Harvard University Press Blog

Nuclear Iran

As has been noted, the fierce debate over a potential nuclear agreement with Iran—which reached a fever pitch this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United States Congress—amounts to an argument over nuclear fission being deliberated in an arena dominated by politics, not by knowledge of physics. Such knowledge is essential, though, both for assessing Iran’s current nuclear capacity to the extent we can, and for gauging the likelihood that Iran’s actual intentions align with those stated.

Theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein, known for his accessible science writing in the New Yorker and elsewhere, wrote Nuclear Iran last year to fill the need for a brief but complete discussion of the Iranian nuclear program from its inception to the present. The book offers lay readers a history of the sort of centrifuges used to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed for bombs, a discussion of the completely different technology required to produce plutonium and to use it in a nuclear weapon, and a blending of the technical and human aspects along the way. The piece below, adapted from the postscript to Nuclear Iran, compacts that science into a concise presentation of the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the potential for any agreement to contain it.

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The negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program are in process as I write this. The outcome is uncertain. But I would like to try to make the issues clear. To do this I will consider two limiting cases, neither one of which has any chance of being adopted but which serve as a useful foil for the discussion.

• Case 1: Iran agrees to give up its entire nuclear program. 
• Case 2: Iran does not agree to give up any of its program but does agree to enhanced inspections.

To discuss Case 1 we need to specify what Iran’s nuclear program is. I begin with reactors. To characterize a reactor, it is useful to specify three elements:

1. The power output
2. The fuel
3. The moderator

I begin with the power output. This is usually measured in watts—a unit of energy produced per second. The practical units for reactors are millions of watts (megawatts) and billions of watts (gigawatts). If the reactor is used to produce electricity, then two kinds of power produced are distinguished—thermal power and electrical power. The thermal power is the actual power that is produced in the fission process. This is generally converted into heat, which may boil water, making steam, which in turn runs the turbines that produce electricity. About two-thirds of the thermal energy is lost for various reasons in this process, hence the watts electric are about a third of the watts thermal.

Embryos and the Diverging Meanings of Life

In Embryos under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life, biologist Jane Maienschein gives us a thoughtful and historically contextualized look at embryos so as to better inform conversations that are too often clouded by politics. Scientific knowledge can and should affect our policy and social decisions, she argues, even when the science alone does not tell us what those decisions should be. In the conversation below, Maienschein outlines some of what we now know of embyros, and stresses the importance of allowing that knowledge to supplant conflicting assumptions about the workings and meanings of life.

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Q. Since before Aristotle cut open a developing chicken’s egg, scientists and theologians have theorized about embryos they couldn’t see. How does speculation about “invisible embryos” continue to shape contemporary thinking?

Most people have never seen an actual embryo, nor seen one develop from a fertilized egg cell. For them, embryos are largely “invisible” and imagined. Many people imagine a tiny person somehow there inside a woman who has just gotten pregnant, for example, and they imagine it as just growing larger over time. Yet in humans, the fertilized egg becomes an embryo and is called that until it is 8 weeks old; an embryo is not yet formed as a fully formed individual. Only after 8 weeks is it called a fetus, because it has the basic structure, the most important organs, and the very beginnings of the functioning of the human organism. Without knowing these developmental stages, and without actually seeing—through models or under a microscope—we are left to imagine what the invisible embryo looks like and how it behaves.

Q. What do the major advances in embryology over the course of the 20th century suggest about the trajectory of future science?

The case of embryo research shows how science is surprising and exciting in so many ways. Old assumptions give way to new knowledge, which leads to new insights and discoveries. The path is not always linear, and sometimes researchers get stuck in a way of thinking that takes a while to rethink. For example, most 20th-century researchers thought that once a cell becomes differentiated in a certain way, it will be fixed or determined in that way forever. We have learned that it is not that simple and that de-differentiation and re-differentiation is possible—with great potential for regenerative medicine. What history shows is the importance of becoming aware of underlying assumptions and rethinking them.

(SPOILER ALERT) You Are Not An Ape!

Why did human evolution diverge from that of our closest primate relatives? What can studying apes tell us about early human social structures? What actually makes us different? In the richly illustrated and referenced Apes and Human Evolution, University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Russell Tuttle synthesizes virtually all we know about such questions to produce an authoritative history of the evolution of us. Below, Tuttle outlines some of the major topics addressed in the book, which he’ll be presenting at Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on March 20th.

