inside an elite psychopath fermentation system...,

RollingStone | Long before Andrew Lohse became a pariah at Dartmouth College, he was just another scarily accomplished teenager with lofty ambitions. Five feet 10 with large blue eyes and the kind of sweet-faced demeanor that always earned him a pass, he grew up in the not-quite-rural, not-quite-suburban, decidedly middle-class town of Branchburg, New Jersey, and attended a public school where he made mostly A's, scored 2190 on his SATs and compiled an exhaustive list of extracurricular activities that included varsity lacrosse, model U.N. (he was president), National Honor Society, band, orchestra, Spanish club, debate and – on weekends – a special pre-college program at the Manhattan School of Music, where he received a degree in jazz bass. He also wrote songs; gigged semiprofessionally at restaurants throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut; played drums for a rock band; chased, and conquered, numerous girls; and by his high school graduation, in 2008, had reached the pinnacle of adolescent cool by dating "this really hot skanky cheerleader," as he puts it.

That fall, he enrolled at Dartmouth, where he had wanted to go for as long as he could remember. His late grandfather, Austin Lohse, had played football and lacrosse for Big Green, and both Andrew and his older brother, Jon, a Dartmouth junior, idolized him as the embodiment of the high-achieving, hard-drinking, fraternal ethos of the Dartmouth Man, or what Lohse calls a "true bro." A Dartmouth Man is a specific type of creature, and when I ask Lohse what constitutes true bro-ness, he provides an idealized portrait of white-male privilege: "good-looking, preppy, charismatic, excellent at cocktail parties, masculine, intelligent, wealthy (or soon to become so), a little bit rough around the edges" – not, in other words, a "douchey, superpolished Yalie."

A true bro, Lohse adds, can also drink inhuman amounts of beer, vomit profusely and keep on going, and perform a number of other hard-partying feats – Dartmouth provided the real-life inspiration for Animal House – that most people, including virtually all of Lohse's high school friends, would find astounding. This, like the high salaries that Dartmouth graduates command – the sixth-highest in the country, according to the most recent estimates – is a point of pride. "We win," is how one of Lohse's former buddies puts it.

On January 25th, Andrew Lohse took a major detour from the winning streak he'd been on for most of his life when, breaking with the Dartmouth code of omertà, he detailed some of the choicest bits of his college experience in an op-ed for the student paper The Dartmouth. "I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks... among other abuses," he wrote. He accused Dartmouth's storied Greek system – 17 fraternities, 11 sororities and three coed houses, to which roughly half of the student body belongs – of perpetuating a culture of "pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault," as well as an "intoxicating nihilism" that dominates campus social life. "One of the things I've learned at Dartmouth – one thing that sets a psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men – is that good people can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason," he said. "Fraternity life is at the core of the college's human and cultural dysfunctions." Lohse concluded by recommending that Dartmouth overhaul its Greek system, and perhaps get rid of fraternities entirely.

This did not go over well. At a college where two-thirds of the upperclassmen are members of Greek houses, fraternities essentially control the social life on campus. To criticize Dartmouth's frats, which date back more than 150 years, is tantamount to criticizing Dartmouth itself, the smallest and most insular school in the Ivy League. Nestled on a picturesque campus in tiny Hanover, New Hampshire, the college has produced a long list of celebrated alumni – among them two Treasury secretaries (Timothy Geithner, '83, and Henry Paulson Jr., '68), a Labor secretary (Robert Reich, '68) and a hefty sampling of the one percent (including the CEOs of GE, eBay and Freddie Mac, and the former chairman of the Carlyle Group). Many of these titans of industry are products of the fraternity culture: Billionaire hedge-fund manager Stephen Mandel, who chairs Dartmouth's board of trustees, was a brother in Psi Upsilon, the oldest fraternity on campus. Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of GE, was a Phi Delt, as were a number of other prominent trustees, among them Morgan Stanley senior adviser R. Bradford Evans, billionaire oilman Trevor Rees-Jones and venture capitalist William W. Helman IV. Hank Paulson belonged to Lohse's fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, or SAE.

In response to Lohse's op-ed, the Dartmouth community let loose a torrent of vitriol against him on The Dartmouth's website. Lohse, it was decided, was "disgruntled" and a "criminal." His "blanket and bitter portrayal of the Greek system" was not only false, complained one alumnus, "but offensive to tens of thousands of Dartmouth alumni who cherished the memories of their fraternities." Another alumnus put it this way in a mock letter to a human-resources manager: "Dear Hiring Manager, do yourself a favor: Don't hire Andrew Lohse... He will bring disgrace to your institution, just as he did when he embarrassed Dartmouth and SAE." The consensus, as another alum put it: "If you don't want to be initiated, don't pledge."

