MagicThought

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: the paternal, symbolic narrative of his-tory is told for the eye; the maternal, imaginary narrative of her-story is told for the ear. As such, it should come as no surprise that potentially the first woman president in the history of this nation, Barack Obama, has a more pleasing voice than Hillary. You’ll notice that the first word to describe the Barackster’s voice is “Magic.”

Does Obama’s baritone give him an edge?

A powerful voice is a “god-given sound,” says opera’s Lotfi Mansouri. Obama’s baritone seems to have that magic. Clinton’s higher-pitched voice, not so much.
By Frank Browning

Feb. 28, 2008 | What is it about Barack Obama’s baritone?

Aside from the symbolism of finding a new hero who might displace the shame and fear that has poisoned American public life since Martin Luther King’s murder in 1968, there is something in the very essence of Obama’s voice — its tone, its timbre, its resonance — that has struck deep chords among Americans and foreigners in this year’s campaign season. Not since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 has a black American moved so many other Americans, white or black. And once the matter of voice was raised for Obama, a not always flattering parallel immediately arose concerning the voice of the first real female candidate in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton.

Eager to probe deeper into the chords of the candidates, I called two of the world’s specialists on what moves us as listeners to others’ voices, Lotfi Mansouri and Rick Harrell, who have coached singers at the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Conservatory opera program.

Says Lotfi, “The fact is that the basic timbre is a god-given sound. Through technique and vocal study and all that, you can learn to control it and develop it, but you cannot manufacture timbre artificially.” Adds Rick Harrell, “The old saying is the eye is the window of the soul. Well I would say the voice is the window into the heart. People, whether they be actors or politicians, can be slick and manipulative and pretend to be genuine or heartfelt. However, the sound of the voice or the sound of a baby’s cry or the sound of someone saying, ‘Please! I can do what’s best for our country.’ It comes across at a very gut level more so than at an intellectual level.”

When it happens that something within us shivers or tingles at the words of a great and moving voice — Martin Luther King Jr. for my generation, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt for my parents, or even perhaps for some others Benito Mussolini — it is because there is something that leaps forth from the very anatomy of the speaker, revealing the innate grain that vibrates with a receptive grain of our own. It is not about goodness or morality or truth-telling and is little affected by coaching or practice.

The late French semiotician Roland Barthes touched on this vocal magic in a famous essay called “The Grain of the Voice.” He cites the power of a Russian church cantor’s chant: “something … is directly in the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages … as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings.” Barthes goes on: “The ‘grain’ is … the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.” Like the variable grain of an oak or a walnut, it reveals, if we let ourselves hear it, the integral character of the person before us.

Mansouri and Harrell also wanted to talk about another iconic American voice — that of Frank Sinatra. By no account did Sinatra possess a great singing voice. To the contrary, it was by most musical assessments decidedly mediocre. And yet, when Sinatra sang, it was as though he filled all the inner and outer dimensions of our experience. “Take ‘One for My Baby,’” Lotfi said to illustrate. “He didn’t just sing the words; you got the whole atmosphere inside and around the words and you were enveloped by it.” Like the great Ella Fitzgerald, whom he studied, Sinatra employed all the technique he could muster: tone, phrasing, inflection, the single note prolonged beyond endurance. Yet all of that would have been as nothing had the story he was telling in his songs not also been the elemental, physical story of his own life. The mediocrity of his lightweight baritone disappeared and we became travelers on the pulsars generated by the anatomy of his voice box in a separate universe of his making.

Can we say that Barack Obama achieves something similar when he speaks his chant for change? That is apparently what is happening for tens of millions of Americans, not to mention the cheering galleries across Europe and around the world who want it to be so.

But set against that resonant Obama grain there is what appears to be a counter-grain of what is all too often labeled Hillary the Shrill, including all the gendered codes buried beneath the word “shrill.”

