Diversity in Bonobo Behavior

One of my themes when I write about nature is the importance of variation. Evolution acts on variation; a species cannot evolve if all individuals are the same. Bogus writers on human evolution are always making statements about what chimpanzees are like, or what human hunter-gatherers are like, that ignore the enormous range of documented variation.

So I welcome David Quammen's new article in National Geographic, documenting diverse behavior among bonobos. One of the stereotypes about bonobos is that they are peaceful and usually settle disputes amicably, perhaps with a quick sex act. And they are on average much less violent than chimpanzees. On average. But they do fight, and since those fights are infrequent they may be all the more important:

Hohmann mentioned other points of conventional wisdom against which he and Fruth dissent, including the notion that bonobo society is held together as a genial sisterhood by female bonding (they consider mother-son bonding at least as important) and the notion that bonobos aren’t aggressive toward one another. Aggression may be rare and muted, he said, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. Consider how subtle human aggression can be. Consider how a single violent act, or merely a mean one, can stick in a person’s memory for years. “I think this is just what applies to bonobo behavior,” he said. 

Bonobos also display considerable violence in hunting:

But Fruth and Hohmann reported nine cases of hunting by bonobos at Lomako, seven of which involved sizable duikers, usually grabbed by one bonobo, ripped apart at the belly while still alive, with the entrails eaten first, and the meat shared. More recently, here at Lui Kotale, they have seen another 21 successful predations, among which eight of the victims were mature duikers, one was a bush baby, and three were monkeys. Bonobos preying on other primates: “This is a regular part of the bonobo diet,” Hohmann said.

The most important thing about both chimps and bonobos, with regards to human evolution, is that both are highly flexible. They vary their diet depending on what is available; the diet of one troop may include much more meat than that of another. They vary their social structure, with some troops being more hierarchical, others more egalitarian. Some individual chimpanzees fight a lot, others never. Some bonobos have sex all the time, others rarely. Generalization about animal behavior often turn out to be wrong, and that is certainly true about ancient humans.

Whooping Cough in Vermont

Vermont is in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic, with more than 700 cases reported in the past 12 months. In 1976, only 1,000 cases were reported in the entire United States.

It's no secret why Bordetella pertussis is coming back. It is coming back because so many parents are refusing to vaccinate their children. To defeat a highly infectious disease, the vaccination rate has to be more than 90 percent. In Vermont, home of so many Whole Earth Catalogers, the state allows a "philosophical exception" to its vaccination requirements, and the rate has dipped to 60 percent. As a result, children are getting sick. And when children get sick, they can spread the disease to young babies, for whom it can be fatal. In 2012, there were at least 41,000 cases of whooping cough in the United States, and at least 18 babies died.

That seems to me like a very high price to pay for tolerating the irrational fears of granola parents.

An Iron Age Warrior of the Caucasus

Russian archaeologists have announced the discovery of an amazing tomb high in the Caucasus mountains dating to around 220 BCE.

A single man was laid to rest in this stone-lined chamber, along with three horses and a cow.

This warrior was buried in chain mail and several weapons, including a 36-inch (0.9 m) long sword placed between his legs. Two bronze helmets were placed on top of the tomb.

Greek influence is apparent in some of the artifacts, and this ornament was made from a coin depicting Athena.

A gold broach, and a black-glazed ewer.

A deer made of bronze and iron. These objects are similar to the ones that came from the graves at Vani, in ancient Colchis; that material also showed Greek influence, along with objects that might have come from the steppes.

Where We Missed Love

A chart by Dorothy Gambrill based on the 'missed connections' section of Craigslist, showing the most frequently mentioned places people met someone they badly want to meet again. You have to love the vast swath of southern and middle America where everybody meets in Walmart. And what's with people in Rhode Island meeting in parking lots? That seems more Ohio to me. I declare a tie for the best answer, with prizes going to Oklahoma for At the Sate Fair and to my own state of Maryland for In the Park.

This Week in the Art World

This Monday the Leopold Museum in Vienna held an exhibit of nude paintings to which only nude people were admitted.

