Losing the World

Happy Shiny Gray Matter

2007-07-09T13:09:00.001-05:00

July 8, 2007
The Gregarious Brain
By DAVID DOBBS

If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, once watched as a particularly charming 8-year-old Williams girl, who was visiting Sacks at his hotel, took a garrulous detour into a wedding ceremony. “I’m afraid she disrupted the flow of this wedding,” Sacks told me. “She also mistook the bride’s mother for the bride. That was an awkward moment. But it very much pleased the mother.”
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Another Williams encounter: The mother of twin Williams boys in their late teens opened her door to find on her stoop a leather-clad biker, motorcycle parked at the curb, asking for her sons. The boys had made the biker’s acquaintance via C.B. radio and invited him to come by, but they forgot to tell Mom. The biker visited for a spell. Fascinated with how the twins talked about their condition, the biker asked them to speak at his motorcycle club’s next meeting. They did. They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears.

These stories are typical of those who have Williams syndrome. (Some people with the disorder as well as many who work with them simply call it Williams.) Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA’s double helix is divided into two separate strands, each strand then becoming the genetic material in egg or sperm. Normally the two strands part cleanly, like a zipper’s two halves. But in Williams, about 25 teeth in one of the zippers — 25 genes out of 30,000 in egg or sperm — are torn loose during this parting. When that strand joins another from the other parent to eventually form an embryo, the segment of the DNA missing those 25 genes can’t do its work.

The resulting cognitive deficits lie mainly in the realm of abstract thought. Many with Williams have so vague a concept of space, for instance, that even as adults they will fail at six-piece jigsaw puzzles, easily get lost, draw like a preschooler and struggle to replicate a simple T or X shape built with a half-dozen building blocks. Few can balance a checkbook. These deficits generally erase about 35 points from whatever I.Q. the person would have inherited without the deletion. Since the average I.Q. is 100, this leaves most people with Williams with I.Q.’s in the 60s. Though some can hold simple jobs, they require assistance managing their lives.

The low I.Q., however, ignores two traits that define Williams more distinctly than do its deficits: an exuberant gregariousness and near-normal language skills. Williams people talk a lot, and they talk with pretty much anyone. They appear to truly lack social fear. Indeed, functional brain scans have shown that the brain’s main fear processor, the amygdala, which in most of us shows heightened activity when we see angry or worried faces, shows no reaction when a person with Williams views such faces. It’s as if they see all faces as friendly.

People with Williams tend to lack not just social fear but also social savvy. Lost on them are many meanings, machinations, ideas and intentions that most of us infer from facial expression, body language, context and stock phrasings. If you’re talking with someone with Williams syndrome and look at your watch and say: “Oh, my, look at the time! Well it’s been awfully nice talking with you . . . ,” your conversational partner may well smile brightly, agree that “this is nice” and ask if you’ve ever gone to Disney World. Because of this — and because many of us feel uneasy with people with cognitive disorders, or for that matter with anyone profoundly unlike us — people with Williams can have trouble deepening relationships. This saddens and frustrates them. They know no strangers but can claim few friends.

This paradox — the urge to connect, the inability to fully do so — sits at the center of the Williams puzzle, whether considered as a picture of human need (who hasn’t been shut out of a circle he’d like to join?) or, as a growing number of researchers are finding, a clue to the fundamental drives and tensions that shape social behavior. After being ignored for almost three decades, Williams has recently become one of the most energetically researched neurodevelopmental disability after autism, and it is producing more compelling insights. Autism, for starters, is a highly diverse “spectrum disorder” with ill-defined borders, no identified mechanism and no clearly delineated genetic basis. Williams, in contrast, arises from a known genetic cause and produces a predictable set of traits and behaviors. It is “an experiment of nature,” as the title of one paper puts it, perfect for studying not just how genes create intelligence and sociability but also how our powers of thought combine with our desire to bond to create complex social behavior — a huge arena of interaction that largely determines our fates.

Julie R. Korenberg, a neurogeneticist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has helped define the Williams deletion and explore its effects, believes the value of Williams syndrome in examining such questions is almost impossible to overstate. “We’ve long figured that major behavioral traits rose in indirect fashion from a wide array of genes,” Korenberg says. “But here we have this really tiny genetic deletion — of the 20-some-odd genes missing, probably just 3 to 6 create the cognitive and social effects — that reliably creates a distinctive behavioral profile. Williams isn’t just a fascinating mix of traits. It is the most compelling model available for studying the genetic bases of human behavior.”

Korenberg’s work is part of a diverse research effort on Williams that is illuminating a central dilemma of human existence: to survive we must relate and work with others, but we must also compete against them, lest we get left behind. It’s like the TV show “Survivor”: we want to keep a place in the group — we must — and doing so requires not only charming others but also showing we can contribute to their success. This requires a finely calibrated display of smarts, savvy, grit and hustle. Show too little, and you’re voted off the island for being subpar. Show too much, and you’re ousted as a conniving threat.

Where is the right balance? A partial answer lies in the mix of skills, charms and deficiencies that is Williams syndrome.

Williams syndrome was first identified in 1961 by Dr. J. C. P. Williams of New Zealand. Williams, a cardiologist at Greenlane Hospital in Auckland, noticed that a number of the hospital’s young cardiac patients were small in stature, had elfin facial features and seemed friendly but in some ways were mentally slow. His published delineation of this syndrome put Dr. Williams on the map — off which he promptly and mysteriously fell. Twice offered a position at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., he twice failed to show, disappearing the second time, in the late ’60s, from London, his last known location, with the only trace an unclaimed suitcase later found in a luggage office.

The rarity of Williams syndrome — about 1 in 7,500 people have it, compared with about 1 in 150 for autism or 1 in 800 for Down syndrome — rendered it obscure. Unless they had the syndrome’s distinctive cardiovascular problems (which stem from the absence of the gene that makes blood vessels, heart valves and other tissue elastic and which even today limit the average lifespan of a person with Williams to around 50), most people with Williams were simply considered “mentally retarded.”

This ended in the late 1980s, when a few researchers in the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience began to explore Williams. Among the most earnest was Ursula Bellugi, the director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. Bellugi, who specializes in the neurobiology of language, was drawn to the linguistic strength that many Williamses displayed in the face of serious cognitive problems. The first person with Williams she met, in fact, came by referral from the linguist Noam Chomsky.

“The mother of that Williams teenager later connected me with two more, both in their teens,” Bellugi said. “I didn’t have to talk to them long to realize something special was going on. Here they had these great cognitive deficits. Yet they spoke with the most ardent and delightful animation and color.”

To understand this uneven cognitive profile, Bellugi gave an array of language and cognitive tests to three groups: Williams children and teenagers, Down syndrome kids with similar I.Q.’s and developmentally average peers. “We would do these warm-up interviews to get to know them, ask about their families,” said Bellugi, who, less than five feet tall and with a ready smile and an animated manner, is somewhat elfin and engagingly gregarious herself. “Only, the Williams kids would turn the tables. They’d tell you how pretty you look or ask, ‘Do you like opera?’ They would ornament their answers in a way other kids didn’t. For instance, you’d ask an adolescent, ‘What if you were a bird?’ The Down kids said things like: ‘I’m not a bird. I don’t fly.’ The Williams teens would say: ‘Good question! I’d fly through the air being free. If I saw a boy I’d land on his head and chirp.’ ”

Bellugi found that this fanciful verbosity was accompanied by infectious affability. To measure it she developed a questionnaire and gave it to parents of Williams, Down and normal children. It asked about things like friendliness toward strangers, connections to familiar people, different social scenarios. At every age level, those with Williams scored significantly higher in sociability than those in the other groups. Having long studied the human capacity for language and its biological basis, Bellugi assumed that some extraordinary urge to use language drove this hypersociability: “The language just seemed to be erupting out of them.”

Then she attended a meeting of Williams families that included infants and toddlers. “That was about a year into my research project,” she says. “The room was full of little ones — babies, toddlers who weren’t speaking yet. And when I came in the room all the young children old enough to walk ran to the door to greet me. No clinging to Mom; they just broke away. And when I would talk to mothers holding infants — literally babes in arms — some of these babies would almost dive out of their mothers’ arms to meet me.

“I knew then I was wrong. The language wasn’t driving the sociability. If anything, it was the other way around.”

Developmental psychologists sometimes call the social urge the “drive to affiliate.” It seemed clear early on that the Williams deletion, which was definitively identified in the mid-1990s, either strengthened this drive or left it unfettered. But how do missing genes steer behavior toward gregariousness and engagement? How can a deletion heighten a trait rather than diminish it?

I got a hint when I met Nicki Hornbaker, who is 19, at Bellugi’s office in La Jolla. Nicki, whose Williams was diagnosed when she was 2, has been participating as a subject in Bellugi’s research for 15 years. She and her mother, Verna, drove down from Fresno that day to continue testing and to talk with me about living with Williams syndrome. Like most people with Williams, Nicki loves to talk but has trouble getting past a cocktail-party-level chatter. Nicki, however, has fashioned at least a partial solution.

“Ever since she was tiny,” Verna Hornbaker told me, “Nicki has always especially loved to talk to men. And in the last few years, by chance, she figured out how to do it. She reads the sports section in the paper, and she watches baseball and football on TV, and she has learned enough about this stuff that she can talk to any man about what the 49ers or the Giants are up to. My husband gets annoyed when I say this, but I don’t mean it badly: men typically have that superficial kind of conversation, you know — weather and sports. And Nicki can do it. She knows what team won last night and where the standings are. It’s only so deep. But she can do it. And she can talk a good long while with most men about it.”

In the view of two of Bellugi’s frequent collaborators, Albert Galaburda, a Harvard Medical School professor of neurology and neuroscience, and Allan Reiss, a neuroscientist at the Stanford School of Medicine, Nicki’s learned facility at sports talk illustrates a central lesson of Williams and, for that matter, modern genetics: genes (or their absence) do not hard-wire people for certain behaviors. There is no gene for understanding calculus. But genes do shape behavior and personality, and they do so by creating brain structures and functions that favor certain abilities and appetites more than others.

Reiss and Galaburda’s imaging and autopsy work on Williamses’ brains, for instance, has shown distinct imbalances in structure and synaptic connectivity. This work has led Galaburda to suspect that some of the genes missing in the Williams deletion are “patterning genes,” which direct embryonic development and which in this case dictate brain formation. Work in lab animals has shown that at least one patterning gene choreographs the developmental balance between the brain’s dorsal areas (along the back and the top of the brain) and ventral areas (at the front and bottom). The dorsal areas play a strong role in vision and space and help us recognize other peoples’ intentions; ventral areas figure heavily in language, processing sounds, facial recognition, emotion, music enjoyment and social drive. In an embryo’s first weeks, Galaburda says, patterning genes normally moderate “a sort of turf war going on between these two areas,” with each trying to expand. The results help determine our relative strengths in these areas. We see them in our S.A.T. scores, for example: few of us score the same in math (which draws mostly on dorsal areas) as in language (ventral), and the discrepancy varies widely. The turf war is rarely a draw.

In Williams the imbalance is profound. The brains of people with Williams are on average 15 percent smaller than normal, and almost all this size reduction comes from underdeveloped dorsal regions. Ventral regions, meanwhile, are close to normal and in some areas — auditory processing, for example — are unusually rich in synaptic connections. The genetic deletion predisposes a person not just to weakness in some functions but also to relative (and possibly absolute) strengths in others. The Williams newborn thus arrives facing distinct challenges regarding space and other abstractions but primed to process emotion, sound and language.

This doesn’t mean that specific behaviors are hard-wired. M.I.T. math majors aren’t born doing calculus, and people with Williams don’t enter life telling stories. As Allan Reiss put it: “It’s not just ‘genes make brain make behavior.’ You have environment and experience too.”

By environment, Reiss means less the atmosphere of a home or a school than the endless string of challenges and opportunities that life presents any person starting at birth. In Williams, he says, these are faced by someone who struggles to understand space and abstraction but readily finds reward listening to speech and looking at faces. As the infant and toddler seeks and prolongs the more rewarding experiences, already-strong neural circuits get stronger while those in weaker areas may atrophy. Patterns of learning and behavior follow accordingly.

“Take the gaze,” Reiss told me. Everyone who has worked with Williams children knows the Williams gaze, which in toddlers is often an intense, penetrating eye contact of the sort described as “boring right through you.” The gaze can seem like a hard-wired expression of a Williams’s desire to connect. Yet the gaze can also be seen as a skill learned at the end of the horrible colic that many Williams infants suffer during their first year and before they start to talk well. This window is longer than that for most infants, as Williams children, oddly, start talking a year or so later than most children. It’s during this window that the gaze is at its most intense. Until she was 9 months old, for instance, Nicki Hornbaker rarely slept more than an hour at a time, and when she was quiet she tended to look vaguely at her mother’s hairline. Then her colic stopped, she started sleeping and “almost overnight,” her mother told me, “she became a happy, delightful, extremely social child, and she couldn’t get enough eye contact.” Later, when talk gave Nicki a more effective way to connect, the intensity of the eye contact eased. Nicki’s eyes now meet yours, warm and engaging, but they don’t bore through you.

To Reiss, the gaze is one of several things Williams people learn in order to pursue social connections. “They want that connection,” he said, “and they learn all these things to get it: the gaze and the gregariousness, the smiles and language and narrative skills, in succession as they’re able to. What they learn is shaped by the inclinations and abilities their genes create.

“Look at the difference between Williams kids and fragile X.” Fragile X, another developmental syndrome, produces similar cognitive defects but a pronounced social reticence or aversion to looking at faces. If a Williams wants to lock eyes, a fragile X child will literally twist himself sideways to avoid eye contact. “Nothing could be more different from a Williams,” Reiss continued. “But the thing is, fragile X kids don’t do that when they’re a year old. They’ll still look at you at that age. And Williams kids don’t have that intense gaze yet at that age. It’s only over the next year or two that they take this incredible divergence. In both cases you have a genetically inclined pattern of behavior that is reinforced.”

This is a genetic version of Bellugi’s observation that sociability drives language. The child gravitates toward the pathways that offer smoother going or more interesting experiences — at least until she finds other pathways more rewarding (sports talk, for example). In fragile X, those pathways tend to keep a child close to himself. In Williams they lead headlong toward others.

As an experiment of nature, Williams syndrome makes clear that while we are innately driven to connect with others, this affiliative drive alone will not win this connection. People with Williams rarely win full acceptance into groups other than their own. To bond with others we must show not just charm but sophisticated cognitive skills. But why? For vital relationships like those with spouses or business partners, the answer seems obvious: people want to know you can contribute. But why should casual friendships and group membership depend on smarts?

One possible answer a comes from the rich literature of nonhuman primate studies. For 40 years or so, primatologists like Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal and Robert Sapolsky have been studying social behavior in chimps, gorillas, macaques, bonobos and baboons. Over the past decade that work has led to a unifying theory that explains not only a huge range of behavior but also why our brains are so big and what their most essential work is. The theory, called the Machiavellian-intelligence or social-brain theory, holds that we rise from a lineage in which both individual and group success hinge on balancing the need to work with others with the need to hold our own — or better — amid the nested groups and subgroups we are part of.

It started with fruit. About 15 or 20 million years ago, the theory goes, certain forest monkeys in Africa and Asia developed the ability to digest unripe fruit. This left some of their forest-dwelling cousins — the ancestors of chimps, gorillas and humans — at a sharp disadvantage. Suddenly a lot of fruit was going missing before it ripened.

To find food, some of the newly hungry primate species moved to the forest edge. Their new habitat put more food in reach, but it also placed the primates within reach of big cats, canines and other savanna predators. This predation spurred two key evolutionary changes. The primates became bigger, giving individuals more of a fighting chance, and they started living in bigger groups, which provided more eyes to keep watch and a strength of numbers in defense.

But the bigger groups imposed a new brain load: the members had to be smart enough to balance their individual needs with those of the pack. This meant cooperating and exercising some individual restraint. It also required understanding the behavior of other group members striving not only for safety and food but also access to mates. And it called for comprehending and managing one’s place in an ever-shifting array of alliances that members formed in order not to be isolated within the bigger group.

How did primates form and manage these alliances? They groomed one another. Monkeys and great apes spend up to a fifth of their time grooming, mostly with regular partners in pairs and small groups. This quality time (grooming generates a pleasing release of endorphins and oxytocin) builds strong bonds. Experiments in which a recording of macaques screaming in alarm is played, for instance, have shown a macaque will respond much more strongly to a grooming partner’s cries than to cries from other members of the group. The large time investment involved seems to make a grooming relationship worth defending.

In this and other ways a group’s members would create, test and declare their alliances. But as the animals and groups grew, tracking and understanding all those relationships required more intelligence. According to the social-brain theory, it was this need to understand social dynamics — not the need to find food or navigate terrain — that spurred and rewarded the evolution of bigger and bigger primate brains.

This isn’t idle speculation; Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and social-brain theorist, and others have documented correlations between brain size and social-group size in many primate species. The bigger an animal’s typical group size (20 or so for macaques, for instance, 50 or so for chimps), the larger the percentage of brain devoted to neocortex, the thin but critical outer layer that accounts for most of a primate’s cognitive abilities. In most mammals the neocortex accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of brain volume. In the highly social primates it occupies about 50 percent to 65 percent. In humans, it’s 80 percent.

According to Dunbar, no such strong correlation exists between neocortex size and tasks like hunting, navigating or creating shelter. Understanding one another, it seems, is our greatest cognitive challenge. And the only way humans could handle groups of more than 50, Dunbar suggests, was to learn how to talk.

“The conventional view,” Dunbar notes in his book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language,” “is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively. . . . I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”

Dunbar’s assertion about the origin of language is controversial. But you needn’t agree with it to see that talk provides a far more powerful and efficient way to exchange social information than grooming does. In the social-brain theory’s broad definition, gossip means any conversation about social relationships: who did what to whom, who is what to whom, at every level, from family to work or school group to global politics. Defined this way, gossip accounts for about two-thirds of our conversation. All this yakking — murmured asides in the kitchen, gripefests in the office coffee room — yields vital data about changing alliances; shocking machinations; new, wished-for and missed opportunities; falling kings and rising stars; dangerous rivals and potential friends. These conversations tell us too what our gossipmates think about it all, and about us, all of which is crucial to maintaining our own alliances.

For we are all gossiped about, constantly evaluated by two criteria: Whether we can contribute, and whether we can be trusted. This reflects what Ralph Adolphs, a social neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, calls the “complex and dynamic interplay between two opposing factors: on the one hand, groups can provide better security from predators, better mate choice and more reliable food; on the other hand, mates and food are available also to competitors from within the group.” You’re part of a team, but you’re competing with team members. Your teammates hope you’ll contribute skills and intergroup competitive spirit — without, however, offering too much competition within the group, or at least not cheating when you do. So, even if they like you, they constantly assess your trustworthiness. They know you can’t afford not to compete, and they worry you might do it sneakily.

