Steven Rose examines the latest theories about the human brain in The Guardian:
Half a century ago, passionate to study the brain, I began my graduate research in a gloomy, red-brick building in south-east London – the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry. In the biochemistry department I was rapidly disabused of any idea that my research might lead to a greater understanding of how the brain could be “the organ of mind” – and still less that it might provide any help for the hospital's patients, whom I could dimly see through my laboratory windows. Neurochemistry meant grinding rats' brains up and extracting their enzymes; neuroanatomy was about cutting thin slices and staining them to be viewed under the microscope; neurophysiology was sticking minute electrodes into nerve cells and checking their electrical responses. To articulate the thought that this might tell one anything about “higher nervous functions” was strictly out of bounds. A dozen years ago, I heard a young American physiologist describe the study of consciousness as a “CLM” – a career limiting move. No topic for a young and ambitious neuroscientist, best left for those old enough to be experiencing the “philosopause” – said to affect scientists who had run out of research steam.
How times have changed! What was once dangerous territory is now the hottest theme in brain research. The subtitle of Semir Zeki's excellent new book is Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness. David Linden's is brasher: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. Richard Joyce goes even further in claiming that our very morality is an evolved property of the brain. The rupture with the past is striking. From the ancients to the 20th century, it was philosophers who speculated about how the mind and brain might work. Now it is neuroscientists who are displacing the philosophers and theologians and telling us how we must behave. Three hundred years ago, David Hume argued that one could not derive an ought from an is, but now we are being told that our “oughts” – our moral feelings – are indeed “ises”, genetically and developmentally incarnated in our brains. Whole new scientific disciplines – neuroeconomics, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics – are emerging. No wonder that an issue of Science, timed for November's US election, claimed that brain imaging could identify voting intentions.
The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.
Those violations include:
Collective punishment – the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.
Targeting civilians – the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.
Disproportionate military response – the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.
This is the full, uncut interview with Professor Michael Baum which was filmed for Channel 4's “The Enemies of Reason.” Michael Baum is Professor Emeritus of Surgery at University College London. The discussion covers alternative and complimentary [sic] medicines, and how they interact with scientific medicine. This video is provided free online by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and http://richarddawkins.net
In preparation for Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday, the editors of Nature compiled a selection of especially elegant and enlightening examples of evolution.
They describe it as a resource “for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection.” Given the continuing battles over evolution in America's public schools — and, for that matter, the Islamic world — such a resource is most welcome.
However, I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the findings below, which range from the moray eel's remarkable second jaw to the unexpected plumage of dinosaurs. They are, quite simply, wondrous — glimpses through an evolutionary frame of life's incredible narrative, expanding to fill every possible nook and cranny of Earth's biosphere.
After all, it's hard to stir passion about the scientific validity of evolution without first captivating minds and imaginations. And this is a fine place to start.
It seems to have been agreed by every single media outlet that only one group has the right to challenge Obama’s promotion of “Pastor” Rick Warren, and that group is the constituency of politically organized homosexuals. But why should that be? Last week, I pointed out that Warren maintains that heaven is closed to Jews and that his main theological mentor was a crackpot “end-of-days” ranter. Why is this not to count against him as well? Do we need our presidential invocation to be given by a bigmouth clerical businessman who is, furthermore, a religious sectarian? Let me add a little more to the mix. In November 2006, Warren made a trip to Syria and was granted an audience with the human toothbrush who has inherited control of that country and all its citizens. Bashar Assad, the dictator of Syria, is also a religious sectarian—his power base is confined to the Alawite sect—and in the intervals of murdering his critics in Lebanon, he does not expect to receive very many distinguished American or European guests. Of late, the most eminent I can think of have been David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and George Galloway of Britain’s so-called Respect Party, and I believe only Galloway—an old fan of Baathism in all its forms—got an audience with the Grand Toothbrush himself.
The presidential campaign of 2008 will be recalled for many firsts: the first African-American presidential nominee, the near-miss campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the record spending and record turnout. But what was not new was its reliance on a very old standard of American political culture, the frontier myth. Perhaps no other set of ideas about America is more powerful politically, and the two autumn campaigns were reverential in their implicit bow to, or explicit exploitation of, the dense complex of frontier images and values attached to the American experience. The limitless possibilities of the American dream, the expansion of American values, the national effort to tame faraway places, the promise of a bounty just over the horizon, and the essential virtue of the American people who explore and settle these frontiers—all of these tropes fortified the hopes of the campaigns to situate their candidate in the company of legendary pioneers. It is a testament to the power of this myth that it grips us still—its self-gratifying qualities having ensured its long lineage—even as the actual frontier of American action is swiftly closing. A century ago, the closure of the continental frontier obsessed politicians and intellectuals alike. Today, when the global frontier is closing, our political leaders have little sense of its significance.
An epic battle between environmentalists and loggers left much of the spotted owl's habitat protected. Now the celebrity species faces a new threat—a tougher owl.
