Stephen Stills—in the NYRB

Ever since Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, died in March, I wondered what would happen to the magazine. He had been the editor, along with Barbara Epstein (who died in 2006) since the magazine began in 1963: 54 years! His talents and diligence as an editor were legendary, and my friends who published there uniformly praised him, though sometimes beefed at what they considered his overly punctilious and demanding editing. But it was largely Silvers who brought the NYRB to prominence among real and self-styled intellectuals, and readers of all stripes.

I had an on-again off-again relationship with the magazine. When I had subscriptions (several times), it was others who gave them to me. In general I liked it, but I found too many of the articles pretentious and boring. On the other hand, they had some really good stuff, too, and tapped some excellent people as their regular writers. I always hoped to write for them, not just for the prestige but for the dosh (around $4500 per article, I believe); but that never happened. Still, my first graduate student, Allen Orr, has had a good run writing for them.

When reader Jon directed me to the new article below, however, I sensed that the Silvers era was over, as i don’t remember anything like this in the old NYRB (click on screenshot to go the piece). While its nominal excuse is a review of a new biography of Stephen Stills, one of my musical heroes, it’s really a Rolling-Stone styled piece about the author’s reaction to Stills’s music. The verdict on the book review is mixed, but the love of Stills is very strong, as it is for me.

Regular readers have heard me say that if I could change places with anyone, and live their life, it would have been Stephen Stills. Enormously talented in the trifecta of songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist (he could play anything), he was also one of the best-looking rock stars ever—in his prime. See the picture below:

If you like Stills—and that’s the same as saying “if you like good rock”—you’ll want to read this piece.  The author, Lorrie Moore, is described as  “the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt and the author of four story collections and three novels.” She’s a Stills-loving academic, just like me.

Her piece is tripartite, beginning with an attempt to list Stills’s five best songs (I agree on many of them, with “4+20” among my favorites), but she quickly gives up, as I did (there’s good stuff from the Buffalo Springfield through CS&N [&Y] and Manassas), and describes going to a recent concert at the famous Ryman Auditorium, where the aging star croaks out his old hits and suffers from arthritic fingers. Buried in the piece is a review of a new biographya; Stephen Stills: Change Partners, by David Roberts, which Moore doesn’t like very much.

But addressing the book is a minor part of the review, as it often was in the old NYRB, and the piece is a must-read for Stills fans, as we hear so little about the man these days. And it’s free, unlike many articles in the magazine.

Here’s Stills singing “4 + 20”. There’s a typical Stillsian mind-dump (perhaps fueled by drugs) at the beginning, but you can ignore that and listen to the song, which begins at 0:43. This was 1969, and he really was 24 that year.

 

My duck is gone

I’m sad and luckless,
For my pond is duckless.

Yesterday I fed Honey a huge dollop of peas and corn; she was on land, so it was easy to give her large amounts without them quickly sinking below dabbling level. As I fed her, I noticed that her flight feathers had grown pretty big. You can see them here.

Here she is scarfing down her lunch:

But today I’ve gone to the pond, food in hand, twice—and she’s gone! Flown the coop! Yes, I think her molt being over, and her wings ready to go, she simply flew off for bigger and better ducky things.

I am quite sad, though that’s tempered with the knowledge that she was heathy and well fed. Perhaps she’ll return next year, and maybe I’ll recognize her by the black stippling on the sides of her beak (I have an enlarged photo). But feeding the red-eared sliders isn’t quite the same; I’m unable to bond with turtles. And what am I going to do with the half pound of freeze-dried mealworms that I ordered to fuel her departure, and which will arrive today?

At least when your kids go off to college, and you become an empty nester, you know you’ll see them again.

A crustacean whodunit: which sea creature attacked an Aussie teen?

by Greg Mayer

Appropriately following upon Jerry’s monstrous, triffid-like seed pod,  an attack by tiny monsters on an Australian teenager has been splashed across world media, including the BBC and the New York Times. The victim, Sam Kanizay was cooling off after a football match by wading in the sea near Melbourne. After a half hour in the water, he emerged bleeding profusely from the ankles, and the bleeding did not readily stop. He was taken to the hospital and should be just fine.

Sam Kanizay being treated in hospital. Photo by Jarrod Kanizay, via Australian Associated Press.

