Diary

I've been reading Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, and, though I thought I'd finish it, I've just decided to give up. The book was first published in 1974, when Holmes was young, and apparently a Shelley fanatic. While I do believe that Shelley was a good poet, his life was so nerve-racking that it's too painful for me to read about it in the slow-motion manner of this volume. You have to wade through his juvenile correspondences and put up with his ridiculously poor judgement in the first hundred pages – and there are still more than six-hundred pages to go! At the age of eighteen he entered his father's alma mater, University College, Oxford, but was expelled, along with his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, after writing and distributing the pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, before completing his first year. At the age of nineteen he persuaded a friend of one of his sisters, Harriet Westbrook, to marry him. She was sixteen at the time. They were married in Edinburgh and lived briefly in York – with Hogg. Looking ahead, after Harriet had a child with Shelley and another on the way, he abandoned her for Mary Godwin, whom he married. Harriet drowned herself when she was twenty-one – and so on. Even though Shelley himself only lived to the age of twenty-nine, I don't think that I can take any more of this. This isn't a criticism of Richard Holmes – I just seem to intensely dislike Shelley as a person.

So I'm still on the lookout for something to read. At the moment I'm fairly cabin-bound, because there has been a lot of snow. I've also been unenthusiastically following the Trump phenomenon. I think that he's so bad that even the conservative supreme court may be forced to act against him. The Democrats are gradually building up some gumption, and I think that we may be close to the nadir right now. Meanwhile, I've been able to find some old films that continue to entertain me.

Diary

Ordinarily I would have found an appropriate book and be commenting on it by now, but there is a hit-and-miss aspect to finding the right book, and it can be extremely time-consuming.  For example, I had no idea that I would like the biography of Carson McCullers as much as I did, and it turned out to be one of my favorites of 2024. My scientific interests are mainly focused on evolutionary biology, and new findings in that field emerge very slowly: one might die waiting for new revelations. I am currently reading a short book by Rosemary Ashton which analyses George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. I like Ashton a lot, and she understands George Eliot very well, but I don't consider that novel to be one of Eliot's best: it seems to appeal more to women than to men, and Simone de Beauvoir loved it. I'm also starting on an old biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I think has more substance, at least in terms of the number of pages. Shelley is not one of my favorite poets, though he is probably more interesting than Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden or Ted Hughes. I liked him in 1974 at the time of my wedding, and I had the best man read "Mutability." That turned out to be an appropriate poem for a marriage that lasted eleven years. As far as poets go, from a biographical standpoint, they can be more interesting than others if they write well, are hyperactive and die young. That sort of applies to Carson McCullers too. Though this is a cliché, there is a fine line between creative genius and craziness, and, for example, I don't think that Beethoven was someone whom I would want to know personally. I don't think that Shelley was crazy, and he is associated with a few others I've been reading about. His wife, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein and was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose biography I read some time ago. And the Shelleys were both influenced by Rousseau. They have many English literary connections, including Shelley's friendship with Leigh Hunt, who later became a friend of G.H. Lewes, making tenuous connections with George Eliot and Charles Darwin. These kinds of connections add an interesting density to the subject matter that rarely occurs in the U.S. There was an intense cultural density in London and Paris, and the only American city that comes close is New York.

My evening entertainment continues to be short snippets of good films. I'm currently watching "Babette's Feast," which I think is very good, though it is very slowly paced. Then I'll probably rewatch "It Happened One Night" and "Annie Hall," which I like a lot but haven't seen in years. I continue to watch the evening news, but, because of the Trump phenomenon, I frequently mute it and sometimes just turn it off. I can only take so much of Trump, who seems like a talking orangutan, especially with his friend, Elon Musk, the talking chimpanzee. I also find the interviews with Trump supporters in congress insufferable and just turn them off. I am reminded of Trump's complaint that modern toilets don't flush well, and think to myself that, with all of his Republican supporters in Washington, he must have the cleanest anus in the world and only needs a toilet for urination. Trump and Musk seem to be at the center of the largest disinformation campaign in American history, and I think that they should both be in jail now. As an investor, I find them both quite dangerous, and I'm now seriously considering investing in gold for the first time. Although I think that the political situation will eventually correct itself, this is probably the first time in American history with a simultaneously corrupt president, congress and supreme court. You have to be intellectually handicapped not to notice this – but, unfortunately, Americans have always been intellectually handicapped if you believe H.L. Mencken.

This winter is turning out to be more normal for Vermont, and there has been snow on the ground most of the time, with temperatures below zero occasionally. The bird feeder is very popular now, and I may have to buy some more sunflower kernels soon.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I just watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the first time in many years and thought I'd write about it today. The film seems to be a little different from the novel, perhaps because it may be based on a play that had been based on the novel. This makes the main characters sharply-focused, and the acting and directing skills necessary to make it were a little more demanding than in the case of most films. The popularity of films and plays can be social phenomena in themselves and in some cases bear little relation to the intentions of the author. When I was in college, the Samuel Beckett play, "Waiting for Godot," was wildly popular and had made Beckett famous; reading about it now, it seems that the play became popular primarily because viewers read their own meanings into it, and those meanings were not ones intended by Beckett, who, before that play, had been an obscure Irish writer. When I saw a college production of it, it didn't make much sense to me. A similar phenomenon can occur with films, and I don't think that Ken Kesey, the author of the novel, particularly approved of the film. Popular films and plays can take on a life of their own in relation to the intent of the original author, and, as I've said, I think that the best literary works shouldn't have film versions. However, I think that Kesey was a run-of-the-mill participant in the Beat movement, which, though it played an important role in American arts from the postwar years up until the 1960's, doesn't have much of a discernable legacy in the present. There may still be some surviving elements in jazz, in writers such as László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, who died in 2021, and perhaps even in the early music of Bob Dylan, but for the most part the Beats are ancient history already.

I think that this film may have an added dimension because, as I wrote earlier, the director was a Czech, Miloš Forman. Jack Nicholson may have been given the part of Randle McMurphy based on his participation in the film "Easy Rider," released in 1969. That film, I think, though a low-budget one, contains anti-establishment elements that could be said to carry over into "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Forman came from an anti-totalitarian arts environment in the Eastern Bloc, working roughly in the same tradition as Milan Kundera and perhaps some of the early Soviet dissident writers. Being a dissident in Eastern Europe is quite different from being a dissident in the U.S.: Alexei Navalny, an enemy of Vladimir Putin, recently died at the age of forty-seven, whereas Bob Dylan, who once wrote protest songs, is now eighty-three years old and a multimillionaire. 

The story line of this film is fairly simple. McMurphy is a prisoner in Oregon who had been found guilty of having sex with a minor, though he had denied knowing her age. Not liking prison, he was able to get himself transferred to a psychiatric hospital. His ward at the hospital is managed by Nurse Ratched, who has been maintaining an orderly environment with strict rules and a regular medication schedule for patients. The patients have a diverse range of psychiatric symptoms: some have severe symptoms and clearly could not function on their own in society, whereas a majority are relatively normal and are there as a matter of personal choice. Nurse Ratched administers a ludicrous group therapy session in which several of the patients don't have the slightest idea what is going on. McMurphy completely disrupts the environment by developing relationships with some of the patients and encouraging them to be more adventurous. One day, he and a group escape by stealing a bus and then stealing a boat to go fishing in the Pacific Ocean. He also arranges to bring along one of his girlfriends. Later, he sets up a large party after hours, with two of his girlfriends and a lot of booze smuggled in. One of his friends, Billy Bibbit, who has a terrible stutter, ends up sleeping with one of the girlfriends. When Nurse Ratched arrives in the morning, the ward is in shambles, and she finds Billy in bed with the woman. After she threatens to tell Billy's mother, he commits suicide by slitting his throat with a piece of broken glass. McMurphy becomes enraged and attempts to strangle Ratched, but he is pulled off her by the attendants.

In the course of his stay, McMurphy develops a close relationship with Chief, a tall Native American who has been pretending to be mute and deaf. When McMurphy realizes this, they begin to talk in private. He plans to escape with McMurphy at some point. After the strangulation incident, for which Ratched gets a neck brace, McMurphy is taken away. It isn't clear what happened to him until the end. He is returned to the ward at night. When Chief sees that he has been lobotomized, he suffocates him with a pillow and then breaks out by lifting up a large sink and throwing it through a window. In the final scene, he is shown running toward a forest.

Although I suppose that there are several ways that one might interpret this film, I prefer to see it as a critique of how American society employs thought control techniques in order to maintain a docile conformity in American life. While McMurphy does have some antisocial tendencies, in this film he engages his community in a way that they mostly appreciate and from which they benefit. This appeals to me because I have always been annoyed by the mindless conformity within the U.S. I think that this view of the film is supported by the fact that the hospital staff decides that McMurphy has to be permanently disabled by brain surgery when they could simply have returned him to prison. I think that some viewers make out Nurse Ratched to be a heartless villain, whereas I see her as an ordinary American who is just doing what she thinks is her job, which happens to encourage conformity and limited self-expression. If you ever wonder why political developments follow the direction that they do in this country, you can find clues in this film. So, overall, I still think that this to be one of the best American films, which includes the script, the acting and the filming.