Natasha Williams, a longtime friend from Ukraine, who directs the Balagula Theatre in Lexington, Ky., says simply that it is jarring to hear a lineup of self-important, deeper-voiced males followed by a higher-pitched female. We are conditioned, she says, to look for authority in the male voice — even though she finds the Republican heir-apparent John McCain squeaky and the now withdrawn John Edwards tweaky. Hillary’s problem arises, Natasha says, “when she gets excited and it comes across as angry and that upsets voters more than if she were an angry man. It’s connected to the fact that when the mother is upset in a house, kids feel insecure. It’s not like that with the father because the mother stands in between the kids and the father. But when mother loses it, then it’s really scary because the whole sense of security goes tumbling down.”

That’s one interpretation. Lynn Meyer, who’s done everything from political consulting to selling Florida real estate to writing a detective novel, has a different take on how men hear women’s voices. “There are two voices that don’t seem very threatening [to men]. One is the little girl voice — either Valley girl or Jackie Kennedy’s little tiny whisper. The other is Lauren Bacall’s [she lowers her own deep and gravelly] very sexy voice. Anything between these two, women have to be very careful they don’t sound like what I call ‘the voice of civilization.’ That’s the voice who told you to eat your spinach, take your elbows off the table, asked you where’s your homework. It’s a voice that sounds like a bit of mother, then schoolteacher, and finally nagging wife.”

Sound like that and you’re dead in the water. That is too often Hillary’s problem when she gets excited, Lynn says. “Every time she changes her register, people use that awful, sexist word ’shrill’ and that’s really code for the voice of the scold.”

I put that proposition to Rick Harrell, the San Francisco Opera coach, who agreed that shrill is death to any public performer: “We wouldn’t want our hectoring mother speaking to us from the White House for the next four years.” Harrell’s Opera colleague Lotfi Mansouri broke in, “It’s a preconception. A cultural preconception.”

One of those apparent cultural preconceptions afoot in the current political fray is a rather odd preoccupation with the baritone quality of Barack Obama’s voice, an insight pointed out by my radio colleague Brenda Wilson, a woman raised in Virginia who often speaks in grave stentorian stanzas. “Type in the phrase ‘Obama’s voice’ on Google and see what you get,” she advised one day.

I did so as I was listening on the transatlantic phone line. “OK,” I said, still clueless. “There are a lot of listings.”

“More than just a lot, Frankie-boy,” she answered. “How many do you see?”

“Yeah, there are a lot. A whole lot. Sixty-some thousand. But what’s that prove?” I persisted. “Everybody knows he’s a great speaker.”

“Yes,” she said, the schoolmarm slipping into her instructions. “Now, type in ‘Obama’s baritone.’ What do you see?”

“Whoa!” I answered. “Two hundred and sixty-nine thousand results!”

“Um-hm,” she murmured.

I waited.

“That’s all,” she said. “Isn’t it curious that the hot candidate gets to be described as a baritone? I mean, really, what’s so good about baritones?” I took the question back to Rick Harrell.

“When you hear commercials, whether on the radio or voice-overs on television, when they’re saying, ‘Trust me, buy this,’ or ‘Trust me, go here, go there,’ as often as not it is a baritone voice. If they want to get you excited and stimulated, then they’ll go for a higher-pitched sound.”

Probing further into the hidden presumptions and preconceptions of the baritone, I came back to an old reference from Freud’s student Theodor Reik, who proposed that the true baritone is an evocation of the ancient shofar, the ram’s horn that came from Abraham’s sacrificial sheep but was also the instrument Moses used to call the wandering tribes together at Sinai to hear the thundering words of God. Retreaded into 20th century neo-Freudianism the shofar/baritone becomes the vocal embodiment of phallic authority.

Hear my horn, hear my authority. It’s not a great leap to hear the multiple meanings of the horn.

