Challenges of $600-a-Session Patients
Andrew Henderson/The New York TimesDr. Michael H. Stone said he and his colleagues had seen a shift from patients who inherited their money to those who made their own fortunes.
A.J. Jacobs' writings stand at the intersection of philosophy, Gonzo journalism and performance art. Stubbornly curious and slyly perceptive, he takes immersive learning to its irrational and profoundly amusing extreme -- extracting wisdom and meaning after long stints as a self-styled guinea pig. For his widely circulated Esquire article, My Outsourced Life, he explored the phenomenon of outsourcing by hiring a team in Bangalore, India to take care of every part of his life -- from reading his emails to arguing with his wife to reading bedtime stories to his own son. A previous article, I Think You're Fat, chronicled a brief, cringe-inducing attempt to live his life in Radical Honesty, telling all the truth, all the time.
Jacobs is author of The Know-It-All, which documents the year he spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z, uncovering both funny and surprising factoids but also poignant insight into history and human nature. For his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically, he attempted to follow every single rule in the Bible as literally as possible for an entire year.
"A. J. Jacobs has written about the Bible in a manner that is brilliantly funny but unerringly respectful, learned but goofy, deeply personal yet highly relevant. I am covetous and wish him smited." ~Mary Roach, author, Bonk
[Riccardo Ricco]Spanish veteran Manuel Beltran -- a former teammate of seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong -- was sent home for testing positive for EPO after the first stage this year. Another Spaniard, Moises Duenas Nevado, was detained by police and expelled from the race on Wednesday after testing positive for EPO -- like Ricco, after the fourth stage.Now there is a third, Riccardo Ricco, who has won two stages of this year's tour and finished second in the Giro d'Italia back in May. He was currently ninth in the GC standings.
Italian rider Riccardo Riccò of Saunier Duval has tested positive for blood booster Erythropoietin (EPO), French sports daily L'Equipe reported on its website on Thursday. According to the paper's Damien Ressiot, one of the climber's urine samples collected by the French Anti-Doping Agency AFLD showed traces of a third generation EPO called CERA (Continuous Erythropoietin Receptor Activator), despite there being no WADA-validated test for the drug.While the first two positives in the Tour will likely be upheld with the B sample test (they always test two samples), this one is a little more suspect in that the positive result is for a substance that has not accepted test.The team's buses and cars were reportedly stopped by gendarmes and searched, and the police were seen taking bags of items away.
The Saunier Duval team has voluntarily withdrawn itself from the Tour de France, and said it would not compete in any races until further notice. Directeur sportif Joxean Fernandez Matxin said he was as surprised as anybody. "We only found out ten minutes ago. The entire team will stop racing, not only in the Tour de France. We suspend the activities of the team until we understand what has happened."
Riccò, who won two stages in the Tour de France (the sixth and ninth), was ninth on general classification before the news broke on Thursday morning. The Italian's impressive performances have in the past been explained by his naturally high hematocrit level.
The Italian from Spanish team Saunier Duval was part of a targeted group of riders. Since the start of the race in Brest, the AFLD performed numerous anti-doping tests on him, at least four according to L'Equipe.
At the start of stage 12 from Lavelanet to Narbonne, Riccò was taken from his team bus into a team car, which took him to the police station. Cyclingnews' Gregor Brown confirmed that the Italian was taken into police custody for questioning.
Fernandez described the final moments before Riccò was driven off. "He sat in the team bus and was not able to say anything. We didn't want to make a scene with the police. They let us drive him away in the team car. A police officer accompanied him in the car."
Professor Michel Audran is one of the world's leading experts on blood doping. He is also one of nine independent experts chosen to act as consultants in the formulation of the UCI's biological passport. Daniel Friebe, Procycling features editor spoke to Audran this morning within minutes of L'Equipe's website announcing that Riccardo Riccò has tested positive for an EPO derivative after stage four of the Tour de France, the individual time trial around Cholet.Read more of this interview.Daniel Friebe: In the last twenty minutes we've heard that Riccardo Riccò has tested positive for an EPO-like product. The early reports suggest that Riccò used CERA or Micera. a so-called third generation EPO. What's your reaction?