Deception runs deep. In his book, “Our Inner Ape,” Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, describes a simple but cruel deception perpetrated by a female chimp named Puist. One day, Puist chases but cannot catch a younger, faster female rival. Some minutes later, writes de Waal, “Puist makes a friendly gesture from a distance, stretching out an open hand. The young female hesitates at first, then approaches Puist with classic signs of mistrust, like frequent stopping, looking around at others and a nervous grin on her face. Puist persists, adding soft pants when the younger female comes closer. Soft pants have a particularly friendly meaning; they are often followed by a kiss, the chimpanzee’s chief conciliatory gesture. Then, suddenly, Puist lunges and grabs the younger female, biting her fiercely before she manages to free herself.”

This “deceptive reconciliation offer,” as de Waal calls it, is classic schoolyard stuff. Adult humans generally do a better job veiling a coming assault. The bigger the neocortex, the higher the rate of deceptive behavior. Our extra-big brains allow us to balance bonding and maneuvering in more subtle and complicated ways.

People with Williams, however, don’t do this so well. Generating and detecting deception and veiled meaning requires not just the recognition that people can be bad but a certain level of cognitive power that people with Williams typically lack. In particular it requires what psychologists call “theory of mind,” which is a clear concept of what another person is thinking and the recognition that the other person a) may see the world differently than you do and b) may actually be thinking something different from what he’s saying.

Cognitive scientists argue over whether people with Williams have theory of mind. Williams people pass some theory-of-mind tests and fail others. They get many jokes, for instance, but don’t understand irony. They make small talk but tend not to discuss the subtler dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Theory of mind is a slippery, multilayered concept, so the debate becomes arcane. But it’s clear that Williamses do not generally sniff out the sorts of hidden meanings and intentions that lie behind so much human behavior. They would reach for Puist’s outstretched hand without hesitation.

To inquire into human behavior’s genetic underpinnings is to ask what most essentially defines us. One of the most vexing questions raised by both Williams research and the social-brain thesis is whether our social behavior is ultimately driven more by the urge to connect or the urge to manipulate the connection.

The traditional inclination, of course, is to distinguish essential human behavior by our “higher” skills and cognitive powers. We dominate the planet because we can think abstractly, accumulate and relay knowledge and manipulate the environment and one another. By this light our social behavior rises more from big brains than from big hearts.

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist and neurologist, sees it differently. Meyer-Lindenberg spent the last several years at the National Institute of Mental Health exploring neural roots of mood, cognitive and behavioral disorders — including Williams syndrome, which he has investigated as part of a team led by Karen Berman, a N.I.M.H. psychiatrist, clinical neurobiologist and imaging specialist. Working with Berman and Carolyn Mervis, a developmental psychologist at the University of Louisville, Meyer-Lindenberg became convinced that we may be overvaluing the cerebral.

“Cognitive social neuroscience tends to be very top-down,” Meyer-Lindenberg says. “It looks at lofty things like triadic intentionality — I’m conscious of you being conscious of me being conscious of you, things like that. Things that presuppose consciousness and elaborate intellectual procedures.” The Berman group’s work, however, was focused on brain networks operating, as Meyer-Lindenberg puts it, “at a lower hierarchical level.”

“And the most important abnormalities in Williams,” he says, “are circuits that have to do with basic regulation of emotions.”

The most significant such finding is a dead connection between the orbitofrontal cortex, an area above the eye sockets and the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. The orbitofrontal cortex (or OFC) is associated with (among other things) prioritizing behavior in social contexts, and earlier studies found that damage to the OFC reduces inhibitions and makes it harder to detect faux pas. The Berman team detected a new contribution to social behavior: They found that while in most people the OFC communicated with the amygdala when viewing threatening faces, the OFC in people with Williams did not. This OFC-amygdala connection worked normally, however, when people with Williams viewed nonsocial threats, like pictures of snakes, sharks or car crashes.

This appears to explain the amygdala’s failure in Williams to fire at the sight of frightening faces and suggests a circuit responsible for Williamses’ lack of social caution. If the results hold up, the researchers will have cleanly defined a circuit evolved specifically to warn of threats from other people. This could account not just for the lack of social fear in Williams, but with it the wariness that can motivate deeper understanding. It is possible, in short, that people with Williams miss social subtleties not just because they lack cognitive tools but because they also lack a motivation — a fear of others — that the rest of us carry to every encounter. To Meyer-Lindenberg, the primacy of such circuits suggests that human sociability rises from evolutionarily reinforced mechanisms — a raw yearning to connect; fearfulness — that are so basic they’re easy to undervalue.

The disassociation of so many elements in Williams — the cognitive from the connective, social fear from nonsocial fear, the tension between the drive to affiliate and the drive to manipulate — highlights how vital these elements are and, in most of us, how delicately, critically entwined. Yet these splits in Williams also clarify which, of caring and comprehension, offers the more vital contribution. For if Williams confers disadvantage by granting more care than comprehension, reversing this imbalance creates a far more problematic phenotype.

As Robert Sapolsky of the Stanford School of Medicine puts it: “Williams have great interest but little competence. But what about a person who has competence but no warmth, desire or empathy? That’s a sociopath. Sociopaths have great theory of mind. But they couldn’t care less.”

David Dobbs writes frequently about science and medicine. His last article for the magazine was about depression.

Yeah, Word

2007-05-31T11:25:00.001-05:00

May 31, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

What I Think About Evolution

SAM BROWNBACK

Washington

IN our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect
that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or
subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised
earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential
debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they
did not “believe” in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I
think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and
with the seriousness it demands.

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not
unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily
believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour
days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution
and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction
between science, faith and reason.

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between
faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any
contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason,
seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how
it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of
science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different
questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual
order and the material order were created by the same God.

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that
God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every
question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see
more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by
providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than
that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human
suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go
together, not be driven apart.

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If
belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small
changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the
past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means
assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the
world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of
punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today.
Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a
unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random
mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the
realm of philosophy or theology.

The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision
of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many
believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that
dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am
happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of
evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the
world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I
believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of
creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a
manner known fully only to him. It does not strike me as anti-science
or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind
theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of
design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

Biologists will have their debates about man’s origins, but people
of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I
oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An
attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be
wrong-headed. As science continues to explore the details of man’s
origin, faith can do its part as well. The fundamental question for me
is how these theories affect our understanding of the human person.

The unique and special place of each and every person in creation
is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any
theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and
intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person,
regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a
purpose.

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the
nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with
certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and
reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those
aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome
addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine
this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology
posing as science.

Without hesitation, I am happy to raise my hand to that.

Sam Brownback is a Republican senator from Kansas.

What we should do, or at least a good attempt at delineating such

2007-05-23T15:12:00.001-05:00

Op-Ed Contributor

How to Win the Energy War

FRANK G. ZARB

Published: May 23, 2007

With gas prices hitting yet another
all-time high, consider this: while history is littered with examples
of countries that were forced to change their domestic and foreign
policies because of the lack of a natural resource, there are very few
notable instances of nations that had the ability to eliminate such a
vulnerability but didn’t. America’s current energy condition, however,
is a spectacular example of such a failure. Consider four facts:

Jim Frazier

No. 1: The United States is very vulnerable to the interruption of its imported oil supply.

No. 2: This dependence on oil has a huge effect on our foreign, military and economic policies.

No.
3: America could have reduced its vulnerability if it had taken
decisive action after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. (In 1973 America
imported 35 percent of the oil it used; today that figure is greater
than 60 percent.)

No. 4: We have never adopted a credible plan to reduce our dependency principally because of a lack of political will.

Back
in 1975, President Gerald Ford used his State of the Union message to
inform Americans how dangerous our growing dependence on foreign oil
was: “We, the United States, are not blameless. Our growing dependence
upon foreign sources has been adding to our vulnerability for years and
years, and we did nothing to prepare ourselves for such an event as the
embargo of 1973.”

But he did more than fret. He had a plan.
“Within the next 10 years,” he announced, “my program envisions 200
major nuclear power plants, 250 major new coal mines, 150 major
coal-fired power plants, 30 major new refineries, 20 major new
synthetic fuel plants, the drilling of many thousands of new wells, the
insulation of 18 million homes and the manufacturing and sale of
millions of new automobiles, trucks and buses that use much less fuel.”

It
was clear that President Ford’s initiatives would materially reduce
dependence on oil imports, but would also increase consumer energy
costs and raise important environmental problems. Liberals complained
about “excessive” new energy production efforts, and the right about
the heavy hand of government.

While the Congress debated, the
normal oil supply from the Middle East resumed and prices came down.
Congressional economists put forward new arguments on what they
believed to be the appropriate pricing of crude oil as reasons to avoid
the harsh medicine President Ford advocated.

But there were two
major flaws in these pricing models, which have bedeviled our energy
policies ever since. First, OPEC has a very different idea of what is
“appropriate.” Second, the normal laws of supply and demand did not
apply. Supply is determined by how many barrels of oil producers are
willing to pump, refine and transport at any given time. And this is
affected more by international politics and less by international
economics.

The price volatility caused by this unique market has
long caused business to limit its investment in new, higher-cost energy
supplies. In response, the Ford administration studied various ways to
institute a floor price for oil and guarantee an annual price
escalation over 15 to 20 years. The thinking here was that if business
could depend on a predetermined escalation of prices, it would make the
necessary investment in production and conservation technology.
Interesting concept ... but again the liberals roared with outrage and
the conservatives laughed at such meddling with the economy. The idea
went nowhere.

A few modest measures from the Ford program were
passed by Congress, including the strategic petroleum reserve, which
stockpiles oil in case the Middle Eastern spigot gets shut off, and
having retailers label appliances for energy efficiency and automobiles
for mileage. But, obviously, this was far short of what was necessary.

In
a fit of frustration, I asked Senator Henry Jackson, the Washington
Democrat who headed the Senate Energy Committee, what we needed to do
to reawaken Congressional interest. He asked me if I knew how to start
another Arab embargo. He was right. Without a crisis, a real national
energy program could not get past normal political paralysis. The Ford
initiative was the last real national attempt to reduce our
vulnerability.

Jimmy Carter talked the talk, calling our energy
situation the “moral equivalent of war.” But his only real
accomplishment was the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which was supposed
to spearhead research into energy alternatives but quickly became a
multibillion-dollar boondoggle.

Ronald Reagan offered a package
of tax incentives for domestic oil and gas production and, wisely,
dismantled the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, but that was about it.
George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and now George W. Bush followed with
proposals to open more public land for domestic oil production, to
create tax subsidies for ethanol, to mandate more fuel-efficient
automobiles and other research and development programs — none of which
can or will have a substantial impact on oil imports.

So here
we are, 30 years later, with oil prices higher than ever and greater
dependence on imported oil. Since one of the current presidential
candidates will inherit this mess, shouldn’t we ask each of them to
spell out the details of his or her energy plan? I’ll lay out some
ground rules. Any credible strategy needs to reduce oil consumption and
increase other energy supplies. All of the measures in the plan need to
add up to a significant reduction in imported oil in the relatively
near term, say, within 10 to 12 years.

I have a few
suggestions. First, gasoline prices must send the right signals to
change consumer driving and car-buying behavior. For many years there
have been arguments about a gasoline tax of 10 cents or 20 cents per
gallon. And now we are seeing price changes in that range from week to
week. But the driving public believes that such price increases are
temporary, so driving behavior doesn’t really change. And long-term car
purchase decisions aren’t based upon perceived short-term price
fluctuations.

To ensure that price signals are consistent and
clear, we could levy a truly substantial gasoline tax — something like
50 cents per gallon to start, followed by 50 cent increases in each of
the following three years — with rebates for lower-income taxpayers.
The revenue from this levy could be used to pay for tax credits for
fuel-efficient autos. We should also have automakers improve their
corporate average fleet economy — commonly called CAFE standards — by
at least 4 percent per year. Increasing tax incentives for the
production and purchase of alternative-fuel vehicles would also help.

The
other major way to wean us from oil is to resume construction of
nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy is the cleanest and best option
for America’s electric power supply, yet it has been stalled by decades
of unproductive debate. Our current commercial nuclear power plants
have an outstanding record of safety and security, and new designs will
only raise performance. How can Washington help? One thing would be
federal legislation to streamline the licensing of new plants and the
approval of sites for them.

The basic elements of a responsible
energy policy are not complicated, but the politics are horrendous.
Still, we can’t continue to throw empty rhetoric at the issue, using
the oil companies as political punching bags and relying on our troops
to keep the oil flowing.

I once told President Ford that some
of our energy proposals were angering both Democrats and Republicans.
His reply: “We must have it just right!” If only the presidential
candidates could show the same sort of courage.

Frank
G. Zarb, the managing director of a private equity firm, was the
assistant to the president for energy affairs in the Ford
administration.

No God But Money: What Religion Is Really Up To = Fucking You Over, Even When You Are Faithful

2007-05-07T15:11:00.001-05:00

May 7, 2007

As Pope Heads to Brazil, a Rival Theology Persists

By LARRY ROHTER

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, May 2 — In the early 1980s, when Pope John Paul II wanted to clamp down on what he considered a dangerous, Marxist-inspired movement in the Roman Catholic Church, liberation theology, he turned to a trusted aide: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Now Cardinal Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI,
and when he arrives here on Wednesday for his first pastoral visit to
Latin America he may be surprised at what he finds. Liberation
theology, which he once called “a fundamental threat to the faith of
the church,” persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin
America, home to nearly half the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.

Over the past 25 years, even as the Vatican moved to silence the
clerical theorists of liberation theology and the church fortified its
conservative hierarchy, the social and economic ills the movement
highlighted have worsened. In recent years, the politics of the region
have also drifted leftward, giving the movement’s demand that the
church embrace “a preferential option for the poor” new impetus and
credibility.

Today some 80,000 “base communities,” as the grass-roots building
blocks of liberation theology are called, operate in Brazil, the
world’s most populous Roman Catholic nation, and nearly one million
“Bible circles” meet regularly to read and discuss scripture from the
viewpoint of the theology of liberation.

During Benedict’s five-day visit here, he is scheduled to meet with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
canonize a saint, preach to the faithful and visit a drug treatment
center before addressing the opening session of a conference of Latin
American bishops that will discuss the future of the church in the
region where liberation theology originated, prospered and drew so much
of his censure. Some liberation theology supporters will be present,
others will be at a parallel meeting, and all have been cautioned not
to be too aggressive in pressing their views.

In the past, adherents stood firm as death squads made scores of
martyrs to the movement, ranging from Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero
of El Salvador, killed in 1980 while celebrating Mass, to Dorothy Mae
Stang, an American-born nun shot to death in the Brazilian Amazon in
February 2005. Compared to that, the pressures of the Vatican are
nothing to fear, they maintain.

“Despite everything, we continue to endure in a kind of
subterranean way,” said Luiz Antonio Rodrigues dos Santos, a
55-year-old teacher active in the movement for nearly 30 years. “Let
Rome and the critics say what they want; we simply persevere in our
work with the poor and the oppressed.”

On a cool and cloudy Saturday morning in late April, evidence of
the movement’s vitality was plain to see. Representatives of 50 base
communities gathered at the St. Paul the Apostle Church on the east
side of this sprawling city, in an area of humble workers’ residences
and squatter slums.

With four priests present, readings from the Bible alternated with
more worldly concerns: criticisms of government proposals to reduce
pensions and workers’ rights under the Brazilian labor code. The
service ended with the Lord’s Prayer and then a hymn.

“In the land of mankind, conceived of as a pyramid, there are few
at the top, and many at the bottom,” the congregation sang. “In the
land of mankind, those at the top crush those at the bottom. Oh, people
of the poor, people subjected to domination, what are you doing just
standing there? The world of mankind has to be changed, so arise
people, don’t stand still.”

Afterward, discussion turned to other social problems, chief among
them a lack of proper sanitation. A representative of the left-wing
Workers’ Party discussed strategies to press the government to complete
a sewer project. Congregants agreed to organize a campaign to lobby for
it.

In other areas here, liberation theology advocates have strong
links to labor unions. At a May 1 Mass to commemorate International
Labor Day, they draped a wooden cross with black banners labeled
“imperialism” and “privatization” and applauded when the homily
criticized the government’s “neoliberal” economic policies, the kind
Washington supports.

“We believe in merging the questions of faith and social action,”
said Valmir Resende dos Santos, a liberation disciple who brings base
communities and labor groups together in the industrial suburbs here.
“We advise groups and social movements, mobilize the unemployed, and
work with unions and parties, always from a perspective based on the
Gospel.”

Since liberation theology first emerged in the 1960s, it has
consistently mixed politics and religion. Adherents have often been
active in labor unions and left-wing political parties and criticized
governments they complain are beholden to modern-day Pharisees.

Supporters see that activism as a necessary virtue to answer the
needs of the poor. Opponents say it dangerously insinuates the church
into the temporal, political realm, and in recent years they have
repeatedly announced the movement’s decline or disappearance.

Some of the distinctions in this debate are finely drawn. John Paul
II’s reach extended into human rights and politics, as he discouraged abortion
and divorce and encouraged fellow Poles and other Europeans to reject
Communism. He is widely credited with helping to bring about the
eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

That, some say, differs from the direct, class-oriented political
activism embraced by liberation theology. Cardinal Ratzinger once
called the movement a “fusing of the Bible’s view of history with
Marxist dialectics,” and other critics complain of what they see as its
emphasis on direct collective action in Jesus’ name over individual
faith.

As John Paul II put it early in his papacy: “This conception of
Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of
Nazareth, does not tally with the church’s catechism.”

Certainly at the upper levels of the church hierarchy, liberation
theology has been forced into retreat. Bishops and cardinals who
supported and protected the movement in the 1970s and 1980s have either
died or retired, succeeded by clerics openly hostile to such
communities and the values they espouse.

“Base communities can only thrive in areas where there are bishops
to encourage them,” said Margaret Hebblethwaite, a British religious
writer whose books include “Base Communities: An Introduction” and “The
Next Pope.” “If you take away the support of the bishop, it becomes
very difficult for them to get anywhere.”

But the movement remains especially active in the poorest areas
like the Amazon, the hinterlands of northeast Brazil and on the
outskirts of large urban centers like this one, the largest in Brazil,
with nearly 20 million people in the metropolitan area. Hoping to draw
less attention and opprobrium to themselves, some of these groups
simply say they are engaged in a “social pastorate.”

