How A Quiet Revolution in Shiism Could Resolve the Crisis in Iran

Mohamad Bazzi in Foreign Affairs:

ScreenHunter_02 Jun. 24 10.00 For many Shiite Muslims, whose religion was born of rebellion, last year's popular uprising in Iran was just the latest in a centuries-long struggle against injustice and tyranny. Now, as the clerical regime consolidates its grip on power a year after the tainted reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran remains torn by what seems to be a hopeless conflict between Islam and democracy. But the 2009 unrest and violent crackdown in Iran were actually battles in a larger war that has been raging for centuries within Shiism — a war over who should rule the faithful, and how. There is a more moderate, democratic vision of Shiism — one that has been stifled ever since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution — that could ultimately resolve the current conflict.

Shiite clerics have long debated their role in politics. The “quietist” school — rooted in the sect's tradition of seeking to avoid confrontation with powerful rulers — argues against direct engagement in political matters. The more activist school emphasizes the martyrdom of Shiism's founding figure, Imam Hussein, who advocated rebellion and confrontation. But even within the activist school, there is a debate over the extent of clerical power.

More here.

We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research

Photo_5802_landscape_largeMark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Everybody agrees that scientific research is indispensable to the nation's health, prosperity, and security. In the many discussions of the value of research, however, one rarely hears any mention of how much publication of the results is best. Indeed, for all the regrets one hears in these hard times of research suffering from financing problems, we shouldn't forget the fact that the last few decades have seen astounding growth in the sheer output of research findings and conclusions. Just consider the raw increase in the number of journals. Using Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of “refereed academic/scholarly” publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main cause: the growth in the number of researchers.

Many people regard this upsurge as a sign of health. They emphasize the remarkable discoveries and breakthroughs of scientific research over the years; they note that in the Times Higher Education's ranking of research universities around the world, campuses in the United States fill six of the top 10 spots. More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise.

If only that were true.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further.

Composed in Delirious Time

Schumann Der Zeit interviews the Swiss oboist, composer and conductor Heinz Holliger on Schumann's labyrinthine imagination, in Sign and Sight:

Die Zeit: Herr Holliger, you reference Robert Schumann in all your compositions. You conduct Schumann and you have devoted huge amount of your time to his life and his work. You don't seem to be able to tear yourself away from this composer.

Heinz Holliger: I readily admit that it is a little obsessive.

How did your passion for Schumann begin?

I was 14 or 15 years old, when I heard the Violin Sonata No. 2 and the Trio in G Minor at a concert in Berlin. These are considered difficult late works which turn most people off Schumann. It was just the opposite for me. It was like being set on fire.

And the flame has never gone out?

On the contrary. It burnss more intensely as I get older.

What is it that keeps it burning?

You never reach a dead end with Schumann and his analytical observations. New doors are always opening up. One door opens onto the next and there is another one behind that, and another and another. In his work, speculative thinking collides head on with a vast, labyrinthine imagination. Schumann was an extremely erudite man. He translated Sophocles at 17. He had considerable literary talents and he was probably one the greatest writers among the composers, up there with Berlioz and Debussy. This makes him an encyclopaedic character. A cosmic figure without limits. The same applies to his music. Although Beethoven was a great role model for him, he never wanted to realise linear trains of thought in his compositions. He was not interested in going from A to B. He starts with a primal cell of a motif, he sets spiralling movements in motion, which exponentiate to create vast edifices. I admire his associative thinking process, his ability to draw out ever new circles of speculation. Schumann's music is all about dislocation. The bar line is a coffin for him. He almost always shifts the emphasis of the weightier notes. He syncopates the primary accents or overlays various layers of time. What emerges is a sort of delirious time. You no longer feel the passing of time.

Post What?

Image Dushko Petrovich's fun talk delivered at The Armory Show’s Open Forum series on March 6th, 2010, in n+1:

Post-minimalist

Decades ago, Richard Serra borrowed an expensive Brancusi book from an artist I know. He kept it too long, ignoring several requests to return it. When he finally brought it back, almost a year later, he casually mentioned he “got forty ideas” off the Romanian.

Post-Brooklynist

A friend had gotten fed up with the annual rent increases. He decided to tell his landlord off and move further into Bushwick. It was really satisfying. He hired an agent and they eventually found an acceptable place: about the same rent, three stops further out. When he went in to sign the lease, he encountered the same landlord behind a different desk.