Though two of Lohse's SAE brothers have confirmed his allegations are generally on the mark, the fraternity has turned on Lohse, portraying him as a calculating fabulist who bought into the Greek system wholeheartedly and then turned against it out of sheer vindictiveness. In a letter to Rolling Stone, SAE's lawyer, Harvey Silverglate, labeled some of Lohse's most extreme allegations "demonstrably untrue" and compared Lohse to the stripper who falsely accused a number of Duke lacrosse players of raping her in 2006. "Lohse is... a seemingly unstable individual," Silverglate wrote, "with a very poor reputation for truth-telling and a very big axe to grind."

almost a psychopath...,

HBR | Psychopaths are the subject of endless fascination. We tend to apply that term loosely to people who engage in bad acts, ranging from pathological lying and repeated deception to major fraud and serial killing. Psychopaths rival pedophiles in the panoply of those we despise and fear. Given this fascination with psychopathy, and the public's current negative view of Wall Street (see Greg Smith's op-ed column in The New York Times about his resignation from Goldman Sachs), it is no surprise that Twitter, the blogosphere, and traditional media have been buzzing about "The Financial Psychopath Next Door," an article in CFA Magazine by Sherree DeCovny (subscription required).

The headline-grabbing factoid in the article was an estimate that 10% of people in the financial services industry are psychopaths. And that's a conservative estimate, according to Christopher Bayer, a Wall Street psychotherapist cited by DeCovny.

DeCovny describes "financial psychopaths" as individuals who seek thrills, lack empathy, don't care about what others think, are charming and intelligent, and are skilled at lying and manipulation. Citing Richard Peterson, managing partner of MarketPsych (a firm that provides psychological and behavioral finance training for the industry), DeCovny notes that these are some of the traits that also predict success on Wall Street.

To understand the implications of all this, it helps to define psychopathy. It is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria. These include glibness and superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, lack of remorse and empathy, refusal to take responsibility for one's behavior, and others.

Determining whether a person is a psychopath is generally done using a test like the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), developed by Robert Hare and his colleagues. People who are "normal" invariably score a few points on such scales. True psychopaths score in the top 25%.

Using formal diagnostic criteria, researchers have estimated that about 1% of Americans — about 3 million people — are psychopaths. Based on statistics alone, there are some true psychopaths on Wall Street, as there are in all walks of life. The odds increase further when we consider the competitive advantage that some of the characteristics of psychopathy, including willingness to take risks, can provide in the field.

Psychopathy is mistakenly regarded as an all or nothing affair: you either are a psychopath or you aren't. If that were the case, saying that 10% of people on Wall Street are psychopaths could actually be somewhat comforting, since it implies that the remaining 90% are not and so shouldn't cause us any concern.

That yes-or-no approach dangerously ignores the fact that psychopathic behavior exists on a continuum. A great deal of damage can be done by individuals who fall in between folks who are "normal" and true psychopaths. These are individuals who would never be diagnosed as a psychopath, but whose behavior to varying degrees can be just as deceptive, dangerous, and remorseless as that of a full-blown psychopath. These individuals are sub-clinical psychopaths, what my colleague James Silver and I refer to as "almost psychopaths" in our upcoming book, Almost a Psychopath.

anthroposophic medicine: heptahedron and the sentient earth?

anthromed | I have something to tell you that is no small thing. I wish to introduce you to someone—someone who you will want to know, and know completely.

Before we start, consider this. In the Tsunami in 2004, animals did not drown. People drowned, but animals had made their way uphill before the waves crashed. They didn’t outrun the waves at the last minute, they were already on safe ground. How do you think they knew?

I think mother nature told them to move, and they heard and took her advice. That sounds juvenile, doesn’t it, like a fairy-tale of a theory. Well, prepare to reconsider. Because right now, I can present to your skeptical mind, evidence that the earth is a sentient being who will share information with us. When listened to, she can guide us through the otherwise impossible.

I can imagine you are thinking, here we go. Eco-gobbledy goop. I will restate it thus: we now have remarkable evidence that the earth contains within it an energy field that is exactly the same shape and energetic pattern as our own human core identity—the mature human consciousness which includes intuition and compassion and conscience—all of which resides in the subtle body at the heart.

The human core identity—heart-centered identity—is formed by the subtle energies in the shape that is the Chestahedron, the seven-sided form. That same shape also forms the sacred geometry template for the whole planet.

To witness the evidence, we must again follow the path of the intrepid investigator, Frank Chester, who continues to explore the essence and ramifications of the seven-sided form after first being inspired by a Rudolf Steiner drawing, a decade ago. Once again a prompt came from Steiner. This is the picture of that drawing:

Fig 1. Steiner’s drawing showing “sort of” tetrahedron and naming
locations of contact on globe.

This drawing was made by Steiner on a chalkboard during his lecture, The Forming of the Earth and the Moon: Causes of Volcanism (Sept. 18, 1924), about the subtle geometry of the earth, in which he said the earth contains a sort of tetrahedron, and the points of contact (written in yellow) are the South Pole, Japan, Mid-America and Caucasus.

Pondering this, Chester found his opening. The Chestahedron is “a sort” of tetrahedron, and he had to find out if it was a fit for the slightly vague mental image of the geometry of the earth’s structure given through clairvoyance by Steiner. Chester found a clear globe showing the continents of the earth and fashioned a Chestahedron of right scale to put inside: see how it matches up—it just fits. The points of contact match the places Steiner named. Mid-America turns out to be Kansas.

