Harvard University Press Blog

Food and Memory

John S. Allen’s The Omnivorous Mind is an examination of the cultural and biological truths revealed by our evolving relationship with food. From the diets of our earliest ancestors, to cooking’s role in the evolution of the human brain, to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies, Allen’s take on how and what we eat is consistently revelatory. Below, Allen looks at the powerful role food plays in human memory. Also below, listen to a conversation with Allen on a recent episode of our podcast. 

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Not that long ago, at the counter of a gas station out in the country, something yellow and red caught my eye—it was a Bit-O-Honey candy bar wrapper. I had not had a Bit-O-Honey bar for nearly 40 years, having moved as a child from Bit-O-Honey’s midwest base to California. So I bought one. As I unwrapped and ate it, certain memories quickly came back to me: the difficulty of getting the inside wrapping paper off the sticky taffy, the little rectangles meant to be broken off one by one, the initial hard chewiness that always made me wonder if it was stale, and finally, the honeyed flavor of the taffy itself, offset by little bits of nut. The memories did not stop there, however: in an instant, I was transported back in time to the back seat of my parents’ car, looking out the window at the apparently endless rows of corn stalks that passed by for hour after hour as we drove down highways and interstates. I thought about AM radio and the backs of my parents’ heads. I finished my chunk of Bit-O-Honey, got in my car, and drove back to the present.

We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body. So my Bit-O-Honey experience is not all that unusual. Search for websites with the word candy combined with vintage, retro, or nostalgia, and it becomes readily apparent that many people use candy as a pathway to the past. But why should this be the case?

 

There are several reasons. First, evolution has seen to it that food in general may be a privileged target of memory in the brain. There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus (one in each hemisphere) that is critical for memory. The hippocampus is particularly important for forming long-term, declarative memories—those that can be consciously recalled and which contribute to the autobiographies that we all carry around in our heads. The hippocampus is also important for spatial memories, which may be its primary role for animals that do not possess language. The hippocampus has strong connections with parts of the brain that are important for emotion and for smell. This may explain why emotional memories can be so vivid or why certain smells trigger a sense of recall in us even before we consciously remember an event.

The End of the Luzin Affair

One of the hopes of any book publisher, especially a University Press, is that its books will have an impact out in the world. And there’s no single metric for that. Sometimes books find a wide audience, sometimes they revolutionize a discipline, sometimes they win awards, or sometimes they become mainstays of college courses. At HUP we’re fortunate to have grown familiar with our books having these kinds of impact, but we recently learned of a real-world effect that’s almost certainly the first of its kind for an HUP publication: a large Russian bureaucracy has officially changed its position in large part because of an HUP book.

The presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences has passed a resolution clearing the name of the mathematician Nikolai Luzin, whom it had condemned in the 1930s because of his ideological views. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, authors of Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, have received word from the Academy that their book played a large part in the discussions that led to the passing of this resolution.

Naming Infinity, which we described on publication in 2009 as “an exciting mathematical mystery tour,” is about the founding of set theory, and a conflict between French and Russian mathematicians over the nature of infinity. The debate centered on the relation between math and mysticism, and we’ll take a stab at an explanation, though surely an oversimplified one.

Mathematicians deal in geometric perfection (like perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines), but such things can’t actually be found in the natural, physical world. The same is also true of numbers, in that they must consist of perfectly equal units (speaking purely in mathematical terms, you cannot count two oranges if the two oranges you count are not exactly, perfectly similar). Okay, so if the objects studied by mathematicians don’t exist in this world then they must exist in another transcendent realm, one where perfection is possible. Or so said mathematicians.

The problem, though, was the question of how mathematicians gained knowledge of the objects in this other transcendent realm, or how anyone’s physical brain could grasp a non-physical reality. Now, you can basically get around this problem by using your imagination and a little common sense (you’ve experienced an orange, and you can pretend that the two you’re counting are identical). But the concept of infinity throws a roadblock on that shortcut, because we have no physical experience of the infinite. We cannot encounter a full infinity in the natural world. And, given the trouble conceptualizing a single infinity, wrapping one’s mind around the thought of an infinity of infinities, which calculus logically required, was nearly impossible. It presented such a complication that Aristotle actually banned infinity from Greek thought, but modern applied mathematics really couldn’t do without.

