Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

This is born out by three contrasting readings in the Values section, one that looks back to what were our Heroes, another that looks at attitudes today and another that looks at diet and obesity - which we take as a proxy for finding new grounds for discipline in a changed world as well as for it's own sake.

On the international front one can compare and contrast the rise of the BRIC nations and the resulting stresses and strains on the world system. The first is reflected in the recent meetings of the Chinese communist party which has delivered historially unparalleled growth over the last two decades and is now facing rising challenges to developing a new, more flexible, representative and just institutional framework in China. It's also reflected in the recent rapid growth of food kitchens in Germany as the new German economy struggles to adjust to a world where blue-collar jobs are scarce. 

But the question of Change and Adaptability are perhaps most reflected in deep structural pressures building up in the US. Two contrasting articles look at the enormous difficulties, one is tempted to say failures, of both Left and the Right to move beyond the failing shibboleths of the past and the lack of new ideas, constructs and policies to deal with this brave new world. Which is partly defined by the rapidly accelerating challenges to the US Middle Class. 

As Gandalf put it, "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

The Culture section has a very interesting article on Ten Choice we faced in 1940-41 as the world struggled with an outbreak of "small wars" around the world which eventually became the conflaguration we know as WWII.

Reaching farther back are three Science articles on the history and evolution of human nature, that which underpins all the things we've been talking about. One our ancient history of shoreline dwelling and very early human history - a history which keeps getting pushed back farther and farther as we learn more. And two complementary articles - one on Music and the Brain and the other on the emergence and development of language.

Values & Attitudes

Fame's Fortune A forgotten museum of great men depicted in bronze. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans sits on a bluff in the Bronx overlooking the Harlem River. A sweeping 630-foot open-air colonnade, designed by Stanford White, on what is now the campus of Bronx Community College, the hall enshrines 103 great Americans, though the last bronze busts were added in 1973 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was voted in. The Hall of Fame's story tells much about America, something about the changing fortunes of the Bronx and a lot about fame. Jay Oliva, a former president of NYU, says the hall was in part "a hype job" by Mr. MacCracken to draw attention to NYU's campus in what was then the countryside. But it was also "an American idea," Mr. Oliva says, born from the Gilded Age notion that America was emerging as a great power and that its history should be carefully recorded and celebrated. Elections to the hall became "a huge deal," Mr. Oliva says, and the Bronx building became famous itself: The New York Times dutifully reported its elections and even its nominations, which came from the public. Senators and Supreme Court justices spoke at the unveilings. Now the hall, despite its history and its glorious architecture, sits unloved and scarcely visited. In part, this is because NYU sold the campus to the city and left the borough. But a larger reason is that ideals of fame current in the early 20th century have slipped from favor. The belief in transcendent glory is "a very Roman idea," says Leo Braudy, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History." The people who made it into the hall shaped history, like Roman generals and emperors, and were thought worthy of preservation in bronze. Today, the "great man" theory of history is itself archaic and "fame can be 100,000 Google hits," as Mr. Braudy says. Modern Americans seem much less willing to proclaim greatness in an all-encompassing sense.

grace not guilt, devotion not deprivation, expression not repression I'm not really sure what to say about "the environment" although I've committed to Blog Action Day today. I remember once an introduction to Zen comic book when I was becoming willing to be curious that maybe the world wasn't limited to my conceptions of it. In the comic, a swimming fish seeker ponders thoughtfully, "Um, so, what is thing they call the ocean?" Well, to be more accurate, and it may be harder to capture in a panel and thought balloons because of its Self-referential absurdity, it's more like the ocean asking, "What is the ocean?" We feel ourselves a mere drop in the ocean - distinct, disparate somehow from the ocean. Yet that very drop is the ocean, the waves, the raincloud arching toward the sky and back again. Nature and our nature: not two, not one, this. I don't believe guilt is going to save the world. I believe in grace. I don't believe deprivation is going to save the world. I believe in devotion. I don't believe repression is going to save the world. I believe in expression. The whole notion of "saving the world" is fraught with dilemmas too. But this post is getting  carried away as it is. So I'm cutting to the chase: Forget saving the world. Enjoy yourself and you cannot help but be re membered to your own nature which has always been inseparateable from Nature, from Universe, from Multiverse.