Michel Audran: Wow. I'm stunned. I'm amazed they're saying it's Micera, simply because there's no validated test for that yet. The World Anti-Doping Agency is working on a test, but it certainly doesn't exist yet.
DF: What exactly is CERA, or Micera to give it its commercial name?
MA:It's a delayed-action EPO, which has a different molecular mass from EPO. It's only been commercially available since the start of the year. We can tell when someone's used it but we can't declare them positive. In that respect it's like Dynepo, another EPO-like product. We know that Micera was being used on the Giro, so I'm not surprised that it's also turned up at the Tour. But I would be very surprised if they AFLD had declared Riccò positive for Micera, for the reasons I've just mentioned. Maybe they searched Riccò's room and found the product itself...
The Tour continues to struggle to eradicate doping after last year's scandal-plagued event in which two teams withdrew and race leader Michael Rasmussen was kicked out just days before the end for lying about his whereabouts to avoid pre-Tour testing.Hopefully, things will get better and more riders will stay clean.
Cofidis dropped out after Cristian Moreni of Italy tested positive for testosterone, and pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov's Kazakh-owned Astana team was kicked out by race organizer ASO after he tested positive for blood doping.
If voters agreed, legal experts say, it would give fertilized eggs the same legal rights and protections to which people are entitled.Oh yeah? If passed, the simple egg and sperm joined into zygote would be a "person," the killing of which would be considered murder.The ballot initiative is funded by Colorado for Equal Rights, a grass-roots antiabortion organization. Its purpose, initiative sponsor Kristi Burton said, is to lay a legal and legislative basis for protecting the unborn. Its passage would also open the door to modifying other laws for the same purpose, she said.
As to what laws could then be modified, Burton would not elaborate. "We try not to focus on some of the issues that will be taken care of later on," she said, repeatedly saying that the amendment is not aimed at outlawing abortion.
"If we give fertilized eggs legal rights, abortion could be considered murder and a woman could be sent to jail for making the difficult life decision to terminate a pregnancy," said Crystal Clinkenbeard, spokeswoman for Protect Families, Protect Choice, a coalition of medical professionals, community groups and religious leaders who oppose the amendment.Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? And that this is the future battleground for anti-choice factions?The measure also could expand the reach of the law into other arenas, legal experts say. For instance, if a woman miscarries, she could be held responsible if it were found she caused it, even unintentionally. If she smoked or drank while pregnant, her behavior might be considered negligence. Damaged eggs might be eligible for monetary damages. The use of fertilized eggs at fertility clinics or in medical research labs would come into question because the disposal of unused eggs could be considered homicide.
"Because this amendment would define a person in a given way and expand the universe of who persons are, it expands the reach of laws that deal with persons," said Bill Araiza, a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles.
The amendment also calls into question pregnant women's medical access, said Scott Moss, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School. "If a pregnant woman is really two people with exactly equal rights, then it is not clear the pregnant woman can undergo any medical treatment that jeopardizes a fertilized egg," he said, adding that the amendment would generate a flood of litigation.
By this definition, the birth control pill is defined as a type of abortion. If the government can make this definition a part of how it dispenses funding, it sets the precedent for expanding this definition into other areas of law.In the proposal, obtained by The New York Times, the administration says it could cut off federal aid to individuals or entities that discriminate against people who object to abortion on the basis of “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”
The proposal defines abortion as follows: “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”
Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents providers, said, “The proposed definition of abortion is so broad that it would cover many types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception.”
“We worry that under the proposal, contraceptive services would become less available to low-income and uninsured women,” Ms. Gallagher said.
Indeed, among other things the proposal expresses concern about state laws that require hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims who request it.