Post-racist

Gagosian has hired a lot of black security guards.

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman reviews Hitchens' Hitch-22 in the LRB and says something very insightful:

Peter and Christopher were brought together on a platform in 2008 to debate the latter’s book against God (God Is Not Great), and discovered that neither of them had the stomach for the vituperation and mutual hostility their audience had been anticipating. A few days earlier, Christopher had cooked Peter supper in Washington, ‘a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it … If he is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage of his life, then what else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just makes him a little sad. What he is sad about is Christopher’s inability to see that his militant atheism is just an extension of his earlier Trotskyism. Christopher, Peter thinks, is still hankering for a world in which evil is vanquished and all the mistakes of the past can be eradicated. What he can’t see is that this wishful thinking is precisely the kind of self-delusion that he takes to be characteristic of religion. That’s because it is a kind of religion. In his yearning for certainty, Christopher is merely replicating the intolerance and taste for indoctrination that he professes to despise among the priesthood.

This idea that the new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The blustering, obscene, insatiable, limitlessly restless author of Hitch-22 doesn’t come across as much of a priest manqué, not even a whisky priest. What he most resembles, to an almost uncanny degree, is a particular kind of political romantic, as described by Carl Schmitt in his 1919 book Political Romanticism. Schmitt was ostensibly writing about German romanticism at the turn of the 19th century (the intellectual movement that flourished between Rousseau and Hegel) but his real targets were the revolutionary romantics of his own time, including two of Hitchens’s Trotskyite heroes, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things. As a result, political romantics often lead complicated double lives, moving between different versions of themselves, experimenting with alternative personae. ‘Reversing one’s position between several realities and playing them off against one another belongs to the nature of the romantic situation,’ Schmitt writes. Political romantics are ostensibly self-sufficient yet also have a desperate need for human comradeship. ‘In every romantic we can find examples of anarchistic self-confidence as well as an excessive need for sociability. He is just as easily moved by altruistic feelings, by pity and sympathy, as by presumptuous snobbery.’ Romantics loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping power itself, sometimes indiscriminately: ‘The caliph of Baghdad is no less romantic than the patriarch of Jerusalem. Here everything can be substituted for everything else.’ Above all, in place of God they substitute themselves. ‘As long as the romantic believed he was himself the transcendental ego, he did not have to be troubled by the question of the true cause: he was himself the creator of the world in which he lived.’

Wednesday Poem

Gardening Space

There wasn't anything here
when we moved in;
there wasn't any here, yet.
But the neighborhood grew quickly,
an ever-accelerating expansion.
Streetlights flicked on.

We waited impatiently
for the compost of matter to decay
to a substrate for life.
In the meantime, we said Howdy!
to the next-door galaxies over the back fence,
their barbeque grills glowing in the bare dark yards,
the kids arm-wrestling, flexing their muscles
in the neophyte friendships
of gravitational pull.

As the background temperature rose
in minuscule increments,
we planted seeds with each small thaw.
They dwindled and died a billion times.
Through the radiation monsoons,
each drop of energy filling a riddle
of expanding rings, we planted again and again,
scattering starry grains
into barren orbital furrows,
strings marking the seed lines.

It was springtime everywhere at once.
Glowing blooms swelled and unfurled,
vapors emanating to fill hollow voids
with being. Moons hovered like irascible insects
over coalescing worlds.

Sometimes we thought summer would never end,
that the heat would last forever.
We never asked where does it come from.
Where does it go?

We sit on the porch,
shucking green planets from
the opening pods of night,
talking about harvests
and the date of the first
hard frost.

by F.J. Bergman
from Astropoetica,
Summer 2009

Dropouts

From Harvard Magazine:

Girl Harvard may have the lowest dropout rate of any college. Though years off are common, currently around 98 percent of those who matriculate at Harvard College receive their bachelor’s degrees within six years, according to the Registrar’s Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Several celebrated Harvard dropouts have done quite nicely sans diploma. These include R. Buckminster Fuller ’17, Robert Lowell ’37, Bonnie Raitt ’72, Bill Gates ’77, and Matt Damon ’92 in the last century alone. But what of those who do not become famous? What becomes of those who leave Harvard voluntarily and, despite multiple invitations, never return? (The College routinely contacts those who have left to ask if they wish to complete their degrees.) We chose an era known for its radical sensibility and tracked down three members of a College class (1969) that might represent its high-water mark, to catch up with them and see if they had any regrets about the path not taken. Here are their stories.

