A MOVEABLE FEAST RISES ABOVE THE STRUGGLE OF HEMINGWAY'S LATER YEARS

From The Guardian:

In looking at In Our Time and A Moveable Feast, we've mainly focused on Hemingway as a young man: fit, young and heading for the stratosphere. But asMogger64 noted in his original nomination, it's significant that A Moveable Feast was "written at the end of his life". It isn't quite the work of an old man. Hemingway never made it that far. But it's pretty much the last word from someone on the way out. It speaks as loudly of Hemingway at the end of his career as it does of the beginning. And that career was remarkable. He had done it all by 1956, when he was spurred into reminiscence following the rediscovery of some old Paris notebooks which had lain for many years in a trunk in the basement of the Ritz hotel. He'd won the Nobel prize. He'd won the Pulitzer prize. He'd sold hundreds of thousands of books. He'd inspired dozens of imitators. He'd become an adjective and a legend. His life outside writing was just as celebrated: the bull fight aficionado, the boxer, the big game hunter, the fisherman, the friend of Spanish Republicans, the man who liberated Paris. Papa: the tall, handsome, heavyweight alpha male.

But by 1956 all that was heading into memory, if it had ever really existed.

More here.

GREAT GATSBY: A STORY FOR THE MODERN AGE

From The Telegraph:

A Gatsby moment is upon us. The Great Gatsby is by far the most popular novel of F Scott Fitzgerald; it embodies the 1920s, and has attained an iconic status, both for American novelists and for many readers. Still, the flood of adaptations about to pour over us is unprecedented. Is there something in the air? Is there something that makes this most glamorous of novels speak to us with especial resonance? Later this summer, a new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby will be released, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (you can watch the trailer here) and the ubiquitous Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan. There are, too, a number of stage adaptations, some rather unusual. A musical version is being launched at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington in the summer, with music and lyrics by Joe Evans. An “immersive” version was staged in Wilton’s Music Hall in April, with dancing and cocktails throughout – the audience advised to dress in their 1920s best. Most curious is a New York version, retitled GATZ, coming to London as part of the London International Festival of Theatre in June and July. The New York theatre group Elevator Repair Service has set the book in a drab office, where a worker finds a copy of the book and starts to read it out; his colleagues take on the roles and the action plays itself out. Remarkably, every single word is performed; it is not a long novel, but even short novels are longer than the longest plays, and this evening will last for eight hours.

The Great Gatsby has always encouraged this sort of reverence. It is true that the earliest surviving film version, a 1949 adaptation with Alan Ladd and a memorable Shelley Winters as Myrtle, takes some bold liberties, beginning with Gatsby’s crooked empire and purchase of the mansion, rather than letting him intrude gradually on the action. Modern viewers, however, will be astonished at the dutiful reverence of the 1974 version with Robert Redford as Gatsby and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, which preserves many of Nick Carraway’s comments in voiceover and an amazing amount of the casual dialogue.

More here.

THE MATHEMATICIAN’S OBESITY FALLACY

Michael Moyer in Scientific American:

As I write, this interview with mathematician Carson C. Chow is the number-one most-emailed story on theNew York Times Web site. Chow, a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, had no experience in the health sciences before he came to study the problem of why so many Americans are overweight. “I didn’t even know what a calorie was,” he says.

This kind of outsider’s perspective can be invaluable when attacking a problem as difficult and entrenched as the epidemic of obesity in the U.S. Chow relates the story of starting work at the institute—a division of the National Institutes of Health—and finding a mathematical model created by a colleague that could predict “how body composition changed in response to what you ate.” The problem, as Chow describes it, was that the model was complicated: “hundreds of equations,” he told the Times. “[We] began working together to boil it down to one simple equation. That’s what applied mathematicians do.”

And what did Chow’s simple model reveal about the nature and causes of obesity? Basically, that we eat too much. “The model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.” Food in, fat out. Simple enough to be captured in a single equation.

Unfortunately Chow’s outsider’s perspective on the obesity crisis isn’t really an outsider’s perspective at all: it is the physicist’s perspective.

More here.

