Sex is best when you lose your head

Review by James Meek

• Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition and Sexual Conflict by Tim Birkhead
  
  Faber, 272 pp, £9.99, May 2000, ISBN 0 371 19360 5

In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other.

Charles Robert Darwin. A copy made by John Collier (1850-1934) in 1883 of his 1881 portrait of Charles Darwin. According to Darwin's son Erasmus, "The picture is a replica of the one in the rooms in the Linnaean Society and was made by Collier after the original. I took some trouble about it and as a likeness it is an improvement on the original." Given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1896. See source website for additional information. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What would the Rev. Morris have made of the scandalous truth? Far from being monogamous, the dunnocks, from a Victorian point of view, have shockingly lax morals. The female dunnock often takes not one but two males as partners. The best a stern man of religion could say about dunnocks is that there’s no superfluous bump and grind when they mate – it’s strictly fertilisation business, over in 0.1 seconds. Fast enough to do it while your mother’s back is turned.

Tim Birkhead and his fellow evolutionary biologists, exploring the nature of sexuality across species from single-celled organisms to humankind, are the paparazzi of the science world. They travel to remote islands and put up with extreme discomfort in the hope of catching animals having sex with each other, and when they do, splash their names and their pictures over the pages of the science journals. It doesn’t always work out. Fiona Hunter and a colleague, later to expose what the mainstream media dubbed ‘penguin prostitution’ in the Antarctic, once watched a colony of fulmars on Fair Isle for 56 days on the trot, 18 hours a day, only to find the species relatively faithful: a mere 16 per cent of females had sex with a bird who wasn’t their partner, and there were no ‘illegitimate’ chicks. This isn’t a glamorous pursuit. Geoff Parker, one of the human heroes of Birkhead’s story, spent months with his face a few centimetres away from fresh cowpats, watching female dungflies being aggressively mounted by two males in turn. Sometimes the biologists witness scenes more disturbing than they had anticipated: Mats Olsson, observing the rape-like mating of the Lake Eyre dragon in Australia, saw a male lizard bite his female victim so hard while impregnating her that she died.

Often it is not enough to be a mere voyeur with a long lens. Like a manipulative aristocrat in a Jacobean drama, the intrepid investigator arranges things: Birkhead gets live zebra finches to mate with dead ones, Nicholas Davies and Ian Hartley make it possible for female dunnocks to take a third husband.

A Dunnock, Prunella modularis, photographed in Torquay, Devon, England in April 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Decades of accumulated work of this kind have changed our understanding of the nature of sex, reproduction and the different roles of male and female. From Darwin’s time up to the late 1960s – not coincidentally, the time when the intellectual assault on male-centred academic thinking got under way in earnest – it was thought that male animals competed for female partners, with the strongest and most attractive impregnating the most females; that females sought only monogamy, and if they did have sex with multiple partners (and biologists couldn’t help noticing that they did) it was against their will, always a form of submission to rape.
In the past thirty years, the conventional wisdom has been destroyed. The truth is that females of most species actively seek multiple partners to have sex with. If the aim of males is to put their sperm into as many females as possible, females are trying, with equal determination, to get the very best sperm to fertilise their eggs – even if that means having sex with many males in turn.

Rivalry between males and discrimination by females extends beyond the sexual act itself. Inside the female, the sperm of different males fight for supremacy – this is sperm competition. At the same time, the female may be able to select the sperm that are best for her – this is sperm choice. This is the true battle of the sexes. The males and females of each species are permanently locked in a struggle to out-evolve each other as their reproductive equipment and behaviour change to achieve their conflicting aims – i.e. maximum fertilisation v. best fertilisation.

Q&A: The Surprising Upside of Getting Old

Americans have tremendous fear of aging — and a great deal of prejudice against the elderly. But, as the joke has it, being old is better than the alternative. And, despite our fears, new research suggests that being old is also a lot better than it looks.22

I spoke with Dr. Marc Agronin, whose new book, How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old, explores these issues through the rich stories of his patients’ lives. Agronin is the psychiatrist for the Miami Jewish Health Systems, a nonprofit that is the largest provider of health care for seniors in the Southeast.

What led you to want to work with older people?
When I went to medical school, I knew I wanted to go into psychiatry, that was a given. In my second year, by a chance encounter I began working with a geriatric psychiatrist and I loved the work. I took an immediate interest in working with older patients. They reminded me not only of my grandparents but also of my wonderful aunts and uncles. I felt that there was so much I could learn from these elders that I was just drawn to it and never looked back.