Sparring between liberation theologians and Benedict — whose own
theology was formed in reaction to the reach of Nazi ideology — has
been long and bitter. In 1984, as the Vatican official charged with
supervising questions of faith and doctrine, he declared that “the
theology of liberation is a singular heresy.”

More recently, he said, “it seems to me we need not theology of
liberation, but theology of martyrdom,” and argued that the movement
will become a valid theology “only when it refuses to accept power and
worldly logic” and instead emphasizes “inner liberty.” But that was
when his job was to carry out John Paul’s orders, and there is
speculation here that his views may have softened somewhat.

That helps explain some of the theological maneuvering that has been going on in Latin America recently.

At the behest of conservatives, the Vatican has imposed sanctions
on the liberation theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, Leonardo Boff
of Brazil and, most recently, Jon Sobrino of El Salvador, a Jesuit born
in Spain. But when the Vatican admonished Father Sobrino, in March,
Pedro Casaldáliga of Brazil, one of the bishops most committed to
liberation theology, wrote an open letter calling on the church to
reaffirm its “real commitment to the service of God’s poor” and “the
link between faith and politics.”

That drew a sharp rebuke from Felipe Aquino, a conservative
theologian whose views are often broadcast on Catholic radio stations
here. “In spite of having received the Vatican’s cordial warning, you
continue to be incorrigible, poisoning the people with the theology of
liberation, which, as Ratzinger noted, annihilates the true faith and
subverts the gospel of salvation,” he wrote.

At a news conference here on April 27, the newly appointed
archbishop of São Paulo, Odilo Scherer, 57, tried to conciliate the two
opposing viewpoints. While he criticized liberation theology for using
“Marxism as a tool of analysis,” he also praised liberation theologians
for redirecting the church’s mission here to focus on issues of social
injustice and poverty.

He also argued that the movement was in decline. Adherents, however, are less sure.

“The force of Latin America’s harsh social reality is stronger than
Rome’s ideology, so the theology of liberation still has a great deal
of vitality,” Mr. Boff, a former Franciscan friar who left the clergy
in 1992, argued in a recent interview. “It is true it doesn’t have the
visibility it once had and is not as controversial as it once was, but
it is very much alive and well.”

2007-05-01T13:10:00.001-05:00

May 1, 2007

In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia

By CARL ZIMMER

LITCHFIELD, Conn. — “This
guy’s the champion,” said Patricia Brennan, a behavioral ecologist,
leaning over the nether regions of a duck — a Meller’s duck from
Madagascar, to be specific — and carefully coaxing out his phallus.

The duck was quietly resting upside-down against the stomach of Ian
Gereg, an aviculturist here at the Livingston Ripley Waterfowl
Sanctuary. Dr. Brennan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University and the University of Sheffield, visits the sanctuary every two weeks to measure the phalluses of six species of ducks.

When she first visited in January, the phalluses were the size of
rice grains. Now many of them are growing rapidly. The champion phallus
from this Meller’s duck is a long, spiraling tentacle. Some ducks grow
phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall, the genitalia will
disappear, only to reappear next spring.

The anatomy of ducks is especially bizarre considering that 97
percent of all bird species have no phallus at all. Most male birds
just deliver their sperm through an opening. Dr. Brennan is
investigating how this sexual wonder of the world came to be.

Part of the answer, she has discovered, has gone overlooked for
decades. Male ducks may have such extreme genitals because the females
do too. The birds are locked in an evolutionary struggle for
reproductive success.

Dr. Brennan was oblivious to bird phalluses until 1999. While
working in a Costa Rican forest, she observed a pair of birds called
tinamous mating. “They became unattached, and I saw this huge thing
hanging off of him,” she said. “I could not believe it. It became one
of those questions I wrote down: why do these males have this huge
phallus?”

A bird phallus is similar — but not identical — to a mammalian
penis. Most of the time it remains invisible, curled up inside a bird’s
body. During mating, however, it fills with lymphatic fluid and expands
into a long, corkscrew shape. The bird’s sperm travels on the outside
of the phallus, along a spiral-shaped groove, into the female bird.

To learn about this peculiar organ, Dr. Brennan decided she would
have to make careful dissections of male tinamous. In 2005 she traveled
to the University of Sheffield to learn the art of bird dissection from
Tim Birkhead, an evolutionary biologist. Dr. Birkhead had her practice
on some male ducks from a local farm.

Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.

“So what does the female look like?” she said. “Obviously you can’t
have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a
garage to park the car.”

The lower oviduct (the equivalent of the vagina in birds) is
typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female
ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. “There
were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals,” she said.

Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy
before. Pondering it, Dr. Brennan came to doubt the conventional
explanation for how duck phalluses evolved.

In some species of ducks, a female bonds for a season with a male.
But she is also harassed by other males that force her to mate. “It’s
nasty business. Females are often killed or injured,” Dr. Brennan said.

Species with more forced mating tend to have longer phalluses. That
link led some scientists to argue that the duck phallus was the result
of males’ competing with one another to fertilize eggs.

“Basically, you get a bigger phallus to put your sperm in farther than the other males,” Dr. Brennan said.

Dr. Brennan realized that scientists had made this argument without
looking at the female birds. Perhaps, she wondered, the two sexes were
coevolving, with elaborate lower oviducts driving the evolution of long
phalluses.

To test this idea, Dr. Brennan traveled to Alaska. Many species of
waterfowl breed there, with a wide range of mating systems. Working
with Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska and his colleagues,
she caught and dissected 16 species of ducks and geese, comparing the
male and female anatomy.

If a male bird had a long phallus, the female tended to have a more
elaborate lower oviduct. And if the male had a small phallus, the
female tended to have a simple oviduct. “The correlation was incredibly
tight,” Dr. Brennan said. “When you dissected one of the birds, it was
really easy to predict what the other sex was going to look like.”

Dr. Brennan and her colleagues are publishing their study today in the journal PLOS One.

Dr. McCracken, who discovered the longest known bird phallus on an
Argentine duck in 2001, is struck by the fact that it was a woman who
discovered the complexity of female birds. “Maybe it’s the male bias we
all have,” he said. “It’s just been out there, waiting to be
discovered.”

Dr. Brennan argues that elaborate female duck anatomy evolves as a
countermeasure against aggressive males. “Once they choose a male,
they’re making the best possible choice, and that’s the male they want
siring their offspring,” she said. “They don’t want the guy flying in
from who knows where. It makes sense that they would develop a defense.”

Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted
males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for
example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects
that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then
expel it. “It only makes sense as a barrier,” she said.

To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species
that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all
matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced
matings. “To me, it means these females are successful with this
strategy,” she said.

Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved
better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. “The males
have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus,” she said.

Other scientists have documented a similar coevolution of genitals
in flies and other invertebrates. But Dr. Brennan’s study is the
clearest example of this arms race in vertebrates.

“It’s rare to find something so blatantly obvious in the female
anatomy,” Dr. Brennan said. “I’m sure it’s going on in other
vertebrates, but it’s probably going in ways that are more subtle and
harder to figure out.”

To test her hypothesis, Dr. Brennan plans to team up with a
biomechanics expert to build a transparent model of a female duck. She
wants to see exactly what a duck phallus does during mating.

Dr. Brennan also hopes to find more clues by studying phalluses on
living ducks. At the waterfowl sanctuary in Litchfield, she is spending
the year tracking the growth and disappearance of phalluses in ducks
and geese. Hardly anything is known about how the phallus waxes and
wanes — not to mention why.

“It may be easier to regrow it than to keep it healthy,” Dr. Brennan
said. “But those are some of the things I may be able to find out. When
you’re doing something that so little is known about, you can’t really
predict what’s going to happen.”

Religion Is The Devil

2007-04-09T12:17:00.003-05:00

April 9, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

The Presidency’s Mormon Moment

By KENNETH WOODWARD

IN May, Mitt Romney, the
former Massachusetts governor and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful,
will give the commencement address at Pat Robertson’s Regent
University. What better opportunity for Mr. Romney to discuss the issue
of his Mormon faith before an audience of evangelicals?

When John F. Kennedy spoke before Protestant clergymen in Houston in
1960, he sought to dispel the fear that as a Catholic president, he
would be subject to direction from the pope. As a Mormon, Mr. Romney
faces ignorance as well as fear of his church and its political
influence. More Americans, polls show, are willing to accept a woman or
an African-American as president than a member of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It isn’t just evangelical Christians in the Republican base who find
Mr. Romney’s religion a stumbling block. Among those who identify
themselves as liberal, almost half say they would not support a Mormon
for president. Although with 5.6 million adherents Mormonism is the
nation’s fourth-largest denomination, 57 percent of respondents to a
recent CBS poll said they know little or nothing about Mormon beliefs
and practices. Mr. Romney needs to be their teacher, whether he likes
that role or not.

Among the reasons Americans distrust the Mormon church is Mormon
clannishness. Because every worthy Mormon male is expected to be a lay
priest in voluntary service to the church, the demands on his time
often leave little opportunity to cultivate close friendships with
non-Mormon neighbors. A good Mormon is a busy Mormon. Those — like Mr.
Romney — who serve as bishops (pastors of congregations) often find it
difficult to schedule evenings at home with their own families.

To many Americans, Mormonism is a church with the soul of a
corporation. Successful Mormon males can expect to be called, at some
time in their lives, to assume full-time duties in the church’s
missions, in its vast administrative offices in Salt Lake City or in
one of many church-owned businesses. Mormons like to hire other
Mormons, and those who lose their jobs can count on the church networks
to find them openings elsewhere. Mr. Romney put those same networks to
effective use in raising part of his $23 million in campaign
contributions.

Moreover, Mormons are perceived to be unusually secretive. Temple
ceremonies — even weddings — are closed to non-Mormons, and church
members are told not to disclose what goes on inside them. This
attitude has fed anti-Mormon charges of secret and unholy rites.
Already in his campaign, Mr. Romney has had to defend his church
against beliefs and practices it abandoned a century ago. That some
voters still confuse the Latter-day Saints with fundamentalist Mormon
sects that continue to practice polygamy and child marriage is another
reason the candidate should take the time to set the record straight.

But Mr. Romney must be sure to express himself in a way that will be
properly understood. Any journalist who has covered the church knows
that Mormons speak one way among themselves, another among outsiders.
This is not duplicity but a consequence of the very different meanings
Mormon doctrine attaches to words it shares with historic Christianity.

For example, Mormons speak of God, but they refer to a being who was
once a man of “flesh and bone,” like us. They speak of salvation, but
to them that means admittance to a “celestial kingdom” where a worthy
couple can eventually become “gods” themselves. The Heavenly Father of
whom they speak is married to a Heavenly Mother. And when they
emphasize the importance of the family, they may be referring to their
belief that marriage in a Mormon temple binds families together for all
eternity.

Thus, when Mr. Romney told South Carolina Republicans a few months
ago that Jesus was his “personal savior,” he used Southern Baptist
language to affirm a relationship to Christ that is quite different in
Mormon belief. (For Southern Baptists, “personal savior” implies a
specific born-again experience that is not required or expected of
Mormons.) This is not a winning strategy for Mr. Romney, whose handlers
should be aware that Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals know
Mormon doctrine better than most other Americans do — if only because
they study Mormonism in order to rebut its claims.

Especially at Regent University, Mr. Romney should avoid using
language that blurs fundamental differences among religious traditions.
Rather, he should acknowledge those differences and insist that no
candidate for public office should have to apologize for his or her
religious faith.

Finally, there is the question of authority in the Church of
Latter-day Saints, and of what obligations an office holder like Mr.
Romney must discharge. Like the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church has
a hierarchical structure in which ultimate authority is vested in one
man. But unlike the pope, the church’s president is also regarded as
God’s own “prophet” and “revelator.” Every sitting prophet is free to
proclaim new revelations as God sees fit to send them — a form of
divine direction that Mormon missionaries play as a trump card against
competing faiths.

At Regent University, Mr. Romney will address an audience of
conservative Christians who regard the Bible alone as the ultimate
authority on faith and morals. Some, like Mr. Robertson, will also be
Pentecostals who claim to receive private revelations themselves from
time to time. But these revelations are strictly personal, the fruit of
a wildly unpredictable Holy Spirit, and their recipients have no power
to demand acceptance, much less obedience, from others.

How, then, might Mr. Romney defend himself against the charge that,
as president, he would be vulnerable to direction from the prophet of
his church?

He should invite critics to review the church’s record. The former
Massachusetts governor is neither the first nor even the most prominent
Mormon office holder. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada,
and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah come immediately to mind — not to
mention Mr. Romney’s father, George, a moderate governor of Michigan
who ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1968.

There is no evidence that church authorities have tried to influence
any of these public servants. On the contrary, the church leadership is
undoubtedly astute enough to realize — as Catholic bishops did with
President Kennedy — that any pressure on a Romney White House would
only harm the church itself. “My church doesn’t dictate to me or anyone
what political policies we should pursue,” Mr. Romney declared in New
Hampshire in February. Voters should accept that declaration unless
there is evidence to prove otherwise.

The issues above are real to many people, and Mr. Romney should take
the opportunity to address them at Regent University. But none of these
popular reservations about the Mormon Church are reasons to vote for or
against Mitt Romney. History was bound to have its Mormon moment in
presidential politics, just as it had its Catholic moment when Kennedy
ran. Now that the moment has arrived, much depends on Mr. Romney.

Kenneth Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about American religion since 1950.

Guantanabanana

2007-04-09T12:17:00.001-05:00

April 9, 2007

Guantánamo Detainees Stage Hunger Strike

By TIM GOLDEN

A long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba, with more than a dozen prisoners subjecting themselves to daily
force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and
lawyers for the detainees say.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ actions were
driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex. About 160
of the roughly 385 Guantánamo detainees have been moved to the complex
since December.

Thirteen detainees are now on hunger strikes, the largest number to
endure the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006,
when the military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of
strapping prisoners into restraint chairs while they are fed by plastic
tubes inserted through their nostrils.

The hunger strikers are now monitored so closely that they have
virtually no chance to starve themselves. Yet their persistence
underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantánamo
has continued even as the military has tightened its control in the
past year.

“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said
we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military
doctor, according to medical records released recently under a federal
court order. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big
increase in fasting.”

A military spokesman at Guantánamo, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy,
played down the significance of the current strike, calling the
prisoners’ complaints “propaganda.”

But the protests come as criticism of Guantánamo continues to rise
in the United States and abroad. Last week, after the Supreme Court
denied a new appeal on behalf of the detainees, the head of the
International Committee of the Red Cross delivered a rare public
reprimand to the Bush administration, saying the prisoners’ ability to
contest their detention was inadequate.

Newly released Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger
strikes, before the use of the restraint chairs, some detainees lost
more than 30 pounds in a matter of weeks. By comparison, the current
hunger strike — in which 12 of the 13 detainees were being force-fed as
of Friday — seems almost symbolic.

For instance, the medical records for Mr. Joudi, a 36-year-old
Saudi, showed that when he was hospitalized on Feb. 10, he had been
fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 percent of his body
weight.

By the time he was transferred a few days later to a “feeding block”
where more serious hunger strikers are segregated from other prisoners,
his condition had stabilized and his weight was nearly back to an ideal
level for a man his size. (His exact weight gain was not recorded.) Mr.
Joudi was subsequently flown home and turned over to the Saudi
authorities, his lawyer said.

Lawyers for several detainees held in the new maximum security
complex, known as Camp 6, compared it to “supermax” prisons in the
United States. The major differences, they said, are that the detainees
have limited reading material and no television, and only 10 of the
Guantánamo prisoners have been charged.

The Camp 6 inmates are generally locked in their 8-foot-by-10-foot
cells for at least 22 hours a day, emerging only to exercise in small
wire cages and to shower. Besides those times, they can talk with other
prisoners only by shouting through food slots in the steel doors of
their cells.

“My wish is to die,” one reported hunger striker in the camp, Adnan
Farhan Abdullatif, a 27-year old Yemeni, told his lawyer on Feb. 27,
according to recently declassified notes of the meeting. “We are living
in a dying situation.”

Commander Durand, the Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed such accounts
as part of an effort by the prisoners and their lawyers to discredit
the detention mission. He described the new unit as much more
comfortable than the detainees’ previous quarters, and denied that they
suffered any greater sense of isolation in the new cell blocks.

“This was designed to improve living conditions,” Commander Durand said, “and we think it has.”

Camp 6 was originally designed as a modern, medium-security prison
complex for up to 200 inmates, with common areas where they could
gather for meals and a large fenced athletic field where they could jog
or play soccer outside the high concrete walls.

But after a riot last May and the suicides of three prisoners in
June, the unit was retrofitted before opening to limit the detainees’
freedom and reduce the risk that they might hurt themselves or attack
guards, military officials said.

As Camp 6 was opening, senior officials expressed concern about how
prisoners would react to its greater isolation. Most had been held in
makeshift blocks of wire-mesh cells that — while often hot, noisy and
lacking privacy — allowed them to communicate easily, pray together and
even pass written messages.

Guantánamo’s other maximum-security unit, Camp 5, has cells that
face each other across a short hallway, allowing the roughly 100
detainees there to converse fairly easily. In Camp 6, the prisoners can
see one another from their cells only when one of them is being moved.
At other times, they look out on the stainless-steel picnic tables in
the common areas they are not allowed to use.

Lawyers for several Camp 6 detainees said their clients were
despondent about the move even though, as military officials note, the
new cells are 27 square feet larger than the old ones and have
air-conditioning, nicer toilets and sinks, and a small desk anchored to
the wall.

“They’re just sitting on a powder keg down there,” said one lawyer,
Sabin Willett, who, like others, described growing desperation among
the prisoners. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”

Lawyers who visited Guantánamo recently said the detainees reported
a higher number of hunger strikers than had the military — perhaps 40
or more. Military officials said there were sometimes “stealth hunger
strikers,” who pretend to eat or surreptitiously vomit after eating,
but they dismissed the detainees’ estimates as exaggerations.

Because reporters are prevented from speaking with detainees or
visiting most of their cell blocks, it is difficult to verify the
conflicting accounts.

Hunger strikes have been part of life at Guantánamo almost since the detention center opened in January 2002.

They reached a peak in September 2005, when more than 130 detainees
were classified as hunger strikers, having refused at least nine
consecutive meals, military records show. As the strikes went on, some
detainees being force-fed continued to lose weight by vomiting or
siphoning their stomachs with the feeding tubes. But by early February
2006, shortly after the military began using restraint chairs during
the forced feedings, the number of hunger strikers plunged to three.

