Dubai: The Story of the World’s Fastest City

From The Telegraph:

Dubaistory1_1498773f Dubai’s wealth came quickly, and it got a little carried away: artificial islands, gaudy hotels and pointy skyscrapers, spectacular or tasteless as they are, according to your viewpoint. But at first, wealth brought amenities we take for granted: running water, electricity, roads. Dubai’s first electric lights were hooked up in the Sixties. It put in taps and telephones around the same time. When the Emir of Qatar married a Dubai princess, the dowry was to pay for the city’s first tarmac road; a year later, he paid for a bridge connecting the emirate’s two halves. He probably felt sorry for his backward neighbour, which had just been taken over by his eccentric new father-in-law, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktoum. The sheikh’s eccentricity was shown in his determination that though he had seen nothing of the world, the world ought to know all about Dubai. He wanted the city’s name to be on everyone’s lips and he has certainly had his way.

In the late Forties, Dubai had suffered an extended famine in which people had eaten locusts, leaves and lizards in order to survive. Yet within a few years, Sheikh Rashid had ordered the Middle East’s biggest port, its tallest skyscraper and its largest airport. The rest is – well, not quite history because we can’t be sure how it will all turn out. By the time Sheikh Rashid died in 1991, Dubai was a commercial powerhouse, its port the most important in the Middle East. His successor, Sheikh Mohammed, extended his father’s methods, demanding ever more fantastical – some might say fanatical – monuments.

More here.



Mother’s Cancer Can Infect Her Fetus

From Science:

Fetus In early 2007, a 28-year-old Japanese woman gave birth to a girl. Thirty-six days later, the mother was hospitalized with vaginal bleeding, which became uncontrollable. Doctors diagnosed leukemia, and she soon died. The baby developed normally until age 11 months, when a huge tumor appeared in her cheek. A biopsy determined the cancer was not sarcoma–a cancer of certain connective tissues–but a leukemic tumor somehow trapped in the child's cheek. The doctors alerted cell biologist Mel Greaves of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton Surrey, United Kingdom, who studies transmissible cancers. Scientists had suspected mother-to-fetus cancer in other cases with strong circumstantial evidence (especially with leukemia and melanoma, which both metastasize readily). But no one had done genetic tests to prove the cancer had grown from a single source and wasn't just an unfortunate coincidence.

In their investigation, Greaves and colleagues discovered incipient cancer cells in routine blood samples taken from the child at birth, strongly suggesting that the transmission happened in utero. They also examined a DNA sequence unique in each case of leukemia, the BCR-ABL1 sequence. It was identical in mother and daughter. Finally, tests showed the child's cancer cells were almost all maternal cells, with no genetic material from the father. This indicated that the transmission path was mother to fetus, not the reverse.

More here.

How different are dogfighting and football?

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

ScreenHunter_10 Oct. 14 10.09 Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Hip-Hop Physics

Electrons dance to a quantum beat in the Hubbard model of solid-state physics.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

ScreenHunter_09 Oct. 14 10.03 Mathematical models and computer simulations usually begin as aids to understanding, introduced when some aspect of natural science proves too knotty for direct analysis. Facing an intractable problem, we strip away all the messy details of the real world and build a toy universe, one simple enough that we can hope to master it. Often, though, even the dumbed-down model defies exact solution or accurate computation. Then the model itself becomes an object of scientific inquiry—a puzzle to be solved.

A good example is the Ising model in solid-state physics, which attempts to explain the nature of magnetism in materials such as iron. (I wrote about the Ising model in an earlier Computing Science column; see “The World in a Spin,” September–October 2000.) The Ising model glosses over all the intricacies of atomic structure, representing a magnet as a simple array of electron “spins” on a plain, gridlike lattice. Even in this abstract form, however, the model presents serious challenges. Only a two-dimensional version has been solved exactly; for the three- dimensional model, getting accurate results requires both algorithmic sophistication and major computer power.

More here.

Why do Italians keep voting for Berlusconi?

Anne Applebaum in Slate:

ScreenHunter_08 Oct. 14 09.10 Silvio Berlusconi has been accused of bribery, tax evasion, corruption, and subversion of the press. His wife has left him on the grounds that he consorts with prostitutes and holds orgies at his villa in Sardinia. He makes embarrassing jokes (and then repeats them, as he did with the one about President Barack Obama's “suntan“) and periodically disappears to undergo more plastic surgery. He is at war with the Italian legal establishment, with almost all the journalists who don't work for him, and with the Catholic Church. Last week, the Italian constitutional court lifted his immunity from prosecution, which means Italians can look forward to a whole new series of law suits and scandals.