Fig 2. Chestahedron in globe
does indeed match Steiner’s points of contact.

The plot thickens when we look at seismology imaging done by a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Synchronistically, Scientific American printed this cover story about new ways to investigate the nature of Earth’s core.

Seeing this, Chester made his way to Pasadena to compare notes with Jeroen Ritsema, part of the team collecting seismic tomography data.

Fig 3. Seismology map produced at CIT.
Dark lines added by Frank Chester.

This map produced by seismology imaging uses blue colorings to represent cool areas, red the warmest, and yellow in between. Frank Chester asked Mr. Ritsema “What do these patterns mean?” Mr. Ritsema shrugged and told Chester that they had no idea of the meanings behind this data. With that, Mr. Chester compared his data points and the map produced by Mr. Ritsema. These tracings, superimposed where the Chestahedron would fit inside the earth according to Steiner's contact points, are added by Frank Chester. Consider the many correspondences that are there.

Next piece of evidence: it turns out that tornado alley, so named because that area suffers the highest incidence of twisters,(map provided by the National Severe Storms Laboratory), is a tracing of the point of contact where two of these global lines meet, forming the edges of the Chestahedron form.

Fig 4. National Severe Storms Laboratory map of tornado alley.
Fig 5. Four tornados forming a line.

Until now, no one has given any meaningful theory as to why tornadoes reliably take a turn to the northeast, as it were, at the edge of Kansas and Nebraska. Tornadoes have been seen forming a line. The unseen force that organized this arrangement of four tornadoes in a line comes from the edge of the Chestahedron, which formative power follows. The organizing power that puts them in a line is not atmospheric in origin (coming from the weather), it is geo-spheric (coming from the earth).

As described in Part One of this article, the subtle template underlying the formation of the heart is a three-dimensional shape that is formed by spinning the angular seven-sided Chestahedron. That spinning traces a ring, shown below in the picture that looks like an inverted bell. That same ring is visible as the walls of the left ventricle of the heart, shown in cross section. It turns out that a matching ring is also visible on the surface of the Earth.

Fig 6. Spinning Chestahedron creates two concentric rings of set proportions.
Fig 7. Cross section of heart shows ring of matching proportions.
Fig 8. Predominance of Aurora Borealis falls within ring of matching proportions.

Photographic evidence from satellites have shown that the Aurora Borealis displays light within the confines of a similar ring, showing up anywhere within the ring but not crossing into the center part. The circle immediately surrounding the North Pole stays dark, and the Northern Lights flare up most boldly all around.But look at the Aurora Australis over Antarctica. The light streams across, in the center area too.

Fig 9. Aurora Astralis streams across South Pole, distinct from North Pole pattern of Aurora Borealis.	Fig 10. Placing concentric cones of the angle of a spinning Chestahedron inside the globe shows the reason for the difference between light displays at North and South Pole

There is an explanation, using the seven-sided form, as to why the Southern Lights show up differently than the Northern. Mr. Chester demonstrates with a set of cones, modeled by extending the northern circles down towards the south at the angle proscribed by the spinning Chestahedron, such that the inner cone ends at a point at the bottom, and the outer cone ends at a circle the same size at the South Pole as seen in this photo.

At the South Pole, there is no inner ring created by the formative forces, aligned with the spinning seven-sided shape. There is just open space at the South Pole, apparently where energy can stream with the same fervor and flow across the center.

This is the Planet I want you to meet.


She has halos.

This is a NASA image spacecraft photo. The light is not enhanced. These are the polar auroras: Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. These visible halos and their shapes, together with the seismology maps, provide measurable proof that the Chestahedron shape is governing the subtle energies of the earth planet, just as they do the human heart.

anthroposophic medicine: heptahedron and the human heart?

anthromed |I am one who has been peripherally aware of the term, sacred geometry, but couldn't quite figure what to make of it. So what, I thought, if this form fits into that one in a mathematical way. So what? And I was dubious about spiritual meanings, seemingly arbitrarily assigned to geometric forms. I had put the notion of sacred geometry over there, (out there), not really relevant at this moment.

Well, after learning about Frank Chester's take on a particular geometric form, the heptahedron (a seven-sided form), my attitude isn't "so what?" anymore. Now, its "so . . . wonderful!"

Frank Chester is an educator and sculptor who took it upon himself to investigate the seven-sided form. His line of inquiry started with pondering this motif, one of seven seals that Rudolf Steiner designed.

Mr. Chester wanted to take this two-dimensional seven-sided image and make it three-dimensional. He thought about what it would be as a platonic form. Not satisfied by the existing models for what a seven- sided form would look like, he tinkered with clay and string and straws and wire and paper and bubbles and whatever models he could make, until he discovered a shape more simple and elegant than any presented before. The implications of his discovery of this heptahedron affect notions in mathematics, geology, architecture, medicine, and more; much more than is touched upon by this article.

