Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

This is a highly readable, deeply sad book about people who have gotten screwed by our nation’s defective health-insurance system. Without really saying it yet, the conclusion seems pretty clear: until the system is involuntary, and risks are shared across every American, it will be broken.

Cohn has just mentioned the prospect — which isn’t far-fetched at all — that in the coming years the insurance industry will be able to use genetic screening to identify, with better and better accuracy, who is likely to suffer from high-cost diseases. (Cohn says doctors can already screen for the presence of a gene that codes for an enzyme whose absence makes breast cancer likely.) It will then be able to deny coverage to more and more high-risk patients. The end of all of this is that the industry will only be insuring healthy patients. Surely that would be ideal for them. It also seems pointless, if we define “insurance” as “spreading risks over a population.” The industry is just defining the population into smaller and smaller units. Eventually the only “population” of which I’m a member is myself.

I wonder whether this country is actually on the road to requiring insurance for every American. The states will have to lead the way, it seems to me, unless the presidential candidates get some spine. If Obama is the leader everyone says he is, then the first thing he’ll do is come up with an insurance plan.

I got back to Massachusetts after the insurance program had passed, so I missed out on much of its background. I intend to dig into the details shortly.

There’s no questioning that Creationism’s Trojan Horse will be the definitive source on the Intelligent Design sham for a long time to come. Its great gift is that it digs as deeply as it can into the public pronouncements of the creationists, and pieces everything together into a rock-solid argument. It demonstrates a few things quite clearly:

1. ID is nothing more than recycled creationism, updated a bit so that it doesn’t get lumped in with the new-earth creationists (i.e., those who believe the Bible is literally true and that the earth is 6,000 years old).
2. ID’s proponents have absolutely no scientific evidence on their side.
3. William Dembski is the supposed intellectual at the root of the ID movement. His notion of irreducible complexity (IC) is supposed to be a rigorous, information-theoretic foundation to the old Paleyan argument from design. Irreducible complexity and its brethren have been heralded since the mid-1990’s as signaling the end of natural selection. Dembski, at least, would like a bit of scientific respectability, so he tries to engage with his critics when they show that his arguments are nonsense. Irreducible complexity was supposed to provide a simple proof of god’s existence, but engagement with critics has forced Dembski to release update upon update; IC is still no closer to making any predictions about anything, yet it gets continuously more complicated. The final nail in Darwin’s coffin is always waiting in the next book.
4. ID is crypto-Christianity with a scientific face. The science is only there so that non-Christians view it as harmless.
5. Intelligent-design advocates aim to build a theocracy in the United States. They view evolution as a fundamental contributor to the “culture war,” and view themselves as its warriors.
6. ID can only thrive in a society where science education is as abysmal as it is in this country.
7. ID advocates say they just want to “teach the controversy.” There’s no good reason to do this, when schools hardly have the resources to teach solid science. There’s a resource-allocation problem, and no reason to allocate them towards an intellectually bankrupt system.
8. It is crucial for the movement to gain a foothold in elementary and high schools, where students are the most impressionable and science faculty are least competent to present arguments fairly.

Creationism’s Trojan Horse approaches the ID movement from every relevant angle: where it gets its money, the background of its founders, their religious affiliation, the things they say when they’re speaking to conservative Christians rather than to scientists, their political moves (including a fight over an Ohio school board), and the actual science that ID claims to have overthrown.

Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross have a difficult line to toe, which might be best summed up by quoting from Richard Wein’s terrific essay “Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch”:

Some readers may dislike the frankly contemptuous tone that I have adopted towards Dembski’s work. Critics of Intelligent Design pseudoscience are faced with a dilemma. If they discuss it in polite, academic terms, the Intelligent Design propagandists use this as evidence that their arguments are receiving serious attention from scholars, suggesting this implies there must be some merit in their arguments. If critics simply ignore Intelligent Design arguments, the propagandists imply this is because critics ca

Creationists like to say that they just want schools to “teach the controversy” — namely the nonexistent controversy about whether purely materialist models can explain the origin of life. Clearly there are legitimate controversies in biology, but we never hear about them. Can anyone point me to a book documenting current controversies among biologists?

The Major Transitions in Evolution contains way more biology than I’m prepared to handle; I suspect one needs to have at least a solid grasp of college chemistry and bio, and possibly beyond that, to get any purchase on the material.