Joanne Ricca: Adventurous Caregiver

When Joanne Ricca was a high-school junior in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the American Field Service chose her as an exchange student to live in a Swedish town the following school year (1964-65). Students at her high school circulated a petition protesting Ricca’s selection. “They thought I was un-American,” she explains. “I was a beatnik, a rebel, very outspoken—I liked to stir things up. My entire junior year I wore the same thing to high school every day—a green corduroy jumper, with a black turtleneck under it in winter—because I thought people made too much of clothes. For me it was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I was a bad girl.”

More here.

“Friendly” Gut Bacteria Can Trigger Rheumatoid Arthritis in Mice

From Scientific American:

Gut-bacteria-can-trigger-rheumatoid-arthritis-in-mice_1 Gut microbes deserve a lot of credit: They not only help digest our food, produce some nutrients, detoxify harmful substances, and protect us from pathogens—they are also important for the development of the immune system. Disturbances in the gut microbiota have been linked to allergies as well as disorders of the digestive and immune systems. Although intestinal organisms' impact on the digestive system's functioning is generally accepted, how they influence pathologies elsewhere in the body has remained a mystery. New research has begun to address this enigma. Diane Mathis, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues have found that one species of naturally occurring gut bacteria can set off arthritis in mice, in part by manipulating cells of the immune system. Their study appears in the June 25 issue of the journal Immunity.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, incurable disease characterized primarily by painful joint inflammation. Although its precise cause is unknown, RA is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system mistakes the body's own substances and cells for foreign invaders and releases friendly fire on them. To study how gut microbes affect the development of RA, the researchers made use of a specific strain of mice that naturally develop severe inflammatory arthritis. They raised the mice under germ-free conditions and found that the animals developed RA significantly more slowly than the controls that were naturally colonized with diverse, nonpathogenic microorganisms. What's more, the colonized mice produced a much greater level of an immunoregulatory protein known as IL-17. This molecule is produced by immune cells and promotes inflammation. Blocking IL-17 function in the mice prevented disease progression, demonstrating the important role of IL-17 in arthritis.

More here.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Artefacts from the People without History

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

6a00d83453bcda69e2013484b21bd7970c-500wi The glare from the glass case prevents us from seeing it clearly, but the object in the photo above is a lady's hat made out of twigs and spiderwebs. It was made in the early 20th century by a San tribesmember in southern Africa, and is currently on display in the Africa Room of the British Museum. This room appears not to attract very many visitors, for reasons I'll get to soon, but I wanted to dwell on this curious hat for a moment still.

Whether or not it meets the formal criteria for qualification as such, this hat is something very close to a cargo-cult object: a reproduction by members of a technologically simple culture, from naturally available materials, of an artefact associated with a dominant, technologically advanced culture. The first cargo cults were identified by western anthropologists in New Guinea, when, shortly after the end of World War II and the disappearance of the goods that the Japanese and American troops had brought into the region, the tribespeople attempted to summon them back by building non-functioning simulations of airports.

The British Museum's labelling tells us that we are supposed to admire the spiderweb hat, in more or less the same way we are supposed to praise the plaques made by casters in the brass foundries of the highly complex early modern Kingdom of Benin. The general message of the Africa Room –which is in fact the Africa Basement– is that, first of all, there is a cohesive, unitary, and stable thing called 'Africa', and, second of all, that everything that comes out of Africa, whether made of brass or of spiderwebs, is equally and perfectly good.

This lesson is one that is very different from what we are taught in the other halls of the museum, where the labels carefully and conscientiously spell out for us the different stages in the rise and decline of classical Assyrian, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilizations. In this respect, the well-meaning 'Africa is good' message in fact perpetuates the myth of stagnation that Eric Wolf sought to dispel in his masterful book, Europe and the People without History of 1982.

More here.

Witches are overwhelming the courts in the Central African Republic

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_02 Jun. 22 16.20 Snaking around the outer wall of the courthouse in Mbaiki, Central African Republic, is a long line of citizens, all in human form and waiting to face judgment. It’s easy to imagine them as the usual mix of drunks, reckless drivers, and check-bouncers in the dock of a small American town. But here most are witches, and they are facing criminal punishment for hexing their enemies or assuming the shape of animals.

