Harvard University Press Blog

In Loving Memory of Lonesome George

Upon learning of the death of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, we invited comment from Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at USC and author of The Last Tortoise. His post is below.

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If Lonesome George had been human, his obituary would have read:

George passed away peacefully on June 24, 2012, at the age of approximately 100. He was born on Pinta Island around 1912 and lived there until 1971, when he moved to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador. He served his country for decades as the greatest tourist attraction in the Galapagos Islands, and was visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year. He dies leaving no surviving descendants.

That last sentence is the one that matters. Jorge Solitario, or Lonesome George, was the last surviving member of his race, the subspecies of giant Galapagos tortoise known as Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni, the Pinta Island tortoise. The main islands of the Galapagos archipelago each have or had their own distinctive giant tortoise, molded by natural selection to be adapted to the terrain and the foods of its island. George’s subspecies inhabited a small northerly island that is fairly barren, rocky, and forbidding, but which once had a large tortoise population. The whaling ships of the 18th century made short work of the islands, collecting hundreds of thousands of the animals to be stored alive in the cargo hold and butchered as needed for fresh meat during their long voyages. We estimate the pre-whaling tortoise population of the entire Galapagos chain to have been 250,000-300,000 tortoises. Perhaps 15,000 live on the islands today; at least three islands have now lost their tortoises altogether.

In 1971, seventy years after the last tortoise on Pinta was thought to have died, a biologist visiting the island spotted Lonesome George ambling across the dry landscape. Not realizing the significance of the sighting, a year passed before another biologist learned that the Pinta race was not quite extinct. Expeditions were mounted to Pinta to search for George. A large tortoise on a small island might not seem a difficult target, but only through much luck was George found. He was transported to the Darwin Station by boat, and remained there for more than forty years. All subsequent attempts to find more Pinta Island tortoises failed. For years he shared his pen with two females from the slopes of Wolf Volcano in the northernmost part of Isabela Island. But George showed no interest in having sex with them. Later, he was paired with females of other, similar subspecies from the islands, and in recent years three clutches of eggs were produced that he had fathered. But none of the clutches hatched. George was likely infertile, either through age, or just very bad luck.

The story of the Pinta Island tortoise does not quite end there. Recent genotyping of tortoises from around the Galapagos has turned up at least one tortoise, from Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island, that is fifty percent Pinta. It is likely the progeny of a Wolf tortoise and a Pinta tortoise that ended up on Isabela. Perhaps ocean currents carried it there, or more likely, he or his mother was dropped overboard by an inept crew of whalers. Only a tiny fraction of the tortoises of the islands have been genotyped, and there lies some faint hope that another male and female of the Pinta Island tortoises live still.

It is always sad and disturbing when humans drive a species into extinction. But extinction is rarely so clear-cut as with the tortoises of Pinta. One last surviving member lived on and on, reminding us of our past sins to his race and beckoning us to try one more time to save them. In the case of Lonesome George, it was too little, too late.

Lonesome George

When Hedgehog Met Guinea Pig

 

And so, like Frog and Toad before them, Hedgehog and Guinea Pig join in beautiful friendship.

Starring:

• Justice for Hedgehogs, by Ronald Dworkin
• A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, by Jim Endersby
• Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society, by Con Slobodchikoff, Bianca S. Perla, and Jennifer Verdolin

Gender Games

Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm is the first comprehensive critical analysis of studies that purport to show a link between testosterone exposure in the womb and the so-called “sexual brain” (meaning everything from the idea that there is a male versus female brain, to the idea that sexual orientation is caused by early hormone exposures). As Jordan-Young puts it on her website, to say she found this theory to be unsupported by evidence is “a bit of an understatement.”

Jordan-Young’s most recent work takes aim at the methods of “gender verification” employed in the governance of elite female athletic competition. Various athletic associations have been scrambling to set guidelines (both legal and scientific) for determining exactly who should be qualified to compete as a woman. The International Olympic Committee, arguably the sporting world’s most influential rule-setter, has a new policy that is expected to ban women with naturally high testosterone levels, on the grounds that elevated levels of the hormone give them an unfair advantage.

As Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis explain, this policy is neither fair nor rational:

(W)hen it comes to sex, sports authorities should acknowledge that while science can offer evidence, it cannot dictate what evidence we should use. Scientifically, there is no clear or objective way to draw a bright line between male and female.

Testosterone is one of the most slippery markers that sports authorities have come up with yet. Yes, average testosterone levels are markedly different for men and women. But levels vary widely depending on time of day, time of life, social status and—crucially—one’s history of athletic training. Moreover, cellular responses range so widely that testosterone level alone is meaningless.