The Current Situation

Since I'm still having a lot of trouble finding something to read, I thought that I'd write a bit about the world situation, particularly the return of the chaos-inducing Donald Trump, and what this means for all of us. There is a palpable sense of despair and panic at the moment, and I'm sure that millions of people would like assurances or guidance of some sort. 

First, let me specifically describe how I see Donald Trump. I see him as a stupid person who has been obsessed for most of his life with being perceived as important. From what I observe, he seems to have no particular talent, and he lacks the intelligence and creativity to come up with anything useful for others. In every public appearance of him that I've ever seen, he presents himself as a successful executive whom others flock to for advice. But this is all made-up, and no savvy people take him seriously. As a result, he became surrounded by sycophants who were generally also stupid, and, particularly after he was coached by Roy Cohn, he became extremely hard-nosed, is accustomed to using his underlings to do his dirty work for him, and he also became comfortable lying constantly. It seems that his primary business tactic was to work with small players for services and underpay them in order to maintain a profitable business. His main skill, to this day, is the avoidance of paying full prices for services that he has commissioned. Because of his enormous inheritance from his father, it was easy for him to win court cases against people who lacked his resources. As a matter of habit, he has continued the same technique right up to the present, and because no other person as unscrupulous as he is had ever reached his political level in the U.S. before, he was able to evade jail time for obvious crimes. In historical terms, one would expect that he would be in jail now.

The other aspect of Trump's ascent is the general political entropy that has occurred in the U.S. since about 1993. When business-friendliness became popular in both parties, the power of money gradually took over politics in the U.S. This is more conspicuous today than ever with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Rupert Murdoch, among others, attending the second inauguration of Trump. This isn't a real show of support and simply reflects a calculated attempt to benefit their businesses. In private, to them Trump fits the definition of a useful idiot. To be fair though, I also have to point out that the tech billionaires have their own set of psychological deficiencies. The point really is that the U.S. was not originally intended to be the world headquarters for pathological money-grubbers, and this is the spectacle that we're witnessing now.

I'm not about to predict world history for the next one-hundred years, but it isn't that hard to see how things will end for Trump. The rule of thumb is probably "Once an idiot, always an idiot." This means that Trump isn't about to successfully create a new world order for oligarchs. The more likely scenario is that Trump will completely screw things up, because that is what he usually does. He doesn't have a coherent ideology, and, for the billionaires, this is just a temporarily convenient arrangement for them. Because Trump doesn't understand or care about the needs of others, it isn't possible for him to intentionally make a positive contribution to society. This means that it is impossible for him to have a positive legacy when he leaves office. Only he and his friends will benefit, there will be no useful policies enacted, and the U.S. federal government may be left in shambles. The people who voted for him will generally be worse-off, and he and his advisors will probably continue to be charged with crimes. The powerful people who are supporting him now have already prepared their justifications and alibis, and the world will move on. No significant new world alliances will be formed, and within four years, Trump will have permanently departed. His health seems to be poor, and he could potentially die from natural causes while still in office. People like him are not usually assassinated, but that is also a possibility.

I won't belabor my points and will just say that Trump will eventually be remembered as the stupid fat guy who screwed things up for the world for a few years. If you can just sit tight and weather this, you should be fine. There are still real questions about where new technology is taking us, whether climate change will be addressed, etc., but that has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Diary

I've been reading Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen, which I think is good, but I haven't become excited enough to plow through it. It is probably a lot more interesting than the film, with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which I vaguely recall seeing long ago. The film is said to take many liberties with the book. Dinesen, who was Danish, writes well and is skilled at capturing the feel of the natives and the land. It is a memoir of her years, from 1913 to 1931, at a 4500-acre coffee farm near Nairobi. The farm was one hundred miles from the equator, but at an elevation of six thousand feet, making the climate quite unusual. It is not a particularly happy story, because she contracted syphilis from her husband, who managed the farm poorly and divorced her, and she never recovered fully from the illness. The farm eventually failed, and she left. She did have a romance with a neighbor, an English soldier, but he died in a plane crash in 1929. As I wrote earlier, she had lunch with Carson McCullers and Marilyn Monroe in 1959 while visiting the U.S. I think that this book may have been the inspiration for The Farm in the Green Mountains, by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, which I discussed earlier, because there are stylistic similarities. This would also explain why Alice and her husband, two Germans, suddenly became enthusiastic about becoming Vermont farmers. Obviously, rural Vermont during the 1940's was not as exotic as rural Kenya during this earlier period. Nevertheless, even though Out of Africa is well-written, I think it would appeal more to a cultural anthropologist or to a historian of colonialism in Africa than to me. For this reason, I am setting it aside and may or may not resume reading it at a later date. 

I am still a little burnt out on the biography/memoir genres and plan to stay on scientific/theoretical books for the time being. I continue to look for biographies but haven't found an appealing one recently. As far as my other activities are concerned, my investment survival instincts have been triggered by the looming commencement of the second Trump administration. He didn't do much damage during his first term, because the economy wasn't bad and the pandemic was the main issue. He mishandled the pandemic, and there would probably have been vaccines whether he was president or not. This time it looks as if there may be a larger window for him to cause economic and diplomatic chaos. For this reason, I sold all of my stocks last Friday and am waiting to see how things play out beginning next week. I managed to make large profits on Nvidia and the four main quantum computing stocks, which all plunged today. I would hate to see a significant economic downturn, but it would probably be worth it if it resulted in the removal of Donald Trump and ended the MAGA movement. Trump isn't even in office yet, and Steve Bannon is already attacking Elon Musk. I find it embarrassing to live in a country where Donald Trump and Elon Musk dominate the news media. As far as investments go, I think that Nvidia will pick up again, but that actual advances in quantum computing may be years away, and the recent run-up was primarily a meme-stock phenomenon.

The winter is turning out nice and white, with an almost continuous light snowfall for several days. The total accumulation hasn't been much, and I've only cleared the driveway twice so far. There is plenty of wildlife to watch. Deer come through the yard to eat dried fruit from one of the trees. Yesterday morning, a red fox chased a squirrel by the house. The squirrel successfully jumped onto the house and escaped.

Diary

With a fifty percent reduction in the number of household members, things get quite slow here during the holidays. However, I do have close relatives nearby, so there is always some activity. I haven't felt much like reading but will be starting again shortly; I recently gave up on another book. I've been watching a free MasterClass presentation by Jane Goodall. I like her and mostly agree with her, but I already know almost everything that she's saying. I was mainly interested in her early life, and found that an extremely fortuitous sequence of events led to her career success. If she hadn't made her way to Africa in 1957 and accidentally met Louis Leakey, you may never have heard of her. I was surprised that there was practically no research on chimpanzees at that time, and she was probably the first person to notice that chimpanzees are essentially the same as humans socially. This, along with genetic studies, eventually led to a vast improvement in our understanding of human evolution, though she is an ethologist and isn't particularly interested in that line of research. The origin of the divergence between chimpanzees and humans seems to have been that our ancestors were more environmentally stressed and began to occupy savannahs, whereas chimpanzees remained in forests. When this occurred, hominids developed bipedal gait. Because of their increased mobility and stresses, they became more cooperative and developed language. Although she is slightly New Agey, Goodall's views are very similar to those of other naturalists, such as E.O. Wilson. It is also quite clear that she despises much of contemporary life because of its environmental destruction and mass consumption. Though she doesn't quite say it, she doesn't approve of the American lifestyle at all. She grew up in England during World War II and became accustomed to rationing, and you can see in her a simmering hatred of corporate greed and consumer waste. We need many more people like her who dedicate their later lives to saving the planet. She doesn't put it this way, but if aliens were to visit Earth today, they would conclude that it has a toxic infestation of humans. I still have several more segments left to watch, which are mainly about environmental activism.

I have also been watching news coverage of the Jimmy Carter legacy, and he was quite different from subsequent presidents, mostly in a positive way. He didn't do well in office, but that was mainly due to bad luck. He inherited high inflation from the Republicans: when I bought my first house in 1980, the mortgage rate was thirteen percent! He also had geopolitical problems with Iran. However, he did a very good job negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel. Overall, it didn't help him that he was a complete outsider in Washington, and his staff was referred to as the "Georgia Mafia." Nevertheless, his Christian values, intelligence and work ethic, I think, made him a better person than any of his successors. It also helped that he had a supportive wife from his hometown. Who would want to be married to Nancy Reagan or Melania Trump? Although I'm an atheist, I've always noticed that people who adopt actual Christian values usually are better than other Americans. One of the greatest social problems of today is that self-identified Christians in the U.S. don't seem to see that Donald Trump is completely lacking in Christian values, and if it wasn't for Trump's glaring stupidity, it would be tempting to call him the leader of a satanic cult. As a thought experiment, try imagining him volunteering for Habitat for Humanity after he leaves office: picture Donald and Melania holding hammers and building houses for poor people. Dream on.