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book…The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros. It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade. We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong. If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong. Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better …

Int’l Affairs

Maseratis Show Asia Is 60-100 Years Behind U.S. Maseratis versus bicycles. It's not the most obvious lens through which to view Asia's boom. Yet to economist Ifzal Ali, few things better illustrate why the region's outlook should be viewed with skepticism. ``More people are riding in Maseratis, but most are still in the bicycle age,'' Ali, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, said in an interview. ``It shows how Asia's rich are getting richer much faster than the poor are becoming better off. It's a bigger problem than people realize.'' Asia's widening rich-poor divide isn't something on which investors tend to dwell. The same is true of governments, which are too busy congratulating themselves for economic growth of 8 percent or faster even as the U.S. and Japan limp along. The problem isn't just festering, but worsening. ``There are two faces of Asia -- one is shimmering, the other is shivering,'' Ali said. ``Unless the problem is addressed, shivering Asia will totally eclipse the shimmering part.'' The risk is that Asia's shivering masses -- those left out in the cold as economies heat up -- cannibalize the future. Of developing Asia's 1.7 billion-person labor force, Ali says, at least 500 million are unemployed or underemployed (those working less than they would like to). Another 250 million will enter the workforce over the next decade. ``Asia needs to create over 750 million good jobs over the next 10 years, a challenge that is unmatched in mankind's history,'' Ali said. ``If your time horizon is the next two years, Asia looks fine, but if you are willing to look beyond that, there's far less reason for excitement.'' All this doesn't figure readily into bond yields or stock valuations. Poverty isn't the first thing currency traders think about when placing bets, nor do many central bankers ponder it seriously. Investors focus on how rising incomes will spur demand for cars, electronics, travel and other goods and services. Asians won't spend if growth doesn't reach them. Politics gets much of the blame. From Beijing to Jakarta, the desire to stay in power day to day takes precedence over long-term thinking. Spreading the benefits of growth would mean reducing corruption and increased spending on everything from infrastructure to job training. Politicians may be wary of increasing public debt.

Chinese Leaders Adapt to Sustain Power Chinese leaders are adapting their authoritarian rule to changing economic realities while toughening controls on political dissent. China is the only one of the world's 10 largest economies that isn't a multiparty democracy. As the Chinese Communist Party gathers this week for a key meeting, the leadership is fine-tuning its rule to make sure things stay that way. Over the past 30 years, the party's historic wager -- that delivering stability and economic growth would ensure acceptance of its authoritarian rule -- has largely paid off. But China is now a more complex nation, of homeowners and entrepreneurs protective of their new prosperity and in closer touch with the rest of the world. And a widening wealth gap, crumbling social services and environmental degradation have fueled public frustration, especially among the rural majority. The secretive group of about two dozen people that runs China, the Communist Party's Politburo, is responding by taking steps to make its rule more accountable to the public. It has also adopted a more-populist approach to government policy, expanding education and health-care programs while still pushing for fast economic growth. At the same time, the Politburo is toughening controls on outright political dissent. That strategy of gradual adaptation is on display this week at the party's 17th National Congress, which began Monday. The congress will ratify a platform of policies for the coming five years that emphasizes more-balanced economic growth and cautious institutional reform.

Germany Tries Food Handouts for the Poor For decades, Germany's welfare state kept the vast majority of people out of poverty. Even the unemployed could often live comfortably: The state paid them benefits worth over half of their last salary, indefinitely. That meant unemployed Germans were often better off than the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. Today, as in many other European countries, Germany's welfare state is in retreat. Europe's stuttering economic performance over the past decade has led governments to trim benefits, hoping to rein in public spending and push people who have become dependent on welfare back to work. For some, especially those without higher education, that means low-paid work or none at all. As the holes in Germany's social safety net grow bigger, more people are falling through. Germany gained poor residents when it absorbed the ex-communist East in 1990. But poverty is rising fast in the country's more economically developed West too. In 1999, 11% of Western Germany's population lived under the poverty line (defined as less than 60% of median household income). In 2005, that rose to 16%, according to the German Institute for Economic Research. In all of Germany, around 14 million people, or 17% of the population, live below the poverty line, which today corresponds to a monthly income of about $1,280 for a person living alone. Such poverty is far less acute than the destitution found in slums of developing countries or even in those of some U.S. cities. And in contrast to millions of poor Americans, all Germans have health insurance. Yet for Germans, the growing split in society is a jarring break with the postwar decades. Then, a "social market economy" spread affluence widely by combining industrial growth with a strong welfare state. "The poor always existed, but they used to be a narrower group of untrained workers with casual jobs such as cleaning," says Berthold Vogel of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Today, blue-collar workers are falling out of Germany's once-broad middle class, he says.