Many people would think that would be a very depressing field of medicine.
I see that all the time and experienced it even when I was doing my training. The older patients were often the ones that the students didn’t want to be around.
[But] the difference wasn’t just in attitude for me: whenever I had experience with older individuals I quickly had deep appreciation for not only their life experience, but also the gratitude they had when someone younger would spend time with them. It was always a positive experience. I never regarded it as something frightening or unpleasant.
I love the stories they tell and hearing about history. So, for me, writing this book was natural — it would be full of stories.

Research now suggests that as we age, our moods improve and we actually grow happier.
There’s great potential. It didn’t occur to me right away how much people learn and grow as they age. That message really transformed my view of aging. I wasn’t trained to look for strengths, but found over time that those strengths are the things that get people through difficult times, whether psychological or spiritual or emotional. They also allow people not only to overcome challenges but even to thrive. The more I saw, the more impressed I was.
Aging, in spite of the inevitable [challenges], is a long process and has its rewards. Amid all the challenges, often the rewards not only balance things out, but most individuals experience a greater degree of well-being and a deeper sense of meaning than they do when they are younger. I often find I get a little taste of that. I feel when I’m with older individuals, I’m as close to the fountain of knowledge as one can get.

Don't Innovate, Imitate

By Jonathan Moules

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery. It is one of the shrewdest ways to become a successful entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are often mistaken for inventors. They are not.
There are some very entrepreneurial inventors, but they are an exception. Most entrepreneurs take another person's technological breakthrough and use their skills in mobilizing resources, publicity, salesmanship, and financial management to create a viable business.

Inventors create the technology, but entrepreneurs turn it into something of economic value. It is possible to go a stage further than this, however, because people do not just invent things, such as cars or personal computers, they come up with ideas for new services that people need and ways of providing them.

Many successful entrepreneurs have built great businesses by doing what someone else has done, only better. This demonstrates that originality in entrepreneurship is actually an over-rated virtue. Imitation, on the other hand, is not just the sincerest form of flattery. It is one of the shrewdest ways to become a successful rebel entrepreneur.

An imitator in action

Image via CrunchBase

Take Lovefilm, the highly successful UK-based startup that has made renting DVD films and television box sets across Europe as easy as going to the post box or getting online. In January 2011, barely 12 years after it was founded, the company had over 1,500,000 members, each paying a monthly subscription of about £8, a catalogue of over 67,000 film and television program titles, and over 4 million rentals per month across five countries.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos starts his High Order Bit presentation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The premise of Lovefilm's business model is simple. Customers pay a monthly fee to receive a number of DVDs or games discs in the post, or the right to download a given quantity over the Internet to a TV or tablet device. They can play the games and watch the films as much as they like, and keep them as long as they like, but they will not get a new one until they return the ones they already have. Lovefilm is able to do this because in most western European countries there are two very reliable delivery mechanisms--one very modern (the Internet) and the other Victorian (the postal service).
Lovefilm's customers pay a subscription to the company, log onto the website and set up lists of favorite films or games, which are ranked as high, medium or low priority. Lovefilm then picks one or two of these, depending on the customer's price plan, and according to availability in the warehouse, and pops them in the mail. Both the old and the new technology work.
Since its creation, Lovefilm has developed its offering to allow customers to bypass the old-economy postal system entirely by streaming video over the Internet to get films 'on demand' on their home computer, games console, TV, tablet computer or smartphone.
Pretty neat, huh? Yes, except Lovefilm is completely unoriginal.

The original

Image via CrunchBase

Reed Hastings pioneered the idea of DVD rental by post in California back in 1997, allegedly after his shock at receiving a bill for $40 in late fees from Blockbuster. Hastings had to fine-tune his original idea to make it work. Initially the business model for his company, Netflix, was for customers to pay for each rental individually. In September 1999, he changed this and Netflix started offering monthly subscriptions. The pay-per-rental model was dropped completely a few months later.
It was not for another three years that Lovefilm began trading in Europe. There were advantages to this. By that time, people had been able to see that the idea worked, helping Lovefilm's founders to put their case when they needed backing from investors or to recruit key personnel.

Founder and CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, class of 1983 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Amazon bought Lovefilm in 2011, making multimillionaires of its investors. This brought the links with Netflix full circle, given that Lovefilm is now part of a U.S. company.
Amazon had seen the potential of the online DVD rental market at first hand with Netflix. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, has a reputation for constantly trying to stretch the Amazon brand into new areas. His approach has often been to try things himself before buying one of the best players in the market--another way of grabbing someone else's good idea. This is exactly what he did with the online DVD rental model. Amazon tried building its own video rental service, based on people downloading titles from its website. This was not as successful as Mr. Bezos would have liked, so he bought Lovefilm instead.
Imitator brands have clearly been a benefit for Amazon. In a way they have acted as the research and development function of Amazon, honing the service until it was ready for Amazon to acquire.

