[found via a post to PEN-L by Jim Devine]

Also available for download.

In a predictably excellent essay reviewing The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Ed: Steve Rose) and Punctuated Equilibrium by Gould, Lewontin offers two valuable reminders. One is the essential and important difference between a “public intellectual” like Gould who works to disseminate knowledge of his field to the general public and someone like Dawkins who (my words) is after slick overarching ideas that can be turned into bestsellers or service personal aggrandisement. The second, perhaps more important (and quoted below) is a reminder of the nature of scientific activity:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

There is hardly a chapter in the main body of The Richness of Life that does not repay a careful reading. Of all the essays in it the one that is most important to the public understanding of science is “Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology,” for it deals with an issue that is so discomfiting for scientists that they avoid it when they can. Despite the myth of detached objectivity that scientists propagate, their motivations are as messy as everyone else’s. In particular, they have political, social, and personal concerns that may influence what they do, how they do it, and what they say about it. Putting aside deliberate fraud, of which we have an embarrassment of examples, the gathering of data, their statistical representation, and their interpretation offer many opportunities for unconscious bias toward conclusions that we already “knew” to be true.

In particular, scientists have repeatedly reported that whites have larger brains than blacks. Gould shows that when the preserved brain is measured before the race of its former owner is revealed, this difference disappears completely. Similarly, claims of larger heads of professionals as compared to laborers are not statistically significant because of very large variation from individual to individual. What is important about this essay is not that it reveals what we already know to be true about the existence of racism and sexism, but that it shows how any claim that something is “scientifically demonstrated” should be treated with the same skepticism that we invoke when there is any reason to think that the investigator has something to gain, either ideologically or professionally, as we do when financial gain is involved.

[ Link ]

FWIW, from BBC:

Guenter Grass was in Waffen-SS

Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass, author of the great anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum, has admitted serving in the Waffen-SS.

More:

Walesa attacks Grass for SS role

I am a member of a few "left" mailing lists, which are typically dominated by Western Orthodox Leftists (typically Marxists) and even tentative mention of open source, by me (an admitted amateur in left theory), is dismissed as irrelevant to left goals, actions, etc. I never quite understood why not. Open source development seems to provide an interesting and successful example of communal effort and production, underpinned by certain ideals (from each according to his abilities and to each according to his need! ;-)) that should warm the heart of leftists.

Not all of the free software / open source movement's principles and functioning is leftist of course. There is a strong libertarian streak running through open source development and certain larger issues (participation within a capitalist system) are poorly addressed. These differences are known within the community, however, and are the subject of ongoing debate. Richard Stallman, the father of what we call today Open Source, goes to great length to stress the political considerations of his movement, and defends his precepts successfully against the newer school (Cathedral/Bazaar types). It seemed strange to me, therefore, that all of this would be so easily dismissed by the entrenched left.

Today, I came across a couple of texts that do seem to take open source a bit more seriously.

One of them is Yochai Benkler's (Yale Law School) book The Wealth of Networks (PDF), the Introduction of which I quote from below:

[A]dvanced economies have shifted from an economy based on production of physical goods and services (e.g., automobiles and textiles, mining and construction) to an economy centered on the production of information goods and services (e.g., cinema and software, legal representation and financial planning).

Second, advanced economies have shifted from a communications
environment relies on an expensive centralized communicator that
broadcasts to a wide audience (e.g., radio, television) to an
environment that relies on a multitude of cheap processors with high computing capacity that are interconnected with one another (i.e., the Internet).

These two shifts make it possible to lessen the market’s
influence over political values. The second shift allows decentralized, non-market production. The first shift means that this new form of production will play a central, rather than peripheral role, in advanced economies.

The first part of this book explores in detail the economic
implications of these two parallel shifts. The central thesis is that a new stage of the information economy is emerging. The industrial information economy of the mid nineteenth and twentieth centuries is now being displaced by the “networked information economy.” The networked information economy is characterized by decentralized individual action carried out through willed distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market strategies.

I haven't read the entire book yet, but it promises to be an interesting read. Another book in a similar vein (which Benkler refers to also) is Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source which funnily enough begins:

Several years ago when I began thinking about open source software, I had to convince just about everyone I talked to, outside of a narrow technology community, that this was a real phenomenon and something worth studying in a serious way. I no longer have to make that case.

Clearly, Weber can speak more intelligently of the matter than I can ;-). In the Preface, he goes on to say:

I became interested in open source as an emerging technological community that seemed to solve what I see as very tricky but basically familiar governance problems, in a very unfamiliar and intriguing way. In the end I’ve decided, and I argue in this book, that the open source community has done something even more important. By experimenting with fundamental notions of what constitutes property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance. At the same time, it is remaking the politics and economics of the software world. If you believe (as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to create wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solutions to problems, then understanding how open source can change those processes is very important.