Freudians, we know, can find something phallic in just about anything that speaks, breathes or moves. But such interpretations of the power of the baritone long antedate Freud or even the children of Abraham. Last summer Harvard anthropologist Coren Apicella took herself and some tape recorders to visit the Hazda people of Tanzania, who live pretty much as their ancestors did several millennia ago. Apicella wanted to know what voice had to do with seduction, fertility and reproduction. To get at the question she invited a clutch of Hazda men into her Land Rover and asked each one to say, “Ujambo,” or “Hello,” in Swahili. Then she played her recordings for a group of Hazda women and asked them to rate the voices.

Hands down, the women chose the baritone “Ujambos” over the higher-pitched ones. “Why there’s this relationship we’re not entirely sure yet. It could be that these men have greater access to mates. And so maybe these men that have deeper voices have higher levels of testosterone, maybe they’re better hunters and they’re able to bring more food home to their wives,” Apicella told NPR reporter Sean Bowditch. As it happens, when Apicella reversed the gender recording, the Hazda men seemed to prefer women with higher voices.

When it comes to the public arena, however, baritone is still the winning vocal register — as Obama’s string of primary victories, even among blue-collar white men, would suggest. It all comes back to how the baritone “is the voice one tends to associate with authority,” as opera coach Rick Harrell says, to get people to buy stuff or take certain medicines or, where candidates are concerned, to “trust … [that they] know what’s good for the country.”

– By Frank Browning

You know for a long time I felt that the cultural unconscious was working itself to put the maternal at the locus of authority in this country, given the obsolescence of the paternal narratives brought on by the verifiability of paternity through paternity tests. Given that the for the first time in history fathers no longer have to abstract the paternal role in procreation in terms of the culture’s dominant writing technology, it just seemed the right time for the maternal imaginary to make a comeback. That led me to believe that Hillary would get the nomination and the election. Perhaps I was right, but had chosen the wrong mother.

The First Woman President?
Obama’s campaign bends gender conventions

SPECIAL GUEST COLUMNIST
Updated: 11:49 AM ET Feb 26, 2008
It has been a rarity in modern political life: a wide-open race for the nomination of both parties. But whatever happens from here on out, this campaign will always be remembered for the emergence of the first serious woman candidate for president: Barack Obama.

Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president.

It was Toni Morrison who first had the insight. In a 1998 essay in the New Yorker, the Nobel Prize-winning author described Bill Clinton as “the first black president,” commenting on his saxophone playing and his displaying “almost every trope of blackness.”

Obama doesn’t play the sax. But he is pushing against conventional—and political party nominating convention—wisdom in five important ways, with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities and values that women bring to organizational life: a commitment to inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing all the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is taking a more traditional (and male?) authoritarian approach.

Obama is advocating conversation and collaboration—talking with everybody, including those with whom he has significant disagreements. Several of the so-called “gaffes” targeted by Clinton and GOP front runner John McCain have been about Obama’s willingness to talk with people we aren’t supposed to like, such as various factions in the Middle East.

Clinton’s campaign, on the other hand, is centered on the idea that she is the experienced realist. She understands the rules in this man’s game of politics and governing, knows how to play by them and win, and can take the heat that inevitably comes with entering the fray. Obama’s argument is that he understands the rules and knows how to play by them—but that he wants to change those rules, because they embody values with which he does not agree. He manages to hold his realism and his optimism in constructive tension together, even though it opens him up to the charge that he is naive.

Clinton proposes policy solutions to every problem. She has the answers, fulfilling our expectations of an aspiring authority figure and the brightest person in the class. Obama often proposes process plans, without specific policy solutions, such as bringing together all the interested parties on global warming and having them hash out their differences in a transparent forum, taking the risk that what they come up with will not be his preferred outcome.

Obama is willing to acknowledge his indiscretions and not apologize for them. His drug use was part of his journey. He returned the campaign contributions of a former friend with an unsavory past. Clinton seems to think that admitting mistakes or acknowledging indiscretions—having second thoughts—is a sign of weakness.