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THE EVOLUTION OF VIRTUE, ALTRUISM, AND SHAME

Jag Bhalla in The Wilson Quarterly:

The stories we’ve been told about the role of competition in our evolution have been unnaturally selective. Sound-bite pop science, of the “red in tooth and claw” and “selfish gene” variety, has left out much that is essential to human nature. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm aims to resurrect some of those missing elements in Moral Origins. In his view, cooperation, along with the traits and rules needed to make it work, was as essential to our survival as large brains.

Boehm has spent 40 years studying hunter-gatherers and the behavior of our primate cousins. His book’s explanatory quest started with a 10-year review of all 339 hunter-gatherer cultures ethnographers have described, 150 of which were deemed representative of our ancestors. Fifty of these have so far been coded into a detailed database. Boehm says this deep data set shows that we have been “vigilantly egalitarian for tens of thousands of years.”

The dominant view of human evolution against which Boehm deploys his arguments and data is well summarized in evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s hugely influential 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins famously warned that “if you wish . . . to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.” In nature, he declared, there is “no welfare state.” Indeed, he wrote, “any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.” These ideas, aided by others’ similar claims, became barrier beliefs, preventing further analysis for decades.

Boehm’s story begins when the survival of our ancestors became a team sport.

More here.

“Social instincts, which no doubt were acquired by man, as by the lower animals . . . will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows.” Indeed, Darwin goes on to call any man who does not harbor such instincts an “unnatural monster.” Boehm helps us see again that we need not be so monstrously at odds with our social natures.

A MATHEMATICAL CHALLENGE TO OBESITY

Claudia Dreifus in the New York Times:

You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?

In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, I married. My wife is a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, and she would not move. So I began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, I heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity.

I didn’t even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on.

I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.

The interesting question posed to me when I was hired was, “Why is this happening?”

Why would mathematics have the answer?

Because to do this experimentally would take years. You could find out much more quickly if you did the math.

Now, prior to my coming on staff, the institute had hired a mathematical physiologist, Kevin Hall. Kevin developed a model that could predict how your body composition changed in response to what you ate. He created a math model of a human being and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The model could predict what a person will weigh, given their body size and what they take in.

However, the model was complicated: hundreds of equations. Kevin and I began working together to boil it down to one simple equation.

More here.

One thing I have concluded, and this is just a personal view, is that we should stop marketing food to children. I think childhood obesity is a major problem. And when you’re obese, it’s not like we can suddenly cut your food off and you’ll go back to not being obese. You’ve been programmed to eat more. It’s a hardship to eat less. Michelle Obama’s initiative is helpful.

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THE SCIENCE OF LOVE AND BETRAYAL

From The Guardian:

I'm an expert. Many of us are. My first wife never said the word "love" without a sneer; my present wife is a true believer. So I've looked at love from both sides now. But if Robin Dunbar is to be believed, I really don't know love at all. Remember those PG Tips ads where they dressed chimpanzees as human beings and made them drink tea? This book is rather like those ads in that it confuses the animal and the specifically human. Why do we kiss, it asks. To taste our potential partner's saliva and decide if they are healthy enough to breed with, a bit like dogs sniffing at each other. A bad taste, a bad smell and off we go with someone else. Sometimes the truth is disturbing, but is this really why my wife and I are still kissing after all these years? It seems to me more like a way of having sex with our mouths – which is wonderful if you like sex, and disgusting if you don't. It certainly isn't something a dog would do.

Dunbar believes emotions such as love and social institutions such as marriage are strategies to maximise the reproduction of our genes. In biological terms, the most successful of all humans has been Genghis Khan – around 0.5% of all males alive today are descended from him and his brothers. But the Great Khan's reproductive strategy of mass rape is something of an aberration. Modern societies derive from communities of hunter-gatherers who practised serial monogamy. Love and marriage are the emotional and social expressions of a reproductive strategy that goes back 200,000 years or so. Why do we pair up? Not so that men can help feed and raise children – women would do this better on their own (the time men spent hunting was largely time wasted, unlike the time women spent gathering). Dunbar runs through a range of biological comparisons – wolves ("resolutely monogamous", but male wolves vomit up food for the mother and pups; unlike many human males they really are good dads), goats, baboons, gorillas – and concludes that we are like marmosets. Women need husbands to protect them from being attacked by other men. Men don't get much out of love and marriage (except, of course, the reproduction of their genes); women get security. But women don't just want security. According to Dunbar (who doesn't see that this is a major hole in his argument), all women would have needed to do is gang together into large groups in order to defend themselves. If only they had kicked out the worthless hunters, who didn't catch enough to feed themselves, let alone anyone else, and only chased big game to show off, they could have managed perfectly well. Why are there no societies of vegetarian Amazons? Presumably because big-game hunting was a useful way of testing men's fitness for reproduction. So love and marriage are the result of a complicated trade off between safe sex and exciting sex. We are marmosets who dream of being gorillas.