Dogs Know You Can't See in the Dark

Researchers carried out a study of 84 food-loving adult dogs, all of whom were told not to touch a piece of food on the floor. Then they waited to see what would happen. The dogs were four times more likely to steal the food if the room was dark. More evidence, if any were needed, of the remarkable degree to which dogs and people understand each other.

Today's Mising Link Found: Whales with Baleen and Teeth

Modern whales fall into two groups, those with teeth and those with baleen. Since early whales all had teeth, baleen must have evolved after whales took to the water. And now there is excellent fossil evidence of the transition, numerous species of whales with primitive baleen. Paleontologists in California have just announced the discovery of four new species of whales with both teeth and primitive baleen, dating to between 17 and 19 million years ago. Above, a jaw fragment from one of the whales.

Solitary Confinement is Torture

George Will takes on one of worst human rights abuses in contemporary America:

Supermax prisons isolate inmates from social contact. Often prisoners are in their cells, sometimes smaller than 8 by 12 feet, 23 hours a day, released only for a shower or exercise in a small fenced-in outdoor space. Isolation changes the way the brain works, often making individuals more impulsive, less able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds.

And he found this from Charles Dickens, who toured Philadelphia's all-solitary Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842:

I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

I hope liberal activists, evangelical Christians, and libertarians can come together to curtail this grotesque misuse of state power.

Capitalism and Conservatism

Responding to an article on the collapse of family ties in rapidly changing Korea, Andrew Sullivan touches one of my constant themes, the radical nature of capitalism:

Capitalism is in this sense anti-conservative. It is a disruptive, culturally revolutionary force through human society. It has changed the world in three centuries more than at any time in the two hundred millennia that humans have lived on the earth. This must leave – and has surely left – victims behind. Which is why the welfare state emerged. The sheer cruelty of the market, the way it dispenses brutally with inefficiency (i.e. human beings and their jobs), the manner in which it encourages constant travel and communication: these, as Bell noted, are not ways to strengthen existing social norms, buttress the family, allow the civil society to do what it once did: take care of people within smaller familial units according to generational justice and respect. That kind of social order – the ultimate conservative utopia – is inimical to the capitalist enterprise.

Which is why many leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conservatives as well as liberals, attached a safety net to such an unsafe, bewildering, constantly shifting web of human demand and supply. They did so in part for humane reasons – but also because they realized that unless capitalism red in tooth and claw were complemented by some collective cushioning, it would soon fall prey to more revolutionary movements. The safety net was created to save capitalism from itself, not to attack capitalism.

White Horse Hill: Bronze Age Dartmoor

Excavations of a cist burial at White Horse Hill on Dartmoor, England, have produced a wonderful assortment of Bronze Age artifacts. Above, ear studs or librets.

Beads, including one of amber.

Because the burial chamber was swallowed by a peat bog, much organic material was preserved, including an animal pelt and a woven mesh bag, which seem to be mashed together in this photo.

Rallying the RINOs

Kathleen Parker wants moderate Republicans to reclaim their party:

Why should RINOs hang their heads in shame and be relegated to the fringes of their party? The party is the fringe. Isn’t it time to reclaim the salt lick? RINOs need to be defiantly proud, aggressively centrist and unapologetically sane.

There are a couple of obstacles to this obvious course. First, sane people are too busy Being Normal to organize. No, “normal” is not a relative term. We all know what normal is, and it doesn’t involve carrying gigantic photos of aborted fetuses to political conventions. For example.

We fetishize politics and political display in this country, or at least the media do. But The Normals really are not so interested in politics as guerrilla theater as programmers, consultants and spinners seem to think they are. Most would like the country to rock along without drama — operating within a reasonable budget, with respect for privacy and the rule of law, compassion for the disadvantaged and an abundance of concern for national security, including border control but not necessarily drone attacks on citizens. More or less.

Perhaps without meaning to, Parker touches on one of the major long-term problems with mass democracy. In a democracy, power flows to those who pay close attention and put in a lot of effort. In America this includes things like voting in primaries, which only about 20 percent of us can be counted on to do, attending political conventions, donating money to candidates, and so on. But as Parker says, normal Americans don't want to do those things. That leaves the field open to activists, who are generally much more extreme in their politics than the more apathetic masses, and ambitious empty suits, who can be counted on to mouth whatever slogans are being shouted the loudest around them.

