Richard C. Lewontin reviews Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture in the NYRB:

In trying to analyze the natural world, scientists are seldom aware of the degree to which their ideas are influenced both by their way of perceiving the everyday world and by the constraints that our cognitive development puts on our formulations. At every moment of perception of the world around us, we isolate objects as discrete entities with clear boundaries while we relegate the rest to a background in which the objects exist.

That tendency, as Evelyn Fox Keller’s new book suggests, is one of the most powerful influences on our scientific understanding. As we change our intent, also we identify anew what is object and what is background. When I glance out the window as I write these lines I notice my neighbor’s car, its size, its shape, its color, and I note that it is parked in a snow bank. My interest then changes to the results of the recent storm and it is the snow that becomes my object of attention with the car relegated to the background of shapes embedded in the snow. What is an object as opposed to background is a mental construct and requires the identification of clear boundaries. As one of my children’s favorite songs reminded them:

You gotta have skin.
All you really need is skin.
Skin’s the thing that if you’ve got it outside,
It helps keep your insides in.

Organisms have skin, but their total environments do not. It is by no means clear how to delineate the effective environment of an organism.

One of the complications is that the effective environment is defined by the life activities of the organism itself. “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,” as we are reminded by yet another popular lyric. Thus, as organisms evolve, their environments necessarily evolve with them. Although classic Darwinism is framed by referring to organisms adapting to environments, the actual process of evolution involves the creation of new “ecological niches” as new life forms come into existence. Part of the ecological niche of an earthworm is the tunnel excavated by the worm and part of the ecological niche of a tree is the assemblage of fungi associated with the tree’s root system that provide it with nutrients.

The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the “struggle for existence” as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

David Hume turns 300 on May 7. It is fitting, I suppose, that a man so resolutely mortal should be enjoying such immortality. Most of Hume's contemporaries are long forgotten. Hume, somehow, endures. His old pal Adam Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations), relates that in Hume's dying days he told his friends, “I have done every thing of consequence which I ever meant to do, and I could at no time expect to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in which I am likely to leave them: I therefore have all reason to die contented.”

It was that ancient and ugly Greek, Socrates, who first made the claim that philosophy is a preparation for death. He said it just before taking his hemlock, so we can assume that he was being serious. What Socrates meant, more or less, was that philosophy is an attempt to come to terms with life. We are born, through no particular fault of our own, and so we must deal with that ambivalent gift. Soon we discover that although we have been given life, we are fated, alas, to die. This all happens rather quickly: the being born, the growing old, the dying. The best thing, Socrates suggests, would be to embrace the brevity of our life, as we hurtle inexorably toward death, with a dose of equanimity. Since we are always engaged in the act of dying, thought Socrates, we might as well try to do it well.

David Hume was — at least on the matter of death and dying — a Socratic man. Even in his most canonical works, A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume was largely preoccupied with establishing limits. The way Hume saw it, our brief lives, crowned by unavoidable death, are unlikely to put us in touch with any grand absolutes. On the other hand, the human mind is an indubitably powerful tool and its powers of reasoning have penetrated many an enigma. Hume was as amazed by human knowledge as the next guy. He simply wanted us to be honest about its failings and limitations.

More here.

Paul R. Pillar in The National Interest:

The continued demand in Middle Eastern streets for greater political rights is leading to ever more rhetorical scrambling by Israel, and by those in this country eager to come to Israel’s ostensible defense (but who really are defending a certain set of Israeli policies). The backdrop to the scrambling is, as I have described before, a threefold Israeli worry about the regional political upheaval. First, increased popular sovereignty in Arab states gives heightened attention to the lack of popular sovereignty for Palestinian Arabs living under Israeli occupation. Second, continued (and even intensified) criticism of Israel from Arab states that are more responsive than before to popular sentiment belies the Israeli contention that animosity toward Israel is chiefly a device used by authoritarian rulers to distract attention from their own shortcomings. Third, the emergence of new Arab democracies in the Middle East will remove the single biggest rationale—that Israel is the only democracy in the region—for the extraordinary special relationship that Israel enjoys with the United States.

The current rhetoric on behalf of Israel repeats most of the themes that have been heard for years—including the themes about criticism of Israel being a creature of Arab authoritarianism and about how the United States must embrace the only democratic ally it has in the Middle East. But there is a sense of greater urgency in the rhetoric. The articulate Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, recently contributed an argument as an article titled “The Ultimate Ally.” It was a game effort to do part of what ambassadors are supposed to do. But to understand what Oren was talking about, see Stephen Walt’s powerfully argued and thoroughly supported demolition of Oren’s piece.

More here.