More here.

SECRETS OF THE FIRST PRACTICAL ARTIFICIAL LEAF

From Science Daily:

A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf -- a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy -- appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes.

Daniel G. Nocera points out that the artificial leaf responds to the vision of a famous Italian chemist who, in 1912, predicted that scientists one day would uncover the "guarded secret of plants." The most important of those, Nocera says, is the process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The artificial leaf has a sunlight collector sandwiched between two films that generate oxygen and hydrogen gas. When dropped into a jar of water in the sunlight, it bubbles away, releasing hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells to make electricity. 

More here.

CAN PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY GET ALONG?

Gary Gutting in the New York Times:

Physicists have been giving philosophers a hard time lately. Stephen Hawking claimed in a speech last year that philosophy is “dead” because philosophers haven’t kept up with science. More recently, Lawrence Krauss, in his book, “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing,” has insisted that “philosophy and theology are incapable of addressing by themselves the truly fundamental questions that perplex us about our existence.” David Albert, a distinguished philosopher of science, dismissively reviewed Krauss’s book: “all there is to say about this [Krauss’s claim that the universe may have come from nothing], as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right.” Krauss — ignoring Albert’s Ph.D. in theoretical physics — retorted in an interview that Albert is a “moronic philosopher.” (Krauss somewhat moderates his views in a recent Scientific American article.)

I’d like to see if I can raise the level of the discussion a bit. Despite some nasty asides, Krauss doesn’t deny that philosophers may have something to contribute to our understanding of “fundamental questions” (his “by themselves” in the above quotation is a typical qualification). And almost all philosophers of science — certainly Albert — would agree that an intimate knowledge of science is essential for their discipline. So it should be possible to at least start a line of thought that incorporates both the physicist’s and the philosopher’s sensibilities.

More here.

THE REALLY NICE GUY MATERIALIST

Julian Baggini interviews Patricia Churchland, in The Philosophers' Magazine (for Abbas):

[Y]ou can understand the trepidation felt by many at the thought of Patricia [Chruchland] tackling the issue of morality head-on. But her recent book, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality defies such expectations, due largely to the fact that the answer to the question implied by the subtitle is very far from everything. This contrasts starkly with what many see as the scientific hubris of Sam Harris in his recent The Moral Landscape.
“Sam Harris has this vision that once neuroscience is much more developed then neuroscientists will be able to tell us what things are right or wrong, or at least what things are conducive to well-being and not. But even if you cast it in that way, that’s pretty optimistic – or pessimistic, depending on your point of view. Different people even within a culture, even within a family, have different views about what constitutes their own well-being. Some people like to live out in the bush like hermits and dig in the ground and shoot deer for resources, and other people can’t countenance a life that isn’t in the city, in the mix of cultural wonderfulness. So people have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes well-being.
“I think Sam is just a child when it comes addressing morality. I think he hasn’t got a clue. And I think part of the reason that he kind of ran amuck on all this is that, as you and I well know, trashing religion is like shooting fish in a barrel. If Chris Hitchens can just sort of slap it off in an afternoon then any moderately sensible person can do the same. He wrote that book in a very clear way although there were lots of very disturbing things in it. I think he thought that, heck, it’s not that hard to i gure these things out. Morality: how hard can that be? Religion was dead easy. And it’s just many orders of magnitude more difficult.”
What Churchland believes science can do is describe the “neural platform” for ethics. What does she mean by this?

THE ORIGINAL COLONIST

From The New York Times:

This is not a humble book. Edward O. Wilson wants to answer the questions Paul Gauguin used as the title of one of his most famous paintings: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” At the start, Wilson notes that religion is no help at all — “mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity” — and contemporary philosophy is also irrelevant, having “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.” The proper approach to answering these deep questions is the application of the methods of science, including archaeology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Also, we should study insects.