Yet by far the most interesting thing about the Italian prime minister is this: Italians keep voting for him. The somewhat ragged coalition he leads—Il Popolo della Libertà, the People of Freedom—won a decisive general election victory in 2008 and trounced the opposition in European parliamentary elections in June 2009. Whether or not you agree with his daughter, who says he “will go down in the history books as the longest-serving and most loved leader in the history of the Italian republic,” you cannot argue with the fact that he has been the dominant force in Italian politics since he first became prime minister in 1994. But why?

More here.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom Win the Nobel in Economics

12nobel-650aLouis Uchitelle on a much deserved prize, in the NYT:

Ms. Ostrom’s work deals in the concept of “commons” shared by a number of people who earn their living from a common resource and have a stake, therefore, in preserving it. Her most recent research has focused on relatively small forests in undeveloped countries. Groups of people share the right to harvest lumber from a particular forest, and so they have a stake in making sure the forest survives.

“When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules for behavior,” Ms. Ostrom said in an interview. “It is an area that standard market theory does not touch.”

Often working with her husband, Vincent, 90, who is a professor emeritus at Indiana, Ms. Ostrom concluded in her research that the “tragedy of the commons” was an inaccurate concept. Particularly in 17th- and 18th-century England and Scotland, the concept described villagers’ overgrazing of their herds on the village commons, thereby destroying it as pasture.

The solution often invoked was to convert the commons to private property, on the ground that self-interested owners would protect their pasture land.

“Conservatives used the tragedy of the commons to argue for property rights, and efficiency was achieved as people were thrown off the commons,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics himself. “But the effects of throwing a lot of people out of their livelihood were enormous. What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of commons without having to resort to property rights.”

Sex, Flies and Videotape: the Secret Lives of Harun Yahya

Yahya_lureHalil Arda in New Humanist:

Yahya is the founder of the Science Research Foundation, an impressive publishing empire that boasts more than 60 websites dedicated to his writings. It provides documentary films and audio recordings in fifteen languages, including Turkish, English, Russian, Amharic and Arabic, and claims to sell more than half a million books a year, including the infamous 850-page, fully illustrated Atlas of Creation, which was sent free in two volumes to dozens of universities, libraries and prominent scientists (including Richard Dawkins) across the world. In painstaking detail, with a mass of photos, graphs and statistics interspersed with verses from the Koran, the Atlas purports to prove that Darwin was utterly mistaken, that each plant and animal was created intact, and that no modification through natural selection ever took place.

Yahya has publicly offered a lucrative prize for anyone who can produce a “transitional fossil” – the lack of which he claims proves evolution to be false. When Dawkins publicly lampooned the research in the Atlas of Creation (he pointed out that one of the photos of a Caddis Fly was in fact a fishing fly, complete with metal hook, stolen from the internet, pictured) labelled Yahya a charlatan on his website, Yahya used his considerable influence and battalion of lawyers to sue for libel and have Dawkins’s website banned in Turkey. This is just one of thousands of cases he has brought before the Turkish courts.

Despite the shoddiness of his science Yahya has found a ready audience among those looking for scientific justification for their rejection of the West. Over the past decades he has served as an adviser to several Turkish politicians, and received endorsements from across the Arab world including Saudi Arabia and Dubai, where his stalls feature prominently at book fairs.

Catching the Wind in Rural Malawi

Kamkwamba_inline_diagram_640x585Maywa Montenegro in Seed:

Fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba had never heard of windmills, or climate change, for that matter, when he stumbled across a photograph one day and it changed his life forever.

Now 22, Kamkwamba has become something of an international DIY celebrity: He’s spoken at the World Economic Forum, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and at TED Global—twice. He’s chatted with Al Gore, Bono, and Larry Page. A documentary about his life is currently in the works. But Kamkwamba’s story isn’t really about stardom: It’s about the grit, resourcefulness, and audacity of a young engineer who built a windmill from scrap in his native Malawi and brought power to his home—and eventually lit up every house in the village. It’s told in brilliant detail in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, (out now from William Morris) co-authored with journalist Bryan Mealer. Seed editor Maywa Montenegro spoke with Kamkwamba while he was in New York City kicking off a US book tour.

Seed: How did you first get the idea to build a windmill?