For French mathematicians, who were as advanced as any but still very much Descartes’ intellectual descendants, a phenomenon couldn’t be understood if it couldn’t be stated clearly. They resisted fuzziness, shunned metaphysics as theology. Not so for a group of Russian mathematicians who happened to be influenced by a heretical religious sect that practiced “Name Worshipping.” They believed that they could achieve union with the divine by chanting the name of God over and over; they believed, in other words, that Name Worshipping could connect them to another, transcendent realm. Just the sort of portal the concept of infinity seemingly required. So this sect of Russian mathematicians, Nikolai Luzin among them, “named” infinity. And this is one of the central arguments of Graham and Kantor’s book: that a religious heresy in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church (Name Worshipping), was actually instrumental in helping the birth of a new field of modern mathematics.

The Rise and Fall of American Madness

Richard Noll’s American Madness describes the electric rise and fall of the psychiatric diagnosis of the mysterious disorder known as “dementia praecox.” As the first specified disease of psychiatry, dementia praecox’s curious history has a great deal to teach us about the nature of the field. As the American Psychiatric Association engages in the vexed process of revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, American Madness is a more timely study than many in the discipline would probably like to admit. We invited Noll to answer a few questions about what we can learn from the story.

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Q: Prior to your work, the last time “dementia praecox” appeared in the title of a book published in English was 1950. Clearly it has slipped into our cultural unconscious. Briefly, what is the narrative of the rise and fall of dementia praecox?

Ah, yes . . . dementia praecox is indeed a vanished kingdom of suffering and despair. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who received this diagnosis between 1896 and 1952 were stigmatized by both physicians and everyday people as incurably insane. One only has to remember how frequently it was invoked in the culture of that era (such as in the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer) to get a sense of how terrifying those two words once were.

As the influential psychiatrist Adolf Meyer once said, the history of dementia praecox is the history of psychiatry. American Madness is, at one level, the biography of a disease, but most importantly I regard it as the story of how, in the late 1890s, American alienists (as they called themselves) strove to rejoin an American medical profession that was moving toward a science-based, laboratory-driven moral economy founded on a new (circa 1860) European concept of diseases as separate, biologically-specifiable entities with specific biological mechanisms and typical courses and outcomes. For American psychiatry to survive as an accepted branch of medicine, and not remain as a queer survival of a nineteenth-century therapeutic sect, its legitimacy and authority depended upon adopting this doctrine. In an era where one was either sane, nervous, or insane, most alienists and neurologists assumed insanity was a hydra, a single monster with many faces, not separate creatures.

In 1896 German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin proposed a classification of mental diseases based on this new fundamental medical principle, and described dementia praecox as a psychotic process that began in the decade after puberty with a distinctive course and outcome. Mental deterioration, weakness and defect worsened and became permanent. It was a hopeless diagnosis. But Kraepelin argued that dementia praecox, as well as other major mental diseases that he created, would one day be found to be rooted in natural, biological disease processes. This claim, in part, made Kraepelinian classification attractive to American alienists who desired to retain their status as physicians. There is a co-dependency of the psychiatric profession and a biological disease concept that persists today.

Beginning in 1896, as one American asylum after another slowly introduced dementia praecox as a diagnostic box, it became the most frequently diagnosed condition, labeling a quarter to a half of all patients in each institution. How American psychiatrists were making this diagnosis is anyone’s guess—they were probably just snap decisions based on whether someone was suffering from a “good prognosis madness” (such as manic depression) or a “bad prognosis madness” (dementia praecox). What we do know is that being young and male made it more likely someone would receive this diagnosis.

As dementia praecox and its successor (a uniquely American re-interpretation of the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler’s concept of schizophrenia) became the natural focus of biological research for much of the twentieth century, American Madness also provides the heretofore untold story of the rise of biological psychiatry and laboratory research in the United States. By 1927 schizophrenia became the preferred term for inexplicable madness, but the Americans reframed Bleuler’s disease concept as a primarily functional or psychogenic condition that was caused by mothers or maladjustments to social reality. When Bleuler visited the United States in 1929 he was horrified to see what the Americans were calling schizophrenia. He insisted it was a physical disease with a chronic course characterized by exacerbations and remissions of hallucinations, delusions and bizarre behaviors.

Q: Is it possible to speak of a “typical” case of dementia praecox?