At the moment I don't have any house issues, which up to now occupied much of my time. Yesterday I added a clothesline to the back porch in case I need it. If everything keeps going smoothly, I may have to recruit some mice to start another mouse infestation just to keep busy. I have a little more to do on weekdays. I am following the stock market and am currently invested in AI and quantum computing. It would be nice if there were another meme stock rally, but that seems unlikely under the current conditions.

My River runs to thee—

My River runs to thee—

Blue Sea! Wilt welcome me?

My River waits reply—

Oh Sea—look graciously—

I'll fetch thee Brooks

From spotted nooks—

Say—Sea—Take Me!

—Emily Dickinson

Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman

Having read some of de Beauvoir's fiction and memoirs, I had a few questions about her life, and this biography, by Toril Moi, was the best that I could find. There is also a biography by Deirdre Bair that reveals many new facts about de Beauvoir, but I decided to skip it, because some readers find Bair a little presumptuous. I also had trepidations about Moi's book, because it is primarily about de Beauvoir's ideas as a feminist, and I thought that she might write in the manner of Elizabeth Povinelli, who sounds absurd to me. Both are academics, but Moi is a little older. On the whole, I liked Moi's book, though it focuses more on ideas than biographical facts, because it does answer the questions I had and provides a clearer picture of de Beauvoir than she did about herself.

One of the areas that I was interested in was the role, if any, of existentialism in de Beauvoir's life. I had thought for a long time that existentialism could be a lot of bunk, and I now think that it is. Having read quite a bit on human evolution, the emerging theory is now that all organisms, including humans, are subject to biological determinism over which they have no control. This makes Jean-Paul Sartre's central idea, that we are "condemned to be free," a falsehood, and I think collapses his entire model. Robert Sapolsky even makes fun of Sartre in Determined. I don't think that existentialism played much of a role in de Beauvoir's life. She paid lip service to it for Sartre's benefit, but it doesn't conspicuously appear in her works. She is best known for The Second Sex, which is primarily a takedown of the patriarchy, and when it was published in 1949 it influenced some of the American women who led the feminist movement in the U.S. in the 1960's and 1970's, such as Betty Friedan and Kate Millett.

I think that in her memoirs and more so in The Mandarins de Beauvoir provided a distorted picture of her life and omitted some of the key factors that influenced her. She was the eldest of two daughters, and was initially very close to her father, who was a conservative, patriarchal bourgeoisie. After her sister, Hélène, was born, her father lost interest in her. Hélène was prettier than Simone and fit her father's model better. He had no interest in an intellectual daughter, and Hélène matched his bourgeois preferences by growing up to become an artist. In Simone's case, until she completed her education and moved out, her parents imposed strict rules on her, and she may have developed an abandonment complex, though she never says this herself. A case could be made that when Sartre became de Beauvoir's ideal partner, he accommodated her because she was his first intellectual fan, and he planned to have a major intellectual career. However, he hedged his bets by setting up the relationship such that they would not marry or live together, and this paved the way for many affairs. In fact, they stopped having sex early in the relationship. But he did live up to their initial agreement, and they continued to confide in each other.

As I said earlier, I don't think that Sartre was of much significance as an intellectual, and Tony Judt, the historian, thought that he missed the boat on Stalin's abuse of power. Angela Carter, the writer, wrote "Why is a nice girl like Simone wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J.-P.?" It was de Beauvoir's minimization of Sartre's sexual escapades that first drew my attention to her omissions. One of the earliest ones was with Olga Kosakiewicz, who was a student of de Beauvoir when she was seventeen and had an affair with Sartre when she was twenty. Olga's younger sister, Wanda, also had an affair with him. Olga later said that she felt psychologically damaged by Sartre. Sartre's behavior toward women sounds as if it perfectly fit de Beauvoir's definition of patriarchal abuse. In many respects, de Beauvoir seems to have adjusted her lifestyle in order to match Sartre's. While she claimed to dislike lesbian sex, she engaged in it often for several years and passed on her lovers to Sartre. Occasionally it almost seems as if they maintained some sort of rivalry in their sex lives. In 1945, Sartre began an affair with Dolorès Vanetti, whom he met while traveling alone in the U.S. In 1947, de Beauvoir also went on a solo trip to the U.S. and immediately started an affair with Nelson Algren. This sort of behavior seemed to become a tit-for-tat pattern in which they both behaved badly but made a private joke of it later.

One of the main things that I noticed from reading de Beauvoir is that she rarely criticizes male behavior but freely offers slightly condescending advice to unhappy women. In The Mandarins, Anne, the de Beauvoir character, pities Paula, who cracks up when Henri, the Camus character, abruptly dumps her, but she isn't at all sympathetic and presumably thinks that Paula should just grow up. In "The Woman Destroyed," Monique also has a breakdown when her husband, Maurice, has an affair, and de Beauvoir once again shows little sympathy. Another thing about her fiction that I dislike is that she portrays young adults within a rigid ideological framework that seems unrealistic to me. Nadine in The Mandarins is portrayed as far more sophisticated for her age than seems possible, and so is Lucienne in "The Woman Destroyed." In "The Age of Discretion," I think that de Beauvoir is too heavy-handed with Phillipe, since he violates Sartre's dogmatic preference for the intellectual life. In these three instances, I think that she missed a lot by never having children and probably didn't understand them well. To me it seems that she may have been unconsciously inserting Sartre's self-serving ideas into her fiction, perhaps as a rationale for her own behavior.

Near the end of the book, Toril Moi does a good job discussing de Beauvoir's psychological weaknesses. This is generally concealed in the de Beauvoir works that I've read. From reading them, you would never know that she had anxiety attacks and suffered from depression, along with the abandonment fears that I mentioned above. In reality, she was nothing like the Anne character in The Mandarins. Moi writes:

For me, the most striking aspect of Beauvoir's choices is the fact that she consistently refused to examine her own emotional strategies with anything like the discernment she mobilized to analyze those of other women. What would have happened to Simone de Beauvoir had she taken psychoanalysis seriously from the start? But this, clearly, is an anachronistic question. Beauvoir was born into a pre-analytical age: in France in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s there was little incentive for her or any other intellectuals to consider psychoanalysis as a major influence on their thought or personal lives.

I would say that de Beauvoir's emotional investment in Sartre was a very bad idea, but that she can't be blamed for that, given her available resources at the time. 

Diary

I've decided to continue reading a biography of Simone de Beauvoir that I recently started, even though I don't think that it will provide a full picture of her. The problem with de Beauvoir is that she wrote mountains of memoirs while conveniently omitting a lot of important information. I think that some of that has come out since she died, but there does not appear to be a high-quality biography that covers all aspects of her life. That could easily be one-thousand pages long, and the one I'm reading is less than three-hundred, excluding the notes. De Beauvoir is currently on my second tier of imaginary friends, because I don't consider her completely honest. I may also place Carson McCullers in the second tier, because she was a lot of fun, but she loses points for not being intellectual enough. I like some poets so much that Emily Dickinson or Denise Levertov might also become second-tier imaginary friends. My only current first-tier imaginary friend is still George Eliot, and I've read so much about her already that I may know her better than her own family did.  

I've been thinking about my criteria for imaginary friends, and will write a little about that today. First I should discuss why I have imaginary friends. In my case, these friends represent a thinking or style with which I can identify. Rather than imagining them as invisible people in the room with me, they are more like figureheads for some of the things that interest me. You may wonder why none of my imaginary friends are male. That is because there is much that I dislike about male behavior: competitiveness, grandiosity and superficiality. These traits can also be found in women, but they are usually less conspicuous. It may simply be that men are generally more stunted emotionally than women. I think that George Eliot, as a novelist, was occasionally able to convey her nuanced reaction to life better than anyone else, including Gustave Flaubert. Similarly, in my opinion, Emily Dickinson and Denise Levertov may occupy a rarefied class of poets.

Although I've never had completely successful relationships with women, I barely had any successful relationships with men. My male friendships have tended to be superficial and transient. It may be relevant that I'm not gay, but I always notice crudity in men that isn't as readily apparent in women, though there are some masculine women around. When I read fiction or poetry, I am likely to tune out male writers faster than female writers, but most of the females eventually get screened out too. There are good male writers of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, but I usually detect an element of vocational expediency that reduces their interest to me. The writers I like don't have gimmicks. 

In other news, as you might expect, I am still having difficulty finding good films. I just watched "North by Northwest," a classic Alfred Hitchcock film. I enjoyed it and thought that it was well-made, but it's not my favorite Hitchcock film. I like Eva Marie Saint, and apparently Hitchcock personally coached her for her role. I thought that she did an excellent job portraying a complex woman – something that you rarely see in films these days. She also appeared in "On the Waterfront." I was amazed to learn that someone who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando and Cary Grant is still alive. She is one-hundred years old!

The snow has all melted here, and I'm watching the birds at the feeder. A few minutes ago there was a Carolina wren, which I hadn't seen before. There is more activity at the feeder now than there was at this time last year because of the snow. The goldfinch count is still very low.

In the Trump department, I am getting used to his return, and, though there are still ominous elements, as a practical matter, I don't think that he will have much effect on me, so I don't waste time on him. The main way that he could actually have an adverse effect on me personally would be to cause an economic collapse, with a stock market crash. At present, much of my discretionary income comes from investments, and another stock market crash would adversely affect me financially. However, whatever he says, he is actually in the pockets of Wall Street and the billionaire's club, and he heeds their directives like a crybaby – so I'm not losing sleep over that at the moment.

