Remora

John McNeil at Genomeweb reports that the headlines last June (like the NYT'S Genetic Code of Human Life Is Cracked by Scientists) were a little premature. We don't have a final count of human genes, yet. All that stir last year - it is rather like announcing that men have landed on the moon, and then finding out, a year later, that they actually have gotten very close to the moon.

Bringing up the always interesting question, what was behind the hype?

Here's the graf from McNeil's article.

"Writing in a letter to the editor of Cell , a group of scientists led by Michael Cooke and John Bogenesch at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, together with researchers at the Scripps Research Institute, said a comparison of the two published versions of the human genome showed for the first time that they have only about 16,000 genes in common. Thus, if the two teams of researchers have accurately predicted their additional 26,000 genes, the total number of genes should equal at least 42,000. "

Dope

I read a rather dismal piece by the anthropologist Robin Fox today, in the London Review of Books. Fox, who is the head of the Anthropology department at Rutgers, reviewed the biography of Colin Turnbull, the man who studied the Ik and the Mbuti Pygmies. Turnbull's book on the Ik, The Mountain People, became famous in the seventies. It supposedly showed a people who had lost any claim to humanity - a people reduced, by starvation, perhaps, to an appalling, Hobbesian state of man against man (und Gott gegen alles). This view of the Ik was dramatized by Peter Brooks and was well propagated, even though it was based on a faulty observation of the Ik by an openly prejudiced man who advocated a form of cultural genocide being practiced against these people.

Turnbull's earlier book about the Pygmies had stressed how good they were, in tacit comparison, especially, to the civilized Westerner. But the Mountain People, with its supposedly tough minded debunking of the Noble Savage myth, won the support of people like Robert Ardrey. In the seventies, along with the beginning of socio-biology, an anthropological school arose which claimed to be at once scientific and tough-minded about humankind. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox (the Rutgers Team) were early and vocal adherents of this school, and of course Ardrey was a big fellow travelor. They introduce each others books, they write about each other - you know, the clique thing. Napoleon Chagnon is another member in not so good standing, now - but his book on the Yanomamo expressed the world view of this ostensibly scientifically minded group rather well in the seventies. These people held that- when you look at primitive human groups - this group had no problem with the word primitive - you'll find violence and power struggles. You won't find cooperation or altruism. And that is how humans are.

Now, one's immediate question is: why is the Hobbesian view more "scientific" than what Fox calls the Rousseauist view? That's a good question. In Fox's review of Turnbull, he contrasts the professional, scientific anthropologist with the subjectivism of the Margaret Mead's and Colin Turnbull's. He also sounds a note common to all the anthropologists of his tribe. It is that contemporary society is dominated by the view that human beings are innately good, and that this view is projected on primitive tribes to show that they have one or another outstanding virtue.

Let's take the later claim first. My response to it is: are Fox and his kind out of their minds? His evidence for the idea that we believe in the innate goodness of human beings seems to come from desultory discussions in the faculty lounge. Maybe Fox should take a look at concrete, even, dare I say it, objective social phenomena and ask himself - does this reflect a society which believes in the innate goodness of man? The first exhibit, of course, would be the over one trillion dollars spent in this country alone to amass a tidy 20 to 40 thousand or so nuclear missiles, and the popular perception that this amount of weaponry can blow up the world. He might want to look at TV news casts - especially local newscasts - and add up how much news is devoted to violence, and how much to, say, works of charity. He might want to check out the standard curriculum of the American high school. In my day, it leaned heavily to Lord of the Flies kind of books - emphasizing a point which is obvious to the average adolecent, that we are born under a bad sign. Far from having disappeared, the notion of original sin, in this culture, has ramified itself in dozens of ways. In fact, this makes anthropological sense - the disappearance of a cultural trope as common in this culture as original sin really would be a surprise.

Why would an anthropologist claim otherwise? The motif for this rhetorical move is resentment. It provides a story line in bad faith, casting such as Fox as embattled, or somehow minority, intellectuals - when in fact they are quite powerful, very networked intellectuals. It presents their opponents not only as wrong, but powerful - which of course creates the question characterstic of the politics of resentment -- how did the bad get to be powerful? There's a fascinating ritual here - a mimicry of victimage by people who are not, in any sense of the word, victims. But as this ritual plays out, increasingly any challenge to the Fox worldview is immediately interpreted as violence. In this way, a group which makes the claim to be scientific engages in a discourse that is anything but.