By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions. (Drug offenses in the U.S., by contrast, account for just 12 percent of arrests.) In Mbaiki—where Pygmies, who are known for bewitching each other, make up about a tenth of the population—witchcraft prosecutions exceed 50 percent of the case load, meaning that most alleged criminals there are suspected of doing things that Westerners generally regard as impossible.

I went to the front of the witch line and asked Abdulaye Bobro, the chief judge, what the punishment was for casting spells.

More here.

Why chimpanzees attack and kill each other

From PhysOrg:

Chimp Chimpanzees (along with bonobos) are humans' closest living relatives. Anthropologists have long known that they kill their neighbors, and they suspected that they did so to seize their land. “Although some previous observations appear to support that hypothesis, until now, we have lacked clear-cut evidence,” Mitani said. The bouts occurred when the primates were on routine, stealth “boundary patrols” into neighboring territory. Amsler, who conducted field work on this project described one of the attacks she witnessed far to the northwest of the Ngogo territory. She and a colleague were following 27 adult and adolescent males and one adult female. “They had been on patrol outside of their territory for more than two hours when they surprised a small group of females from the community to the northwest,” Amsler said. “Almost immediately upon making contact, the adult males in the patrol party began attacking the unknown females, two of whom were carrying dependent infants.”

The Ngogo patrollers seized and killed one of the infants fairly quickly. They fought for 30 minutes to wrestle the other from its mother, but unsuccessfully. The Ngogo chimpanzees then rested for an hour, holding the female and her infant captive. Then they resumed their attack. “Though they were never successful in grabbing the infant from its mother, the infant was obviously very badly injured, and we don't believe it could have survived,” Amsler said. In most of the attacks in this study, chimpanzee infants were killed. Mitani believes this might be because infants are easier targets than adult chimpanzees. Scientists are still not sure if the chimpanzees' ultimate motive is resources or mates. They haven't ruled out the possibility that the attacks could attract new females to the Ngogo community.

Mitani says these findings disprove suggestions that the aggression is due to human intervention.

More here.

Science ends here

Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:

ScreenHunter_01 Jun. 22 14.47 Ever since the late French physician, Maurice Bucaille — on a hefty payroll of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh — wrote Islam, Bible & Science (1976), many believe that ‘proving’ scientific truths from holy books has been the exclusive domain of Muslims. However, in spite of being impressed by the holy book’s ‘scientific wonders’, Bucaille remained a committed Christian.

Very few of my wide-eyed brethren know that long before Muslims, certain Hindu and Christian theologians had already laid claim to the practice of defining their respective holy books as metaphoric prophecies of scientifically proven phenomenon. They began doing so between the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas Muslims got into the act only in the 20th century.

Johannes Heinrich’s Scientific vindication of Christianity (1887) is one example, while Mohan Roy’s Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism (1999) is a good way of observing how this thought has evolved among followers of other faiths. It is interesting to note how a number of Muslim ‘scientists’ have laboured hard to come up with convoluted interpretations of certain scriptures. Ironically, their ancient counterparts, especially between the 8th and 13th centuries in Baghdad and Persia, had put all effort in trying to understand natural phenomena and the human body and mind through hardcore science and philosophy.

More here.

New Tools for Helping Heart Patients

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Heart-articleLarge On a recent Monday, Helen Elzo got a call from her doctor’s office. A device implanted in her heart was not functioning. She needed to go to the hospital and have it replaced. She was aghast — her heart is damaged and, at any time, can start quivering instead of beating. If the device, a defibrillator, was unable to shock her heart back to normal, her life was in danger. In the old days, Mrs.Elzo, 73, who lives outside Tulsa, Okla., could have gone for months before the problem was discovered at a routine office visit. But she has a new defibrillator that communicates directly with her doctor, sending signals about its functions and setting off alarms if things go wrong.