The number rose again sharply but briefly last May, reaching 86
after three detainees attempted suicide and a riot broke out as the
guards searched for contraband. Yet even then, no more than seven
strikers were forced into the restraint chair regimen.

Three detainees who had been hunger strikers hung themselves on June
10. After July, no more than three detainees subjected themselves to
extended forced feeding.

That number began to grow again as detainees were moved into Camp 6
in December. By mid-March, the number of hunger strikers reached 17.
For the first time, as many as 15 detainees continued with the strikes
despite being force-fed in the restraint chairs.

Military officials have described the restraint chair regimen as
unpleasant but necessary. They originally said prisoners needed to be
restrained while digesting, so they could not purge what they were fed.

Now, the rationale has changed. The restraints are generally applied
“for safety of the detainee and medical staff,” records show, and they
are kept on for as little as 15 minutes at a time, rather than the two
hours commonly used before. Afterward, the prisoners are moved to a
“dry cell” and monitored to make sure they do not vomit.

Even so, some detainees describe the experience as painful, even gruesome.

One Sudanese detainee, Sami al-Hajj, a 38-year-old former cameraman for Al Jazeera,
described feeling at one point that he could not bear the tube for
another instant. “I said I would begin to scream unless they took it
out,” he wrote in a recent diary entry given to his lawyer. “They
finally did.”

Stephen H. Oleskey, who represents Saber Lahmar, an Algerian
religious scholar whom military officials accused of propagating a
religious legal ruling that was linked to the suicides, said of his
client: “The man has been in segregation — virtual isolation — for over
nine months. Physically and emotionally, he’s collapsing. We think this
punishment does exceed what the law allows, and that he won’t survive.”

Military officials said Mr. Lahmar and other detainees had received adequate medical attention.

Margot Williams and William Glaberson contributed reporting.

Fossa Food

2007-04-02T13:46:00.000-05:00

These long-haired beings of small size are known by a variety of names throughout Africa, including in the Congo, they are called kakundakári; in central Africa as amajungi or niaka-ambuguza; in East Africa as agogwe, doko, mau, or mberikimo; in southern Africa as chimanimani or tokoleshe; and in West Africa as abonesi, ijiméré, or séhité. Various attention has been given to these reports in different decades. For example, there were widespread reports of reddish-haired séhité in 1940s’ Ivory Coast (more properly known today at République de Côte d’Ivoire), where there were no known pygmies at all.

British primatologist W. C. Osman Hill, when talking about similar hominids in South Asia, the nittaewo of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), felt they were a small form of Homo erectus. Scottish-American zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson considered that some proto-pygmies might simply be unclassified pygmy Homo sapiens who have retreated into the rainforests and tropical mountain valleys of Africa or Asia. The French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans considered the small African creatures may be proto-pygmies, proto-bushmen, or australopithecine (gracile species). In On the Track of Unknown Animals, Heuvelmans commented: "Now there is no known ape, even among the anthropoids, which normally walks upright on its hind legs….Perhaps the agogwe are therefore really little men."

I want to share an addition to the International Cryptozoology Museum, a new sculpture whose photographs are seen about this blog. It represents a depiction of the Agogwe from Tanzania (Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), and gives me this opportunity to introduce these hominoids here.

The following is my summary description of this unknown African hominoid:

Agogwe

The Agogwe is a downy-haired little unknown biped reported throughout east Africa. Said to have yellowish, reddish skin underneath its rust-colored hair, the Agogwe allegedly inhabits the forest of this remote region.

One of the most discussed sightings occurred near the turn of the nineteenth century when Capt. William Hichens was sent on an official lion hunt to this region. While there, waiting in a forest clearing for a man-eater, he saw, as he would write, December 1937, in the London magazine Discovery: "two small, brown, furry creatures come from the dense forest on one side of the glade and disappear into the thickets on the other. They were like little men, about four feet high, walking upright, but clad in russet hair. The native hunter with me gazed in mingled fear and amazement. They were, he said, agogwe, the little furry men whom one does not see once in a lifetime. I made desperate efforts to find them, but without avail in that wellnigh impentratable forest."

(John) Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (March 25, 1867 – March 6, 1941) was the American sculptor famous for creating the monumental presidents' heads at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, as well as dozens of other impressive public works of art.

Gutzon Borglum was born in St. Charles, Idaho, to the second wife of a Danish Latter-day Saint polygamist in Idaho Territory. At the age of seven, he moved to Nebraska and graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. He was trained in Paris at the Académie Julian, where he came to know Auguste Rodin and was influenced by Rodin's dynamic impressionistic light-catching surfaces. Back in the U.S. in New York City he sculpted about a hundred saints and apostles for the new Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 1901, got a sculpture accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the first sculpture by a living American the museum had ever purchased—and made his presence further felt with some well-placed portraits. Soon he had a national reputation.

A fascination with gigantic scale and themes of heroic nationalism suited his extroverted personality. His head of Abraham Lincoln, carved from a six-ton block of marble, was exhibited in Theodore Roosevelt's White House and can be found in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. A bully patriot, believing that the "monuments we have built are not our own," he looked to create art that was "American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement" according to a 1908 interview article. His equation of being "American" with being born of American parents—"flesh of our flesh"—was characteristic of nativist beliefs in the early 20th century. Borglum was highly suited to the competitive environment surrounding the contracts for public buildings and monuments, and his public sculpture is sited all around the United S

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Dudes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dozens

People who have synaesthesia — a rare condition that runs in families — have “joined senses.” They “see” letters or numbers or musical notes as colors — a capital A will be tinged red, or 5 plus 2 will equal blue, or B.B. King will play the yellows.
Rare as that is, there is an even rarer variation, said Julia Simner, a cognitive neuropsychologist and synaesthesia expert at the University of Edinburgh. Lexical-gustatories involuntarily “taste” words when they hear them, or even try to recall them, she wrote in a study, “Words on the Tip of the Tongue,” published in the issue of Nature dated Thursday. She has found only 10 such people in Europe and the United States.
Magnetic-resonance imaging indicates that they are not faking, she said. The correct words light up the taste regions of their brains. Also, when given a surprise test a year later, they taste the same foods on hearing the words again.
(Synaesthetes are hardly ever described as “suffering from” the syndrome, because their doubled perceptions excite envy in many of us mere sensual Muggles.)
It can be unpleasant, however. One subject, Dr. Simner said, hates driving, because the road signs flood his mouth with everything from pistachio ice cream to ear wax.
And Dr. Simner has yet to figure out any logical pattern.
For example, the word “mince” makes one subject taste mincemeat, but so do rhymes like “prince.” Words with a soft “g,” as in “roger” or “edge,” make him taste sausage. But another subject, hearing “castanets,” tastes tuna fish. Another can taste only proper names: John is his cornbread, William his potatoes.
They cannot explain the links, she said. There is no Proustian madeleine moment — the flavors are just there.
But all have had the condition since childhood, so chocolate is commonly tasted, while olives and gin are not.
And, sadly, even her American subjects don’t seem overwhelmed by salivary Thanksgiving memories.
Dr. Simner tests hundreds of words, and when she was asked to check her list for today’s dinner ingredients, she came up with “Stephanie” linked to sage stuffing, “civil” to gravy, “London” and “head” to potato, “perform” to peas, “union” to onions, “microscope” to carrots, “city” to mince pie and “confess” to coffee.
But, alas, no turkey. Or cranberry sauce.
“I can give you a whole fry-up English breakfast,” she said apologetically. “But not a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Two Gems

2007-04-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

So This Manatee Walks Into the Internet

*
by JACQUES STEINBERG

Published: December 12, 2006

The skit, as scripted for the Dec. 4 installment of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” was about absurdist college sports mascots that the host and his writers would like to see someday.
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The Web site hornymanatee.com has its own sorts of shows.
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James Lipton did the dance of the manatee on “Late Night.”

Among them were “the Boise State Conjoined Vikings,” who had been born locked at the horns, as well as something Mr. O’Brien called “the Webcam manatee” — said to be the mascot of “F.S.U.” — which was basically someone in a manatee costume rubbing himself or herself provocatively in front of a camera (to the tune of the 1991 hit “I Touch Myself”). Meanwhile a voyeur with a lascivious expression watched via computer.

Who knew that life would soon imitate art.

At the end of the skit, in a line Mr. O’Brien insists was ad-libbed, he mentioned that the voyeur (actually Mark Pender, a member of the show’s band) was watching www.hornymanatee.com. There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it.

In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast.

By yesterday afternoon hornymanatee.com — created by Mr. O’Brien’s staff and featuring images of such supposedly forbidden acts as “Manatee-on-Manatee” sex (again using characters in costumes) — had received approximately 3 million hits, according to NBC. Meanwhile several thousand of Mr. O’Brien’s viewers have also responded to his subsequent on-air pleas that they submit artwork and other material inspired by the aquatic mammals, and the romantic and sexual shenanigans they imagine, to the e-mail address conan@hornymanatee.com.

One viewer sent a poem. Mr. O’Brien asked James Lipton, the haughty host of “Inside the Actors Studio” on Bravo, to read it on “Late Night.” It included the lines: “I want to freak thy blubber rolls,” and “The product of our ecstasy will be half man and half a-’tee.” After that a curtain opened, and Mr. Lipton gamely danced with the manatee character. Another viewer wrote a song, which Mr. Pender, the band’s trumpet player, crooned to the character. Set to the heavy metal band AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” it included the lyrics “She had big black eyes/no discernible thighs” and “The waves start shakin’/the ocean was quakin’/my pelvis was achin’. ”

Reached by telephone at NBC yesterday, Mr. O’Brien said he was stunned and overwhelmed by the viewers’ response to what had initially been a throwaway line, and by what that response, collectively, suggested about how the digital world was affecting traditional media like television.

“We couldn’t have done this two years ago, three years ago,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s sort of this weird comedy dialogue with the audience.”

He added, “I still have an abacus.”

Regardless, Mr. O’Brien and his staff are digitally savvy enough to seize an opportunity when it presents itself, particularly in the aftermath of such Internet comedy phenomena as “Lazy Sunday,” a filmed clip from “Saturday Night Live” that drew large audiences on the Web last year, initially as a bootleg. After the taping of the Dec. 4 show, Mr. O’Brien said the show’s executive producer, Jeff Ross, informed him of the problem, then asked him whether he wanted to mute the mention of the site or buy the Web address.

“We didn’t want to take it out,” Mr. Ross said yesterday, “so we bought it.”

In explaining to the audience the next night what he and his writers had done, Mr. O’Brien marveled, “For $159, NBC, the network that brought you ‘Meet the Press,’ Milton Berle and the nation’s first commercial television station became the proud owner of www.hornymanatee.com.”

Now, by clicking on “tour,” visitors to the site are drawn into a netherworld of mock-graphic images with titles like “Mature Manatee” (with a walker of course) and “Fetish” (a manatee in a bondage costume) as well as dozens of viewer submissions, including “Manatee & Colmes,” a spoof of “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News.

Mr. O’Brien said he knew he was on to something when, on Wednesday night, he was at a Christmas party in the lobby of a friend’s building and a waiter approached him with a platter of salmon and toast points. When Mr. O’Brien politely declined, he said the waiter drew in close and whispered in his ear, “My compliments to the horny manatee.”

As he prepared last night’s show, Mr. O’Brien said he was planning to give the bit its first night off, although he was confident it would soon return.

“We don’t want the entire show to be ‘Late Night With Horny Manatee,’ ” he said. “Though, of course, it will become that eventually.”

The Great Society (men peeing down, women up, the student becomes the heresiarch)

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqtzu_minilogue

The Ambient Walkman
By JASCHA HOFFMAN
Published: December 10, 2006

The popularity of the iPod has given new urgency to an old criticism of the portable music player: namely, that it isolates the listener by tuning out the world around him. As one response to this problem, Noah Vawter, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has created a pair of headphones that tunes the listener back in.
Illustration by Julia Hasting

The Ambient Walkman

The device, which Vawter calls Ambient Addition, consists of two headphones with transparent earpieces, each equipped with a microphone and a speaker. The microphones sample the background noise in the immediate vicinity — wind blowing through the trees, traffic, a cellphone conversation. Then, with the help of a small digital signal-processing chip, the headphones make music from these sounds. For instance, percussive sounds like footsteps and coughs are sequenced into a stuttering pattern, and all the noises are tuned so that they fuse into a coherent, slowly changing set of harmonies.

The overall effect is a bit like listening to U2 with the vocals removed. Vawter is working on a version of the device that would rearrange the noises around the user to approximate any given pop song.

Archives 3

2007-04-02T10:56:00.001-05:00

Qatada ibn al-Nu'man (Arabic: قتدة بن النعمان) was one of the Sahaba of Muhammad and a Ansar. He had a grandson named Asim ibn Umar ibn Qatada ibn al-Nu`man al-Ansari's (d. 120 or 129) [1].

His surname was "Abdul Khateb" ( d.632), hafiz (one who memorized the Quran by heart), and transmitter of numerous hadith. At the battle of Uhud in 625, Qatadah was stuck in his eye and his eyeball was hanging down on to his cheek. The Companions wanted to cut it off, but first they asked Muhammad's opinion, and he told them not to do so. He then made du'a (supplicated) on Qatadah's behalf and placed his eyeball back in its place. Afterwards it is said that he could not tell which eye had been struck.[2][3]

Ibn Hazm, a 11th century Sunni Islamic scholar states that he regarded Nikah Mut'ah as legal after Muhammad's era [4].

You can't patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldn't be able to patent genes, either.

--Michael Chrichton

Yeats's perspective on the world's troubles was not what many people who quote him today might suspect. For one thing, he was not a Christian. He dabbled in theosophy and the occult, and considered Christianity an idea whose time had passed. "The Second Coming" is not, as its title and the Bethlehem reference might suggest, an account of the return of the Messiah. What is being born is nothing resembling Christ.

The poem reflects, as Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, says, Yeats's belief that a "change in god" was coming, "and that the 2,000-year reign of Christianity was about to end." But it does not reveal who this god will be. Its last two lines are a question: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

--Adam Cohen, NYTimes

In some American Indian tribes, a ceremony to initiate relations with another tribe included the burning of the tribe's most valuable possession, Mr. Ruffle said. "Why? It's a signal that you'd go to the extreme cost to maintain the relationship."

--Damon Darlin, NYTimes

Like so much in that initiating edge of the American place, Olson was self-invented, made his world both with and of his mind insistently. One recalls W.C. Williams writing, "A new world/ is only a new mind./ And the mind and the poem/ are all apiece." Olson valued immensely what he spoke of as "mindedness."

It became, rather, a primary activity and resource for what can be called "historical geography," as Duncan McNaughton notes, adding then with significant emphasis taken from Olson's characteristic friend, the geographer, Carl Sauer, that "nothing whatever is outside the consideration of historical geography."

How needs one say it? A tracking of the earth in time? A place? Olson loved John Smith's curious phrase, "History is the memory of time."

--Robert Creely

Mallarmé warned us that the world was made "to end up in a book"; recent cultural history would revise that to "thousands and thousands of books."

Pinsky lets Greville speak the last words (the poet's equivalent to prayer), a passage ending with the line, "The earth stands still, yet change of changes breedeth."

--Alfred Corn, in his review of Robert Pinsky's The Figured Wheel: New & Collected Poems

February 10, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
California Split
By GAR ALPEROVITZ

Washington

SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America's fundamental political structure.

Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. "We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta," he recently declared. "We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state." In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, "We are a good and global commonwealth."

Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California's governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America's constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does "participatory democracy" mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

A recent study by the economists Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of Tufts demonstrates that the bigger the nation, the harder it becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed population. Regions that don't feel well served by the government's distribution of goods and services then have an incentive to take independent action, the economists note.

Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country's news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.

James Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, understood these problems all too well. Madison is usually viewed as favoring constructing the nation on a large scale. What he urged, in fact, was that a nation of reasonable size had advantages over a very small one. But writing to Jefferson at a time when the population of the United States was a mere four million, Madison expressed concern that if the nation grew too big, elites at the center would divide and conquer a widely dispersed population, producing "tyranny."

Few Americans realize just how huge this nation is. Germany could fit within the borders of Montana. France is smaller than Texas. Leaving aside three nations with large, unpopulated land masses (Russia, Canada and Australia), the United States is geographically larger than all the other advanced industrial countries taken together. Critically, the American population, now roughly 300 million, is projected to reach more than 400 million by the middle of this century. A high Census Bureau estimate suggests it could reach 1.2 billion by 2100.

If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power. More than half of the world's 200 nations formed as breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations — including Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name a few — are devolving power to regions in various ways.

Decades before President Bush decided to teach Iraq a lesson, George F. Kennan worried that what he called our "monster country" would, through the "hubris of inordinate size," inevitably become a menace, intervening all too often in other nations' affairs: "There is a real question as to whether 'bigness' in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name."

Kennan proposed that devolution, "while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government," might yield a "dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment."

Regional devolution would most likely be initiated by a very large state with a distinct sense of itself and aspirations greater than Washington can handle. The obvious candidate is California, a state that has the eighth-largest economy in the world.

If such a state decided to get serious about determining its own fate, other states would have little choice but to act, too. One response might be for an area like New England, which already has many regional interstate arrangements, to follow California's initiative — as it already has on some environmental measures. And if one or two large regions began to take action, other state groupings in the Northwest, Southwest and elsewhere would be likely to follow.

A new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. Most likely, regional empowerment would be popular: when the Appalachian Regional Commission was established in 1965, senators from across the country rushed to demand commissions to help the economies and constituencies of their regions, too.

Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his "nation-state" ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming. And he may be closer to the mark than he knows with his dream that "California, the nation-state, the harmonious state, the prosperous state, the cutting-edge state, becomes a model, not just for the 21st-century American society, but for the larger world."

Gar Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is the author of "America Beyond Capitalism."

With One Word, Children's Book Sets Off Uproar
By JULIE BOSMAN

The word "scrotum" does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature. The book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important."

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children's books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

"This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn't have the children in mind," Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. "How very sad."

The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools.

Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship.

"The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole," she said. "That's what censors do — they pick out words and don't look at the total merit of the book."

If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children's books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah's Book Club title. Libraries and bookstores routinely order two or more copies of each year's winners, with the books read aloud to children and taught in classrooms.

"The Higher Power of Lucky" was first published in November by Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, accompanied by a modest print run of 10,000. After the announcement of the Newbery on Jan. 22, the publisher quickly ordered another 100,000 copies, which arrived in bookstores, schools and libraries around Feb. 5.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend's dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

"The word is just so delicious," Ms. Patron said. "The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It's one of those words that's so interesting because of the sound of the word."