In America, the major corrective to the forces that push politics toward extremes is the presidential election. Many more people vote in presidential elections, including millions who otherwise pay no attention to politics. A party that wants to win the presidency has to develop mass appeal, and this has historically dragged both parties toward the center. This often leads to nominees that party loyalists despise, but once elected they do tend to become the leaders of their parties. We'll see how long it takes this pressure to drag Republicans back from their time in the wilderness.

Here's an Interesting Life

Wikipedia summary of the career of William Augustus Bowles:

Bowles was born into a wealthy Maryland Tory family, enlisting with the Maryland Loyalists Battalion at age 14 and becoming an ensign in Royal Navy by age 15. Cashiered for dereliction of duty after returning too late to his ship at Pensacola, Bowles escaped north and found refuge among the Lower Creek towns of the Chattahoochee basin. He married two wives, one Cherokee and the other Hitchiti Muscogee, and became heir to a Muscogee chiefdom. In 1781, a 17-year old Bowles led Muscogee forces at the Battle of Pensacola. After seeking refuge in the Bahamas, he traveled to London. He was received by King George III as 'Chief of the Embassy for Creek and Cherokee Nations'; it was with British backing that he returned to train the Muscogee as pirates to attack Spanish ships.

In 1799, Bowles formed the State of Muskogee, with the support of the Chattahoochee Creeks and the Seminoles. He established his capital at Miccosuki, a village on the shores of Lake Miccosukee near present-day Tallahassee. It was ruled by Mico Kanache, his father-in-law and strongest ally. Bowles envisioned the State of Muskogee, with its capital at Miccosuki, encompassing large portions of present-day Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and incorporating the Cherokee, Upper and Lower Creeks, Chickasaw and Choctaw. Bowles' first act was declaring the 1796 Second Treaty of San Ildefonso which drew the boundary between the U.S. and West Florida null-and-void, because the Indians were not consulted.

He denounced the treaties Alexander McGillivray had negotiated with Spain and the U.S., threatening to declare war on the United States unless it returned Muscogee lands, and issuing a death sentence against George Washington's Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins, who won the loyalty of the Lower Creeks. He built a tiny navy, and raided Spanish ships in the Gulf of Mexico, and, in 1800, declared war on Spain, briefly capturing the presidio and trading post of San Marcos de Apalache before being forced to retreat. Although a Spanish force that set out to destroy Mikosuki got lost in the swamps, a second attempt to take San Marcos ended in disaster. After a European armistice led to the loss of British support, Bowles was discredited. The Seminole signed a peace treaty with Spain. The following year, he was betrayed by Lower Creek supporters of Hawkins at a tribal council. They turned Bowles over to the Spanish, and he died in prison in Havana, Cuba two years later.

Who could write such a story?

La Fête du Citron

Images from the 80th Lemon Festival, underway this week in Menton, France.

The Roman Mosaic of Lod

This wonderful mosaic, dating to around 300 CE, was found by an Israeli road crew in 1996 under about 3 feet (1 m) of fill. The mosaics measure about 50 by 27 feet (17 by 9 m).

Archaeologists were called in to uncover it carefully and remove it for preservation. The mosaics were part of a large private house; the main panel (above) would have been in an audience chamber. The house had mud brick walls, and after the house was abandoned, some time in the fifth century, the walls collapsed and preserved the floor.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York helped raise funds to preserve the mosaics, and they were exhibited at the Met in 2010-2011.

They are still touring the world, while a new center to display them permanently is constructed in Israel.

The project has an awesome web site, with hours of video and much else, where you can learn more than you probably ever wanted to know about ancient mosaics. The detailed description of how the mosaic was conserved is especially impressive.

Movie Criminals Live!

Most crime is so mundane, so stupid even, that it is startling to read about really smart crooks pulling off a really big job:

Eight masked gunmen made a hole in a security fence at Brussels’ international airport, drove onto the tarmac and snatched some $50 million worth of diamonds from the hold of a Swiss-bound plane without firing a shot, authorities said Tuesday.

The gang used two black cars in their daring raid late Monday, grabbed the cache of stones and sped off into the darkness, said Anja Bijnens, spokeswoman for the Brussels prosecutor’s office. “They tried to pass themselves off as police officers,” Bijnens said. They reportedly wore outfits which resembled dark police clothing and both cars had blue lights on top, she said. Police found one burnt-out vehicle close to the airport later Monday night and said they were still looking for clues.

 The heist was estimated at some $50 million in diamonds, said Caroline De Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “What we are talking about is obviously a gigantic sum,” De Wolf said. An airport spokesman said the robbers made a hole in the perimeter fence and drove up to the Swiss passenger plane, which was ready to leave. The robbers got out of the car, flashed machine guns at pilots and security transport workers before taking the loot from the hold, which was accessed from outside. Without firing a shot they drove off through the same hole in the fence, completing the spectacular theft within barely five minutes, Bijnens said.

This reminds me of the famous theft of 13 masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, or the Antwerp Diamond Heist of 2003.

I suppose we should be happy that geniuses are as rare in crime as in every other endeavor.

Children were Never an Economic Benefit for their Parents

In any casual conversation about falling fertility, you are likely to hear that people used to have lots of children because they made their parents richer by working the fields or whatever, but now children are only an economic drain. This notion is very widespread. I was recently asked, by a childless adult, why people bother to have children at all now that they are no longer an economic benefit.

However, this assertion flies in the face of evolutionary logic. It is only by investing in their children that parents reap the evolutionary benefit of reproduction; evolutionary models pretty much demand that parents put more into having children than they get back. Hillard Kaplan:

In contrast to wealth-flows theory, models of fertility and parental investment derived from evolutionary biology expect that the net flow of resources will always be from parents to offspring, even when fertility is high. The logic underlying this expectation is that natural selection will have produced a preponderance of organisms that are designed to extract resources from the environment and convert those resources into descendants carrying replicas of their genetic material. Organisms that extracted a net gain from offspring would produce fewer genetic descendants than those that utilized their own labor and excess energy to produce more viable offspring. This does not mean that natural selection could not favor a positive flow from some offspring to parents or from offspring to parents at some ages but that the overall intergenerational flow of resources will be downward.

Kaplan backed up this assertion with very detailed data from three hunter-gatherer societies, finding that in every case parents got less back from the time they invested in raising and teaching children than they would have if they had spent that time hunting, gathering, or doing other work. In simplest terms, children eat much more than they catch, and this continues right up to the time that they have their own children. Eva Mueller found the same for peasant societies:

Children have negative economic value in peasant agriculture. Up to the time that they become parents themselves, children consume more than they produce.

Nor is there much evidence that raising children provides care in old age; in the first place, few people in traditional societies lived much past the end of their working lives, and in the second studies have shown that aging parents could hire caregivers for much less than the cost of raising children. Peasants, for example, could invest their profits in buying land, or lend out money at interest, rather than have children, and they would come out economically ahead.

In the past, people had children for the same reason we do: the emotional imperatives built into us by evolution.

This is from a fascinating review article on the economics of family life by Ted Bergstrom, which you can read here.

The Puzzle of Psychiatric Medications

This paragraph set me thinking:

After the discoveries of chlorpromazine and another antipsychotic drug, haloperidol, in the 1950s, scientists figured out that these drugs changed the brain’s levels of the chemical messenger dopamine. Since then, the relationship between dopamine and schizophrenia has been hotly pursued by the research community, even though it is not exactly clear how those drugs work to combat symptoms. Thousands of studies have been published describing the link between dopamine and schizophrenia. . . .  Dopamine probably does play a role in schizophrenia, but other still unexplored factors might be as or more important. The cause of the disease remains unclear.

The same thing could be said about serotonin and antidepressants. The antidepressants that make some depressed people feel better have a measurable impact on Serotonin levels, but we don't understand the relationship between serotonin and depression and don't have a clue what causes depression in the first place.

When you think about how poorly we understand the brain, it is no wonder that we have so much trouble helping people with mental illness.