Clinton’s message is that she will drive her solutions to enactment and implementation despite the forces of evil lurking everywhere. As a woman, Clinton feels constrained to portray herself as tough, competitive, willing to take on the bad guys. She has to be more male than men, in the same way that women are reluctant to leave the office early to pick up their children at day care because they fear they will not be thought of as serious about their careers, while men are applauded for doing so.

Obama can raise possibilities that are off the table for Clinton. She needs to tell us that she can solve our problems. Obama seems comfortable in what we think of as a female role: not overpromising what he can accomplish, and telling us that the work of change is ours as much as it is his. As recently as his speech in Wisconsin right after the Potomac primaries, Obama told his listeners that any real change was going to require difficult work on their part.

Elections aren’t about leadership. They are about winning, and winning requires pandering: telling people what they want to hear. Leadership is often about giving people news they don’t want to hear. My favorite definition of leadership is disappointing your own people at the rate that they can absorb.

While Obama has tried to combine optimism and realism, John McCain is the only candidate in the race who has consistently delivered messages that his constituents did not want to hear. He is the only one who has regularly gone in front of hostile crowds and been willing to stand and defend positions—on immigration, the Iraqi war, ethanol, restoring jobs in Michigan, and campaign finance—that were certain to offend people whose votes he was trying to secure. Despite the gender-bending styles displayed by Obama and Clinton, McCain’s manner of exercising leadership is an androgynous and rare activity.

Martin Linsky is co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and a longtime faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

One need only look briefly at any number of cultural traditions to know that when there’s a major technological transition in a given historical moment, then the monstrous mother comes out of hiding. I’m thinking here of Medea (greek alphabet) or Lady Macbeth (printing press) to name only two of many. Thus we should not be surprised at the recent spate of mothers killing their children as we move inexorably toward the total dissolution of analog culture, at the same point in the cultural unconscious when another mother grows more monstrous as her bid for the White House falters. Oh and notice that both writers of the following NYT article are Mac people vs PC, as in “M(a)cFadden” and “Macropoulous,” the latter name clearly of ancient Greek Origins, but also sonically identical to the name of a computer company

http://www.macropolis.hu/

and the title of a graphic novel about a sadistic serial killer created by, errr…. “Dreamweave Productions.”

http://www.hillcity-comics.com/graphic_novels/new_graphic_novel1549.htm

The ear knows all.

February 25, 2008
Mother Is Held in L.I. Slaying of 3 Children

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS
A Long Island woman described as emotionally disturbed and afraid of losing custody of her children called the police on Sunday and led officers into a blood-spattered bedroom where her young daughter and two small sons lay slain on a bed, investigators said.

The woman, Leatrice Brewer, 27, who lived with the children in an apartment in the Nassau County hamlet of New Cassel, was taken to a hospital for physical and mental examinations, the police said. Late Sunday evening, she was charged with the murder of all three children.

Neither the police nor the county medical examiner said what caused the death of the children, who were identified as Jewell Ward, 6; Michael Demesyeux, 5; and Innocent Demesyeux, 18 months old. But investigators said one appeared to have been drowned, while the others had been slashed to death.

“It was a very disturbing scene, not only because they were children,” Detective Lt. Kevin Smith of the Nassau police said of the bedroom where the victims were found, at 891 Prospect Avenue in New Cassel. He declined to give details, pending inquiries by homicide detectives and the medical examiner.

The killings on Sunday appeared to add another grim chapter to a growing casebook of children slain by mothers: five drowned in a bathtub near Houston; two battered with rocks in Tyler, Tex.; three drowned in San Francisco Bay. The cases — some ending in verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity — have ignited a national debate over mental illness and the legal definition of insanity.

Nassau authorities declined to discuss any motives behind Sunday’s killings. But relatives and acquaintances described Ms. Brewer as emotionally unstable.

The two fathers of the children said they had tried through the courts to gain custody. Ricky Ward, Jewell’s father, said he had been trying in Family Court for a year. “Whenever I tried to get my daughter, Family Court wouldn’t let me,” he said. “The courts wouldn’t hear me out. I blame this on Leatrice Brewer and Family Court.”