This shape has seven sides: each side has exactly the same surface area. There are four equal triangles and three equal four-sided shapes that look like kites. In the picture (below left) of his cardboard model, you see one of the triangles, and two of the kite-shaped sides. Mr. Chester has found that he can draw all the surfaces of this shape, flattened, by using two sizes of circles; the arc tracings on the sides of this model show the remnants of that drawing process. The relationship between the size of the two circles is the Golden Mean, a ratio that artists and scientists have found governs many natural items such as the proportions of a leaf or of the human body.

Here is another model (above, right) of the heptahedron, which he has named the “chestahedron,” showing edges only. Mr. Chester did all kinds of things with his model to discover wherever it might lead him. He was curious about the sacred geometry relationships; in particular, how platonic forms fit inside each other. He found that the heptahedron fits inside a cube with its axis at 36 degrees.

The angle of 36 degrees was noteworthy to Mr. Chester because he remembered that the human heart sits at that particular angle inside of a person's chest. Various theories have been presented as to why the heart sits at this angle—but none very satisfactorily. Does it have to do with the earth's tilt? Since the earth's tilt is only about 23 degrees, not so likely.

One of the things he did was to dip the edges-only model into soapy liquid and then blow air into it through a straw to make a bubble, a process which rounds all the lines and surfaces, making the shape organic. Frank Chester compared his rounded seven-sided shape with a drawing he found on the web of the left and right ventricles of the heart. The right ventricle fits around the left ventricle.

Mr. Chester had the idea of putting his rounded seven-sided shape on its axis into a vortex generator, a tank of spinning water. If he put the shape in straight down, the original vortex is undisturbed. But when he puts the shape in at the angle of 36 degrees and keeps it spinning with an electric drill, the shape of the first swirl of water is changed. It forms a sort of pocket on the side. Mr. Chester made a model of what he saw in that interaction, cut a cross section of that model, and sure enough, it looks just like a dissection of the human heart.

Inspired by a drawing made by Rudolf Steiner, Frank Chester has followed the path of curiosity and experimentation until it led to a 3-D demonstration of the formative forces at work, creating the asymmetrical shape of flesh that is the human heart. The manifest implication is that the formative forces that actually build the flesh of the heart are engaged as swirl, contained in shape and direction by the geometric form.

The heart is not a pump. Instead the heart is a streaming device, and in the left ventricle, the spin of fluid is captured and twirled back on itself. In this way, the heart acts as a brake. The prime reason for this braking is balance. The heart is a balancing organ.

The idea that the heart is a pump has dominated medicine for centuries. Yet at the apex of the left ventricle of the heart, the bottom point, the tissue is paper thin, not strong enough to enclose fluid under pressure. With the vortex model for understanding the motion of blood within the heart, one can see how this part of the heart never receives dangerous pressure, which it would, if the heart were indeed a pump. Other researchers have been able to show with cameras that the blood courses through the blood vessels of the human embryo, before the heart is even formed. Something else is moving the blood. This is another reason Frank Chester believes that the heart is not a pump.

He has found that the heart is a streaming organ that is itself formed by a reversing, swirling stream. The blood enters the left ventricle in a clockwise spiral. By the time it moves out of the left ventricle, it is spinning in a counterclockwise motion. It reverses direction inside of the left chamber.

the geometric structure of brain fiber pathways

Science | The structure of the brain as a product of morphogenesis is difficult to reconcile with the observed complexity of cerebral connectivity. We therefore analyzed relationships of adjacency and crossing between cerebral fiber pathways in four nonhuman primate species and in humans by using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. The cerebral fiber pathways formed a rectilinear three-dimensional grid continuous with the three principal axes of development. Cortico-cortical pathways formed parallel sheets of interwoven paths in the longitudinal and medio-lateral axes, in which major pathways were local condensations. Cross-species homology was strong and showed emergence of complex gyral connectivity by continuous elaboration of this grid structure. This architecture naturally supports functional spatio-temporal coherence, developmental path-finding, and incremental rewiring with correlated adaptation of structure and function in cerebral plasticity and evolution.

what does e.o. wilson mean by "a social conquest of the earth"?

Smithsonianmag | In his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson explains his theory of everything—how hominids evolved, why war is common, how social insects became social, and why ants and bees and humans are so successful. Science writer Carl Zimmer spoke with Wilson.

When you use the phrase “the social conquest of earth” in the title of your book, what do you mean by that? How have social animals conquered the earth?
The most advanced social insects—ants, termites, many species of bees and wasp—make up only about 3 percent of the known species of animals on earth. But on the land they make up in most habitats upwards of 50 percent of the biomass. And of course humans, one of the very few of the largest animals that have reached the social level, has dominated in every respect.

And you see their social behavior as being key to these two kinds of animals having become so dominant?
When you study social insects, as I have, you see directly why eusocial, advanced social issues overall dominate because they will organize groups of individuals in seizing territory, in appropriating food, in defending their nest and generally controlling the parts of the environment for which they’re specialized.