Because Fox's review isn't on the Net, I'm not going to play ping pong with it on this post. Instead, lets go to another example of the misuse of the word science which is generally in keeping with the school of Fox, Tiger, et al. There's a piece in the April Scientific American that is a perfect expression of the use of science, and the connotations evoked by that word, to disguise a merely ideological construct.

It was written by Michael Shermer, who labels himself as a Skeptic. If Shermer is a skeptic, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Shermer mounts a defense of Napoleon Chagnon against a book published by Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado. Tierney's book, briefly, attacks Chagnon for a number of reasons.
1. He accuses Chagnon of provoking violence by the means he used to get information.
2. He accuses Chagnon of being criminally careless in gathering together Yamomami Indians in 'festivals" that Chagnon filmed, knowing that some of the Indians were infected with measels.
3. He subjects Chagnon's facts and figures to a long and complicated critique. This part of the book extends for a good one hundred pages, and even includes a humorous table showing the dates when Chagnon promised to supply his data for various article he has written, and the date when that data was actually revealed. The latter date is -- it hasn't been revealed yet. A considerable portion of Chagnon's data set, even from the seventies, has still not been made available to other researchers.

Shermer begins his defense by his interpretation of Tierney's attack. He simplifies Tierney's points into one over-riding point: that Chagnon falsely labels the Yanomamo as Violent People. Here is Shermer's response.

' Humans are not easily pigeonholed into such clear-cut categories. The nature and intensity of our behavior depend on a host of biological, social and historical variables. Chagnon understands this. Tierney does not. Thus, Darkness in El Dorado fails not just because he didn't get the story straight (there are countless factual errors and distortions in the book) but because the book is predicated on a misunderstanding of how science works and of the difference between anecdotes (on which Tierney's book is based) and statistical trends (on which Chagnon's book depends). "

It is the last sentence I want to highlight here. Shermer's distinction is deeply meretricious, and, I think, syptomatic of how evolutionary anthropologists have distorted the word science.

To say that Tierney's book is based on anecdotes is rather funny, especially when contrasted with "statistical trends." What are Chagnon's statistical trends? Well, when you track them down, they are... anecdotes. Chagnon collected a number of stories about murders. There are no police among the Yamomami - his stories about murders depend on informants. As do his other stories about violent acts. From this base, he produced his statistics. Schermer must believe that quantifying over stories given one by informants somehow transforms the anecdote into science. That belief is, to say the least, not very skeptical.

In fact, the anecdote/science distinction is bogus, anyway. To report an occurence in a laboratory is, in one sense, to relate an anecdote. Hopefully, it is an anecdote that contains information that allows for the reconstruction of the occurence. Measurement alone is not science. I can count my fingers all day, but that doesn't make me a hand specialist. When Chagnon does quantify his research, they have a tendency to, let us say, exhibit grossly peculiar patterns. For instance, as Tierney shows, Chagnon's statistics on violence among the Yamomami show that violence among males INCREASES with age -- which, if true, would make the Yamomami a unique case. Or take the statistics on lineage based upon the blood samples taken by Chagnon and his partner, James Neel, in the sixties. According to Neel, these blood samples show a very low percentage of illegitimacy. That is, the husbands of Yamomami women usually turned out to be the real biological fathers of their children. Two things should be said about this. One is that the blood samples were taken before the technique of DNA fingerprinting was developed; so Neal and Chagnon necessarily had to use the much more unreliable blood type technique. But the other thing to say is -- what does legitimacy mean in a polyandrous society? Especially given Chagnon's own account of the prevelance of rape among the Yamomami, it is hard to know what to make of the evidence of the blood types. It is hard to know, in other words, without a supporting context of anecdotes - information from informers.

As for Tierney's countless factual errors - well, this is a stone that the friends of Napoleon Chagnon might not want to launch. His record is filled with matters of fact and conclusions that are violently disputed by others in the field, like Douglas Good and Brian Ferguson. His attitude towards evidence is bizarrely territorial - he seems to believe that information is about loyalty rather than objective fact. His tendency to accuse his opponents of Marxism doesn't help, either.

I once planned to do an extensive review of Tierney's book, but I never got around to it. A pity. One of these days, I will track the fallacies of evolutionary psychology and its allies (socio-biology and evolutionary anthropology) down, and shoot them. Bang bang bang - clay pigeons, all. In front of all of the readers of this site.