WEAPONS: The Perfect Storm The most powerful Internet weapon on the planet is hiding in plain sight, and no one can do anything about it. At least not yet, or not that anyone is talking about. The weapon in question is the Storm botnet. This is the largest botnet ever seen, and it is acting like something out of a science fiction story. The Storm network is now believed capable to shutting down any military or commercial site on the planet. Or, Storm could cripple hundreds of related sites temporarily. Or, Storm could do some major damage in ways that have not yet been experienced. There's never been anything quite like Storm.  The Storm computer virus had been spreading since early in the year, grabbing control of PCs around the world. By now, Storm had infected nearly 5-10 million computers with a secret program that turned those PCs into unwilling slaves (or "zombies") of those controlling this network (or botnet) of computers. Many of you may have noticed a lot of recent spam directing you to look at an online greeting card, or accompanied by pdf files. That was Storm, the largest single spam campaign ever. When you try to look at the PDF file, Storm secretly takes over your computer. But Storm tries very hard to hide itself. All it wants to do is use your Internet connection to send spam, or other types of malicious data.

Taxes in Developed Nations Reach 36% of Gross Domestic Product After dipping briefly in the first years of this decade, taxes are growing again around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said yesterday.

Taxes in 2005 equaled the previous peak year of 2000, the organization said, when by one measure 36.2 percent of gross domestic product in 30 industrial countries, including the United States, went to taxes at all levels of government. The organization, which is based in Paris, said that when final figures are in for 2006, they will most likely show a new peak. The cost of government has risen by about 20 percent since 1975, when taxes accounted for less than 30 percent of the gross domestic product of the organization’s member countries. The increase in the ratio of taxes to gross domestic product since 2000 occurred despite cuts in tax rates in most of the countries, said Christopher Heady, head of tax policy for the organization. But even with reduced corporate tax rates, Mr. Heady said that worldwide corporate profits had risen so sharply since 2002 that the amount of money flowing into government coffers had increased. He attributed most of the long-term rise in taxes to expanded social insurance programs, like universal health care and pensions. Mr. Heady said two forces were at work in the rising proportion of taxes to economic activity. One was an upturn in world economic activity since 2002, and especially a sharp rise in corporate profits. The second factor, he said, was that while many countries cut tax rates, the cuts were made in a way that subjected more individual income to tax at the highest, albeit reduced, rates.

ME

Tangling With the Taliban NATO troops push into Afghanistan's high-threat areas. Afghan "ownership" is a nice idea and good P.R. Reality is another story. Governor Ezatullah struggles alone to run his district; the foreigners recently hired him a clerk, his first employee. Police lack regular salaries from Kabul, which irregularly sends cash down in bags, so live off bribes. As a result NATO troops, who claim to play only a supporting role, are forced to step in and provide basic services. The six British patrol bases near Sangin are "the equivalent of having a police station in your town," says one British officer. The troops clear irrigation ditches and get local bazaars up and running. "If we can't offer more than the enemy, we've lost from the start," says Helen Gates, the civilian deputy head of the "provincial reconstruction team" responsible for Sangin. "Our efforts to empower local government are in an embryonic stage." As it turned out, the experience that Gen. Craddock and his men got in Kosovo turned out to be very useful after 9/11. These post-conflict or, less P.C., post-modern colonial missions take time. The outside world is trying to construct -- not reconstruct -- a more or less functioning state. Yet time is a scarce resource given the attention spans and patience of people back home. Gen. Craddock pleads for it "to get the Afghan police, army, bureaucracy to stand up and get the job done themselves." "I don't think that we're losing," he said. "Question is, are we winning fast enough?"