How do you see the process by which you go from asocial species where insects are living as individuals to these incredibly highly organized societies? What do you see as being the progression through natural selection?
It’s actually fairly clear-cut when you take into account what we know about the evolutionary steps leading from completely solitary to eusocial or advanced social behavior. A great many solitary species—let’s say bees, wasps, the primitive cockroach—in the first stage build a nest and care for the young.

In the next stage, the mother or the mated pair stays with the nest and rears the young, defending them and securing food for them. In the next stage, whereas ordinarily the young would disperse upon reaching maturity, now they remain with the mother or the parents. And if that happens, and they work together as a group, then you have the advanced stage of social behavior.

A lot of scientists see social behavior as being partly the product of what’s called “inclusive fitness,” the effect that genes have not just in terms of an individual animal’s number of offspring but how many offspring their relatives may have. You’ve argued that inclusive fitness is not necessary and that you can focus on natural selection on individuals and on what you call “group selection” to explain how these social animals, like the social insects or humans, evolve their behavior. What do you mean when you use the term group selection?
As you might know, group selection became almost taboo in discussions on social behavior. But it comes back forcefully in the new theory developing about the origin of advanced social behavior.

The way I define it, group selection operates on the fitness, or lack thereof, of the social interactions in the group. In other words, it’s not simply group versus group in that sense but what actions individuals take that affect the group. And that would of course be communication, division of labor and the ability to read others’ intentions, which leads to cooperation.

When it’s an advantage to communicate or cooperate, those genes that promote it are going to be favored in that group if the group is competing with other groups. It gives them superiority over other groups and the selection proceeds at the group level, even as it continues to proceed at the individual level.

kin and kind: a fight about the genetics of altruism

New Yorker | Charles Darwin regarded the problem of altruism as a potentially fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection. After all, if life were such a cruel “struggle for existence,” then how could a selfless individual ever live long enough to reproduce? Why would natural selection favor a behavior that made us less likely to survive? And yet, as Darwin knew, altruism is everywhere, a stubborn anomaly of nature. For a century after Darwin, altruism remained a paradox.

The first glimmers of a solution arrived in the nineteen-fifties. According to legend, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked how far he would go to save the life of another person. Haldane thought for a moment, and then started scribbling numbers on the back of a napkin. “I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one,” Haldane said. “Or to save eight cousins but not seven.” His answer summarized a powerful scientific idea. Because individuals share much of their genome with close relatives, a trait will also persist if it leads to the survival of their kin. Haldane never expanded his napkin calculations into a formal mathematical theory. That task fell to William Hamilton. In 1964, he submitted a pair of papers to the Journal of Theoretical Biology. The papers hinged on one simple equation: rB > C. Genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit (B) of an action exceeded the cost (C) to the individual once relatedness (r) was taken into account. Hamilton referred to his model as “inclusive fitness theory.”

At first, Hamilton’s concept of inclusive fitness was entirely ignored. Many biologists were turned off by the math, and few mathematicians were interested in the problems of biology. The following year, however, an ambitious entomologist named E. O. Wilson read the paper. Wilson wanted to understand the altruism at work in ant colonies, and he became convinced that Hamilton had solved the problem. By the late nineteen-seventies, Hamilton’s work was featured prominently in textbooks; his original papers have become some of the most cited in evolutionary biology.

As Wilson realized, the equation allowed naturalists to make sense of animal behavior using genetic models, giving the field a new sense of rigor. In an obituary published after Hamilton’s death, in 2000, the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins referred to Hamilton as “the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.” But now, in an abrupt intellectual shift, Wilson says that his embrace of Hamilton’s equation was a serious scientific mistake. Wilson’s apostasy, which he lays out in a forthcoming book, “The Social Conquest of the Earth,” has set off a scientific furor. The vast majority of his academic colleagues are convinced that he was right the first time, and that his recantation has damaged the field.

The controversy is fuelled by a larger debate about the evolution of altruism. Can true altruism even exist? Is generosity a sustainable trait? Or are living things inherently selfish, our kindness nothing but a mask? This is science with existential stakes. Tells about Wilson’s recent collaboration with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita on the paper “The Evolution of Eusociality” and the criticism it received from the scientific community.

xibipiio - the concept of experiential liminality

language the cultural tool?

Guardian | Native speakers of Pirahã, in the Amazon lowland jungle, have no words for left or right, they use the same term for blue and green, and their definitions of red, black and white turn out to be similes, rather than dedicated words.

These once-isolated people, a tiny group, have no system of numbers; their sentences cannot accommodate subordinate clauses or other forms of recursion (embedding phrases), and they are not impressed by the Gospel of St Mark in Pirahã, not least because it is a story composed by someone they do not know, about someone they have never heard of, in a time and place that has no meaning for them. The Pirahã people tend to confine their discourse to things they know about, and their verb forms can be suffixed to distinguish between hearsay, inference and observation. They have no perfect tense.

On the other hand, they can also sing, hum, yell and whistle information to one another. So they have four additional speech forms as well as a very precise vocabulary for their environment and everything in it that matters to them. If there is some deep structure that underpins all 7,000 human languages – a universal grammar or language acquisition device or language instinct, already hard-wired in the human brain at birth – Pirahã seems to be an exception.

