How Has Twitter Changed the Role of the Literary Critic?

Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes on social media’s effect on criticism, in the NYT's Bookends:

[Adam Kirsch] At first glance, it seems that critics, in particular, should relish a tool like Twitter. Criticism is a kind of argument, and Twitter is excellent for arguing back and forth in public. Criticism is also a kind of reportage, and Twitter is an ideal way of breaking news. With many major events, from presidential debates to the Oscars, it is more informative and entertaining to follow them in real time on Twitter than it is to actually watch them. For all these reasons, journalists have been especially avid users of Twitter.

Critics, however, have been surprisingly reluctant to embrace the tweet. Many of the most prominent are not on Twitter at all. Those who are tend to use their feeds for updates on their daily lives, or to share links, or at most to recommend articles or books — that is, they use Twitter in the way everyone else does. What is hard to find on Twitter is any real practice of criticism, anything that resembles the sort of discourse that takes place in an essay or a review.

This absence, like the dog that didn’t bark in Sherlock Holmes, may be an important clue to the true nature of criticism. Never in history has it been easier than it is today to register one’s approval or disapproval of anything. The emblem of our age is the thumbs-up of the “like” button. If criticism is nothing more than a drawn-out version of a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be made obsolete by the retweet or the five-star Amazon review. Cut to the chase, the Internet demands, of critics and everyone else: Should we buy this thing or not?

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Kindred Spirits

Barbara J King in Aeon:

Most animals for whom we have data treat their kin differently from non-kin. When food resources are scarce, or a hungry predator appears in the midst of an animal group, it’s often relatives who help each other out. This makes good evolutionary sense: when one animal aids another who shares its genes, it boosts the chances that its own genes will be long-lived.

Nowadays, however, as I study and write about the expression of emotion in a variety of mammals, I have come to realise that this perspective is too limiting. If we make the biology of kinship the primary motivator for an animal’s behaviour, we might be slow to explore the nature of its other social relationships. Indeed, some scientists have begun to describe the close bonds between non-kin relatives as ‘friendships’, in species ranging from chimpanzees and elephants to domestic and farm animals. This is an encouraging trend. I think we can go further, especially by borrowing a new concept from anthropology that Marshall Sahlins calls mutuality of being.

Mutuality of being refers to a special type of relationship, one that overlaps with friendship but has its own distinct qualities. To qualify as friends, two animals must engage in positive social interactions beyond the context of mating and reproduction. In her pioneering field study Sex and Friendship in Baboons (1985), Barbara Smuts used grooming and proximity to decide which male and female baboons were friends. More broadly, the anthropologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, define friendships as close, enduring social bonds, including those that form between males and between females.

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Genetics: The Rite Of Passage

Genetics: The Rite Of Passage

Rapid advances in genetics have been slow to produce practical applications. “Many thought sequencing the human genome would unlock the door and show us the genome’s machinery, with all the parts and controls conveniently marked. Instead, it showed us a genome that was mostly unmarked and ludicrously complicated—so complicated that even 13 years later, its workings remain mysterious”

The Snowden Leaks And The Public

The Snowden Leaks And The Public

Guardian editor discusses his publication of documents revealing US government spying methods. “What’s gradually being revealed is that the US and UK have been seeking to put entire populations under surveillance … Little wonder that the state sends its officials around to newspaper offices to try to keep the lid on all this stuff. The arguments are the ones you would expect them to use: you’ll have blood on your hands”

I Met A Serial Killer

I Met A Serial Killer

Wow. And then some. The writer, as a young Marine, is picked up by an older man who utterly charms him, gets him drunk, and tries to lure him into sex. It was “a magic afternoon where I had been swept away by my attraction to an interesting guy. But in the end, no harm.” Which was lucky, given that the seducer was America’s worst-ever serial killer, Randy Kraft, who tortured and murdered dozens of men, many of them young Marines

Is Glenn Greenwald The Future of News?

Is Glenn Greenwald The Future of News?