A Point of View: What would Keynes do?

What would John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th Century, have made of the current economic situation, ponders philosopher John Gray.
"I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath."

That was how John Maynard Keynes, speaking in 1938 in a talk later published as his brilliant memoir My Early Beliefs, recalled his younger self and his friends in the Bloomsbury Group as they had been in the years before World War I.

• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was educated at Eton and Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics
• He became friends with members of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals and artists
• Keynes joined the Treasury during World War I, and in the wake of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, criticising exorbitant war reparations demanded from Germany, claiming they would harm the country's economy and could foster a desire for revenge
• During inter-war years, Keynes became a prominent arts patron
• His best-known work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, made Keynes Britain's most influential economist
• Keynes led 1944 British delegation to the Bretton Woods conference in the United States, playing an important role in planning the World Bank and International Monetary Fund

The influential Cambridge economist has figured prominently in the anxious debates that have gone on since the crash of 2007-2008. For most of those invoking his name, he was a kind of social engineer, who urged using the power of government to lift the economy out of the devastating depression of the 30s.

Find out more

• John Gray is a political philosopher and author of
  False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

• Listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer
• BBC Podcasts - A Point of View
• Four Thought podcast

That is how Keynes's disciples view him today. The fashionable cult of austerity, they warn, has forgotten Keynes's most important insight - slashing government spending when credit is scarce only plunges the economy into deeper recession.

What is needed now, they believe, is what Keynes urged in the 30s - governments must be ready to borrow more, print more money and invest in public works in order to restart growth.
But would Keynes be today what is described as a Keynesian? Would this supremely subtle and sceptical mind still believe that policies he formulated long ago - which worked well in the decades after the World War II - can solve our problems now?

Continue reading the story ...

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Why Procrastination is Good for You

By Megan Gambino

In a new book, University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy argues that the key to success is waiting for the last possible moment to make a decision

 In his new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Frank Partnoy claims that when faced with a decision, we should assess how long we have to make it, and then wait until the last possible moment to do so.
Book jacket: Courtesy of Pete Garceau; Portrait: Courtesy of Fergus Greer

Sometimes life seems to happen at warp speed. But, decisions, says Frank Partnoy, should not. When the financial market crashed in 2008, the former investment banker and corporate lawyer, now a professor of finance and law and co-director of the Center for Corporate and Securities Law at the University of San Diego, turned his attention to literature on decision-making.
“Much recent research about decisions helps us understand what we should do or how we should do it, but it says little about when,” he says.
In his new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Partnoy claims that when faced with a decision, we should assess how long we have to make it, and then wait until the last possible moment to do so. Should we take his advice on how to “manage delay,” we will live happier lives.

The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

A federal investigation alleged Enrique Prado's involvement in seven murders, yet he was in charge when America outsourced covert killing to a private company.

CIA

It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise."

Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain

Electrically stimulating the brain could make you smarter. Image: Allan Snyder

Imagine a creativity cap. A device that would free you, if only momentarily, from your mindsets, from your prejudices, from the mental blocks to creativity.

These words are emblazoned on the website Creativitycap.com, and they represent the vision of neuroscientist Allan Snyder. Snyder believes we all possess untapped powers of cognition, normally seen only in rare individuals called savants, and accessing them might take just a few jolts of electricity to the brain.

It sounds like a Michael Crichton plot, but Snyder, of the University of Sydney, Australia, says he wouldn’t be surprised to see a prototype of the creativity cap within a couple of years. His research suggests that brain stimulation improves people’s ability to solve difficult problems. But Snyder’s interpretation of his findings remains controversial, and the science of using brain stimulation to boost thinking is still in its early stages.

“I think it’s a bit of a minefield,” said psychologist Robyn Young of Flinders University in Australia, who has tried to replicate Snyder’s early experiments. “I’m not really sure whether the technology is developed that can turn it into a more accurate science.”

Snyder has long been fascinated by savants — people with a developmental brain disorder (often autism) or brain injury who display prowess in a particular area, such as mathematics, art or music, which far exceeds the norm. Kim Peek, who provided the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie “Rain Man,” was a savant who could memorize entire books after a single reading, or instantly calculate what day of the week any calendar date fell on. But he had a severe mental disability that prevented him from performing simple actions such as buttoning his shirt.

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

Few snippets from Jennifer Egan's excellent short fiction work, “Black Box,” in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, The Science Fiction Issue.

Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker

-----

Some citizen agents have chosen not to
return.

They have left their bodies behind, and
now they shimmer sublimely in the
heavens.

-----

...Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.

The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.

When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.

-----

Some powerful men actually call their beauties "Beauty."

Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties.

If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you've gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind.

Kindness feels good, even when it's based on a false notion of your identity and purpose.