I have The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language — a more-tractable Major Transitions, apparently — checked out of the library. It probably falls into the queue behind Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price.

Great interview with Ellen Barkin, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. It’s so, so funny. (Via Mindful Link Propagation, which I only learned today was Atom-feedable [thanks, James!]. The article is cached below.) (more…)

Crazy: with the preface that “gadget” here is a term of art,

We’ve been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they’d like to spend more time developing if they could, and we’ve been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we’re happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

That’s amazing. It can only help Google, even if the licensing on the Gadgets is generous toward the developers; it grows their network, and makes Google a focal point for software development. If they’re not already officially a “platform company,” they’re on their way.

I am obsessed with Belle and Sebastian, and have been for quite a while. Every time I find myself listening to one of their albums at work, I eventually play all of them — or at least Tigermilk, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, If You’re Feeling Sinister, The Life Pursuit, and their NPR broadcast. I routinely listen to nothing but Belle and Sebastian during the workday.

I think that’s a good argument for actually buying their music. I’ve paid for two of their concerts by now, so I’m not completely a free rider, but I’m pretty danged close — particularly given how much joy I’ve gotten from their music.

Wilco sent out an email recently, urging their email-list subscribers to do the right thing and buy their new album (Sky Blue Sky). So I went ahead and bought it, along with their second-most-recent one (A Ghost Is Born). I’ve not been as big a fan of their two most recent discs as I was of the preceding two, but they’re good albums and the band in general is worth supporting; Jeff Tweedy is a terrific songwriter.

I also need to buy a ton of Elvis Costello. He’s another target of my obsessions. I own Blood and Chocolate, My Aim Is True, When I Was Cruel, Punch The Clock, The Juliet Letters, and probably others, but I also listen to Armed Forces, The Delivery Man, and Spike constantly; I should probably snap those up, too.

I have a hard time justifying this, though, at least in Costello’s case. He’s surely a multi-millionaire. And while I guess that shouldn’t matter, it does. I have a limited music budget, for one thing, and I’d rather give my money to some poor up-and-comer. (I recently discovered Feist; I’m not certain, but I’d bet she’s living an ordinary middle-class existence nowadays. She deserves my money.) What I’d really like is for the recording industry to hire independent auditors to go through their books and document each artist’s income for public consumption. I’d bet that more money would go toward the poor and less to the Britney Spearses of the world. As well it should.

Funny:

>>> from __future__ import braces
File "<stdin>", line 1

SyntaxError: not a chance

(from PEP 3099)

This seems like a worthwhile thing to publicize:

Shop for Change:
5% for Farmers Markets at Whole Foods June 27 Mark your calendars and spread the word! On Wednesday, June 27th, you can stock up at Whole Foods Market while helping to support small family farms and farmers markets throughout Massachusetts. Every Whole Foods store in eastern and central Mass. will donate 5% of sales to The Federation of Massachusetts Farmers’ Markets on June 27th. The Whole Foods Market in South Hadley will hold its 5% Day on Sept. 5th. FMFM board and staff members are thrilled at this powerful fundraising opportunity, and hope you will join us in Shopping for Change. For a complete listing of Whole Foods Markets in Massachusetts, visit www.wholefoods.com.

I’m reading Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design right now (naturally on Cosma Shalizi’s recommendation), and by a wonderful little coincidence I happened to watch Deputy White House Press Secretary Donna Perino try to explain why Dick Cheney actually deserves to evade oversight.

In the case of both creationists and Perino, I stand in awe. When Perino bobs and weaves around the questions she’s asked, does she know she’s spewing falsehoods? If she knows that the regime she’s defending is sometimes in the wrong, yet she continues to defend it because of her role as its spokesperson, that would seem to make her behavior unethical. If, on the other hand, she believes that the Bush administration is always right, then from my perspective she’s just deluded. There’s also the possibility that she fully realizes their errors but believes that they’re serving a higher good. I guess that would make her something of a utilitarian. No set of policies is perfect, after all, and maybe she’s just standing behind what she views as the best available administration. It still strikes me as unethical to defend specific policies that you know to be unjust, and moreover to attempt to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes about them. As citizens, we rely on each other to separate fact from fiction, and that responsibility holds more intensely still for our leaders and their subordinates. Yet we also seem to take it for granted that in our various roles we take on other responsibilities, and that it’s part of the game to allow our ostensible leaders to play fast and loose with the truth.