My friend Hadi Ghaemi sent me this with a note which said, “An account of real events just two years ago in Guatemala, that is so surreal and full of twists and turns, I don't think the minds of Borges, Garcia Marquez, Agatha Christie, with a dash of Salvador Dali, combined, could even conceive and produce such a bizarre and complex story.” Decide for yourself.

David Grann in The New Yorker:

Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.

Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end. Rosenberg, who had four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. He was lithe and handsome, though his shiny black hair had fallen out on top, leaving an immaculate ring on the sides. Words were his way of ordering the jostle of life. He spoke in eloquent bursts, using his voice like an instrument, his hands and eyebrows rising and falling to accentuate each note. (It didn’t matter if he was advocating the virtues of the Guatemalan constitution or of his favorite band, Santana.) Ferociously intelligent, he had earned master’s degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University.

More here.

Alec Barrett in the Harvard Political Review:

In the summer of 2010, USA Today’s Greg Toppo asked, “Is 2010 the year of the education documentary?” The article seized on a striking trend: the sudden emergence of films examining the problem of public education in the United States. Three of these, 2010’s highly acclaimed Waiting for “Superman,” the lesser-known 2009 film The Cartel, and the soon-to-be-released TEACHED come from different political perspectives and focus on different aspects of educational reform. They even use some of the same footage, including a rather jarring clip of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg saying, “A parent says to me, ‘Oh, my kid goes to a great school,’ and I said, “Lady, your kid can’t read or add two and two. What do you mean it’s a good school?’” Yet the fact that three such different filmmakers have created films around the theme not only demonstrates Hollywood’s interest in educational films like these but also a widespread, national interest in seeing them…

…TEACHED creator Kelly Amis brings her experience as a teacher to her film. In an email to the HPR, she said, “We let teachers talk…instead of mostly talking about them.” Amis is the least political of the three filmmakers and seeks to show as much as tell her viewers. Before the full documentary was released, she put out a series of short films online, which will target a wider audience through digital media. The first, “Path to Prison,” features a former convict who taught himself to read at age 17 after being pushed through the Los Angeles school system without so. In five minutes of one man’s experience, we hear about inept teachers, ineffective evaluations, and the socioeconomic consequences of a broken system. Amis’s project “will not necessarily follow the traditional film trajectory,” but the film strives to be both a rallying cry to galvanize those who would fight for change and a source of hope for those who have lost faith in the system.

More here. Kelly Amis is, of course, not only the filmmaker behind TEACHED but also a 3QD writer. She is trying to raise funds to finish the movie with a Kickstarter campaign. Please do consider donating a few dollars to this important effort: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teached/teached.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Biographer Deborah Baker was “on the prowl” in the New York Public Library – not looking for anything in particular. But while “idly clicking” through library files, she glimpsed the name “Maryam Jameelah” – apparently a well-known figure in the Muslim world. Curious, Baker put in a request for the file. Little did Baker know the kind of journey she was about to embark upon – one that would culminate in the profoundly disorienting biography that she calls The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism. Maryam Jameelah, it turns out, was once Margaret Marcus, born in 1934 to a non-observant Jewish family living in a pleasant New York suburb. Her parents (who liked cruises and card games) and her sister, Betty (destined to become a New Jersey housewife), aspired simply to the comforts of postwar middle-class American life. Margaret, however, from her very youth, seemed driven by deeper passions. Rejected by her girlfriends as a teenager, Margaret turned her considerable intellect and enthusiasm in an unlikely direction: She developed a fascination with Arab life. As a young woman, Margaret renounced not only Judaism, but the whole of Western civilization. She finally converted to Islam, declaring that she would devote her life to the struggle against the “materialistic philosophic-secularism” of the West.

A voracious reader, Margaret dived deep into Muslim texts and entered into correspondence with any Islamists willing to answer her letters. One of these turned out to be Mawlana Mawdudi, an influential Pakistani journalist and theologian who was also founder of the Islamic revivalist party Jamaat-e-Islami. Drawn to the brilliant young convert who revealed herself to him through her letters, Mawdudi eventually offered to liberate Margaret from the West by bringing her to Pakistan so she could live a proper Muslim life with his wife and daughters while he found her a pious Muslim husband.

More here.

From The Smithsonian:

Parenting styles have been and always will be a subject of hot debate. But rather than judge who among our own kind is the fittest mother, we turn our gaze to the entire animal kingdom and ask, what animal is the best mother?