For Daniel Everett – linguist, anthropologist and once an evangelist missionary in the Amazon – the case settles an old argument about the nature of language. The exceptional language of the Pirahã people seems to be a unique cultural tool – like their knowledge of plant toxins, and their ability to fish with a bow and arrow – adapted for their exceptional circumstances. It is just another finely honed instrument from the human cognitive toolbox: we have large brains, we are social animals, we co-operate, we have a lucky arrangement of lungs, larynx, pharynx, palate, tongue, teeth and lips. We can speak, and so language has evolved, just as our brains and bipedal locomotion have evolved.

Language, in the Everett formula, is the sum of cognition plus culture plus communication. There is no need for a language instinct to set a three-year-old suddenly talking nineteen to the dozen. The infant's ambient culture compels the order of subject, verb and object, the potency of individual words and phrases (such as "nineteen to the dozen"), and the precise choice of phonemes.

This claim has reportedly annoyed the hell out of other linguists, among them Noam Chomsky, one of the high priesthood of the discipline, and the founder of the belief in what, for shorthand, is called a universal grammar. It also presents a challenge to the arguments of the psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, a 1994 bestseller. The notion of language as an innate human talent received a colossal fillip that year with the identification of one British family, some of whose members, through three generations, were perfectly ordinary, while others had a very precise and puzzling problem with the rules of language. This was interpreted as evidence for a "grammar gene".

This, to be fair, was before the genome of even the simplest bacterial organism had been sequenced, during an era in which researchers were betting that humans inherited more than 100,000 genes, perhaps even a million. Among these might be a gene for schizophrenia, a gene for intelligence, for being good at the 100m sprint and for learning to manipulate sentences.

The picture has changed since the human genome project ended in 2003. The awesome bundle of human complexity turned out to be delivered by about 23,000 genes; many more than a fruit fly, certainly, but many fewer than the maize plant. Whatever it is that lets us relish the preposterous loquacity of Mr Micawber, condemn the hubris of footballers and compile scenarios for a Greek debt default, all on a brief bus ride, it won't be a simple genetic turn of the screw in a larger than usual primate brain.

chicken/egg?

Guardian | Daniel Everett is a linguist who is best known for his studies of the language of the Pirahã people of the Amazon basin. His new book, Language: The Cultural Tool, explores his theory that language isn't innate but a tool developed by humans to solve problems.

Can you give me a very quick summary of the essential claim of this book?

There are two claims, the first is that universal grammar doesn't seem to work, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. And what can we put in its place? A complex interplay of factors, of which culture, the values human beings share, plays a major role in structuring the way that we talk and the things that we talk about.

From your experience in the Amazon, and generally, what is it that makes language possible?

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.

You studied the Pirahã community in the central Amazon. Is there something especially interesting about Pirahã language?

I was assigned there to translate the Bible for them because no one could figure out the language – it's not related to any other known living language. All languages have unique characteristics, but the Pirahã just seems to have so many unique characteristics. Things that we didn't expect. I mean the absence of numbers, the absence of counting and colours, the absence of creation myths, and the refusal to talk about the distant past or the distant future. A number of things like this, including, the special characteristic of recursion, the ability to keep a process going in the syntax forever. This constellation of features really cried out for an explanation and, it took me about 20 years to realise that there might be a unifying explanation for all of these things. My experience with the Pirahã was absolutely fundamental in shaping my ideas about human language.

bears repeating...,

reasoning, learning, and creativity: frontal lobe function and human decision-making

plosbiology | The frontal lobes subserve decision-making and executive control—that is, the selection and coordination of goal-directed behaviors. Current models of frontal executive function, however, do not explain human decision-making in everyday environments featuring uncertain, changing, and especially open-ended situations. Here, we propose a computational model of human executive function that clarifies this issue. Using behavioral experiments, we show that unlike others, the proposed model predicts human decisions and their variations across individuals in naturalistic situations. The model reveals that for driving action, the human frontal function monitors up to three/four concurrent behavioral strategies and infers online their ability to predict action outcomes: whenever one appears more reliable than unreliable, this strategy is chosen to guide the selection and learning of actions that maximize rewards. Otherwise, a new behavioral strategy is tentatively formed, partly from those stored in long-term memory, then probed, and if competitive confirmed to subsequently drive action. Thus, the human executive function has a monitoring capacity limited to three or four behavioral strategies. This limitation is compensated by the binary structure of executive control that in ambiguous and unknown situations promotes the exploration and creation of new behavioral strategies. The results support a model of human frontal function that integrates reasoning, learning, and creative abilities in the service of decision-making and adaptive behavior.

chomsky: language as a tool

why won't they listen?

NYTimes | To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.

political institutions determine the wealth of nations

mit | It is among the grandest topics in scholarship: Why do some nations, such as the United States, become wealthy and powerful, while others remain stuck in poverty? And why do some of those powers, from ancient Rome to the modern Soviet Union, expand and then collapse?