Remora

The Financial Times claims that Gustav Rau has the second largest private art collection in the world. I emphasize 'claims' - the largest art collectors are notoriously eccentric. It wouldn't surprise me if Rau's collection were surpassed by the odd Japanese billionaire.

In any case, the collection is, controversially, making a tour. The controversy is over whether Rau is of sound mind. Rau was a doctor in Zaire for many years. And he is also incredibly wealthy - which leaves a large gap between the lines. You don't become wealthy in Zaire without having had to do with Mobutu. But the article doesn't mention the tyrant's name, so one will just have to speculate. Anyway, the Swiss government claims an interest in the collection. Here's the explanation:

"The Rau Foundation might have remained anonymous had the doctor not retired in 1993 to Monaco, where he was later found disconsolately wandering the streets. A Lausanne court declared him mentally incapable, and, because under Swiss law the state has a share in the control of a foundation, the authorities took over the collection.

But Dr Rau, it seems, was not impaired at all. He made Unicef his heir, and haggled with the Swiss to allow highlights of his collection to tour Japan in 2000. He ignored the conditions - that the pictures return to Embrach - and instead sent them to Paris, from where they began a world tour that Rau hopes will include the US and Brazil, before ending up on permanent Unicef loan to the Musee de Luxembourg."

Dope
As I said in my last post, today is Plutarch day. Let's see - there is an incredibly large amount of info about Plutarch on the Net -- which is intriguing, considering that Plutarch was also a favorite of the printers when the printing press produced the book revolution in the Renaissance. The parallel might have been intentional - for instance, MIT's Perseus people surely had that in mind.

Let's start with Roger Kimbell's essay on Plutarch, for The New Criterion.

Unfortunately, Kimbell writes in an insufferable high table manner. I assume the name rings a bell - he's one of the warriors in that dreariest contemporary phenom, the Culture Wars - author of Tenured Radicals, etc. Poor Kimball - when he has some hair up his butt, he can get his rocks off, but without an opponent to caricature - writing in the belles-lettres format - he comes off sounding like he'd been suckled on bottle of port. What kills me is the High Table affectation combined with the middlebrow phrasing. Nabokov was always amused by that American combination of the Great Books and up-lift attitude - remember Lolita's mother, Charlotte Haze, with her Time-Life, Will and Ariel Durant culture? I don't share Nabokov's disdain for this kind of thing - hey, Will and Ariel Durant were socialists, and come out of the long Anglo tradition of Workingman's self-improvement groups (as Shaw pointed out, many a voluntary reading association provided a more up to date educational background than you could squeeze out of your average Oxford Don) - but it is funny to encounter such unconscious and pathetic bits of it in Kimball. Most interesting graf in Kimball's essay:

"I have always been surprised that more is not made of Alcibiades today. He seems the perfect contemporary hero: rich, handsome, brilliant, amoral; he had it all. He was even bisexual, virtually a prerequisite for appearing well-rounded these days. Plutarch notes that when it came to �temperance, continence, and probity,� Alcibiades must be judged �the least scrupulous and most entirely careless of human beings.� But he forgives him a lot, not least because �he was often of service to Athens, both as a soldier and a commander.�

In fact, Plutarch nearly always attempted to accentuate the positive."

Between the "He was even bisexual, virutally a prerequisite for appearing well-rounded these days" and the "accentuate the positive," you have the essence of the New Criterion stylebook - from the bizarre phobias dear to the conservative heart to the eyerolling cliches of fifties pop culture.

Kimball pairs Plutarch and Suetonius - the one dispensing moral admonition wrapped up in a life story, the other dishing dirt. Go to the Suetonius link for the intro to the Oxford Classics Magazine story about the guy.

Finally, here's a bit of Plutarch in North's translation, copied from Stoics Org - which I must warn you is a very badly put together site, taking forever to download. Still, Plutarch in English is North's translation from Amyot. It is, malheureusement, hard to find North - unfortunately the Plutarch we might find in the used book store is invariably the colorless Dryden/Clough translation. I remember picking up a copy of this when I was, what, fourteen, and falling asleep trying to read the Life of Theseus. Back in my adolescence, I was a great one for self-improvement. But I never made it through Theseus.