The bottom line is this: For a time, it seemed as if we were about to use the bright beam of science to illuminate the murky world of human action. Instead, as Turkheimer writes in his chapter in the book, “Wrestling With Behavioral Genetics,” science finds itself enmeshed with social science and the humanities in what researchers call the Gloomy Prospect, the ineffable mystery of why people do what they do.The essential truth of how "A leads to B" is that individuals can respond to environmental conditions and change accordingly -- why and how this happens is still the mystery, but some of us believe in an innate drive to evolve, when given the proper conditions. Of course, Brooks takes this to mean that we should uphold traditions, be "respectful toward accumulated practice." He's a conservative and that's what he believes in.The prospect may be gloomy for those who seek to understand human behavior, but the flip side is the reminder that each of us is a Luxurious Growth. Our lives are not determined by uniform processes. Instead, human behavior is complex, nonlinear and unpredictable. The Brave New World is far away. Novels and history can still produce insights into human behavior that science can’t match.
Just as important is the implication for politics. Starting in the late 19th century, eugenicists used primitive ideas about genetics to try to re-engineer the human race. In the 20th century, communists used primitive ideas about “scientific materialism” to try to re-engineer a New Soviet Man.
Today, we have access to our own genetic recipe. But we seem not to be falling into the arrogant temptation — to try to re-engineer society on the basis of what we think we know. Saying farewell to the sort of horrible social engineering projects that dominated the 20th century is a major example of human progress.
We can strive to eliminate that multivariate thing we call poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we’re not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be.
So, that's art, eh? If I were trying to view actual art in the gallery, I'd be annoyed. But then I would apparently be missing the meaning (you'll have to read the article to see what this "art" is about).Is art running out of ideas? Artists forced to explain modern art
From the Tate to Trafalgar Square, new works often seem to come with an explanation for the viewer. Please, says Tom Lubbock, let us make up our own minds
Monday, 14 July 2008
A major change to the urban environment over the last generation is the explosion of running. Once, you could walk down a street and not have people continually rushing by, practically knocking you over, and behaving – what's more – as if they had the right to practically knock you over. Now you can't. To run is an act of virtue. It's almost a sacred rite.Indoor public spaces, though, are still exempt from the cult of running. If you break into a sprint in a library or a church or an art gallery, somebody will probably try to stop you. So coming across Martin Creed's Work No. 850 at Tate Britain, your first response is, naturally, surprise, with a slight added frisson of danger. You're in a museum. This means a social rule is being broken.
As you may have heard, the Turner Prize-winning artist has arranged for relays of young runners, male and female, to pelt every 30 seconds, one at a time, as fast as possible, from one end of the central Duveen Gallery to the other, while avoiding visitors. Since the stretch is only 87 metres, there's a pause before the next sprinter appears. And, on weekdays, when there aren't many visitors, they have a straight-ish run.
If this was happening on a track or in a park, you probably wouldn't give it much refection. But it's happening in an art gallery, and so – beyond being surprised – it's right to apply some artistic considerations, and see if they're rewarded.
For example, you can pay attention to the work's structure. You can notice that Work No. 850 involves fixed start- and end-points, and fixed time intervals, and maximum speed – but also a variable path between these points (depending on interposing visitors) and variable pauses between each run (depending on individual speeds). And, if you're critically inclined, you can wonder whether this is a satisfying structure. Do the 30-second intervals set up a good rhythm? Would it be improved by slower speeds? Would a marked-out visitor-free path be better? How about just a single runner? Or, even if the arrangement is as good as it can be, does this very minimally shaped experience amount to all that much?
Perhaps you feel that, just by itself, it doesn't. But don't walk away yet. Try another artistic gambit. Go for the big one. Try asking: what does it mean? What's it about? Ah, now we're talking.
What we're up against here are two of contemporary art's guiding imperatives. Rule 1) Justification by meaning: the worth and interest of a work resides in what it's about. Rule 2) Absolute freedom of interpretation: a work is "about" anything that can, at a pinch, be said about it.He concludes the article with a pertinent quote from Susan Sontag:In short, meanings are arbitrary, but compulsory. And this double bind holds almost universal sway. Whenever you learn that a work explores or investigates or raises questions about something, that it's concerned with issues around this or notions of that or debates about the other, you know you're in its grip.