The Origin of Language

I did end up reading From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language, by Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny, but overall found it too academic to be enlightening. After over 200 pages, they conclude:

For us, then, the honesty and uniqueness questions become: Why did hominins evolve such cooperation-dependent lifeways? Why did only hominins develop such cooperation-dependent lifeways? Why (perhaps) did only sapiens develop the complex forms of cooperation that required the resources of full language? We have not answered these questions in this book, though we have said a little about the third. Rather, we have embedded our account of the evolution of language within the framework of a broader picture of the evolution of hominin cooperation. We have elaborated and defended that framework, but not here, as it requires book-length treatment in its own right (Sterelny 2012a; Sterelny 2021). If that account of the emergence and changing character of hominin cooperation is seriously wrong, this account of language falls with it. If, on the other hand, it is broadly correct, it answers the honesty and uniqueness questions.

Putting all this together then: we do not claim to have provided even a close approximation of a proper lineage explanation, taking us from an independently supported baseline identifying the communicative skills of the earliest hominins to language-equipped modern humans. But we do claim to have outlined, and in places done a little more than outline, an expandable lexicon, displaced reference, the core cognitive capacities on which syntax depends, the gesture-speech transition (assuming there was one), and the expanded functionality of language.

As you can see, these authors are not exactly bold in their assertions. I am primarily interested in the main process of language acquisition and how it led to what Ian Tattersall calls symbolic reasoning, i.e., intelligence. For this reason, I read another Tattersall essay, "Language Origins: An Evolutionary Framework." This contains the same ideas as "Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition," which I discussed earlier. Homo sapiens came into existence 200,000-300,000 years ago and began to move out of Africa 70,000-100,000 years ago. Tattersall relies on human-made items to judge cognitive ability, and he thinks that although humans may have been relatively modern in a neurological sense 200,000 years ago, modern human cognition did not develop until about 100,000 years ago:

In the period between around 100 and 70 thousand years ago we begin to find, at sites in the eastern Mediterranean and northern and southern Africa, evidence that hominids – almost certainly Homo sapiens – were piercing, stringing, and sometimes ochre-staining small gastropod shells, presumably for use in body ornamentation (Henshilwood et al. 2002, 2004; Vanhaeren et al. 2006; Bouzougger et al. 2010). In all documented modern human societies such ornamentation is redolent with implications of status, occupation, group membership, and so forth; and it is widely accepted as a robust proxy for self-identification and symbolic cognitive processes on the part of humans who decorated themselves....

Tattersall concludes:

Our cognitive and linguistic skills are, of course, built on a foundation of hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate brain evolution; and nothing would be the same today if even one of the innovations that accumulated over that long period had not been acquired. But there is something emergently different about us: something that was not fine-tuned by natural selection over a vast period of time, and that in consequence makes our behavioral repertoire infinitely flexible – just like language itself.

I am reminded of Improbable Destinies, by Jonathan B. Losos, which I discussed in 2018. In his experiments with lizards in the Bahamas, he found that evolutionary changes could occur in just one generation if long-legged ground lizards were pressured to live in the vegetation above due to the introduction of larger, predatory lizards at ground level. Because long legs were disadvantageous above ground level, the lizards immediately evolved shorter legs. Losos doesn't discuss the mechanism for the reduction in leg length – I would think that this would be too brief a period for a genetic change. It seems more likely that the genotype allowed flexible outcomes in the phenotype for situations like this. A similar process may have occurred among humans. It seems plausible that Homo sapiens built up various cognitive skills through the use of language by living in cooperative groups for thousands of years. The advanced cognition of modern humans may have been precipitated by adverse environmental conditions during the late Pleistocene period. It seems unlikely that the extinction of all of the other Homo species alive at that time could have been a coincidence.

I should also add that the emergence of biological phenomena, including neural development, as discussed by Robert Sapolsky, adds a new dimension to how we now think about evolution.

Diary

All of a sudden, we seem to be having a normal winter again. This is probably because there is currently a La Niña effect, making the temperatures cooler here. They say it may not last, though. There has been snow on the ground since Thanksgiving, and I've put up the birdfeeders. This year, the birds came almost immediately. The chickadees always come first, and they were followed by tufted titmice and nuthatches. There are usually juncos in the yard, and they joined in. After a few days, the hairy and downy woodpeckers found the suet. The goldfinches always form the largest group, but they build up slowly, because they prefer to come in flocks; I've only seen a couple of them so far. All of the squirrels are coming over and having a try and failing at the sunflower kernel feeder; they eventually give up. So now I have something to look at outside while I'm sitting at my computer. The squirrels can be a little annoying at first, because they crawl all over the outside of the house. Also, some of the woodpeckers tap on the house occasionally. They don't seem to do any serious damage, but I check to make sure that they don't create any large holes. One nice thing about log cabins is that the siding is durable and low-maintenance. I spent many hours painting clapboard in Middlebury, and it also rots. I don't seem to have a carpenter ant problem, and there are no termites here. 

This is the beginning of cabin fever season, and I'm attempting to read more now, since I don't spend as much time outdoors. I've been dabbling in a couple of biographies but so far haven't become excited enough to finish one. I've also started on a scientific book that attempts to explain the evolution of human language from the time of our earliest ancestors to the present. This is right up my alley, and I will definitely finish it. I agree with Ian Tattersall and think that human language is what distinguishes us from other primates and is the source of our particular cognition. This is an extremely difficult subject, because you can't go back in time to see exactly how it developed, and there aren't many cultural or physical clues. Nevertheless, it would be nice to know, because that is what makes us distinctively human. Ironically, I don't think that this type of research will end up making us feel better about ourselves: we'll just find out that through ordinary biological processes, mutations and the right mix of environmental conditions we came into existence; God didn't roll out the red carpet for us, and we don't even know why the universe exists.

Speaking of red carpets, I just watched "The Silence of the Lambs" again and can see why it won so many awards. Although the plot has lots of holes in it, the acting by Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, and even Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill), is quite good. The problem is that the film is based on a popular suspense novel and I don't think that anyone exactly like Hannibal Lecter or Buffalo Bill ever existed, though there have been serial killers with some of their characteristics. One scene is borrowed from the actual Ted Bundy. I also didn't like the fact that the FBI and police are depicted as inept throughout the film. On a side note, there are internet discussions about whether the film is anti-transgender, since Buffalo Bill behaves in a transgender manner. Anyway, I found the film entertaining, but wouldn't call it art. Without the acting, I don't think that it would have been as impressive.

Like many people, I am attempting to follow the news without paying much attention to Donald Trump. It is somewhat of a consolation to think of Trump as a complete idiot and recognize that as harebrained as his ideas are he can't have much effect on world history. You have to consider that he was named one of the worst presidents ever by political experts after his first term, and he hasn't changed at all. He isn't in the least bit creative, and right now the only thing he's doing is coming up with new versions of his old bad ideas that didn't work. Because of his ego, he never admits mistakes, so he tends to repeat them. You can see his little mind working and look ahead to his future certification as the worst president in American history. So far, many of the Republicans in Congress are still supporting him, but I think that their loyalty is wearing thin. He may be just a couple of blunders away from being impeached again. If he damages the economy at all, he won't have anything to hang his hat on.

Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar

Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar

Unless thou know'st the Tune

Or every Bird will point at thee

Because a Bard too soon—

—Emily Dickinson

Paradigm Shift Overload

Because I'm tired of biographies at the moment, I thought that I would instead write about how I see the current malaise that seems to be affecting people, especially in the U.S. The phrase "paradigm shift" was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although that's really just a fancy way of saying that scientific models change over time, you can extrapolate from it that most conceptual models generated by humans change over time, and sometimes they are completely replaced by new models. A simple example is the change from the geocentric model of the solar system to the heliocentric model. Scientists are constantly attempting to explain the universe, and occasionally one theory completely replaces another. Sometimes theoretical fissures last for many decades, and there has been a dual model in physics where gravitational theory operates independently from quantum theory, and the two models seem incompatible. This state of affairs has been around since Einstein, and he was unable to reconcile the two systems. Other conceptual models in science can become problematic over time, and, as Sabine Hossenfelder laments in Lost in Math, some physicists have recently become so enraptured by mathematical aesthetics that they seem to have lost interest in experimental data, which is the basis for empirical models.

The reason why I'm bringing this up is that, as an observer of people, it is fairly obvious to me that a rapid increase in the number of public conceptual models employed by people in the developed world is causing a higher level of stress than that which occurred during earlier historical periods. Broadly speaking, humans have evolved to live in groups, and, historically, that required the members of each group to operate on similar ideologies and worldviews. When the world population was much lower, ideological conflict between groups was less common than it is today, because groups simply didn't run into each other as often as they do now. With a much larger world population, and with most religions evolving into various sects, individual countries may have conflicting ideologies both internally and externally. Probably that kind of conflict was rare two-thousand years ago in the individual lives of people, but it has gradually increased and accelerated in the last two-hundred years. In the preceding colonial period, Europeans simply traveled to North and South America and took whatever they wanted, and if the natives caused too much trouble, they just killed them. A similar attitude was adopted more recently in the American South, where slaves were considered personal property until after the Civil War. The gist is that, within a long-term historical context, people didn't recognize belief systems that differed from their own, and, even up until the late nineteenth century, it was often thought that indigenous populations were subhuman species.