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In Apes and Human Evolution, I argue that since the 19th-century evolution revolution, theories of human evolution have been biased by folk beliefs about the meaning of individual, sexual and group differences in appearance and customs and by world events, like warfare, and personal experiences of theorists. As apes became subjects of detailed study their behavior served variously to reinforce or refute notions of close similarity between them and us.

Over the past 45 years scientists who trained in programs devoid of anthropology have developed models that emphasize increasingly close affinity between African apes and humans. Some of them claim that chimpanzees are actually people (Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus) or that people are somewhat more cultured chimpanzees (Pan sapiens). Such claims, abetted by popular books and other media, exemplify poor evolutionary anthropology and are offensive toward the very communities and heads of state to whom we must appeal for scientifically informed preservation of apes and their habitats.

Although the old argument about which nonhuman primates are closer to humans has settled on the apes, many puzzles remain regarding the extent to which we can draw on them as models for specific aspects of our variable genomes, morphology and behavior. Rare major and many minor fossil discoveries underpin phylogenic models of primate evolution over a span of geologic time greater than sixty-five million years, but small samples of fragmentary specimens and very patchy spatiotemporal representation usually limit their informational value. Our Linnaean family, the Hominidae, contained a notable number and variety of species that is difficult to organize into phylogenic lineages, only one of which terminated in modern Homo sapiens.

Where Language Comes From

Where did language come from? The question’s not as old as you may think, and the answer’s not as clear. There are all sorts of theories as to how and why humans developed language and the cognitive capacities that enable its use, and thus far there’s been little to recommend any one postulate over the others. The publication of More than Nature Needs, though, represents a breakthrough that author Derek Bickerton details below.

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This year is the ninetieth anniversary of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the country’s largest association of professional linguists. The event was, naturally, celebrated at the Society’s annual meeting on January 2-5 in Minneapolis with a commemorative symposium. Two issues were significantly absent: how language evolved, and where (if anywhere!) linguistics was going.

Granted, few linguists seemed even aware of language evolution until 1990, when Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s seminal paper Natural Language and Natural Selection and my book Language and Species were published. But since then, dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the topic have appeared. However, a substantial majority of them still come from writers in other disciplines, and perhaps that’s the problem. Thinking how language could have evolved entails dealing with data from several other sciences, and from its birth linguistics, balanced uneasily between science and humanities, has always been a somewhat cloistered discipline.

The Linguistic Society of Paris got things off to a bad start in 1866 by banning discussions of language origins from its proceedings. Since then, things have been worsened by the way schools and universities teach linguistics. In America a large majority of linguistics courses are limited to graduate students. Consequently while most college-educated persons have had significant exposure to physics or biology, linguistics remains terra incognita to all but a few. To the layman, a linguist means merely someone proficient in several languages; people at cocktail parties have no notion that to ask a linguist “How many languages do you speak?” is like asking a garage mechanic “How many cars do you own?”

For devotees of the Delphic injunction “Know thyself” (to be read, of course, as “Know what it means to be human” rather than “Know what it means to be Fred or Freda Smith”), these facts are tragic. A large part—maybe even the most crucial part—of being human is having language. Without it, how could we have science or religion, laws or codes of morality? Yet most books and articles on human evolution hardly mention language. Similarly, most books and articles on the evolution of language make no attempt to integrate it in the story of human evolution. As a result, we know more about the origins of the solar system or even the cosmos than we do about how we got language and all our other cognitive capacities. There are theories around, of course. But for most issues in science, there’s one theory that most people accept—the Nebular Hypothesis for the solar system, the Big Bang for the cosmos. For human language and cognition, theories are legion, and they’re all over the map, and it’s hard to see what would make any one of them preferable to others.

Un Cours de Latour

Ever found yourself wondering how to patrol the borderline between science and politics? How to handle technical innovations? How to understand the shifting nature of the natural world? How to become a citizen in the public life of science and technology? You may be experiencing a need for scientific humanities, and Bruno Latour is here to help.

Latour, author most recently of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, will be leading a MOOC this spring on the extension of interpretative skills to scientific discoveries and technical innovations. The course equips students to:

• learn the basics of the field called “science and technology studies,” a vast corpus of literature developed over the last forty years to give a realistic description of knowledge production
• handle the flood of different opinions about contentious issues and order the various positions by using the tools now available through digital media
• comment on those different pieces of news in a more articulated way through a specifically designed blog.