...In “The Social Conquest of Earth,” he explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects. Wilson calculates that one can stack up log-style all humans alive today into a cube that’s about a mile on each side, easily hidden in the Grand Canyon. And all the ants on earth would fit into a cube of similar size. More important, humans and certain insects are the planet’s ­“eusocial” species — the only species that form communities that contain multiple generations and where, as part of a division of labor, community members sometimes perform altruistic acts for the benefit of others. Wilson’s examples of insect eusociality are dazzling. The army ants of Africa march in columns of up to a million or more, devouring small animals that get in their way. Weaver ants “form chains of their own bodies in order to pull leaves and twigs together to create the walls of shelters. Others weave silk drawn from the spinnerets of their larvae to hold the walls in place.” Leafcutter ants “cut fragments from leaves, flowers and twigs, carry them to their nests and chew the material into a mulch, which they fertilize with their own feces. On this rich material, they grow their principal food, a fungus belonging to a species found nowhere else in nature. Their gardening is organized as an assembly line, with the material passed from one specialized caste to the next.”

More here.

THE AGE OF INSIGHT: HOW OUR BRAIN PERCEIVES ART

From Columbia Magazine:

Many strands of Eric Kandel’s life come together in his latest work, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. The 82-year-old University Professor and co-director of the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative was born in Vienna, where, as a boy of 8, he witnessed the Nazis march into the Austrian capital. Decades later, he recalls how much his own intellectual interests were shaped not only by the Holocaust that followed, but by the cosmopolitan city that in the early 1900 served as an extraordinary incubator for creativity and thought that shaped the world we live in today. From the Modernist painters Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele to the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, a new view emerged of the human mind. Indeed, before Kandel plunged into research on the neurobiology of memory, which would win him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, he had aspired to be a psychoanalyst himself. As he pondered the mission of Columbia’s Mind Brain Behavior Initiative—to connect biomedical sciences with the arts, humanities and social sciences—he came to see that our contemporary understanding of human behavior can be traced directly back to fin de sécle Vienna 1900, particularly in its emphasis on the unconscious and irrational aspects of the human mind.

And it didn’t hurt that he and his wife Denise, who survived the Holocaust as a child in France, have long been art collectors who own small works by Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele, as well as by other German Expressionists. Indeed, Kandel’s 600-page work is dedicated to his wife, a professor of sociomedical sciences in the Department of Psychiatry at the Mailman School of Public Health. “I discuss beauty and I say everyone gets pleasure out of looking at a beautiful face, and I use a photograph of Denise when I first met her,” he says. “I mean she is, and she was, for me remarkably beautiful. And one of the things I enjoyed in our friendship when I first met her is that, in addition to our very wonderful relationship, she was just so pleasant to look at.”

Q. What made you decide to turn your attention to the neurobiology of how we perceive art?

There are many motivating factors. One was my longterm interest in Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele, the three Austrian Modernists, my fascination with Vienna 1900 and with Freud. I wanted to become a psychoanalyst and I’m Viennese so I sense a shared intellectual history, particularly with turn-of-the-century Vienna. But the immediate stimulus actually came from [Columbia President] Lee Bollinger. The idea behind the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative is to try to understand the human mind in biological terms and to use these insights to bridge the biology of the brain with other areas of the humanities. Lee expressed the belief that the new science of the mind could have a major impact on the academic curriculum, that in a sense everyone at the University works on the human mind. I felt I was doing this for personal reasons, but isn’t it wonderful that it is also in line with one of the missions of the University?

More here.

SAM HARRIS ON KNOWING YOUR ENEMY, AND A RESPONSE

Sam Harris in his blog:

Imagine that you work for the TSA and are executing a hand search of a traveler’s bag. He is a young man in his twenties and seems nervous. You notice that he is carrying a hardcover copy ofThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You pick up the book and ask him if he likes it. He now appears even more nervous than before. You notice something odd about the book—the dust jacket doesn’t seem to fit. You remove it and find a different book underneath. How do you feel about this traveler’s demeanor, and the likelihood of his being a terrorist, if the book is:

A. The Qur’an (in Arabic)

B. The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide

C. Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know
D. Dianetics

If you care more about A than B, C, or D, as I think you should, you are guilty of religious profiling (and calling it “behavioral profiling” doesn’t change this fact).

