Tulips in Georgetown

Pictures taken yesterday at lunch.

Ritual and Belief

Yesterday I noticed several online headlines with the tone, "Did Neanderthals Believe in an Afterlife?" This piqued my curiosity and triggered my skeptical tripwires, but I didn't have time to read any of the stories until today. I can report that in this case it is not the scientists themselves who are responsible for the rhetorical over-reach; they seem to have reported, quite cautiously, that they found three Neanderthals who seem to have been intentionally buried, and that two panther paws seem to have been buried with them:

The Neanderthals were found covered together with rocks burying their remains. The researchers believe it's likely that other Neanderthals intentionally placed the rocks over the bodies from a height. While it cannot be ruled out that an accident killed the three individuals, the scientists believe that wasn't the case.

"I think there is just enough evidence at Sima de las Palomas to think that three articulated skeletons are unlikely to have been the result of a single random accident to three cadavers that somehow escaped the ravages of hyenas and leopards, which were present at the site," Walker said.

Unburnt bones of two articulated panther paws were embedded in rock "in an area where the rest of the animal's skeleton was conspicuous by its absence notwithstanding its proximity to the human skeletons," the authors write.

The researchers speculate that a Neanderthal cut off the panther paws and kept them. It is also possible that the paws were added to the bodies before burial, perhaps holding some ritual significance.

The distinction is important because there is no necessary connection between burying the dead and any coherent notion of an afterlife. To take only the closest example, I don't believe in an afterlife but I would still be troubled by the sight of hyenas tearing into a relative's corpse. Elephants sometimes put considerable effort into hiding their dead. I think that both burial ritual and conceptions of an afterlife are rooted, separately, in the feelings stirred in us by death. When we bury the dead we are expressing primarily emotions and only secondarily (if at all) theology.

It is all too common for people to see a pile of valuable goods in a grave and think, "Look, these people believed in an afterlife where the dead could use pots, swords, and gold!" I doubt it. By placing valuable objects in the grave people were giving expression to the emotions of loss, to a felt need to sacrifice, to their own aspirations for status -- funerals were in many societies a major site for competitive display -- and perhaps to feeling creeped out by having the deceased's most personal belongings still lying around the house. None of this presupposes a theology of an afterlife as a world like this one.

The relationship between ritual and belief is complex, and when they agree point by point it is just as likely that the theology has been articulated to explain the ritual as that the ritual is an enactment of the theology. Emotion is prior to either, and since all higher mammals (at least) experience strong emotion, there is no necessary connection between giving expression to emotion and any sort of higher, human thinking.

El Mirador

Great article by Chip Brown at Smithsonian about El Mirador, the greatest city of the early Maya:

We were hovering now over the heart of the ancient city of El Mirador, once home to an estimated 200,000 people and the capital of a complex society of interconnected cities and settlements that may have supported upwards of a million people. The last thing you would ever guess from a casual aerial overview was that virtually every topographical contour in the primordial forest was created not by geological and environmental forces but by the vanished inhabitants of one of the world’s foundational civilizations.

“All this was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago,” Hansen said. “The whole thing developed before Tikal existed.”

The Langton Matravers Hoard

This British hoard of bronze axes, found in 2007, dates to around 800 BC. As you can tell, by the late Bronze Age axes had become a sort of currency in northwestern Europe, and most of those found by archaeologists had never been used.

Kin Selection vs. Group Selection

Where does altruism come from? Why do animals regularly risk or even sacrifice themselves for the good of others?

It is a hard problem for evolutionary theory, as Darwin recognized. The most popular explanation for the past 40 years has been "kin selection," proposed in 1965 by William Hamilton. Kin selections posits that when animals sacrifice themselves for their siblings and cousins, who share many of their genes, they are helping to pass enough of their genes to the next generation to make the sacrifice evolutionarily worthwhile. Among the scientists who helped make kin selection into textbook orthodoxy, the most prominent was E.O. Wilson. There has been much stir in the world of biology lately because E.O. Wilson himself has come out strongly against kin selection:

Over the course of subsequent decades, Wilson came across evidence that made him doubt the connection between genetic relatedness and altruism. Researchers were finding species of insects that shared a lot of genetic material with each other but didn’t behave altruistically, and other species that shared little and did. “Nothing we were finding connected with kin selection,” Wilson said. “I knew that something was going wrong — there was a smell to it.”