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of "The Higher Power of Lucky" is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it.

"I think it's a good case of an author not realizing her audience," said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. "If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn't want to have to explain that."

Authors of children's books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

In the case of "Lucky," some of them take no chances. Wendy Stoll, a librarian at Smyrna Elementary in Louisville, Ky., wrote on the LM_Net mailing list that she would not stock the book. Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. "I don't think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson," she said in an interview. One librarian who responded to Ms. Nilsson's posting on LM_Net said only: "Sad to say, I didn't order it for either of my schools, based on 'the word.' "

Booksellers, too, are watchful for racy content in books they endorse to customers. Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass., said she once horrified a customer with "The Adventures of Blue Avenger" by Norma Howe, a novel aimed at junior high school students. "I remember one time showing the book to a grandmother and enthusing about it," she said. "There's a chapter in there that's very funny and the word 'condom' comes up. And of course, she opens the book right to the page that said 'condom.' "

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book's content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. "I don't want to start an issue about censorship," she said. "But you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature."

"At least not for children," she added.

Archives 2

2007-04-02T10:55:00.001-05:00

February 4, 2007
Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue
By IAN BURUMA

Tariq Ramadan, Muslim, scholar, activist, Swiss citizen, resident of Britain, active on several continents, is a hard man to pin down. People call him "slippery," "double-faced," "dangerous," but also "brilliant," a "bridge-builder," a "Muslim Martin Luther." He wants Muslims to become active citizens of the West but four years ago was himself refused permission to enter the U.S. He could not take up the teaching position he'd been offered at the University of Notre Dame . Oxford University took him on as a visiting fellow instead.

To his admirers, he is a courageous reformer who works hard to fill the chasm between Muslim orthodoxy and secular democracy. Young European Muslims flock to his talks, which are widely distributed on audiocassettes. A brilliant speaker, he inspires his audiences, rather like Black Power leaders did in the 1960s, by instilling a sense of pride. A friend of mine saw him last year in Rotterdam, talking to a hall packed with around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. To them he had the aura of an Islamic superstar. Even my friend, an Iranian-born Dutchman with entirely secular views, was impressed by the eloquence of this Muslim thinker, who wishes to press his faith into the mainstream of European life. His critics see things differently: they accuse him of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, promoting the oppression of women and waging a covert holy war on the liberal West.

I first met Ramadan last year in Paris. The French news magazine Le Point had organized a debate between the two of us on Muslims in Europe (or "Eurabia," as some fearful people are now calling my native continent). I was instructed to "really push him." But if the hope of Le Point was for sparks to fly, they were disappointed. Ramadan is much too smooth for sparks. Slim, handsome and dressed in a very elegant suit, he spoke softly in fluent English, with a slight French accent. His first languages were French and Arabic, but he heard English at home in Geneva, spoken mostly by visiting Pakistanis.

Perhaps I didn't push hard enough. We agreed on most issues, and even when we didn't (he was more friendly toward the pope than I was), our "debate" refused to catch fire. So when I set off for London a few months later to talk to him again, I felt that I had seen the polished Ramadan, the international performer who, in the words of Reuel Marc Gerecht, an expert on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, sounds "like a British diplomat at the U.N. ," the kind who leaves you with "a strong impression that prevarication is in the DNA."

So who is Tariq Ramadan? What does he stand for? Even physically, he proved a hard man to pin down. We had made an appointment, but fixing a time was a challenge. His Oxford college had no idea where he was. A home number could not be provided. E-mail messages went unanswered. Perhaps he was in Rotterdam, where he holds a chair in "Identity and Citizenship" at Erasmus University. Perhaps he was in France, or maybe somewhere else, appearing on a television talk show, signing books, speaking at a conference. Finally, a secretary from his office in Paris was able to make a connection. He was in Stockholm. We managed to meet the next day at the house of a friend in London. Ramadan, beard neatly clipped, was dressed, as always, in a smart suit and an open shirt.

"I want to be an activist professor," he told me. This means that he spends more time writing, speaking and advising everyone from Tony Blair to the elders of mosques than on university teaching. Ramadan, who is 44, also lives the life of a devout Muslim, praying five times a day. The main thing, for him, is to find a way for Muslims to escape their minority status and play a central role as European citizens. "The fact that Western Muslims are free," he said, "means that they can have enormous impact. But it would be wrong to claim that we are imposing our ways on the West. New ideas are now coming from the West. To be traditional is not so much a question of protecting ourselves as to be traditionalist in principle."

Traditionalist principles, for Ramadan, apply to politics as much as to religion. Muslims, he says, should not try to create a "parallel system" to Western democracy, let alone aspire to building a Muslim state. "There is no such thing," he says, "as an Islamic order. We have to act to promote justice and inject our ethics into the existing system." According to Ramadan, the global order of neoliberal capitalism allows the wealthy West to dominate the world. Resisting this order is part of his task as an activist professor, who derives his "universal principles" from his Muslim faith. This message not only provides educated European Muslims with a political cause but is also pushed with considerable success at such international leftist jamborees as the World Social Forum, where the world's antiglobalists meet.

I asked Ramadan what it was like to grow up as an Egyptian Muslim in Geneva. And not just any Egyptian Muslim: his maternal grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, founder in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to resist what it regards as Western domination and create an Islamic state. Al-Banna was murdered in 1949, by Egyptian government agents, following the assassination of the Egyptian prime minister by a Muslim Brother. "Difficult," Ramadan replied, "very difficult, and full of tensions. There were very few Muslims in Geneva in the 1960s, apart from a few United Nations people and some North Africans. Some of my brothers were attracted by Western life, and one of them even rejected everything to do with religion. But our parents were very liberal about it, never forcing me to pray, always open to dialogue and discussion."

"Liberal" was a surprising description of Ramadan's father, Said Ramadan, al-Banna's favorite disciple and a tireless promoter of political Islam. He had to escape from President Nasser's Egypt, after the Muslim Brotherhood was banned there in 1954 (a Muslim Brother was accused of trying to kill Nasser), and settled in Geneva. The youngest of six children, Tariq was named after Tariq Ibn Ziyad, the North African Muslim who conquered Spain in 711. Ramadan denies being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood — one of whose credos is "God is our goal, the Prophet our model, the Koran our law, holy war our way and martyrdom our desire" — but is proud of his illustrious background. To many Muslims al-Banna is still a very great man. When I met Ramadan later in the week at the gigantic East London Mosque, I heard him being introduced, with a tone of reverence, as al-Banna's grandson. "With older people it lends authority to what I'm saying," Ramadan told me, as we walked through the mosque, where the main languages were Bengali and Urdu, apart from quotations from the Koran, which were in Arabic.

Even though Ramadan's father represented the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, promoting the cause of Islamic government, Ramadan went to a mainstream Swiss school, where he got a solid grounding in French literature and European philosophy. He graduated a year early and studied philosophy, literature and social sciences at University of Geneva. By age 24, he was already dean of a high school and later lectured in religious studies at a college in Geneva and the University of Fribourg. I was fascinated to learn that of all European philosophers, Ramadan chose to study Friedrich Nietzsche, who had anticipated the death of religious faith. He even wrote his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche. Had he ever experienced any doubts himself?

"Doubts about God, no," he replied. "But questions, yes. Nietzsche raised strong and accurate questions about religion, on how religious identities are built, and how believers use victim status to become killers themselves. I also read everything by Dostoyevsky, whom I liked from the very beginning. That was my universal frame of reference. It was not easy, growing up in a committed Muslim family while dealing with people outside who were drinking, and all that. But I was protected on ethical grounds, as a religious person, first of all by playing sports, every day, for two hours or more — football, tennis, running. And reading, reading, reading, five hours a day, sometimes eight hours. My father warned me that life was not in books. But it meant that even though I stayed away from drinking, I got respect from the people around me. I was known as 'the professor,' 'le docteur.' "

The notion of the bookish grandson of Hassan al-Banna reading Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky is arresting but not entirely surprising. Like them, he was wrestling with the idea of a disenchanted world that appeared to be falling into nihilism. In his teens and early 20s, Ramadan says, he "felt lonely in Europe, facing racial discrimination, and all that. So I idealized Egypt. My body was in Europe, but my heart was over there. I wanted to go back 'home.' "

In 1986 Ramadan married a Swiss woman, the sister of one of his football buddies who had converted to Islam. She took the name Iman, and they moved with their young children to Cairo in 1991, where Ramadan studied Muslim philosophy with scholars from Al-Azhar University. Their stay in Egypt deepened his understanding of Islam but also turned him into a convinced European. "I felt I had been misled," he told me. "The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong. Everything I am doing now, speaking of connections, intersections, universal values we have in common, this was already there in history." At the same time, he realized that "home" was actually in Europe, that while Islam was his faith, his culture was European. Ramadan's intellectual struggle to bridge different traditions was a personal one too.

In his book, "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam," published in 2004, Ramadan lists various approaches to Islam, from "political literalist Salafism" — militant, anti-Western, in favor of the Islamic state — to "liberal reformism," which sees faith as an entirely private affair. I asked him at the mosque where he placed himself. "A Salafi reformist," he said, which might seem a contradiction but is explained in his book as follows: "The aim is to protect the Muslim identity and religious practice, to recognize the Western constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the social level and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one belongs."

Ramadan's favorite Muslim philosophers are the late-19th-century reformists Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who tried to revive Islam under Western colonial rule by rational interpretation of the holy texts. They were skeptical of religious tradition, accumulated over time, and looked for core principles in the Koran that spoke to reason. For them there was no contradiction between scientific reasoning and their Muslim faith. And female emancipation or democratic government could be reconciled with the original principles of Islam. Both had lived in Europe. Both were harsh critics of colonialism and Western materialism. In Ramadan's words, "They saw the need to resist the West, through Islam, while taking what was useful from it."

Speaking about his grandfather, Ramadan observed: "People say that his ideas formed the basis of Al Qaeda. This is not true." The spiritual father of revolutionary Islam, according to Ramadan and others, was another Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb, who advocated a holy war against the idolatrous West. Ramadan pointed out that "Qutb actually joined the Muslim Brotherhood after my grandfather was killed. They didn't even know each other. My position on Hassan al-Banna is that he was much closer to Muhammad Abduh. He was in favor of a British-style parliamentary system, which was not against Islam."

This may or may not be an accurate representation of Hassan al-Banna, but it tells us a lot about the way Ramadan presents himself. Reconciling what seems hard to reconcile is what makes him an interesting and sometimes baffling figure. It is why the University of Notre Dame appointed him as Henry R. Luce professor of religion, conflict and peace building. Prof. R. Scott Appleby, the man who did everything he could to bring Ramadan to South Bend, Ind., was hardly naïve about Ramadan's European reputation. Over breakfast in New York recently, he told me: "He's doing something extraordinarily difficult if not impossible, but it needs to be done. He is accused of being Janus-faced. Well, of course he presents different faces to different audiences. He is trying to bridge a divide and bring together people of diverse backgrounds and worldviews. He considers the opening he finds in his audience. Ramadan is in that sense a politician. He cultivates various publics in the Muslim world on a variety of issues; he wants to provide leadership and inspiration. The reason we wanted him is precisely because he's got his ear to the ground of the Muslim world."

And this may also have been the reason that the U.S. State Department revoked his work visa in July 2004. Ramadan had already sent all his family possessions to South Bend. His children had been enrolled in local schools. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Ramadan was denied entry under a provision of the Patriot Act that bars foreigners from the U.S. who "endorse or espouse terrorist activity." After the A.C.L.U and various academic groups contested the government's refusal to process Ramadan's application for another visa, a federal judge ruled that the State Department had to make a decision. The State Department refused to issue another visa on the grounds that Ramadan had donated roughly $900 to two European organizations that give aid to Palestinians. The organizations were, and still are, legitimate charities in Europe but since Ramadan made his donations have been blacklisted in the U.S. for supposedly giving money to Hamas. The A.C.L.U. lawyer, Jameel Jaffer, told me that Ramadan had fallen foul of the same principle that used to bar Communists from coming to the U.S.: his politics are not welcome.

But what exactly are his politics? Ramadan explained to me what shaped his political understanding: "In my family, resistance was a key concept, resistance against dictatorship and colonialism. When I was 18, I started to travel to southern countries, in Latin America, India and Africa. The people I met were often leftists. The liberation theologists in Brazil were very important, resisting in the name of religious principles. I was at home with this discourse. I was also close to the Tibetans and spent one month with the Dalai Lama. It was the same philosophy, spiritual commitment and resistance, in their case against Chinese colonialism. Perhaps because of these personal experiences, I started to read the work of my own grandfather, who used the Scriptures, the story of Moses, against British colonialism. He was saying in the 1940s what the liberation theologists were saying in the 1960s."

Some of Ramadan's critics, most notably the French journalist Caroline Fourest, who wrote a sharp attack on him titled "Frère Tariq" (Brother Tariq), draw a direct line from Hassan al-Banna, through Said Ramadan and Tariq Ramadan himself, to the militant Islamism threatening the West today. Such was the disquiet in France about Islamist violence that Ramadan was barred from that country in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted. Ramadan prefers to see the family legacy in terms of "Islamic socialism, which is neither socialist, nor capitalist, but a third way." In this reading, his father's friendship with Malcolm X is much more significant than any Saudi Arabian connection. This is why Ramadan was a popular speaker with African-American Muslims before his visa was revoked.

"Western Muslims and the Future of Islam" throws some light on Ramadan's idea of "Islamic socialism," an ideology, combining religious principles with anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics, that goes back to the time of the Russian Revolution. (Libya's strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is one who claims to rule according to these principles.) The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan's book, is "the northern model of development," which means that "a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive." For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the "abode of war" (alam al-harb), for "when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance."

To be a sworn enemy of capitalism does not mean you are a communist, a fascist, a religious fundamentalist or indeed an anti-Semite, but it is something these otherwise disparate groups frequently have in common. Advocating a revolt against Western materialism on the basis of superior spiritual values is an old project, which has had many fathers but has never been particularly friendly to liberal democracy. Ramadan's brand of Islamic socialism, promoted with such media-friendly vitality, in conferences, interviews, books, talks, sermons and lectures, has won him a variety of new friends, especially in Britain and France.

Gilles Kepel, a leading French scholar of Islam, describes in his book "The War for Muslim Minds" how Ramadan "reached out to make alliances with the far left, working a territory abandoned by his rivals" — rivals, that is, like André Glucksmann, once a Maoist, now a supporter of the war in Iraq. Kepel goes on to explain that Ramadan "exchanged his costume as the Muslim Youth's spokesman — an outfit too tight to accommodate his ambitions and talent — for the garb of the universalist intellectual." Just as Marxists claim a universal validity for their political ideology, Ramadan says he believes that religious principles, as revealed in the Koran, are universal. It was as a universalist that Ramadan promoted the right of Muslim women to wear the veil at French schools. "Rights are rights," he said, "and to demand them is a right."

This has been read as a rallying cry to convert the West to Islam, the first step toward the establishment of Eurabia. Ramadan denies that this is his intention. "Whatever your faith," he explained to me, "you are dealing with your fundamental principles. The message of Islam is justice. The neoliberal order leads to injustice. The point is to extract universal principles from one's faith, but in politics it has to be a personal decision. The danger of my discourse in France is that I'm telling people to be citizens. Muslims are still treated as aliens. I'm telling them to vote."

Ramadan, as Kepel observes, is "balanced on a tightrope," for his socialism is not always congenial to devout Muslims. Marx (along with "the Jew," "the Crusader" and "the Secularist") is a demonic figure for the Muslim Brothers. Ramadan is candid about his enemies: "My fiercest critics come from majority Muslim countries. Traditional Salafists condemn me for being against Islam." Conversely, Ramadan's defense of certain practices rooted in Islamic tradition creates much suspicion among those who might otherwise agree with his politics.

Two media-driven controversies helped to make Ramadan both famous and notorious. The first was an exchange on French television in 2003 with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister (now running for president as the candidate of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement party), well known for his description of rioters in poor immigrant neighborhoods as "scum." Sarkozy accused Ramadan of defending the stoning of adulterers, a punishment stipulated in the section of the Islamic penal code known as huddud. Ramadan replied that he favored "a moratorium" on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright. Many people, including Sarkozy, were outraged. When I talked with Ramadan in London, the mere mention of the word "stoning" set him off on a long explanation.

"Personally," he said, "I'm against capital punishment, not only in Muslim countries, but also in the U.S. But when you want to be heard in Muslim countries, when you are addressing religious issues, you can't just say it has to stop. I think it has to stop. But you have to discuss it within the religious context. There are texts involved. I am not just talking to Muslims in Europe, but addressing the implementation of huddud everywhere, in Indonesia, Pakistan and the Middle East. And I'm speaking from the inside to Muslims. Speaking as an outsider would be counterproductive. But now I can say that Sarkozy helped me enormously, because the controversy helped me to spread my ideas."

The other, perhaps even more contentious issue, also raised by Sarkozy, was Ramadan's supposed anti-Semitism. A month before the television debate, Ramadan posted an article on a Web site named Oumma.com, titled "Critique of the (New) Communalist Intellectuals." This article had been turned down by both Le Monde and Libération. Ramadan's main argument was that "French Jewish intellectuals" — like Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann and Pierre-André Taguieff (in fact not Jewish at all) — who used to be "considered universalist intellectuals" had become knee-jerk defenders of Israel and thus "had relativized the defense of universal principles of equality and justice." Ramadan was trying to turn the tables on those who accuse Muslims of obsessing about their victimhood by accusing "Jewish intellectuals" of doing precisely that, thinking of just their own tribal concerns, while Ramadan's pursuit of justice for Palestinians was supposedly part of a universalist project. These intellectuals were of course "the rivals" who, in Kepel's phrase, had "abandoned" the left, just as many early neoconservatives had done in the U.S.

Ramadan's attack was unfair. The intellectuals he mentioned had all championed many causes other than Israel, including putting a stop to the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia. And by compiling this blacklist of Jews and placing a philosopher whose name merely sounded Jewish among them, he opened himself to the charge of anti-Semitism. The response was shrill. André Glucksmann wrote: "What is surprising is not that Mr. Ramadan is anti-Semitic, but that he dares to proclaim it openly." Bernard-Henri Lévy compared Ramadan's article with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the vicious Russian forgery about Jewish world domination. It all was vastly overblown, but these labels have a way of sticking to their target. When I asked the British Labor politician Denis MacShane, one of the few British politicians with a deep knowledge of France, about Ramadan, he repeated all the allegations about Ramadan's religious bigotry but said that the "fundamental dividing line is about Israel and the Jews."