This comes from the comparison of two lawgivers - Lycurgus, ruler of Sparta, and Numa, ruler of Rome.

"But the LACONIAN, keeping his wife in his house, and the mariage remaining whole and unbroken, might let out his wife to any man that would require her to have children by her: naye furthermore, many (as we have told you before) did them selves intreat men, by whom they thought to have a trimme broode of children, and layed them with their wives. What difference, I praye you was betwene these two customes? saving that the custome of the LACONIANS shewed, that the husbands were nothing angrie, nor grieved with their wives for those things, which for sorrowe and jealousie doth rent the hartes of most maried men in the world. And that of the ROMAINES was a simplicitie somwhat more shamefast, which to cover it, was shadowed yet with the cloke of matrimonie, and contract of mariage: confessing that to use wife and children by halfes together, was a thing most intolerable for him. Furthermore, the keeping of maidens to be maried by Numaes order, was much straighter & more honorable for womanhed: and Lycurgus order having to much scope and libertie, gave Poets occasion to speake, and to geve them surnames not very honest. As Ibycus called them Phanomeridas: to saye, thighe showers: and Andromanes: to saye manhood. And Euripides sayeth also of them. Good nut broune girles which left, their fathers house at large and sought for young mens companie, & tooke their ware in charge: And shewed their thighes all bare, the taylour did them wrong, on eche side open were their cotes, the slytts were all to long. And in deede to saye truely, the sides of their petticotes were not sowed beneath: so that as they went, they shewed their thighes naked and bare. The which Sophocles doth easely declare by these verses: The songe which you shall singe, shalbe the sonnet sayde, by Hermione lusty lasse, that strong and sturdy mayde: Which trust her petticote, about her midle shorte, and set to shewe her naked hippes, in francke & frendly sorte. And therefore it is sayed, the LACON Wives were bolde, manly, and stowte against their husbands, namely the first. For they were wholy mistresses in the house, and abroade: yea they had law on their side also, to utter their mindes franckly concerning the chiefest matters..."

Remora

It is Plutarch day tomorrow. My Mom used to sing me the song
Plutarch day comes once a year
and on that day be of good cheer

and then we would all gather round and listen to her read the Comparison of Pompey with Agesilaus. Brings a tear to my eye, still. So I thought I'd point you all to this translation of one of his essays. It is in French though.
LIVRE IV

So okay, first in the French, continuing the discussion of the parts of the soul: Pythagore, Platon, � le prendre � la plus g�n�rale division,
tiennent que l'�me a deux parties, c'est � savoir la partie
raisonnable, & la partie irraisonnable: mais � y regarder de plus
pr�s & plus exactement, elle a trois parties, car ils sous-
divisent la partie irraisonnable en la concupiscence & en
l'irrascible. Les Sto�ques disent, qu'elle est compos�e de huit
parties, cinq des sens naturels, le sixi�me, la voix, le septi�me,
la semence, le huiti�me, l'entendement, par lesquelles toutes les
autres sont command�es par ces propres instruments; ni plus ni
moins que le poulpe se sert de ses branches. D�mocrite & Epicure
mettent deux parties en l'�me, la partie raisonna [297] ble log�e
en l'estomac, & l'autre �parse par tout le corps: D�mocrite met,
que toutes choses sont participantes de quelque sorte d'�me,
jusques aux corps morts, d'autant que manifestement ils sont
encore participants de quelque chaleur, & de quelque sentiment, la
plus part en �tant j� (17) �vent�e.

To take the typical opinions of Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has two parts: the reasonable and the unreasonable. But if you scrutinize a bit more closely, you'll see there is a third part, for they subdivide the irrational into concupiscence and irritability. But the Stoics say it has eight parts, the five natural senses, and the sixth being the voice, the seventh seed, and the eighth the understanding, by which all the others are governed, more or less in the same way the octupus uses its tentacles. Democritus and Epicurus have the bicameral soul too, with reason lodged in the stomach, and the irrational part distributed throughout the body. Democritus posits the concept that the soul participates in everything, even dead bodies, insofar as this participation is characterized by warmth and a miniscule quantity of sentiment, mostly in moving air.

That last clause is a killer - I think it means, in exuding heat and stirring up air - which I guess refers to the smell of corruption. And hey, you have to love the Stoics, they were always coming up with the craziest theories just to bug the Platonists.