-----

Posing as a beauty means not reading what you would like to read on a rocky shore in the South of France....

------

Eagerness and pliability can be expressed even in the way you climb from the sea onto chalky yellow rocks.

"You're a very fast swimmer," uttered by a man who is still submerged, may not be intended as praise...

------

...The directive "Relax" suggests that your discomfort is palpable.

"No one can see us" suggests that your discomfort has been understood as fear of physical exposure.

"Relax, relax," uttered in rhythmic, throaty tones, suggests that your discomfort is not unwelcome.

Newyorker Subscribers can read the full version of this story

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here Deborah Treisman talks with Jennifer Egan about her story “Black Box,” written as a series of Tweets. And Jonathan Lethem, Junot Díaz, and Sam Lipsyte share their science-fiction thoughts and book recommendations.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/2012/06/04/120604on_audio_egan

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Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution

Richard Dawkins had a great article about evolution a while ago..

Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution
The way in which wolves adapted to the environment to turn into dogs reveals another insight into evolution
by Richard Dawkins

We can turn to the example of dogs for some important lessons about natural selection. All breeds of dogs are domesticated wolves: not jackals, not coyotes and not foxes. But I need to qualify this in the light of a fascinating theory of the evolution of the dog, which has been most clearly articulated by the American zoologist Raymond Coppinger. The idea is that the evolution of the dog was not just a matter of artificial selection. It was at least as much a case of wolves adapting to the ways of Man by natural selection. Much of the initial domestication of the dog was self domestication, mediated by natural, not artificial, selection. Long before we got our hands on the chisels in the artificial selection toolbox, natural selection had already sculpted wolves into self-domesticated “village dogs’ without any human intervention.
Only later did humans adopt these village dogs and transmogrify them, separately and comprehensively, into the rainbow spectrum of breeds that today grace (if grace is the word) Crufts and similar pageants of canine achievement and beauty (if beauty is the word).

Coppinger points out that when domestic animals break free and go feral for many generations, they usually revert to something close to their wild ancestor. We might expect feral dogs, therefore, to become rather wolf-like. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, dogs left to go feral seem to become the ubiquitous “village dogs” — “pye-dogs” — that hang around human settlements all over the Third World. This encourages Coppinger’s belief that the dogs on which human breeders finally went to work were wolves no longer. They had already changed themselves into dogs: village dogs, pye-dogs, perhaps dingos.

Real wolves are pack hunters. Village dogs are scavengers that frequent middens and rubbish dumps. Wolves scavenge too, but they are not temperamentally suited to scavenging human rubbish because of their long “flight distance”. If you see an animal feeding, you can measure its flight distance by seeing how close it will let you approach before fleeing. For any given species in any given situation, there will be an optimal flight distance, somewhere between too risky or foolhardy at the short end, and too flighty or risk-averse at the long end. Individuals that take off too late when danger threatens are more likely to be killed by that very danger. Less obviously, there is such a thing as taking off too soon. Individuals that are too flighty never get a square meal, because they run away at the first hint of danger on the horizon. It is easy for us to overlook the dangers of being too risk-averse. We are puzzled when we see zebras or antelopes calmly grazing in full view of lions, keeping no more than a wary eye on them.
We are puzzled, because our own risk aversion (or that of our safari guide) keeps us firmly inside the Land Rover even though we have no reason to think there is a lion within miles. This is because we have nothing to set against our fear. We are going to get our square meals back at the safari lodge. Our wild ancestors would have had much more sympathy with the risk-taking zebras. Like the zebras, they had to balance the risk of being eaten against the risk of not eating. Sure, the lion might attack; but, depending on the size of your troop, the odds were that it would catch another member of it rather than you. And if you never ventured on to the feeding grounds, or down to the waterhole, you’d die anyway, of hunger or thirst. It is a lesson in economic trade-offs.
The bottom line of that digression is that the wild wolf, like any other animal, will have an optimal flight distance, nicely poised — and potentially flexible — between too bold and too flighty. Natural selection will work on the flight distance, moving it one way or the other along the continuum if conditions change over evolutionary time. If a plenteous new food source in the form of village rubbish dumps enters the world of wolves, that is going to shift the optimum point towards the shorter end of the flight distance continuum, in the direction of reluctance to flee when enjoying this new bounty.