What has changed since the end of the last century is a partial migration of group identities from regional cultures to social media cultures. There have been many negative consequences to this, and I'll discuss some of them here. Before the internet came into existence, people often had face-to-face encounters with people who lived in their areas, and this was the primary source of their worldviews and was supported by local news media and local governments. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, the internet has gradually taken on an important role by replacing traditional TV programming and news with material that can be produced anywhere, with content and ideas that did not originate locally. This phenomenon has been influencing local ideas for over twenty-five years now, and some of the perspectives that have arisen in particular locales do not represent the historical ideas of a region. One of the effects of this change has been the rise of various opinion leaders and politicians whose careers would have been impossible fifty years ago. The best example that I can think of is the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 compared to the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. In Nixon's case, indications of bad character alone forced him to resign or else be removed by impeachment. In Trump's case, although his behavior has been considerably worse than Nixon's – he is a convicted felon and a known rapist – he won reelection by a margin. In the culture of 1974, that could not have occurred.  

In recent years, many individuals have mobilized on social media for their personal benefit. They are now able to reach groups that were invisible a few years ago and seed them with propaganda that places them in the role of opinion leaders without having to face any consequences. They can convince people that the shooting of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax or that they are successful executives when they are not. If you think about it, it is truly astounding that Donald Trump was reelected after several members of his own administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, stated publicly that he was unfit for office. While there are probably false ideas floating around most of the time, there have never before been as many as there are now. If you look at this from the point of view of human cognition, many people are unable to navigate an environment like this on their own. Few people are able to form opinions independently from a group that they identify as their peers. Unfortunately, the people whom they think are their peers may just be internet hucksters these days. It is possible that new regulations will correct this in the coming years, but that is certainly unlikely to occur under the new Trump administration. Trump has been one of the most successful corrupt abusers of social media. 

When I see people viewing their cell phones in public constantly, they are starting to resemble addicts in need of a fix. It seems that some sort of therapy could be developed for these people, but I'm not sure that it exists now. I think that the core of the problem is that humans in general have not adapted to an environment in which numerous worldviews, which are often incompatible with each other, are presented to them. 

Diary

I had planned to begin commenting by now on a biography of Gustave Flaubert that I've been reading, but I just got sick of it and gave up. Several years ago I read a shorter biography, and I thought that this one might be more informative. However, I found the author's writing style too distracting with respect to the elements that are important to me. I like to focus on family background, upbringing, early influences, personality, interpersonal relationships and career. This book does include that information, but, unfortunately, because the author is an academic, he has to throw in the the history of Rouen, where Flaubert was born, and the history of French medicine, since Flaubert's father was a doctor. The author is an American academic, and this may work in American academic circles, but, as I've said, I generally dislike academic writing styles. As an alternative, I've ordered a biography of Ottoline Morrell, and will probably be reporting on that soon. I'm not especially interested in the Bloomsbury Group, with whom Morrell interacted, but she seems to qualify as an interesting person, in part because of her relationships with Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. She was a fringe bohemian – not common for a British aristocrat. We'll see how that goes.

I am sorely in need of reading material with winter closing in. Because of the weather, I usually don't hike as much at that time of year. At this point I don't have any special projects, because the house is in full working order, there are no rodents inhabiting it, and I'm not interested in improvements. Many suburban housewives would prefer a larger stove, a dishwasher and an island – but I'm not a suburban housewife. Some of the walls are white, but I have no reason to paint them. I could probably use a few area rugs, but I don't really need them. The house isn't exactly swarming with visitors. As far as the outside is concerned, even though the yard is surrounded by trees, I haven't had to remove any fallen trees or limbs, because it hasn't been as windy here as in Middlebury.

Another reason why I need distractions is that I don't really want to follow the news now. Consciously or unconsciously, it can be disturbing to see images of a free active criminal on a daily basis. In the news coverage, you can watch as he assembles his new criminal gang, and it is disconcerting to think about the chaos that may ensue. The news media are continuing their unprofessional neutrality on the behavior of the people in power. It seems possible that corporations, if not the billionaires themselves, will actually take over the federal government. That would include congress, the supreme court and the president. The silver lining, though, is that Trump is such a poor executive that he is almost guaranteed to fail. He will still make horrendous mistakes even when his advisors recommend otherwise. So, as I said, it's only a matter of time before he disappears.

I've been thinking a little about the Republican and Democratic ideologies of recent years. Actually, neither were ever very good. The Republicans have long been about business and personal wealth, but they used to have a sense of noblesse oblige that has gradually disappeared. Republicans usually had fairly selfish outlooks, but those were held in check by their religious beliefs or a vague moral sense in their peer group. Now they seem almost exclusively selfish, to the extent that they don't even trust each other and are literally becoming a band of thieves. The Democratic tradition from FDR up to Jimmy Carter focused on helping the needy in the aftermath of the Great Depression. That all changed under Bill Clinton, when the presidency suddenly became business-friendly. Today, under neoliberalism, both parties favor business over people, and this partially explains why voters didn't get excited by Kamala Harris: she didn't represent a discernible populist change as far as low- and middle-income people were concerned. Other reasons for her failure were her sex, race and the relatively limited exposure to the public that she had compared to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, voters are really stupid and vote mainly on the basis of familiarity. Trump is proof that you can now become President if you have enough photo ops. He has inadvertently created a dangerous copycat phenomenon in which people say to themselves "God, if that idiot can become President, I could do it!" Unfortunately, this has caused a large cadre of slimy Machiavellians to cluster around him. However, I don't think that this situation will necessarily turn out as badly as you may think – eventually Trump will fail and lose his attractiveness to followers. How many people are emulating Joseph McCarthy today?

Diary

I've sort of been waiting for the election season to end. But now it looks as if we're going to be hearing about politics nonstop for several years. For me this is about as much fun as being forced to watch Roseanne reruns every night. That is a sitcom that I permanently gave up on after less than one episode. Since I'd prefer not to think about Donald Trump, I'll just make a few comments now so that I can move on to more interesting topics. 

At this point, since everything that Trump says is a form of hype, and his worldview is comparable to that of a character in a low-grade sitcom, it isn't clear where things will go from here. He doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix anything, but he always tries, unconvincingly, to appear knowledgeable and in control. The worst-case scenario might be his immediate transformation of the country into a fascist state, but I don't think that he is competent enough to pull that off. This is an ironic situation, because he won by convincing lower- and middle-income people that he will improve their economic prospects, and most of his career has been devoted to abusing ordinary workers either financially or sexually and then protecting himself by making litigation prohibitively expensive for them. If his father hadn't handed him $500 million, he would have been in jail decades ago. The evolution of his career consisted of starting as the front man for his father's unscrupulous real estate business and then becoming the front man for miscellaneous unscrupulous billionaires. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos do not want a federal government that increases their personal or business taxes, and they want as little regulation as possible for their corporations. If Trump accommodates them, the federal deficit will skyrocket, since he has promised his supporters lower taxes. He has also boxed himself into a corner on higher tariffs on foreign goods, since that would cause inflation. What Trump, like most crooked politicians, will probably do is raise the deficit as much as he can in the short term to create an illusion of prosperity and time his inflationary policies so that inflation remains relatively low until the end of his term. He is too stupid to do this on his own, but he has hordes of political lackeys dying to help him.

Besides Trump's avoidance of appropriate tax-based wealth redistribution that would benefit his voters, some of his appointees could be dangerous. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could potentially open the floodgates to pandemics that kill millions of people. Ironically, if Trump's administration adopts a global-warming-denial policy, many of his supporters, who are located in the South, will face the direst consequences. Then you have to consider Trump's membership to the international kleptocracy, which may prompt him to withdraw aid to Ukraine, which is what his master, Vladimir Putin, would prefer. This could add a few thousand more deaths to Trump's account. As far as the Israel-Hamas war is concerned, that is completely over his head, and Trump has little incentive to get involved.

On a more positive note, it is worth mentioning that civil war is probably off the table. That is because the federal government is now under de facto corporate control, and civil wars are bad for business. That could hurt Tesla and Amazon sales!

As for me, I am staying in place. In my neighborhood I could pass for a Republican, and if things got really bad, I could put a bomb shelter in the back yard. 

In other news, though it is currently unseasonably warm, I'm all prepared for snow. I just made a rare family road trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This was my first road trip to a city in ten years. I thought that it was a good museum, but not as good as the ones, collectively, in Manhattan, London or Paris.

The Controversial Origin of War and Peace: Apes, Foragers, and Human Evolution

I came across this article, by Luke Glowacki, in 3 Quarks Daily. It is an unusually academic article for them to post, but I read it with interest, because war has been so much in the headlines recently. Unfortunately, the article is extremely narrow in scope and focuses mainly on the timeline in the history of war. The questions become "Did war originate with our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos or later?" and "If it originated much later, was it present among Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers?" I think that the article could have been improved by spending more time defining the role of war and aggressive behavior within a species.