It's weird how people can't resist. If you want to make art sound serious, this is simply the way you do it. Read any gallery wall-caption or leaflet or catalogue, and see how long it is before the writer commends the work solely on the basis of what it's about. And then note how it is isn't really about that at all.
Meaning comes first – even before the work itself.
"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us."I'm intrigued by the question of whether or not meaning can come before the work of art. I think this idea dates back to the Dadaists.
Charades reveals a universal sentence structureIf Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush's, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe.
- 22:00 30 June 2008
- NewScientist.com news service
- Ewen Callaway
English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint: a subject followed by a verb and object; for example, "mice eat cheese". Other languages, like Turkish and Korean, tend toward subject-object-verb construction, or "mice cheese eat".
"There's something pretty fundamental about these orders," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Chicago, who led the study.
Scientific charades
To determine whether these differences carry over to unspoken communication, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked 40 native speakers of Chinese, Turkish, English and Spanish to mime scenarios shown on a computer screen using only their hands and body.
These included a boy drinking a bottle of soda and a ship's captain swinging a pail of water.
Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction.
"We actually thought we were going to get gestures that just matched your speech," Goldin-Meadow says.
In a separate experiment, she asked volunteers to reconstruct a scenario using transparencies depicting different elements. Again, people of all cultures tended to arrange the transparencies in subject-object-verb order.
Early signs
Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces.
"I think the results are exciting," says Carol Padden, a linguist at the University of California, San Diego, US.
Padden has documented the emergence of a new sign language in the last 70 years among a small group of Bedouins in the southern Israel.
So-called Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language also builds sentences around a subject-object-verb construction. "Consistent word order appears early in a new sign language," she says.
Journal reference: PNAS (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710060105)
Back in the early days of linguistic theory Chomsky argued for what this research seems to confirm:
Chomsky goes so far as to suggest that a baby need not learn any actual rules specific to a particular language at all. Rather, all languages are presumed to follow the same set of rules, but the effects of these rules and the interactions between them can vary greatly depending on the values of certain universal linguistic parameters. This is a very strong assumption, and is one of the most subtle ways in which Chomsky's current theory of language differs from most others.
Since then, many others have taken up this position, to the point that it has become the accepted truth. Now there is more evidence to support the idea, which is always good.
NGC examines those competing faiths and rival prophets that challenged early Christianity, such "lost" Messiahs as Mithras, Simon Magus, and Apollonius of Tyana. Some of these Messiahs and their faiths were once more popular than Christianity but their beliefs and practices were borrowed from the growing Christian movement. With historical re-enactments and interviews with Biblical scholars, theologians and historians, Rivals of Jesus presents a lost chapter of religious history.
Read the whole review.Collateral Damage
According to Jane Mayer, the United States has succeeded in creating an American gulag.
With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.
In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.
Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.
To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.
Above all, the story Mayer tells is one of fear and its exploitation.
That fear should trump concern for due process and indeed justice qualifies as a recurring phenomenon in American history. In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else's civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.
Read the whole article.Mayer has been admittedly obsessed with the administration's detainee policy for years and knows how to piece together her own string and the hidden scraps that others have reported into a complete fabric.
The combination has led to perhaps the deepest and broadest chronology yet of the path from September 11 to the authorization of torture in the abstract -- including, she reports, gouging out eyeballs and "slitting an ear, nose, or lip, or in disabling a tongue or limb" -- to its implementation at black sites, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and in Afghanistan.
Mayer marshals much of her evidence against "Cheney's Cheney," David Addington, the vice president's counsel who replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as his chief of staff when he resigned amid his indictment. Addington is a sharp-elbowed right-wing ideologue vested in increasing the power of the executive over that of Congress and the courts. He was often the last person to see documents or executive orders before they went to the president and helped shape the crucial Office of Legal Counsel memos that justified torture and other executive encroachments. A longtime Cheney ally, he drafted a congressional report in the 1980s arguing that President Reagan was justified in funding the Nicaraguan Contras even though Congress had outlawed it.