No. The label was so frequently used in an inchoate medical environment absent of consensual agreement on classification and nomenclature that we have little historical evidence as to how, on a daily basis, an individual physician applied these social constructions in his or her practice. Historian Gerald Grob termed this problem for historians of psychiatry as that of the “Invisible Patient.” Knowing the diagnosis of a person of the past tells us next to nothing about their history, signs or symptoms. Alienists and neurologists operated on a gut-feeling level. Diagnosis was not based on an explicit cognitive exercise, like running down a checklist of signs and symptoms, but was more like the experience of recognizing a melody or a scent. A “precox” patient evoked an uncanny feeling of remoteness or of the “bizarre” in a physician, and that was the most important basis of a diagnosis.

Q: How should American Madness help us to understand the sort of epistemic crisis currently confronting American psychiatry?

As everyone knows, the American Psychiatric Association is involved in a highly controversial effort to revise its diagnostic manual. DSM-5 (as it will be called when it appears in 2013) reflects the fact that scientific medicine has not yet solved the problem identified by American alienists a century ago: the linkage of clusters of signs, symptoms, and clinical history to biologically specified disease concepts. The proposed diagnostic criteria in DSM-5 requires a “bottom-up” differentiation of patients, which can be achieved only through an objective biological test (or tests). Until such a tool is developed for schizophrenia, a heuristic associated with an unimaginable assortment of confusing biological findings, we can neither validate nor invalidate our era’s schizophrenia concept. Genetic tests will almost certainly not be the answer, nor will the exclusive emphasis on the brain. As Sabine Bahn and her associates at the University of Cambridge are demonstrating with their new biomarker-based blood test for schizophrenia, severe psychotic disorders might be due to a life-long smoldering systemic or “whole body” disease process that involves glucose metabolism and immune system dysfunction. This is what Kraepelin proposed for dementia praecox, and it might be true for our era’s schizophrenia as well.

Slow Violence and Our Better Angels

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.

Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:

I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:

The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?

A Third Galileo

Works on Galileo have essentially shown us two views of his life and work—Galileo the astronomer and martyr of science, and Galileo the precursor of Newton. Mark Peterson’s new book, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, gives us a third view. Peterson’s is a Galileo with a more expansive understanding of mathematics than the other two familiar Galileos, one who is capable of a synthesis of the artistic and the mathematical in his own person, a Galileo interested in and indebted to Hellenistic culture.

Peterson, a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, explains the book’s origins:

The beginnings of this project were some observations about mathematics and the arts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. I was especially intrigued by some mathematical ideas that I had noticed in Dante, unexpected mathematical sophistication centuries before Galileo. I also became fascinated with Galileo, and I began to wonder where he had come from. This question seemed to organize my thoughts. What was Galileo’s intellectual inheritance, and how did it form him? Galileo’s education was in the humanities and the arts, so the question is a sprawling one. And even that is not enough, because Galileo’s ultimate enthusiasm was for mathematics, and that is another broad intellectual stream. Where all these streams mixed, that is where Galileo came from, or so I imagined. To understand it, I had to follow the streams back to their sources.

The book summarizes the classical legacy in mathematics and the sciences, and contains chapters on the Renaissance arts of poetry, painting, music, and architecture. We learn, for instance, that Galileo’s favorite poem was Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s epic of love, chivalry, and madness. The thread connecting the book’s sections, writes Peterson, is mathematics: “Implicitly I ask, what did mathematics mean for the arts? And what did the arts mean for mathematics?”

The sections come together with Peterson’s reconsideration of Galileo himself, in light of all this background material on the various artistic traditions of which he was a product. What we have in Galileo’s Muse, then, is the surprising and extraordinary claim that it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. And, what’s more, Peterson presents a dramatic and convincing claim that the Oratione de Mathematicae Laudibus, a 1627 book attributed to Galileo’s young protégé Niccolo Aggiunti was actually written by Galileo himself, and should be read as confirmation of this “third” Galileo.

Mark Peterson spoke with us about Galileo’s Muse for an episode of the Harvard Press Podcast. You can listen here.

The Stephen Jay Gould Mosaic

We’ve just released new paperback editions of a collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s most fascinating and introspective essays, with cover designs that reflect the unity of science to which Gould devoted his life and writing. By themselves, each cover contains an element out of context, tough to understand on its own. Together, the covers form an image that makes sense.

Here they are, arranged in order at our warehouse, ready to ship:

And then here, on display at Reiter’s Books in DC:

The books in this collection are some of Gould’s finest, all displaying his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy. They include Dinosaur in a Haystack, Full House, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and Diet of Worms, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, and I Have Landed.