Ramadan himself says that it was because of his views on Israel and on U.S. policy in Iraq that he was deprived of his visa to teach in the U.S. He told me: "I was asked to take part in a dialogue in Paris with representatives of American Jewish organizations, including Jack Rosen, head of the American Jewish Congress . It turned out to be less of a dialogue than an interview about my opinions on the Palestinian conflict. Rosen promised to talk to President Bush. But after this interview, I knew I would never get a visa."

This might sound like just the kind of conspiracy theory anti-Semites tend to indulge in. But unlike some Islamic activists, Ramadan has never expressed any hostility to Jews in general. There is no question that he is ferociously anti-Zionist. He sees this as part of his resistance to colonialism. A glance at his Web site shows precisely where he stands. "The dignity of the Palestinians is to resist, ours is to denounce. ... That means denouncing fears as much as the unjust and wretched policies which continue to kill an entire people in an occupied territory."

Ramadan is in fact one of the few Muslim intellectuals to speak out against anti-Semitism. In an article in Le Monde, he wrote: "We have heard the cries of 'down with the Jews!' shouted during protest demonstrations, and reports of synagogues being vandalized in various French cities. One also hears ambiguous statements about Jews, their secret power, their insidious role within the media, and their nefarious plans. ... Too rarely do we hear Muslim voices that set themselves apart from this kind of discourse and attitude."

Nonetheless, Ramadan's criticism of Jewish intellectuals missed the point. The main reason his European critics, Jews or non-Jews, have turned against Islam, and political Islam in particular, is not Israel so much as a common fear that secularism is under threat. That fear is coupled with a deep disillusion, in the wake of failed Marxist dictatorships, with the kind of anticolonial leftism that Ramadan now promotes in the name of universal principles rooted in the heart of Islam. As Denis MacShane put it to me, "Ramadan repudiates core European principles that developed from Galileo to gay marriages."

What enrages former or current progressives is the apparent paradox that lies at the heart of Ramadan's political rhetoric. On global capitalism he speaks like a 1968 left-wing student revolutionary, but on social affairs he can sound like the illiberal conservatives whom those students opposed. In American terms, he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs. One of Ramadan's fiercest critics in France, Caroline Fourest, fears that he has long-term plans to challenge European secularism through religious bigotry. She told me over the phone that she considered Ramadan "more dangerous than the obvious extremists, precisely because he sounds more reasonable." The question of women is key to this.

I wanted to know what exactly Ramadan meant by "Islamic femininity," described in "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam" in terms of "natural complementarity" and "autonomy of the feminine being." This sounded a trifle vague. He replied: "When you are struggling for your rights, you can achieve a legal status. This is necessary. We must have the struggle for equal rights of women. But the body must not be forgotten. Men and women are not the same. In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives or daughters. Now woman exists as woman."

I was not sure this answer left me much the wiser. Later I put some of Caroline Fourest's allegations to him — that he had advised Muslim girls to avoid shaking hands with men; that he warned against mixed swimming pools; that women should not be allowed to engage in sports if their bodies were exposed to men. He claims that these quotes were taken out of context. "What I mean," he said, "is that men and women should have a choice. If they want to follow the rules of modesty, they should be able to choose to do so. Myself, I shake hands with women." I asked him whether his own daughters practiced their faith. He laughed and said that he certainly hoped so, but they were free to choose. Both were sent to ordinary public schools in Switzerland and Britain.

The question is how far secular society should be pushed to accommodate Islamic principles. "We are in favor of integration," Ramadan says in a recorded speech, "but it is up to us to decide what that means. ... I will abide by the laws, but only insofar as the laws don't force me to do anything against my religion." A Muslim must be able to practice and teach and "act in the name of his faith." If any given society should take this right away, he continues, "I will resist and fight that society." There is some ambiguity here. What does it mean to act in the name of one's faith? In 1993 he was against the performance of "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet," a play by Voltaire, in Geneva, saying it "would be another brick in the edifice of hatred and rejection." And yet he is careful not to call for violence or legal bans. As in the case of the Danish cartoons lampooning Islam, he prefers to use such words as "respect" or "tact."

Olivier Roy, perhaps France's greatest authority on Islam, says that the matter of respect, what he calls "the discourse of dignity," is Ramadan's greatest appeal to his followers. I asked Roy in a telephone interview recently who Ramadan's main followers were. "Not the first generation of immigrants," he replied, "and certainly not the fundamentalists. The poor in the French suburbs don't care about him, either. He appeals to people of the second generation, who have a college or university education but do not feel fully integrated. They are the would-be middle class, and for them the discourse of respectability, of dignity, is very important."

I thought of Roy's words as I walked through Brick Lane, in London's East End, on the way to the mosque where I was to meet Ramadan one day in December. Brick Lane used to be a poor Jewish area, where refugees from Russian pogroms eked out a living in the Sunday markets, cheap clothing stores and kosher dining halls. Now the Jews have moved up and on, and the area has become "Bangla Town," home to Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. Brick Lane itself is lined with curry restaurants and stores selling "Muslim fashion" — head scarves, burqas, men's baggy pants, even "Halal cosmetics." I was struck by the word "fashion." It denotes choice, a matter of modern identity more than a tradition left behind in the villages of Pakistan or Bangladesh. The same stores sold audiocassettes of the kind used to promote Ramadan's speeches: cassettes with such English titles as "Islam for Children" or "How to Live as a Muslim."

This is the world in which Tariq Ramadan operates, an urban Western environment full of educated but frequently confused young Muslims eager to find attractive models they can identify with. I thought of the Somali-born Dutch activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as charismatic in her way as Ramadan. Having had her fill of controversies in the Netherlands (she wrote the film "Submission," which led to the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist), she now works at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Her mission, too, is to spread universal values. She, too, speaks of reform. But she has renounced her belief in Islam. She says that Islam is backward and perverse. As a result, she has had more success with secular non-Muslims than with the kind of people who shop in Brick Lane.

Ramadan offers a different way, which insists that a reasoned but traditionalist approach to Islam offers values that are as universal as those of the European Enlightenment. From what I understand of Ramadan's enterprise, these values are neither secular, nor always liberal, but they are not part of a holy war against Western democracy either. His politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without fear.

Ian Buruma is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the Henry R. Luce professor at Bard College. His most recent book is "Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance."

Archives Of Note And Worth:

2007-04-02T10:52:00.000-05:00

March 21, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Why I Was Fired
By DAVID C. IGLESIAS

Albuquerque

WITH this week's release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.

Of course, as one of the eight, I've felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for "performance related" reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn't think so, he said, "I am very sorry to hear that," and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a "diverse up and comer" in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)

When some of my fired colleagues — Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas; Paul Charlton of Phoenix; H. E. Cummins III of Little Rock, Ark.; Carol Lam of San Diego; and John McKay of Seattle — and I testified before Congress on March 6, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. Not only had we not been insulated from politics, we had apparently been singled out for political reasons. (Among the Justice Department's released documents is one describing the office of Senator Domenici as being "happy as a clam" that I was fired.)

As this story has unfolded these last few weeks, much has been made of my decision to not prosecute alleged voter fraud in New Mexico. Without the benefit of reviewing evidence gleaned from F.B.I. investigative reports, party officials in my state have said that I should have begun a prosecution. What the critics, who don't have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible — namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.

What's more, their narrative has largely ignored that I was one of just two United States attorneys in the country to create a voter-fraud task force in 2004. Mine was bipartisan, and it included state and local law enforcement and election officials.

After reviewing more than 100 complaints of voter fraud, I felt there was one possible case that should be prosecuted federally. I worked with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department's public integrity section. As much as I wanted to prosecute the case, I could not overcome evidentiary problems. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. did not disagree with my decision in the end not to prosecute.

Good has already come from this scandal. Yesterday, the Senate voted to overturn a 2006 provision in the Patriot Act that allows the attorney general to appoint indefinite interim United States attorneys. The attorney general's chief of staff has resigned and been replaced by a respected career federal prosecutor, Chuck Rosenberg. The president and attorney general have admitted that "mistakes were made," and Mr. Domenici and Ms. Wilson have publicly acknowledged calling me.

President Bush addressed this scandal yesterday. I appreciate his gratitude for my service — this marks the first time I have been thanked. But only a written retraction by the Justice Department setting the record straight regarding my performance would settle the issue for me.

March 21, 2007
Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils
By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, March 20 — British authorities proposed new rules on Tuesday to allow schools to forbid Muslim students to wear full-face veils in class, reflecting a wider debate over Britain's relationship with its Muslim minority.

The recommendation was the latest episode in a saga of rancorous discussion of the full-face veil, known as the niqab. Last October, Prime Minister Tony Blair described the niqab as a "mark of separation" that made "other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable."

The Department of Education published the new guidelines after a court in Buckinghamshire rejected a 12-year-old Muslim girl's demand to wear the niqab in class last month.

The proposed regulations, which have yet to be formally adopted, said the individual right to "manifest a religion or belief" did not bestow a right to demonstrate faith "at any time, in any place or in any particular manner."

School principals should be allowed to order pupils to show their faces because otherwise "the teacher may not be able to judge their engagement in class," the proposed regulations said. Moreover, they said, "schools need to be able to identify individual pupils in order to maintain good order and identify intruders easily."

The issue of Islamic dress in schools has been contentious in many parts of Europe, sometimes pitting secularist ideologies against the religious beliefs of growing Islamic minorities.

But Islamic dress made headlines in Britain for another reason recently, when a trial of terrorism suspects included surveillance television footage of a male suspect at a bus station as he fled London in what appeared to be an all-covering burqa-style dress.

Jim Knight, the schools minister, said Tuesday that schools should consult with parents when setting their regulations on permissible uniforms. "While they should make every effort to accommodate social, religious or medical requirements of individual pupils, the needs of safety, security and effective learning in the school must always take precedence," he said in a statement.

The government's position drew angry responses from some Muslim groups, including the Islamic Human Rights Commission, whose chairman, Massoud Shadjareh, said it was "simply shocking" for the government to "issue guidance against Muslim communities."

"Successive ministers dealing with education issues have failed to give proper guidance when requested by human rights campaigners about schools' obligations regarding religious dress, including the head scarf," he said.

Others sought to defuse the debate by insisting that disagreements over dress codes could be resolved within schools. "The vast majority of schools are able to solve these issues locally, and that should continue to be the case," said Tahir Alam, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain .

The proposed dress regulations also included recommendations enjoining school principals not to discriminate indirectly against minorities by banning hair styles "more likely to be adopted by specific racial groups."

The rules urged school authorities to outlaw forms of dress "associated with gangs," but said students should not be expelled for refusing to wear standard school uniforms except in the event of "persistent and defiant" transgressions.

March 20, 2007
Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
By NICHOLAS WADE

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists' bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book "Sociobiology" that "the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book "Moral Minds" that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, "Primates and Philosophers," the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped.

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Dr. de Waal's views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males' hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.

These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.

Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal's view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. "I look at religions as recent additions," he said. "Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do."

As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. "The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare," he writes. "The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter."

Dr. de Waal has faced down many critics in evolutionary biology and psychology in developing his views. The evolutionary biologist George Williams dismissed morality as merely an accidental byproduct of evolution, and psychologists objected to attributing any emotional state to animals. Dr. de Waal convinced his colleagues over many years that the ban on inferring emotional states was an unreasonable restriction, given the expected evolutionary continuity between humans and other primates.

His latest audience is moral philosophers, many of whom are interested in his work and that of other biologists. "In departments of philosophy, an increasing number of people are influenced by what they have to say," said Gilbert Harman, a Princeton University philosopher.

Dr. Philip Kitcher, a philosopher at Columbia University , likes Dr. de Waal's empirical approach. "I have no doubt there are patterns of behavior we share with our primate relatives that are relevant to our ethical decisions," he said. "Philosophers have always been beguiled by the dream of a system of ethics which is complete and finished, like mathematics. I don't think it's like that at all."

But human ethics are considerably more complicated than the sympathy Dr. de Waal has described in chimps. "Sympathy is the raw material out of which a more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned," he said. "In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and when."

Many philosophers believe that conscious reasoning plays a large part in governing human ethical behavior and are therefore unwilling to let everything proceed from emotions, like sympathy, which may be evident in chimpanzees. The impartial element of morality comes from a capacity to reason, writes Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton, in "Primates and Philosophers." He says, "Reason is like an escalator — once we step on it, we cannot get off until we have gone where it takes us."

That was the view of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Singer noted, who believed morality must be based on reason, whereas the Scottish philosopher David Hume, followed by Dr. de Waal, argued that moral judgments proceed from the emotions.

But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc justification. "Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated, emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes," Dr. de Waal writes.

However much we may celebrate rationality, emotions are our compass, probably because they have been shaped by evolution, in Dr. de Waal's view. For example, he says: "People object to moral solutions that involve hands-on harm to one another. This may be because hands-on violence has been subject to natural selection whereas utilitarian deliberations have not."

Philosophers have another reason biologists cannot, in their view, reach to the heart of morality, and that is that biological analyses cannot cross the gap between "is" and "ought," between the description of some behavior and the issue of why it is right or wrong. "You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it," said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University. "That's not to discount the importance of what biologists are doing, but it does show why centuries of moral philosophy are incredibly relevant, too."

Biologists are allowed an even smaller piece of the action by Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina. He believes morality developed after human evolution was finished and that moral sentiments are shaped by culture, not genetics. "It would be a fallacy to assume a single true morality could be identified by what we do instinctively, rather than by what we ought to do," he said. "One of the principles that might guide a single true morality might be recognition of equal dignity for all human beings, and that seems to be unprecedented in the animal world."

Dr. de Waal does not accept the philosophers' view that biologists cannot step from "is" to "ought." "I'm not sure how realistic the distinction is," he said. "Animals do have 'oughts.' If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on each other, which is the first kind of 'ought' situation."

Dr. de Waal's definition of morality is more down to earth than Dr. Prinz's. Morality, he writes, is "a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values." The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies "in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval." By this definition chimpanzees in his view do possess some of the behavioral capacities built in our moral systems.

"Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are," Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book "Good Natured." Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal's view. Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in "Primates and Philosophers," with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."

February 25, 2007
Music
Same Stooges. Different World. Finer Wine.
By BEN RATLIFF

THERE are the Stooges, from Ann Arbor, Mich., accidental inventors of punk, in the summer of 1970, on nationwide television. And there's Iggy Pop, their singer: bare torso and sausage-casing jeans, silver gloves, dog collar, chipped front tooth.

The song is "TV Eye," and they have gotten wickedly good at their primitive groove — as good as they will ever get. Iggy weaves in and out of the beat: one second borne by the music, one second abstracted from it. Suddenly he does a violent knock-kneed dance and slips into the audience, gone except for his wounded-animal noises.

"There goes Iggy, right into the crowd," says the host of the special NBC program "Midsummer Rock." It's Jack Lescoulie, an announcer on the "Today" show, the Al Roker of his day. In his late 50s he looks like the anti-Stooge: professional, good-natured, well fed, well insured.

After a commercial break we see Iggy crawling on the stage. "Since we broke away for our message, Iggy has been in the crowd and out again three different times," Mr. Lescoulie says. "They seem to be enjoying it, and so does he." The camera centers on a scrum of teenagers looking downward. Iggy surfaces, hoists himself up so he's standing on shoulders, and remains aloft, pointing forward like the prow of a ship. Next he's scooping something out of a jar, wiping it on himself, flinging it around. "That's peanut butter," Mr. Lescoulie says, incredulous.

I'M going to be straight," Iggy Pop said recently, talking about that film, which circulated for years in certain circles and is now of course available on YouTube. "I was more than a little high."

He was often more than a little high. But these days Iggy Pop, a k a Jim Osterberg, is ferociously grounded. He swims and practices a form of tai chi, and his only vice, he says, is a few glasses of Bordeaux. Coming up on his 60th birthday, he bears signs of age: creased and ropy, he limps from cartilage lost in his right hip, and can't hear well over ambient noise.

For the first time in 34 years, however, he and the members of his onetime band are putting out a new record: "The Weirdness," which will be released by Virgin on March 6. (Careful historians will say 37 years: this is the version of the Stooges that made "Fun House," around the time of the peanut butter concert — the brothers Ron and Scott Asheton on guitar and drums and Steve Mackay on tenor saxophone.)

In the intervening years they too have changed. As has the world around them.

Once upon a time Iggy and the Stooges defined themselves against the Lescoulies of the world: they were outrageous, truculent, elemental. But these days it seems there are more Iggys than Lescoulies. Everyone's subversive, everyone's perverse. What can the Stooges be, if not a band that defines itself against the rest of the world? What happens when they're old and experienced, and punk attitudes, already in their third generation, have infiltrated so many corners of the culture? How do they climb back into that frame of mind?
BREAKING up" doesn't exist anymore. A band only has extended periods of downtime.

The Stooges' downtime was a little more down than others. Ron Asheton used to say that Iggy had become too self-involved for the Stooges to play together again. Scott Asheton pursued Iggy at various points over the last 10 years, and the answer was always no. "I wasn't going to go backwards," Iggy explains now. "And I wasn't going to do anything to what I thought was a great band."

At some point, however, the incentives just became too powerful: prime gigs at the best rock festivals in the world, both the best-paid and the most creatively run.

Plus, what else was there to do? Scott Asheton, who lives in Florida, had been working in construction. His brother, Ron, had been in a series of bands that hadn't made a stir, still living in his boyhood home on the west side of Ann Arbor, where the band had its first rehearsals. (All three went to Ann Arbor High together.)

Iggy needed the Ashetons just as much. "We managed to stay in a band together during a protracted period of failure," he said of those early days, gigging and making records and living in a filthy house. "No rewards. No approval. No money. These are really the only guys I know. That doesn't mean, 'Oh, shucks, I like them so much.' I mean, we lived together."

Besides, "I'd hit a wall playing alone, in my solo music," he said. "I was just at wit's end about what to do — bands, songwriting, everything."

He invited the Ashetons to work on a few songs with him for his album "Skull Ring" in 2003. A week after they convened, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival floated the idea of a Stooges reunion show. (They did the show; Iggy wouldn't say how much they were offered, though he does say that the Stooges now get paid much better than he did for concerts during his solo career.) And the bassist Mike Watt came on board, once of the Minutemen, to take the place of Dave Alexander, who died in 1975.

Before they all headed into the studio, Mr. Watt flew to Florida to go over the new songs, and Iggy gave him a lesson about finding his "inner stupidity."

They were practicing "She Took My Money." ("She took my money/And didn't say thank you/She took my money/And immediately banked it.") Mr. Watt has a strong melodic style on the bass, but Iggy leaned on him to play with a pick instead of his fingers, and to stay with the backbone of the song, even if it meant sounding as dumb, he explained, as the guy singing the bass notes in a doo-wop group. "Play the content," Iggy urged. "As soon as one of us isn't playing that, we don't have a song."