Now, mathematics can show, and has shown, that kin selection could work, but it does not show that it is the actual mechanism driving altruism. There has always been an alternative theory out there, a theory that is much older than kin selection: group selection. Now Wilson has become the most prominent advocate for the group selection model:

The alternative theory holds that the origins of altruism and teamwork have nothing to do with kinship or the degree of relatedness between individuals. The key, Wilson said, is the group: Under certain circumstances, groups of cooperators can out-compete groups of non-cooperators, thereby ensuring that their genes — including the ones that predispose them to cooperation — are handed down to future generations. This so-called group selection, Wilson insists, is what forms the evolutionary basis for a variety of advanced social behaviors linked to altruism, teamwork, and tribalism — a position that other scientists have taken over the years, but which historically has been considered, in Wilson’s own word, “heresy.”

It will be very hard to resolve this argument, because both models predict altruistic behavior, and lo, we have altruistic behavior. The argument is based on a very technical and subtle argument about the relationship between equations and the world. In other words, this is an argument not so much about science as the philosophy of science -- and you all know how good philosophers are at settling arguments. It may turn out that both models apply, in different situations.

I bring this up mainly to make the point that science is not, as certain pseudo-intellectuals -- Ayn Randians, Marxists, barroom rationalists, middle school shop teachers -- like to say, "obvious." Science is hard. To understand science at a high level it really is necessary to think philosophically: to frame problems correctly, to ponder what we mean by cause and effect in various situations, to consider the relationship between equations and models. Scientists are all metaphysicists, whether they want to admit it or not.

Mission Creep in Libya, Continued

The latest:

The French government said Wednesday it would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support the ragtag rebel army in Libya, offering a diplomatic boost for the insurgent leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, as he met with President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

. . . the moves, likened by some critics to America’s decision to send military advisers to Vietnam, raised worries in both countries that their military establishments were being drawn closer into the conflict. The French government spokesman, François Baroin, told reporters on Wednesday that the number of military liaison officers would be in single digits and their mission would be to help “organize the protection of the civilian population.” The British deployment could involve up to 20 advisers.

French government ministers stressed that they do not plan to send ground troops to support the rebels.

By this point you have to ask, why not send troops? If the French and British are determined to get rid of Qaddafi, why not land a parachute regiment on his compound and have done with it?

Australopithecus sediba

The bones of Australopithecus sediba were uncovered in South Africa in 2008. They date to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years ago. Detailed analysis of the fossils was presented last year, and they are intriguing. A. sediba had a small brain, at the lower end of the australopithecene scale, but its pelvis closely resembled those of genus Homo; in this case, at least, the animal was fully bipedal with a chimp-sized brain. Analysis of the brain cavity suggests that though the brain was small, it was organized like that of a modern human, with outsized frontal lobes. Could the frontal lobes of our ancestors started to grow before the brain as a whole? It seems odd, but who knows?

The picture presented by the fossils from this period gets more complex with each new discovery. Rather than a straight progression from something ape-like to something human, what we see is a riot of experimentation, with dozens of different species emerging and disappearing. These bipedal apes were highly successful and spread across Africa, occupying forests and savannas. At some point one of those species evolved into the earliest humans, but we are a long way from figuring out which species that was, let alone why or how.