So much of Gould’s work was dedicated to showing why a more accurate way of understanding our world is to look at a given subject within its own context, and not as the progress of an average value or single thing. These new covers, then, are intended to highlight the complexity of context, to demonstrate how much more we understand when we stop trying to look at things in isolation.

Our thanks to Sam Potts for the great design. And, if you all see a little room to grow in that mosaic, you’re not wrong. More to come!

Second Chances at First Impressions

Along with all of our new books, each season we release paperback editions of dozens of titles that were first published in cloth a year or two earlier. When a paperback comes out it can be a nice reminder of a favorite work from seasons past, but it can also be an occasion to take a new look at a book that may have escaped notice the first time through. For the books themselves it can be a second chance at a first impression. With that in mind, we’ve collected here the first crop of Fall paperbacks, and excerpted the first few sentences of each. Maybe you’ll find something you didn’t even know you’d missed.

Ian Almond, Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched With Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds

This book is a somewhat primitive book. It has a very straightforward purpose: to relate a selection of moments in European history when, in the very heart of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Muslims and Christians collaborated and co-operated with one another to fight against a common enemy–often an enemy also composed of Muslims and Christians. The book does not really do much more than this. It is not some vast overview of Muslim-Christian relations since 1100, nor an in-depth analysis of inter-cultural exchange between Islam and Christianity. It does not offer profound gems of philosophical insight into how human beings can learn to love one another, nor moving moments of idealism concerning the common humanity which can overcome all political/social/religious divisions, etc., etc. The book’s very modest aim, on the contrary, is to show how Muslims do not belong to an ‘other’ civilisation, but rather to the essence of a ‘Europe’ we are quickly in the process of forgetting.

Bernard Bailyn, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830

Historical accounts of events and developments that took place in the Atlantic world began to appear almost as soon as contacts were established between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth century. But Atlantic history itself—that is, the evolving history of the zone of interaction among the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—was first seen as a distinct and cohesive subject of historical inquiry in the years immediately after World War II.

Daniel Bodansky, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

One evening a few years ago, a volunteer for a well-known environmental organization rang my doorbell to solicit a contribution. I declined, saying that I disagreed with the organization’s positions on various issues. The volunteer demanded to know which ones.

Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome

The year was 1468. On Fat Tuesday, the last and most extravagant night of carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat attentively watching the races from his throne high above the boisterous crowd, when suddenly a scuffle broke out. The papal guards had stopped someone who was loudly insisting on speaking with the pope urgently about a matter of life and death. The man, his beard and dark eyes barely discernible under his hood, was dressed like a philosopher. Seeing that he had captured the pope’s attention, the “philosopher” broke free of the guards and intoned: “Holy Father! You are in great danger!” The pope sat up, leaned forward, and beckoned the stranger to approach and explain. What he heard made him tremble and turn pale.

Chrystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

This is a history of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), and the thousands of women who joined their campaigns against rape and for women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the height of lynching in the American South. Felton was born in 1835 to a prosperous slaveholding family in De Kalb, Georgia. Wells, the daughter of slaves, was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Despite differences in their age, race, class, and status, they both, in very different contexts, took radical stances on rape and lynching. Together, their struggles against sexual violence—Wells advocated on black women’s behalf and Felton mostly fought for the protection of poor white women—brought to southern politics the concerns of women who historically had been excluded from debates about rape and protection. Although both campaigned for women’s safety, they confronted the problem of lynching in completely different ways. While Wells became internationally known for her radical anti-lynching crusade, it was Felton’s notorious plea to “lynch a thousand a week” that thrust her into the national spotlight. From different sides of the color line, Felton and Wells were women’s rights pioneers who negotiated and challenged the racial and sexual politics of the New South.

A New Perspective on Florence and Baghdad

We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.

The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.

Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:

The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.

As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”

There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.

So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”

Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.

Daniel Lieberman on The Fastest Human Ever

We publish books on such a wide variety of topics that it can often feel like experts on everything are just an email away. We’ll see news stories and wonder, by reflex, what this or that author might have to say about them. “Oh, that’s an interesting take. Let’s get Dr. X on the line for some context.” Or, “That story makes no sense, let’s see if Professor Y can explain.”