Save? Invest? Spend? Does Anybody Know What Would Help the Economy?

Robert Samuelson on why the economy is not creating more jobs:

To overgeneralize slightly: We have gone from being an expansive, risk-taking society to a skittish, risk-averse one. Before the 2008-09 financial crisis, the bias was toward more spending. The inclination was to surrender to immediate gratification. Want a new car? Sure, why not? More meals out? Great idea! Businesses behaved similarly. Banks made the next loan; companies hired the next worker and approved the next investment project. An ever-expanding economy justified optimism, and optimism supported an ever-expanding economy. Hello, bubble.

The psychology has now reversed. The bias is against extra spending. Eat out? Try leftovers. Remodel the basement? Oh, leave it alone. In the boom years, the personal saving rate (savings as a share of after-tax income) fell from 10.9 percent in 1982 to 1.5 percent in 2005. Now it’s edging up; from 2010 to 2012, it averaged 4.4 percent. It could go higher, imposing a further drag on the economy.

If, like me, you grew up in the 1970s and 1980s reading about how the US was falling behind Japan because of our "anemic" savings rate, this sounds very strange. The old economic model was that the main determinant of economic growth was investment, so what would increase growth was more saving, leading to more investment.

If this was ever true it is not true any more. Now even Republican-leaning economists like Samuelson admit that we have plenty of money to invest, so this is not the problem. On the contrary, we have in the world today vast pools of capital desperately searching for any sort of investment opportunity. I was just talking to an acquaintance in real estate who complained that several commercial properties around Boston had recently been bought by Asian investors at prices so high those investors are guaranteed to lose money in the short term. There is so much money around, he suggested, that to some people a modest but predictable rate of loss seems like a better choice than remaining exposed to the swings of global capital markets.

No, our problem is low demand.

I have never claimed to know much about economics, but it seems to me this calls for a liberal solution. Attempts to increase demand by cutting taxes have had little effect; after all, the rich already have more money than they can spend or invest profitably. The only way forward I can see would be to tap some of that idle capital through high taxes on the rich, or taxes on financial transfers or some such, and let the government invest it in public infrastructure. Building a high-speed rail network would create a lot of jobs and leave us all better off at the end; all of our major subway systems could be expanded and upgraded; our water and sewer systems need billions in repairs; potholed roads could be repaired; aging schools could be renovated or replaced; and so on. This is not the sort of program I would have endorsed 15 years ago, but right now I don't see any alternative. The way things are going, the Labor Department doesn't expect the unemployment to fall below 7.5% until 2015, and that is a horrible thing to impose on working Americans.

On a deeper level, I have to ask myself what it means that our economy depends on constantly increasing our consumption. We already live in a world where bottled water shipped from Fiji seems perfectly normal, and $4 cups of gourmet coffee are the daily indulgence of students and mailroom clerks. We have more clothes than we can wear, more stuff than we can fit in our enormous houses, luxurious cars with enough available horsepower to power our electrical grid 50 times over. Is this the best we can do with the vast resources created by our awesome technological and managerial prowess? I would prefer to invest more, via taxation, in things like providing addiction treatment for everyone who wants it, prenatal care for all pregnant women, more parks, more flower gardens, and other public goods. But on an economic level, this is more or less the approach they take in Europe, and they have a terrible problem with unemployment, too. So it remains a mystery how to make a modern economy work for everyone.

Dutch Women Don't Want to Work

In the oh-so-progressive Netherlands, the gap between men's and women's incomes is the widest in Europe. Women aren't protesting, though. In fact, attempts by the government to get women to work more hours at higher-paying jobs have failed because of indifference on the part of the women. Jessica Oilen, ambitious American reporter, finds it all rather confusing:

I've been in the Netherlands for nearly three months now, and I've come to one overwhelming conclusion: Dutch women are not like me. I worry about my career incessantly. I take daily stock of its trajectory and make vicious mental critiques of my endeavors. And I know—based on weekly phone conversations with friends in the United States—that my masochistic drive for success is widely shared among my female friends. Meanwhile, the Dutch women around me take a lackadaisical approach to their careers. They work half days, meet their friends for coffee at 2 p.m., and pity their male colleagues who are stuck in the office all day.

Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises. 

A major 2009 study concluded that the government's efforts to get more women to work full time were "doomed to failure" because nobody wants to change. There's even a Dutch book titled Dutch Women Don't Get Depressed arguing that Dutch women are happier because they have a better balance between work and the rest of their lives.

Sounds great to me. All I need is a Dutch husband. . . .

Lightning at the Vatican

I just wanted to say that this picture of lightning striking the Vatican on the day of the pope's resignation is amazing. Does this happen often? Certainly this is the only picture I have found of this happening -- in contrast to, for example, the Empire State Building, which gets struck by lightning all the time.

Petty Corruption in a Shrunken Vatican

I just today got around to reading about the last papal scandal, which began when the Pope's butler leaked a pile of private correspondence to Italian reporters. It's a dismal story, full of mean-spirited backstabbing and frustrated hopes. The pope wanted to reform the Vatican and make it more transparent and accountable, but his efforts were frustrated by a cabal of Italian cardinals. For example, the pope actually announced in public that the Vatican bank would adopt international rules against money laundering and allow EU officials to audit its books, but this never happened; too much exposure of church secrets, the cardinals insisted, and they have had their way so far. The man who spearheaded the reform effort was packed off to serve as ambassador to the US, the whole matter quietly forgotten. It's like something from the sixteenth century, except back then the papacy was one of the world's wealthiest and most important institutions. At least when the Borgias and the Medicis were struggling for control, the papacy was a prize worth having. Now, the machinations of cardinals feel like the maneuverings of board members in a suburban homeowners' association. Small men, squabbling over crumbs, as the church sinks around them.

The Margaret Mead Controversy Rolls On

Once upon a time, a young American anthropologist named Margaret Mead went to Samoa, where she spent a lot of time interviewing women about their sex lives. Then she came home and wrote a book called Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), in which she argued 1) that Samoan teenagers had a lot of sex before marriage, and 2) that because of the lack of "repression" Samoans had much less troubled attitudes toward sex than westerners, and their transition to adulthood was much happier and smoother than the adolescent struggles experienced by western teenagers.

Mead has been controversial ever since. This is partly because of her personality and her political beliefs, and partly because some of her work was undoubtedly sloppy. She was a leftist first and an anthropologist second; for her, activism always came before scholarship. She was a leading light of a school of left-wing thought that we might call feminist sexual pacifism, viz., women must become equal partly so they can then restrain male aggression, and the first thing we need to do to remake society is end men's sexual control of women. Free love, not war.

The ongoing debate over Mead's work in Samoa was launched by Derek Freeman, who argued in a 1983 book that 1) Mead made a lot of stuff up, and 2) she was so gullible that she was taken in by teenage girls who were only telling jokes. Freeman's sources were from the families -- prominent Christian families, full of bishops and the like -- of some of Mead's subjects, and they told Freeman that they were shocked by the lies Mead had told about their grandmothers 50 years before. Freeman chose to believe these sources and therefore to accuse Mead of being gullible, which, well, you know.

After numerous books and articles and countless hours of arguments in the bars at anthropological conferences, the consensus seems to be that the factual part of Mead's Samoan work is pretty good. Premarital sex was common in early twentieth-century Samoa. As to whether Samoans were really happier than stuffy middle class Americans, well, that is a harder question, but she was certainly entitled to her opinion.

Some of Mead's later work has not stood up nearly so well. For example, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies compared three societies in New Guinea and found that the greater the power of women, the less violent the society. Since there are hundreds of distinct societies in New Guinea, no doubt it would be possible to find three of which this was true, but later work suggests that Mead did not even achieve this. In particular, the Arapesh, said by Mead to be pacifists, have been embroiled in wars ever since. Even Mead knew that they had recently been involved in a war, but they insisted that they only fought defensively, and Mead believed them. Other claims about sex roles in these societies have also been questioned by later anthropologists.