Corpses in the Ditch

Northwestern Europe is dotted with earthen constructions that our medieval ancestors called "castles," but were re-christened by Victorian archaeologists "hill forts." For puzzling reasons having to do with the mindset of twentieth-century anthropology, there has been a movement among archaeologists to insist that these Iron Age structures were not forts at all. Insisting that the "forts" were not really defensible, archaeologists have argued that they were livestock corrals, or ritual enclosures, or gathering places where dispersed tribes met on an annual basis. It always struck me that the medieval people who dubbed them "castles" knew a whole lot more than we do about what was really defensible in the Iron Age, but the impulse to overturn the received wisdom is very strong in modern science. Add that to the turn among anthropologists away from tribal warfare as an explanation for everything, and toward ordinary life and economic themes, and an insistence that hill forts were not military constructions was all but inevitable. But consider the new evidence from Fin Cop in Britain:

A burial site contained only women and children - the first segregated burial of this kind from Iron Age Britain. Nine skeletons were discovered in a section of ditch around the fort at Fin Cop in the Peak District. Scientists believe "perhaps hundreds more skeletons" could be buried in the ditch, only a small part of which has been excavated so far.

Construction of the hill fort has been dated to some time between 440BC and 390BC, but it was destroyed before completion. The fort's stone wall was broken apart and the rubble used to fill the 400m perimeter ditch, where the skeletons were found. A second, outer wall and ditch had been started but not finished.

No doubt is possible to explain this as some sort of ritual event, but the obvious intepretation is the one suggested by the excavators:

The findings provide a rare insight into warfare in pre-Roman Britain, according to Dr Clive Waddington of Archaeological Research Services, who directed the excavations.

"There has been an almost accepted assumption amongst many archaeologists that hill forts functioned as displays of power, prestige and status and that warfare in the British Iron Age is largely invisible," he said.

"For the people buried at Fin Cop, the hurriedly constructed fort was evidently intended as a defensive work in response to a very real threat."

The British press is portraying the discovery as "overturning our assumptions," an interesting case study in how quickly a new idea can become an entrenched orthodoxy. The "New Archaeology" didn't exist until after 1960, but already it seems to have penetrated deeply into the consciousness of ordinary Brits:

Ann Hall of Longstone history group said: "Locals have always viewed the hill as a peaceful spot. Now we have uncovered sad evidence of an ancient massacre and learned that our well-loved landmark may also be a prehistoric war grave".

Yes, the locals have thought of the spot as "peaceful" for so long they are surprised to discover that something that looks like a fortress may actually have been one.

Stone Eyes

One of the examples sometimes used by creationists to attack evolution is the eye, as in, "what good is 10% of an eye?" Actually, 10% of an eye is very useful. Consider the Indian Fuzzy Chiton (Acanthopleura granulate), a shelled mollusc native to the Caribbean. This creature has nodules of clear mineral on its shell, like small rocks, and there has long been speculation that these are primitive eyes. Recent research confirms this:

When left alone, a chiton will lift part of its oval-shaped body to breathe. But when threatened, the animal will clamp down tightly on the seafloor to protect its soft underbelly.

In the lab, the scientists placed individual animals on a stone slab beneath a white screen, which could change colors. Once the chitons seemed relaxed, the team either placed a black disk directly above the mollusks or changed the color of the background screen from white to gray.

The black disk was designed to simulate a suddenly appearing predator, while the dimming screen mimicked subtle changes in natural light that chitons might experience in the wild—for example, when a cloud passes in front of the sun.

In the experiment, the chitons went into lockdown mode when shown the black disk, but the animals remained at ease when the screen dimmed. This suggests the chiton's eyes are able to distinguish shapes, a prerequisite for true vision.

"The eyes allow the chitons to see objects—not with much detail—but they can distinguish between approaching objects and just decreases in light," Speiser said.

Speiser estimates chiton vision is about a thousand times coarser than human vision, and it's likely they see only in black-and-white.

Real World Education

Besides writing Dilbert, Scott Adams has ideas about education. In this post he wonders

why our school system is so mismatched to the educational needs of modern students. This leads me to a hypothesis that I will call the Education Complexity Shift.