Chimpanzees are known to behave aggressively toward other chimpanzee groups. Bonobos are not as well understood, but they don't seem to be as aggressive as chimpanzees. Glowacki fails to mention that bonobos operate in matriarchal hierarchies, and I think that gender could be a useful lens for discussing war, since female primates are generally less physically violent than male primates, and are accordingly smaller and weaker. Although there is evidence that human hunter-gatherers engaged in warlike behavior, it is somewhat unclear how that manifested itself prior to the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Glowacki does at least mention that, as a practical matter, it would be difficult for early hunter-gatherers to organize and coordinate anything that would resemble a modern army. He finishes by saying:

Recognizing that the capacity for both war and peace may be an outcome of our evolutionary history better explains how our species today can create durable peaceful relationships among societies that encompass billions of individuals but at the same time petty grievances and disputes can precipitate war with little provocation. We carry their evolutionary legacy today in our own struggles to create a more peaceful world, but one in which we all too often turn to violence.

I did not find this saccharine conclusion very enlightening.

My preferred way of looking at human behavior is through the lens of our evolutionary development of eusocial behavior, or, more broadly, cooperation. This occurred in tandem with bipedal gait and, later, the development of language. Through this process, Homo sapiens in effect outcompeted not only chimpanzees and bonobos, but all other hominids. Evolutionary processes permitted humans to achieve greater fitness than all other primate species. Rather than pretty this up for a feel-good moment, I prefer to compare humans to eusocial insects. I am reminded of my earlier post, "The Brutality of Life," in which I described bumblebees:

Every spring, a fertilized queen sets out to start a nest. She finds a site, often a hole in the ground, and begins to lay eggs. The queen emits chemicals that cause all of the eggs to become females that do not reach maturity. The nest then becomes a factory where the queen continues to lay eggs and her daughters tend to the eggs, find food and defend the nest. Toward the end of summer, the queen stops emitting the chemicals that control the development of her eggs and offspring. Some of her daughters mature to adulthood, and some males are born. The daughters start to lay their own eggs. Initially, the queen attempts to eat all of the eggs laid by her daughters, but eventually, her mature daughters attack and kill her. The mature daughters that have been fertilized leave the nest seeking shelter for the winter. In the spring, the process starts again.

It seems to me that scientists often ignore the most basic principles of Darwinism. Natural selection is not a pretty process, and for the most part it's just a numbers game: did a species survive, and, if so, how? We like cooperation and social harmony, but that is only because we have evolved to feel that way. Most species don't, and that includes bumblebees. While, ostensibly, bumblebees are eusocial, like us, the queens exert complete biological control over all of the other members of their hive. Eusociality itself does not imply equality. The end result is that bumblebees are an extremely durable species, while nearly all bumblebees are, in effect, slaves. In his essay, "Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition," Ian Tattersall describes how modern humans evolved in a rather haphazard manner during periods of vacillating climate change. In an evolutionary sense, this means that we just happened to have the right characteristics at the right times, and we could easily have become extinct with slight environmental differences. As a cautionary note to optimists, I often feel compelled to point out that our notions of morality do not correspond with the universe in general and are simply evolutionary characteristics that have helped our species survive. On the other hand, on a more purely rational basis, there is ample reason to remove from office leaders whose aggressive military actions cause the pointless loss of human life and unnecessary humanitarian crises. The long list of offenders includes not just Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, but Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush.  

In my opinion, the major problems that we are facing now are human overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change. Those two conditions alone are generating pointless wars. Most countries, including the U.S., currently lack governments that seem capable of addressing those risks.

Diary

I've started on a longer biography but haven't made much progress in it so far. There are more distractions than usual this year, and I only like reading when I can really concentrate properly. One distraction has been a stream of solicitations from my dear friend, Kamala Harris, for more money, and I've sent all that I'm going to send and put "STOP" on messaging and opted out of emails. I also have to admit that it is unnerving to think that Donald Trump could be elected president in a few weeks. I still think that the odds are against it, and, even if it does occur, you have to remember just how incompetent he is. He isn't as talented as Hitler or Napoleon, and nearly every venture that he has undertaken failed. The main problem associated with Trump is that he is an enormous waste of resources when there are many serious national issues that need to be addressed.  But you have to remember that Joe Biden, who already seemed senile in 2020, beat Trump after just one term. At this point, there are more young non-neoliberals in the Democratic pipeline, so the party could recover. Therefore, in my view, Trump is on the way out, and it's only a question of whether it will be in a few weeks or in four years at the most. One consolation for me is to be living in a state where Trump could never win. While Rutland County is a little more conservative than Addison County, it is still Democratic. I recently met my Vermont representative, Stephanie Jerome, who drove to my house to introduce herself to me. She is a Democrat, and I've already voted for her. 

My tomatoes are still holding out, though the weather is turning cold. A local man, who is living with a large family that includes his children and grandchildren, took a large bag of ripe tomatoes and all of the green tomatoes. He said that he would take whatever is left at the end of the season and feed it to his pig. Our local social media is Front Porch Forum, and it comes in handy for getting rid of things that you don't want. Vermonters are less wasteful than most Americans. I still have plenty of tomatoes for myself and eat a tomato salad for dinner every other day. Next year, I think I'll grow two of the same plants plus one cherry tomato plant.

I currently seem to be all set with my mouse friends. I heard them in the walls recently and did another full inspection of the house exterior. At the top of the roof, under the eaves, they had enlarged a small opening by chewing on it. In order to see it, you had to hang over the eaves and look underneath. The evening after I sealed it, the two remaining mice panicked and ran through the house to the back porch, where I trapped them. I released them in the yard, since they can't get back in now. The mice here are wild, and they don't enter the house looking for food. They primarily seek shelter during the winter. They also like to store food in dry places. Before there were humans here, they were doing the same things in trees. As far as they're concerned, the house is a big tree.

I will have a visitor here next week, so my blog posts may be delayed a little.

Diary

The fall colors are intensifying now, and it looks as if they may almost be peaking in the mountains. I think this is the best time of year here, followed by May. When I lived in Oregon, I didn't enjoy the climate much. There weren't enough deciduous trees to make the fall spectacular. There was no snow in the winter. The spring was hardly noticeable. The summer was boring, with no thunderstorms. The lack of dynamism in the climate seemed to translate into the insipidity of the local population. I think that the only things I liked there were the mountains and the rugged coast, but I spent most of my time in the Willamette Valley. Although I like some of the progressive aspects of the West Coast, I can't say that I've met anyone from there who appealed to me. In my readings, I've noticed that Czeslaw Milosz, Bertrand Russell, Carl Zuckmayer, and Vivian Maier disliked it. Even though I'm not really European, I still feel that way. The Northeast isn't exactly European either, but it's physically closer and still slightly connected.

I've been trying to find some good reading material but haven't come up with anything suitable yet. I gave up on two books that I started and am about to begin searching again. Every few years I get rid of a pile of unread books because they are a waste of space. I am the opposite of a hoarder. 

The presidential election is drawing closer, but I can't exactly say that I'm excited. Trump has demonstrated time and again that he is not qualified for the job, and there is now a large chorus, including Republicans, saying the same thing. Just to show how bad Trump is, Liz Cheney is campaigning with Kamala Harris. Almost no economists endorse his economic plan. While campaigning, he is usually incoherent. Experts on geopolitics think that world leaders find him easy to manipulate. So, what we're talking about is voter psychology. A majority of men prefer Trump, probably because he is an alpha male and can bully women or whomever he chooses. A majority of women prefer Harris, probably because she is pro-abortion and supports women's rights. This generally has little to do with policies. If Harris is weak on policies, she is more likely to use her available resources to find new ones. Trump, on the other hand, makes most of his decisions on an ad hoc basis; he is a "shoot from the hip" thinker who regularly demonstrates that he doesn't understand economics or foreign policy. His only goal in life seems to be to increase his self-esteem – whether he deserves it or not.

The other big story is the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. It's also hard to get excited about that. I think that Biden has handled this incorrectly and ought to  have reigned in Netanyahu long ago. A commentator recently said that Israel has tactics but no strategy. That seems to be correct as I've been observing this. Over the years, Israel has built up its defenses without a real plan, and whenever an opportunity arises, they just say "Hey, we can blow that up!" I have seen no evidence that they give any thought to the long-term consequences of their actions. Of course, I tend to view this in terms of evolutionary biology. Like chimpanzees, the Israelis and their neighbors are incapable of producing effective long-term plans, and all they can do is engage in tit-for-tat confrontations. To my way of thinking, this is primarily a case of animal crowding, in which physical violence is the default solution whenever a conflict arises. With the Israel lobby, Netanyahu thinks that he can ignore the U.S. and U.N. whenever he feels like it. He has the insight of an alpha chimpanzee. It seems to me that Israel has created an unnecessary humanitarian crisis along with millions of victims who will seek retribution for decades – simply because they could do it.