The interesting question from a biological point of view is “What did this to him?” We have a natural history whodunit, with two contenders, both crustaceans, and both quite small: isopods or amphipods. The BBC, citing Genefor Walker-Smith, said it was amphipods. The Times said the consensus was that it was isopods. Sam’s father Jarrod put some meat out in the water, and collected a host of critters, and posted a video of them to Youtube.

Most people in the north temperate zone are probably familiar with what we call in New York “cement bugs”, but are known by many other names: sow bugs, pill bugs, rollie pollies, etc. These are isopods, and there are marine ones called sea lice. Amphipods are less familiar in the Northern hemisphere, as they are aquatic and marine, and thus less commonly encountered. (There are terrestrial ones in the Gondwanan continents.) The ones that live at marine beaches are called sand fleas. One way to tell at least the usual ones apart is that isopods are dorso-ventrally compressed (‘squashed’ from above); while amphipods are laterally compressed (‘squashed’ from the side), and typically lay and move about lying on their sides. Both are said by the news reports to occasionally bite people.

In the video, you can clearly see that the critters are amphipods– pause the video, and enlarge on the screen if necessary, to see this. The Times quotes Alistair Poore, of the University of New South Wales, as also saying the critters are amphipods. However, although Jarrod trapped them by using meat as a bait, it’s not certain that what he trapped are the same things that bit Sam.

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect

Believe me, the last thing I want to do this morning is sit down and take apart another dumb article holding Richard Dawkins responsible for all the world’s wrongs.  I saw this article a few days ago when it was published on Alternet, but this morning it was republished on Salon with the same title: “The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins“, and since Salon is read more widely than Alternet  (though they’re both dire), I dipped my squib and got to work. Salon, of course, is a Regressive Leftist rag that will go to any lengths to smear people like Sam Harris and Dawkins. And their lack of journalistic standards is instantiated in the article at hand.

I seem to becoming to Richard what Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) was to Charles Darwin: a smaller fish who assumes the burden of defending the Big Shark.  But Richard is my friend, he’s not going to do this himself, and I feel that for his sake, as well as that of evolutionary biology (which is misrepresented in this piece, as it often is in Dawkins hit-pieces), I have to set the record straight.

The author of this dreadful article is one Jeremy Lent, an author who’s touting his new book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. He’s also head of a think tank called The Lilogy Institute,  Th aims of the institute seem to involve a kind of wooish holism:

Instead of the conventional view that our human existence is split between mind and body, liology sees our human organism as an integrated whole, where our thoughts are embodied and our bodies possess an intrinsic intelligence.

Liology sees no fundamental split between rigorous science and the source of meaning in life. Instead, it sees current findings in systems biology and complexity science as pointing the way to understanding our place within the infinitely complex and mysterious natural world in which we have evolved.

Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded.

It goes on from there, but I still have little idea of what this means except that it extols interconnectedness and holism, a theme of Lent’s attacks on Richard. Lent has four Big Points, all of which are wrong—in fact, they’re not even wrong.  I’ll take them in order.

1.) Dawkins’s ideas are wrecking the planet by encouraging unbridled capitalism, selfishness, wealth inequality, and a rampant reductionism that will wreck the truly holistic and interconnected view of life that we must embrace to save our planet.

I kid you not. Dawkins is Satan or the anti-Christ. Here are a few quotes from Lent. He begins with the KPFA deplatforming controversy and then says this:

What this controversy misses, however, is the far greater destructive force of other ideas Dawkins has promulgated over decades, which have helped form the foundation of a mainstream worldview that endorses gaping wealth inequalities and encourages the wanton destruction of the natural world.

There’s more:

The damage that Richard Dawkins has caused our global society goes far deeper than any hurtful comments he has made about Islam. As we face the gaping inequalities caused by uncontrolled capitalism, along with the looming threat of catastrophic climate change and other impending global crises, we must recognize the role that Dawkins’s ideas have played in forming the philosophical foundations of our unsustainable worldview.

. . .  just as religion has caused millennia of suffering based on delusional ideas, Dawkins himself has created a new delusional framework offering a false rationale for an economic and technocratic system destroying human and natural flourishing. The choice is not between religion and science, as Dawkins and his followers suggest. The real choice is between a flawed worldview that leads inexorably to globally destructive behavior and one that recognizes life’s deep interconnectedness and humanity’s intrinsic responsibility within it.