The course, like scientific humanities itself, aims to help modern citizens overcome the distinctions between science, morality, politics, and society, and in so doing to regain some confidence in the authority of science. To understand, for example, why the scientific documentation of global warming can be overruled by politics.

As Latour warns in the course introduction video below, “Today no one can afford the luxury of ignoring how science and society collaborate to mold our common world.”

FUN-MOOC : Scientific Humanities by fr-universite-numerique 

On the Organic Law of Change

This year marks the centennial of the passing of Alfred Russel Wallace, who at the time of his death in 1913 was the most famous naturalist in the world. We’re quite pleased to be publishing a beautifully produced facsimile edition of Wallace’s “Species Notebook” of 1855-1859, a never-before-published document that helps to reestablish Wallace as Darwin’s equal among the pioneers of evolution. In the brief excerpt below, James T. Costa gives a hint of why he undertook the project of annotating Wallace’s notebook; and below that, watch a lovely little paper-puppet animation of Wallace’s life and work.

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Wallace’s Species Notebook was well named: it is a window into Wallace’s early evolutionary thinking, encompassing the period in which his fertile mind was churning out paper after insightful paper as he searched for clues to the origin of species. The period of the notebook is, notably, punctuated by the publication of two watershed papers in the history of the field—Wallace’s Sarawak Law paper (1855) and Ternate essay (1858)—among others. In its notes, sketches, and narratives we see Wallace the philosopher and Wallace the collector: the arguments for his planned book on transmutation are found side by side with specimen label designs; his discussions of the nature of species and varieties, the meaning of fossils, struggle in nature, or the branching history of life all share space with notes on the cost of rice, lists of books to read, a proposed remedy for the proliferation of taxonomic synonyms, and a practical scheme for a library of natural history. Then there are the myriad collection notes, from the hunting of orangutans and birds of paradise to his catches of curious beetles and beautiful butterflies.

Wallace is decidedly underappreciated relative to his illustrious colleague Charles Darwin, all but unknown outside of scholarly circles and even little known within, and this despite his being not only the co-discoverer of one of humanity’s greatest insights into the workings of nature—evolution by natural selection—but also the founder of the modern discipline of zoogeography. He made fundamental contributions in evolutionary biology, biogeography, ornithology, and entomology, and weighed in on a host of social issues of his day in a continuous stream of scientific papers, essays, interviews, and books. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to appreciate that history, in some respects, has not been just to Wallace.

That his gifts and contributions are not more widely appreciated today is our loss, for Wallace’s story is nothing short of epic, his achievements all the more poignant for their realization against all odds. Wallace’s unique blend of pluck, perseverance, and creativity were combined with the temperament of a philosopher, the sense of wonder of a child, and more than a dash of genius. This centennial year marking the naturalist’s death in 1913 offers an opportunity for both celebration and reflection on the man and his accomplishments, and there is so much to celebrate and reflect upon. In this regard Wallace’s Species Notebook is an unparalleled lens through which the scope of his early evolutionary thought is seen to advantage, in the context of life in the field where the ideas were conceived. It is in the spirit of enabling the reader to accompany Wallace on his journeys both physical and intellectual that my annotations are offered.

 

But Then What Have We Been?

In We Have Never Been Modern, published twenty years back, Bruno Latour argued that we fundamentally misunderstand the condition in which we live. This age we’ve called modernity, characterized by careful distinctions between nature and society, human and thing, fact and value, is in reality defined by an overarching hybridity, a defiance of clear delineation, an undermining of the essence of modernization.

Lovely. But, if not modern, then what have we been?

Identifying a positive definition of the project of Western civilization is the goal of Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, a newly published book presenting an ongoing, interactive, metaphysical investigation. And, people, this inquiry, this “anthropology of the Moderns,” is neither piece nor walk of cake. The book itself is a challenging work in that destabilizing manner we expect of Latour, and one for which a familiarity with Latour’s earlier output will be of great aid.