At the moment, I am concerned that the Israel situation, Hurricane Helene and the dockworkers strike may add further confusion to the U.S. election. However, it is possible that people's common sense will kick in and Trump will be permanently ousted. It doesn't take much intelligence to recognize that, when circumstances are becoming more chaotic, a person who is known for creating pointless chaos is not the best choice for addressing those conditions.

We do not know the time we lose—

We do not know the time we lose—

The awful moment is

And takes its fundamental place

Among the certainties—

A firm appearance still inflates

The card—the chance—the friend—

The spectre of solidities

Whose substances are sand—

—Emily Dickinson

Diary

I haven't been doing much of anything for the last few days or had much to say. I do have another book to read but haven't started it yet. At the moment I have lots of tomatoes and will have to start giving them away soon, because I can only eat so many of them per week. Next year, maybe I'll have just two tomato plants and perhaps something else. This little garden has been more productive than the one in Middlebury: the tomatoes are larger, and there are more of them. They get more sun here, and also more water, because they are right next to a hose and the house.

It's already becoming very autumnal, with the leaves changing and starting to fall. But it's still a long way from the peak. As in most years, the weather is dry now. I am all set for winter, and they say it could be colder and snowier, which is what I prefer. So far, heating costs haven't been much of a factor, and I can keep the house in the low seventies during the winter without using much fuel.

The mouse situation seems to be under control at the moment. As in Middlebury, they prefer to enter near ground level, and when you block those entrances they go higher up. They don't like the high-up entrances, so they go through the house once they get in and look for lower entrances, but there aren't any now. The high entrances are dangerous for them, because they could fall and die, or they could be spotted by owls or other predators. The high entrances also leave them farther from food sources. The last entrances I've blocked have been at the edge of the roof, and they can't go any higher. Fortunately, it is very easy for me to get onto the roof, and it's not very steep. I'm not sure how many actual mouse holes I've blocked, but I think it's at least ten. My mouse research also extends to the shed. I think those entrances are also blocked. They had nest entrances in the dirt in front of the shed, and I noticed that, as soon as a small milk snake came by, they closed off those entrances. It is often difficult to distinguish instinctive behavior from intelligent behavior.

I think I'm doing a lot better than Henry David Thoreau. His cabin had no running water or toilet, and he considered a mouse that lived in it with him to be his pet.

I don't make many campaign contributions, but I sent money to the ActBlue PAC for Kamala Harris, and now I'm being barraged with donation requests – very tiresome. It always seems pathetic to me that political success often depends on fundraising and advertising, because I've never voted for anyone on the basis of an advertisement. Advertising of any kind usually has no effect on my behavior. When I make a campaign contribution, it is like an affirmation that I have little in common with most voters. I don't think that's how democracy is supposed to work. To me, the fact that a voter needs to see an advertisement in order to vote indicates that he or she is unqualified to vote. Furthermore, all adult Americans should know by now, without being told, that Donald Trump is a lying criminal with purely selfish motives and no identification with any constituency, except perhaps self-centered billionaires. 

The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

This 2023 biography of George Eliot, by Clare Carlisle, was recommended to me by a reader. Reading it was like a walk down memory lane, because I had already covered most of the same material, but in the last century. Even so, I never stopped being a George Eliot admirer, and Carlisle, who is a philosophy professor, does offer some useful insights at the end.

I tend to evolve intellectually, and I have always found George Eliot to be an interesting case study. I came across her when I was about forty, and I was gradually working my way through various fields at the time. By that point, I had already decided that philosophy, particularly as an academic discipline, is mainly a waste of time, and I was taking a shot at literature while also becoming interested in evolutionary biology. Since starting this blog in 2014, I have gradually given up on literature, but I think that Middlemarch may be the one novel that is worth reading. I find it interesting because it successfully represents a local culture at a particular place and time and accurately depicts a variety of its inhabitants, including unvarnished descriptions of human behavior. When it was written, Darwinism was being discussed in London, and Eliot would have been exposed to it through G.H. Lewes and Herbert Spencer. Lewes himself had transitioned from the arts to the sciences and was personally acquainted with Charles Darwin. In addition, though modern psychology didn't exist then, Eliot understood people well. After reading Middlemarch, I eventually came to think of it as an insightful book, unlike most novels, because it provided more than the usual fictional entertainment. While it does contain predictable romantic intrigues and relationship failures, it is of much greater substance than a Jane Austen novel. Unlike some of Eliot's other stories, religion, mysticism and the occult are not at the forefront. At this point in my life, I prefer to view the world through the lens of evolutionary biology, because, if nothing else, it provides you with a way of understanding why things are the way they are now.

Where I think Carlisle does a good job is in showing how difficult it is to know how George Eliot made some of her decisions and whether she regretted any of them. The "double" in the title refers to how and why she paired up with G.H. Lewes and, later, after Lewes had died, with John Cross. I had thought about this before and have some thoughts now. First, I should say that it was largely an accident that she became a writer. Her father happened to retire near Coventry, Eliot happened to still be living at home, and their new neighbors happened to be the Brays. Charles Bray was a progressive ribbon manufacturer, and his home became a salon for progressive intellectuals. He was a follower of Robert Owen, who visited there, along with various London intellectuals. Unlike modern manufacturers, Bray and Owen cared about their workers. Eliot befriended Bray's wife, Cara, and her sister, Sara Hennell. In any case, it seems that Eliot may never have established any connections with London intellectuals if she hadn't lived there, and her life could easily have taken a different course.

In London, though she was recognized as a talented writer, editor and translator, she was not physically attractive and came from an ordinary rural family, so she did not have many suitors. She "dated" Herbert Spencer, but was crushed when he dumped her. That is just as well, because Spencer was cold and would have been unacceptable to her, since she was emotionally needy. The only other prospect to turn up was G.H. Lewes, who, though warm, had several shortcomings. He was short and pockmarked, and was an illegitimate son of a man who had abandoned his mother. Furthermore, his wife had cuckoled him by having four children with his best friend in addition to his three, and he couldn't divorce her under existing law without an embarrassing trial. He was struggling to support his wife and children, and, having generally failed as a playwright and a novelist, he eventually became a science writer – with little formal education. On top of this, he was an avowed atheist, while Eliot had a devout childhood. Nevertheless, the relationship met Eliot's needs, and, after he encouraged her to write fiction, they became extremely wealthy. Lewes was an extroverted man-about-town and did an excellent job as her manager.

The question that comes up is whether he was the sort of man who suited Eliot. From her point of view, I would say no. He was a slightly disrespectable bohemian who drew disparaging comments from his social superiors – to be expected in England. She preferred people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had met through Charles Bray. Emerson was a tall, handsome, elegant and religious college graduate, and she was instantly attracted to him. Part of the point of Carlisle's book is that the choice of a partner can be somewhat inscrutable. Because Eliot tended to be conservative and religious, I would say they there was a certain amount of expediency in her pairing up with Lewes. I think that she was quite aware that, from a social standpoint, Lewes was an inappropriate partner for her.

Following this line of reasoning, it makes sense that she married John Cross after Lewes died. She had taken a lot of flak for living with Lewes out of wedlock. Cross was tall and came from a good family. In person, I think that he must have been boring to an intellectual woman like Eliot. My guess is that she had the same social-climbing instinct as many women. There is some evidence of a problem in that he inexplicably dove into the Grand Canal in Venice on their honeymoon, apparently because he was having some sort of breakdown. This was all swept under the rug, and Eliot died a few months later.

I might add that the biography that Cross assembled after Eliot died was so bad that her literary reputation declined for several years. I've read it myself and can see why. On balance, I would have to say that Lewes was a better choice than Cross. If she had been a little more adventurous, she may have found a less burdened partner than Lewes and a more interesting partner than Cross.

Diary

I've been reading some new and old poetry for the last few days but haven't found anything that I like. The new poetry generally seems stilted to me, and I don't think that I agree with the current norms within the publishing industry. I have yet to find a poem that I like in the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books, and the ones that I do like I usually find only occasionally in anthologies. Of course, a lot of this is just a matter of personal taste, and what is considered a good poem at any particular time may not match your preferences at all. The impression I have is that this is not an exciting time in American poetry, and you may just be stuck with what some editor thinks is good – or what some poet thinks some editor thinks is good. Although I like New Yorker cartoons, I'm letting my subscription expire – again. I've also been trying to find some long biographies but so far have only found a couple of short ones.

The late summer here has been cool. I think that all the hummingbirds are gone. I have ripe tomatoes, but the ripening process is slowed by shorter days and cool temperatures. Now that the plants are exposed, they occasionally get nibbled by deer, but the deer don't like the tomatoes themselves and only eat some of the new shoots. I haven't seen any hornworms and may never, because the yard is enclosed by the woods. At first I missed having views from the house, but I now like the privacy and quiet, and I think that the air quality here is better than it was in Middlebury. Since I hike more often now, I still get in plenty of scenery. In this neighborhood, rain made it a soggy summer, and there were blights. I trimmed out the dead leaves from my purple lilacs. My tomatoes are fine, but all of my neighbor's died. There are lots of puffballs in the yard, and on Saturday I held a puffball puffing event.