Conversation between former NYT editor Keller, and Greenwald, leaker-in-chief of the Snowden NSA papers, about whether journalism can be objective. Keller argues that “aggressive but impartial” reporting requires journalists to suppress their opinions and let the facts speak. Greenwald argues that facts are elusive; it’s misleading for journalists to conceal their opinions; and engagement produces better journalism (Metered paywall)

The Argument Machine

The Argument Machine

Suppose you are an evil genius constructing a device for plunging rational, well-meaning people into furious arguments. What would your Argument Machine look like? Probably it would encourage people to pepper one another with assertions in public. It would allow bystanders to repeat comments out of context: “Nothing creates a fight faster than in-group language overheard by the out-group” In fact: it would be Twitter

雙面中國

• 最新出刊／雙面中國
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监听门：坏事变好事？

监听门：坏事变好事？

FT专栏作家拉赫曼：监听事件对美国造成的短期损害十分严重，但这一事件也可能有一个长期的好处：奥巴马政府可能最终将不得不约束一下本国情报部门的触角范围

“窃听风暴”引发美高层内斗

“窃听风暴”引发美高层内斗 

白宫和国会正分头对美国海外情报收集活动展开评估。美国国内对国家安全局(NSA)的态度，正由维护转向攻击。

學者擔心天安門撞車案加劇民族矛盾

1. 學者擔心天安門撞車案加劇民族矛盾

北京——在一輛吉普車在天安門廣場附近撞倒幾十位行人，在中國最神聖的標誌前爆炸，並造成5人死亡後的一天，當局似乎正將目標鎖定在來自新疆的嫌疑者身上。新疆位於中國偏遠的西部，近來爆發過針對北京強硬政策的愈發暴力的抵抗事件。

雖然官方在首都各個重要路口、地鐵站和旅遊景點增派了安保人員，但政府對此次事件的性質緘口不言，很多中國人認為這是一次對國家的政治和象徵性心臟的蓄意襲擊

大學的價值不盡在排名

大學的價值不盡在排名

ARIEL KAMINER 06:55

如何評價一所大學的優劣？人們沒有共識。但這沒有妨礙大學排名之風越來越盛，衡量大學投入產出比的排名尤其繁多。教育界認為，排名的確提供了一種參考，但絕不是全部。

中文維基百科呈現不同版本的中國

中文維基百科呈現不同版本的中國

GRACE TSOI 17:15

中文維基百科是兩岸三地政治、文化觀點交鋒的戰場。六四、港人國籍、國共內戰都曾引起論戰。不過，本着維基中立、平等的原則，這種爭論日趨理性成熟，大家也更寬容。

後工業時代，讓機械人更像人類

後工業時代，讓機械人更像人類

JOHN MARKOFF 06:46

未來的機械人將是我們的保姆、嚮導和保安。它們會出現在我們的日常生活中，與我們合作互動，而不是簡單地代替人類執行危險任務。機械人的外形也會更像我們的樣子

余華：戲謔、謊言與中國的空氣污染

• 余華：戲謔、謊言與中國的空氣污染

  
  在中國，承認空氣污染不易，治理空氣污染更難。應對PM2.5，中國官員想出了很多避重就輕的法子，比如取締露天燒烤和戒煙。

Whither pragmatism?

by Dave Maier

Last month, a couple of commenters on my post on Dennett's plea for "respect for truth" asked what pragmatists I like, and for a general elaboration of my pragmatism. I had to think about the best way to respond, and this is what I have finally come up with. Sorry for the delay!

There's a famous article called something like "Thirteen Types of Pragmatism". This is a typically pragmatist attitude: forget universal definitions, just tell me what we've got. That's what we'll do here; but even so, we'll be keeping an eye on why we want to call these things "pragmatism" at all. After all, that same attitude tells to abandon "pragmatism" if it stops being useful, and I'm happy to call myself something else if it helps.

1) Pragmatism as practice over theory

We don't need to be exhaustive here, just to link some ideas together. A good place to start in characterizing pragmatism is the ordinary not-necessarily-philosophical idea of giving priority to practice itself over any theoretical understanding of that same practice. Pragmatists of this sort say: forget the operating manual, just do what experience tells you about what works. Engineers revel in the perceived virtue of this attitude: dirt under the fingernails and all that.

2) Pragmatism as science over metaphysics

But this is stacking the deck. Naturally even theorists recognize the priority in this sense of that which is represented over the necessarily merely derivative representation of same. If the manual says the engine will explode if you use such-and-such type of fuel, but experience shows otherwise, then the manual is wrong. A related but more philosophically consequential pragmatist attitude pits the empirical world of our experience against a purported "metaphysical" world of abstractions and essences.

