interests of men. Thus, when Playboy presents images of Playmates with tough elements, it encourages men to assimilate nontraditional images of women. In this fashion, then, Playboy acts as an effective means of altering stereotypes about women. Inness suggested that "tough women challenge the assumption that toughness is an attribute associated with men" (179). In the present article, we have identified a novel spin on the concept of the tough woman. The tough Playmate challenges the assumption that toughness in a woman cannot coexist with seductive sexuality. In the present article, we asserted what might by viewed by many as a surprising and counterintuitive notion. We suggested that the Playboy Playmate, the seeming poster girl/woman/person for the exploitation of women, can be recast as an instantiation of a tough woman. Playboy's efforts to popularize the image of the Playmate as a tough woman creates a multilayered puzzle. The Playboy Puzzle Playboy'?, efforts to popularize, even in a limited form, an image of the tough woman suggest that Playboy, the alleged manual for sexism, may in fact be more multilayered than critics have previously allowed. Playboy's centerfold text represents a complex space for the discussion of gender. The first layer of the puzzle concerns the main topic of discourse in the magazine. Playboy is a men's magazine, but one of the central topics is women. Thus, in Playboy, men receive messages about women and women's personalities. Examples of idealized femininity (i.e., Playmates), however, are complex because they often contain messages that contradict conventional femininity. In her analysis of women's magazines, Inness notes that women's magazines have an implicit but unstated alliance with the producers of feminine artifacts (i.e., makeup, clothing). The magazine touts the products produced for women. In exchange, through ad dollars, the magazine receives payment from the products' producers. In contrast, in Playboy, because the primary reader is male, there is no alliance between it and women's products. Hence, the magazine is free to present images of women that contradict the dictums of the "cult of femininity" (Ferguson). The second layer of the puzzle involves the relationship between the tough woman image and Playboy's own media identity. Because it valorizes sexualized images of a narrow definition of femininity, Playboy at first appears to be a space that would suppress the tough woman. Playmates are thought to reify a form of femininity that invokes images of sexual exploitation. Their nudity and sexually provocative posing make them appear willing collaborators in their own sexualization and exploitation. Yet the centerfold texts make an effort to present Playmates as competent, in control, physically adventurous, and strong. As such, Playboy Playmates can be conceptualized as a fountain of tough images for women. The presence of these tough images undermine the argument that Playboy is a monolith of women's sexual exploitation. As we have argued elsewhere, it appears that Playboy challenges the gender roles that it appears, at first blush, to reinscribe. One possible limitation of our work is that we cannot assess whether the profiles of Playmates are "true"-that is, reasonably accurate reporting or pure fiction. To a large extent, for our purposes, this distinction is irrelevant. Regardless of their accuracy, the profiles do exist in the magazine. To some extent, if they are fabrications, they become even more interesting documents. Why would Playboy go to such extremes as creating images of toughness that are not even reflected in truth? Most readers of Playboy are adult males. At such, it might be expected that the images of tough women in Playboy would alienate, rather than pique the interests of, most readers. The third puzzle is why Playboy would invest in an image of collective femininity that might possibly drive away readers. The obvious answer is that men do, in fact, find images of tough women alluring. This notion permits us to speculate about a concept that, as far as we are aware, has never been considered. We propose the existence of patriarchal feminism-that is, that men may encourage women to adopt attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors consistent with feminist ideologies because they (men) are in fact attracted to women with these characteristics. This assertion causes us to question the meaning of the word playmate. Critics of Playboy (e.g., Cox) tend to assume that the emphasis belongs on the wordplay, and suggest that the term derogates women because it implies that women can and should exist to be the playthings of men. We prefer to put the emphasis on the term mate, and suggest that the Playmate represents a companion for men. According to this interpretation, men would like to have a romantic interest with a woman with whom they could share their own interests. As such, the real message of Playboy may be for the creation of tough women and tender men who together form the basis for a depolarized view of gender in our society. Works Cited "American in Paris." Playboy. Jan. 1985: 134-47. Bailey, Cathryn. "Making Waves and Drawing Lines: The Politics of Defining the Vicissitudes of Feminism." Hypatia 12 (1997): 17-28. Beggan, James K., and Scott T. Allison. "The Playboy Rabbit is Soft, Furry, and Cute: Is This Really the Symbol of Masculine Dominance of'Women?" Journal of Men's Studies 9 (2001): 341-70. ______. "What Do Playboy Playmates Want? Implications of Expressed Preferences in the Construction of the 'Unfinished' Masculine Identity." Journal of Men's Studies 10 (2001): 1-38. ______. "The Playboy Playmate Paradox: The case against the Objectification of Women." Gendered Sexualities. Ed. Patricia Gagne and Richard Tewksbury. Vol. 6. London: Elsevier Sciences, 2002. Beggan, James K., Patricia Gagn?, and Scott T. Allison. "An Analysis of Stereotype Refutation in Playboy by an Editorial Voice: The Advisor Hypothesis. "Journal of Men's Studies 9 (2000): 1-21. Berns, Nancy. "Disgendering the Problem and Gendering the Blame: Political Discourse on Women and Violence." Gender & Society 15 (2000): 262-81. Brady, Frank. Hefner. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Brooks, Gary. The Centerfold Syndrome. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. Chapkis, Wendy. Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. New York: Routledge, 1997. Cox, Harvey. The secular City. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1983. Ferguson, Marjorie. Forever Feminine: Women's Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann, 1983. Findlen, Barbara. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Seattle: Seal Press, 1995. Heywood, Leslie, and Jennifer Drake, eds. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Inness, Sherrie A. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Juffer, Jane. At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life. New York: New York UP, 1998. Kelley, Harold H. "Attribution in Social Interaction." Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior. Ed. Edward E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, Harold H. Kelley, Richard E. Nisbett, S. Valins, and Bernard Weiner. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1972. 1-26. May, Rollo. Love and Will. New York: Norton, 1969. McDowell, Colin. Dressed to Kill: Sex Power & Clothes. London: Hutchinson, 1992. McElroy, Wendy. XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. Meyerowitz, Joanne. "Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material: Responses to Girlie Pictures in the Mid-Twentieth-Century U.S." Journal of Women's History 8 (1996): 9-35. Miller, Russell. Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy. New York: New American Library, 1984. Owen, P. R., and E. Laurel-Seller. "Weight and Shape Ideals: Thin Is Dangerously in." Journal of Applied Social Psychology 30 (2000): 979-90. Reed, John Shelton. "My Tears Spoiled My Aim" and Other Reflections on Southern Culture. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993. Scott, Kathryn Leigh. The Bunny Years. Los Angeles: Pomegranate Press, 1998. Sennett, Richard. Authority. New York: Knopf, 1980. Shakespeare, William. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. Edmond Malone, Ed. New York: AMA Press, 1966. Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. Walker, Rebecca. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Anchor, 1995. Weyr, Thomas. Reaching for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America. New York: Times Book, 1978. Scott Allison is the MacEldin Trawick Professor of Psychology and chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Richmond. He received his PhD in social psychology at the University of California -Santa Barbara in 1987. Dr. Allison's research and teaching interests include social cognition, decision-making, and media biases. James Beggan received his PhD in psychology in 1989 from the University of California -Santa Barbara. He is currently an associate professor of sociology at the University of Louisville. His research interests involve the representation of gender in the media, with a special interest in better understanding how mass media can be used to contradict and reinforce stereotypes. He has published critical analyses of Playboy magazine and the pornographic films of Candida Royalle. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 02:09:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:09:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Harper's Magazine: Lewis H. Lapham: We Now Live in a Fascist State Message-ID: Harper's Magazine: Lewis H. Lapham: We Now Live in a Fascist State Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:34:38 -0700 [Thanks to Laird for this. He added the title to Lapham's monthly "On Message" column.] [Knowing the source of this piece makes it all the more disturbing. It is not every day that the editor of a respected national magazine publishes an essay claiming that America is not on the road to becoming, but ALREADY IS, a fascist state.... or words to that affect. [To help prepare you for what follows, here are the final sentence from this piece.... [I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police. -Laird Wilcox] On message By Lewis H. Lapham Harper's Magazine October 2005, pps. 7-9 "But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." -Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1938 In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state." The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds, rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United States they numbered among their admirers a good many important people who believed that a somewhat modified form of fascism (power vested in the banks and business corporations instead of with the army) would lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression -- put an end to the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of socialist heresy and democratic dissent. Roosevelt appreciated the extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office; so does Eco, who takes pains in the essay "Ur-Fascism," published in The New York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable: The truth is revealed once and only once. Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader. Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect. Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values. The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies. Argument is tantamount to treason. Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in the grand opera that is the state. Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it has since become to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character of an American government. Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been surprised. He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the force of America's racist passions and the ferocity of its anti-intellectual prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened. The American democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no longer moving "forward as a living force, seeking day and night to better the lot" of its own citizens, and now that sixty years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest Generation," added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited plains. A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the fact, write books about the good old days when everybody was in charge of reading his or her own mail. I hear their message and feel their pain, share their feelings of regret, also wish that Cole Porter was still writing songs, that Jean Harlow and Robert Mitchum hadn't quit making movies. But what's gone is gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to deplore the fact that we're not still riding in a coach to Philadelphia with Thomas Jefferson. The attitude is cowardly and French, symptomatic of effete aesthetes who refuse to change with the times. As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, "Is America a fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, "Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen," an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers. We don't have to burn any books. The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond. We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the bourgeoisie. In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the codes of social hygiene occasionally put the regime to the trouble of smashing department-store windows, beating bank managers to death, inviting opinionated merchants on complimentary tours (all expenses paid, breathtaking scenery) of Siberia. The resorts to violence served as study guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to give up on the democratic notion that the individual citizen is entitled to an owner's interest in his or her own mind. The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to regarding themselves as functions of a corporation. Thanks to the diligence of out news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do you get to keep the house in Florida or command of the Pentagon press office but on some sunny prize day not far over the horizon, the compensation committee will hand you a check for $40 million, or President George W. Bush will bestow on you the favor of a nickname as witty as the ones that on good days elevate Karl Rove to the honorific "Boy Genius," on bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate "Turd Blossom." Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal, that it is the corporation that grants the privilege of an identity, confers meaning on one's life, gives the pension, a decent credit rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of course the corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood, listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the copyright to any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it not? As surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to protect the brand. Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark -- on golf courses and commuter trains, tending to their gardens in Fairfield County while cutting back the payrolls in Michigan and Mexico -- I'm proud to say (and I think I speak for all of us here this evening with Senator Clinton and her lovely husband) that we're blessed with a bourgeoisie that will welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes the rain in April and the sun in June. No need to send for the Gestapo or the NKVD; it will not be necessary to set examples. We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations. People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no further use for free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional, reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated to the time available for television talk or to the performance standards of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet the criteria of the free market. We don't require the inspirational genius of a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of the Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge that the major media syndicates run the business on strictly corporatist principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or inappropriate, committed to the promulgation of what is responsible, rational, and approved by experts. Their willingness to stay on message is a credit to their professionalism. The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with individuals who regarded their freedom of expression as a necessity -- the bone and marrow of their existence, how they recognized themselves as human beings. Which was why, if sometimes they refused appointments to the state-run radio stations, they sometimes were found dead on the Italian autostrada or drowned in the Kiel Canal. The authorities looked upon their deaths as forms of self-indulgence. The same attitude governs the agreement reached between labor and management at our leading news organizations. No question that the freedom of speech is extended to every American -- it says so in the Constitution -- but the privilege is one that musn't be abused. Understood in a proper and financially rewarding light, freedom of speech is more trouble than it's worth -- a luxury comparable to owning a racehorse and likely to bring with it little else except the risk of being made to look ridiculous. People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner respectful of the telephone tap and the surveillance camera have no reason to fear the fist of censorship. By removing the chore of having to think for oneself, one frees up more leisure time to enjoy the convenience of the Internet services that know exactly what one likes to hear and see and wear and eat. We don't have to murder the intelligentsia. Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so glutted with easy entertainment that no writer or company of writers is troublesome enough to warrant the compliment of an arrest, or even the courtesy of a sharp blow to the head. What passes for the American school of dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of obscure journals, across the coffee cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted lecture halls in small Midwestern colleges. The author on the platform or the beach towel can be relied upon to direct his angriest invective at the other members of the academy who failed to drape around the title of his latest book the garland of a rave review. The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the front rank of nations addressing the problems of a twenty-first century, certain to require bold geopolitical initiatives and strong ideological solutions. How can it be otherwise? More pressing demands for always scarcer resources; ever larger numbers of people who cannot be controlled except with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian guidance. Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The existence of mankind hangs in the balance; failure is not an option. Where else but in America can the world find the visionary intelligence to lead it bravely into the future -- Donald Rumsfeld our Dante, Turd Blossom our Michelangelo? I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist commandments against our record of achievement, we can see how well we've begun the new project for the next millennium -- the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of "intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on the part of a complacent populace; the nation's congressional districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient Rome. An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden age until the proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 02:10:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:10:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Polygamous Community Defies State Crackdown Message-ID: Polygamous Community Defies State Crackdown http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25polygamy.html By TIMOTHY EGAN COLORADO CITY, Ariz., Oct. 19 - One year ago, Arizona authorities set up shop in a double-wide trailer here at the edge of the nation's largest polygamous community, trying to bring at least a semblance of secular law to an American small town like no other. Theirs was the first independent government presence in half a century at this settlement straddling the Arizona-Utah border, a place frozen in a 19th-century frontier theocracy inspired by the early Mormon Church. But the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, continue to defy the law, the authorities and dissidents say: under the direction of leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, women are still being removed from their husbands and assigned to other men, and girls under 18 are ordered to become brides of older men on a day's notice, all despite the presence of full-time outside law enforcement. DeLoy Bateman, a high school science teacher here who left the church several years ago, says his daughter's marriage was recently broken up by church leaders. She was ordered to become the bride of her father-in-law, a man twice her age, Mr. Bateman says. "This just makes me want to cry," said Mr. Bateman, a lifelong resident of Colorado City. "They tore up this marriage and ordered her to have sex with this older man. I've lost my daughter and her children to this church. I have to stand outside on the sidewalk and beg if I want to see my grandchildren." Other residents and investigators tell similar stories about the church, which continues operating under the direction of its absolute leader, Warren Jeffs, in spite of his being one of the country's most-wanted fugitives, indicted on sexual abuse charges along with eight of his chief followers. "It's just like the mob," said Gary Engels, a former police detective who has been retained by county officials to investigate child abuse accusations here. "The church is able to keep iron-fisted control even though the top leaders are fugitives." Church leaders - and officials of the mayor's office, the Police Department and the school board, all of whom are followers - declined to be interviewed. The police, as well as church body guards in white pickup trucks, followed a visiting reporter and a photographer around town for several days. Members of the sect say they are the true followers of Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism 175 years ago. About a third of the residents are on food stamps, and the welfare rate is one of the highest in the West. The followers, who account for most of the twin towns' 8,000 people, justify taking public money with a term used by Smith's own followers: "bleeding the beast" - that is, taking from a government under which the early Mormons were often persecuted. Until a few months ago, the church leaders also controlled this community's biggest asset: a trust owning all the land in the two towns and the surrounding area, worth upward of $150 million. But in response to a state lawsuit, a court froze the trust in June, and all trustees linked to Mr. Jeffs were removed. The court has yet to decide who will control the trust. Mr. Jeffs, whose whereabouts is unknown, no longer defends himself in any legal proceeding and has ordered his followers to do the same, state officials say. The sexual abuse charges on which he was indicted in June maintain that he forced a 16-year-old girl to marry a 28-year-old married man. Mr. Jeffs, age 45, has as many as 70 wives, people who have left the church say. He teaches that a man cannot get to heaven unless he has at least three wives. And because there are not enough women to meet the demands of men who want eternal life, brides are constantly being reassigned. "Just yesterday I got word of one of my students who had stopped attending classes: she has been pulled away from her husband and assigned to another man," said Carolyn Hamblin, a counselor and assistant dean at the Colorado City branch of Mohave Community College. "It just breaks my heart," said Ms. Hamblin, a follower of the mainstream Mormon faith, which renounced polygamy in 1890 as a condition of Utah's statehood. The community that Mr. Jeffs continues to rule though absent lies in one of the country's most remote areas, about 100 miles north of the Grand Canyon. The settlement has become more desolate-looking in recent years. Most of the handful of church-run businesses have closed, the residents seeking work elsewhere. Some houses are boarded up. The streets are deep in red mud. As many as 500 people have left the community, townspeople say, to live at a new church compound in the town of Eldorado in West Texas. Like so many other decisions, the selection of those who can join that compound is up to Mr. Jeffs. "He has a cellphone, he has a couple of key cronies, and he uses all the government positions in town to enforce his will," said Ross Chatwin, who sued the church after it tried to reassign his wife and children and ordered him to leave town. Although the church still owns all the towns' property, Mr. Chatwin won the right to stay in the house where he and his family lived. He and his wife, Lori, are among a small group of active dissidents who remain here, and want to see the community stay together in some form. The Arizona attorney general, Terry Goddard, whose own office is already active here, has asked the Justice Department to investigate the local police, saying they "seem to be aiding and abetting" criminal behavior by discouraging witnesses in sexual abuse cases from testifying; a third of the force has been decertified by Utah and Arizona for criminal conduct. In a recent letter to the United States attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. Goddard wrote, "I believe that the officers of the Colorado City Police Department have engaged in a pattern of conduct that deprives individuals of their constitutional and civil rights." The Justice Department has not decided whether to intervene. Mr. Goddard has also moved to put the school district in receivership. Five years ago, church leaders ordered all families to withdraw their children from the one big public school here, kindergarten through high school, in favor of home schooling or church schools. The public school instantly lost about 1,000 students, more than two-thirds of enrollment. Yet the church, whose followers account for a majority of the voters, continues to control the school board and - until recent legal action by Mr. Goddard - the school purse strings, which are now frozen. Mr. Goddard said that while teachers had gone weeks without pay, church officials in control of the district had used public education money to buy a $200,000 airplane and had funneled school funds and property to the church. They also have an administrative staff of 23 people, compared with 6 at other school districts of the same size, he wrote in a report to the Arizona Education Department. Mr. Jeffs continues to raise money for his church by ordering his leading followers to donate $1,000 a month and everyone else to give 10 percent of income, Mr. Chatwin said. Some of the sect's top leaders have gone to the Texas compound, where a huge stone temple is under construction and new homes are being built, even as this community appears to be withering away. "If you can visualize a 90-year-old frail woman who has given everything she owns to the cause and has been left penniless - that is the condition of the town right now," said Jim Hill, an investigator with the office of the Utah attorney general. "It's been sucked dry by these people." From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 02:10:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:10:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Watson and Wilson) Long-Ago Rivals Are Dual Impresarios of Darwin's Oeuvre Message-ID: Long-Ago Rivals Are Dual Impresarios of Darwin's Oeuvre http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/science/sciencespecial2/25darw.html By NICHOLAS WADE Two eminent biologists, James D. Watson and Edward O. Wilson, have been pitted by their respective publishers in an odd and inadvertent competition that recalls a bitter former rivalry. They are editors, for different publishers, of the same book. The work is an anthology of Darwin's four principal writings on evolution with editors' introductions. In the case of the W. W. Norton book, to be published next month, the editor is Dr. Wilson. The Running Press entry, which came out last month, is spearheaded by Dr. Watson. Each has a certain affinity with his illustrious subject. Like Darwin, Dr. Wilson is a great gatherer and synthesizer of biological facts, perceiving new patterns like his theory of sociobiology. Dr. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, made the greatest advance in biology since Darwin, confirming evolution as the explanation of human origins. In their editorial comments on Darwin's four books - "The Voyage of the Beagle," "On the Origin of Species," "Descent of Man" and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" - both note the strange disconnect that Darwin's theory is the bedrock of their discipline yet is doubted by large segments of the American public. It is "surpassingly strange," Dr. Wilson writes, that half of Americans who responded to a recent poll said they did not believe in evolution at all. Dr. Watson writes that evolution is disputed only by those who "put their common sense on hold." The repudiation of Darwin by religious fundamentalists is largely an American phenomenon, dismaying to Europeans, Dr. Wilson said in an interview. He attributes the difference to the frontier nature of early American society. The religion of the frontier, he said, was "very simple, very evangelical in nature, and could summon people to quick action together." In Europe, religion was "far more hierarchical, more closely connected with the ruling class and more likely to be a state religion." The fundamentalist strain of American religion has continued to the present day, and its collision with Darwin is one that Dr. Wilson finds perturbing. "Evolution is one of the best proven ideas of biology, so when you reject that you are beginning to turn away from what is becoming the pre-eminent science of the 21st century," he said. "So it will make a difference if the public refuses to believe in evolution." Dr. Watson is less perturbed that so many Americans do not believe in evolution. "Oh, but eventually they will," he said in an interview in his office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. "As people get themselves genetically tested and see that it helps them, they will realize their biological instructions work this way." He has little time for intelligent design, the proposal that evolution is shaped at the level of DNA by some thoughtful demiurge. "If I have any message for intelligent design, it is that it will come and go," he said. Dr. Watson says he wants no war between science and religion, and sees other reasons besides religious belief for people's sometimes feeble embrace of science. "I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated," he said. But Dr. Wilson sees the two world views as irreconcilable. He believes that the propensity for religious belief was "hard-wired into us," because the tribes that believed they were favored by the gods "were the tribes that beat the other tribes." The advance of science can only undermine the religious view of the world. "I don't see the modern scientific view of the human condition will do anything but move away from traditional religious thinking," he said. Dr. Watson and Dr. Wilson find themselves cast as dual impresarios of Darwin's oeuvre because of a misunderstanding that developed between Dr. Wilson and Running Press, part of Perseus Books, which first invited him to do the book. Dr. Wilson's agent transferred his contribution to Norton, and Running Press then enlisted Dr. Watson to take Dr. Wilson's place. Being authors of rival publications is as nothing compared with the intense competition between the two when they were young assistant professors in the Harvard biology department in the 1950's and 60's. Dr. Watson, fresh from his triumph with DNA, did not see the point of studying anything in biology other than genes, especially not whole animals. "At department meetings, Watson radiated contempt in all directions," Dr. Wilson wrote in "Naturalist," his autobiography. "He shunned ordinary courtesy and polite conversation, evidently in the belief that they would only encourage the traditionalists to stay around." The traditional biologists and the new molecular biologists sparred over which directions research should take and which discipline new hires should belong to. Dr. Wilson's side received an unexpected boost one day in 1958 when their champion received tenure before Dr. Watson. In a biography, "Watson and DNA," Victor K. McElheny records how the Harvard biology department was apprised of this development. "Watson could be heard coming up the stairwell to the third floor," Mr. McElheny wrote, repeatedly shouting the same one-word obscenity. The two men, according to each, have long since made up, and they now portray their clash in terms of the historical collision between the disciplines that each represented. "Jim was a notoriously difficult person then," Dr. Wilson said. "But over the years, he has mellowed. And I guess I did too, and with organismic biology making use of molecular biology, biology began to be united." Dr. Watson says much the same. "I was against bad organismal biology," he recalled. "I wasn't against Ed. I wanted molecular biology to thrive at Harvard, and his fair-mindedness led him to appoint Lewontin," he said, referring to Richard Lewontin, the population geneticist who led a political and personal attack on Dr. Wilson for his book "Sociobiology." The anthologies are meant to coincide with a Darwin exhibition opening next month at the American Museum of Natural History that is tied to the approaching anniversary of "On the Origin of Species, " still making trouble after 150 years. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 27 02:10:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:10:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Scare Yourself Silly, but the Real Terrors Are at Your Feet Message-ID: Scare Yourself Silly, but the Real Terrors Are at Your Feet http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/health/psychology/25essa.html [I have not read this article, since I'm trying to cut back on my reading. It should be of interest to several people on my list, and it takes only a few seconds to send it. If it's really good, let me know.] By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Just in time for Halloween, the usual yearly ritual of terror by headline is now playing itself out in medical offices everywhere. Last year it revolved around flu shots; a few years ago it was anthrax and smallpox; a few years before that it was the "flesh-eating bacteria"; and before that it was Ebola virus, and Lyme disease and so on back into the distant past. This year it's the avian flu. "I was crossing Third Avenue yesterday and I was coughing so hard I had to stop and barely made it across," a patient told me last week. "I'm really scared I'm getting the avian flu." I just looked at him. What could I say? He has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for the last 50 years. He has coughed and wheezed and gasped his way across Third Avenue now for the last 10 years. His emphysema is not going to get any better, but it might stop getting worse if he were to stop smoking. He made it clear long ago that this is not going to happen. When it comes to the whole cigarette/health question, his motto, apparently, is "What, me worry?" But the avian flu - now there's a health scare a person can sink his teeth into. So scary and yet, somehow, so pleasantly distant. So thrilling, so chilling, and yet, at the same time, so not here, not now, not yet. All in all, a completely satisfying health care fear experience. Unlike his actual illness. Scary movies give children nightmares. Scary health news gives adults the extraordinary ability to ignore the immediate in favor of the distant, to escape from the real (and the really scary) into a far easier kind of fear. A few years ago, a young woman waited patiently to be seen in our office after hours. She was a patient of one of my colleagues, but she couldn't wait for their scheduled appointment; she needed to see someone right away. "I'm worried I have Lyme disease," she said. "I have all the symptoms. I think I need to be treated." "But you have AIDS," I said. "I'm tired and weak and I have fevers and sweats. I've lost my appetite. I can't think straight. I'm losing so much weight!" She had seen a TV news report on Lyme disease, and then she had checked the Internet. All her symptoms were right there. "But you have AIDS," I said. "And you don't want to take meds. That's why you're feeling so bad." "I'm really scared about Lyme disease," she said. "I really need to get treated." "If you want to be scared, how about that untreated AIDS of yours?" We looked at each other. It was an impasse. The fact that logic was on my side mattered not at all: evidently the real was just a little too real for her. How much better to find another illness to be scared of, obsess over, get treated for, get rid of. Eventually she coerced my colleague into testing her for Lyme disease and treating her despite negative tests. Then she decided her symptoms might actually be due to a brain tumor, instead. And so it went, until she died of AIDS. Of four patients I saw in a single hour last week, three announced how scared they were of the avian flu. I reassured them, but there was quite a bit I did not say, and here it is. I did not say: If you want to be scared, then how about that drug habit of yours you think I don't know about? How about the fact that you are 100 pounds overweight and eat nothing but junk? How about the fact that in a few short months Medicaid is going to stop paying for your very expensive medications and no one knows how just high that Medicare Part D deductible and co-payment are going to be? I did not say: If you want something to be scared of, how about the drug-resistant Klebsiella that is all over this very hospital, an ordinary run-of-the-mill bacterial strain that has become so resistant to so many antibiotics that we've had to resurrect a few we stopped using 30 years ago because they were so toxic. That Klebsiella is one scary germ. It's in hospitals all over the country, and by now it's probably killed a thousandfold more people than the avian flu. But you don't hear much about our Klebsiella. Like our bad habits and our dismally insoluble health insurance tangles, our antibiotic-resistant bacteria are with us, right here, right now. Apparently they all lack the drama, the suspense, the titillating worst-case situations that energize our politicians and turn into a really newsworthy health care scare. They're all just too real. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Oct 27 14:08:29 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 08:08:29 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Scare Yourself Silly, but the Real Terrors Are at Your Feet In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4360DF5D.2030206@solution-consulting.com> It is well known that fear is not a reliable motivator for change, because we can habituate to fear so quickly. The best motivator seems to be hope for a better future. Medics have tried for years to scare people into health; it would work better to have pictures of Lance Armstrong and a 'you can do this too' message. The Motivational Interviewing people have a good deal to say about motivating change, and they do not emphasize fear and threat. MI's original impetus came from Bill Miller being disenchanted with the confrontational method of helping problem drinkers. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Scare Yourself Silly, but the Real Terrors Are at Your Feet > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/health/psychology/25essa.html > [I have not read this article, since I'm trying to cut back on my > reading. It should be of interest to several people on my list, and it > takes only a few seconds to send it. If it's really good, let me know.] > > By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. > > Just in time for Halloween, the usual yearly ritual of terror by > headline is now playing itself out in medical offices everywhere. Last > year it revolved around flu shots; a few years ago it was anthrax and > smallpox; a few years before that it was the "flesh-eating bacteria"; > and before that it was Ebola virus, and Lyme disease and so on back > into the distant past. This year it's the avian flu. > > "I was crossing Third Avenue yesterday and I was coughing so hard I > had to stop and barely made it across," a patient told me last week. > "I'm really scared I'm getting the avian flu." > > I just looked at him. What could I say? He has smoked two packs of > cigarettes a day for the last 50 years. He has coughed and wheezed and > gasped his way across Third Avenue now for the last 10 years. His > emphysema is not going to get any better, but it might stop getting > worse if he were to stop smoking. > > He made it clear long ago that this is not going to happen. When it > comes to the whole cigarette/health question, his motto, apparently, > is "What, me worry?" > > But the avian flu - now there's a health scare a person can sink his > teeth into. So scary and yet, somehow, so pleasantly distant. So > thrilling, so chilling, and yet, at the same time, so not here, not > now, not yet. All in all, a completely satisfying health care fear > experience. Unlike his actual illness. > > Scary movies give children nightmares. Scary health news gives adults > the extraordinary ability to ignore the immediate in favor of the > distant, to escape from the real (and the really scary) into a far > easier kind of fear. > > A few years ago, a young woman waited patiently to be seen in our > office after hours. She was a patient of one of my colleagues, but she > couldn't wait for their scheduled appointment; she needed to see > someone right away. > > "I'm worried I have Lyme disease," she said. "I have all the symptoms. > I think I need to be treated." > > "But you have AIDS," I said. > > "I'm tired and weak and I have fevers and sweats. I've lost my > appetite. I can't think straight. I'm losing so much weight!" > > She had seen a TV news report on Lyme disease, and then she had > checked the Internet. All her symptoms were right there. > > "But you have AIDS," I said. "And you don't want to take meds. That's > why you're feeling so bad." > > "I'm really scared about Lyme disease," she said. "I really need to > get treated." > > "If you want to be scared, how about that untreated AIDS of yours?" > > We looked at each other. It was an impasse. The fact that logic was on > my side mattered not at all: evidently the real was just a little too > real for her. How much better to find another illness to be scared of, > obsess over, get treated for, get rid of. > > Eventually she coerced my colleague into testing her for Lyme disease > and treating her despite negative tests. Then she decided her symptoms > might actually be due to a brain tumor, instead. And so it went, until > she died of AIDS. > > Of four patients I saw in a single hour last week, three announced how > scared they were of the avian flu. I reassured them, but there was > quite a bit I did not say, and here it is. > > I did not say: If you want to be scared, then how about that drug > habit of yours you think I don't know about? How about the fact that > you are 100 pounds overweight and eat nothing but junk? How about the > fact that in a few short months Medicaid is going to stop paying for > your very expensive medications and no one knows how just high that > Medicare Part D deductible and co-payment are going to be? I did not > say: If you want something to be scared of, how about the > drug-resistant Klebsiella that is all over this very hospital, an > ordinary run-of-the-mill bacterial strain that has become so resistant > to so many antibiotics that we've had to resurrect a few we stopped > using 30 years ago because they were so toxic. > > That Klebsiella is one scary germ. It's in hospitals all over the > country, and by now it's probably killed a thousandfold more people > than the avian flu. > > But you don't hear much about our Klebsiella. Like our bad habits and > our dismally insoluble health insurance tangles, our > antibiotic-resistant bacteria are with us, right here, right now. > Apparently they all lack the drama, the suspense, the titillating > worst-case situations that energize our politicians and turn into a > really newsworthy health care scare. > > They're all just too real. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Oct 27 18:50:14 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:50:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity In-Reply-To: <200510271800.j9RI06e32584@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051027185014.34844.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>If a strong, confident woman is willing to pose nude (and stand up to a potential backlash), then she must be very tough indeed. The seeming contradiction of the tough Playmate may rewrite the concept of male patriarchy.<< --Nudity can signify many things... innocence, shame, nature, manipulation... what it signifies depends on who is observing, who is naked, and who is interpreting the observer's reactions. Often, different subcultures find it impossible to agree on what an act signifies, each insisting that it is the objective and final observer, or observing in the name of some higher power (God, social convention, etc). In reality, signs have different meaning depending on context, and there is no way to finalize context. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Oct 28 01:38:04 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:38:04 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] reinventing capitalism Message-ID: <436180FC.3020000@solution-consulting.com> Interesting column today from Thomas Sowell, could be a supporting story for your book / workshop in December. http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/10/27/173033.html Rosa Parks and history By Thomas Sowell Oct 27, 2005 Syndicated columnist The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? "Racism" some will say -- and there was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries. Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races. These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit -- and you don't make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about. It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process. It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn't care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote. The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts. These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn't comply. None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront. Just as it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of whites to demand racial segregation through the political system to bring it about, so it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of blacks to stop riding the streetcars, buses and trains in order to provide incentives for the owners of these transportation systems to feel the loss of money if some blacks used public transportation less than they would have otherwise. People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want. Black people's money was just as good as white people's money, even though that was not the case when it came to votes. Initially, segregation meant that whites could not sit in the black section of a bus any more than blacks could sit in the white section. But whites who were forced to stand when there were still empty seats in the black section objected. That's when the rule was imposed that blacks had to give up their seats to whites. Legal sophistries by judges "interpreted" the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal treatment out of existence. Judicial activism can go in any direction. That's when Rosa Parks came in, after more than half a century of political chicanery and judicial fraud. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Oct 28 02:40:23 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:40:23 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] reinventing capitalism Message-ID: In a message dated 10/27/2005 9:36:33 PM Eastern Standard Time, ljohnson at solution-consulting.com writes: Interesting column today from Thomas Sowell, could be a supporting story for your book / workshop in December. an interesting peek at the undergarments of history, Lynn. How are you? ---------- 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 Oct 28 14:03:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 07:03:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Can you explain why this is a fraud? Message-ID: Chiron wins big contract to make bird flu vaccine EMERYVILLE FIRM GETS $62.5 MILLION, 2ND LARGEST AWARD By Steve Johnson Mercury News Chiron won a $62.5 million federal contract Thursday to help produce a vaccine to counter the threat of a bird-flu pandemic. The contract is the second-largest award for bird-flu vaccines announced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Last month, the agency awarded $100 million to Sanofi-Aventis of France. Both contracts are for a vaccine aimed at defeating the virus' most virulent strain, H5N1, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia. The victims are believed to have contracted the flu virus from geese and other birds rather than people. But health officials fear the virus might mutate into one that can be transmitted from person to person, putting millions of lives at risk. ``An influenza vaccine effective against the H5N1 virus is our best hope of protecting the American people from a virus for which they have no immunity,'' said the agency's secretary, Mike Leavitt. Chiron, a biotechnology company in Emeryville, has been one of the nation's major developers of vaccine for seasonal flu and other illnesses, including rabies, measles, polio and tick-borne encephalitis. Vaccines are usually designed to protect people from getting infected. Federal officials hope to stockpile enough vaccine for 20 million people. For people who do become infected, some anti-viral treatments might help minimize the severity of the illness. The government also wants to store enough anti-viral medicine -- such as Tamiflu, developed by Gilead Sciences of Foster City and produced by Roche -- to treat an additional 20 million people. Chiron will be expected to provide its vaccine early next year, said Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Hall. He added that the precise number of doses the company will provide isn't yet known. That will depend on how strong the vaccine proves to be and whether it can be used with other drugs to boost its effectiveness. From Euterpel66 at aol.com Fri Oct 28 19:20:50 2005 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:20:50 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity Message-ID: <1a4.42ba4976.3093d412@aol.com> In a message dated 10/27/2005 2:53:43 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: --Nudity can signify many things... innocence, shame, nature, manipulation... what it signifies depends on who is observing, who is naked, and who is interpreting the observer's reactions. Often, different subcultures find it impossible to agree on what an act signifies, each insisting that it is the objective and final observer, or observing in the name of some higher power (God, social convention, etc). In reality, signs have different meaning depending on context, and there is no way to finalize context. Michael Maybe I have missed something, but what about ART? Every Friday a model poses nude for four hours for me Some of them are strong women insisting on certain conditions. An acquaintance draws her nudes from Playboy. My sister turned Playboy down when they approached her because she was concerned about future repercussions. Now I wonder if she regrets that decision. I think she might. Lorraine 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 Wed Oct 26 02:31:41 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:31:41 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] "No Peace Without Victory" Message-ID: <25905772.1130293901893.JavaMail.root@mswamui-cedar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: peaceVictory.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 166224 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 27 03:49:50 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 20:49:50 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] "Feed Your Head" Message-ID: <19465800.1130384990742.JavaMail.root@mswamui-swiss.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: FeedYourHead.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 150725 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 28 01:09:35 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 18:09:35 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ask Your Doctor Message-ID: <8686293.1130461776665.JavaMail.root@mswamui-andean.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: AskYourDoctor.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 138503 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Oct 28 22:52:59 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:52:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity In-Reply-To: <200510281959.j9SJxje15984@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20051028225259.58695.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Lorraine says: >>Maybe I have missed something, but what about ART? Every Friday a model poses nude for four hours for me Some of them are strong women insisting on certain conditions. An acquaintance draws her nudes from Playboy.<< --That's an example of how agreement upon a frame influences perception of what's in it. The "artistic nude" frame renders anything in it culturally acceptable, even highbrow. The "porn" frame can put the same content in a totally different light. The same individual can have two sets of "eyes", depending on the setting, other observers, and contextual cues. Some artists enjoy playing with the boundary lines between frames, turning porn into art and vice versa. It seems difficult for most people to intentionally shift their interpretation, and it's relatively easy to convince them that something is art or trash, just by surrounding the object with signs commonly associated with one context or the other. Perception is malleable, and most people aren't very comfortable with ambiguity, preferring situations where they know in advance which set of eyes to use. Michael __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Oct 28 23:45:28 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:45:28 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity In-Reply-To: <1a4.42ba4976.3093d412@aol.com> References: <1a4.42ba4976.3093d412@aol.com> Message-ID: <4362B818.1060401@solution-consulting.com> I object to this thread. I click on the messages and there are no pictures. Euterpel66 at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 10/27/2005 2:53:43 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, > anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: > > --Nudity can signify many things... innocence, shame, > nature, manipulation... what it signifies depends on > who is observing, who is naked, and who is > interpreting the observer's reactions. Often, > different subcultures find it impossible to agree on > what an act signifies, each insisting that it is the > objective and final observer, or observing in the name > of some higher power (God, social convention, etc). In > reality, signs have different meaning depending on > context, and there is no way to finalize context. > > Michael > > Maybe I have missed something, but what about ART? Every Friday a > model poses nude for four hours for me Some of them are strong women > insisting on certain conditions. > An acquaintance draws her nudes from Playboy. > My sister turned Playboy down when they approached her because she was > concerned about future repercussions. Now I wonder if she regrets that > decision. I think she might. > > Lorraine > > Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. > ---Andre Gide > > http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 29 01:22:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:22:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 047: Frank's Abandonment of Reality, One Year Later Message-ID: 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 Oct 29 01:25:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:25:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Horror International Message-ID: 'Horror International' The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.28 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i10/10a02101.htm NOTA BENE By NINA C. AYOUB Fear is global in horror movies. Yet film scholars focused mainly on American horror until fairly recently, say Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams. Taking those attempts further, Mr. Schneider, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, and Mr. Williams, a professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, present Horror International (Wayne State University Press). As editors, they join 19 other film scholars analyzing movies from Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, and Thailand. Raiford Guins opens by considering how cross-cultural perceptions of films by the Italian gore masters Dario Argento and Mario Bava have been affected by changes in technology. Their films achieved new popularity in the United States on videotapes but in a badly mangled format, chopped up and clumsily dubbed. Today aficionados can buy DVDs of remastered prints with subtitles and restored scenes. But when gore goes upmarket, does it lose some schlock value prized by cultists? Later, in a section on localized horror, Adam Knee considers how recent movies made in Thailand have resurrected haunts from folk culture, including the pii bporp, a "malevolent liver-consuming spirit" and the pii dtai tang krom, "the ghost of a woman who has died in childbirth." Also in the Pacific, Ian Conrich describes how a "Kiwi Gothic" unsettles New Zealand's "pastoral paradise." Exploring horror in the social realm, Suzie Young visits another nation often known for niceness. She considers how depictions of schoolgirls in Canadian horror reflect a "legitimation crisis" in a country where "ennui and anxiety are as persistent as the northern blackfly in the summer woods." While with Romanians, the world's cultural association of their country with vampires has not always been welcome, notes Christina Stojanova. During the Ceausescu dictatorship, state studios produced a biopic of the medieval ruler Vlad Tepes, known in the West as inspiration for Dracula, but at home as a hero. But after Ceausescu met his own violent end, films such as Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth have uncovered more of "the archaic core of Romanian culture, intact under the layers of rubble. ... " Interestingly, some countries' prolific film industries have almost no horror. In Viola Shafik's essay on Egypt, she considers why, out of more than 2,500 full-length features produced, she can identify only three as unequivocally in the genre. And in at least one, she quips, the monsters "do not behave all that badly." From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 29 01:25:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:25:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Discover: Time Machine Message-ID: Time Machine http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/cover/ [Descriptions of graphics on the right. Best to click the URL.] Will a clock that works flawlessly for 10,000 years become the greatest wonder of the world? By Brad Lemley DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 11 | November 2005 | Technology SOMETIMES, WHEN THINGS GET SUFFICIENTLY WEIRD, SUBTLETY NO longer works, so i'll be blunt: The gleaming device I am staring at in the corner of LONG CLOCK Prototype number two of the Clock of the Long Now is, at nine feet tall, a diminutive model of the final version, which is expected to be at least 60 feet tall and will have multiple displays. This prototype records the changes in the relative positions of Earth and the five other planets that humans can eyeball without a telescope. "If you came up to the clock thousands of years from now, you could still read the time, even if you did not have the same time system we use now," says designer Danny Hillis. a machine shop in San Rafael, California, is the most audacious machine ever built. It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do--run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years. Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis. Made of stone and steel, it is more sculpture than machine. And, like all fine timepieces, it is outrageously expensive. No one will reveal even an approximate price tag, but a multibillionaire financed its construction, and it seems likely that shallower pockets would not have sufficed. Still, any description of the clock must begin and end with that ridiculous projected working life, that insane, heroic, incomprehensible span of time during which it is expected to serenely tick. Ten thousand years. The span of time from the invention of agriculture to the present. Twice as long as the Great Pyramid of Giza has stood. Four hundred human generations. How? Or more to the point, why? Most humans are preoccupied with the here and now. Albert Einstein, echoing the sentiments of other deep thinkers of the modern era, argued that one of the biggest challenges facing humanity is to "widen our circle of compassion" across both space and time. Everything from ethnic discrimination to wars, such reasoning goes, would become impossible if our compassionate circles were wide enough. That is exactly why W. Daniel Hillis, the man whose insights underlie the world's most powerful supercomputers, has spent two decades designing and building LONG VIEW Clock designer Danny Hillis, standing next to an early plywood and aluminum prototype, knows that looters and vandals pose a significant threat to his engineering marvel, no matter how well it works. "The most dangerous period will be the couple of hundred years after I'm dead, before the clock is really old and assumes historical importance," he says. "So there will have to be a caretaker. That's part of the plan." prototypes of what he has dubbed the Clock of the Long Now. The clock in the corner of the machine shop, you should understand, is a prototype, the second prototype. Nonetheless, even the prototype can tick away for 10,000 years. Hillis and his team just finished it a few weeks ago. There will be more prototypes over the next few decades before the final, much larger version is embedded in a mountain in Nevada. The clock idea originally sprang from Hillis's observation that in the 1980s, all long-range planning seemed to smack into a wall called the year 2000--the nice, round number seemed to be the omega point for everyone from software programmers to international policymakers: "Nobody could even think about the year 2030. It bugged me." Because technology began 10,000 years ago--there are pot fragments at least that old--Hillis decided to build a clock that would tick that long into the future, conceptually fixing humanity in the center of 20 millennia. Musician Brian Eno, Hillis's friend and a clock project collaborator, dubbed that vast span "the long now." The clock of his dreams, said Hillis in 1993, "ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium." The final version, which will be at least 60 feet tall, frankly strikes more than a few people as pointless. "Many people are completely uninterested. They think it's nonsense, a waste of time," Hillis says. And he concedes that "in the world of ideas, it's an odd one." Still, project insiders have found that the idea, like the clock itself, ticks away patiently, incrementally engaging skeptical minds. "People will make some flippant comment, then come back months later with an idea about how to make it work," says Alexander Rose, a codesigner and executive director of the Long Now Foundation, which finances the clock. Hillis, at first motivated by a vague desire to promote long-term thinking, has been transformed by his idea: "Now I think about people who will live 10,000 years from now as real people." His eyes take on a distant focus as he says this, as if he sees them massed on the horizon. "I had never thought that way before." But Hillis, who has been known to drive a fire engine to work, also cautions against regarding the Clock of the Long Now too gravely: "This project has a lovely kind of lightness to it." Genius is a shabby, abused, and degraded noun, but Hillis reminds one of what it should mean. He is cochairman and chief technology officer of Applied Minds in Glendale, California, a 21st-century analogue of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratories. There, an elite engineer corps patents a river of inventions ranging from voice encryptors to cancer detectors. Universally called Danny, Hillis is affable and witty but tends to veer abruptly into subjects like lattice theory, which "describes a piece of graph paper in n dimensions," and from there the conversation becomes a labyrinth impossible to negotiate. "Danny's intelligence is the rarest of kinds," says Rose. "The sheer practicality of his knowledge makes him a true genius." As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe. About a decade LONG COUNT A top-down view of a serial-bit adder reveals a cam slider, the long silvery piece with channels carved in its end, which triggers binary calculations as it rotates in a carriage over bit pins on a fixed disk. A 360-degree rotation constitutes one tick of the mechanism. The clock ticks just twice a day, at noon and at midnight. later he invented an electronic mainframe computer called the Connection Machine that worked somewhat like a human brain; instead of one processor, it had 65,536, all firing at once like buzzing neurons, a model that supercomputers have used ever since. The irony is inescapable: The architect of the world's fastest machine now designs the world's slowest. The trip to Hillis's office is a cross between a Disney ride and the multidoor opening sequence of the 1960s television show Get Smart. I enter a low-slung industrial building, meet Hillis in the lobby, follow him into a red, British-style phone booth, pick up the receiver, wait for him to say the password, and follow him through the false back when it opens into a cavernous workroom. I then pass under a 13-foot-tall, five-ton, four-legged robot he designed, marvel at his new invention that instantly makes three-dimensional maps of any place in the world, then settle into his gadget-strewn office complete with a New Yorker cartoon of a gypsy behind a crystal ball who says: "Why ask me about the future? Ask Danny Hillis." So that's what I do: "How do you build a clock that will keep perfect time for 10,000 years?" Hillis, who loves gadgets and was once Walt Disney Imagineering's vice president for research and development, smiles and begins to explain the HOW STARS TELL US THE TIME One universal way to visualize the passage of time is to make a dynamic model of the heavens. The changing relationship of Earth and the five inner planets can be calculated based on how long it takes each planet to revolve around the sun, which ranges from 87.97 Earth days for Mercury to 10759.50 Earth days for Saturn. Here, the diagram shows the conjunction of the planets on November 15, 2005. HOW THE CLOCK CAN BE READ The Clock of the Long Now prototype features an orrery, a simplified planetary display. The shperical cage of the orrery, called the firmament, is tilted at 23.27 degrees, the angle of he Earth's axis in relation to the flat plane of the planets as they radiate out form the sun. The cage includes a celestial equator with degree markings for measuring the alignment of the planets at any given time. challenges involved. The clock must remain accurate for 100 centuries while sitting on an atmospherically, geologically, and worst of all, culturally violent planet. To forestall looting (the bane of many built-for-the-ages projects, such as the Egyptian pyramids), it cannot contain parts made of jewels and expensive metals. In case of societal collapse, it must be maintainable with Bronze Age technology. It must be understandable while intact, so that no one will want to take it apart. It must be easily improved over time, and it must be scalable so that the design can be shown via smaller prototypes. "The ultimate design criterion is that people have to care about it," says Hillis. "If they don't, it won't last." All straightforward, but ludicrously daunting. Time can mean many things, but Hillis's machine needs to track a particularly messy version: Earth-surface clock/calendar time, which is based on a byzantine agglomeration of astronomical rotations, orbits, and perturbations of hugely varying lengths, overlaid with arbitrary cultural whims about how to divide it up. What kind of machine can, for 10 millennia, accurately reconcile hours, days, weeks, months, leap years, leap centuries, the precession (wobbling around an axis) of planetary orbits, and, grandest cycle of all, the 25,784-year precession of the equinox? Answer: a digital one. A calculation that extends to 28 bits is accurate to one in 3.65 million--or in clock terms, one day in 10,000 years. Bits and bytes are typically rendered electronically, but Hillis says he "rejected electronics from the start. It would not be technologically transparent and probably not durable. I could quickly see that the clock had to be mechanical." So Hillis invented--and patented--a serial-bit adder, or a mechanical binary computer. Instead of using "voltage on" or "voltage off" to define zeros and ones like a typical electronic computer, the disk-shaped adder uses levers that can rest in either the "0" or "1" position. An individual adder can be programmed with 28 pins--what a programmer would call 28 bits--to represent in binary code any number displayed by the clock, such as the lunar cycle of 29.5305882 days. A cam slider with special grooves carved into it spins over the adder's pins, reading the pins and levers and ticking the levers back and forth with each revolution until it reaches the desired number and "overflows." At that point, the slider pops out of the clock's side--rather like a cuckoo popping out on the hour--and engages a small wheel, which in turn moves some part of the clock's display. The clock's guts are a stack of serial-bit adders, each controlling a different part of the display. As if that were not complicated enough, the final clock will require a helical column called the "equation of time" cam. Its purpose will be to make the HOW THE CLOCK COMPUTES The clock is driven by binary mechanical computers called serial-bit adders with one adder per planet. An adder consists of a disk with an outer set of bit-pin levers, each of which can take on a value of "1" or "0," as well as an inner ring of fixed bit pins programmed with a mathematical constant that represents the duration of the planet's orbit. (A) The levers and pins are read by a series of channels in a cam slider that rotates in a carriage. (B) The slider also adds sums by tripping levers as it goes. (C) During each rotation, the slider jitters back and forth as it accumulates sums. (D) When the accumulated sums reach an overflow value, the slider pops out of the carriage and catches a Geneva wheel. (E) The movement of the Geneva wheel updates the planetary display. conversion from absolute time to local solar time. Using a stylus that traces the cam's rather feminine shape, the clock will be able to compensate for elliptical eccentricities in Earth's orbit around the sun and the tilt of Earth's axis. These two celestial phenomena "beating against each other," as Hillis puts it, produce variations in the the sun's apparent rate of travel through the sky that would add up to about 15 minutes per year over the clock's lifetime. (That a short section of the cam vaguely resembles a nude female's hips and thighs isn't accidental: Hillis twiddled and tweaked to make the cam look like that. "Other configurations could have worked, but it would not have looked nearly as wonderful," he says.) Still, no mechanical clock, however cleverly crafted, can keep perfect time for 10,000 years. So Hillis added solar synchronization: A sunbeam striking a precisely angled lens at noon triggers a reset by heating, expanding, and buckling a captive band of metal. And what about power? By harnessing natural processes like temperature or pressure changes, "there are lots of ways to make it totally self-winding," says Hillis. "But I want people to engage the clock, not forget it." So the perfect power system could handle neglect but would respond to love. The final clock, untended, will wind itself enough to keep its pendulum swinging and track time, but human visitors--perhaps by merely stepping on a platform--could also wind the display. "So when you visit the clock, it shows the last time someone was there," says Hillis. "When you wind it, it catches up to now and stops, set for the next person. It rewards attention." The last question, what to display, gives Hillis the most pause. All cultures recognize days, months, and years because they spring from simple "once around" astronomical cycles, but hours, weeks, centuries, and other divisions are arbitrary, varying wildly across times and places. Hillis is still mulling how to handle that, but he knows for sure that the final clock will somehow mirror the positions of the planets relative to the stars and to one another. "That will be one of many displays it has," he says. Hillis is in the process of rolling out these and more ideas in a series of increasingly complex prototypes. The first one, now on permanent display at the Science Museum in London, was financed by an anonymous donor who lent it to SLOWER THINKING Aside from its eponymous clock, the Long Now Foundation, formed in 1996, pursues projects aimed at promoting "slower, better" thinking: o The Rosetta Project attempts to preserve all human languages. The project concentrates on languages that are likely to go extinct by 2100, including hundreds whose native speakers number in the thousands or fewer. Its document database, representing some 2,300 languages as of June 2005, is(www.rosettaproject.org) and will be periodically published in a book and on a micro-etched disk for widespread distribution. o Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, a series of monthly lectures in various locations around San Francisco, have included such speakers as geographer Jared Diamond, astronaut Rusty Schweikart, and musician Brian Eno. o The Long Bets Web site (www.longbets.org) lets all comers wager on long-range predictions (a minimum of two years; there is no maximum), with proceeds going to a charity named by the victor. For example, $2,000 is riding on the prediction "By 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes." the museum. "The deal we offer is, if you fund the next stage of the development of the clock, we will give you a prototype," says Hillis. "We have spent millions of dollars so far--I don't know the exact number." The nine-foot-tall London clock uses a slowly rotating torsional pendulum, ticks once every 30 seconds, and tracks hours, sidereal and solar years, centuries, phases of the moon, and the zodiac--and happens to be hauntingly beautiful. Incredibly, its three-year-long construction was completed in a mad rush scarcely one hour before midnight on December 31, 1999. That meant there was no time to test it before the switch to the year 2000, the most complex date change in the Gregorian system since the year 1600 because it involved a once-in-400-years leap year exemption. Yet at midnight, "it bonged twice. It was perfect. That was a great moment," says Hillis softly. "Some people say their millennium experience was anticlimactic. Mine wasn't." In his biodiesel-powered Toyota Land Cruiser, Alexander Rose drives me from the Long Now Foundation's office in the historic Presidio district in San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge to Rand Machine Works, a metal shop in San Rafael that's about the size of a three-car garage. In a dark back corner the second prototype is rising, adder ring by adder ring. It is funded by billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft and a longtime Hillis pal. The clock's builder is Chris Rand, a nonpareil build-anything machinist who has helped craft everything from the Star Wars land cruisers to America's Cup yachts. This project, he says, is working on him. "I think about everything more long term now," he says. Someday this clock may become a holy object, but for now it's a half-finished project in a gritty shop that infidels can touch and tinker with. I scoot the adder arm around with my index finger. A complex series of channels cut into its end makes it jitter back and forth as it slides over pins. The whole thing is so brilliant it makes me laugh. Gears constitute the heart of the calculation engines of most other mechanical clocks, but as friction grinds them down, they get smaller, which means they move faster, which means they lose accuracy. But an adder's pin--even a worn one--is either there or not there, at either "1" or "0" until the thing shears clean through, which in a big clock with massive pins should take more than 10,000 years. Genius. Still, materials remain a tricky question. The prototypes so far have been made largely of stainless steel, but the metals that will compose the final clock remain in doubt. "Just about nobody is doing research on materials that will last for thousands of years," says Rose. Hillis, Rose, and Rand will make at least one more prototype after this one, but before Hillis dies, they will build the big one. The Long Now Foundation made a serious commitment to the final clock when, in 1999--or, as foundation literature renders this and all other years, "01999"--it bought 180 acres of desert mountain land adjoining Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada. Dry, remote, and geologically stable, the site has one other serendipitous attribute--it is studded with bristlecone pines, the world's oldest living things. At the Long Now Foundation's office, Rose hands me a core section of a bristlecone on the property. "This is just the outer trunk, just 1,000 years, from 944 to 2003," he says. Some bristlecones in the area are nearly 5,000 years old. The clock site may be the only spot on Earth where commencing a 10,000-year process seems like a halfway sensible thing to do. Hillis's plan for the final clock, which he reserves the right to change, has it built inside a series of rooms carved into white limestone cliffs, 10,000 feet up the Snake LONG STACK The Long Now prototype's calculation engine consists of six serial-bit adders, stacked like pancakes. The long shaft, topped with small gears, is part of a Geneva wheel mechanism. The clock features six of these devices. Each one links an individual serial-bit adder to a large gear that moves a planet in the display. Range's west side. A full day's walk from anything resembling a road will be required to reach what looks like a natural opening in the rock. Continuing inside, the cavern will become more and more obviously human made. Closest to vast natural time cycles, the clock's slowest parts, such as the zodiacal precession wheel that turns once every 260 centuries, will come into view first. Such parts will appear stock-still, and it will require a heroic mental exertion to imagine their movement. Each succeeding room will reveal a faster moving and more intricate part of the mechanism and/or display, until, at the end, the visitor comprehends, or is nudged a bit closer to comprehending, the whole vast, complex, slow/fast, cosmic/human, inexorable, mysterious, terrible, joyous sweep of time and feels kinship with all who live, or will live, in its embrace. Or so Hillis hopes. Some people will no doubt make a pilgrimage to the cavern, but for the next century at least, that will probably require some commitment, as the site is "as far as you can get from civilization within the continental United States," Hillis says. "That will help people forget about it and avoid the contempt of familiarity." Most people, however, will never visit the clock, just as most people never visit the Eiffel Tower. They will only know that it exists. That knowledge alone will acquaint them with the Long Now, and that is part of the plan. "When Danny first proposed the clock and I told people about it, they would say, 'What?' " says Stewart Brand, cochairman of the Long Now Foundation's board of directors. "Now as I go around, people come up and say, 'Hey, Stewart, how's the clock coming?' People are already engaged by it, and it is working on them. It exists before it exists." Even after it exists, the idea of the clock will no doubt change more minds than the clock itself. How much power resides in that deceptively simple idea? Ask yourself in a month. Discover More For information on the Long Now Foundation and its various projects, visit www.longnow.org. For an image of the prototype on display at the Science Museum in London as well as more details about the clock's workings, go to www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/icons_of_invention/technology/1968-200 0/IC.106. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer. Stewart Brand. Basic Books, 2000. 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Privacy Policy / Your California Privacy Rights | Terms and Conditions | Site Map | Subscribe Online Today From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 29 01:25:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:25:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Russian Youth Group Protests Attacks on Foreign Students, as Violence Continues Unabated Message-ID: Russian Youth Group Protests Attacks on Foreign Students, as Violence Continues Unabated News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.10.25 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005102504n.htm [Is AntiRacism a meme?] By BRYON MACWILLIAMS Moscow An estimated 1,000 young people marched through a provincial city in Russia on Sunday in an uncommon display of interethnic unity against racist violence that recently claimed the life of a college student from Peru. The protest, which was organized by a Kremlin-backed youth organization, was carried out without the approval of the city government in Voronezh, located about 300 miles south of Moscow. Foreign and local college students joined the ranks of student activists from a group called Nashi, or Ours, who represented more than a dozen cities. Organizers had selected Voronezh as the site for what the group called an anti-fascist protest against racial discrimination and violence toward foreigners -- a problem that long has been shrugged off as hooliganism by local governments and police officials nationwide -- after the murder there of the Peruvian student, Enrique Arturo ?ngeles Hurtado. Mr. ?ngeles Hurtado, who was enrolled at the Voronezh State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, died on October 9 after he and three other students were attacked by a group of up to 20 young men armed with metal rods ([70]The Chronicle, October 14). By last week charges had been filed against 13 of the 14 suspects arrested in connection with the attack. Sunday's protesters assembled around noon on the downtown Petrovsky Square. From there they marched along a major street, chanting slogans such as "Thumbs Down to Fascism" and carrying placards with messages like "Stop the Killing of Foreigners in Russia." The march culminated at University Square, where the protesters unfurled a 50-by-60-foot banner that constituted a pledge. It read: "Today we appeal to those who regard the murder of ?ngeles to be the right thing, and the murderers as heroes. ... Guys, if you think that gathering into a pack of jackals and killing a defenseless person is a heroic act, you are mistaken." Hundreds then signed their names to the banner, which will stand in the center of the city for 10 days, according to organizers. "Foreign students travel to Russia to study, spend money in Russia ... and over the course of four, five, or six years study Russian and, having obtained their education, go back home. Consequently, throughout the world, people speak Russian and know about Russian culture," said Maksim Abrakhimov, one of the so-called commissars of Nashi. "To fail to understand that and attack foreigners is not only a blow for the image of Russia, but a blow against Russia itself." One state news agency reported that some 2,000 people had participated in the march, while another said the number was more than 1,000. One participant reported on a Web log that the total number of marchers was closer to 500. A small group of skinheads photographed and goaded the marchers, who were escorted by local riot-police officers, according to a Voronezh-based Web site. Unlike their response to protests staged this month by foreign students, representatives of the city's government and law-enforcement agencies did not address the protesters. Despite the city's status as one of the most dangerous for foreign students, universities in Voronezh apparently will remain on a list of 172 institutions recommended to foreign students by the Ministry of Education and Science. Earlier this month, in light of recent killings of foreign students in Voronezh and in St. Petersburg, the ministry said it would reassess the recommended universities ([71]The Chronicle, September 16). Although the final list is scheduled to be released in November, a state newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, is reporting that only three institutions have been stricken: Krasnoyarsk State University and the state pedagogical universities in Nizhny Novgorod and Orenburg. Organizers of Sunday's march said banners similar to the one unfurled in University Square in Voronezh would be placed in cities throughout the country. The message is timely. On Monday the information and analytical center Sova reported a spate of attacks against foreign students over the past several days: In Moscow, three young men were arrested in the beating of a philosophy student from the Congo Republic; in St. Petersburg, three young men beat and stabbed a Chinese student, who was later hospitalized; in Kursk, several teenage boys beat a medical student from Malaysia outside a dormitory; and in Rostov-on-Don, a group of unidentified men stabbed a student from Cameroon, while a similar group attacked a female medical student, also from Cameroon. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [72]Fatal Assaults Prompt Russia to Rethink Which Universities Are Suited to Foreign Students (10/14/2005) * [73]Russian Official Admits That Government Cannot Guard Foreign Students From Deadly Racist Attacks (9/16/2005) * [74]Foreign Students in Russian City Protest Another Apparently Race-Based Killing (10/20/2004) * [75]Foreign Students in Russian City Protest Racist Attacks (2/25/2004) * [76]Many Foreign Students in Russia Fear for Their Lives (5/10/2002) * [77]Stabbing Death of Tunisian Student Angers Other Foreign Students in Russia (3/27/2001) References 70. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101405n.htm 71. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/09/2005091612n.htm 72. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101405n.htm 73. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/09/2005091612n.htm 74. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/10/2004102006n.htm 75. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/02/2004022506n.htm 76. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i35/35a04601.htm 77. http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/03/2001032708n.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 29 01:26:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:26:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Phillip D. Collins: Immanentizing the Eschaton: The Gnostic Myth of Darwinism and Socio-political Utopianism Message-ID: Phillip D. Collins: Immanentizing the Eschaton: The Gnostic Myth of Darwinism and Socio-political Utopianism http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Darwinism_Gnostic_Myth.htm [Sage quotations below.] [1]Illuminati Conspiracy Archive Immanentizing the Eschaton: The Gnostic Myth of Darwinism and Socio-political Utopianism - by Phillip D. Collins, Mar. 28th, 2005 Darwinism and the Rise of Gnosticism With the publication of [2]The Da Vinci Code and the release of the Matrix films, Gnosticism has experienced a cultural revival in the West. Is the rise of Gnostic thinking simply a fleeting trend, like the outrageous clothing that Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera wear one day and never don again? Perhaps. Yet, it is interesting to note that the popularization of Darwinian evolution preceded Gnosticism's ascendancy in the West. The significance of this fact becomes evident when one reads the words of Dr. Wolfgang Smith: "As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living beings created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim... Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb. In other words, it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of depreciating `God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.' It perpetuates, if you will, the venerable Gnostic tradition of `Jehovah bashing.' And while this in itself may gladden Gnostic hearts, one should not fail to observe that the doctrine plays a vital role in the economy of Neo-Gnostic thought, for only under the auspices of Darwinist `self-creation' does the Good News of `self-salvation' acquire a semblance of sense." (242-43) In light of this intriguing observation, one could view the current rise of Gnosticism as the natural corollary of Darwinism's unquestionable epistemological primacy in the West. The current Gnostic revival could represent the next stage of Darwinism's metastasis. It is interesting to note that the British Royal Society, the Masonic institution responsible for the promulgation of Darwinism, rigorously imposed a division between science and theology upon the halls of scientific inquiry. Webster Tarpley characterizes this division as "literally Gnostic." Indeed, the restriction of scientific research to the corporeal machinations of nature is redolent of Gnostic thinking. It is a distortion of Platonic metaphysics, the conceptual framework of which emphasizes a separation of the corporeal (the Becoming) and the incorporeal (the Being). This framework bears close resemblance to the traditional Christian Weltanschauung, which divides existence into the spiritual and the physical. However, Gnosticism rejected the Christian Eschaton of heaven and hell. This is where the distortion begins. According to Gnosticism, the physical universe is hell. Corporeal existence is a prison that fetters man through the demonic agents of space and time. However, through revelatory experience (gnosis), the sensate being of man could be transformed and this hell could become heaven. Guided by this Gnostic axiom, the Freemasonic Royal Society redirected scientific attention exclusively towards the material world. By focusing scientific efforts upon the temporal spatial realm, the members of the Royal Society probably hoped to see the eventual transformation of the irredeemable physical realm into the "immanentized Eschaton" of an earthly heaven. This was also the ultimate objective of Marxism, which was disseminated on the popular level as both fascism and communism. It is no coincidence that, historically, both the Nazis and the communists exhibited a religious adherence to the Gnostic myth of Darwinism. Smith writes: "In place of an Eschaton which ontologically transcends the confines of this world, the modern Gnostic envisions an End within history, an Eschaton, therefore, which is to be realized within the ontological plane of this visible universe" (238; emphasis added). According to Vatican insider Malachi Martin, the Italian humanists who eventually created speculative Masonry "reconstructed the concept of gnosis, and transferred it to a thoroughly this-worldly plane" (519). Both Nazism and communism were birthed by organizational derivations of Masonry. Given Gnosticism's derision for all things corporeal, it is extremely paradoxical that its adherents exhibit such a preoccupation with this material plane. Nonetheless, the Eschaton must manifest itself within the temporal spatial realm. Gnostic psychologist Carl Jung reiterates: "According to [the alchemist] Basilius Valentinus, the earth (as prima materia) is not a dead body, but is inhabited by a spirit that is its life and soul. All created things, minerals included, draw their strength from this earth-spirit. This spirit is life...and it gives nourishment to all the living things it shelters in its womb." (329) It comes as little surprise that Darwinism, which is premised upon metaphysical naturalism and materialism, is so compatible with Gnosticism. Both emphasize the primacy of this material plane. Had such a metaphysical doctrine remained confined to the realm of academic polemics, it may have been harmless enough. However, this was not to be the case. The Gnostic myth of Darwinism eventually migrated from the abstraction of speculative philosophy to other areas of study. With this migration, Darwinism enjoyed epistemological primacy. Julian Huxley elaborates: "The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields. Inorganic subjects such as the life-history of stars and the formation of the chemical elements on the one hand, and on the other hand subjects like linguistics, social anthropology, and comparative law and religion, began to be studied from an evolutionary angle, until today we are enabled to see evolution as a universal and all-pervading process." (Qutd. in Newman 272) Inevitably, the Gnostic myth of Darwinism subsumed social and political theory. The result was the socio-political Utopianism that underpinned all of the 20th century scientific dictatorships. Nazi Germany stands as a prime example of a Gnostic scientific dictatorship edified by Darwinism. In fact, Darwinian Sir Arthur Keith candidly admitted: "The German Fuhrer as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution" (230). Darwinism's natural correlative, Gnosticism, was also present. Nazism was premised upon the occult doctrines of a Gnostic cult called Ariosophy, which promoted: "[T]he rule of gnostic elites and orders, the stratification of society according to racial purity and occult initiation, the ruthless subjugation and ultimate destruction of non-German inferiors, and the foundation of a pan-German world-empire. Such fantasies were actualized with terrifying consequences in the Third Reich: Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka are the hellish museums of Nazi apocalyptic, the roots of which lay in the millennial visions of Ariosophy." (Goodrick-Clarke, no pagination) The Holocaust, which was an orgy of violence and death, represented Nazi Germany's efforts to "immanentize the Eschaton." In essence, Germany qualified as a Gnostic scientific dictatorship, edified by the "science" of Darwinism. Communist Russia also exhibited all of the characteristics consistent with this profile. The [3]Encyclopedia of Religion explains: "both Hegel and his materialist disciple Marx might be considered direct descendants of gnosticism" (576). In fact, Hegel is the ideological nexus where the Gnostic scientific dictatorships of Nazism and communism intersect. In [4]The Secret Cult of the Order, Antony Sutton states: "Both Marx and Hitler have their philosophical roots in Hegel" (118). According to the Encyclopedia of Religion, the Gnostic Kabbalist named Christoph Oetinger significantly influenced Hegel's early work (576). From Hegel would spring two of the worst scientific dictatorships in history. Both of them were Gnostic at their core: "In this century, with the presentation of traditional religious positions in secular form, there has emerged a secular Gnosticism beside the other great secular religions--the mystical union of Fascism, the apocalypse of Marxist dialectic, the Earthly City of social democracy. The secular Gnosticism is almost never recognized for what it is, and it can exist alongside other convictions almost unperceived." (Webb 418) As history has graphically demonstrated, the various religious crusades to "immanentize the Eschaton" are deadly serious. This truth is tangibly evidenced by the atrocities committed by the socio-political Utopians of secular Gnosticism. Both Auschwitz and the Soviet gulag are products of the same jihad. The secular theocracies that have waged this jihad have consistently been scientific dictatorships edified by Darwinism. The Alchemical Mandate Inevitably, the Gnostic myth of Darwinism guides its adherents to the same conclusion... evolution requires man's assistance. Through societal intervention, socio-political Utopians believe that humanity can facilitate its own evolutionary development and eventually "immanentize the Eschaton." Freemason and Darwinian apologist T.H. Huxley wrote: "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step, and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which exist, but of those who are ethically the best." (81) In actuality, Huxley was reiterating a central mandate of Masonic doctrine: the alchemical transformation of man into a god. Masonic scholar W.L. Wilmshurst provides a summation of this core precept: "This--the evolution of man into superman--was always the purpose of the ancient Mysteries, and the real purpose of modern Masonry is, not the social and charitable purposes to which so much attention is paid, but the expediting of the spiritual evolution of those who aspire to perfect their own nature and transform it into a more god-like quality. And this is a definite science, a royal art, which it is possible for each of us to put into practice; whilst to join the Craft for any other purpose than to study and pursue this science is to misunderstand its meaning." (Wilmshurst 47; emphasis added) Freemasonry rejects the belief in man's creation by a supernatural God. This contention is clearly articulated in the constitution of the Great Council of Turkey, which was organized by 33^rd Degree Masons: "In a very early age and according to an inorganic process, organic life came to be. In order to produce cellular organisms cells came together in groups. Later, intelligence sprang forth and human beings were born. But from where? We keep asking ourselves this question. Was it from God's breathing over formless mud? We reject the explanation of an abnormal kind of creation; a kind of creation that excludes man. Since life and its genealogy exist, we must follow the philogenetic line and feel, understand and acknowledge that a wheel exists that explains this great deed, that is the act of `leap.' We must believe that there was a phase of development in which there was a great rush of activity that caused life to pass at a particular moment from that phase to another." (Giovanni 107; emphasis added) What kind of creative role does man attain according to Masonic doctrine? 33^rd Freemason Manly P. Hall may have provided the answer. Hall writes: "Man is a god in the making, and as in the mystic myths of Egypt, on the potter's wheel, he is being molded. When his light shines out to lift and preserve all things, he receives the triple crown of godhood, and joins that throng of Master Masons, who in their robe of Blue and Gold, are seeking to dispel the darkness of night with the triple light of the Masonic Lodge." (54-55) Herein is the Darwinian metaphysical claim of "self-creation," which provides the foundation for Gnosticism's doctrine of "self-salvation." Evidently, the creative role reserved for humanity is the role of the Creator Himself. Thirty-third degree Mason J.D. Buck condenses this contention into one simple statement: "The only personal God Freemasonry accepts is humanity in-toto . . . Humanity therefore is the only personal god that there is" (216). This was one of Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt's "inner Areopagites: man made perfect as a god-without-God" (Billington 97). This religion is nothing new. Throughout the years, it has reappeared under numerous appellations. W. Warren Wagar enumerates this religion's numerous manifestations: "Nineteenth--and early twentieth--century thought teems with time-bound emergent deities. Scores of thinkers preached some sort of faith in what is potential in time, in place of the traditional Christian and mystical faith in a power outside of time. Hegel's Weltgeist, Comte's Humanite, Spencer's organismic humanity inevitably improving itself by the laws of evolution, Nietzsche's doctrine of superhumanity, the conception of a finite God given currency by J.S. Mill, Hastings Rashdall, and William James, the vitalism of Bergson and Shaw, the emergent evolutionism of Samuel Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, the theories of divine immanence in the liberal movement in Protestant theology, and du Nouy's telefinalism--all are exhibits in evidence of the influence chiefly of evolutionary thinking, both before and after Darwin, in Western intellectual history. The faith of progress itself--especially the idea of progress as built into the evolutionary scheme of things--is in every way the psychological equivalent of religion." (106-07) A core doctrinal precept of the religion is the alchemical mandate for the conscious engineering of humanity's apotheosis. T.H. Huxley's prot?g?, Freemason and Fabian socialist H.G. Wells, presented an allegorized depiction of the alchemical mission to achieve apotheosis in [5]The Island of Dr. Moreau. Astute readers will recognize the character of Dr. Moreau as an instrument of the Masonic Craft. Like the practitioners of the royal art, Dr. Moreau "consciously emulates the evolutionary laboratory of the world" (Suvin & Philmus 65). Years later, Darwinian fundamentalist and high priest of scientism Carl Sagan would recapitulate this alchemical mandate for the emulation of nature's "evolutionary laboratory." In his 1980 book [6]Cosmos, Sagan asserted that, through the blind forces of evolution, man had come to inhabit the position from which he could now consciously control and direct the evolutionary process (320). The scientific dictatorships of communism and fascism represented two such efforts to consciously engineer humanity's evolution and "immanentize the Eschaton" on earth. Yet, these two Gnostic experiments in socio-political Utopianism are but microcosms of a larger religious vision. It is the religious vision of the supranational elite. Fanatical in their blind faith in the Gnostic myth of Darwinism, the supranational elite still pursues the same objectives today. Re-sculpting Prima Materia Martin explains that the humanist precursors to speculative Masonry desired "a special gnosis" (520). They believed that this "special gnosis" was a "secret knowledge of how to master the blind forces of nature for a sociopolitical purpose" (520). The subjugation and manipulation of nature is a theme consistently recapitulated by socio-political Utopians. One socio-political Utopian to reiterate this theme was Fabian socialist Bertrand Russell. In Religion and Society, Russell states: "The way in which science arrives at its beliefs is quite different from that of medieval theology. Experience has shown that it is dangerous to start from general principles and proceed deductively, both because the principles may be untrue and because the reasoning based upon them may be fallacious. Science starts, not from large assumptions, but from particular facts discovered by observation or experiment. From a number of such facts a general rule is arrived at, of which, if it is true, the facts in question are instances... Science thus encourages abandonment of the search for absolute truth, which belongs to any theory that can be successfully employed in inventions or in predicting the future. `Technical' truth is a matter of degree: a theory from which more successful inventions and predictions spring is truer than one which gives rise to fewer. `Knowledge' ceases to be a mental mirror of the universe, and becomes merely a practical tool in the manipulation of matter." (13-15; emphasis added) For the socio-political Utopian, science represents a "special gnosis" designed to manipulate matter and reconfigure reality itself. It is an instrument for the re-sculpting of prima materia and "immanentizing the Eschaton." Technology has become the chief means of achieving this alchemical transformation of reality. Technology's potential for such an application is evident in the etymological origins of the appellation itself. It is derived from the Greek word techne, which means "craft." Simply defined, "crafting" is the skillful creation of something. Hence, expressions such as "outstanding craftsmanship" or a "master of the craft." In the context of socio-political Utopianism, "crafting" is the skillful creation (or, more succinctly, re-sculpting) of reality itself. The "special gnosis" of science has provided the means through techne. Mark Pesce, co-inventor of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, elaborates upon techne's role in manipulating matter: "Each endpoint of techne has an expression in the modern world as a myth of fundamental direction -- the mastery of matter..." (no pagination; emphasis added). This is the central precept of socio-political Utopianism: mastering reality itself. Scientology provides an excellent example of this paradigm. Founded by sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard, this religious organization espouses doctrines that closely align with Gnostic thought. For instance, Hubbard exhibited a distinctly Gnostic aversion towards the human body. In [7]History of Man, he declared: "The possession of a ... body is a liability for through that body the being can be given pain, can be regimented by the routine demands of eating and care from harm ... Today we live in a vast cult called Worship the body. Medical doctors, school teachers, parents, traffic officers, the whole society unites into this war-cry, Care for the body." (Qutd. in "[8] Low life expectancy of scientologists & Hubbard on violence," no pagination; emphasis added) Moreover, Hubbard religiously adhered to the Gnostic myth of Darwinism. In [9]Dianetics, he writes: "It is fairly well accepted in these times that life in all forms evolved from the basic building blocks: the virus and the cell. Its only relevance to Dianetics is that such a proposition works--and actually that is all we ask of Dianetics. There is no point to writing here a vast tome on biology and evolution. We can add some chapters to those things, but Charles Darwin did his job well and the fundamental principles of evolution can be found in his and other works. The proposition on which Dianetics was originally entered was evolution." (69; emphasis added) According to Scientology, reality is not governed by immutable principles or universal invariants. On the contrary, it is a malleable pliancy, the fabric of which can be manipulated through technology. Thus, Hubbard contends that man must not "face reality," but must "make reality face him" instead (308). This assertion echoes the theme of mastering reality. Eventually, Scientology became the subject of an ethnographic study conducted by a sociologist named William Sims Bainbridge. Bainbridge is also an adherent of an emergent scientistic religion called Transhumanism, which promotes "the breeding of 'genetically enriched' forms of 'post-human' beings" (Hayes, no pagination). Professor Katherine Hayles describes this "post-human" condition: "[I]n the posthuman, there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals." (Qutd. in Hook, no pagination) Like Scientologists, Transhumanists adhere to the Gnostic myth of Darwinism. Reiterating the contention of Darwinian fundamentalist Carl Sagan, Transhumanists believe that evolution can be consciously managed and directed. Warren Robinett elaborates: "If mind is program and data, and we control the hardware and the software, then we can make changes as we see fit. What will human-like intelligence evolve into if it is freed from the limits of the human meat-machine, and humans can change and improve their own hardware? It's hard to say. The changes would perhaps be goal-directed, but what goals would be chosen for self-directed evolution? What does a human become when freed from pain, hunger, lust, and pride?" (169-70) While Robinett is speaking rhetorically, it is interesting that he chronically compares humanity to a machine. As Professor Hayles makes abundantly clear, the "post-human" condition is man's transformation into a machine. This could be the intended outcome of self-directed evolution. Transhumanists openly express their derision for the human condition. For instance, British roboticist Kevin Warwick candidly renounced his humanity: "I was born human. But this was an accident of fate--a condition merely of time and place" (qutd. in Hook, no pagination). This prompts a disturbing question. If the human condition was some sort of biological accident, then what is mankind's ultimate evolutionary destiny? Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering, reveals the final destination on the evolutionary map: "Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature's first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny" (qutd. in Hook, no pagination). This aversion towards humanity echoes the precepts of an older religion. C. Christopher Hook elaborates: "Transhumanism is in some ways a new incarnation of gnosticism. It sees the body as simply the first prosthesis we all learn to manipulate. As Christians, we have long rejected the gnostic claims that the human body is evil. Embodiment is fundamental to our identity, designed by God, and sanctified by the Incarnation and bodily resurrection of our Lord. Unlike gnostics, transhumanists reject the notion of the soul and substitute for it the idea of an information pattern." (no pagination) Evidently, the Gnostic ambitions of socio-political Utopianism are alive and well. In fact, in the Gnostic tradition of Ariosophy, Transhumanism advocates the enthronement of an elite. This new post-human elite is dubbed the "GenRich" class. According to Transhumanist Professor Lee Silver, the end of this century will witness the ascendancy of the GenRich elite: "All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry [will be] controlled by members of the GenRich class... Naturals [will] work as low-paid service providers or as laborers..." (qutd. in Hayes, no pagination). Like the socio-political Utopianism of Marxism, Transhumanism will not end class distinctions. Instead, it will just create new ones. If Transhumanism were merely some marginalized organization, then such beliefs would be somewhat laughable. However, this is not the case. With chapters in more than 20 countries and luminaries occupying numerous academic institutions, the Transhumanist movement is a formidable force (Hayes, no pagination). Moreover, many of its members have been actively engaged in government-sponsored research. Clearly, the movement is more than the average cult. The Gnostic religions of Scientology and Transhumanism represent links in an ideational chain, which finds its origins in ancient Mesopotamia. They are philosophical and religious scions of the Mystery religion. Of course, variants of the ancient Mysteries largely constitute the religious doctrines of the elite. Like communism and fascism, Scientology and Transhumanism are but microcosms of the ruling class religious vision for man. A stratified society of rulers and slaves, eugenical regimentation, a technologically altered reality, the complete obliteration of all those things that define humanity... all these comprise the anatomy of the Eschaton they seek to immanentize. Sources Cited * Billington, James H, [10]Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980. * Buck, J.D. [11]Mystic Masonry or the Symbols of Freemasonry and the Greater Mysteries of Antiquity. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1990. * Eliade, Mircea (ed.). [12]The Encyclopedia of Religion. England: Macmillan, 1987. * Giovanni, P.M. Turkiye Fikir ve Kultur Dernegi E. ve K. S. R. Sonuncu ve 33. Derecesi Turkiye Yuksek Surasi, 24. Conference (translated: The Turkish Society of Idea and Culture, 33rd degree, Turkey Supreme Meeting, 24th conference), Istanbul, 1973. * Goodrick-Clarke, Nicolas. [13]The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935. England: Aquarian Press, 1985. * Hall, Manly P. [14]The Lost Keys of Freemasonry. The Philosophical Research Society, 1996. * Hayes, Richard. "[15]Selective Science." TomPaine.commonsense, 12 February 2004. * Hook, C. Christopher. "[16]The Techno Sapiens Are Coming." Christianity Today, 19 December 2003. * Huxley, Thomas. [17]Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. New York: Appleton, 1896. * Jung, C. G. [18]Psychology and Alchemy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. * "[19] Low life expectancy of scientologists & Hubbard on violence." alt.religion.scientology, 30 Dec 1997. * Martin, Malachi. [20]The Keys of this Blood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. * Newman, J.R. What is Science? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. * Pesce, Mark. "[21]Ontos and Techne." Computer-Medicated Magazine, April 1997. * Robinett, Warren. "The Consequences of Fully Understanding the Brain." [22]Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge, ed. Arlington: Virginia, 2002. * Russell, Bertrand, Religion and Society, London: Oxford UP, 1947. * Sagan, Carl, [23]Cosmos, New York: Random House, 1980. * Smith, Wolfgang. [24]Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Illinois: TAN Books, 1988. * Sutton, Antony. [25]The Secret Cult of the Order. Cranbrook, Australia: Veritas, 1983. * Suvin, Darko and Robert M. Philmus. H.G. Wells and Modern Fiction. New Jersey: Associated UP, 1977. * Tarpley, Webster. "[26]How the Venetian System Was Transplanted Into England," The New Federalist, 3 June 1996. * Wagar, W. Warren, [27]H.G. Wells and the World State. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961. * Webb, James. [28]The Occult Establishment. Open Court, 1976. _________________________________________________________________ About the Author Phillip D. Collins acted as the editor for The Hidden Face of Terrorism. He has also written articles for Paranoia Magazine, MKzine, News With Views, B.I.P.E.D.: The Official Website of Darwinian Dissent and Conspiracy Archive. He has an Associate of Arts and Science. Currently, he is studying for a bachelor's degree in Communications at Wright State University. During the course of his seven-year college career, Phillip has studied philosophy, religion, and classic literature. He also co-authored the book, The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: An Examination of Epistemic Autocracy, From the 19th to the 21st Century, which is [29]available online here. CSS printer friendly [30]enabled "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H.L. Mencken "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license ... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." David Brower - first Executive Director of the Sierra Club; founder of Friends of the Earth; and founder of the Earth Island Institute - quoted by Dixie Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, p.166 "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), American editor, critic "A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." Ted Turner - CNN founder and UN supporter - quoted in the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June '96 "If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels." Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund - quoted in 'Are You Ready For Our New Age Future?', Insiders Report, American Policy Center, December '95 "[The British oligarchy's] religion is not the Anglican Christianity they publicly profess, but a hodgepodge of paganism, including Satanic cults such as Theosophy and Rosicrucianism [neither is genuine]. The central, syncretic ideology of the oligarchy's inner cult life is the revived Egyptian drug cult, the myth of Isis and Osiris, the same anti-Christian cult that ran the Roman Empire. And like the ancient Isis-worshipping Egyptian dynasties, the British ruling family networks have maintained power for centuries by keeping the secrets of their intrigues WITHIN THE FAMILY." Dope, Inc.: The Book that Drove Henry Kissinger Crazy, by EIR; Part 3, Ch 10: The Families Behind the Drug Empire "The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size." Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, p.130-131 The curse of our time is the proliferation of so-called 'think tanks' that advise our public leaders. Their influence has increased tremendously during recent years. Alfred M. Lilienthal, September 20, 2003 "Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." Henry Kissinger, Speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992. Bilderberg meeting. "The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable." U. S. Privacy Study Commission, 1977 References 1. http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/ 2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385504209/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029097304/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 4. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0949667196/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 5. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553214322/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 6. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345331354/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0317034278/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 8. http://www.holysmoke.org/lm/longevit.htm 9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/088404632X/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 10. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0765804719/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 11. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1564592715/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 12. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029097304/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 13. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0814730604/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 14. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0893148385/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 15. http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9937/view/print 16. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/001/1.36.html 17. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1404349650/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 18. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691097712/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 19. http://www.holysmoke.org/lm/longevit.htm 20. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671747231/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 21. http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/apr/pesce.html 22. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1402012543/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 23. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345331354/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 24. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895553155/ref=ase_conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?v=glance&s=books 25. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0949667196/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 26. http://www.abjpress.com/tarpb1.html 27. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0836959159/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 28. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/091205056X/conspiracyarc-20/104-8924776-1297547?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 29. http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-31164-4 30. http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/About/#aOptions From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 29 01:27:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:27:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] H-N: Mark Daims reviews Education as Enforcement Message-ID: Mark Daims reviews Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools edited by Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard http://human-nature.com/nibbs/04/ed.html [Thanks to Laird for this.] Book Review Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools edited by Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard RoutledgeFalmer 2003. Reviewed by Mark Daims, DVM, Hudson, New York, USA. Education as Enforcement incorporates 21 compelling essays (including the foreword and introduction) on the subtext of the process of education in America. Whether or not a reader agrees with any particular essayist, each writer defends children passionately and should be heard. Henry Giroux's foreword forcefully attacks the current administration's tactics concerning education and the greater society. Alluding to a "tyranny of emergency" and an inauthentic use of the country's fear of terrorism, Giroux feels the President is changing the nature of our society -- community is constructed "through shared fears rather than shared responsibilities." Giroux wants educators to act collectively to instill democratic and social values in children and move back towards a society of shared responsibilities. The greatest struggle Americans face is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all the citizens of the globe, especially youth. The introduction by Kenneth Saltman's that follows explores the messages given to the nation's children. He examines the nation's "walk" not its "talk" and finds all the discussion about conflict resolution denied by the nation's military responses and violent actions. He notes that on the pages following a Time's article on Columbine, there was a two page advertisement by the Internet search engine Alta Vista that pictured a Lockheed martin F-16 fighter. The search words that found the fighter were "Who will guide my sleigh tonight." Examining movies and other media, the essayist finds that militarism is us. Even our economic structure, including free-trade agreements, undermines the lives of children. With globalization, Coca Cola has infiltrated every niche in the globe, yet inexpensive medicines and nutritious foods are unavailable to many, many children. Forty seven million children in the richest twenty-nine nations in the world are living below the poverty line. Child poverty in the wealthiest nations has worsened as national incomes have risen over the past half century. The first essay, "The Function of Schools: Subtler and Cruder Methods of Control" by Noam Chomsky, begins the argument that education is enforcement, enforcement of the ideas and ethics of the dominant culture and also mirrors John Taylor Gatto's (former New York state teacher of the year) assertion that "school trains children to obey reflexively." Chomsky feels that it is the well-behaved, obedient students that do well and this means that our educational system selects for the obedient and conforming. The educational system constantly pressures students and even faculty towards conformity: In the fourth grade you're a "behavior problem." In college you may be "irresponsible" or "erratic" or "not the right kind of student." If you make it to the faculty, you'll fail in what's sometimes called "collegiality." The essays that follow range from range from critiques of the "No Child left Behind" policy to a revealing dialogue between the author and several inner city kids. "Rivers of Fire: BPAmoco's iMPACT on Education" (Kenneth Saltman and Ruth Goodman) examines corporate interest in education BPAmoco's children's video "Rivers of Fire" explores volcanoes while delivering a subtle corporate message that nature is a entity to be managed and used (not preserved). After presenting an overview of BPAmoco's and Monsanto's human rights violations overseas, the authors point out that while BPAmoco was distributing "Rivers of Fire" to children it was creating real rivers of fire in Michigan where one city was trying to force the company to stop leaking petroleum products into the city's sewers. A quotation from Mark Evans, a senior vice president of Scholastic Inc., might serve to partially sum up the essay. More and more companies see education marketing as the most compelling, memorable, and cost-effective way to build share of mind and market into the 21st century Gillette is currently sponsoring a multi-media in-school program designed to introduce teenagers to safety razors -- building brand and product loyalties through classroom-centered, peer-powered lifestyle patterning. The next essay, "Education IS Enforcement," by David Gabbard is convincing in its hypothesis that the function of school is to mold children to fit the goals of the government which in America's case is the market. The daily process and form of education serve to train workers: Insofar as the majority of future workers will likely find little intrinsic rewards in the jobs they will come to perform in the workplace, the relative meaninglessness of school provides a perfect "boot camp" for teaching them to accept alienation as an inevitable part of life. Compulsory education and standardized tests sort children into the roles that will be of the most benefit to the market economy. Gabbard compares the military's use of IQ tests to track soldiers into their best roles with the role of standardized testing. In military terms, then, compulsory school assigns persons their rank relative to their future use-value as human resources. Many of the essays that follow assert that the "No Child Left Behind" program tracks minority children into low paying jobs. Underfunded schools struggling to provide mandated requirements can only provide a emaciated education which in turn funnels any graduates into meaningless work or jail. The minimum standards for an education are those that would only qualify a person for a low paying job. Schools in trouble are punished while those that succeed are rewarded. This merely reinforces current inequities. "Freedom for Some, Discipline for "Others," by Enora Brown compares two Chicago schools: Groundview Technical High School attended mostly by non-white working-class students and Mountainview Township High School attended by mostly white, professional-class students. The names of the schools are painfully apt. JROTC programs are spreading - another essay details - spreading disproportionately among certain types of schools. Mountainview has a wing devoted entirely to the fine arts; Groundview a wing devoted to JROTC. Mountainview resembles a small liberal art college with over three hundred multilevel, discipline-based academic courses... Groundview's curricula resembles the industrial education model designed for ex-slaves, which prepares poor African-American youth to take on the "simpler trades." Groundview's students must always wear their student IDs and their class schedules. Brown also opposes the corporatization or privatization of schools. "In fact, privatization redirects public funds for private accumulation." All the essays have something valuable to say but Pepi Leistyna's "Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front" presents the author's dialogue with seven troubled inner city kids; only one is white with the rest being fully or partly African-American, Puerto Rican or Cape Verdean. In this essay the children speak many of the arguments made by the adult essayists seeking to positively affect their lives. Pepi: Are the drugs and booze in school? (There is an enthusiastic group response, "Oh Yeah! "Everywhere") Carlos: It's a joke cause that ain't no high school. The whole time I was there I got one book. Olavo: They dictate all the rules in the high school man. Stevie: It is a prison. Olavo: If you do something in the cafeteria, like you supposed to sit four on the table, and you sit five on the table, they'll grab you and give you three days suspension. (Later in the discussion about the school) Roland: If you black, the attitude is, "You Dumb." Carlos: If you come from a bad neighborhood they make sure you never make it. Stevie: They think that you are a trouble maker. Dion: Automatically, Automatically! (Later at the end of the discussion) Pepi: Most all of you have kids now, what are you going to tell your kids? What's your advice to any kid? Stevie: I wanna tell them to stay in school man, no matter how bad it is, juss do it, juss stay in school! Dion: Get through yo! The essays are: "The Function of Schools: Subtler and Cruder Methods of Control," Noam Chomsky "Rivers of Fire: BPAmoco's iMPACT on Education" Kenneth Saltman and Ruth Goodman "Education IS Enforcement," David Gabbard "Cracking Down: Chicago School Policy and the Regulation of Black and Latino Youth" Pauline Lipman "Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front" Pepi Leistyna "Freedom for Some, Discipline for "Others," Enora Brown "Forceful Hegemony" Don Jacobs "The Proliferation of JROTC: Educational Reform or Militarization" Marvin Berlowitz and Nathan Long "Education for War in Israel: Preparing Children to Accept War as a Natural Factor of Life" Haggith Gor "Post-Columbine Reflections on Youth Violence as a (Trans)National Movement" Julie Weber "Imprisoning Minds: The Violence of Neoliberal Education or "I Am Not For sale"" Sheila Macrine "Taking Command: The Pathology of Identity and Agency in Predatory Culture" Ron Scapp "Commentary on the Rhetoric of Reform: A twenty Year Retrospective" Sandra Jackson" "Controlling Images: The Power of High Stakes Testing" Kevin Vinson and E. Wayne Ross "Dick Lit: Corporatism, Militarism, and the Detective Novel" Robin Goodman "Virtuous War: Simulation and the Militarism of Play" Eugene Provenzo "We Were Soldiers: The Rewriting of memory and the Corporate Order" William Reynolds and David Gabbard "The Politics of Compulsory Patriotism: On the Educational meaning of September 11" Michael Apple "Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy at Ground Zero" Peter Mclaren and Ramin Farahmandpur From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 29 01:27:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:27:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted Message-ID: Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/education/26gifted.html [Again, my big beef with the No Child Left Behind Act is not that it is wasteful and utopian, for this is no different from other programs, but that it requires States to have develop uniform curricula for gifted, bright, bright normal, normal, dull normal, morons, imbeciles, and idiots alike.] By MICHAEL JANOFSKY RENO, Nev. - Misha Raffiee is 10 years old. An eighth grader in her final year of private school here, she reads up to six books a month, plays violin and piano and asks so many questions that her teachers sometimes get angry at her. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, she wants to be a brain surgeon. Her parents expect her to have a bachelor's degree by the time she is 14 and a medical degree soon after. The pace will be wholly dependent upon her teachers' abilities to feed an intellect that in her current setting often goes wanting. "I do wish they would go faster," she said of her classroom activities. "If I could go at my own pace, I could go forward twice as fast." By next fall, Misha may have her chance. She has applied to the Davidson Academy of Nevada, a newly formed public school at the University of Nevada, Reno for profoundly gifted children, those whose test scores and evaluations place them in the 99.9th percentile. It is a rare opportunity. Children like Misha, who have I.Q.'s of 160 and above, constitute only a tiny fraction of the 72 million children who attend the nation's public and private schools. Their needs are often overlooked as federal and state governments concentrate their resources on slower learners to lift test scores in reading and mathematics to a minimum standard. While federal spending for the Bush administration's education law, No Child Left Behind, is to reach $24.4 billion in the current fiscal year, the Department of Education has allocated only $11 million for programs aimed at "gifted and talented" students. Recognizing that children with unusually high aptitude require special attention and more rigorous coursework, many communities try to serve them through schools that offer specialized classes, accelerated learning programs and dual credit for high school and college. In addition, a small but growing number of charter, magnet and early-entrance schools are tailoring their curriculums to prepare students for college. And foundations, like the Institute for Educational Advancement in South Pasadena, Calif., are forming to help gifted children find programs to challenge them. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the "vast majority" of federal spending for children in kindergarten through 12th grade was for the neediest children. Why so little money for the brightest children? "Unfortunately," she said, "we don't live in a perfect world with infinite resources." Education experts familiar with the needs of the most gifted students say there are scarcely enough programs to serve them. "We are undercutting the research and development people of this nation," said Joseph S. Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, at the University of Connecticut. "No one would ever argue against No Child Left Behind, but when you ignore kids who will create new jobs, new therapies and new medicines, we're selling them down the river." Nancy Green, executive director of the National Association for Gifted Children, said that state and local efforts were admirable but that their inconsistency reflected lost opportunities. A new survey by her association found that among 39 states that responded, 24 spent as much as $10 million on programs for gifted children but 7 spent less than $1 million and 8 spent nothing. "For a nation, I'm not sure why we value equity over excellence," Ms. Green said. "All kids are entitled to an appropriate education for their ability, not just those we're teaching to a minimum standard." A 2004 report by the International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa charges American schools with impeding the development of the country's brightest children and calls the lack of more programs for them "a national scandal." It warns, "The price may be the slow but steady erosion of American excellence." The Davidson Academy would be an unusual addition to the options available to especially smart children, according to its founders, Bob and Jan Davidson, a retired couple who made a fortune designing educational software. In 1999, they created a foundation dedicated to serving highly gifted children and, as part of it, a summer scholarship program that enables students aged 12 to 15 to earn up to seven college credits at the University of Nevada, Reno. Mr. Davidson said the academy, an outgrowth of the summer program, was the nation's first public school for gifted students created by a private foundation and codified by state law. In June, Gov. Kenny C. Guinn signed a bill that authorized public schools for "profoundly gifted pupils" to operate in a university setting. "Our families in the summer program started asking us to start a school," Ms. Davidson said. "We told them that we were not interested in raising their children. But they told us that if we built a school, they would come." With plans to accept 30 applicants for the first year and twice that for the second, the academy will be open to any students living in Nevada who can perform at a sixth-grade level or better and can demonstrate exceptional abilities through achievement tests and letters of recommendation. Already, Mr. Davidson said, applications have arrived from students in California and the East Coast whose parents said they would be willing to move to Nevada. The curriculum is intended to be flexible, Mr. Davidson said, to satisfy the individual needs and interests of each student. Some courses will be available for dual credit in high school and college; some, for just college credit. Students will also have a choice of taking courses in the usual manner of 15 weeks or in an immersion format of 3 weeks. In either case, students will be invited to specialize, but they must also take classes, like history and civics, that are required for a public high school diploma in Nevada. The Davidsons said they intended to cover all student costs - a minimum of $10,000 a student each year - except for those courses taken only for college credit. They are also assuming some of the construction costs of a $50 million building where the academy will eventually be housed. The state has agreed to pay $31 million of the construction costs. For Misha's parents, Kambiz, an associate dean at the university, and his wife, Simi, a former bank economist, the academy could not have come along at a more opportune time. They have watched their child in wonderment - "She was reading at 2, reading chapter books at 3," her mother said - and worried how to keep her stimulated next year. Misha seemed overjoyed at the prospect of attending a challenging school near home. She can keep her friends, continue swimming with her community team and remain as violinist and associate concert master with the Reno Philharmonic Youth Symphony Orchestra. "It would be a lot better if it started this year," she said of the academy. "A lot of times now, I ask three and four questions that are really complex, and the teacher stops and says, 'We're not getting into that; let's go on to another subject.' At the academy, I know I could ask whatever I wanted and the teacher wouldn't get mad." From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 29 01:38:35 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 18:38:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity In-Reply-To: <1a4.42ba4976.3093d412@aol.com> Message-ID: Speaking of art and nudity, back when I was going to coops every weekend we once had a pregnant model who continued to pose throughout her pregnancy and then returned nursing the baby. What a special atmosphere that was! -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Euterpel66 at aol.com Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 12:21 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] nudity In a message dated 10/27/2005 2:53:43 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: --Nudity can signify many things... innocence, shame, nature, manipulation... what it signifies depends on who is observing, who is naked, and who is interpreting the observer's reactions. Often, different subcultures find it impossible to agree on what an act signifies, each insisting that it is the objective and final observer, or observing in the name of some higher power (God, social convention, etc). In reality, signs have different meaning depending on context, and there is no way to finalize context. Michael Maybe I have missed something, but what about ART? Every Friday a model poses nude for four hours for me Some of them are strong women insisting on certain conditions. An acquaintance draws her nudes from Playboy. My sister turned Playboy down when they approached her because she was concerned about future repercussions. Now I wonder if she regrets that decision. I think she might. Lorraine 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 Euterpel66 at aol.com Sat Oct 29 02:18:14 2005 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 22:18:14 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity Message-ID: <104.6c51a4d2.309435e6@aol.com> In a message dated 10/28/2005 6:53:58 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: Lorraine says: >>Maybe I have missed something, but what about ART? Every Friday a model poses nude for four hours for me Some of them are strong women insisting on certain conditions. An acquaintance draws her nudes from Playboy.<< --That's an example of how agreement upon a frame influences perception of what's in it. The "artistic nude" frame renders anything in it culturally acceptable, even highbrow. The "porn" frame can put the same content in a totally different light. The same individual can have two sets of "eyes", depending on the setting, other observers, and contextual cues. Some artists enjoy playing with the boundary lines between frames, turning porn into art and vice versa. It seems difficult for most people to intentionally shift their interpretation, and it's relatively easy to convince them that something is art or trash, just by surrounding the object with signs commonly associated with one context or the other. Perception is malleable, and most people aren't very comfortable with ambiguity, preferring situations where they know in advance which set of eyes to use. Michael Yes, that true Michael. Take Mapplethorpe for example Lorraine For Lynn> Pictures 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 Sat Oct 29 02:52:25 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 19:52:25 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] nudity In-Reply-To: <104.6c51a4d2.309435e6@aol.com> Message-ID: Mapplethorpe has been a subject of considerable meditation for me as a photographer. The question is, how can you let it all hang out without destroying yourself in the process? Some of us fear our power because we know how potentially destructive it is. It's a challenge to figure out how to release it without breaking things. Steve H. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Euterpel66 at aol.com Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 7:18 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] nudity In a message dated 10/28/2005 6:53:58 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, anonymous_animus at yahoo.com writes: Lorraine says: >>Maybe I have missed something, but what about ART? Every Friday a model poses nude for four hours for me Some of them are strong women insisting on certain conditions. An acquaintance draws her nudes from Playboy.<< --That's an example of how agreement upon a frame influences perception of what's in it. The "artistic nude" frame renders anything in it culturally acceptable, even highbrow. The "porn" frame can put the same content in a totally different light. The same individual can have two sets of "eyes", depending on the setting, other observers, and contextual cues. Some artists enjoy playing with the boundary lines between frames, turning porn into art and vice versa. It seems difficult for most people to intentionally shift their interpretation, and it's relatively easy to convince them that something is art or trash, just by surrounding the object with signs commonly associated with one context or the other. Perception is malleable, and most people aren't very comfortable with ambiguity, preferring situations where they know in advance which set of eyes to use. Michael Yes, that true Michael. Take Mapplethorpe for example Lorraine For Lynn> Pictures Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ---Andre Gide http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Oct 29 15:51:49 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 09:51:49 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Some New Help for the Extremely Gifted In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43639A95.7040602@solution-consulting.com> 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 > > [Again, my big beef with the No Child Left Behind Act is not that it > is wasteful and utopian, for this is no different from other programs, > but that it requires States to have develop uniform curricula for > gifted, bright, bright normal, normal, dull normal, morons, imbeciles, > and idiots alike.] > > By MICHAEL JANOFSKY > > RENO, Nev. - Misha Raffiee is 10 years old. An eighth grader in her > final year of private school here, she reads up to six books a month, > plays violin and piano and asks so many questions that her teachers > sometimes get angry at her. > > Driven by an insatiable curiosity, she wants to be a brain surgeon. > Her parents expect her to have a bachelor's degree by the time she is > 14 and a medical degree soon after. The pace will be wholly dependent > upon her teachers' abilities to feed an intellect that in her current > setting often goes wanting. > > "I do wish they would go faster," she said of her classroom > activities. "If I could go at my own pace, I could go forward twice as > fast." > > By next fall, Misha may have her chance. She has applied to the > Davidson Academy of Nevada, a newly formed public school at the > University of Nevada, Reno for profoundly gifted children, those whose > test scores and evaluations place them in the 99.9th percentile. > > It is a rare opportunity. Children like Misha, who have I.Q.'s of 160 > and above, constitute only a tiny fraction of the 72 million children > who attend the nation's public and private schools. Their needs are > often overlooked as federal and state governments concentrate their > resources on slower learners to lift test scores in reading and > mathematics to a minimum standard. > > While federal spending for the Bush administration's education law, No > Child Left Behind, is to reach $24.4 billion in the current fiscal > year, the Department of Education has allocated only $11 million for > programs aimed at "gifted and talented" students. Recognizing that > children with unusually high aptitude require special attention and > more rigorous coursework, many communities try to serve them through > schools that offer specialized classes, accelerated learning programs > and dual credit for high school and college. > > In addition, a small but growing number of charter, magnet and > early-entrance schools are tailoring their curriculums to prepare > students for college. And foundations, like the Institute for > Educational Advancement in South Pasadena, Calif., are forming to help > gifted children find programs to challenge them. > > Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the > "vast majority" of federal spending for children in kindergarten > through 12th grade was for the neediest children. Why so little money > for the brightest children? > > "Unfortunately," she said, "we don't live in a perfect world with > infinite resources." > > Education experts familiar with the needs of the most gifted students > say there are scarcely enough programs to serve them. > > "We are undercutting the research and development people of this > nation," said Joseph S. Renzulli, director of the National Research > Center on the Gifted and Talented, at the University of Connecticut. > "No one would ever argue against No Child Left Behind, but when you > ignore kids who will create new jobs, new therapies and new medicines, > we're selling them down the river." > > Nancy Green, executive director of the National Association for Gifted > Children, said that state and local efforts were admirable but that > their inconsistency reflected lost opportunities. A new survey by her > association found that among 39 states that responded, 24 spent as > much as $10 million on programs for gifted children but 7 spent less > than $1 million and 8 spent nothing. > > "For a nation, I'm not sure why we value equity over excellence," Ms. > Green said. "All kids are entitled to an appropriate education for > their ability, not just those we're teaching to a minimum standard." > > A 2004 report by the International Center for Gifted Education and > Talent Development at the University of Iowa charges American schools > with impeding the development of the country's brightest children and > calls the lack of more programs for them "a national scandal." It > warns, "The price may be the slow but steady erosion of American > excellence." > > The Davidson Academy would be an unusual addition to the options > available to especially smart children, according to its founders, Bob > and Jan Davidson, a retired couple who made a fortune designing > educational software. In 1999, they created a foundation dedicated to > serving highly gifted children and, as part of it, a summer > scholarship program that enables students aged 12 to 15 to earn up to > seven college credits at the University of Nevada, Reno. > > Mr. Davidson said the academy, an outgrowth of the summer program, was > the nation's first public school for gifted students created by a > private foundation and codified by state law. In June, Gov. Kenny C. > Guinn signed a bill that authorized public schools for "profoundly > gifted pupils" to operate in a university setting. > > "Our families in the summer program started asking us to start a > school," Ms. Davidson said. "We told them that we were not interested > in raising their children. But they told us that if we built a school, > they would come." > > With plans to accept 30 applicants for the first year and twice that > for the second, the academy will be open to any students living in > Nevada who can perform at a sixth-grade level or better and can > demonstrate exceptional abilities through achievement tests and > letters of recommendation. Already, Mr. Davidson said, applications > have arrived from students in California and the East Coast whose > parents said they would be willing to move to Nevada. > > The curriculum is intended to be flexible, Mr. Davidson said, to > satisfy the individual needs and interests of each student. Some > courses will be available for dual credit in high school and college; > some, for just college credit. Students will also have a choice of > taking courses in the usual manner of 15 weeks or in an immersion > format of 3 weeks. In either case, students will be invited to > specialize, but they must also take classes, like history and civics, > that are required for a public high school diploma in Nevada. > > The Davidsons said they intended to cover all student costs - a > minimum of $10,000 a student each year - except for those courses > taken only for college credit. They are also assuming some of the > construction costs of a $50 million building where the academy will > eventually be housed. The state has agreed to pay $31 million of the > construction costs. > > For Misha's parents, Kambiz, an associate dean at the university, and > his wife, Simi, a former bank economist, the academy could not have > come along at a more opportune time. They have watched their child in > wonderment - "She was reading at 2, reading chapter books at 3," her > mother said - and worried how to keep her stimulated next year. > > Misha seemed overjoyed at the prospect of attending a challenging > school near home. She can keep her friends, continue swimming with her > community team and remain as violinist and associate concert master > with the Reno Philharmonic Youth Symphony Orchestra. > > "It would be a lot better if it started this year," she said of the > academy. "A lot of times now, I ask three and four questions that are > really complex, and the teacher stops and says, 'We're not getting > into that; let's go on to another subject.' At the academy, I know I > could ask whatever I wanted and the teacher wouldn't get mad." > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 00:25:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 20:25:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Creativity: A Special Issue Message-ID: New Scientist: Creativity: A Special Issue 5.10.29 (many articles) The creative mind: special report - Opinion http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.300&print=true Everyone has it, some a lot more than others. The development of humans, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it? What is going on in our brains when ideas form? Does it feel the same for artists and scientists? We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process - and learn how we can all ignite the spark within. [These are the articles. I arranged them in order of the printed edition, to which I subscribe.] Looking for inspiration - finding the muse Where it's at - creative hotspots One culture - art's debt to relativity Never give up - mathematical stickability When the music takes you Just got to write this down - the double life of Alice Flaherty Natural talent - nature's profligate beauty The complexity of the universe - Paul Davies hunts a new law Oh look, a new clich?! - Douglas Hofstadter's clever Cats And how to be original - we asked the experts Looking for inspiration http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.400&print=true * Helen Phillips PEOPLE have speculated about their own creativity for centuries - perhaps ever since we became able to think about thinking. Because creative thought just seems to "arrive", the credit has been laid at the feet of gods and spirits or, recently, the id or the subconscious mind. Whatever it is, it is thinking at the edge, at the very fringes. The only bit of the creative process we actually know about is the moment of insight, yet creative ideas and projects may incubate beyond our awareness for months or even years. Not surprising, then, that creativity has long eluded scientific study. In the early 1970s, it was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative. Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the "creative personality" tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. "Creatives" have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog. But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist and author Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has bipolar disorder, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Some features of schizophrenia are also thought to be more common in creative types, according to psychiatrist Gordon Claridge of the University of Oxford. He uses a "schizotypy scale" to record features of the illness that are not pathological by themselves, including experiencing hallucinations, hearing voices, having disorganised thoughts, believing in magic and so on. People with these traits tend to score highly on tests of lateral, divergent and open thinking. But those who score very highly on such tests find this kind of thinking can be very destructive. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead. Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits. But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity, he showed, has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It's the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. "It's as if the less creative person can't shift gear," says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. "Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively." Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that this change in activity was particularly noticeable on the right side of the brain. However, people who had the connections between the two sides of their brain severed to treat intractable epilepsy seemed to become far less creative, showing that communication between the sides of the brain is also important. Researchers are now trying to identify some of the specific anatomy of creativity. Brain studies of people with particular types of creativity show, perhaps not surprisingly, that the active areas are determined by the specialist knowledge being used. Language, imagery, spatial awareness and so on - each skill is localised to some extent to a particular brain part or parts. Mathematicians and physicists may have larger parietal lobes, important for spatial representation, while writers may have more widely distributed language regions in the frontal and temporal lobes, perhaps spreading across both sides, when they are normally confined to the left. But it's not just these speciality areas that are active. Using information creatively needs coordination between many areas. "Creative synthesis requires a new pattern, to put the brain in a state where a large number of areas are simultaneously active," says Claxton. When we concentrate in a less creative way, such as when reading the gas bill, there are fewer active centres and less synthesis. Ingegerd Carlsson, a psychologist from the University of Lund in Sweden, and her colleagues found something that they think might link different forms of creativity. When people were performing a creative task - trying to list as many uses for an object as they could - the frontal lobes of their brain were noticeably more active. The frontal lobes are thought to help people change tasks and strategies and to shift attention from task to task. The frontal lobes also help coordinate the connectivity between different brain areas by controlling the release of signalling chemicals, says neurologist David Beversdorf of Ohio State University in Columbus. One thing that relaxed states of mind, sleep and depression - all linked with increased creativity in some way - have in common are low levels of a brain signalling chemical called noradrenalin, or norepinephrine. This chemical controls how easily neurons "talk" to each other. Low levels of it seems to encourage broad networks of neurons to communicate, whereas higher levels seem to focus that activity into tighter, smaller networks. Treating people with precursors to noradrenalin seems to hinder their ability to solve creative word puzzles, says Beversdorf, while drugs such as propranolol, which block the chemical, can help people do better at tasks such as spotting anagrams. Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right-hand side, extending backwards towards a deeper region called the anterior cingulate cortex. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be. But to be truly creative needs more than just the right personality and the right brain areas and networks. It's about using them effectively. Skills, situations and our social setting can shape our creativity just as dramatically as the brain resources we are born with. The most creative people also use the different rhythms of the day, the weekends and the holidays to help shift focus and brain state. They may spend two hours at their desk then go for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them, and they don't feel guilty. And creativity need not always be a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people's moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work. Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and author of Creative Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2000) says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn't think they are completely nuts. Where it's at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.500&print=true * Richard Florida THE world is flat - or so says The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. It's the title of his latest book (Allen Lane, 2005), in which he argues that globalisation has levelled the playing field, allowing people the world over to exploit the cutting edge. "You no longer have to emigrate," writes Friedman, "in order to innovate." But Friedman fails to capture the complex reality of how economic growth and innovation cluster together in the modern global economy. In particular, scientific and technological creativity, the engines of that economy, are more geographically concentrated then ever. Geographer Tim Gulden of the University of Maryland at College Park and I have found that the bulk of the world's patents originate in just a few dozen city-regions - places such as Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, New York and Taipei. For all the concern over the rising global prominence of Bangalore and Shanghai, those two still do relatively little at the cutting edge. In 2003, the University of California alone generated more patents than either India or China, and IBM accounted for five times as many as the two combined. And while Asian city-regions are major players in commercial innovation, scientific advancement occurs largely in cities across Europe and North America. The US's success has stemmed in large part from its ability to attract creative talent. During the 20th century, its universities drew eminent scientists such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, fleeing fascism and intolerance in Europe. The creative influx accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s, providing much of the power for America's high-tech economy. But talent does not just flow between countries. More precisely, it locates in communities, regions and cities. This has been the case for centuries: from Athens to New York, cities have long served as crucibles of invention. This is driven by a key social and economic force: when talented people come together, their collective creativity is not just additive; rather, their interactions multiply and enhance their individual productivity. Researchers at The Brookings Institution have developed a computer simulation of this effect. The model was formed around two simple principles: first, that creative people cluster together to form teams that turn into companies or organisations; second, that these bodies then search for places in which to locate. Its simulated world emerged as a near-perfect representation of the real one. Creative people and the firms they built clustered in a hierarchy of cities. But this only raises further questions: why do some city-regions such as San Francisco or Boston become enduring centres of creativity and innovation, while others do not? In the age-old economic models that still dominate thinking about such issues, talent is conceived as a stock, similar to a supply of raw materials that is stored up in one area or another. On the contrary, talent is one of the most mobile resources on the planet, and is getting more so every day. What makes for a creative centre? A key driver is the presence of one or more world-class universities; many have noted the MIT effect in Boston or the Stanford effect in Silicon Valley. But for universities to help drive growth they must be embedded in a broader cluster of creative industries, supportive institutions, and a diverse and vibrant labour market. The crucial thing is a region's openness to talent: the ability of a place to draw creativity from all quarters of society. My research has found high rates of correlation between, on the one hand, the openness of a city to immigrants, its absence of racial and ethnic segregation, its acceptance of gay and lesbian populations and its enthusiasm for artists and, on the other, its ability to attract clusters of scientific and technological creativity and turn them into economic wealth. A recent Gallup survey confirms this. It found that people across all racial and class groups value cities that are open and tolerant of a broad swathe of the population. In addition to jobs and incomes, residents also expect the city to give them less tangible things - aesthetic beauty, a connection to place and exposure to new ideas. Today, centres of creativity and innovation are more concentrated than ever: talented and creative people no longer feel tethered to particular jobs or locations. In the modern global economy, great universities matter, and so do great cities. To sustain creative centres that drive economic productivity and growth, both need to work together. One culture http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.600&print=true * Arthur Miller What is scientific creativity? It involves the same kind of elements as artistic creativity. Both the scientist and the artist are trying to represent the reality beyond appearances. I believe that at the moment of creative insight, boundaries dissolve between disciplines and both artists and scientists search for new modes of aesthetics. That was certainly the case with Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. They were both trying to understand the true properties of space, and to reconcile them with how space is seen by different observers. Einstein discovered relativity and Picasso discovered cubism almost simultaneously. Has scientific creativity ever been sparked by art? Cubism directly helped Niels Bohr discover the principle of complementarity in quantum theory, which says that something can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but it will always be measured to be either one or the other. In analytic cubism, artists tried to represent a scene from all possible viewpoints on one canvas. An observer picks out one particular viewpoint. How you view the painting, that's the way it is. Bohr read the book by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes on cubist theory, Du Cubisme. It inspired him to postulate that the totality of an electron is both a particle and a wave, but when you observe it you pick out one particular viewpoint. So scientists can benefit by thinking in artistic terms? Sometimes scientific discoveries are made through visual design. For instance, there's the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in astrophysics. It's a graph that basically plots the temperature versus brightness of a star. It was invented when Henry Russell had only 10 minutes to give a speech and 300 stars to show. He plotted them all onto one diagram just to condense the information. When he did, this whole collection of stars assumed a shape, fell into a specific sequence. The interpretation of that diagram has become a major topic in astrophysics. Another example is Harry Kroto, who was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996. Kroto's first love was graphic design. That gave him a real advantage in science. Artistic insight helped him construct a three-dimensional image from two-dimensional data to deduce the design of carbon-60. Scientists who understand aesthetics, beauty and form gain a creative edge. Does it happen the other way around, with science inspiring creativity in art? Marcel Duchamp had read some works on relativity and the influence is obvious in his Nude Descending a Staircase. Wassily Kandinsky was also very much influenced by relativity, and particularly by E=mc^2. He took that equation to mean that everything is fundamentally amorphous, so that's what he painted. Technology has always profoundly affected art. Today there's a movement in computer art that is held back only by the pace of the technology. What do scientists and artists have in common? They see reality in new ways. While everyone else saw a pendulum swinging back and forth, Galileo saw it falling and rising. In that way he was able to do breakthrough work on the nature of falling bodies. Every great artist has seen the world in a new way. That's exactly what Einstein did, too. His early papers were very conceptual, especially the 1905 paper on special relativity. It has very few equations, and the data that he used had been around for years. He just saw the problems in a new way. In art and in science, discoveries are made by breaking the rules. But what's interesting about Einstein and Picasso, and other highly creative people, is that they can't seem to follow their discoveries through to the logical conclusions. Picasso never crossed the Rubicon and entered into abstract expressionism. Einstein didn't believe in quantum mechanics as the final atomic theory, nor in the most spectacular consequence of general relativity, the black hole. It seems that genius burns brightly for a while and then burns out. The young revolutionary becomes conservative. Never give up http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.700&print=true * Timothy Gowers What is mathematical creativity? I firmly believe it is not some magical, mysterious thing, particularly in mathematics, and in other fields too, though I don't have enough experience of things like poetry or painting to be authoritative. I'm convinced everything can be explained. How do you analyse it? It is difficult. The closer you look, the more it seems to dissolve. If you take an idea that seems outstandingly creative, it usually didn't appear in someone's head by magic. Some thought process led to it, and this can be broken into smaller ideas until you get down to the lowest level of thought process, which is essentially routine. So if you add up a whole load of routine things, you can somehow end up with something that everyone acknowledges is creative. So creativity is a procedure or an algorithm? Yes, but I realise that I'm opening a big can of worms. That statement requires much more justification than I can possibly give in an interview. If I suggest to people that creativity might be algorithmic, they generally say that it cannot be a simple procedure. They are right, it is not a simple procedure. But that doesn't stop it being a procedure. How does the creative process happen in mathematics? There's a famous passage in the book Littlewood's Miscellany by the mathematician John Littlewood in which he talks about the different phases of forming a mathematics problem. One of the most important is immersion. You need to spend a long time thinking hard and getting nowhere in the hope that at some later stage you'll have what feels like a bright idea. Of course, you'd never have had this idea if you hadn't been through the immersion stage. What does immersion feel like? Most of the time it's very frustrating. You try lots of things that don't work: 90 to 95 per cent of mathematical research is the process of trying things and discovering that they don't work. And this is another factor I think is important. Supposing 1 in 100 ideas turns out to work. If all that people see is the 100th idea, they'll think how extraordinary it was that somebody thought of that. An analogy is videoing yourself rolling four dice and then editing the video to show only the rolls that produce four sixes. It would look rather remarkable. Has immersion worked for you? Yes. One example is a theorem of a Hungarian mathematician called Endre Szemer?di that I spent two years thinking about until finally I got a new proof. Can you break down the creative process that led to this result? If I go back, I can find explanations for all the new ideas in that proof. When other people saw them, however, the new ideas looked quite novel because a lot of what I'd been doing didn't make it into the final paper. You cannot just write a big diary of your thought experiences, including your mistakes. It would be too long. Mistakes are an important part of the thought process. It's a good research strategy to be a little bit cavalier about the details and go back and check them afterwards. It speeds up the process of having ideas. Immersion sounds similar to obsession. I think obsession plays an important role. People tend to think of mathematics as some very mysterious thing that is done by people with special brains. But a large part of what makes mathematicians' brains special is the capacity to become obsessed with a maths problem. And the reward? The sort of pleasure you get is like supporting a not terribly good football team. Once in a while the team has some spectacular success that you can live off for several years. In between, you're yearning for something else to happen. It's a bit like that. When the music takes you http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.800&print=true Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand Can you describe the process you go through when you write songs? There are two very different stages. There is an initial creative stage where it all comes out, and then there's a stage of chopping it about, arranging it and turning it into something that can be heard by the rest of the world. The best songs come straight out. It feels a bit like the first time you ride a bicycle or drive a car. You're trying to control something but you're not quite sure which direction