I find the intersection of politics and anthropology quite fascinating. It has certainly been with us for a very long time. After all, why are we curious about other cultures? One big reason is that they show us other ways of doing things, and just knowing that there are other ways of doing things can lead us to question our own cultural assumptions. As Mead's mentor Franz Boas wrote in his introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa,

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Instructive how? Margaret Mead and her allies pursued anthropology as a critique of western society. They were convinced that we had gone badly astray -- and in an era of world war, totalitarianism, scientific genocide, and concrete box architecture, who could blame them? To the conservatives' claim that we had gone astray by too much questioning of our own traditions, Mead opposed the claim that, on the contrary, World War I was the perfect expression of the western tradition, and what was needed was a radical reconsideration of our society from top to bottom. The point of anthropology, to people like Mead, is to convince people that our way is not necessarily the best way. Anthropologists have therefore been strongly drawn to societies with weak notions of private property, strong public roles for women, and so on.

As a child of the post-sexual revolution world, I have never found Mead's claims about Samoan sexuality terribly interesting. We in America now have a sexual cultural at least as promiscuous as that of Polynesia, but we emphatically do not find that this makes it psychologically easier for anyone to navigate the transition from child to adult. I am therefore drawn to another part of Mead's picture of Samoa. A Samoan girl, she wrote, was presented with only a single set of values, and only one possible path to adulthood. But

... a[n American] girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaller, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that women's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races. Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. . . . And this may be within the girl's own household. Add to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one another, becomes appalling.

This, it seems to me, is the source of the troubles young westerners have with their identities. The less that is fixed for us by tradition, the more we have to find or invent for ourselves. But although I find this to be Mead's most important observation, neither she nor her critics devoted much attention to following it up. After all, if we believe that young westerners have troubles because they live in an enormous, rapidly changing, highly commercialized, highly diverse society, what then? Obviously we cannot somehow recreate a world in which we all pursue our father's careers, honor the king and worship in the only church our ancestors have ever known. So there is little fodder for left-right wrangling, nothing to get angry about, and therefore not much reason, it seems, for politicized anthropologists to care.

Savage Rabbits at the Denver Airport

Today's just because news item:

It's a problem that plagues passengers who park at Denver International Airport- bunnies are causing hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in damage to cars. The rabbits eat the wires under the hood. The USDA Wildlife Service is removing at least 100 bunnies every month but the problem persists.

"I see at least dozens every morning. They go hide under the cars and the cars are warm," said airport shuttle driver Michelle Anderson. "They like to chew on the insulator portion of the ignition cables. That's what we see," said Arapahoe Autotek spokesman Wiley Faris.

And once you have a rabbit problem, it is hard to do much about it, because they breed faster than you can kill them. (One hundred a month? Ha!) So regular airport parkers have taken to smearing their ignition wires with coyote urine.

The Wombs of Bears

Bear reproduction is curious. It works like this: in the spring or summer, mother black, brown, and polar bears manage to approach close enough to a potential father to have bear sex, which is different from fighting only in that insemination somehow occurs. Their fertilized eggs grow into blastocysts. But then they stop growing for months while the mother tries to get fat enough to live through the winter.

Then, in late fall, the mother bear curls up in some cozy snow cave and goes to sleep. (Memo to scientific nitpickers: bears hibernate, regardless of what your narrow definition says. They spend months with a heart rate of 9 beats per minute, their metabolism reduced by more than half, and that's good enough for me and most bear experts.)

Once she is down for the winter, the mother bear's body starts to make calculations. If she has not gained enough weight to insure her own survival, her body expels the blastocysts and she has no baby that year. Otherwise her body allows one, two, or three blastocysts to implant in the womb and start to develop. Once this happens, gestation lasts only about two months. That means that in colder places bears give birth while still hibernating. Their babies find their way to the breasts and latch on, and so spend their first few weeks curled up with their sleeping mother. I know some of you human mothers out there are already jealous -- imagine giving birth in your sleep to the exact number of babies you can afford to raise! You would sleep through the initial, painful part of breastfeeding, too, and wake up with a surprise present of month-old, super cute bear cubs.

Russian Meteor -- Wow

Amazing photos and videos of the meteor that split the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia yesterday.

But here's a question: why do so many Russians drive around with videocameras on the dashboards of their cars?