Likewise for the creationists. Either they know that at least some of what they’re saying is false, or they believe all of it is true. If they believe some of it is false, then they may believe that telling lies is justified by the world it brings about (namely a theocratic state).

I really would like to meet any of these people (Perino, Michael Behe, William Dembski) and talk with them. I don’t actually believe any of us would change the others’ minds. In all honesty, I just want to meet them to get a taste of sociopathology as a going concern. Do they just deceive themselves? That is, do they believe their own untruths? Do they put away their critical faculties while they peddle nonsense?

Behe and Dembski are intelligent people. Dembski has a Ph.D. in mathematics, of all things; Behe has one in biochemistry. They must be as aware as anyone of the flaws in their arguments. They simply must be aware, also, that their flawed arguments reveal a terrible cynicism about humanity: they must believe that if they actually told people the truth, the people would reject their arguments. So instead they resort to lies.

Creationism’s Trojan Horse certainly believes that they’re lying, not only because it sees their credentials but also because their motives in the “wedge document” and elsewhere are so transparent. The wedge document on its own doesn’t really pin mendacity on them, though; the document claims that one of “intelligent design”’s first goals must be to lay the scientific groundwork to prove their case. They’ve failed at this task, of course, and the arguments that they’ve bothered to advance have been transparently bad (recycled Paley). It’s the refusal to back down in the face of a transparently bogus argument that calls them out as charlatans.

I want to understand their theology. Why do they believe that speciation by natural selection says anything at all about their creator? Is it really just because they’re fundamentalists? Do they really believe that the Bible’s description of the Creation must be literally true, and absolutely without symbolism? Many of us without a religious bone in our bodies have no problem understanding how natural selection and the Bible could be compatible — namely, that the Bible tells stories symbolically, and that if there is a God He’s created the Universe according to a particular set of rules. It is then our job to discover these rules.

Now, I can imagine some room for concern if you’re Christian. There’s probably no teleology in natural selection or quantum mechanics or relativity theory or any other scientific model; evolution isn’t “aiming at” anything. Christian theology, to the very limited extent that I understand it, does indeed say that God has a plan for mankind’s ultimate redemption; somewhere in the stack of models, Christianity does posit a teleology. So if you want to be a Christian biologist or physicist, you’ll want to hunt for God’s will somewhere in there. But again: I would hope it would be a postulate of our theology that God’s mind is literally unfathomable. If we see that the lowest levels of the models bespeak no teleology, we have several roads available: keep hunting for it at higher levels, reject our current understanding of our God, or reject our current understanding of the science. Or all three. If you reject the science, you have at least two choices: work within the scientific framework to prove your claim that science is wrong and Scripture is right; or throw out science, and explain why you believe that the whole institution has to be overthrown. You are not allowed to issue pretend scientific arguments and pathetic attempts at logic.

Part of what makes creationism so puzzling, if we assume that they’re honestly trying to understand our world rather than play political games, is that their skepticism doesn’t go any lower. Why focus so much on natural selection when nature’s purposelessness shows up so much more clearly elsewhere? Doesn’t quantum mechanics, which argues that the universe is non-deterministic at the lowest levels, cast much more doubt on Scripture? Natural selection is not nearly so random: it is, in fact, random mutation subject to differential reproduction.

The simplest hypothesis in response is that fighting quantum mechanics is bad politics. Physics has a justifiably great reputation, having proven itself in engineering if nothing else; no one who uses a computer or a light bulb or an airplane or even a tall building could argue with a straight face against the essential truth of modern physics. Whereas natural selection, as it’s normally taught, leaves some room for doubt: isn’t it all about stuff that happened millions of years ago? And doesn’t it say that we’re no better than monkeys? The PR is right there waiting to be grabbed. So the creationists have grabbed it.

Which gets me back to the belief about creationists that I don’t really want to come to, but that I find myself inevitably driven toward: that they are advancing ideas purely for their political value, in the hopes of winning the culture war by any means necessary.

All of the above has made me lean toward an uncomfortable conclusion: the charlatans always have the upper hand. There are a lot more ways of being wrong than there are of being right, and the wrong ideas often seem to have the best PR. The great challenge for our side is learning the levers of power (specifically marketing) while never stooping to our enemies’ level.

Lots of people have been writing about the terrific Washington Post investigation of Cheney’s seemingly unfettered dominance within the White House (part 1, part 2). Marty Lederman today delivers a great synthesis of those articles, and of the big questions left unanswered. Among the latter, the biggest is: why does this president, seemingly unlike any previous president, let the VP exercise such dominance?