Props could certainly go to elephant mothers who endure staggering 22-month pregnancies. Also, polar bears. A female polar bear has to double her weight or else her body might absorb the fetus. (Both animals made Animal Planet’s list of “Top 10 Animal Moms.”) Then there are lions, who make especially benevolent mothers. In fact, each lactating mother in a pride will allow any offspring, including other females’ cubs, to nurse from her. With so many factors to weigh, I took the question to Craig Saffoe, a biologist and curator of the Great Cats and Bears units at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. “I think if you are looking at who are the best moms, you’d have to think about who protects their young, who ensures that their young survive to independence,” says Saffoe. “And then there is also just how they deal with the infants. Infants are so fragile, and not every animal is great with that.”

More here.

Junot Diaz in the Boston Review:

Apocalypse comes to us from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Now, as James Berger reminds us in After the End, apocalypse has three meanings. First, it is the actual imagined end of the world, whether in Revelations or in Hollywood blockbusters. Second, it comprises the catastrophes, personal or historical, that are said to resemble that imagined final ending—the Chernobyl meltdown or the Holocaust or the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed thousands and critically damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Finally, it is a disruptive event that provokes revelation. The apocalyptic event, Berger explains, in order to be truly apocalyptic, must in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate “the true nature of what has been brought to end.” It must be revelatory.

“The apocalypse, then,” per Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.” Apocalypses of the first, second, and third kinds. The Haiti earthquake was certainly an apocalypse of the second kind, and to those who perished it may even have been an apocalypse of the first kind, but what interests me here is how the Haiti earthquake was also an apocalypse of the third kind, a revelation. This in brief is my intent: to peer into the ruins of Haiti in an attempt to describe what for me the earthquake revealed—about Haiti, our world, and even our future.

After all, if these types of apocalyptic catastrophes have any value it is that in the process of causing things to fall apart they also give us a chance to see the aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denials.

More here.

Doug Gross (aptly?) at CNN:

We admit to being sort of creeped out by this: A Japanese lab has created a device that may let let you “French kiss” someone over the Internet.

And by “kiss,” we mean waggle your tongue on a plastic straw, thereby making another plastic straw waggle remotely on someone else's tongue.

Hot, huh?

Well, the folks at Tokyo's Kajimoto Laboratory say it's just the beginning of what could become a full-on person-to-person experience over the Internet.

The lab, part of The University of Electro-Communications, posted a video in which a researcher demonstrates the “Kiss Transmission Device.” It's a motorized box that looks a little like a police Breathalyzer.

In the video, Nobuhiro Takahashi, a graduate student and researcher at the university, manipulates the plastic tube on one device with his tongue. A program stores the movements on a computer and then transmits them to another device, causing its tube to move — presumably in someone else's mouth.

More here.

Suzanne Ruta in Berfrois:

Le Quotidien d’Oran is one of Algeria’s most widely read French language dailies. People say they buy it just to read Kamel Daoud’s page three chronique or column, Raina raikoum, (my opinion, your opinion). In a country where the lone TV station is state controlled and investigative reporting is just about impossible, Daoud has fought for the right to offer a daily “dose of subversion.” He is the paper’s editor and a gifted novelist as well. (O Pharaon, 2005, a portrait of a small town war lord, reads like Garcia Marquez minus the butterflies.) But, he was once a street reporter, covering the surreal atrocities of Algeria’s recent civil war. The chroniques are savvy and down to earth but also capable of great leaps of faith or despair, depending on the day.

After ten years of civil war and another ten of political lockdown, Algerians have not taken the same risks as their amazing neighbors in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. Daoud reveals what Algeria – once a beacon to oppressed nations – has these days instead of revolutionary stirrings; the harraga – the many thousands of young men who risk their lives each year, trying to reach Europe in flimsy boats, and an endless succession of ad hoc riots. A youth riot in early January left several dead and the gerontocratic regime nervous, but when in the weeks following, a new coalition of human rights activists and labor leaders, tried to start a Tunisian style uprising at home. They failed, because the oil rich Algerian regime can throw money at its problems and because timid political demonstrations have been blocked by massive deployments of police and hired thugs. At the first pro-democracy march on February 12^th, 2011, Daoud was dragged through the street in Oran and crudely insulted by the police. That became the subject of his next pithy column…

More here.

For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world, writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian, and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to the front line. In government archives, I’ve looked at laconic reports by officers who survived battles in which most of their troops died; I’ve listened to recordings of veterans and talked to a man whose labor-activist grandfather was court-martialed because he wrote a letter to the Daily Mail complaining that every British officer was assigned a private servant. In a heartbreakingly beautiful tree-shaded cemetery full of British soldiers mowed down with their commanding officer (as he had predicted they would be) by a single German machine gun on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, I found a comment in the visitors’ book: “Never Again.” I can’t help but wonder: Where are the public places for mourning the mounting toll of today’s wars? Where is that feeling of never again?

more from Adam Hochschild at Guernica here.

This quote went viral on the internet, following the killing of Osama Bin Laden: ‎”I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” The citation was attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., but a number of people came forward to debunk it. A Salon article attributed the quote to famous magician Penn Jillette. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic wrote, “Out of Osama’s Death, a Fake Quotation is Born.” But when I (silly me) posted the quotation on my Facebook page and heard about kerfuffle, I found someone who indeed attributed the quote to MLK’s 1963 Strength to Love.

more from Cynthia Haven at Bookhaven here.

Holbrook argues that freedom is the one item we could not subtract from Shakespeare’s plays “without their, in effect, ceasing to be his”. Freedom is both a personal and a political concept and Holbrook explores them jointly: Shakespeare is aware that personal freedom can often conflict with ethics and morality and social norms. Cordelia’s insistence on speaking in her own voice rather than another’s is both ethically principled and ethically disastrous; the autonomy of villains such as Aaron conflicts with society but so too does that of public rulers like Antony and Cleopatra. Such tensions between self and society lead to larger questions: if it is right for Hermia to disobey her father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is it also right for a people to rebel against a king? Holbrook extends these themes to an analysis of Victorian and Modernist Shakespeare criticism. F. J. Furnivall’s approach to Shakespeare “reflects the liberal’s wish to break with a coercive morality”; Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and others see Shakespeare “as standing for life and against a life-crushing morality”. T. S. Eliot objected to Shakespeare because he was morally problematic but Holbrook argues that fidelity to self-realization can be ethical; for Shakespeare (as for Montaigne, who gets much attention here), cultivating the self is more important than capitulating to expectation. When Shakespeare presents vice as a choice it becomes a positive marker of self-determination. Richard of Gloucester determines to be a villain, Aaron embraces his blackness, Antony and Cleopatra choose passion rather than just giving in to it.

more from Laurie Maguire at the TLS here.

From The Boston Globe:

From The Telegraph:

One of the many virtues of Lewis Wolpert’s excellent investigation of “the surprising nature of getting old” is that he does not treat the elderly as an undifferentiated blob, distinguished only by different degrees of dependency, deafness, cantankerousness, technological incompetence and resistance to novelty. Variety, rather than uniformity, is to be expected since we bring to our later years a lifetime of experiences. Increasing age is typically marked by decline in physiological function, a growing burden of disease and a rising probability of dying, but many factors determine our physical nick and attitudes to life.

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. It has become the almost reflexive response of believers when faced with an argument for a godless world. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. In recent years, the riposte of many to this challenge has been to argue that moral codes are not revealed by God but instantiated in nature, and in particular in the brain. Ethics is not a theological matter but a scientific one. Science is not simply a means of making sense of facts about the world, but also about values, because values are in essence facts in another form. Few people have expressed this argument more forcefully than the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Over the past few years, through books such as The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris has gained a considerable reputation as a no-holds-barred critic of religion, in particular of Islam, and as an acerbic champion of science. In his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, he sets out to demolish the traditional philosophical distinction between is and ought, between the way the world is and the way that it should be, a distinction we most associate with David Hume. What Hume failed to understand, Harris argues, is that science can bridge the gap between ought and is, by turning moral claims into empirical facts.

more from Kenan Malik at Eurozine here.

I came to San Rafael to look for Baird’s tapir, Central America’s largest mammal, weighing in at over 500 pounds, and one of the most endangered animals in the Neotropics. The tapir suffers somewhat from illegal—and increasingly efficient—hunting, but its greatest struggle is against the loss and fragmentation of its habitat due to commercial and private logging and the expansion of agriculture and pasture. The coffee industry is one of the most grievous offenders. It is easy to see how habitat loss can harm a species, but fragmentation—without any loss, per se—can be just as bad. Fragmentation creates isolation, and isolated populations can experience rapid evolutionary change, normally to their detriment. Decreased genetic diversity leaves such groups susceptible to debilitating disorders that would be less likely, and less damaging, in free-ranging populations. With my brother-cum-field-assistant and two guides—the first, concerned by abundant jaguars in the area, insisted that we pick up a second—I set out from the village to find tapir. Or, not exactly tapir, but evidence of them: their feces. In order to learn about the genetic health of a population—levels of inbreeding, say—one needs DNA samples. Each bolus scrapes off a few intestinal cells as it passes through the colon, and, there we are, enterprising scientists, to collect them. We followed a track, cut only that week, deep into the jungle, as far as an enormous cedar tree that the villagers had just felled. Along the way we passed a pit viper impaled on a stake in the middle of the path. From the end of the path we headed into virgin territory, following a maze of streams. Here we made camp.

more from Niall McCann at Boston Review here.