I'll begin by stipulating that any field of study is helpful in training a student's mind to become more of a learning machine. Two hundred years ago, when life itself was simple (feed the horse, plant the corn) you needed to make school artificially complicated to stretch a student's mind. Once a student's mind was expanded, stressed, stretched and challenged, it became a powerful tool when released back into the relatively simple "real world."

The Education Complexity Shift observes that the real world has become more complicated than school. Imagine trying to teach a young child how to do the routine adult task of planning the most efficient trip by plane, or getting a mortgage, or investing. How about planning a wedding? How many pieces of software do you use for your job?

Today, life is more complicated than school. That means the best way to expand a student's mind is by teaching more about the practical complexities of the real world and less about, for example, the history of Europe, or trigonometry.

I'll pause here to acknowledge that both history and trigonometry are useful for students who plan to become historians or rocket scientists. For the other 99.9% of the world, little from those classes will be retained. The only benefit from much of what is taught in school is generic training of the mind, and for that we now have a better and more complicated option: the real world.

Some of you will argue that learning history is important on a number of levels, including creating a shared culture, understanding other countries, and avoiding the mistakes of the past. I agree. And if the question was teaching history versus teaching nothing, history would be the best choice every time. But if you compare teaching history with, for example, teaching a kid how to compare complicated financial alternatives, I'd always choose the skill that has the most practical value. You get all the benefit of generic mental training plus some real world benefits if any of it is retained.

I think Adams underestimates the intellectual complexity of nineteenth-century farming, but I do think he has a point. It would be possible to do a lot of intellectually demanding school work while focusing entirely on things Americans do every day. But that would only stretch minds in one direction, toward complexity. It would not do the other kinds of mind-stretching provided by a really good education: the questioning of our assumptions, the consideration of how people live or have lived in societies very different from our own, and the examination of beliefs so basic that we are hardly aware we have them. Calculating mortgages is challenging in a sense, but does it compare to contemplation of the vastness of the universe, the depth of geological time, or the astonishing intricacy of the living cell?

There is more to a real education than cleverness.

Down to the River

Ben, Clara, Coraline and I just took a walk down to the tadpole ponds by the Patapsco River on this glorious spring day. The leaves are just coming out in the woods, so the tops of the trees are tinted with green.

The kids were in a great mood and climbed all their usual climbing rocks.

The tadpole ponds were swarming -- this wet, wet years has been good for frogs, at least.

Then to the new "beach" along the river, where the dam used to be. The river was running high and fast after yesterday's storms, and when Coraline went into the water after some geese she got an alarmed look on her face and immediately struggled back to shore. The "beach" is strewn with these boulders, which are perfect for king of the hill games and the like. We found an old tennis ball at the water's edge and threw it for Coraline, but she remains an inferior fetch player; she wall chase the ball reliably, but she doesn't seem to understand that she has to bring it back. (The equipment in the background is for the rebuilding of the US 40 Bridge.)

Ben liked this recliner rock so much that he tried to mark it with his handprints. He was quite surprised when they disappeared after just a minute or two.

It was a great afternoon.

Cutting Environmental Budgets

Republicans are on a mission to cut the budgets of environmental agencies at the both the federal and state levels. The budget just agreed to by the Republican House and Obama cut funding to the EPA by $1.6 billion. Cuts to state environmental agencies are being made all over the country. The people behind these cuts seem to think that these are "pro business" moves that will reduce red tape and make development easier.

Alas, it doesn't work like that. What state environmental agencies mainly do is review permit applications to make sure projects conform with environmental law. If you reduce the number of reviewers in the agency without changing the law, what happens is that the remaining reviewers are overwhelmed and the time needed to get permits approved just gets longer, much to the frustration of developers. This happened in Maryland under the recent administration of Republican Bob Ehrlich, and the result was such long delays in project approval that many developers deserted him and supported Democrat Martin O'Malley in the next election. Now in some states Republicans may now have the clout to rewrite environmental laws, but the most burdensome regulations are the Federal ones, and they are not even trying (yet) to change the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act. So these budget cuts are not nearly so "pro business" as the Republicans seem to think.