Addington and Cheney's involvement in war crimes is teased throughout the book, as is, once a while, Bush's. A group of senior White House officials in 2005 put together a proposal they called the Big Bang. It would have shuttered Guantanamo and brought the United States back into conformity with international law. It died, but as Mayer writes, it "reached Bush, two sources said, proving that as of the summer of 2005, he knew there were senior officials inside his administration, including the deputy defense secretary, who thought the war on terror was being undermined by his detention policies, and that Guantanamo needed to be closed."
Mayer relates how Cheney and Addington were ultimately able to put down the rebellion within the White House, and today much remains as it was. In fending off the reformers, though, they have exposed themselves that much more to the judgment of history. The Impeach-Bush-Now crowd will not be disappointed by Mayer's research. And the administration may have exposed itself to more than just a historical verdict.
Dan Abrams talks to Jane Mayer author of the book The Dark Side which includes details such as some the torture techniques used at Guantanamo Bay, that the approval of those techniques went far up the chain of command in the Bush administration, and that James Comey and Jack Goldsmith were afraid they were in physical danger and being spied on.
Fraser offers an immanent and transcendental critique of Taylor's notion of the self. He attempts to show how Taylor fails to make a total rejection of Marxism and how the weakness of Taylor's arguments for the social, theistic, religious, moral and aesthetic dimensions of modern self can be overcome by adopting a more advanced humanist Marxist approach. The novelty of this critique is its humanist Marxist approach that not only finds how Taylor misreads Marx but also attempts to surpass the misgivings of Taylor' s approach and, thereby, certainly makes an advancement, however little it might be in comparison to Taylor's grand enterprise, of our understanding of the self. Keeping 'affirmation of ordinary life', 'self-interpretation' 'language' and 'dialogue' as the points of reference, in Chapter 1, Fraser compares Taylor's notion of the self with Marx's notion of the self. Here he attempts to show how 'Taylor's discussion on the self has a relatively strong resonance in Marx's own writings; a resonance which Taylor failed to explore' (p. 13). Both Marx and Taylor, reject 'the emblematic figure of Crusoe as the starting point for understanding individuals' and advocate for an understanding of the selves 'in their social setting as part of a community and as historically developed in different forms' (p.16). Fraser finds 'the affirmation of ordinary life' as 'a part of the expressivist humanist Marxist tradition' (p. 30) and the dialogical nature of language in Marx's idea that the development of language presupposes 'individuals living together and talking together' (p. 17). He observes that Tailor fails to appreciate 'the real links between class, ethics and culture' (p. 30) and considers Marxist emphasis on class detrimental to ethics and culture.Read the whole review.
The foreword to this book begins with a quotation by Hodding Carter: 'A wise woman once said to me: "There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings."' It is sadly apparent that the mothers of the women interviewed for Susan Nathiel's thoughtful and approachable study, were unable to give either of these things to their daughters. Their illnesses rendered them barely able to look after themselves.Read the whole review.
The author begins by giving the reader background information on infant development, and the importance of bonding between a baby and her primary caregiver. Interestingly, Nathiel defines 'maternal' as referring to the primary caregiver, whether male or female, parent or other relative or guardian, but the focus of the study is the failure of the mother's ability to parent.
C.B. Martin, an early proponent of the causal theory of mind, wrote yet another volume promoting his 'ontologically serious' realist metaphysics and its implications for philosophical concepts of causation, intentionality, consciousness, and the mind-body problem. According to the preface The mind in nature has three foci: (i) the defense of realism of dispositions and a disposition based account of causality, (ii) the importance of nonconscious, nonmental systems for the philosophy of mind and (iii) the importance of percept and percept like dreamings and imagines for conscious systems. Martin argues for realism of properties and dispositions in reference only to the nonabstract actual world (p.1) He defends this account against operationalist, conditional or counterfactual, possible world accounts (e.g., Quine, 1948; Goodman, 1955; Sellars, 1963; Lewis, 1973; 1997) and insists on the importance of his 'Truthmaker Principle': the principle that when a statement is true, there must be something (some fact or event or property) that makes it true (pp.24-25). He opposes a supervenience view of causation (e.g., Searle, 1992) arguing that "there is no causal work for the whole that is not done by the parts, provided the complex role of the parts is fully appreciated" (p.35). Instead, Martin suggests a compositional model in which the parts and their properties exhaust the explanatory relevant entities. Properties "have a dual nature: in virtue of having a property, an object possesses both a particular dispositionality and a particular qualitative character" (p.44). He firmly rejects Humean models of causality in which cause and effect are distinct temporal events (e.g., Hume, 1748; Goodman, 1955; Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973) but also objects to reductionist accounts and insists that "every disposition is a holistic web" (p.60). For Martin's work the resulting gradualist account of reality is essential because he firmly rejects the idea that fundamental differences between the mental and non-mental, between the non-conscious and conscious, between the intentional and non-intentional exist.Read the whole review.
I’d like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed. (The science would be in a sorry state if one man 150 years ago had, in fact, discovered everything there was to say.) Obsessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually asking whether he was right about this or that, implies that the discovery of something he didn’t think of or know about somehow undermines or threatens the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology today.Damn straight.It does not. In the years ahead, I predict we will continue to refine our understanding of natural selection, and continue to discover new ways in which it can shape genes and genomes. Indeed, as genetic data continues to flood into the databanks, we will be able to ask questions about the detailed workings of evolution that it has not been possible to ask before.
Yet all too often, evolution — insofar as it is taught in biology classes at all — is taught as the story of Charles Darwin. Then the pages are turned, and everyone settles down to learn how the heart works, or how plants make energy from sunshine, or some other detail. The evolutionary concepts that unify biology, that allow us to frame questions and investigate the glorious diversity of life — these are ignored.
Darwin was an amazing man, and the principal founder of evolutionary biology. But his was the first major statement on the subject, not the last. Calling evolutionary biology “Darwinism,” and evolution by natural selection “Darwinian” evolution, is like calling aeronautical engineering “Wrightism,” and fixed-wing aircraft “Wrightian” planes, after those pioneers of fixed-wing flight, the Wright brothers. The best tribute we could give Darwin is to call him the founder — and leave it at that. Plenty of people in history have had an -ism named after them. Only a handful can claim truly to have given birth to an entire field of modern science.
Jon Stewart Takes On Media, Obama For Overreacting To New Yorker Cover: "It's Just A F***ing Cartoon!"
On Tuesday's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart took on the media and Barack Obama for overreacting to, and thus validating, the New Yorker cover controversy."It's a trifle, it's nothing," Stewart said. "There's so many other things to talk about: Iraq, the collapse of some of our most prestigious financial institutions...right?" he continued, before showing a montage of the media firestorm over the cover.Stewart also took the Obama camp to task for calling the cartoon "tasteless and offensive":"Really? You know what your response should've been? It's very easy here, let me put the statement out for you: Barack Obama is in no way upset about the cartoon that depicts him as a Muslim extremist. Because you know who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists! Of which Barack Obama is not. It's just a fucking cartoon!"Watch below, and look for the special treatment Stewart gives Wolf Blitzer around 2:30 in:
Bonus: John Oliver, Rob Riggle and Wyatt Cenac hit the streets to explain the impenetrable satire that's almost everywhere:
To Trust or Not to Trust: Ask Oxytocin
istockphoto/Julie Macpherson
The development of trust is an essential social tool, allowing people to form productive and meaningful relationships, both at a professional and personal level. Bonds of trust are also extremely fragile, however and a single act of betrayal—such as a marital affair—can instantly erase years of trustworthy behavior. The consequences of such breaches in confidence can be disastrous, and not only for a relationship. People who have been betrayed in the past will sometimes start avoiding future social interactions, which is a potential precursor to social phobia. In light of these connections, recent research has attempted to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying trust behavior. This is the goal of an exciting new study by neuroscientist Thomas Baumgartner and colleagues at the University of Zurich in Germany that combines different disciplines (economics and neuroscience) and methodologies (neuroimaging and neuropharmacology) to investigate how the brain adapts to breaches of trust.
The Chemistry of Trust
To study social interactions, economists, and more recently neuroscientists, take advantage of a simple game played between two people called the “trust game.” (For more on greed and altruism, see this.) In a typical trust game, an investor (Player 1) is faced with a decision to keep a sum of money (say, $10) or share it with a trustee (Player 2). If shared, the investment is tripled ($30) and the trustee now faces the decision to repay the trust by sending back a larger amount of the initial investment (for example, $15 for each participant) or to defect and violate trust by keeping the money. In this game, the investor is therefore left with an important social dilemma: to trust or not to trust. Although it is more profitable to trust, doing so leaves the investor at risk of betrayal.
It has been hypothesized that oxytocin, a hormone recognized for its role in social attachment and facilitation of social interactions, is also important in the formation of trust. For instance, application of oxytocin to “investors” in experimental games increases their tendency to engage in social risks and trust someone else with their money (see this and this). The study by Baumgartner and his colleagues highlights the neural mechanisms through which oxytocin acts to facilitate trust behavior by investigating what happens in the brain when trust breaks down.
When Trust Is Broken
The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan 49 participants who were given either placebo or oxytocin via a nasal spray. Participants were instructed to act as investors during multiple rounds of a trust game with different trustees. They were also told that they would engage in a risk game (similar to the trust game in terms of financial risk, but played against a computer instead of another human being). In order to investigate the role of oxytocin following breaches of trust, the experiment was divided into a pre- and post-feedback phase. In between the two phases, participants received feedback information indicating that roughly 50 percent of their decisions (in both trust and risk games) had resulted in poor investments—that is, their trust had been breached (trust game) or their gamble did not pay off (risk game).
Participants who were given a placebo prior to playing the game decreased their rate of trust (that is, how much money they were willing to invest) after they discovered their trust had been violated. Participants who received oxytocin, however, continued to invest at similar rates regardless of whether or not their trusting behavior had been taken advantage of. These behavioral group differences were accompanied by differences in neural responses, as participants in the oxytocin group showed decreases in responses in the amygdala and caudate nucleus. The amygdala is a region of the brain involved in emotion and fear learning, and is rich in oxytocin receptors, whereas the caudate nucleus has been previously linked to reward-related responses and learning to trust . Thus, the authors hypothesized that oxytocin decreases both fear mechanisms associated with a potential aversion of betrayals (via the amygdala) and our reliance on positive feedback that can influence future decisions (via the caudate). This in turn facilitates the expression of trust even after breaches of trust have occurred. Notably, the behavioral and neural results observed were only apparent when participants played the trust game, but not the risk game, suggesting that oxytocin’s effects on trust are exclusive to interactions with real people.
A Science of Social Phobias?
The study demonstrates how oxytocin can facilitate social interactions after trust has been violated, by potentially lowering defense mechanisms associated with social risks and by overcoming negative feedback that is important for adapting behavior in the future. These intriguing results provide an important step in our understanding of mental disorders where deficits in social behavior are observed. Excessive fear of betrayal, for example, could serve as a precursor to social phobia, a disorder characterized by a disabling fear of social interactions. Over the long-term, this lack of social interaction may lead to serious problems in mental and physical well-being. Thus, to continue forming a bridge between basic and clinical research, future studies may focus on the effects of oxytocin during the sort of betrayals that more commonly occur in real life (such as being betrayed by a loved one or a business partner). It will also be interesting to examine how different genders respond to breaches in confidence following oxytocin administration.
Trust is an adaptive mechanism essential to building social relationships, and breaches of trust have a profound impact on social behavior and mental health. Understanding the balance between levels of oxytocin and appropriate levels of trust will be another important step in the future. Lower levels of oxytocin in some situations may certainly be adaptive, as a person will become more wary of possible harm. Higher levels of oxytocin, however, may also be necessary at times to allow an individual to “forgive and forget,” an imperative step in maintaining long-term relationships and mental well-being.
Mind Matters is edited by Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust was a Neuroscientist.