AFGHANISTAN: Follow The Money While religion is a major factor in the Afghan unrest, the biggest cause of violence is money, or the lack of it. The booming heroin trade is doing more to keep the violence going, than anything else. This is the poorest country in Asia, and one of the most heavily armed. The Taliban arose in the 1990s to halt a civil war over money. The Taliban believed religion was more important. But that didn't last long, and the Taliban fell within two months of the U.S. attacking in 2001, with smart bombs and suitcases full of hundred dollar bills. Now it's the drug lords hauling around the fat stacks of hundreds. This cash enables the Taliban to hire gunmen (at several times what police and soldiers get paid). These lads try to protect poppy fields, and the labs where the poppies are refined into opium and heroin. The money also pays for the Taliban and al Qaeda suicide bomber teams. Technically, the Taliban are fighting for political power, but they cannot ignore what their paymasters want. But ultimately, control of Afghanistan goes to those with the most money. In ages past this was the tribes with the access to the most valuable resources. A thousand years ago, it was the trade route from China to Europe, that passed through. Today it's the heroin trade. Whoever controls that, or eliminates it, will control Afghanistan.

Politics and Policies

A Left-Handed Salute  Sociologist and radical activist Todd Gitlin, who has been a figure in the American Left since his Vietnam-era days in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has made a serious effort to reflect on the failures of the American Left since the 1960s. The criticisms he puts forward here, which are inevitably self-criticisms in part, are unsparing and penetrating, made all the more memorable by his unacademic, direct, and often epigrammatic style. He sees a story rich with irony, in which it has been precisely the Left's most triumphant expressions in contemporary American life that led it into the spiritual wasteland in which it now finds itself. And for this lost condition, he believes, the Left has only itself to blame. Gitlin argues that the results may have benefited individual leftists, who have feathered their own nests quite nicely by fusing radicalism and academic careerism, but they have been unambiguously disastrous for the Left as a political force outside the academy. The Great Refusal turns out to have been little more than "a shout from an ivory tower," an advertisement of futility that was unable to conceal the despair, paralysis, and general contempt, including self-contempt, that lay behind it. The abandonment of patriotism, he says, was a sure recipe for political irrelevance: how can one hope to sway an electorate toward which one has all but declared one's comprehensive disdain? Now there is another reason. The events of 9/11 convinced him that the civilized world faces a deadly threat and that the exercise of American power in the world is not always an unmitigated evil—it may even be desirable and necessary.

Crisis on the Right  As conservatism rose first to prominence and then to power, and as the conservative counterestablishment became an establishment in its own right, I.S.I. plugged along, mostly in the background. Today, as conservatism staggers through its worst crisis in a generation (or two), I.S.I. is still there — now asking what went wrong. Nash identifies four braided but distinct strands of modern American conservatism. Traditionalists value continuity, order and hierarchy; libertarians prize personal freedom and social spontaneity; neoconservatives blend the New Deal’s idealistic spirit with conservatism’s muscular nationalism; and religious conservatives fight relativism, secularism and immorality. Given their differences, the surprise is that these four heads ever joined atop one political beast. Just as impressive, in a different way, is Anderson’s book, …. He concerns himself with politics in the Aristotelian sense: the study of how people best govern their societies and their souls. His 10 essays range in subject from judicial activism to the philosophy of John Rawls. The pieces stand independently and deserve to be savored that way, but common themes emerge. Like his intellectual mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, and unlike so many of today’s red-meat, red-state right-wingers, Anderson is no triumphalist tub-thumper for capitalism or democracy. Both, he recognizes, are far better than the alternatives; but both, unchecked, can set in motion cultural forces — anomie, dependency, ruthless egalitarianism — that corrode soul and society alike. Like Jouvenel, Anderson holds with a worldly-wise anti-utopianism whose lineage goes back to the very origins of conservative thought. If more of today’s conservatives had heeded its cautions, they might not have been so surprised to see Iraq’s unstructured liberation turn sour.