Also, David Addington scares the shit out of me. Everyone’s got at least one eye turned toward Cheney, whom we’ve always known to be this administration’s grey eminence. But Addington is the guy behind the guy whom comparatively few know about, advocating fascism with a pretty face.

(Cached: part 1, part 2.)

Cheney and Addington recently asserted that an Executive Order providing just the teensiest bit of Executive Branch oversight didn’t apply to the office of the VP, because that office is not officially part of the Executive Branch. Rahm Emanuel responded with a clever little bill denying funding to Cheney’s fourth branch of government. (I like Rahm’s illustrative chart, and the speed of his reaction.) I wonder if this recent controvery, and the Post series, will bring down onto Cheney the Congressional investigation that he so richly deserves.

It’s possible that Cheney hasn’t actually broken any laws. If so, this suggests something distinctly rotten in the processes beneath our government. Shouldn’t it be illegal to, say, encourage torture and advance legal advice that everyone outside the White House views as laughable? The power of the Executive Branch shouldn’t give you license to turn us into a nation of barbarians. Inasmuch as laws are supposed to represent the moral foundations of the citizenry, shouldn’t our laws forbid the kind of world that Cheney and Addington would like to create? I don’t know how to structure those laws, but it seems that the only thing that could keep us from becoming a fascist state is the very real threat of putting fascists in jail.

Word to the wise: if you define a str() method in MyClass, and you find that

myobj = MyClass() mystr = str(myobj) 

doesn’t give you the mystr that you expected, that’s because you want to be using repr() instead. The Python documentation on this score seems to say just the opposite:

str( self)

Called by the str() built-in function and by the print statement to compute the “informal” string representation of an object. This differs from repr() in that it does not have to be a valid Python expression: a more convenient or concise representation may be used instead. The return value must be a string object.

That says to me, “str() computes the string representation of your object that str() uses.” Apparently I read it wrong.

Anyone who loves Girls Are Pretty — and who doesn’t, really — may be inclined to read a compilation of GAP posts in Happy Cruelty Day. I would vote against it. Or if you’re going to read it, read it just like you’d read the blog — a post, or maybe a couple, per day. Stylistically, it’s not meant to be swallowed in big gulps. More importantly, I don’t think there’s enough wheat in it to justify all the chaff.

The editors would have made a better decision had they only picked out the 30 or 40 greatest GAP columns. Instead, they have a year’s worth of columns spread over 400 pages. Books are just not the right medium for this kind of material.

In Kendall near where I work is “Ann Marie Sarchioni Square”. Google for her name and all you get is a photo on Flickr.

The anonymous commenter there is interesting. It’s weird that Cambridge doesn’t describe what its honorary square honorees did to get a square named after them. In Sarchioni’s case it’s particularly intriguing, because you can see in the photo that she died a month shy of her fifth birthday.

Then there’s Mark Sandman Square near The Middle East (named after the lead singer of Morphine), and Richard Modica Square right near Central Kitchen in Central Square. I went to Central Kitchen with a friend years ago, and she told me that Richard was one of the Princeton singers killed in Florida.

I’m not sure, though, what Cambridge has to do with him; it’s not clear that he ever lived there.

Maybe I’ll give Cambridge City Hall a call and see if they have any documentation on their various squares.

P.S.: I called Cambridge City Hall to ask whether there’s a central repository of information about honorary-square designees. They routed me to the Cambridge Historical Commission, which informs me that there is no such central repository. Honorary squares are designated and voted on during city-council meetings; if records of the honorary squares are anywhere, they are in city-council minutes. Those minutes are not on the web.

At some point soon, I am going to document the tremendous difficulty of getting anything productive done as a citizen of Boston/Cambridge. Hopefully soon I will actually be able to contribute to my community, but they do not make it easy.

I’ve been trying to think of a new name for this blog for a while, probably focusing on its bookishness. I was thinking of “Take up, Read!” for a while, following Augustine (Tolle, lege; tolle, lege). But Adam convinced me that that would sound weird when cited (“Take Up, Read! points us to  . . . ”).

So I went with Bibliobibuli.org, which is at least easy to type. (It references a Mencken line: “There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”) I’ve put literally nothing in it yet, so don’t expect much just at the moment.

I may move everything from this blog over there, or maybe just the book posts; I’ve not decided yet.