There's only one world, of course; the question instead concerns the best method of investigating it. Theory is okay on pragmatist grounds if it is scientifically respectable, as after all Newton's laws of motion are as theoretical as you can get, and we're not giving those up. This is better than the previous thought, but it still stacks the deck. Here too metaphysicians recognize the importance of connecting what they say about the world with what we experience. Still, metaphysics isn't science, and can't be dismissed on those grounds alone, if at all.

3) Pragmatism as anti-Cartesianism

On the other hand, "metaphysics" remains a natural term of abuse for pragmatists, as is the idea of a world beyond experience. Historically, pragmatists have attacked that "metaphysical" idea most directly in its Cartesian manifestation, for example as implicated in that version of skepticism. Cartesians are best known for mind-body substance dualism, but they don't need that particular idea to motivate their skepticism. All they need is a more general conceptual dualism of subject and object.

Now this sort of pragmatism looks like the kind I like: the kind dedicated to rooting out the many pernicious manifestations of that Cartesian idea. Unfortunately, however, in combating each of these one by one (e.g. skepticism in particular), by my lights pragmatists have often failed to stay focused on the dualism itself. I actually think this was unavoidable, and I don't want to take any credit away from our honored ancestors. I just want to distinguish this sort of pragmatist "anti-Cartesianism" from later versions (like mine, below).

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SYMMETRY BREAKING, THE HIGGS BOSON & ABDUS SALAM

by Tasneem Zehra Husain
Over the past two years, the Higgs Boson has seeped into the popular consciousness, and with the announcement of this year's Nobel Prize, it is in the limelight once again. Yet, many people are still not quite sure what this particle is, and what, if anything, it has to do with Pakistan's only Laureate, Abdus Salam.
The 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics recognized a mechanism whereby the breaking of symmetry causes a field to pervade the vacuum. To get a sense of what that means, think of the vacuum as the blank canvas upon which our universe is painted, and the Higgs field as a color wash covering the canvas. Had the canvas been pure white, the 'true' colors of our painting would show up; instead, we experience colors after they have been tinted by the background - the Higgs field taints our perception. Just because the canvas is blank doesn't mean there's nothing on it!
Vast ideas have many sides, and often, a different metaphor is needed to explain each facet. One catch phrase regarding the Higgs Boson is that it explains the origin of mass. To understand the connection, consider how we experience mass. When asked to judge how heavy something is, an instinctive reaction is to try pushing the object in question. Intuition tells us that if the same force is exerted on two objects, the heavier one moves slower than the lighter. If two balls, pushed with equal force across a flat surface move with the same speed, we conclude their masses are equal.
But what if the balls carry electric charge, and we perform this experiment in the background of a constant electric field? We might find one ball moves slower than the other, and mistakenly conclude that it is heavier, whereas in truth the masses of both are the same. The discrepancy arises because first ball is pushed in a direction where its motion is resisted by the field, whereas the second ball is pushed in an unaffected direction, and so, proceeds at its natural speed.
In a symmetric universe no direction would be singled out, and regardless of its orientation, very ball would whizz around equally fast. If, however, we introduce a field that violates symmetry, we can pick out a 'special' direction, along which balls will move slower, and hence, appear more massive.
Just as an electric field can be oriented along any axis, the Higgs field too, is free to choose a direction. An illustrative example is that of a marble in a Mexican hat. Poised on the hump of the sombrero, the marble is surrounded with infinite possibilities, each as good as the next, but its position is precarious and almost impossible to maintain. Sooner or later, it will roll down into the circular rim, spontaneously breaking the symmetry. The direction in which the marble falls is completely random; the point on the rim where it lands is not distinguished in any way, until by virtue of the marble landing, it becomes the point of reference for everything that happens from then on.
Mass, which we had thought of as an intrinsic attribute, turns out to be a perceived quantity, a manifestation of the interaction between an object and the background. Particles which appear identical in the absence of a field can take on a variety of appearances in its presence.