It might have seemed like square advice, but Mr. Watt took it in stride. "Don't get me wrong," he said the other day. "There wouldn't be punk without the Stooges. But after punk, things changed. And they come from the '60s, so there's a different sensibility there. Iggy just said: 'Let go, Watt. Let go of ego. Learn from the source.' "

Over the 70 or so shows the group has played since 2003, it has developed a routine, including a repertory of 14 songs from the earlier albums "The Stooges" and "Fun House." At least once Iggy writhes on top of the bass amp; artfully he keeps his pants in danger of falling down; he chants "I am you" during the free-jazz portion of the song "Fun House."

You can't be prepared for the power of a Stooges show; it still baffles you, makes you a Lescoulie. Iggy juts his hip out like a bumper, skips and punches the air, dives into the audience. On the final night of the All Tomorrow's Parties Festival, which the Stooges headlined in Minehead, England, in December, Iggy encouraged about 60 people to dance onstage, endangering the backline of amplifiers. And he practices his extraordinary physical vocabulary, tilting his shoulders and extending his arms above and behind his head. (Not insignificantly, he was a backstroker on the Ann Arbor High swim team.)

Afterward, backstage, Iggy let two glasses of wine last him 40 minutes. He was in a fine mood. "I sang about twice as hard as I usually do," he marveled. "And I was worrying. A little voice was saying to me, 'Do you sound too demented?' You know, you don't want to overdo it. It happens to any musician. If you want to do really well, sometimes you take it all on yourself. And that ain't it. You've got to tone down to fit into the beauty of the percolation. This is all part of finding the stupidity, you know."

IN October at Electrical Audio studios in Chicago the overall picture was of scheduled productivity. After the basic tracks for "The Weirdness" had been recorded, each band member was given his own day to make suggestions and additions. I came during Ron Asheton's day, when he was tracking some extra guitar solos. The day before had been Steve Mackay's day; Iggy thanked him with a bottle of very nice wine.

Around one another the three original Stooges communicate in shorthand. Iggy Pop, famous as a wildman and credible as a sage, is less well known as an organized type: a note taker, a list maker. He led the discussion on the fine points of each playback. Scott Asheton, a brooding figure who rarely left his chair, voiced a few reservations — "Too much solos sounds too amateurish," he said at one point — and little else. (He was right, and more solos made it on to the record than probably should have.) Ron Asheton just confidently got his job done. After recording one screaming guitar overdub, he re-entered the control room. "Was I too obtuse?" he asked, feigning an epicene British accent. Nobody answered.

While recording, Iggy swam laps in the hotel pool every day before going to work at noon. During the recording of "Fun House" in 1970, by comparison, he dropped acid before each day's session.

Still, Ron Asheton says the Iggy Pop of today is not altogether unfamiliar. "He's more like the Jim I knew in the beginning," Mr. Asheton said. (To old friends, Iggy is Jim.) "It's like the better Jim times. When we first started hanging out, he didn't smoke cigarettes. Jim and I were always more conservative, hesitant to drink, the last ones to smoke marijuana. When we got to Chicago, he had a piece of paper, and it said exactly what's going to happen on every given day. He asks our opinion; we have a mutual pact that we all have to agree. I love that he deals with the schedules. I know that he needs to do that. He's clear about what he wants to do."

The resulting album takes pains to remind you that the Stooges are authentic, that their simplicity and roughness isn't just a casual disposition, or a consequence of being messed up, but a dogma. But "The Weirdness" sounds nothing like "Fun House." Gone are the medium and slow tempos, the glorious cosmic drone of old songs like "Dirt" and "Ann"; the band "wants less uncertainties," in Iggy's words, and in the process has shed half its old sound. It's almost all fast and rough — almost a punk album, with the hard riffs and commitment to bashing that one wishes the Rolling Stones still had. The spirit is there, even when, in some cases, the songwriting is not.

Its engineer is Steve Albini, who has become known for his own dogma of simplicity: analog equipment, full-band live takes, no filters and reverb. The Ashetons' drums and guitars are big, and Iggy, relatively speaking, is small. He pushes his voice, yelping the lyrics, which are typically zen-mundane. Stooges songs used to be about boredom, sex and hanging out. Now they are about boredom, aging, money, sex, greed and hanging out.

The best example is "ATM." Most of its words have one syllable; it is a smart-stupid rendering of a cash machine as a symbol for money, efficiency, and aging. And it has a provocative aside. "The leaders of rock don't rock," he sings at one point. "This bothers me quite a lot."

He wouldn't tell me who he was talking about specifically, he said, but he believes that the rock business is too big, run by people who know nothing about it.

Wasn't that always the case?

"No," he said, decisively. "The people I met at the top in 1972 tended to be crackpots from the fringes of the lowest parts of the entertainment industry. And they tended to know their stuff. Jac Holzman" — the president of Elektra, the Stooges' old label — "was a former record-store owner in the Village. The guy who ran the very biggest talent agency in New York had ties to the pinball industry, I guess you could say. They could really screw an artist up, but they weren't just someone from Legal."

He started warming to the subject: the real subject of the song, he said, was "a fairly loosely aggregated industry-slash-palace guard that has coalesced around the corpus of something called rock, and that something has grown to have something to do with units of digital information, and filling a parking lot." He paused. "It's impressive. It's brutally compelling, sometimes. But it's not enjoyable."

He says he can hear moments of wildness in the old Stooges record that he knows he can't reach anymore. "But some of that's youth."

"And the time period," said Scott Asheton. "What was goin' on."

"So, you know," Iggy responded. "I don't worry about it too much. Other people are going to do plenty of yakety-yak on that subject for me. Who needs another comment from me?"

How is it to make a new Stooges record without drugs?

"You know, I don't feel the difference," he said, thoughtfully. "You?" he asked Scott Asheton.

"Ah, no," he replied, turned 180 degrees away, smoking a cigarette.

"I feel just like I did when I was stoned," Iggy continued. "I feel the same. The thing is, it's wonderful to know we can't take them," he said, and smiled crisply.

March 15, 2007
Google Is Reviving Hopes for Ex-Furniture Makers
By SHAILA DEWAN

LENOIR, N.C. — Almost 40 years ago, when Irene Marsh was a young woman, she took a few months of computer science courses. But when Ms. Marsh realized that would not help her find a job in this Appalachian furniture region, she dropped out and went to work in a factory making tabletops.

Then, like thousands of other furniture makers here in the last five years, she lost her job to workers overseas, after 37 years at one company. But Ms. Marsh, who recently sat with a mouse and keyboard in a basic-skills classroom at Caldwell Community College a few miles south of here, may yet have her chance at a computer job.

Last month, the Internet search giant Google announced that it would take advantage of the area's underused electric power grid, cheap land and robust water supply to build a "server farm" — a building full of computers that will become part of the company's worldwide network.

Google says it hopes laid-off furniture workers, most of whom never graduated from high school, will be among the 250 employees at two facilities on the 215-acre site, much of which was once a lumberyard.

Ms. Marsh, 58, intends to apply. "Of course, you know, it's come a long way," she said cheerfully. "Back then you used to have punch cards and all that. They needed a whole room for one big gigantic computer."

That Google chose Lenoir, a town that still uses some 18th-century techniques to make its signature products, may seem odd: Server farms require relatively little human labor, and they do not produce anything, not even baby computers.

But the choice of Lenoir, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, bodes well for other struggling manufacturing economies in the South, as Google is already considering two sites in South Carolina for similar facilities. Google will not reveal how many server farms it has or intends to build, but they are important components in its race to stay ahead of competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo.

Since the deal in Lenoir (pronounced leh-NORE) was announced in February, city and county officials have found themselves on the defensive, criticized for the secrecy of the negotiations and the package of incentives, potentially worth $260 million, that Google will receive.

At Google's request, the state legislature passed a law exempting some high-tech businesses from paying sales tax on electricity — a tax the company says it would not pay in many other states. And as long as the server farm is operational, the city and county will forgive 100 percent of the company's personal property taxes and 80 percent of its real estate taxes for up to 30 years.

The deal's critics point out that although Google said it would invest $600 million and create 250 jobs at an average salary of $48,000, it made no minimum guarantees, often considered an important part of shielding economic development deals from accusations that they are corporate giveaways. The incentive package is one of the largest ever in the state, and when it is broken down per job, it is as much as $1.24 million each.

"I agree that jobs are what we need," said T. J. Rohr, the only city councilman to vote against the incentives (on principle, he said; he is a Libertarian). "But what's the limit that you're willing to pay for a job?"

Local officials argue that the company will pay hundreds of thousands in franchise fees, sales taxes and payroll taxes and that it has filled local hotels with construction workers, bought tons of stone and concrete and hired security guards. Since the deal was announced, a former Winn-Dixie store, on the market for more than a year, has sold, and the town mall is under contract, officials said.

"Here's what I've asked people, too: What's the disadvantage?" said David Barlow, the mayor. "What if they weren't coming? Then we'd have 100 percent of nothing."

Most of the criticism has come not from locals but from the state's two biggest newspapers, The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh, which have, among other things, questioned the secrecy employed in negotiating the deal.

At times, things have gotten personal. "God bless them if they can learn how to run a server farm," a Charlotte Observer columnist wrote of Lenoir's work force. "A lot of folks in Charlotte and Atlanta and D.C. already know how."

Tim Sanders, a county commissioner during the bulk of the negotiations, said officials simply researched competing sites and tried to make a better offer. He said Google had already paid $4 million to the city and county to offset some infrastructure costs, while the local governments have lost nothing.

"We're being criticized like we're a bunch of country hicks out here and we can't count," Mr. Sanders said.

Mr. Barlow and Mr. Sanders considered the deal so important that they went door to door to ask some 35 homeowners to sell their land to amass a tract of the size Google wanted to buy. "I dreaded living here if Google did not choose that site," Mr. Barlow said.

Still, local residents have wondered how many of them will be qualified for the jobs Google has to offer. (The company says contractors will employ landscapers, janitors and security workers in addition to the 250 jobs.)

Kyle Kiziak, 22, who works for a welding supply company, said his stepfather was recently laid off from his job as a truck driver. "He sits there and thinks, 'Will they hire someone like me?' " Mr. Kiziak said.

Lloyd Taylor, Google's director of global operations, said there was a false assumption that the data center would have "a team of rocket scientists holed up in a room." Many of the company's computers, he said, can self-diagnose problems and be repaired by trained workers. Google is already helping the community college develop a technology training program. And, he said, the company believes that furniture makers have "a great work ethic."

The need for jobs, economic diversification and good news is dire. Lenoir's furniture industry has been decimated by overseas competition, and the transformation has been swift. The unemployment rate went from one of the state's lowest, 2.4 percent, in 2000, to 6.9 percent last year, after peaking at 9.8 percent in 2003. Some 5,000 furniture jobs have been lost. Many workers in their 40s and 50s, who raised families and paid mortgages on factory salaries, have had to go back to school.

G. Alex Bernhardt Sr., chairman and chief executive of the Bernhardt Furniture Company, said the industry had collapsed so quickly because a depression after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks coincided with a substantial increase in China's capacity to handle furniture manufacturing jobs, leading to a series of difficult announcements to Lenoir's workers.

"I usually say to them, 'I shop at Wal-Mart, I think most of you shop at Wal-Mart — we can't have it both ways,' " Mr. Bernhardt said during an interview in his office.

Even though his company is a major taxpayer that does not get the same breaks promised to Google, Mr. Bernhardt said, he is enthusiastic about the center.

"They're bringing something new and fresh to the community that we need," he said. "People who have to pay for those incentives, like Bernhardt, are not complaining about it."

Then Mr. Bernhardt began to muse about the county's transition from agrarian to industrial and now, he hopes, to a knowledge-based economy. "My grandfather started the first furniture factory in Lenoir," he said.

"I wonder how long that took them," he said. "It certainly didn't take only five years."

March 9, 2007
Protocol Is Cited in Limiting Scientists' Talks on Climate
By FELICITY BARRINGER

WASHINGTON, March 8 — The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the agency requirement that two employees going to international meetings on the Arctic not discuss climate change, saying diplomatic protocol limited employees to an agreed-on agenda.

Two memorandums written about a week ago and reported by The New York Times and the Web site of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Thursday set strict parameters for what the two employees could and could not discuss at meetings in Norway and Russia.

The stipulations that the employees "will not be speaking on or responding to" questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice are "consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries to talk about only what's on the agenda," said the director of the agency, H. Dale Hall.

One of the two employees, Janet E. Hohn, is scheduled to accompany a delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants.

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department , parent of the wildlife service, said the memorandum did not prohibit Ms. Hohn from talking about climate change "over a beer" but indicated that climate was "not the subject of the agenda."

The other employee, Craig Perham, an expert on polar bears, was invited by the World Wildlife Fund to help advise villagers along the Siberian coast on avoiding encounters with the bears, said Margaret Williams, director of the Bering Sea program of the fund.

With increasing frequency, polar bears are being found near the villages of the Chukchi in part because their migrations have shifted as warming trends alter the sea ice.

In 2006, after a 15-year-old girl was killed by a marauding bear, the local groups reached out to Russian scientists and the World Wildlife Fund for help, Ms. Williams said. She asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to take along Mr. Perham to seacoast villages less than 250 miles from Alaska to offer his expertise.

A memorandum on Feb. 26 said Mr. Perham "understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to those issues."

Mr. Hall, the director, said in an interview Thursday that "these memoranda could have been better worded," but that requiring strict adherence to a set agenda had "been a longstanding practice."

Asked for the formal agenda of the Russia meetings, Ms. Williams of the World Wildlife Fund said no such document had been negotiated.

"There was," she said "an invitation letter from us to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It always talked about human-bear interactions."

Top-down control of government scientists' discussions of climate change heated up as an issue last year, after appointees at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration kept journalists from interviewing climate scientists and discouraged news releases on global warming.

The NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, ordered a review of policies, culminating in a decision that scientists could speak on science and policy as long as they did not say they spoke for the agency.

In April, John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser, sent the new NASA policy to more than 12 agencies urging them to follow suit.

March 7, 2007
Editorial
A Libby Verdict

There will be a great deal written and said in coming days about the frustrations of the Scooter Libby verdict — that it did not tell us whether someone deliberately blew Valerie Plame Wilson's cover or erase serious concerns about the prosecutor's abuse of the First Amendment. Let's focus first on what the verdict does say.

One of the most senior officials in the White House, Lewis Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was caught lying to the F.B.I. He appears to have been trying to cover up a smear campaign that was orchestrated by his boss against the first person to unmask one of the many untruths that President Bush used to justify invading Iraq. He was charged with those crimes, defended by the best lawyers he could get, tried in an open courtroom and convicted of serious felonies. Mr. Libby walked freely out of the court, had his say in public and will be allowed to appeal.

It was another reminder of how precious the American judicial system is, at a time when it is under serious attack from the same administration Mr. Libby served. That administration is systematically denying the right of counsel, the right to evidence and even the right to be tried to scores of prisoners who may have committed no crimes at all.

And although we still do not know the answer to the original mystery, the case provided a look at the methodical way that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby, Karl Rove and others in the Bush inner circle set out to discredit Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson, a career diplomat, was sent by the State Department in 2002 to check out a British intelligence report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the government of Niger for a secret nuclear weapons program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Mr. Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In July 2003, Mr. Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in The Times that what he had found did not support that claim. The specter of a nuclear-armed Iraq was central to Mr. Bush's case for rushing to war. So, the trial testimony showed, Mr. Cheney orchestrated an assault on Mr. Wilson's credibility with the help of Mr. Libby and others. They whispered to journalists that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and that nepotism was the reason he had been chosen for the trip.

That is what we know from the Libby trial, and it is some of the clearest evidence yet that this administration did not get duped by faulty intelligence; at the very least, it cherry-picked and hyped intelligence to justify the war. What Mr. Wilson found, and subsequent investigations confirmed, was that there was one trip in 1999 — not "recently," but four years before Mr. Bush's statement — by an Iraqi official to Niger and that during that trip, uranium was never discussed.

What we still do not know is whether a government official used Ms. Wilson's name despite knowing that she worked undercover. That is a serious offense, which could have put her and all those who had worked with her in danger. We also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.

The potential damage from that decision remains of real concern. But it was still a breath of fresh air to see someone in this administration, which specializes in secrecy, prevarication and evading blame, finally called to account.

March 6, 2007
Layoffs Follow Scandal at Colorado Megachurch
By DAN FROSCH

DENVER, March 5 — In the wake of a scandal involving its founding pastor, the Rev. Ted Haggard, the New Life Church in Colorado Springs has been forced to lay off 44 of its 350 workers to offset a sharp drop in donations.

Mr. Haggard resigned as president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals in November and was removed as senior pastor of the New Life megachurch after a former male prostitute said that he had had a three-year sexual relationship with Mr. Haggard and had helped him obtain methamphetamines.

After initially denying the accusations, Mr. Haggard confessed to buying drugs from the former prostitute, Michael Jones, and admitted to what he termed "sexual immorality." Mr. Haggard has since gone through counseling, and was declared "completely heterosexual" by a member of a panel of ministers appointed to oversee New Life.

Since the announcement of Mr. Haggard's removal on Nov. 5, New Life's donations have fallen to $4.9 million in the past four months, compared with $5.3 million in the same period a year earlier, said Rob Brendle, the associate pastor. The drop was previously reported in The Denver Post.

Attendance at New Life, which has an estimated 14,000 members, has declined about 15 percent, Mr. Brendle said.

"We are in a position where the reality of our financial situation is causing us to look at how we can be more efficient," he said, "and we spent a lot of time thinking and analyzing how best to do that. These are difficult times, and these have been difficult decisions. But the floor of this church has not fallen out."

Shortly after the scandal, the church's board of overseers began a "moral audit" of New Life's leaders. The audit resulted in disciplinary action against a small number of employees and the resignation of one more for "unrelated issues of sin," said Mr. Brendle, who was among those interviewed by the board for the audit.

"Everyone's trust was shaken," he said. "They asked me what I know about Ted, when I knew and what I did about it. They asked me questions about the general health of my spiritual life and about personal morality and character."

Mr. Brendle said the recent layoffs, which affected pastoral staff members and administrative assistants, among others, would help restore fiscal stability. Congregants, some of whom learned of the firings at a question-and-answer session held by a panel of church leaders during Sunday services, remained upbeat about New Life's fortunes.