The funny thing about my “racism” is that I would probably be more concerned if the young man in this example were light-skinned, like me, than Middle Eastern. Why? Because he would have had to make a great effort to learn Arabic. Is there anything intrinsically sinister about learning Arabic? No. I wish I knew Arabic. But it is one more detail that fits the profile of someone who is deeply committed to the worldview of Islam and disposed to conceal that fact. Are all such people terrorists? Of course not. But every person who attempts to blow himself up on an airplane, now or in the foreseeable future, is likely to come from this group. Of course, if that changes, we should alter our view of security accordingly. If the Ku Klux Klan were to declare a broader war on civilization and begin a campaign of suicide bombings, we would have to keep an eye on that profile too (and being nonwhite or Jewish would help smooth your path through security).

More here.  And a response by security expert Bruce Schneier:

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, then we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

First, in the sheep’s case the profile is accurate, in that all wolves are out to eat sheep. Maybe a particular wolf isn’t hungry at the moment, but enough wolves are hungry enough of the time to justify the occasional false alarm. However, it isn’t true that almost all Muslims are out to blow up airplanes. In fact, almost none of them are. Post 9/11, we’ve had 2 Muslim terrorists on U.S airplanes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. If you assume 0.8% (that’s one estimate of the percentage of Muslim Americans) of the 630 million annual airplane fliers are Muslim and triple it to account for others who look Semitic, then the chances any profiled flier will be a Muslim terrorist is 1 in 80 million. Add the 19 9/11 terrorists—arguably a singular event—that number drops to 1 in 8 million. Either way, because the number of actual terrorists is so low, almost everyone selected by the profile will be innocent.  This is called the “base rate fallacy,” and dooms any type of broad terrorist profiling, including the TSA’s behavioral profiling.

More here.

THE BRAIN… IT MAKES YOU THINK. DOESN'T IT? DAVID EAGLEMAN VS RAYMOND TALLIS

Are we governed by unconscious processes? Neuroscience believes so – but isn't the human condition more complicated than that? Two experts offer different views.

David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis in The Guardian:

David Eagleman: It is clear at this point that we are irrevocably tied to the 3lb of strange computational material found within our skulls. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change. Our personality, decision-making, risk-aversion, the capacity to see colours or name animals – all these can change, in very specific ways, when the brain is altered by tumours, strokes, drugs, disease or trauma. As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical.

This clarifies some aspects of our existence while deepening the mystery and the awe of others.

For example, take the vast, unconscious, automated processes that run under the hood of conscious awareness. We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the "me" that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed.

More here.

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SYNESTHESIA MAY EXPLAIN HEALERS' CLAIMS OF SEEING PEOPLE'S 'AURA'

From Science Daily:

Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as "synesthesia" (specifically, "emotional synesthesia"). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability.

In synesthetes, the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected. Synesthetes can see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people or letters with a particular color.

The study was conducted by the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology Óscar Iborra, Luis Pastor and Emilio Gómez Milán, and has been published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. This is the first time that a scientific explanation has been provided for the esoteric phenomenon of the aura, a supposed energy field of luminous radiation surrounding a person as a halo, which is imperceptible to most human beings.

More here.

HOW TO END THIS DEPRESSION

Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books:

The depression we’re in is essentially gratuitous: we don’t need to be suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives. We could end it both more easily and more quickly than anyone imagines—anyone, that is, except those who have actually studied the economics of depressed economies and the historical evidence on how policies work in such economies.

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don’t we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.” Now, as I argue in my forthcoming book^*—and show later in the data discussed in this article—is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

More here.

HOW SCIENCE BECAME INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING

From The Telegraph:

It is only in recent years that science has become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive. But long before Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, Primo Levi had sought to make science accessible to the layperson in his 1975 literary-scientific commentary, The Periodic Table. A lapidary integration of chemistry and autobiography, the book continued a tradition of writing from Galileo to Darwin which vanished in the 20th century following academic specialisation. Philip Ball, like Levi, displays a polymath’s enthusiasm for knowledge of all kinds, and writes of science with humility and intelligent generosity.