William Kamwamba: In 2001, there was drought in Malawi so many people didn’t have enough food. Starting in November, people began starving to death. It was the same year I was supposed to start high school, but in Malawi you pay school fees. My parents couldn’t manage to pay the fees so I was forced to drop out.

In order to keep up with my friends who were going to school, I decided to start reading books at the library. When I was reading, I came across a book that had a picture of a windmill. I thought maybe if I try to build one of these machines, I will be able to pump water for irrigation and then my family would no longer have to go through this hunger problem.

From Liberalism to Social Democracy

AndreasIraGeoffrey Kurtz reviews Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson's Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns, in Dissent:

The central political question at stake in this book is whether the liberal tradition contains sufficient resources for its own renewal. In other words, whether the way of thinking about politics pioneered by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant offers the ideas the democratic left needs if it is to rethink its work today. The authors think it does. But in explaining their reasons, they also give us reason to think that it might not.

Kalyvas and Katznelson present a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the liberal and republican traditions in political thought. Debates between liberals and those critics of liberalism who style themselves as “civic republicans” have often been organized around unnecessary dichotomies.

How can we choose between process and substance, the universal and the particular, the individual and the community? We can’t, at least not if we want to think through the demands of a politics that is simultaneously radical and democratic.

Kalyvas and Katznelson’s alternative is to understand the relationship between the two traditions historically. Liberalism, they write, developed from republicanism as a butterfly does from a chrysalis. A cohort of pivotal thinkers between 1750 and 1830 began as republicans and, in trying to construct “a republic for moderns,” ended up inventing modern liberalism and bringing about the end of republicanism as a “freestanding model.”

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_07 Oct. 13 14.16 In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

More here.

How I learned to stop worrying and live with the bomb

Michael Lind in Salon:

Bomb President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize has been justified by some because it draws attention to the goal he endorses of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. I share that goal, but not because nuclear weapons are uniquely horrible — if you're a victim, it makes little difference whether you're killed or maimed by nuclear weapons or conventional weapons, which sometimes can create lingering illnesses and poison the landscape, too. I support the abolition of nuclear weapons because, if it were successful, it would lock in the advantages of the small number of great powers like the U.S. that are capable of building and maintaining first-class conventional militaries.

The goal of American liberal internationalism, since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, has been what Wilson called “a community of power” — a great power concert whose members collaborate to keep the peace. This is different from the conservative vision of unilateral U.S. hegemony. But whether you think the law should be enforced by a posse or a single sheriff, you want the law officers to be better armed than the law-breakers.

More here.

In Mammals, a Complex Journey to the Middle Ear

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Ang Imagine what a dinner conversation would be like if you had decent table manners, but the ears of a lizard. Not only would you have to stop eating whenever you wanted to speak, but, because parts of your ears are now attached to your jaw, you’d have to stop eating whenever you wanted to hear anybody else, as well. With no fork action on your end, your waiter would soon conclude that you were obviously “done working on that” and would whisk your unbreached baked ziti away.

Sometimes it’s the little things in life that make all the difference — in this case, the three littlest bones of the human body. Tucked in our auditory canal, just on the inner side of the eardrum, are the musically named malleus, incus and stapes, each minibone, each ossicle, about the size of a small freshwater pearl and jointly the basis of one of evolution’s greatest inventions, the mammalian middle ear. The middle ear gives us our sound bite, our capacity to masticate without being forced to turn a momentarily deaf ear to the world, as most other vertebrates are. Who can say whether we humans would have become so voraciously verbal if not for the practice our ancestors had of jawboning around the wildebeest spit.

More here.

Subject: Our Marketing Plan

Ellis Weiner in The New Yorker:

ScreenHunter_06 Oct. 13 11.31 Hi, Ellis—

Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books. First, let me say that I absolutely love “Clancy the Doofus Beagle: A Love Story” and have some excellent ideas for promotion.

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

More here.

The pieces are in place, but no one wants an intifada

Tony Karon in The National:

ScreenHunter_05 Oct. 13 11.24 Mr Obama has certainly not been deterred by failure thus far. His envoy, George Mitchell, is in the region pressing the two sides to begin final-status negotiations, but there is little belief on either side that a peace agreement is possible. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, declared that any attempt to reach a final settlement for years to come is misguided and doomed to fail, and the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s senior aide, Uzi Arad, has said much the same.