Recycled Art in Africa

Africa has become the land of recycling, where poor people dress in donated western clothes, wear sandals made from old truck tires, build houses from leaky shipping crates, and so on. Some African artists have made this frugality part of their aesthetic, and many of the continent's top names are men who work mainly with junk. These masks by Romuald Hazoume of Benin approximate traditional forms but are made out of "found objects."

One of the biggest African artists these days is El Anatsui, who makes these large hangings out of bottle caps and similar bits of discarded metal.

The way these works evoke both African artistic traditions and the facts of contemporary life makes them more interesting to me than the found object art I have seen in North America.

The Last Two Speakers

In the category of "Too Much Like a TV Movie":

The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it's at risk of extinction. There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company. "They don't have a lot in common," says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says, can be "a little prickly" and Velazquez, who is "more stoic," rarely likes to leave his home.

No Planting Today

This is normally my big gardening weekend. Our expected last frost date is April 15, so I usually spend the next weekend buying tomato and pepper plants, planting flower seeds, and otherwise inaugurating the summer garden.

Not this year, alas. It has been raining most of the day, with the temperature in the 50s, and we had a ferocious huge storm that just passed by. So everything will be a few weeks late this year, at least.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

--Dylan Thomas

Um,

A Roman pendant recently found by a metal detector enthusiast in Norfolk, England, and announced to the press under the title, "The Golden Phallus." Apparently these are not rare objects, although most are bronze (below).

They are always found on Roman military sites. They may be good luck charms worn by soldiers, or they may be advertisements worn by another sort of person often found around military installations.

Piracy

Charles Blow gives what I think is the only possible moral response to the Ryan budget: outrage.

Wall Street is rolling in cash. C.E.O. bonuses are going gangbusters. It’s a really good time to be rich!

If you’re poor, not so much. The pall of the recession is suffocating. The unemployment rate is still unbearably high. The Census Bureau reported in September that the poverty rate for 2009 was 14.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1994, and the number of uninsured reached a record high. And the Department of Agriculture has reported record “prevalence of food insecurity.”

So in a civil society, which of these groups should be expected to sacrifice a bit for the benefit of the other and the overall health and prosperity of the nation at a time of great uncertainty? The poor, of course. At least that seems to be the Republican answer.

Under the guise of deficit reduction, the Republicans are proposing to not only make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, but to reduce their taxes even more — cutting the top individual rate from 35 percent to 25 percent to “promote growth and job creation.” And they plan to pay for this by taking a buzz saw to programs that benefit the poor, elderly and otherwise vulnerable. . . .

More tax cuts would be gluttony in a time of starvation. That is not America. That is a nation about to be plundered, and a people laid to waste.

I find it very puzzling that more Americans don't understand the impetus behind the Republicans' fiscal strategy: to help the rich get richer, damn everyone else.

Paternity

In New York right now a woman is suing to have her mother's husband's name removed from her birth certificate, because he was not, as she now knows, her biological father. She is doing this because she wants to claim part of the fortune of the man she says was her "actual" father.

I say, to hell with the notion that a man who just contributes sperm is anybody's father.

I say this believing that much of who we are is genetic. Watching my own biological children grow I often see eerie echoes of myself; my second son has my attitude toward authority, my love of disappearing into imagined worlds, my ears, and my feet. He was born that way, so far as I can tell, and some of the things he inherited from me would have come out eventually no matter who raised him.

Those inherited traits may be important, but they do not make me his father. What makes me his father is all the time I have spent raising him: feeding him, reading to him, taking him into the woods to look for frogs, fighting with him about doing his homework and cleaning his room. Fatherhood is an emotional investment (and a financial one), not a accidental fusion of cells.

I think about this often partly because I have an adopted child as well as the four biologicals. The notion that someone else is Clara's father, someone who abandoned her when she was a week old, enrages me. I have been preparing myself since we first conceived the notion of adopting for the moment when she decides to learn about her "real" parents, and wondered if she would do this in a spirit of anger and rebellion, or embarrassed curiosity. At the moment Chinese law makes this a futile endeavor, but this might change, and one day she might well find some other "parents" in a little Chinese town. I understand the pull of that curiosity, and I do not dismiss it. The people who gave her her genes did shape her as profoundly as I will.