Ball’s new book, a readable survey of the role of curiosity in science, is a good example of what the French call haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. In pages of limpid prose, Ball brings difficult ideas down a level. Until the early 17th century, when pretty well anything of human concern was fit for study, curiosity was seen as dangerous and condemned as such. The view has never quite gone away. Even Karl Marx was shocked by Darwin’s materialist view of nature as bleak survivalism in On the Origin of Species (the book was a “bitter satire”, Marx reckoned, on human progress). Beneath Darwin’s bleak vision, however, was a childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries of the natural world and a delight in extracting order out of chaos. In Ball’s opinion, Darwin personifies “the modern struggle with curiosity”. The Bible had warned against curious-minded individuals like Darwin conducting investigations where they should not. (“For in much wisdom is much grief”: Ecclesiastes.) Even today, upholders of Biblical morality condemn Darwin as godless: man is not a lonely mutation grubbing with the brutes – he stands at the very pinnacle of God’s creation. In tasting of the fruit of knowledge, Darwin had sinned against the divine order of things.

More here.

INTERPRETING SHARI’A

From Guernica:

Muslims agree that Shari’a is God’s law. But the mysticism surrounding Prophet Muhammed’s nearly 1,400-year-old words has solidified to a point where finding a consensus on the particulars of Shari’a is difficult. The debate has now saturated modern politics and pop-culture around the globe. London-born Sadakat Kadri, human rights Lawyer, travel writer, and journalist, took on this collective confusion in his new book Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslin World. As he traveled through South Asia and the Middle East to conduct research, Kadri began untangling the edicts of Shari’a and its interpretations, which could allow for a sex change but not apostasy. His finished product, full of travel experiences, written through the lens of his knowledge of the law and his connection to the subject matter, “provides a compelling overview of the historical events that shaped Islamic law,” wrote Ian Critchley, in the Sunday Times, and delivers “an admirably even-handed account of [Islamic law’s] often fraught position today.” At Asia House this February, Kadri sat with Mishal Husain to discuss Heaven on Earth, the history of Islamic law, and Islam’s interaction with the religious present—both Muslim and non-Muslim. Kadri earned a Master’s from Harvard Law and spent time in Prague during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. He has written a travel guide to Prague as well as the book The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson (2005), after his experience moving to New York City just before 9/11. He currently writes a column for the New Statesman. Mishal Husain was born in England and grew up in both the Middle East and the UK. She received a law degree from Cambridge and works as a BBC international news presenter on Impact Asia, BBC World News, as well as other programs.

—The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Mishal Husain and Sadakat Kadri, published here courtesy of Asia House London.

More here.

THE IRRATIONALITY OF IRRATIONALITY: THE PARADOX OF POPULAR PSYCHOLOGY

Samuel McNerney in Scientific American:

In 1996, Lyle Brenner, Derek Koehler and Amos Tverskyconducted a study involving students from San Jose State University and Stanford University. The researchers were interested in how people jump to conclusions based on limited information. Previous work by Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists found that people are “radically insensitive to both the quantity and quality of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions,” so the researchers knew, of course, that we humans don’t do a particularly good job of weighing the pros and cons. But to what degree? Just how bad are we at assessing all the facts?

To find out, Brenner and his team exposed the students to legal scenarios. In one, a plaintiff named Mr. Thompson visits a drug store for a routine union visit. The store manager informs him that according to the union contract with the drug store, plaintiffs cannot speak with the union employees on the floor. After a brief deliberation, the manager calls the police and Mr. Thompson is handcuffed for trespassing. Later the charges were dropped, but Mr. Thompson is suing the store for false arrest.

All participants got this background information. Then, they heard from one of the two sides’ lawyers; the lawyer for the union organizer framed the arrest as an attempt to intimidate, while the lawyer for the store argued that the conversation that took place in the store was disruptive. Another group of participants – essentially a mock jury – heard both sides.

The key part of the experiment was that the participants were fully aware of the setup; they knew that they were only hearing one side or the entire story. But this didn’t stop the subjects who heard one-sided evidence from being more confident and biased with their judgments than those who saw both sides. That is, even when people had all the underlying facts, they jumped to conclusions after hearing only one side of the story.

More here.