On the Palestinian side, the president, Mahmoud Abbas, grows ever weaker. His political demise was accelerated last week by Palestinian fury over his decision to sideline the Goldstone report into alleged war crimes during Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January. Fatah has instructed Mr Abbas to stay out of any talks with Mr Netanyahu until the Israelis commit to the settlement freeze demanded by the Obama administration. And his likely successor as the head of Fatah, the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, says anyone who believes it possible to negotiate peace with the current Israeli government is “delusional”.

Moreover, Mr Obama could soon have more to worry about than the absence of progress. Ominous echoes are everywhere of the conditions that brought about the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, which left thousands dead and destroyed the Oslo peace process.

More here.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Corsets, cameras and camouflage: Meeting Kate Adie

by Tolu Ogunlesi

KateAdie She was the only woman on the frontlines during Gulf War 1, surrounded by 43,000 men. So how did she cope with doing that thing that men can do in public but women can’t? “Nudity is tolerable, using the loo in front of other people isn’t,” she explained to a wine-sipping group of us gathered around her at a Nairobi house in August; as we awaited the start of a dinner party to end the 2009 Storymoja Hay Festival.

No war without Kate

In 2001 Britain’s Independent newspaper described Kate Adie OBE as “the best-known, most respected woman reporter in the UK.” She came to national prominence in 1980, reporting – from behind a car door – the siege of the Iranian embassy in London, in May 1980. In 1986 she covered the American bombing of Tripoli, and in 1989, in Tiananmen Square she was hit in the arm by a bullet which went on to kill a young man. During the first Gulf War a British newspaper published a cartoon showing two soldiers preparing to go into battle. “We can’t start yet, Kate Adie isn’t here,” one says to the other.

A day before the dinner party I had the privilege, alongside Ugandan journalist David Kaiza, of interviewing Adie in a packed tent on the grounds of Nairobi’s Impala Club. After four decades of reporting – which saw her rise from studio technician at a local BBC radio station in Durham to become the BBC’s Chief News Correspondent in 1989, covering wars everywhere from Armenia to Bosnia to Rwanda to the Middle East – she is eminently qualified to lecture on grand concepts like “news” and “war”.

“Ninety percent of wars are about land,” she said. “In the future it will be [about] land with water, land you can build on; live on.” She also hinted at the capacity of ‘war’ to feed the human predilection for euphemism – which would explain Kenya’s “post-election violence”, and Northern Ireland’s “troubles”.

The making of a journalist

But “international media” is one concept that doesn’t deserve an explanation. “There is no such thing as the international media,” she said.”You are all paid by somebody, you are all working for somebody… there is no such thing as international journalism reporting for the world. CNN’s target audience is middle America; it just happens that other people are subjected to it.” The BBC is “British in origin, and in orientation.” And for her “there really isn’t any kind of war that sees journalists as neutral. Whose side are you on – that’s the first question. Are you for us or against us?”

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Early Islam, Part 2: The Golden Age

By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

A great rebellion had overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus in 750 CE, after which power shifted east to Baghdad—a city more Persian than Arab back then—reflecting the growing prominence of Persians in Islam. A new caliph, Abu Al-Abbas, a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle, founded the Abbasid dynasty, satisfying the fond desire of many rebels to get a caliph from the Prophet’s lineage. But their hopes were soon dashed when the new caliph began living up to his nickname, Al-Saffah—‘the blood-shedder’—by ruthlessly eradicating former allies like Abu Muslim. For the new regime, loyalty to the dynasty, and not the brotherhood of Islam, would be the basis of empire.

AbbasidPainting Leading up to the rebellion that had ousted the Umayyads, the Abbasids had made great play of the former’s addiction to wine and women. Now that they were themselves in power, their promise of a return to ‘true religion’ under the Prophet’s own family vanished into thin air; luxuries and irreligious behavior grew instead. The Abbasids, partly out of expediency, began patronizing a more liberal school of theology—the Mu’tazilah—much to the resentment of the Shiites and the orthodox Sunnis; it led to more crushed Shiite rebellions. [1]

The caliphs that followed Al-Abbas now presided over a loose collection of provinces, each with a governor and a bureaucracy similar to older Persian arrangements, where local satraps had a good deal of autonomy and power. Administration was divided into departments—or divans—headed by the vizier. The old Arab monopoly on power had passed—Islamized Persians began entering the higher echelons of leadership. The dominant Abbasid legal system—there were at least four to choose from, all proceeding from the Shari’ah but with significant variations nonetheless—became the Hanafi rite, the most liberal of the lot. In making civil laws and administering justice, it opposed overly literal readings of the Qur’an, relying instead on analogy, consensus, and judicial reasoning. [2]