Now, why couldn't I have put it that way, when arguing for the importance of examining open source! Below is a bit more from the Introduction, followed by a link:

This is a book about property and how it underpins the social organization of cooperation and production in a digital era. I mean “property” in a broad sense—not only who owns what, but what it means to own something, what rights and responsibilities property confers, and where those ideas come from and how they spread. It is a story of how social organization can change the meaning of property, and conversely, how shifting notions of property can alter the possibilities of social organization. I explain the creation of a particular kind of software—open source software—as an experiment in social organization around a distinctive notion of property. The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the exclusion view of property really is. Open source is an experiment in building a political economy—that is, a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms. In this case it is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution. It is also a political economy that taps into a broad range of human motivations and relies on a creative and evolving set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior.

There is an excerpt in PDF from the book available for download from Harvard University Press.

[A question to English usage types: is "Apropos of" or "Apropos to" the right usage in this title? My initial urge was "of" but on further thought I felt "to" is more apropos!]

I have already posted on the Kaavya Viswanathan affair (plagiarization by the young Indian-American author), though I did not quite articulate what it is that bothered me about her. Below is an article from the Guardian that describes the difficulty that minorities have in getting published. A comment towards the qend of the quoted text describes my uneasiness: that minority writers are further disadvantaged by those (otherwise privileged) who play upon their minority status to open doors. 

Guardian | Monica Ali and Zadie Smith are in the minority, finds survey
Michelle Pauli

Wednesday May 10, 2006

The book trade is missing a trick by ignoring the potential of the black and ethnic minority (BME) market, says a new report by the Bookseller and the Arts Council.

The Books for All survey of publishers, booksellers, agents and librarians found that a "fear factor" was holding back the book trade from pursuing a growing market and a huge potential source of writing talent.

[...]
While 7.9% of the UK's population is of ethnic minority origin, only 50 (1%) of this year's top 5,000 bestsellers are by BME writers, despite the high profile of award-winners Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Monica Ali.

[...]

The report is critical of the lack of monitoring that takes place in the publishing process, with 58% of publishers unsure whether the number of submissions received from BME authors has risen, fallen or stayed the same during the past year, but acknowledges that accusations of tokenism can also be damaging.

"There is obviously a wealth of excellent Asian writers out there," said Poorna Shetty, editor of Asiana magazine, "but, inevitably, there are some books that get published because of the ethnic tag, rather than because they're actually great books."

[...]

From Schopenhauer (serious) to the Beatles (trivial), the West has demonstrated a fitful fascination for things Indian. The latest (not counting the return of Yoga) has been Indian English literature — by which I mean not the modestly illuminating works of someone like R.K. Narayan, bot more the cutesy stuff such as the exotic prose of Arundhati Roy. Much was made of the Indian-American Kaavya Viswanathan's precocious work of fiction in the past year. Things have taken a turn for the worse and the below news item might signal the beginning of the end of this fad.

Young Author Asserts Copying Was Unintentional – NYT

By DINITIA SMITH and MARIA NEWMAN

Kaavya Viswanathan, the young author who has admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," said today she was troubled to see so many similarities between her book and two novels by Megan McCafferty.

"When I was writing, I genuinely believed each word was my own," the 19-year-old Harvard University sophomore said in an interview this morning on NBC's "Today" show.

She also said the similarities were unintentional, even though she admitted earlier this week that she had copied them, and she hopes Ms. McCafferty can forgive her.

"The last thing that I ever wanted to do was cause any distress to Megan McCafferty," she said. " I've been unable to contact her and all I want to do is tell her how profoundly sorry I am for this entire situation."

She has promised to revise her book and said she would acknowledge McCafferty in a foreword.

On Tuesday, the day after Ms. Viswanathan apologized to the author, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous."

Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act."

[...]

Publisher to Recall Harvard Student's Novel

By MOTOKO RICH and DINITIA SMITH

Published: April 28, 2006

Just a day after saying it would not withdraw "How Opal
Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" from bookstores, Little,
Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer's books, said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves.

[...]

Author may have copied from 2nd book
'Opal Mehta' has been pulled from retailers' shelves

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — A Harvard sophomore's novel, which was pulled from the market last week after the author acknowledged mimicking portions of another writer's work, appears to contain passages copied from a second author.