Craig Welch in Smithsonian Magazine:
Every chick counts, because spotted owls are vanishing faster than ever. Nearly 20 years after Forsman's research helped the federal government boot loggers off millions of acres to save the threatened owls, nature has thrown the birds a curveball. A bigger, meaner bird—the barred owl—now drives spotted owls from their turf. Some scientists and wildlife managers have called for arming crews with decoys, shotguns and recorded bird songs in an experimental effort to lure barred owls from the trees and kill them.
To Forsman and other biologists, the bizarre turn is not a refutation of past decisions but a sign of the volatility to come for endangered species in an increasingly erratic world. As climate chaos disrupts migration patterns, wind, weather, vegetation and river flows, unexpected conflicts will arise between species, confounding efforts to halt or slow extinctions. If the spotted owl is any guide, such conflicts could come on quickly, upend the way we save rare plants and animals, and create pressure to act before the science is clear.
Over the years, inventors have come up with dozens of widgets that they claim can transform the undrinkable or bring the finest wines to perfection without the long wait. Sadly, there's little scientific evidence that most of them work (see “Faking it”). Looks like you're stuck with the plonk.
Or are you? Fortunately, there is one technique that stands out from the rest. It is backed by a decade of research, the results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal and the end product has passed the ultimate test- blind tasting by a panel of wine experts. No fewer than five wineries have now invested in the technology.
The secret this time is an electric field. Pass an undrinkable, raw red wine between a set of high-voltage electrodes and it becomes pleasantly quaffable. “Using an electric field to accelerate ageing is a feasible way to shorten maturation times and improve the quality of young wine,” says Hervé Alexandre, professor of oenology at the University of Burgundy, close to some of France's finest vineyards.
Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.
This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.
No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless.
The story of the hostage who comes by turns to identify with the captor is one of the oldest ever told. Tales of unsullied Puritan maidens kidnapped by Indians only to end up “going native” were staples of early American literature. The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which describes the ordeal of a minister’s wife held for eleven weeks by Narragansett Indians during King Philip’s War in 1676, was among the first such narratives, and it was enormously popular when it was published in Boston in 1682. Three hundred years later, a similar story seized the West’s imagination: in Stockholm in 1973, after four customers were taken hostage in a holdup of the Sveriges Kreditbank, there were reports that one of them became affianced to one of the bank robbers. The archetype is of such sturdy provenance, in fact, that it surprised me to learn from William Graebner’s Patty’s Got a Gun that it wasn’t until six years after the Kreditbank incident that the term “Stockholm syndrome” appeared in the American mass media. The phrase first surfaced in 1979, Graebner explains, “when Time magazine suggested that the syndrome might have taken hold among those being held hostage by Iranian militants in Tehran.” Perhaps the obsession with the notion of a loss of self under conditions of duress is so primal, so elemental of modern anxieties, that people feared to give it a proper name. Until, that is, the 1970s–a time so drenched in the detritus of captivity that the culture suddenly could not do without the shorthand.
Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson make a decidedly odd couple; an enduring, epistolary friendship between a reclusive, oracular poet and a gregarious magazine writer with an unfailing appetite for public life is at best unlikely. They met only twice, though their correspondence lasted, with vicissitudes, from 1862 until Dickinson’s death in 1886. Brenda Wineapple stakes the friendship on Dickinson’s bold letter of entreaty to Higginson, a man she had met only in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”. Born of Dickinson’s urgent query, the friendship survived on her fevered insistence that Higginson deserved the precious gift of her poems. A bookish youth, rapt by Emersonian “Newness”, as he called it, Higginson shuttled between divinity school and journalism, looking for a way to remake the world. He found it in two causes: abolitionism and women’s suffrage, both of which he embraced with a radical’s fervour and a reformist’s optimism. Willing to use violence in the cause of freedom, he twice attempted to free escaped slaves from Boston jails and in 1859 became one of the “Secret Six”, long-distance accomplices to John Brown in his ill-fated attack at Harper’s Ferry. As Colonel Higginson, he took command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first official regiment of freed slaves.
1-Hi Jeff. You recently took part in the Free Gaza movement (1) and successfully reached Gaza by boat with others activists, journalists and human rights workers from around the globe. How did you get involved in such an initiative and why was it important for you to take part?
As an Israeli and the head of an Israeli peace organization (ICAHD – The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), I was asked by the Free Gaza Movement organizers to take part in their action to Break the Siege of Gaza by sailing two boats from Cyprus to Gaza City port. I agreed because this was a non-violent political action; breaking the siege and by implication highlighting Israel’s responsibility for it (which it tries to shrug) fit into ICAHD’s mission, to end the Israeli Occupation completely. Had this been defined as a humanitarian mission I would not have participated, since the so-called “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is not the result of some natural calamity, but of a deliberate policy of Israel – plus the US, Europe and Japan, it must be said, and aided by Egypt – to break the will of the Palestinians to resist and to replace the democratically elected government of Hamas by a collaborationist regime more amenable to Israeli control.
2-What was the goal of this initiative and has it been reached?