Continue reading "SYMMETRY BREAKING, THE HIGGS BOSON & ABDUS SALAM"

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What Lies Beneath New York

What Lies Beneath New York

Adventures in the pipes and passages below New York, “an underworld of caverns, squatters, and unmarked doors”, with three men who spend a lot of time there. Joseph Leader is chief of New York’s subway operations. Steve Duncan is an amateur explorer of the city’s sewer system — which have very few rates, but lots of eels. Michael Horodniceanu runs the MTA’s construction-management company, campaigning to get new tunnels built

The Death Of JFK: What More Do We Know?

The Death Of JFK: What More Do We Know?

Fifty years on, two conclusions endure. First, US security services gathered formidable evidence for the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. Second, those same security services were “up to their armpits” in sinister behaviour, including the killing of other world leaders. “The division of American life into two orders — an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime — collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir”

香港觀察／爭媒體自由、反都更─港人的十月憤怒

香港觀察／爭媒體自由、反都更─港人的十月憤怒

香港人的不耐煩，體現在十月此起彼落的群眾運動裡，爭言論自由、爭居住權利，香港人的焦慮對港府、也對北京。詳全文

經濟學家認為通脹有利於美國經濟

• 經濟學家認為通脹有利於美國經濟

  BINYAMIN APPELBAUM 19:24

  
  美國的年化通脹率8月份僅為1.2%，一些經濟學家希望出現更高的通脹，以刺激消費。他們批評美聯儲在通脹政策上太保守。

桑卡蘭：印度也有好男人

• 桑卡蘭：印度也有好男人

  
  印度社會強姦案頻發，但印度也有優秀男性，在家族和社區中，他們是善良、顧家的好人。一旦脫離鄉土與家庭，孤獨與絕望會誘發極端行為。

羅森堡：教室里的革命

羅森堡：教室里的革命

「精熟翻轉教學」的理念取消了固定的學習時長和統一教學大綱。學生的能力決定進度的快慢，教師與學生的一對一互動代替了集體授課。每個人根據自身條件完成學業

中國藝術品市場亂象 贗品以假亂真，拍後拒付現象嚴重

中國藝術品市場亂象

贗品以假亂真，拍後拒付現象嚴重

DAVID BARBOZA, GRAHAM BOWLEY,AMANDA COX 08:13

中國藝術品拍賣市場近年來異常紅火，好古的雅趣和送禮文化催生出天價拍品。但這也是一個混亂的市場，贗品充斥、以假亂真，拍後拒付問題頻出。高端交易中，大約一半因買家拒付無法成交。

• 拍賣公司香港繁盛，折射藝術市場

Citizen Marx

Sam Stark in The Nation:

A New York Times obituary for Karl Marx used verbs like these—born, began, edited (theRheinische Zeitung), suppressed, fled, arrested, sent (across the frontier!), found (refuge!), occurred (revolution!), hastened, revived, remained, expelled, proceeded, supported (himself!), labored (hard!), conceived (the International!)—to show that he had led a life “full of adventure, like all political conspirators.” The paper was impressed by Marx’s productivity as a journalist—Capital hadn’t yet been translated—but it identified him first and foremost as “the ostensible leader of the famous International Society in Europe.” This International Society, it explains, was “originally intended to work for the benefit of working men in general, partially on the trade-union system,” but then “became a purely political organization, which has since grown to formidable dimensions throughout Europe.” What happens when working men meddle in politics? “It is believed by many that the Commune in France was really inspired by the International Society, though the charge has been strenuously denied.” 

Although it was erroneously published in 1871, twelve years before Marx died, this obituary already shows the paranoid circumlocution that is still used to implicate him in historical events without clearly defining his role. By the same logic that holds Marx responsible for several twentieth-century revolutions, he appears here as the “ostensible” leader of a shadowy group that meant well but went wrong and inspired some catastrophe. Each step in this argument is speculative and muddled, beginning with the first. Marx was officially a coordinating secretary to the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–1876), a loose-knit network of many different kinds of groups that mostly worked together on labor issues like the organization of strikes and the regulation of the working day. Marx himself staunchly opposed revolutionary conspiracies: “There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir,” he is reported to have told a curious interviewer for the New York World, “except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that our Association is a public one, and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them.”