We can imagine wild wolves scavenging on a rubbish tip on the edge of a village. Most of them, fearful of men throwing stones and spears, have a very long flight distance. They sprint for the safety of the forest as soon as a human appears in the distance. But a few individuals, by genetic chance, happen to have a slightly shorter flight distance than the average. Their readiness to take slight risks — they are brave, shall we say, but not foolhardy — gains them more food than their more risk-averse rivals. As the generations go by, natural selection favours a shorter and shorter flight distance, until just before it reaches the point where the wolves really are endangered by stone throwing humans. The optimum flight distance has shifted because of the newly available food source.
Something like this evolutionary shortening of the flight distance was, in Coppinger’s view, the first step in the domestication of the dog, and it was achieved by natural selection, not artificial selection. Decreasing flight distance is a behavioural measure of what might be called increasing tameness. At this stage in the process, humans were not deliberately choosing the tamest individuals for breeding. At this early stage, the only interactions between humans and these incipient dogs were hostile. If wolves were becoming domesticated it was by self-domestication, not deliberate domestication by people. Deliberate domestication came later.

We can get an idea of how tameness, or anything else, can be sculpted — naturally or artificially — by looking at a fascinating experiment of modern times, on the domestication of Russian silver foxes for use in the fur trade. It is doubly interesting because of the lessons it teaches us, over and above what Darwin knew, about the domestication process, about the “side effects” of selective breeding, and about the resemblance, which Darwin well understood, between artificial and natural selection.
The silver fox is just a colour variant, valued for its beautiful fur, of the familiar red fox, Vulpes vulpes. The Russian geneticist Dimitri Belyaev was employed to run a fox fur farm in the 1950s. He was later sacked because his scientific genetics conflicted with the anti-scientific ideology of Lysenko, the charlatan biologist who managed to capture the ear of Stalin and so take over, and largely ruin, all of Soviet genetics and agriculture for some 20 years. Belyaev retained his love of foxes, and of true Lysenko-free genetics, and he was later able to resume his studies of both, as director of an Institute of Genetics in Siberia.

Wild foxes are tricky to handle, and Belyaev set out deliberately to breed for tameness. Like any other animal or plant breeder of his time, his method was to exploit natural variation (no genetic engineering in those days) and choose, for breeding, those males and females that came closest to the ideal he was seeking.
In selecting for tameness, Belyaev could have chosen, for breeding, those dogs and bitches that most appealed to him, or looked at him with the cutest facial expressions. That might well have had the desired effect on the tameness of future generations. More systematically than that, however, he used a measure that was pretty close to the “flight distance” that I just mentioned in connection with wild wolves, but adapted for cubs. Belyaev and his colleagues (and successors, for the experimental program continued after his death) subjected fox cubs to standardized tests in which an experimenter would offer a cub food by hand, while trying to stroke or fondle it. The cubs were classified into three classes. Class III cubs were those that fled from or bit the person. Class II cubs would allow themselves to be handled, but showed no positive responsiveness to the experimenters. Class I cubs, the tamest of all, positively approached the handlers, wagging their tails and whining. When the cubs grew up, the experimenters systematically bred only from this tamest class.

After a mere six generations of this selective breeding for tameness, the foxes had changed so much that the experimenters felt obliged to name a new category, the “domesticated elite” class, which were “eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs”. At the beginning of the experiment, none of the foxes were in the elite class. After ten generations of breeding for tameness, 18 per cent were “elite”; after 20 generations, 35 per cent; and after 30 to 35 generations, “domesticated elite” individuals constituted between 70 and 80 per cent of the experimental population.
Such results are perhaps not too surprising, except for the astonishing magnitude and speed of the effect. Thirty-five generations would pass unnoticed on the geological timescale. Even more interesting, however, were the unexpected side-effects of the selective breeding for tameness. These were truly fascinating and genuinely unforeseen. Darwin, the dog-lover, would have been entranced.
The tame foxes not only behaved like domestic dogs, they looked like them. They lost their foxy pelage and became piebald black and white, like Welsh collies. Their foxy prick ears were replaced by doggy floppy ears. Their tails turned up at the end like a dog’s, rather than down like a fox’s brush. The females came on heat every six months like a bitch, instead of every year like a vixen. According to Belyaev, they even sounded like dogs.

These dog-like features were side- effects. Belyaev and his team did not deliberately breed for them, only for tameness. Those other dog-like characteristics seemingly rode on the evolutionary coat-tails of the genes for tameness. To geneticists, this is not surprising. They recognise a widespread phenomenon called “pleiotropy”, whereby genes have more than one effect, seemingly unconnected. The stress is on the word “seemingly”. Embryonic development is a complicated business. As we learn more about the details, that “seemingly unconnected” turns into “connected by a route that we now understand, but didn’t before”. Presumably genes for floppy ears and piebald coats are pleiotropically linked to genes for tameness, in foxes as well as in dogs. This illustrates a generally important point about evolution. When you notice a characteristic of an animal and ask what its Darwinian survival value is, you may be asking the wrong question. It could be that the characteristic you have picked out is not the one that matters. It may have “come along for the ride”, dragged along in evolution by some other characteristic to which it is pleiotropically linked.