P.S.: Jamie Forrest adds the possibly decisive consideration that shifting only book posts over to Bibliobibuli would give it some niche-marketing power that shifting all my posts would not.

Anthony Lane this week is worth reading all the way through, but I have to single out the opening:

How do you solve a problem like Angelina? Ms. Jolie is now more of a brand than a person, and she comes in six flavors:

1. The celebrity. Angelina Jolie is so famous that when she looks in the mirror her reflection asks for an autograph. The only publication in this country yet to feature her on its cover is The American Numismatic Magazine, and even that will change the moment she bends down to pick up a nickel.

2. The sexpot. In this she is unchallenged, and yet her timing is off by fifty years. When it comes to channelling her carnal appeal, no current film director has a clue; the guy she needs is Frank Tashlin, who guided Jayne Mansfield through “The Girl Can’t Help It” (1956) and “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (1957), and whose eyeballs, if confronted with Jolie in the flesh, would pop out on cartoon springs and bob around.

3. The Brad handler. She took one look at the world’s most widely desired man and scooped him up with no more ado than a Parisian grande dame tucking a Chihuahua into her clutch bag.

4. The mother. Official estimates as to how many children Jolie now possesses, and from how many continents, change on a weekly basis. When not giving birth herself, she likes to order in. How this has affected Mr. Pitt is unclear, but his expression is sometimes that of a man who stepped out to hail a cab and got run over by a fleet of trucks.

5. The world saver. Jolie is a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Her father, Jon Voight, told the Biography Channel that “she’s developed into one of our great humanitarians.” This was clearly on the minds of political leaders when they met Jolie at a summit of the World Economic Forum in Davos two years ago. Half of them offered their entire foreign-aid budget for a chance to fetch her a mai tai.

6. Oh yes, the actress. This last talent, so often neglected, is displayed in her new film, “A Mighty Heart,” and without it the legend of Angelina Jolie would be little more than a vaporous joke.

There are some hints of the Nabokov-to-come in Invitation to a Beheading:

The grandfather and grandmother (the one all shaky and shriveled, in patched trousers, the other with her white hair bobbed, and so slim that she might have encased herself in a silk umbrella sheath)

or

The novel was the famous Quercus, and Cincinnatus had already read a good third of it, or about a thousand pages. Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak. At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least.

The idea of the novel was considered to be the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree (growing lone and mighty at the edge of a canyon at whose bottom the waters never ceased to din), the author unfolded all the historic events — or shadows of events — of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dismounted from their steeds — one dappled, the other dun — so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm’s blue zigzag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now, upon a spread cloak a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now a brief drama in the life of some villagers. There was a paragraph a page and a half long in which all the words began with “p.”

The first passage has the beginnings of Nabokov’s love of little turns of phrase; eventually his style became more abstract, and the words themselves — rather than the images they represented — the center of attention. The second has the barest outlines of his future cynicism toward reviewers, other writers, and even his reader. (Indeed, I’m never sure whether he likes anyone. I suspect he’s the perfect misanthrope.)

This book, though, is not nearly as captivating as his later works. It only inspires me to go to the opposite end of his career and read Ada, or Ardor. Those who’ve not experienced Nabokov would do well to read Lolita, which despite its fame as some kind of highbrow pornography is not even vaguely so; indeed, the Vintage edition comes with Nabokov’s (as always, astringent) response to those who think it pornographic. You could also try his autobiography Speak, Memory, but it’s always felt like Nabokov’s flights of imagery were getting too self-satisfied in that book: yes, Nabokov, we know you’re a stylist; now say something.

After Lolita, I’d recommend Pale Fire. It’s Nabokov as his best and worst: stylistic fun, a maddeningly elusive story, and the sense that you’re the victim of a very long joke.

P.S. (20 June 2007): Having finished it, I can recommend it somewhat more. I give it a B or a B-. As with all the Nabokov I’ve read, it’s worth reading. It’s just that some are more worth reading than others.

I remembered yesterday that I’ve also read The Defense. Again, it’s a worthwhile read stylistically, but I don’t really think Nabokov started to care so much about his characters until Lolita. The Defense wants to paint vivid imagery from the mind of a man who is obsessed with chess and growing insane. He does it well, but again: I suspect he’d have done it better 20 years later. In a life with finite time, I don’t think one has time for The Defense.