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Wu Chen'en's "Journey to the West"

Julia Lovell  in the LA Review of Books:

Journey to the West (c. 1580) is one of the masterworks of classical Chinese writing. It recounts a Tang Dynasty monk’s quest for Buddhist scriptures in the 7th century AD, accompanied by an omni-talented, kung fu-practicing Monkey King called Wukong (one of the most memorable reprobates of world literature); a rice-loving pig-spirit able to fly with its ears; and a depressive man-eating monster from a sand dune. It is a cornerstone text of Eastern fiction: its stature in Asian literary culture may be compared with that of The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote in European letters.

The novel commences with a spirited prologue — seven chapters long — recounting the Monkey King’s many attempts to achieve immortal sagehood, in the course of which he acquires knowledge and weapons that will serve him well through the book as a whole: the ability to perform “cloud somersaults” that carry him 30,000 miles in one leap, a gold-hooped staff (weighing almost 20,000 pounds) that can shrink to the size of a needle. He becomes a master of subterfuge by learning to transform himself into 72 different varieties of creature (though his human disguises lack perfect authenticity due to his inability to lose his tail). He studies demon-freezing spells and how to turn each of the 84,000 hairs on his body into other animals (including clones of himself) or objects. Yet time and again he is brought low by his irrepressible love of mischief. Finally, after taking up a bureaucratic sinecure in the heavenly government of the Jade Emperor, he commits the unforgivable crime of gorging himself on the peaches, wine, and elixirs of immortality.

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The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think

James Somers in The Atlantic:

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.” Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction—like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant—in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think. Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself. Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves—and we’ll have made intelligent machines.

The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves? Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

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Coffee Or Smoothies: Which Is Better For You?

Coffee Or Smoothies: Which Is Better For You?

Two to five cups of coffee a day help you live longer, think more clearly, feel happier. Smoothies are sugary drinks that make you fat and increase your chances of getting some kinds of cancer. So it’s coffee by a mile. If you want fruit, go for fruit, not smoothies. The reason that coffee got a bad reputation in the first place was that coffee-drinkers tended to have other bad habits, and the causation got confused

如何有尊嚴地離開這個世界

如何有尊嚴地離開這個世界

ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

作為全球生命倫理學研究的領軍人物，佩吉·巴汀一直在捍衛着人們的死亡權。當她的丈夫遭遇車禍導致四肢全部癱瘓、生命危在旦夕時，她的理論也面臨一場嚴峻的考驗。

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  一個醫生面對的生死

基因的社会生活

吴大地

近几年来，科学家发现，人的基因不是一个蓝图。一天又一天，一周又一周，人们的基因不断的和他们的环境，他们的邻居、家人以及他们自己的心态对话。这些互动的效果进入他们的细胞控制室，从而影响他们的习性、行为、生理与健康。

大卫·多布斯（David Dobbs ）近来在 Pacific Standard发表了一篇精彩的文章《基因的社会生活》（ The Social Life  of Genes）介绍了基因学在这方面的新发展。

文章中，大卫首先提到是一个有趣的试验。科学研究员捕抓了一千只新生的小蜜蜂，欧洲品种与非洲品种各五百只。然后对调它们的居所：把生性凶猛的非洲小杀人蜂放进欧洲蜂的蜂窝里，同时，把习性温和的欧洲农场蜂放进非洲野蜂的蜂窝里。追踪研究的结果发现，这些蜜蜂婴儿的性格都随着它们的成长环境改变了：温和的变凶暴，凶暴的变温和。

进一步的研究显示，生活环境似乎是通过改变小蜜蜂的基因运作而改变其行为习性的。

这些欧洲蜂与非洲蜂的基因非常接近，但不完全相同。一些研究员相信，它们的习性与行为，受到基因表达（ gene expression）的影响。近年来，科学家们已经知道，基因可以改变它们的活跃程度，有如受到调光开关控制。我们身体内大多数的细胞都含有全套的22000个基因。但是，在任何给定的时间，任何一个给定的细胞，只有小部分的基因是活跃的。这些活跃的部分，发送影响细胞活性的化学信息。这个变量的基因活性称为基因表达，我们的身体以这种方式做大部分工作。