In the 12 years that he had known her, Mr. Ward said Ms. Brewer had tried to kill herself a number of times. The Nassau police said they were investigating a report that she had jumped out a window of her apartment on Sunday. “He problem was her mind state,” Mr. Ward said. “She wasn’t stable and wasn’t able to communicate. She didn’t want anyone to have her kids. It’s a tragedy that my daughter’s gone.”

Innocent Demesyeux, the father of Ms. Brewer’s two sons, said that he and Ms. Brewer had been battling in court for 18 months over visitation rights and custody of the boys, and that she feared she might soon lose custody.

“I’ve been fighting to see them,” he said. Interviewed while sitting in a car parked outside the scene of the killings, Mr. Demesyeux, 28, of Hollis, Queens, said he had last seen his sons a month ago. He said that he and Ms. Brewer had a date in Nassau County Family Court on Monday, and that he had hoped to win the case. He said Ms. Brewer had missed court dates recently and had refused to take drug tests, which he said he had passed.

He said that he had recently been in contact with a county child protective services agency and that a representative was to have visited Ms. Brewer’s apartment on Friday. It was unclear if that visit took place.

Some neighbors said Ms. Brewer had behaved bizarrely. “I used to see her walking down the street during the day in her pajamas,” said Lisa Jones, who said she was a distant relative of Ms. Brewer. Asked if Ms. Brewer had seemed mentally unstable, Ms. Jones said, “Absolutely.”

Tatiana Wideman, 13, who said she had been a baby sitter for Innocent, said of Ms. Brewer: “She was stressed out. Everybody knew it. She would go around asking people for money.”

The Rev. Elijah Crawford, pastor of the Healing Power Church, spoke on behalf of the family at the Westbury home of a relative of Ms. Brewer’s, where family members had gathered. He said he had been told that Ms. Brewer had snapped because money she had expected from a social services agency — money she needed for the children — had failed to arrive.

“She didn’t get it, and snapped out,” the pastor said. He later said of family members: “They don’t know what happened. All they know is that she snapped. They said she had great love for her children. It’s just something that happened all of a sudden.”

Lieutenant Smith said the police responded to a 911 call at 8:55 a.m., summoning them to the Prospect Avenue address. It is a white-brick, two-story apartment building on the northwest corner of Swalm Street.The avenue, lined with commercial and residential buildings, is the main thoroughfare of New Cassel, a hamlet in the town of North Hempstead with 13,000 residents.

The 911 caller was apparently Ms. Brewer, but the police declined to specify what was said. Officers arriving at the scene found a building with four apartments, two on the ground floor and two upstairs, and were met on the second-floor landing by Ms. Brewer, who took them into her apartment, No. 3, and then into the bedroom, where the three children lay on a bed.

The children, the lieutenant said, were “obviously dead.”

Homicide detectives and dozens of police officers arrived shortly afterward, along with a crime scene investigation truck, which pulled into a driveway behind the building. The avenue was cordoned off to vehicular traffic, and yellow tape was set up to contain the large crowd — people from New Cassel and adjacent Westbury, as well as members of the news media — who gathered to watch the police activity.

Many people emerging from nearby church services joined the throng, and the talk for much of the day was of the deaths of the children, whose bodies were in the building all day and into the evening. They were to be taken to the medical examiner’s office in Mineola, and an autopsy was planned for Monday.

While the debate over degrees of mental illness and the legal definition of insanity continues, mental health experts and defense lawyers in recent years have been encouraged by the outcome of several high-profile cases in which mothers who killed their children have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to mental institutions instead of prisons.

Last year, Lashuan Harris, 24, who threw her three young sons to their deaths in San Francisco Bay in 2005, was declared insane by a judge one day after a California jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. The defense argued that she was schizophrenic, borderline mentally retarded and convinced that she was acting on orders from God when she threw the boys — ages 6, 2 and 16 months — into the water.