Now this is simply bullshit, and it rests on the three ideas (below) that Lent says that Dawkins has promulgated. They are these: that the “selfish gene” is somehow a both an explanation and a rationale for the idea that humans are “inherently selfish”;  that Dawkins’s reductionist attitude leads to a loss of meaning and wonder in life; and that by emphasizing the materialist and reductionist aspect of evolution, which devolves to genes, Dawkins somehow has prevented us from adopting the holistic, interconnected view of nature that is the basis of Lent’s “Lilogy” and the way to save the planet. Let’s discuss these briefly.

2. Selfish genes mean selfish people, ergo capitalism, inequity, and the destruction of human flourishing. This idea has been dispelled for years, yet it still persists in the minds of the ignorant. Over and over again, Richard has explained that the notion of selfish genes is a metaphor: genes behave as if they were selfish entities during natural selection, because the genes that replicate more prolifically are the ones that produce evolution, and come to predominate over time. This does not mean, as anyone knows who has read Richard’s work, that gene replication produces selfish entities. Altruism, parental care, and so on can evolve via selfish genes, through either kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Selfish genes can even produce a rudimentary but effective morality, as they apparently have in other apes. So Lent is wrong when he says that altruism is a “selfish behavior.” Rather, it evolved by genes that acted as if they were selfish. Here’s Lent:

Since Dawkins’s 1976 publication of “The Selfish Gene,” millions of people have come to understand evolution as the result of genes competing against other in a remorseless drive to replicate themselves. Ruthless competition is seen as the force that separates evolution’s winners from losers. Even altruism is interpreted as a sophisticated form of selfish behavior used by an organism to propagate its own genes more effectively. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins suggests, “because we are born selfish.”

It’s a harsh story, and one that has become a bedrock of modern economics, which argues that human beings are motivated by their own self-interest, and their collective self-serving actions result in the best outcome for society. This has led to a commonly accepted pseudo-scientific rationalization for laissez-faire capitalism, using the misappropriated term “survival of the fittest” to justify ruthless exploitation of the poor by wealthy corporations.

It is, however, a story that has been shown in recent decades to be erroneous at each level of its narration. Dawkins’s idea of the “selfish gene,” while still holding currency in the popular imagination, has been extensively discredited as a simplistic interpretation of evolution. In its place, biologists have developed a far more sophisticated view of evolution as a series of complex, interlocking systems, where the gene, organism, community, species, and environment all interact with each other intricately over different time frames.

Check out that link in the third paragraph! (Hint: it doesn’t go to any scientific discrediting.) In fact, the usefulness of the selfish-gene metaphor is alive and well, and has provided useful insights into how natural selection works. It is true that no behavior can evolve unless the genes underlying it outcompete alternative genes, but selection can produce behavior that involves compassion, care, and reciprocity. Yes, it must redound to the actor’s genes, but show me an evolved behavior that does not.

Further, Richard has always promulgated an ethic of compassion and unselfishness, which can overcome the real selfishness that is also an evolved part of our behavior. That is what he meant by being “born selfish,” for he certainly didn’t mean by that that every human being is solely out for itself, groupmates and relatives be damned.

Finally, it’s arrant foolishness to think that economics and capitalism are the outcome of The Selfish Gene. Need I point out that the book was published in 1976, but ideas of self-interest as underlying economics go back to Adam Smith? And Dawkins is not responsible for “Social Darwinism” justifications for capitalism, either, nor is Darwin. People are always looking for ways for science to justify their own bad acts, but that doesn’t make people like Darwin or Dawkins responsible for misappropriating what are, after all, simply scientific ideas about genetics. But it’s clearly and self-evidently wrong to blame “laissez-faire” capitalism on Dawkins. Shame on Lent for pulling such a shoddy move.

3. Dawkins’s reductionism and naturalism have taken the joy out of life. Yep, that’s what Lent says (my emphasis:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have been responsible for foisting a cruel myth on thinking people around the world: that if they reject the illusions of monotheism, their only serious alternative is to believe in a world that is harsh, selfish, and ultimately without meaning. Their ideas arise from a particular form of scientific thought known as reductionism, which holds that every aspect of our world, no matter how awe-inspiring, is “nothing but” the mechanical motion of particles acting predictably on each other.

