Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /home/customer/www/ufppc.org/public_html/libraries/fof30/Input/Input.php on line 99 United for Peace of Pierce County - Book Notes
Tues., Oct. 16, marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis. -- Michael Dobbs, the author of a 2008 history of the episode, in which the two superpowers came close to all-out nuclear war, argued Tuesday in a New York Times Op-Ed that the received narrative of the Cuban missile crisis is false. -- In that version of events, President John F. Kennedy showed "toughness" and faced down the Soviet Union. -- But Dobbs's research revealed that Soviet ships did not, in fact, stop a few miles from Kennedy's blockade line. -- Instead, "the lead Soviet ship, the Kimovsk, was actually 750 miles away from the blockade line, heading back toward the Soviet Union, at the time of the supposed 'eyeball to eyeball' incident. Acting to avert a naval showdown, the Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had turned his missile-carrying freighters around some 30 hours earlier."[1] -- "The "eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow just blinked" account is a myth fabricated by Kennedy administration propagandists. -- "In fact, Kennedy went out of his way to avoid such a war," according to Dobbs. -- "In deciding how to respond to Khrushchev, Kennedy was influenced by his reading of The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman’s 1962 account of the origins of World War I. The most important lesson he drew from it was that mistakes and misunderstandings can unleash an unpredictable chain of events, causing governments to go to war with little understanding of the consequences." -- The myth of Kennedy's steely-eyed obduracy has had unfortunate consequences, becoming a false "touchstone of toughness by which presidents are measured" that is now playing an an unhelpful role in the U.S.-Iran stand-off, Dobbs warned....
It is not the case that evolution "explains" traits or that an understanding of evolution is essential for an understanding of human behavior, Anthony Gottlieb writes in the Sept. 17, 2012, number of the New Yorker.[1] -- Gottlieb's piece is a review of Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2012), the latest book by the prolific UW Seattle prof David Barash. -- According to Gottlieb, a sometime academic who is well versed in the history of ideas, one of the problems in popular thinking about evolution is that the popular mind has trouble grasping that the notion of evolutionary "design" is just a "useful shorthand." -- "[E]volution has to make compromises, since it must work with the materials at hand, often while trying to solve several challenges at once," Gottlieb says. "If nature always stuck to simple plans, it would be easier to track the paths of evolution, but nature does not have that luxury." -- "[B]iologists speak[ing] figuratively of design in nature, or the 'purpose' for which something evolved" is "useful shorthand, as long as it’s understood that no forward planning or blueprints are involved. But that caveat is often forgotten when we’re talking about the 'design' of our minds or our behavior." ...
David Ropeik of the Harvard Extension School is one of those who are promoting the idea that the structure of the human brain gives priority to emotion over rational thought, and in particular that the amygdala is instrumental in this. -- Ropeik's name has appeared in the New York Times more than 800 times, and on Sunday he published another piece in the Sunday Review section, rehearsing the argument that "the basic architecture of the brain ensures that we feel first and thnk second."[1] -- "The part of the brain where the instinctive “fight or flight” signal is first triggered -- the amygdala -- is situated such that it receives incoming stimuli before the parts of the brain that think things over," he wrote. -- This idea is far from new, and back in 2010, self-satisfied liberals touted the news that scientists at University College London found that "people with conservative views have brains with larger amygdalas," as the Telegraph reported.[2] -- In fact, promoting such notionsis something of a cottage industry. -- Ropeik himself is a former television reporter[3] who has parlayed a specialization in environmental news into a career in risk analysis (he is now "an independent consultant to government, business, trade associations, consumer groups, and educational institutions" who continues to teach at the Harvard Extension School after leaving the Harvard School of Public Health, where he served for a time as director of communications for its Center for Risk Analysis). -- Ropeik is the author of How Risky It It Really? Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts (McGraw-Hill, 2010) and the co-author of Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You (Mariner Books, 2002). -- But a British writer thinks that there is less here than meets the eye, warning, in effect, that disease vectors for a wave of "intellectual pestilence" have been released: "the 'neural' explanation has become a gold standard of non-fiction exegesis, adding its own brand of computer-assisted lab-coat bling to a whole new industry of intellectual quackery that affects to elucidate even complex sociocultural phenomena," said a piece in the New Statesman a few weeks back.[4] -- "Happily," wrote Steven Poole, a British author and journalist, "a new branch of the neuroscience-explains-everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix 'neuro' to whatever you are talking about. Thus, 'neuroeconomics' is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; 'molecular gastronomy' has now been trumped in the scientized gluttony stakes by 'neurogastronomy'; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing 'neuropolitics'; literature academics practice 'neurocriticism.'" -- Poole calls it "self-help armored in hard science," noting that "[i]n a self-congratulatory egalitarian age, you can no longer tell people to improve themselves morally. So self-improvement is couched in instrumental, scientifically approved terms." -- The fly in the ointment of all this pseudo-enlightenment is the mistaken assumption that, in the words of Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, “activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes." -- In fact, Poole writes, "That a part of it 'lights up' on an fMRI scan does not mean the rest is inactive; nor is it obvious what any such lighting-up indicates; nor is it straightforward to infer general lessons about life from experiments conducted under highly artificial conditions. Nor do we have the faintest clue about the biggest mystery of all -- how does a lump of wet grey matter produce the conscious experience you are having right now, reading this paragraph? How come the brain gives rise to the mind? No one knows." -- In the popular literature on brain science, "the great movie-monster of nearly all the pop brain literature is . . . the amygdala. It is routinely described as the 'ancient' or 'primitive' brain, scarily atavistic. There is strong evidence for the amygdala’s role in fear, but then fear is one of the most heavily studied emotions; popularizers downplay or ignore the amygdala’s associations with the cuddlier emotions and memory." ...