From Adam Smith and Max Weber to the current day, scores of writers have grappled with these questions. Some scholars, like Weber, have argued that religious or cultural differences create vastly different economic outcomes among countries. Others have asserted that a lack of natural resources or technical expertise has prevented poor countries from creating self-sustaining economic growth.

Economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of Harvard University have another answer: Politics makes the difference. Countries that have what they call “inclusive” political governments — those extending political and property rights as broadly as possible, while enforcing laws and providing some public infrastructure — experience the greatest growth over the long run. By contrast, Acemoglu and Robinson assert, countries with “extractive” political systems — in which power is wielded by a small elite — either fail to grow broadly or wither away after short bursts of economic expansion.

“You need political equality to underpin economic prosperity,” says Acemoglu, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. More specifically, he says, economic growth depends on widespread technological innovation. But widespread innovation is only sustained where countries promote rights, giving more people the incentive to invent things.

And while Acemoglu and Robinson have documented this thesis during roughly 15 years of joint research, now, in their new book, Why Nations Fail, released this week by Crown Publishers, they look more closely than ever at the collapse or stagnation of countries that lack these inclusive political systems.

Elites, Why Nations Fail asserts, resist innovation because they have a vested interest in resisting change — and new technologies that create growth can alter the balance of economic or political assets in a country.

“Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people,” Acemoglu and Robinson write. Yet when elites temporarily preserve power by preventing innovation, they ultimately impoverish their own states. Fist tap Dale.

The First Crack: $270 Billion In Student Loans Are At Least 30 Days Delinquent

zerohedge | Back in late 2006 and early 2007 a few (soon to be very rich) people were warning anyone who cared to listen, about what cracks in the subprime facade meant for the housing sector and the credit bubble in general. They were largely ignored as none other than the Fed chairman promised that all is fine (see here). A few months later New Century collapsed and the rest is history: tens of trillions later we are still picking up the pieces and housing continues to collapse. Yet one bubble which the Federal Government managed to blow in the meantime to staggering proportions in virtually no time, for no other reason than to give the impression of consumer releveraging, was the student debt bubble, which at last check just surpassed $1 trillion, and is growing at $40-50 billion each month. However, just like subprime, the first cracks have now appeared. In a report set to convince borrowers that Student Loan ABS are still safe - of course they are - they are backed by all taxpayers after all in the form of the Family Federal Education Program - Fitch discloses something rather troubling, namely that of the $1 trillion + in student debt outstanding, "as many as 27% of all student loan borrowers are more than 30 days past due." In other words at least $270 billion in student loans are no longer current (extrapolating the delinquency rate into the total loans outstanding). That this is happening with interest rates at record lows is quite stunning and a loud wake up call that it is not rates that determine affordability and sustainability: it is general economic conditions, deplorable as they may be, which have made the popping of the student loan bubble inevitable. It also means that if the rise in interest rate continues, then the student loan bubble will pop that much faster, and bring another $1 trillion in unintended consequences on the shoulders of the US taxpayer who once again will be left footing the bill.

selling war from 1917 to 2012...,

aljazeera | One day in 1917, US President Woodrow Wilson sat in his office scratching his head. He faced a dilemma. The war in Europe was very good for American business, but he needed to persuade the American public that entering the war was good for democracy.

The problem was that Americans were deeply sceptical of capitalism, far more than today. As John Reed wrote in "Whose War?", an essay that ran in the socialist magazine The Masses: "The rich has [sic] steadily become richer, and the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionally poorer. These toilers don't want war... But the speculators, the employers, the plutocracy - they want it... With lies and sophistries, they will whip up our blood until we are savage - and then we'll fight and die for them."

Reed wasn't on the fringe. Six weeks after Congress officially declared war, enlistment totalled over 70,000 recruits. The military needed a million men. Something needed to be done, but initiating a draft alone would only incite rioting in the streets.

So Wilson launched an enormous propaganda campaign to turn public opinion around. He sent 75,000 speakers into communities around the country to deliver 750,000 speeches in favour of war. For the unmoved, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which criminalised criticising the government during wartime.

Americans often ascribe to economcis effects that are in fact caused by politics. Before the Espionage Act, for instance, there were hundreds of radical newspapers, many of them socialist or communist - or just sympathetic to the plight of workers. After the war, most disappeared. That wasn't the result of market forces. The US government went to great pains at great expense to persuade Americans to embrace an approved ideology while it silenced dissidents with old-fashioned censorship. The Masses, along with 70 other radical publications, went out of business, because the US Post Office wouldn't deliver it.

Yet they were the lucky ones.

'A turnkey totalitarian state'

The Wilson era saw 2,000 prosecutions under the Espionage Act. One was Eugene V Debs, the union organiser. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving a speech, lambasting the draft for World War I. Today, the Obama administration hopes to convict Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking documents to WikiLeaks, including a video of an American helicopter gunning down Iraqi children.