A reader alerted The New York Times to at least three portions of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," by Kaavya Viswanathan, that are similar to passages in the novel "Can You Keep a Secret?," by Sophie Kinsella.

Some interesting links:

• Probability theory and Viswanathan's plagiarism
• Examples from the Harvard Crimson

I was re-reading Philip Kitcher’s comprehensive critique of SocioBiology over the weekend. Titled "Vaulting Ambition" its a serious and detailed work that  works through the arguments and the models. The book has the convincing mathematics inside; I will stop at posting the more simple and emotional appeal in the introduction:

 A Bicycle Is Not Enough

When I was growing up on the South Coast of England in the 1950s, I was haunted by a vision of judgement. [...] Those of us whose families were not rich enough to sidestep the state educational system knew that judgement awaited us at age eleven. An examination would separate the academic sheep from the academic goats. We did not want to find ourselves among the goats.

For those who failed the famous British eleven-plus — about fifty percent — judgement was virtually final. Institutions suited to their perceived abilities awaited them. These establishments tried, usually unsuccessfully, to combine sound discipline with the inculcation of mechanical skills. Once committed to them, few of my contemporaries would return to the company of the educational elect.

[...]

[Kitcher goes on to list the now famous statistical fabrications of Sir Cyril Burt in order to advance his perverse theories of intelligence, and derives a caution from such episodes in science on how we evaluate current attempts at quantifying or describing human capabilities. He then ends:]

In the early 1970s, on a visit to England, I went to see a distant cousin. One of her children had just failed the eleven-plus — the old system of final judgement lingered on in the bastion of Conservatism in which I spent much of my youth and in which my cousin lives. Like many children before her, the girl had been promised a new bicycle if she passed the eleven-plus. Like many parents before them, her mother and father had given her the bicycle anyway. The daughter was visibly depressed. She felt that she had failed her parents, and she was not looking forward to the beginning of the school year when she, together with the other "failures", would transfer to a new school. Still, the bicycle was there, a small consolation to her and a token of parents’ continued support. As she wobbled down the sidewalk (the bicycle was somewhat too big for her), pride in her new possession temporarily overcame her sense of inadequacy. As I watched her, I remembered many of the children I had known, and the ways in which the educational system had narrowed their horizons at an early age. Those whose asprations have been mangled and whose lives have been reduced through the application of misguided sicence direct us to lok closely at any theorizing that lead us to further mistakes. Their descendants deserve better. A bicycle is not enough.

There is a certain vulnerability, of over-reaching, in acts of triumphalism that robs the agent of his well-deserved preening (we saw some of that in the fall of Bush (at least in popularity) in short order after proclamations of a ‘mandate’). There was a time when Selfish Gene theorists and other reductionists were somewhat of establishment outsiders and also not favourable with the public. EP and Sociobiology proponents fought hard to reach their current Amazon.com sales rank (Edward Wilson had to endure water being poured on him by indignant students, for instance), and with their most outspoken critic now safely in his grave, it is only natural and deserving that they enjoy the limelight to knock off a few mighty tomes of overarching wisdom.

But as the Eastwood character said in ‘Unforgiven’, it does seem to be not about deserving, at least over at the NYT Book Review, where old Dennett, all around AI and Neo-Darwinism groupie, gets a spanking in a review of his own take on Religion (following Edward Wilson’s attempt at it a few years ago). Read on (and click through) for an entertaining review that almost redeems TNR.

But before I let you proceed to the review, i have to say that I am quite tickled by the reviewer’s identification of scientism and materialism as the force behind some of these lines of thought. I am tickled because I have sitting in the drafts (for this blog) a festering rant about the American Left that ties into some of this stuff. It is particularly funny, to me, that Wieseltier (the reviewer) says:

Dennett’s book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

Funny because I was thinking of some parts of the left and their own omniscient white man with a long beard… ;-). But that is another blog post…

The God Genome

‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,’ by Daniel C. Dennett
Review by LEON WIESELTIER
Published: February 19, 2006

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person’s qualities may be known by a person’s brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett’s usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett’s book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. “By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,” he declares, “and yet I persist.” Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts! He wonders whether religious people “will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.” If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as “protectionism.” But people who share Dennett’s view of the world he calls “brights.” Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that “brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest”? Dennett’s own “sacred values” are “democracy, justice, life, love and truth.” This rigs things nicely. If you refuse his “impeccably hardheaded and rational ontology,” then your sacred values must be tyranny, injustice, death, hatred and falsehood. Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name; and in a new era of American obscurantism, this is not helpful.

[...]

What’s up with the dudes with big white beards, anyway?