But to me that has nothing to do with being anyone's father. Fatherhood is a relationship with the child. If you don't have one, you are not that child's father. The person in China that I think has a claim on Clara's affections is her foster mother, who raised her for a year and gave her a loving start in life. Not someone who sired and then abandoned her.

My argument here is not just about emotion, but about law. I don't think the law should in any way acknowledge sperm donors as fathers. It is the man who puts in the work who is the father. I realize that not every situation is so simple, and that some children have several men in and out of their lives. But when courts have to adjudicate these things, they should be thinking about relationships, not DNA.

Orangutans Can Fish

From Science News:

Orangutans living in Borneo scavenge fish that wash up along the shore and scoop catfish out of small ponds for fresh meals, anthropologist Anne Russon of York University in Toronto reported on April 14 at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Over two years, Russon saw several animals on these forested islands learn on their own to jab at catfish with sticks, so that the panicked prey would flop out of ponds and into a red ape’s waiting hands.

As Russon notes, if Orangutans can fish, surely early hominids could, too.

Nuremberg, 1493

Woodcut by Hartmann Schedel. Click to enlarge.

Along the Stream

Clara and I walked along a little stream near our house today. It's quite lovely in the spring, despite the trash, but in the summer it dries up to a trickle.

I took Clara's picture posing with one clump of feral daffodils, and after that she wanted to pose with every flower we saw. There were a lot of flowers.

Austerity for Austerity's Sake

The British Tories' tough guy approach to their own economic and fiscal problems -- raise taxes, cut spending, reduce debt, and hope the broader economy would take care of itself -- isn't working very well. As any economist could have told them (and many did), the effect has only been to intensify the recession:

In the United States, the debate over how to cut the long-term budget deficit is just getting under way. But in Britain, one year into its own controversial austerity program to plug a gaping fiscal hole, the future is now. And for the moment, the early returns are less than promising.

Retail sales plunged 3.5 percent in March, the sharpest monthly downturn in Britain in 15 years. And a new report by the Center for Economic and Business Research, an independent research group based here, forecasts that real household income will fall by 2 percent this year. That would make Britain’s income squeeze the worst for two consecutive years since the 1930s.

What did they think they were doing? Well, they thought they were battling the usual sort of recession, which is associated with high interest rates:

All of which has challenged the view of Britain’s top economic official, George Osborne, that during a time of high deficits and economic weakness, the best approach is to aggressively attack the deficit first, through rapid-fire cuts aimed at the heart of Britain’s welfare state.

But, see, Britain isn't facing high interest rates, just like the US isn't facing them now. Interest rates in London are very low. In Ireland and Portugal, which really are facing high interest rates, the governments don't have much choice, and they are facing years of austerity; but Britain did not have to balance its budget now. This was a moral approach -- tighten our belts, get down to work -- to an economic problem.

The economy, as we learn yet again, doesn't give a fig for morality. Its rules are different from those of a peasant household. What the US and Britain really need now is a few years of a rapid growth and some inflation, fueled by more deficit spending. But somehow the public mood is for tough love, scrimping, saving, coupon clipping. This misguided moralism would be an interesting experiment in mass psychology, if it weren't that millions of people will remain unemployed because of it.

The Viking Style

The swirling, interlacing style of Viking art, expressed in wood and metal.

The Ingvar Stones

One of my favorite things that I have learned about teaching Celts to Vikings this year is the Ingvar Stones.

In 1036, a Swedish Viking named Ingvar the Far-Traveled raised a large mercenary force, several hundred strong at least, and took them to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. There they took part in a civil war raging in the kingdom of Georgia. Most, it seems, died of disease -- including Ingvar -- others in battle. Only one ship out of 26 returned to Sweden.