At the moment, I'm very satisfied with the house. The well and its filtration system are working properly. The plumbing ventilation was blocked, and I fixed that. My indoor plants are happier here than they were in Middlebury. All of the appliances are working properly, though they're old. I think the clothes drier is 42. The refrigerator is 15. The stove is ancient, but it works fine.

I gave up on the new telescope mount that I bought and returned it, because I think that it was defective. Since winter is approaching, I'm going to wait until spring to buy a different model. The viewing is usually bad here during the winter because of clouds. Amateur astronomy has changed since I started in 2013, and there has been a shift from direct viewing to astrophotography. Because long-exposure photography doesn't require large telescopes or mounts, the equipment is somewhat less expensive. I prefer direct viewing, and photography doesn't interest me. Astrophotography attracts a different kind of person and can be competitive when you submit your photographs for publication. Although they can be spectacular, they are usually so doctored up that they look nothing like what you would see with the naked eye. You do get more bang for the buck, because a long exposure time can provide you with the equivalent of a large telescope. However, it's still just a photograph, and no optical telescope on earth can match the Hubble or James Webb telescopes.

The problem with my new mount had to do with the fact that it was made in China, and they are dumping them on the U.S. market and putting local manufacturers out of business. Their U.S. vendors are complicit in the process. It is impossible to get reliable reviews, and the vendors never tell you their true opinions of the equipment. Rather than alienate the Chinese manufacturer, they just allow you to return the equipment – as long as you pay a restocking fee and the return shipping cost. This removes the risk for vendors, but hardly qualifies as good customer service. I plan to buy an American-made mount of known reliability from a different vendor. 

It looks to me as if the Trump era is about to end. For the first time since 2016 there is open discussion about how the press has mishandled reporting on political candidates. Because the liberal newspapers knew that they had already locked-in readers who prefer progressive candidates, they had no incentive to attack Republican candidates, because that was the only remaining segment in which they might increase their readerships. They have been covering this up by pretending that it is their journalistic duty to remain neutral on political matters, but the real reason is that they would love to pull readers from Fox News – or anywhere. In any case, newspapers have been dumbing down for decades to attract readers, and they all resemble the National Enquirer now more than they did twenty years ago. Clickbait has taken off everywhere, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. I am hoping that Kamala Harris will rise to the occasion and publicly eviscerate Trump in the debate tomorrow. He eventually fails at everything he does, and this has the potential to end his political career.

Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition

This essay, by Ian Tattersall, from Rethinking Human Evolution, is probably the last I'll discuss from the book. Like the other essays, it challenges conventional wisdom regarding human evolution and makes some good points.

For reasons previously explored both by this author (Tattersall 1997, 2015) and by the editor of this volume (Schwartz 2006, 2016), paleoanthropology has been mired since the mid-twentieth century in the beguiling notion that evolution in the hominid family (hominin subfamily/tribe, if you prefer; the difference is notional) has consisted essentially of the burnishing by natural selection of a central lineage that culminated in Homo sapiens. Yet accretions to the hominid fossil record over the same period have, in contrast, consistently shown that hominid phylogeny instead involved vigorous evolutionary experimentation. Over the seven-million-odd years of our family's existence, new species and lineages were regularly thrown out onto the ecological stage, to be triaged in competition with organisms both closely and distantly related. Extinction rates were high to match. Further, it is by now well established that all this took place in the context of constantly oscillating climates and habitats (deMenocal, 2011), to which steady, perfecting adaptation would not have been possible, even in principle.....the gradualist interpretive framework has tenaciously lingered, leading to the widespread application in practice of a strictly minimalist systemic approach that has often been justified by spectacularly contorted reasoning (see Spoor et al. [2007], and Lordkipanidze et al. [2014] for classic examples).

Tattersall looks closely at brain size in various hominids. The generally accepted narrative, which I've mentioned before, is that our ancestors first became bipedal due to climate change and the replacement of forest with savannah; this led to dietary changes in which meat provided a more efficient energy source, and cooperation increased, leading to language development and increased brain size. Tattersall says that, although brain size did increase generally in hominids, there is no evidence that this increase alone correlates with increased intelligence. One hypothesis is that the demands of human childrearing required higher intelligence. Tattersall adopts a different position. He thinks that the development of language in early Homo sapiens provided the main impetus. By about 100,000 years ago, humans were sufficiently adept in the use of symbolic language that they were able to manipulate symbols in their thinking processes, which roughly corresponds with what we think of as intelligence. So, Tattersall's view is that what we think of as intelligence is an unexpected byproduct of the acquisition of language. And, although brain size did initially play a role, it doesn't necessarily now. For example, the now- extinct Neanderthals had larger brains than us but apparently lacked our capacity for symbolic manipulation. Additionally, human brain size has been decreasing for tens of thousands of years. Tattersall compares this to early brute force computers (such as Deep Blue), which had to be large to solve problems, whereas recent, smaller algorithmic computers solve even harder problems more efficiently. On the whole, Tattersall's point is that the development of human cognition did not occur within a context of steady movement toward a likely end; a more accurate description is that, at any given time, nature seems to be conducting various survival experiments for which no outcome is clear. Additionally, energy usage often plays a role in evolution. Neanderthals had large bodies and brains, so they were energy-inefficient compared to humans. Strangely, we are now running into similar constraints with cryptocurrencies and AI, which are already straining our energy resources. It looks as if the evolutionary model for both animals and machines may be the movement to lower energy consumption combined with higher performance. Without the sun, we wouldn't be here.

These thoughts relate to those of other writers I've discussed. For example, Giorgio Vallortigara has shown that even chicks use basic arithmetic and geometry, but without symbols or language. This is a good example of how a cognitive function can become more useful through the use of symbolic reasoning. There is also somewhat of a connection with the work of Vinod Goel, who discusses the evolution of the human brain, which is actually a wider look than Tattersall's discussion. Tattersall is probably only talking about the prefrontal cortex, which is relatively small, and the rest of the human brain is mostly quite ancient. Looking at this only from the present, the determinists I've discussed may have some relevance, because they specifically emphasize human limitations and the variability of skills within the current population. This group includes Robert Sapolsky, Robert Plomin, David Reich and Kathryn Paige Harden. While Tattersall is apparently happy that evolution managed to allow us to be here today, he doesn't discuss the liabilities that we've inherited from our evolutionary past. Having myself observed human behavior for seventy-four years now, there is a lot not to like about it.

Human and Mammalian Evolution: Is There a Difference?

This short essay, by John de Vos and Jelle W.F. Reumer, is another from the book I'm reading. I found it interesting and will just sum it up.

From ancient times to the present, there has been a conceit regarding the place of humans in the world. De Vos and Reumer state this nicely as follows:

When God created the world, he did so in a succession of different steps. The creation of animals was one such step. The creation of mankind was another one. Ever since, mankind has been considered (i.e., has considered itself) not to be part of the animal kingdom. This notion—that Homo sapiens is a species next to, above, or outside the mammalian world—has long perverted science. Ernst Haeckel's famous "Stammbaum des Menschen/Pedigree of Man," published in 1874, shows "man" in the highest branch of the tree, above the rest of the living world, although part of the apes.

Commendably, these authors prefer to study humans as mammals, and their research shows that, in the past, environmental changes affected humans just as much as other mammals. The Pliocene period, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, entailed a cooling of the planet, during which forests were transformed to grassy plains in the American prairies, the Eurasian steppes and the African savannahs. Horses and antelopes evolved from smaller, shorter-legged animals to have longer legs, new dental characteristics and increased socialization. The Pliocene, with its increase in grasslands, was also the time of origin for early hominids such as Australopithecus.

Thus, both the evolution of human bipedalism and erect posture on the one hand, and of the long-legged running gait in horses on the other, are the result of Miocene-through-Pleistocene climate change in conjunction with the reduction of forest ecosystems and increase in open habitats....Humans, antelopes and horses are mammals that adapted to a new environment, and their evolution reflects their convergences.

There are also parallels between humans and other mammals seen in studies of island paleontology:

Although the mechanisms leading to observed phenomena remain unclear, these studies have given rise to what is called the "Island Rule." That is, in general, small mammals (shrews, hedgehogs, rodents, leporids) become larger when isolated on islands, and large mammals (elephantids, hippopotamids, bovids, cervids) become smaller....Although until fairly recently one might have wondered if humans would be an exception to the Island Rule, the possibility emerged with the discovery of the remains of a Late Pleistocene hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores....Claims of microcephaly notwithstanding, the specimens are more reasonably seen as evidence of island dwarfing and of a separate species.

During the Late Pleistocene, many large mammals became woolly: the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, musk ox and cave bear. At that time, the climate was cold and dry. But at the end of the Pleistocene, the climate became warmer, and most of the woolly species became extinct. As a speculative matter, the authors suggest that Homo neanderthalensis, which had evolved during the Pleistocene, may also have been "woolly," and became extinct along with the other woolly mammals.

The point of the authors is that large mammals are large mammals, and there are probably convergences when different species experience the same environmental changes. From a scientific point of view, I think this is fairly obvious – though it would be heresy to many.