it's going. You end up with this big sprawling mess of an idea. Then you have that other process which is a lot more controlled, where you discard all the parts that are irrelevant or that obscure the good stuff at the heart. During the first process you're not really considering what you're doing, you're just doing it. The actual writing of a song is fairly easy. But the second process is very ruthless and quite cold because you have to cut away things that you're attached to. Do you write better in certain environments? I tend to write in all sorts of places. For our new record I've written songs in hotel rooms, on the back of tour buses, in corridors, wherever I've had an opportunity to sit down and pick up a guitar. Environment isn't particularly important. I usually just feel like doing it and do it. It's usually either when you feel there's no pressure to be doing other things, or when you feel almost selfishly unaware of other things. That's essential: having a disregard for anything happening around you. Whether it's somebody shouting about something they want you to do or you're desperately hungry or thirsty, you can just turn it off. Are you a different person when you're writing? I find myself being rude to people when I'm trying to get past the distractions. I used to have big arguments with my mother. It's funny because I'm generally not rude at all, I'm generally very polite, probably too polite. The only time I'm really rude is when I'm writing things. What does it feel like when you're writing? If it's good, it feels really exciting. It's like listening to a story you've never heard before. You lose your sense of where you are. All the everyday stuff - conversation, where you left your keys - it all seems to belong to a different brain, almost like a brain in somebody else's head. That's why the distractions are so infuriating, because it's like being reminded that this other brain exists. Most of the stuff I write about is from experiences I've had in everyday life when you use the trivial part of your brain, but the other part is always absorbing things it can use later. Interview by Eleanor Case. Franz Ferdinand's new album is You Could Have It So Much Better David Gray How do you write your songs? I begin with little ideas that aren't fully formed and I have to either excavate further or enlarge a small idea and turn it into a song - perhaps join it to some other ideas that I have hanging around. So a lot of the time it's more like being a mechanic. But occasionally a song just seems to come out of nowhere. I pick up my guitar and within half an hour I've written one. It's an instinctive process, a shutting down of conscious thought. It's about opening a door in your brain that is normally closed. It's about dredging up things that surprise you: images that you had stored and didn't know you had remembered. One image will unlock a chain of images, and that becomes a song. What kind of images? For example, an image of a tree I once saw came to me and helped resolve the calm of the song Ain't No Love. The tree had drops of water hanging on it, glistening in the sun, and it looked like a tree of diamonds: a beautiful image that is lodged in me rather like a splinter. It comes from way back in your life and you don't even know it's there. How do you know if a song is any good? You shouldn't always trust inspiration. Just because it came out of thin air doesn't mean it's any good. But sometimes you can tell, because all your emotions are stirred. The emotion, the purity of the germ of the song - it's all so vivid and wondrous. It feels so shockingly fresh. But a song that comes from nowhere is usually much better than anything you consciously think up. What's your state of mind when you're writing? It's an extremely intense period. I find myself storming around the room, biting my nails, scratching my head to the point that it bleeds. It's like having an itch you can't scratch until the process is completed. It takes hold of you. That's how you make records. You start off by tinkering around, making a few sounds and having a really good time, but when you get deeper into it and your demands get greater and more ambitious, something rears its ugly head. You become possessed. I'm not a particularly easy person to live with during these times. I find it really hard to get back into normal life. What puts you in the mood to create? An openness of heart. You either have it or you don't. It's an upwelling of feeling - and I will suddenly want an instrument to see if I can express it. Interview by Lucy Middleton. David Gray's new album is Life in Slow Motion Alison Goldfrapp & Will Gregory of Goldfrapp You think a lot about the theatrical side of your performances as well as the music. Where do you find your ideas? Alison: The inspirations are quite often outside music. We keep pictures, cut things out, write random things in notebooks, record things on Dictaphones, write up dreams. There are things that have been in your mind since you were a child. It's a matter of extracting them and regurgitating them in a different shape. Will: There's something quite childlike about it because you almost go back to just playing and being in the sandpit and making things. The ideas haven't got any verbal reasoning behind them and that's quite fun, quite liberating. At its best, it's like playing with a box of dressing-up clothes and trying them on and seeing how you look in them. Do you throw away a lot of ideas? Will: It's like you've got a map. You just don't know which are the blind alleys. When you start something, you don't know what it is or what it's going to be. Living with that perpetual sense of doubt can be pretty stressful. Each time you start to build, there's a part of you saying, this is rubbish, you can't do this, and there's another part that's saying this is quite fun, let's see where it goes. Do things ever arrive fully born? Alison: Yes, though sometimes when you have the whole picture it doesn't make it easy, because you can never achieve the whole thing. Or there's not much point in realising it because it's already formed. You've thought it, you've done it! Things that are half-done are safer. What's the difference between people who do what you're doing and those who just aspire to it? Will: It's to do with self-confidence - that grey state of the unknown is terrifying and some people find it harder to deal with. If you have a certain amount of self-belief you can say, I don't know what I'm doing but it's fine. Alison: I think people look at things differently. They don't see connections that penetrate beyond the thing itself. Like looking at a tree in a pot, some might say that's just a tree in a pot. Then someone else might say, it's a tree in a pot, it has those colours and it could be this and it might go into that. Or you might be looking at brickwork and think it looks like someone's skin. Will: It's like that Picasso sculpture of a bicycle. He turned it at a certain angle and suddenly the seat and handlebars look like a bull's head. Do you do any other creative things? Alison: I started knitting. I like it because it's very repetitive and really immediate. Interview by Liz Else. Goldfrapp's latest album is Supernature Just got to write this down http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.900&print=true * Alice Flaherty The writer: All in my head I HAVE a problem with writing. It started on a particular day, seven years ago. That day everything changed somehow and all the changes were of the utmost importance. I had to record them. One day I noticed that I was crouched on the floor of a bathroom in the building where I worked as a neurologist, writing on toilet paper because the idea couldn't wait until I got back to my office. When there was no paper, I wrote on my forearms. As my ideas got more intense, I even wrote on myself while I was driving. The change in my writing came 10 days after I gave birth prematurely to twin boys, who died. They were so small - one held my finger before he died, and his hand hardly fitted around it. For nine days my grief was "appropriate". On the tenth, I woke wildly excited, filled with hundreds of ideas pressing to be written down. I holed up in my office to write, and family and friends worried that I was depressed. But depression and mania can come in complicated mixtures: my mood, while sorrowful, was also manic. I didn't want my agitation, or even my grief, to end. It felt as if my grief had brought a magical kingdom of sorrow so close to this one that I could reach into its shadows and bring back dream fruit. It was a kingdom where beauty can't be separated from pain. In my transformed state, I saw meaning everywhere, which made the world radiant but also terrifying. Metaphors came alive. The rhythmic swoop of telephone wires had a faint message I needed to decipher and transcribe. Aesthetic experience? Psychosis? The distinction seemed to be missing the point. Sometimes, writing felt like a disease that took me away from family and friends. Other times, it filled me with pleasure and energy: I felt I was taking dictation from the muse. Most of what poured out was trash, but by picking through it I have had two books published which won awards, with a third in press and a fellowship to finish a fourth. Writers and artists with unusual creativity problems started to refer themselves to my clinic. That led to a research grant to study biological factors in creativity. Such social approval is always pleasant, but in someone with a tendency as odd as mine it is also key to my being able to claim that I am merely mad about my work, not mad. After four months, the urge to write left as suddenly as it had come. For the next month, it took a great deal of concentration to even lift my arm. I didn't feel like a blocked writer, but as if I were not a writer at all. The state was almost peaceful, a rest cure from the agitation of the previous months. If I tried to write or speak, though, I felt I was suffocating, my lungs full of water. A year after my twin boys died, I delivered, in an odd symmetry, premature but healthy twin girls. Again 10 days after the birth, I switched into a manicky, hypergraphic state. My doctor suggested a mood stabiliser. The first one was not a success, but after several tries we found a regime that has smoothed out the sharpest peaks and valleys of my writing. Without, luckily, flattening them completely. These days my excited writing has a seasonal rather than a post-partum pattern: it peaks in late summer, and early each winter it goes into hibernation. When my writing is driven, writing seems one of the glories of humankind. When I write as a scientist, writing seems a product of the brain. I try to keep my passionate and scientific writing separate because convention demands it. Doing so is artificial, though, and even deceptive - bloodless prose often hides the true motivations for a scientist's research. I study the drive to write because it is something in my brain that torments me, something that needs treatment. But never, I hope, a complete cure. The neurologist: All in my brain BECAUSE I am a neurologist, I could easily summon up a Greek word for my symptoms: hypergraphia, an exaggerated desire to write. And it had a pedigree. Norman Geschwind, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, showed that hypergraphia comes from a change in the brain's temporal lobes. These regions, located between the ears, are important for speech comprehension and emotional meaning. Geschwind noticed a cluster of personality traits in some people with temporal lobe epilepsy. This cluster is sometimes called the Dostoevsky syndrome, after the novelist who had all of these traits. So do the temporal lobes also control non-literary creativity? A form of senility called front-temporal dementia suggests they may. In people whose temporal lobe is most damaged, mood swings and compulsions are far more prominent than cognitive problems until late in the disease. Neurologist Bruce Miller of the University of California, San Francisco has recently described a number of these people who, with no previous interest in art, suddenly begin composing music or painting even though the rest of their abilities were collapsing. In these patients, the intact frontal lobe may be as important for their creative bursts as the temporal lobe deficits. Ingegerd Carlsson's group in Sweden has shown that in normal, non-demented people, brain activity is higher in the frontal lobes of creative than non-creative subjects. There is mounting evidence that the front-to-back communication between the frontal and temporal lobes is more important for creativity than the left brain-right brain model of the 1970s, when the right brain was thought to be visuospatial and intuitive, while the left brain was linguistic, deductive, and did your tax forms. Other disorders that affect frontal and temporal lobe activity also affect creativity: chief among them is manic depression. Mania and milder states of increased energy turn out to be much more likely than epilepsy to cause hypergraphia as well as pressured speech. And the temporal lobe is abnormally active in people who have manic depression, as captured by functional brain imaging and electro-encephalograms. While there is sometimes thought to be a link between depression and creativity, that link may exist because depression is often coupled to rebound periods of at least mild agitation or mood elevation. Recent evidence suggests that depression correlates better with writer's block than with creative bursts. Depression itself often brings with it a decreased desire to communicate, and a feeling that life and words have lost meaning. Interestingly, the behaviour of depressed - and blocked - people is often surprisingly similar to those who have had frontal lobe injuries. People with such injuries have poor judgement and lack creativity, whereas frontal lobe activity increases in creative people who are thoroughly engaged in creative tasks. An important addition to the parallels above is the difference between the kind of aphasia (language deficit) that stem from frontal versus temporal lobe damage. Frontal lobe injury often causes Broca's aphasia, in which patients have trouble generating speech, and are painfully aware of it. Injury to the temporal lobes, however, causes Wernicke's aphasia, where patients have poor comprehension and are therefore not aware that they don't make sense. Thus they actually speak more fluently, if emptily, than before. Broca's patients are often depressed, whereas Wernicke's patients can be manic or impulsive. There have been plenty of attempts to boost creativity in "normal" people. My colleague Shelley Carson and I, for example, are testing the hypothesis that creativity can be encouraged by exposure to a bright full-spectrum light for half an hour every morning to treat the brain's seasonal response to short winter days. Preliminary results suggest there is indeed a significant benefit. Students do better on tasks from writing haiku to listing as many uses as possible for a paper clip - and many of them are not keen to return the light boxes at the end of the experiment! Researcher Alan Snyder, based at the University of Adelaide, Australia, is working with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). He has found that holding an electromagnet near the frontal lobe can influence creative skills, with volunteers showing dramatic improvement in drawing and mathematical abilities. Unfortunately, the abilities of the volunteers revert to their previous level within minutes of turning the magnet off. The idea of trying to control the muse with pills and magnetic pulses is disturbing. But standard educational and behavioural alternatives are worrisome too: they are more expensive, slower, better at imparting knowledge than creative motivation. Although novel attempts to boost creativity may appear alien or frivolous, creativity is not a luxury, it is an essential. On the personal scale, lack of creativity can put employment in jeopardy. On a world scale, just think of all the pressing problems in need of creative solutions. Natural talent http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.000&print=true * Philip Ball IS NATURE creative? The notion sounds at first like a sop to sentimentalists, an anthropomorphism one step away from pantheism. The beauty of nature is a perilously seductive concept. Biologist Karl von Frisch had it more or less right when, confronted with the variety of delicately patterned radiolarians and diatoms, he was determined not to get misty-eyed: "I do not want to wax philosophical about so much 'useless' beauty scattered over the oceans," he said. "Nature is prodigal." But on closer inspection, the idea of natural creativity has a lot going for it. Like creative people, nature produces things that appear neither inevitable nor obvious, and solves problems with innovative solutions. Nature's unwitting problem-solving mechanism is natural selection, and the solutions it finds have won the admiration of engineers - hence the field of biomimetics, the application of natural solutions to human engineering problems. Nothing in the laws of physics or chemistry guarantees, for example, the evolution of the gecko's adhesive foot - a pad with inexhaustible stickiness supplied by a carpet of tiny, crack-probing hairs. Nor could we predict from first principles the self-cleaning mechanism of the lotus leaf or the laminated armour-plating of molluscs. An engineer who came up with these designs would be creative in anyone's book, and it seems unfair to deny nature that accolade just because they were the result of a blind search honed by selection. Random mutation coupled to selective pressure turns out to be an efficient way to find good solutions, so much so that scientists and engineers are now copying this technique. Though lacking purpose, evolution can conjure up wonderfully artistic design. Moreover, the creativity of natural selection is self-perpetuating, as it ensures that no successful product can afford to rest on its laurels. Of course, not all creativity is about solving problems. Artists often produce beautiful things for the sheer joy of it. Once evolutionary arguments have explained away our aesthetic delight in nature's splendours - in the physical processes that give rise to, say, a sunset - where in nature is there any room left for pure artistic creativity? We might concede that there is none, if everything in nature were either functional (as in features formed by evolutionary adaptation), inevitable (such as the formation of atoms, stars, planets and, in the end, sunsets) or just random. But it isn't. Not all features of organisms have an adaptive function - some are just epiphenomena, side products with no evolutionary significance. And surprisingly, some of these apparently function-free properties seem profusely creative. Wild cats and fish develop striking pigmentation patterns that serve clear roles: for camouflage, warning signals, mimicry and so on. But similar patterns are observed on many mollusc shells, even though these creatures live buried in mud, or have opaque coatings that obscure the markings entirely. These superficial elaborations are astonishingly diverse. Freed from evolutionary pressures, says Hans Meinhardt of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in T?bingen, Germany, "nature is allowed to play". Nature creates endlessly without any apparent purpose. And not only in biology. For example, you might expect that wind-blown sand would be scattered evenly, or at least randomly. But neither is the case: it forms patterns at many scales, from snaking ripples the size of your fingers to dunes and super-dunes, called draas, several kilometres wide. Cloud banks are massaged by the air into mares'-tail and mackerel skies, patterns that don't mean anything but are simply inherent in nature. "Inherent" does not by itself imply creativity: the methane molecule, say, is also inherent in nature. But what is striking about nature's spontaneous pattern-forming potential is that, unlike the rules of chemistry, the outcome is not specified. Jaguars share generic similarities in their pelt markings, but no two are identical. The mechanisms that underlie such patterns prove to be fertile sources of variety: the slightest change in the generative rules, or in the boundary conditions within which those rules operate, can produce dramatically different patterns. What's more, these pattern-creating processes don't seem specific to any particular system. Meinhardt argues that both shell patterns and sand ripples can be explained by a single basic mechanism - local positive feedback coupled to a longer-ranged inhibiting process. Mathematician Stephen Wolfram goes further. He thinks that pattern-forming systems called cellular automata underpin all physical and mathematical laws in the universe, so that a few simple principles create everything we see and experience. Artists are starting to use pattern-forming algorithms like cellular automata to create visual art and music. This is an acknowledgement that nature is able to produce the kind of rich yet coherent structures that we respond to in art, and that nature's creativity is a resource we can draw upon for our own inspiration. The complexity of the universe http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.100&print=true * Paul Davies PEOPLE sometimes call the big bang "the creation," but this is a serious misnomer. The universe has never ceased to be creative. The elaborate universe we observe today - dazzling in its richness, diversity and complexity - didn't spring into being ready-made. Rather, it emerged gradually, over billions of years, through a long succession of self-organising and self-complexifying processes. In fact, the universe began in an exceptionally bland state, a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, as evidenced by the near-perfect uniformity of the radiation left over from its fiery birth. Most cosmologists believe that even this near-featureless state was preceded by something simpler still - perhaps little more than rapidly expanding empty space. But the dull, uniform distribution of matter was primed to set off a chain reaction of creative processes. Gravity pulls matter together, so the spread-out initial distribution was inherently unstable, and slight irregularities in the density of material were quickly amplified. In this manner gravity sculpted complex cosmic structures, and by a process of slow accretion galaxies emerged from the smoothly distributed gases. The emergence of life on Earth, and the slow evolution of multicellularity, complex behaviour, and eventually intelligence, is just a small branch of the cosmic creativity that began with the big bang. Viewed on a cosmological scale, the history of the universe appears to be one of increasing complexification. This seems at odds with the second law of thermodynamics, according to which all physical processes irreversibly degenerate - the universe is inexorably dying even as it blossoms. But there is no contradiction between these two universal trends - the creative and the destructive - because every structure that emerges in the universe is paid for in the currency of entropy. Luckily, the cosmic kitty is far from empty. Although the universe is noticeably "running down" as stars burn their fuel and die, there is enough useful energy left for the cosmos to create complex phenomena for many trillions of years to come. Still, while nature's creativity does not conflict with the second law, it is not explained by it either. It is easy to imagine a universe which irreversibly degenerates without doing anything exciting on the way. Yet our universe creates stars, snowflakes, clouds, rainforests and people. What is the source of this astonishing creativity? Physicists are far from knowing just what it takes to create order out of chaos. They cannot point to specific characteristics in the laws of physics as "the source of creativity". It is not even clear that the whole story lies within the known laws. Some scientists suspect there are undiscovered laws, or overarching principles, at work, coaxing clod-like particles of matter toward organised complexity. Sometimes the hypothesised "principle of increasing complexity" is called the fourth law of thermodynamics. One thing is clear. The simplicity of the primordial universe ensured its eventual complexity. Only these bare beginnings contain such immense creative potential: cosmic creativity was forged in the big bang. Once sentient beings like us emerged, a whole new phase of creativity came with it. Through art, science and technology, humans are refashioning the world. Who can say how far mental creativity will help shape the cosmos? Oh look, a new clich?! http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.200&print=true * Mike Holderness * Liz Else Few things are quite as challenging as using a computer to model something we think of as quintessentially human. And if you're Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive science researcher whose book G?del, Escher, Bach inspired a generation, trying to model creativity will make you ask yourself tough questions. How much can we learn about human creativity this way? Is "creativity" the right word anyway? And will the Cats deliver? Mike Holderness and Liz Else quizzed Hofstadter How do you define creativity? I think we would do better to talk about "discoverativity" than creativity. I am convinced creativity is the ability to discover things that are in some sense there for anyone to find: things that the rest of humanity will appreciate because they are beautiful or because they are insightful or because they are truths about nature. Of course, we consider some people great musical composers when nine-tenths of the world has never heard of them, and when most of those who have heard their music didn't like it anyway. But they've found what I call a "vein of receptivity" in the minds of a large number of people. Are some discoveries more creative than others? Well, some are easier to make. Take what happened in quantum mechanics in the 1920s. I use the metaphor of people finding a new beach. Physicists rushed to this beach because they knew that it was going to be covered in wonderful shells. It wasn't that hard to find fantastic, beautiful shells because it was a completely virgin beach. But after 10 or 20 years it got harder and harder. Then it became time to try to find new beaches. It is standard to think of science as discovery, but doesn't "discovering" a novel sound bizarre? My feeling is that novelists discover patterns or structures of human behaviour, perhaps miniature plot lines. And they also discover idiosyncratic fashions of weaving plot lines together, in multiple layers, and these devices become characteristic of them as an author. They might make a complex analogy: "That marriage is like another marriage that I once saw." That is how we navigate human relations. We are always asking each other for advice: "How should I treat my daughter?" "Oh, my friends had a daughter who used to do similar things, so..." Novelists observe the world and discover events and people in it that they find interesting, and their discoveries pepper their novels. Good novelists are those whose sense of what is interesting coincides with that of many others. Will we be able to scan brains and say "Look, that's the creative thing being appreciated"? There has recently been a very strong push to connect the most complicated cognitive or emotional phenomena to the latest trends in biology and exploring the brain. People yearn to find "the" neural correlate of an emotion or even a creative thought. To me, that hope seems about as silly as trying to find the key to the greatness of a novel by closely examining the typographical symbols that compose it. Clearly, the relative frequency of "k" and "j" is ridiculously far from what makes a novel great. There are so many levels of description between the level of letters and that of ideas. How wide is that explanatory gap between neurons and thoughts? Well, a great poem creates activity in billions of neurons, each changing every few milliseconds over several minutes at least. From my viewpoint, you could assign to each intermediate level of description a factor of 10, and since a neuron firing is 10 or 20 levels away from the level of a poem, you are missing the mark by something like 15 orders of magnitude. That just gives an idea of how senseless it is to try to talk about a neural correlate of poetry. Would we do better approaching the enigma of analogy to understand creativity? There's no doubt about it. Making analogies is central to being human. Every single word choice we make, for instance, is done by analogy. Consider the word choice you made earlier - "explanatory gap". It seemed trivial to you, but for a computer it would be terribly, terribly hard. Every single word choice is analogy-making, because it is connecting prior experiences with a new experience and recognising the commonality. As we grow up, we do that repeatedly at more and more abstract levels until we build up very deep insights about the world. In the 1980s and 1990s you tried to model analogy-making on a computer. What did you do? We kept it as simple as we could. Our program Copycat deals with questions like "If ABC changes to ABD, what, by analogy, would XYZ change to?" There are many defensible answers, by the way, including XYA, XYD, XYY, XYZ, WYZ, WXZ, DBA and others. Our goal is to make a program that can find all these answers but also that has aesthetic preferences that make it "like" some more than others. Although it finds XYD most frequently, it "likes" WYZ the best. Copycat itself came out of an analogy - the idea of modelling a computer program on an ant colony. Copycat is composed of many, many small processes, many of which run in parallel. Each small "ant" makes its contribution to finding the analogy. How have you developed it since the early days? We have a newer project, Metacat. It can say: "This analogy is like that one", and you can ask it: "In what way?" Metacat will reply that the pressures that give rise to this analogy are related to the pressures in that one, but there is this difference. Metacat also has a limited sense of its own goals - and in the future we would like it to have a sense of the goals of the person it is talking to. For instance, if I were to say to it: "If ABC changes to ABD, what would ABC change to?", I would want it to reply indignantly: "Why are you asking me what you just told me?" That sounds as if it is expressing constraints on what is important. In my book Le Ton Beau de Marot, I discussed the key role of constraints in creativity. Constraints give a framework within which to work. Take, say, the rhythm used in most English sonnets, iambic pentameter. The vast majority of people like this regular periodic beat. As in music, they like a rhythm based on a small integer. You can go out on a limb and try seven or eleven, but the odds are that fewer people will be attracted to your creation. Such preferences are part of our biological nature. Pandering to inbuilt preferences suggests film producer Samuel Goldwyn's demand that his creative people produce "new clich?s". That's cute. I can almost subscribe to this motto. I would just add one word: to me, creativity is finding "new future clich?s". Everything truly creative eventually becomes a clich?. The Mona Lisa is the most clich?d of all the clich?s you can imagine - and something similar could be said of Einstein's great discovery E = mc^2. In each case, someone found a hidden vein of receptivity in the human mind - something that a lot of people could relate to. How long do you expect it to be before Metacat delivers a significant insight into human creativity? Well, I feel this is already happening, and I hope it will increase in the next few years. But I don't expect human-level intelligence suddenly to flower out of our work. If that happened, it would mean that our intelligence is a lot simpler than we humans tend to believe. In fact, I personally would be devastated if any of my computer models turned out to be just as smart as a human being. It would be a terrible shock. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 01:06:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:06:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Times: Put what where? 2, 000 years of bizarre sex advice Message-ID: Put what where? 2,000 years of bizarre sex advice http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-100-1804184-100,00.html 5.10.1 Put what where? 2,000 years of bizarre sex advice Tight corsets cause nymphomania, orgasms can kill and wasps are a turn-on. John Naish looks at the top sex tips over the ages Mating. Reproduction. Nothing is more crucial to humanity's survival, so it would be logical to expect us to have got it sussed early in our evolution. But since the start of civilisation, the fundamentals of human sex -- where to put it, how and when -- have been absurdly confused by a parade of moralists, pundits and visionaries all claiming to know the magic secrets and only too happy to pass them on at a very reasonable price. Just as every generation thinks that it invented sex, we also think we invented lovemaking manuals, or at least based them on a few prototypes such as the Kamasutra and Marie Stopes's 1918 Married Love. But today's maelstrom of books, videos and DVDs has a far richer, more twisted heritage than that. The tradition of bestselling love guides goes back to the Ancient Chinese. Our earliest known manuals were first written in 300BC and buried in a family tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan province. Recent translation reveals the timeless nature of the subjects they tackled. Written as Cosmo coverlines, they would look like this: Four Seasons of Sex -- and Why Autumn is Hot, Hot, Hot; Wild New Positions; Tiger Roving, Gibbon Grabbing and Fish Gobbling; Aphrodisiacs to Keep You Up All Night!Plus Exclusive! Your Love Route to Immortality. As ever, it was all nonsense: home-made Viagra recipes involved ingredients such as beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails. The books also promised that any man who had sex with a different virgin every night for 100 nights without ejaculating would live for ever (albeit rather uncomfortably). These odd beginnings set a trend: weird tips from strange authors, many of whom became manual martyrs. Ovid, the Roman poet, advised women on the best positions to suit their bodies in his poem Ars Amatoria. For example: "If you are short, go on top/If you're conspicuously tall, kneel with your head turned slightly sideways." The prudish Emperor Augustus banished poor Ovid to a chilly outpost of empire (a small town on the Black Sea in modern Romania). Medieval European sex advice followed the strait-laced trend: most of it said "don't". Pleasure paved Hell's roads and misogynistic manuals such as De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) claimed that females used sex to drain men of their power and that some hid sharp shards of iron inside themselves to injure innocent lovers. A technological breakthrough in the Renaissance put us back on our lascivious tracks. The printing press enabled publishers to churn out dodgy books faster than the Church authorities could ban them. Readers were treated to gems such as Mrs Isabella Cortes's handy hint from 1561 that a mixture of quail testicles, large-winged ants, musk and amber was perfect for straightening bent penises. The era also brought us the earliest recorded recommendation of slippers as a sex aid ("Cold feet are a powerful hindrance to coition," warned Giovanni Sinibaldi in his 1658 book Rare Verities.) But to find history's oddest advisers, we must look to the Victorians and Edwardians. William Chidley, for example, believed that he could best promote his ideas by walking around in a toga. Chidley, an Australian, advised readers in his 1911 pamphlet The Answer that heavy clothing caused erections, which would lead to sexual overexcitement, illness and death, as well as being "ugly things" of which "we are all ashamed". He urged people to live on fruit and nuts and to practise a method of flaccid intercourse apparently based on horses' sex lives. Yet it wasn't his ideas that got him repeatedly arrested, but his silk toga, which the authorities thought indecent. After his death, supporters continued propounding his theories into the 1920s. For the ultimate proof that you don't need relevant qualifications to become a world expert, we turn to Marie Stopes. She was married and in her late thirties when she wrote one of Britain's most enduring sex guides, Married Love. But she was also a virgin. Stopes was inspired by her betrothal to Reginald "Ruggles" Gates, who, she told a divorce court, had failed ever to become "effectively rigid". When Married Love hit the shelves early in 1918 it outsold the bestselling contemporary novels by a huge margin. By 1925, sales had passed the half-million mark. Stopes was a fan of Hitler's eugenics and arrogant enough to offer Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw advice on writing. Her main sex-manual innovation was a theory that women have a "sex tide" of passion that ebbs and flows on a fortnightly basis -- and woe betide the man who didn't understand this. In case her second husband, the manufacturing magnate Humphrey Verdon Roe, got it wrong, she made him sign a contract releasing her to have sex with other men. So that's our sexual forebears, a weird lot with funny ideas. Compared with them we might appear at the zenith of sexual enlightenment. Our age is remarkable for the sheer volume of sex advice being consumed: one woman in four now owns a sex manual, says a survey by the publishers Dorling Kindersley. Everyone from porn stars to the car-manual firm Haynes has one out. Well, I wonder. In 50 years' time, I foresee the students at a university faculty of s exual semiotics studying the early Twenty-Ohs with the same mirth, incredulity and horror that shake us when we consider our ancestors' obsessions. Perhaps they will wonder why we bought so many manuals, videos and DVDs but seemed to have so little time or energy left for sex. Maybe they will link our obsession with orgasms to our endless need to go shopping. They might also connect our avid consumption of sex advice to our growing terror of personal embarrassment and "getting it wrong". They may even have a name for us; perhaps the erotic neurotics. Put What Where? Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice, by John Naish (HarperElement ?9.99), is available from Times Books First at ?9.49 p&p free. Call 0870 1608080 or visit [3]www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy Wisdom of the ancients How to pull "Pick the woman's worst feature and then make it appear desirable. Tell an older woman that she looks young. Tell an ugly woman that she looks `fascinating'." Philaenis, papyrus sex manual (2BC) Go blondes! "All women are lascivious but auburn blondes the most. A little straight forehead denotes an unbridled appetite in lust." Giovanni Sinibaldi, Rare Verities: the Cabinet of Venus Unlock'd (1658) Buns and corsets cause nymphomania "Constricting the waist by corsets prevents the return of blood to the heart, overloads sexual organs and causes unnatural excitement of the sexual system. The majority of women follow the goddess Fashion and so also wear their hair in a heavy knot. This great pressure on their small brains produces great heat and chronic inflammation of their sexual organs. It is almost impossible that such women should lead other than a life of sexual excess." Dr John Cowan, The Science of a New Life (1888) On the other hand . . . "The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind." Dr William Acton, Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1858) Indian enlargement "Rub your penis with the bristles of certain insects that live in trees, and then, after rubbing it for ten nights with oils, rub it with the bristles as before. Swelling will be gradually produced. Then lie on a hammock with a hole in it and hang the penis through the hole. Take away the pain from the swelling by using cool concoctions. The swelling lasts for life." Kamasutra, translated by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. "Bunny" Arbuthnot (1883) Climaxes can kill "Fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination, epilepsy and defecation have occurred in young men after first coitus. Lesions of various organs have taken place. In men of mature age the arteries have been unable to resist the high blood pressure and cerebral haemorrhage with paralysis has occurred. In elderly men the excitement of intercourse with young wives or prostitutes has caused death." Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: a Manual for Students (1933) How often? "The ordinary man can safely indulge about four times a month. More than that would be excess for a large majority of civilised men and women." Lyman B. Sperry, Confidential Talks with Husband and Wife: a Book of Information and Advice for the Married and Marriageable (1900) Single-handed signs "Look at the habitual masturbator! See how thin, pale and haggard he appears; how his eyes are sunken; how long and cadaverous is his cast of countenance; how irritable he is and how sluggish, mentally and physically; how afraid he is to meet the eye of his fellow, feel his damp and chilling hand, so characteristic of great vital exhaustion." Dr Henry Guernsey, Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects (1882) Never marry these women "Redheads. Any girl named after a mountain, a tree, a river or a bird. Ones with rough hands or feet. Ones who sigh, laugh or cry at meals. Any girl with inverted nipples, a beard, uneven breasts, flap ears, spindle legs or who is scrawny. Girls whose big toes are disproportionately small. Girls who make the ground shake when they walk past." Koka Shastra, The Indian Scripture of Koka (12th century) And, if you can't find it, don't worry "The clitoris, while important, is not nearly as important as many of us have been taught or led to believe." Edward Podolsky, Sex Technique for Husband and Wife (1947) But whatever you do ... "Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner." Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972) ONLINE Q&A John Naish will be available on Times Online to answer your questions on his book. Send your e-mails to him and read the answers [4]here References 4. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,616,00.