I challenge Lent, or anyone, to find where in Dawkins’s work he’s said anything even remotely like this. Yes, he’s said we should reject the illusions of monotheism (and polytheism like Hinduism, which Lent curiously neglects), but has never claimed that this leads to a view of the world that is “harsh, selfish, and ultimately without meaning.”  In fact, Dawkins has repeatedly argued that embracing reality and science rather than numinous illusions makes the world more enjoyable and meaningful. Has Lent read Unweaving the Rainbow, or The Magic of Reality, and pondered the title of the latter work?

Lent has simply made stuff up here in an attempt to smear Dawkins. It is an old but untrue trope, which Lent may harbor in his unconscious, that atheism leads to nihilism. I suggest he go to Sweden and Denmark and observe all the joyless and lugubrious people in those godless lands!

4. Dawkins’s reductionism is not only untrue, but is ruining the Earth. To wit:

Richard Dawkins has been responsible for popularizing an updated version of this Cartesian myth, writing famously that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” adding: “That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.” Open any science magazine, and you’ll see genes described as programmers that “code” for certain traits, while the mind is discussed as “software” for the “hardware” of the body that is “wired” in certain ways. Thanks to Dawkins and his followers, this deluded view of nature as a machine has become ubiquitous, creating the moral sanction for corporations to treat the earth as a resource to plunder, beguiling techno-visionaries to seek immortality by downloading their minds, and inspiring technocrats to argue for solving climate change through geoengineering.

It goes on, touting Lent’s own ideas of holism, and heaping praise on Lynn Margulis (who accepted the discredited Gaia hypothesis), but let me say that there is nothing in Dawkins’s own writings that have justified or encouraged plundering the Earth, nor have I even seen a hint that people are using Dawkins’s writings as a rationalization to destroy the planet. Have the Koch brothers cited The Selfish Gene?

Scientific naturalism happens to be true, and everything comes down to the laws of physics, although we also see higher-order phenomena that are “emergent” in the sense that while we don’t know enough to predict them from the laws of physics, they must be consistent with the laws of physics. That is what reductionism means, and there is no “holism” completely independent of reductionism. That said, I’d like to see Lent’s evidence that corporations have relied on Dawkins’s ideas to justify plundering the Earth. Corporations have plenty of justifications for rapacity—when they even offer justifications—and the selfish gene is not among them.

Let us remember again that Dawkins’s genetic reductionism does not come with any ethical implications, and Richard has said that over and over again. Yes, people can misuse his ideas, as they did Darwin’s, but that is neither Darwin’s nor Dawkins’s fault.  And that is one of Lent’s big errors beyond his mischaracterizing the science. Lent’s other error is to claim that people have actually become rampant, Earth-destroying capitalists, as well as depressive nihilists who have no meaning in their lives, because of what Richard Dawkins has written.

Only someone set out to smear Dawkins could have written such nonsense, for there is simply no data, scientific or anecdotal, to back it up. Lent has blamed Dawkins for all the wrongs of the world because Dawkins is a convenient (though battered) scapegoat. That’s a common tactic, but is employed only by the malicious, the ignorant, and the publicity-hungry who want to use Dawkins’s name as clickbait. Lent, after all, has a book to sell.

h/t: Rodney

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

We have an ant swarm today! What is that? Well, ants swarm for several reasons, but the one below is undoubtedly a mass egress to mate and found a new colony, as described here.  Reader Roger from St. Cloud, Minnesota describes what he saw—and sent some photos:

Earlier this afternoon I noticed a mass of yellow ants coming up through my decking… and then two morphs of winged ones started appearing. Not long after that came the swarming. I believe they’re Citronella Ants Lasius claviger. Larger winged ones are females; smaller ones are the males. The wingless ones are the workers. The winged ants would emerge from under the decking, pause a while at the edge, then move off and start flexing their wings. After a few tries they’d take flight.

And then just a few feet away at the edge of the deck another species of tiny black ant (identity unknown) was also swarming. A little research suggested that rain stimulates this behavior and we had about 2-3” this week here in central Minnesota.

One of the citronella females wandered in among the others and promptly got taken down by several of the workers.

And for the birders, here are three photos from one of our youngest contributors, Jamie Blilie (we have more in the works). From his dad, Jim Blilie:

My son Jamie (13) has been busy with his camera this summer (Canon Powershot SX530 HS, “superzoom” camera).