Jordan-Young and Karkazis argue that if what we’re actually seeking is clarity then “it’s time to stop pawning this fundamentally social question off onto scientists.” And they go on to note that sex testing of female athletes will always be discriminatory, in that men will most likely never be subjected to similar verification. With competitive fairness underwriting these regulations, there’s little concern that a scientifically unqualified male (whatever that means) would have an advantage over scientifically verifiable ones (again, whatever that means).

And so these policies are ostensibly rooted in the notion that female athletes must be “protected” from competition against men. “Protection has been the cloak that covers all manner of sex discrimination,” write Jordan-Young and Karkazis, “and it is seldom, if ever, the best way to advance equality.”

In perhaps the most damning point against policies based on testosterone levels, Jordan-Young and Karkazis explain that there’s no valid reason to equate higher testosterone with enhanced performance. Not only is testosterone not “the master molecule of athleticism,” but the performances of women who have been found in violation of policies such as that being considered by the IOC have not been out of line with those of other elite female athletes.

Flattery Most Sincere

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, by Stephanie McCurry; published by HUP in cloth April 2010 and in paperback May 2012; cover design featuring William Bauly’s 1861 painting Fate of the rebel flag:

A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman; published by Random House in cloth June 2011:

And in paperback June 2012:

We’re blushing. 

Rodney King's Legacy

Last week, in advance of a march planned to protest NYC’s stop-and-frisk policy, we quoted Khalil Gibran Muhammad describing how the tactic casts all young men of color as potential criminals. You can see scenes from that march in this short video:

 

Just hours before the march, the body of Rodney King was discovered at the bottom of his LA swimming pool. King, whose videotaped 1991 beating at the hands of the LAPD led to days of uprising and heightened scrutiny of police brutality nationwide, was 47.

Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, explained to Tavis Smiley last year that the beating of Rodney King “crashed in” on his college days, diverting him from what had then been a path toward a career in business. “From that point forward,” he told Smiley, “I was fundamentally shaken by the position of being a young Black man in America and really had a lot of unanswered questions about where I fit in the world and what the future held for me.”

Yesterday, Muhammad reflected on Rodney King’s legacy, and how policies like stop-and-frisk can be traced to a “crisis of legitimacy” that arose after the treatment of King and others came to light:

Looking back over the past two decades through the lens of King’s life – including the acquittal and mistrial of the four officers (two were later convicted of civil rights violations in federal court) and the 1992 LA uprising that followed – reveals that police intimidation and/or violence has become a normal rite of passage for millions of black people in America today. Since 2006, in New York City alone, roughly a half million black and Latino people every year are treated as would-be criminals through a perfectly legal policy of racial profiling known as stop, question and frisk. Required to prove their right to pass freely in the financial and cultural capital of the free world, those stopped are almost all innocent of any criminal offence.

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The raw violence [of the King beating] did not match three decades of post-racial mythology, where the only racism supposedly left in America was affirmative action. King’s tape and others that followed, along with greater federal scrutiny of police agencies, compelled criminal justice officials and politicians to re-engineer or rig the system into a labyrinth of ostensibly race-neutral policies – such as stop, question, and frisk or stand your ground laws. It is now this system that legitimates the routine targeting of young black men for harassment or violence and that is now under attack as witnessed by yesterday's silent march in New York City.

You can read the rest of Muhammad’s piece at the Guardian.

The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1932 that “Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.” Last year we asked Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness and Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, whether the statement still characterizes life in America:

Do I think that a statement like that holds true, even to this day? Yes. If I were to give the glib, short answer: yes. And it comes in many forms. One form is the case of New York, where we know explicitly about a policy like stop-and-frisk. A policy like that exists on the rationale that, in black and brown communities, you’ll find the most street level crime, mostly revolving around drugs or contraband guns, and so those communities should be subjected to extreme forms of surveillance, like stopping and searching people, frisking them. That is a form of accusation, the very form of surveillance and policing in those communities is, in effect, taking individual black and brown young men, and accusing them of potential criminality. There is something about the ability and the willingness for us as a society to accept that kind of treatment of young black men whose innocence should be presumed, and not in question, when they are encountered on the streets.

The statistics on the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy are staggering, with the New York Times reporting that in 2011 the NYPD stopped people 685,724 times, and that 88% of those stopped were not arrested or even ticketed. And 87% of those stopped were Black or Latino.

Scrutiny of the policy is at a high, with the NAACP organizing a silent march to protest stop-and-frisk in NYC this Sunday, June 17th. As the NAACP explains, silent marches have a tradition that dates back to 1917, when Du Bois led the organization’s first major public protest and demonstrated the power of thousands of people marching silently through the streets:

Silence is a powerful force that, like other forms of non-violent protest, holds a mirror to the brutality of one's opponents. On June 17, we will hold up a mirror to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. It is not only discriminatory, it actively seeks to humiliate innocent citizens—particularly African American and Latino men—and criminalize otherwise legal behavior.
 