In 2006, Andrea P. Yates, who drowned her five small children in a bathtub at their home in the Houston area in 2001, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in her second trial. In 2002, another jury had convicted her of murder, rejecting defense claims that she was so psychotic that she thought she was saving the souls of her children by killing them. An appeals court overturned that conviction because of erroneous testimony by a prosecution witness.

And in 2004, Deanna L. Laney, who bashed in the heads of her sons, 6 and 8 years old, in Tyler, Tex., in 2003, saying that God had ordered her to do it, was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity.

Her lawyers argued that insanity was the only way to explain why Ms. Laney, a deeply religious woman who had home-schooled her children, would kill her sons without shedding a tear. Psychiatrists testified that Ms. Laney believed that she was chosen by God to kill her children as a test of faith.

So why will Barack get elected at this complex moment in the cultural unconscious? One reason could well be that the font he uses on all of his campaign signs is Gotham. Isn’t that the name of the city where our Vampiric hero, Batman, lives? Oh yes, I think it is.

A Font We Can Believe In

Barack Obama and his favorite font, Gotham

Unless you’ve been avoiding television, newspapers, and all other forms of mass media for the past few months, you’ve probably seen Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” and “Stand for Change” banners. The typophiles among you have realized that the “change” font Obama’s campaign uses is Gotham, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, originally as a commission for GQ Magazine.

Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones spoke about the creation of Gotham during our interview for Helvetica, and looking back at their description of what GQ wanted from the font, it sounds surprisingly Obama-esque. “GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it,” says Hoefler. It also needed to look very masculine and “of-the-moment.” Mission accomplished.

The conversation about the origins of Gotham didn’t make it into the film, but was included among the 41 bonus features on the Helvetica DVD. I’ve posted part of the interview above. Watching this clip, I think it’s interesting that the design of Gotham was influenced by early Modernism, another movement that was about change and social idealism. And I like that the design aesthetic that may help move Obama into the White House was inspired by the humble NY Port Authority Bus Terminal sign.

And here’s a video from the guy who made the film, Helvetica, talking about the Obama font.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow6ajKO0XsM&eurl=http://www.helveticafilm.com/blog/2008/02/19/a-font-we-can-believe-in/

You know for years I’ve been wondering why Dragons play such a big role in all of these myths of parthenogenesis, paternity, and literacy. Well, I think I just figured it out, thanks to an article that appeared today in the NYT. It’s all there in the first line of the article: “DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion.” Having put together these seemingly incompatible mythic figures, the article then proceeds to provide scientific evidence of what they have in common. Both can give birth apparently without any role played by fathers. No wonder it’s a dragon that Cadmus slays, then plants its teeth in the ground, giving birth to both the founding Greek Paternal line and the alphabet.

February 24, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don’t Need To.

By NEIL SHUBIN
Chicago

DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.

Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.

But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.

Komodos — like many fish, amphibians and reptiles — have lots of reproductive tricks. For example, females can store sperm for a long time, tiding them over when conditions may be poor for reproduction. It’s possible that the Wichita dragon eggs could have been fertilized by the sperm from a male that was on site a long time ago. But DNA analysis of the “miracle embryos” from Britain showed that every bit of their DNA came from the females, and nobody should be surprised if this is also true of the Kansas dragons.

Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year.

The shark example is particularly striking because sharks are very primitive living fish, having shared a common ancestor with us over 400 million years ago. Biological cloning is not a recent invention of scientists; it is an ancient ability. And sharks, fish and lizards are probably only the tip of the iceberg. We know of virgin birth only in those rare instances when we’ve been lucky enough to see it. Nobody knows how common it is because there has been no systematic search for the phenomenon.

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes — there are many varied ways.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

And that is the point. Biology is about variation. Without variation, the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges like changing climates and environments. So as we continue our very necessary debates over ethical issues, let’s bear in mind that morality is a concept limited to our species. The natural world is a fuzzy place that doesn’t always accommodate our decidedly human need to find cut-and-dried categories.