That’s exactly what happened the other day when I saw this Chuck Klosterman story on Grantland asking “Is The Fastest Human Ever Already Alive?” The story begins with Usain Bolt, the dominating Jamaican sprinter, Olympic gold medalist, and holder of multiple world records. Klosterman notes the incredible downward trend of sprint times over the last two decades and speculates that, superhuman as they seem now, Bolt’s times could look pedestrian in as few as ten years.

These downward trends can’t continue forever though, because, as Klosterman notes, we can’t expect that a human will eventually run 100 meters in 0 seconds flat. So, working from the assumption that we’ll eventually hit the limit of what’s possible for human speed, Klosterman tries to figure out how close we’ve gotten to the limit, and whether the fastest human ever could possibly already be alive. Not quite as Klostermany as a few weeks back when he tried to apply the sports metric “value over replacement player” to rock musicians, but still pretty Klostermany.

So, anyway, three paragraphs into the article I’m wondering what Daniel Lieberman would have to say about this line of inquiry. Lieberman is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and author of The Evolution of the Human Head, which we published earlier this year. This is right up his alley, let’s send him an email.

But then I kept reading and—look at that—Lieberman pops up towards the end of the story. Way to go, media! And, unsurprisingly to people familiar with his work, Lieberman seems to demur on the question of the upper limits of human speed, because speed just isn’t what we’re built for:

“It’s useful to keep in mind that we should not be too impressed by Bolt and other speedsters. By mammalian standards, they are comparatively slow. Most decent quadrupeds out there—dogs, horses, zebra, lions—can run about 20 meters per second, twice as fast as Bolt, and they can do so for much longer (up to a few minutes). No Olympic sprinter could ever outrun a lion. We humans gave up the ability to run fast by mammalian standards many millions of years ago when we became bipeds and lost the ability to gallop. Instead, what humans excel at is endurance, especially on a hot day.”

In other words: “Think you’re fast? Go race a lion.” Sobering perspective from an expert.

And Lieberman’s very much the expert. We somehow seem to have not shared this video here before, so take a look now. Daniel Lieberman on barefoot running:

 

Insects and Delicacy

Everyone knows you have to be delicate with insects. Most of us have probably made the mistake of handling the wings of butterflies or moths, accidentally removing some of their “dust,” which is actually comprised of the scales that they need to fly. Who hasn’t, as a child, been a little too careless and mauled a ladybug? Or, among those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in regions they populate, let curiosity get the better of us when handling a lightning bug or firefly? You have to be delicate with insects.

Well, here’s some insect news requiring a slightly different brand of delicacy. As Science put it in a story last week: “Tiny Bug Makes a Riot With Its Privates.” Or, in the words of the BBC: “‘Singing penis’ sets noise record for water insect.”

That’s right. From the BBC story:

Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.

The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as “stridulation”.

Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.

On average, the songs of M. scholtzi reached 78.9 decibels, comparable to a passing freight train.

First off, let’s note that “stridulation” is not actually defined as “rubbing genitalia against belly.” Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean explain in their book Engineering Animals: How Life Works, in a chapter on animal communication:

Sound is just a vibration: to make it you have to move things. Most insects and other noisy arthropods achieve this by stridulation—rubbing one body part against another. Generally this action involves a body part that acts as a file and another that acts as a pick: ideally the pick is connected to some sort of resonant structure, such as wing panels. The file is dragged across the pick (or vice-versa) and a noise is generated.

So this bug, the Micronecta scholtzi, a freshwater insect that measures just 2mm, is stridulating its way to the rumble of a freight train. The scientists who made the discovery say that if body size is taken into account then the M. scholtzi are the loudest animals on earth. The fact that the bug makes this call underwater explains why scientists are just now noting its extraordinary volume, as 99% of the sound is lost when transferring from water to air.

In his recent book Cricket Radio: Tuning In the Night-Singing Insects, John Himmelman explains everything about the calling of crickets and katydids, the singing insects we’re likely most familiar with. Crickets and katydids stridulate with their legs, a more common variation than is practiced by the M. scholtzi. In crickets the file and pick, or scraper, are together referred to as the “stridulary organ,” but in the case of the M. scholtzi that begins to sound like a bit of a euphemism. Himmelman also explains that some grasshoppers engage in a different kind of noisemaking, known as “crepitation,” in which the rapid opening of the hind wings creates a crackling sound.

We built a web page that lets you hear the different calls of some of Himmelman’s crickets. Have a listen to them, and then go hear what the M. scholtzi sounds like, courtesy of the BBC. It’s sort of like a maraca. Not so delicate after all.