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.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Yeah, Word
May 31, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
What I Think About Evolution
What I Think About Evolution
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.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
What we should do, or at least a good attempt at delineating such
How to Win the Energy War
How to Win the Energy War
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:
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.
Monday, May 7, 2007
No God But Money: What Religion Is Really Up To = Fucking You Over, Even When You Are Faithful
As Pope Heads to Brazil, a Rival Theology Persists
As Pope Heads to Brazil, a Rival Theology Persists
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.”
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia
In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia
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.”
Monday, April 9, 2007
Religion Is The Devil
The Presidency’s Mormon Moment
The Presidency’s Mormon Moment
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.
Guantanabanana
Guantánamo Detainees Stage Hunger Strike
Guantánamo Detainees Stage Hunger Strike
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.
Monday, April 2, 2007
Fossa Food
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.”
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
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.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
NBC
The Web site hornymanatee.com has its own sorts of shows.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Television
Enlarge This Image
NBC
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.
*
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.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
NBC
The Web site hornymanatee.com has its own sorts of shows.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Television
Enlarge This Image
NBC
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.
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