Right now in our nation’s most diverse city, NYPD officials are legally empowered to stop and pat down any individual based on nothing more than their own suspicion. In 2009, the most common justification for a stop was a vague category called “furtive movements.”

The result? Blacks and Latinos are nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by police, and the searches overwhelmingly target young men of color. In one eight-block area of an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police made 52,000 stops over a four-year period—an average of nearly one stop per resident each year.

And the vast majority of those stopped are innocent. In 2011, the NYPD stopped and questioned 685,000 New Yorkers. Of those, 605,000 walked away with no charges—only a feeling of humiliation and anger.

 People of color should not be afraid to walk down the street in their own city. On June 17th, we will proudly walk with them to assert that right. Like thousands of activists before us, we will channel the power of our silence to bring public attention to the use of racial profiling by the New York Police Department.

Also this week, the Times released a short documentary, The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk, focused on a young man in Brooklyn who says he was stopped more than 60 times before age 18. It’s a powerful story:

 

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bechdel

Alison Bechdel, a favorite of many here at the Press, has a new graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother that attempts to answer the ages-old (or at least Freud-old) question of why we are who we are. As Lawrence Weschler explains in his warm endorsement of Are You My Mother?, Bechdel “deploys everyone from Virginia Woolf to D. W. Winnicott (the legendary psychoanalytic theorist who comes to serve as her quest’s benign fairy godfather) to untie the snares of a fraught past.”

One of the great pleasures of the book is getting to see the progression of Bechdel’s immersion in Woolf et al. She depicts herself buried in works ranging from Lacan, Freud, and Jung, to C. S. Lewis, A. A. Milne, and Dr. Seuss. And so, in tracking her syllabus, we couldn’t help but notice an HUP title in the mix, Adam Phillips’ On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Here’s Bechdel in repose with Phillips:

Then, later in the story, Bechdel turns to Phillips for insight into her mother’s paralyzing arachnophobia:

So, of course, we ran off to find a copy of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, which was a New York Times Notable Book back when released in 1993. The book’s essays find Phillips, a children’s psychotherapist, bringing a relaxed humor to stories about the subtleties of human behavior and the unconscious. The fascinating passage on spiders from which Bechdel quotes is excerpted below.

Secret Document, Invisible Hand

Earlier this year, the Planet Money Podcast did an episode on “The Secret Document That Transformed China,” a story they describe as follows:

In 1978, a group of farmers in a Chinese village called Xiaogang wrote a secret contract and hid it in the roof of a mud hut. They were afraid the document might get them executed. Instead, it wound up completely transforming the Chinese economy.

 

The episode, which you can listen to via the embedded player above, describes how farmers in Xiaogang and across China had their working hours and planting patterns dictated by Communist Party officials, and had to communally share their harvests. Under that system they were barely subsisting, often reduced to begging for food, a shameful experience for those whose work was to grow it. So a small group of farmers agreed in secret to try something new. The farmers would keep a portion of their own yield, and so be inspired to work harder with the knowledge that their own families would benefit.

Of course, in the villages of Communist China there was no personal property. As one of the farmers told the Planet Money reporters, every single piece of straw belonged to the group. According to Party officials, even the teeth in each farmer’s mouth belonged to the collective. Knowing how boldly their plan contradicted Party directives, the farmers all agreed to provide for the families of any one of them who was killed or banished as punishment for their new system.

As the podcast details, their pact was a great success. They all worked much harder than before, and had harvests to match. Those things couldn’t go unnoticed, though, and they were found out by a local official who planned to shut down their arrangement, until he was overruled by a higher bureaucrat who demanded the farmers be allowed to continue. The Party decided to treat these farmers and their twist on the Protestant ethic as an experiment, and their success led to the arrangement’s wide adoption across Deng Xiaoping’s newly reform-minded China.

The Planet Money folks characterize the drafting of that secret document as a watershed moment in Chinese history, and, given the prevailing conception of the CPC as steadfast in its resistance to change, it’s easy to imagine this “transformation” of China as the result of a rare and unlikely willingness to experiment. But a recent book from the Harvard University Asia Center suggests otherwise.

In Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, a group of distinguished scholars details China’s “guerilla policy style,” which flowed from and resembled Mao’s revolutionary strategy. The book’s contributors argue that constant adaptation is in large part responsible for the ability of the Chinese Communist system to survive such disruptions as Tiananmen Square, outlive rapid economic expansion, and outlast the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations that were all ostensibly defined by their shared institutional structure.

The Seminary Co-op Documentary Project

After 50 years in its current spot, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore is moving to a new location later this year. Two University of Chicago alumni and Seminary Co-op members who recognize the importance and uniqueness of this legendary bookselling institution have undertaken a project to document it before the move, and they want your photos and stories.