The evolution of the dog, then, if Coppinger is right, was not just a matter of artificial selection, but a complicated mixture of natural selection (which predominated in the early stages of domestication) and artificial selection (which came to the fore more recently). The transition would have been seamless, which again goes to emphasise the similarity — as Darwin recognised — between artificial and natural selection.
Selection — in the form of artificial selection by human breeders — can turn a pye-dog into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in a few centuries. The difference between any two breeds of dog gives us a rough idea of the quantity of evolutionary change that can be achieved in less than a millennium.

The next question we should ask is, how many millennia do we have available to us in accounting for the whole history of life? If we imagine the sheer quantity of difference that separates a pye-dog from a peke, which took only a few centuries of evolution, how much longer is the time that separates us from the beginning of evolution or, say, from the beginning of the mammals? Or from the time when fish emerged on to the land? The answer is that life began not just centuries ago but tens of millions of centuries ago. The measured age of our planet is about 4.6 billion years, or about 46 million centuries. The time that has elapsed since the common ancestor of all today’s mammals walked the Earth is about two million centuries. A century seems a pretty long time to us. Can you imagine two million centuries, laid end to end? The time that has elapsed since our fish ancestors crawled out of the water on to the land is about three and a half million centuries: that is to say, about 20,000 times as long as it took to make all the different — really very different — breeds of dogs from the common ancestor that they all share.
Hold in your head an approximate picture of the quantity of difference between a peke and a pye-dog. We aren’t talking precise measurements here: it would do just as well to think about the difference between any one breed of dog and any other, for that is on average double the amount of change that has been wrought, by artificial selection, from the common ancestor. Bear in mind this order of evolutionary change, and then extrapolate backwards 20,000 times as far into the past. It becomes rather easy to accept that evolution could accomplish the amount of change that it took to transform a fish into a human.

© Richard Dawkins 2009
Extracted from The Greatest Show on Earth, to be published by Bantam Press on September 10 at £20. To buy it for £18 contact 0845 2712134 or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
www.richarddawkins.net

No Country for Old Men

Wikipedia has a great article about the movie "No Country for Old Men" (2007), I think it's one of the best movies of the past decade and deserves all the accolades that it has received.

The Script of Script of No Country for Old Men by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy (Draft) also makes for fascinating reading!

Some notable insights from the Wikipedia article [among many others, including Themes and analysis]: 

Title

The title is taken from the opening line of 20th-century Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium.":

”THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect”

Richard Gilmore relates the Yeats’ poem to the Coens’ film. “The lament that can be heard in these lines,” he says, “is for no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of the old … Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato’s Academy, for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition. In his book of mystical writings, A Vision, Yeats says, ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers…spoke to the multitude and the few alike.’ The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society’s religious, aesthetic, and practical life is Yeat’s ideal …It is an ideal rarely realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium. Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men, one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times, that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.”

Differences from the novel

Tasha Robinson lists the differences between the Coen brothers award-winning script and the Cormac McCarthy novel:
“• The book is less removed about the end of the interaction between Chigurh (the Javier Bardem character) and Moss' wife …; it spells out the fact that he shoots her. She also doesn't refuse to call heads or tails on his coin: She calls it incorrectly, though they then have pretty much the same conversation they have in the film, about how he, not the coin, is deciding her fate.
• The book is also more specific about how Chigurh ended up in the car of the deputy he kills at the beginning of the film; he murdered a man for a snotty remark, then permitted himself to be captured ‘to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will.’ Explaining some aspects of his life to Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) before killing him, Chigurh describes this as a vain, foolish act.
• The first hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very differently; rather than punching out the lock and wounding Moss, Chigurh apparently steals a key from the murdered clerk and quietly enters Moss' room, and Moss hides and takes him captive at gunpoint, so they have a chance to see and know each other. Then Moss runs and the chase/shootout begins.
• There's a scene where Chigurh delivers the recovered cash to some higher-up whom he's never met before, but whom he's clearly decided is now his employer; he presents the money and they come to terms after a brief ‘How did you find me?’ ‘What difference does it make?’ conversation.
• There's also a protracted scene toward the end where Sheriff Bell interviews one of the kids who witnessed Chigurh's car accident, and apparently stole Chigurh's gun out of his car afterward.
• The chase scene with the dog that follows Moss downstream until he manages to dry out his gun and shoot it is an invention of the film, and doesn't appear in the book in any way.
• Where the film last sees Moss alive heading off to have a beer with a lady who calls to him from poolside at her hotel, the book has a lengthy interlude between him and a young female hitchhiker, whom he gives money and advice ... He actually dies because he puts down his gun when the Mexicans following him take her hostage.”
Robinson adds that “the list of plot changes above may seem long, but they represent a small percentage of the actual story, which mostly plays out in the film exactly as McCarthy puts it on the page, scene for scene, conversation for conversation. A lot of the speeches and wittiest exchanges are verbatim from the book.”
Other listed differences include:
“• [The film] omits all references to Bell's experience in World War II, which is a key to understanding his character in the novel. In the novel, in the scene with Uncle Ellis, Bell tells a long story about how he received a medal of honor in the war, which he feels he did not deserve because he ran away and left his men. Bell is haunted by his guilt about this incident, which the film completely omits.
• The opening [voice-over narration] is composed of lines taken from 3 different passages of first-person narration: (90; 63-4; 3-4). As one can see from the page numbers, the filmmakers took passages out of their contexts and reworked them into one coherent statement.
• [In the] shoot out between Chigurh and Moss after Moss escapes from Hotel Eagle: This scene intensifies the dramatic action in which Moss barely escapes in the truck and then waits for Chigurh and wounds him, momentarily turns the tables as Moss hunts Chigurh who escapes. In the novel, Chigurh gets involved with battling the Mexicans and loses track of Moss.”
Craig Kennedy adds that “one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell’s narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn’t make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine.”
Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh’s encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. “Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh’s question as, ‘What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss? (55)’, he says, ‘the film elides the word ‘saw’, but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as ‘almost dark’ (52), the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man’s desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at ‘near dark’; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man’s ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth.”