Income-Inequality Gap Widens Widening Gap: The wealthiest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and highlighting the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers. Behind the Numbers: Scholars attribute rising inequality to several factors, including technological change that favors those with more skills, and globalization and advances in communications that enlarge the rewards available to "superstar" performers whether in business, sports or ntertainment. Political Fallout: The data pose a potential challenge for President Bush and the Republican presidential field. They have sought to play up the strength of the economy and low unemployment, and the role of Mr. Bush's tax cuts in both. Democrats may use the data to exploit middle-class angst about stagnant wages. The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers. The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.The IRS data, based on a large sample of tax returns, are for "adjusted gross income," which is income after some deductions, such as for alimony and contributions to individual retirement accounts. While dated, many scholars prefer it to timelier data from other agencies because it provides details of the very richest -- for example, the top 0.1% and the top 1%, not just the top 10% -- and includes capital gains, an important, though volatile, source of income for the affluent.The IRS data go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s.

·         Econ Blog: The Two Sides of Tax Cuts, Inequality's Roots: Wall Street, Not Board Rooms, Tax Shares for Rich and Poor

Life is harder now, experts say Why do so many middle class Americans with so much stuff say they feel so squeezed? If they are dogged by debt, isn’t it their own fault? Perhaps, some experts say, things are not as they appear. Bankruptcy law expert and Harvard University Professor Elizabeth Warren spent a lot of time crunching consumer spending numbers for her popular books, "The Fragile Middle Class” and “The Two-Income Trap.” In both, she makes this point: Despite all those $200 sneakers you hear about and the long lines at Starbucks, consumers are actually spending less of their income — much less — on discretionary items like clothing, entertainment and food than their parents did. In fact, after taking care of essentials like housing and health care, today’s middle class has about half as much spending money as their parents did in the early 1970s, Warren says. The basics, according to Warren, now take up close to three-fourths of every family's spending power (it was about 50 percent in 1973), leaving precious little left over at the end of the month — and leaving many families with no cushion in case of a job loss or health crisis. Warren's theories fly in the face of conventional wisdom and those crowded malls. But the premise is simple: Even though household incomes have risen about 75 percent from 1970, most of that is the result of a second earner — generally a woman — joining the work force. And that added income has been swallowed by rising fixed expenses, such as child care and housing costs, Warren argues. The average family pays at least twice as much for housing compared to its counterpart in the 1970s, Warren says, and in some competitive areas with good schools, housing costs have risen by as much as 600 percent.

• Who or what is the middle class?
• How much of my wages goes to health care?
• Life is harder now, experts say
• How you can cope with ‘middle-class crunch’
• Where a home of their own is an elusive dream
• A family banks on its human capital
• Tourist mecca squeezes the middle
• Tracking the middle class' missing cash
• Why money doesn't equal happiness
• Gut Check America Section Front

Opinion: Recession isn't an 'if' but a 'when' Housing prices are heading lower. Stock prices are heading down. And it's all systems go for a downturn in the U.S. economy, no matter what the bulls say. As I think about recent developments on Wall Street, I am struck by the absurdity of the current mentality. By that I mean: The latest run in the stock market, which peaked as the structured-credit problems made themselves known, had been powered by leveraged-buyout madness, which itself had been powered by lunacy in various forms of structured credit. What I expect to unfold is a recession and severe weakness in the equity market. To get a sense of the timing, I was therefore eager to hear the comments of noted speakers last week at a New York conference held by Jim Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. To my surprise, it seemed most of them were not too terribly concerned about the stock market or the economy.

Do you think you're better off than your middle-class counterparts in the early-1970s?   

Yes. I have a house full of gadgets they could only dream of.         17%

About the same. I spend less on some things and more on others. 21%

Not even close. I'm busting my hump and barely hanging on.         62%

 
Plans for Coal Power Plants Scrapped At least 16 coal-fired power plant proposals nationwide have been scrapped in recent months and more than three dozen have been delayed as utilities face increasing pressure due to concerns over global warming and rising construction costs. The slow pace of new plant construction reflects a dramatic change in fortune for a fuel source that just a few years ago was poised for a major resurgence. Combined, the canceled and delayed projects represent enough electricity to power approximately 20 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy's latest tally of pending coal plants, released last week, shows eight projects totaling 7,000 megawatts have been canceled since May. That's besides the cancellation earlier this year of eight plants in Texas totaling 6,864 megawatts. Utilities have also pushed back construction on another 32,000 megawatts worth of projects, according to the Energy Department report.