AIME begins, in fact, with the rejection of a common misunderstanding of Latour’s perspective on objectivity, a concept at the heart of his field of science studies:

Now, in its early days, in the 1980s, this field was perceived by many scientists as a critique of scientific Certainty—which it was—but also of reliable knowledge—which it most certainly was not. We wanted to understand how—with what instruments, what machinery, what material, historical, anthropological conditions—it was possible to produce objectivity. And of course, without appealing to any transcendent Certainty that would have all at once and without discussion raised up Science with a capital S against public opinion. As we saw it, scientific objectivity was too important to be defended solely by what is known by the umbrella term “RATIONALISM,” a term used too often to bring debate to a halt when an accusation of irrationality is hurled against overly insistent adversaries. Well before questions of ecology came to the forefront of politics, we already suspected that the distinction between the rational and the irrational would not suffice to settle the debates over the components of the COMMON WORLD. As we saw it, the question of the sciences was rather more complicated than that; we sought to investigate the manufacture of objectivity in a new way. And that is why we are always astonished, my colleagues in the history or sociology of the sciences and I, at the hostility of certain researchers toward what they call the “relativism” of our inquiries, whereas we have only been trying to prepare scientists for a finally realistic defense of the objectivity to which we are just as attached as they are—but in a different way.

This is not an academic distinction, and Latour need but genuflect towards the epistemological crisis exacerbating our ecological catastrophe to make that clear. The institution of science, that presumed pillar of modernity, is failing to convince us Moderns of the most dangerous thing we know. Those producing the knowledge of climate change and those on whom corrective action depends exist in different modes.

And so Latour’s project is one of diplomacy, of opening channels between these modes and the dozen others whose conflicts can be so consequential for our very planet. We may not be modern, but without such assuagement we’ll surely be doomed.

Practical Ways to Beat the Sexting Impulse

When news broke this week of former Congressman and current NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s further indiscretions, we were put in mind of a forthcoming book, David Lewis’s Impulse: Why We Do What We Do Without Knowing Why We Do It.

Informed by the latest research in neuropsychology, the book explores all the mystifying things people do (and do again) despite knowing better, from blurting out indiscretions to falling for totally incompatible romantic partners. Seems an apropos book for a man in Weiner’s position.

On closer consultation, though, the book was found not to speak directly to the issue of impulsive sexting. It does, however, offer practical ways to beat the overeating impulse, some of which we’ve adapted below.

1. Eat Sext from smaller plates and bowls phones. Because we eat sext with our eyes as much as with our mouth hands, using smaller plates and bowls phones is a quick and easy way to reduce the number of calories consumed sexts sent. In a study I conducted in London as part of a Channel 4 television documentary entitled Secret Eaters Sexters, we found that volunteers who served themselves ice cream into a sexted with a large bowl phone took sexted 44 per cent more than those with a smaller bowl phone.

2. Eating Sexting with chopsticks without autocorrect, rather than a knife and fork with autocorrect, obliges you to take smaller mouthfuls use shorter words and eat sext more slowly. Eating Sexting more slowly allows time for the digestion process to work effectively. It also gives you a better chance of recognising when you have eaten sexted sufficient food sexts.

3. Put ice in your drink sext. Because the body has to use energy to heat up the beverage sext, around 1 calorie per ounce word of fluid sext is consumed. If you drink sext the recommended not recommended eight 8-ounce glasses of water sexts a day with ice cubes you will burn up between 60 and 70 extra calories each day.

4. We eat sext significantly more when dining sexting in company than eating sexting alone. For Secret Eaters Sexters, I asked diners sexters to have lunch sext alone, as a couple or at a table of six friends. The group consumed sent some 600 more calories sexts than the solitary diner sexter and over 80 more than the couple. What happens is that we tend to pace ourselves on the fastest eater sexter in a group. Also, distracted by conversation and banter we fail to notice how much we are eating sexting and are more susceptible to offers of second helpings sextings. Be aware of this risk the next time you eat sext with a group of friends or colleagues. Refuse second helpings sextings. Pace yourself to the slowest eater sexter at the table. Try to be the last person to start eating sexting.

5. When dining sexting out in an upmarket restaurant be aware of the effects of soft lights and classical music. Both encourage you to linger longer and so eat or drink sext considerably more than you realise.

6. When snacking on popcorn sexting in the cinema, use your other hand. That is, if you normally hold the popcorn container in sext with your right hand and pick don’t sext with your left, then swap around. By making this small change in your eating sexting habits you force yourself to think more about what you are doing and are, therefore, likely to eat sext less. During a study to test the effects of this tactic in a London cinema, I provided half the audience with an oven glove worn on the normal popcorn picking sexting hand. Their consumption sexting fell by a quarter compared to their non-handicapped companions.

Okay, that’s six solid tips. Maybe take them under advisement? Food Sext Food for thought, at least.