Neil Shubin, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, is the author of “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.”

Ok, so there’s this movie called the American Astronaut, and it’s a science fiction musical that is basically parenting and printing…in space. If I had known about this film sooner, I would have definitely done my final project on it. This is probably the best film I’ve ever seen in my life. This scene takes place on Jupiter where boys grow up with no first-hand knowledge of women. (Women on Venus found a way to reproduce without men.) To keep up morale they keep a boy on the planet who can actually remember his glimpse of the maternal as a symbolic substitution for the real thing…I guess it makes perfect sense that he sings to them about VOWELS before getting to the juicy part, which turns out to be nothing more than an afterthought:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=EEyZffBQKu0&feature=related

If you haven’t seen the American Astronaut, you’re really missing out! It’s a truly incredible film.

Judy

As we all know, the bee population is mysteriously dying in California, with severe agricultural reproductions.  Well now, apparently, the same thing is happening to bats in New England, with at least 8,000 dying off last winter and up to 200,000 shuffling off this year.  The dead bats have white rings of fungus around their noses, something scientists have never seen. Most important to me is the connection between bats dying (vampires) and the ring virus (for lack of a better term).  Maybe they watched a video they shouldn’t have.
Here’s the story

–Brandon

Apparently the current democratic primary season isn’t the only competition in town between a man and a woman:

http://www.slate.com/id/2184363/

MEDICAL EXAMINER
The Merry Band of Wrigglers
Men, women, passion, and sperm.
By Melinda Wenner
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, at 11:57 AM ET
The old adage says that a wife can’t change her husband, but the truth is that women for thousands of years have been shaping one crucial male attribute: sperm. Men tend to produce as many sperm as possible as quickly as possible, a manufacturing decision that sacrifices quality control: Their sperm are frequently mutated or deformed as a result. Why, then, do men make millions of sperm at once? Because they’re adapting to ward off the effects of women’s frequent cheating, according to a paper published in December in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Humans aren’t especially good at monogamy. Evidence gathered from surveys and paternity tests suggests that 25 percent of women and 30 percent of men cheat on their spouses at least once during marriage. The evolutionary reason that men cheat is pretty simple: to father as many children as they can. It’s more complicated for women, who can only give birth so many times. The quality of the child, then, wins over quantity. Because men with the best genes aren’t always the most stable and resourceful partners (they don’t have to be), women might marry the latter but cheat with the former. Then they can become pregnant with a genetically superior child who will, if her mother can pull it off, grow up with the help of her unwitting spouse.

Women aren’t consciously playing out these underlying reasons for their urge to cheat, of course. But if this cheating “pays off” in children who are more likely to survive and reproduce, the predilection to cheat will become an evolutionally advantageous trait—and the net result, over many generations, will be women who cheat.

Clearly, though, this is no good for their husbands, who are duped into raising kids who aren’t theirs. Some scientists believe men have adapted clever ways to prevent this from happening. Not only are there studies to indicate that husbands do things to keep their wives from cheating in the first place—such as tracking their whereabouts—there is research that suggests men have evolved so as to correct for women’s cheating after the fact, by maximizing the chances that their sperm will conceive over someone else’s.

The idea of “sperm competition,” as it is called, is a familiar one in the animal world—there’s lots of literature about it. For example, male flour beetles have spiny penises designed to remove rival sperm from a female’s reproductive tract. And in a study published in 2002, scientists compared two groups of nematode worms: those that mated with females in the presence of competing males and those that mated without any male competition. After 60 generations had passed under these conditions, the offspring of the worms with the competition ejaculated sperm that were on average 20 percent larger than the sperm of other males. In nematodes, larger sperm crawl faster and can reach the eggs sooner.