 

This past weekend [written on Jun 27] we took a hike at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, right in the middle ofthe Minneapolis/St. Paul cityscape. A wonderful spot.  He got photos of an Indigo Bunting and Turkeys

 

Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea):

Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo)

Around our house, he’s gotten many more.  Friendly Baltimore Orioles (Icterus galbula) (even climbing on our screens).  We’ve been feeding them oranges and when the orange is “done” (exhausted), they

screech at us from the table where we put the oranges!  C’mon guys, more food!

What was the monster plant?

Yesterday evening I posted this picture of a scary-looking bit of vegetation that I found on the trunk of my car:

Readers tried to identify it, and several hit on the correct answer: it’s the seed pod of a tree. (It had fallen from the tree overhanging my car.) But what kind of tree? I don’t yet know, but I’ll show the underside of an older pod and then the leaves of the tree. An answer will be forthcoming with probability 100%:

The tree has leaves like this, so give us an ID:

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

Good morning; it’s a cool Monday in Chicago (at this moment, 62° C, 17° C), and a work day in the U.S., though Grania reports a “bank holiday” in Ireland. It’s August 7, 2017: National IPA (India Pale Ale) Day, the egregiously overhopped brew favored by hipsters and those with asbestos palates that can be stimulated only by an overdose of hops. I eschew such one-note brews and still prefer the British-style ales, with the apotheosis, increasingly hard to find, being Timothy Taylor’s Landlord.

On this day in 1930, the last confirmed lynching of blacks in the Northern United States occurred in Marion, Indiana, though lynchings continued in the South. The victims, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were arrested for robbery, murder, and rape the night before, and a crowd broke into the jail, absconded with them, and hanged them (you can see the gruesome image here). Exactly eight years later, the construction of the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp began in Austria. On August 7, 1947, Thor Heyerdahl’s raft, the Kon-Tiki, completed a 7,000 km, 101-day voyage across the Pacific in an attempt to prove that early Polynesians could have visited South America (he went in the wrong direction!). The voyage ended when the balsa raft smashed to pieces on a reef in the Tuamoto Islands. Many of us, including me, have read his famous book on this voyage. Finally, on August 7, 1987, Lynne Cox became first person to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing between two islands in the Bering Strait in 2 hours and five minutes in water that was 6-7°C! She was also the first woman to swim the Cook Strait in New Zealand.

Notables born on this day include Emile Nolde (1867), Mata Hari (1876), Louis Leakey (1903), James Randi (1928, still with us), Don Larsen (1929, also still alive), Garrison Keillor (1942), David Duchovny (1960) and Charlize Theron (1975),

Don Larsen, a baseball player, was the only man ever to pitch a no-hitter and a “perfect game” (a game in which nobody reaches first base: they all strike out or hit a ball that is caught) in World Series history. He was playing for the Yankees and pitched the game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in game 5 of the series on October 8, 1956. Larson is still alive and lives nearby, in Michigan City, Indiana. Here are some highlights from that famous game.

And it’s also Theo the Coffee-Drinking Cat’s birthday in London. As reader and catstaff Laurie announced on her website, A Classicist Writes, the black moggie is exactly 13 today. Yes, he drinks espresso, and prefers it black. Here’s his birthday video featuring his special talent (he attributes his longevity to coffee):

Those who died on this day include Rabindranath Tagore (1941), Peter Jennings (2005; was that really 12 years ago?), and Judith Crist (2012).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, where I’ll be in a month, the animals’ dialogue is enigmatic, and I’ve asked for an explanation. Malgorzata’s reply:

What am I to answer? Hili and Cyrus are looking for something and they don’t know what they are looking for. Hili is worried that you would not understand the dialogue. Cyrus answers like I do: if we don’t know ourselves what we are looking for, how are we to explain it to Jerry?

Hili: It’s here.

Cyrus: No, it’s a bit further down.

Hili: Jerry will ask what is it.

Cyrus: But we don’t know ourselves.

In Polish:

Hili: To tu.
Cyrus: Nie, kawałek dalej.
Hili: Jerry znów będzie pytał co.
Cyrus: Przecież my też nie wiemy.

And reader Howie sent an evolution cartoon emphasizing perhaps what is—besides syntactic language and our knowledge that we’re going to die—the only unique characteristic of H. sapiens: