Why war? Darwinian explanations, such as the popular “demonic males” theory of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, are clearly insufficient. They can’t explain why war emerged relatively recently in human prehistory—less than 15,000 years ago, according to the archaeological record—or why since then it has erupted only in certain times and places.

Many scholars solve this problem by combining Darwin with gloomy old Thomas Malthus. “No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment,” the Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc asserts. “This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities.” Note the words “always” and “inevitable.”

LeBlanc is as wrong as Wrangham. Analyses of more than 300 societies in the Human Relations Area Files, an ethnographic database at Yale University, have turned up no clear-cut correlations between warfare and chronic resource scarcity. (…)

War is both underdetermined and overdetermined. That is, many conditions are sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary. Some societies remain peaceful even when significant risk factors are present, such as high population density, resource scarcity, and economic and ethnic divisions between people. Conversely, other societies fight in the absence of these conditions. What theory can account for this complex pattern of social behavior?

The best answer I’ve found comes from Margaret Mead, who as I mentioned in a recent post is often disparaged by genophilic researchers such as Wrangham. Mead proposed her theory of war in her 1940 essay “Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity.” She dismissed the notion that war is the inevitable consequence of our “basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature.” This theory is contradicted, she noted, by the simple fact that not all societies wage war. War has never been observed among a Himalayan people called the Lepchas or among the Eskimos. In fact, neither of these groups, when questioned by early ethnographers, was even aware of the concept of war. (…)

Warfare is “an invention,” Mead concluded, like cooking, marriage, writing, burial of the dead or trial by jury. Once a society becomes exposed to the “idea” of war, it “will sometimes go to war” under certain circumstances.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

New Yorkers are accustomed to strong odors, but several years ago a new aroma began wafting through the city’s streets, a smell that was more unnerving than the usual offenders (trash, sweat, urine) precisely because it was so delightful: the sweet, unmistakable scent of maple syrup. It was a fickle miasma, though, draping itself over Morningside Heights one afternoon, disappearing for weeks, reemerging in Chelsea for a few passing hours before vanishing again. Fearing a chemical warfare attack, hundreds of New Yorkers reported the smell to authorities. (…) The city quickly determined that the odor was harmless, but the mystery of its origin persisted for four years.

During maple syrup events, as they came to be called, operators at the city’s popular NYC311 call center—set up to field complaints and provide information on school closings and the like—were instructed to reassure callers that they could go about their business as usual.

But then city officials had an idea. Those calls into the 311 line, they realized, weren’t simply queries from an edgy populace. They were clues.

On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity.

Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes.

Fifteen months after the Maple Syrup Mystery was solved, mayor Michael Bloomberg paid a visit to the 311 call center. (…) Launched in March 2003, 311 now fields on average more than 50,000 calls a day, offering information about more than 3,600 topics: school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs. The service has translators on call to handle some 180 different languages.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Mark Borthwick }

I like, I don’t like.

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay, roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, beer excessively cold, flat pillows, toasted bread, Havana cigars, Handel, measured walks, pears, white or vine peaches, cherries, colors, watches, pens, ink pens, entremets, coarse salt, realistic novels, piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Jules Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc, having change, Bouvard et Pécuchet, walking in the evening in sandals on the lanes of South-West, the Marx Brothers, the Serrano at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, et cetera.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in trousers, geraniums, strawberries, harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, afternoons, Satie, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin concertos, Renaissance dances, pipe organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and his kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, et cetera.

I like, I don’t like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours.

{ Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1975 }

{ Blue-faced golden snub-nosed monkeys }

A report issued this month found that nearly 1,000 tigers had been killed in the last decade as part of illegal trade. The numbers are based on tiger seizures from 11 of the 13 countries that still have wild tiger populations. That is 100 tigers a year falling victim to poachers. When estimates put the wild population at 3,500 individuals or less, loss of 100 a year to poachers is devastatingly high.

{ Promega Connections | Continue reading }

Tigers survive in 40% less area than they occupied a decade ago. (…)

Three tiger subspecies - the Bali, Javan, and Caspian - have become extinct in the past 70 years. The six remaining subspecies - Amur, Bengal, Indochinese, Malayan, South China, and Sumatran - live only in Asia, and all are threatened by poaching and habitat loss.

{ WWF | Continue reading }

{ Scientists discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy | NY Times | full story }

{ Interborough Subway, 14 St. to 42nd St., New York, May 21, 1905 | More: Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, 1899 | video }

related { 50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City }

{ Von Bruenchenhein’s drawing made with ballpoint pens, rulers and French curves, 1965 | Von Bruenchenhein’s hyper-productive creative existence is receiving its first in-depth museum exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum. | NY Times | full story }

…an essential difference between genetics, the study of a fixed inheritance in DNA, and epigenetics, which is the study of how the environment affects those genes, causing different ones to be active at different rates, times and places in the body.

Evolutionary approaches to human behavior have often been framed in terms of “good” and “bad”: Why did homosexuality evolve if it’s “bad” for the genes, because it reduces the chance that they’ll be passed on to a new generation? Why wouldn’t an impulsive temperament be “selected against,” seeing as its possessors would be more likely to fall off cliffs? Some thinkers have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain why a “maladaptive” behavior hasn’t disappeared. (…)

When we focus on particular genes in your particular cortex turning “on” and “off,” the selective forces of evolution aren’t our concern. They’ve done their work; they’re history. But your genes, all “winners” in that eons-long Darwinian process of elimination, still permit a range of human behavior. That range runs from a sober, quiet conscientious life at one extreme to, say, playing for the Rolling Stones at the other. From the long-term genetic point of view, everything on that range, no matter how extreme, is as adaptive as any other. Because the same genes make them all possible.

In other words, the epigenetic idea is that your DNA could support many different versions of you; so the particular you that exists is the result of your experiences, which turned your genes “on” and “off” in patterns that would have been different if you’d lived under different conditions.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

photo { Hiroshi Watanabe }

{ 1. Steven Brahms | 2. Robert Davies }

{ Nouveau York party at Le Bain, The Standard New York, October 31, 2010 | photo: Keetja Allard }

When we change our appearance, for example, by getting a haircut, friends will often note that we look different, but they may not be able to pinpoint exactly what has changed. This may result from our tendency to process faces holistically rather than by individual features.

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, volunteers were shown an image of a face or a house, followed by a similar image that may or may not have changed [images]. The volunteers were better at detecting that a change had occurred in faces than in houses, but they were surprisingly better at identifying which feature had changed in houses than in faces.

These findings suggest that holistic and feature-specific processing may be both advantageous and disadvantageous, depending on the nature of the task.

{ APS }

related { Questions about the safety of the latest sensation in hair care, the so-called Brazilian hair-relaxing treatment | NY Times | full story }

The history of philosophy abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it. One of the worst offenders is Kierkegaard, who argues in a hundred ways that the ultimate is inexpressible, that truth is “subjectivity,” that the meaning of life can be given by no formula, no proposition, no abstraction, but only by the concrete experience of surrender whose content can never be given in words.

The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture. And he set a fashion that continues to this day.

I am currently reading a mercifully short book by Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, in which the argument is stated on the first page  — namely, that since music works through melodies, rhythms and harmonies and not through concepts, it contains no messages that can be translated into words. There follows 50,000 words devoted to the messages of music — often suggestive, poetic and atmospheric words, but words nevertheless, devoted to a subject that no words can capture.

{ Roger Scruton/Big Questions Online | Continue reading }

photo { Shelbie Dimond }

Raymond Moore recently described a study about the influence of romance novels on condom use. Erotic romance as a genre generally focuses on spontaneous and passionate sex. Since rubbers don’t exactly scream passion, love scenes rarely mention their use.

Researchers at Northwestern University were interested in how novels affected attitudes toward condom use in readers. They surveyed college students about their reading habits and found that students who read more romance novels had more negative attitudes towards condom use and less intention to use condoms.

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

photo { Barnaby Roper }

China may not matter quite as much as you think

It is hard to exaggerate the Chinese economy’s far-reaching impact on the world, from small towns to big markets. It accounted for about 46% of global coal consumption in 2009, according to the World Coal Institute, an industry body, and consumes a similar share of the world’s zinc and aluminium. In 2009 it got through twice as much crude steel as the European Union, America and Japan combined. It bought more cars than America last year and this year looks set to buy more mobile phones than the rest of the world put together, according to China First Capital, an investment bank.

In China growth of 9.6% (recorded in the year to the third quarter) represents a slowdown. China will account for almost a fifth of world growth this year, according to the IMF; at purchasing-power parity, it will account for just over a quarter. (…)

Since the crisis, China has shown that its economy can grow even when America’s shrinks. It is not entirely dependent on the world’s biggest economy. But that does not mean it can substitute for it.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Prior }

{ Funky Forest - After School Club | more | Thanks Glenn }

Steve Miller is justifiably proud of the manicured grounds around his stately stucco home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. So he was nonplussed last year when he discovered that someone had been tossing plastic bags of dog excrement into the sculptured shrubs around a palm tree in his front yard.

“It was a pile of at least 10 bags,” said Mr. Miller, 55, who owned a dance costume business in Bristol, Pa., before retiring to Florida in 2005. (…)

Mr. Miller went to a local electronics store and bought a $400 do-it-yourself video surveillance kit. In so doing, he joined the ranks of outraged homeowners who are recording their neighbors’ misdeeds. Attracted by the declining prices and technological advances of such devices, these homeowners are posting the videos online to shame their neighbors or using them as evidence to press charges. (…)

A month’s worth of video footage clearly showed one of his neighbors slinging bags of dog feces into his yard. (…) Mr. Miller showed the video evidence to his community’s security patrol. “They were stunned, and wrote the guy a citation for improper waste disposal, littering and leash law violations.”

Moreover, the neighbor had to pick up all that he had tossed. Mr. Miller also had some fun at the neighbor’s expense, posting a video on YouTube with a suitably silly soundtrack and narration. (…)

There are countless videos online that are intended to settle scores between neighbors. Whereas such disputes were once confined to the individuals involved, now they can have a much wider audience, whose members often take sides and post comments.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine.

Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

This was demonstrated in a study by Pearl Martin and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia (Martin et al., 2005). In their experiment they tried to convince participants to change their minds about the controversial issue of voluntary euthanasia.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Charles Brittin, Arrest at Los Angeles Federal Building Protest, 1965 }

Americans less healthy than English, but live as long or longer, study finds

Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography. (…)

“If you get sick at older ages, you will die sooner in England than in the United States,” Smith said. “It appears that at least in terms of survival at older ages with chronic disease, the medical system in the United States may be better than the system in England.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Real-time holographic video displays could be near

Holograms may seem like an original invention from some science fiction films. A famous scene often mentioned in this context is that from Star Wars where Princess Leia records an important holographic message, ending with the words “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi“.

Such visions of holograms aren’t fiction. In a paper published in Nature, Nasser Peyghambarian, Pierre-Alexandre Blanche and colleagues from the College of Optical Sciences at The University of Arizona demonstrate a holographic system that is capable of displaying holograms at speeds approaching almost that of video capability. (and sure enough, they do mention Star Wars in the abstract of the paper…)

Holograms have been invented in 1947 by Dennis Gabor. They are made by shining a laser beam on an object and then recording the laser light reflected by the object on a photographic film. Simultaneously, a reference beam of the same laser is directly guided to the photographic film, where it causes an interference of the two beams. The interference pattern stored in the photographic film not only contains information on the light intensity (as in conventional photos) but also the phase difference between the two laser beams. The phase difference is a measure of the three-dimensional shape of the object. Together, intensity and phase contain the complete information of a light beam.

{ All That Matters | Continue reading }

photo { Ryan Bailey }