Ingvar's expedition was remembered in songs and eventually written into a saga. His men were memorialized by their families with rune stones set up all over Sweden, 26 of which survive. The one above is typical; the inscription reads:

Andvéttr and Kárr and Kiti and Blesi and Djarfr raised this stone in memory of Gunnleifr, their father, who was killed in the east with Ingvarr. May God help their spirits. Alríkr(?), I carved the runes. He could steer a cargo-ship well.

This one says:

Þjalfi and Holmlaug had all of these stones raised in memory of Baggi, their son, who alone owned a ship and steered to the east in Ingvarr's retinue. May God help Baggi's spirit. Áskell carved.

These stones sum up the spirit of the Viking age for me. Ingvar's expedition was a mad adventure with a high risk of death for everyone involved, even had they been successful. Yet he had no trouble recruiting 26 shiploads of men to sail a thousand miles down treacherous rivers, much of the way through hostile territory, to take part in a war in which none of them had any personal stake. Whatever else they Vikings were -- killers, pirates, slavers -- they were certainly brave. They were brave when they had to be, but more notably they were brave for no very good reason. The Icelanders recorded that their ancestors crossed the Atlantic to an unknown island because they wanted to be more free. Ingvar's men went because going seemed better than staying home. The men who settled Greenland, or fought for the emperor in Constantinople, or sailed their longships into the Mediterranean to raid Spain and Italy, also had no pressing reason to go. They just did.

The Ingvar Stones give a clue as to why the Vikings were like that. The people who stayed home in Sweden must have followed Ingvar's adventure as best they could, and they made the news they heard into songs. Their relatives who went seemed heroic to them, and when they did not come home they set up stones to honor their memory. (Not many runestones were set up for ordinary Swedish farmers.) Viking boys grew up hearing such stories, seeing that the people who were talked about and admired were the ones who crossed the sea in search of adventure and gold. The ones who came home with chests full of English or Saracen silver became chieftains, lording it over their more timid neighbors. The biggest hazard faced by Scandinavian kings was that some exiled relation would come home with a ship full of money and an outsized reputation and toss them off their thrones. In this world, adventure was a way of life, the more dangerous the better.

Green

The first stage of spring is enacted under barren trees, and then, overnight it seems, the leaves start to come out and suddenly the world is green.

Business Education

As a businessman (of sorts) who never even took an economics course in college, let alone one on management or accounting, I have spent some time thinking about the weak connection between what I did in school and what I do for a living. Even the archaeology I studied was largely theoretical or focused on Europe and the Middle East, only tangentially related to the archaeology I do now. I might, I suppose, be taken for a model of how to make use of a liberal education, since I have quite successfully learned things like soil science and budgeting as I have gone along, and have made good use of academic skills like writing and defining research problems. But I understand why people who are going to spend their lives in business might want to learn something about it in school.

This is on my mind because David Glenn has a long article in the Times about the problems with business education. Any academic could have told Glenn about the problems he points to: the business major draws the least motivated students, who do the least work in school and seem to learn the least; the heavy emphasis on group assignments allows accomplished slackers to sponge off the work of others; there is no consensus about what business students should learn, so professors sometimes have no clear idea of what they should be teaching. Business majors do the worst of all students on the GMAT, taken by those entering MBA programs, and nobody is at all surprised by this.

What is business, anyway? Other than accounting, which is complicated and has wide application, I can't think of many generalized sorts of business knowledge. Most of what I need to know for my job is highly specialized, from Federal regulations to nineteenth-century pottery to the personal foibles of certain key bureaucrats. No doubt people in other fields have to learn equally arcane sets of facts. Other than a few of the largest professions -- banking, retail, maybe real estate -- there can't be much demand for courses in these things at the university level, nor any body of material from which to teach. Anyway, people could always learn that stuff later, like I did.