"It's unfortunate and sad, and it hurts," said Tim Chambers, 43, who has attended New Life for 10 years. "There are a lot of emotions that come with this, because a lot of these employees have been around a good while.

"But these individuals are getting a lot of love and support. And I think this is going to help us move forward when our new pastor comes in."

Despite New Life's struggles, Chris Paulene, director of member services for the National Association of Evangelicals, said other evangelical churches had not been affected by Mr. Haggard's case.

"This is a completely isolated incident," Mr. Paulene said. "It won't affect the rest of the churches, at least not measurably."

New Life, which Mr. Haggard started in his basement in 1985, is searching for his successor.

"I speak with Ted every week," Mr. Brendle said. "He is authentically repentant and humble."

Mr. Brendle added: "I would say that the people at New Life are confident in the process of transition that is under way and hopeful for the future. There is a pervasive sense that our best days are ahead of us."

March 6, 2007
Editorial
Manufacturing Misdemeanors

The New York Police Department has been going fishing. Not content to nab criminals when they break the law on their own, the department has been planting unattended bags in subway stations to see who might take them, at which point waiting officers pounce.

As NY1 News reported last week, 220 people were arrested last year in the sting, known as Operation Lucky Bag. In dismissing one of these cases, a Brooklyn judge said the police "do not need to manipulate a situation where temptation may overcome even people who would normally never think of committing a crime." This program bothers us for that and many other reasons and should be discontinued immediately.

Civil libertarians have argued that the program is entrapment. That is a legal distinction for the courts to decide, but it certainly looks like that to a layperson. It is clearly a poor use of resources. People wandering off with lost property ranks far down the list of law enforcement priorities.

There is also the question of whether the sting does actual harm. In an era of terrorism, where the police have to rely on the help of average people to notice anything suspicious — including apparently abandoned bags — the last thing New York needs are cynical operations that encourage mistrust between the police and subway riders.

And of course, there is the effect on neighborliness. It is remarkable how many people in this city are willing to track down the owners of lost cellphones, wallets or bags. Arresting good Samaritans is bad enough, but encouraging them not to help in the future through this kind of overly aggressive policing is a downright shame. The best thing to do with this misbegotten program would be to end it.

February 27, 2007
Justices Decline Case on 200-Year Sentence for Man Who Possessed Child Pornography
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 — An Arizona man who received a 200-year prison sentence for possessing 20 pornographic images of children failed Monday to persuade the Supreme Court to consider whether the sentence was unconstitutionally excessive.

Arizona law imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for "sexual exploitation of a minor," and it requires that sentences for multiple convictions be served consecutively.

The sentence that the man, Morton R. Berger, received was consequently longer than the sentence any other state would have imposed for a similar offense, a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court wrote in an opinion last year dissenting from that court's decision upholding the 200-year sentence.

A majority of the Arizona Supreme Court declined to examine the aggregate sentence as a whole, instead focusing on the sentence of 10 years for possessing a single pornographic image, which it found was not excessive or disproportionate. It was this aspect of the analysis that Mr. Berger, a 57-year-old former high school teacher, challenged in his appeal to the United States Supreme Court .

"If this court reviews Berger's entire punishment instead of examining the sentence for a single count," the brief said, "it would find Berger's punishment cruel, unusual and unconstitutional."

His appeal said that in most states, sentences for similar crimes would run concurrently, and an offender would serve no more than five years, with the additional possibility of probation or early release. Both are barred under Arizona law. Had the offense been prosecuted under federal law, Mr. Berger's brief said, the federal guidelines would have provided a five-year sentence.

The case, Berger v. Arizona, No. 06-349, has drawn considerable attention in criminal law circles as providing a possible occasion for the justices to take a fresh look at a subject they have treated only sparingly. While fully engaged in reconsidering the respective roles of judges and juries in criminal sentencing, the court has been extremely reluctant to strike down particular sentences as excessive.

Douglas A. Berman, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and an authority on sentencing, also noted the difference in the court's treatment of punitive damages and criminal sentencing.

In an interview on Monday, recalling that the court last week vacated an award of punitive damages against Philip Morris, Professor Berman said, "For a host of good reasons, the justices think they have a role in regulating extreme corporate punishment, but I fear the court doesn't embrace a role in regulating extreme individual punishment." Professor Berman has been writing about the Berger case for months on his blog, Sentencing Law and Policy.

Arizona vigorously opposed Supreme Court review of the sentence, telling the justices that it had been properly based on "overwhelming evidence" of Mr. Berger's "large-scale, deliberate and long-term acquisition of child pornography."

The state's brief said that after Mr. Berger turned down a plea bargain, the prosecutor whittled the case to 20 counts out of fear of "deluging the jury" with highly graphic and disturbing images. The police had found the images in Mr. Berger's possession after learning that his credit card number had been used to buy contraband images from a child pornography Web site based in Dallas.

These were some of the court's other activities on a busy Monday:

Primary Elections

The justices agreed to decide the constitutionality of the open primary system adopted in 2004 by Washington State. Under that system, people can vote for any candidate without regard to the party affiliation of the candidate or the voter. Candidates, however, can designate their own party preference on the ballot. The top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party label.

The Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties in the state challenged the system on the ground that it violated their First Amendment right to freedom of association by depriving them and their members of the ability to control the selection of candidates running under their banner. Two lower courts agreed, on the basis of recent Supreme Court precedents upholding the rights of political parties to control their own affairs.

The justices granted and consolidated two separate appeals, one filed by the state (Washington v. Washington Republican Party, No. 06-730) and one by the Washington State Grange, an organization that advocated for the voter initiative that established the new system (Washington State Grange v. Washington Republican Party, No. 06-713).

Gun Use

In its latest effort to parse a federal law that makes it a crime to "use" a gun in relation to a drug offense, the court agreed to decide whether the receipt of an unloaded firearm as payment for drugs amounted to a prohibited "use."

The federal appeals courts are divided on this question, which the Supreme Court did not directly resolve in 1995 when it ruled that "use" required "active employment" of the gun, a definition that the court said then included using a gun as an item of barter or commerce even if the gun was never fired.

In the new case, Watson v. United States, No. 06-571, the defendant, Michael A. Watson, acquired a gun from a police informant in return for 24 doses of the drug OxyContin. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected his argument that receipt of a gun under such circumstances did not meet the "active employment" test.

The question occurs often, in various permutations, because a violation of the statute in question carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison in addition to any underlying offense. More than one in 10 of all federal drug convictions carry an enhanced sentence for use of a firearm.

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies'
By JOHN TIERNEY

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn't plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They'll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They'll stop worrying about "frankenfoods" and embrace genetic engineering.

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.

He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he's been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called "America Needs Indians." That's somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.

But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.

Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long — as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker — that he's become a cottage industry in academia.

Last year, Fred Turner of Stanford published "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism." This fall Andy Kirk of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is putting out "Counterculture Green: The Environmentalism of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog." By next year we should be due for a revisionist historian's discovery of a modern social movement that Mr. Brand did not orchestrate.

In addition to publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, he organized the first Hackers Conference, in 1984, and helped found The WELL, the early electronic community that was a sort of prototype of the Web. In Professor Turner's history, he was the impresario who knew everyone and brought the counterculture and the cyberculture together, from the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s to Wired magazine in the 1990s.

He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture's fears of computers turning into Big Brother. "Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines," he told Conservation magazine last year. "Where are the green biotech hackers?"

He's also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

"There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective," he says. "Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don't know where it is and you don't know what it's doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody's atmosphere."

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he's been shifting toward the minority.

"My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by," he says. "I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind."

Mr. Brand got his first look at the big picture one afternoon in 1966 while sitting on a roof in San Francisco at what he calls an "altitude of three stories and 100 mikes," meaning micrograms of LSD. He contemplated the skyline and decided the buildings weren't parallel because he was seeing the curvature of the Earth.

This reminded him of Buckminster Fuller's theory that people abused the environment because they thought of the Earth as flat and infinite, not as a finite globe. The next day the Earth looked flat again, but the 28-year-old Mr. Brand had a new cause. He printed up buttons asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"

Two years later, when Earth's portrait from space was finally released, he used it on the cover of his new project, the Whole Earth Catalog. The catalog became the bible for the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, but Mr. Brand was not into the simple self-sufficient life on the farm. He was into new tools and new ways of sharing information. As he famously explained in the introduction to the catalog: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

Along with the potter's wheels and organic-farming tips, the catalog featured a state-of-the-art offering from Hewlett Packard: a desktop calculator that cost $4,900. In 1968, which was 16 years before the Apple Macintosh, Mr. Brand helped arrange the first demonstration of a computer mouse.

In a 1972 article, he contrasted "hackers" (a novel term then) with old-fashioned "planners," hailing the experimental, collaborative culture that was taking shape in cyberspace. At the first Hackers Conference, he uttered another of his enduring aphorisms, "Information wants to be free."

Mr. Brand's latest project, undertaken with fellow digerati, is to build the world's slowest computer, a giant clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, powered by changes in temperature. The clock is an effort to promote long-term thinking — what Mr. Brand calls the Long Now, a term he borrowed from the musician Brian Eno.

Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn't always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.

The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich's theories of the coming "age of scarcity" were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Simon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon's cornucopian theories.

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon's victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn't. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.

"It is one of the great revelatory bets," he now says. "Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they're wrong, it's really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we'd have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I've been wrong is when I assume there's a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought."

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he's afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

Old-fashioned rural simplicity still has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom plants and livestock, they're benefiting from technological advances made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they just ruin the romance?

Mr. Brand would rather take a few risks.

"I get bored easily — on purpose," he said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix. "Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things."

That's a good strategy, whether you're trying to build a sustainable career or a sustainable civilization. Ultimately, there's no safety in clinging to a romanticized past or trying to plan a risk-free future. You have to keep looking for better tools and learning from mistakes. You have to keep on hacking.

Game With No Winner

It's almost enough to make us nostalgic for streaking and sitting on flagpoles. College students from Michigan to Florida have found a new way to get attention, offend others and make a right-wing statement all at once. It's a game with a name that says it all: "Catch the Illegal Immigrant."

The game is a variation on hide and seek: one player poses as the immigrant, and everyone else tries to find that person. There's a prize, usually $200 or less, which is not much, but enough to celebrate the cheap exploitation of a fellow human.

"Catch the Immigrant" is the brainchild of an intern with the College Republican National Committee, who lost her post after coming up with this and other campus recruitment gimmicks. Another game, called "Fun With Guns," invited young Republicans to fire BB guns or paint balls at cardboard cutouts of Democratic leaders. Republican Party leaders have tried to distance themselves from the games, but seem to have done little to stop them.

The right-wing organizers of the immigrant games — particularly Young Americans for Freedom and Young Republicans — have declared piously that they're just trying to spark debate. At that, they have succeeded. Protesters defending immigration and human dignity have outnumbered the game's players at the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Pennsylvania State and other campuses, including, most recently, at New York University.

The reaction from schools has been mostly tepid. Administrators are in a tough spot, trying to balance free speech with offensive behavior. More speech is the answer, including voices of authority pointing out the nastiness of this game as well as the inherent cruelty of hunting people for sport.

"Catch the Immigrant" also reflects a larger misunderstanding of the immigration issue. The more than 11 million illegal immigrants cannot be caught. Even if they could be, rounding them up and deporting them would be disastrous, economically and socially. Educators should teach the game players about the real world.

Billions Over Baghdad
By JOHN B. TAYLOR

The story of the currency plan is one of several that involved large sums of cash. For example, just before the war, Saddam Hussein stole $1 billion from the Iraqi central bank. American soldiers found that money in his palaces and shipped it to a base in Kuwait, where the United States Army's 336th Finance Command kept it safe. To avoid any appearance of wrongdoing, American soldiers in Kuwait wore pocket-less shorts and T-shirts whenever they counted the money.

The Cinquain

2006-11-22T12:53:00.000-05:00

Disappointed With Technology (The Cinquain)

Printer,
office pool-boy,
tempts many needy hands
but yields nothing without shame-mark,
ink-stain.

CINQUAIN

The traditional cinquain is based on a syllable count.

line 1 - 2 syllables
line 2 - 4 syllables
line 3 - 6 syllables
line 4 - 8 syllables
line 5 - 2 syllables

The modern cinquain is based on a word count of words of a certain type.

line 1 - one word (noun) a title or name of the subject
line 2 - two words (adjectives) describing the title
line 3 - three words (verbs) describing an action related to the title
line 4 - four words describing a feeling about the titlem, a complete sentence
line 5 - one word referring back to the title of the poem

Flooding Heaven, Dousing The Flames Of Hell

2006-11-22T12:50:00.000-05:00

Paul and I stayed up all night discussing matters of spirituality, religion, science, and time; our discourse having been motivated principally by hiking, John Ashbery, and this article:

November 21, 2006

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

The Meat Of Our Times, The Times Of Our Meat

2006-11-22T12:14:00.000-05:00

Cure Me

By PETER HOFFMAN

NOVEMBER is a busy time for city restaurants. Urban dwellers close up their second homes, and market ingredients shift from cool tomatoes to dense squashes and earthy mushrooms. The appeal of eating comfort foods around a convivial table returns.

Two weeks ago, amid all this autumn activity, Stephen Kaye telephoned, offering to sell a whole Tamworth pig. Stephen is an upstate farmer who has brought us the most delicious asparagus I’ve eaten, the creamiest fingerling potatoes we’ve served, mint that made an ice cream still unsurpassed, and my first grass-fed beef, a Dexter-Angus cross. Now he was proposing to deliver a pig the week before Thanksgiving.

My first reaction was: Are you kidding? Do you have any idea of the logistics that go into serving the great American meal to 185 diners? My harried sous chef hasn’t the time or the space to handle a 150-pound carcass.

But then I remembered that this is also a busy time on the farm. It is a race against the frost, to gather root crops and plant garlic and hardy greens that winter over. And of course it is also ideal pig-killing time. Any later in the season, and precious forage or grain for other animals would have to be used to maintain the girth that the pig put on in summer pasture. Any earlier, and we wouldn’t be taking advantage of all the energy and nutrients available in the field grasses.

If I really am dedicated to cooking by the seasons and supporting local agriculture, I thought, now would be the obvious time to buy a whole pig. Ideally, I would break it down into primal cuts, put the hams in salt for the next month, and then hang them at room temperature for two years, allowing them to slowly dry into prosciutto. And why not grind up the dark, fatty shoulders with salt, pepper and juniper, stuff the mixture into casings, and then leave the sausages in a cool room for six weeks to naturally ferment, developing delicious, tangy porcine flavors?

I can’t, because the United States Department of Agriculture and the local health departments do not allow commercial processing of meat without refrigeration.

This is astonishing, because since Neolithic times, people have safely cured and preserved meats without refrigeration. Europeans have turned curing into an art, and the best processors are revered craftsmen who earn national medals of honor. Salt, time and a good dose of fresh air are the only additions needed to produce salsicce, culatello and 24-month-old prosciutto or serrano — foods that Americans smuggle home from Europe in their luggage.

In the United States, sadly, we have adopted a different approach. In the early 20th century, artisan sausage-makers catered to fellow immigrants and their children who hungered for the traditions and tastes of their homelands. As a child in Bergen County, N.J., I was greeted at my German grandmother’s house with a large platter of bündnerfleisch, Swiss air-dried beef. I pronounced it “bunder,” and translated it into my personal lexicon as “wonder meat,” because I never tasted anything else so good.

The shop that sold that meat is long gone. When first-generation craftsmen retired or died, their children didn’t want to take over the business and the salumeri of the nation’s Little Italys and the wurst shops of the Little Bavarias closed.

At the same time, meat production became industrialized, and was conducted on a much larger scale. As production speeds increased and labor was increasingly unskilled, food safety became a serious issue. The making of sausage and cured meats, once a skilled profession, became an opportunity to process discarded meats into a marginally edible form. Tainted meat and unsanitary factories led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

More recently, in 1996, the Agriculture Department established the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, which detail how production facilities can minimize the chances of contamination. And the key requirement is that all meat be held at temperatures less than 42 degrees.

And so the ancient, ingenious methods of meat preservation created in the days before refrigeration have come under attack because they don’t use refrigerators.

Yet now, as more chefs cook seasonally and buy locally, the use of whole animals is becoming more commonplace. Embracing the notion that meat is a precious resource, chefs in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore., are rediscovering the ancient crafts of meat preservation.

Unfortunately, federal and local health officials are cracking down on these production methods. Last spring, New York City health department officials summarily tossed scores of prosciutto legs — without ever measuring the meat’s moisture or salinity levels to determine their safety. If it was being held anywhere in the bacteria “danger zone” of 42 to 140 degrees, then it was deemed unsafe.

Yet Italy’s finest prosciutto pro-ducers and Spain’s great Ibérico arti-sans hold their products at 55 to 60 degrees, a temperature range that they say enhances flavors, without causing health problems.

What we need is to invert the logic now applied to meat safety. Rather than apply refrigeration standards to an ancient and safe method of preservation, we need an alternative set of standards that take into account what salting and drying can do to discourage the growth of bacteria. Federal and local health officials should recognize artisanal methods as an alternative to refrigeration.

November is a time to give thanks to earth’s bounty, enjoy the fruits of a good season and prepare for the colder, harsher days ahead. On second thought, maybe I will take that pig from Stephen Kaye.

Peter Hoffman is the owner and chef of the restaurant Savoy.

Important Headlines Of Our Times

2006-11-16T16:36:00.001-05:00

"Kool Keith Stabs Kool Keith Look Alike, Wins Book Deal For Tell-All To Be Written By Kool Ghost Keith"

The Rib

2006-11-15T21:33:00.001-05:00

Tastiest comma,
Fly back
Into Adam

And teach him to sew:
His tongue keeps wandering
At night.

Tercet

2006-11-15T20:33:00.000-05:00

The writer works best in the dark--
like the mushrooms,
he has to eat a lot of shit to grow.

Words that should be words that aren't words, at least not in English:

2006-11-15T18:12:00.001-05:00

plear - adj., something pleasant. Perhaps relating to fruit. Or a quality of dry-wall. Perhaps texture.

shinp - adj., sharp, but in a specifically, terrifyingly impotent way:

"Hys eyes," quoth Wernerlitz, "as shinp as broken, crackling wendigoe bones, met myne owne."

--Fieldington, Stanship Marshdown, 1506.

gunup - n., a spear used against the genitals of the wolverine in India.

gunuj - adv., syn. "very" or "well," as in "he ran well fast" or "Ida was gunuj fair... until the skin disease."

julit - n., a kind of drink to be made only inside Scotch or Persian castles, and then only in winter.

tilg - n., a kind of poisonous mint.