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 01:06:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:06:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business Message-ID: Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business http://www.reason.com/0510/fe.mf.rethinking.shtml 5.10 A Reason debate featuring Milton Friedman, Whole Foods John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductors T.J. Rodgers Thirty-five years ago, Milton Friedman wrote a famous article for The New York Times Magazine whose title aptly summed up its main point: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. The future Nobel laureate in economics had no patience for capitalists who claimed that business is not concerned merely with profit but also with promoting desirable social ends; that business has a social conscience and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em- ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. Friedman, now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago, wrote that such people are preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades. John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, is one businessman who disagrees with Friedman. A self-described ardent libertarian whose conversation is peppered with references to Ludwig von Mises and Abraham Maslow, Austrian economics and astrology, Mackey believes Friedmans view is too narrow a description of his and many other businesses activities. As important, he argues that Friedmans take woefully undersells the humanitarian dimension of capitalism. In the debate that follows, Mackey lays out his personal vision of the social responsibility of business. Friedman responds, as does T.J. Rodgers, the founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and the chief spokesman of what might be called the tough love school of laissez faire. Dubbed one of Americas toughest bosses by Fortune, Rodgers argues that corporations add far more to society by maximizing long-term shareholder value than they do by donating time and money to charity. Reason offers this exchange as the starting point of a discussion that should be intensely important to all devotees of free minds and free markets. Comments should be sent to letters at reason.com. Putting Customers Ahead of Investors John Mackey In 1970 Milton Friedman wrote that there is one and only one social responsibility of businessto use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. Thats the orthodox view among free market economists: that the only social responsibility a law-abiding business has is to maximize profits for the shareholders. I strongly disagree. Im a businessman and a free market libertarian, but I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies. From an investors perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But thats not the purpose for other stakeholdersfor customers, employees, suppliers, and the community. Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate. My argument should not be mistaken for a hostility to profit. I believe I know something about creating shareholder value. When I co-founded Whole Foods Market 27 years ago, we began with $45,000 in capital; we only had $250,000 in sales our first year. During the last 12 months we had sales of more than $4.6 billion, net profits of more than $160 million, and a market capitalization over $8 billion. But we have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value by making shareholder value the primary purpose of our business. In my marriage, my wifes happiness is an end in itself, not merely a means to my own happiness; love leads me to put my wifes happiness first, but in doing so I also make myself happier. Similarly, the most successful businesses put the customer first, ahead of the investors. In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, customer happiness is an end in itself, and will be pursued with greater interest, passion, and empathy than the profit-centered business is capable of. Not that were only concerned with customers. At Whole Foods, we measure our success by how much value we can create for all six of our most important stakeholders: customers, team members (employees), investors, vendors, communities, and the environment. Our philosophy is graphically represented in the opposite column. There is, of course, no magical formula to calculate how much value each stakeholder should receive from the company. It is a dynamic process that evolves with the competitive marketplace. No stakeholder remains satisfied for long. It is the function of company leadership to develop solutions that continually work for the common good. Many thinking people will readily accept my arguments that caring about customers and employees is good business. But they might draw the line at believing a company has any responsibility to its community and environment. To donate time and capital to philanthropy, they will argue, is to steal from the investors. After all, the corporations assets legally belong to the investors, dont they? Management has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value; therefore, any activities that dont maximize shareholder value are violations of this duty. If you feel altruism towards other people, you should exercise that altruism with your own money, not with the assets of a corporation that doesnt belong to you. This position sounds reasonable. A companys assets do belong to the investors, and its management does have a duty to manage those assets responsibly. In my view, the argument is not wrong so much as it is too narrow. First, there can be little doubt that a certain amount of corporate philanthropy is simply good business and works for the long-term benefit of the investors. For example: In addition to the many thousands of small donations each Whole Foods store makes each year, we also hold five 5% Days throughout the year. On those days, we donate 5 percent of a stores total sales to a nonprofit organization. While our stores select worthwhile organizations to support, they also tend to focus on groups that have large membership lists, which are contacted and encouraged to shop our store that day to support the organization. This usually brings hundreds of new or lapsed customers into our stores, many of whom then become regular shoppers. So a 5% Day not only allows us to support worthwhile causes, but is an excellent marketing strategy that has benefited Whole Foods investors immensely. That said, I believe such programs would be completely justifiable even if they produced no profits and no P.R. This is because I believe the entrepreneurs, not the current investors in a companys stock, have the right and responsibility to define the purpose of the company. It is the entrepreneurs who create a company, who bring all the factors of production together and coordinate it into viable business. It is the entrepreneurs who set the company strategy and who negotiate the terms of trade with all of the voluntarily cooperating stakeholdersincluding the investors. At Whole Foods we hired our original investors. They didnt hire us. We first announced that we would donate 5 percent of the companys net profits to philanthropy when we drafted our mission statement, back in 1985. Our policy has therefore been in place for over 20 years, and it predates our IPO by seven years. All seven of the private investors at the time we created the policy voted for it when they served on our board of directors. When we took in venture capital money back in 1989, none of the venture firms objected to the policy. In addition, in almost 14 years as a publicly traded company, almost no investors have ever raised objections to the policy. How can Whole Foods philanthropy be theft from the current investors if the original owners of the company unanimously approved the policy and all subsequent investors made their investments after the policy was in effect and well publicized? The shareholders of a public company own their stock voluntarily. If they dont agree with the philosophy of the business, they can always sell their investment, just as the customers and employees can exit their relationships with the company if they dont like the terms of trade. If that is unacceptable to them, they always have the legal right to submit a resolution at our annual shareholders meeting to change the companys philanthropic philosophy. A number of our company policies have been changed over the years through successful shareholder resolutions. Another objection to the Whole Foods philosophy is where to draw the line. If donating 5 percent of profits is good, wouldnt 10 percent be even better? Why not donate 100 percent of our profits to the betterment of society? But the fact that Whole Foods has responsibilities to our community doesnt mean that we dont have any responsibilities to our investors. Its a question of finding the appropriate balance and trying to create value for all of our stakeholders. Is 5 percent the right amount to donate to the community? I dont think there is a right answer to this question, except that I believe 0 percent is too little. It is an arbitrary percentage that the co-founders of the company decided was a reasonable amount and which was approved by the owners of the company at the time we made the decision. Corporate philanthropy is a good thing, but it requires the legitimacy of investor approval. In my experience, most investors understand that it can be beneficial to both the corporation and to the larger society. That doesnt answer the question of why we give money to the community stakeholder. For that, you should turn to one of the fathers of free-market economics, Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations was a tremendous achievement, but economists would be well served to read Smiths other great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There he explains that human nature isnt just about self-interest. It also includes sympathy, empathy, friendship, love, and the desire for social approval. As motives for human behavior, these are at least as important as self-interest. For many people, they are more important. When we are small children we are egocentric, concerned only about our own needs and desires. As we mature, most people grow beyond this egocentrism and begin to care about otherstheir families, friends, communities, and countries. Our capacity to love can expand even further: to loving people from different races, religions, and countriespotentially to unlimited love for all people and even for other sentient creatures. This is our potential as human beings, to take joy in the flourishing of people everywhere. Whole Foods gives money to our communities because we care about them and feel a responsibility to help them flourish as well as possible. The business model that Whole Foods has embraced could represent a new form of capitalism, one that more consciously works for the common good instead of depending solely on the invisible hand to generate positive results for society. The brand of capitalism is in terrible shape throughout the world, and corporations are widely seen as selfish, greedy, and uncaring.This is both unfortunate and unnecessary, and could be changed if businesses and economists widely adopted the business model that I have outlined here. To extend our love and care beyond our narrow self-interest is antithetical to neither our human nature nor our financial success. Rather, it leads to the further fulfillment of both. Why do we not encourage this in our theories of business and economics? Why do we restrict our theories to such a pessimistic and crabby view of human nature? What are we afraid of? Making Philanthropy Out of Obscenity Milton Friedman By pursuing his own interest [an individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations The differences between John Mackey and me regarding the social responsibility of business are for the most part rhetorical. Strip off the camouflage, and it turns out we are in essential agreement. Moreover, his company, Whole Foods Market, behaves in accordance with the principles I spelled out in my 1970 New York Times Magazine article. With respect to his company, it could hardly be otherwise. It has done well in a highly competitive industry. Had it devoted any significant fraction of its resources to exercising a social responsibility unrelated to the bottom line, it would be out of business by now or would have been taken over. Here is how Mackey himself describes his firms activities: 1) The most successful businesses put the customer first, instead of the investors (which clearly means that this is the way to put the investors first). 2) There can be little doubt that a certain amount of corporate philanthropy is simply good business and works for the long-term benefit of the investors. Compare this to what I wrote in 1970: Of course, in practice the doctrine of social responsibility is frequently a cloak for actions that are justified on other grounds rather than a reason for those actions. To illustrate, it may well be in the long run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. In each of thesecases, there is a strong temptation to rationalize these actions as an exercise of social responsibility. In the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to capitalism, profits, the soulless corporation and so on, this is one way for a corporation to generate goodwill as a by-product of expenditures that are entirely justified in its own self-interest. It would be inconsistent of me to call on corporate executives to refrain from this hypocritical window-dressing because it harms the foundations of a free society. That would be to call on them to exercise a social responsibility! If our institutions and the attitudes of the public make it in their self-interest to cloak their actions in this way, I cannot summon much indignation to denounce them. I believe Mackeys flat statement that corporate philanthropy is a good thing is flatly wrong. Consider the decision by the founders of Whole Foods to donate 5 percent of net profits to philanthropy. They were clearly within their rights in doing so. They were spending their own money, using 5 percent of one part of their wealth to establish, thanks to corporate tax provisions, the equivalent of a 501c(3) charitable foundation, though with no mission statement, no separate by-laws, and no provision for deciding on the beneficiaries. But what reason is there to suppose that the stream of profit distributed in this way would do more good for society than investing that stream of profit in the enterprise itself or paying it out as dividends and letting the stockholders dispose of it? The practice makes sense only because of our obscene tax laws, whereby a stockholder can make a larger gift for a given after-tax cost if the corporation makes the gift on his behalf than if he makes the gift directly. That is a good reason for eliminating the corporate tax or for eliminating the deductibility of corporate charity, but it is not a justification for corporate charity. Whole Foods Markets contribution to societyand as a customer I can testify that it is an important oneis to enhance the pleasure of shopping for food. Whole Foods has no special competence in deciding how charity should be distributed. Any funds devoted to the latter would surely have contributed more to society if they had been devoted to improving still further the former. Finally, I shall try to explain why my statement that the social responsibility of business [is] to increase its profits and Mackeys statement that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies are equivalent. Note first that I refer to social responsibility, not financial, or accounting, or legal. It is social precisely to allow for the constituencies to which Mackey refers. Maximizing profits is an end from the private point of view; it is a means from the social point of view. A system based on private property and free markets is a sophisticated means of enabling people to cooperate in their economic activities without compulsion; it enables separated knowledge to assure that each resource is used for its most valued use, and is combined with other resources in the most efficient way. Of course, this is abstract and idealized. The world is not ideal. There are all sorts of deviations from the perfect marketmany, if not most, I suspect, due to government interventions. But with all its defects, the current largely free-market, private-property world seems to me vastly preferable to a world in which a large fraction of resources is used and distributed by 501c(3)s and their corporate counterparts. Put Profits First T.J. Rodgers John Mackeys article attacking corporate profit maximization could not have been written by a free market libertarian, as claimed. Indeed, if the examples he cites had not identified him as the author, one could easily assume the piece was written by Ralph Nader. A more accurate title for his article is How Business and Profit Making Fit Into My Overarching Philosophy of Altruism. Mackey spouts nonsense about how his company hired his original investors, not vice versa. If Whole Foods ever falls on persistent hard timesperhaps when the Luddites are no longer able to hold back the genetic food revolution using junk science and fearhe will quickly find out who has hired whom, as his investors fire him. Mackey does make one point that is consistent with, but not supportive of, free market capitalism. He knows that shareholders own his stock voluntarily. If they dont like the policies of his company, they can always vote to change those policies with a shareholder resolution or simply sell the stock and buy that of another company more aligned with their objectives. Thus, he informs his shareholders of his objectives and lets them make a choice on which stock to buy. So far, so good. It is also simply good business for a company to cater to its customers, train and retain its employees, build long-term positive relationships with its suppliers, and become a good citizen in its community, including performing some philanthropic activity. When Milton Friedman says a company should stay within the rules of the game and operate without deception or fraud, he means it should deal with all its various constituencies properly in order to maximize long-term shareholder value. He does not mean that a company should put every last nickel on the bottom line every quarter, regardless of the long-term consequences. My company, Cypress Semiconductor, has won the trophy for the Second Harvest Food Bank competition for the most food donated per employee in Silicon Valley for the last 13 consecutive years (1 million pounds of food in 2004). The contest creates competition among our divisions, leading to employee involvement, company food drives, internal social events with admissions paid for by food donations, and so forth. It is a big employee morale builder, a way to attract new employees, good P.R. for the company, and a significant benefit to the communityall of which makes Cypress a better place to work and invest in. Indeed, Mackeys own proud example of Whole Foods community involvement programs also made a profit. But Mackeys subordination of his profession as a businessman to altruistic ideals shows up as he attempts to negate the empirically demonstrated social benefit of self-interest by defining it narrowly as increasing short-term profits. Why is it that when Whole Foods gives money to a worthy cause, it serves a high moral objective, while a company that provides a good return to small investorswho simply put their money into their own retirement funds or a childrens college fundis somehow selfish? Its the philosophy that is objectionable here, not the specific actions. If Mackey wants to run a hybrid business/charity whose mission is fully disclosed to his shareholdersand if those shareholder-owners want to support that missionso be it. But I balk at the proposition that a companys stakeholders (a term often used by collectivists to justify unreasonable demands) should be allowed to control the property of the shareholders. It seems Mackeys philosophy is more accurately described by Karl Marx: From each according to his ability (the shareholders surrender money and assets); to each according to his needs (the charities, social interest groups, and environmentalists get what they want). Thats not free market capitalism. Then there is the arrogant proposition that if other corporations would simply emulate the higher corporate life form defined by Whole Foods, the world would be better off. After all, Mackey says corporations are viewed as selfish, greedy, and uncaring. I, for one, consider free market capitalism to be a high calling, even without the infusion of altruism practiced by Whole Foods. If one goes beyond the sensationalistic journalism surrounding the Enron-like debacles, one discovers that only about 10 to 20 public corporations have been justifiably accused of serious wrongdoing. Thats about 0.1 percent of Americas 17,500 public companies. Whats the failure rate of the publications that demean business? (Consider the New York Times scandal involving manufactured stories.) Whats the percentage of U.S. presidents who have been forced or almost forced from office? (Its 10 times higher than the failure rate of corporations.) What percentage of our congressmen have spent time in jail? The fact is that despite some well-publicized failures, most corporations are run with the highest ethical standardsand the public knows it. Public opinion polls demonstrate that fact by routinely ranking businessmen above journalists and politicians in esteem. I am proud of what the semiconductor industry doesrelentlessly cutting the cost of a transistor from $3 in 1960 to three-millionths of a dollar today. Mackey would be keeping his business records with hordes of accountants on paper ledgers if our industry didnt exist. He would have to charge his poorest customers more for their food, pay his valued employees less, and cut his philanthropy programs if the semiconductor industry had not focused so relentlessly on increasing its profits, cutting his costs in the process. Of course, if the U.S. semiconductor industry had been less cost-competitive due to its own philanthropy, the food industry simply would have bought cheaper computers made from Japanese and Korean silicon chips (which happened anyway). Layoffs in the nonunion semiconductor industry were actually good news to Whole Foods unionized grocery store clerks. Where was Mackeys sense of altruism when unemployed semiconductor workers needed it? Of course, that rhetorical question is foolish, since he did exactly the right thing by ruthlessly reducing his recordkeeping costs so as to maximize his profits. I am proud to be a free market capitalist. And I resent the fact that Mackeys philosophy demeans me as an egocentric child because I have refused on moral grounds to embrace the philosophies of collectivism and altruism that have caused so much human misery, however tempting the sales pitch for them sounds. Profit Is the Means, Not End John Mackey Let me begin my response to Milton Friedman by noting that he is one of my personal heroes. His contributions to economic thought and the fight for freedom are without parallel, and it is an honor to have him critique my article. Friedman says the differences between John Mackey and me regarding the social responsibility of business are for the most part rhetorical. But are we essentially in agreement? I dont think so. We are thinking about business in entirely different ways. Friedman is thinking only in terms of maximizing profits for the investors. If putting customers first helps maximize profits for the investors, then it is acceptable. If some corporate philanthropy creates goodwill and helps a company cloak its self-interested goals of maximizing profits, then it is acceptable (although Friedman also believes it is hypocritical). In contrast to Friedman, I do not believe maximizing profits for the investors is the only acceptable justification for all corporate actions. The investors are not the only people who matter. Corporations can exist for purposes other than simply maximizing profits. As for who decides what the purpose of any particular business is, I made an important argument that Friedman doesnt address: I believe the entrepreneurs, not the current investors in a companys stock, have the right and responsibility to define the purpose of the company. Whole Foods Market was not created solely to maximize profits for its investors, but to create value for all of its stakeholders. I believe there are thousands of other businesses similar to Whole Foods (Medtronic, REI, and Starbucks, for example) that were created by entrepreneurs with goals beyond maximizing profits, and that these goals are neither hypocritical nor cloaking devices but are intrinsic to the purpose of the business. I will concede that many other businesses, such as T.J. Rodgers Cypress Semiconductor, have been created by entrepreneurs whose sole purpose for the business is to maximize profits for their investors. Does Cypress therefore have any social responsibility besides maximizing profits if it follows the laws of society? No, it doesnt. Rodgers apparently created it solely to maximize profits, and therefore all of Friedmans arguments about business social responsibility become completely valid. Business social responsibility should not be coerced; it is a voluntary decision that the entrepreneurial leadership of every company must make on its own. Friedman is right to argue that profit making is intrinsically valuable for society, but I believe he is mistaken that all businesses have only this purpose. While Friedman believes that taking care of customers, employees, and business philanthropy are means to the end of increasing investor profits, I take the exact opposite view: Making high profits is the means to the end of fulfilling Whole Foods core business mission. We want to improve the health and well-being of everyone on the planet through higher-quality foods and better nutrition, and we cant fulfill this mission unless we are highly profitable. High profits are necessary to fuel our growth across the United States and the world. Just as people cannot live without eating, so a business cannot live without profits. But most people dont live to eat, and neither must a businesses live just to make profits. Toward the end of his critique Friedman says his statement that the social responsibility of business [is] to increase its profits and my statement that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies are equivalent. He argues that maximizing profits is a private end achieved through social means because it supports a society based on private property and free markets. If our two statements are equivalent, if we really mean the same thing, then I know which statement has the superior marketing power. Mine does. Both capitalism and corporations are misunderstood, mistrusted, and disliked around the world because of statements like Friedmans on social responsibility. His comment is used by the enemies of capitalism to argue that capitalism is greedy, selfish, and uncaring. It is right up there with William Vanderbilts the public be damned and former G.M. Chairman Charlie Wilsons declaration that whats good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa. If we are truly interested in spreading capitalism throughout the world (I certainly am), we need to do a better job marketing it. I believe if economists and business people consistently communicated and acted on my message that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies, we would see most of the resistance to capitalism disappear. Friedman also understands that Whole Foods makes an important contribution to society besides simply maximizing profits for our investors, which is to enhance the pleasure of shopping for food. This is why we put satisfying and delighting our customers as a core value whenever we talk about the purpose of our business. Why dont Friedman and other economists consistently teach this idea? Why dont they talk more about all the valuable contributions that business makes in creating value for its customers, for its employees, and for its communities? Why talk only about maximizing profits for the investors? Doing so harms the brand of capitalism. As for Whole Foods philanthropy, who does have special competence in this area? Does the government? Do individuals? Libertarians generally would agree that most bureaucratic government solutions to social problems cause more harm than good and that government help is seldom the answer. Neither do individuals have any special competence in charity. By Friedmans logic, individuals shouldnt donate any money to help others but should instead keep all their money invested in businesses, where it will create more social value. The truth is that there is no way to calculate whether money invested in business or money invested in helping to solve social problems will create more value. Businesses exist within real communities and have real effects, both good and bad, on those communities. Like individuals living in communities, businesses make valuable social contributions by providing goods and services and employment. But just as individuals can feel a responsibility to provide some philanthropic support for the communities in which they live, so too can a business. The responsibility of business toward the community is not infinite, but neither is it zero. Each enlightened business must find the proper balance between all of its constituencies: customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and communities. While I respect Milton Friedmans thoughtful response, I do not feel the same way about T.J. Rodgers critique. It is obvious to me that Rodgers didnt carefully read my article, think deeply about my arguments, or attempt to craft an intelligent response. Instead he launches various ad hominem attacks on me, my company, and our customers. According to Rodgers, my business philosophy is similar to those of Ralph Nader and Karl Marx; Whole Foods Market and our customers are a bunch of Luddites engaging in junk science and fear mongering; and our unionized grocery clerks dont care about layoffs of workers in Rodgers own semiconductor industry. For the record: I dont agree with the philosophies of Ralph Nader or Karl Marx; Whole Foods Market doesnt engage in junk science or fear mongering, and neither do 99 percent of our customers or vendors; and of Whole Foods 36,000 employees, exactly zero of them belong to unions, and we are in fact sorry about layoffs in his industry. When Rodgers isnt engaging in ad hominem attacks, he seems to be arguing against a leftist, socialist, and collectivist perspective that may exist in his own mind but does not appear in my article. Contrary to Rodgers claim, Whole Foods is running not a hybrid business/charity but an enormously profitable business that has created tremendous shareholder value. Of all the food retailers in the Fortune 500 (including Wal-Mart), we have the highest profits as a percentage of sales, as well as the highest return on invested capital, sales per square foot, same-store sales, and growth rate. We are currently doubling in size every three and a half years. The bottom line is that Whole Foods stakeholder business philosophy works and has produced tremendous value for all of our stakeholders, including our investors. In contrast, Cypress Semiconductor has struggled to be profitable for many years now, and their balance sheet shows negative retained earnings of over $408 million. This means that in its entire 23-year history, Cypress has lost far more money for its investors than it has made. Instead of calling my business philosophy Marxist, perhaps it is time for Rodgers to rethink his own. Rodgers says with passion, I am proud of what the semiconductor industry doesrelentlessly cutting the cost of a transistor from $3 in 1960 to three-millionths of a dollar today. Rodgers is entitled to be proud. What a wonderful accomplishment this is, and the semiconductor industry has indeed made all our lives better. Then why not consistently communicate this message as the purpose of his business, instead of talking all the time about maximizing profits and shareholder value? Like medicine, law, and education, business has noble purposes: to provide goods and services that improve its customers lives, to provide jobs and meaningful work for employees, to create wealth and prosperity for its investors, and to be a responsible and caring citizen. Businesses such as Whole Foods have multiple stakeholders and therefore have multiple responsibilities. But the fact that we have responsibilities to stakeholders besides investors does not give those other stakeholders any property rights in the company, contrary to Rodgers fears. The investors still own the business, are entitled to the residual profits, and can fire the management if they wish. A doctor has an ethical responsibility to try to heal her patients, but that responsibility doesnt mean her patients are entitled to receive a share of the profits from her practice. Rodgers probably will never agree with my business philosophy, but it doesnt really matter. The ideas Im articulating result in a more robust business model than the profit-maximization model that it competes against, because they encourage and tap into more powerful motivations than self-interest alone. These ideas will triumph over time, not by persuading intellectuals and economists through argument but by winning the competitive test of the marketplace. Someday businesses like Whole Foods, which adhere to a stakeholder model of deeper business purpose, will dominate the economic landscape. Wait and see. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 01:06:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:06:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: (Bouchard) Why do we believe in God? Message-ID: Why do we believe in God? http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5307917-103680,00.html Faith in a higher being is as old as humanity itself. But what sparked the Divine Idea? Did our earliest ancestors gain some evolutionary advantage through their shared religious feelings? In these extracts from his latest book, Robert Winston ponders the biggest question of them all Thursday October 13, 2005 The Dolley Pond Church of God With Signs Following was founded in Tennessee in 1909 by one George Went Hensley. This former bootlegger took to the pulpit in a rural Pentecostalist community in Grasshopper Valley. One Sabbath, while he was preaching a fiery sermon, some of the congregation dumped a large box of rattlesnakes into the pulpit (history does not record whether they were angry or just bored). Without missing a beat, in mid-sentence, Hensley bent down, picked up a 3ft-long specimen of this most venomous of snakes, and held it wriggling high above his head. Unharmed, he exhorted his congregation to follow suit, quoting the words of Christ: "And these signs will follow those who believe ... in my Name ... they will take up serpents." News of Hensley's sermon spread through Grasshopper Valley; others joined him in handling snakes, and the practice caught on. There have since been around 120 deaths from snakebite in these churches, but most of the congregants tend to refuse medical help if they are bitten, preferring to believe that divine intervention will be more efficacious. Sadly, Hensley himself perished from a snakebite in 1955, and shortly afterwards the US government wisely acted to prevent the practice - although it is still legal in parts of the States. Today, snake-handling continues mostly in small communities in rural areas of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as pockets in other southern states. Participants feel that "the spirit of God" comes upon them as they open the boxes containing the snakes. Often lifting three or four of them up simultaneously in one hand, holding them high and allowing the creatures to wind around their arms and bodies, they praise God ecstatically. To many of us, religious or not, this type of activity seems little short of outright lunacy. And it's certainly the case that religion and mental ill-health have long been linked. The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness. Many years ago, a team of researchers at the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota decided to put this association to the test. They studied certain fringe religious groups, such as fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostalists and the snake-handlers of West Virginia, to see if they showed the particular type of psychopathology associated with mental illness. Members of mainstream Protestant churches from a similar social and financial background provided a good control group for comparison. Some of the wilder fundamentalists prayed with what can only be described as great and transcendental ecstasy, but there was no obvious sign of any particular psychopathology among most of the people studied. After further analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional Protestant churchgoers - the "extrinsically" religious - than among the fervently committed. A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport did some key research in the 1950s on various kinds of human prejudice and came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today. He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he defined as religious self-centredness. Such a person goes to church or synagogue as a means to an end - for what they can get out of it. They might go to church to be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring respectability or social advancement. Going to church (or synagogue) becomes a social convention. Allport thought that intrinsic religiosity was different. He identified a group of people who were intrinsically religious, seeing their religion as an end in itself. They tended to be more deeply committed; religion became the organising principle of their lives, a central and personal experience. In support of his research, Allport found that prejudice was more common in those individuals who scored highly for extrinsic religion. The evidence generally is that intrinsic religiosity seems to be associated with lower levels of anxiety and stress, freedom from guilt, better adjustment in society and less depression. On the other hand, extrinsic religious feelings - where religion is used as a way to belong to and prosper within a group - seem to be associated with increased tendencies to guilt, worry and anxiety. It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages. Many anthropologists and social theorists do indeed take the view that religion emerged out of a sense of uncertainty and bewilderment - explaining misfortune or illness, for example, as the consequences of an angry God, or reassuring us that we live on after death. Rituals would have given us a comforting, albeit illusory, sense that we can control what is in fact ultimately beyond our control - the weather, illness, attacks by predators or other human groups. However, it is equally plausible that the Divine Idea would have been of little use in our prehistoric rough-and-tumble existence. Life on the savannah may have been in the open air, but it was no picnic. Early humans would have been constantly on the lookout for predators to be avoided, such as wolves and sabre-tooth tigers; hunting or scavenging would be a continual necessity to ensure sufficient food; and the men were probably constantly fighting among each other to ensure that they could have sex with the best-looking girl (or boy) or choose the most tender piece of meat from the carcass. Why would it be necessary, in the daily scramble to stay alive, to make time for such an indulgent pursuit as religion? Richard Dawkins, our best-known Darwinist and a ferocious critic of organised religion, notes that religion seems to be, on the face of it, a cost rather than a benefit: "Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of man-centuries in its building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolised medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion." It seems at first glance as if Dawkins is arguing that religion is an evolutionary disaster area. Religious belief, it seems, would be unlikely, on its own merits, to have slipped through the net of natural selection. But maybe that interpretation of what Dawkins is saying neglects some of the further benefits that religion might well offer in the human quest for survival and security. In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York state, says that religiosity emerged as a "useful" genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness. This produced a leaner, meaner survival machine, a group that was more likely to be able to defend a waterhole, or kill more antelope, or capture their opponents' daughters. The better the religion was at producing an organised and disciplined group, the more effective they would have been at staying alive, and hence at passing their genes on to the next generation. This is what we mean by "natural selection": adaptations which help survival and reproduction get passed down through the genes. Taking into account the additional suggestion, from various studies of twins, that we may have an inherited disposition towards religious belief, is there any evidence that the Divine Idea might be carried in our genes? While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain. Dopamine is one neurotransmitter which we know plays a powerful role in our feelings of well-being; it may also be involved in the sense of peace that humans feel during some spiritual experiences. One particular gene involved in dopamine action - incidentally, by no means the only one that has been studied in this way - is the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4). In some people, because of slight changes in spelling of the DNA sequences (a so-called polymorphism) making up this gene, the gene may be more biologically active, and this could be partly responsible for a religious bent. And it is easy to suggest a mechanism by which religious beliefs could help us to pass on our genes. Greater cohesion and stricter moral codes would tend to produce more cooperation, and more cooperation means that hunting and gathering are likely to bring in more food. In turn, full bellies mean greater strength and alertness, greater immunity against infection, and offspring who develop and become independent more swiftly. Members of the group would also be more likely to take care of each other, especially those who are sick or injured. Therefore - in the long run - a shared religion appears to be evolutionarily advantageous, and natural selection might favour those groups with stronger religious beliefs. But this is not the whole story. Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework - and enforcing it - we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion. Psychologist Eliot Turiel observed that even three- and four-year-olds could distinguish between moral rules (for example, not hitting someone) and conventional rules (such as not talking when the teacher is talking). Furthermore, they could understand that a moral breach, such as hitting someone, was wrong whether you had been told not to do it or not, whereas a conventional breach, such as talking in class, was wrong only if it had been expressly forbidden. They were also clearly able to distinguish between prudential rules (such as not leaving your notebook next to the fireplace) and moral rules. This would suggest that there is a sort of "morality module" in the brain that is activated at an early age. Evidence from neuroscience would back this up, to a degree. In my last book, The Human Mind, I noted that certain brain areas become activated when we engage in cooperation with others, and that these areas are associated with feelings of pleasure and reward. It also seems that certain areas of the brain are brought into action in situations where we feel empathy and forgiveness. So religion does not seem to be produced by a specific part of our psychological make-up. Is it more likely, then, that religious ideas are something of an accidental by-product created by other parts of our basic blueprint, by processes deep in the unconscious mind that evolved to help us survive? Shared beliefs What identical twins teach us about religion In the United States during the 50s and 60s,it was considered best to separate at birth twins who were to be adopted. This led to a number of these children being brought up by families who did not even know that their adopted baby had a twin; and sadly, the children themselves were brought up intotal ignorance of their "lost" twin. Identical twins, of course, are formed in the uterus by the embryo splitting; so identical twins have exactly the same DNA. Non-identical twins -growing from two separate eggs fertilised by different sperm - do not have identical genes, but will just share many general aspects of their genetic inheritance, as do any other brothers or sisters in one family unit. Thomas Bouchard, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, recognized that these twins, if compared with each other as they grew up, would provide an important way of measuring genetic and environmental influences. His groundbreaking work in the 1980s and 90s gave rise to some extraordinary insights into which aspects of the human condition are more likely to be due to nature, and which to nurture. In one study, Bouchard concentrated on72 sets of twins who had reached adulthood. He first established which of the twins (35 sets in all) were genuinely identical by genetic testing. These were then invited to complete personality tests. Such questionnaires, which are widely used by psychologists, pose questions in the form of statements, to which the respondents have to rate their level of agreement on a scale of one to eight. The following is a small sample of the many statements relating to religion: ? I enjoy reading about my religion. ? My religion is important to me because it answers many questions about the meaning of life. ? It is important to me to spend time in prayer and thought. ? It doesn't matter to me what I believe as long as I am good. ? I pray mainly to gain relief and protection. ? I go to my (church, synagogue, temple) to spend time with my friends. ? Although I am religious, I don't let it affect my daily life. When Bouchard and his team compared the answers to these and other personality questions, they found strong statistical evidence that identical and non-identical twins tended to answer differently. If one identical twin showed evidence of religious thinking or behaviour, it was much more likely that his or her twin would answer similarly. Non-identical twins, as might be expected (they are, after all, related), showed some similarities of thinking, but not nearly to the same degree. Crucially, the degree of religiosity was not strongly related to the environment in which the twin was brought up. Even if one identical twin had been brought up in an atheist family and the other in a religious Catholic household, they would still tend to show the same kind of religious feelings, or lack of them. Work by several other scientists has inclined to confirm Bouchard's findings. One study, conducted by an international team at the Institute of Psychiatry in London under Dr Hans Eysenck, looked at information from twins living in the UK and Australia. The researchers found that attitudes to Sabbath observance, divine law, church authority and the truth of the Bible showed greater congruity in identical rather than non-identical twins - again supporting the idea of a genetic influence. Bouchard has consistently found in many of his studies that intrinsic religiosity -which seems to incorporate a notion of spirituality - is much more likely to be inherited. Extrinsic religiosity tends to be a product of a person's environment and direct parental influence. Bouchard also found that tendencies towards fundamentalism were also rather more likely to be inherited. It is of some interest, too, that, in the populations that Bouchard and his colleagues have studied, women tend to have inherited rather more religious attitudes than men. ? The Story of God by Robert Winston is published by Transworld at ?18.99. Winston's new series of the same name will be broadcast on BBC TV, starting in December. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 01:06:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:06:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Sunday Times: So what do you have to do to find happiness? Message-ID: So what do you have to do to find happiness? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-100-1793873-531,00.html 5.10.2 So what do you have to do to find happiness? Are we wired up to be cheerful, or are some of us destined to languish in abject misery? Dorothy Wade reports on the new science of feeling good Behind the neoclassical facade of the Royal Institution, in London's Mayfair, the latest in a 200-year series of lectures was taking place in a hushed amphitheatre this summer. Standing on the shoulders of scientific giants such as Faraday and Dewar were three academics debating "Happiness, the science behind your smile". Purists might imagine the founding geniuses of the Royal Institution turning in their graves. What does science have to tell us about such a frivolous subject? And how do you define happiness, let alone study it? But happiness has finally burst out of the academic closet. Several weighty volumes on the subject have been published this year. And on the same night as the RI event, the economist Lord Layard and the psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud were debating the Politics of Happiness at the London School of Economics just a mile away. Perversely, happiness has a negative image in our culture. Influenced by a sceptical European philosophical outlook, we think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus. Isn't it selfish to try to increase our happiness, while much of the world faces suffering and premature death? Great writers from Freud -- "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation" -- to Philip Larkin -- "man hands on misery to man" -- have painted happiness as an elusive butterfly. But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they'll be even happier in 10 years' time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive. These are the conclusions of a burgeoning happiness industry that has published 3,000 papers, set up a Journal of Happiness Studies and created a World Database of Happiness in the last few years. Can scientists tell us what happiness is? Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state. Public surveys measure what makes us happy. Marriage does, pets do, but children don't seem to (despite what we think). Youth and old age are the happiest times. Money does not add much to happiness; in Britain, incomes have trebled since 1950, but happiness has not increased at all. The happiness of lottery winners returns to former levels within a year. People disabled in an accident are likely to become almost as happy again. For happiness levels are probably genetic: identical twins are usually equally bubbly or grumpy. One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong. America has pursued the chimera of happiness vigorously, not least through the insatiable consumption of self-help literature such as Climb Your Stairway to Heaven: 9 Tips for Daily Happiness! So it is no surprise that it's an American who is making happiness a subject of scientific study. At first glance, Martin Seligman's bestselling book Authentic Happiness, with its sunshine-yellow title on a sky-blue cover, blends with other manuals on the pop-psychology shelves. But America's latest guru of feeling good is not a stage hypnotist, an evangelical preacher or even a business visionary. Seligman is an eminent professor of psychology with a string of degrees. One of the chief architects of the prevailing model of depression, his work has helped to found modern "cognitive" therapies. The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul". Feeling out of place as a chubby 13-year-old Jewish kid at a wealthy college, he hit on the role of therapist as a route to the hearts of unattainable girls. "What a brilliant stroke! I'll bet no other guy ever listened to them ruminate about their insecurities, nightmares and bleakest fantasies." As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour. Now Seligman is famous again, this time for creating the field of positive psychology. In 1997 the professor was seeking a theme for his presidency of the American Psychological Association. The idea came while gardening with his daughter Nikki. She was throwing weeds around and he was shouting. She reminded him that she used to be a whiner but had stopped on her fifth birthday. "And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch." Seligman describes this as an "epiphany". He vowed to change his own outlook, but more importantly recognised a strength -- social intelligence -- in his daughter that could be nurtured to help her withstand the vicissitudes of life. Looking back on "learned helplessness", he reflected that one in three subjects -- rats, dogs or people -- never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them. "What is it about some people that imparts buffering strength, making them invulnerable to helplessness?" Seligman asked himself -- and now he's made it his mission to find out. Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait. A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently. Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He wanted to revolutionise psychology, but his weapon would be tough science. Clinical psychology was the science of how to get from minus five to zero. This would be the science of getting from zero to plus five. Seligman wanted experiments, he wanted statistics, he wanted proof. He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form "pods" to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science. Their holy grail is the classification of strengths and virtues. After a solemn consultation of great works such as the samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita and the writings of Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas, Seligman's happiness scouts discovered six core virtues recognised in all cultures: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. They have subdivided these into 24 strengths, including humour and honesty. But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of happiness and classifying the virtues? Aren't these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved? Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as "the power of positive thinking". His plan to stop the new science floating "on the waves of self- improvement fashions" is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below. And this takes us back to our evolutionary past. Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals. Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: "Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world." Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot -- we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe. Of the six universal emotions, four -- anger, fear, disgust and sadness -- are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.) According to the psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lecturers, the negative emotions each tell us "something bad has happened" and suggest a different course of action. Fear tells us danger is near, so run away. Anger prompts us to deter aggressors. Sadness warns us to be cautious and save energy, while disgust urges us to avoid contamination. Joy, according to Nettle, simply tells us, "something good has happened, don't change anything". The evolutionary role of pleasure was to encourage activity that was good for survival, such as eating and having sex. But unlike negative emotions, which are often persistent, joy tends to be short-lived. We soon get sick of cream cakes or blas? about our pay rise. What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images -- a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing -- the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain. The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain's evolution. The pre-frontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history. Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has scanned brains in different emotional states. When he wired up a Buddhist monk entering a state of bliss through meditation, he found electrical activity shooting up the frontal lobe of the monk's brain on the left side. Observing toddlers at play, he picked some who were exuberant and uninhibited, behaviour linked to higher levels of positive emotion, and others who were quiet and shy. Tested later, the inhibited toddlers showed greater activity on the brain's right side; activation of the lively toddlers' brains was on the left. Happiness and sadness are lopsided. Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive. This is called the "hedonic treadmill" by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness. It makes sense that the brain of a species that has dominated others would evolve to strive to be best. Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions -- the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens -- that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain's reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly, ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the "wanting" parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure. At the Royal Institution, Nettle explained how brain chemistry foils our pursuit of happiness in the modern world: "The things that you desire are not the things that you end up liking. The mechanisms of desire are insatiable. There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly -- having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the psychology of wanting, and the psychology of liking gets drowned out." Liking involves different brain chemicals from wanting. Real pleasure is associated with opioids. They are released in the rat brain by sweet tastes. When they are blocked in humans, food tastes less delicious. They also dampen down pain so that pleasure is unadulterated. Happiness is neither desire nor pleasure alone. It involves a third chemical pathway. Serotonin constantly shifts the balance between negative and positive emotions. It can reduce worry, fear, panic and sleeplessness and increase sociability, co-operation, and happy feelings. Drugs based on serotonin, such as ecstasy, produce a relaxed sense of wellbeing rather than the dopamine pattern of euphoria and craving. In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness. Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His teams are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives. Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach "victimology" and says research shows it to be worthless: "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects." The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked "cathartically" about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked. Cognitive therapy places less emphasis on the past. It works by challenging a person's thinking about the present and setting goals for the future. Another newcomer, brief solution-focused therapy, discourages talk about "problems" and helps clients identify strengths and resources to make positive changes in their lives. The focus of most psychotherapy is on decreasing negative emotion. The aim of Seligman's therapy is to increase positive emotion (positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites and can co-exist: women have more of both than men). From the time of Buddha to the self-improvement industry of today, more than 100 "interventions" have been tried in the attempt to build happiness. Forty of these are being tested in randomised placebo-controlled trials by Seligman and his colleagues. In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week. A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person. Seligman and his graduate students weep tears of joy when they do this exercise, but most Brits would probably rather be miserable than do it. So it's a relief to hear that it doesn't work particularly well. It has strong, but only brief, effects. Seligman speculates that doing more exercises for longer would bring greater benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people have registered with his website [3]www.reflectivehappiness.com -- where, for $10 a month, they are given a happiness programme including instruction in a package of positive exercises. Sylvia Perkins, a 73-year-old retired librarian from south Michigan tried the "Savour a Beautiful Day" task. Her husband died of lung cancer four years ago, and after a recent mild stroke she moved into an assisted living community. "The move has been very difficult for me and I've been trying to fight off the feeling that I've just come here to die. When I heard about this exercise, I decided to give it a try, because it seemed like a hopeful thing to do." She spent her "beautiful" day going through photos and mementoes and making scrapbooks for each of her children. She also wrote them letters about her most precious memories of them and stuck them in the albums. "This exercise helped me feel reconnected to my children. I have felt more hopeful about my situation. I realise that my health prognosis is really quite good and I am confident that I will have many more years to share with my family." Positive psychology has a schmaltzy American feel that might not translate well into a British setting. Dr Nick Baylis of Cambridge University is working with colleagues to "tweak" positive psychology for "British ears". He calls his research the "study of wellbeing" rather than the science of happiness. As a forensic psychologist, he worked with young offenders at Feltham and decided that studying what went wrong in damaged lives was not productive. "I had looked at broken lives. Now I wanted to look at lives that go well." He founded the charity Trailblazers to give young offenders positive role models. In his Young Lives research project, he interviewed hundreds of accomplished people from Kate Adie to Jamie Oliver about their strategies for making the most of life. Their advice and ideas can be found in [4]www.YoungLivesUK.com and in the book Wonderful Lives. When Baylis went to Cambridge as Britain's first lecturer in positive psychology, he was treated as a "neo-Nazi", he says. The study of happiness was a "taboo subject". He sent an e-mail to colleagues who might have an interest in wellbeing, and received a reply from only one, Professor Felicia Huppert. She studies the secrets of a happy, productive old age, and theirs is now a fruitful collaboration. The British approach to wellbeing also emphasises good physical health and diet, proper sleep, relaxation and exercise, and spending time in the natural environment. Given its famously bad health and diet, Glasgow is a city in need of positive medicine. It's become a live laboratory for the new science. Last month, Professor Seligman paid his second visit to Glasgow's Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing, to spread the happiness gospel to Scottish teachers, coaches and businessmen as part of the Vanguard programme, backed by the Scottish Executive. The sceptical Scots seem to welcome Seligman's empirical approach. Dr Carol Craig, who runs the centre, is passionate about curing Scotland's epidemic of pessimism and low self-esteem. She points to many indicators of malaise: the Scottish suicide rate is double the English one, and antidepressant prescribing is 40% higher. A new UN report says that Scotland is the most violent country in the developed world. Scottish children are among the least confident anywhere, according to the World Health Organization. Craig believes that the dark, forbidding nature of Calvinist religion is responsible for the dour Scottish psyche. "We're a culture that encourages feelings of lack of self-worth. We're a culture that goes out of its way to make sure people don't feel good about themselves," says Craig. From a young age, Scots are taught humility, modesty and conformity. Scottish humour often pokes fun at those who "get above their station". Craig speculates that the high rate of emigration from Scotland has denuded the country of optimists and left too many pessimists behind. Could any of this be linked to the fact that men in one part of Glasgow, Shettleston, have a life expectancy of 64? (Scottish men, on average, live to 73.) And that west Scotland is the unhealthiest region in Europe, with high rates of heart disease, cancer and strokes? Has anyone found a causal link between happiness and health? Nuns may hold the answer. Nuns make a great natural experiment, because they lead the same routine lives with similar diets and activities. None have married or had children. Yet there is huge variation in their health and longevity. In 1932, 180 novices in Milwaukee wrote short sketches of their lives. One wrote: "God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value. The past year has been a very happy one." She lived to 98 in wonderful health. Another wrote a joyless and neutral sketch, ending: "With God's grace, I intend to do my best for our Order." She died after a stroke at the age of 59. Researchers who quantified positive feeling in all 180 sketches discovered that nearly all (90%) of the happiest quarter were still alive at 85. But of the least cheerful quarter, only a third survived to that age. Another piece of the jigsaw fitted this year when a team from University College London tested the happiness levels of 216 middle-aged civil servants in a study of risk factors for coronary heart disease. People who had the most happy moments per day had the lowest rates of cortisol, a hormone that can be harmful if produced excessively, and of the chemical plasma fibrinogen, a predictor of heart disease. The happiest men (but not women) also had the lowest heart rates. Angela Clow, professor of psychophysiology at Westminster University, is a world authority on the biochemistry of stress. "There is clear evidence that stress makes you susceptible to illness, but I wanted to turn this around and discover how happiness makes you healthier. There's not a lot of happiness research in the UK, because if you do it, people think you're trivial," says Clow. In one experiment, she and colleagues blindfolded participants and wafted smells of chocolate, water and rotten meat under their noses. Then they measured levels of secretory IgA, an antibody that protects the body against invading cells, in their saliva. Chocolate sent the antibody levels soaring up; rotten meat brought them down. Clow found that pleasant music also boosted the immune system, as did stimulating the left side of the brain with magnetism. Comparing patients in a day-surgery waiting room with music and art on the walls against one with no music and plain white walls, Clow found that the art and music patients had lower heart-rates, blood pressure and cortisol, and needed less sedation before their surgery. "But why should happiness have such an effect on the immune system?" asks Clow. She speculates that there is an evolutionary mechanism. Our happiest ancestors were bold creatures who socialised and ventured out to explore. This brought them into contact with infection, so they needed higher levels of antibodies in a stronger immune system. But repeated stress weakens us. The stress response temporarily increases the level of cortisol, a vital hormone that regulates the whole immune system. This is a healthy response, designed to produce fight or flight only in cases of real danger. Unfortunately, the daily hassles of modern life induce repeated stress in some of us, subjecting our bodies to frequent pulses of cortisol. This unbalances the immune system and makes us ill. Laughter and humour are also being studied for their effects on health. Research methods include using a tickle machine, and probing with electrodes to find the funny parts of the brain. Laughter, like stress, increases blood pressure and heart rate and changes breathing. But unlike stress, it reduces levels of chemicals circulating in the body. In one study, people's cortisol and adrenaline were reduced after watching a favourite comedy video for 60 minutes. It's difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that's short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours. You'd better start writing that gratitude letter now. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN Men often complain about their wives' volatility. Now research confirms that women really are both happier and sadder. Positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites -- you can have both in your life. Women experience more of all emotions except anger. First it was found that women experience twice as much depression as men. Next, researchers found that women report more positive emotion than men, more frequently and more intensely. It all points to men and women having a different emotional make-up. Cognitive psychologists say that men and women have different skills related to sending and receiving emotion. Women are expressive; men conceal or control their emotions. Women convey emotion through facial expression and communication; men express emotion through aggressive or distracting behaviour. Does the difference lie in biology, social roles or just women's willingness to report emotion? That's up for debate. References 3. http://www.reflectivehappiness.com/ 4. http://www.YoungLivesUK.com/ From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 01:06:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:06:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Remote Control Works on Humans Message-ID: Remote Control Works on Humans http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/business/article.adp?id=20051025163809990030&ncid=N [The hidden rulers already know how to control our morals.] By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP 5.10.26 07:28 EDT ATSUGI, Japan (Oct. 26) - We wield remote controls to turn things on and off, make them advance, make them halt. Ground-bound pilots use remotes to fly drone airplanes, soldiers to maneuver battlefield robots. But manipulating humans? Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was. Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But more sinister applications also come to mind. I can envision it being added to militaries' arsenals of so-called "non-lethal'' weapons. A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration at an NTT research center. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head - either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved. I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off. The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation - essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear that help maintain balance. I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walking to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was convinced - mistakenly - that this was the only way to maintain my balance. The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it. I could even remote-control myself by taking the switch into my own hands. There's no proven-beyond-a-doubt explanation yet as to why people start veering when electricity hits their ear. But NTT researchers say they were able to make a person walk along a route in the shape of a giant pretzel using this technique. It's a mesmerizing sensation similar to being drunk or melting into sleep under the influence of anesthesia. But it's more definitive, as though an invisible hand were reaching inside your brain. NTT says the feature may be used in video games and amusement park rides, although there are no plans so far for a commercial product. Some people really enjoy the experience, researchers said while acknowledging that others feel uncomfortable. I watched a simple racing-car game demonstration on a large screen while wearing a device programmed to synchronize the curves with galvanic vestibular stimulation. It accentuated the swaying as an imaginary racing car zipped through a virtual course, making me wobbly. Another program had the electric current timed to music. My head was pulsating against my will, getting jerked around on my neck. I became so dizzy I could barely stand. I had to turn it off. NTT researchers suggested this may be a reflection of my lack of musical abilities. People in tune with freely expressing themselves love the sensation, they said. "We call this a virtual dance experience although some people have mentioned it's more like a virtual drug experience,'' said Taro Maeda, senior research scientist at NTT. "I'm really hopeful Apple Computer will be interested in this technology to offer it in their iPod.'' Research on using electricity to affect human balance has been going on around the world for some time. James Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, has studied using the technology to prevent the elderly from falling and to help people with an impaired sense of balance. But he also believes the effect is suited for games and other entertainment. "I suspect they'll probably get a kick out of the illusions that can be created to give them a more total immersion experience as part of virtual reality,'' Collins said. The very low level of electricity required for the effect is unlikely to cause any health damage, Collins said. Still, NTT required me to sign a consent form, saying I was trying the device at my own risk. And risk definitely comes to mind when playing around with this technology. Timothy Hullar, assistant professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., believes finding the right way to deliver an electromagnetic field to the ear at a distance could turn the technology into a weapon for situations where "killing isn't the best solution.'' "This would be the most logical situation for a nonlethal weapon that presumably would make your opponent dizzy,'' he said via e-mail. "If you find just the right frequency, energy, duration of application, you would hope to find something that doesn't permanently injure someone but would allow you to make someone temporarily off-balance.'' Indeed, a small defense contractor in Texas, Invocon Inc., is exploring whether precisely tuned electromagnetic pulses could be safely fired into people's ears to temporarily subdue them. NTT has friendlier uses in mind. If the sensation of movement can be captured for playback, then people can better understand what a ballet dancer or an Olympian gymnast is doing, and that could come handy in teaching such skills. And it may also help people dodge oncoming cars or direct a rescue worker in a dark tunnel, NTT researchers say. They maintain that the point is not to control people against their will. If you're determined to fight the suggestive orders from the electric currents by clinging to a fence or just lying on your back, you simply won't move. But from my experience, if the currents persist, you'd probably be persuaded to follow their orders. And I didn't like that sensation. At all. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 30 09:19:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 04:19:45 -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 shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 29 15:37:55 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 08:37:55 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Build America Message-ID: <14078713.1130600276942.JavaMail.root@mswamui-backed.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BuildAmerica.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 85948 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 30 16:09:33 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 08:09:33 -0800 (GMT-08:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Trophy Room Message-ID: <4155293.1130688573747.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: TrophyRoom.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 143278 bytes Desc: not available URL: From kendulf at shaw.ca Mon Oct 31 02:00:16 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:00:16 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Creativity: A Special Issue References: Message-ID: <002001c5ddbe$d6c756c0$413e4346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> The apparent contradiction between modest IQ and high creativity, has a fairly simple solution. If cognition depends on matching internal patterns v. perceived external patterns, then high IQ is the ability to rapidly match external with internal patterns, while creativity is the formulation of non-existing patterns. Creating patterns must interfere with matching patterns. There is no escape from that. Efficient, high speed pattern matching is the encyclopedic memory we admire. It may be linked to rapidly detecting novel patterns, even appreciating such, but will be stymied creating novel patterns. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Premise Checker" To: "Transhuman Tech" ; Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2005 4:25 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: Creativity: A Special Issue New Scientist: Creativity: A Special Issue 5.10.29 (many articles) The creative mind: special report - Opinion http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.300&print=true Everyone has it, some a lot more than others. The development of humans, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it? What is going on in our brains when ideas form? Does it feel the same for artists and scientists? We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process - and learn how we can all ignite the spark within. [These are the articles. I arranged them in order of the printed edition, to which I subscribe.] Looking for inspiration - finding the muse Where it's at - creative hotspots One culture - art's debt to relativity Never give up - mathematical stickability When the music takes you Just got to write this down - the double life of Alice Flaherty Natural talent - nature's profligate beauty The complexity of the universe - Paul Davies hunts a new law Oh look, a new clich?! - Douglas Hofstadter's clever Cats And how to be original - we asked the experts Looking for inspiration http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.400&print=true * Helen Phillips PEOPLE have speculated about their own creativity for centuries - perhaps ever since we became able to think about thinking. Because creative thought just seems to "arrive", the credit has been laid at the feet of gods and spirits or, recently, the id or the subconscious mind. Whatever it is, it is thinking at the edge, at the very fringes. The only bit of the creative process we actually know about is the moment of insight, yet creative ideas and projects may incubate beyond our awareness for months or even years. Not surprising, then, that creativity has long eluded scientific study. In the early 1970s, it was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative. Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the "creative personality" tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. "Creatives" have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog. But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist and author Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has bipolar disorder, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Some features of schizophrenia are also thought to be more common in creative types, according to psychiatrist Gordon Claridge of the University of Oxford. He uses a "schizotypy scale" to record features of the illness that are not pathological by themselves, including experiencing hallucinations, hearing voices, having disorganised thoughts, believing in magic and so on. People with these traits tend to score highly on tests of lateral, divergent and open thinking. But those who score very highly on such tests find this kind of thinking can be very destructive. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead. Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits. But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity, he showed, has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It's the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. "It's as if the less creative person can't shift gear," says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. "Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively." Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that this change in activity was particularly noticeable on the right side of the brain. However, people who had the connections between the two sides of their brain severed to treat intractable epilepsy seemed to become far less creative, showing that communication between the sides of the brain is also important. Researchers are now trying to identify some of the specific anatomy of creativity. Brain studies of people with particular types of creativity show, perhaps not surprisingly, that the active areas are determined by the specialist knowledge being used. Language, imagery, spatial awareness and so on - each skill is localised to some extent to a particular brain part or parts. Mathematicians and physicists may have larger parietal lobes, important for spatial representation, while writers may have more widely distributed language regions in the frontal and temporal lobes, perhaps spreading across both sides, when they are normally confined to the left. But it's not just these speciality areas that are active. Using information creatively needs coordination between many areas. "Creative synthesis requires a new pattern, to put the brain in a state where a large number of areas are simultaneously active," says Claxton. When we concentrate in a less creative way, such as when reading the gas bill, there are fewer active centres and less synthesis. Ingegerd Carlsson, a psychologist from the University of Lund in Sweden, and her colleagues found something that they think might link different forms of creativity. When people were performing a creative task - trying to list as many uses for an object as they could - the frontal lobes of their brain were noticeably more active. The frontal lobes are thought to help people change tasks and strategies and to shift attention from task to task. The frontal lobes also help coordinate the connectivity between different brain areas by controlling the release of signalling chemicals, says neurologist David Beversdorf of Ohio State University in Columbus. One thing that relaxed states of mind, sleep and depression - all linked with increased creativity in some way - have in common are low levels of a brain signalling chemical called noradrenalin, or norepinephrine. This chemical controls how easily neurons "talk" to each other. Low levels of it seems to encourage broad networks of neurons to communicate, whereas higher levels seem to focus that activity into tighter, smaller networks. Treating people with precursors to noradrenalin seems to hinder their ability to solve creative word puzzles, says Beversdorf, while drugs such as propranolol, which block the chemical, can help people do better at tasks such as spotting anagrams. Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right-hand side, extending backwards towards a deeper region called the anterior cingulate cortex. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be. But to be truly creative needs more than just the right personality and the right brain areas and networks. It's about using them effectively. Skills, situations and our social setting can shape our creativity just as dramatically as the brain resources we are born with. The most creative people also use the different rhythms of the day, the weekends and the holidays to help shift focus and brain state. They may spend two hours at their desk then go for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them, and they don't feel guilty. And creativity need not always be a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people's moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work. Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and author of Creative Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2000) says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn't think they are completely nuts. Where it's at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.500&print=true * Richard Florida THE world is flat - or so says The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. It's the title of his latest book (Allen Lane, 2005), in which he argues that globalisation has levelled the playing field, allowing people the world over to exploit the cutting edge. "You no longer have to emigrate," writes Friedman, "in order to innovate." But Friedman fails to capture the complex reality of how economic growth and innovation cluster together in the modern global economy. In particular, scientific and technological creativity, the engines of that economy, are more geographically concentrated then ever. Geographer Tim Gulden of the University of Maryland at College Park and I have found that the bulk of the world's patents originate in just a few dozen city-regions - places such as Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, New York and Taipei. For all the concern over the rising global prominence of Bangalore and Shanghai, those two still do relatively little at the cutting edge. In 2003, the University of California alone generated more patents than either India or China, and IBM accounted for five times as many as the two combined. And while Asian city-regions are major players in commercial innovation, scientific advancement occurs largely in cities across Europe and North America. The US's success has stemmed in large part from its ability to attract creative talent. During the 20th century, its universities drew eminent scientists such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, fleeing fascism and intolerance in Europe. The creative influx accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s, providing much of the power for America's high-tech economy. But talent does not just flow between countries. More precisely, it locates in communities, regions and cities. This has been the case for centuries: from Athens to New York, cities have long served as crucibles of invention. This is driven by a key social and economic force: when talented people come together, their collective creativity is not just additive; rather, their interactions multiply and enhance their individual productivity. Researchers at The Brookings Institution have developed a computer simulation of this effect. The model was formed around two simple principles: first, that creative people cluster together to form teams that turn into companies or organisations; second, that these bodies then search for places in which to locate. Its simulated world emerged as a near-perfect representation of the real one. Creative people and the firms they built clustered in a hierarchy of cities. But this only raises further questions: why do some city-regions such as San Francisco or Boston become enduring centres of creativity and innovation, while others do not? In the age-old economic models that still dominate thinking about such issues, talent is conceived as a stock, similar to a supply of raw materials that is stored up in one area or another. On the contrary, talent is one of the most mobile resources on the planet, and is getting more so every day. What makes for a creative centre? A key driver is the presence of one or more world-class universities; many have noted the MIT effect in Boston or the Stanford effect in Silicon Valley. But for universities to help drive growth they must be embedded in a broader cluster of creative industries, supportive institutions, and a diverse and vibrant labour market. The crucial thing is a region's openness to talent: the ability of a place to draw creativity from all quarters of society. My research has found high rates of correlation between, on the one hand, the openness of a city to immigrants, its absence of racial and ethnic segregation, its acceptance of gay and lesbian populations and its enthusiasm for artists and, on the other, its ability to attract clusters of scientific and technological creativity and turn them into economic wealth. A recent Gallup survey confirms this. It found that people across all racial and class groups value cities that are open and tolerant of a broad swathe of the population. In addition to jobs and incomes, residents also expect the city to give them less tangible things - aesthetic beauty, a connection to place and exposure to new ideas. Today, centres of creativity and innovation are more concentrated than ever: talented and creative people no longer feel tethered to particular jobs or locations. In the modern global economy, great universities matter, and so do great cities. To sustain creative centres that drive economic productivity and growth, both need to work together. One culture http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.600&print=true * Arthur Miller What is scientific creativity? It involves the same kind of elements as artistic creativity. Both the scientist and the artist are trying to represent the reality beyond appearances. I believe that at the moment of creative insight, boundaries dissolve between disciplines and both artists and scientists search for new modes of aesthetics. That was certainly the case with Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. They were both trying to understand the true properties of space, and to reconcile them with how space is seen by different observers. Einstein discovered relativity and Picasso discovered cubism almost simultaneously. Has scientific creativity ever been sparked by art? Cubism directly helped Niels Bohr discover the principle of complementarity in quantum theory, which says that something can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but it will always be measured to be either one or the other. In analytic cubism, artists tried to represent a scene from all possible viewpoints on one canvas. An observer picks out one particular viewpoint. How you view the painting, that's the way it is. Bohr read the book by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes on cubist theory, Du Cubisme. It inspired him to postulate that the totality of an electron is both a particle and a wave, but when you observe it you pick out one particular viewpoint. So scientists can benefit by thinking in artistic terms? Sometimes scientific discoveries are made through visual design. For instance, there's the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in astrophysics. It's a graph that basically plots the temperature versus brightness of a star. It was invented when Henry Russell had only 10 minutes to give a speech and 300 stars to show. He plotted them all onto one diagram just to condense the information. When he did, this whole collection of stars assumed a shape, fell into a specific sequence. The interpretation of that diagram has become a major topic in astrophysics. Another example is Harry Kroto, who was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996. Kroto's first love was graphic design. That gave him a real advantage in science. Artistic insight helped him construct a three-dimensional image from two-dimensional data to deduce the design of carbon-60. Scientists who understand aesthetics, beauty and form gain a creative edge. Does it happen the other way around, with science inspiring creativity in art? Marcel Duchamp had read some works on relativity and the influence is obvious in his Nude Descending a Staircase. Wassily Kandinsky was also very much influenced by relativity, and particularly by E=mc^2. He took that equation to mean that everything is fundamentally amorphous, so that's what he painted. Technology has always profoundly affected art. Today there's a movement in computer art that is held back only by the pace of the technology. What do scientists and artists have in common? They see reality in new ways. While everyone else saw a pendulum swinging back and forth, Galileo saw it falling and rising. In that way he was able to do breakthrough work on the nature of falling bodies. Every great artist has seen the world in a new way. That's exactly what Einstein did, too. His early papers were very conceptual, especially the 1905 paper on special relativity. It has very few equations, and the data that he used had been around for years. He just saw the problems in a new way. In art and in science, discoveries are made by breaking the rules. But what's interesting about Einstein and Picasso, and other highly creative people, is that they can't seem to follow their discoveries through to the logical conclusions. Picasso never crossed the Rubicon and entered into abstract expressionism. Einstein didn't believe in quantum mechanics as the final atomic theory, nor in the most spectacular consequence of general relativity, the black hole. It seems that genius burns brightly for a while and then burns out. The young revolutionary becomes conservative. Never give up http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.700&print=true * Timothy Gowers What is mathematical creativity? I firmly believe it is not some magical, mysterious thing, particularly in mathematics, and in other fields too, though I don't have enough experience of things like poetry or painting to be authoritative. I'm convinced everything can be explained. How do you analyse it? It is difficult. The closer you look, the more it seems to dissolve. If you take an idea that seems outstandingly creative, it usually didn't appear in someone's head by magic. Some thought process led to it, and this can be broken into smaller ideas until you get down to the lowest level of thought process, which is essentially routine. So if you add up a whole load of routine things, you can somehow end up with something that everyone acknowledges is creative. So creativity is a procedure or an algorithm? Yes, but I realise that I'm opening a big can of worms. That statement requires much more justification than I can possibly give in an interview. If I suggest to people that creativity might be algorithmic, they generally say that it cannot be a simple procedure. They are right, it is not a simple procedure. But that doesn't stop it being a procedure. How does the creative process happen in mathematics? There's a famous passage in the book Littlewood's Miscellany by the mathematician John Littlewood in which he talks about the different phases of forming a mathematics problem. One of the most important is immersion. You need to spend a long time thinking hard and getting nowhere in the hope that at some later stage you'll have what feels like a bright idea. Of course, you'd never have had this idea if you hadn't been through the immersion stage. What does immersion feel like? Most of the time it's very frustrating. You try lots of things that don't work: 90 to 95 per cent of mathematical research is the process of trying things and discovering that they don't work. And this is another factor I think is important. Supposing 1 in 100 ideas turns out to work. If all that people see is the 100th idea, they'll think how extraordinary it was that somebody thought of that. An analogy is videoing yourself rolling four dice and then editing the video to show only the rolls that produce four sixes. It would look rather remarkable. Has immersion worked for you? Yes. One example is a theorem of a Hungarian mathematician called Endre Szemer?di that I spent two years thinking about until finally I got a new proof. Can you break down the creative process that led to this result? If I go back, I can find explanations for all the new ideas in that proof. When other people saw them, however, the new ideas looked quite novel because a lot of what I'd been doing didn't make it into the final paper. You cannot just write a big diary of your thought experiences, including your mistakes. It would be too long. Mistakes are an important part of the thought process. It's a good research strategy to be a little bit cavalier about the details and go back and check them afterwards. It speeds up the process of having ideas. Immersion sounds similar to obsession. I think obsession plays an important role. People tend to think of mathematics as some very mysterious thing that is done by people with special brains. But a large part of what makes mathematicians' brains special is the capacity to become obsessed with a maths problem. And the reward? The sort of pleasure you get is like supporting a not terribly good football team. Once in a while the team has some spectacular success that you can live off for several years. In between, you're yearning for something else to happen. It's a bit like that. When the music takes you http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.800&print=true Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand Can you describe the process you go through when you write songs? There are two very different stages. There is an initial creative stage where it all comes out, and then there's a stage of chopping it about, arranging it and turning it into something that can be heard by the rest of the world. The best songs come straight out. It feels a bit like the first time you ride a bicycle or drive a car. You're trying to control something but you're not quite sure which direction it's going. You end up with this big sprawling mess of an idea. Then you have that other process which is a lot more controlled, where you discard all the parts that are irrelevant or that obscure the good stuff at the heart. During the first process you're not really considering what you're doing, you're just doing it. The actual writing of a song is fairly easy. But the second process is very ruthless and quite cold because you have to cut away things that you're attached to. Do you write better in certain environments? I tend to write in all sorts of places. For our new record I've written songs in hotel rooms, on the back of tour buses, in corridors, wherever I've had an opportunity to sit down and pick up a guitar. Environment isn't particularly important. I usually just feel like doing it and do it. It's usually either when you feel there's no pressure to be doing other things, or when you feel almost selfishly unaware of other things. That's essential: having a disregard for anything happening around you. Whether it's somebody shouting about something they want you to do or you're desperately hungry or thirsty, you can just turn it off. Are you a different person when you're writing? I find myself being rude to people when I'm trying to get past the distractions. I used to have big arguments with my mother. It's funny because I'm generally not rude at all, I'm generally very polite, probably too polite. The only time I'm really rude is when I'm writing things. What does it feel like when you're writing? If it's good, it feels really exciting. It's like listening to a story you've never heard before. You lose your sense of where you are. All the everyday stuff - conversation, where you left your keys - it all seems to belong to a different brain, almost like a brain in somebody else's head. That's why the distractions are so infuriating, because it's like being reminded that this other brain exists. Most of the stuff I write about is from experiences I've had in everyday life when you use the trivial part of your brain, but the other part is always absorbing things it can use later. Interview by Eleanor Case. Franz Ferdinand's new album is You Could Have It So Much Better David Gray How do you write your songs? I begin with little ideas that aren't fully formed and I have to either excavate further or enlarge a small idea and turn it into a song - perhaps join it to some other ideas that I have hanging around. So a lot of the time it's more like being a mechanic. But occasionally a song just seems to come out of nowhere. I pick up my guitar and within half an hour I've written one. It's an instinctive process, a shutting down of conscious thought. It's about opening a door in your brain that is normally closed. It's about dredging up things that surprise you: images that you had stored and didn't know you had remembered. One image will unlock a chain of images, and that becomes a song. What kind of images? For example, an image of a tree I once saw came to me and helped resolve the calm of the song Ain't No Love. The tree had drops of water hanging on it, glistening in the sun, and it looked like a tree of diamonds: a beautiful image that is lodged in me rather like a splinter. It comes from way back in your life and you don't even know it's there. How do you know if a song is any good? You shouldn't always trust inspiration. Just because it came out of thin air doesn't mean it's any good. But sometimes you can tell, because all your emotions are stirred. The emotion, the purity of the germ of the song - it's all so vivid and wondrous. It feels so shockingly fresh. But a song that comes from nowhere is usually much better than anything you consciously think up. What's your state of mind when you're writing? It's an extremely intense period. I find myself storming around the room, biting my nails, scratching my head to the point that it bleeds. It's like having an itch you can't scratch until the process is completed. It takes hold of you. That's how you make records. You start off by tinkering around, making a few sounds and having a really good time, but when you get deeper into it and your demands get greater and more ambitious, something rears its ugly head. You become possessed. I'm not a particularly easy person to live with during these times. I find it really hard to get back into normal life. What puts you in the mood to create? An openness of heart. You either have it or you don't. It's an upwelling of feeling - and I will suddenly want an instrument to see if I can express it. Interview by Lucy Middleton. David Gray's new album is Life in Slow Motion Alison Goldfrapp & Will Gregory of Goldfrapp You think a lot about the theatrical side of your performances as well as the music. Where do you find your ideas? Alison: The inspirations are quite often outside music. We keep pictures, cut things out, write random things in notebooks, record things on Dictaphones, write up dreams. There are things that have been in your mind since you were a child. It's a matter of extracting them and regurgitating them in a different shape. Will: There's something quite childlike about it because you almost go back to just playing and being in the sandpit and making things. The ideas haven't got any verbal reasoning behind them and that's quite fun, quite liberating. At its best, it's like playing with a box of dressing-up clothes and trying them on and seeing how you look in them. Do you throw away a lot of ideas? Will: It's like you've got a map. You just don't know which are the blind alleys. When you start something, you don't know what it is or what it's going to be. Living with that perpetual sense of doubt can be pretty stressful. Each time you start to build, there's a part of you saying, this is rubbish, you can't do this, and there's another part that's saying this is quite fun, let's see where it goes. Do things ever arrive fully born? Alison: Yes, though sometimes when you have the whole picture it doesn't make it easy, because you can never achieve the whole thing. Or there's not much point in realising it because it's already formed. You've thought it, you've done it! Things that are half-done are safer. What's the difference between people who do what you're doing and those who just aspire to it? Will: It's to do with self-confidence - that grey state of the unknown is terrifying and some people find it harder to deal with. If you have a certain amount of self-belief you can say, I don't know what I'm doing but it's fine. Alison: I think people look at things differently. They don't see connections that penetrate beyond the thing itself. Like looking at a tree in a pot, some might say that's just a tree in a pot. Then someone else might say, it's a tree in a pot, it has those colours and it could be this and it might go into that. Or you might be looking at brickwork and think it looks like someone's skin. Will: It's like that Picasso sculpture of a bicycle. He turned it at a certain angle and suddenly the seat and handlebars look like a bull's head. Do you do any other creative things? Alison: I started knitting. I like it because it's very repetitive and really immediate. Interview by Liz Else. Goldfrapp's latest album is Supernature Just got to write this down http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.900&print=true * Alice Flaherty The writer: All in my head I HAVE a problem with writing. It started on a particular day, seven years ago. That day everything changed somehow and all the changes were of the utmost importance. I had to record them. One day I noticed that I was crouched on the floor of a bathroom in the building where I worked as a neurologist, writing on toilet paper because the idea couldn't wait until I got back to my office. When there was no paper, I wrote on my forearms. As my ideas got more intense, I even wrote on myself while I was driving. The change in my writing came 10 days after I gave birth prematurely to twin boys, who died. They were so small - one held my finger before he died, and his hand hardly fitted around it. For nine days my grief was "appropriate". On the tenth, I woke wildly excited, filled with hundreds of ideas pressing to be written down. I holed up in my office to write, and family and friends worried that I was depressed. But depression and mania can come in complicated mixtures: my mood, while sorrowful, was also manic. I didn't want my agitation, or even my grief, to end. It felt as if my grief had brought a magical kingdom of sorrow so close to this one that I could reach into its shadows and bring back dream fruit. It was a kingdom where beauty can't be separated from pain. In my transformed state, I saw meaning everywhere, which made the world radiant but also terrifying. Metaphors came alive. The rhythmic swoop of telephone wires had a faint message I needed to decipher and transcribe. Aesthetic experience? Psychosis? The distinction seemed to be missing the point. Sometimes, writing felt like a disease that took me away from family and friends. Other times, it filled me with pleasure and energy: I felt I was taking dictation from the muse. Most of what poured out was trash, but by picking through it I have had two books published which won awards, with a third in press and a fellowship to finish a fourth. Writers and artists with unusual creativity problems started to refer themselves to my clinic. That led to a research grant to study biological factors in creativity. Such social approval is always pleasant, but in someone with a tendency as odd as mine it is also key to my being able to claim that I am merely mad about my work, not mad. After four months, the urge to write left as suddenly as it had come. For the next month, it took a great deal of concentration to even lift my arm. I didn't feel like a blocked writer, but as if I were not a writer at all. The state was almost peaceful, a rest cure from the agitation of the previous months. If I tried to write or speak, though, I felt I was suffocating, my lungs full of water. A year after my twin boys died, I delivered, in an odd symmetry, premature but healthy twin girls. Again 10 days after the birth, I switched into a manicky, hypergraphic state. My doctor suggested a mood stabiliser. The first one was not a success, but after several tries we found a regime that has smoothed out the sharpest peaks and valleys of my writing. Without, luckily, flattening them completely. These days my excited writing has a seasonal rather than a post-partum pattern: it peaks in late summer, and early each winter it goes into hibernation. When my writing is driven, writing seems one of the glories of humankind. When I write as a scientist, writing seems a product of the brain. I try to keep my passionate and scientific writing separate because convention demands it. Doing so is artificial, though, and even deceptive - bloodless prose often hides the true motivations for a scientist's research. I study the drive to write because it is something in my brain that torments me, something that needs treatment. But never, I hope, a complete cure. The neurologist: All in my brain BECAUSE I am a neurologist, I could easily summon up a Greek word for my symptoms: hypergraphia, an exaggerated desire to write. And it had a pedigree. Norman Geschwind, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, showed that hypergraphia comes from a change in the brain's temporal lobes. These regions, located between the ears, are important for speech comprehension and emotional meaning. Geschwind noticed a cluster of personality traits in some people with temporal lobe epilepsy. This cluster is sometimes called the Dostoevsky syndrome, after the novelist who had all of these traits. So do the temporal lobes also control non-literary creativity? A form of senility called front-temporal dementia suggests they may. In people whose temporal lobe is most damaged, mood swings and compulsions are far more prominent than cognitive problems until late in the disease. Neurologist Bruce Miller of the University of California, San Francisco has recently described a number of these people who, with no previous interest in art, suddenly begin composing music or painting even though the rest of their abilities were collapsing. In these patients, the intact frontal lobe may be as important for their creative bursts as the temporal lobe deficits. Ingegerd Carlsson's group in Sweden has shown that in normal, non-demented people, brain activity is higher in the frontal lobes of creative than non-creative subjects. There is mounting evidence that the front-to-back communication between the frontal and temporal lobes is more important for creativity than the left brain-right brain model of the 1970s, when the right brain was thought to be visuospatial and intuitive, while the left brain was linguistic, deductive, and did your tax forms. Other disorders that affect frontal and temporal lobe activity also affect creativity: chief among them is manic depression. Mania and milder states of increased energy turn out to be much more likely than epilepsy to cause hypergraphia as well as pressured speech. And the temporal lobe is abnormally active in people who have manic depression, as captured by functional brain imaging and electro-encephalograms. While there is sometimes thought to be a link between depression and creativity, that link may exist because depression is often coupled to rebound periods of at least mild agitation or mood elevation. Recent evidence suggests that depression correlates better with writer's block than with creative bursts. Depression itself often brings with it a decreased desire to communicate, and a feeling that life and words have lost meaning. Interestingly, the behaviour of depressed - and blocked - people is often surprisingly similar to those who have had frontal lobe injuries. People with such injuries have poor judgement and lack creativity, whereas frontal lobe activity increases in creative people who are thoroughly engaged in creative tasks. An important addition to the parallels above is the difference between the kind of aphasia (language deficit) that stem from frontal versus temporal lobe damage. Frontal lobe injury often causes Broca's aphasia, in which patients have trouble generating speech, and are painfully aware of it. Injury to the temporal lobes, however, causes Wernicke's aphasia, where patients have poor comprehension and are therefore not aware that they don't make sense. Thus they actually speak more fluently, if emptily, than before. Broca's patients are often depressed, whereas Wernicke's patients can be manic or impulsive. There have been plenty of attempts to boost creativity in "normal" people. My colleague Shelley Carson and I, for example, are testing the hypothesis that creativity can be encouraged by exposure to a bright full-spectrum light for half an hour every morning to treat the brain's seasonal response to short winter days. Preliminary results suggest there is indeed a significant benefit. Students do better on tasks from writing haiku to listing as many uses as possible for a paper clip - and many of them are not keen to return the light boxes at the end of the experiment! Researcher Alan Snyder, based at the University of Adelaide, Australia, is working with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). He has found that holding an electromagnet near the frontal lobe can influence creative skills, with volunteers showing dramatic improvement in drawing and mathematical abilities. Unfortunately, the abilities of the volunteers revert to their previous level within minutes of turning the magnet off. The idea of trying to control the muse with pills and magnetic pulses is disturbing. But standard educational and behavioural alternatives are worrisome too: they are more expensive, slower, better at imparting knowledge than creative motivation. Although novel attempts to boost creativity may appear alien or frivolous, creativity is not a luxury, it is an essential. On the personal scale, lack of creativity can put employment in jeopardy. On a world scale, just think of all the pressing problems in need of creative solutions. Natural talent http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.000&print=true * Philip Ball IS NATURE creative? The notion sounds at first like a sop to sentimentalists, an anthropomorphism one step away from pantheism. The beauty of nature is a perilously seductive concept. Biologist Karl von Frisch had it more or less right when, confronted with the variety of delicately patterned radiolarians and diatoms, he was determined not to get misty-eyed: "I do not want to wax philosophical about so much 'useless' beauty scattered over the oceans," he said. "Nature is prodigal." But on closer inspection, the idea of natural creativity has a lot going for it. Like creative people, nature produces things that appear neither inevitable nor obvious, and solves problems with innovative solutions. Nature's unwitting problem-solving mechanism is natural selection, and the solutions it finds have won the admiration of engineers - hence the field of biomimetics, the application of natural solutions to human engineering problems. Nothing in the laws of physics or chemistry guarantees, for example, the evolution of the gecko's adhesive foot - a pad with inexhaustible stickiness supplied by a carpet of tiny, crack-probing hairs. Nor could we predict from first principles the self-cleaning mechanism of the lotus leaf or the laminated armour-plating of molluscs. An engineer who came up with these designs would be creative in anyone's book, and it seems unfair to deny nature that accolade just because they were the result of a blind search honed by selection. Random mutation coupled to selective pressure turns out to be an efficient way to find good solutions, so much so that scientists and engineers are now copying this technique. Though lacking purpose, evolution can conjure up wonderfully artistic design. Moreover, the creativity of natural selection is self-perpetuating, as it ensures that no successful product can afford to rest on its laurels. Of course, not all creativity is about solving problems. Artists often produce beautiful things for the sheer joy of it. Once evolutionary arguments have explained away our aesthetic delight in nature's splendours - in the physical processes that give rise to, say, a sunset - where in nature is there any room left for pure artistic creativity? We might concede that there is none, if everything in nature were either functional (as in features formed by evolutionary adaptation), inevitable (such as the formation of atoms, stars, planets and, in the end, sunsets) or just random. But it isn't. Not all features of organisms have an adaptive function - some are just epiphenomena, side products with no evolutionary significance. And surprisingly, some of these apparently function-free properties seem profusely creative. Wild cats and fish develop striking pigmentation patterns that serve clear roles: for camouflage, warning signals, mimicry and so on. But similar patterns are observed on many mollusc shells, even though these creatures live buried in mud, or have opaque coatings that obscure the markings entirely. These superficial elaborations are astonishingly diverse. Freed from evolutionary pressures, says Hans Meinhardt of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in T?bingen, Germany, "nature is allowed to play". Nature creates endlessly without any apparent purpose. And not only in biology. For example, you might expect that wind-blown sand would be scattered evenly, or at least randomly. But neither is the case: it forms patterns at many scales, from snaking ripples the size of your fingers to dunes and super-dunes, called draas, several kilometres wide. Cloud banks are massaged by the air into mares'-tail and mackerel skies, patterns that don't mean anything but are simply inherent in nature. "Inherent" does not by itself imply creativity: the methane molecule, say, is also inherent in nature. But what is striking about nature's spontaneous pattern-forming potential is that, unlike the rules of chemistry, the outcome is not specified. Jaguars share generic similarities in their pelt markings, but no two are identical. The mechanisms that underlie such patterns prove to be fertile sources of variety: the slightest change in the generative rules, or in the boundary conditions within which those rules operate, can produce dramatically different patterns. What's more, these pattern-creating processes don't seem specific to any particular system. Meinhardt argues that both shell patterns and sand ripples can be explained by a single basic mechanism - local positive feedback coupled to a longer-ranged inhibiting process. Mathematician Stephen Wolfram goes further. He thinks that pattern-forming systems called cellular automata underpin all physical and mathematical laws in the universe, so that a few simple principles create everything we see and experience. Artists are starting to use pattern-forming algorithms like cellular automata to create visual art and music. This is an acknowledgement that nature is able to produce the kind of rich yet coherent structures that we respond to in art, and that nature's creativity is a resource we can draw upon for our own inspiration. The complexity of the universe http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.100&print=true * Paul Davies PEOPLE sometimes call the big bang "the creation," but this is a serious misnomer. The universe has never ceased to be creative. The elaborate universe we observe today - dazzling in its richness, diversity and complexity - didn't spring into being ready-made. Rather, it emerged gradually, over billions of years, through a long succession of self-organising and self-complexifying processes. In fact, the universe began in an exceptionally bland state, a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, as evidenced by the near-perfect uniformity of the radiation left over from its fiery birth. Most cosmologists believe that even this near-featureless state was preceded by something simpler still - perhaps little more than rapidly expanding empty space. But the dull, uniform distribution of matter was primed to set off a chain reaction of creative processes. Gravity pulls matter together, so the spread-out initial distribution was inherently unstable, and slight irregularities in the density of material were quickly amplified. In this manner gravity sculpted complex cosmic structures, and by a process of slow accretion galaxies emerged from the smoothly distributed gases. The emergence of life on Earth, and the slow evolution of multicellularity, complex behaviour, and eventually intelligence, is just a small branch of the cosmic creativity that began with the big bang. Viewed on a cosmological scale, the history of the universe appears to be one of increasing complexification. This seems at odds with the second law of thermodynamics, according to which all physical processes irreversibly degenerate - the universe is inexorably dying even as it blossoms. But there is no contradiction between these two universal trends - the creative and the destructive - because every structure that emerges in the universe is paid for in the currency of entropy. Luckily, the cosmic kitty is far from empty. Although the universe is noticeably "running down" as stars burn their fuel and die, there is enough useful energy left for the cosmos to create complex phenomena for many trillions of years to come. Still, while nature's creativity does not conflict with the second law, it is not explained by it either. It is easy to imagine a universe which irreversibly degenerates without doing anything exciting on the way. Yet our universe creates stars, snowflakes, clouds, rainforests and people. What is the source of this astonishing creativity? Physicists are far from knowing just what it takes to create order out of chaos. They cannot point to specific characteristics in the laws of physics as "the source of creativity". It is not even clear that the whole story lies within the known laws. Some scientists suspect there are undiscovered laws, or overarching principles, at work, coaxing clod-like particles of matter toward organised complexity. Sometimes the hypothesised "principle of increasing complexity" is called the fourth law of thermodynamics. One thing is clear. The simplicity of the primordial universe ensured its eventual complexity. Only these bare beginnings contain such immense creative potential: cosmic creativity was forged in the big bang. Once sentient beings like us emerged, a whole new phase of creativity came with it. Through art, science and technology, humans are refashioning the world. Who can say how far mental creativity will help shape the cosmos? Oh look, a new clich?! http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825232.200&print=true * Mike Holderness * Liz Else Few things are quite as challenging as using a computer to model something we think of as quintessentially human. And if you're Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive science researcher whose book G?del, Escher, Bach inspired a generation, trying to model creativity will make you ask yourself tough questions. How much can we learn about human creativity this way? Is "creativity" the right word anyway? And will the Cats deliver? Mike Holderness and Liz Else quizzed Hofstadter How do you define creativity? I think we would do better to talk about "discoverativity" than creativity. I am convinced creativity is the ability to discover things that are in some sense there for anyone to find: things that the rest of humanity will appreciate because they are beautiful or because they are insightful or because they are truths about nature. Of course, we consider some people great musical composers when nine-tenths of the world has never heard of them, and when most of those who have heard their music didn't like it anyway. But they've found what I call a "vein of receptivity" in the minds of a large number of people. Are some discoveries more creative than others? Well, some are easier to make. Take what happened in quantum mechanics in the 1920s. I use the metaphor of people finding a new beach. Physicists rushed to this beach because they knew that it was going to be covered in wonderful shells. It wasn't that hard to find fantastic, beautiful shells because it was a completely virgin beach. But after 10 or 20 years it got harder and harder. Then it became time to try to find new beaches. It is standard to think of science as discovery, but doesn't "discovering" a novel sound bizarre? My feeling is that novelists discover patterns or structures of human behaviour, perhaps miniature plot lines. And they also discover idiosyncratic fashions of weaving plot lines together, in multiple layers, and these devices become characteristic of them as an author. They might make a complex analogy: "That marriage is like another marriage that I once saw." That is how we navigate human relations. We are always asking each other for advice: "How should I treat my daughter?" "Oh, my friends had a daughter who used to do similar things, so..." Novelists observe the world and discover events and people in it that they find interesting, and their discoveries pepper their novels. Good novelists are those whose sense of what is interesting coincides with that of many others. Will we be able to scan brains and say "Look, that's the creative thing being appreciated"? There has recently been a very strong push to connect the most complicated cognitive or emotional phenomena to the latest trends in biology and exploring the brain. People yearn to find "the" neural correlate of an emotion or even a creative thought. To me, that hope seems about as silly as trying to find the key to the greatness of a novel by closely examining the typographical symbols that compose it. Clearly, the relative frequency of "k" and "j" is ridiculously far from what makes a novel great. There are so many levels of description between the level of letters and that of ideas. How wide is that explanatory gap between neurons and thoughts? Well, a great poem creates activity in billions of neurons, each changing every few milliseconds over several minutes at least. From my viewpoint, you could assign to each intermediate level of description a factor of 10, and since a neuron firing is 10 or 20 levels away from the level of a poem, you are missing the mark by something like 15 orders of magnitude. That just gives an idea of how senseless it is to try to talk about a neural correlate of poetry. Would we do better approaching the enigma of analogy to understand creativity? There's no doubt about it. Making analogies is central to being human. Every single word choice we make, for instance, is done by analogy. Consider the word choice you made earlier - "explanatory gap". It seemed trivial to you, but for a computer it would be terribly, terribly hard. Every single word choice is analogy-making, because it is connecting prior experiences with a new experience and recognising the commonality. As we grow up, we do that repeatedly at more and more abstract levels until we build up very deep insights about the world. In the 1980s and 1990s you tried to model analogy-making on a computer. What did you do? We kept it as simple as we could. Our program Copycat deals with questions like "If ABC changes to ABD, what, by analogy, would XYZ change to?" There are many defensible answers, by the way, including XYA, XYD, XYY, XYZ, WYZ, WXZ, DBA and others. Our goal is to make a program that can find all these answers but also that has aesthetic preferences that make it "like" some more than others. Although it finds XYD most frequently, it "likes" WYZ the best. Copycat itself came out of an analogy - the idea of modelling a computer program on an ant colony. Copycat is composed of many, many small processes, many of which run in parallel. Each small "ant" makes its contribution to finding the analogy. How have you developed it since the early days? We have a newer project, Metacat. It can say: "This analogy is like that one", and you can ask it: "In what way?" Metacat will reply that the pressures that give rise to this analogy are related to the pressures in that one, but there is this difference. Metacat also has a limited sense of its own goals - and in the future we would like it to have a sense of the goals of the person it is talking to. For instance, if I were to say to it: "If ABC changes to ABD, what would ABC change to?", I would want it to reply indignantly: "Why are you asking me what you just told me?" That sounds as if it is expressing constraints on what is important. In my book Le Ton Beau de Marot, I discussed the key role of constraints in creativity. Constraints give a framework within which to work. Take, say, the rhythm used in most English sonnets, iambic pentameter. The vast majority of people like this regular periodic beat. As in music, they like a rhythm based on a small integer. You can go out on a limb and try seven or eleven, but the odds are that fewer people will be attracted to your creation. Such preferences are part of our biological nature. Pandering to inbuilt preferences suggests film producer Samuel Goldwyn's demand that his creative people produce "new clich?s". That's cute. I can almost subscribe to this motto. I would just add one word: to me, creativity is finding "new future clich?s". Everything truly creative eventually becomes a clich?. The Mona Lisa is the most clich?d of all the clich?s you can imagine - and something similar could be said of Einstein's great discovery E = mc^2. In each case, someone found a hidden vein of receptivity in the human mind - something that a lot of people could relate to. How long do you expect it to be before Metacat delivers a significant insight into human creativity? Well, I feel this is already happening, and I hope it will increase in the next few years. But I don't expect human-level intelligence suddenly to flower out of our work. If that happened, it would mean that our intelligence is a lot simpler than we humans tend to believe. In fact, I personally would be devastated if any of my computer models turned out to be just as smart as a human being. It would be a terrible shock. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.12.6/151 - Release Date: 10/28/2005