LutePlayer10thCAbbasid In the ensuing decades came an era of relative peace. A general flourishing of agriculture and trade led to unprecedented prosperity and a huge burst of intellectual and cultural creativity, especially during the reigns of Haroon al-Rashid (786-809 CE) and al-Mamun (813-833 CE). This ushered in the ‘golden age’ of Islam;[3] Baghdad became the richest city in the world—only Constantinople came somewhat close. In A Short History of the Arab Peoples, Sir John Glubb wrote:

‘Their ships were by far the largest and the best appointed in Chinese waters or in the Indian Ocean. Under their highly developed banking system, an Arab businessman could cash a cheque in Canton on his bank account in Baghdad. [Wealthy women wore] lavish jewels and pearls, silks and embroidered fabrics. [A new upper class valued] exquisite carpets and cushions, the sparkling fountains, the soft music and the exotic perfumes of private apartments [of] musk, myrtle and jasmine …

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Losing the Plot (Stanley’s Girl)

By Maniza Naqvi Kiss-lips

Chapter One: The Little Coffee Shop

Chapter Two: The Hotel

Chapter Three: Dreaming Dulles

Chapter Four: Sovereign Debt or Civil War

The terminal entered, Pakistan left behind she adjusted for the gained time. Younger by an hour—she smiled, fiddling with her watch. One of the perks of the job: eternal youth and its secret: jetlag. Staying put could change all that. As she followed the other passengers she recalled her earlier conversation with Stanley. She had said to him in frustration: Dying—Death—Yes Stanley—precisely that. You do seem to be setting off all the alarm bells which are usually associated with men of your age. I suppose it’s that whole last gasp…

In the immediate aftermath of dying would it be like this? A long steep escalator moving slowly towards the light, a glass encased place, shielding the inhabitants from the terrible heat and fire outside. And inside, an abundance of the essentials for life: energy, cool air, gushing fountains, the sound of music, and light aplenty. And all that you could buy all the time, everywhere: Duty Free. And people, many but still in the scheme of things, a few, moving towards their separate journeys—towards that plenty! Towards that abundance. She watched a man in front of her wave a light blue passport and walk through immigration—unquestioned—no border restrictions:, Let Them Pass and So It Was and So it Shall Be! This was Freedom, this was liberty this was the essence of modernity. She had a pang of panic. Was this true? Was this it? Were the chosen few the ones who fit, the “good”, the ones with the right nationalities and those who were granted passports and visas? Had the system distilled itself down to this? Had all of history, ended at this distillation of itself? She thought about being the chosen, being privileged, being powerful, having God’s grace smile upon her. And she was gratified. That it was so.

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Ecce Canis

Towards a Philosophical History of Dogs

Justin E. H. Smith

6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a62ddc6f970c-500wi What is it about the dogs? In recent philosophy everyone from John Searle to Donna Haraway has had something to say about them. And recent philosophy, as I never tire of insisting, is nothing new.

Now I have also been insisting for some time that there is no such animal as 'animals'. That is, when it is discovered, for example, that a chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden is stockpiling stones to be thrown at a later hour, this does not prove, as the popular media would claim, that 'animals' are capable of conceptualizing and planning for the future. What a chimpanzee does says nothing at all about 'animals', but at most something about chimpanzees, and likely only about some chimpanzees, or indeed only one of them. Animals, I mean to say, need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Haraway, to her credit, recognizes this. Her take on the special case of dogs issues in the somewhat cryptic claim that “we have never been human” (a riff, I think, on Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern). I understand this to mean that, for as long as there have been humans, the denotation of 'we' has never been understood to include all and only members of our species. It also includes dogs: we and they have co-evolved, and in a certain sense this puts our species closer to Canis lupus familiaris than to Pan troglodytes, not with respect to the tracing back of common ancestors, but with respect to recent history, the history of the past 15,000 years or so, the history that lingers in both of our memories, in which humans have been exercising intense selective pressure on dogs, and perhaps also dogs on humans. The result is that we have come out more like each other, behaviorally and expressively, than we are to either of our nearest cousins: the grey wolf in the case of dogs, and chimpanzees in the case of humans. The wolf is the dog's closest ancestor, but this implies no solidarity. Quite the contrary: the dogs are on our side.

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