Remora

I've dealt with some heavy stuff this week - but this is the most startling news of all!==> brainsluice ==> extra ==> nasa fakes moon landing!. I suspected those crafty NASA people of faking that moonlanding, but these pics are so overwhelmingly conclusive -- and also, the muppets crawling out of the craters are sorta cute. ... Now if only someone would get to the bottom of the notorious SURVIVOR scam. Outback of Australia, they said -- sure. Those Survivor folks were marooned on a lot behind a Shoney's in Hackensack, New Jersey. Far from dining on grubs and goat, they called out for pizza during the breaks. How do I know this? Secret sources that I can only divulge to the National Enquirer for a certain to be determined amount of up front incentive.

Dope
It is time to talk about... Argentina.
That's right. The country that, in the early 90s, made foreign investors cream in their boxers by adopting those golden Chile policies - free markets for everybody was the slogan. Tie the peso to the dollar, slay that inflation, and what do you have? An investors dream.
Luckily, when an investors dream turns into a nightmare, you always have the government.
So, the IMF loaned de la Rua's government its money. Is this good news?
The Times Analysis was characteristic of the Times. Here's a move that is mainly going to benefit those speculators that have loans to Argentina. And those investors, those emerging market managers, are they headquartered in Buenos Aires? Is the pope a Mormon? Of course they aren't. Look for their offices in shady Westport, Connecticut, or in the LatinAmerican sections of the Morgan bank, and Citicorp. But no - in keeping with the fiction that foreign policy in the US responds strictly to our ideological need for promoting democracy and free-trade (valued by the Times as much as democracy, as any avid reader of that rag knows), the key graf here reads:

"The decision underscored that even at times when the United States holds most of the cards � it is the largest single shareholder in the I.M.F. and is generally thought to have veto power over new loans � it finds it difficult to deny an urgent request from an ally. It also cannot simply walk away from the interventionist financial diplomacy of the Clinton administration. That is, at least in part, because after a decade of fast-paced economic integration it is hard to separate financial rescues from other foreign policy priorities the Bush administration puts higher on its agenda, like free trade, open stock and bond markets, even democracy."

Although it makes me a little ill to agree with Paul O'Neill, our secretary of ALCOA, I mean the Treasury, he was right that the IMF bailout makes little sense. First of all, what advantage accrues to the average Argentinian in "tightening his belt?" O'Neill, in interviews last week, indulged in the typical Yankee luxury of dissing aspects of the Argentine economy that are even worse in the USA - for instance, that Argentina is a poor exporter. Well, its trade balance compares favorably with this country's, as O'Neill knows. The US can afford to run twenty years of trade deficits because it has a uniquely large internal market - most countries can't do that. But the way to wealth, as the crash of 98 and as the petit mal of 2001 is showing, is not to jump up an export economy and ignore the internal market - in fact, that is crazy. Unfortunately, governments that heavily borrow to implant infrastructure for creating exportable goods eventually bleed the internal market by adversely affecting their native wage levels - and so far, the theory that one can bootstrap out of this as minimally compensated workers begin to accumulate enough capital to stimulate a viable consumer sector - as in the US - just hasn't worked.
For a scary whiff of the rhetoric that is emanating from certain circles in Buenos Aires right now, here's a graf from an op ed piece in the Buenos Aires Herald.

"For the last year or so, Argentina has been edging nearer to the queue that is awaiting its turn outside the knacker�s yard where �failed states� are broken up. Some suspect it will soon barge its way towards the front. Last week, a former president of Uruguay, no less, titillated Spaniards with an article in El Pa�s in which he posed the question: Does Argentina still exist or has it already left us? Being an optimist at heart, towards the end of his article Julio Mar�a Sanguinetti did find some reasons for hope of which the most encouraging was the allegedly splendid quality of Argentina�s �human capital.�
The trouble is, people have been going on for decades about just how exceptionally bright they think Argentines are, but this belief � which, as might be expected is popular among Argentine intellectuals � has surely contributed a great deal to the collective debacle by making too many of them assume that the country�s plight is none of their doing or that, seeing they are so clever, they will find it easy to wriggle out of any hole they may have fallen into while their eyes were fixed on the stars. In any case, even were it to be proved beyond doubt that Argentina really is home to an astonishing number of �bermenschen that would be no consolation at all: the Titanic would have gone down just as fast if every single passenger had been a PhD."