Pick up any book on how to succeed in business and you find that the author is not imparting knowledge, but coaching people in the right personal habits. (Viz., The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or The One-Minute Manager.) Yes, being able to work in groups is important in business, but can you really teach people how to get along with each other? Managers need to be able to motivate their employees, but is there a guidebook on how to do that?

In response, many business programs are putting the emphasis on practical experience, requiring teams of students to launch actual businesses. This strikes me as the right way to impart business skills. Otherwise, universities should focus on training minds, and teach people things that are hard to learn rather than facts about business that are likely to be out of date in a decade anyway.

Black Confederates?

Ta-Nehisi Coates calls attention to the persistent myth that thousands of black soldiers fought for the Confederacy, quoting this from Tony Horwitz:

When New York Gov. George Pataki recently backed calls to boot Georgia's flag from Albany's display of state flags because of its "racist" component, he quickly roused ire. "As many as 50,000 brave young black men were wounded and killed fighting for the South," wrote Charlie Condon, South Carolina's attorney general in a letter. "Your slander of our region and its historic flag is outrageous and offensive."

But what many historians find outrageous and offensive are the claims being made by men such as Condon. Though he later revised his estimate to 50,000 blacks who "served in the Confederate Army," Smith at American University puts the number of black rebels "actually shooting people" at 30,000.

Most historians regard this figure as inflated - by almost 30,000.

"It's pure fantasy," contends James McPherson, a Princeton historian and one of the nation's leading Civil War scholars. Adds Edwin Bearss, historian emeritus at the National Park Service: "It's b.s., wishful thinking." Robert Krick, author of 10 books on the Confederacy, has studied the records of 150,000 Southern soldiers and found fewer than a dozen were black. "Of course, if I documented 12, someone would start adding zeros," he says.

For more scholarship on the subject see this web site, or Bruce Levine’s, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War.

Of course you can see immediately why Southern apologists are so drawn to this myth, which exonerates the Confederacy of racism and "proves" that the war was not about slavery. The plain reality is that almost all the blacks who served the Confederate military did so as laborers, or as body servants to white officers. If there were a few black men who so liked the idea of shooting Yankees that they somehow connived their way into fighting units, that just shows what a strange and variegated species we are. The Confederate government was dead set against treating blacks as the equals of whites in any way, and as policy they never enrolled blacks as soldiers in their army.

I Want Democracy

The Montreal Gazette covers an experiment carried out by political scientist Dietlind Stolle:

First, daycare kids were given clickers and asked to vote which sticker they liked best, one of an ice cream cone or a soccer ball. Because this was a democracy, and ice cream had trounced soccer, everyone got a sticker with an ice cream cone on it.

But what would have happened if this wasn’t a democracy?

“They voted again for a sticker, but instead they got nap time,” said Stolle.

“They were puzzled, and one girl said right away, ‘I want democracy.’ Then all the others joined in. It was fantastic as an experience.”

South Africa, Still Sliding Downward

Ryan Malan reviews three books on the steadily deteriorating situation in southern Africa. He begins:

The central problem of writing about South Africa is that it is almost impossible to explain the country's slow-motion catastrophe in terms that make sense to foreigners. Consider these headlines, culled from just a fortnight's newspapers. Johannesburg's City Press reports that the head of the ruling party's Political School—set up to nurture "revolutionary morality" among thieving civil servants—is declining to explain how he has come to own two new BMWs and a Maserati. South Africa's Sunday Times alleges rampant corruption in the administration of Northern Cape province. The same paper reports new attempts to silence a trade-union leader who likens the nation's rulers to "hyenas" who feed off the poor. Elsewhere, we have FAILED BILLION-DOLLAR EDUCATION PROGRAM; WHISTLE-BLOWER MURDERED; WIFE OF NIA CHIEF ON TRIAL FOR SMUGGLING COCAINE, the NIA being our CIA. And finally, the story of the hour: The National Prosecuting Authority has abandoned its investigation into the whereabouts of $130 million in bribes generated by South Africa's notorious 1990s arms deal.

As it was told in the beginning, so it shall be in the end: as you sow, so shall you reap.