The study of sperm competition in humans, though, is fairly new. In a study (with photos!) published in 2003, researchers at the State University of New York-Albany used a variety of dildos, artificial vaginas, and a homemade semen recipe to test whether the penis might be elegantly designed not only to deposit semen in the vagina, but also to remove it. The researchers speculated that when a man has sex with a woman who has recently slept with another man, the first man’s semen is pulled out with the second man’s penis (because it gets caught behind the second man’s coronal ridge, which separates the head of the penis from the shaft). This lends meaning to the term “sloppy seconds”: Sex the second time around is sloppy, because the semen that is removed ends up, well, making a mess.

The researchers found evidence to support their hypothesis: Dildos featuring a coronal ridge, like a real penis, displaced 91 percent of semen that got there first. Dildos without ridges displaced only 35 percent. Given that chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, do not have ridges on their penises, this is “pretty strong evidence for the fact that the human penis evolved to compete with rival male semen in the female reproductive tract,” says SUNY psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, who led the study. (Chimpanzees are very promiscuous, but they appear to solve the sperm competition problem differently: They produce extremely large volumes of semen that solidify in the vagina. Like a plug.)

That the human penis might have evolved as a semen displacement device is “not an outrageously ridiculous idea,” says Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist at Florida Atlantic University. Size, too, may matter here—the longer a man’s penis is, the more likely it is to deposit semen out of reach of other men.

Of course, if a man has sex with a woman twice in quick succession, then there is the risk that he will displace his own semen. But researchers believe that men have evolved ways of preventing this from happening—for instance, men usually need to “recover” for a few hours between orgasms, and they rarely continue to thrust after they ejaculate. Both of these behaviors help keep men from accidentally removing their own goods.

Men also act differently when they have reason to believe that their partner may have cheated. Several survey-based studies suggest that the more time that has passed since a man has last seen his spouse, the more he will want to have sex with her. When men sleep with their partners in these circumstances, they also thrust deeper and harder than usual—consistent with the idea that they are attempting to “scoop out” rival semen—and release more sperm when they ejaculate. Not that men are aware that they’re doing this.

If men have evolved adaptations to thwart women from having other men’s children, what is to stop women from evolving counter-adaptations? Nothing. “You have what biologists call an evolutionary arms race of sorts,” Gallup explains. Just as a man is more likely to initiate sex with his partner if he suspects she has been unfaithful, a woman who has cheated does the opposite, according to other research. She tries to wait as long as possible before having sex again, perhaps to maximize the chances that her egg will be fertilized by the superior male she dallied with. In addition, women are most likely to cheat when they are at the most fertile point in their menstrual cycle, and they’re more likely to orgasm, too; some biologists argue that the female orgasm, which is accompanied by vaginal and intrauterine contracts, helps to pull semen into the reproductive tract.

Of course, there are other more obvious explanations for the waiting and the orgasms: guilt in the first instance and pleasure in the second. Perhaps, too, women wait because they don’t want their husbands to smell the scent of another man. Cheating for evolution’s sake is one thing; getting caught on an individual basis is another. A husband isn’t likely to be more sympathetic when his wife tells him that evolution made her do it.

Melinda Wenner is a science writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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I stumbled across an interview article with the writer Brian K. Vaughan, who often co-writes episodes of the tremendously successful “Lost”, and found out that he also just finished a comic book series called “Y: The Last Man”. Just guess what the story-line is…

“Issue 60 [the final issue] capped five years of the adventures of Yorrick Brown, last man on Earth after a mysterious plague kills everything else with a Y chromosome. Yorrick and his companions, scientist Allison Mann, secret agent 355, and Ampersand the monkey, traveled all over the world looking for Yorrick’s missing fiancée and for the secret to the plague.”

Also interesting is that later in the interview, they refer to Allison Mann not with her name, but with her number “355″.

Here’s the link to the full article!

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/02/a-conversation.html

Have fun,
Jenna P.

Tooth Scan Reveals Neanderthal Mobility

This article talks about the study of an ancient tooth and how it relates to early human mobility. Plus there’s some cool pics.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/tooth-scan-reveals-neanderthal-mobility/20080208203609990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

~ Jenny