The goal of this initiative, as I mentioned, was to break the Israeli and international siege on Gaza – although we were careful not to disconnect Gaza from the wider Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, of which it is a part. In an important sense we succeeded. One successful action gives tremendous hope and encouragement to the people the world over that civil society initiatives can shame governments to relent and even change policy, as well as express solidarity with oppressed people. But in order to genuinely break the siege, regular boat traffic must be established. In that we have partially succeeded. So far five FGM boats have reached Gaza (the last one on December 9th, as I write this), although a Libyan ship was turned away and a boat of Palestinian-Israeli parliament members was prevented from sailing. I am in the midst of a campaign, with European supporters, to organize maritime trade unions in ports around the Mediterranean to express solidarity with Gaza, which hadn’t seen a foreign vessel in 40 years before ours arrived. One of our goals is that on appointed day in the spring or summer one or more boats will depart to Gaza from every port on the Mediterranean. Imagine what a scene, what a gesture of solidarity and resistance that would be!
3-As an Israeli Jew, what type of welcome did you get from the Gazans? Did you meet anyone from Hamas?
We all received a tremendous welcome from the Palestinian Gazans – 40,000 came out to greet us as we entered the port! As, unfortunately, the only Israeli Jew (two more have since sailed to Gaza), I was sought out by Gazans who wanted to communicate with me – in Hebrew – how much they yearned for a just peace in which all the inhabitants of the country could live together in peace.
The photographs of Guillaume Zuili evoke memories of another time, another era, long gone and wistful. These dusty, chalky, charcoal-like smudges of memories could have been snatched from a re-screening of an old movie. Each feels like an iconic, dreamlike moment of random beauty.
Zuili, a Frenchman who splits his time between Paris and Los Angeles, has developed an intriguing hybrid style of photography. By using a crude pinhole camera but modern high speed film, he’s able to make hand-held snapshots of elegant beauty that celebrate the graininess inherent in film plus the soft, smudged focus of pinhole photography. Without the high-speed film, he would never capture this snapshot aesthetic; pinhole photography usually requires a tripod and long exposure time.
But of course it is more than just the technique that makes these images so successful. Skilled composition, ruthless editing, and then alchemical magic in the darkroom all transform these images into objects of beauty.
Conventional wisdom long held that the human immune system was no match for cancer. Born of native cells, the logic went, cancer fooled the immune system into concluding it was harmless. Thus protected from attack, cancer easily thrived until its host died.
A deeper understanding of our biological defenses has changed that. The human immune system does battle cancer. But we could better optimize our defenses to fend off malignant disease. That’s clear from cancer treatments attempted in New York City and Germany as early as the 19th century. Those experiments and other undervalued evidence from the medical literature suggest that acute infection—in contrast to chronic infection, which sometimes causes cancer—can help a body fight tumors.
It’s not the pathogens that do the good work. But the way our bodies respond to the pathogens is key. Infection events, especially those that produce fever, appear to shift the innate human immune system into higher gear. That ultimately improves the performance of crucial biological machinery in the adaptive immune system. This lesson comes, partly, from doctors who risked making patients sicker to try to make them better.
New tools equal new perceptions. Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.
And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up. Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded. Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn't want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes. Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure By Paul A. Offit (Columbia University Press) In a perfect world, the public's knowledge would mirror the scientific consensus. In Autism's False Prophets, vaccine expert Offit dissects how shady lawyers, suspect science, self-interested politicians, and equivocating journalists have derailed this hope, convincing millions that vaccines cause autism even as the scientific community has proven the theory false. More than a book about a disease, it is an ode to uncorrupted science and a cautionary tale that data alone is never enough. Buy
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex By Mary Roach (W.W. Norton) There are many humorous science books. There are not many hilarious science books. With Bonk, a review of science's study of sexual behavior, Mary Roach has written a volume so viscerally funny, it's easy to overlook how obsessively she researched her subject. But Roach's tales of a day with pig inseminators, a hands-on experience with penile implants, and a romp under an ultrasound machine serve as not-so-subtle reminders of her commitment to writing the first-ever comprehensive book on sex research. Buy
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.
Half a century ago, passionate to study the brain, I began my graduate research in a gloomy, red-brick building in south-east London – the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry. In the biochemistry department I was rapidly disabused of any idea that my research might lead to a greater understanding of how the brain could be “the organ of mind” – and still less that it might provide any help for the hospital's patients, whom I could dimly see through my laboratory windows. Neurochemistry meant grinding rats' brains up and extracting their enzymes; neuroanatomy was about cutting thin slices and staining them to be viewed under the microscope; neurophysiology was sticking minute electrodes into nerve cells and checking their electrical responses. To articulate the thought that this might tell one anything about “higher nervous functions” was strictly out of bounds. A dozen years ago, I heard a young American physiologist describe the study of consciousness as a “CLM” – a career limiting move. No topic for a young and ambitious neuroscientist, best left for those old enough to be experiencing the “philosopause” – said to affect scientists who had run out of research steam.