Film ending and final scene

"Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?"

–Actor Josh Brolin on the film's ending

Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the film ending. “Even in their best films”, she said, “the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which [Sheriff] Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.”
Curt Holman of CL Atlanta also argues that “there's something deflating about the film's final scenes. McCarthy raises the ancient problem of human evil: Is it an inherent flaw of human nature, or the net result of random fate? McCarthy seems to conclude that it's a generational thing. ‘Anytime you quit hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am’, the end is pretty much in sight,’ says [Sheriff] Bell, and you suspect he's only half-kidding.”
Actor Josh Brolin, however, defended the ending of the film. "I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence." After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones. "If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie. You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked.
Ciro Discepolo emphasizes that “the key to understand the whole film … is the two dreams that Tommy Lee Jones relates to his mate in the final scene,” he said. “In his first dream, the sheriff sees his own father handing over some money that he would lose: old generations handed over to us values we have lost. The other dream shows the sheriff and his father riding a horse. They have to pass through a narrow and dark mountain pass. His father overtakes him and lights a natural torch; he then settles down and lights a fire that gives light and warmth, then he waits for his son. This is the hope that the country – that country and every country – could eventually find out the right way to a place with a warm fire and much more light.”
Lucia Bozzola explains the meaning of the "dream" in the final scene. "Considering that [Sheriff] Bell opened the film by musing that his law enforcement progenitors wouldn’t know what to make of the violence nowadays", she said, "not to mention all of the references to Chigurh as a ghost, it’s not that tough to figure out why Bell’s dream matters, or why he’s chosen this path. He’s never going to be able to do what his father did as far as law and order because there’s always going to be a specter that’s ahead of him. Or a Terminator. If he’s going to survive in this country, a good man has to give up. I suppose this is how the West was lost."

"Alone Together": An MIT Professor's New Book Urges Us to Unplug

BY DAVID ZAX @ fastcompany.com

 

In her new book, an MIT professor shares her ambivalence about the overuses of technology, which, she writes, "proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies."

Sherry Turkle, has been an ethnographer of our technological world for three decades, hosted all the while at one of its epicenters: MIT. A professor of the social studies of science and technology there, she also heads up its Initiative on Technology and Self. Her new book, Alone Together, completes a trilogy of investigations into the ways humans interact with technology. It can be, at times, a grim read. Fast Company spoke recently with Turkle about connecting, solitude, and how that compulsion to always have your BlackBerry on might actually be hurting your company's bottom line. 

 

The title of your book, Alone Together, is chilling.

If you get into these email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you're alone, you get into this situation where you're continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation. You're alone but looking for approval as though you were together--the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody's validation. I make a statement in the book, that if you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We're raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it's your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook...we're losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.

You only mention Twitter a few times in the book. What are your thoughts on Twitter?

I think it's an interesting notion that sharing becomes part of actually having the thought. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's, "I share therefore I am." Sharing as you're thinking opens you up to whether the group likes what you're thinking as becoming a very big factor in whether or not you think you're thinking well. Is Twitter fun, is it interesting to hear the aperçus of people? Of course! I certainly don't have an anti-Twitter position. It's just not everything.

You write in your book that we today seem to view authenticity with the same skittishness that the Victorians viewed sex.

For some purpose, simulation is just as good as a real. Kids call it being "alive enough." Making an airline reservation? Simulation is as good as the real. Playing chess? Maybe, maybe not. It can beat you, but do you care? Many people are building robot companions; David Levy argues that robots will be intimate companions. Where we are now, I call it the "robotic moment," not because we have robots, but because we're being philosophically prepared to have them. I'm very haunted by these children who talk about simulation as "alive enough." We're encouraged to live more and more of our lives in simulation.

 

 

Read more here.

 

 

After the unthinkable: How 9/11 changed fiction

IN THE days and weeks after 9/11 a number of writers asked what the future of fiction could be after such a rupture. The comments echoed philosopher Theodor Adorno’s comment: “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
 
Ten years on it is abundantly clear that fiction does, of course, have a future. Some novelists have tackled the events of that September day head on; others have used the episode as a spur to look at the Western world shaken out of its complacency. The quality of the output, as in all areas of fiction, is highly variable.
 
Jay McInerney’s “The Good Life” was a rather crass before-and-after view of a couple forced to re-examine their relationship following the events of 9/11; Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” had a number of touching moments but was ultimately too long to carry itself. Don Delillo’s “Falling Man” was a strange sort of novel which lacked the density of his other work, but it did capture some of the most chilling elements of the events: “By the time the second plane appears,” Keith comments as he and Lianne watch the endlessly cycling video of the attacks, “we're all a little older and wiser.”
 
There are three important reasons why it is hard to write a good 9/11 novel. The first is that the attack on the World Trade Centre was such a huge and overpowering event that it often overshadows and dominates the fictional elements of a novel: literary novelists normally shy away from choosing such a big and unbelievable event as the backdrop to a story. Mr McInerney’s book is the poorer, I think, because his characters seem so paper-thin beside the burning towers and anguished souls the television footage depicted. For this reason non-fiction has often been the better medium to convey the most moving and poignant record of the day.

The second is that all fiction of every genre hinges around some kind of crisis, internal or external, that a book has to see its way through. This can take many forms. But 9/11 is in a sense a bigger crisis than many novels can contain or capture: it’s a situation where truth is both bigger and stranger than fiction.
 
That is probably why many authors have taken 9/11 as a jumping-off point to look at a group or type of person they had not thought to before. Martin Amis wrote a short story in the voice of one of the 9/11 hijackers. John Updike’s “Terrorist” traced the world of a would-be suicide bomber, for example. The setting for that book, like Updike’s other work, was suburban middle-America, and many of the characters were also recognisable from earlier books, but his central figure, a teenager who becomes radicalised, sits uneasily in this context—uneasy both for the character and sadly the novel too.

Read more...

Race, Religion, and Diversity in London After 9/11

by Zadie Smith @ newyorker.com

Suddenly summoned to witness some thing great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness,” wrote John Updike ten years ago in these pages. He watched the towers fall with “the false intimacy of television,” from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Over in North West London, we were certainly very small and distant, but we still felt that false intimacy. We are a mixed community, including many Muslims, from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Africa. I grew up with girls who wore the head scarf, a fact that seemed no more remarkable to me at the time than Jewish boys wearing yarmulkes or Hindu kids with bindis on their foreheads. Different world. What enabled it? It helped that so many of the class disparities between us had been partially obscured. United in the same primary schools, we were neither mesmerized by, nor especially frightened of, our differences. Later, that sense of equality became difficult to maintain. Teen-agers are preoccupied with status and justice—they notice difference. Why do some have so much while others have nothing? Natural superiority? Hard work? Historical luck? Or exploitation? For some, the basic political insights of adolescence arrived with an extra jolt: your people over here were hurting your people over there; your home was attacking your home. Then came the cataclysm. The end of the world for nearly three thousand innocent people. The beginning of a different sort of world for the rest of us. From the epicenter in Manhattan, shock waves rippled across Europe. In North West London, a small but significant change: the stereotype of the Muslim boy was transformed. From quiet, sexless, studious child—sitting in the back of class and destined for an engineering degree—to Public Enemy No. 1.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/09/12/110912ta_talk_smith#ixzz1XL0cLP70

Zadie Smith was only 25 when her first novel, White Teeth, was published. It seems that this is sort of the Number One Fact about Zadie Smith, as it were, especially for Writing About Zadie Smith. At the New Yorker festival this past fall, Smith was questioned about what it was like to become such a remarkable success at such an incredibly young age. Her response was classically Zadie: It wasn’t that unusual at all, she said, and then she proceeded to list a host of names who had achieved similarly early and lasting success — among them John Updike, Martin Amis, and the rest of the foundation of modern Western literature. And she’s right — for a talent of her caliber, she is just right on track.