We have a lot of svn repositories at work, so learning how to navigate around them is important. Here’s one thing that I wish I’d learned early on.

Suppose you’ve made a directory called ~/svn that will hold all your svn checkouts, and suppose you want to check out /long/path/to/thing.py in the project called my_project, but none of the other directories under my_project. When I first started using svn, I would do

export repo=svn+ssh://server/svn
cd ~/svn/my_project
mkdir -p long/path/to
cd long/path/to
svn co $repo/trunk/my_project/long/path/to 

(The export statement should be in your ~/.bashrc; you won’t be retyping it every time.)

As may be obvious, that is The Wrong Way To Do It. By far the better way is like so:

cd ~/svn
svn co -N $repo/trunk
svn up my_project 

svn co -N just creates the svn metadata rather than downloading all the corresponding projects; svn up is the part that actually pulls down the files, for my_project only.

Granted, this uses up more space on your disk, because it’s copying down all of my_project rather than just my_project/long/path/to. But it’s substantially more convenient in so many other respects that it’s worth the extra space. For one thing, if you later on decide you want to check out my_other_project, you can just do

cd ~/svn/trunk svn up my_other_project

And then to bring all your checked-out projects up to date, you can just do

cd ~/svn/trunk svn up

I’m not nearly an svn expert. But as I learn little bits, I’ll record them here.

Republicans often complain about “the coarsening of the culture.” I’d just like to ask here whether they think it coarsens the culture to joke about bombing other countries.

From Gintis, page 54 (and thank you to Amazon’s Search-Inside-the-Book feature, by the way, for letting me look up the quote when the book’s not nearby):

Have you ever wondered why so many of God’s creatures are bilaterally symmetric? Well, one reason is that most such creatures must chase and/or flee predators. The fox, for instance, is faster than the rabbit, but the rabbit can change direction faster than the fox. Suppose the rabbit were strong on the left side and weak on the right side. Then it would easily jump to the right, but with difficulty to the left. Thus, it would mostly jump to the right. Knowing that the rabbit will jump to the right, the fox will trail the rabbit with a bias to the right, and with a predisposition to jump right, thus making the benefit of jumping right less valuable to the rabbit. But then mutant rabbits that reversed this pattern of strength and weakness would more likely survive, driving out the existing rabbits. And so on. In equilibrium, the rabbit would be bilaterally symmetric, as would the fox. So, mixed strategies, limiting an opponent’s options by mixing up one’s actions, are of fundamental importance in strategic interaction.

That’s just cool. The tricky part would be quantifying exactly how much of bilateral symmetry can be explained by game-theoretic ideas rather than by embryology; I think D’Arcy Thompson would have different things to say on the matter, though I’ve not read much of On Growth and Form.

Still, it’s a provocative passage. I’m really getting into evolutionary game theory recently, mostly because the tools are so wiedely useful. I think I’m going to enjoy Gintis’s book.

P.S.: It’s worth noting that the quality of the writing in this field is no small part of its allure. John Maynard Smith is an exceptional writer; I presume he got this from J.B.S. Haldane, who was his teacher. Haldane himself was a spectacular writer, having written (inter alia) The Causes of Evolution.

Gintis has a quote from Wittgenstein at the top of the preface, which he translates as “What can be said, can be said clearly, and what you can’t say, you should shut up about.” (The German is “Was sich sagen läßt, läßt sich klar sagen, und woven man nicht spechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” Babelfish backs up the translation, at least approximately.) I like that quote, and I wonder if the evolutionary game theorists I’ve been reading have taken it to heart.

Even apart from the writing, evolution and evolutionarily stable strategies seem like the sort of things that any child could understand, if not rigorously then at least conceptually:

1. Organisms are subject to random mutations. Sometimes those mutations keep them alive longer, and when they’re kept alive longer they can have more offspring. Sometimes, though, those mutations make them live less long; when that happens they have fewer babies. So over time, the mutations that help them have more babies will show up more often than the ones that don’t.

2. Let’s say that blue eyes make an organism have more babies than green eyes or brown eyes, and that those are the only eye colors that anyone can have. Then if someone else tries to come in with green or brown eyes, their babies will eventually get driven out of the population, because blue eyes are better.

I like to believe that any concept can be explained to any intelligent person in just a couple hours, at a level where the listener can start finding faults in the argument or using it to deduce other concepts. I am intensely suspicious of ideas that cannot be explained clearly. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to evolutionary game theory.