The War on Terror has inspired new laws and new ways to decimate civil liberties. The US Department of Justice recently rationalised the killing of Americans abroad. Attorney General Eric Holder twisted himself into knots trying to separate due process from judicial process. The difference apparently means that it was okay to murder an American working for al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Worse is our spying on everyone, including Americans. The National Security Agency (NSA) is building a huge complex in Utah to house server farms that can handle yottabytes of data (a yottabyte equals one septillion bytes, or one quadrillion gigabytes). According to James Bamford, the NSA wants to eavesdrop without needing court orders. As one source said, we are becoming "a turnkey totalitarian state".

If the NSA is collecting information on everybody, who does it consider an enemy of the state? "Terrorists" is one answer, but how do you define "terrorist"? Are terrorists also political extremists? Fist tap Arnach.

the myth of freedom in the land of the free

aljazeera | In 1893, a massive financial panic sent demand for the Pullman Palace Car Company into a downward spiral. The luxury rail car company reacted by slashing workers' wages and increasing their work load. After negotiations with ownership broke down the following year, the American Railway Union, in solidarity with Pullman factory workers, launched a boycott that eventually shut down railroads across the US. It was a full-scale insurrection, as the late historian Howard Zinn put it, that soon "met with the full force of the capitalist state".

The US Attorney General won a court order to stop the strike, but the union and its leader, Eugene V Debs, refused to quit. President Grover Cleveland, over the objections of Illinois' governor, ordered federal troops to Chicago under the pretense of maintaining public safety. Soldiers fired their bayoneted rifles into the crowd of 5,000, killing 13 strike sympathisers. Seven hundred, including Debs, were arrested. Debs wasn't a socialist before the strike, but he was after. The event radicalised him. "In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle," Debs said later on, "the class struggle was revealed".

I imagine a similar revelation for the tens of thousands of Americans who participated in last fall's Occupy Wall Street protests. As you know, the movement began in New York City and spread quickly, inspiring activists in the biggest cities and the smallest hamlets. Outraged by the broken promise of the US and inspired by democratic revolts of Egypt and Tunisia, they assembled to protest economic injustice and corrupt corporate power in Washington.

Yet the harder they pushed, the harder they were pushed back - with violence. Protesters met with police wearing body armour, face shields, helmets and batons; police legally undermined Americans' right to assemble freely with "non-lethal" weaponry like tear gas, rubber bullets and sonic grenades. There was no need for the president to call in the army. An army, as Mayor Bloomberg quipped, was already there.

Before Occupy Wall Street, many protesters were middle- and upper-middle class college graduates who could safely assume the constitutional guarantee of their civil liberties. But afterward, not so much. Something like scales fell from their eyes, and when they arose anew, they had been baptised by the fire of political violence. Fist tap Arnach.

the polite conference rooms where liberties are saved and lost

truthdig | I spent four hours in a third-floor conference room at 86 Chambers St. in Manhattan on Friday as I underwent a government deposition. Benjamin H. Torrance, an assistant U.S. attorney, carried out the questioning as part of the government’s effort to decide whether it will challenge my standing as a plaintiff in the lawsuit I have brought with others against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Bill.

The NDAA implodes our most cherished constitutional protections. It permits the military to function on U.S. soil as a civilian law enforcement agency. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus for citizens. The law can be used to detain people deemed threats to national security, including dissidents whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, and hold them until what is termed “the end of the hostilities.” Even the name itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian concept that endless war has to be waged within “the homeland” against internal enemies as well as foreign enemies.

Judge Katherine B. Forrest, in a session starting at 9 a.m. Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, will determine if I have standing and if the case can go forward. The attorneys handling my case, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, will ask, if I am granted standing, for a temporary injunction against the Homeland Battlefield Bill. An injunction would, in effect, nullify the law and set into motion a fierce duel between two very unequal adversaries—on the one hand, the U.S. government and, on the other, myself, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir and three other activists and journalists. All have joined me as plaintiffs and begun to mobilize resistance to the law through groups such as Stop NDAA. Fist tap Arnach.

muslim convert leads the drone war..,

WaPo | For every cloud of smoke that follows a CIA drone strike in Pakistan, dozens of smaller plumes can be traced to a gaunt figure standing in a courtyard near the center of the agency’s Langley campus in Virginia.

The man with the nicotine habit is in his late 50s, with stubble on his face and the dark-suited wardrobe of an undertaker. As chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center for the past six years, he has functioned in a funereal capacity for al-Qaeda.

Roger, which is the first name of his cover identity, may be the most consequential but least visible national security official in Washington — the principal architect of the CIA’s drone campaign and the leader of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In many ways, he has also been the driving force of the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killing as a centerpiece of its counterterrorism efforts.

Colleagues describe Roger as a collection of contradictions. A chain-smoker who spends countless hours on a treadmill. Notoriously surly yet able to win over enough support from subordinates and bosses to hold on to his job. He presides over a campaign that has killed thousands of Islamist militants and angered millions of Muslims, but he is himself a convert to Islam.

His defenders don’t even try to make him sound likable. Instead, they emphasize his operational talents, encyclopedic understanding of the enemy and tireless work ethic.

“Irascible is the nicest way I would describe him,” said a former high-ranking CIA official who supervised the counterterrorism chief. “But his range of experience and relationships have made him about as close to indispensable as you could think.”