BYZANTIUM AND ISLAM: AGE OF TRANSITION (7TH–9TH CENTURY)

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Peter Brown in the New York Review of Books:

In the century between 630 and 730 a considerable portion of the Old World took on its modern face. Through a series of astonishing campaigns, Arab Muslim armies created a single empire that, for a time, would reach from southern Spain to northern India and the western borders of China. From the “big bang” of these conquests a new galaxy emerged. From then onward, a closely interconnected chain of Muslim regions (one part of which, from modern Morocco to the borders of Iran, came to speak Arabic) stretched across Africa and Eurasia, joining the Atlantic to western China. A new civilization came into being, one that has lasted, with many permutations, into our own days. In the words of Finbarr Flood, a major contributor to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum’s somewhat modestly titled exhibition “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century),” the foundation of the Arab empire was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.”

The exhibition takes us to the heart of this great detonation. It embraces the last century of the pre-Islamic Middle East and the first two centuries of Islam. To our surprise, we do not find ourselves in a world swept by a mighty wind. Instead, we enter a series of quiet rooms where time seems to stand still. Like a perfect late fall day, only the occasional rustle of a falling leaf startles us into realizing that the seasons are about to change. The few clear signs that Islam had, indeed, become politically dominant in the Middle East by the end of the seventh century strike us with almost ominous intensity. For there are so few of them.

More here.

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF PRAYER: IT'S A BRAIN PUZZLE

From The European:

In a recent study our team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain responded to praying in Christian believers. Surprisingly, considering God’s postulated invisibility, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, we found that conversing with God was not associated with regions that process abstract concepts. Rather, we found a marked pattern of activity in four regions that typically activate when humans relate to other humans. Neurologically, this finding suggests that strong believers process God as a concrete person – in spite of the theologically complex and highly abstract nature of the Christian God. Interestingly, we did not find this pattern in believers who did not use praying regularly. Perhaps the religious brain can learn to treat gods as real persons through regular practice and strong beliefs. 

Importantly and somewhat contrary to the widespread assumption that communicating with God constitutes a unique experience reserved for believers, our findings suggest that praying to God is comparable to ‘normal’ interpersonal interaction, at least in terms of brain function. Praying, it seems, is subserved by the basic processing of our biologically evolved dispositions like other complex cultural phenomena, in this case the evolved human capacity for social cognition. One might ask if these findings, then, are evidence that God is just an illusion, an imagined friend that always listens in times of distress? Or may they in fact be proof that God affects us even at the level of brain function? Atheists and believers alike take considerable interest in this kind of research. Fortunately, as a scientist my interest lies solely in the physical world and speculations about the spiritual dimension lie well beyond scientific scrutiny.

More here.

EUSOCIALITY

EUSOCIALITY

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Those famous questions, inscribed by Paul Gauguin in his giant Tahitian painting of 1897, introduce The Social Conquest of Earth. Their choice proclaims Edward O Wilson’s ambitions for his splendid book, in which he sums up 60 distinguished years of research into the evolution of human beings and social insects. Wilson has focused on the biology of behaviour since joining Harvard University as a junior research fellow in 1953. He also has a passion for writing, with 25 books to his credit (including two Pulitzer Prize-winners). The Social Conquest of Earth fully maintains the elegant and informative style of its predecessors. His most influential book, Sociobiology (1975), defined a new discipline, with the message that social behaviour could only be understood through the lens of evolution. At that time the idea that genes and natural selection play such an important role in human society outraged many social scientists and people on the political left. By now the main messages of sociobiology and its offspring, evolutionary psychology, have been absorbed into the intellectual mainstream, though the nature-nurture debate rumbles on as scientists investigate the relative contribution of genes and the environment to various aspects of life.

more from Clive Cookson at the FT here.

TESTOSTERONE ON MY MIND AND IN MY BRAIN

[SIMON BARON-COHEN:] What I want to talk about tonight is this very specific hormone, testosterone. Our lab has been doing a lot of research to understand what this hormone does and, in particular, to test whether it plays any role in how the mind and the brain develops.

Before I get to that point, I'll say a few words by way of background about typical sex differences, because that's the cradle out of which this new research comes. Many of you know that the topic of sex differences in psychology is fraught with controversy. It's an area where people, for many decades, didn't really want to enter because of the risks of political incorrectness, and of being misunderstood.

Perhaps of all of the areas in psychology where people do research, the field of sex differences was kind of off limits. It was taboo, and that was partly because people believed that anyone who tried to do research into whether boys and girls, on average, differ, must have some sexist agenda. And so for that reason a lot of scientists just wouldn't even touch it.  

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