UPDATE: It seems that Russians all have dashboard cameras because accidents are common and the traffic court system is so corrupt that the only way to avoid false liability claims is to have videotape of any accidents. Strange world in which we end up with all this awesome video of a meteor impact because of traffic court corruption.

Hopperstad Stave Church, Norway

I love Norway's medieval wooden churches, and it was hard to choose one to feature as my medieval church of the week. I settled on Hopperstad, built around 1130. I chose it because of its famous medieval carvings, which I will get to below. Today, as you can see, the church also looks spectacular from a distance.

Sadly, this is the largely the result of a "restoration" undertaken in the 1880s. In 1880 it looked like this. Inspired by not-very-sound ideas about what the church "probably" looked like before time and Protestantism took their toll, the rebuilders remodeled the roof along the lines of the famous church at Borgund.

But if the rebuilding was not authentic, it sure is gorgeous.

But Hopperstad does retain many original features. The interior is the most intact of any medieval church in Norway.

And the completely authentic west portal is surrounded by amazing carvings.

Antiwar Liberals are not Defending Obama's Foreign Policy

Conservatives have been crying hypocrisy lately about liberals and Obama's foreign policy; if Bush did these things, liberals would be up in arms, so the argument goes. Alex Pareene demolished this attack in a piece at Salon this week. First, as he points out, many liberals support Obama's aggressive posture overseas because they are, in fact, interventionists who generally support killing brown people in the pursuit of justice and democracy. Numerous liberals from Hillary Clinton to Diane Feinstein voted for the Gulf War resolution, and to call these people hypocrites for not denouncing Obama misses something important about them.

Second, those of us in the antiwar faction are not defending Obama's actions. Pareene:

There is undoubtedly less outrage, but ignoring the administration’s more questionable actions is far more common than defending them, at least among the sort of liberals I read. That’s obviously not a strong claim for liberal intellectual heroism — “just look the other way for now because the other guy is worse!” is probably a fair caricature of lots of liberal thought during the last election — but it’s still quite different from claiming that Obama’s policies were and are being actively defended by antiwar liberals.

Finally, a slogan I can get behind 100 percent: look the other way for now because the other guy is worse.

Helping the Blind See

News today that the FDA has approved a new device that can give partial vision back to people whose light-sensitive cells have been ravaged by retinitis pigmentosa. The device consists of a video camera, embedded in a pair of glasses, that broadcasts a signal to a grid of electrodes implanted in the eye (above). It's a fairly cumbersome rig that requires wearing a small computer on your hip as well as the glasses, and for most patients what it produces is far from normal sight. But it's something, and it points the way toward a time when will be able to fully restore sight to the blind.

Imperial Bungling at Hoth

Spencer Ackerman points out the utter incoherence of the Empire's attack on the Rebel base in the Hoth System. Besides their loss of surprise, for which Vader strangles their admiral just as the battle is beginning, and their useless "blockade," which can't stop unarmed transports from leaving the system, there is the puzzlement of the ground assault. The point of the attack is said to be destroying the generator that is protecting the base from bombardment. But note how it unfolds:

The first phase of the battle is a ground assault launched against the generator. Vader devotes five (or maybe four, since Irvin Kershner’s directing isn’t consistent) Imperial AT-AT Walkers to the task. Vader sees no need to give them air cover, even though he’s tasted the quality of Rebel piloting during the destruction of the Death Star. Two of the Walkers are destroyed, one by Luke Skywalker’s Snowspeeder squadron, and another by Luke himself. . . .

But the surviving Walkers reach the shield generator and destroy it. But does the bombardment then commence? No!

Only Vader can’t bombard the base: He’s in it. For reasons that never get explained — and can’t be justified militarily — Vader joins the Stormtrooper assault on the base. So much for his major weapon against the Rebels, and the primary reason for ordering the Walkers to invade and destroy the generator. Once Vader opts to bring down the shield and lead the invasion, he’s lost the battle.

I mean, really. Is a small amount of consistency too much to ask?

A Note on Republican Foreign Policy

Who gives a rat’s ass about Benghazi? Seriously, who?

--Rod Dreher, The American Conservative