我们身体内的基本生物事件，例如在子宫内生长展组织、进入青春期，或停止生长，都是受这些轮流启动的调光器开关所控制的。其他时候，基因的活动会应对人体环境的变化。例如，某些基因开关会被启动以对抗感染，或治愈你的伤口，或横冲直撞给你带来癌，或让你发烧，燃烧你的大脑。基因的表达的变化可以让你瘦，发胖，让你和你的同卵双胞胎的样子大不相同。到头来，基因不会决定你是谁。关键在基因的表达。而基因表达的变化，取决于你的生活方式。

科学家比较了上述两组小蜜蜂的基因表达图谱（Gene expression profile），发现小蜜蜂基因表达的模式日渐与其栖居的社群接近

。

更令科学家惊讶的是，生物个体在其社群中的社会地位，也会影响其基因的运作。

非洲伯氏妊丽鱼（Astatotilapia burtoni）社群中的头号雄鱼，不但吃的最多，领土最广，同时享有最大的交配权。其外表也与众不同，身上条纹色彩特别鲜艳，体积也比其他的雄鱼大。有趣的是，当研究员把鱼群中的老大捞走之后，第二号雄鱼的体积会在短短的几个小时内，增长20%。身上也开始出现鲜艳的条纹，俨然老大。

除了上面谈到的社群环境与社会地位之外，研究员还发现个人的感觉情绪，以及思想心态都会影响到基因的表达。

压力会影响健康，是众所周知的。科学研究证实，交游广阔的人，比较不容易伤风感冒。同时，他们也发现，压力与孤独感，会造成免疫系统失衡。

免疫系统失衡是个影响健康的大问题。通常情况下，一个健康的免疫系统的操作有如一只被拴住的攻击犬。当发现病原体时，它就会起而攻击，以发炎方式以及其他反应摧毁入侵者。同时也会及时激活抗炎反应，在消灭病原体之后终止发炎。那些备受精神压力心境孤独的人，其免疫系统却像一只没有被拴住的狗。即使他们没有生病，那只狗却到处乱咬。这些健康人体内约78个推动炎症的基因，比平时更忙，好像在抵抗感染。同时，131个通常合力控制发炎的基因却怠工，鲜有动作。此外，减退活动的基因还包括了关键的抗病毒基因。

研究员不断的在承受各种压力的人的身上，发现类似的基因表达模式。不过，令他们感到意外的是，比起各种精神或生理压力，孤独感最具破坏力。

一个对受虐儿童的研究显示，一个被虐待的儿童，如果得到适当的“社会支持”（ social support）, 知道有人在关心他支持他，这种密切的社会联系，可以减少约80%左右的健康风险。另一个研究则显示，犯哮喘病的儿童，如果内心觉得孤苦无告而对周围的环境常怀恐惧，则会导致其免疫系统失衡，使发病几率大幅度增高。

以往，精神学界的共识是，不幸的境遇、恶劣的经验、极端压力，虐待以及暴力是导致疾病的毒素。不过，近年来对基因的研究却显示，最毒的、最有危害性的，是社会隔离所带来的孤独感。加州研究员，史蒂文科尔（Steve Cole）说“说到杀伤力，与孤独感比较，其他各种压力都不能望其项背，是没得比的。”

大卫·多布斯这份报告，至少有两个重要的启示。

第一，促使我们对人类 默认状态(Humanity’s default state)的重新思考。

从人类的进化史看，人类是群居动物。自始以来人类都生活在社群内，在大家互相扶持下，共同生存发展起来的。孤独无靠往往意味死亡。不过，自启蒙运动以来，在个人主义成了主流的西方社会，人们往往把“社会支持”设想成是一种附加的，额外的东西。这种观点假定，人类的默认状态是孤独。然而，事实并非如此。我们的默认状态是连接（connection）, 向来如此。

英国的政治哲学家, 托马斯·霍布斯（Thomas Hobbes）说：“没有文明的人类生活是孤独，贫穷，肮脏，野蛮和短促的。”他错了，原始人的生活可能是贫穷，肮脏，野蛮和短促的。但很少是孤独的。

第二个启示是，基因不是我们的宿命。我们是可以通过改善我们的社会环境、人际关系以及个人心态来改变我们的命运的。

联合早报 言论 2013年10月26日

How science goes wrong

From The Economist:

A simple idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.

More here.
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