On the horizon is an even smarter heart device, one that detects deterioration in various heart functions and tells the patient how to adjust medications. They are part of a new wave of smart implantable devices that is transforming the care of people with heart disease and creating a bonanza for researchers. The hope is that the devices, now being tested in clinical trials, will save lives, reduce medical expenses and nudge heart patients toward managing their symptoms much the way people with diabetes manage theirs. Patients, who often are frail or live far from their doctors, can be spared frequent office visits. Doctors can learn immediately if devices are malfunctioning or if patients’ hearts are starting to fail.

More here.

Man is by nature a cell-phone-speaking animal

Schallj

I have always liked the fact that we are not the primary objects of our own intellects. We are said to be the lowest of the intellectual beings in the universe. We do not know by knowing ourselves. We know ourselves by knowing first what is not ourselves. While knowing what is not ourselves, we become alive, active. We reflect that it is my very self that knows. I become alive to myself through the gift of what is not myself. Again this suggests that things fit together. They serve one another even by being what they are. Aristotle pointed out that a medical doctor has a very precise purpose that limits what he does. If things could not go wrong with the physical side of man, we would not need doctors. They are called in when things do not function properly. The doctor does not, however, cure us. Nature cures us. The doctor removes or adds to what is preventing our bodies from curing themselves. The doctor is not qua doctor concerned with the good life. He is concerned with life, health. His activities are properly directed to restoring a particular patient to health. When this is accomplished, the relationship of doctor and patient ceases.

more from James V. Schall, S.J. at First Principles here.

huge, ciliated protozoans regally gliding along in the rectal fluid like motile, translucent leaves

Profumo_06_10

It was hard to forget the account of parasitologist Arthur Looss pouring hookworm culture over a boy’s still warm amputated leg, or of the African infested with nematodes who has to ‘wheel his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow’. An Egyptian girl has a yard of ‘spaghetti-thick’ Guinea worm emerging from her arm, wound gingerly around a twig. In the Australian outback, Missus Murphy’s phantom pregnancy proves to be a cyst of tapeworm tips weighing all of eighteen pounds. Well, you get the idea. In his saga of trysts and cysts, exploding buboes, chiggers, leeches, defecation and ingestion, Kaplan keeps his already pullulating narrative constantly on the move with personal anecdotes attesting to his unquenchable enthusiasm. We see him chasing escaped cockroaches, embarking on a seagull cull, and hunting the Brooklyn mudflats as a boy, where couples making out in their automobiles were said to be ‘watching the submarine races’. But it is the biological drama of his subject that enthrals him. Of the canine tapeworm, he notes: ‘The proglottids are tapered at each end into a lovely chain that I have seen imitated in jewellery’ (I bet Mrs K can’t wait for her birthdays); and of land snails, that they ‘eat the egg-laden faeces with the leaf like caviar on crackers’. Dissecting a frog, he admires ‘huge, ciliated protozoans regally gliding along in the rectal fluid like motile, translucent leaves’.

more from David Profumo at Literary Review here.

Ours is not a philosophical age, much less an age of Stoicism

ALife

Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. Through Marcus’ writings, individual self-interest and concern for others become mutually supporting ends: The well-being of others and my own well-being are one and the same. And so my happiness consists in orienting my actions toward others and the good of the whole, rather than in pursuing the endless vagaries of earthly desire-sex, fame, fine things, the love and approval of peers-the Goblin Market cravings (to borrow a term from the poet Christina Rossetti) that contemporary society usually encourages us to indulge as the means to self-fulfillment. Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate. Stoicism says just the opposite: Stop indulging illusory physical and emotional longings and see your real happiness outside of yourself, your body, your emotions. As McLynn points out in his explanation of Marcus Aurelius’ intense popularity in the Victorian era and increasing neglect in our own, ours is a culture more interested in rights and entitlements than in duty, while Stoicism is only interested in duty, and duty understood to be synonymous with virtue and happiness. But it is a duty that liberates-a duty that teaches us to transcend the tyranny of the emotions and the body and that insists that contentment is ours for the having whenever we summon the strength to push away the things of the world that obscure it.

more from Emily Colette Wilkinson at In Character here.

Monday, June 21, 2010

The Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Science

TOP-Quark-2010 Strange final DawkinsCharmWinner

Richard Dawkins has picked the three winners:

  1. Top Quark, $1000: Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
  2. Strange Quark, $300: The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
  3. Charm Quark, $200: My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts

Congratulations to the winners (I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Richard Dawkins for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carla Goller, Sughra Raza, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD science prizes work, here.