Science and Culture

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 Between October 3, 1935, when the armies of Italy invaded Abyssinia, and May 10, 1940, when German troops entered the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, war after war rocked the world. And yet all these bloody conflicts did not amount to a world war. That, as Ian Kershaw shows in this splendid and thought-provoking book, came as a result of decisions made in London, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Moscow, and Washington between May 1940 and fall 1941. It was then that the many local conflicts expanded and merged into a single gigantic struggle between, in the one camp, Nazi Germany, its minor European allies, and the Japanese Empire, and, in the other camp, much of the rest of the world. That the great strategic and political decisions taken in 1940 and 1941 assured the victory of the Great Allied Powers testifies to the wisdom of Churchill and Roosevelt as well as to the supreme viability of the democratic systems over which they presided. The decisions also exposed the fatal inefficiency of militaristic, authoritarian Japan and tyrannical, fanatical Germany. Still, ultimate success in this greatest of all wars was not a democratic monopoly: the country that contributed most to the defeat of Hitler was not the United States or Great Britain but the Soviet Union, a state based on unbridled terror, whose murderous leader invariably made the wrong decisions in the years 1940-1941.

Key Human Traits Tied to Shellfish Remains Almost from the start, it seems, humans headed for the shore. But this was no holiday for them. More than likely, it was a matter of survival at a perilous time of climate change in Africa 164,000 years ago. By then Homo sapiens had developed a taste for shellfish — much earlier than previously thought, scientists report in today’s issue of the journal Nature — as the species was adapting to life in caves on the craggy coast of southern Africa. Exploring a cave in a steep cliff overlooking the ocean, an international team of scientists found deposits of shellfish remains, hearths, small stone blades and fragments of hematite, some of which, the scientists believe, had been ground for use as the coloring agent red ochre that sometimes had symbolic meaning. Previous research had indicated that human ancestors had for ages depended solely on terrestrial plants and animals. Both fossil and genetic data show that modern humans evolved 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, but archaeological evidence for the emergence of modern behavior in technology, creativity, symbolic thinking and lifestyles is sparse. But six years ago, at Blombos Cave, near Pinnacle Point, archaeologists uncovered 77,000-year-old tools along with pigments and engraved stones suggesting symbolic behavior, a sign of early creativity. Now, at the Pinnacle Point cave site, the shellfish remains reveal another important innovation. Other coastal populations had been found exploiting marine resources as early as 125,000 years ago. Neanderthals were cooking shellfish in Italy about 110,000 years ago.

 This Is Your Brain on Music  But what is music? Why does it move us so? What does it have to do with memory or emotion or language? Was music a precursor or antecedent of language? Are we wired for it, or is it completely socially acquired? Those subjects and more are the focus of This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitin points out that we are all musical experts. Even if we don't know the names of scales and modes, we can tell them apart. Regular people can identify out-of-tune notes just as well as professional musicians. The first section of This Is Your Brain on Music deals with defining what music is, and how it differs from generic noise. Melody, contour, and rhythm all get their just due. The middle section (the largest part of the book) deals with what parts of our brain are involved with what parts of analyzing music. This was for me the most fascinating part of the book; we know a lot more about brain function than when I took a course in neural mechanisms of behavior almost twenty years ago. One interesting philosophical point that Levitin raises concerns the old adage about a tree falling in a forest. Levitin argues that sound only exists inside our minds, as does color. Sure, out there in the world there are air molecules vibrating at different frequencies, and photons of different wavelengths of light. But the color blue is simply a quality our brains assign to light of particular wavelengths; there is nothing actually "blue" about electromagnetic radiation of 455-490 nm. Likewise, sound is a quality constructed in our minds; a way our brain interprets mechanical vibrations.