To Throw Is Human

In a much-discussed paper published in this week’s Nature, a team of scientists unveiled the findings of their study of the human throwing motion. The study’s authors, a group that includes Daniel Lieberman, author of The Evolution of the Human Head, sought to uncover how it is that humans are so much better at throwing than other animals. Adult chimpanzees, for example, are much stronger than humans but their tosses top out around 20 mph. Young humans can easily exceed that rate, and some major league pitchers are routinely clocked at over 100 mph.

By making 3-D recordings of athletes, Lieberman et al were able to break down the throwing motion in a way that’d never been done before. Analysis of that footage revealed the crucial part played by the human shoulder, the ligaments and tendons of which are able to store elastic energy as an arm is cocked in preparation to throw and then release it in the arm’s ensuing forward motion.

From NPR’s coverage of the study:

Human shoulders are broader than our primate cousins’, and our shoulder blades are located along the flat of the upper back, explains Daniel Lieberman, a physical anthropologist at Harvard University and a co-author of the study. The shoulder blades of chimps on the other hand, are positioned more along the side of the body, he says. “If your shoulders are more vertically oriented—like in a chimpanzee—then the muscles can’t generate that much power.”

“Our earliest ancestors also had chimp-like shoulders,” Lieberman says. But evidence from two fossils suggests that may have changed with Homo erectus, a species that lived about 2 million years ago. The fossils Lieberman and his colleagues examined had shoulders resembling a modern day human’s.

Homo erectus shared two more features with humans that Lieberman and his team think crucial to the ability to throw with power: a slender, flexible waist, which allows us to twist the torso in relation to our hips and legs, and a twist in the shape of the humerus, the bone that connects the shoulder to the elbow. These features “evolved bit by bit,” Lieberman says, “but they appear all in a package in Homo erectus.”

He and his team think the ability to throw also gave this ancestral species an evolutionary advantage. “We don’t have fangs. We don’t have claws and massive paws,” Lieberman notes. Without such built-in weapons, the ability to hurl objects with force and precision must have allowed Homo erectus to become a more efficient hunter.

Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head is one of the 100 significant works we’ve chosen to highlight as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of HUP. Over at our centennial site, where we’ve been posting excerpts from these 100 titles, you can read a section of Lieberman’s book that really makes clear how this new study of human throwing ability fits with his work on the head and on running.

Cicadas Cicadas Cicadas

It’s just about cicada time here on the East Coast, when millions (billions?) of these strange, noisy creatures will make their way up through the dirt, looking for love. They’ve been waiting down there in wingless nymph form, feeding on the dilute sap of plant roots while they undergo the longest juvenile developmental period of any insect. When the ground reaches 64 degrees and they emerge, outnumbering humans hundreds-to-one and nearly deafening us for our troubles, well, it’s gonna get a bit freaky. Not for nothing did the colonists at Plymouth in 1634 dub them locusts, despite little resemblance to the Biblical grasshoppers.

As entomologist May Berenbaum assures, though, there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” she says. It’s just such mistaken attribution of outlandish abilities that inspired Berenbaum’s “modern bestiary,” The Earwig’s Tail. She’d come to realize, she writes in the book’s Preface, that “the majority of the most bandied-about insect facts familiar to the general public aren’t facts at all.” In The Earwig’s Tail she takes on twenty-six of “the most firmly entrenched modern mythical insects,” and, in many cases, leaves us with an even more fantastic truth.

When she gets to cicadas, Berenbaum turns to politics and Washington D.C., where the emergence of “Brood X” (the various populations of cicadas run on different schedules and are given roman numeral names) coincides with a presidential election every sixty-eight years, most recently in 2004.

Here’s Berenbaum:

First to take metaphorical advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On May 14, 2004, at the height of the emergence, 700,000 registered Republicans received an email attachment from the Republican National Committee. A narrator intoned, “Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance. The shells they leave behind are the only evidence they were here. Like a cicada, Senator Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense . . . But, he leaves his record behind . . . when the cicadas emerge, they make a lot of noise. But they always revert to form, before disappearing again.” The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its wings and ends with an animated cicada morphing into John Kerry.

The Kerry campaign’s retort? “Maybe, if given another 17 years, President Bush could create a job in Ohio.” Cicada burn.

Cicadas also had a cameo in presidential politics in 1902, Berenbaum reports, when President Theodore Roosevelt “was practically drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to impose ‘orderly freedom’ in the Philippines.” The experience of inundation seems not to have adversely affected his feelings on colonialism.

We’ll wait to see what metaphors are made of this coming return.