They describe the project as follows:

As alumni of the University of Chicago who think that the Seminary Co-Op was an essential part of our experience, we will be documenting the beloved bookstore in its current location before its imminent move. Although we're thrilled that the new space will have windows and other improvements, we anticipate missing the sense of intimacy created by low ceilings and unbroken walls of books, as well as the sense of physical discovery experienced as you walk through the maze that is the layout of the current space. Moreover, because the Co-Op just turned 50 last year, it's a wonderful time to take a moment to celebrate and remember! It's become clear that a serious attempt to capture the unique atmosphere and character of the Co-Op must include not only photographs, but also stories and videos. Let us invite you to please join us in this endeavor. If you would like to participate in this project in any way – have your portrait taken in the bookstore, share your favorite Co-Op memory (written or via audio interview), submit any artifacts or memorabilia you have from the Co-Op for exhibition/archival in Special Collections, and/or something else – please contact Jasmine and Megan at sem.coop.project@gmail.com.

They’ve put together a series of postcards to help promote the project, including that one up top featuring the Loeb Classical Library.

So help them out! Send them your thoughts and memories of the Co-op. Here’s one from us, an archival shot of John Rawls photobombing in the basement. Don’t ask us where we found it. 

America's Long War for Oil

June’s Journal of American History is a special issue on “Oil in American History” featuring nearly two dozen essays on the theme, all of which are currently available full-text online. Below, we’ve posted a short excerpt from Toby Craig Jones’s contribution to the issue, an article entitled “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East.” Jones, whose Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia we published in 2010, is at work on a book about America’s oil wars.

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Capturing oil and oil fields and establishing direct or imperial control over oil has not been part of the United States’ strategic logic for war. But protecting oil, oil producers, and the flow of oil has been. This is a critical distinction. The period between 1990 and the end of the long war in Iraq marks only the latest stage of American militarism in the Gulf. If oil and American oil policy—rather than the behavior of Saddam Hussein, the politics of the war on terrorism, or a handful of other political factors—are kept in focus, then one can argue that this period constitutes not a series of wars, but a single long war, one in which pursuing regional security and protecting oil and American-friendly oil producers has been the principal strategic rationale. That the permanent shadow of war has settled over the Persian Gulf in the last three decades is largely the direct outcome of the ways that oil has been tied to American national security and the ways that American policy makers linked security to militarization.

It might be tempting to argue that the escalating involvement of the United States and its history of militarism and military engagement in the Gulf region have provided a kind of security for the region. After all, oil has continued to flow, the network of oil producers has remained the same, and thus the primary interests of the United States in the region have been served. But three decades of war belie this argument. War is not tantamount to security, stability, or peace. Even in the periods between wars in the region the violence carried out by regimes against their own subjects makes clear that peace is not always peaceful. The cost has been high for the United States and especially for people who live in the Middle East. In thirty years of war, hundreds of thousands have died excruciating and violent deaths. Poverty, environmental disaster, torture, and wretched living conditions haunt the lives of many in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere in the region. Of course, the burden of death and destruction does not fall entirely on the United States and its policy of militarization. The politics of war have primarily served the interests of regional leaders who have, often from a position of weakness, exported violence to deflect internal challenges to their authority. And international political rivalry, particularly during the Cold War, drew in the other global powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which also helped facilitate insecurity and disorder in the Middle East.

The region’s autocrats have also remained in power. As citizens began to challenge ruling regimes in early 2011 in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman—three of the closest allies of the United States in the region—it became clear that those governments are all too willing to turn the weapons of war, purchased mostly from the United States, on their subjects. It is also clear that those regimes are hardly stable and that they are and will remain perennially vulnerable to domestic and regional shocks, which poses a real dilemma for U.S. policy. In addition to factoring in the human toll of wars and the moral dilemmas they raise, Americans trying to determine the true price of oil in the United States must take into account the financial cost of maintaining a massive military presence in the Gulf region. Roger Stern estimates that between 1976 and 2007 the total cost of maintaining the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf was about $7 trillion, and that figure does not include the costs of the 2003 Iraq War.

The increasing willingness of the United States to use force and violence to shore up the flow of oil to global markets has not been a sign of American strength but rather of its limits. Popular political discourse in the United States often posits Americans and their government as unwitting victims of an unhealthy and unsustainable addiction or as dupes of duplicitous oil producers. It would certainly be wise to break this addiction to oil, but to do so requires coming to terms with the history of that addiction and the multiple costs it entails. But it is hardly clear that any such reconsideration is happening. Instead, the United States appears set to continue along a familiar path. Having crafted a set of relationships with oil and unstable oil producers and having linked the fate of those relationships to American national security virtually ensures that while the United States is wrapping up the most recent oil war, its military and political strategists are already preparing for the next one.

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Visit the companion website for the “Oil in American History” issue of the Journal of American History.